D4

Realmwalkers

by

So after the dramatic delays for the launch of Diablo IV Vessel of Hatred that I talked about yesterday, I finally was able to get in and get some game time last night. The only problem with that is that I have had a massive amount of issues playing the game since it was updated. I am not entirely certain what has changed in the game since the roll-out of Vessel of Hatred but I am seeing way more hitching and rubberbanding in game than I originally did playing the base game. Namely, this happens when I load into a new area or zone out of the sanctuary bubble surrounding a town. This tells me that it is a loading asset or network throughput problem more than anything else. When you transition zones you are essentially loading into a new “map” with a variable number of new players loading into it with you.

This prompted me to run some actual tests on the two “fast” drives in my system. For years I thought my “T drive” aka the drive that I put into this stock system was the faster of the two drives. It turns out that is absolutely not the case. In fact, it is pretty slow, or slower than I thought. The maximum throughput of a SATA III SSD is around 600 MB/s and my drive is running around 556 MB/s which admittedly is not that much slower than the maximum. Considering I have not spent much time inside my own machine since I bought it as a prebuilt… I assumed BOTH of my drives were SSDs when in truth apparently my “C Drive” is an NVME. So all of this time I have been favoring the worst drive. I guess I need to figure out if I have the room to add one of those PCIE to NVME interface cards to add some more fast storage at some point.

Moving Diablo IV to the faster drive helped quite a bit, but it did not remove all of the problems. I still am constantly dealing with freezes whenever I cross zone boundaries and it is frustrating as heck. I don’t think it is a network throughput problem because I am connected directly to my router with a 1-gigabit connection and per speed test I am seeing roughly 360 Mbps down and 35 Mbps up… which is pretty much the maximum rating of my internet connection. If I could play this game offline… I feel like it would probably clear all of these issues up. Whenever I am in a dungeon or other instanced area, I experience zero hitching and freezes, which tells me the problem is the other players. Hell really is other people.

Annoyances aside, I am really enjoying the Spiritborn. Sure I would have rather had a Paladin/Crusader just like every other Diablo player on the planet, but the new class is pretty fun. It feels like this blend between the Diablo III Monk and the World of Warcraft DPS Demon Hunter. I am loosely following this leveling build from Maxroll, and at some point, I will swap to their Deathtouch Centipede endgame build. The only annoyance that I have currently is that I keep having to swap weapon transmogs because there are three different types of weapons that they can use. I love that you can access transmogs at any point while you are out in the world, but I wish you could lock in your weapon appearance in a similar fashion to how you can do your armor.

I’ve legitimately made almost zero progress in the campaign. I made it over the border into Nahantu and unlocked the Mercenary system, and then proceeded to spend the rest of the evening unlocking all of the mercenaries. At this point, my favorite is Varyana the grump elderly cannibal. The Demon child seems like he is a model swap from the Tiefling kids in Baldur’s Gate III, but I am currently running with him so I can get at least one level of reputation. I remember reading something about wanting to get one rank in all of them so that you can unlock bartering at some point. Going forward though I will probably use a combination of Subo because he makes enemies and harvestable resources show up on your map. I am also using Varyana as my backup tied to my charge attack so that I am constantly proccing her to come cleave things.

One of the good at bad things about an expansion launching at the same time as a season is that the two mechanics often blend together. It turns out my favorite part of the expansion so far is in stead something associated with Season 6. Every so often a Realmwalker will spawn, if you remember from Diablo III these are giant demons that summon a portal to another realm when you beat them up. This time around they roam around the map spawning random baddies and if you kill enough of these baddies it will make the Realmwalker mad enough to fight you. At that point, you can beat it up and it will summon a portal to a dungeon.

Inside of the dungeon you can choose the type of rewards you want for completing it, which also determines the type of Opals that drop at the end. Opals essentially function as potions but stack with the rest of the consumables in the game. While you have the 30-minute effect active you gain experience towards the seasonal rewards track and also have a chance of spawning extra rewards out in the world. Essentially the ones I have encountered so far are Opals that give you extra gold, extra crafting materials, and extra gear drops. Seeing as I have gotten several legendaries after using one of the equipment potions, I am guessing this is going to be a good way to farm more gear. There are two higher tiers of Opals apparently available later, one that gives you gem fragments, and another that gives you bossing materials.

