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Army of Bone

June 28, 2017 by Belghast

As I said yesterday morning I took a break from Final Fantasy XIV and the trial that has a good number of us completely high center on finishing the game. For those unaware Diablo 3 released its first in what I hope is a series of smaller addon packs that infuse the game with a little new blood… or skeletons in this case. While not really an expansion pack, Rise of the Necromancer adds the much wanted class to Diablo 3 and it is implemented in a way so that it blends seamlessly with the rest of the game. I will talk a bit more about that later, but here is functionally what you get for your $14.99… which is amusingly easily within the bounds of converting a single WoW Token to Blizzard Balance.

Non-Combat Pet – disgusting half baked flesh golem thing
A Pair of Cosmetic Wings – you can see me rocking them in the above screenshot
Necromancer Themed Banner Shape, Sigil and Accent
Necromancer Portrait Frame
Pennant – looks similarly Necromancery
Two additional character slots – which I was apparently close to being out of
Two additional bank stash tabs

Lets be honest… I probably would have paid $15 for two more bank tabs but as far as I am concerned that is plenty of goodness for the price. The Necromancer itself is insanely fun and most of last night I went around being followed by an army of undead minions. I cheated a bit in that I crafted a full set of Cain set gear and hung on to my Leoric’s Crown which had a 95% multiplier on it… for the Flawless Royal Ruby that I slotted in it… giving me 130% bonus experience and 112 bonus experience per kill. Now in my travels I have never leveled a Gem of Ease, which was the route that my friend Grace took to leveling significantly faster than me. Regardless the experience is flying and last night I managed to make it to level 56.

The key difference this time as compared to my normal seasonal characters is that I opted to play through the original game story as is to try and catch any changes that were put in place for the necromancer. I have been pleasantly surprised at just how well this new class blends with the original experience because they have shimmed in Necromancer specific responses from NPCs and Companions alike. This is the first time I have actually run the game with the scoundrel as my companion and he regularly makes comments about not needing any more empty skulls following us around. There was an event in Act II where I encountered a Necromancer out in the desert… which I greeted as a long lost friend rather than a strange traveler. Sure it feels a little weird to have the Paladin accept you as a friend… when you functionally defile the dead and bind them into your service… but whatever if you can manage a minor bit of hand waving what is left is a really enjoyable experience. The other thing that was awesome… is that it has been years since I last saw these cinematic and I was impressed with just how well they still hold up. I have so much love for Diablo 3 and it is the game that I am always rooting for good things to happen to… and small content packs like this one definitely seem like a viable way to continue growing the game. I am more than willing to keep plunking down this $15 price point to get new classes and assorted stuff to go with it.

I am really hoping this means we might see the Druid or Amazon as a result. Even more than rehashing characters from Diablo’s past… I would love to see them branch out and start giving us brand new concepts for characters. What about giving us a redeemed demon, or a fallen angel to control for ourselves. I just feel like there is a lot of life left in this game and I want to see them keep moving forward with expanding it. What I think is cool is that functionally this expansion pack was split into two halves… the first being the content listed above… and the rest being simply patch 2.6.0 which adds three new areas to the game for everyone regardless if they purchase the pack or not. Something called Challenge Rifts also went into the game as well as the usual number of tweaks and balances preparing us for the next season. I like this idea of expanding both the free content at the same time as giving us an additional way to keep spending money with the game and supporting its development. This is a weird balancing act that all of these “buy once, play forever” type of games seems to struggle with… as in what is content that should just be free because you bought the game, and what is content that is reasonable to charge an extra fee for. I feel like this balance with Diablo 3 seems about right and I think at this stage in the game it probably works far better than releasing a full expansion with a complete new act and 10 more levels to grind through each time you start a new character. I would love to hear my readers thoughts on this one. I for one am a happy camper, but I would be curious to hear some dissenting opinions.

