Action RPGs Archives - Page 190 of 262

Fragmented Gameplay

October 22, 2018 by Belghast

This was a busy weekend, largely because I spent most of it not in Oklahoma. We opted to take a fall break trip down to Dallas, and in some ways it was a really awesome trip… but in other ways it was not. When we left town on Friday morning it was raining, and for the most part did not stop raining until some time over night. This made for a very cold and wet trip, combined with lots of moments when it was raining so hard that I could barely see the road ahead of me. This became more stressful when I was crammed between two lines of K-Rails and the two lanes of traffic felt super squeezed together. We made it there safely, but the trip took way longer than it normally would have given the circumstances. Under perfect conditions with zero stops, we can make it to Frisco where we were staying in the hotel in roughly 4 hours… we were not under perfect conditions, and we stopped constantly to roam around. Friday was largely spent meandering around hitting various places along the way.

This made for a very compact Sunday, trying to get everything that we normally have to do on a Sunday done as well as anything triggered by being out of the house for two days. This mean’t that most of my gameplay yesterday was in several fragmented chunks which largely involved running Headless Horseman in World of Warcraft on all of my tanks, and leveling in Destiny 2 as I had yet to hit the level cap nor really make much traction in the story. I am a little weird when it comes to approaching Destiny content in that I prefer to level up independent of the story, and then grind through the story knowing that anything that happens to drop will potentially fuel my later item level grind. I largely took this screenshot because occasionally I forget that I end up getting paired with local people through Bungie’s matching algorithm that factors connection quality above pretty much anything else. Notice the player GerthBrooks… which made me chuckle at first and then was a little disturbed by it. For the uninitiated, Garth Brooks is also an Oklahoman and while his girls were in High School literally lived in the same town as I do.

Another thing I found out this weekend is that Escalation Protocol is really damned good for leveling… as there were groups I managed to get in the same instance with that were farming the level 7 boss. This thing drops some shaders, but also a chest that requires some sort of key that I am going to have to figure out. Upon some quick googling it seems like I simply didn’t do much content in Warmind, and as a result don’t have any keys to open these things with. The truth is that I largely bounced hard after grinding up my second account worth of characters upon the PC release. I managed to stick it through until the Curse of Osiris expansion, but the repetitive nature of that content left me annoyed. I will admit however that so far Forsaken seems really cool, I picked up and did some more of the story last night.

My highest priority however is to sort out how to do the Festival of the Lost content before it disappears. I had enough of the cash shop second chance currency to pick up this sweet corrupted ship. Past that I hear there is a better version of the infinite forest that I need to check out, that has a chance of dropping what appears to be a really sweet auto rifle. I contemplated playing God of War, but with the fragmentation of my play time… I focused on something that I could drop in and out of quickly rather than something that would require my full attention for long periods of time. Depending on how tonight goes… will determine if I return to Destiny for Festival stuff, or play some Dad of War. Regardless I managed to hit 50 the new level cap and am at 500ish light, so now to finish the story and get geared again. The lack of weapon options are driving me insane right now… but it is forcing me to use combinations that I never would have before. I’ve been getting a lot of play out of sidearms since they game keeps dropping them for me.

Yoinking Yang

September 25, 2018 by Belghast

It is always staggering how much difference a few pieces of gear make in Diablo 3. I went from being unable to really function… to being able to push Torment X without much issue. I could potentially go higher but I have not really pushed myself. As of this morning I did a solo 40 just to verify that I was wrecking things as fast as I thought I was… and of course upgrade that blood shard capacity. Last night after a mythic+ in World of Warcraft I dropped back over into Diablo 3 and with a whole lot of Grace’s help started running content to attempt to get drops. Over the course of numerous rifts and greater rifts I managed to start piecing together the set that I should be using to make the Unhallowed Essence build work.

This is where I am at as of this morning, with everything acquired minus Wraps of Clarity and the Focus ring. From there I need one of those doodads that adds a slot to a weapon… and to reroll a bunch of my gear for more optimal stats. Then of course there is the game of trying to swap out your normal items with better ancient versions. Regardless however I am functioning so much better than I was and can finally stand on my own two feet again. I was in this awkward spot for too long where I could survive the higher torments… but just couldn’t kill anything fast enough. That all changed once I got a handful of items and started finally being able to keep up with Grace and her Necro pushing machine. The funny thing is… she STILL doesn’t have the ring she needs to make her set completely work… and I have somehow managed to get almost nothing but ring drops myself.

