Action RPGs Archives - Page 212 of 253

Journey Completed

October 24, 2016 by Belghast

This weekend represents quite possibly the quickest I have “finished” the Diablo 3 seasonal journey. I say finished with quotes because there is still a lot more that I could be doing, but I think I am ultimately as far as I intend to go. Of note… when I logged in this morning I got an anniversary achievement and the above Diablo pet so if you are interested you might check it out and make sure you log in within the next few days. For lack of a better word… Season 8 completely caught me off guard. Unfortunately the rotating three month schedule means that this is going to happen more often than not these days. Season 7 released during the Legion pre-launch event… so it too was a fairly truncated effort. I know my friend Grace managed to make it in on the day before Season 7 ended and push hard enough to get her extra bank tab. It would have been a great season to do that for, given just how good the hunter set was for pushing content. I however just let my attempt at getting that bank slot slip away because I couldn’t bring myself to push any further. This time around… we have a new set and a new optimal build. We started the season once again on a Friday night, logging in and beginning the push within moments of the season going live. Generally speaking we make it pretty close to 70 on that first night… but this time both Grace and I lost our “oomph” at around 54.

I managed to pick up the next day with another group and we ground together from the 50s through to 70 making it to roughly paragon 20 before needing to bail and get some dinner. Yesterday afternoon I focused on getting the various achievement bits needed to get the first four chapters of the seasons journey and unlock the cosmetic options, and finished gear set. This time around with the Demon Hunter it was Natalya’s set, which is a bit of an odd one given that it focuses on dealing damage with rain of vengeance. This is the basic build that I followed, substituting a few abilities for ones I prefer, namely I found Stampede way harder to control than Shade for Rain of Vengeance. I played a little of both but given how much I was in constant motion having the stampede actually pointed in the right direction was always a thing. Towards evening yesterday though I finally started to feel like I was getting a handle on the play style and soloing my GR20 was actually far easier than I had expected. The biggest problem is that this build just clears so much more slowly than the equivalent Multishot build did last season. If I were to actually push for the full compliment of seasonal achievements… I would more than likely try and farm up a full set of Unhallowed Essence again and just go back to the tried and true multishot.

However it is highly unlikely that I will spend much more time on this season. There was just something lackluster about it, given that nothing had changed since the previous season. All of the same builds worked as we left them in the previous patch. I was one of the people cheering on the three month seasonal cycle, but having been through it a few times now… I am thinking that maybe it is just too short a time period between them. Previously enough time had passed for me to start to miss the seasonal grind… enough to be truly excited for another opportunity to hang out and push to 70 together. This time… it just felt like we were doing it to get shiny cosmetic baubles instead of to really enjoy the experience. This makes me a little sad given just how pumped I have been in the past for the season to roll around and start anew. This time around I literally had no clue it was happening until Grace told me. In the past I almost marked the date on my calendar and started to get excited for the whole process. Who knows maybe in a weeks time I will feel differently and want to pick up where I left off… grinding out more seasonal achievements. That said I am perfectly happy leaving Season 8 as is, because I feel like I did what I set forth to do… collect another batch of exclusive cosmetic appearances.

Seasonal Bits

October 21, 2016 by Belghast

Tonight begins the next season for Diablo 3, and I have to admit much like season 7 this one completely snuck up on me. Were it not for my friend Grace the beginning of the season would have passed me by completely. For the last several of these we have done a Friday night vigil as we attempt to grind our way up to 70 on a brand new set of seasonal characters. Once again I think I am going to go with a Demon Hunter, largely because they seemed super easy to push through the seasonal process and at least get high enough to collect the cosmetic goodies. I am just not super into Diablo 3 right now, the evidence being that it just got removed from my side bar. The challenge is that I can only have so many games that I actively care about at one time. Right now I am spending the bulk of my time playing World of Warcraft, and attempting to steal as much time as humanly possible to feed my love of Destiny. From there I am also juggling in some time for Guild Wars 2 and Final Fantasy XIV… while at the same time trying to keep a foot in Rift for when the expansion lands there. This scattered approach at gaming has a lot to be desired at times, because it ends up leaving me feeling like no one game is getting the attention it deserves. Diablo 3 fell off the radar once I managed to get last seasons cosmetic items, and I had not even realized the season had closed until Grace talked about merging in her seasonal inventory. This in itself is one hell of a chore, but I find myself getting significantly more mercenary about this process as the seasons go along. Pretty much any legendary that is not ancient quality or part of the actively equipped set of gear… gets sharded.

