Diablo 3 Season 29 is Awesome

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Good Morning Folks! This weekend I got pulled back into Diablo III. The new season dropped a few weeks ago but I did not actually get around to playing it on launch day. Instead over the course of the week my friend Ace got engaged with Diablo III again, which then pulled me back in on Saturday afternoon. This is without a doubt the most chill leveling experience I have ever had because I started a little after 2 pm my time and by the time I finished recording the podcast that evening, I was just a stone’s throw away from 70. That isn’t anywhere close to record time or anything, but it is a heck of a lot faster than I normally end up leveling. When we would do a season launch on a Friday I would maybe make it to 50 that first night.

The key difference this season is a new event type called a “Vision of Enmity”. I recorded some footage of me doing one on Saturday, largely so I would have an example for this inevitable blog post. Essentially any mob you kill in the open world has a chance of spawning a portal, and when you teleport inside you are presented with a series of “rooms” for lack of a better term. Each room will either spawn another portal or spawn a treasure goblin. Killing the Treasure Goblin drops a chest full of bounty materials that signal the end of the event. The rooms seem to have a handful of possible outcomes:

  • One or more elite packs spread out through the map.
  • A room where everything is magic or higher, and drops death’s breath.
  • A room with three Greater Rift Portal bosses.
  • A room where every mob is a treasure goblin, most of them being the material goblins.
  • A room with a single treasure goblin spawn, signaling the normal end of the run.

The treasure goblin room is by far the most ridiculous thing I have seen in Diablo III full stop. That said… even the normal rooms are insanely rewarding. Almost my entire leveling process was me attempting to do one full round of bounties. I would start down the path to a bounty objective, and at some point, a portal would spawn. Early on I would get distracted by the portal forcing me to do the objective all over again because, at the end of the event, you get shunted back to town. Later I got in a rhythm of doing the objective, going to town, vendoring, and then going back to the portal because thankfully it gets marked on your minimap with an arrow pointing towards it. One single round of five acts of bounties plus all of the assorted portals that spawned… added up to I think 65 levels. For the last few I did Nephelem rifts to finish things off.

The most beneficial part of Enmity portals is that you end up with so many materials. I started getting Death’s Breath at level 2 and when I would get one of the rooms with three Greater Rift bosses they would drop Greater Rift Keystones. At the time of writing this, I have 166 GRift stones and almost all of those were gained through Enmity portals. Similarly, I have around 100 of each of the bounty materials and I have consumed a bunch of them cubing items and doing other crafting recipes. Materials are not really a problem because if you run out… just run a few more portals and in the process of doing those you will likely also get a number of legendary items. This legitimately feels like the most generous Diablo III season ever.

We talked about this on the show a bit, but it feels like the Diablo III team did not hold anything back. This is reportedly the last new season for the game and in doing so they created something purely fun for the players. It makes me a little sad to be honest, because the very limited team working on Diablo III has managed to create some extremely fun content over the last several leagues. I wonder what this game would have been like if they had gotten the full backing of Blizzard. Seeing how rich and varied the content is in Path of Exile makes me sort of wish for an alternate universe version of Diablo III where it got the same love and attention. That is not to say that the team working on D3 has not done some amazing stuff, but you can clearly tell they have limited resources.

I am very much in that awkward phase of not having all of my gear and not having enough gold to finish crafting my set of gems. I love Crusader and more specifically the Invoker set, so when I saw it was the Haedrig’s Gift set for the season I knew what class I would be playing. I have my six-piece and am currently trying to farm a Ring of Royal Grandeur in order to swap to Half Invoker/Half Crimson. I have none of my cube items and I am missing the correct jewelry and chestpiece. I think a lot of my squishiness will be alleviated when I get an Aquilas’ chest to drop. For now, I am very much in the area where my killing potential is extremely high… but my survival is very very low. I just swapped back to using the Paladin as a heal bot so here is hoping that resolves some of the issues.

