Leapquake and Whirlrend

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If you have been around this blog for any length of time you will know that I sorta have a thing for Diablo 3. It is easily one of my favorite games of all time. On what is effectively a three month interval I drop everything that I am doing and allow myself to get wrapped up in the seasonal madness. This began on Friday and as is our tradition Grace and I did the early grind together with Byx who has of late become our regular third. Topping off the party was Grace’s husband that we lovingly refer to as “the Kraken” for reasons that won’t make sense. We actually lasted considerably longer than normal and made it to just shy of 60 before sleep finally claimed me. Unsurprising to anyone, Grace managed to grind out the rest of the season before sleep claimed her.

We actually had a significantly more structured approach to this year and we completed a challenge rift in an attempt to get a bit of a boost. I crafted a two handed mighty weapon and it thankfully turned into Fury of the Vanquished Peak, which provided a nice boost to Seismic Slam damage, but also was a required cube item for the final build. This season the Haedrig’s Gift set is Might of the Earth and as a result I built into the Seismic Slam build which involves hopping around the map and each time you do so you drop an earthquake and then using a significantly buffed Seismic Slam to do the clearing. The build ended up significantly more powerful and more quickly than I had expected in part because of that early cube item get.

My goal for the season however was to build out a Whirlrend build, which involves a specific combination of items that effectively lets you spin forever and each time you touch something apply multiple stacks of rend that tick down instantly dealing all of the damage at once. I love the build in part because it is mindless and doesn’t require any timing for finesse. It is the perfect build for farming Rifts and Bounties… which I am going to have to do a significant amount of this season to get the Avarice conquest once again. The only challenge I am running into is that the Might of the Earth build above just has a higher potential right now for clearing. Whirlrend is fun, but at least at this very moment it feels EXTREMELY squishy as in the GR60 range a pack of anything that throws a projectile can effectively end my day.

The challenge that I ran into even trying to make the Whirlrend build work, is that I was missing a number of key items… items that were not dropping at all. The biggest of these was the Ring of Might, and after some reading I found out that the easiest way to get one of these is to do Kadala’s blood shard lottery on a low level Barbarian… level 8 to be specific. As a result my second seasonal Barbarian was born, and sure enough on my third ring bought from Kadala I picked up that Ring of Might. Had I been following a guide more closely it probably would have had me pick up this item early on, but regardless it worked.

The next key item in my cross-hairs was picking up Ambo’s Pride a legendary Mighty Weapon that makes your rend apply all of its stacks at once. I was having zero luck getting this either through the lottery or through converting rare mighty weapons. Doing some more reading it is apparently available at level 29 and at that level the drop pool is significantly smaller. This meant that I needed to level my baby second barbarian so I ultimately ran a round of bounties and that was effectively enough to get it. I proceeded to attempt to gamble and rare convert on my level 30 Barbarian and the luck was not with me. However in one of the runs farming bloodshards to try another round of gambling I managed to get the drop effectively negating leveling up to 30.

The core problem with Whirlrend is that it really needs way more paragon points than I currently have, or at least way more perfect items than I managed to acquire. For now I am probably going to shift back to Might of the Earth Seismic build because while it requires a lot more work, I think I can probably make more progress in knocking out the remaining steps n the seasonal journey. I need to pick which of the set dungeons I am going to master, because quite honestly this is the thing that trips me up pretty much every season. I am bad at set dungeons, and I hate being on a timer… so I pretty much avoid doing them until they are literally the only thing I have left in the season. I’ve already solo’d my GR70, but I have yet to step foot into a set dungeon. I guess I need to buckle down and figure this out.

Secret Mission Update

On Friday I wrote a bit about a Blaugust secret mission I am working on. I still need eighteen bloggers who are willing to do some shenanigans with me. Essentially I am working on something and all it requires is that you:

  • Have a Blog or Vlog
  • Are Willing to Make a Post on a Specific Date

If I can pull this off it will be really cool, but I don’t want to go into more details publicly right now. However if you are interested in helping me with this drop me a line on any of the various contact means you might have. Comment section of the blog, twitter, facebook, discord, or whatever other contacts means you might have for me. I have some documentation ready to go that I will share with you if you choose to accept this nonsense.

AggroChat #306 – The Nature of Roles

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Featuring: Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen

This is one of those shows when we had a long list of things to talk about, but we just sorta started on one topic and it developed a mind of its own.  First up we talk about Bel and his insane grinding nature when it comes to the Four Job Fiesta.  From there we reprise a topic that got bumped last night and talk about the unique nature of Guild Wars 1 almost trading card game like skill based system.  From there we dive into a discussion about the changes that were made with Guild Wars 2, and how they may have taken some wrong advice from the data at the time.  This dives into a discussion of what makes up a role in a game and how exactly games tend to message that.  We go through a whole series of leaps and wind up in a discussion about how freedom to change your build feels really good in games like Guild Wars 2 and Diablo 3.  It even descends into a discussion about what exactly makes up the nature of a “Character” in a game, and if it should just be a cosmetic choice and everything of importance be account bound.

Topics Discussed

  • Bel and grinding in Final Fantasy V
  • Guild Wars 1 Card Based Spells
  • Guild Wars 2 and Abolition of Roles
  • Taking the Wrong Queue from Data
    • People who like only Tanking or Healing
  • The Secret World – When a game has wrong choices
  • What makes a Role a Role
    • And how is it messaged?
  • Freedom of Choice is Really Important
  • What makes a Character a Character?

