Grace

Rise of the Necromancer

June 28, 2017 by Grace

Yesterday saw the launch of the new Necromancer class in Diablo 3. If you’ve been around this blog a while you know I’m a huge D3 fan, so it was a no-brainer for me to spend $14.99 to pick up the new goodies. I spent most of my evening yesterday checking out the class and some of the other offerings that came along with the newest patch, and came away very pleased.

The first thing I tried when I booted up D3 last night was the new Challenge Rift system. Okay I lied the first thing I did was run to my stash and rearrange things to take advantage of the 2 new stash tabs I got with my necromancer purchase. But after that the next thing I did was try a challenge rift! The system took me a minute to figure out. Namely, to get to the challenge rift, you have to select a character, but before you log into a new game you must go to the game settings. Challenge rift will be a new option for your game type (beside the old story and adventure modes). Selecting this will assign you the character for the randomly-selected greater rift run of the week. When you zone in you’re in a new mini-area where you can learn about challenge rifts, check out your assigned skills and gear, and practice on some demons they keep laying around for that purpose. It was fun to see someone else’s build and try to make it work. This week’s rift was a demon hunter with an impale build. The fact that it was randomly selected means sometimes you end up with strange choices, for instance this person had a cubed ability that boosted fan of knives…but they were not using that skill. In any case I managed to get through the rift in about half the time of the original run so I made it work just fine. I really enjoyed this concept and my main hope is that they either make it more rewarding (the crafting mats were nice but not exciting), or update the offerings more frequently. I can see myself trying it out once every week but I’m not that interested in trying to climb the leaderboards or anything. The real joy of it is just seeing what random build they give you and making the most of it.

Anyway after the challenge rift was conquered I finally made my brand new necromancer. I decided to level via the story since it has been quite a while since I played all the way through it. Like I sometimes do with single-player games, I made things super easy for myself so I could play around and focus on the narrative instead of the gameplay. That meant normal mode and a gem of ease, so enemies just fell over when they so much as looked at me until I got above level 60. I ended up setting on a build that I’m sure will not be remotely functional at endgame but has been keeping me very entertained. I’ve got 1 generator, 1 movement ability, and the rest of my abilities all summon minions of one flavor or other. I had a blast running around and turning the corpses of my enemies into part of my rolling death swarm. By the end of the night I had made it into Act V so tonight I’ll finish up and switch to adventure mode. Hopefully I can get some set pieces and start figuring out a viable build for running rifts.

I expect I’ll be heading back to FFXIV before the end of the weekend, both because all my friends are still deeply entrenched there and because I don’t want to burn out on D3 before the start of the new season next month. Still, I’d say I’ve already gotten my money’s worth out of this content pack. The cosmetic stuff is nice, the stash space is amazing for this pack rat, and the new class has been great fun. I am already looking forward to playing as a necromancer next season!

Stormblood: Roll Credits

June 26, 2017 by Grace

I “finished” FFXIV Stormblood this morning. By that I mean I got far enough through the MSQ to see the credits. This is a pretty leisurely leveling time for me, clocking in at 9 days to 70 and 10 days ’til the credits rolled. Part of that was due to the launch difficulties and part was simply being willing to take my time more than I usually do in a new MMO expansion. Now that I’m 70 and through the main story, there are expert dungeons and primal fights to tackle, along with the sacred ancient rite of grinding bookrocks for gear upgrades.

The story, for the most part, has been some of their best so far. There is one villain whose writing I really disliked, but otherwise I’ve been impressed. They even got away with sticking me with Alphinaud again after letting me enjoy hanging out with his much cooler sister. They also managed to make me care about the fight for independence from the empire on two fronts. I know that “fighting the evil empire” is a solid FF mainstay but in FFXIV I’ve never cared about them that much. To be honest they’re still my least favorite type of enemy in the game, but at least this time around they’ve been a clear and constant threat instead of just popping in for inopportune plot points. I’m looking forward to seeing what happens in the aftermath of the 4.0 MSQ and how all the still-loose ends get woven together over the life of the expansion.

Stormblood’s group content has set a very high bar. FFXIV has some of the most interesting, beautiful, and complex dungeons and raids I’ve ever seen and this expansion does not disappoint on that front. The dungeons start off fairly simple but ramp up very quickly in complexity. There are 6 total that unlock while leveling, and only one of them is not tied directly to the MSQ. The theme of the first dungeon is my favorite, a haunted shipyard. The second dungeon is the optional one, and is the most beautiful in my opinion. I’d love to live there once we clear out all the creatures who are trying to kill us. The third dungeon has the most flimsy story premise (“go face this challenge before we’ll let you get to the real fight”), but it has my absolute favorite boss fight in any of the Stormblood dungeons so far. This game is absolutely making sure that by the time you get through the story, you’re also prepared for the challenges you’ll face at endgame. Dungeons 4, 5, and 6 are so deeply tied to the MSQ that I’m afraid to talk about them much for fear of massive spoilers. Of those three I think dungeon 5 is my favorite, but I haven’t run them as many times as I have the early dungeons, so I’ll reserve judgement a bit.

