Action RPGs Archives - Page 214 of 253

Combo Breaker

May 20, 2016 by Belghast

Ending the Streak

The other day I talked about how the three plus year streak has been looming over my head like this impassable object. After long thought I’ve decided that the sooner I break it the better, and as a result I will not be making posts this weekend. I mean that is in part a lie since I will be posting over on AggroChat Sunday morning in the form of our weekly episode. However tomorrow morning I am going to chill out, and eat my breakfast in peace with zero thought of what the hell I am going to post that morning. That is at least the theory… I have a feeling that in practice it is going to be a lot harder to NOT post than it is to post. The end goal is basically to reach a point where I am posting a new post every workday morning, so I can continue the routine of drink coffee and write about stuff. That means weekends and holidays I get to myself, or more than likely it just means I start gaming a little earlier on those days. My hope is that some time off is actually going to present topics that I want to talk about, rather than trying to wrack my brain for a new post.

I have to tell you I am a little nervous about this “new experiment” following up the previous “grand experiment”. It makes solid sense to just post week days since those are the days that folks generally read on. However at this point I am just used to the comfortable routine. So in theory the next time you will hear from me is Monday morning. As far as my weekend plans… I think I have a pretty chill one ahead of me. Tonight may or may not be a thoroughly awkward family dinner, largely because I have not decided if I am actually going or not. We just had one of these a few weeks back, but there is a family member in town that folks have not seen in some cases years… so folks are pulling together an impromptu dinner. Past that I am hoping the report of non-stop rain is exaggerated and I get to spend a little time out on the back porch. I have bubbles that need blowing. Last weekend I went to a birthday/adoption party and they had bubbles for the kids… and it made me remember just how damned much I love blowing bubbles. So I bought myself a small bottle of the soapy mess for hanging out on the back porch. Viva adulthood and the ability to buy your own damned toys!

Light Level Cap

It has been a little over a month since I last set foot in the Kings Fall raid, or at least it seems like it. There was a bit of a change around that ended up with Squirrel trying to start an earlier raid team beginning at 8 pm which is more sane and rational for those of us who get up at 5 in the morning for work. However that never really took off in the fashion that we had hoped, and it also lead for the official “rookie” raid night to get moved to Wednesdays. As a result of this switcheroo I simply didn’t raid for several weeks, and this week was my first time signing up again largely on the promise of a “guaranteed” 335 artifact from the War Priest Challenge Mode. Unfortunately that Guarantee like oh so many things in Destiny, was not really set in stone and I wound up getting yet another damned 334 item. I did however have a lot of fun running the raid, and after some time away from it all of the jumping puzzles that stress me out so much didn’t seem quite so bad. I even managed to run the orb on sisters without screwing up too badly.

Last night Squirrel, Jex and I had what has become somewhat of a tradition… a night of Challenge of Elders and whatever the hell else any of us happened to need. So on paper this should have been one of the easiest weeks, with precision shot bonus experience. However in many cases we struggled to survive and I think it was largely the inclusion of “fresh troops” into the mix. I died so damned many times last night, and we were just shy of being able to get to the 90,000 bonus in two rounds. I would have felt bad about my performance were it not for the fact that both Jex and Squirrel died quite a bit as well. The frustrating thing about CoE is it has become one of those “unskippable” activities each week because it is one of the few reliable means of getting 335 loot. I say that… however almost every single item I got this week was a damned 334, which is completely maddening. There seems to be some bug that hits where instead of giving you upgrades it starts giving you side grades. That said I did manage to get a Titan Mark as end of match loot, and then after CoE we went to the Dreadnaught for some Court of Oryx. After summing three Tier 3 events… the final one dropped my 335 Artifact taking me to the current light level cap. This is extremely exciting for me, because this represents the first time in my history playing this game that I have EVER been capped on light. Special thanks to Squirrel, Jex, Wet and the entire Axioma Clan for helping me get here.

