September 2015 – Page 22

Hammerknell and Keywardens

September 4, 2015 by Belghast

Nightmare Larva

I had a strangely disconnected evening last night essentially happened in two distinct parts. My great niece was in town doing a track meet, and we had arranged to meet up with the family for dinner. Initially I thought I would get home and we would essentially leave right away. That wasn’t quite the case and we ultimately did not walk to dinner until around 7ish, which left me with a fair amount of time to kill. I have once again been feeling the Rift itch lately, as I go through every few weeks. The shiny new mount that I talked about yesterday may or may not have been the catalyst. So I poked around Meridian for a bit and ultimately decided to do an Instant Adventure. For those not familiar with the concept, Rift has this really cool thing where you hit a button and get thrown together with a raid group of people and teleported to a specific area of the world. There you complete a series of objectives, and get teleported to a new place where the process starts over again. Each time you complete a segment you are rewarded loot just like in a Rift, except this time they are generally caches of gear for your class.

Last night I noticed there was a new option called “Intrepid Adventures”. I say this is a new option, but I really mean it was new to me… because I had not noticed it before. That said I have not really run any instant adventures since the launch of Nightmare Tide. What it appears to be is a Instant Adventure style tour of raid encounters. I got teleported into the caverns under Hammerknell, where I fought all sorts of tougher but still manageable monsters leading up to several “boss” fights. I have to say it gives a nice flavor to leveling especially as I have not actually seen any of the raids since Vanilla. I had a lot of fun and will probably use this option when I return to leveling again. I am right now about halfway through 62 and the grind to 65 has been slower going than I had hoped. I honestly have problems with the layout of content since vanilla, or more so I just liked the feel of leveling in Vanilla better. This is of course personal preference, and since Storm Legion and Nightmare Tides feel really similar… I am guessing they have done the market research that tells them that the Rift demographic wants that style of content. Anyways… I have contemplated trying to set up at least one night a week to play Rift. The problem there is that I am not sure there are enough nights in the week to go around for all of the games I want to be regularly playing.

Hunting Keywardens

When I got home from dinner however it was all about Diablo 3. Before dinner I had managed to pop in shortly and get my good friend Neph invited to our Stalwart Diablo clan that makes finding folks to group with significantly easier. My friend Shandrah popped on and started the leveling trail for Neph, Damai and Ashgar which was a full group so I happily worked on Season IV objectives. Right now I am working on the fourth and final chapter of objectives, and I spent most of the night tracking down the various Key Wardens which I had to defeat on Torment I or better. After a significant rearrange of my abilities I am finding that Torment I is actually fairly easy. I am essentially doing a variation of the classic “spin to win” Whirlwind build. I am using Frenzy with the added fury bonus of Berserk as my builder, for the purpose of being able to build fury as fast as humanly possible so I can spend the most time in whirlwind. From there I use Whirlwind with Blood Funnel which heals me every time I crit, which is often. From there I have Overpower with Killing Spree, Threating Shout with Falter, Ignore pain with Ignorance is Bliss, and Wrath of the Berserker with Insanity. For passives I take Boon of Bul-Kathos, Rampage, Ruthless and Weapons Master.

The end result is a built that can chew thing mobs pretty effectively, but the most important part is that it has really solid “sustain” which seems to be the most important thing as a melee character. None of my gear is ideal at the moment, and I am not using the right legendary procs because I simply haven’t gotten them to drop. That said it is a good start and better than the previously build I was working with. I am still relatively new to the whole Rifts and Greater Rifts thing, and at this point I have two objectives standing in the way of my spiffy portrait and pet. One of which is “Reach Greater Rift Level 10 Solo” which I find really confusing. Last night I attempted to do this one and completed a Greater Rift… albeit without getting the bonus. But I am not sure if this means that I need to complete the rift with the bonus or if I physically need to manage to get to dungeon level 10 within the Rift. The last one however will take some doing considering I am in a mishmash of gear right now, and it is to have a level 70 legendary equipped in every slot. I have been spending my blood shards on gear slots that I am currently missing in the hopes of slowly knocking this achievement out. In any case… I am close and I am having a blast just killing stuff for loot and paragon levels!

Bel VS Mobile Gaming

September 3, 2015 by Belghast

The Eureka Moment

I just had a moment of realization while checking on the progress of Vault 816… I am not a mobile gamer. While I really enjoy the idea of playing Fallout Shelter, I always have the same thought I have with any mobile game. “Man I wish I could play this on my desktop or through a web browser.” There are games that I enjoy the idea of playing… like Fallout Shelter, Alphabear, Dragon Coins, or Final Fantasy Record Keeper. The problem is I get frustrated by the imprecise controls. Using your finger to move objects around the screen feels so much more cludgy than doing it with a nice tight mouse pointer. Granted if I were a smaller person I would probably not be having any of these issues.

Sausage-Like Fingers

I am 6’4” and have huge hands… I can palm a basketball. Attached to these huge hands are useless sausage-like fingers that have the fine motor skills of sleepy toddler. The more I think about it… this fact has gotten in the way of my enjoyment of almost every mobile game I have played. At first I thought the bulk of my problems would be resolved were I simply playing on a larger device. However as I graduated from my iPhone 3s to a Samsung Galaxy S2 to a Samsung Galaxy S5… each time the screen size increased sizably but the difficulty never went away. When I finally got my own iPad I still felt like throwing it across the room anytime I was asked to do anything that required a modicum of detailed movement.

