season 4

Ill-Fitting Pants

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Good Morning Folks! I find myself in one of those transitional periods in gaming… where the thing you really want to be playing has not come out yet, but everything that you are playing is not quite right. I am having a heck of a lot of fun in Final Fantasy XIV but essentially only to the point where I run out of daily roulette bonuses. I spent chunks of yesterday trying to catch up on quests and honestly… I think I am of the mindset of my friend Jay and just going to cancel them en masse and then pick up the pieces whenever I feel in the mood to sort them out again. First I think we should all take a moment to appreciate just how pretty Limsa Lominsa is at night. I think more than anything this is why I decided to switch my allegiance to this city all those years ago.

I’ve been scurrying around trying to do a bunch of prep work, but am starting to feel like I am studying too hard for a test to where I start to second guess myself. I don’t really have enough time to get my gear maxed out at this point, and I have already geared out my Warrior and Machinist to a point where they should be viable for a good chunk of the early bits of Dawntrail. I’ve been pouring “bookrocks” into ninja gear so that I can finish that character out after I have finished leveling my tanks. My Dark Knight is getting pretty close as I managed to knock out two levels yesterday, and will easily get another level today. After that, I will spend the last week working on Gunblade but am unlikely to get it across the finish line before the expansion launch without some dedicated grinding. Essentially I am in this pattern of playing a lot of things… for a little bit of time… and feeling weird about it. Side note if you have not backed up your settings in awhile you might want to do so. I had not backed mine up since 2021.

In Guild Wars 2 I am pretty much playing a little bit each night at reset and knocking out my daily wizard chores. I should be wrapping up Secrets of the Obscure but I gotta say… I am not the biggest fan of Nayos. Right now the story quests have not inspired me to dive deeper into it. The fight with Ceros was easily three times longer than it should have been. That entire instance should have been chopped up into multiple instances because, by the time I finished it, I was ready to gnaw my arm off to release myself from that trap. I am in this weird place with Guild Wars 2 where I still enjoy playing it casually and I like knocking out things that will eventually get me another legendary… but I am having trouble fully attaching to it knowing that I am about to go all in on Dawntrail.

Similarly, I am in an odd place with Diablo IV. My build was good enough to get me to 100, but feels sort of awful pushing harder content. I have been poking at leveling a Necromancer, but the drive to play is mostly gone. Getting to 100 feels like “finishing” the game to me, that was the thing I had never done previously and after accomplishing that goal I was ready to do something else. I enjoy the changes to the game but it also doesn’t really drive me to play more of it. It is nowhere near as rich and textured as Path of Exile and there are not as many different things to interact with. Everything sort of feels very samey where you just keep pushing up difficulty rather than interacting with systems. I keep thinking about respeccing either to Dust Devils Dual Swing or the new Dust Devils Whirlwind… but it feels like it takes too much effort and focus to get me there. So instead I log in… flop around like a fish out of water for a bit and then log right back out.

I am still periodically logging into World of Warcraft Pandaria Remix as my “third game” but honestly a lot of my drive to play it is gone there as well. I’ve leveled and geared one character to the standards I am willing to do during a short event, and leveled a second character…. and now sit less than 10 levels away from the cap on a third. I could level more characters or I could grind out more bronze… but honestly… I scooped up most of the mounts I care about and gearsets are honestly more enjoyable to farm from the raids themselves once the warband changes go in with the expansion. I still have no clue what I am going to do for War Within. I have my Alliance home in House Stalwart, a Horde home on the same server in Facepull, and then another group of friends over on Drenden that have offered me a home. I just don’t really know what I want to do with myself when it comes to Warcraft nor how seriously I want to treat the game.

I feel like I want something that I can really sink my teeth into and no life… but also don’t really want to get engaged in something when in eight days I am just going go degenerate on FFXIV. Path of Exile released a patch yesterday and I logged in this morning because it needed to update its cache after some significant graphical changes. All in all the game seems to maybe perform better. I suppose I could while away the hours where I am not doing dailies in FFXIV or GW2 doing some more POE. There is another league challenge that I could probably knock out if I set my mind to it. I have a bunch of the memories maps and there is one for doing those that I did not touch during Necropolis.

Basically, as the title of the post says… it feels like I am wearing a pair of ill-fitting pants right now and some new ones arrive in eight days. I’m not fully engaged with FFXIV enough to be using this time to its fullest and doing all the raids… most of which I have not even unlocked. I finished up the Stormblood Hildebrand quest so I will keep moving forward in that chain, but I am not sure what else I am really going to accomplish before the 28th. How are you spending your time before Dawntrail? Drop me a line below.

Horned Hellrazer

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Good Morning Folks! When last we spoke I was sitting at level 62 and had yet to transition into World Tier IV. Shortly after making that post I got to around 65 and finished the capstone dungeon and have been rolling around on the maximum world tier ever since. At time of writing this blog post, I am sitting at level 92 with a good chunk of the way toward 93. In theory, if I push it really hard tonight and grind out Nightmare Dungeons I could hit level 100. I have no however been in the mood to “push it really hard” and have been mostly taking the leveling process in a super chill manner. I am already higher than my previous highest character which made it to 90, after weeks of frenetic play during Season 2. I am not sure what my real end goal with this season is save for seeing the Pit which I believe unlocks at level 100.

