Pouty Wizard

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Friday was the start of another Diablo 3 Season, and as is usually the case Grace and I met up and leveled together until I decided it was time for bed. This season we also grabbed our friend Byx to join along in the fun, which made for a really enjoyable grind. Since I had never gotten a Wizard or a Witch Doctor to level 70, I opted to play a Wizard this time around and to be honest… it is messing with my head. Finger Wigglers are not exactly the sort of classes I excel at, and I am having trouble adjusting to just how squishy I am and now much I am riding the razors edge between destroying everything with impunity and my own death.

The set this time is Tal Rasha which has a bunch of different viable builds. Essentially the idea behind it is to stack up a massive buff for casting an ability of each element. This sort of idea plays nicely into items like the Convention of Elements that give you alternating buffs, but there really is no way to actually time hitting the right ability while the right buff is up… or at least that is not something in my scope of functionality. Instead I teleport wildly while spamming every ability trying desperately to keep my buff at 4 stacks while destroying everything with a cavalcade of Meteors raining down from above.

This season we cheated and cheated hard in the form of Saturday morning getting one hell of a boost from a friend of ours named Kolrath. He seemingly ground all night long and by 9 am Saturday morning was a whirling avatar of death that managed to push me from 40 to 70 and Grace from 55 to 70 in a matter of two runs. After that I have spent a bunch of the weekend farming bounties in an attempt to get all of the items needed for my particular build. At this point I think I have them and now begins the slow process of grinding out the post seasons journey steps. The bane of my existence is the set dungeon and I will have to buckle down and master that as it is ultimately going to hold me back from completing two of the steps.

I really do not like being on a timer and having to be mindful of that while doing a bunch of other shit… is pretty much the exact opposite of the kind of gameplay that I want from a game. As a result it is the set dungeon that always hamstrings my progress. I can do them, I just need to sort of force myself to do them. If anyone is online and doing literally anything else… I will join in that and ignore my maintenance duties. Similarly I tend to push off the solo Greater Rifts as well, but at least in this case I have done through a solo 40 and need to knock out a solo 50 soonish. I am missing most of the gems that i need to finish this set so I am going to be doing a lot of grinding of Greater Rifts.

AggroChat #277 – Failures to Launch

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Featuring: Ammo, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra and Thalen

Tonight we have a show with a running theme about launches of varying degrees of success.  We get the memes out of our system about the Cybertruck and how Bel would absolutely drive one.  We talk about the concerning launch of the Google Stadia and the challenges of cloud gaming in general.  We talk about the announcement of Half Life Alyx… and how we all became way less interesting when we heard it was VR.  We talk about the launch of Pokemon Sword and Shield and how Ash is frustrated about the lack of the eternal PokeDex, but otherwise it is a solid game.  Grace and Bel talk about the rocky start to Diablo 3 Season 19 and the various bugs that they are encountering. Bel and Thalen talk about the Vex Offensive entering the Final Assault in Destiny 2, and how players were expecting it to be something different.  Finally Bel talks a little bit about returning to and playing a bit of the Anthem Cataclysm events.

Topics Discussed

  • Cybertruck
    • Object Still Loading
  • Google Stadia
    • Challenges of Cloud Gaming
    • Unknown Market
    • XCloud / Playstation Now / Parsec
  • Half Life Alyx
    • Half Life 1 ½ 
    • The Failure of VR
  • Pokemon Sword and Shield
  • Diablo 3 Season 19 Issues
  • Destiny 2 Vex Offensive Final Assault
    • Fans Expected Fatebringer 2.0
  • Anthem Redux

Original Blog Post on AggroChat.com

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

When it Rains It Pours

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This is Kenzie. In one of the yesterday’s photos she was the one laying on my legs while Allie was laying beside me. She is my crazy monkey girl and is currently screaming at me to throw a hairband for her to fetch while I am typing this. Along with everything I talked about yesterday, we got some bad news about Kenzie recently as well. It turns out she is Diabetic and after taking a second round of bloodwork to verify it… we will have to very soon begin giving her insulin shots every morning and evening. Insulin is nonsensically expensive and while an injection pen is in theory going to last us a good while with Kenzie, I am now deeply concerned about the expense for those who have to take way more doses.

I was at first appalled when the vet said that in a lot of cases folks end up putting the animal down when they have diabetes. I could never consider something like that with Kenzie, but when the cost of upkeep is going to add one to three hundred dollars a month depending on severity I guess I can see how that would put folks in a really tough spot. I am thankful that we will be able to weather the burden and that our Vet did a ton of legwork for us and found the cheapest place for insulin pens and needles and we just had to then go acquire them. At some point this weekend we will be taking her into the Vet to be taught how to deliver the shots correctly, and then this gets added to my daily routine.

I am also thankful that Kenzie takes meds well and will pretty much tolerate us doing anything. I hope that streak continues when that “anything” is poking her with a needle twice a day. She has finally stopped screaming and is laying down beside me now on the box that a PC Tower Case came in. I was so slow getting my system transferred over into it that she claimed the box as her domain, giving her a way to be close to me while I sit in my office chair. When I finally swapped over to the new case, I put the old case in the box and taped it back shut so she would continue to have her own personal perch. For the longest time she laid beside me on my desk, and there is a blanket sitting there still for that purpose… but she prefers the cardboard box.