There are also three trials in the Stormblood MSQ. They are each very distinct and challenging in their own way, but the final trial is the most difficult by far. It took me 4 different pug groups to finally clear it. The start of the expansion is probably making this more difficult than it should be, since many folks (like me) are still in leveling gear and don’t know the fight yet. It is also a very long fight, with a truly ridiculous number of moving parts to keep track of. This is the one I’m most looking forward to the EX version of, when I’m safely in a group full of my friends and we can take the time to learn whatever nonsense amount of dancing will be required to win.

If you’re playing Stormblood, I hope you’re enjoying it as much as I am, and if you’re not, now’s a great time to hop in and try FFXIV for yourself!

Stormblood Stuff

June 19, 2017 by Grace

Stormblood is finally upon us and boy did the early access weekend have an extremely rough start. On Friday I woke up at butts-o’clock so I could log in and get a head start on things before I had to go to work. I did as much as I could of the main story quest until I ran into the roadblock of the first instanced solo duty. Being an optimistic sort, I ran to work and figured that I’d pick up where I left off when I got home. I spent all day at work worrying that my friends who had taken the day off were going to race past me and I’d be playing catch-up all weekend. By the end of the day I discovered that was not true. The instance servers were still overloaded and after a lengthy queue to get in my reward was being disconnected immediately when I tried to start my story quest.

All of Friday evening and Saturday I smashed my face against that quest, along with the thousands of other people milling around the questgiver and giving “insightful” commentary in the zone chat. In some other games this road block wouldn’t be quite so bad, but FFXIV gates their content heavily with their story. That means that all the new group content and zones were locked until we could get past this quest. On the plus side, I got some IRL crafting done, finished off my dad’s fathers’ day gift, and got to watch a movie. On the down side, I was so frustrated and angry I was about to just go play WoW and swear off FFXIV for a few weeks until I could calm down and they could fix the game.

Luckily, on Sunday morning when I got up the quest let me through on the first try. After that was a full day spent catching up on all the questing and dungeons and things I had wanted to do earlier in the weekend. I’ve seen the first dungeon and the first trial, and as much of the story as I can through level 64. The next step of the MSQ requires another level, and I’ve unlocked the second dungeon so I suspect I’ll be running that a few times until I can progress again. Some of my friends are doing all the side quests, but I prefer to level through group content if I can, so that those side quests are still around when my other classes need to be leveled. I greatly enjoyed the first dungeon, and ran it quite a few times as my friends got to that point in the story.

The story has been good so far. It is far too early to be posting spoilers, but I will say I am enjoying myself more than I thought. It is no secret that I didn’t care much about where the initial Stormblood story was taking us, but the MSQ is doing a good job of making me care. Also getting to travel around with Alisaie and Lyse has been one of the highlights of questing in any game I have ever played. The story leading up to the first trial was a joy, and if they swap out Alaisaie and make me go back to traveling with Alphanaud again I might never forgive them.

Reading Challenge #89: The Outlander Series by Diana Gabaldon

June 14, 2017 by Grace

It’s reading challenge time again! This time I’ll be sharing my thoughts on #89, The Outlander series by Diana Gabaldon. This a relatively modern novel, as it was published in 1991. It is also a romance novel, a type of fiction I probably have not willingly read since around 1991. I had plenty of warning. It’s right there in the description on Amazon that this is a time travel romance novel. I’m not sure why I was surprised that it ended up being exactly that. I guess deep down I am still an optimist.

TW: discussion of abuse, torture, sexual assault

This novel follows Claire, an English nurse who is on a second honeymoon in the Scottish Highlands with her husband Frank in 1945. They’re rediscovering each other after being separated by the war. After a few days of exploring the highlands, Claire and Frank discover a group of the local women holding a mysterious ceremony in a ring of standing stones. Shortly after, Claire touches one of the stones and is magically transported back to what we eventually learn is the year 1743. Once there, she immediately becomes mired in the conflict between a local clan and the British. Specifically, British captain “Black Jack” Randall, who happens to be her husband Frank’s ancestor. And of course, because this is a romance novel, she falls in love with one of the clansmen, Jamie Fraser.

I don’t even really know where to begin in my assessment of this book. I guess I should be open up front and say that, as I suggested above, it has been a long time since I read a romance novel. I think if I chose to read one on my own now, I’d want it to have much more romance and much less torture, rape, and abuse. I’d also like the characters to make more sense. I suppose this is why I like to read light sci-fi and fantasy that sometimes happens to have romance in it, rather than books that make fun sexy times the main attraction. That said, the prose in this work is fairly good, it’s the content that turns me right off.

