Yesterday morning was a bit rough due to the hosting issues, and as a result I got my normal post out significantly later in the day. If you are on a cycle of only reading my blog in the morning then I would greatly appreciate you giving that mid day post a read as well, because I am curious about folks thoughts. In other business I still need about 11 bloggers to volunteer for Blaugust Promptapalooza so please check that post out as well if you are so inclined. Now that the business is out of the way I have been spending most of my time working on the Season 21 journey in Diablo 3. Here is a rundown of the progress made since I last wrote about it.
I tweaked my “No Set” build quite a bit, switching it from an earthquake based build to one that uses Hammer of the Ancients or “HOTA” in D3 parlance. I started with this build as a template and then tweaked it with the items that I actually had access to, namely I still have not gotten fart pants or illusionary boots. I also swapped the Esoteric Alteration gem for a Legacy of Dreams which makes the whole no-set thing significantly easier. I managed to do the 45 with plenty of time to spare and quite honestly Legacy of Dreams just made it a cake walk considering I went in with a 55 gem. The one gotcha is that I took this conquest to mean “no set bonuses active” but what it actually means is no set pieces at all equipped. I ran it once with a pair of ancient legendary set pants and didn’t get the conquest until I went back in and ran with a random legendary pants equipped.
The other conquest that I have knocked out is curses. The easiest way to make this one happen is to keep recreating your adventure mode game until you see the “Cursed Peat” bounty up in Act V Paths of the Drowned. This guarantees that the cursed chest is up, and that particular event spawns a ton of little boglings which help you add up the numbers needed. Two nights ago I was on fairly late and I saw it was up and tried to solo it… and I only hit 311, so just a bit shy of the 350 needed. Last night however Grace and I popped in and out of games until we found the right bounty and managed to beat the 350 needed by about 20. I wish we could have connected with Thalen, because I am certain he will need the conquest as well at some point this season.
That leaves me with only the very time consuming conquest left… Avarice. I’ve written about this before but effectively on T16 I am going to need to run 7 rounds of bounties or a total of 31 bounty caches. I realize I just linked to the post that has all of this information but for the sake of anyone with fresh eyes I am going to repost the cache related information here.
A T13 bounty cache contains 1,190,000 gold. 43 T13 caches contain enough gold to achieve the conquest.
A T14 bounty cache contains 1,440,000 gold. 35 T14 caches contain enough gold to achieve the conquest.
A T15 bounty cache contains 1,540,000 gold. 33 T15 caches contain enough gold to achieve the conquest.
A T16 bounty cache contains 1,640,000 gold. 31 T16 caches contain enough gold to achieve the conquest.
I could in theory do them on T13 and effectively knock the bounties out quicker… but I am not sure if the difference in speed would be worth two full more rounds of bounties. I always do more than the strict amount because I am constantly afraid of having to repeat the entire process again. So in theory were I doing T13 I would collect at least 45 chests (9 rounds), and on T16 I would collect at least 35 chests (7 rounds). I am limited in part due to my movement speed and less on the actual killing speed… so in theory there isn’t that big of a difference in the time it takes me to clear T13 as to T16.
Once I have finished my 3rd conquest I will have one last thing to finish, and I have been collecting a vault full of legendaries to knock it out. Essentially I have to use the cube to extract 40 powers, and doing all of these bounties are going to give me plenty of materials to be able to complete this easily. I will be swimming in them, and hopefully can use the excess to begin rerolling the various items I have equipped and hopefully get everything to ancient, and maybe a few to primal. The weirdest part about the season for me is that the roles have been reversed. I am the one carrying others and not the one being carried, which is kind fun for a change. If you need help knocking out any seasonal stuff let me know and I can hopefully arrange a time to assist.
If you have been around this blog for any length of time you will know that I sorta have a thing for Diablo 3. It is easily one of my favorite games of all time. On what is effectively a three month interval I drop everything that I am doing and allow myself to get wrapped up in the seasonal madness. This began on Friday and as is our tradition Grace and I did the early grind together with Byx who has of late become our regular third. Topping off the party was Grace’s husband that we lovingly refer to as “the Kraken” for reasons that won’t make sense. We actually lasted considerably longer than normal and made it to just shy of 60 before sleep finally claimed me. Unsurprising to anyone, Grace managed to grind out the rest of the season before sleep claimed her.
We actually had a significantly more structured approach to this year and we completed a challenge rift in an attempt to get a bit of a boost. I crafted a two handed mighty weapon and it thankfully turned into Fury of the Vanquished Peak, which provided a nice boost to Seismic Slam damage, but also was a required cube item for the final build. This season the Haedrig’s Gift set is Might of the Earth and as a result I built into the Seismic Slam build which involves hopping around the map and each time you do so you drop an earthquake and then using a significantly buffed Seismic Slam to do the clearing. The build ended up significantly more powerful and more quickly than I had expected in part because of that early cube item get.
