Leaping Doggos

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Hey Folks! I hope you all had a most wonderful weekend. I’m now beginning the weird phase of working at home while my wife is off for summer break. I took advantage of this nonsense by sleeping in until 6:30 instead of my usual 5:30… and as a result, everything just feels “off” this morning. It was a bit of a busy weekend, but when I did play games I spent some time playing Last Epoch. Coming up on the 25th Eleventh Hour Games is going to be dropping the 0.9.1 patch… which I mistakenly called 1.0 in a video I recorded. I’ve been trying to get back into the swing of the game and I spent some time playing captain toilet brush, seen above. While I love the feel of “mapping” on the Paladin, fighting bosses as a melee character that has its entire damage centered around having a big third hit… feels awful. So this sent me back to the drawing bin in trying to find a comfy new character to spend time on.

When I set aside Last Epoch for diving back into Path of Exile at the launch of the Crucible League, I was spending a lot of time playing a Beastmaster Primalist character. More specifically this was a character that I had intended upon doing the “Squirrel Build” where essentially you get a unique helm called the Herald of the Scurry and then it transforms every wolf that you can summon into two squirrels. If my calculations are correct it will mean that I have an army of twelve squirrels following me around and shredding my enemies. The only problem with this is… that in spite of spending a lot of time on my level 90 Necromancer farming for the helm… I’ve never seen one drop.

Over the weekend I recorded some gameplay of my build in its current state doing a monolith… or map as I will likely keep referring to it. So essentially I have focused my entire passive tree on making my wolves stronger and making them deal a lot of bleed damage and then I run around with a pack of six of them. I don’t have an active skill really, and the way I deal damage is whenever I leap it fires off an Upheaval when I land. However, my Upheaval is specced in such a way as to generate a totem that fires off six upheavals in a row. So essentially I leap around making totems and then use Warcry and Frenzy Totem to buff my doggos who are actually doing the damage for me. I had to go so far as to remove Upheaval from my bar because I kept hitting it periodically and screwing things up. Instead, I have Tempest Strike on my bar, which mostly sucks… but it keeps me from resetting the Upheaval Totem duration.

I have most of the key points in the build at level 74 and am largely just “gilding the lily” when it comes to putting additional points in to slowly flesh things out. It’s a fun build, but also a fairly squishy one. I’m hoping to improve that over time as I get better gear, but right now I am just trying desperately to avoid getting hit while leaping around and letting my doggos shred things. I think in theory the build will improve feel-wise when I can finally get a Herald of the Scurry and double the total number of minions that I have on the field. Essentially my goal right now is to work my way to empowered monoliths and then spend all of my time in the second one… Black Sun… until I get a helmet to drop.

Alternatively, I could just log into the Necromancer and see how it feels now, and farm Empowered Black Sun until I get the helm. Admittedly I have not played the Necro at all since coming back to Last Epoch over the weekend. That might be a good option to see what I think about the character and the current state of that build. I mean I enjoyed it quite a bit while I was leveling it, and I am already in Empowered Monoliths… and I think I will probably have a much easier time GETTING TO Empowered Monoliths on the Beastmaster if I have the helm. Anyways… Last Epoch is still a lot of fun and it was pretty fast for me to get back into the swing of things there. I’m looking forward to this week’s patch and seeing what all gets tweaked and changed. More specifically I am curious what new content gets added to the game as that has been teased and potentially today we will get some answers in the last of the hype week blog posts.

I hope you all have a great week and for those in the United States… a good lead-up to Memorial Day weekend.

AggroChat #435 – Seats to the Downfall

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

Tonight we start off the show with what is quite possibly the least nonsensical intro that bends around and becomes a Happy Birthday message to Solaria…  which by the time this releases will be one day belated.  Tonight we talk about the Overwatch PVE Mode debacle and this expands out into a larger discussion of the downfall of Blizzard Entertainment.  From there we talk about Amazon making a new Lord of the Rings Game and some snark towards LOTRO.  Grace discusses exploring what is ultimately a very Free to Play Racing Game called Asphalt 9.  We talk a bit about the Last Epoch 0.9.1 Pre-Patch Hype week of teasers and that Bel has officially given up on killing Maven in Path of Exile.  Bel and Grace talk a bit about a Southeast Asian-Inspired Diablo-style ARPG game that looks like it is straight out of the 16-bit era of games called Ghostlore. Finally, we wrap things up with some discussion of the Star Citizen 3.19 patch and Invictus Launch Week, and the New Player Experience.