Mixed Feelings

May 9, 2017 by Belghast

This morning like so many mornings I have been feeling largely uninspired in my attempt to find something to write about. In Star Wars the Old Republic I am in an odd space of doing some miscellaneous clean up before moving on to the Knights of the Fallen Empire content. This is enjoyable but not exactly the sort of thing that makes a good blog post because it doesn’t necessarily reveal anything worth mentioning. As a result I have spent way too much time looking at twitter, and almost like a miracle a tweet came across my timeline. It seems that Secret World Legends is releasing on June 26th, which is admittedly way sooner than I was expecting. It seems like it literally just went into beta about a month ago, which means one of two things. One either the beta has gone so amazingly well that they are moving up their time tables… or two that they were always going to launch on the 26th regardless of what happened in testing. Admittedly I have a lot of mixed feelings about this game relaunching.

I have a lot of love for The Secret World… but much in the same way as you might love that one movie you saw back in your childhood that you through was really damned cool and remember fondly as a sequence of memories. It will probably always be one of the best story driven MMO experiences I have had. They also did some interesting things with the deck building style ability system that let you mix and match actives and passives until you crafted a character that fit your specific play style. For example I fell in love with Blades/Shotgun which was this amazingly fun build with a mix of ranged and melee abilities that let me adapt to pretty much any open world situation. The problem being that these extremely custom builds all fell completely apart when you entered the end game. The game saw every single one of my circle of friends, having to abandon whatever path they were on to choose something new and group friendly to be able to even start to make a dent in the nightmare content. This is the point where most of us checked out, because we loved being whatever character fantasy we had built for ourselves… and having to abandon that just ruined the game experience.

All of that said… my twitter time line is full of moments when I broadcast the game out to my friends in an effort to get everyone to experience it. Each time it went on sale I talked about how good of a deal it was. I love the setting and I love the challenge of some of the quests that force you to figure out how to do silly things like decode things from base 64 encoding. In the trailer above they talk about switching the game from an MMO to a shared world action RPG… which largely sounds like marketing nonsense. They are switching the game to be reticle targeting, which can be a positive if all of the movement and interaction keys work nicely with it. In many ways this could be an attempt to make it a more console friendly design, because that sort of a control scheme seems to simply work better with a controller than it does with mouse and keyboard. All of the individual weapons seem to have a mini game aspect. About a month ago Elemental was shown off on the dev stream to have a “heat” mechanic that you are trying to keep in check. This makes me wonder however how well custom builds like my beloved Blades and Shotgun will work in this scenario. Will we have to choose a single weapon and stick to that?

Mostly I think I am going to have to fall into the “wait and see” camp at least until I get my hands on the game. I want it to work well, because I would really love to see a game like The Secret World succeeding. It did a lot of interesting things that no one else is still doing, and presented a game setting that is unique and interesting. The big problem however is all of that interesting bits came in a package that never quite worked as well as I thought it should. The user interface was always a bit of a disaster that you learned out to work around, rather than something that really reinforced the enjoyment of the game. Similarly the combat was scattered with a bunch of really great ideas that never quite coalesced into something that felt really good to play. There were elements of sheer brilliance, but those were what helped you get past all of the things that you found yourself barely tolerating. My ultimately hope is that with Secret World Legends they can go back and fix all the bits that never quite worked right, and then arrange the copious amounts of story they already have into a cohesive narrative. If they can do that and give me fun moment to moment play… then without a doubt I will be playing a lot more Secret World in the near future. They are however launching during a super tight window following ESO Morrowind on the 6th and FFXIV Stormblood on the 20th. That fact means without a doubt that while I might be playing this game… it is not going to even come close to being a primary game for me.

Diablo 3 Season Start and Anniversary Event

January 9, 2017 by Belghast

My weekend was largely dominated by the launch of Diablo 3 Season 9, and the Darkening of Tristram event. Up until this point I had not really touched any of the anniversary content, and to be honest the season beginning had completely slipped my mind until Grace asked me if we were doing our usual push. It has become a bit of a tradition to hang out Friday night and push as far as we can. While I rarely actually make it to 70 that first night, we both end up with a good head start into the season. This time around however we opted to do the Darkening of Tristram content… which is essentially a 16 plus level Greater Rift. I say plus because there are a number of offshoots that grant access to boss battles like the Skeleton King and other side areas. The interesting thing is that as much as I was not feeling Diablo 2… I absolutely enjoyed the weird nostalgic romp that is the darkening content. Basically glorious retrovision was cute… but did not destroy the fact that the underlying game is one that I still greatly enjoy. However for Diablo 2… I had simply moved on past that style of gameplay and the sort of character decisions that game asked you to make… permanently or at least relatively permanently.