The above screenshot is just because I wound up setting up a new outfit in Rift, and thought it was cool. I’ve loved the whole shade touched effect since the very first world event, and this time around for their “fall” event they are offering a shade touched skull that I could add to my wardrobe collection. I also picked up the scythe made of bone… because I kinda have a thing for scythes. The other interesting thing that I learned this morning is that apparently FRAPs does not handle DSR well. Dynamic Super Resolution is a thing that Nvidia cards can do, where they essentially run the game in 4k on a 1080p resolution. That is an oversimplification of what it ACTUALLY does but we are just going to go for that simplistic definition for the time being. I am going to need to go out hunting and see if I can find another all purpose screenshot program, because fraps apparently only takes a single 1080p panel of the larger image. This wound up with some rather comedic screenshots while trying to capture something for this mornings post. I finally wound up doing Alt+PrintScreen and pasting it into photoshop to get the results this morning… which also caused the FRAPs framerate counter to come along with it. DSR works great for a game like League of Legends or Diablo 3, but it does some weird stuff as a result. I guess I need to do some experimenting with the nvidia screenshot tool that comes with the new version of “Experience” and see if it works well enough to kick fraps to the curb. Thing is that is really all I use it for… dumping screenshots from every game into a single “gameshots” directory for me to sort through for the purpose of this here blog. In any case… the plan is to hang out in Diablo 3 tonight and do another grind ritual with the start of this brand new season. I always have a blast doing it, even when I am not exactly prepared for it.

Rise of Iron

September 27, 2016 by Belghast

On September 20th the Rise of Iron expansion launched for Destiny, and considering just how damned engaged I am currently with World of Warcraft Legion, the truth is that I had not really spent much time playing the game until this weekend. On Saturday when we recorded the podcast, I noted some of the issues I was seeing about what seemed to be recycled sections of the Cosmodrome for the purpose of building the Plaguelands area. There is one entire section that was essentially the same, but with added snow, ice and SIVA/Splicer destruction marks. What I am realizing after spending some time with the game is that this is absolutely on purpose. The current cosmodrome and the plaguelands overlap slightly, and it seems as though this area got repeated as a way of explaining to the player visually how the two zones fit together. After spending a significant amount more time roaming about, I can verify that the plaguelands are massive and extremely unique in geography apart from this one region. It is really hard trying to make something feel completely new, when essentially you are having to build it out of the same visual language that the first zone of the game used several years ago. So while much of what you end up seeing looks extremely familiar, there are some really interesting things going on, like exploring the heavily skewed wastes of capsized shipping freighters for example.

The dreadnaught very much felt like you were invading a dark and foreboding foreign space. Everything about that dungeon felt like a dungeon crawl, as you explored the nooks and crannies gleaning secrets from every corner. The plaguelands are much the same, but this time around it is a sprawling outdoor space, and part of the cognitive dissonance is that at least on some level I keep remembering that I am exploring the same cosmodrome complex that I have known for years. It feels as though I simply got to open a door to a new area that I never saw before… and essentially because of the recycling of that first area that is precisely what happened. The only disappointment is that the new story elements were pretty short, and while retaking Felwinter Peak was an awesome sequence of quests, and shutting down the SIVA replication chamber was one of the more epic fights in the game… it all felt extremely brief. The truth is the amount of content contained within Rise of Iron feels like a DLC addon… and not an “expansion” in the terms I am used to think of it from my MMO roots. The level cap does not change, and while all of the light levels increase greatly… the process starts to stall out heavily just five points from the 335 cap I was already sitting at on my characters. All of this said I still have yet to really scratch the surface of the content, but it just does not feel like quite the same transition as Year 1 to Year 2. I guess in many ways Rise of Iron didn’t have quite so many wrongs to right, and as such didn’t need to be quite the overhaul that Taken King was.

