demon hunter

Jotunn and Felblades

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Good Morning Folks. Ace and I got together early in the evening and ran around a bunch of Destiny Rising. Of course we had to do our Ikora nonsense, and we realized there was a clear pattern. We have the first round where we do pretty damned good, and honestly rank fairly high overall. For example once again last night we got 2nd place overall and for most of the match we were running in the first place spot. Then immediately after that… we had a round where we spent most of it dead… and finished in last place. However at this point we only have two more rounds of Shifting Gates in order to complete the objective of running 10 with Ikora. At that point we are probably going to keep doing it… but just play more reasonable characters.

On top of the Ikora nonsense we did two raids last night that went exceptionally smoothly. It makes me wonder if folks are finally starting to grok the mechanics in there, or if there is just no one but hardcore players queuing for it these days. We also did a Master strike, but it was one with Precision Shinka’s which meant that I took one for the team and played Tan-2. I really need to buff him up quite a bit, but I am mostly focused on trying to get Jolder up high enough so that I can get a gold medal and get unstuck from my present light level logjam. Ace managed to move past it with their Estela which of course makes me feel like I am falling behind heh. I did pull a new Exotic weapon out of the master strike, and it is supposedly pretty powerful.

This of course meant I had to drop down to a planet and give it a spin on Xuan Wei, the only character that currently can use a fusion rifle. It is odd… basically instead of firing a spread of shots, you fire one giant grenade like slug. I can see how it would make him significantly more powerful overall and given that there is no spread… you no longer need to get quite so close to a target in order to optimize the damage. At some point I will probably run some Realm of the Nine with him to see how it feels doing proper content. This is something I need to do more often in general, but right now I mostly need to run it as Jolder so I can get void upgrade materials. I think Ace passed me because Destiny Rising is one of the few games they are playing right now, whereas I have a stack of games that I am trying to rotate between.

Speaking of other games… swapping over to a Demon Hunter seems like it was what I needed to get into Legion Remix. I feel like Blizzard has done what Blizzard has always done… and fucked with the formula a bit to make it worse. I feel like Panda Remix was accidentally a great game mode, that was released as a lark as filler content. With Legion Remix they purposefully tried to design this content… and as a result lost some of what made the previous incarnation great. Namely it feels like they have significantly slowed down the progress. What was so great about Panda is that it felt like you were grinding endgame content almost immediately… and this time around it feels like I have to properly level… which delays the enjoyment of grinding raids and such. I am still having fun, the pacing just feels completely off from what it did in Panda.

The flow of things is really weird too, because a lot of the class hall stuff seems to have been neutered, where you cannot run missions anymore. They speed you past the general unlocking phases that were time gated which is a good thing, but it also feels like a lot of the content has been removed. That said there is still a bunch of general unlocking of things content that has to be done, like retrieving your artifact weapons. This morning i started the process of unlocking Suramar and it does not seem to have gotten the timerunner treatment with things being sped up. Legion is still my favorite expansion in all of World of Warcraft, but it also does not feel anywhere near as fresh or exciting as it did with Panda. I think it was just a new concept and now the novelty has worn off a bit.

That said I am still enjoying myself and am nearing level 40 in the first area that I chose to go to, Azshara. I still probably have over half of the zone left to go, and maybe I am making good progress overall… but the pace just feels slower than Panda did. I am not really worrying to much about gear upgrades and I will batch up a couple dozen bronze chests while questing and then unlock all of them and scrap the excess. Of course I have to break out my Yak every time to restore my cosmetic appearance, because that is more important to me than the gear levels currently. I am not sure if I am really getting back into the flow of World of Warcraft, but I am not bouncing as hard as I did with the Hunter or any time I have tried to quest through War Within.

Tonight though is Guild Wars 2 with friends, and the vague plan is to group up and run amok in the Mad King’s Labyrinth. I don’t think any of us have done much of anything from the Halloween event other than maybe opening some trick or treat bags. I remember having a lot of fun with the Labyrinth before, and mostly you just need to run around with a group because it is very easy to get overwhelmed quickly. It has been years since I last participated in this event, so it should be a lot of fun with friends.

The Catch-Up Tax

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Good Morning Folks. I did not end up blogging yesterday, because admittedly I am going through a bit of a funk. I’ve been fighting what I think is allergies, because ragweed is booming and it is traditionally my worst allergy. However it has been a struggle to drag myself out of bed in the morning and find the oomph to get up and around. I was looking forward to the launch of Legion Remix yesterday, but was not entirely certain when it would be rolling out. I noticed that the servers were still down when I attempted at lunch, and then after work I was able to get in and create a character. The challenge with Remix in general… is I have multiple copies of every class so I had no clue what I actually wanted to play. Originally I thought I would roll a hunter, but I have to admit I was not feeling it at all last night. I think I have just gotten too used to the action combat style of ARPGs and Guild Wars 2, and the game-play felt so sluggish.

This morning I rolled a Demon Hunter, because it is pretty action oriented and we will see if I can get into Legion Remix with this character. I rolled it on Eonar, which is a server that a friend of mine who no longer plays the game, plays on… but if they ever come back… I will at least have another character to poke around on over there. To be fair, I have also not been able to get into retail wow at all, and am only on the second zone of the War Within expansion… making almost no progress the last few times I have logged in and tried. I am wondering if Panda Remix was just magic in a bottle, and happened to be the right thing at the right time to catch my attention. Legion is without a doubt my favorite expansion, but I am wondering if World of Warcraft is just not for me anymore. I rebound a bunch of keys to try and make it feel better. I will give the Demon Hunter a spin over lunch, and see if I can catch it up to at least as far as I got the Hunter last night.

