diablo 3 Archives - Page 9 of 14 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Star Wars Disappointments

September 5, 2015 by Belghast

Force Friday

Once upon a time I was a die hard Star Wars fan and more importantly collector. Throughout my childhood, my parents enabled the collecting of Star Wars figures, and in truth I think my parents got more into it than I did. There was a certain thrill in chasing down those last few figures that I did not have. So it was not a huge surprise in 1996 when the figured were re-released to the marketplace that I got back into it. In fact there were so many of my college friends who went damned near bankrupt buying various bits of star wars merchandise. This fervor was only made more insane by the re-release of the movies in the theaters. My wife was a trooper and tolerated the shit out of my habits, and I even got her into sifting through the racks looking for this or that figure. However when I went to see Phantom Menace it pretty much killed my desire to keep doing that. I know it is cliche’d but I still have not reconciled the disappointment I feel over the prequels. I am sure taken without the viewpoint of a lifetime of nostalgia and hero worship over the original movies… they are probably not that horrible. However for me personally… they were just a bunch of cool lightsaber battles and the bits of movie I tolerated until I got to see more of said lightsaber battles. The problem is it is a habit you never really kick, and on a regular basis I filter through the toy isle and look at the star wars figures. I still have a handful of figures hanging out around my office.

With the announcement of Force Awakens, I have to say I have been getting pretty damned excite about it. So when I heard about this Force Friday thing where they would be releasing in bulk all of the Force Awakens merchandise out into the stores…. it made me think of the sheer excitement I felt when they released all of the Phantom Menace merchandise. Now I know people who went out Thursday night at midnight for the official first moments… me however… I am past the whole doing something at midnight time. The last item I purchased like that was probably the Wrath of the Lich King expansion. I did however need to run get cat food over lunch and while I was at Target, there as no way in hell you could keep me from going through the Star Wars isles. From the moment I stepped into the store things just felt strange. They had this huge cardboard stand-up of Chewbacca near the front entrance in the dollar section… asking patrons of the store to take a selfie with it… and do your best Chewie Roar. I mean I realize this is Disney we are talking about… a company that has made its entire career by capitalizing on our nostalgia. It just felt somehow more cheap… more commercial… more forced. It didn’t help that quite literally you could not go for very far in the store without running into some bit of Force Awakens merchandise stuffed here or there. I mean even in the home goods section they had cups on one of the end caps.

Low Quality Figures

The thing I regret is not having taken any good pictures, because for this next section it would help out quite a bit. They had a dedicated section set up in the seasonal area, and I of course made a bee line there expecting it to be some sort of a one stop shop for all of the merchandise. Now there was quite a bit there, but one thing was missing completely… the standard sized Star Wars action figures that I collected so many years. For those I had to go to the traditional “Star Wars” isle in the toy section, and they had a fair assortment. I had a Kylo Ren and a Captain Phasma in my hands, when I started to notice a few things about the figures. Firstly the cards they were on felt really cheap compared to modern Star Wars toys. Instead of a thick piece of cardboard with printing on both sides… it was some sort of a sandwiched construction made out of a bunch of thinner layers of cardboard which gave it a very irregular look. Then I started paying attention to the figures themselves…. and while the sculpts themselves were fairly nice… the paint jobs were atrocious. It looked like they had applied the worst sort of rush treatment to get them out the door in time for this “big event”. I’ve been looking for images that illustrate my point, but all i can really say is that it felt like they were a paint by number that just could not stay inside of the lines.

On the storm troopers for example… large chunks of black were globed over onto the white sections of armor. The Captain Phasma figures that I had seen preview shots of had a nice satin sheen to them to simulate the chrome armor. Instead the figure I had in my hand was a dull matte hunk of largely unpainted grey plastic. I looked at figure after figure and they all seemed to have these same basic defects that just made them look cheaply produced. The thing is… this is not the standard I am used to in Star Wars figures. I have a bunch of the more modern figures… and they all had excellent paint jobs. Granted the “newest” figure I have is of Savage Opress, but it still is a figure from the last few years. The twelve inch figures looked a little better, but they were still not really up to the standards I would expect from that sort of a figure. On the positive however… the Funko Pop figures looked amazing as always, and the Lego display I saw looked amazing. Lego is on of those companies that is always spot on when it comes to quality, and you know that for the most part anything you buy will be perfectly formed and defect free. Hasbro on the other hand… seems to have slipped massively, and if I were them I would be ashamed of the quality of this figure line.