The biggest problem that I have been dealing with is performance issues. The worst place this occurs is during Helltides where players are zooming in and out of your effective range constantly… often causing the game to hitch at the worst possible times. Almost every death that I have taken has been due to a player coming into my immediate area and causing a hitch as things load in around that player. Unfortunately, group activities are pretty much required to chase the best gear you can get. I do want to shout out this player from yesterday while waiting on a boss to spawn. Dingalingus is maybe the best “awful” name I have ever seen. This season has seen me crashing out to desktop a lot namely when trying to transition between areas which is unfortunately what 90% of this game is all about. Some of the instability was with RTX features and I have turned all of those off which seems to have improved things marginally but I still occasionally get the disconnect/crash to the desktop when teleporting into town.

I’ve not entered the pit and as such I am not complaining about gold gains yet like every other player out there. What is killing me though… a few scenarios surrounding loot. In this Season, Diablo IV stole the concept of exalted gear from Last Epoch where at least one stat drops with an extremely juiced stat roll. Unfortunately, these can drop on items that are effectively vendor trash. Once you reach World Tier IV, nothing that drops that is not item level 925 aka the maximum level… is not worth paying any attention to. I was able to get fully decked out in 925 gear relatively quickly and by at least level 75, I was sitting in a full set. That means every unique that drops and “exalted” item that drops that is not at least at that maximum item level is worthless. So the tweak I would love to see going forward is that if a unique drops or if an exalted item drops it drops at the item level cap. Nothing feels worse than salvaging an item that could have been amazing but rolled with a substandard item level on it.

Minor complaints aside it feels like Diablo IV has finally arrived at a good “base” for the game. From here they need to work on adding more things to do and different ways to obtain the same end results. For example, if you really enjoy Helltide… but don’t enjoy Nightmare Dungeons… there is no way to level your glyphs and as such will always be weaker than characters who leveled up those glyphs slowly. There are a lot of gear drops that are focused on Bossing, and I am personally not a character who enjoys doing boss fights. I feel forced into farming them so that I can have a shot at maybe seeing the specific uniques that I need. The thing that makes Path of Exile so strong is that it has enough content that you can reasonably focus on sone specific niche and the market economy will make sure you still have access to anything you might want. Diablo IV is a good base game now, but suffers from the same problem that Last Epoch does where there just isn’t quite enough stuff to be doing yet.

It will be interesting to see how Diablo IV evolves over time. I am hoping we see more permanent system going into the game rather than temporary mechanics. I want the game to succeed and it is finally in a state where it feels good to play it. So I am hoping in another years time it will feel like a proper contender for the ARPG throne.

AggroChat #478 – Bullethell Raid Simulator

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

Hey Folks! We start off the show talking about some of the recent updates to Pathfinder adding a number of player background options including build your own animal race.  Kodra talks about his experience finishing up Animal Well, and Ash talks about playing a game that mimics raiding in Final Fantasy XIV called Rabbit & Steel.  Bel shares his thoughts so far about Diablo IV Season 4, where they gave up on whatever the original vision was and just made the ARPG people expected them to make.  This ends up in a side conversation about how breaking an implied promise and removing content from your game is very hard to pull off.  We talk about still being bitter about Cataclysm and Destiny 2.

Topics Discussed:

  • Pathfinder Animal Options
  • Animal Well Finished
  • Rabbit & Steel
    • FFXIV Bullethell Raid Simulator
  • Diablo 4 Season 4
    • They decided to make the game folks wanted
  • Changing Content is REALLY hard
    • Cataclysm Blowing up the World
    • Destiny Deleting Content

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Decaying Friends

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I did not make it terribly far last night as we had a family dinner thing to go to, which put me getting home extremely late. Additionally, the whole not really sleeping the night before because we lost power at 2:30 in the morning also meant I turned in pretty early. I did get to level 62 on my Barbarian and I did make an attempt at the World Tier 4 dungeon at 57 only to get wrecked by Elias. I think that fight favors folks who don’t have to stand all up in his grill. His attacks were just dealing too much damage for me to burn him all the way down. I am probably going to wait until around 65 before giving it another shot hoping that the levels and additional gear will make the difference.

I did create a baby Necromancer this morning just to play around with that class and see how the minion gameplay feels. It feels exceptionally strong, and to be honest… it feels like the easier option. Within 10 minutes or so I was level 16 because leveling in this game is just nonsense especially since I have the experience from monster kills buff in action. I will probably keep at the Barbarian because I feel like the visceral gameplay is more enjoyable for me personally, but I will keep poking around at the Necromancer as well. I would not be shocked if I managed to get both of them to 100 during this season.

The most important part of any character though is setting up the cosmetics and I feel like Necro has the best stuff. This is not a matched set of gear but it has the feel that I want it to have. I am such a sucker for “plate skirts” for characters and still consider Judgment the best gear set in World of Warcraft. I am hoping to get some time to play this weekend with my friend Ace and I am not sure if I will be bringing my Barbarian or dragging along this Necro when I do it. There are problems namely around the acquisition of gold and how awkward leveling glyphs feels, but all in all the changes that came with “loot reborn” have breathed much-needed life into the game.