Ultimately these “seething realm” dungeons feel like what the Nightmare Dungeons should have been… just a quick boss rush with interesting side effects that feel rewarding for your time. All in all, I am enjoying the expansion but I’ve not really seen any of the story yet. I guess tonight I will spend my evening focused on that to see how well it grabs me. I’ve always been a “do the story last” type person when it comes to games because I like being able to just overpower it with levels and gear. If there is a way for me to trivialize content I will do so all the time. I also just like roaming around aimlessly way more than I like questing in general. When I am in a questing mood, I want to keep my head down and push through all the way to the end in effectively a single sitting.

One interesting side effect of the new class… is that they ACTUALLY know how to hold a fucking Halberd. When the Barbarian equips one of these they hold it so that the Axe blade is facing their head. It has driven me insane the entire time I have played this game. I checked and the Barbarian is still clueless so it appears that the Spiritborn just has better common sense. Anyway, I am hoping the hitching problems that I have been having lessen as the servers are a bit less crowded. There are drops available each week on Twitch so while you are doing other things, open a browser tab and farm them. I left Twitch running overnight and farmed up the drops from yesterday. Annoyingly you have to watch six hours… or in my case AFK six hours… to farm up a full set of the weekly drops.

Is Diablo IV Vessel of Hatred the best thing ever? No. Not even close. However, I am having quite a bit of fun and for now, I am calling that good enough.

Multiple Caps Reached

by

Good Morning Folks! Or at least I hope to finish writing this and publish it within a timeframe that could still be referred to as “morning”. Here in the United States, it is Memorial Day and as such I would normally count this as part of my weekend and not blog. However, I found myself feeling weird about it being a Monday and not blogging so here we go! Since I last blogged I’ve hit a few milestones, the first of which is dinging level 100 for the first time in Diablo IV. Sadly I think it also probably denotes the end of my involvement with the game for the time being. I might max out my seasonal reputation but I am not feeling terribly driven to push further into the endgame. I am just not bossing motivated and the “mapping” experience in Diablo IV is sort of boring.

I’ve been actively doing The Pit since around 95 and I gotta say it feels worse than Greater Rifts did. The above is a picture of having cleared a Greater Rift in Diablo III and the comparative loot explosion that you got at the end. Clearly, The Pit just feels lackluster because generally speaking you tend to get four items and it does not seem to scale heavily as you go up in difficulty. Maybe there are breakpoints where it starts to feel more rewarding, but for the most part, it feels like it is a system that entirely exists to get the materials needed to masterwork your items… which again is a system that only really exists so that you can go deeper into The Pit. If The Pit already feels unrewarding… doing more of it so you can do more of it… does not feel like a good experience to me. I am not driven to prove how hardcore I am… I play these games to get cool loot and when I stop getting that I tend to bounce.

On the other side, I have been playing a huge amount of World of Warcraft Pandaria Remix lately and dinged 70 on my first timerunner character. I gotta say this setup is extremely sweet for setting up a character and preparing it for the next expansion. Just creating a character gives you maximum flying speed and a full inventory of 36 slot bags, then you can pick up those same bags for 10 Bronze each and outfit your bank in them as well. From what I understand when the event is over this character will exit the other side as a normal level 70 character with one of those high item level gear cache bundles as though it had been boosted allowing for it to essentially start War Within on a strong footing. Given that every character gets a boost from the current level of my timeless cloak, it is honestly a great way to seed various servers with max-level characters. I’ve always had a slew of friends who play on Drenden so currently planning on leveling a Tauren Paladin and maybe some sort of a Hunter over there.

Here is a crudely photoshopped mess of me attempting to show off all of the stats of my cloak at the same time. I am not sure how to read the cloak rank number, but I think that means I have collected 15k threads so far. I would potentially believe this based on my stat hits, and this is all through legitimate means. By the time I started my first character the “frog farm” had been nerfed, so this is just through normal play patterns. I have enough survival through my gem choices and my cloak stats that I can pretty much roll around in Titan Grip Fury mode. I need to work on earning my rings and necklace which are associated with achievements. Basically doing all the dungeons in Heroic Mode gets one ring, another is associated with doing all of the Heroic Scenarios, and the last is from running all of the raids in Normal Mode. I wish they would nerf this a bit and change it to Raid Finder mode because it is way easier to queue for Raid Finder than to use Group Finder for raids.

