Good Morning, Folks. You are getting a Diablo IV Screenshot because that happens to be the game I am playing the most at the moment, but this is very much not a gaming blog post. I figured it had been a bit since I had done a “State of the Bel” post, as I am referring to them in my mind, where I catch you up on how things are going with the nightmare that is cancer. Prior to yesterday, I would have told you things were going swimmingly and infinitely better than the first two rounds. This morning, that answer is a bit more complicated, but we will get into that. Essentially, rounds one and two of chemo were met with external factors that complicated things. During round one, I fought with my blood pressure and was trying to figure out the correct amount of meds to take to keep it down to healthy levels, but not drop it to the very fainty 70/40 that I was running for a few days. Solving this problem… of course, uncovered other issues.
I was woefully anemic, as I simply had no red blood cells to transport oxygen through my body. As a result, every time I would stand up, I would feel incredibly woozy for a bit, and getting up in the mornings was pure hell. The answer to this problem was to start giving me Iron Infusions. These legitimately look like giant packets of soy sauce, but are pinkish in hue when they flow into your body. The effect is that it looks like you are bleeding in the wrong direction. After round two, there was a rush infusion to try and get my levels up, and since it moved the needle, when I did round three, they just included the soy sauce along with my normal treatments. This seems to curb a lot of the negative effects that I was feeling, and quite honestly, on the day I get a fresh iron infusion, I feel sort of like I can take on the world. That shit is magical, and it feels like I am hyper-oxygenated for a time, which is a weird feeling for a lifelong severe asthmatic who is likely ALWAYS running low on oxygen.
For those who are curious, this is what infusion days look like:
I arrive, and they open my port, aka jam a giant needle in my chest. Prior to leaving the house, I have applied lidocaine cream to the area so that I really cannot feel a thing.
First up is a long-acting anti-nausea medication and a steroid to help get me through some of the low-immune-system moments. This takes around 15 minutes to deliver.
Next up, I get my Iron Infusion, aka the bag of soy sauce. This takes 30 minutes, and occupies what previously was a dead point because there has to be 30 minutes between the anti-nausea meds and the first of the chemotherapy.
There is a bit of a break, but next up is Folinic Acid in one bag, and Oxaliplatin in the next, and these are both hung and set to drip together into me. This process is the big haul that takes two whole hours. At some point during this, I have to get up and tote my bags to the bathroom because they have pushed so many fluids into my body at this point, I am about to burst.
After a little break, they give me a bolus of Fluorouracil, aka 5-FU, which takes about 15 minutes, similar to the steroid round.
Last, they hook me to the portable pump filled with Fluorouracil, and make sure the valve is against my skin because, for some reason, the heat of my body is what makes the pump work. This will be tethered to me for 46 hours, and I refer to it as the evil lemon, because it looks like a weird lemon. I feel very much like I have a Harkonnen Heart Plug, because I have to do everything while being aware that I have a pump attached to me that goes directly into my heart. Act normal.
So, back to the story… one of the new side effects that sprang up during round two is that I was having a lot of visual issues. Namely, for the first five or so days after the chemo treatment, I was having visual flashes off the right side of my body. It felt like someone was flashing a strobe just outside of my visual range. Additionally, I had some very black line floaters appearing in the same eye. They looked like impossibly black threads that would snake around my vision. This rightly freaked me the fuck out, because my family has a history of retinal detachment, and this was already a point of anxiety for me. After some googling of Folfox(the colloquial name of the treatment) symptoms, it seems that in some very rare occasions, it could lead to damage to the retina or optic nerve. During one of my lab and doctor visit days, I explained these symptoms, and they also seemed equally concerned, but they were happy that they went away on their own. They suggested following up with an eye doctor.
That is what I did yesterday. Last year, I switched to a new eye doctor who operates out of the small town where I grew up, which is only about a thirty-minute drive from where I live. Yesterday’s visit cemented that I made the right decision because she remembered the family history of retinal detachments and took things extremely seriously. Even taking a moment while my eyes were dilating to research the specific ocular things that Folfox can do. Essentially, I got a clean bill of health. Everything inside my eye, apparently, looks extremely healthy, and for good measure, she checked my prescription, and it had not really deviated from last September. Specifically, she said that the most common problem with Folfox is that it attacks the optic nerve, and explained what the symptoms of that would look like to me. It would be either a partial or complete blurring of vision in the eye where it is happening, and a fading of colors, either in saturation level or shifting what colors look like.
