Action RPGs Archives - Page 204 of 254

Army of Bone

June 28, 2017 by Belghast

As I said yesterday morning I took a break from Final Fantasy XIV and the trial that has a good number of us completely high center on finishing the game. For those unaware Diablo 3 released its first in what I hope is a series of smaller addon packs that infuse the game with a little new blood… or skeletons in this case. While not really an expansion pack, Rise of the Necromancer adds the much wanted class to Diablo 3 and it is implemented in a way so that it blends seamlessly with the rest of the game. I will talk a bit more about that later, but here is functionally what you get for your $14.99… which is amusingly easily within the bounds of converting a single WoW Token to Blizzard Balance.

Non-Combat Pet – disgusting half baked flesh golem thing
A Pair of Cosmetic Wings – you can see me rocking them in the above screenshot
Necromancer Themed Banner Shape, Sigil and Accent
Necromancer Portrait Frame
Pennant – looks similarly Necromancery
Two additional character slots – which I was apparently close to being out of
Two additional bank stash tabs

Lets be honest… I probably would have paid $15 for two more bank tabs but as far as I am concerned that is plenty of goodness for the price. The Necromancer itself is insanely fun and most of last night I went around being followed by an army of undead minions. I cheated a bit in that I crafted a full set of Cain set gear and hung on to my Leoric’s Crown which had a 95% multiplier on it… for the Flawless Royal Ruby that I slotted in it… giving me 130% bonus experience and 112 bonus experience per kill. Now in my travels I have never leveled a Gem of Ease, which was the route that my friend Grace took to leveling significantly faster than me. Regardless the experience is flying and last night I managed to make it to level 56.

The key difference this time as compared to my normal seasonal characters is that I opted to play through the original game story as is to try and catch any changes that were put in place for the necromancer. I have been pleasantly surprised at just how well this new class blends with the original experience because they have shimmed in Necromancer specific responses from NPCs and Companions alike. This is the first time I have actually run the game with the scoundrel as my companion and he regularly makes comments about not needing any more empty skulls following us around. There was an event in Act II where I encountered a Necromancer out in the desert… which I greeted as a long lost friend rather than a strange traveler. Sure it feels a little weird to have the Paladin accept you as a friend… when you functionally defile the dead and bind them into your service… but whatever if you can manage a minor bit of hand waving what is left is a really enjoyable experience. The other thing that was awesome… is that it has been years since I last saw these cinematic and I was impressed with just how well they still hold up. I have so much love for Diablo 3 and it is the game that I am always rooting for good things to happen to… and small content packs like this one definitely seem like a viable way to continue growing the game. I am more than willing to keep plunking down this $15 price point to get new classes and assorted stuff to go with it.

I am really hoping this means we might see the Druid or Amazon as a result. Even more than rehashing characters from Diablo’s past… I would love to see them branch out and start giving us brand new concepts for characters. What about giving us a redeemed demon, or a fallen angel to control for ourselves. I just feel like there is a lot of life left in this game and I want to see them keep moving forward with expanding it. What I think is cool is that functionally this expansion pack was split into two halves… the first being the content listed above… and the rest being simply patch 2.6.0 which adds three new areas to the game for everyone regardless if they purchase the pack or not. Something called Challenge Rifts also went into the game as well as the usual number of tweaks and balances preparing us for the next season. I like this idea of expanding both the free content at the same time as giving us an additional way to keep spending money with the game and supporting its development. This is a weird balancing act that all of these “buy once, play forever” type of games seems to struggle with… as in what is content that should just be free because you bought the game, and what is content that is reasonable to charge an extra fee for. I feel like this balance with Diablo 3 seems about right and I think at this stage in the game it probably works far better than releasing a full expansion with a complete new act and 10 more levels to grind through each time you start a new character. I would love to hear my readers thoughts on this one. I for one am a happy camper, but I would be curious to hear some dissenting opinions.

