Good Morning Friends! On Friday evening Season 28 of Diablo 3 started, and I returned to my regular rhythm with my good friend Ace in attempting to complete it. We decided to come back to Diablo in part because this is probably the last great hurrah for the game before the launch of Diablo 4, and the title goes even further into “maintenance mode”. Speaking of maintenance… I had a bit of a rough start. I logged in early Friday morning and was encountering all sorts of issues where my stash tabs were not loading immediately and when they did load it looked like a 90s-era GeoCities site loading one icon at a time. This stabilized but when it came to the actual seasonal launch, I started encountering a problem where I would hard lock every 30 mins or so and then have to hard kill the application to get out of it and back into the game… occasionally having to go so far as to go into task manager and kill battle.net entirely.
I am not sure what caused this or honestly what solved it. I tried to do a client repair but it did not seem to be doing much of anything. Instead what I ended up doing is exiting Battle.net entirely, moving my D3 install, and then going through the process of reinstalling the game while pointing at the new directory. From there I attempted a client repair again, and this time around it took about 10 minutes to complete making me think that maybe it was actually doing something that time. When I got into the game I noticed that for some reason it was set to 32-bit mode instead of 64-bit mode. I swapped that and from that point forward the game has been extremely smooth and I’ve yet to crash out to the desktop again. I am not sure exactly which of the things I did actually solved the problem, or even what the problem was exactly… but for now I am going to stop asking questions.
When I want an easy mode season, I always lean heavily on the Demon Hunter. This time around the Gears of Dreadlands set was on Haedrigs Gift, which meant that I completed most of the early seasonal accomplishments on that set. It is perfectly cromulent and is technically supposed to be the best set currently for progression. I’m not exactly the biggest fan of it because it feels a bit piddly given that you have to keep weaving in normal attacks or you just stop functioning entirely. Weaving normal attacks is always a good idea mind you, but if you get to a point where you can’t easily the wheels sort of fall off.
I used my farming ability however to piece together the Unhallowed set and swap over to Multishot. While my brain had gotten used to the spin to win strafing GoD build, I am slowly getting adjusted once again to the more familiar Demon Hunter gameplay. For the longest time I was waiting for a Yangs to drop and then… waiting for a second Dawn. Once I got both I swapped over and can immediately more comfortably farm T16. Saturday night after recording the podcast several of us knocked out two conquests in rapid order, so I should be able to complete the third one without much issue when I finish leveling 3 gems to 65.
That puts me in a very familiar spot when it comes to finishing up the season. I’ve not touched a set dungeon at all because I hate them. Right now I plan on doing the Marauder set because if I remember correctly it is a pretty easy one. I’ve almost completed building out Marauder and am only missing a few pieces. I have everything that I need ready for the Augment minus one of the red gems, and then it is simply a case of extracting a bunch of cube powers and pushing the gems to 70. I feel like some of the pressure has lessened because I could slack off entirely and then finish up all of this stuff in the final weekend if that ended up happening.
This season’s gimmick is the Altar of Rites, which ends up driving a lot of your farming and grinding. Essentially you sacrifice items to the Altar to get permanent buffs. For example, now my pet can salvage whites, blues, and yellows in addition to picking up gold. The problem with this however is that it cannot keep up with the process and seems to miss a ton of gold and a ton of materials. Another buff is that it makes it so all gear has no level requirement… but what it actually does in practice is set everything to level 1. However Companions don’t seem to be able to take advantage of this, so it means while leveling you cannot tell if your companions can or cannot equip something. The Altar is cool, but also seemingly introduced a bunch of jank into the game that they seemingly were not quite prepared for.
What I was not really prepared for… is how much more I seem to enjoy Path of Exile as compared to Diablo III. I just don’t feel nearly as engaged this season in Diablo, and it is almost as though the gameplay loop is nowhere near as rich as I remember it being. I had fun running amok with Ace, and I had missed that sort of experience, but for whatever reason, the gearing process in D3 has felt way more hollow this season than it has in previous ones. I could micromanage getting exactly the right stats, but it doesn’t feel as repeatably enjoyable as roaming around in Delve, Heist, or doing Maps in Path of Exile.
