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Hugged to Death

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Good Morning Friends! Yesterday was the launch of Last Epoch Multiplayer patch 0.9 and it was most certainly interesting. Shocking to no one that has ever experienced an MMO launch… there were problems. I attempted to create a character around noon when the servers first went online and encountered a litany of errors and gave up. Last night around 4 pm when I was attempting to log in, I kept encountering the above situation where it would try and load the character and then fail out with an error of “[LE-61] Failed to Matchmake” but have to hit some sort of time out before it returned me to the character select screen to try again. Around 5:30 my time, things had calmed down enough that I was actually able to log into the game as was my good friend Ace. From there we experienced a pretty hilarious night of weird bugs until I reached a point where I could no longer interact with NPCs… and we had to call it a night.

The above video is one that I snagged from this post on Reddit and uploaded to YouTube so that I could embed it. Unfortunately, it was uploaded directly to Reddit so please know I am not attempting to take credit for it. I absolutely encountered this same bug several times yesterday, and in truth, it seemed to be happening quite a bit for various skills. For example, if I used Lunge without a target, it would lock me in the movement animation while seemingly it waited for the command to time out. When I got shield charge, I was able to charge through walls and skip sections of the map…. because I am guessing my client, Ace’s client, and the server all had a disagreement on where exactly I was heading and where I successfully managed to go. The funniest thing though was when I would shield charge… and it would go super slow for a few seconds and then rapidly warp me to the final destination of the ability. When things got really bad towards the end of my session I started rubberbanding back to near Ace’s location because it was as though the server lost track of me.

Please note this is not me complaining, this is me regaling you with the experience we had last night. Ace and I were on discord laughing the entire time like we were drunk with joy. The folks I feel bad about though are the team over at Eleventh Hour Games. I am certain they did not get any sleep last night… most specifically MoxJet aka Judd (Mox) on Discord. He was in the chat when I disappeared last night and was back up this morning around 6 am, still answering questions… still being chill, responsive, and helpful. I remember when we were attempting to log in yesterday I was watching the chat for any signs of updates, and the chat was thrown into slow mode allowing one new message from each user every 5 minutes. Even then being throttled like it was… it was scrolling by faster than I could read it. I mean all multiplayer launches are at least somewhat traumatic, but I feel for the late nights the team is going to have over the coming days.

Last Epoch is legitimately overwhelmed by new players at the moment. If you look at the steam charts, as of writing this post Last Epoch is sitting in the 8th spot for top-selling games in the US and 12th Globally. Notice that Steam indicates that it is new to the list, which I believe means it has not appeared before on the top 100 list at all. This game went from a very niche title to being thrust into the mainstream literally overnight. I bought into the game in 2018 when it was a wildly different experience, and over time it has shifted from something I honestly did not enjoy much to being a legitimate contender for the Diablo/Path Of Exile throne. This is absolutely benefitting from the hype surrounding Path of Exile having a phenomenal Sanctum league, and Diablo IV waiting in the wings… but not quite ready for launch. It is probably even widely benefitted from Diablo II getting a remastered edition that has had its own traction among classic ARPG players. So while this is awesome for the future of Eleventh Hour Games as a company… it is going to be a bit of a rocky ride in the interim for that team.

For the moment since I spent so much time playing Necromancer in testing, I decided to try out a Sentinel build. This looked to be the sort of Righteous Fire gameplay I enjoy where you are nigh unkillable and just AOE everything around you to death. You can see the .85 build here on Last Epoch Tools, which I am adapting to fit .9, and for the most part, there are not significant enough differences to really cause challenges. I also plan on playing around with a Ritualist and Acolyte like I did in testing and Rogue is just stupid fun and arrives at a point of power way earlier than the other classes. I ran a bunch of things up on the test realm and I plan on doing the same over the coming weeks in online play. The game keeps your offline and online characters separate similar to how Wolcen did, so you have to make a choice of playing with friends or not ever playing with friends. I wish we could have at least played characters offline and then shifted to online play, but I get why they wanted to keep online play somewhat sacred.