No Time To Explain

May 25, 2017 by Belghast

Once upon a time in Destiny year one, there was a weapon called The Strangers Rifle. It was funky looking, had a unique feel and sound to it… and you got it whenever you finished the primary storyline of Destiny… then spent forever collecting stuff to level it up completely. It was also gained from someone that we really know little to nothing about… other than the fact that she doesn’t have time to explain why she doesn’t have time to explain. However this weapon got left behind in the past largely because The Taken King introduced the ability to upgrade weapons through infusion. However they did introduce a hidden quest that involved a bunch of madness that I mentioned at least briefly back in April of 2016 in a post. Apparently they have changed it up a little bit… but once upon a time you had to wait for the Paradox mission to appear as the daily heroic. Then during the course of the mission you had to collect three ghost fragments and return the Future War Cult Ghost to Lakshmi-2 in the tower. From there you had to pledge the Future War Cult and gain 1000 reputation to unlock the next part, which involved killing Taken Minotaur until a Simulation Core dropped. Then we reach the part I was stalled on for over a year for various reasons… killing Atheon in the Vault of Glass on any difficulty.

Last night the awesome folks in Tequila Mockingbird… but more importantly Squirrel and Jex helped pull together a raid for the purpose of getting me my Atheon kill. We did it on old school difficulty, largely for the purpose of trying to steamroll through it and then move on to getting in a Crota kill. After the raiding I lucked out during the next part, which is to find a chest that spawns in a weird version of the Twilight Gap crucible map. Thankfully I knew my way around the map and I decided to head over to B first… and sure enough sitting right beside what would normally be the capture point was a chest containing the piece I needed. From there I went on to do the Blood of the Garden quest, which did not exactly work how I was expecting it. Firstly I did not realize I was not in the final area of the map… and I knew there was an anger mechanic that was supposed to spawn the Taken Ultra that I needed to kill to get the final component. However I didn’t remember how high I needed to get my anger and I wound up slaughtering wave after wave of Minotaur until I somehow managed to get the anger to over 200%… and when nothing still spawned I noticed the arrow on my mini map pointing to the next area. Sure enough the big Minotaur was up and way easier to take down than attempting to survive that constant deluge of a dozen regular Minotaur at a time. Finally I went back to the tower and claimed my No Time to Explain exotic pulse rifle… to which I had to sacrifice both an exotic that I was no longer using… and a 400 primary to bring it up to modern standards.

That was the part of the evening that went amazingly well… the other part of the evening was struggling to do Crota. First off I had only actually been into the raid once before… and back during the “we overpower this so much, what are mechanics even” phase. As a result we struggled more than a bit, because we were doing it on heroic where resurrections are not a thing that happens. Additionally we lost a member of our fire team a little bit into the raid, and wound up replacing him with an unknown quantity. Said new person was moody as hell while we were actually failing to mechanic, and then when we called it a night made sure we knew how mad he was. Before he left chat he said something along the lines of that he bailed on his normal raid to come get an easy Crota kill, and now he screwed up and missed the raid invite. No one promised him an easy kill, and even though we were failing a lot… we were laughing and having fun while doing it. That is ultimately the important part, and sure I didn’t manage to finish my Necrochasm quest… but I had a lot of fun learning bits and pieces of the modern version of the Crota raid. In truth I think if I went back in again I be more prepared for what I needed to get through on the other side. All told however I managed to pick up a couple of cool weapons in the process including a spiffy new Oversoul Edict… so I think in the grand scheme of things the night was a complete win far as I am concerned. Once again huge thanks to Tequila Mockingbird for hanging out and making stuff happen, and Squirrel for prodding them into doing so.

Treadblades and Grenades

May 22, 2017 by Belghast

A good chunk of this weekend was about me riding the high that was the Destiny 2 gameplay reveal panel. I wrote about my feelings Friday, but I am still extremely hyped. What I find interesting is that there are some hardcore Destiny players that walked away disillusioned by the announcement. For me I largely wanted them to take the same Destiny mechanics that I love and apply them to a much more open world. From the sounds of it that is precisely what we are getting. However it seems like the competitive PVP scene walked away frustrated, because they were expecting ladder brackets and things like that to support their specific play style. While I love the Crucible, I am anything but serious when I play it… and as a result I largely am okay with a more casual PVP focus. What is funny about this is that it is the same community that got super frustrated when they were only being matched against similarly skilled players, and have been the biggest proponents of moving away from skill based matchmaking. I can at least see one of their complaints, which is largely that they were expecting the game to move to a server/client structure rather than the peer to peer setup that we have today. I feel like the currently crucible matchmaking algorithm does a decent job of weeding out the “redbars”, and it has been a really long time since I have been in a match with more than one of them. That could however be based on the fact that I am living in the center of the United States and have solid pings to either coast though.

