Action RPGs

Action RPGs along the lines of the Diablo Franchise

Email of Destiny

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Good Morning Folks. I was sort of all over the place this weekend, dipping my toes in a bunch of different gaming ponds. However the absolute highlight of the weekend is attached to some deeply strange circumstances. On the 16th I got an email from Nintendo outlining how the Switch 2 Preorder lottery would work… and in it included the phrase “It’s your time to purchase” which it stated would be in the email you receive if you were chosen. Obviously I immediately turned around and searched for this exact phrase… and while I did not uncover an email from Nintendo it DID include an email draft that I never actually sent to a friend of mine… where I was sending them SWTOR patch notes. Thing is… this is a person that I used to talk to on a near daily basis… but had not talked to in years. We apparently had a brief conversation in 2021 but I have no working memory of this event.

We always had this weird tentative connection, and for the life of me I have no clue how we met because so much of my time in World of Warcraft is crusted with the dusts of time. However we sort of had this dynamic of being friends that went to different schools. Occasionally I would convince her to join in one of my mad schemes… or recruit her to join a raid here or there… but for the most part we operated in completely different circles. So completely out of the blue… and unlike myself.. I decided to email to see how they were doing. What shocked me the most is that I got a pretty quick response, which led to us chatting on Discord off and on throughout the day. I’ve lost contact with so many people over the years from leaving World of Warcraft to leaving Twitter, people who meant a lot to me and were really close friends… but also when it comes to online connections you never know how you are perceived in their eyes and how much of a friend they actually consider you. When I made a break from World of Warcraft I sort of put all of that in a box and shoved it into the back corner of a closet… and I am glad that I made enough of an impression for someone to be interested in reconnecting.

For other non-gaming related stuff, this was Eurovision weekend and it is always a highlight. Ace and I have been watching this for awhile… and then making random often snarky comments over Slack during the show. I feel like it was a bit weaker of a total show than some years, because there were way fewer “fun” acts and way more “serious” acts. It seemed to be the year of the torch song, and I was at least thankful if someone was going to go in that direction… that the best one won out. However the absolute highlight of the show was a collaboration between Kaarija and Baby Lasagna… the 2nd place but significantly better than the winner contestants from 2023 and 2024. They did this amazing fighting game mashup experience of their two fan favorite tracks… and then broke into a brand new song that they created together and dropped on the day the semifinals concluded. Unfortunately the ONLY way to see this if you are not in an EU country… is via this reaction video because the REAL video of the experience is region blocked.

Enshrouded dropped a massive patch that they are calling the Thralls of Twilight update. As a result Saturday I spent most of the morning playing a brand new character and new save file. There are so many immediately noticeable visual upgrades, but I have not really gotten far enough to experience many of the new content updates. I did something that I had never done before… which was place my original base flame on the edge of a cliff and then proceeded to build off the cliff creating a very defense-able location. My idea is that as I expand my base area… I can eventually build down into the shroud below. So instead of actually playing the game and progressing my character… I spent most of the morning carefully excavating the cliffs surface one 2×2 block at a time. I made a decent amount of progress and created this work platform down at the lowest point that the original blueprint of my base would allow. At some point I will start expanding down again to see how far I can get this time. As Ash stated during the podcast… I really am apparently a Dwarf because I do love hollowing out a mountainside.

Another game that I have been playing quite a bit of is Slormancer, which is a 2D ARPG with an art style and quirky animation style similar to Rogue Legacy. It is a really simplified version of the ARPG genre, and uses a dual stick style control scheme that would fit perfectly for a device like the Steamdeck. I’ve not actually tried it yet but that is on my list of things to do in the near future, because this seems like an ideal chilling in the backyard type game. It also has a bit of a feel of the 2D beat-em-ups like Guardian Heroes or Castle Crashers. I’ve not made it terribly far yet, but have gone far enough to unlock all of the characters and fight my first mini-boss. I think I probably prefer the knight to the huntress or mage, but have not really gotten far enough to unlock the various skill specializations. I know the mage got instantly better as soon as I specced into the ability that fires a second bolt after the first. Really cool game and I can see myself poking at it off and on for awhile.