I realize there is such a thing as a stylus, but then I am having to fiddle with an awkward device on top of an already awkward control scheme. The problem is… there really are games that I want to enjoy on mobile devices. Fallout Shelter for example takes two things that I have loved in the past… the Fallout Franchise, and Sim Tower like gameplay. During my pre-college and college years I spent silly amounts of my free time playing both of these games. I spent enough time playing Sim Tower to be able to build freaking airports at the top of my towers. I have played each of the Fallout franchise games multiple times, and even though I rarely play the original… I feel like I could pretty safely pick it right back up and meld into the nostalgia nicely. So I am the core demographic of this game… except for the whole control scheme problem.

I honestly have no clue why I felt like I needed to write this post, other than having my own little Eureka moment. For the longest time I thought my dislike of mobile gaming was more about the game experiences that you have on a mobile device. Now I realize that is wrong… there are plenty of “gamerly” experiences available. My problem is that I struggle to get any sense of control while playing a mobile game. Finger based movement against a slick screen always feels chaotic to me. It reminds me of how frustrated I get when trying to use a trackball. I guess I am just accustomed to the mouse, keyboard and controller… and when it finally comes down to relying on my own digits to make things work… I find the experience frustrating. I am wondering if anyone else out there with sausage-like fingers suffers from this same issue? We should totally form a support group or something.

The Value of Pessimism

September 3, 2015 by Thalen

I'm an optimist by nature. In the words of Miles, I like to like things. You're unlikely to see me being negative about things very often on this blog simply because I'd much rather spend my time finding things to be positive about. This isn't to say that I love everything uncritically, I just tend to keep criticism to myself.

With notable exceptions

Sometimes though, you have to be the pessimist. I'm running into this at my day job currently; a project is having some rough patches and I'm finding myself needing to be a critical voice in the face of an optimism that I fear might have us go live with something that doesn't do the job. It may be my fears are unfounded (I certainly hope so), but you have to take the worst case into account along with the best.

I don't enjoy being a downer, but sometimes everyone else is chasing rainbows and I'm the only one left to say 'but what if?' What's the backup plan? How do we recover if this fails? It's something I've had to learn myself over the years after having to scramble when something blew up in my face. Maybe I'm developing wisdom as I age.

Pfft, yeah right.

Learning Japanese: Vocabulary

September 3, 2015 by Tamrielo

I’ve hit the point in my Japanese studies where what I really need to do is build a ton of vocabulary. I have a reasonable grounding of basic grammar and sentence structure, and I need more vocabulary so I can start learning quirks and learning how to put pieces together.

It’s made more difficult by the lack of good resources. Straight translation isn’t necessarily the best, because there are shades of meaning in word use that I don’t yet know. In English, “friend”, “companion”, “partner”, and “teammate” can be used in very similar ways, sometimes interchangeably, but they’re different enough that you can’t just pick one and use it universally. Introducing your lover as a “friend” is a quick route to hurt feelings, and referring to a friend as your “partner” makes a few suggestions that you might not intend.

It’s a severe pitfall when learning a new language, and it’s one of those things that draws a stark line between the fluent and the learner. I’m probably getting a bit ahead of myself by thinking about this sort of thing this early on, but I can’t help but want to know the proper, appropriate way of saying what I want to say, and understanding both how and why it differs from a literal translation. Growing up, I always chuckled a bit at classmates who would scoff at learning multiple words with similar meanings– they would wonder why there needed to be two or three or four words that “meant the same thing”, and I’d wonder what the differences were, and why there were multiple words that meant the same thing.

As a result, I’m very sensitive to the idea that, in Japanese, a single kanji can have multiple meanings, and that clever wordplay and eloquence revolves around using the right word in the right place, seemingly moreso than English. It makes me want to have the same breadth of vocabulary I have in English so that I can be more precise in my speech. I know I want to eventually be an eloquent speaker, and I know I need to have a broader understanding of the language to know what eloquence even means in a language that isn’t English.

To get there, though, I need vocabulary, and I have to learn it somehow. Rote memorization isn’t getting me very far– I’m good at it when it comes to abstractions like the hiragana and katakana, but when it comes to attaching concepts to words I’m a lot weaker. I’ve considered starting to memorize kanji, using the same techniques that I used for hiragana and katakana, but it hasn’t been very successful thus far because I’m not always sure what words to start with and how to use them. I have, for example, picked up 私 (watashi, “I/me”) because it’s extremely useful and relatively straightforward, but I’m continually forgetting 音 (sound, noise, note) because I’m not really sure how to use it properly.

I find myself wishing I could take the opportunity to immerse myself completely in the language and just be lost for a while until I make the connections I need. This would be a uniquely awful experience for me, because communication is so important to me, but it would accelerate my learning a lot, and I’d learn how to use the language properly. I’m not sure there are good opportunities for me to do this, though.

In the meantime, I’m memorizing how to count various things. It’s a process.