Real Life

Diablo Disconnects

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Good Morning, Folks. Monday at 6:30 pm my time, Diablo IV Lord of Hatred launched, and it has been a bit of a mess. I think things have mostly stabilized, but for the first evening, I was getting disconnected when trying to start story quests. What made this so infuriating is that Diablo 4 has no checkpointing system when it comes to story content and dungeons. This means if you get disconnected anywhere during the content, you have to start over from the very beginning. Worse than that, there is this whole problem of your character being stranded in the world and having to keep attempting to log back in. This was not just an “overloaded servers” issue, because Tuesday morning, I woke up about 3 am and could not get back to sleep, and decided to go ahead and get up and play some Diablo 4. At 4 am, I got disconnected from a quest dungeon and experienced the same behavior as during peak times. They have since dropped a few hotfix patches, and things seem to mostly be stable now.

My original plan was to play a Warlock and lean heavily on Command Fallen, which, at least on paper, sounded similar to my beloved Summon Raging Spirits from Path of Exile. In practice, however, this ability feels NOTHING like a minion ability, and is instead mostly a targeted attack that just happens to send an explosive minion at the target. This feels super freaking awkward and nothing like the spammy SRS gameplay style where you are running around and flooding the map with temporary minions. This, combined with the disconnects, made me rage quit out on the warlock for the time being and roll a Paladin instead, since I already know that I enjoy that playstyle. At some point, I will revisit the Warlock and probably do some sort of hellfire caster build. I was pretty happy with the name Beldemona and shocked that I had never used that before for one of my “evil” caster characters.

At the current moment, I am level 37 and slowly chipping my way through the story content. I played a bit Tuesday morning and then again after maybe 7 pm last night. I have no clue where I am in the totality of the story, but so far, it is pretty solid. I hate the whole Akarat as Jesus simulacrum thing, but the story surrounding the Amazons and even the engagement with Lilith so far have been pretty great. It feels like a massive improvement over the Nahantu storyline from the first expansion. They did, however, kind of do Neyrelle dirty, and I am annoyed about that. The layout of the zones in Skovos is way more focused on the story content than I would have come to expect. I am not sure how these zones are going to feel after completing the story when you are dealing with evergreen open-world content. Then again, Nahantu kind of suffered from the same problem, and I never spent much time returning to those zones.

I am not entirely certain how I feel about the “no passives” build structure that went in with Lord of Hatred. At least with my Thorns Paladin, you spend a lot of time leveling as something else and then swapping a bunch of things over at 36 when you unlock some of the specific paths on the tree. It just feels like we are leaning way more heavily on gearing, but then again, since you can choose to craft whatever temper you need, instead of randomly rolling these, it might all shake out in the end. I’ve not really gotten any useful legendaries yet, and I am not sure what level those really begin to factor into the drop pool. I did spend a bit of grinding in Helltide when I got frustrated with the disconnects on Monday night, and the rewards, at least at low levels, felt pretty crummy. I was mostly getting blues from opening loot boxes, and I would have expected almost entirely yellow or better. I am looking forward to finishing the campaign so that I can see what endgame loot starts to look like.

Being brutally honest, I am not really certain if I like this version of Diablo IV better than the last version I played when the Paladin was introduced. It is different, and I will have to see what it feels like once I conquer the storyline demon. I never play through the story with repeat seasonal characters. My inner murder hobo is way too strong, and I mostly grind out the levels in Helltide or do whispers. I am really looking forward to seeing what War Plans introduces to the game, but I figure all of that unlocks the moment you finish the story. I don’t REALLY play ARPGs for the story, even though I occasionally enjoy it as I do in Path of Exile 1/2. Currently, it feels like I am taking my medicine and just biding my time for the story content to be finished. Lord of Hatred is better than the base game and the first expansion, but it is still not as good as something like Diablo III was storyline-wise. I don’t love all of the ambiguity of the morality in this game. I prefer to smash demons and angels and not have to care about who is betraying me in the process.

In other news, it is Evil Lemon time, aka when I am hooked up to a portable chemotherapy pump that is slowly poisoning me. The worst part of chemotherapy is realizing that I have 10 days where I feel various versions of crap, and then 4 days at the very end where I have to cram two weeks of necessary activities into before prepping for the next round. I am on the downward slide, and remembering this morning how much food hurts. Essentially, early on in the cycle, it hurts to chew anything and swallow anything, which is often why I shift over to a mostly liquid diet for a few days until the worst of that passes. I know I will be at my weakest this coming Saturday and Sunday, and it helps that the flow of this process is predictable. The cold reaction was instant and much worse than round two, which was in itself worse than round one. Luckily, it is not exhibiting in neuropathy, really, but mostly just pain because the skin has peeled off my fingertips. I am regularly applying lotion in an attempt to help with the healing, but it is bad enough that my phone rarely recognizes my thumbprint for unlocks.