Still Spinning

I find it extremely bizarre that I have yet to get Diablo 3 out of my system. When I came home last night from work, I immediately plunked myself down on the sofa, put something on Hulu and started working on bounties for crafting materials. At this point I am two achievements away from getting my season four toys, and I think probably I can knock one of them off soon. The biggest challenge seems to be getting legendaries to drop so that I can fill gear slots with them. More so than that… the real challenge is getting legendary rings and a necklace with gem slots in them… because with the introduction of legendary gems no piece of level 70 jewelry is really viable without a gem slot. I hear tell that there are items in the game that you can use to socket items, but I have yet to actually see any of them. Right now I would settle for a second level 70 ring so that I can maybe knock out the legendary in every slot achievement. Still enjoying the barbarian, but it gets frustrating the higher I dial up torment because I just take so damned much damage… since I require being in the thick of everything to deal any real damage. At this point Torment 1 is my new normal, and I keep thinking the more paragon levels I pour on… the easier things will get. In the mean time I will keep plugging away at Rifts and Bounties until I get the items I actually need to drop.

Hammerknell and Keywardens

September 4, 2015 by Belghast

Nightmare Larva

I had a strangely disconnected evening last night essentially happened in two distinct parts. My great niece was in town doing a track meet, and we had arranged to meet up with the family for dinner. Initially I thought I would get home and we would essentially leave right away. That wasn’t quite the case and we ultimately did not walk to dinner until around 7ish, which left me with a fair amount of time to kill. I have once again been feeling the Rift itch lately, as I go through every few weeks. The shiny new mount that I talked about yesterday may or may not have been the catalyst. So I poked around Meridian for a bit and ultimately decided to do an Instant Adventure. For those not familiar with the concept, Rift has this really cool thing where you hit a button and get thrown together with a raid group of people and teleported to a specific area of the world. There you complete a series of objectives, and get teleported to a new place where the process starts over again. Each time you complete a segment you are rewarded loot just like in a Rift, except this time they are generally caches of gear for your class.

Last night I noticed there was a new option called “Intrepid Adventures”. I say this is a new option, but I really mean it was new to me… because I had not noticed it before. That said I have not really run any instant adventures since the launch of Nightmare Tide. What it appears to be is a Instant Adventure style tour of raid encounters. I got teleported into the caverns under Hammerknell, where I fought all sorts of tougher but still manageable monsters leading up to several “boss” fights. I have to say it gives a nice flavor to leveling especially as I have not actually seen any of the raids since Vanilla. I had a lot of fun and will probably use this option when I return to leveling again. I am right now about halfway through 62 and the grind to 65 has been slower going than I had hoped. I honestly have problems with the layout of content since vanilla, or more so I just liked the feel of leveling in Vanilla better. This is of course personal preference, and since Storm Legion and Nightmare Tides feel really similar… I am guessing they have done the market research that tells them that the Rift demographic wants that style of content. Anyways… I have contemplated trying to set up at least one night a week to play Rift. The problem there is that I am not sure there are enough nights in the week to go around for all of the games I want to be regularly playing.

Hunting Keywardens

When I got home from dinner however it was all about Diablo 3. Before dinner I had managed to pop in shortly and get my good friend Neph invited to our Stalwart Diablo clan that makes finding folks to group with significantly easier. My friend Shandrah popped on and started the leveling trail for Neph, Damai and Ashgar which was a full group so I happily worked on Season IV objectives. Right now I am working on the fourth and final chapter of objectives, and I spent most of the night tracking down the various Key Wardens which I had to defeat on Torment I or better. After a significant rearrange of my abilities I am finding that Torment I is actually fairly easy. I am essentially doing a variation of the classic “spin to win” Whirlwind build. I am using Frenzy with the added fury bonus of Berserk as my builder, for the purpose of being able to build fury as fast as humanly possible so I can spend the most time in whirlwind. From there I use Whirlwind with Blood Funnel which heals me every time I crit, which is often. From there I have Overpower with Killing Spree, Threating Shout with Falter, Ignore pain with Ignorance is Bliss, and Wrath of the Berserker with Insanity. For passives I take Boon of Bul-Kathos, Rampage, Ruthless and Weapons Master.

The end result is a built that can chew thing mobs pretty effectively, but the most important part is that it has really solid “sustain” which seems to be the most important thing as a melee character. None of my gear is ideal at the moment, and I am not using the right legendary procs because I simply haven’t gotten them to drop. That said it is a good start and better than the previously build I was working with. I am still relatively new to the whole Rifts and Greater Rifts thing, and at this point I have two objectives standing in the way of my spiffy portrait and pet. One of which is “Reach Greater Rift Level 10 Solo” which I find really confusing. Last night I attempted to do this one and completed a Greater Rift… albeit without getting the bonus. But I am not sure if this means that I need to complete the rift with the bonus or if I physically need to manage to get to dungeon level 10 within the Rift. The last one however will take some doing considering I am in a mishmash of gear right now, and it is to have a level 70 legendary equipped in every slot. I have been spending my blood shards on gear slots that I am currently missing in the hopes of slowly knocking this achievement out. In any case… I am close and I am having a blast just killing stuff for loot and paragon levels!