Sadly I have no screenshots of me playing with Ace last night because quite honestly we were laughing too hard for me to think to take screenshots. We managed to run a few characters up to around level 17, and I plan on more or less holding my Sentinel where it is currently and resuming play together tonight. At first, we thought maybe there was some catch-up experience going on, but I think they just buffed the XP rates across the board whether or not you were grouped. The main thing we noticed is it felt like we were getting way more “Blue” and “Yellow” monsters than we would in a non-multiplayer map. The chat message indicates that the monster’s health is buffed but I think the changes maybe go deeper than that. It felt good to play with friends and did not feel like we were just stomping things without any challenge. I even died last night because I just did not get out of the bad fast enough. It was a heck of a lot of fun and I am hoping the servers calm down or stabilize as the team adds more resources.

I did not get anything that was necessarily set defining, and I probably traded more good items to Ace than I kept because I ended up getting a lot of +minion items on a build that does not care in the least about that. I did get Snowblind which is a somewhat universally good leveling item. Sadly I am not really going into elemental attacks at all, but maybe I will find some +cold weapons to make this do some work for me. I am also using Avarice Gloves which have synergy with elemental attacks. If I can lean in that direction a bit, those items should help me out a little bit. I had fun though and that is ultimately the real judge of a game launch. I think the Eleventh Hour Games team has a great product on their hands, and hopefully, they have the capital required to ramp up enough to stem the bleeding. They definitely have some work ahead of them because the testing did not hammer the servers anywhere near what happened last night. However, I think they are in a good place to move forward because it was at least playable.

Did you play Last Epoch last night? What were your experiences? Drop me a line below.

Lions Arch-Ish

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Good Morning Friends! You ever have one of those nights where you spent the entire evening playing a single game… but also feel like you made no real progress in it? That was my night and I am not entirely certain what I have to show for it. I know I was playing from at least 6 pm CST onwards because I caught the early Tequatl at server reset, but I have no clue how to account for the rest of my evening. I know I teleported into a few zones to help with bounties for folks who posted a plea in the “Looking for Group” tool and added a few people to my friends list through doing that. I did not however get over my fear of posting my own groups and actually doing the strike that I needed to do. I think at some point I gave up on the notion of either miracle-ing my way into an existing group posting for what I needed or getting the fortitude to do it myself and moved on with other activities.

That meant going back to Lion’s Arch for what I knew would be the final conflict and Scarlet Briar sacking it. I say this without concern about spoilers because… it is sort of a known secret at this point. Even though many of us never experienced the Living World Season 1 content, we have been confronted that the Lion’s Arch or the Claw Island missions are not the same ones that we see today, and ultimately probably went to the wiki to find out why. I am an old enough player to remember both versions of the city fondly, and while there are folks who wish we could go back to old Lion’s Arch… I have to say I greatly prefer what is colloquially referred to as “Disney Lion’s Arch” because it makes a more usable hub city. Destruction of your main city is still one of the most daring moves I have ever seen a game make, and I am not entirely certain it was a good call for the longevity of the title. It created some bitterness in the players who were fond of it before and a lot of dissonance for the players that came later.

Essentially there are two copies of Lion’s Arch that you experience in the story. The first is as the attack has fallen upon the city and toxins are building up around you, while you attempt to rescue as many as you can. There is a miasma meter that ticks up over time, and you do whatever you can to save whoever you can in the process. I only made it so far as rescuing Evon Gnashblade and I think 30 citizens before the gunk claimed me and ended the mission. I am not sure if you can legitimately do all of the objectives that you have presented in front of you in the time you have available. What does not help this process is the fact that all of the enemies appear to be infinitely respawning. I learned this the hard way pretty quickly when I was carefully clearing everything before starting an escort, only to have it immediately respawn on top of me.

The second instance that you encounter is “retaking” Lion’s Arch after regrouping with the refugees in Gendarran Fields. The new map is essentially one big meta as you fight enough skirmishes in a region to get the boss to show up, and upon defeating the boss you take back control of that sector. For the purpose of my quest, I needed to do enough events to fill a bar similar to earlier steps in the Living World Season 1 content. I stuck around and helped out in trying to retake the city, and we failed miserably at fighting one of three legendary bosses that have a Red/Green/Blue resistance scheme. The one we were fighting was Blue and vulnerable to Red or Green… but I could not seem to get my team to go over to the green puddle and get the corresponding buff so we could actually finish the fight. We got close, however, for only having a half dozen or so people fighting it. We failed the instance though but did get more than far enough to finish my quest.