Anyways, hoping to maybe wrap the story tonight in Diablo IV and see what the endgame has in store for me.

Ginger, Jollibee, and Pragmata

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Good Morning, Folks. This is Ginger, and we became friends yesterday, while I spent an hour milling around at my mother-in-law’s house waiting for someone. I had an exceptionally busy day that involved travelling about two hours away to sell my RV… that had more or less been sitting and rotting in my mother-in-law’s yard for the last decade unserviced. That was a phase in our lives, largely dictated by my wife and wanting to spend time with her sister… but when said sister passed, we just never used it anymore. Given that my mother-in-law had passed along several suitors looking to buy the RV, I took the hint that she wanted to get it out of her yard. It needs four new tires, a new battery, two new skylights, a resealing of the roof, and probably some work on the slideouts… so I figured I should probably get what I can while I can. With everything else going on in my life, it was so inconsequential that I did not even think about it. I forced my mother-in-law to take a third of the money because she needs it more than I do, and I told her to call it “lot rent”. I would have given her all of the money, but I knew there was no way in hell she would have accepted that.

Last week, we had the Anaheim FanFest for Final Fantasy XIV, and with it came a whole slew of new announcements. The highlight of this, however, was the above cat race. I would love it if we could play as this race… but I sincerely doubt that will be a possibility. Just know that I love these critters and will be spending lots of time in their town. FanFest did what it needed to do and rekindled a spark in me for Final Fantasy XIV. Dawntrail was weird, because while I mostly enjoyed it at the time… the longer it has sat with me, the less I actually liked it. It felt too much like a beach episode in an Anime, because it was wholly disconnected from everything that we had cared about to that point. Maybe it is just that Endwalker stuck the landing so thoroughly that anything after that… was going to feel like a letdown. With the announcement of Evercold, though, we are returning to the FFXIV that I care about… nonsense surrounding the reflections, this time going to the world ravaged by Ice. I am super interested in this whole FFXIV meets Northrend vibe that it has, as well as the Shadow of Colossus thing going on with the Kaiju-sized Automatons roaming around.

Another highlight is seeing this Jollibee Lovely cosplay, which was amazing. I wish we had Jollibee restaurants around here because I have always wanted to try it. The closest ones are five hours away down in Texas. This means I will miss out on getting the charming “Eat Chicken” emote, unless I want to pay the scalpers on eBay who are selling off emote codes. I am really interested to see what the evolved form of the classes that I care about looks like, specifically Warrior. I am honestly kind of amped about the whole concept of only needing to care about item level for one class, but still being able to play all of the others. I always liked leveling all of the jobs, but hated the process of gearing them, so any streamlining of that is going to be phenomenal. The one thing that I did not hear that I wanted to hear badly… is that they were doing away with the way that glamouring currently works. I want a system that collects the appearance when an item drops and then allows me to get rid of it immediately so I can clear out my retainers.

I jumped back into the game and started working my way through the post-Dawntrail content. I have to say it doesn’t really land super well yet, mostly because I did not love the place where the expansion left off. I am hoping that given enough time, I will start to vibe with the content again. One of the things that shocked me, though, was how fast the muscle memory came back. I have not tanked anything since 2024, and after the very first pull in the first dungeon, I was immediately going through the rotations like I knew what I was doing. I guess once those mental pathways have been burned in thoroughly after over a decade of playing the game… they are stuck that way forever. This is going to be something that I poke at over the coming weeks and months because it is not like I am in a massive rush to finish things up, given that we have until January. I might, however, join in the shenanigans on Thursday nights as folks chase moogle tomes.

I’ve also started playing Pragmata, and my lord this is a charming game. Imagine Brock Sampson from Venture Bros… having to keep track of a very precocious child that is always getting into trouble. Essentially, it is the best Resident Evil game I have ever played… if you replaced the zombies with robots. I say that mostly because it is a game about managing resources. You are given very limited quantities of things that hit hard and can take out things quickly, and this is paired with a hacking mechanic that requires you to really think your way through combat encounters. Over time, you get tools to speed this up in the form of an overload that buys you some time to deal with the robots individually, and another mechanic eventually that allows you to autohack things, but this is less efficient than manually hacking. Before long, you are able to chain attacks on every single robot in the vicinity and effectively take them all down at once.