All told I am very happy with this season so far, but I also know that I am going to maybe get a week out of it before returning to Path of Exile as my primary game. Playing Diablo III made me realize how lucky I am to have so many good ARPGs to swap between. It used to be Diablo III was pretty much it for me, and I would hunger for a new season. Now when I get tired of one game I can swap to one of many other ARPGs and keep the joy rolling. At some point, I will make my way back to Last Epoch and see some of the changes over there. For now, though, I am happy to be playing some Diablo III and happy to be working on my Invoker build. If you’ve ever loved Diablo III, I highly suggest reinstalling and checking this season out because the Enmity rifts are extremely fun. I love that it is content that you can do pretty much immediately. I can only hope that the Diablo III team will be consumed by Diablo IV where hopefully they can right that sinking ship.

AggroChat #450 – Arrrchivists Be Praised

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Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen

Hey Folks! We start the show by discussing Diablo 3 Season 29, and how it Visions of Enmity are shockingly good.  We praise the Arrrchivists who have somehow managed to make Marvel Heroes private servers a reality…  just currently feature-limited. Kodra and Ash talk about their experiences recently with the Furvana seaside Furry Convention.  Tam begins a discussion about narrative structures and how New Game Plus functions in different games.  Kodra talks about a brand new skip method in Mario 64 and how it essentially branched out of a long-running meme in the speed-running community. He also talks about playing the Mice and Mystics board game with his kiddo.  Finally, we wrap things up with some discussion of the newly announced Bluey Video Game.

Topics Discussed

  • Diablo 3 Season 29
    • Visions of Enmity
  • Marvel Heroes Returns…  Sorta
  • Furvana
  • Comparing Narrative Structures and New Game Plus
  • Don’t let your memes be dreams
    • Mario 64 new skip
  • Mice and Mystics
  • Bluey the Video Game

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

The Next Ugly Duckling

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One of the things about me and Path of Exile is that it seems like I always have to have some project that I am tinkering with. In this league, I have had two resoundingly successful builds, and two that are probably way better than I am giving them credit for. Righteous Fire is essentially a guaranteed banger at this point, and I have tweaked it further than I have in previous leagues. There are still places I could go with it but it would involve a significant respec of my tree and figuring out a way to deal with ailments. Summon Raging Spirits Guardian is way stronger than I would have expected it to be, and it legitimately is on the same tier as Righteous Fire in my mind. Lightning Arrow did what it was supposed to do and helped me fund the switch to Righteous Fire, and then there is my Storm Brand Inquisitor that honestly gets better the longer I play it. Now I feel like I want to venture forth into undiscovered territory.

Two ascendancies saw massive reworks, the Guardian and the Chieftain. So I knew that I wanted to do something with Chieftain just for the hell of it, and so that I could experience the Hinekora node before it likely gets nerfed in the future. An ability that I really like but have never built around is Shield Crush. I played with it a bit on Ruthless, and remember seeing an interesting-looking Juggernaut build from Jorgen that was a deep delver. So I got it in my head that I wanted to try and take that concept and transplant it to the Chieftain tree and then focus on Physical to Fire conversion with some Ignite damage. Normally in this situation, I would lean on POE.Ninja to see what other builds are out there in the wild trying to do this thing. Unfortunately… there are two folks trying this in trade league and one in hardcore… and they are all somewhat doing something different with it.

One of the things that I have learned while playing Path of Exile for several leagues, is that just because something is not in the meta does not mean that it is bad. The challenge of course is that I just have to figure out how to make this combination of abilities feel good and strong enough to get through the campaign. There are some very specific uniques that I have already acquired that should make this feel great… but I have to get to the other side of the leveling gap before I can really utilize them. At the moment… I am sort of making it up as I go along and hoping that given a sufficient number of regret orbs, I can eventually shape this into something that feels great.