The Breachmaker is Scarlet Briar’s giant flying airship drill and you see it during the cutscenes upon zoning in during the attack on Lion’s Arch the first time. I got far enough in the quest chain that my next step is a story mission which is likely an attack on that Breachmaker itself. Last night when I got there I did not really have enough time to get engaged in anything that would potentially take that amount of time. The problem with Guild Wars 2 story sections is they are not really a predictable length and as a result, I need to make sure I have an hour or more before diving into them. A lot of them take considerably less time, but every so often there is one that will take a few hours to get through. Unlike FFXIV, this game is not exactly good about warning you.

Other than the Lion’s Arch nonsense, I encountered this contraption yesterday… and Arena.Net got another 600 gems out of me. This is the Noodle Cart Chair, and unlike most other chairs… up to 2 other players can join you and there is a button to press to eat noodles. This was me and another player sitting on the chair together in Rata Sum, and every time I have thrown mine out I’ve ended up with someone joining me. This is maybe one of the coolest cosmetic microtransactions I have seen because it adds something social to the experience. I mean I love noodles anyways, but this is just delightful and the animation of watching the jadetech making noodles, washing bowls, etc is just magical.

Another thing that I did yesterday was to spend some time fishing because I have been waiting around in Seitung lately hoping to catch someone doing that meta event. That is one of the two steps I have remaining for the turtle mount. So when I am not procrastinating about starting a strike group, I am idling in the zone hoping we end up with enough critical mass to complete the boss. It did give me a chance to play with another microtransaction that I picked up a while back. I love the octopus fishing pole and the way its tentacles move subtly as you idle between casting. Fishing in Guild Wars 2 is not necessarily the best system I have experienced, but it is far from the worst. Would that all games could have a fishing system as good as New World. It is enjoyable enough and I should really get more used to throwing my pole out while waiting around for Tequatl to spawn.

Tonight my plan is to try and knock out the last steps of the Lion’s Arch quest chain, and then move on to Living World Season 2. I will probably also try to keep tabs on both Strike groups and Seitung meta in order to hopefully catch one of those. I need to look up the event table for that zone so I know how often it fires. Tomorrow, however… will be all about the drop of the Last Epoch Multiplayer patch.

What Lies Beneath

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Good Morning Friends! This is a pretty exciting week on top of wrapping up Diablo III Season 28, we had the first content drop from Guild Wars 2 after the “roadmap” and “vision” for the game going forward were announced on the 13th. This new content patch came out on the 28th, but much to my chagrin I realized that I had a library book that was going to be due on the 1st… so instead of really playing any of the new content I pushed my way through the second book in the Gentleman Bastards series by Scott Lynch. That meant last night I was entirely focused on getting into the game on my Necromancer and trying out some of the new content.

For the last few weeks, there has been a certain amount of consternation from the community stalwarts about what exactly Guild Wars 2 looks like in a “post-living-world” environment. The pattern of things in the past has been that there would be a paid expansion followed by a sizeable gap while the content was being worked on with a living world season released and then another gap until either another living world season or the release of another paid expansion. The “roadmap” instead seemed to indicate that we would begin to see smaller expansions followed by quarterly content drops leading up to another paid expansion in a semi-yearly cycle. I think in the grand scheme of things this sort of release cadence is best for growing a population of active players, but I also think the quality and detail of each single map drop needs to be significant. Not all expansion maps in Guild Wars 2 are created equal so would this be a Bloodstone Fen that folks rarely revisit or something more akin to a Drizzlewood Coast and becomes an active pillar of the community?

Last night I finished the story as it exists currently, finishing with the “Deep Trouble” mission. Something of note, I have never played Guild Wars 2 current content ever. I’ve never been caught up enough with the game to play “Living World” content as it was being doled out, so I have no real frame of reference for what to expect. What is currently in the game seems to be four story missions that lead you down into the Gyala Delve, and introduce you to the situation that is happening there. My gut feeling is that I am waiting on some sort of timer before the next set of quests drops, but in reality, I might be waiting a few months given that the next content drop is expected “before summer” whatever that means for a timeframe. I enjoyed hanging around with Gorrick, Rama, and Yao and want more of the “Best Friends Detective Agency”.

