Games

A Collection of Games that I Write Posts About

Curses, Thrill, and Bounty Farming

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Idling in Tristram on Seasonal Barbarian in Diablo 3 Season 21

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.

Leapquake and Whirlrend

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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.

Skill Based Matchmaking

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Yesterday was the beginning of the first Iron Banner of Season 11, and with it I decided to start my grind once again on my least favorite character. It had been a few seasons since I last participated in Iron Banner, but when I last did it involved a quest line that required you to do a bunch of weapon based kill quests on each character. I figured I would devote last night to trying to get the Hunter through the quest and then work on the Warlock and Titan on following evenings. However it turns out that has all changed and there is now a single simple quest that involves killing 25 folks with sidearms and another 25 with auto rifles.

The reward for this is getting the new seasonal copy of an auto rifle and a sidearm. While the old quests were a bit of a slog, it was nice because you wound up with a full set of armor and a random roll for each individual weapon that would be dropping. This felt pretty good because if you got a shitty drop on one character you might get an amazing drop when you get over to the next character. Example right now I have gotten a single drop of The Forward Path and it is truly heinous. Essentially it is an auto rifle without any range or impact with all of the stability and handling you could ever want which seems extremely bad.

For the side arm I got what feels like a thoroughly mediocre roll. I am still not entirely certain I like playing with side arms, but I most definitely do not like playing with anything that looks this stupid. Suros designs are either awesome or horrific looking with little middle ground. This however shows the problem of having only one quest and one set of drops per account. There are two new weapons that will last for several seasons and both of the rolls that I got from them were duds. Granted I can keep grinding the Iron Banner forever and getting more drops.

The problem with that is Bungie disabled Skill Based Matchmaking, which is a hot button issue in the crucible community. Essentially it favors players with a better connection over players that are actually within your skill range. The end result is that folks like me who are not terribly good at pvp get matched with folks like Aztecross who is a pvp focused streamer and YouTuber. There is no way in hell that someone who regularly gets to the lighthouse in Trials of Osiris should ever be matched up with a scrub like me. However in the land of magical thinking and mystery it happens because apparently we have similar connections. He absolutely carried our team to victory, and I did next to nothing in the process.

Bungie has gone back and forth on this point over the years, and I feel like there has to be a happy middle ground because right now doing the crucible if you are not a crucible player feels miserable. However when skill based matchmaking is enabled all of the PVP Streamers and YouTubers scream their heads off about it because it is in their words “too sweaty”. As they move further and further up the bracket they get matched with progressively closer and closer groups of players until there is a point where there are no casual matches and only the most white knuckle gaming ever. This seems fair to me to be honest, given that as you improve you should be matched up higher and higher moving to a group of your peers.

The end result is that I wind up having to put myself in a mindset where I just do not give a shit about if I win or lose, and that I am tightly focused on completing whatever objectives I might have for quests. I also try really hard to break up the crushing defeat by venturing forth into other activities. I took a break last night to knock out some of my strike objectives for example, and when I returned to the Iron Banner I was once again ready to get my face beat in. I hope that Bungie looks at the data and decides disabling Skill Based matchmaking is a bad idea, because other than big events like Iron Banner it seems like it is only going to drive off the more casual gamers.

Tentacular Wings

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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.