All of the World Bosses and Raids are on daily lockouts so that they can be farmed constantly. In fact, one of the popular leveling methods for alts involves getting to 25 and then queueing for LFR wings on each character daily to get a huge boost in XP and threads. I’m focused on this main character though and trying to unlock all of the things I need to unlock before shifting to alts. Given that I am queuing as a DPS, getting into raids should be relatively straight forward. I contemplating tanking them but honestly, I am not sure if I want the responsibility of trying to remember how all of this content worked. Maybe after running through various content a few times, I might shift over to my tank gear and give it a shot.

I did not in a million years think I would be falling back in love with World of Warcraft. If anything I thought I would be limping through the remainder of the story content in Final Fantasy XIV and preparing myself for the launch of that expansion. Early Access for it starts on June 28th which will be here before I realize it. I essentially need to make some hard decisions about whether or not I am going to hop on that train or not. There is a bare minimum amount of work that needs to be done if I am going to attempt to play at all. Essentially I need to get through the MSQ and then do a massive amount of retainer maintenance. Every class is level 80 or higher and as such I really need to spend some time cleaning out gear that I will never wear to free up room for new gear. This would involve a lot of grand company turnins… and probably is a week’s worth of effort at a minimum.

At one point I was pushing up a number of jobs to level 90 and managed to complete Paladin which I leveled during the campaign and then Monk, Dragoon, Samurai, and Machinist through doing daily quests and pvp content. I was pretty close on Red Mage as well so I could probably easily push it up as well. Basically, the new jobs will probably start at 80 which means the only gear I would care about keeping that us below that are things for Sage and Reaper which I could probably easily push to 80 as well. The problem with all of this is that I just need to make the decision to get started. I think at some point I will be in a daily maintenance routine with Pandaria Remix which would leave some room for maybe dipping my toes back into FFXIV.

This is of course on top of any time that I am spending in Guild Wars 2, because I would also really like to finish out the Secrets of the Obscure content there. I picked up my next Legendary starter kit and this is one that I have wanted for ages… so I need to start working towards collecting a bunch of Mystic Clovers and knocking out another Gift of Exploration and Gift of Battle. I need to see which character is closer to 100% World Exploration and then finish that out. I will probably have more fun doing it on my Ranger thought. I would really like to have a Legendary Hammer because it is a weapon that I really enjoy on a bunch of different classes.

Anyways… I got a lot of gaming on my plate. The positive is that I will definitely not be bored for a while.

Seeking Cat Tree Chair

by

Morning Folks! I completed what is probably the last of the challenges that I am going to face in this league. I am happy to sit at 34/40 because other than the memories challenge everything else is T17 or Uber Boss related. I took the lame way out and just bought some bulk constrictor maps at 21 of them for a Divine Orb which allowed me to grind out the last few guardian maps that I needed for this challenge. I feel pretty great with the progress that I made during the Necropolis League and would be perfectly fine at this point if I did not play again until the start of 3.25. I am not saying for certain that is going to happen but that I would would feel accomplished for the progress I’ve made.

Today is the launch of Diablo IV Season 4 and I know that I will be spending at least a bit of time playing it. Generally speaking… I tend to start a Barbarian since that has been the last that I have enjoyed the most to date. They feel a bit weak at the start of the game but once you start gearing them they feel great. Earlier this week Raxx released a Tier list video and apparently… Necromancers especially of the minion variety have been significantly buffed. This is making me consider a Necro start given that I do love me some minion gameplay. I am not sure which class I will spend most of my time playing, and really how good the state of the game feels is going to be what determines my level of engagement. I had a heck of a lot of fun during Season 2 so here is hoping that Season 4 feels equally good.

Other than that I have been spending quite a bit of time playing Guild Wars 2. Kodra has been back and active a good deal lately, which has prompted me to want to go back and explore Tyria. I would love to be able to find a time when I can be online with various folks that I know and actually do some of the content. Fractals are probably the lowest common denominator, but I would love to get more engaged in Strikes and potentially even Raids now that there is a training wheels mode. I have a commander tag so that is pretty much what is required for doing multi-group activities.