As far as Season 9 goes I opted to play a Crusader once again… which is honestly my favorite of the Diablo 3 options. Primarily my decision this time around was due to the fact that the Invoker set was one again the freebie, allowing me to play quite possibly my favorite build… the one I loving refer to as “stop hitting yourself”. It is all about maximizing your thorns damage and then watching the mobs grind themselves to death on your armor. Essentially it plays into my ultimately player fantasy… and that is being this immovable object that survives being swarmed and walks out unscathed. The unscathed part however is a little open to interpretation since there are a handful of mob types that can just eat my lunch, but overall I am extremely happy with the progress so far this season. So far I have soloed up to a 42 greater rift, and had more than enough breathing room to probably be able to bump that up to 45 without issue. The most interesting thing is… I am already doing the equivalent of Torment 8 while still missing most of the items I need to do my proper build. I am following the traditional Thorns/Invoker build and am still missing: Traveler’s Pledge, Compass Rose, Heart of Iron, Justice Lantern, Akarat’s Awakening and Convention of Elements… and in truth I could probably use a better Hack than the one I managed to pick up.

I managed to complete through step 5 (Slayer) in the Seasons journey and am just now starting to slowly work on the Champion aka step 6. However the bulk of my time has been spent working on finishing the various Anniversary events. There is an excellent guide up on Icy Veins that I have been working on, and to the best of my knowledge I have completed them all. The one that took the longest however was “Protector of Tristram” which I included a screenshot of the completion above. Essentially as you go through the Darkening of Tristram Rift each floor has specific mobs that can spawn. You are usually only going to see a single spawn per floor, but in at least one rare case I didn’t see any rares up. Similarly in other rare cases you have a shot at seeing all three mobs up on a given floor… because that happened to me for certain on the fourth floor of the dungeon. Where the guide comes in handy is after a few runs of the event you are going to get your list of 40 whittled down to something more manageable. Towards the end of my grind I realized that I needed mobs on floors 5, 6, 7, and 12… so I began focusing those specific floors and simply rushing to the exit on any floors that I didn’t need. Finally both myself and Grace wound up needing the same mob… which feels like a rare spawn on floor five Foulwing.

The other item that took a long time to finally complete was the collection of Cultists pages which can be found off special Temporal Priests that spawn in amongst existing cultists out in the world. In theory there will only be a single Temporal Priest in a given spawn location, so once you have found it it is probably safe to move on to the next area. The Icy Veins guide has the zones that are likely to have them up at a given time. That said we did manage to find quite a few of them while doing normal rifts, and it seems like the “one per area” bit is unique to a given floor because we wound up with multiple pages in the same run a few times. For those curious about drop rates of pages… by the time I finished I managed to obtain:

Page 1: 1 copy
Page 2: 4 copies
Page 3: 3 copies
Page 4: 1 copy
Page 5: 3 copies
Page 6: 1 copy
Page 7: 3 copies

I doubt any of the pages are intentionally rarer than others, but for me I spent a lot of time grinding away still needing the very first page to drop. At this point I am extremely happy to have finished up all of the anniversary event and can now just start pushing towards that stash tab. This feels like a good season so far, and I am hoping that my drive maintains itself as I get into the harder content.

Literal Ankle Biter

December 12, 2016 by Belghast

This was a bit of an odd weekend. Lets get the bad out of the way. For several months we have been trying to figure out how to get Luna to a point where she does not attack the other two cats on sight. We’ve kept her sequestered in my wife’s office and each night I grab her and we hang out in my office while I play games. She almost always ends up snuggled on my desk, and in truth is just about the sweetest cat ever… when not around our other two. This is an important distinction before I tell you this next bit… because she is adorable and cuddly… when she is by herself. In my infinite lack of wisdom I decided that I wanted to make one last attempt to socialize them since she had seemingly bonded with me so tightly after our many many weeks of chilling in my office. We locked our eldest cat up in the bedroom and brought Luna out, at first carrying her and holding her on the sofa. Before long thought she wanted to explore… and for the most part our youngest and her were not interacting at all. However there came a point where we were moments away from a cat fight, and I tried to gather Luna up and carry her off to my office. She struggled to try and get away but I got her up to the office without much issue. I turned to shut the door and I felt this searing pain on my leg around my lower calf. She had bit me… and now I was left with the decision of how the hell to get out of my office without letting her out so she could go after Kenzie.