I am really hoping that when the Last Epoch Multiplayer launches, it can be that happy medium between the more casual grouping play of Diablo III, and the more rich systems of Path of Exile. I also hope to get into testing for Diablo IV so I can try that out and see how it feels. Basically, I am not sure if I was just in the wrong frame of mind for this season of Diablo III, but something feels missing and I can’t quite put my finger on it. I am going to wrap things up, but I think I would rather be playing Guild Wars 2 when I am not actively playing with friends.
Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! This week we accidentally recorded an hour-and-a-half-long show. I guess this is what happens when you punt a bunch of topics to another week because we were missing the folks attached to said topics. We start off with the discussion about Theatrhythm Final Bar Line that we hinted at last week. From there we talk about Media from our Childhood that is not cursed… aka The Princess Bride. From there Tam talks about his further Steam Deck adventures with Eastward and What The Golf. Bel talks about his experience buckling down and getting his Skyscale in Guild Wars 2. We talk briefly about the Valve Honeypot catching over 40,000 DOTA cheaters, and Kodra talks about playing Troll Mario Maker levels, more specifically Super Wagon World. From there we go down this nostalgic trip about pulling dungeons and the puzzles that they used to present and our niche desire for randomized dungeon runs in MMORPGs.
Topics Discussed:
Theatrhythm Final Bar Line
Princess Bride and Kids
Media from our Childhood Still Valid for Modern Standards
Eastward
What the Golf
Bel Gets a Skyscale in Guild Wars 2
Tam is Experiencing Good Crabs Again
Diablo 3 Season 28
The Altar
Bel’s Rough Start
Valve Crafts a Cheater Honeypot
Over 40,000 Bans for DOTA
Super Wagon World
Troll Levels for Mario Maker
Xenoblade III is a Pulling Puzzle
Nostalgic Trip Down Memory Lane about Pulling Dungeons
Good Morning Friends. This is going to be a bit of a light spoiler day because yesterday I caught up with the last few Marvel movies that I had not seen. First I finally got around to watching Black Panther Wakanda Forever. I was not entirely certain how a film without Chadwick Boseman would go, but in the grand scheme of things I think it went pretty great. I’ve always liked Shuri, but what I really liked was the quirky scientist character she was allowed to be. Shuri as Panther was also enjoyable but did not feel as uniquely “her” for lack of a better term. I thought overall the film was enjoyable but lacked the clear focus that the first film had. I think that is the problem with the current crop of Marvel films… they feel like they don’t quite know what exactly they are building towards. The highlight of the film for me was further world-building and seeing both Namor and Talokan.
Ant-Man and the Wasp Quantumania was another big world-building movie bringing us finally to the Quantum Realm. Again I think that the movie itself was fun, but lacked a lot of the focus that the earlier outings had. It sorta felt like a D&D campaign where your GM just kept throwing new faces and locations at you without giving you much in the way of the backstory behind any of them. We know Kang is a big bad because we have been told over and over that he is a big bad, but it feels like it isn’t something that has necessarily been earned. For Thanos, we saw the effects of him long before he took the field, so, as a result, he was a bad guy that we fully grasped and respected without having to keep explicitly stating that “this dude is really powerful and bad”. I enjoyed the spectacle of the movie and the settings… but it doesn’t feel like we got enough time with any of it to really matter before booping us back to reality again.
In electronics work, there is a term called “Magic Blue Smoke” that happens when you phenomenally screw something up. There are usually some sparks, the air is filled with the smell of ozone, and a little puff of blueish-grey smoke billows up from the object. After this point, it is completely dead and no amount of poking and prodding is going to bring it back from the dead without replacing some major components. I feel like the Magic Blue Smoke has left the Marvel projects, and while they are interesting spectacles they are missing both the core focus that the pre-endgame sequence had and also missing a lot of the heart. I think this is what happens when you truly stick the landing and complete the story in a largely satisfying fashion, and anything more just ends up cheapening the experience. I’ve felt this a few times before with franchises, and I think Marvel as far as movies go is “done”. I still enjoy them for what they are, but the magic is gone and I am uncertain it will ever truly come back.