Topics Discussed:

  • Happy Birthday, Solaria!
  • Overwatch 2 PVE Mode Debacle
  • The Downfall of Blizzard
  • Amazon snarks about LOTRO
  • Extremely F2P Racing
  • Last Epoch 0.9.1 Pre-Patch Hype Week
  • Bel Gives up on Maven
  • Ghostlore ARPG
  • Star Citizen 3.19 Invictus Launch Week
    • New Player Experience

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Overwatch and Losing Hope for Blizzard

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Hey Folks! I am doing one of my fairly rare Saturday posts in part because I made something resembling a legitimate YouTube video. Also, the situation has changed slightly since I made that video and I wanted to talk through some of it. I am not exactly going to rehash my thoughts from the video, because I figure if you are curious it is only like 5 minutes and you can just watch the damned thing.

Essentially this is all spun from the announcement earlier this week that Overwatch 2 would be canceling its PVE-focused Hero Mode. This somewhat started my thoughts percolating because I had largely been waiting to pay attention to Overwatch when this fully fleshed-out PVE mode was released. When Loading Ready Run… admittedly one of my favorite YouTube channels… released a segment on Checkpoint adding their own thoughts, this essentially caused my feelings to tip over and the above YouTube video is the result. Essentially my feelings are that Overwatch 2 was relaunched in large part because the first game was not monetized anywhere near as much as ActiBlizz in their current configuration would have liked. Relaunching the game under the guise of improvements gave them the opportunity to add a bunch of new hooks to drain the coffers of their player base.

So yesterday the game director Aaron Keller released a public blog post explaining the reasons why they cancelled Hero Mode. There is also a fair bit of gaslighting going on that “no really everything is going as planned, we are just removing this level-up system”. This admittedly made me wonder if I simply misremembered what was originally pitched at BlizzCon in 2019. That year… seems simultaneously “last year” and “a decade ago” at the same time. So much has changed over the last four years… so that caused me to go digging for the original announcement. Thankfully there are channels out there that rip every announcement and upload it under their own banner. So I only had to go as far as GameSpot to find a full rip of the entire 22-minute-plus presentation from 2019.

So I spent a chunk of this morning watching the video, and specifically paying attention to the wording. Admittedly this was a simpler time when it comes to Blizzard and our feelings about them as a company. This is before the bulk of the sexual assault allegations came out in the media, before the public failure of Warcraft III Reforged, before the failed state of World of Warcraft, and before the absolute depravity that is Diablo Immortal monetization. There is an interesting article from 2021 on PC Gamer tracking how Blizzard’s reputation has collapsed that covers sixteen different topics… and fails to include anything that happened in most of the last three years. Suffice it to say in 2019 we viewed Blizzard significantly differently than we do today… or at least I know I did. That said even going back and watching this video… stirred up feelings I had for this franchise that had gone dormant.

Watching through the video and the subsequent talk from Jeff Kaplan, I feel pretty certain that no… I did not misremember things. In this chat after the moving cinematic that still managed to invoke some tear-jerking all these years later… Kaplan does what he always did best and chats with the audience. During this speech he promised a “complete story experience” and that Hero Mode would be the equivalent of “Adventure Mode from Diablo” but for Overwatch. Specifically that they were doing this because the audience had been asking for a PVE Overwatch game and that they would be delivering “A Ton of PVE Content”. When Overwatch 2 launched without any of the PVE-focused Story Mode of the game, a lot of players like myself adopted a “wait and see” stance. Even after reading through the carefully shaped statement… I still feel like there just isn’t any reason for me to pay attention to Overwatch 2 from this point forward. They dropped the parts of the 2019 Vision for the game, that I cared about.

I chose this picture of Mei for my final image in the video I released yesterday morning, and it feels fitting to end this blog post with it as well. She is a precious cinnamon roll that we do not deserve. Anyways this is also probably the end of my talking about Overwatch given that it is clear that the trajectory for the game is going in a direction that I just don’t care about. Admittedly a large part of why I bought the first version of the game was to get Mercy’s Wings for my Diablo III characters. Honestly… I consider that money well spent because I have used the heck out of them. As far as the game… I still really like the characters and the universe it is set in, but have no interest in whatever is going on with that franchise at this point.