There is a new event going on in Diablo IV where they are lavishing the players with loot. Essentially each time you loot a whisper cache, you get an extra one and apparently the drop rates of chaos armor have been amped up significantly. Additionally they have finally fixed the Spires in Infernal Legions so that they cause monsters to rush in and attack you, and also spawn monsters from within making them significantly faster to clear. I knocked out one achievement on the seasonal journey last night, namely the one for doing an Infernal Legion with over 1000 aether gained in Torment IV. The remaining objectives are all pretty awful, but at some point I will probably make an attempt at them. Essentially I need to catch a Helltide as it is spawning… that also happens to have the Chaos Rift objective associated with it and then clear as many as I can. The problem with all of this… is that other players are going to get in the way of the remaining objectives. So I essentially need to play at a low population time if I am going to be successful at any of this.

Since I could not play Legion Remix over lunch, I decided to unlock the Monster Hunter Wilds quest in Final Fantasy XIV. There were a lot of things happening to land on exactly the same day… new WoW patch, new FFXIV patch, Legion Remix, and Halloween event starting in Guild Wars 2. The intro quest was pretty short as I followed around a palico in the wild west zone adjascent to Tuliyollal. It did not take long until I had unlocked the duty associated with the quest, which is to fight a Guardian Arkveld… aka the signature beast from Monster Hunter Wilds. There is a weapon set and a cosmetic gear set for doing the quest, as well as the ability to unlock a Seikret mount which are the feathered bird raptor things from MHW. Unfortunately I hit the wall quickly that I knew I would… which is that my gear level was not 725 aka the requirement for doing the duty.

So I did the thing that I have done many times before… and bought my way out of the gear slump. It cost around a million gil total, but I bought all of the left side items… aka weapon, and armor pieces, in order to be able to queue for the duty. I am not sure when I am going to run it, but at some point this week I will make an attempt on the Guardian Arkveld. I have not played FFXIV in eons… but at some point I should probably also start working on the story quest. It is weird how FFXIV is not triggering the same issues I am having with World of Warcraft. Everything about FFXIV is slower paced, and as a result it is like my brain is prepared for that. We will see if I can manage to slip back into the game, or if I am ultimately going to bounce off it as well.

I’ve not participated in it, but there is a lot of new stuff going in with the Shadow of the Mad King patch in Guild Wars 2. Specifically the weapon set looks really cool, and at a minimum I want to collect that pistol graphic to use on my Harbinger. I figure probably Thursday night when we do our normal Guild Wars 2 stuff, we might detour to the Labyrinth and spend our time roaming around it as a group. I did pop into Guild Wars 2 last night, but only long enough to do a round of wizard chores before bouncing. I was legitimately all over the freaking place last night, even playing some Path of Exile 1. I am struggling to find something that is really grabbing ahold of me fully right now. Once again… I think it is that aforementioned funk that I seem to be in. Like I have reason… and it hit me yesterday as an employee was requesting of for Fall Break… something that I would normally be doing as well when my teacher spouse was still with me. I have a cookout on Friday with a lot of her friends… so that is going to be a challenge to get through, but I also feel like I need to make the effort.

Anyways… there is a lot going on, and I am hoping you are enjoying at least some of it.

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.

Double Agent

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I’ve reached this sorta happy place with World of Warcraft where I find myself alternating back and forth between it and Destiny 2 for how I spend most of my evenings.  Over the last month or so I had spent most of my pushing up my Orc Warrioress, and have now reached the point where I can no longer easily push her power level up by just doing World Quests.  As a result this caused a bit of an identity crisis over the Christmas break and lead me to pick another of my various horde characters to start working on.  Having not actually pushed up a Demon Hunter… and Legion being the expansion all about Illidari…  I figured it was high time to actually do this thing.  I started out leveling as Havoc like I had before on the Alliance side but promptly swapped over to Vengeance when I started missing tank survival.  It turns out that I really like Vengeance as a spec and you get to do a bunch of fun things…  sadly at the cost of your charge around the map ability.  The way shorter cooldown version of Heroic Leap in the form of Infernal Strike however makes up for the lack of the less predictable movement ability.  If nothing else the build allows me to do most of the World Questing with impunity and at some point I will actually try some dungeon tanking.

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For the moment however when it comes to LFR, Heroics or Timewalking…  I have been swapping back to Havoc and just noobing it up.  This is the point where I have to step back from some of the commentary I made while leveling the warrior.  I was shocked and amazed at how chill the horde side of the house had been during my experiences…  but once I donned the mantle of the demon hunter…  and potentially as a side effect of the long holiday break…  all of the asshats seemed to come out of the woodwork.  Monday night I chain ran my five timewalking dungeons in a row… and all of the cool demeanor that I had originally attributed to the horde side melted away.  It became a night of gripes and wipes as I limped through my five instances and then walked away praising some dark god that my sanity was still intact.  I am still not entirely certain why my recent change in religion of sorts and swap to the horde, but I would have to think a lot of it has to do with simply wanting to hang out with my friends in Facepull.  As a result it has been this super chill place to hang out and have occasional comments about the game and life in general.  On a day by day basis I am feeling way less of a double agent and more leaning towards the Horde.  For years I never could seem to get into characters on that side of the fence and the only reason why I had a max level character during Warlords was because I boosted, this time around however I have the same number of Alliance characters as I do Horde and I am already plotting the next thing to level.  Side note…  Blood Elf demon hunters look way cooler than the damned floppy eared Night Elf equivalent.