My goal for the season however was to build out a Whirlrend build, which involves a specific combination of items that effectively lets you spin forever and each time you touch something apply multiple stacks of rend that tick down instantly dealing all of the damage at once. I love the build in part because it is mindless and doesn’t require any timing for finesse. It is the perfect build for farming Rifts and Bounties… which I am going to have to do a significant amount of this season to get the Avarice conquest once again. The only challenge I am running into is that the Might of the Earth build above just has a higher potential right now for clearing. Whirlrend is fun, but at least at this very moment it feels EXTREMELY squishy as in the GR60 range a pack of anything that throws a projectile can effectively end my day.
The challenge that I ran into even trying to make the Whirlrend build work, is that I was missing a number of key items… items that were not dropping at all. The biggest of these was the Ring of Might, and after some reading I found out that the easiest way to get one of these is to do Kadala’s blood shard lottery on a low level Barbarian… level 8 to be specific. As a result my second seasonal Barbarian was born, and sure enough on my third ring bought from Kadala I picked up that Ring of Might. Had I been following a guide more closely it probably would have had me pick up this item early on, but regardless it worked.
The next key item in my cross-hairs was picking up Ambo’s Pride a legendary Mighty Weapon that makes your rend apply all of its stacks at once. I was having zero luck getting this either through the lottery or through converting rare mighty weapons. Doing some more reading it is apparently available at level 29 and at that level the drop pool is significantly smaller. This meant that I needed to level my baby second barbarian so I ultimately ran a round of bounties and that was effectively enough to get it. I proceeded to attempt to gamble and rare convert on my level 30 Barbarian and the luck was not with me. However in one of the runs farming bloodshards to try another round of gambling I managed to get the drop effectively negating leveling up to 30.
The core problem with Whirlrend is that it really needs way more paragon points than I currently have, or at least way more perfect items than I managed to acquire. For now I am probably going to shift back to Might of the Earth Seismic build because while it requires a lot more work, I think I can probably make more progress in knocking out the remaining steps n the seasonal journey. I need to pick which of the set dungeons I am going to master, because quite honestly this is the thing that trips me up pretty much every season. I am bad at set dungeons, and I hate being on a timer… so I pretty much avoid doing them until they are literally the only thing I have left in the season. I’ve already solo’d my GR70, but I have yet to step foot into a set dungeon. I guess I need to buckle down and figure this out.
Secret Mission Update
On Friday I wrote a bit about a Blaugust secret mission I am working on. I still need eighteen bloggers who are willing to do some shenanigans with me. Essentially I am working on something and all it requires is that you:
Have a Blog or Vlog
Are Willing to Make a Post on a Specific Date
If I can pull this off it will be really cool, but I don’t want to go into more details publicly right now. However if you are interested in helping me with this drop me a line on any of the various contact means you might have. Comment section of the blog, twitter, facebook, discord, or whatever other contacts means you might have for me. I have some documentation ready to go that I will share with you if you choose to accept this nonsense.
Yesterday was the 20th anniversary of Diablo II, a game I very much remember picking up in the store. In fact I remember that pretty much the entire office ran out at lunch to pick the game up. A few years back we tried to play the game for the AggroChat Game Club and found that it does not hold up anywhere near as well as our memories of it. If you log into the game right now you get a free set of “prime evil” wings, which are sorta ugly as sin… but it is also free cosmetics so yay. If you so choose there is a big post with various Blizzard voices talking about what the game meant to them. There is another post up on the official site talking about the various things in commemoration of the event including the wings.
For me Diablo II is a weird sign post, because it represents a schism in the ARPG crowd. It is the game that a certain group of players hold up on a pedestal as being when the game was perfect and pure. I on the other hand happen to love Diablo III and am quite honestly afraid that Diablo IV may not be a game I actually want to play based on how hard it seems to be drawing on those grim dark vibes. The key problem I have going back and playing Diablo II these days it is that the game play feels so damned sluggish and slow. I am used to zipping around the field and the rushing through rifts style gameplay of Diablo III. There is also the massive problem of having to decide upon your build the moment you start playing instead of constantly being able to evolve it as you progress completing resetting it at any time you choose.