So while the story left me somewhat wanting… the zone is absolutely phenomenal. If this is the sort of expansion map that we can expect to be seeing every three months or so, I think the community is going to be extremely pleased. Effectively the map unfolds over the course of four subregions, the first of which is above ground… and then the next three regions going deeper under the jade sea into a mining pit of a sort. The further down you get the more sinister things to end up being. There is a void haze mechanic that requires you to keep renewing a Jadebot Filtration system at each outpost. Being down in the complex of caverns and tunnels eventually will use up your filter requiring you to get a new one or risk taking damage over time from the haze. Visually everything is stunning, with probably my favorite bit being that you can see aquatic life frozen in the jade walls, for example, this big whale shadowed in the distance.

What I spent most of my night doing was doing bits and pieces of the meta event that spans the zone. Essentially this reminds me of a weird mix of Drizzlewood Coast and the Chalk Gerent meta. You are following Gorrick, Rama, and Yao as they retake sections of the cave complex and in doing so make them safe from the incursion of the haze and corrupted Jade Brotherhood members. Essentially you follow the red events and they will take you through the sequence as you leave the “safe” camp up top and head to various points on the map retaking them. During each sequence, there are a number of side bosses that spawn and a big battle to take back a base. Along the way, each encounter will spawn a number of Gyala Delve Mining Caches that you can open with Jade Miner’s Keycards.

The final phase of the event involves fighting three bosses on three different platforms, so you ultimately have to split your group in order to deal with all of them. I am uncertain how this is supposed to work, but in my experience so far everyone keeps killing their boss until everyone else has killed theirs as well. I assume there is supposed to be some measure of coordination, but it feels like right now we are largely brute-forcing this mechanic until we find out something better. Over time the community will learn the best way to do this, and I have a feeling this entire sequence is going to be popular for farming the Gyala loot boxes. I managed to pull one of the unique items from the loot boxes, a Mini Void Emberknight. Completing the final event also seems to reward you with two Luxon Hunter’s Weapon Caches which include brand new jade item appearances and drop with the Ritualist’s prefix.

All told I had a lot of fun doing the meta a few times, but realistically I need to get my Ranger caught up because I think I would rather do these metas on that character as opposed to my Necromancer. The Necro is a content soloing god, but it feels like I do a much better job at being a team player on my Soulbeast Longbow Ranger. So more than likely I am going to fall back to working on catching that character up through the story. I might pop my head into Gyala once a night and try and ride the meta for a single completion or something, but I would rather be there with a different character long term. In truth, I want to get the Ranger up because it seems like a better option for ALL team content in the long run. I mean I could always respec to a more group-friendly Necromancer build… but then I would not be as good at soloing content as I am now.

Now that I have finished with the story as it stands currently, I am going to venture forth today and check out some of the community opinions about how successful “What Lies Beneath” and Gyala Delve have been received. Until I completed the story I was staying entirely away from any content about the game because I wanted to experience it all with fresh eyes. I personally think this is a good course forward with the game and I look forward to more of these content drops if this is the quality of content we are going to get. The new meta is really fun and feels extremely rewarding. The only thing that would be better is if there was an albeit rare chance of getting ascended drops. I mean that might be the case but the wiki pages for Ravenous Wanderer are not filled out yet, so I am not sure we know the full drop table yet.

Have you dipped your toes into the new story content drop? What were your feelings about it? Drop me a line below.

[Edit] – I found out after writing this that you do in fact have a chance of getting some ascended stat choice weapons from this meta. More specifically the new Sword, and both new Dagger appearances.

The Last Season

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Good Morning Friends! I am going to warn you that this post is going to be a bit on the melancholy side. Yesterday over lunch I finished up Diablo III Season 28 or at least finished the Guardian step in the journey. There is still a ton that I have left to unlock on the Altar of Sacrifice, but I largely plan on doing that at my leisure over the coming months. While this was not the easiest season ever, it was definitely on the easier scale. Ace finished their season I believe on Sunday, so I was lagging a bit behind. My goal is to help Thalen and maybe Byx if she wants it… finish up their seasons and largely chill out doing low-key content for awhile. I feel like I have three pretty powerful builds on the Demon Hunter having crafted the Gears of Dreadlands Haedrigs set, the Unhallowed Essence Multishot set, and then a Marauder set yesterday for the purpose of the set dungeon.