I feel similarly about Final Fantasy XIV and how Endwalker was the extremely satisfying conclusion to a ten-year journey. I’ve struggled with returning to the game because I no longer have that narrative driving me forward and making me want to crave more knowledge. FFXIV is still a technically competent game and I am sure will keep producing interesting content, but the journey I was on has finished. I am uncertain what the next journey is going to look like, but they will need to hook me in the same way they did with A Realm Reborn in order to get me to commit to following the next one. I’ve reached a level of maturity in gaming to understand that is what is happening, and not that the game is somehow “worse”. In fact the game is probably in the best state it has ever been in, but the adventure I was on has finished.
Looking back with wisdom… I think this is ultimately what caused me to peel away from World of Warcraft. At the end of Wrath of the Lich King, the story had reached a conclusion and we had dealt with all of the “big bads” left over from the Warcraft RTS lineage. I know I struggled with Cataclysm but was never entirely certain WHY I struggled with it so hard. It was an expansion of changing the base world and lacked the big adventure aspect of the other expansions of going someplace we had never gone before. More than that however it featured a central story arc that I did not care about in the least. I’ve never much cared about the Dragon storyline and Deathwing just seemed like a convenient reason to revamp some of the older zones that were showing age. Arthas and Illidan were what kept moving me forward into new content, and with them forcibly retired at the hands of the raiding players… it felt like I had reached the logical conclusion of the game.
I think we’ve reached this point at least with Marvel where the best stuff is happening on the smaller screens. Loki, Wandavision, Werewolf by Night, Ms. Marvel, She-Hulk, and event the somewhat maligned Moon Knight are doing extremely interesting things. The movies just seem to lack the same spirit and creativity that is being played out in short-run series form on Disney Plus. I mean Star Wars has also suffered from this problem for quite a while where the Dave Filoni-verse represented the best and brightest of what was available for that setting, and the movies were hollow shells. Disney will always chase big box office gold, but I think maybe that era is over. I find myself enjoying the more focused and personal stories of the series. For a while in the Marvel films I have been waiting for another conflict to erupt that feels as good as the sequence that ultimately ended with End Game, but I am no longer certain it is coming. I think maybe that was a once-in-a-lifetime event, and now that it is concluded the entire concept of what a “Marvel Movie” is needs to change.
I’ve seen a growing dissatisfaction on social media for awhile surrounding the Marvel releases, so I am pretty certain I am not alone in thinking the original focus of the films is finished. I am not sad that I watched either the second Black Panther film of Quantumania, but neither made me necessarily excited for what is to come. I am sure I will keep watching these films in the future when they come to streaming media, but I think I am done with the “going to the theater” phase of the Marvel cinematic experience. I am way more excited about what is happening on the small screen than anything I know coming to the big one.
Good Morning Friends! One of the best things about Guild Wars 2 is the overwhelming amount of things that you could be doing on any given day. One of the worst things about Guild Wars 2 is that when I say overwhelming… I mean that literally because there are a truly staggering number of individual activities that are fighting for your attention. I know one of the big frustrations I had for quite a while was trying to determine what exactly I wanted to be doing on a given night when I was not either focused on the story or focused on zone completion. As a result, I thought it might be interesting for you to see what exactly I tend to do on a nightly basis when I am playing the game. Essentially I took some screenshots as I went about my evening, and am going to share some of the thoughts that go into the decisions I made.
My evenings almost always begin in Sparkfly Fen more specifically in the Splintered Coast region. For Guild Wars 2 the daily reset happens at 6 pm CST, and starting around 5:30 I will place myself in the zone waiting for the inevitable mass of people that gathers there to take down Tequatl the Sunless, one of the oldest and still most enjoyable Dragon World Boss encounters in Guild Wars 2. I do this nightly because it is worth at least a gold coin, rewards four dragon caches, and I’ve had the luck to see two different ascended weapons drop from the fight so it seems like a good gamble to get more. The fun thing about Tequatl is that you tend to see a lot of the same faces there every night, and I used to bump into guildies there without even planning for that to happen. It is a great way to start the evening.