Three of Coins Problem

May 17, 2016 by Belghast

The Ultra Knight

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Last night while making yet another trip to the Dreadnaught just to kill the Ultra Knight, I started thinking about what a glorious debacle the situation of exotic drop rates are in Destiny. Don’t get me wrong, I love this game… and they have made so many great strides over the last year into truly making it an amazing place to be. The problem is… they are seemingly inches away from landing on the target but nonetheless not quite there. The problem currently centers around making doing content feel rewarding. I completely blame the recent Iron Banner for giving me more hope than I probably should have had. During that weekend I had a single activity that I wanted to be doing, as often as I could… and that was queuing for more Iron Banner. During the weekend I managed to make it to Rank 5 on all three of my characters, and the primary motivation was the acquisition of loot. Sitting in queue and playing a match felt like quite literally the best use of my time because I knew that every four or five matches I would be rewarded with some shiny bauble that either would replace my current item in that slot or serve as infusion fodder.

Once that weekend ended however it feels like I simply don’t have an activity like that that is equally rewarding. There is of course Challenge of Elders, but the Challenge requires you to gather together a fireteam to really have a chance at completing it. We have absolutely made a date on Thursday nights to try and get our various characters through CoE but the problem is… what do I do with the rest of my time in game. I am largely a soloist, and it feels like I don’t have a similarly valuable activity that feels like I am spending my time wisely. So as a result that activity ends up being heading to the Dreadnaught every 10-15 minutes to kill the Ultra Knight, so that I can consume yet another Three of Coins buff… and every fifth kill or so get an Exotic Engram, which may or may not decode to 335 light and help me push the goal forward. In fact there are so many times that I will be playing another game like Diablo or last night World of Warcraft… where I take a break every 15 minutes or so and log into my PS4 via the Remote Play app with the sole purpose of rushing to the Ultra Knight and attempting to get that exotic engram.

Lies of Xur

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The problem is that this isn’t really an enjoyable feedback loop and feels like a hacked workaround to solve core problems in the actual gameplay. In theory that default thing I could be doing with my time should be either the Crucible or Vanguard play lists. Those are activities that need players doing them to keep the game thriving. However instead of getting interesting things while doing these activities, it feels like they solely serve the purpose of being a vehicle for me to spend Three of Coins buffs. Then there is the problem of strikes like Dust Palace and Omnigul not actually removing the buff and triggering the potential of an exotic drop. Then there is also the problem of Xur, where he is supposed to be this trader that sometimes brings us amazing things. However for most of us, Friday is simply the occasional that finally allows us to restock our Three of Coins and nothing he has to offer is actually interesting. This is because it feels like if you are doing any activity in this game, and you don’t have the Three of Coins buff active, you are playing the game completely wrong.

There is a lot of talk about Bungie summoning the Diablo developers to talk about the lessons they learned with the “Loot 2.0” patch. One of the key lessons seems to have been lost in translation. Diablo currently has a Three of Coins like effect when it comes to Legendary drops, but the difference is… it is always active. In theory if you are actively playing the game you should be seeing a Legendary drop at least every 10-15 minutes with the chance going up significantly based on the difficulty of the activity you are tackling. This means that doing literally anything from killing a level 1 mob to killing a boss has a chance of summoning a Legendary drop. This is how things should ultimately work inside of Destiny, because going out into the world and doing activities should feel like the most rewarding activity. You remember every time you get a drop from a boss, but no one remembers that one time the Cryptarch happened to give them something interesting. It feels like Destiny needs to reconsider the way loot works in the game, and make it so that Strikes, Crucible, Nightfall, Prison of Elders, and Raids are the default thing that players want to go and do, rather than simply finding any vehicle for flipping that Ultra kill switch. I also think there should be that random snowballs chance in hell of quite literally ANY mob out in the world dropping a super rare Exotic Engram, or even one of the good Legendaries at a decent light level. Bungie needs to drive players into the feedback loop of doing group activities, because the activities are fun but also the best possible way for them to get rewards.