Now we get on to the title of this post that is both figurative and literal. We are going through a nonsensical amount of rain right now and coming home from the store yesterday I got completely drenched, along with the four sacks of groceries I was carrying. When I got everything into the kitchen I went back into the living room to take off my jacket and lay it up to dry when I noticed a bunch of water on the coffee table. I had a moment where I was trying to figure out if I accidentally sat the wet sacks down on the table, or if it was something else. Then while trying to figure this out I heard a distinct drip coming from the rafter above the table. We have a very slow leak and it has happened once or twice before, generally speaking when the rain is blowing horizontally due to the wind. So that is another thing on the list that will have to be dealt with as we get someone to come out and look it over. I am hoping it is just a case of the flashing pulling up or something like that.

Tonight however… I am hoping to get some relaxation in the form of mindless Diablo 3 grinding. It is the opening of a new season and with it comes something I have never done before. I have a plethora of Demon Hunters, Crusaders, Barbarians and Necromancers… but I have never before gotten a Wizard or a Witch Doctor to 70. Grace confirmed that the Haedrigs set this time is a good one for Wizards and as a result I am planning on pushing myself well out of my comfort zone and running up a finger wiggler. If this works I might even knock out the Witch Doctor next season.

There is just something relaxing about our quarterly ritual of grinding up fresh characters in Diablo 3. Given all of the nonsense happening right now in my life I really need something peaceful and relaxing. I’ve had pretty fraught evenings of late where I never could quite settle into playing anything in particular. So I am looking forward to having a purpose tonight.

Lastly before I close things out. I want to take a moment to thank everyone for their comments yesterday. They really do mean a lot even though I told you that you didn’t have to make them. I mean I knew that my admonishment would do nothing, but I also sorta felt like I needed to let people off the hook. We all have a lot of things that we are dealing with and my burden is by no means more significant than anyone else. That said I really do appreciate the constant reminder that I have a bunch of people out there that care about me.

Processing Loss

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This is Allie. She has been my baby girl since shortly after we got her. I can’t tell you exactly how long we have had her because it legitimately seems like forever and wildly predates the time when I was keeping track of things through the blog. Best as we can tell she was somewhere between 13 and 16 years old because as a feral rescue, we have no real clue how old she was when we adopted her. She had a bit of a rocky start in our lives because we thought she was fighting some sort of kennel cough. The entire time we had her she would go into these sneezing fits, which we eventually came to realize were just brought on by allergies.

However this meant that we kept her isolated up in my wife’s office for a good chunk of time after we first got her. During this time I spent an awful lot of my free time hanging out in the office and just spending time with her so she wouldn’t be lonely. As a result we developed a pretty strong bond that continued on throughout her entire life. She had been sick for the last few years, realizing she had a thyroid condition too late to really be able to do much to fix it other than offer palliative care. Even when I knew she was not feeling amazing, she never stopped wanting to be on top of whatever I happened to be doing.

Long ago I had to learn how to play on my laptop while she was draped across me like a seat belt. We were legitimately surprised she made it through last winter, so as we entered this winter we were on constant watch. There were so many times she would be sleeping somewhere curled up and I would have to check on her to make sure she was okay. She remained “my” sweet and loving Allie right up until the end. Roughly and hour before recording the podcast last week, she had a massive seizure and within the span of ten minutes she was gone. My wife held her wrapped up in a towel as she passed.

I’ve not really been able to talk about this, because I am still processing. I knew it was coming which has helped, and Allie was a shadow of her former active self which has also helped me to realize it needed to happen. However no matter how much rationalize it… she was still my baby girl and one of the most loving cats that I have ever known. Talking about this sort of thing tends to spawn a deluge of support, and I am not sure if that helps. I mean I know you all at this point and I know you have my back, but I think this is just the sort of wound that needs to scab over a bit before I can move on with my life. The two remaining girls are adjusting and it has sort of reset the balance within the house causing a momentary truce which has helped.

It is also within this raw state that I am trying to process the news about the death of Brad McQuaid. I don’t have any personal stories about him, because I was just another player in a sea of players. However Everquest was a very important and foundational game for me, and with it came the legend of Brad McQuaid and the Vision. I also played quite a bit of Vanguard and was ultimately going to play some Pantheon. On some level I think Brad had this idea in his head that he never could quite reach and each time he set out with a game he failed somehow to render it quite the way he could see it in his minds eye. On many levels Vanguard felt like a higher fidelity version of Everquest and similarly so Pantheon was shaping to be the same higher fidelity version of Vanguard.

I am not sure if my life supports the style of play that these games were trying to present. However I still have a good respect for the ideas behind it. Brad was one of those folks that I looked up to and wanted to be when I was still entertaining the concept of making a break from corporate development and going into games. I am not even sure if he was a personal hero of mine, but he was definitely someone I kept tabs on each time he did anything. The world is going to feel smaller without him out there somewhere chipping away at trying to finally render this vision he had, in the same clarity he seemingly saw it in his minds eye.

On that note I am going to wrap up the post. I am knocked off balance right now between the sequence of events. I am sure I will be back to my normal self over the coming weeks, but for now I am just processing everything.