Necromancer Set Mastery

Necromancer Set MasteryThere is no fancy wing reward for mastering the Necromancer set dungeons, which partly led to me ignoring these set dungeons for so long. Like all of the other classes, there are still two banners to get though, one for basic completion and one for mastery. At this point there’s also the principle of the thing. I’ve come this far, I might as well master all of the available dungeons. Plus it is my secret hope that Blizz will continue to add more classes, and eventually add another cosmetic reward for mastering everything. In any case it’s finally done, and here’s how it went:

The free set for Season 11 was Rathma’s, so that’s where I started. The two objectives were to get a total of 500 seconds of cooldown reduction on army of the dead, and to summon 100 skeletal mages. The summoning part was easy, especially with the ring that summons an extra mage every time. The cd reduction was a bit trickier. On my first attempt I didn’t get anywhere close. The second attempt saw me get the objective but run out of time trying to mop up the required kills. I finally mastered it on the third try. The “trick”, which wasn’t really a trick, was to make sure I was using army of the dead immediately when it came off cd so I didn’t waste any cd reduction. I basically got to a big room full of enemies and let my skeletons swing at them until I got the objective done, then summoned tons of mages and mopped up. I waited to summon the mages since when they’re up the damage buff means things die before they contribute much to the cd objective. Not a bad dungeon at all, and I appreciated that both objectives tied to the set, and weren’t gimmicky “don’t get hit by X” type things.

I worked on the Inarius dungeon next. The objectives also both directly tied to the set bonus: rip the bones from 100 enemies and kill 200 enemies affected by a bone armor tornado. This one was incredibly easy. I had the full set but no other specific legendaries, I just used whatever I had laying around in the season. I went in blind to the map and I got the mastery on the first try. Killing enemies affected by bone armor tornado is super easy, it will pretty much happen naturally. Ripping the bones from enemies required a bit more care, mostly because I was killing things before I could group them up. It was definitely easier than Rathma’s dungeon so if you’re having trouble with that one try Inarius’ instead.

Necromancer Set Mastery

Next up was Trag’oul’s dungeon. This one requires you to spend, and then heal, 1,000% of your life with your abilities. I basically just went at a cautious pace, alternated blood nova and devour, and beat it in one try. The layout of the dungeon has some nooks and crannies for enemies to hide in, but as long as you don’t leave stragglers you should have plenty of time.

After how easy the first three dungeons were, I was pretty nervous that I had saved the hardest for last. In retrospect I should never have worried. It was way harder for some reason for me to actually farm up the full set and bother to try this dungeon than it was to master it. The Pestilence dungeon objectives are to hit enemies with 150 empowered bone spears, and to NOT take 400k damage. The first bit is the easy part, it will pretty much happen with any build that you would want to use in this dungeon. Avoiding damage wasn’t that bad either, I just had to play a bit conservatively and not rush into the middle of swarms and elites. I mastered this dungeon on the first try, with over a minute of time to spare. Easy as bone spear pie.

Necromancer Set Mastery

Overall the Necromancer set dungeons were some of the easiest in the game. The worse of this lot was definitely Rathma’s. I one-shot all of the others, so I guess they were all equally easy. You can find my thoughts on the other classes’ dungeons in this post from September. I wish I hadn’t waited so long to finish the Necromancer, especially with how easy the last dungeon was to master. It felt a bit anticlimactic after the long journey it took to get to this point. At least now I’m officially finished with set dungeons, at least until they release a new class!


Necromancer Set Mastery

On the 2017 Game of the Year

Excuse me while I brush the cobwebs off.

At some point this month (possibly even this week), there’s going to be a Game of the Year show from Aggrochat. I’ll keep most of my thoughts contained to that show (or possibly a post after said show), but I do want to place some special emphasis on one game from last year. In a year filled with many incredible games, one stands out as my overall favorite.

Hollow Knight was my favorite game of 2017, and also my favorite Metroidvania, period. (For anyone wondering, it’s displacing Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow.) It’s a beautiful and expansive entry into the genre, set in a kingdom of bugs. The art style is fairly unique: It’s hand-drawn with limited use of color. This is fairly subtle, but it’s enough to give most areas a unique feel. Things that hurt you tend to be orange.

A while back, Matt Lees mentioned (when talking about Hyper Light Drifter) that “It’s a bit like Dark Souls” basically translates to “I don’t know what I’m talking about.” I’m not really going to help matters at all: Hollow Knight bears a more than superficial resemblance to Dark Souls. Aside from the obvious “lose all of your currency on death” aspect, it really shows in the storytelling. You are dropped into the kingdom and a nearly empty town with no context. Bits and pieces of the story are handed out as you go, mostly from various NPC interactions. Taken as a whole, you can get a picture of the world (and the awful things that happened before you got there). You get the feeling of being alone in a very big world, thanks to how rare it is to see NPCs that don’t want to do you harm.

The thing that really puts Hollow Knight over the top for me is the incredible sense of exploration. The game is very nonlinear even for the genre, and the map is very large. Without sequence breaking, you need to get the fireball, the dash, and the wall climb. After this point, things get really open. You’re intended to go into City of Tears, but there’s very little preventing you from poking the other edges of the map and finding your way into some very dark places. On a smaller scale, the game is good at rewarding poking into things. Hidden rooms are blacked out until you either walk into them or break open the entrance. Tiny corners tend to have some sort of reward, usually in the form of a relic (lore and currency) but sometimes a captured grub or something rarer. I also found traversal a lot of fun once you have the dash and wall-jump, although no single ability stands out in this area. (Ori still holds the crown for most fun movement ability ever.)

