An Evening with the Scions

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I’ve most definitely reached this place in Diablo IV where my only real progression comes in the form of lucky drops from the World Boss. At this point, I have item level 925 items in every slot but my Chestpiece and Two-Handed Hammer weapon and it is all up to the luck of the draw when I finally replace those. I am using a unique main weapon that is going to be a bit harder to replace than your average hammer. Given that I am getting zero benefit from Whispers Caches and the Bloodtide event… I am guessing that means I would have to grind up to high levels of Nightmare Dungeons to actually find some viable drops again. As a result, I am mostly only logging in for World Boss kills.

I could always fall back on playing some Path of Exile, but I do not really want to burn myself out further knowing that I really want to play next Friday when the Sentinel/Kalandra event starts. At the moment I think I am going to try out leveling a Righteous Fire Chieftain as an alternative for when we start “Bel League” at the beginning of 3.23 in December. Mostly I want to test that out as an alternative to Juggernaut because it is so much easier to get maximum resistances on and we won’t likely have access to Legacy of Fury boots for quite some time. Hinekora’s Wrath gives a nice big explosion that is actually better than the Maven Boots but I will be missing a lot of the bonuses that you get as a Juggernaut for survival purposes. It won’t be as sturdy, but hopefully, the big explosions will make up for it.

What I did instead last night was poke my head back into Final Fantasy XIV and do something more than playing the daily cactpot and reset the demolition timer on my house. I’ve been in this weird place with FFXIV for a while now because I leveled a Paladin through Endwalker. Playing a tank is not really conducive to easing back into a game in a low-pressure manner. I did not last long enough in Endwalker to actually get to the point of leveling a DPS alt, which has made it a bit hard for me to summon the desire to come back in earnest.

Yesterday however I remembered that Duty Support exists, and is no longer the massive pain in the ass that leveling the trust system was. This has allowed me to pick up where I left off on my Machinist and run some low-key chill dungeons with my Scion friends. Sure it is a bit boring to keep running the same dungeon over and over… but that is probably what I would be doing anyway with a pack of random strangers. I might as well ease back into the game with friendly bots that are not going to hassle me over dumb mistakes I make while I get used to the game again.

It has to be said that right now Final Fantasy XIV feels really odd. It has been a very long time since I have played a purely hotbar combat MMORPG. Over the last few years, I have either been playing ARPGs or Guild Wars 2 and New World… both of which are way more closely related to an Action MMO than their earlier hotbar cousins. The first time I needed to get out of an AOE I instinctively tried to hit my usual dodge roll button… and was really sad when I remembered that Final Fantasy XIV does not have something like that. The game feels very “old” when it comes to design… but again I think it is more something that I will have to get used to.

Largely I want to get to the point where I can catch up in the story, and grind out some gear so that I can get ready for the next expansion. I am going to give it a shot even though I largely felt like FFXIV storywise wrapped up in a good place with Endwalker. I think Guild Wars 2 might be more my speed as far as MMORPGs go, because I have gotten used to more active combat but by the end of the evening I did finally start to hit my stride. I know FFXIV is probably never going to be my main game again because my tastes have changed a bit but I do want to get back to a point where I can have fun with it again.

Of Harvests That Are Dark

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Friends… I have been on a bit of an adventure. The other day I saw some commentary from a friend talking about the movie Dark Harvest that came out earlier this month. The poster for it seems rather compelling and being a huge fan of Children of the Corn it piqued my interest. This was released as a rental on streaming platforms and got a live screening at the Alamo Drafthouse. So in another place and another time this likely would have been a major theatrical release, but in the weird place we are in at the moment it went “directly to home video”.

Then I read the fateful words on the poster… that it was “Adapted from The Award-Winning Novel”. 2023 has been the year of the book for me, and I am currently reading my fortieth of the year. Given how drastic movie adaptations can veer from the original material, I figured I would take a pause in my reading of Agency by William Gibson and give this novel a try. In the worst-case scenario, I bounce hard and simply watch the movie like I was going to originally.

This was a bit easier said than done because apparently, Dark Harvest has been a VERY popular name for novels. Some further research led me to the fact that the first one in this sequence is the one I was looking for by Norman Partridge. The “Award Winning” in the movie tagline relates to the Bram Stoker Award for Best Long Fiction from the year 2006. So yesterday morning I popped over to the Libby App and luckily one of the three libraries that I have a card for had it available. The novel itself is really more of a novella given that it is only 176 pages in length and I was able to easily read it over my lunch break.

Dark Harvest tells a tale that isn’t necessarily unique, but it does so in a really visceral manner from the perspective of an omniscient narrator that you learn more about as the tale comes to its conclusion. It is a tale of a suffocating small town, with bitter meanspirited people, and a yearly ritual that holds a dark secret. It is a novel that contains a “twist” but one that is pretty easily guessed and outright explained well before you have reached the halfway point. It is a novel with a deep sympathy for the monster, more in the vein of Frankenstein than Pumpkinhead. The town and more specifically the Police Officer stand in opposition against our trio of anti-heroes as we the readers root for them to succeed. Things may not be tied up in the neatest of bows at the end… but it was still fairly satisfying. More than anything this is a novel that rebels against the “things have always been this way and have to stay that way” narrative of small-town America. As a product of deeply rural “one horse town” America, I at least found it satisfying and immediately identified with the narrative of wanting to leave at any cost. That is precisely what I did… once I was gone, I was gone and I didn’t even come home on the weekends.