Immediately after finishing Tequatl I will go someplace safe, like using my Mistlock Sanctuary pass… and evaluate the daily quests that are available. These serve as a bit of a choose-your-own-adventure and will span a wide variety of activities from PVP, WvW, PVE Open World, and occasionally Dungeons. Ultimately I am looking for the three that I can knock out the easiest because I never want to leave the 2 gold you are rewarded for getting the Daily Completionist chest on the table. If you are curious there is a massive list on the Wiki of all of the daily achievements available. If you truly have your shit together you can even hit the wiki and see what the next set of daily achievements will be, but I rarely have that much foresight into my activities. Essentially here are some of the ones I am looking for in the list in order of preference.
Daily WvW Big Spender– If you do WvW at all. this one takes mere seconds to complete because you can simply pop over to your Guild Hall (if your guild has one) and buy a single Badge of Tribute to complete it.
Daily Mystic Forge – Another extremely fast one to complete… throw any recipe in the mystic forge. I tend to gamble with weapons to try and get a precursor… which I realize is large a waste of resources but whatever. You can make literally any mystic forge recipe to complete this one.
Daily Harvesting Quest – There will always be some sort of “go to X zone and harvest X resource” quest. Do these because they give you a reason to go harvest resources which is always good, and also give you a big box of resources once you complete them.
Daily WvW Veteran Creature Slayer – This one can be completed extremely quickly and if you are doing it near reset, you are guaranteed to have a party of people who are in WvW to complete it as well. Essentially you want to kill either the Veteran Harpy, Warg, or Wurm located in WvW zones, see the wiki pages for specific spawn points. I have them memorized and you should probably do this as well.
Daily Zone Event Completion – There will always be a completion event for some zone in the game where you need to roam around the zone and get at least bronze credit (aka tag a single mob) in four different events. Generally speaking, your best practice is to pop into the zone and look for either a commander tag or a mentor tag on the mini-map. Follow these folks around and more than likely they will be running an efficient route of quests. Also watch your chat, because more than likely there will be someone calling out waypoints where events are happening allowing you to boop over there and get credit.
Daily Bounty Quest – Generally speaking if you look in the group finder for the zone this is taking place in, there will be one or more groups active. Join the group, transfer to the map they are all on, and get credit for the kill. These can be annoying if you do not have good zone exploration for the area or are missing your core mounts. Since the Path of Fire bounty quests reward you a lot of ancillary achievement unlocks needed for other quests, these are always good bets.
Simple WvW Objectives – There are a few really easy WvW objectives and these are “Land Claimer”, “Caravan Disruptor”, and “Master of Monuments”. They can be completed quickly solo pending you are not being harassed by the enemy players too much. I put this way down at the bottom of the list because I will happily do them, but I am going to look for faster and less focused options before I get to this point. “Mist Guards Killer” is also a solid option if you are actually going to be playing WvW for awhile because you will absolutely kill plenty of veteran guards during that process.
Last night specifically I went with:
Daily Desert Highlands Bounty Hunter
Daily Shiverpeaks Miner
Daily Gendarran Fields Event Completer
After I have set my focus for the night and which daily quests I will be knocking out, I generally look to see if any of my normal harvesting activities are going to complete a quest for me. For example, I have a number of resource nodes in my home instance that I have either collected through living world zones or purchased off the gem store. Since I know that “Shiverpeaks Miner” is one of the quests I am going to complete, I can go to my home instance in Hoelbrak and get credit for that quest. I am going to harvest all of the nodes in my home instance every single day, and by simply choosing to do it in the Norn capital which is part of the Shiverpeaks zone set instead of Rata Sum as I usually do… it means I will essentially get free completion without going out of my way to do anything extra.