Endless Rockets

May 10, 2016 by Belghast

Action Movies

This so far has been one of the stranger breaks from work I have experienced. Yesterday I was a complete waste of space in all possible versions of that term. I think I was just overly drained from the weekend and spent most of the day starting things but not quite getting into them. I played some Rift, patched up Final Fantasy XIV but never actually logged in, played an awful lot of Diablo 3 in very short spurts and occasionally connected to Destiny over remote play to attempt to get exotics from the Ultra Knight on the Dreadnought. For much of the day though I aimlessly drifted along with whatever happened to be on television. Namely for whatever reason yesterday was apparently classic action movie day or something, because I caught all of Die Hard and Rambo: First Blood Part II, as well as bits and pieces of others. The funny thing about action movies is with time they usually seem worse than you remember them… this was absolutely the case with Rambo. There were so many things in that movie that just seemed silly, from the fact that the helicopter he was piloting at one point seemed to have an endless supply of rockets, to the fact that he fired a ton of bullets and never seemed to stop and change the magazine… nor did it actually seem to have any place in his outfit to store extra magazines.

Diehard on the other hand, for the most part holds up just as well as I remember it. In fact in many ways, I appreciate the movie more these days. The only part I ever really had trouble reconciling was how he ended up without shoes. I mean I get the point… he was taking the advice to de-stress, but before I went off to be a hero I would have put my shoes on rapidly. Also the concept of undressing in a strange bathroom is not really something I would ever be comfortable with. However once the movie starts proper that movie makes a strange amount of sense. It comes off as more a heist film than a traditional action movie, and we are getting to watch both the heist and the guerrilla resistance to it. The movie has so many tropes that play out to make it work… from the cokehead hotshot, to the incompetent police chief… to the equally incompetent federal agents. I am sorry but Bruce Willis is still a bad ass even when I see him in a modern movie, but he seems to have lost a lot of his early “moonlighting” charm that gets displayed in the original Die Hard. Sure he makes snarky comments, but I feel like Die Hard really was more a reprisal of the Addison character in a different setting. The other big takeaway from watching both movies back to back is just how many visuals have been stolen from these films.

Crusaders are Slow

Last night was also a mixed bag in that we had been warned for the last several days that a major weather event was coming. Most certainly it was because it absolutely wreaked havoc on Wynnewood area, but for the most part in the Tulsa area we got nothing but spotty rain. That did not stop us however from going into storm mode where we both hung out downstairs watching the constant scroll of weather reports and storm chasers across our screen. As a result I didn’t do the normal Destiny thing because it didn’t really feel safe to be upstairs and oblivious to what was happening. Instead I played quite a bit more Diablo 3, and eventually took to helping my friend Thalen level. Later we were joined by Grace and the pace of leveling increased greatly. As my crusader I can take a lot of damage, but I just dish it out ever so slowly. The unfortunately part about my seasonal journey is that I am now to the point where I need to do some sort of a conquest to move on to the next step, and none of them look really doable for a crusader. I mean the “easiest” and most grindy one is to level three gems to 65, and at this point I am working on that every so slowly. I have all three of my normal gems to over 45 and am ever so slowly working my way to 65.

However to get that bank tab I am going to need another conquest somewhere. We made a quick attempt at the kill 350 in a cursed chest and came up very short with our group getting 292 which normally would feel awesome… but still very short of the goal. I have a couple of friends playing Demon Hunters and in theory they can solo it, so I might pester them for assistance. The chest in question that supposedly is the easiest to do is one that spawns in the Paths of the Drowned in Act V, and spawns a ton of bogglings. The problem being for me to kill things as a crusader I need to get them super close to me… and trying to wrangle all of the mobs is the big challenge. I really either need an disintegration wizard or a rapid fire demon hunter that can wreck things as fast as they spawn to get through it. The only problem here is that I am definitely behind the curve when it comes to this season and both demon hunters already have their extra bank tab and are now playing significantly less. My fear is that this is going to be the equivalent of the Black Spindle in Destiny… aka that thing I try a bunch of times but can never seem to do. As far as today goes… I am not sure what is on the radar. I know I need to adult like mad, and do the laundry. I am also hoping to sneak off to go see Civil War, largely because I know some of my co-workers will be wanting to talk about it upon my return. As far as gaming goes, that is entirely up in the air and more than likely I will just end up playing a lot more Diablo 3.