My favorite aspect of the game is just how easy it is to engage in open-world group activities. I had a Wizard’s Vault challenge that asked me to kill 100 Risen. I figured I would pop over to Orr and do some gathering while slowly completing that challenge, and before I knew it someone was calling out that the Arah event was starting up, so I joined the crowd and made my way to the legendary High Wizard easily soaking up enough kills along the way. It is moments like that which really sell me on Guild Wars 2, because it is so easy to start doing one thing and get wrapped up in a bunch of other things along the way that you were not planning on doing at all.

Later in the evening, I wound up in WVW because I had cashed in my Wizard’s Vault tokens in order to get the third legendary weapon box. This meant that I needed to farm up another Gift of Battle, which meant following around and helping a group of folks take objectives. I had not really played WvW since the most recent round of changes but pending you are going there to actually do the combat, it seems like you gain progress faster than you did previously. I’m about halfway to my next gift of battle and figure in the coming weeks I will poke my head back into WvW a bit more as I tend to find it shockingly chill.

Unfortunately, when I cashed in my Wizard’s Vault tokens I did not pay attention to the other rewards. This chair is amazing and I must have it, which means I need to be fairly active each day to make sure I am gaining enough progress in order to pick it up. Why yes I do want to be surrounded by lounging cats while I am waiting on World Events to start. Chairs in this game are such an odd pastime, but I am happy to see a really great one available that is not in the cash shop.

BlizzCon 2023 Thoughts

by

Good Morning Folks! I have to be honest… I had every intention of writing a post on BlizzCon this past Friday as the event was going on but that never quite came to fruition. For those who do not follow such things, this past Friday and Saturday was the first in-person BlizzCon since 2019. I know a ton of friends who were very happy about the return of the event and made plans to travel to Anaheim for it. I’ve always wanted to go, but tend to have a fairly fraught relationship with Blizzard games in general. I feel like it is probably a good idea to get this out of the way, but I have not actively played World of Warcraft since December 2020, though I have followed from afar and did some alpha testing for the latest expansion Dragonflight. I’ve grown apart from the fandom and Diablo was really the last vestige that I clung to.

If you are so inclined, you can watch the full uncut presentation for Blizzcon 2023 here.

All of that said… I am shocked to say that I thought this year’s BlizzCon was almost universally positive. I found it extremely interesting that within 10 minutes of the event starting, we had a speech from Microsoft’s Phil Spencer. He said all of the right things, but I find myself wanting to believe them. As someone who has been a Windows programmer for most of my career… I have a fraught relationship with Microsoft as a whole. That said… I can’t see that Microsoft has done wrong by any of the companies they have acquired. They have most definitely been a steadying force for Mojang and Minecraft. The one strike that I could throw against them was Redfall, but who knows precisely how that mess unfolded because it was a game so far out of the comfort zone of that studio. As compared to the reign of Bobby Kotick… I have to imagine that Microsoft will be a positive force for Blizzard as a whole.

Another thing that I have to admit is that there is a lot of presentation that I just did not care about at all. Overwatch is a setting that seems interesting, but I am not going to engage unless they shift gears and turn it into a looter shooter. Hearthstone is something that I did care about for a while… but now that Magic that Gathering Arena exists and is relatively enjoyable… I have a good representation of the game I actually care about and don’t really need the Blizzard clone. Rumble is outside of my wheelhouse especially now that my aging phone seems to have trouble running any modern games that are not the most simplistic of 2D graphics. So essentially for me… BlizzCon was a show about World of Warcraft and Diablo, both of which got some interesting announcements.

Based on the schedules that came out ahead of the show, I fully expected that we would not get a Diablo IV announcement this year. I am pleasantly surprised that we did and it is going to be set in the area of the world from Diablo 2 Act 3 the Torajon Jungles. This should in theory be southwest of Kehjistan in the current Diablo IV areas. They were pretty limited on their information but did drop that we are going to be seeing a new class that has not existed in the Diablo franchise before. Data mining leaks ahead of the show indicated that this was some sort of nature-based class. More important than all of this however is that they released some information about more endgame content going into Diablo IV starting this week and continuing into Season 3 in January. There is also going to be a winter holiday event which might be interesting for a bit. Unfortunately, the new endgame content starting this week is going to be gated behind the season’s journey, which means it is really only for folks who are languishing at level 100 and doesn’t do much to solve the problem of running out of an interesting reason to grind further after about level 80.