All of this without even mentioning the charms, or the bosses, or the major secrets. I really had fun with this one, and you can probably hear me repeat a lot of this in a few days.

On the 2017 Game of the Year

Excuse me while I brush the cobwebs off.

At some point this month (possibly even this week), there’s going to be a Game of the Year show from Aggrochat. I’ll keep most of my thoughts contained to that show (or possibly a post after said show), but I do want to place some special emphasis on one game from last year. In a year filled with many incredible games, one stands out as my overall favorite.

On the 2017 Game of the Year

Hollow Knight was my favorite game of 2017, and also my favorite Metroidvania, period. (For anyone wondering, it’s displacing Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow.) It’s a beautiful and expansive entry into the genre, set in a kingdom of bugs. The art style is fairly unique: It’s hand-drawn with limited use of color. This is fairly subtle, but it’s enough to give most areas a unique feel. Things that hurt you tend to be orange.

On the 2017 Game of the Year

A while back, Matt Lees mentioned (when talking about Hyper Light Drifter) that “It’s a bit like Dark Souls” basically translates to “I don’t know what I’m talking about.” I’m not really going to help matters at all: Hollow Knight bears a more than superficial resemblance to Dark Souls. Aside from the obvious “lose all of your currency on death” aspect, it really shows in the storytelling. You are dropped into the kingdom and a nearly empty town with no context. Bits and pieces of the story are handed out as you go, mostly from various NPC interactions. Taken as a whole, you can get a picture of the world (and the awful things that happened before you got there). You get the feeling of being alone in a very big world, thanks to how rare it is to see NPCs that don’t want to do you harm.

On the 2017 Game of the Year

The thing that really puts Hollow Knight over the top for me is the incredible sense of exploration. The game is very nonlinear even for the genre, and the map is very large. Without sequence breaking, you need to get the fireball, the dash, and the wall climb. After this point, things get really open. You’re intended to go into City of Tears, but there’s very little preventing you from poking the other edges of the map and finding your way into some very dark places. On a smaller scale, the game is good at rewarding poking into things. Hidden rooms are blacked out until you either walk into them or break open the entrance. Tiny corners tend to have some sort of reward, usually in the form of a relic (lore and currency) but sometimes a captured grub or something rarer. I also found traversal a lot of fun once you have the dash and wall-jump, although no single ability stands out in this area. (Ori still holds the crown for most fun movement ability ever.)

On the 2017 Game of the Year

All of this without even mentioning the charms, or the bosses, or the major secrets. I really had fun with this one, and you can probably hear me repeat a lot of this in a few days.

Reading Challenge #84: The Crystal Cave by Mary Stewart

I read this book more than 20 years ago, and remember liking it, so I was worried whether it would hold up to a critical re-read as an adult. This book combines a lot of things that normally are huge turn-offs for me. It’s low-magic fantasy with plenty of war and politics, embedded in a quasi-historical real world setting. Any one thing on that list is often enough to make me completely mentally check out. Luckily in this case the story and characters are well-written and compelling, and the Arthurian legend is both beloved and familiar but also flexible enough to withstand many interpretations. The combined effect is a book that I routinely stayed up hours past my “bedtime” for, eagerly devouring chapter after chapter.

The Crystal Cave is the first book in a series, and the whole story takes place before the birth of Arthur. Instead, it follows the life of Merlin from his childhood as a royal bastard with an unknown father, through his mundane and magical education, and sees him coming into his powers as an advisor and a prophet. One of the things this book does so well is it forces us to see Merlin as a human being, one whose magical gifts aren’t always controlled. We see his seemingly unending need for information and knowledge, and how much of his magic and prophesy are really just a combination of soaking up information and combining it with intellect to suit his needs. He’s a man who has a small amount of magical power, but uses his wits to leverage that into a larger-than-life reputation and political clout.

I know the shape of the myth of King Arthur but not all the details, so I don’t have the clearest sense of what is “canon” and what is unique to this retelling. What I do know is that this book places the coming-of-age of Merlin into a historical context that feels authentic from my admittedly fuzzy point of view. The details of daily life, the scope of the battles and military intelligence, the medicine and engineering were all touched on with a level of care that drew me deeply into the world and held me there. It may not be completely accurate, but the world felt alive and real on every page.

Honestly I was surprised that The Crystal Cave was listed by itself, instead of as the full series like so many other works on this challenge list. It left me wondering if the quality of the later books isn’t up to the level of this one, or whether this was just the most well-known of the series. I loved this one enough to want to keep reading. Honestly my only complaint is that it wasn’t available on Kindle, which made it harder for me to read in bed until the middle of the night like I wanted to.

TL;DR: An origin story for Merlin and the beginning of the King Arthur Legend.

The Crystal Cave by Mary Stewart

Rating: 5/5 stars

Verdict: Excellent read, if you’re interested at all in the Arthurian mythology I would highly recommend.

Next up: The Culture Series by Iain M. Banks


Reading Challenge #84: The Crystal Cave by Mary Stewart