Now, one of the confounding variables is that this all happened during the second round, but did not happen during this third and most recent round. The one change between rounds is that I have now had two bags of iron infusion, and have raised my red blood cell count considerably. Talking with the eye doctor, essentially everything I was experiencing could be attributed to extreme anemia. Everything I was experiencing could be caused by a lack of blood flow and oxygen to the eyes. Essentially, the eyes are one of the furthest points in the circulatory system, and if there is anything wrong at a blood level, it can cause visual artifacts and flashes. So in theory, the continued Iron Infusions have helped to stave off some of the visual hallucinations that I was dealing with. If nothing else, it felt good to get a bit of peace of mind that everything was mechanically fine with my eyes. One of my greatest fears has always been losing my eyesight. I figure so long as I can see and so long as my brain is functioning appropriately, I could deal with pretty much anything else.
Collectively, this third round of chemo has gone so much more smoothly than the first two. I feel like I have bounced back more quickly from the infusions. I am still dealing with the weird cold reaction symptoms, but my energy levels as a whole have been much higher. The only negative is… that it feels like I have this very finite pool of energy. Because of how busy yesterday was, and that I tried to cram too much into too short a period of time, I overdrew the bank of energy. As a result, I am paying massively today for this. After mostly doing great for the last several days, I was back to it, taking an hour to get ready this morning, because I kept having to pause between actions. I am sure I will recover from this as well, but I am just not used to having such a limited amount of stamina for doing anything. That has, without a doubt, been the hardest part of chemo in general: accepting the fact that right now, there are just going to be some things that don’t get done in the time frame that I wish they could.
So at a high level… I am doing much better than I was during the first two rounds. However, I still have to realize that I am compromised and need to temper my hubris. I had offers to take me to the eye doctor yesterday, but I stubbornly drove myself and also paid a visit to my parents afterwards. On top of working that morning, it was just collectively too much going on for the state in which I am. I’ve said before that effectively I have 10 shitty days each cycle and 4 good ones… and I need to respect that. I was on day 7 of the 10 shitty days part of the cycle, and I knew that… I just thought I was doing well enough to ignore my own limitations. Each rotation, I learn something new about myself and about the treatment, so I will just file yesterday away as another of those learning moments.
The post State of the Bel: Round Three appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning, Folks! This is going to seem like a bit of whiplash, but my opinion of Diablo IV Lord of Hatred has evolved yet again. At this point, I am over Paragon 150 with the Paladin, which means I have picked up most of the best nodes on the Paragon board. I’ve done a lot of content, both in queuing directly for things for the purpose of knocking out seasonal journey achievements, and through the War Plan system. Essentially, there is this awkward phase around Torment 1 where it is a bit of a struggle to get Ancestral gear, and I found that frustrating. Once I pushed through this by using the crafting system to craft up blue and yellow ancestrals into usable gear, things started to move more smoothly. I have to give them credit; the crafting system is phenomenal, and essentially, you can take any item and make it function for your build so long as it is the right item level. Essentially, the game has the POE2 version of the Chaos Orb, which removes an affix and adds a random affix, and through this, you can kind of brute force your way to something useful. If you only have one bad affix, there is still the enchanting system that can be used to target, remove it, and get something usable.
At this point, I have a fairly optimal set of legendaries and a few key uniques that buff the amount of thorns damage that I am dealing. I can relatively easily do Torment VII, but mostly do VI because speed is king when it comes to farming content. That said, I feel like I have hit the ceiling of the initial thorns leveling build that I have been running. There is an endgame version of this that changes out a lot of stuff, and I could move over to it. Though I am tempted if I have to respec my character anyway, to migrate over to an Arbiter Hammerdin build, which is supposedly extremely good at speed farming. The biggest problem that I have with the current version of Thorns is that it relies entirely upon Blessed Shield to deliver most of the damage, which moves slowly, and ends up creating a delayed damage output. So you either have to lead with shield throw so that mobs run into it as they are coming at you, or have a trail of mobs who are slowly being whittled down by the shields as they follow behind you. If I want to continue playing Paladin and push it to the higher tiers… I need to make a decision and deal with what will probably be a minor setback as I start acquiring gear again.
