A Quiet Start to the New Year

I’m doing my best to keep this place from being abandoned this year but lately I’ve had more to say in my book posts than anything else. There hasn’t been too much exciting going on in my gaming life to talk about. I’ve been mainly playing old staples like WoW and Diablo 3. Then there’s Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc which I have a lot to say about but need to wait so I can talk about it on the podcast instead. I’ll still give a quick status update here since the blog must go on!

First up, WoW. I’m definitely hitting a boredom stage with Legion now. I got enough artifact traits on my main class and spec to unlock the 5% boost and then promptly lost all interest in doing world quests. Or much of anything to be honest. I’ve been poking at alts but since there’s a much higher amount of effort, and specifically group content, needed to progress professions in Legion I haven’t been that motivated to care about my alts as much as I used to. Raiding has also reached an awkward plateau where we can fairly easily clear normal EN and ToV and heroic EN, but anything past that seems like too much effort for not much reward. I took a mini break from raiding over the holidays and was hoping to come back energized but instead I got the opposite. Now I’m looking forward to Nighthold being released next week(?!) so we’ll have a new challenge. If that doesn’t re-energize me then I suspect it will be time for a short break from the game.

In D3 news, oh hey it’s season 9! I’ve been enjoying this season far more than the past few, even though there’s not really much new to speak of. The anniversary event was small but a fun distraction at the start of the season. I think the big thing that has drawn me in this time around is that I’m not playing a demon hunter. The past few seasons I’ve stuck with demon hunter because it made life easy for completing the season journey. While I don’t actively dislike the playstyle like I do for melee classes, it still ranks below casters in terms of general enjoyment for me. So swapping to a witch doctor has been a breath of fresh, plague-and-spirit-filled air. While wizard is always going to be my favorite in terms of raw power and player fantasy, there’s something incredibly fun about the silly abilities of the witch doctor. My only regret is that I chose to play this class in a season where their free set bonus emphasizes dots instead of pets, so I don’t get to have swarms of zombies and such following me around while I throw piranhas at things. Anyway my initial plan for this season was just to get far enough to unlock the cosmetic stuff, but it looks like I might keep pushing the season journey a bit farther than that.

Last but not least, my reading list is still looming over me. I set my goodreads goal for this year at 12 books, which seems very reasonable. I don’t have a timetable for my reading challenge other than trying to get through at least one a month, and I have a lot of other books outside the challenge that I want to get through as well. That said, the review for the next item on the list may have some delay. The Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson appears to be the first time in this challenge that I’ve encountered a series that I actually want to keep reading, so even though I have finished the first book I will be holding off on my review until I decide if I am going to read all three.

So that’s what I have been up to. Nothing exciting but nothing bad either so I can’t complain. I hope the new year is treating you well so far!


A Quiet Start to the New Year

Torn on Switch

Torn on Switch

Last night was of course the Nintendo Switch reveal stream…  that seemed to occur for pretty much everyone at an extremely awkward time.  For me personally it kicked off about 10 pm, so I was able to tune in as I was winding down a night of running Nightfalls (and sometimes failing) in Destiny with Squirrel and Jex.  I talked a bit yesterday about my mixed feelings regarding the Switch and its launch on twitter.  Every fiber of my being wants this console, but there is also the logic center of my brain that keeps reminding me of the not amazing track record I have with Nintendo consoles.  I will get more into that later, but first to talk about the details we learned last night.  The Switch is in fact coming a lot faster than I expected with a launch window of March 3rd 2017, or for those who think in these terms….  if I am counting correctly 8 weeks from the Friday I am writing this post on.  In the short term I will be able to play the console personally in a few weeks at Pax South, and there will be a series of demo events happening in “major” cities…  which means nowhere event vaguely close to the fly over country where I live.  They have confirmed two launch titles…  the first of which is 1, 2, Switch which is another one of those Nintendo gimmick games like Wii Sports that while extremely fun is in large part a tech demo for all of the new “innovations” they have woven into the new system.  The launch title that matters however is Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.

