arpg Archives - Page 80 of 82 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Journey Completed

October 24, 2016 by Belghast

This weekend represents quite possibly the quickest I have “finished” the Diablo 3 seasonal journey. I say finished with quotes because there is still a lot more that I could be doing, but I think I am ultimately as far as I intend to go. Of note… when I logged in this morning I got an anniversary achievement and the above Diablo pet so if you are interested you might check it out and make sure you log in within the next few days. For lack of a better word… Season 8 completely caught me off guard. Unfortunately the rotating three month schedule means that this is going to happen more often than not these days. Season 7 released during the Legion pre-launch event… so it too was a fairly truncated effort. I know my friend Grace managed to make it in on the day before Season 7 ended and push hard enough to get her extra bank tab. It would have been a great season to do that for, given just how good the hunter set was for pushing content. I however just let my attempt at getting that bank slot slip away because I couldn’t bring myself to push any further. This time around… we have a new set and a new optimal build. We started the season once again on a Friday night, logging in and beginning the push within moments of the season going live. Generally speaking we make it pretty close to 70 on that first night… but this time both Grace and I lost our “oomph” at around 54.

I managed to pick up the next day with another group and we ground together from the 50s through to 70 making it to roughly paragon 20 before needing to bail and get some dinner. Yesterday afternoon I focused on getting the various achievement bits needed to get the first four chapters of the seasons journey and unlock the cosmetic options, and finished gear set. This time around with the Demon Hunter it was Natalya’s set, which is a bit of an odd one given that it focuses on dealing damage with rain of vengeance. This is the basic build that I followed, substituting a few abilities for ones I prefer, namely I found Stampede way harder to control than Shade for Rain of Vengeance. I played a little of both but given how much I was in constant motion having the stampede actually pointed in the right direction was always a thing. Towards evening yesterday though I finally started to feel like I was getting a handle on the play style and soloing my GR20 was actually far easier than I had expected. The biggest problem is that this build just clears so much more slowly than the equivalent Multishot build did last season. If I were to actually push for the full compliment of seasonal achievements… I would more than likely try and farm up a full set of Unhallowed Essence again and just go back to the tried and true multishot.

However it is highly unlikely that I will spend much more time on this season. There was just something lackluster about it, given that nothing had changed since the previous season. All of the same builds worked as we left them in the previous patch. I was one of the people cheering on the three month seasonal cycle, but having been through it a few times now… I am thinking that maybe it is just too short a time period between them. Previously enough time had passed for me to start to miss the seasonal grind… enough to be truly excited for another opportunity to hang out and push to 70 together. This time… it just felt like we were doing it to get shiny cosmetic baubles instead of to really enjoy the experience. This makes me a little sad given just how pumped I have been in the past for the season to roll around and start anew. This time around I literally had no clue it was happening until Grace told me. In the past I almost marked the date on my calendar and started to get excited for the whole process. Who knows maybe in a weeks time I will feel differently and want to pick up where I left off… grinding out more seasonal achievements. That said I am perfectly happy leaving Season 8 as is, because I feel like I did what I set forth to do… collect another batch of exclusive cosmetic appearances.

Breaking Routine

October 17, 2016 by Belghast

This weekend was a bit of an odd one, namely when it came to Sunday morning. Generally speaking I have the process of finishing up an AggroChat episode down to a fairly regimented process. Saturday night before I crash I try to do what I call the initial edit, which is most of the actual edit work. Then Sunday morning I write the small bit of copy, and upload and syndicate the podcast to the various sources where it gets put. However this week was the first week doing all of this on the new machine… and I was not prepared. For starters we recorded a really long show mostly about the Final Fantasy XIV 3.4 main story quest. We did not unfortunately ONLY talk about that, and that meant we had almost three hours of recorded audio to process… and didn’t actually finish things up until around midnight my time. Instead of staying up further, I decided to crash and deal with it in the morning. Then Sunday it was a carnival of errors, as the version of audacity on my new machine was apparently slightly newer than the version I had been using which means a lot of the filters had different options… or at least were arranged in different ways. Additionally there was the process of trying to find all of my source files off of the old machine, which is thankfully still accessible over the network.