What all the Destiny love created however is a strong desire to play the game I currently have my hands on. Over the weekend I spent a good deal of time upstairs playing around, and picked back up my Xbox One character since it allowed me to experience the full circuit of Destiny emotions. All of my PSN characters are comfortably at 400 light, and all I am really doing there is upgrading additional gear to that level. So there is a missing chunk of the experience… the brief joy of seeing a higher light level item that you can then use to infuse into your gear. So as a result I opted to spend most of the weekend playing my now 378 Titan. On PSN however I did spend a bit of time working on achievements, and that meant a lot of chain running of SIVA Crisis Strikes for the purpose of trying to get super kills. This also meant rocking my Bad Juju, because for me at least it seems to be a much better super energy magnet than the Zhalo Supercell. I think right now I am 5 super streaks away from finishing up one book, and then I can start in earnest on the modern Age of Triumph book. I am still a little bummed that they came out and dashed my hopes of “cross save” functionality between the various client versions. I would have happily purchased Destiny 2 for all available platforms if this actually happened.

On the World of Warcraft front, I indulged in something I had been wanting to for awhile. With the recent spike in token prices I opted to purchase one and it sold for roughly 130,000 gold. I then took that gold and purchased the Champion’s Treadblade… which I always thought was a way cooler design than the Warlord’s Deathwheel. This also jarred me off center in being less of a lazy engineer. I never actually got around to crafting the original Mekgineer’s Chopper. It was one of those things I always intended to do… but never wanted to spend the money on. functionally no matter how much faction discount you have the end result is always going to be 12,000 gold worth of parts. I used this influx of cash from the token however to serve as a reason to go ahead and finish this off. I happened to have pretty much everything else needed to craft it laying around on various alts, so it was simply a matter of flying out to Storm Peaks and buying the few vendor items.

The last major event of the weekend is that I finally decided what to use my character boost on. I have not really touched much of anything this expansion on the Horde side. My friend Grace has reverted back to her Horde ways, and as a result I figured I should probably have at least one character that I like to be able to play with her. As a result I took the Deathknight that I rolled on her server and boosted it to 100, and started leveling it last night. The thing that I didn’t realize about the 100 boost… is just how lousy the gear is that they give you. I remember I started Legion sitting in mostly 710 gear on my characters from the pre-launch invasion events. My newly boosted Unholy Deathknight was equipped in a full set of 640 gear… which if I remember correctly was the required level to queue for heroics in Warlords of Draenor. As a result this is the first character I have taken to the Broken Shores invasion scenario that I actually had trouble surviving. I died about four times during this invasion… but that also could simply be because this late in the expansion there was only one other player actually doing it. Whatever the case I clawed my way up from the frustrating gear level and am making progress in Azsuna.

Destiny 2 Feels

May 19, 2017 by Belghast

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So yesterday was the big reveal of Destiny 2 gameplay and I have to say I am not disappointed in the least. In fact at this very moment I am feeling inordinate amounts of Destiny love. There were a few things that were released that gave me all the feels. The first is the “Story of Zavala” trailer of sorts that tells the tale of how he came from being a corpse somewhere in the cosmodrome to being the leader of the Vanguard. Unfortunately I have not seen this trailer released separately so you have to catch it about 14 mins into the video that I linked… which is the entire Destiny 2 reveal stream dumped to YouTube. In that trailer you see a young Amanda Holliday getting her first look at a starship, so that in itself was completely priceless. The second cavalcade of feels comes from the gameplay reveal trailer… which appears to be cut from what is going to be one of the intro cinematics showing how the tower falls. There is a moment in the trailer for each class where they get to shine… and I absolutely got all the feels when I saw Zavala call everyone to him and raise a Titan bubble. There are similar badass moments where Ikora Rey Nova Bombs a Cabal transport, and Cayde-6 Golden Gun’s three Cabal troopers.