I am also still playing some Last Epoch because every so often I just want to run a map. I feel like I am not engaged in Path of Exile for the moment, or at least not forcing myself knowing that when 3.26 drops I will be back with new force. Eleventh Hour Games keeps releasing quality of life updates, for example I noticed that when you click on an egg and search your bank… it highlights items with no legendary potential so that you can easily see which items that will work. More importantly though is the differentiation between the Tomb marker and the objective marker, making it much easier to complete maps in general. I know that my Not-Righteous-Fire Paladin is going to eat a nerf… because it is a bit too powerful… but I am hoping it lands in a still very playable state for next season. Though since they have already said Season 3 is going to be all about Necromancers… I am probably going to be playing one of those.

Guild Wars 2 lately has become my main game, and I am spending a lot of time in Dragonfall. I am not exactly sure WHY… but when trying to figure out my next project I landed upon Vision. This is an extremely long process that involves doing pretty much everything there is to do in the Season 4 zones, and yields a Legendary Accessory as a result. I figured I would start on the hardest of the zones… Dragonfall and have been slowly chipping away at various achievements. It might be easier to knock some of this out in WvW through using the Dragonfall Reward Track. Since I like WvW quite a bit… that at least gives me something to be working on again since I do not currently need another Gift of Battle. Probably the hardest sub achievement is going to be Championship Bout, which involves killing a laundry lost of bosses that spawn after you finish the zone meta event. In theory if there is a good commander and everyone is working together, you could probably get this in a single go. However without fail… the group fragments and folks start taking on random bosses meaning that no one group gets credit for everything.

I’ve made a lot of progress on various achievements though, and have used the Memory Essence Encapsulator for Dragonfall to finish that bit of the quest. This is going to be the hardest bit honestly, because buying each encapsulator costs a bunch of crafted resources… some of which I cannot make and will have to lean on the market board to pick up. The big problem is the Lesser Vision Crystal which requires 500 skill in either Armorsmithing, Leatherworking, or Tailoring… and I have not hit 500 in any of those. I guess that could be a side quest for awhile… to try and push one of those up. According to GW2 efficiency, my tailoring is the closest sitting at 465 currently. Since my friend that I talked about at the top of the post just started playing Guild Wars 2, and is playing a Necromancer… I might get some levels crafting them some gear which at least gives me a purpose behind spending the resources required.

Anyways… what matters the most though… is that I have objectives. That seems to be my key to sticking with any MMORPG is that I have some goal that I am working towards. When I achieve the goals I tend to fade away, so as long as I can keep grabbing a shiny new objective to work towards… I am way more likely to stick around for awhile. It was a good weekend, and I hope it is going to be a good week… though that is doubtful considering we have bad weather for the next several days. I am hoping no more tornadoes that come close to my house.

Weird Headspace Time

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Good Morning Folks. I’ve had a weird week and a lack of desire to put pen to digital page. As a result you’ve only gotten Monday, Wednesday, and Friday posts instead of one each day. Largely it has felt like I have not really had much to talk about, because in truth I am struggling to find purchase on anything that brings me joy. Part of this is due to the fact that we got a partial RTO (return to office) order yesterday, starting in July… after five years of being fully remote. I knew this was coming down, but I just did not know the timing. As such I am struggling to concentrate on much of anything, and while I am enjoying what I have played of Expedition 33 so far… it is just too much thinking. I need shut my brain off entertainment so that I can stew in my own mess and sort through my thoughts and feelings. I’ve also just sort of been bone weary tired lately, which is not helping either.

I finished Andor season 2 however, and it is quite possibly the best Star Wars anything out there. Everything else is going to feel like a bit of a let down after how phenomenal this tale has been. At some point I want to watch Rogue One, which was already my new favorite Star Wars movie… to see how the character of Andor evolved between the two properties and see if it matches up cleanly at all. Even if you are not a traditional Star Wars enjoyer, you owe it to yourself to watch the two seasons of Andor. Even from a pure artistic standpoint it is so lavish and stylish, giving us a whole new view of the galaxy far far away. While we are only getting two seasons of Andor, I would honestly really love to see some more connected properties about characters that were introduced here as gap filler between these events and the more familiar events of the Star Wars original trilogy.

