Aggrochat #166 – Crunchyroll and Chill

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

aggrochat166_720

This week we have a bit of an odd show, namely because there is far less gaming talk than other stuff talk.  We start off with me botching the intro… then roll straight into a discussion that got dropped from last weeks show due to the already two hour runtime.  Kodra, Ashgar and Tam have been watching a whole lot of anime namely with the new season of content showing up on Crunchyroll.  As a result they run down some of the more memorable shows.  From there we talk a bit about the Destiny 2 beta and the season 11 open in Diablo 3…  or that time everyone played necros.  We wrap things up with some talk about the Final Fantasy XIV escape room experience.

Topics Discussed

  • Anime Roundup
    • Your Name
    • Restaurant to Another World
    • Kinka Bancho Otome
    • Knights and Magic
    • My Hero Academia
    • Gamers
    • Ikemen Sengoku
    • In Another World With My Smartphone
    • New Game!!
  • Destiny 2 Beta
  • Bone Spikes For Days
  • FFXIV Escape Room

 

D3 Season 11 Starts Thursday!

Is anybody out there still excited about Diablo 3’s seasons? I mean I’m excited to really dig into a playthrough with a necromancer, and the new pet looks pretty great, but the season itself? Definitely lost a lot of its charm. It doesn’t help that I fully completed the season’s journey last time around, so there’s nothing much to aspire to. Many of my usual D3 buddies have stopped coming around for the season launch at all, although there’s still a few of us that still plan to team up on opening night.

Unlike previous seasons, S11 is starting on a Thursday. That’s bad news for trying to get to 70 or onto the leaderboards right away, but I’m not sure how much of a hurry I’ll be in this season anyway. I’ll be happy to get as far as I can in the few free hours I have, and then make the real push on Friday as usual. I don’t have any expectations for this season other than getting the cosmetic items. I also still have 3 barbarian set dungeons to master. I haven’t decided yet whether I want to go for the Masters of the Universe conquest again this season, and use it as an excuse to finish up the barbarian and necromancer dungeons. There are several conquests that are much easier this time, so it certainly isn’t necessary. I also already have most of the sets collected now on my non-seasonal barbarian, and I’m not sure I want to have to level and farm everything up again on a new one.

It actually feels pretty nice to go into the season with very low expectations. There’s no pressure, I can take things at my own pace, and once I get my cosmetic goodies I don’t have to feel bad if I get distracted by something shiny and wander away for a while. I’m especially glad that I can put the new necromancer through its paces without worrying about having to play it at a high enough level for the Conqueror or Guardian tiers. A nice chill D3 season is just what I need to distract me from the fact that we’re starting on Omega Savage this week in FFXIV.


D3 Season 11 Starts Thursday!

AggroChat #165 – Bribery Still Works

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

aggrochat165_720

This is one of the weirder shows we have recorded in a while in part because we went into it somewhat tentative as to whether or not we really had a full show.  Instead we wound up recording for over two hours.  We go through a lengthy discussion of Magic the Gathering in both the paper and online varieties.  This includes some talk about the new expansion Hour of Devastation, but also some general discussion about the history of Magic as a whole.  We get into another long discussion about Warframe and the upcoming “open world” area.  Ashgar has been playing some Final Fantasy XII and we talk a bit about our experiences with the game.  From there we travel into Final Fantasy XIV and talk about how we are experiencing this early drop off from Stormblood.  Finally we wrap things up with a discussion about Warhammer 40,000 and how they seem to have finally decided to move the story forward.

Topics Discussed

  • Sealed Hour of Devastation
  • Magic the Gathering
  • Open World Warframe
  • Final Fantasy XII
  • Final Fantasy XIV
  • 40k Moving the Story Forward

Monk Set Mastery

Monk is probably the class I have played the least in D3. I mean I don’t love the barbarian, but I had at least leveled one to 70. Not so with Monk. That made a bit of extra challenge, since I had to spend a lot of time leveling and farming to get reasonable gear for this project. After having done these dungeons, I still don’t really enjoy monk, but I’m not as intimidated and annoyed at playing melee.

Monk Set Mastery

The first monk dungeon I tried was the Inna’s Mantra one, entirely because that’s the first full set I found via my farming. That might have been a mistake. Inna’s is one of the dungeons where too much power is a terrible thing. The objectives are to avoid getting frozen, which is incredibly easy, and to unleash mystic allies on 10 enemies within 10 yards (x5). Unfortunately my allies were a bit too helpful and kept killing the enemies well before I could round up a group of 10. I had to play a game of stripping off my legendary gems and swapping out gear until I got to a point where I could meet this objective even once in the dungeon, much less 5 times. I finally got it thanks to a combination of moving gear around and getting extremely lucky with spawns of enemies. In the end I had to remove one of my rings entirely, which seems questionable. Definitely a frustrating start to this group of dungeons.

Next up was the Dungeon of the Raiment of a Thousand Storms. The two objectives are very straightforward, reach the golden chest in under 2 minutes and do not get hit by a single succubus projectile. This took a couple tries, since you have to find a good balance between clearing the early parts of the dungeon and getting to the middle of the maze to hit the chest in time. The first few times through I could either hit the chest or clear enough enemies but not both. Eventually I found that clearing most of the straight outside path, rushing to the chest, then backtracking through the maze seemed to work pretty well. Even though it took a few attempts, this one felt more like a fun challenge than an annoyance. I liked it!

Third on the list was Uliana’s Stratagem. The first time through I didn’t complete either of the objectives, I’m not sure whether that is the fault of the dungeon or my unfamiliarity with monk. The requirements are to simultaneously explode 15 enemies marked with exploding palm (x4), and to take no fire damage at all. Only the elites have fire attacks, but unfortunately the dungeon itself has various fire traps in the floor you have to watch out for. This dungeon is also quite large and sprawling, so it pays to either look up a map or run it a couple times to get used to the layout. On my second attempt I got both objectives but was still missing around 50 enemies, simply because I hadn’t cleared fast enough. I ended up “cheating” the fire damage with the Star of Azkaranth, and got it on my 4th try.

Last but not least was the Sunwuko (Monkey King) set dungeon. The objectives are to maintain sweeping wind for the duration of the dungeon, and use decoys to hit 20 different enemies in 6 seconds (x5). On my first try of the dungeon, I both failed to keep up sweeping wind and also died because I was dumb. I got the mastery on the second attempt. I’d say this was definitely one of the easier dungeons to master. The map is big but manageable with dashing strike, and there were plenty of enemy groups to hit for the decoy objective. I think there’s a legendary belt that might have helped me keep up sweeping wind more easily, but I didn’t have it and I managed fine without it.

This group of set dungeons was a very mixed bag. They ranged from incredibly annoying (Inna’s), to very easy (Sunwuko’s). They also included one with a gimmick that I suspect some people probably hate but I thought was actually pretty fun (the golden chest in Thousand Storms). I was afraid at the outset that I was going to struggle more than usual with these since I had never played monk before, but it turned out not to be much worse than any of my other set dungeon struggles. Now only the barbarian stands between me and two pairs of awesome wings!


Monk Set Mastery