Paragon Levels with Friends

September 1, 2015 by Belghast

Blaugust Administrata

Blaugust is officially over… I mean it… put your pencils down and turn in your papers. Now begins the fun part of actually attempting to “grade”, and by that I mean tabulate the results. I started doing this yesterday afternoon with some of the early finishers, and if everyone that was a day away crossed that finish line… we have a pretty huge bunch of winners. Equally impressive as of yesterday we had 76 “Survivors” meaning that during the course of the month they managed to get in at least fifteen posts. Mostly I wanted to say a little bit this morning about just how proud I am of everyone who attempted any length of posts this month. The concept of daily posting is rather daunting and there are still days where I question my sanity as I plunk away at the keys each morning trying to make sense of the jumble of thoughts in my head. So while I will be terming people as “winning” the challenge you are all winners in my book even if you didn’t make it to fifteen posts.

My goal all along has been to get more people creating more content about the things they love doing. After a point folks stop caring so much about what you are writing, and focus in on the fact that it is YOU behind the screen that is writing it. The whole idea behind Blaugust is if you can prove to yourself that you can churn out thirty one posts in a single month… then posting a handful of posts every week on a fixed schedule is really not that terribly daunting. Whether or not they realize it, people crave consistency. I started this blog with a decent boost of readers, but over the years of my lack of posting… I pretty much pissed all of those regular readers away. When I became consistent, folks started tuning in every morning to read all of these seemingly useless thoughts I was dumping out of my head… and apparently enjoying it. Today is my day for calculations, but I wanted to close Blaugust with one thought. Don’t let Blaugust be this marathon that you run once a year and then stick back on the shelf until the next year. Let Blaugust be a spirit that you embrace every day, and an excuse to create regular posts throughout the year.

Boys Will Be Boys

First off I have to say that I have always hated this phrase… but sometimes it absolutely fits. Last night I talked to my mom on the phone, because it had been a few days since I had called my folks. They have had to deal with the fallout of a flood in one of the bathrooms, and this weekend they got into my childhood bedroom. My closet backed up to the bathroom so it was a assumed that pretty much everything in it would be ruined. The funny thing is… my Mom expected me to remember what I had in my closet over two decades ago. Luckily it seems that for the most part all of my comic books, and various sundry cards that I never bothered to “move out” were left untouched. Apparently some plywood seems to have wicked up the bulk of the water that made it through to the closet. As she was pulling stuff out of the closet she kept stopping and asking my dad what various things were. Then she got to an item that threw her for a loop.

I was a little skater kid, and there was a phase in my life where everything that mattered about anything… was skateboard related. She pulled out this baseball bat that was scrawled with all sorts of skater terminology and logos in a combination of sharpie and paint pen. She wanted to know why this bat was all scarred like it had been hitting concrete and “defaced” in such a way. My Dad just said that it looked like “little boys were playing”. So I had to explain to my mother what the bat was used for. We used to go to the tennis court with our skateboards, as much padding as we had, and baseball bats. My friend and I would ride towards each other, each of us on one side of the tennis net like we were “jousting”. At which point we would put as much padding on our left arms as we could and use the right arm to swing the baseball bat at the other person. The goal of course was to knock the other person off their skateboard and the padding was in a vague attempt to block the blows. It is a miracle we didn’t do serious harm to each other. This apparently did not phase my father, because it turns out his childhood friend and he would fire arrows at each other from recurve bows… so I guess in the grand scheme of things getting beaned with a baseball bat doesn’t seem that dangerous?

Paragon Levels with Friends

Since a good chunk of our raid was still doing the whole Pax Prime thing, we were not able to put in any attempts on Ravana Extreme last night. Instead I spent a good chunk of time fiddling with Bitdefender and ultimately uninstalling it. I guess I should have known better when my good friend Wulf struggled to keep it from blocking the Final Fantasy XIV game client, but I went ahead and gave it a shot. This time around it was the Glyph client for Trion Worlds that I could not get it to unblock. I finally uninstalled it and went back to AVG because at least I am used to it. That of course killed an hour, so by the time I finally logged into Diablo 3 it was fairly late in the evening. Grace was already hard at work doing rifts and such so I joined her until she left to go eat dinner. Then there was a block of time when the server was rebooted and patched, and I could not get reconnected to save my life. All the while I am watching The Strain on Hulu, which is a show I would absolutely suggest if you like Horror. The added benefit is you get to see Argus Filch playing a Van Helsing like badass… and yes I know the actors name is David Bradley but he will always be Filch to me.

