diablo

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.

Irrationally Large Box

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Good Morning Folks. Starting this morning’s post off with a picture of Gracie being super snuggly. It was a good weekend, but a busy weekend. I spent a lot of time working in the garage and set up the first of the storage shelves, and then cleared the room for the next one… which I will hopefully work on today. Essentially I am trying to get all of my wife’s stuff that I just piled in the center of the garage, up on shelves… and get a bunch of stuff that I will never use that has been in the garage for eons, out into a pile to have hauled off. The thing that is fighting against me, is the fact that we are still having 90+ degree days and the garage is a sauna, so I am trying to limit my time out there to hour long bursts of activity. I just noticed I am covered in bruises from wrestling with items that I probably had help putting out there the last time they were moved. I made it work through and got them into the growing pile in my backyard. There is a service we have used before that will haul it off so long as I pile it up for them relatively neatly.

The big move of the weekend however, was setting up a new television… that again was probably too large for me to be handling by myself. One of the last things that we did together was put together this new entertainment center over my birthday weekend back in June. Last week I added to that a riser, that would allow me to put the cable box, and ultimately my Switch 2 and PlayStation 5 under the TV. The entire reason why we swapped out our entertainment center was to eventually upgrade from our 43 inch television to something larger, and I had been shopping off and on for awhile. The problem is… I did not want to ship a television. There is just too much shit that can go wrong in transit, which meant more or less that I was limited to Walmart, Target, Best Buy, Sam’s Club, or CostCo for which my membership had lapsed. I was specifically looking for a 120hz 4k 65 inch television… preferably one with Google operating system rather than Amazon Fire. Most of the ones that I had seen were in the $800 range, but I found one on CostCo that was a 4k 144hz panel that also came with a 5 year warranty thrown in… so I renewed my membership and snapped that puppy up.

So as such I spent a good chunk of the weekend enjoying the new larger television. I watched a few movies on Friday and Saturday, and then got reacquainted with both the PlayStation 5 and the Nintendo Switch 2. I bounced around a lot on the PS5, but on Sunday night I settled in for some long sessions of Super Mario Wonder and the upscaled version of Bravely Default. I actually got into the last one quite a bit, and stayed up later than I had intended. When I finally made it to bed… Mollie was rather cross with me for not arriving in the bedroom at the correct time and screamed at me for awhile as she demanded attention. I figured it is just me now… I might as well enjoy my life in whatever ways I can, and upgrading the TV was one of those simple ways to get some more quality of life easily. It was also one of the projects we had on our radar, and it felt like actually accomplishing something that my wife and I had already planned. There are a few more of those projects that I eventually want to take care of… but they will require significantly more than $400.

Over in Diablo IV, I landed on a set of Chaos armor that actually works well enough for my build. Vasily’s Prayer is pretty much a requirement for making the build feel good, and I had picked up Chaos version of it on both the gloves and chest. I figured it would be easier to swap out the gloves and then find some other item that can replace Rampaging Werebeast. For now I am running Fleshrender and it seems to be working pretty well, because it makes it so Debilitating Roar deals damage to poisoned enemies… and my Pulverize is always poisoning enemies. So every time I roar I am not just getting a survival boost, I am also doing over 4 million AOE damage to everyone that has already been poisoned by my Pulverize puddles. Now I just need to do massive amounts of farming to knock out the remaining achievements in the seasons journey.

Over in Destiny Rising, I finally bucked up and knocked out several seven minute legendary quests so that I could bump up my ascension level. Essentially I got Silver Medals on Jolder, Estela, and Umeko and now I am stalled out again at 19 Ascension until I get a Gold Medal. For the moment I am closest to getting there on Jolder, but the thing that is going to hold me back the longest is getting my light level up past 65000. I need to run another Legendary mission on Jolder where I take zero deaths… and in truth my previous 7 minute run was deathless… but it did not count because I did not have the quest yet. Other than that I need to upgrade the exotic sword and then swap her artifacts to all exotics, and my weapon mods to all exotics… and I THINK that might get me over the light hurdle. Having long grinds though is perfectly fine, and it is going to take a bit longer because I was later starting the game.

