Yesterday was the 20th anniversary of Diablo II, a game I very much remember picking up in the store. In fact I remember that pretty much the entire office ran out at lunch to pick the game up. A few years back we tried to play the game for the AggroChat Game Club and found that it does not hold up anywhere near as well as our memories of it. If you log into the game right now you get a free set of “prime evil” wings, which are sorta ugly as sin… but it is also free cosmetics so yay. If you so choose there is a big post with various Blizzard voices talking about what the game meant to them. There is another post up on the official site talking about the various things in commemoration of the event including the wings.
For me Diablo II is a weird sign post, because it represents a schism in the ARPG crowd. It is the game that a certain group of players hold up on a pedestal as being when the game was perfect and pure. I on the other hand happen to love Diablo III and am quite honestly afraid that Diablo IV may not be a game I actually want to play based on how hard it seems to be drawing on those grim dark vibes. The key problem I have going back and playing Diablo II these days it is that the game play feels so damned sluggish and slow. I am used to zipping around the field and the rushing through rifts style gameplay of Diablo III. There is also the massive problem of having to decide upon your build the moment you start playing instead of constantly being able to evolve it as you progress completing resetting it at any time you choose.
Diablo IV seems compelling, but when there is talk of World PVP… I start seriously tuning out. I don’t want PVP in my Diablo period… and if it has to exist for the vocal edge case folks then I hope it is walled off much like War Mode in World of Warcraft. I am already not super certain what I think about having players blended into my world, because Diablo for me is a very solitary or small group activity. I don’t interact with the larger community and I have never once grouped with someone I did not already know in Diablo III. After looking forward to the game for so long, a fear is starting to set in that it might not be a game I actually enjoy playing. Hopefully Blizzard will continue to support Diablo III at least their current lackluster support mode so I can keep playing it if the fourth game and I don’t get along.
Diablo III Season 21 – July 3rd
This is also your friendly reminder that along with logging in to get your wings, you should be logging in to get your mailbox straightened out. On July 3rd they are starting the new season and once again I plan on playing a seasonal character. The goal right now is to play up another Crusader because Haedrig’s Gift is Invokers… my favorite Crusader set for pushing. Since this is an extended weekend I am hoping to be able to stay up later than the average seasonal start and push most of the way to the level cap. I said yesterday on twitter than the season is almost a religious experience for me and that is absolutely true. While the experience is ultimately short lived, I look forward to it each time.
Iron Banana
Additionally this week I have the beginning of the first Iron Banner of Season 11, and it is my goal to make a significant amount of progress prior to getting sucked into Diablo III on Friday. I plan on logging in tonight and beginning the grind on my Hunter then following the path through Warlock and finally ending up on my Titan for maximum light gain. Additionally in answer to something I threw out there yesterday… it seems like we are shaping up a raid team and have all of the necessary players and a few extras to hopefully make that happen. For those who are looking for friendly conversation while doing the Destiny we have my “Beyond the Light” discord community that you are more than welcome to join. We spent some time yesterday commenting about my apparent clairvoyance with naming the community damned closed to the upcoming “Beyond Light” expansion back when the game launched.
All in all it has been an exceptionally stressful time for me at work, but the gaming front has procuded some fun activities for me to devote time and resources towards. I ran a few nightfalls with Chef and Prae last night which were a blast, though fell significantly short of the 100k needed for rewards. The fun part however is probably the most important aspect, and hopefully we can hook up over the next few nights to do some banana.
The post Tentacular Wings appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
I guess I am fully back in Destiny 2 at this point, because I did a thing this weekend that is slightly mind numbing but effective. In Destiny you are afforded a small number of opportunities to get improvements in your light level (yes I still call it light level). Because of this… it is beneficial for you to run three different classes through all of the various opportunities for light gain. The challenge however is for you to get the maximum benefit from doing this… you need to in theory start with your least favorite character and work your way up to your favorite.