The worst part of it however was the changes to the Truncate Silence filter…. which is a crutch we lean on heavily for AggroChat. We are fairly pensive folk, and as a result there are a lot of lengthy pauses in conversation. With truncate silence that 3 hours of audio becomes 2 hours… but on my first attempt it maybe clipped a little more than actual silence. For whatever reason it was clipping the hell out of anytime Kodra talked, giving his speech a record skipping characteristic. However this is not something I realized until I was just about to upload the files to our host. Thankfully I caught it in time and was able to redo that portion, lowering the granularity of the filter. This mean’t what is normally a couple hour process… ate up I think four hours in total. Admittedly I was piddling around in Guild Wars 2 during much of it, so there were probably moments when I didn’t notice a filter had finished here or there. The positive however is that every filter applied went massively faster than on the previous AMD FX-6300 based processor. That was really my hope with the new i7 based system, is that it would be able to chew through rendering tasks far more successfully. As with any system there is going to be an adjustment and moving in period, and I am hoping that now that I have finished a single podcast on this machine additional ones will be much quicker.

As far as the weekend itself went, I was all over the place. I played a significant amount of Destiny, completing a bunch of bounties and discovering the Archon’s Forge… or more so how easy it was to get a pick up group. Much the same way as the court of Oryx, you seem to be able to just show up and folks will either be doing it… or quickly swarm when they think anyone else is. I also played a lot of World of Warcraft, completely a few mythic dungeons as well as successfully completing my first Mythic+ keystone. I’m looking forward to seeing that upgraded loot in the weekly order hall chest. In addition to that I completed the five time-walking dungeons on both Belghast and Exeter, and on the later I used it as a way to gear him up. I am now sitting over the 825 cap needed to get into LFR so my hope is tonight I will be able to run the two parts available and potentially get more upgrades that way. Generally speaking on Belghast the 835 rewards are not super enticing, but I still ran it this week for the purpose of getting some rune stones. I also need to do a bunch of fishing, as I now have the pattern to turn the 300 versatility food that I spent a chunk of the weekend crafting… into a 375 version. I am only using this stuff for raiding and mythic+ attempts, as I keep a bank full of Faronar Fizz for other stuff.

The biggest take away from the weekend is that I am actually finding myself legitimately enjoying Guild Wars 2. Recently it had been a game that I was dipping my toes into for the sake of my friends that were also playing it. However before the podcast we ran several of the story mode dungeons and they were pretty enjoyable. Enough so that when I sat down to decide which game I would play during the podcast, I decided to go ahead and stay with Guild Wars 2. That means that I spent the next three hours roaming aimlessly completing little objectives here and there, and mostly finding my way to the next story mode dungeon. The post 80/ Heart of Thorns mastery leveling is pretty slow. In all of that time I only managed to get about half of a mastery level… and then I ended up wasting a bunch of experience because I didn’t notice I needed to click through and train it. I am pretty not sure what my purpose in game is, but I am still fairly dead set on the warrior… and more importantly hammer warrior. That makes me the make shift tank for the group, and I have been using rifle lately as my dps weapon because it allows me to have something that I can hit things with at range. At some point I want to pick back up where I left off in attempting to level armor smithing, but right now my craft window looks somewhat like madness to me. All in all I feel like I have come to terms with the game in accepting what it is… and more importantly what it is not.

Bumbling Around

August 11, 2016 by Belghast

Yeti Power

After a Tuesday night spent chasing Legion Invasions and being an Illidari, I felt like last night I needed a nice relaxing night of being a completely different sort of Demon Hunter. By nice and relaxing I mean a night spent pushing rifts and causing anime style rocket explosions as I cleared entire rooms at the same time. It is strange how Diablo has morphed over the years for me. Originally it was that game that I wished I could play with friends… but didn’t have stable enough internet to be able to play it. Then it when the second game was released it absolutely become a game I played almost exclusively with friends. When three was released, I was in a place where I was largely soloing and found it a less than amazing experience. Now several years later each time a new season is launched it becomes this focusing force that brings a bunch of us back together for another trip happily through the paragon and gear grind. For most of the night last night I was joined by my fairly regular demon slaying buddy Grace, and we also managed to snag Thalen and bring him along for the fun. The night as a whole was pretty great because on our first tag team attempt at bounties… a Menagerist Goblin spawned dropping this extremely awesome Yeti pet named “The Bumble” for me to go wandering with. Additionally I was able to knock out several pieces of gear off of my list, and I finally managed to get the last of the three legendary gems needed for this build. The highlight of the night however was getting an Ancient Yang’s Recurve to drop… which admittedly made Grace super jealous. However because of this it is now my duty to tag along in any D3 madness to push hard for folks so they too can get their sweet ancient drops.

