diablo Archives - Page 17 of 21 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Flawless Royal Warlock

January 10, 2017 by Belghast

Last night I had every intent of attempting to get a Nightfall going. As a result when I first got home from work I grabbed some food and popped upstairs to fiddle about on my warlock. It is odd how my order of enjoyment has shifted when it comes to my alts. Nothing is ever going to dislodge Titan as my primary class in Destiny, but the other two appear to be in a state of flux. Originally speaking my secondary character was always my Hunter, and my Warlock generally sat in this realm of just one or two steps removed from “afterthought”. However with Rise of Iron and even some of the late Taken King content… that sort of shifted around and I tend to enjoy my time spent on the Warlock far more than the Hunter. I think part of it is that the movement options for the Hunter seem awesome at face value… but double jump just feels more limited than either the Titan or Warlock jumps. Admittedly I have constant issues with the Warlock jump because it essentially works backwards of that of the Titan. However in both cases it feels like I can get where I am needing to go more easily than trying to time a bunch of jumps in order to get up to anyplace high. On the Hunter I feel like there is never a situation where I do not want to be using the Bones of Eao… so much so that I question if it would not simply be better for the class if that Exotic were phased out and that function just defaulted. I still wish there were artifacts that allowed you to switch which jump your class had… because in truth I would still give everyone the Titan jump if given the chance.

Now I said I had every intent of running a Nightfall last night, but instead when my wife managed to make it home I popped back downstairs to fix her some dinner. After doing so however instead of filtering back up to my office, I decided to chill downstairs on the sofa with her… which mean’t no PS4. I realize I am one of the only people on the planet for which “sofa gaming” does not mean a console, but I have all of my consoles hooked up next to my gaming PC in my office so I can capture from them easily… and also that is where the Television that I can dominate lives. Before long I was on the laptop and playing some more Diablo, and eventually connected with some friends chain running Rifts for fun and profit. All in all it was a really good night for me and progression, because firstly… managed to get all of my gems to “Flawless Royal” level. Additionally I managed to knock out a few more items from my set build namely that I now have the right armor and “weapon” in my cube. I am now down to a place where the only things I am missing are my jewelry… but these are also some of the more expensive items to buy from Kadala. There is a more powerful Legacy of Nightmares build that I am working towards, largely because I have never actually tried doing a build using that pair of rings. The game apparently wants me to try it however since I wound up with an Ancient version of one of the rings last night. However I am in the very awkward place of needing Justice Lantern, both pieces of the Endless Walk jewelry set, and the ever present Convention of Elements in the cube. On a positive note last night I managed to pick up a pair of Nemesis Bracers which I can swap with my Heart of Iron in the cube to make farming runs go more smoothly. Additionally I managed to get all three of my primary build gems over level 25 so they finally start doing interesting things. All of these things combined seem to now allow me to pretty easily farm Torment X content, which means that 7/10 of the next Seasonal step is knocked out… with the only truly heinous thing left being mastering the set dungeon. For that I am largely going to need to tweak my build because I don’t actually use consecrate anymore, although it is definitely worth trying given how bed of nails works with it.

Tonight however… will most definitely be a night for Destiny because in theory it should be easier to get two characters through Nightmares on reset day 🙂

Diablo 3 Season Start and Anniversary Event

January 9, 2017 by Belghast

My weekend was largely dominated by the launch of Diablo 3 Season 9, and the Darkening of Tristram event. Up until this point I had not really touched any of the anniversary content, and to be honest the season beginning had completely slipped my mind until Grace asked me if we were doing our usual push. It has become a bit of a tradition to hang out Friday night and push as far as we can. While I rarely actually make it to 70 that first night, we both end up with a good head start into the season. This time around however we opted to do the Darkening of Tristram content… which is essentially a 16 plus level Greater Rift. I say plus because there are a number of offshoots that grant access to boss battles like the Skeleton King and other side areas. The interesting thing is that as much as I was not feeling Diablo 2… I absolutely enjoyed the weird nostalgic romp that is the darkening content. Basically glorious retrovision was cute… but did not destroy the fact that the underlying game is one that I still greatly enjoy. However for Diablo 2… I had simply moved on past that style of gameplay and the sort of character decisions that game asked you to make… permanently or at least relatively permanently.