The challenge is that prior to this weekend neither my Hunter or Warlock had really been dusted off in several seasons. So there was a significant amount of catch up to be done before I could even really begin the light grind. My Hunter was somewhere in the 800s and my Warlock was I believe around 930? If you can’t tell the pecking order of my characters goes something like this… Titan > Warlock > Hunter. I am not sure WHY the Hunter is my least favorite, but I think it has a lot to do with most of the grenades being largely PVP focused. You see almost nothing but Hunters in the crucible and in part this is because the class seems to largely be stacked towards that goal. Trip mines are not terribly useful in PVE burn encounters.
The highlight of my weekend is easily getting my ideal roll for Bad Omens that is good for the next few seasons. The Gjallarhorn was a legend because it had a very good combination of perks, namely that it had tracking and wolf pack rounds, which caused it to take out a lot of smaller targets around the main target, or at least deal a bunch of extra damage. The only rocket launcher that I have found to date that comes close is Bad Omens with Cluster Bomb and Tracking, which while not nearly as powerful does effective the same thing. Considering how useful this combination has been… I am exceptionally happy to have a copy that will stay around for awhile.
This season has largely been about finding non-expiring weapons that I enjoy, and can continue enjoying for several seasons. I’ve always liked the Night Watch Scout Rifle, but this whole expiration thing has given it a new importance in my mind. Right now of the various copies I have gotten my favorite is the one that has Rapid hit and Rampage. This seems like the ideal configuration for when I am often using a Scout Rifle, aka standing back at range and whittling down a bunch of mobs in a Nightfall or something similar. I do wish I had lucked into getting the ivory skin like I have for the other gambit themed weapons.
My workhorse of the season is the Gnawing Hunger Auto Rifle. It also seems to be what everyone is running because I have seen some statistics showing this is the most widely used crucible weapon right now. There are a lot of really good rolls on it, and right now I find myself leaning towards Subsistence and Rampage. This particular combo works nicely together as Rampage kills create a stacking buff and Subsistence makes those kills refund ammunition to the magazine to keep the chain going.
The weapon that I am the most surprised by that I am enjoying an awful lot is Lonesome, a sidearm that is also Gambit Themed. I’ve never really been a big fan of sidearms, or at least I never could seem to get the level of work out of them that some of my friends could. The specific combination that I find myself enjoying the most is High-Caliber Rounds, Full Auto and Multi-Kill Clip. I find I use this weapon in the same manner that I would a shotgun, or submachinegun when waves of things are running up on me. I am certain this is not a god roll by any means, but I like it a lot and the full auto takes away the spammy nature of the weapon.
So as I said at the start of the post, it seems like I am fully engaged in this season. What I really want however is to figure out a reoccurring time and set up some raids. I have a handful of players at the ready, but will have to work through the time commitments and find a sweet spot. Ultimately what I would like to do is work my way through all of the raids that are available between now and September. That means getting in and beating all of the following:
Leviathan
Eater of Worlds
Spire of Stars
Last Wish
Scourge of the Past
Crown of Sorrow
Garden of Salvation
Like I said I have part of a team tentatively assembled but if you want to be included in this nonsense, let me know. My fearless friend Squirrelpope has volunteered so many times in the past that I am probably going to try and figure out a way to include him, because he would serve as one hell of a tour guide.
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Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen
Tonight we have an assorted topic type show, but the main discussion ends up centering around games and game value. What makes one game feel like a valuable experience and another game just seems like a waste of time. We talk a bit about the Phantasy Star Online 2 America Day holiday and how they have a really strange impression of our country. Kodra talks about his adventures in the deeply edge case Sudoku. We also have a discussion about when the right time to group is in a game versus largely solo play. In the middle of all of this there are several references to Guild Wars 2 and Destiny 2 for reasons.