Ace and I got together Sunday afternoon and did some more all Ikora nonsense again. We are still seeking the Trikora as Ammo called it during the podcast, but we did have a really successful run. Largely we just followed around the Umeko that we were grouped with and provided supporting fire. Ikora is actually somewhat powerful if you happen to catch players unaware while you still have your abilities active. When her abilities are down though… you just do not have the tools to close the deal. We are past the halfway point in this nonsense though and we just need to do four more rounds in order to knock out her lore item. We also ran a Gauntlet Blitz as Ikora and that was honestly better than I expected it to be. On top of that I introduced Ace to the frustration that is the raid, and we managed to get through that twice. However we did have one run where people who had no clue what they were doing kept grabbing the keys and then sitting on them, so they also know the frustration of when things go south.

I had enough resources to craft an exotic engram and I pulled Polaris Lance, which is a pretty solid scout rifle that I might work on upgrading for Tan-2/Umeko. I am not sure if this is the play over an Exotic Sniper or not, but I remember liking the weapon in Destiny, so hopefully it is also a solid bet here too. The only problem is that Exotic weapons are so costly in resources to keep upgraded, and I just do not feel like I have the necessary resources to build out every single one of them, much like there are heroes that I am just going to completely ignore. I wish the higher you got up in Ascension, the more common some resources got. So that you could get Mythic resources for example much easier than you previously could… or some of the early Exotic resources. However anything yellow…. still maintains a lot of time gated grinding behind it.

I am hoping everything is setting up for a really good week. I know this week is also the start for Legion Remix, but I am not entirely certain how much I will be engaging with that. I am kinda digging playing some console games, so I might be doing more of that in the evenings. Hoping by this time next week… I have the garage more under control and have at least been able to schedule the folks to come pick up in the growing pile in the backyard.

Thirty Million Gold

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Good Morning Folks. I am still struggling a bit with this respiratory crud, but am doing better enough to be able to function and actually work today. If it drags on, I will end up going to the doctor but given that I doubt there is anything that they can do other than put me on a dose pack of prednisone… which will royally fuck with my sleep patterns… I have been trying to avoid that. I mostly spent the night playing Diablo IV downstairs while snuggling with cats. Gracie was doing the thing in my office where she refused to not be the center of attention, and when this happens it is generally better if I go down to the couch where she can snuggle in my arms while I am playing, rather than me trying to hold her with one hand while using the computer with other other. In wild news… the last few mornings I have been able to pet the super skittish feral black cat that hangs out in front of the house with Greybie.

Last night I managed to finally have some luck with the trade channel and picked up a set of Ancestral Tibault’s Will for 30 million gold. That seems like a nonsensical number, but I had over 200 million and nothing really to do with it… so it effectively has no value to me. I opted to throw on a non-Ancestral copy of Vasily’s Prayer which at least allowed me to have the fully functional build, and this more or less has allowed me to bump up to Torment IV and farm the world content comfortably. Just before sitting down to write this blog post I ran Varshan again and finally got an Ancestral version of that helmet to drop, so in theory I have Ancestral of better of everything that is required for the build. I still cannot quite do bosses on T4… but they melt on T3. Now it is just a matter of getting better versions of all of the uniques and maybe hopefully getting a few mythics so I can bump up to that version of the build. I am also hunting for a better pair of boots with more movement speed on them.

The biggest challenge that I am going to face right now is that most of the final set of challenges involve running content on t4 while having a piece of Chaos Armor equipped. I am not really certain which slot I can theoretically sacrifice to the achievement gods in order to make that happen, but I will do some testing. I need to run a few more Infernal Hordes to do the chaos rifts inside of them and also farm some T3 or higher Helltide in order to finish out the next to the last step in the seasons journey. I am on the very last step of the Reign of Chaos quest chain, and I am working on the last section of the Battle Pass. In theory within the next week I will have milked every last bit of this season that I really need to, and be able to walk away happily knowing that I pretty much did everything I could do.