Shocking to no one who has been with me for very long in my Diablo journey, saved the set dungeon for the very last thing. It always feels really weird to have completed almost all of the harder achievements with this relatively simple one sitting there holding up the process. I hate set dungeons because I have a mental block about being timed while being expected to accomplish a certain set of tasks. This is deeply rooted in my brain and dates back to some third-grade trauma. While I fully understand WHY it exists, I have never truly been able to remove it entirely. I always make the set dungeon out to be this epic obstacle, then like yesterday end up one-shotting the damned thing. I specifically built a Marauder set because, for a Demon Hunter, it is probably the easiest option especially now that the damned worms are marked with a skull on the map.

While this was an enjoyable season… there is just something about it that feels hollow. I think it dawned on me WHY it feels weird. The entire community is treating this like this is the end of Diablo III. Raxxanterax for example has been a pillar of the content creation community, and yesterday announced that the video for Challenge Rift 297 would be the very last of those guides that he released. Even between Ace and I, we largely wanted to make sure that we were going to finish this season because we thought that with the impending release of Diablo IV, this might be the last opportunity to rekindle the old fun. It seems like everyone seems to have that same idea and I am seeing folks returning from the Path of Exile community that had not played the game in years. This feels like a send-off for a beloved friend, but also… is exceptionally depressing.

Diablo III has meant so much to me on a deeply personal level. Sure I have always loved Diablo since I first got into testing for the original game back in college. Diablo III however set the pace of a reoccurring destination event surrounding its seasons. Ace and I would do this late-night leveling thing on Friday they released, and while we’ve made less progress over the years as we have gotten more used to sleep… it was still this thing I think we both looked forward to. It felt like an MMORPG launch happening every three or four months like clockwork, and no matter what else we were playing it would bring a handful of us together for this destination event. While the magic also lasted a shorter period of time as we got better at the time, often finishing the season before the end of the first season… it was still something that I set my calendars by and made sure I was ready to go without distractions.

I think part of the struggle we’ve gone through over the last few years is that Diablo was severely tainted by the events surrounding the shitstorm that is Blizzard Entertainment. We’ve struggled at length to find another game that triggered the same sort of mental joy that Diablo III Season Journey did, and have failed. While I love Path of Exile as the ugly child that it is, it really feels bad to play with friends. We’ve tried Wolcen, Torchlight III, Torchlight Infinite, and hell even some Grim Dawn and none of them have managed to rekindle the magic surrounding our quarterly destination event. It is my hope that maybe just maybe Last Epoch releasing its multiplayer update on the 9th of March will give us the first real viable option. I’ve played enough of it to know that I enjoy it quite a bit, but it is really going to take us all playing it together to determine if it feels “right”.

Due to some lucky circumstances… I got gifted a copy of Diablo IV so I will be poking my head into it when it releases and the upcoming beta periods. However I have enough friends that are simply not willing to give Blizzard any more money, so I figure it is going to be a pretty hollow experience. I am also not entirely certain that it would capture the magic of Diablo III. When the third game was released, there were large parts of the broader Diablo community that hated it. Diablo IV feels very much like a play to bring them back into the fold and maybe make a dent in the popularity of Path of Exile. That means it is very unlikely to be the big dumb fun that a Diablo III season is, and will be more focused on a more grimdark hardcore audience. Diablo Immortal was probably the true spiritual successor, but given that it wound up being a shit sandwich of truly evil monetizations… that one is off the table.

I guess even if Diablo III fades away, I have all of the memories of me and Ace doing dumb things together for fun and profit. This is one of the oldest images I found on WordPress of us doing a greater rift together. I’m hoping that Last Epoch can become the next game that we shift our quarterly nonsense to. Path of Exile worked great for me, but never really became a good-feeling group activity. Last Epoch is going to be starting their seasons I believe around the launch of 1.0 and calling them “Cycles”. It sounds like at least with the start they are going to be relatively simplistic outings without a lot of extra mechanics going on. I think I am mostly okay with that because there is a thin line between doing next to nothing with early Diablo III seasons, and the wild feature bloat that is Path of Exile leagues.

Basically, I feel like a good friend is moving away, and that there isn’t much I can do about that. I fully expect when Diablo IV launches that what community existed around Diablo III will slowly fade away. So in many ways, this probably legitimately is the “Last Season” and I am going to try and be okay with that.