Another thing of note that I thought I would talk about this morning is my plans for Fallout 76. My good friend Shiana pinged me last night about what I was planning for Fallout and also for Anthem. He knows me too well, in that he didn’t phrase the question as to IF I was playing… just where I was playing. As it stands right now I plan on doing both on the PC since that is the more comfortable platform for me personally. As far as Fallout 76, when they announced that you could run a private server… I set my mind on trying to acquire one of these. My hope is that TypeFrag will offer one since I like their group funding model that allows people to chip in if they so choose to the server rental fees. We use that for the Teamspeak server that we use for recording AggroChat, and it is nice mostly because it means I am not footing the entire bill on my own.

Regardless of who is paying I plan on having a server with as close to a PVE ruleset as the game allows me. It will be a nice chill carebear haven with as many of the toxic influences filtered out as possible. Basically I think this game is going to be amazingly fun pending you can gather up the right mindset of players that are willing to work together and build interesting communities. The nukes will of course exist, but the hope is that we nuke areas of high mob population and not players… and sorta treat it like a raid zone since it will cause interesting stuff to spawn in from what I have read. If you want a chill place to play Fallout 76 and are cool with a no PVP ruleset, then this oasis may be the place for you.

Tam Stole My Luck

September 24, 2018 by Belghast

This weekend was the beginning of the 15th season in Diablo 3 and like usual Grace and myself decided to do the thing that we do roughly every three months… and start new seasonal characters. I went with the Demon Hunter because the Unhallowed Essence set is in theory one of the really fun ones… pending I can actually assemble all of the parts of it. Grace went with the Necro because I believe this time is Rathma’s which is another pretty fun set… pending you assemble all of the pieces of it. For most of the season she was way stronger than I was as we ran through the content, but there will be a point where that balance starts to shift the other way. The problem is I have not hit it yet and am struggling a bit with pushing content. I found getting the Greater Rift 20, the last thing I needed for my cosmetic items and last of the Haedrig’s Gift items… but be extremely painful.

This season I seem to have had really bad luck, essentially having NONE of the items I need for my build apart from the Hellfire Amulet. Legendaries seem to be extremely stingy this time around, and often times as I am leveling I start getting some of the drops needed to toss into the cube. That didn’t happen. In theory I am going to start grinding some T1 rifts to try and assemble the rest of the set. I am convinced that Tam stole my luck, because I didn’t even get a single item of my class set to upgrade to Ancient. At a bare minimum however I now have my pet and portrait frame and anything after this is gravy.

In World of Warcraft I mostly spent time this weekend over on the Alliance side leveling my Paladin. Paladins right now seem just as overpowered as Demon Hunters and I have been breezing through content pulling tons of things in a path of destruction… and in truth consecration ends up pulling way more than I had intended most of the time. Originally when I took a stab at playing the Death Knight I had started Stormsong Valley and could not be bothered with that storyline of missing ships. This time around I decided to start Drustvar and its awesome cultist nonsense… and so far I have been enjoying the storytelling way more than a tale of political intrigue. I like big bombastic storylines, like the whole fighting old gods with ghost dinosaurs thing that is going on over on the Horde Side, so Drustvar seems more of that fit.

The only negative is it means at some point I will have to return to the more subtle political intrigue storyline and hopefully I am invested enough in my character at that point to carry me on. I figured the Paladin gave me a lot of options for running stuff… but the truth is I will probably just tank or dps… and it is highly unlikely that I ever heal. While I technically got the healing Artifact weapon, I am not sure if I ever had it equipped. All in all though… just not loving the Alliance content anywhere near as much as I did the Horde. However I will say so far… the War Campaign stuff seems cooler on the Alliance side… even though it feels weird to be retracing steps I know as horde quests. I did not realize that I would be effectively sharing the same space… like Anyport for example in my world is very much a Horde town… but it is seemingly also open to Alliance? Also finding it weird that I am seeing way more Orange names while I am leveling than Blue ones. Maybe there was an initial push of alliance players… or maybe the AIE presence on our shared shard greatly pushes the balance to Horde.