The other thing that happened last night is that I attempted the “Numlock Trick”. One of the more annoying things in Diablo 3 is that most builds have some sort of buff that they want to cast essentially anytime it is available. The goal of the build is usually to get enough cooldown reduction so that you can keep it up 100% of the time. For the Multishot build I am using for my Demon Hunter, it is focused largely around getting keeping Vengeance up 100% of the time… and right now I have it close enough that I maybe have a second without it up at any given time. The other day I heard something mentioned in a build video talking about “using the numlock trick” on one of these buffs… and I had to investigate to satiate my curiosity. There is apparently a strange glitch in the game that allows you to essentially constantly be spamming a button press. I mean in theory you could do the same thing with hardware macros on a keyboard, but this just sort of “works”. The idea is to bind the 1-4 hotkeys to have a secondary key which relates to Numpad 1-4. To toggle on autocast for any of the abilities you turn your Numlock key on, hold down the keys you want to autocast and then turn off your Numlock. Just like that the key keeps repeating over and over… which causes some weird behavior. Firstly if you are holding any key the cast will not fire… so if you are holding force move or the left mouse button down… just ease up on it to let the next cast go off. Secondly… it has the strange behavior of interrupt abilities like identification or teleport. What I do to get past those is to start the channeled cast, and then hold any key. In my binding I have S set as an alternate bind for Shift… which is to stop moving and hold still. Holding this down while channeling works well to keep my auto casts from interrupting whatever ability I want to do.

The other “strangeness” that happens is that any time you shift games, and sometimes when you just downgrade difficulty it can turn the autocasting off completely. In this case you just flip back on numlock, hold your keys down, and turn it back off to set the glitch back up. Now that I know this exists… I am wondering what other uses can be had for it. Supposedly folks use this regularly for Taeguk builds on the monk side to keep the stacks. In theory I could do the same trick to make sure I am evasive fire shots in with my hunter, to build hatred and keep up the damage shield. For the time being however I am keeping it simple and only using this to try and keep Vengeance up as often as possible as well as my Companion ability. I was always horrible at using these cooldowns, and tended to save them until I reached a point where I had a lot of elites to attack rather than just constantly using them knowing that I had another cooldown just around the corner. I need to spend some time working on achievements so I can catch up to the point Grace is currently in the seasonal journey. I am still not sure if I am going to go for the stash slot this time around… but for the moment I am going to keep playing so long as the game feels fun and fresh. Tonight however I have earmarked to go do Broken Shores scenario on my various alts… because I have yet to actually see the new cinematics.

Kittens and Gaming

July 5, 2016 by Belghast

Tiny Babby

It was a good weekend, if not a very rainy one as a whole. This made for an extremely humid evening last night for fireworks and festivities. Our plans largely backfired because in the past we have been able to see the fireworks from the comfort of our back yard. This time around however they apparently switched locations, and the bulk of the fireworks were hidden behind a stand of trees. All of that aside however the highlight of my weekend was the little guy that I am feeding above. Now to clear up some confusion… we did not adopt him but did however drive like an hour and some change to go up and see him. My Mother-In-Law found this little guy abandoned, but I am a bit fuzzy on the details. All I know is zero sign of mother and probably about a week old when she found him. She has been nursing him with a bottle as pictured, and at this point we think he is somewhere between two and three weeks old. Completely sweetheart who seemed to really like my beard. He would curl up under it and start kneading the underside of my chin. My wife took lots of pictures of me feeding him… as to why it ended up with me feeding him that is anyones guess. He seemed to take the bottle better from me, and growing up we had barn kitties… who sometimes were not that keen on being a proper momma. So I remember occasionally having to nurse a litter by hand so I guess that muscle memory just kicked in. We have no plans to adopt this little guy because he seems to be in just fine hands already. Though I will admit… it was hard not to try and take him home with us.