I’m currently in Act IV and desperately in need of an upgraded shield and preferably an upgraded sceptre that I can actually equip. My intelligence however is in the dumpster, so I am struggling to find something that is both a sufficient dps upgrade and that I can actually equip right now. For the moment I am running around with a hammer and that seems fine. The shield is important since shield crush scales off armor and energy shields. Mostly I want as much armor as I can reasonably get on the shield, but I’ve yet to see a new base for several levels. Unfortunately, the vendor in High Gate doesn’t seem to have anything to offer that would really help me out. I can do sufficient damage, and I am pretty tanky… but it just is a bit slow going at the moment. I feel like I am going through the ugly duckling doldrums for this build but I am going to push my way to the other side.

I’m not to the point of sharing a POB because I am not entirely certain what changes I am going to need to make in order to improve this. I took Avatar of Fire, and I think maybe I did so a bit too early. Between it and a few other abilities I was converting 90% of my physical damage to fire… but I think maybe it would be better off to also have access to other damage types for the time being. That is probably a late-game choice if I end up making it. I was looking at a build that was trying to do this back in 3.19… at least the fire conversion shield crush but the tree has changed significantly since then. It will be interesting if I can ultimately turn this into something fun.

Honkai Luck

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Yesterday was the launch of a brand new banner in Honkai Star Rail, and as a result, I had to return and test my luck. I’ve not been playing this game of late, largely because I have been hyper-focused on Path of Exile. That said I had quite a amount of currency saved up given that I completely skipped the Not-Dan-Heng banner and managed to snag Kafka relatively quickly. Probably the most important thing about this banner, in particular, is it gives access to a brand new 4-star healer, making it hopefully much easier to obtain than the other options. I remember desperately pulling against the Luocha banner in the hopes of obtaining him because I needed a second healer.

I snagged Lynx the new healer almost immediately and then managed to get two additional copies so that I now have her with some eidolons unlocked. The challenge with new characters is that you essentially have to level them up from scratch, and I was already strapped for resources. I will have to play with her a bit to see if I like her better than Natasha because for the moment Luocha is just so powerful that I would find him hard to replace.

Pretty quickly I saw the gold glow from the train car and hoped that meant I would be picking up the new character Fu Xuan. However, it seems like I had wasted my pitty on Bailu. There was a time when I really wanted this character, but largely because I was stuck needing a second healer. Now I have four healers… which greatly dilutes the importance of Bailu. I guess it is still cool anytime you can pick up a 5 star though.

Another character that I really need to level is Pela. I kinda developed a kinship with this character during the Museum event, and in truth, she is really freaking strong. Given that she is easy to pull on this banner, I managed to pick up enough additional copies of her to unlock all of her eidolons. So at some point, I really need to get around to focusing on leveling and equipping her.

I had made six pulls on the banner depleted almost all of my saved-up currency, and essentially expected not to get the new 5 Star off this banner. Then I remembered that I have the monthly pass thing, and never converted the other currency it gives you into pull currency. So shifting those 300 whatsits into 300 whosits gave me the 1600 needed for a seventh round. It was then that I lucked into a mega pull picking up another copy of Pela, Hook, and the chase character Fu Xuan.

So I ultimately depleted any reserves that I had but I guess it was well worth it to pick up a 6 Eidolon DPS, 2 new healers, and the chase character. I had what I would consider to be an extreme amount of luck to walk away with two 5-star characters in such a short period of time. Now I return to banking my currency until the next banner that I care about rolls around. I need to get back into the swing of playing each day at least a little bit. I think the challenge that I find myself in, is I have so much story content that I now need to complete that logging in just feels overwhelming.

I kind of think of this as the “bags full” problem. There are many MMOs that I can’t bring myself to return to because my bags are full of crap that I no longer recognize, and I just don’t have the spoons to sort through it. In Honkai Star Rail and Final Fantasy XIV… I have an overwhelming amount of content to do in order to get caught up again… so that when I see that I just log right back out. I wish I had a mental trick to avoid this because it ultimately spells a death spiral for many games. This is most definitely a “me” problem not necessarily something wrong with any of the games that trigger it. Anyways… I hope you have been having a great week. Mine has been inordinately stressful but it seems like things are beginning to calm down.