I’ve also been leveling a Warlock, in part because this is the build that the streamer Raxxanterax has been playing and it looks insanely powerful. Legitimately, it seems like Dread Claws Warlock is this league’s version of the early Spiritborn builds that were so insanely powerful at the launch of the last expansion. Initially, this relies upon Command Fallen as its builder and Dread Claws as its spender. I did not really love the feeling of Command Fallen, because I went into it expecting them to feel a bit like Summon Raging Spirits. However, once you get the Fallen Rush notable, it transforms them into an Abyss ability, making it so you summon 3 at a time, and allows you to target them by resummoning them. This makes it feel much better, and pretty much I am constantly spamming both my right and left clicks to either summon/target my pack of Fallen or fire off cascading dread claws, which gives it a pretty comfortable gameplay style. You are always targeting things before they can get to you, and your Dread Claws are mostly doing all of the work to mop things up before they can damage you.
The entire build gets a bit more Summoner feeling when you unlock the Warlock quest chain at 15. This involves you going and defeating a series of demons and binding them to your will, so that you can then choose one to permanently follow you. The Dread Claws build uses Laalish, which is a giant worm that is constantly following you and leaping out of the ground to eat mobs. Having one big minion, a turret-style minion, and a swarm of fallen minions makes the entire thing feel a bit more like I wanted it to feel from the start. Your Ultimate is a swarm of minions that effectively shred the target, making short work of whatever you throw them on. The only negative about it is that the swarm is stationary, so you have to sometimes nudge a mob back into it to get the full effect. All in all, I am pretty damned happy with the Warlock and look forward to pushing it to 70, and then building the proper endgame build with all of my paragon points.
One other side note, there is an event running right now that adds an extra battle pass to the game that unlocks a bunch of World of Warcraft-themed weapon skins. There is also a rather expensive pack that gives you all of the Tier 2 armor sets, and I am specifically the kind of sucker who fell for that. The T2 era was the golden days of World of Warcraft for me, and those are some of my favorite sets. So I was more than happy to be able to run around as a Judgement Paladin or a Nemesis Warlock. It also seemed fitting to have the Warlock using Corrupted Ashbringer. I have enough disposable income to make these bad decisions, because really… it is not worth what they are charging. However, given how much bullshit is happening in my life right now… I will take my joy however I can get it, even if that means retail therapy for some overpriced digital baubles.
In other news, we have been in teaser season for a bit with Path of Exile II slowly releasing some very short videos. SirGog has finally decided to make a video covering everything that has been released to date, so if you have not been watching as they slowly drip-feed us information, I suggest checking out his summary. The entire League Reveal presentation takes place on the 7th, and the full release of the content drops on the 29th. As SirGog indicates in the video, this is a really weird sequence of events for Grinding Gear Games. This is not the way that previous leagues have been teased, nor is the timing of the release following their normal patterns either. Generally speaking, we get the content revealed one week, and then the next week we have the start of the league. Anzac Day was the last public holiday until June, so I am not entirely certain why the big gap between the two events. Either way, I am hoping to wrap up my Diablo IV shennannigans well before the 29th so that I can hop into Path of Exile II fully, with no regrets.
What have you been playing? Have you tried out Diablo IV: Lord of Hatred? If so, what are your thoughts? Drop me a line below.
The post Warlock Pretty Great appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning, Folks. At this point, I have completed the Diablo IV Storyline and am slowly grinding up paragon levels. I have unlocked Torment 1 and can reasonably farm that without much issue. Note that it is without any real semblance of a build because legendaries in general have felt really sparse and hard to acquire. I don’t necessarily love that, but it was a decision to dial back the look, and at least for me, it feels like they just spread the same amount of butter across a lot more toast. My Thorns Paladin feels reasonable and not completely broken, and a lot of the power that it lost I think, is in the form of the missing passives. I honestly feel sort of meh about Diablo IV as a whole right now. I thought this expansion and patch were going to usher in a new great age for the game, and it certainly shook up a lot of things… but I can’t necessarily say that the moment-to-moment gameplay in the endgame is better. I don’t hate it, but I also don’t necessarily love it either and feel like Path of Exile 1/2 and Last Epoch are doing a much better version of this genre across the board.
I had to cherry-pick a screenshot for talking about the story that does not give much of anything away, because I do really feel like this is worth experiencing for the story alone. I did not like the story for Vessel of Hatred, and it very much felt like a letdown in every single way. Lord of Hatred, however, is really freaking good, and there are way more interesting interactions with famous people from the Diablo franchise than we have had to date. There were actual moments here in this game that made me feel things… I actually had to choke back tears at one point. That is pretty rare for an ARPG story, and I felt like the game earned its story beats more than we have at any point since the launch of D4. Sure, I hated the whole Akarat as Jesus nonsense, but in truth, you don’t really spend that much time having to interact with that narrative. What was way more interesting was the manner in which we reintroduced Lilith and also dealt with some of the challenges around Rathma as the child of Lilith and directly connected back to our character. It is really good stuff and expands the general lore of Diablo in some interesting ways.