Forty Five

I spent a good deal of my weekend playing ArcheAge and as of last night I am level forty five. This means that for the last two zones I have been leveling exclusively in the mixed faction regions that are more or less open PVP. This was a huge point of anxiety around launch that ultimately I could not hit the level cap without venturing out into zones where folks could gank me. As it turns out… everyone seems to have something better to do with their time. I’ve spent many an hour out in the mixed zones and while I have seen a ton of “red” players not a single one has bothered me. Granted that might be simply because I am higher level than they were, or it might also be that they are focused on more important things. So essentially I have leveled the same as I did before, and enjoyed questing… with just the slightest awareness in the back of my head that I am not entirely safe. Largely I just shifted to a point of view where if I am going to go afk… I go find a Nui shrine to do so near because of the peace aura surrounding them. As far as leveling goes… I am slightly ahead of the curve more than likely thanks to the Patron buffs. I am largely ignoring crafting and spending a meager pittance of labor points on opening lootbags and gear, which has kept me outfitted and is a shocking amount of experience. I tend to let the bags collect while I am working on a quest hub, and then before moving to the next open them all and stash the crafting materials in the warehouse before moving on. I had honestly wondered if I would hit a wall when I moved into the open pvp zones, but so far the game is just as fun as it was beforehand and I am moving along smoothly.

Taming Familiars

Another game that I have been poking around in is Riders of Icarus after talking about it over the week with the AggroChat crew. The character on the right is my Beserker, and the character on the left is Tamrielo’s rogue of some sort. It is shocking how when left to our own devices… we end up creating pretty similar looking characters. In both cases we even purposefully decided to go with a hairstyle that is unlike what we normally choose… yet we still seemed to have chosen the exact same alternate appearance. The game as a whole is doing some interesting things, with the central feature that makes it special being that you can go around taming mounts and combat pets. Unfortunately unlike ArcheAge you cannot have both a mount and a combat pet at the same time… or at least I couldn’t figure out how to make that work. There are certain aspects of the game that remind me of a whole slew of other games, but more than anything they seem to be focused on the player fantasy of mounted combat… namely mounted aerial combat with a crossbow or lance. This so far is the least enjoyable part of the game for me, because well… so far I suck horribly fighting in the air because it feels like I lose all situational awareness and often back into another mob while dancing around the one I am currently fighting.

Last night I managed to get to some sort of a proper dungeon and was pleased to see that you could complete it in a solo fashion, or with a full group. The feel of the zone is extremely similar to Ragefire Chasm in World of Warcraft, but nonetheless fun and interesting. I am wondering if on higher difficulties you have more than the single boss at the end of the cavern which is the golem pictured above. I’ve played this game quite a bit and I am still not sure if I like it or not. I think I might need to play the Guardian tank class a bit to see if that is maybe more my speed, because generally speaking I enjoy playing dps… but my heart is never really in it. The game can be set up to run in a traditional action bar combat method or through left/right mouse button action combat style. What I find personally works best is a bit of a hybrid between the two… namely setting the game into Action Mode but also using hotbar combat. The biggest challenge for me right now is the fact that all of my attacks are fairly slow… and animation locked so dodging and avoiding attacks becomes a challenge. I am enjoying the game enough to keep playing, but just not sure if it is different enough from the other games I am playing to keep my attention for the long haul. If you are out there playing Riders of Icarus feel free to throw Belghast a friend invite.

Crafting Away

As for Rift I am stuck in a bit of a holding pattern for the moment. Each night I focus largely on completing all of the daily crafting quests for the various purple, blue and green currencies. However I guess I have reached a point where I should probably venture into the world for real. Over the weekend I managed to cap both the purple and blue currencies, and even though I spent them down a bit… that tells me that maybe I have focused too intently on this one aspect of the game. I’ve been making almost nightly trips out into Goboro Reef… that I found out from Captain Cursor I have been calling by the wrong name all of this time. The zone was one that I did not really like a first, but for Karthite and Sarleaf farming I find it extremely relaxing. At some point I need to just break the pattern and focus on pushing my way further into the Planetouched Wilds. Either that or start up with the running of experts again, because I am still far from ideally geared. However I am not sure if Experts or Intrepid Adventures are the better option at the moment. I am really looking forward to the change to the Warlord soul that is up on the PTS, because I have always enjoyed playing it… at least significantly more so than the Paragon soul that I am currently using. I always liked the rhythm of landing Piercing Thrust after a combo point dump attack. It feels good to see a single attack deal that sort of damage, and supposedly the PTS changes restore the soul to general viability, which I am absolutely looking forward to.