Diablo IV seems compelling, but when there is talk of World PVP… I start seriously tuning out. I don’t want PVP in my Diablo period… and if it has to exist for the vocal edge case folks then I hope it is walled off much like War Mode in World of Warcraft. I am already not super certain what I think about having players blended into my world, because Diablo for me is a very solitary or small group activity. I don’t interact with the larger community and I have never once grouped with someone I did not already know in Diablo III. After looking forward to the game for so long, a fear is starting to set in that it might not be a game I actually enjoy playing. Hopefully Blizzard will continue to support Diablo III at least their current lackluster support mode so I can keep playing it if the fourth game and I don’t get along.
Diablo III Season 21 – July 3rd
This is also your friendly reminder that along with logging in to get your wings, you should be logging in to get your mailbox straightened out. On July 3rd they are starting the new season and once again I plan on playing a seasonal character. The goal right now is to play up another Crusader because Haedrig’s Gift is Invokers… my favorite Crusader set for pushing. Since this is an extended weekend I am hoping to be able to stay up later than the average seasonal start and push most of the way to the level cap. I said yesterday on twitter than the season is almost a religious experience for me and that is absolutely true. While the experience is ultimately short lived, I look forward to it each time.
Iron Banana
Additionally this week I have the beginning of the first Iron Banner of Season 11, and it is my goal to make a significant amount of progress prior to getting sucked into Diablo III on Friday. I plan on logging in tonight and beginning the grind on my Hunter then following the path through Warlock and finally ending up on my Titan for maximum light gain. Additionally in answer to something I threw out there yesterday… it seems like we are shaping up a raid team and have all of the necessary players and a few extras to hopefully make that happen. For those who are looking for friendly conversation while doing the Destiny we have my “Beyond the Light” discord community that you are more than welcome to join. We spent some time yesterday commenting about my apparent clairvoyance with naming the community damned closed to the upcoming “Beyond Light” expansion back when the game launched.
All in all it has been an exceptionally stressful time for me at work, but the gaming front has procuded some fun activities for me to devote time and resources towards. I ran a few nightfalls with Chef and Prae last night which were a blast, though fell significantly short of the 100k needed for rewards. The fun part however is probably the most important aspect, and hopefully we can hook up over the next few nights to do some banana.
I had one of those moments this morning, where I suddenly realized that it had been a really long time since I have done one of these topics. The intent is to use this opportunity to actually lock in what I have been spending my time playing and update the sidebar of my blog. The goal has traditionally been to do one of these each month, but I regularly fall short of this. The last one of these that I did was during the beginning weeks of Blapril, and prior to that… it was August of 2019. As with many things in my life I have failed to keep track of that goal.
It has been a weird few months for the world, and I think we can all agree that maybe goals deserve a little bit of slack right now. So this morning I am going to do the thing and talk about the games I am actively playing, an the ones that are getting removed from the list. Given that several months have passed I expect a significant amount of shake up.
To Those Remaining
Destiny 2 – PC
Hello Darkness, my old friend. Destiny and I have had a long tumultuous relationship since its original launch back in 2014, but it is never very far from my list of regularly played games. I had reached a point where I was deeply disillusioned about the seasonal system, and finding it really hard to muster the drive to grind out the content each time. Then recently I have found myself back in the orbit of this game and greatly enjoying my time. What changed? Well the Darkness has finally arrived and we are seeing some significant forward momentum in the story line. Additionally we have an event going on right now that is a farming bonanza that is a mix of Gambit and a Escalation Protocol. I am active and enjoying myself but time will tell how engaging the next expansion drop in September will be.
Diablo III – PC and Switch
Diablo you are so rarely very far from this list, but admittedly right now I am playing a lot more of you on the Switch than I am on the PC. A new season will be dropping very shortly, so I am sure that will change at least for a brief burst of activity. This has replaced Dragalia Lost as the thing I often play before falling asleep, because the length of time it takes to do a round of bounties or grind a handful of rifts is about how long I have before sleep claims me. My greatest wish however is that my Switch account was actually connecting to my PC account allowing me to farm real progress from the handheld. Cross play should be the rule of the land, and I am hoping as we enter this next general that it and cross save become more of a fixture.
To the New and Returning
Guild Wars 2 – PC
So recently Tam has been on a Guild Wars 2 kick and trying to upsell folks hard on playing it. As a result I have been back poking my head into the game and I still am not super happy with it. This is a title that I have had an extremely long and sordid past with, as we never could quite see eye to eye and still cannot. I’ve said it before, this is the first and only alpha program that I felt the need to actively resign from. It is doing something, and a lot of people love it… but it is a struggle for me to play it. I did however spend some time on the Revenant last night and had a significantly more enjoyable time than I do generally on my Warrior… but that seems like a mountain of horizontal progression that separates those two characters. This might get removed from the list as quickly as it was added, but for now I am throwing it on there.