The movie however does what Hollywood always seems to do… and mercilessly fucks with the story. By the time we are ten minutes into the tale, it is already barely recognizable from the source material. While the novel is a tale of rebelling against dark traditions… the movie leans significantly more into the monster movie genre. As a result, you end up with this sort of what if Lord of the Flies happened during the Purge where the kids who all look like Back to the Future 1950s extras go out and wage war against Pumpkinhead. The only pieces that remain from the Novel, are the most basic building blocks of the plot… the October Boy, Starved Children Pressed into Service to Defend the Town, and the townsfolk enabling or at least turning a blind eye to the whole process.

I am not saying Dark Harvest is a bad film, just that it has very little to do with the novella that spawned it. It seems to constantly be flipping back and forth on this border of taking itself way too seriously, and cartoonish levels of nonsensical violence. For example, I give you the “bloodsplosion” which is a truly nonsensical scene where apparently the monster brutally murders an entire cellar worth of kids who have tried to hide away from “The Run”. Nothing that the monster could have done… would have caused this giant fountain of blood to come crashing out of the cellar, but we have it nonetheless as a weird hamfisted callback to the elevator scene from The Shining maybe? There is zero sympathy for the devil here… as Sawtooth Jack is just a mindless abomination that must be killed. There is some attempt to pin a message on at the end… but the delivery just does not really work with anywhere near the same gravity as it does in the novel.

I am not saying it is a bad film. So long as you go into it with the knowledge that it is going to be a movie with an easily guessable twist that makes some oftentimes interesting stylistic choices… you will probably enjoy yourself. That said after watching it… I fully understand why this went “directly to home video”. I think the biggest sin that the movie does, is doing a poor job of representing the novel. That however often seems to be the case, especially with horror adaptations. It isn’t that the novel itself is the best thing I have ever read, but it is good enough that I would suggest it, especially considering how quick of a read it is. I am less certain however if I would recommend the movie. This is maybe one of those situations where you would be better off watching the movie first, and then reading the real story afterward if you found the premise at all compelling.

So yes… I am damning this with the faintest of praise. If nothing else it was an interesting journey that I went on yesterday. The novel if nothing else has some really damned good lines in it. I will leave you with my favorite:

words don’t matter unless they are walking the hard road to the truth

Kalandra Redemption Arc?

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Last night I wound up playing Diablo IV again. I am not really certain how much longer I will be lingering in this game, but I realized after yesterday’s post how close I was to finishing the 90 levels of the Battle Pass system. For reference, I dinged 80 this morning while I was in the game taking some screenshots, and dinged 90 on the Battle Pass around the time I hit 79, so it is easily done on a single character without partaking of the nonsense “accelerated” version. This honestly makes me feel much better about the battle pass as a whole because it seems significantly less grindy than what I experienced with Destiny 2. As far as the seasonal achievements… it is really asking me to get a character through all of the end-game boss fights, and if I actually stick around to grind out the next 20 levels… I might care about those.

While I greatly enjoy Legions and the “Bloodtide” events, I have reached a point in progression where I only really care about the World Bosses. The World Bosses can drop item level 925 gear, and so far I have picked up six pieces in total with a few spares sitting in the bank. No event other than the World Boss seems to be capable of dropping gear that high level, or at least I have not ground up Nightmare Dungeons to the point where they can given that I am around the level 21-25 range with them currently. Legions, Bloodtide, and Helltide all seem incapable of dropping anything decent yet so that puts me in the awkward position of not really caring about much loot that is dropping save for hunting for the handful of legendary affixes that I care about and lining up some spare aspects to extract.

Mechanically the game is still quite fun, but I am reaching the point where I am grinding for the sake of grinding. Otherwise, I can just keep the D4Armory Events page up and pop in right before a World Boss spawn. I ran a handful more Nightmare Dungeons and they are sort of in the “aggressively fine” state where I am getting enough map drops that I can salvage the ones with the affixes that I don’t care for, and then craft more of hopefully the ones that I don’t mind too much. I know I complained the other day about Drifting Shadows… but honestly, that is one of the better options that does not seem to impede too much on the fun of romping through the dungeon. I still do not think the state of dungeons in general is good, but it is at least something to do and I should probably spend more time leveling my glyphs.

Path of Exile released a trailer and some general announcement notes about the November events that will be taking place starting next Friday. There is no Endless Delve as folks had thought, and instead, the first event is a return of the Krangled league… where all of the passive tree and ascendancy nodes are jumbled making it almost impossible to build a viable character. This is going to get a hard pass from me, but the next one is a revisiting of the league mechanics from Sentinel and Kalandra… both of which I actually enjoyed so I am probably going to try league starting an RF Chieftain during this event. Lastly is a league called Shifting Stones where every map will have a super juiced version of the Atlas passives applied to it, and what each map gives you will shift every 15 minutes. If I am feeling up to it I might throw together something quickly just to play with that. If you get a character to at least level 50 in two of the three events, you will get a loot box… which legitimately is not that big of a reward but at least something.