As far as Season 9 goes I opted to play a Crusader once again… which is honestly my favorite of the Diablo 3 options. Primarily my decision this time around was due to the fact that the Invoker set was one again the freebie, allowing me to play quite possibly my favorite build… the one I loving refer to as “stop hitting yourself”. It is all about maximizing your thorns damage and then watching the mobs grind themselves to death on your armor. Essentially it plays into my ultimately player fantasy… and that is being this immovable object that survives being swarmed and walks out unscathed. The unscathed part however is a little open to interpretation since there are a handful of mob types that can just eat my lunch, but overall I am extremely happy with the progress so far this season. So far I have soloed up to a 42 greater rift, and had more than enough breathing room to probably be able to bump that up to 45 without issue. The most interesting thing is… I am already doing the equivalent of Torment 8 while still missing most of the items I need to do my proper build. I am following the traditional Thorns/Invoker build and am still missing: Traveler’s Pledge, Compass Rose, Heart of Iron, Justice Lantern, Akarat’s Awakening and Convention of Elements… and in truth I could probably use a better Hack than the one I managed to pick up.

I managed to complete through step 5 (Slayer) in the Seasons journey and am just now starting to slowly work on the Champion aka step 6. However the bulk of my time has been spent working on finishing the various Anniversary events. There is an excellent guide up on Icy Veins that I have been working on, and to the best of my knowledge I have completed them all. The one that took the longest however was “Protector of Tristram” which I included a screenshot of the completion above. Essentially as you go through the Darkening of Tristram Rift each floor has specific mobs that can spawn. You are usually only going to see a single spawn per floor, but in at least one rare case I didn’t see any rares up. Similarly in other rare cases you have a shot at seeing all three mobs up on a given floor… because that happened to me for certain on the fourth floor of the dungeon. Where the guide comes in handy is after a few runs of the event you are going to get your list of 40 whittled down to something more manageable. Towards the end of my grind I realized that I needed mobs on floors 5, 6, 7, and 12… so I began focusing those specific floors and simply rushing to the exit on any floors that I didn’t need. Finally both myself and Grace wound up needing the same mob… which feels like a rare spawn on floor five Foulwing.

The other item that took a long time to finally complete was the collection of Cultists pages which can be found off special Temporal Priests that spawn in amongst existing cultists out in the world. In theory there will only be a single Temporal Priest in a given spawn location, so once you have found it it is probably safe to move on to the next area. The Icy Veins guide has the zones that are likely to have them up at a given time. That said we did manage to find quite a few of them while doing normal rifts, and it seems like the “one per area” bit is unique to a given floor because we wound up with multiple pages in the same run a few times. For those curious about drop rates of pages… by the time I finished I managed to obtain:

Page 1: 1 copy
Page 2: 4 copies
Page 3: 3 copies
Page 4: 1 copy
Page 5: 3 copies
Page 6: 1 copy
Page 7: 3 copies

I doubt any of the pages are intentionally rarer than others, but for me I spent a lot of time grinding away still needing the very first page to drop. At this point I am extremely happy to have finished up all of the anniversary event and can now just start pushing towards that stash tab. This feels like a good season so far, and I am hoping that my drive maintains itself as I get into the harder content.

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.