Claire gets sexually assaulted by Captain Randall almost immediately upon being transported into the past. Her would-be saviors don’t treat her much better, and the first half of the book is an anxiety-ridden whirlwind of wondering whether all the unwanted sexual attention will eventually lead to rape. Thankfully it doesn’t. At least not until the point at which she is forced to marry. There’s a ~~pretext~~ plot point where Randall orders that she be turned in for questioning, and the only way to avoid this is for her to be legally a member of the clan. So she has the choice to marry one of the two eligible bachelors that are traveling with their group, the strong, handsome, etc. Jamie or Some Other Guy (TM). I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that I consider being coerced into marring someone and forced to consummate the marriage is rape, but of course this being a romance novel it turns out that they have amazing sexual chemistry and there are all the requisite fireworks and hearts. Did I mention that mr. 20-something virile highlander man was a virgin? But somehow everything was still amazing and perfect? I think that’s the point where my eyes rolled right out of my head and I lost the ability to take this book seriously anymore. A+ marks for pandering to your presumed readership base I guess?

Anyway Claire spends the entire first half of the book looking for chances to escape from whoever happens to be capturing her at the time in order to get back to the standing stones and try to return to her own time. She even gets a beating from her husband as a result of one such attempt. Perhaps because the author specifically sought to make me vomit in my own mouth, of course Claire struggles against the beating but eventually comes to understand how it was the good and just and necessary thing. Please excuse the retching noises I’m making, I’m sure it will pass eventually. Eventually she ends up telling Jamie the truth about where and when she is from, and they return to the standing stones. Again I must really be an optimist because somehow I was hoping she’d return back to her own time or maybe bounce back and forth to carry out the time-traveling affair with Jamie but no. When she got her chance to go home to indoor plumbing and modern medicine and a non-abusive husband, of course she chose to stay in the 1700s.

Now is the part where I admit another place I was wrong. Because this book had time travel nonsense happening, I guessed that in the end Claire would get raped by Captain Randall and end up being her future husband’s great-great-whatever grandmother. It seemed like the sort of nonsense thing that would be likely in this kind of story. Fortunately we were spared that. Unfortunately, what actually happened was also completely awful. Because it turns out our big bad villain is actually gay or bi, and has the hots for Jamie. In a heroic gesture Jamie sacrifices himself, letting Randall have sex with and tourture him in exchange for letting Claire escape. Please imagine that I’ve written a 3 page diatribe about how awful it is to equate gay sex with evil and torture. I am still actually too angry to write coherent words about it here.

There’s some other awful nonsense after that horrific climax, including a mind-boggling scene in which Claire attempts to save Jamie’s life by literally drugging him and forcing him to relive his rape and torture. I don’t even know how that was supposed to work, but of course by the end they’re having magical sex in the middle of a french monastery because romance novel I guess. Somewhere in there are also hints about what the hell is up with the magical time-travel enabling standing stones. Claire befriends a witch who seems to have some knowledge of this, but she literally ends up being burned to death for being a witch before she can explain anything. Claire finds out she was from the future of her own future (1960s to Claire’s 1945, I believe). Nothing else ever comes of that. There’s also a scene near the beginning of the book where a strange ghostly man was staring at Claire in the window which I naively assumed meant there would be multiple time travel shenanigans but that was left completely unexplained. While I’m slightly curious whether any of the time-travel questions get answered in subsequent books, there’s no way in hell I will force myself to read more in this series to find out.

As romance novels go I’m sure this one is just fine, as long as you don’t mind the sexual assault. There’s slightly more than the barest pretense at a reason for the protagonists to fuck. Of course there is a lot of abuse and blood and sickness and lack of agency in between those steamy sex scenes, so that might make it less than stellar after all. It certainly got enough people to like it to warrant being made into a tv series though. When I look at this book objectively I can appreciate its spot on the list. In a genre dominated by men it is refreshing to see a novel by a woman and aimed squarely at other women gaining support and acclaim. However I do not like romance novels, and I do mind sexual assault and regular assault, and the way this book equates “gay” and “evil”, and the lack of payoff on the whole time-travel front.

I can’t help but compare this to the Doomsday Book, another time travel novel ranked lower than this one on the challenge list. The Doomsday Book gave me characters and story that I cared deeply about, and the time travel was explained reasonably well and was more than just an excuse for the protagonist to go back in time to have sex with Scottish clansmen. I cried real tears at the end of the Doomsday book, while I nearly cried tears of joy just because this one was over and I never have to think of it again. If you want a time travel novel please do yourself a favor and read The Doomsday Book.

TL;DR: Unsatisfying time travel by means of magic and with no resolution. It is a romance novel and meaningful character motivation is secondary to excuses for sexytimes. Full of sex but also various kinds of abuse and assault. I hated it.

The Outlander Series by Diana Gabaldon

Rating: 2/5 stars

Verdict: It was very much not my thing at all, but I can sort-of understand why so many people liked it. For the love of all that is good please read The Doomsday Book instead.

Next up: Something I’ve been looking forward to: The Thrawn Trilogy by Timothy Zahn!