Diablo IV

Season Seven Complete-ish

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Hey Folks. Getting a bit later of a start today than I normally do for a blog post. I had a weird day with a weird schedule… but things seem to have calmed down enough for me to sit down over lunch and make a proper post. Last night I spent some time hanging out with Ace and specifically trying to target a few different seasonal objectives. Initially the idea was that we would knock out the “Pit 75 with 5 mins remaining” and got that on our first attempt with about a minute to spare. From there we decided to make a go at opening 25 of the seasoning root pods within 15 minutes… thinking surely that grouping up we would both get credit. It turns out that we did not… and my spamming the pods meant that I got the achievement and Ace didn’t. So at some point over the next few days we will make another go at it and I will just murder things while they spam the pods.

Since last night I managed to knock out the achievement for opening 10 chests in a single Helltide, which pushed me over the edge and completed my seasons journey. In theory I still have a few objectives left but I really have no pressure to complete them as I have accomplished the thing I set out to do in Season Seven. I have a new raven pet, and also picked up another resplendent spark. Essentially I could stop playing right now and feel entirely satisfied. That said I am probably going to keep playing a bit to see if I can improve my gear and maybe do another round of boss summons trying to more Mythics. We should probably try and link up with Eliyon or Kodra and let them get in on the summoning nonsense to get some good loot from it.

For the New Years event and seasonal reputations I am sitting at rank 7 and rank 18 respectively. I’ve found the most luck so far just hanging out in a Helltide or Witchtide zone and farming the special seasonal altars, rather than grinding out Nightmare Dungeons. More than likely in the coming days I am going to finish up my Coven Reputation and hopefully at the same time finish out the Lunar New Year rep as well. This is going to give me a couple more resplendent sparks that in theory will let me craft another mythic… which hopefully gives me one of the others I want for my build. If I max both reputations that will give me 3 sparks… giving me a second chance pending I get a bad option when crafting the first one.

Past that I think I am done with Helltide and am going to mostly make myself available to help Ace complete the rest of their season journey objectives. Diablo IV is a pretty great game at this point, but very much feels like it takes the same role as Diablo III does. Its a fun game to play for a few weeks with a nice clear progression of objectives to finish. However once the Seasons Journey is over, I find that I lose my desire to keep grinding. Mythics are just unobtainium enough to make them feel like they are not a realistic goal… it is like getting a Headhunter or Mageblood to drop. Whereas Path of Exile has little hits of dopamine along the way… Diablo IV doesn’t really have much in the way of interesting things to farm once you have gotten your build to the point of functional.

Lunar Awakening is Not Great

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Good Morning Folks. I had taken a break in Diablo IV because I knew the Lunar New Year event was right around the corner, and a lot of my remaining achievements for the seasons journey would simply require me to grind a ton. I figured if I was going to be grinding, I might as well be getting credit for the Lunar Awakening event. This was great in theory, but it turns out that it is a really bad event to be doing with friends. All of the things that are actually fun to do with other people… reward zero credit towards the event. The only truly reliable method for grinding this out is to run a stupid amount of Nightmare Dungeons. These feel bad on the best of terms, but somehow feel even worse with a party. As a result we did a few of these… decided it was not a good time… and then moved on with our lives.

Neither of us had been playing a ton, and as a result we had not gathered up that many boss materials… but still made the effort to summon what we had. Ace’s cat however had other ideas and we got cut short after three bosses in the rotation. However this was enough for me to get my first Mythic item to drop… which was unfortunately Doombringer and not something I could use… but I turned it into a shard and got the chest-piece I wanted for my build. I am uncertain that yesterdays event patched in the fixes to the Mendeln ring, because I did not feel any stronger. I also did not see anything in the patch notes specifically calling it out.

At this point I have unlocked three of the caches on the Ancestral Favor path, and honestly it might be most efficient to just run around looking for the world events associated with this instead of purposefully grinding. The big problem that I am having with this event is that it is so limited in scope as to how you can progress it. In theory if I were doing this event, every activity would reward at least some credit towards the reputation system. Instead the only thing that you can do with other players that seems to reward anything is Nightmare Dungeons, which are legitimately the bottom of the rung when it comes to “fun things you can do with friends”. I think I will probably push a little bit towards this goal each day, and hopefully over the course of the event I will unlock everything. I am going to get bored if I try and mainline it however.

With that in mind, once we adjourned for the evening due to cat aggro, I went downstairs and spent the rest of the evening in Path of Exile. My build feels relatively solid at this point and while I have moments where I take stupid amounts of damage… this is largely caused by bad map rolls rather than endemic to the build itself. I’ve been running my Delve atlas tree and slowly working on “breaking delve” which is the process of slowly upgrading the various levers enough to where delve begins to feel like a reasonable activity.

Ultimately my goal is 150 depth for now, and I need to upgrade my darkness resistance significantly more in order to do that level comfortably. I am also slowly upgrading my sulphite capacity so that I can spend more time down in the mines once I have filled up from mapping. I like the Delve virtual cycle of doing some maps then doing some delve until I run out of sulphite. Ultimately my goal is to get to 150-200 depth and start chasing cities, because at that level I can get all three types of cities and their associated boss fights. In theory once I start gathering up resonators, I will also start getting a reliable income to spend on upgrades… or at least the few upgrades that are available in a semi-private league.