Bag Bloat

May 7, 2016 by Belghast

Overflowing

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Last night I was having a conversation with a friend of mine about MMORPGs and she mentioned that she had logged into a game recently and had a visceral reaction. Upon logging in she saw what a state of disarray her bags were, and when she tried to go to the bank to simply just stuff it all in there… was confronted with the same thing going on there. She ultimately just logged out and went on to play something else. This exact sequence has happened to me time and time again and is the biggest obstacle for me playing certain games. A big game on that list is Rift. Right now every single corner of my bank is full, and most of my bags as well. Every so often I have the desire to play the game, but when I log in and see a few hours worth of sorting ahead of me to get my bags into a state where I can feel comfortable playing… I just log back out frustrated. In my case the bags are full of non-critical items like dimension stuff and crafting materials… but it isn’t stuff I am willing to part with either. So instead of playing the game like I originally wanted, I just lament how I don’t have a good solution to fix the problem.

I am in a similar place right now with World of Warcraft. My bags, bank, and void storage are completely full with cosmetic gear for transmogrification. I know that with Legion they are putting in a system that will allow me to save the graphic and not have to keep the item. However in the mean time I am stuck juggling all of this loot with no real end in sight. Sure I could get marginally larger bags, but that would only buy me a few slots worth of reprieve rather than being a permanent solution. So with World of Warcraft, I honestly doubt I will be seriously playing that game until the pre-legion patch launches… that hopefully gives us the transmog solution. This is a situation I am very familiar with because I have struggled with it for years in Everquest II, but in that case it is simply because the inventory maintenance systems they have are pretty horrible and I can’t remember what half of the items I have looted actually do. I wish games would have tool tips that clearly identified what an item is used for, because in the past I have accidentally sold that one important item that I could never get back to complete a quest, and I am in constant paralysis when it comes to potentially doing the same thing again.

Bulk Storage

Since Rift is the king of adding in new and interesting systems to solve problems. I would like to humbly suggest two more be added to the pile. Basically for me personally I need bulk storage for Dimension items and Crafting materials. So what I propose is an account wide bulk storage system. For the dimensions some sort of toolbox that you can dump items into and then place them directly from a panel that collects and shows you how many of each item you have. In order to remove items from the economy and not allow players to just horde items that they might later sell, I would suggest that adding a dimension item binds it to you so that it can only be used in dimensions attached to your account. There would probably need to be a limit to the number of a single item you are storing, but in theory it just goes into the void and then is summoned inside of your dimension via the toolbox panel. This solves a bunch of problems other than storage, namely that the toolbox interface would allow you to see just what you had to place, and even more so what you were lacking so you could go off and acquire those items in particular. Wildstar has a system very similar to this, and it works amazingly well. Having something in place similar would allow me at least to tame my bag bloat.

From the crafting side of the equation I suggest a similar system. When you dump your crafting materials into bulk storage they again go into the void and are only extracted through crafting. Once again this keeps players from stockpiling materials that could then be used to flood the market at a later date. Putting them into bulk storage would essentially remove them from the economy. Once again it would be best to have this system be account wide, so that you could farm materials on any of your characters and share them for the purpose of crafting. I would absolutely love something like this because I obsessively harvest nodes… but often times have nothing I really need to do with them. I simply stockpile them for that moment I will eventually need them. If I were smart I would simply sell them on the open market, knowing that I could buy them once more if I actually needed them for a project. Instead I dump them in my bank and they take up space. What I envision for an interface is a pretty minimal on, with just each of the crafting materials listed out by category… and a number beside each indicating how many you have in bulk storage. Guild Wars 2 has a similar system that works amazingly well, and seeing something like that in Rift would make my day. Basically having these two systems, combined with the “appearance saving” systems that Rift and Wildstar already have… and World of Warcraft is about to get… would fix almost all of my bag woes.