I snuck out and by the time I got downstairs I was bleeding pretty badly. There are five marks… so I am guessing one is maybe a claw mark or she drug off of me and raked me with her fang again. Two of them are about a half inch in length and pretty deep… and two others are deep puncture wounds where she chomped down hard on my leg. It hurts quite a bit to walk and just generally exist in the world right now, but I don’t think there is any real damage. After going through the crap with my wife when she got bitten we are being extra cautious, and using the super duper antibiotic creme that they gave us back then. Walking is not comfortable and today is going to be interesting. I had to venture out to get more extra large band-aids, because in theory you can hit all of the spots with two of the largest size. After getting bandaged up I went back upstairs where she seemed as freaked as I was by the event. She sat on the floor in the back of my office up against the accordion closet door for a long while looking freaked. Eventually I peeked down underneath the desk towards where she was at and said “it’s okay, I’m not mad” and almost instantly her demeanor changed and she bounded over and hopped up on the desk laying down beside me. The thing that is breaking my heart is that I now know that this is probably never going to get any better, and we really do need to find her a new home. Unfortunately the friend that we thought was going to take her… had her landlord say no. It was in their contract that they could have pets if landlord approved… but I am guessing the asshole is biased against cats, because he assumed they were talking a dog.

Other than the cat thing…. and hurting… I streamed a lot of Iron Banner. I think it was Friday night at some point that I managed to hit Rank 5 with the Banana, and from that point on it was just gravy as far as loot went. I guess in theory I should have been swapping to the Warlock or Hunter to get them to Rank 5 but instead I simply made a poor attempt at farming some more gear to increase my light levels. This last 10 points is going to be slow as hell, but I entered the weekend at 390 and exit at 392 which I guess is reasonable. According to beam I have now streamed seven hours of game play, which I guess isn’t a bad start for my first week. Now a good chunk of that on Sunday at least was to an empty audience, but I entertained myself and have a bunch of footage to sift through. There was one Iron Banner match where for whatever reason I started humming the Super Mario Brothers theme song inserting “Nope” instead of some of the notes. All in all I think I like Rift for an Iron Banner match type, but like I said before I struggled a bit at first because the game play feels so vastly different from anything I had been used to. The best item I got all weekend is still the above Branded Lord with Hammer Forged, Enhanced Battery and Range Finder… which I now have fully leveled and am almost using exclusively.

Lastly I played some “Let It Die” as evidenced by the first screenshot in the post today, and streamed it as well… except for whatever reason my audio was being overpowered completely by the game audio. I will have to fiddle with that and adjust it some. This game is just strange as hell, and I guess in many ways it feels a little Dark Soulsian, in that the mobs that you encounter are somewhat brutally powerful at times. There will be times that you get stunlocked to the point where you simply cannot do anything to deal with the encounters other than die. The strangest part so far is the types of weapons you encounter… hot irons, router drills, hammers… firework launchers. As you ascend the Tower of Barbs you encounter all sorts of monsters that should be in a silent hill game with bizarre implements that are trying to kill you, all the while you are using a zombie corpse thing as your avatar. You start out buck naked each time and have to scrounge up armor and weapons to be able to survive for terribly long in the tower. This is of course a “free to play” game and where the money aspect comes in is that in order to resurrect yourself using “death insurance” you need to spend a rainbow skull currency, that the game gives you a handful of to start out. However in the brief period of time I played yesterday I wound up using two of them before realizing… that in truth I had not really made any actual progress and should stop doing that. I’ve not quite figured out what the point is yet… as far as how you actually improve your character. I thought after I cleared a level I would be taken back to the lobby… but apparently I have to do that manually so I essentially lost all progress on that character and had to grab a fresh corpse to start the climb all over again. It has some deep rogue like elements, all the while mixing in bizarre Neo Tokyo and Silent Hill tropes…. with a dash of Dark Soulsian difficulty. Given that several of those checkboxes are things that Kodra likes, I think he maybe should try this game out. What I am wanting to know is if you can play it multiplayer, because this would probably be super enjoyable with friends.