Skovos is also a really great new area to add to the game. I had some doubts about it as I was going through the content, but watching it open up a bit as I entered the endgame, I really do think there is some interesting stuff going on here. The legion event, for example, in Skovos is this whole pirate-attack-themed thing, and it is so much more interesting than the baseline legion events. Similarly, the Helltide areas feel really good on Skovos, but the only negative of all of this… is that essentially this one location sunsets the need to go to any other location. It has effectively shrunk the world down to only ever needing to exist in this one area. The hub of Temis literally has access to all of the things that forced you to go to other cities, and also serves as the only place you can access the Horadric Cube. So essentially, Skovos is now the game in its totality, in a way that did not occur with Vessel of Hatred and Nahantu.
Gear feels extremely hard to get in a way that I have never quite experienced since the launch of Diablo IV, and I am not sure I am a fan of it. Blasters who are grinding this game ten plus hours per day are finding plenty of gear, but I do worry about the folks who are only playing for a few hours at a time. I have exactly ONE ancestral item, and it dropped from the Obol vendor as a white item that I then upgraded into a Mythic via the cube. I am sure this will change as I go up in Torment tiers, but I also sort of need the gear to be able to go up in difficulty. I feel like I am being artificially gated by just not finding any legendary drops that are usable. I am wearing a bunch of stuff, but it does not necessarily equate to anything resembling a build right now. I am mostly being carried hard by the power of the baseline thorns build, instead of actually feeling like I have synergy with any of my gear. I liked loot raining down from the skies, and it is a bit of a bummer to be playing in extreme poverty league.
The other thing that is annoying me a bit right now is the reintroduction of Capstone dungeons. These feel like they are a complete waste of time. Essentially, in an ARPG, anything that does not reward good experience or loot is not worth doing, and these feel like an artificial barrier that is placed in our way to keep us from progressing. They are not hard to do, mind you, but they take about three times as long as I feel like they should. These essentially gate your seasonal ranks, which themselves gate your ability to progress up into torment levels. So instead of just needing to run a T1 Pit in order to unlock Torment rank 1, you now also have to do a dungeon that will not reward much loot, and also takes about 10-15 minutes to run, since there are three distinct phases to it. I am not sure what the design goal was with reintroducing capstone dungeons, because they don’t feel challenging… they just feel like a waste of my time.
Another thing that has been a bit of a disappointment is the Warplan system. These are what I would term “aggressively fine”. Sure, it is best practice to never do any activity without a Warplan sending you there, but they don’t really feel like they meaningfully improve the baseline content. A Nightmare Dungeon is always going to be a Nightmare Dungeon, and the Pit is always going to be the Pit… and while you are stapling some extra rewards on them via the Warplan, it doesn’t really feel transformative at all. Maybe I have not seen enough of the trees yet that unlock as you do the content, but most of the options feel like they are just going to give you more chances at loot. There is also no methodology for banning specific content. For example, I kind of hate the Kurast Undercity and never want to do it… and there is no way for me to say “never show me this content, and make the other content more frequent”. My options are to avoid the content in the warplans, and if I cannot… reroll the entire thing. Even if they gave us the ability to reroll specific nodes on the Warplan tree, it would be better than what we have currently.
I think the reality is that Diablo IV is never going to be “my” game, not at least in the way that Diablo III once was. I am entirely too Path of Exile aligned at this point to really ever be satisfied with the limited set of things that the Diablo franchise is now providing. I think there are going to be some players who will enjoy the slowed-down progression systems because it gives them a longer tail before they reach the point of feeling wildly overpowered. For me, however, I want to play Diablo IV as a fun weekend or two and not as a primary game, and as such, artificially gating content that we already had access to previously and throttling the gearing just feels like a turn in the wrong direction for me personally. That game isn’t bad, and I enjoyed the story quite a bit… but I will also never play that story again because it is the least efficient way to do a seasonal character. I am not sure how long I will be playing Diablo IV, but I doubt I will finish out the seasonal journey before I am back to either Last Epoch or Path of Exile.
The post Great Story, Meh Endgame appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