Topics Discussed
Phantasy Star Online 2 “America Day”
When to play a game with friends
What point do you transition from solo to group play
There are times when I make significantly bad decisions. This is potentially one of them. I’ve been back and enjoying Destiny 2, and of course my brain has decided that I should totally sabotage that progress with playing the game “optimally”. There is a correct way to deal with the seasonal light grind, and that is to grind up all three characters and focus on your least favorite two first before moving on to your main character. The theory being that any light gain in your weapons along the process will help to boost your “main” character further each week. My main is of course my Titan, and probably my least favorite character is my Hunter… so I have instead been focused on grinding all of the weekly objectives on my Warlock.
Don’t get me wrong I do enjoy the Warlock quite a bit, but Titan and Warlock jumps are polar opposites. When I switch between the two I have to do a sort of mental remap of my reactions, during which I am performing horribly. I decided to use this period of time to get the two crucible objectives knocked out. Basically whenever I am having fun, I swear my brain purposefully goes out of the way to destroy that notion. Thankfully I was hanging out with my friend Grace on voice and more or less stopped caring about performance while we chatted away. At some point during the night I noticed that both my instincts and performance suddenly improved and I once again started taking down enemies. Since they apparently disabled skill based matchmaking… apparently I improved rather than just being de-ranked enough to no longer get put up against good players.
The impending weapon sunset is having interesting effects upon me. Firstly I am being way more brutal with deciding whether or not I want to keep a weapon. I have a bad problem with digital hoarding in games that allow me to do so, and my vault is filled with artifacts from the launch of the game. The fact that most of this is going to be useless in a few months makes me realize that I need to have a massive house cleaning and shard all the things. Essentially anything with a power cap of 1060 is going to stop being relevant when the next season changes. I believe everything in this screenshot minus the exotics is going to effectively become trash as soon as the seasonal reset happens.
This means that there are a lot of weapons that I really enjoyed using… that are just going to stop being useful. Take this Hero’s Burden, I got it from Iron Banner some seasons back and have used it a ton over the seasons whenever I didn’t want Riskrunner taking up an exotic slot. It is going to be sad to see it go, but I have a vault filled with tons of these things that just no longer have the value they once did. Sure I could keep it and run around completing bounties with it, but what is the point long term because I know that there is going to constantly be a refresh of new items to chase. Essentially I am going to have to start thinking of Destiny 2 in the same way that I think of seasonal content in Diablo 3… that it is entirely disposable.
What pains me however is to lose access to what has been one of my favorite auto rifles to date… what I consider to be the perfect roll of Steelfeather Repeater. At least in the case of this weapon it looks like I probably have one more season left in it after this one is over given it has a cap of 1260 rather than 1060. This seasonal reset could be really good, if Bungie plays it correctly. When Forsaken came out all gear in our vaults was magically upgraded to 750 light, and I think Bungie needs to do this each time a season changes. So when the next season releases we should all bump up to 1060 light, which was the previous cap so that everyone starts each season on a level playing field.
I admit that a significant amount of why I have not played my Hunter is because she is currently sitting at 857. The baseline starting point for this expansions content is 1000, and Bungie would love to sell me the ability to catch up to that point quickly. It is not however worth 2000 Silver to boost up to that point, but it also represents a non-zero amount of time to sit down and grind that level up. If I am having that feeling about a third string alt, then I imagine there are a lot of players who have not participated in months or years that are feeling the same way. I know my friend Warenwolf had not played since the gear boost to 750 and as a result had a lot of catching up to do before he became “viable”.
Ultimately I would love to see them get into a cadence so that each time the game moves forward in level, your characters get mailed a set of gear that represents the minimum level required to start the next grind. Eight blues don’t really do anything to destabilize the game or the gear economy, but they go a long way to making players feel like catching up is within reach. This makes it significantly easier for those of us who are playing the game actively to successfully talk our friends into returning to give it one more try. As it stands now however… the progression of the game feels like a runaway train to anyone who has not been actively playing, which is bad for bringing folks back into the fold.
The post Warlocks are Slow appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