Final Fantasy XIV – PC
I came back about a month or so ago and spend a significant amount of time grinding mounts and leveling the bard the rest of the way to 80. Now I find myself languishing a bit with not really being certain what I should be doing next. I leveled my three harvester classes to 70, with one of those being fishing that I leveled completely from scratch. The challenge I have with FFXIV is that I never seem to be able to find a rhythm of repeatable interactions. I show up… grind for awhile… burn out for awhile… and then return when more story drops to repeat the cycle. I wish I could find something more favorable to use as an engagement pattern, but I struggle for whatever reason to find it.
Phantasy Star Online 2 – PC
I gotta admit, this right now is the new hotness. This is the thing that I have probably poured more time in lately than anything else. I loved the original Phantasy Star Online back during the Dreamcast era, and previously went through the hell of playing on the Japanese servers. So of course when the game released to North America and on PC I would spend time playing it. As of right now my Ranger is sitting at 71 and I expect to keep grinding it up to 75. I spent a bunch of meseta to fix my previous transgressions with my mag and it is now a perfect 200 Ranged Power. Still deeply enjoying the game, but as I have said before it takes an awful lot to actually get through some of the nonsense systems. I need to sit down and push further into the story, but it is its own kind of slog. For now real happy to have Phantasy Star Online back in my life, and pretty much I am playing it and Destiny every evening at least for a bit.
Torchlight III – PC
I’ve been an alpha and beta tester of this game for quite some time, since it was originally called Torchlight Frontiers. However all of that time was covered by an NDA and as a result I have not really been able to talk about the game until recently when it shadow dropped on Steam Early Access. The game is very “early access” right now, but I am playing it intermittently while dealing the various bugs that are cropping up and the issues they seem to be having with the server infrastructure. I expect great things for this game, and expect it to be on the list for awhile as I play it every so often until it officially releases.
World of Warcraft – Retail – PC
World of Warcraft makes the list, but is kinda hanging by a thread right now. I am not actively playing it at this very moment… but I VERY actively played it since the last time I wrote about the game. WoW will always be comfort gaming, and as we adjusted to our new lives in the pandemic, I clung pretty hard to this game. It doesn’t hurt that there is a massive XP buff going on and I could abuse it as a way of catching up a bunch of characters. I started this recent run only having a Warrior and a Demon Hunter at level 120 horde side… and I closed it with having my first Alliance 120 with my Paladin, along with another Paladin, a Warlock, a Hunter, a Druid, a Death Knight, and a Mage horde side at 120. However the grinding ground to a halt and I have not been actively logging in much lately. That said I know I am never very far away from logging back in to World of Warcraft.
To Those Departing
Animal Crossing: New Horizon – Switch
Animal Crossing New Horizons was effectively my first Animal Crossing game, having only ever played the mobile title before. It was an interesting ride, and one that helped me to get through those first few covid tinged days. However the grind reached a point where I decided I just didn’t want to keep up with it anymore. Were I to play this again I would absolutely join team cheater and start time travelling, because the engagement pattern of ACNH is such that after awhile I felt chained to it. I felt like I had to log in every day because I was wasting potential progress time. Were it the sort of thing that I could play hard for a weekend and then walk away for another couple of weeks, it would probably still be in the rotation. I realize this is exactly how you can play if you time jump, so I might dust this off and figure out how exactly that works at some point soon. For now however I am going to be honest and remove it from the list.
Atom RPG – PC
You were a really cool game Atom but I never quite got around to finishing you off, and I am not exactly sure why I added you to the list of games I was actively playing and not just the “ships passing in the night” thing that I tend to do for more single player experiences. In the time since adding it to the list, they have released a sequel so I figure at some point I will return and finish this off. For now however it is getting bumped from the list.
Wolcen – PC
I can’t honestly tell you why I stopped playing, but it happened. I’ve heard there are a lot of issues going on with the game, and that in itself has kept me from returning. I had a lot of fun, but there were some issues that I had, namely that group play felt less valuable than single player play. The few times that Grace and I attempted to group up, it felt miserable. I hope they sort some of this out, and I am absolutely down with returning at some point in the future. However for now, it gets removed from the list.
Summary
During the time since the last post I have shifted further back into my MMORPG roots and away from the Single Player game sequence that I was on over the holidays. Destiny 2 and Phantasy Star Online 2 have more or less become my primary games, with occasional jaunts off into other titles. I will be curious to see if I find my roots again in Guild Wars 2 or not, but the external pressure isn’t exactly helping that desire. I have a few side projects that I am working on, and I hope to get to the stage of being able to unveil them soon… which might completely change the mix of titles. For now however we are back up to date, and hopefully I can get back in the habit of doing these as a monthly thing.