What makes the game so damned charming through is the whole father/daughter relationship that develops between Hugh and “Diana”. Every so often, Diana even draws you pictures of your adventures. In your conversations, there are various things that are said that Diana takes note of. Like one of the first things you teach her is that high fives mean you did a good job, and then from that point forward… she wants high fives after everything. There is also this whole side mission of collecting what are effectively STL files to reprint objects from Earth so that she can learn about them. She is a completely blank slate when you first find her, and through your interactions, she grows and becomes a way more potent teammate as you take down the constant cavalcade of bots.

There are a lot of hilarious moments. Take, for example, the way that Diana learns knowledge by biting down on what are effectively giant SD Cards. There is another thing that regularly happens where, during hacking sequences, Diana will scream a sequence of zeros and ones at the boss. It is a game that does not take itself terribly seriously, but is also quite a bit of fun to play. I think I am probably about halfway through the game, or at least based on the map shown in the game, I am halfway through the known destinations. There is a lot of extra exploration that opens up once you have cleared an area, and at some point, I want to go sweep some of the zone that I have already been through, looking for more collectables and STL files to print stuff for my base. Unfortunately, I am probably going to be putting this game to bed for a few weeks, because I think it will require too much dexterity, and I am going into another chemotherapy week.

With that… I have no clue what my posting schedule is going to look like over the next few days. Round Two was way worse than Round One… and tomorrow I start Round Three of Eight. I am HOPING that things don’t keep scaling as they did between the first two rounds. I know that I am also going to start getting Iron Infusions with every round of Chemo, which should, in theory, slowly improve the anemia. I just know that by Friday of the coming week, I am going to be dead to the world, and the worst days will be Saturday and Sunday…. and slowly I will begin to climb out of that hole next week. I did everything I needed to do to batten down the hatches for another week of lethargy, and I am running out at lunch today to pick up some fresh goods for the coming week. I guess I am saying… I will see you when I see you.

Mornings Are Hard

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Good Morning, Folks. This is going to be one of my rare unsyndicated posts, where I just talk to the folks who read me every day. This is Tuesday of the down week between my second and third rounds of chemotherapy, and I am well into the recovery mode. Yesterday I had my first round of iron infusions, and that seems to have helped quite a bit in general. When I finished with the infusion, it legitimately felt like I was waking up, and I had way more energy than I have had since I started chemo. This morning, unfortunately, things were back to being really rough, and I think mornings are just going to be that way as I recover. I had a lot of issues with nausea and indigestion last night, and as a result, I did not sleep terribly well, so it is hard for me to subtract what I am struggling with because of lack of sleep and what is struggle due to the treatments. Last round, I did not really start to feel like myself again until Friday of the down week, so I am curious if that happens again.

The thing that worries me the most is that the doctors have talked about how Folfox is additive in the severity of the symptoms with the number of rounds that you have. The first round was honestly a cakewalk, apart from the whole blood pressure issues that I was dealing with. This round… the challenges have all increased from more days with nausea, to the whole weird-assed cold reaction lasting longer, to feeling like I just have no stamina when it comes to doing anything. I am trying my best to continue to function, and I am hoping I have a few good days at the end of the week to get some stuff done around the house. For the moment, doing my job and making sure both myself and the cats are fed is pretty much the maximum load that I can seemingly handle. Even playing games feels way more taxing than it should, and I have spent more time just catching up on shows than pretty much anything else.

I am not complaining as a call for help, because I have plenty of resources that I can draw upon. I am just a deeply stubborn human being and really would prefer to do things on my own if at all possible. However, as we roll into round three, I am starting to doubt if that is going to be possible, especially if there is a continued escalation of symptoms, and I have six more rounds of this to go. I am going in for lab work on Friday, and I am really curious to see if the iron infusion has made any sort of lasting change to how low my red blood cell count was. I would post a picture of what the infusion looks like, but it is a wee bit too close to blood, and I do not want to make anyone squeamish. It was really weird because it sort of felt like I was bleeding in the wrong direction while taking it. I still have way more color than I did before yesterday, thanks to the infusion, but I think the burst of energy that I had immediately following it was all too temporary.

All I really want now is a nap, so I might take one over my lunch break. I wish sleep came easier, but there always seems to be something getting in the way, and my old trick of Benadryl and Magnesium Glycinate does not seem to actually be working. One of the things that I swore when I started this process is that I would be honest with my readers about how it is going. This morning’s blog post is mostly just explaining where we are at. I am doing okay, I will be just fine, I will make my way through this… but it is going to be a much larger challenge than I originally thought it was going to be.