I also finally got around to watching Freaky Tales, which is a weird 1980s quadrilogy of odd tales… that feels oddly adjacent to the connected story-lines in Pulp Fiction. The trailer gives the impression that it is much more of a fixed narrative, rather than four individual stories, each from the point of view of a group of characters. The events of everything weave in and out of the narrative, but effectively each story is a closed loop. What is wildest about this sequence is that apparently they are based on actual events that took place in Oakland around 1987. The entire story is woven by Too Short, who is played in the movie by an actor… but actually makes a cameo himself. There are a bunch of odd cameos, specifically Tom Hanks as a gambling den running cinephile video store owner was specifically out of left field. It is well worth the watch, especially if you grew up in the 80s and were ever a member of any of the various subcultures from that era.

Last night I started watching my way through Star Wars: Tales of the Underworld which is a Dave Filoni animated show tracing a series of events centered around Asajj Ventress and Cad Bane. I am not sure if there is an eventual crossover in the series between the two characters, but thusfar there appears to be a sequence of Ventress specific episodes and then a sequence of Bane specific episodes. I’m only a few episodes into the Bane part of the show, but the Ventress episodes were phenomenal. I’ve always liked this character, specifically the interesting redemption arc that they have given her. She went from being just a really cool looking villain to a very textured character over the source of the Clone Wars series. I think that has honestly been my favorite part about the Filoni-verse is how his shows have taken relatively paper thin characters and added mass and form to them.

So when I said that I was done with Sir Gog league… I had apparently lied. I’ve needed something that I can shut my brain off while playing… and Path of Exile at this point is one of those things. I’ve committed most of the game to muscle memory, and I accidentally landed on a fairly reasonable build. I’ve continued down the path of Sunder, but making it do lots of fire damage and leaning into buffing that through a few support gems. Combine this with a bunch of gear that I am getting through running Kingsmarch shipping missions, and you have a reasonably tanky character that does fairly decent damage. That said… the boss fights continue to be complete nonsense. They just feel progressively more and more cheap, like Grinding Gear Games was setting out just to find brutal ways to kill players rather than making well thought out fights.

I do think I have hit my hard limit though with this fight, because I have reached the point where I just cannot grind through an encounter. During the Doedre fight in Act 8… I am doing almost zero amount of damage to the boss before the massive room wide area of effect attacks take me out. All I am really doing at this point is incrementing the death meter, and showing zero sign of making it through the fight. I think this is the point where my character just ends. I made a good attempt at getting through the gauntlet, but it beat me. I could get my second ascendancy points, but I am not sure that would actually buy me anything significantly in the survival department. Like I said before, all of the builds that seemed to do this when it was a hardcore event were some form of miner that just one-shot everything. I believe this was during the seismic trap is overpowered days of the game.

The other game I have been playing quite a bit of lately is AFK Journey. Normally I have this as part of my nightly before sleep ritual of playing through a bunch of daily missions, and then never really getting around to anything else. One of my friends though is looking for someone to duo a bunch of corrupted monster encounters, and in order to get to them I have to have progressed a certain amount of way through the storyline. So as a result I am mainlining the story and trying to get as much of it knocked out as I can. Yesterday I believe I cleared the bulk of the seasonal storyline, and am now in optional territory. However I am going to keep cranking through this just to make sure there are no walls later in the game when we actually attempt to group up and do the content. I still find the game deeply charming and am consistently shocked at just how much of it you can play without having spent a dime on it. It is not that I am against spending money on games… even mobile games… but games like this don’t really give you any reasonable feeling means of doing so. All of the money sinks are specifically designed for whaling out.

Anyways that is where I am at. This is going to be an exceptionally busy weekend because Mother’s Day has snuck up on me once again and I have no clue how we are going to see everyone within the constrains of a single two day weekend. Hopefully y’all have your own affairs figured out, because I surely do not.