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Destiny 2 is a tale of starting over after a monumental fall from grace, which in itself is probably the best way of dealing with a power reset scenario. Having spent the last week playing through the Fallen Empire storyline in Star Wars the Old Republic… I absolute approve of the notion that sometimes you need to shuffle the deck to freshen up the game. What I like the most about what I saw though is that everything looked and felt like it was still Destiny… just with the Destiny-ness sliders moved all the way to eleven. They reveal that we are going to four new places… but in part I am hoping that given time we will also revisit areas that we have been to before. The maps themselves are supposedly more open world style, or at least the one that was showed reminded me of something on the scale of the Hinterlands from Dragon Age: Inquisition with lots of active hotspots to go explore and find adventures. This is definitely playing to my core desires as a player, but I am also hoping that it still has directed story missions for the folks like Tamrielo who tend to bounce super hard from “now go explore” setups in games.

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It sounds like all of the things that made Destiny awesome are coming back, but that they are adding a whole layer of new stuff on top. To be truthful if you look at my characters stats… I have spent a significant number more hours doing patrol missions than literally anything else in the game. Just as a reference according to my Profile on Bungie.net… on my Titan I have played a grand total of 14 days 15 hours… and of that time 7 days 4 hours was in Patrol mode. So giving me a big open world to roam in is absolutely going to serve my interests. However it sounds like the strikes and raids and crucible modes are all coming back with a vengeance with brand new concepts being introduced. It also seems like some of the specs are being tweaked… and I am not sure if each class is getting a wholly new sub class or if we are just losing one and gaining one. Titans for example I know have a Void class that revolves around wielding a shield like Captain America. Warlocks have a new sub class that gives them flaming angel wings and lets them wield a giant flaming sword. So I am not sure if those are in additional to the subs we already have… or if those are now replacing the Defender Titan and Sunsinger Warlock. I mean I am hoping we get something new… but Defender was absolutely one of those sub classes that was super niche and extremely hard to complete “kill with elemental abilities” sort of bounties.

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The biggest news from yesterday is that the PC client would be going through Battle.net… which is curiously being referred to as Battle.net and not the Blizzard Launcher. I said before that I would likely never stop calling it Battle.net, and I am guessing maybe they have rethought that branding decision… now that a non-Blizzard game is going to be using that infrastructure. This decision has a lot of positives and as far as I am concerned fairly few negatives. I’ve spent over a decade now cultivating a community inside of the Blizzard franchise games, and knowing that I can carry that ready made community into Destiny is going to be a huge bonus for me. What Bungie is getting from PSN and XBL is an account system that takes care of all of the day to day friend maintenance and messaging functionality and lets them just connect up a game to it. I mean the option that we all probably through they would be taking was to integrate this game with Steam completely, and rely on steam users for profiles. However to be honest, Blizzard does a far better job of policing its own network than Steam does, because quite frankly it is not in the interest of Valve to clamp down too harshly. The only negative here about any of this is that it sounds like the PC client will not be available on day one… and will instead be a console launch only. Ultimately I was going to buy this on PS4 and PC anyways… so this is not a huge deal for me… however it is going to suck for anyone who wants to hold out for the PC.

My dream that is likely to go unrealized is that I could have a single set of character spread across all of the platforms. I am perfectly okay with purchasing a PC client, PS4 client, and Xbox One client… and not necessarily being able to cross play between them. However I would love if my characters which are attached to my Bungie account carried over and worked on each platform. Let me play with my PC friends, PS4 friends and Xbox friends with the characters I have spent so much time building. I mean I managed to get my Xbox One character up to 370 light… but that feels pittiful compared to my stable of three 400 light characters on the PS4 side, each with access to a vault full of awesome stuff. Compared to the 14 days on PSN… I have only played 21 hours of the Xbox One gameplay because not having all of my toys was always a major set back. Since the characters are bound to the Bungie account… they could absolutely make this thing happen. They just need the will to do so. So I have hopes and dreams… but I am fully expecting them to get dashed in the long run. At this point however I am just riding the hype train and so freaking ready for this game to come out.