I am not sure how long Pohx League is going to stay active, but GGG has upgraded the cap to 40k players and I believe made it available to everyone. On top of that they have also started to spoil information about the event league with nineteen new ascendancies. It is going to be called the Legacy of Phrecia Event and this morning they shared the Harbinger ascendancy for Witch, and the Gambler ascendancy for Duelist. Sir Gog has also released a video doing a bit of a deep dive into these two ascendancies. Given how wildly different these are going to be… it makes me think this is probably going to be a void league aka a league where the characters do not transfer into standard. They seem far less generalist, and more designed for each to be played in a very specific manner. For example how good the Harbinger ascendancy is… will rely heavily upon whether or not the Harbingers you summon are permanent minions… or if they are on similar cooldowns to the uniques that the abilities originally came from.

I’m 60 maps deep into the Atlas at this point and have knocked out most of the white and yellow options. At this point I need to start tempting fate and running corrupted red tier maps to keep expanding out my passives. The thing is I am not really pushing it nearly as hard as I would during a normal league start, because I have done this progression a few times for Settlers. I unlocked the full Atlas when the league launched and then did it again with the Necro Settlers event launched. I will likely finish up 115 of 115 in this league as well, just because it is a thing that ends up happening if you play often enough. With me doing Delve, I am hopefully going to encounter more map caches which will speed up the process.

So right now my plan is to do Lunar stuff until I get bored… and then drop back down into old comfortable Path of Exile grind mode.

AggroChat #510 – Death From Above

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Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen

Hey Folks! This week we started with a single topic…  and by the time we were finished ended up having to bump half of the assembled topics to next week in order to keep the runtime down.  We start off with Bel talking about the bad news for Path of Exile players, and how there is no new league around the corner.  He also talks a bit about getting sucked into the private league that Pohx created which has capped out at 20,000 players.  From there Grace talks a bit about playing Heroes of Hammerwatch II and enjoying that.  Kodra shares his thoughts about the Diablo IV Campaign thus far as he still is effectively in the first act. Grace and Ash share their experiences with Coridden a more narrative-driven action role-playing game.  Finally, Kodra and Tam talk about their experiences playing Battletech and how Kodra is coming around to the idea of playing games for fun, rather than simply optimizing the strategy for winning.

Topics Discussed

  • Path of Exile League Months Away
    • Pohx League
  • Heroes of Hammerwatch II
  • Kodra’s Diablo 4 Thoughts
  • Coridden
  • Battletech – A Game of Awesome Moments

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Goodbye Hillock

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Good Morning Folks! I am still terribly bummed about the Path of Exile news, but yesterday I knocked out an achievement that I have been working towards for literal years now. There is an achievement called “Beginner’s Luck” for getting a drop from the beach at the beginning of the campaign, an area that cannot be returned to once you have exited it. So essentially I have had a character named BelginnersLuck parked there and every now and then I run down the beach kill Hillock and then log to another character. I got to level 8.5 in doing this and effectively have every single item at yellow rarity from repeating this process over and over. Unfortunately I did not get the drop that is unique to Hillock, but I did at least get something meaning that I can stop this nonsense.

Pohx released a video yesterday sharing his disappointment about Path of Exile, and then handling it in the best way. Since folks really wanted a fresh start, he set up a private league that is up to 9500 players currently. I have no clue if he will keep expanding the size of the league because it gets rather expensive, but good on him for making a player run event happen since GGG does not appear to be willing to do something official. I was expecting them to do Endless Delve or something that they have done in the past to give the POE1 player base something to focus on. I missed my opportunity to apply when there were openings to this private league, so I doubt I will be able to participate in a few hours when it goes live.

I’ve taken a bit of a break from Diablo IV as there is a lunar new year event about to start right around the corner with various experience and drop bonuses. I’m in the phase of the game where I just need to spend a lot of time grinding, and I figure there is no point in doing that until I can earn the cosmetics from this event and also have some of my progress sped up slightly. I still do not feel super powerful yet in Season 7, and had been slowly accumulating a full set of gear so that I could have an alternate Blood Wave build to play with it. On the 4th I am sure I will be back and grinding that out, and hopefully finishing my seasons journey.

I’ve also been back playing some Guild Wars 2, and at least popping in and trying to do dailies and chip away at my weeklies. It is always extremely comfortable going back to Guild Wars 2. I probably should work on the Janthir Wilds story since I have not done the second part. Additionally there are holiday events going on there which could be lucrative. I could also start work again on one of the various legendaries that I have parts for. I picked up the kit from the dailies shop for Kudzu, since I really like using Longbows on a few of my characters. The weapon also deeply reminds me of Rhok’delar from World of Warcraft.

A new season dropped in Dwarven Realms as well, and with it comes a complete overhaul of the generally awful passive tree. I am sure at some point tonight I will be in the game playing that, so that I can talk about it on the podcast Saturday. I really want to probably do a bit of research because I know there is some sort of a spin to win build, and I am interested in seeing what that takes to build weapon and skill wise. I am not even sure if there are proper build sites for this game or not. I have always just winged it and been relatively successful, but like I said I do want to know what weapon grants the whirlwind-like ability.

I’ve also been fighting some sort of respiratory crud for the last few days and am running a low grade fever. So more than anything I am probably going to be chilling on the sofa and trying to coax cats to snuggle. I hope you all have a wonderful weekend, because I am super tired of this week.