season 2

Vampires are Hunting You

by

Yesterday was the release of Diablo IV Season 2 and as I said I would… I created yet another Barbarian. I patterned this one loosely after my previous seasonal character because I though she looked cool. One of my favorite abilities from beta testing was Upheaval, but by the time the game launched it had been nerfed into oblivion and I was just too damned stubborn to realize that. Now however it has apparently been buffed and tweaked back into a viable state, so I am leveling with that ability and things seem to be going fairly smoothly. Admittedly I am only level 23 after a relatively casual night of play, and the game did not really begin to bog down in previous attempts until the 40s. I am largely following the path blazed by Maxroll and they have a decent enough guide to Upheaval.

The main content feature of the new season is the Blood Harvest. These are essentially the Helltide zones but better in every possible way. In a Helltide you fight to gain embers and then have to turn those embers in to unlock chests that reward gear. If you die at any point you lose half of your embers and the embers themselves disappear after a single Helltide event. Then there is an hour wait for the next Helltide to spawn in which you are twiddling your thumbs looking for something to do. Blood Harvests however are always up and while each one might only last an hour, the progress you gain in Blood Lures… carries over to the next event making it no big deal if you manage to catch the end of one. There are similar chests that show up around the zone and you can summon “Blood Seekers” which are special Elite vampires that drop keys for them. Additionally, there is a whole reputation system with whatever the Vampire Hunters Guild is called that unlocks various reward caches as you level.

The other side of this is that as you kill vampires you will occasionally gain a resource called Potent Blood, which then can be gambled on obtaining either new Vampire Abilities or powering up your existing ones. It costs 25 Potent Blood to spin the wheel and you are given a selection of three abilities to either unlock or devote some experiences to. The abilities get stronger as they gain levels and depending on the configuration of your gear you can have up to five different vampire powers active at the same time. While the Season 1 mechanic was pretty lame, this duo of Blood Harvest and Vampire Powers really does give this a more Path of Exile seasonal mechanic feel. Ultimately you will reach a point where you have capped out everything if you play enough, but it does feel interesting and meaningful to get potent blood that you can then pour into your abilities to keep making them stronger.

Where the seasonal mechanic fails… is that once again we have some required bag bloat. There are three types of seals that need to appear on your gear in order to equip items. Think Magic the Gathering casting costs… each ability requires a certain number of Pacts of a given type. There are items that you can pick up in the world that allow you to add a pact of a specific type to your gear and as a result, you always end up with four of your already very limited bag slots taken up by carrying around stacks of these consumables. The fourth type removes pacts from an item allowing you to start from scratch and make sure you have all of the right ones for your build. The deeper we go into the season, the more infuriating this is going to be because when you find an upgrade… not only do you need to make sure you have the right Legendary Ability imprinted upon it, but that it also has the correct combination of “mana symbols” for you to equip your abilities. While not as bad as “socket pressure” can be in Path of Exile… it still feels equally awful.

One interesting mechanic that I ran into this morning while popping into the game to grab some screenshots is what appears to be an “you’ve pissed the vampires off” mechanic. I was doing an event and during the middle of it I got a message scrolling across my chat box that said something to the effect of “The Vampires are Hunting You” and then I was overwhelmed quickly as several big chonky elite vampires spawned in to “whoop my ass”. I’ve not found much written about this, but it appears like there is some sort of “heat” system in the game where if you are killing too many vampires too successfully, the game is going to raise the stakes. I fought valiantly as long as I could but eventually, it became too much and I died… which seemed to reset the hunt allowing me to come back and finish the event I was already doing.

All in all, it definitely seemed like a step forward. Both the Blood Hunts themselves and the vampire abilities are fun enough to warrant chasing them… and they are doable from level one so they make this season feel immediately focused around the mechanics. From the sidelines however it did not seem to be moving the needle forward much in getting players to come back for the season. At launch I had over 200 friends playing this game and last night we were doing good if a half dozen other folks were logged in. Maybe folks are sitting back and waiting to see what those of us who committed to playing on day one report. I will say that mechanically the new stuff is enjoyable and so far I have not hated the experience of playing a Barbarian. I will have to see if the gameplay bogs down as I pour on more levels, but pending it keeps about the same pace and combat loop I am probably going to be enjoying myself for awhile.