She-Ra and Secret Missions

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Apologies that a post never actually happened yesterday. It was one of those mornings that after waking up and showering I checked my phone only to see that I had missed a bunch of emergency texts from work over night. Basically the entire morning was spent dealing with issues that had come up, some of which threatened potential litigation. The level of stress that I have been under over the last three weeks has been indescribable as so many things have gone wrong in sequence that I am no longer shocked by them. The biggest challenge for me is that I am stressed beyond the point of being able to actually find relief.

Traditionally my prime outlet is gaming, and I have been in this funk of sitting at my machine and largely staring blankly into oblivion. Yesterday for example I was technically off the clock at 9:51 in the morning having worked my maximum allowed hours for the week. However instead of firing up a game and doing something that I would enjoy, I mostly just browsed the internet or watched YouTube videos for a solid four hours before doing something with any meaning behind it. I did have an enjoyable evening finishing up objectives in Destiny and slowly catching up on She-Ra. It is such a phenomenal show, and I highly recommend it to anyone.

I finished everything on the Huntress for the week, so I am now moving on to the next character in pecking order and going to at a minimum work on Iron Banner for the Warlock. I am not sure how much I will get accomplished over the next several days given that Diablo 3 seasonal start is tonight, but going to at least make an attempt to push. Grinding random stuff in Destiny and watching things on Netflix seems to be a pretty good stress reliever for me right now.

I can’t really handle ONLY watching video these days so I tend to be playing something on my 43 inch 4k television while watching netflix over on my 1080p side monitor that I have turned portrait mode. This generally contains whatever I happen to be watching, twitter and the various chat programs. That said I seem to be very bad at watching things like Discord while I am also watching something on Netflix. Apologies for all of the ignored messages last night. I am in a much better headspace than I was yesterday so whatever it was that I was doing seemed to help.

Blaugust Secret Mission

Now this next bit is going too be purposefully obtuse, but I am in need of about 30 volunteer bloggers for a secret mission. We had the normal Blaugust style festivities this year in April, and we’ve talked about doing something to mark the traditional event. I have a plan and I am in need of volunteers for shenanigans. It won’t require much effort out of any one blogger, and I can even assist with some of it. I will go into further details in private, but I am wanting to more or less keep this secret until I am ready to announce the plans… which means in order to do it I need those 30 volunteers. You all have about a bajillion different ways to contact me, so if you are interest in this quest hit me up and I will fill in the details further.

Skill Based Matchmaking

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Yesterday was the beginning of the first Iron Banner of Season 11, and with it I decided to start my grind once again on my least favorite character. It had been a few seasons since I last participated in Iron Banner, but when I last did it involved a quest line that required you to do a bunch of weapon based kill quests on each character. I figured I would devote last night to trying to get the Hunter through the quest and then work on the Warlock and Titan on following evenings. However it turns out that has all changed and there is now a single simple quest that involves killing 25 folks with sidearms and another 25 with auto rifles.

The reward for this is getting the new seasonal copy of an auto rifle and a sidearm. While the old quests were a bit of a slog, it was nice because you wound up with a full set of armor and a random roll for each individual weapon that would be dropping. This felt pretty good because if you got a shitty drop on one character you might get an amazing drop when you get over to the next character. Example right now I have gotten a single drop of The Forward Path and it is truly heinous. Essentially it is an auto rifle without any range or impact with all of the stability and handling you could ever want which seems extremely bad.

For the side arm I got what feels like a thoroughly mediocre roll. I am still not entirely certain I like playing with side arms, but I most definitely do not like playing with anything that looks this stupid. Suros designs are either awesome or horrific looking with little middle ground. This however shows the problem of having only one quest and one set of drops per account. There are two new weapons that will last for several seasons and both of the rolls that I got from them were duds. Granted I can keep grinding the Iron Banner forever and getting more drops.

The problem with that is Bungie disabled Skill Based Matchmaking, which is a hot button issue in the crucible community. Essentially it favors players with a better connection over players that are actually within your skill range. The end result is that folks like me who are not terribly good at pvp get matched with folks like Aztecross who is a pvp focused streamer and YouTuber. There is no way in hell that someone who regularly gets to the lighthouse in Trials of Osiris should ever be matched up with a scrub like me. However in the land of magical thinking and mystery it happens because apparently we have similar connections. He absolutely carried our team to victory, and I did next to nothing in the process.

Bungie has gone back and forth on this point over the years, and I feel like there has to be a happy middle ground because right now doing the crucible if you are not a crucible player feels miserable. However when skill based matchmaking is enabled all of the PVP Streamers and YouTubers scream their heads off about it because it is in their words “too sweaty”. As they move further and further up the bracket they get matched with progressively closer and closer groups of players until there is a point where there are no casual matches and only the most white knuckle gaming ever. This seems fair to me to be honest, given that as you improve you should be matched up higher and higher moving to a group of your peers.

The end result is that I wind up having to put myself in a mindset where I just do not give a shit about if I win or lose, and that I am tightly focused on completing whatever objectives I might have for quests. I also try really hard to break up the crushing defeat by venturing forth into other activities. I took a break last night to knock out some of my strike objectives for example, and when I returned to the Iron Banner I was once again ready to get my face beat in. I hope that Bungie looks at the data and decides disabling Skill Based matchmaking is a bad idea, because other than big events like Iron Banner it seems like it is only going to drive off the more casual gamers.