The big take away of the evening is that we managed to get Mor to 70 on his Crusader, and I managed to get up to 47ish Paragon levels before the end of the night. I still cannot deal anywhere close to as much damage as Grace can at this point so I feel like I need to do some research into how best to gear and spec out a Barbarian. I mean I do respectable damage but I think my gear just isn’t quite at the same level as hers. She is still absolutely carrying both of us hard when it comes to doing group content. Though last night I did manage to stay alive most of the time, I think I took two deaths throughout the night, which is significantly better than previous outings. We spent most of the night on Torment IV, and I can personally solo Torment I pretty effectively… it is just that bosses seem to take forever. I am not sure how long this current addiction to Diablo 3 will last, but for the time being I am rolling with it.

Blaugust and Nephalem

August 31, 2015 by Belghast

Last Day of Blaugust

As the subheading says, it is in fact the last day of Blaugust and as such very soon I am going to begin tabulating the results. It has been an interesting month, but also a very quick one. It seems like just yesterday I was kicking off this challenge, and now we are staring at the finish line. It has also been interesting just how many people have participated in one way or another. Even if you did something as simple as retweet a Blaugust post, you are part of this and I thank you. In truth I was not really sure how the turn out for year two would end up looking. The biggest surprise honestly was just how many year one folks came back for this year. You’d think that they would have learned better by the time the second event rolled around. As I sift through the results it is going to be interesting to see just how many folks have completed both years at this point.

The big take away this year is that we have already reached a point where we are just too big to be planned somewhat “on the fly”. Up until July I was still questioning if I would actually go through with a second Blaugust. I was somewhat shocked at the number of people who were looking forward to it. So I pulled things together and we ended up with this year, that went significantly more smoothly than the first. As a result I think for the 2016 Blaugust I will be starting to pull things together about four months in advance. Folks offering to sponsor prizes was a brand new concept to me, and this year we had Anook and KingsIsle Entertainment both chipping in prizes. I greatly appreciate them both, but I am hoping if I start the wheels moving several months ahead I will be able to get a few more people to come on board. It would be awesome to get some game keys donated for a sort of “Blaugust Game Club” like our AggroChat Game Club. Where every Blaugust writer has the opportunity to play a specific game and write about it, because it is super interesting when you collect a bunch of opinions on the same title. I realize we are just how wrapping up, and folks are I am sure sick of it for the time being… but I am already thinking about how to make next year better.

Nephalem Ascended

Friday night when I got home from eating with friends I started a brand new Female Barbarian, and as of last around 8 pm I managed to hit 70 securing at least some of the Season 4 rewards. While I managed to get drug along for a handful of levels, this is still the fastest and most dedicated I have ever leveled in Diablo. In part a huge chunk of it has been that I have largely been leveling with my friend Grace, who keeps pushing me to go do content rather than just piddling around like I normally do. Pushing is the wrong word because she was not even insistent… she just gave me a reason to keep grouping up and doing interesting things. The other big change this season is that I pretty much completely ignored the story line. In Season 3 I attempted to level my way through the story, which is apparently the worst possible way to level these days. Instead I largely started adventure mode from the moment I created the character, and the result is as I leveled I tended to always have legendary weapons that I could craft for my character.

One of the big changes that came with Season 4 was the introduction of the “Season Journey” interface that serves as a way of unlocking the various rewards. Just for hitting level 70 on a seasonal character I unlocked the transmogrification pieces, but in order to get the Portrait Frame and the Pet I have to complete all four Chapters of the Season Journey. As of last night I have completed the first three and they were honestly all pretty easy. The final element that I needed was to defeat one of the major bosses on Master difficulty or harder. Since Belial is the fastest to get to on Adventure mode I popped over there and took him out with relative ease. Now I have to do some of the more grindy things like taking out each of the key masters on Torment difficulty. I also need to finally use the Kanai cube to extract a Legendary power, but I am trying to sort out what sort of power I want to keep. Honestly I feel like I need to read up on how exactly that process works before making any decisions surrounding getting powers from it. I know that once you do this you can choose at least one power as a permanent buff, and I have a few that are really nice.

I really did not spend much time playing Reaper of Souls, and as such I had never actually done a Rift of any sort until this weekend. Grace on the other hand is an expert at such things and as a result I spent some of my “post 70” time last night with her working on Rifts and then the Greater Rifts that follow. I have to say they are crazy amounts of fun, and I am trying to sort out how best to use my legendary gems. Right now I have two of them, and I need to run more Greater Rifts to power up the second one. The first one is now at level 6, but once again I think I need to do some research in how best to utilize them. The game is so much more intricate than I remember it being, and in truth I have never played Diablo 3 seriously. I am having a blast so I guess that is really all that matters. My hope is that tonight our Final Fantasy XIV raid can down Ravana Extreme… but after that… I hope to put in big ole dent in some of these Chapter IV objectives.