Evil and Phones

May 6, 2016 by Belghast

Society and Cell Phones

This morning I am going to talk about something that I have been kicking around in my head for awhile, but haven’t really been able to shape into a full fledged commentary. It feels like each week there is some new alarmist piece of media talking about the degradation of society, and placing the blame squarely on the cell phone. For awhile I have had this working theory, that these articles for the most part are written by extroverts, and I am sure for that group of people the landscape has changed in a very scary way. I use my cell phone as a cloaking device, and what I mean by that is I am fiddling with my phone in order to create just enough social friction to convince you that it isn’t worth the time to engage in small talk while standing in the elevator next to you. For years I’ve been frustrated by the fact that apparently standing in the same vicinity as someone is passive consent to be deluged with a bunch of conversation that I have no interest in. Having my smart phone at the ready has greatly cut down on that unwanted interaction, because they see that I am engaged… or at least LOOK like I am engaged. It is the same cloaking device mentality that I apply at work by wearing headphones every single moment I am sitting at my desk. I may not actually be listening to anything, and honestly often times am not. However the act of wearing the headphones stops a lot of “drive by” conversation.

More so than that I feel like access to the internet and social media allows me to engage people safely. I’ve had to learn how to be “normal” but face to face conversation with someone I am not extremely familiar with is a massive anxiety ridden trap. While talking I am actively trying to be normal, running through a checklist of things and constantly aware of how much or how little eye contact I am making. When I am hanging out with someone I am familiar with most of this goes away, and I can just let my guard down. The thing is… non face to face communication lowers all of these barriers for me. I can be a social butterfly in a text only interaction. When I first stepped foot onto IRC back in 1994, it greatly broadened my horizons and introduced me to a world of new people and new places to learn about. So for me, as an introvert… it allows me a certain measure of extrovertedness because it hacks my brain into thinking it is perfectly okay. However for the Extroverts out there… I have a feeling that this does in fact seem like an epidemic. They no longer have all these passive participants that they can forcibly engage in dialog, and instead have to seek out other Extroverts who are equally hungry for that interaction. What I think is happening is that finally introverts are getting a vehicle where they can express themselves more comfortably. I might be wrong, but this is my working theory.

Return of Thorns

The last couple of days has seen me completing my Invoker set for my Crusader, and gathering up most of the items needed for the build I have been working towards. I am just not a fan of the Akkhan’s set and I lacked a handful of the pieces really needed to make it a viable option. A big part of the Season are the Seasonal rewards, and the last major bottleneck for me was the set dungeon for Akkhan. In spite of having tried it numerous times I simply could not stay alive long enough to complete it. However with the Invoker set I was able to muscle through that dungeon and come damned near close to getting “mastery” on my first attempt. The thorns set just feels better to me and as such I have been testing the limits to which I can push it. I am still missing a handful of items, but last night I managed to solo a level 50 Greater Rift without much issue. Earlier in the evening my friend Grace and I who are similarly geared… managed to complete a Greater Rift 60 together. In theory I could probably do the 60 right now solo, but even as a duo there were some pretty sweaty moments. The big problem for me are still a handful of mob types that can straight up one shot me, or come damned close to it. I think that is the sort of thing that only improves with slightly better gear and more paragon levels.

I am still in a constant search for the goblin that drops pets. Some of my friends have found one but so far neither myself nor grace has seen one. Last night we burned through two of the rings that summon the goblin realm thinking that there are three to four goblins in there. However we still had zero luck, but I did fine a cute easter egg. Notice the name of the boss I am fighting in the above image. Essentially right now I need to spend a significant amount of time running Torment X bounties with the hopes of getting the rest of my gem patterns to drop. I think that would go a long ways into improving my overall survival and output, by upgrading to the highest tier of gems available. I am also still in search of the best in slot main hand, and I need to get a shield to throw in the cube. For optimum performance I also need to get another Aquilla chest, because right now I have those reversed with the Aquilla in the cube and the Heart of Iron on my person… when it really should be in the cube. In any case I am just happy that I am functional at Torment X and above. Now begins the long wait to get just the right items to drop when I need them. I also need to start working on the various conquests if I hope to get the extra bank slot for this season. This honestly is a point of frustration for me… I hate that you can ONLY get the slots through conquests. I think that they should sell the extra stash tabs, but also allow players to do the conquest to get one as well. That means if you are doing conquests you are getting the new cap twice as fast.