In other news, 0.3.1 dropped in Path of Exile II, and with it comes the significant rework of the endgame and removal of towers as the primary means of adding content to maps. I ran a few maps as a test and for the most part they seem way less rippy than they were previously. I am still largely running t14 content and it seemed pretty easy overall. I have not played for about a month now, so who knows what other previous patches could have added to this feeling. It seems like maybe they have not removed ALL of the content that they intended to remove because it seems like Expeditions are still showing up as icons on the map, whereas I thought ALL additional content would be added by the Tablets instead. Additionally it seems like the whole corruption thing stays on the atlas, which makes sense given that is how you unlock most of your atlas passives.

While the overall density and rippyness of the map was lowered, it did not necessarily feel like the rewards were lowered as a result. I ran a few maps and pulled quite a bit of currency and what felt like more uniques than normal from them. Granted two of them came from a Rogue Exile, but I walked out of the map with five uniques which seems pretty solid for a 4 mod t14 map. I am not really sure if I am going to dip my toes back into the game at this point, because once I unattach from a League in Path of Exile, it sort of feels hard to get back into the swing of things. My mind has adjusted to Diablo IV at this point and I am probably going to ride that into the ground, or at least until I give Legion Remix a shot next week.

I think yesterday I might have just been in a low point, so apologies for whining about life on the blog. I put together a shelving unit which felt like significant progress so that probably cheered me up a bit. I am feeling better about my existence in the world today… even though the country seems to be burning around me.

Yon Bus of Struggle

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I am getting around to posting a bit later than normal today, because I am a bit sick and fighting some generic respiratory crud. I think it is largely allergies because we are in Ragweed season… and it is by far my worst allergy. I also kicked up a bunch of dust last week in the garage and think I am paying for it. I am struggling a bit right now and find myself in a bit of a funk where nothing seems to “fit right”. I am certain I am dealing with a depression, because how could I not after losing my spouse earlier this year. There is likely no way I got out of that without mental and emotional baggage that I am dealing with pretty regularly. My emotions feel like a scalded tongue… that I cant quite taste things in the way that I used to before. Joy is hard to find… and I keep wandering back and forth between things without much luck. The other day Tipa commented “I don’t know how you fit so much into your day!” and the secret is… I keep bouncing around like mad between a dozen different things and never really making much traction in any of them. I also have no other human to suggest that I do something other than desperately look for something to kill the time.

I am still popping into Destiny Rising each day to play some of the various daily activities, but this is honestly a game that I find myself enjoying the most when Ace and I happen to connect with our schedules at the same time. I am doing the thing that is very familiar in Gacha games where I am trying not to spend any currency and bank it up, so that when the next character banner drops I can immediately purchase a bunch of pulls for it. I am 16 away from the five star choice on the default banner, and whenever I hit that, I am likely going to choose Ning Fei so I have an Arc Champion that is actually pretty decent. Mostly I am chipping away at various lore tasks from different champions and forcing myself to do the planetary dailies on Ikora just to get them done. I think my favorites are still Jolder and Estela right now… with Gwynn and Umeko being close in the running. Wolf has sadly been relegated to the sidelines, and I actually started playing some Tan-2 to get used to the way that he plays a bit.