Ultimately I am enjoying myself, in spite of the fact that the gearing this time around feels significantly more grindy. The biggest part of this is the fact that it seems like blue engrams have a hard cap of 340 light. I spent a good deal of last night when I couldn’t get to sleep running around and doing content out in the world, and with that gathered up a dozen or so blue engrams. Apart from the ones that upgraded into Legendary, or turned into Strange Coins… every single one came out at exactly 340 light which only serves to be armor materials or weapon parts. With Rise of Iron, Blue is the new Green… which makes the fact that I am getting a constant string of 190ish light Greens simply tedious. Something just feels wrong with the engram system this time around, because nothing shy of a Legendary seems to make a difference. That means that the real way to move that needle forward is to either grind out faction packages or do heroic strikes… something I have not really dared to do just yet given the highly interrupted playtime I have gotten so far. When I do open a faction package however the fact that you can choose between an Armor, Weapon or Chroma package is a welcome change. It is my understanding that the faction packages have a similar hard cap to Blues, which winds up getting you to 365 leaving raid gear and exotics your only way to push up to the new 385 light cap. All of this would feel a bit frustrating… were it not for the fact that the moment to moment gameplay feels so damned good. The biggest problem I have however is the fact that my favorite weapon is an exotic… which means I need a constant flow of infusion fodder to keep moving it forward.

Since I am also an avid Destiny lore hound… I have to say this expansion is great for many reasons in that it fleshes out a lot of bits of the overall story that were left alone. Unfortunately most of this happens in more grimoire cards, which are only hinted at in the actual spoken dialog. For the last two years we have participated in the Iron Banner, as Lord Saladin arrives at the Tower looking for a new generation of Iron Lords. Now we finally get to learn about the names we have heard during that time like Jolder or Timur. This is the story of what happened to the Iron Lords and once again the story of the hubris of humanity as it tried to exploit the resources of the traveler. While I completed the main storyline rather quickly, I still have a bunch of quests that are slowly playing their way out as I have yet to take on the raid, or do any of the new strikes. I have a feeling that these will ultimately lead to unlocking the various new quest exotics, and I am hoping giving me more bits of the story. All in all it seems well worth the $30, but the truth is… you are just paying the upkeep cost on being able to keep current with the game. The game is once again falling into the spot of giving me something that I can do quickly, without getting to engaged in content that will be hard for me to pull myself away from. Are you playing the expansion? What are your thoughts?

Regularly Playing: July/August Edition

March 7, 2025August 14, 2016 by Belghast

I just realized the other day that it had been a long while since I had done one of my regularly playing posts. The general idea is to true up my sidebar list of games and bring it into alignment with the games that I am actually playing on a fairly regular basis. Some of these might not be every day occurrences but they represent the regular rotation of games you are likely to see me talking about. At some point however I fell off the wagon and went the entire month of July without any form of an update. As a result I am doing this to cover both July and August and get me up to date.

To Those Remaining

World of Warcraft

I am legitimately playing World of Warcraft more actively than I have in years. More than likely this is the most seriously I have played since before the launch of Cataclysm. I am really enjoying the game, and the changes to the various specs… and even enjoying the Legion launch event more. Over the last few days I have been using this event as a bit of a springboard to help level up some of my sub 100 characters because every two events you participate in seems to be roughly a levels worth of experience, even in the 90s. So I took my Shadowpriest last night for example from 92 to 94 in two full rounds of the event. As far as the rest of the game there is still a ton of stuff I want to do, that mostly centers around running older content and collecting appearances. To say I am looking forward to the Legion Launch is a bit of an understatement.

Final Fantasy XIV

Final Fantasy XIV on the other hand has fallen a little bit by the wayside. It is that game that I am logging into only to raid… which ironically is traditionally my stance with World of Warcraft. I am loving the Monday night raid team, and we are now starting to do more serious content. I still have little to no drive however to level or gear, at least until the content we are doing requires it. That might be a thing that happens soon because we have pretty much defeated all of the “easy” end game content and are now starting down the path of the more difficult stuff. However it feels amazing to have “the band back together” and doing raids together as a team.