Lastly we recorded another podcast this weekend as is the usual, and this time around we talked a lot about the Dragon Warrior/Dragon Quest franchise… and the fact that I think of it as Warrior is telling to the last time I actually played one. We also had this unintended deep dive into Hollow Knight after some conversation about Hyperlight Drifter sort of jarred it loose. We are trying really hard to bring the shows in around an hour in length and as such they sort of feel better than they used to. We are trying to limit the number of topics… which has this side effect of causing topics to roll forward to other weeks. The Dragon Quest topic for example had rolled twice before we finally talked about it. I am thinking the Trello system that we are using for show notes seems to work pretty well, as we can drop things into the queue throughout the week easily. Regardless… if you tried listening to us when we often times recorded two to three hour long shows…. you might give it a shot again.

Reluctantly Fury

August 29, 2018 by Belghast

This morning is a hard morning, because I am struggling to wake up. I apparently had a way more active night than I realized, because in my mind I slept all the way through. However my wife told me a tale this morning that tells otherwise. Apparently I fell asleep with the television on and at some point during the night she woke up and decided that it should be turned off. The television remote was on the end table on my side of the bed so she proceeded to wake me up and tell me to turn it off. Instead of doing this… I apparently proudly proclaimed that “I peed”. At which point she tried to tell me no.. please turn off the television… to which I again proudly replied “but I already peed”.

This apparently happened a couple more times before I finally reluctantly turned off the television. I remember absolutely none of this happening at all. In my mind I went to bed and slept all the night through without incident, but I am guessing my generally groggy state this morning is due to the fact that I didn’t in fact do that thing. I have been taking a dose of nyquil before going to bed because I have been fighting this nameless crud, and I am wondering if the sleep inducing nature of that… lead to my odd behavior. Regardless it is blogfodder as I call it, and like so many things I probably shouldn’t tell you… I am telling you anyways.

Last night I managed to get the Demon Hunter to 114 and finish out the quests in Vol’dun. At this point I have moved him on to Nazmir which is a zone I never quite finished on the Warrior before getting caught up in the madness of world questing. As I was winding down on the Demon Hunter I decided to make one more pass on the Warrior to see if there were any quests up that I absolutely had to do. It was around this point that I decided to try out Fury in proper and get my bars set up. Now at this point I don’t have a great combo of weapons for Fury as I am have a spear from world questing that came in around 320 and an axe that came from a world boss I believe at 289ish. It is good enough to get started, but generally speaking I have had hell getting weapons this entire expansion so far. I was hoping that onehander fury was a thing again and I could just drop some fist weapons crafted by my leatherworker, but that is apparently not a thing.

The shocking truth is… Fury is amazing. It feels good and shockingly feels like I have more moment to moment survival than I do as a protection warrior. Basically this is now my world questing form and will probably run dungeons as such also to help build out the rest of my gear. This is the expansion where apparently I am maining Fury on the Warrior, however that is not enough of a consolation prize to give up my mission to level the Demon Hunter and tank on it. It does at least make me feel like maybe I didn’t completely waste the first two weeks of this expansion leveling a character that would be permanently shelved during this expansion. Maybe just maybe at some point they will apply some tweaks to the way protection feels and I can dust off the sword and shield.

Another thing that I poked my head into last night was Destiny 2, and for starters the lighting model feels totally different as evidenced by the way this ship looks. As far as the changes… I am still wrapping my head around what weapons do what. What I thought was going to happen was that we could put any weapon in any slot. What actually happened was that weapons are still divided by Kinetic, Energy and Power slots and then to confuse things further… the weapons are split by what sort of ammunition they use being primary, special or heavy. Fusion Rifle, Sniper Rifle and Shotgun all now are counted as special weapon types and are divided between the first and second slot. What I had hoped was that I could run around with Uriel’s Gift in the first slot, Merciless in the second slot, and then a Sword in the third slot. That is not a thing since Merciless and Uriel’s Gift both occupy the same slot.

None of this works exactly how I remembered them explaining it in the first live stream about Forsaken, however I have also not been following the changes terribly close. So technically there probably are ways you could have a shotgun in the first two slots, but I am not sure how viable that is actually going to be. The infusion however works much better to where it is slot based and not weapon type based. That said we still can’t do what we were able to do in TTK era of feeding trash drops from one class to become infusion fuel to push up another class which is unfortunate. Supposedly the changes feel really good, but I am on a mission to level the Demon Hunter so I did not give it that much time. I hope to explore it more over the long weekend break.