Fun is Ephemeral

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Hey Folks. I did not end up blogging yesterday because the morning just sort of got away from me. On Monday I talked about my adventures in Pohx League 2.0 with the Atlas Invasion ruleset. Immediately following that post… I rolled a character in Sir Gog’s league which is using a Softcore Ruleset based on the Gauntlet event. Initially my goal was to run up a Commander and do another attempt at Volcanic Fissure of Snaking. I didn’t get that far and am instead some sort of one handed mace sunder build… leaning into fire damage with the goal of at some point farming up the right main attack gem. One of the fellow league participants dumped a bunch of random uniques on me in early act 1… one of which was a Lead Sprinkler which essentially caused me to shift focus to building around that. Truth be told I have something akin to a functional build going, and after a bit of respeccing away from the early bleed iteration it is getting more functional. I do know that I will pretty much NEVER again level using Rolling Magma when I could be using Ground Slam and Crushing Fist any time I block something. The optimal slam tree is close enough to the Righteous Fire tree that I am just going to stop muling an Templar and roll with it going forward, because I really hate Rolling Magma.

I get why someone might like the Gauntlet ruleset, because there are a bunch of shocking changes to the flow of the game. For example it took me three deaths to get off the beach because Hillock was supported by The Maven, had a new leapslam attack, and summoned zombies. I decided to side with “Definitely Oak” here for the extra life, but I am sure that fight is pretty different considering that the other two most certainly were. On some level it is a bit fun to see how ridiculous this event was, but also… it feels like I am just grinding my way through the rough spots by throwing my body at it over and over until the monster falls down. A lot of the Act bosses specifically feel more cheap than they are interesting… I have no clue how in the hell a melee players on hardcore did the Vaal Oversoul for example. Looking back at actual gauntlet footage, a lot of players seemed to be playing cheap builds designed to oneshot encounters from a safe distance. Basically yesterday I decided that as I entered Act 5… that I wasn’t really having any fun. The novelty had warn off and all I was left with was friction… and I’ve never been a “frustration for frustrations” sake type gamer.

I could always roll back to Pohx’s Atlas Invasion league where I am progressed to the point of maps… but honestly… for a limited event with only three weeks left I am just not sure how much effort I am willing to put out there. Settlers of Kalguur specifically is starting to wear very thin. I’ve played the original league, Necro Settlers league, Pohx League 1.0, the Legacy of Phrecia Event, Pohx League 2.0, and Sir Gog’s Gauntlet league. During Phrecia I even pushed all the way to level 100 with my Righteous Fire Scavenger. I just feel like I have done this song and dance too many times to really find much joy in it. Sure it was exciting and refreshing to return to Path of Exile over the weekend… but once I cleared the campaign and got used to the new reality of map bosses in every map… the fun sort of drained away. I feel like I am going through a weird funk right now where I am struggling to find a permanent source of enjoyment. This could be because I have a bunch of real world things going on that are beating me down… but that is all the more reason why I need my diversionary tactics to keep me sane.

I had an absolute blast in Last Epoch, but similarly arrived at a point where I felt like I “beat” the game. There are a whole slew of alternate characters that I could run up and gear… but I am not exactly drawn to doing that right now. I made it further this league than I ever have before… and in large part that is due to the fact that the Judgement build is so freaking broken. I’ve cleared the Harbingers, gotten to 400ish corruption comfortably, and taken down normal Aberroth. I have no real drive to keep grinding away to the point where I could start farming Uber Aberroth. Basically I know what I would need and it either comes from being exceptionally lucky… or diligently trying the same content over and over. I spent a bit of time early in the evening yesterday running Monolith Echoes and they are still a lot of fun in the moment to moment game play, but I am struggling to find anything that really scratches that meaningful progression itch in the game right now.

Last week Path of Exile II released a pretty significant patch that in large part solved some of the loot problems that were happening with the game. I’ve been back and played a few maps and there does in fact appear to be way more loot dropping than had previously been. The challenge there is that adding more loot does not really fix the problems with that game. The moment to moment game play still feels pretty awful, and like I am wading into a pool filled with oatmeal. Yes I can clear entire screens by leaping into a pack of mobs and then hitting Boneshatter which gets amplified by Herald of Ash. Sure that works… but the whole delay and sluggishness of movement makes it feel sort of awful. That same type of build in Path of Exile 1 would feel phenomenal. Everything feels like it is locked behind animation cycles that feel awful to wait on. All of the most popular builds right now are largely focused around exploiting some bug that is currently in the game to cause a single attack to either wipe the entire screen or delete a boss in second. I just do not care enough about the game to shift to building one of those builds right now. So essentially… there is no fun left there either.