In the realm of “why does this exist” we get to World of Warcraft and more specifically “Classic WoW”. Apparently, the classic servers are updating to Cataclysm… which seems really weird to me given that the sweeping changes to the old world that came with Cataclysm were the impetus for many of the unofficial emulator servers that eventually coalesced into the official “Classic” product. Does anyone actually want this? I am hoping that they maintain some Wrath servers for the folks who did not want to move forward into Cataclysm. Maybe there is someone out there who missed out on the first decade of World of Warcraft and is now interested in reliving it at a rapidly increased pace. It is however spawning a number of memes around this having to happen so that they could launch World of Warcraft Classic Classic. I have specific negative feelings towards Cataclysm as this is when I first broke from the game as a whole.

The other classic project however seemed really interesting. “Season of Discovery” is sort of a re-imagining of World of Warcraft with unique talent trees and class changes designed to make playing it wildly different. They specifically name-dropped Tanking Warlocks and Mage Healers as mutations available during this game mode. The irony here is that we absolutely had a Warlock Tank in Ahn’qiraj, and I myself tanked as a PVP geared Boomkin…. so this might be something that interests me in the long run. One of my favorite eras of World of Warcraft is Gladiator Stance and being able to dps with a sword and shield as a Warrior. If they bring this back… then they probably have me at least for a bit.

The big news however was the announcement of a change in practice towards expansions in World of Warcraft and while they did not elaborate on this… a shorter time frame between them. Not only did they announce The War Within which comes out next year, but also Midnight and The Last Titan as a trilogy of expansions with shared themes. We’ve learned that they always worked on multiple expansions at once from the fallout of Battle for Azeroth and Shadowlands… but I do feel like this would probably improve the narrative experiences of the Warcraft universe. Final Fantasy XIV was only as good as it was because it was a cohesive narrative that evolved over a decade rather than what felt like a serialized villain of the week type gameplay that we have had in Warcraft. My hope is however that they can be nimble with the mechanical side of the game because having the narrative be something that is building over time is good… you need to be able to adjust to changes on the ground when the player base is not reacting well to something like the “borrowed power” systems.

I think this is going to be the World of Warcraft expansion that wins me back. Almost everything about it seems to specifically cater to my interests. I love underground areas and this seems to be an entire expansion where we are diving deeper below the surface. I am very much dwarven-influenced, and I am all about tunneling through the earth to find interesting things. When I plan Minecraft I almost always start by digging a giant shaft to bedrock and see what I find along that path. I am also super interested in the Warband system as I have always wanted to be able to share more benefits from my Alts, given that I tend to be an Altaholic by nature. Almost everything that they announced seemed universally good and I am super interested in the Delve system which seems to be a dungeon-like experience that scales between 1 and 5 players.

I think more than anything… there was just a different energy in the air for this show. Gone was the “we know better ” attitude that surrounded a lot of the discussions from past BlizzCons and it was replaced by what seemed like a genuine unbridled excitement over what they were showing off. The vibe was just better than it has been in probably a decade or maybe even longer. Blizzard felt like a different company, and while we had the return of Metzen… he didn’t necessarily overshadow the other folks who were presenting things to the players. I want to see Blizzard thrive under Microsoft not in small part because I still know more than a handful of folks who work there. I want to play these games without having a bad taste in my mouth and feel like I am betraying my core principles.

This is the first time in a very long time that I have had hope for World of Warcraft as a franchise, and Blizzard as a company. I watched Diablo IV evolve from a complete shit show at launch to being a rather enjoyable if not somewhat temporary game with Season 2. Blizzard seems to be saying the right things and I just hope that they can back up those words with actions over the next few years. In the new year, I am probably even going to poke my head into the Dragonflight expansion and see what it has to offer. This is the best I have felt coming out of BlizzCon weekend in a very long time. Good job all… now keep that momentum going into the next few major launches.