As far as Blizzard as a company, I feel like I have been laboring under the false assumption that maybe just maybe Microsoft could ride in and set things right for that company. The debacle that has happened with Redfall however makes me deeply question if that is ever going to be the case. Also in reading up on ALL of this today before sitting down to write this blog post… I was presented with just how far Blizzard has fallen over the last four years. Looking at BlizzCon from 2019… it feels like it was this happier time when I was ignorant of what was going to play out both in the world and more specifically in that company. I never thought I would feel nostalgic about 2019… but god I do at this point. I would love to go back to feeling positive about most things, and the future of Blizzard entertainment and a lot of these characters and franchises that I’ve loved over the years.

However, we are here now, and understand the reality of the situation, and as much as it pains me… I am just not sure if there is any hope for the company at this point. I say that knowing there are many friends who still work for the company, I really wanted to keep that torch of hope burning. However, at the moment I am feeling pretty damned snuffed out.

Greybie is Pure

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Good Morning Friends! Last night I did not do a ton of gaming because around 7 pm I went outside… and largely stayed there until 9 pm. I got a message from my wife that Greybie had shown up in the backyard, and I wanted to get some lovins. Greybie is such a good boy, and once again I tried to coax him to hop up on my lap and failed miserably. He however wanted pretty much constant attention and would reach up anytime I stopped petting him. I had the original intention of going out and reading, but instead, I pretty much spent all of the two hours that I was out there… hanging out and spending time with Greybie. Our backyard is a bit of a peaceful oasis, and I’ve realized that I actually do like entertaining folks… just exclusively of the fur-bearing kind.

Tripod was a bit calmer last night and instead of pacing back and forth under the table, she hopped up in one of the chairs and watched us from a few feet away all night long. There was one moment where she slinked her way over behind me… then suddenly thought better of it and retreated back to her chair. I did not move to intercept because I wanted to make sure she had the confidence to be closer to us without fear of us trying to grab her or something. This is truly the long con when it comes to Tripod because she has been in our backyard going on five years or so, and it feels like short bursts of progress. She always seems happy when I come out to feed and lingers nearby… but never really gets within touching range.

As soon as we went inside for the night, she was over roaming around my chair to investigate the area. She spent a lot of time sniffing everything to get her bearings. She clearly recognizes me as her human, because when it is just my wife out in the yard she doesn’t get nearly as close as she does when I come out. I just don’t think she knows how to interact with me yet, or has the confidence to actually come over and get attention. She will stare intensely at Greybie when we are petting him and then will start rubbing up against the legs of chairs and such scratching her own head on them. My hope is that she will eventually put the two together and realize that humans do a really good job of being head-scratcher.

While I was going to the effort of posting videos on Catfriend Television, I decided to go ahead and post this video of a rather rotund raccoon visiting the front yard early this morning. I’ve seen as many as four at once, but more recently we’ve just had this one showing up every few nights. I’ve also posted about the possum that visits the backyard and very occasionally the front porch. I’ve yet to capture anything terribly unexpected, but apparently, my dad has four deer that roam around their house. When I went up there to take him to a doctor’s appointment on Wednesday, I had to stop while they crossed their driveway. He also has two new cats that showed up, which are rather friendly… Bonnie and Clyde. I’ve yet to get a good photo of Bonnie who has come to visit me each time I’ve been up there lately. She just had a litter of kittens, so I look forward to playing with some tiny fuzzballs at some point.

As far as gaming goes, I think I have wound down Path of Exile for a bit and started picking back up Last Epoch. There is a big patch that is set to land next week, so I am getting back in the swing of things and preparing for that. There is also a new content update for Guild Wars 2 that is about to release next week as well, so I am sure I will be spending some time exploring that as well. I made an attempt at Maven and failed miserably and called it “good enough” for the Crucible League, and will likely just buy a carry next League so I can have the advantage of four void stones. Eater of Worlds and Searing Exarch are so easy to get to… but The Elder and Maven are such a colossal pain in the ass to even get to the fight… let alone defeat them. I don’t really enjoy bossing, but I want the ability to get base T16 maps for everything… so I will likely just spend the currency to get someone to carry me to victory going forward and get it over with.

I hope you all have a great weekend. It is raining like crazy here so I expect it to be a very indoors weekend for us. I’m hoping that I get some more time hanging out with the outdoor cats however.