There is also a new Diablo IV season going on right now, so in my search for joy… I rolled a character with the idea of playing the whirlwind build that I never quite created during any of the other leagues. I recently resolved my performance issues that I had with the game and others… because at some point windows had decided to set my virtual memory to my slowest drive. Even though the game feels fresh and snappy compared to previous leagues… I am just not feeling it. Diablo IV gameplay is so samey, and it feels like the ideal method for leveling is to run from zone to zone chasing these new invasion events… where players will straight up oneshot everything before you can touch them. Playing a Barbarian was probably the wrong call because I am constantly starved for rage right now, since I am not getting the initial hit on things that are being nuked from orbit by random ranged players. This game would be infinitely more enjoyable if there were no other players in the world. Had they not tried to retrofit Diablo into the MMORPG model… there might have been a really enjoyable game there. I want the ability to play with my friends when I am in the mood to do so… but every other instance of other players in my games is a net loss. Which is ironic… because in games like Guild Wars 2… I love the existence of random players.

So ultimately last night I went in a totally different direction and left behind the ARPG games that have fueled me for the last five or six years. I’ve heard amazing things about Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and fired it up yesterday. This game is phenomenal and I have only really just played through the prologue. I am not the biggest fan of quick time events in my combat… but am playing on the lowest difficulty setting as to avoid as much of the annoyance as I can. I would be far happier if this were truly just turn based combat instead of playing “press your luck” to avoid damage. However all of that said… the game world, the characters, the set design… all make up for those frustrations. I already want to know what the heck is going on in this world. It is also shocking how damned good this game looks for coming from what seems to be a really small studio with many of the folks having this as their first game release. I’m already hooked and really like the characters so far.

So I guess this is what I am going to be playing… at least until it too stops bringing me joy. Fun is a deeply ephemeral thing, because all of the above should in theory be fun for me. However for some reason my brain is wired in a specific manner so that very little is really hitting in the right ways.

Atlas Invasion is Wild

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Hey Folks! I am back on my Path of Exile bullshit. It always feels good to go home, and there will always be something about Path of Exile that feels special to me. How I got here however is its own story. Since it has been 10 going on 11 months since the last Path of Exile league… Grinding Gear Games keeps running events in order to briefly placate the very angry and dejected player base. The Phrecia league event was extremely fun, and one of the best times I have had playing Path of Exile in recent memory. Currently we are going through a phase where they have unlocked and made private leagues free for all players to create… something that normally has a relatively hefty cost to it. I think we paid around $60 for the league that we ran, because we extended the time a bit and it would have been more had we needed to scale up the number of participants in any meaningful way.

Currently anyone can create a private league for free during this event, and there are a number of different templates. SirGog for example is running a league with the Phrecia alternate classes but with the extremely difficult Gauntlet rule set created specifically for Zizaran’s reoccurring Gauntlet event. Pohx on the other hand is running a more casual friendly outing with the inclusion of the Shifting Stones and Atlas Invasion rulesets. Essentially Shifting Stones makes it so every map has either Tower Damage Blight, Endless Delirium, Endless Legion, or Player Haunting Tormented Spirits mapped to the specific Atlas Keystones that grant those things, and what a zone has changes every 15 minutes. Atlas Invasion on the other hand makes it so that once you leave the beach, every single map has two bosses that have “invaded” the map and the pool of what it can draw from is wild.

Most of the time you are going to get one of the generic rebrands of campaign bosses, but every so often you get a pinnacle boss spawning in your map. These are scaled down in difficulty for the area of the map, but still do all of the same attacks. For example while I was fighting the Dweller in Act 1… I heard the “DIE!!!!” voice line and then frantically tried to dodge a giant shaper beam that came through the wall. Before finishing Act 1 I had fought Shaper, Elder, a few Guardian encounters, and Ulhtred the pinnacle boss attacked to Expedition. The ones that I found roughest weirdly enough were the ones associated with Breach… because Tul for whatever reason will oneshot me every time I see him when I may not be prepared to dodge his frontal cone attack.