After harvesting all of the resources in my Home instance, I go into each of the Guild Halls that I have access to and harvest all of the resources that are there as well. Since I am a member of guilds with halls located in Cantha and in Heart of Maguuma it means if there are daily achievements for those zones I am going to get credit as well. Generally speaking, I will follow the same sequence of Guild Halls every day with “Greysky Armada” the guild I am most active in being the last one I do every day. That way if I harvested any of the rare crafting materials that are used for guild halls specifically, I can dump them in the bank before moving on to the next objective for the evening. At this point, I generally check the message of the day to see what resources we need for our next objective and if I can dump any of those into the bank or actually complete an objective I will do that as well.
From there I will boop out to Bitterfrost Frontier and collect Winterberries. I’ve talked about BlishHUD quite a few times before, but one of the awesome things it has in the pathing module is the ability to mark all of the zone-specific rare resources on your HUD. I am not entirely certain if the above screenshot shows it well enough, but you will see in the foreground a number of clusters of berries overlayed over my map indicating the spawn point of two winterberry bushes with each icon. I can quickly zoom around gathering these up and because I have them all marked like this, there is zero chance that I forget one each day. The reason why I have been doing this every day of late is that Winterberries are a relatively easy way to get a stat selection ascended rings, a stat selection ascended earring, a stat selection ascended backpack and the only stat selectable ascended rebreather in the game far as I am aware. I have an army of alts and only three of them have any pieces of ascended gear, so I figure farming this every chance I get will be a benefit in the long run.
While I was farming the Guild Halls I completed the Daily End of Dragons Lumberer achievement, which meant that I only needed two more to get the Daily End of Dragons “Wandering Cantha” chest. So the next thing I did last night was pop over to New Kaineng City and work on “Jade Brotherhood Slayer” and “Kaineng City Taskmaster” which require you to fill any of the repeatable renown hearts. This required me to do a bit of googling because I am nowhere near as familiar with Cantha as I am with other regions and it looked like the best place to go for Jade Brotherhood was the Cobble Quarter from there I looked for a nearby heart to fill while doing events to kill Jade Brotherhood until I got the slayer achievement. If I wanted to keep the daily train going, there are ones associated with Living World Seasons 3, 4, and 5 as well.
Generally speaking, what I would normally do at this point is see what was currently happening in the game. Another addon that I have installed through BlishHUD is an event table that I can toggle on and off with Alt+E. If there is a zone meta about to start, I might pop over into that zone and begin helping with the precursor events. If I am so inclined, I can hop on the World Boss train as well and join up with the next boss in sequence also shown on that table, or the World Boss Portal Device that I picked up off the gem store. If I am in the mood for story content, this is also the point where I would slip into following the quest chains on one of my characters. For example, I am slowly working my way through Living World Season 1 right now on the Ranger because I have resolved to complete all of the content in the game on that character in the proper order this time.
What I did last night instead however is continue to enjoy the fact that I have a Skyscale, and flew around collecting Mastery Points that I previously deemed too frustrating to mess with. It was a chill way to end the evening, and I largely did exactly that… occasionally engaging in random events until I decided it was time to go be unconscious. Guild Wars 2 truly does have an overwhelming number of possibilities for how you spend your time in the game. It is one of those experiences where you have to figure out your own goals and how you want to accomplish them. For me… I like my daily routine as it tends to move me around the world and open up a bunch of possibilities for where I want to branch off and do some specific things. Often times while completing my dailies it will set something in my mind that I then want to focus on. The routine for me at least acts as a bit of an ice breaker, chopping up the insurmountable number of possibilities into a more manageable list of things that I might engage with.
While playing Guild Wars 2 there is always going to be a much longer list of things that I want to do, than I actually have time to do. For example, I had been sitting on the Skyscale quest for a few years with minimal progress there until finally something clicked in my brain and made me focus on it. I’m in a similar state with the epic weapon I have been working on, and at some point, that will become my core focus as well. The daily routine though gives me a framework to focus on and sort of opens my mind up to the possibilities that already lay in my path. I am not sure at all if this post will have helped anyone else out there to tackle the impossible amount of content in Guild Wars 2, but I thought if nothing else it might at least be an interesting discussion to start.