The primary complaints that I have however are all related to performance. The servers did not feel stable… and even this morning there were times where things locked up and it was as though I was waiting for the server to catch up to me. There were numerous times throughout the evening when I crashed out of the client while teleporting or loading into a dungeon, and a few of those required me to open up the program manager and manually kill the client that was still stranded in memory. I’m hoping they will have some rapid patches that address these performance issues. The beginning of the evening was really bad and it lessened a bit as the night went on. However like I said even this morning… there were still moments where the client went unresponsive.

I still had quite a bit of fun though, or at least enough to keep me playing for a bit. Last season I got through the first four challenges and I am going to see if I can get a bit further. If you were waiting in the wings to see how this season went, then I figured you might as well pop in and check it out for yourself. I am sure before long I will have some of the same complaints that I always seem to about this game, but for the moment I am having a better time this season than I did last.

Ranger vs Mordremoth

by

Good Morning Friends! This weekend I fell out of my ARPG grind and back into some Guild Wars 2. Diablo IV was largely a disappointment and while I got lots of hours out of the game, I can’t say that most of them were really enjoyable. I am still very much engaged with Honkai Star Rail, but there is only about an hour’s worth of play that I can get out of that game on a day-to-day basis without spending additional money or banked resources. I got my Spriggan in Last Epoch up to Monoliths but I can only handle so much of that at once because they end up feeling very repetitive in their current state. With the announcement of the Secrets of the Obscure expansion, it has stoked my desire to get back engaged with Tyria. While my Necromancer has completed all of the content but Living World Season 2, I spend way more time on my Ranger and I am using that character to complete all of the content in the order of release.

Over the weekend I finished up Living World Season 2 and completed all of the Heart of Thorns expansion. I have to say, it is a much more enjoyable experience having played through all of Living World Season 1 then seeing the characters evolve in Living World Season 2… and finally having the major events play out during Heart of Thorns. It all has so much more impact because when I did the content initially… I had no real clue what I was doing and at the same time kept trying to treat Heart of Thorns like a traditional MMORPG expansion pack. I also have a much more stable grasp on the lore of the world thanks to having completed all of it once before. Having already unlocked most of the Heart of Thorns zones through gameplay on the Ranger, it also meant that I could largely focus on only completing the story missions.

The other huge benefit of this playthrough is that I now have access to a SkyScale, which means that most content becomes trivialized by significantly greater movement ability. I thought maybe it would make Tangled Depths more palatable, but that isn’t really the case. I have come to love the zone for what it is, and I greatly enjoy doing the Chak Gerent event… but it is still a nuisance to try and figure out where the quest marker is actually sending me. I still do not feel like games in general do a great job of visualizing the Z-Axis when to quests, and there are many times that I just sort of had to rely on previous knowledge of the game to get me in the vicinity of where I was supposed to go. That said… there are some really cool areas of Tangled Depths like this cavern with glowing mushrooms.

Another thing that greatly enhances my enjoyment of the game has been having BlishHUD turned on. For example, in the Roots of Terror map, I came across this chamber filled with Chak. There was a handy Blish HUD reminder that I could get achievements for killing 1, 10, and 50 Chak… so I spent the next bit of time exterminating every single Chak in the chamber until I got the Mastery achievement. There have been a few cases where I was already doing one thing… that seeing how close I was to completing another achievement caused me to press on and go for it. I generally enjoy playing the Ranger more than I did the Necromancer, and as a result, I feel like I am way more likely to go back and retry some of these maps later to pick up the remaining mastery achievements as a result.

Last night I started Living World Season 3 before deciding that sleep needed to happen. I remember this season really fondly, at least in part because the map designs were so good. Bloodstone Fen is a bit of a butt, but with maxed-out gliding and access to a Skyscale, it should be pretty trivial. This is part of why I am excited about Secrets of the Obscure and giving everyone an easier path to the Skyscale. It just makes everything so much more enjoyable when you don’t have to fiddle around with frustration mechanics. Guild Wars 2 does this amazing job of adding different layers to the map, and then also makes it a bit of a slog to move between them based on Mastery mechanics alone. The Skyscale is admittedly a bit of an easy button, but for me personally, it is making my enjoyment of the content so much higher.

I think my ultimate goal is to get caught up on all of the content on my Ranger before Secrets of the Obscure drops on August 22nd. That is going to be a bit of a rapid pace to go through the content, but I think if I am ONLY focusing on the story… it might be doable. It would also serve as a bit of a nice refresher before the new content drops as well. I get that the new content is supposedly not going to require you to have completed any earlier content to understand, but it would still be nice to have everything unlocked fully on the character I am enjoying playing the most. I mean that might change when I can swap things up with new weapon options in the expansion, but for the time being… I like being a longbow/greatsword dude.