You may be thinking to yourself… This sounds awful! You would be wrong. As penance for making you fight a bunch of Atlas bosses they each drop somewhere between one to four unique items. Before I exited Act 2 I had already seen a Cloak of Flames, pretty much setting me up for success the entire run as Righteous Fire Chieftain. Most of the uniques are the low tier ones that you will leave rotting on the ground, but every so often something really special drops. Essentially it feels like mapping with a juice Rogue Exiles atlas strategy… but begins the moment you exit LionEye’s Watch. What is really cool is how you realize that there are a lot of uniques that are exceptionally powerful at low levels. I’ve picked up a couple of Cloak of Flames, Immortal Flesh, Berek’s Respite, and once I get a second Rise of the Phoenix I will probably start corrupting them trying for some interesting results.

One of the interesting things about a limited trade environment, is that because I know I will never find a perfect item… I tend to be willing to craft more gear for myself. Granted the boots in the above screenshot dropped almost perfect already from Betrayal, and all I had to do was slap fire resistance on them. Coming back to Path of Exile, it really feels like they could do with bumping down Exalted Orbs in loot tier so that they drop more often. I’ve yet to see one and had to buy one from the currency exchange to do a craft that required one. I’ve been focused on mostly running Betrayal to get my enchants and Harvest because it is by far the most accessible crafting method for getting decent gear, specifically resist rings, amulets, and cluster jewels.

However I am having to re-learn a lesson that I have learned many times in the past… by not going into Delve early I have missed out on a bunch of currency and maps. Delve is so damned good at producing large amounts of basic crafting currency. I have been strapped for pretty much everything from alts to alchs and it sucks. More than that Delve Cities seem to produce a bunch of random maps independent of what tier your current progression is at. So instead I am relying entirely on the few horizon orbs I get, vendor recipe, and map drop luck to make my way through the atlas progression. I did not really start making progress until yesterday because I did not hit maps until Saturday night. The juicy nature of the Atlas bosses has meant that during the campaign I was seeking out every optional boss… and doing every Vaal side area because they would guarantee two extra bosses as well.

The only negative of the event is that something appears to be jacked up with Kingsmarch. Essentially more than half of the times I tried to travel there I would get “Failed to join any instances”. There are threads about this error where folks have claimed that logging out and back in fixed it for them. This has not been the case for me. I can bounce in and out of the game effectively forever and it does not fix it when it is occurring. Then randomly other times it will just work fine and allow me to pop into the zone and do my business. This has sucked quite a bit because shipments are a pretty good source of early gear and currency, and I have effectively been locked out of them. This also means that my progression in Kingsmarch is a bit behind where it should be. Hopefully now that we are past the weekend someone at GGG will sort this out.

All in all though this has been a really fun event. Really if you are trying to do a group found/semi-SSF event this is the perfect ruleset. You end up generating a ton of uniques and for example I noticed every time a Dreadarc dropped which is something Kodra would have needed for Hexblast. Before I left act one I probably saw a dozen of them, which was wild. So essentially if we were ever going to do another AggroChat league I would want to run this ruleset and then have folks basically post a shopping list of what uniques are useful to them, so we could fill up the guild bank. Another thing that I found great while leveling was the Araku Tiki amulet which provides up to 50 life and 50 Fire Resistance… perfect for a budding Righteous Fire character. I ended up wearing one of these until maps because I just could not find a good enough neck to give up that much life and resistance on a single item.

I’ve had a lot of fun so far, but not sure how much I am really going to push it. Some leagues ago I joined SirGog’s chat channel during the scour league which made it so everything dropped as bases and you had to craft your own gear. After that… I just never reset my global back to another channel. I’ve come to really like the chill but focused vibe that the channel tends to attract, and did not know that chat channels apparently spanned across multiple leagues. As a result I have been listening to folks who are participating in his “Softcore Gauntlet” ruleset event and while I normally do not go for “challenge for challenge’s sake” type events, it sounds equally hilarious. So at some point I am going to roll a character in that event when I figure out what I can plan that will be exceptionally tanky using the Phrecia classes.