I am legitimately hoping that the Sentinel/Kalandra league means that we might see a revisiting of these two mechanics in Standard with 3.23. I always thought that the Kalandra mechanic specifically was very interesting, but just happened to land at a time when the sandbox state of the game was not great. Had it released in place of say Crucible, when the balance of the league was very strong… I think it would have been significantly better received. It has a really bad taste in most players’ mouths because the game itself was in a bad state at that moment, so maybe this event will give it a bit of a redemption arc. Players have also been begging for Sentinel’s recombinator system to go standard for a while. If nothing else it will be an interesting week to get in and revisit all of this for seven days.

Lastly, I wrapped up The Peripheral by William Gibson last night and enjoyed it enough to start the second part of the unfinished “Jackpot Trilogy” immediately following. I’ve been a fan of Gibson since first reading Neuromancer, but I got out of the habit of rabidly consuming everything he released. I caught part of The Peripheral series on Amazon and liked it quite a bit, which prompted me to try out the novel given that the series was not picked up for additional seasons. All in all, it was a good novel with memorable characters, but maybe not the high point of my year so far. I am going to at least make my way through the second novel and then be sitting and waiting for the release of the third.

Sad Little Totems

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I am exceptionally groggy this morning, which makes little sense considering how much I slept last night. Yesterday I got up around 3 a.m. so that I could run my wife to the airport. She is on business in the D.C. metro and was sending me photos from her adventures throughout the day. My personal favorites were some of the ones she sent me from one of the Smithsonian museums. There was a cool Rosie the Riveter Lego set but unfortunately, the glass was super polished and I did not feel like sharing a photo that had my wife’s reflection in it without her knowledge. Basically, yesterday was a bit of a blur. It is not often that I feel my age, but trying to survive on caffeine and very little sleep throughout the day is not something that I have done since my days in the Late Night Raiders in Vanilla WoW. I went to bed around 8 pm last night and as far as I am aware slept all the way through until 4 am ish and then even then managed to eek my way to 5:30 before actually getting up.

Before finally calling it a night, I did spend some time in Path of Exile and wrapped up the seasonal challenge associated with Ritual. I had completely respecced my Atlas to go hard into Ritual nodes, so now I have to figure out what I want to do instead. Getting 19 of 40 seasonal challenges rewards a stubby little totem and it has been a minor point of pride that I have managed to get one for the last three leagues. Granted this is not actually a major achievement, but it is one for me on a personal level. I went from completely floundering in Path of Exile, to being able to complete my Atlas, to being able to actually do enough achievements to get a totem for my hideout. I would have finished up sooner but unfortunately, the Vaal boss down in Delve did not drop a Doriani’s Machinarium Map and I have been unwilling to pay the 6.5 divines that they are currently going for.

I also attempted to play a few alts in Diablo IV at which point I was struck by how generally alt-unfriendly this game is. The seasonal abilities are on a character-by-character basis… which makes little sense given that all of the abilities cap out a level 3, and you can pretty much max them out on a single character. One of the nice things about Diablo III was how easy it was to twink out your alts, so that when you started your next character you got to keep all of your paragon points from the first. Similarly, gear was easily applied in specific bands. Right now gear drops are based on the level at which you got them dropped regardless of how low item level an item is. Diablo 4 tends to set equippable levels in a loose relation to the level in which you acquired the item. So you can tend up with items that are dropping and make no sense to be using them… because they are either not Sacred or not Ancestral… that have a higher item level equipped than the range for which those items are useful.

One of the things that I think would be cool is have something associated with the season’s blessing that as you level up… you lower the equippable levels of all items by a percentage until when you hit level 100 it removes ALL equipment restrictions. One of the biggest joys of alting in an ARPG is twinking out your secondary lineup of characters. It would be nice if this were possible in Diablo IV, but in its current state… it really isn’t. Not that there is a lot of crossover between gear items to even make that viable, but still something would be better than the current state of the game. The XP boost is at least noticeable though which I guess is still rather nice.

I am honestly not sure what my focus is going to be next. I popped into New World and tried to get back into the swing of things there… but honestly, I have been gone just long enough to make a lot of things unintelligible. It seems as though with the new expansion they have removed the ability to level up gear which sorta sucks. It also seems like they have increased the caps of a lot of the crafting professions… which also somewhat sucks because I had fought so hard to cap out a few of them before to be done with it. When new levels are added into a game… it makes me appreciate things like Guild Wars 2 where there is a fixed level cap and then horizontal progression with systems. I do really like the flail though as far as weapons go.

Anyways… I am rambling. I hope you are all having a great week and hopefully, by tonight I will have sorted out what direction I am going game-wise for a bit. I am going to need something to distract me from how empty the house feels for the moment with my Wife traveling.