Now yesterday I said that a lot of it was going to ultimately come down to price.  The first leaked price of $250 seemed like a viable option and potentially even a day one and pre-order system for me.  Shortly after that another price started circulating which was $350…  and that was definitely going to be a wait and see price point.  The final reveal targeted things at $299 which is a figure that I am not quite sure about one way or the other.  I feel like ultimately…  we are going to need to see more details about what actual titles will be available at launch.  I am not sure if Zelda is enough to push this console for me at the start.  However I also know if the Nintendo track record holds… this means that if you did not pre-order your console it is likely going to be next Christmas before there is a reasonable flow of units to the shelves to allow folks to make that late impulse buy.  I remember when the Wii launched in November, it was late February before I even saw one on a store shelf, and even then it was probably mid summer before they were a regular enough occurrence to warrant not noticing.  Nintendo is extremely horrible with supply chain management and producing anywhere near the right number of units to meet the current demand.  This is evidenced by the fact that you quite literally still can’t find 3DS units on store shelves, from a drought that started around Thanksgiving.  Similarly you essentially have zero shot in hell of finding a Nintendo Classic console yet.

Where my brain begins to temper my desire to buy this console is when I think about my general track record with Nintendo.  Growing up I was absolutely a Nintendo fanboy, getting my Nintendo Classic shortly after release and my Super Nintendo a few months after launch as well.  Similarly I saved up my money and purchased a Gameboy within the first six months.  So when the Nintendo 64 launched in college I was similarly smitten with the console, and spent way more money than we should have been spending at the time for the unit given our already strapped college life existence.  While enamored with the early titles through Zelda…  an event occured that pretty much killed me caring about the later titles.  PC Gaming got absolutely amazing, and I got my 3DFX 2 card which made everything that I was seeing on the Nintendo 64 start to look extremely sluggish and primitive.  So instead of caring about Goldeneye, I was playing GL Quake.  The other problem the Nintendo 64 had was the lack of role-playing game support, and when Squaresoft took the Final Fantasy franchise to the Playstation I followed it.  That said I have so much nostalgia for those early days of Nintendo, so I keep purchasing the consoles hoping to rekindle some of that magic.  In the end however of my consoles they tend to be the ones that gather dust.

The other huge problem that I have found is that my life really does not fit a mobile console that well.  I have both a 3DS and a Vita and they maybe see some play time once a week as I am looking for something to do before falling asleep.  The Wii U seemed like an awesome idea, but the limited range on the unit made it largely useless to me.  My expectation was that I would be able to play the screen unit wherever in the house I wanted to, and maybe even out on the back patio.  The reality however is that I need to remain within roughly 8 feet of the unit to keep a stable connection.  So as a result currently the unit is set up in the bedroom so I can play it from bed… but that makes for awkward gaming any other time.  Ultimately I think the real problem for me with Nintendo is that they seem to be extremely focused on gimmicks.  The Switch as a console is a gimmick, and while I don’t think it will be the frustrating experience for me that the Wii controls were…  I definitely think it is going to attempt desperately to function in methods other than your standard game console.  This focus on gimmickry also seems to come at a massive cost in processing power and graphical performance.  While Zelda Breath of the Wild looked gorgeous in its own way… watching the footage last night it definitely felt like a game that was not quite as detailed as the current generation of console games.  While the Switch has courted Bethesda to put Skyrim on their new console…  Skyrim is also a seven year old game at this point.  In the montage of games… I didn’t see much in the way of modern ports which concerns me that we are setting up for another Wii U situation… where the console is simply not powerful enough to run the style of games that the majority of publishers are creating.  That said… you buy a Nintendo console for the first party games and I really want to see some more firm times on when more of those are releasing before committing.

Lobbing SIVA Charges

Lobbing SIVA Charges

Last night did not go entirely as planned, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a pretty amazing night.  The original plan that I had in my head was an attempt at completing the Nightfall bounty on as many characters as I could for shots at the Icebreaker.  However as the day went on that plan slowly morphed into going to my very first Wrath of the Machine raid.  So around 8pm last night we managed to pull together the six players needed for the raid and I shifted into full on learner mode.  Destiny is one of those games where I am constantly amazed at the level of dedication the community has.  A raid in Destiny is this complex sequence of events that have to be completed in a specific way…  and the first time I step into one of the encounters it is full on information overload.  I find it interesting how fast the community as a whole crowd sources the solution to the fights, sharing tidbits of information and ultimately mapping strategies for how to complete them.  I say this because the fights themselves are actually messaged somewhat poorly as to what you should be doing at any given time.  Since I am very much a “learn by doing” player, it means for the first few raids I ultimately feel completely lost.