In Diablo 4 I have officially respecced to the proper endgame build, but am still lacking some of the components. It gave me a bit of survival so that Torment III is now as comfortable as Torment II was previously. Bossing on T3 is still a bit of a crapshoot and depends upon the type of damage that a given boss is dealing. My resistances are still complete crap, and I should probably work on that. The biggest challenge that I am having at the moment is that everything I am doing… feels like a complete waste of time. I need two things… an Ancestral Vasily’s Prayer, and an Ancestral Tibault’s Will. The first comes specifically from Echo of Varshan which means I need to be running Whisper caches to get keys for that. The second is a general drop unique and can come specifically from anywhere… but specifically is apparently on Andariel and Harbinger of Hatred loot pools. The challenge in both cases is that it feels like Ancestral gear drops so freaking infrequently. The above image shows a T3 Beast in the Ice drop pool… with zero ancestrals dropping which is pretty much the norm.

Mostly I have been focused on chipping away at various seasonal trappings like the challenges, battlepass, and the Reign of Chaos quest chain. The amount of farming required to finish the last bit… seems excessive. I feel like Blizz has made the determination that they need to slow things down… to eek more player engagement out of a season, when in truth Season 7 was the best… because it felt like a really fun weekend, similar to how Diablo III seasons used to feel. The game is not detailed enough to be played in a manner like Path of Exile… so any slowing of things down just feels like overstaying its welcome. Wouldn’t you rather have your players saying “wow that was a blast, can’t wait for next season” instead of trying to decide if they give a crap enough to keep grinding. I am rapidly the approaching the point where I am questioning how much I still care.

Legion Remix starts next week on the 7th, and as a result I have been trying to poke my head back into World of Warcraft in an attempt to get into the swing of things. Friends… I really want to finish up the War Within campaign but I am finding it so hard to care about anything that is going on. I tried again last night, and I was just checking boxes off a spreadsheet in the way that I was engaging with the content. I am playing my Dark Iron Dwarf that I rolled during the Pandaria remix event, and honestly… I like playing a defensive warrior about as much as I like playing anything else. The combat though… just feels so much less interesting than it does in Guild Wars 2, which is the game I have mostly been mainlining in the MMORPG world for awhile. I think mostly movement just feels bad, since at its core… World of Warcraft is just prettier Everquest and there is not any real action elements of my movement that factor into how combat resolves. So long as I am in rage of the target and my bounding box is connected to their bounding box… mashing a button makes a thing happen. It does somewhat make me worry how Legion Remix is going to land… but regardless I am still going to give it a shot I think.

In other things happening on the 7th… the Monster Hunter Wilds crossover event is opening in Final Fantasy XIV. I thought this might have been a good signal to get back into the game and quest through things… given that I have not really played actively other than logging in to keep my house active since the patch that dropped the Arcadion. As a result I am fully decked out in that gear… but am going to be yet again… too short to ride the ride since the Guardian fight is going to require 725 gear. This is the thing that I always hate the most about playing Final Fantasy XIV, is that when it comes time for a new expansion… my gear is never good enough to make it through all of the content without either grinding a bunch… or buying my way out of the problem. I hate having to buy a crafted set from the auction house to bail my ass out for having not played reliably during the patch cycle. Since Stormblood… I have basically been a player that plays heavily at the beginning of an Expansion, and then returns at the very end of one… and it is honestly a play pattern that feels like crap because of the required catch up. Even Gacha games every so often throw you a bone with a full set of gear that is good enough to do whatever the latest content drop is.

Since you have made it this far, and listened to me whine about my frustrations and struggle to get attached to anything right now… I will reward you with another photo of Gracie. So often when I am gaming anymore, she will crawl up on the headrest of my new office chair and complain that I am not giving her attention. I am just looking for anything right now that gives me some focus.. and ultimately delays me thinking about the fact that my human is gone. I could be out doing things with friends… but I feel way more “alone” when I am out in public than I do when I am finding something to distract me at home. I spent a lot of time alone since shifting to remote work… but I almost never left the house without my spouse. So going into the world… makes me realize all that I am lacking and missing. There are a lot of things that I want to do around the house, but I end up in ADHD logjams while trying to do them. Mostly I am just trying to keep moving the needle forward with small amounts of progress every single day.

Anyways… if you have made it this far. Thanks for reading.