The Evil Lemon

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Good Morning, Folks. I am on day two of the evil lemon, which is hooked up and feeding me poison over the course of 46 hours. I had been warned that the negative cold reactions from the Oxaliplatin escalates over time, and so far that is absolutely a thing. Essentially, any time I touch anything metal… or something that is even coated with rubber over top of metal… I get this tingle sensation in a bad way. I am hoping that it phases out around Thursday like it did last time, because so far it is not fun at all. I’ve cranked up the temp in the house, and it does not seem to be helping at all. Last round of chemo I struggled with sorting out my blood pressure, and that seems to be stable this go round, so I am hoping I will have an easier go for this first week. We had some pretty awful tornadic storms last night, so I really did not sleep terribly well. I might end up taking off the afternoon and trying to catch up on sleep. I am at least getting a bit more used to sleeping with this dumb bag hooked up to me, because from midnight on, I think I got pretty solid sleep until 5:30 or so.

I figured I would share another picture that I took the other day, prior to starting chemo. This is “Splotchie”, and he has been hanging out lately. The positive is that, for being a grizzled tomcat, he seems to get along well enough with Greybie and does not abuse him. I am not sure if I have ever shared a picture of Splotchie on the blog, but he is not friendly, unfortunately. He tolerates me being around, but will not let me get anywhere near him. I love his markings, though, they always remind me of a jaguar. I keep thinking that at some point, he will be willing to let me pet him. There is also another tomcat from a few doors down that is a tux, who will let me pet him, but I have not caught a photo of him. He belongs to this little kid down the street, but he sneaks out and comes to visit. So long as they all leave Greybie alone, I am fine with as many visitors as they want.

In gaming news I have been poking around in Last Epoch again. On the podcast this past weekend, Tam was sharing how broken Fire Aura was, and I noticed that Maxroll seemed to have a pretty solid build for it. I have taken a relatively crazy path through the campaign, with jumping on the first two dungeon skips and then leveling up through Majassa. In lieu of the final act, I started working on Monoliths but I might go back and finish the ancient timeline just to get the bonus points. All in all this build is nonsense, and you can legitimately run around similar to Righteous Fire and just let your Fire Aura burn through most of the trash mobs. The specific version that I am running converts fire to frost damage and freezes targets, which is a thing that I have always thought would be an interesting alternate version of Righteous Fire.

I just got high enough level to be able to equip a lot of the gear that I had been holding onto. There are several pieces that I need to convert to legendaries, and I need to sort out how best to deal with the rest of my resistances. Overcapping Cold Resistance is a thing that buffs Fire Aura, so I am trying to stack that on as many pieces as I can. One of the things that I am seeking the most is a 2lp or better version of the Mad Alchemist’s Laddle. Similarly, I would love to find a 3lp or better Transcriber’s Gavel. I am also always on the lookout for better versions of the Last Nomad rings. What will really help is getting an Omnis amulet because it comes with a ton of resistances. That is going to rely on farming a bunch of 200+ corruption Shade of Orybuss, and unfortunately, as many of these as I have killed… I have yet to see a single one drop. I could also farm Confluence of Oblivion, Woven Echoes, but I am not sure how many of those I currently have.

I came really close to downing Aberroth the other night, with a wipe at 4%. The problem with doing harder content is that I am just too disorganized right now. I think in the meantime, I am going to focus mostly on knocking out monoliths that I have not unlocked on my Spellblade. This will get me some more levels and potentially more gear, and then when I get up there in levels, I might make a shot at Aberroth on the spellblade. I did tweak my Forged Weapons build and dropped the forged armor pet, and picked up holy symbol instead for some additional damage output and survival. That seems to have been a generally positive shift, and was what led to getting Aberroth to 4%. In theory, I probably need to try and get a better two-handed weapon, since the forged weapons inherit those stats. Volcanus has been great, but mostly I just need to craft a better version that has some more base damage stats on it.

I am also poking at Path of Exile still. I am 87% through level 99, am effectively 2 pips and some change to go until level 100. I’m running my pretty chill Delve tree, and gathering up a couple of maps worth of Sulphite before diving down into the mines to burn through it. Delve is shockingly good experience gain, especially around the 250-300 depth realm. This also really does not require much out of me, and I can turn my brain off and just grind. At the very least, it requires way less forethought than Last Epoch does at the moment. That is one of the things I love about Path of Exile, is that it feels like it has way more reliable defenses than Last Epoch does. Sure, there can be some spikes in damage, but it feels like it happens way less often in POE. I think more than anything, I just really want to hit level 100, so that I can go back to some spicy mapping to knock out some of the other challenges.

I am doing okay, and other than the worse spikes in cold reaction… this round of chemo seems to mostly be going more smoothly. I think a lot of the troubles that I had last round were blood pressure related, and I have mostly sorted that out. I look forward to getting unhooked from the evil lemon tomorrow, and will hopefuly be able to get proper rest again.