Lobbing SIVA Charges

What is extremely interesting about Wrath of the Machine versus Kings Fall is that the “roles” are not necessarily fixed.  In Kings Fall you could essentially put your most seasoned player on the job of doing whatever was the most important task on a given fight.  While there was a certain measure of randomness, like who got chosen to run the spark on the invisible platforms…  others like the person getting Golgoroth’s Gaze were very much something you had in your control.  As a result to some extent it was much easier to carry a new player through and allow them to see the fights in motion, before they were ever expected to take up a key roll in the fight.  That is very much NOT the case in Wrath of the Machine given the game shifts the roles around quickly and while you might be dpsing one moment, the next you might be needing to toss SIVA charges at fixed markers.  The hardest of these fights for me to grok was the Aksis encounter where the raid divided up into three sides, and the game randomly empowered three players at a time…  sometimes requiring you to shift around quickly to cover a side if it did not have an empowered player.  The end result is that new players ultimately have to learn quickly because you never know exactly when that key role is going to fall on your shoulders.

Lobbing SIVA Charges

There were several points during the night where I absolutely know I failed at various mechanics, but while moving through the content I started to get a feel for what I was doing wrong and how to correct it.  Now with Kings Fall, most of the encounters were fairly easy…  but it was the jumping sequences that were the bane of my existence.  With Wrath of the Machine, the encounters themselves seem to be the challenge, and while I died a few times during the much shorter jumping sequences they didn’t see anywhere near as nerve wracking as disappearing ships over of a giant open chasm.  Last night was also important because it marked the first time I had really done large group content with Tequila Mockingbird my clan.  It has been over six months since Axioma clan was dissolved in a fit, and [TQMB] was formed out of the ashes.  It definitely feels like we wound up with the absolutely best natured of folks for the reboot.  Within minutes I felt right back at home, which I guess is a strange statement considering I have been proudly sporting the clan tag since the moment the reboot happened.

Lobbing SIVA Charges

So while I had no real intent of raiding last night, I am super happy to have seen the content now and to have gotten some of the really awesome stuff that drops there.  There seems to be a massive problem with duplicates from the SIVA key caches.  On the first boss encounter I got the Ether Nova fusion rifle… and then turned around and got the same thing from the cache.  From the second encounter I managed to pick up Arms, that I am extremely happy about given that they have the crazy heavy ammo trait.  From the third encounter, I picked up an Artifact which is decent but it is really hard to get excited over an artifact when I am apparently now swimming in 400 light ones.  From the final phase of the Aksis encounter I walked away with the Genesis Chain auto rifle, and then spent a key and got an exact duplicate.  Past that I wound up with three exotics from the run:  4th Horseman, Hereafter, and Crest of Alpha Lupi.  The first two turning into shards since I don’t really like either weapon, and the last from an engram serving as infusion fodder for the Twilight Garrison I had yet to upgrade.

Lobbing SIVA Charges

I spent a bit of time after the raid running around in the Plaguelands patrol zone to play with both the Auto Rifle and the Fusion Rifle and I like both.  The Genesis Chain feels really awesome when you get headshots and cause the firefly to proc since it has a unique sound effect that goes with it.  The Fusion Rifle… largely just feels like a competent Fusion Rifle.  I sincerely doubt I will be giving up either The Branded Lord or Saladins Vigil for it, but it is nonetheless a reasonable weapon that is probably going to get ferried off to one of my alts.  I have heard it works really amazingly in Crucible, so I will have to give it a shot there.  It is bizarre how I have gone from being someone that NEVER used Fusion Rifles, to being someone who largely now favors them over Shotguns for close to medium range engagement.  The other really awesome thing that happened is that I am now flagged to do the Outbreak Prime quest, which honestly could be an entire post in itself.  It turns out that Lexy is also stalled on this quest, so that gives us Hunter and Titan… and we just need to find a Warlock to ride along with us since that quest requires you to group up all three classes to progress.  Wondering if maybe some point this weekend we can knock out the required pieces so that by the time the reset rolls around we are working on the final step which is the run the raid again.

 

Flawless Royal Warlock

Flawless Royal Warlock

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.

Flawless Royal Warlock

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 Flawless Royal Warlock