Good TV Bad TV

by

Fear Season 2

FearTheWalkingDead

Something you need to know about me, is that I love Walking Dead.  I started watching it during the first six episode season and have been a fan since.  Over time it developed into a sort of watercooler moment for me and my coworkers, where we watch it every Sunday night and discuss it the next morning at work.  This is the first time in my life that I have really had a show that I wanted to talk about like this, and even more so had people I wanted to talk about it with.  So naturally when Fear the Walking Dead was announce we were pumped, because it would be our methadone to help weather the long dry spells between episodes of the main franchise.  That said…  season one was a massive disappointment, for me at least.  It centered around a cast of characters that I simply struggled to relate to.  I spent most of the first season rooting for them to get eaten by zombies, and now that we enter the second season I had hopes that maybe just maybe they would finally turn into characters worthy of the franchise.  As it stands the only characters that I can honestly say I like…  are Daniel Salazar and Victor Strand…  the characters that the show runners are very much setting up to be the “bad guys”.

The biggest problem I have with the show right now is that the characters seem so phenomenally dumb.  Admittedly the world has just fallen, and they are not quite adjusted to it… however they should have spent enough time by now to realize that the dead are dangerous.  They should also know however that humans are even more dangerous.  It just feels like they have exited the first season with zero lessons learned.  It is like they still keep expecting life to return to normal… even as they are heading out to sea with Los Angeles burning in the background.  I don’t want to get into any spoilers, but honestly that is pretty easy so far because nothing of any importance has really happened yet.  Right now I am still very much rooting for the zombies because I keep thinking if we can thin the herd of our cast a little bit… maybe just maybe they will start to take the threat seriously.  I guess the problem that I am having is that I keep expecting this to be Walking Dead, when at its core it just isn’t.  I will probably give the show a few more episodes, because until Game of Thrones starts up in a few weeks I don’t have a Sunday evening show to be watching… and I have gotten into the habit of watching something on Sunday nights.  That said…  so far the second season is off to a pretty boring start.

Daredevil Season 2

daredevil_chained

As disappointed as I am in Fear… if there was a polar opposite I would feel that about Daredevil season two.  While the season did not have the strong single story arc that the first one did, it chopped up into what felt like three smaller separate story arcs that were equally enjoyable.  This is really the season where we see Daredevil emerge to be the hero we recognize from the comics.  Its like over the course of season one and the first half of season two… the pieces were falling into place one by one.  I guess that is part of what I have loved so much is that you can see the progression from a vigilante wearing essentially black sweatpants to the badass hero that we have come to expect.  There are going to be spoilers in this write up because I am not sure how to talk about it without really going into spoilers.  The quintessential moment for me was the creation of his “cane” weapon.  From that point on this show turned into exactly what I always hoped it would be and I was constantly getting rewarded with awesome shots of him throwing it into baddies and then retracting it just in time to hit someone else with it.  While he has better armor in this show… I like that it still shows the personal toll that being a hero has on not only his body but his relationship with Karen and Foggy.

The highlight of the season however has to be the introduction of the Punisher.  “Shane” was a character that I loved to hate in The Walking Dead, and when that character left the show there was a big hole that never quite got filled…  that is until Rick himself started to fill that role.  Jon Bernthal makes a phenomenal Punisher,  and I hope beyond hope that eventually we will see his own spin off series.  As a kid my favorite comic book character was The Punisher, and my friends was Daredevil…  so it was always an extremely special moment whenever we got to read comics where the two characters interacted and teamed up to fight the Kingpin.  I have this feeling that we are heading in that direction, because in this season the Kingpin also finally became the Kingpin that we love to hate.  As far as the Elektra arc I have to say it was done pretty well, and the whole hand vs chaste concept.  The season was essentially a condensed version of all of the story lines that I can remember relating to Elektra/Daredevil/Stick/The Hand.  Unfortunately the whole “Black Sky” concept is not something that I remember from the comics, because in that version The Hand worship a demon called the Beast.  So this appears to be the point where we leave the story line and go off in a different direction.  Regardless I am sure we will see Elektra once again, and I am certainly hoping that Season 3 will show us more of the Punisher and Daredevil team up as well.