Rift

At the very least right now I am logging in every day to participate in the Starfall Prophecy launch event, which is namely collecting prophecies that I can then later turn in for rewards. The pre-order bonus means that we will get access to some awesome stuff like the artifact finding mount, and I want to make sure I don’t miss out on any of that. Otherwise I need to really hunt for a group of players that are more active. I don’t want to disband the House Stalwart guild or anything, but I might consider moving Belghast off to another guild, because I would like to see Comet of Ahnket before the expansion lands since the lore seems like it will give me a headstart into understanding what is going on. Additionally I want to spend a sleepy afternoon at some point doing more Intrepid Adventures. Those things are just absolutely fun as hell and it is a style of “LFR” that I wish more games would look into implementing.

To The Returning and New

Diablo 3

As stated when I originally removed it from the list, I knew that it would be a limited time thing. With the beginning of this month came the launch of Season 7 of Diablo 3, and a return of several of us to actively playing again. This time around we do not have nearly the throng of players that we did with season six, but myself, Grace and Thalen are all fairly active. This time feels a little cheap though because we all seemed to opted for the fastest possible clearing class… or at least our view on that. The Demon Hunter is a powerhouse and one that you can get up and running insanely quickly. By the time we dinged 70 we were already pushing content hard and fast, and after roughly a weeks time I am now clearing greater rifts in the 50s like they are a cakewalk. The only question now is just how serious I am going to be on trying to get that extra stash slot. Right now there is so much going on, that I am afraid Diablo 3 is going to fall by the wayside.

Pokemon Go

Pokemon Go is something that did not even exist on my radar when I did the last “Recently Playing” and has been something that has dominated my life since. I have gone through the stages of grief with this game, and have reached a point where I continue to play it without really understanding why. I wrote the other day about some of my frustrations, and they are very real. However still… anytime I leave the house I check for nearby Pokemon each time I stop and get out of the car. As the heat starts to chill the hell out… and we no longer have 100 degree days I will probably start resuming my evening pokestrolls. However when it is 100 degrees at 9pm at night… it is just too damned hot to go out roaming too far. I hope this game gets some much needed changes, because the ones thusfar feel like they are taking it in the wrong direction. Niantic Labs still does not seem to understand that they made a MMO.

No Man’s Sky

This one is seriously brand new… but I have a feeling that over the coming weeks it is going to be a new obsession for me. I called it Interstellar Skyrim, and it invokes the same sort of feelings in me. The problem being… all of this is pending you can actually get it running on your machine. There are lots of problems ahead of this title before it reaches serious mass adoption, and I hope that in the coming weeks they can push through them. To say it has performance issues is the understatement of the century right now, and I am questioning my original plan to get this on the PC. That said I am committed at this point and still very much enjoying the experience.

To Those Parting

Destiny

I have so much love for Destiny, but for whatever reason I have drifted away from it in the last few weeks. In both the month of July and August I have not really played much, so I am temporarily removing it from the list. I know without a doubt in Mid-September when Rise of Iron hits, that I will be back and actively playing it again. In the meantime however I feel like I have gotten it out of my system for the moment. However if my friend Grace suddenly decides to start playing again, I will likely be right back there with guns a blazing. I think a huge part of it is that I really have not been spending all that much time up in my office where my Playstation 4 is, and instead hanging out on the sofa playing on my laptop. Much like when I remove Diablo 3 from the list… this is absolutely going to change in the coming months and I am sure I will have yet another resurgence.

ArcheAge

I feel like ArcheAge is a casualty of simply too much other stuff going on right now. At the beginning of July I had a bit of a renaissance with this game and managed to push through to fourty six… and then the content seemed to dry up a bit. The quests are still there, but they seem to be generally less plentiful, and the progress I was making felt a bit bogged down. As a result this sort of just fell by the wayside, and I am sure at some point I will reignite my fires for this game because at the end of the day I still very much like it. The biggest thing that came from this last journey is that I realized that PVP isn’t as big of a hurdle as I was expecting. I have technically spent the last dozen or so levels in pvp enabled areas… and really did not run into a single issue. Flagged players avoided me, and I avoided them and we continued questing along happily. At some point I am sure I will return, but for the time being I am removing it from my list of “active” games.