Tales of the Aggronaut – Page 659

Seasonal Bits

October 21, 2016 by Belghast

Tonight begins the next season for Diablo 3, and I have to admit much like season 7 this one completely snuck up on me. Were it not for my friend Grace the beginning of the season would have passed me by completely. For the last several of these we have done a Friday night vigil as we attempt to grind our way up to 70 on a brand new set of seasonal characters. Once again I think I am going to go with a Demon Hunter, largely because they seemed super easy to push through the seasonal process and at least get high enough to collect the cosmetic goodies. I am just not super into Diablo 3 right now, the evidence being that it just got removed from my side bar. The challenge is that I can only have so many games that I actively care about at one time. Right now I am spending the bulk of my time playing World of Warcraft, and attempting to steal as much time as humanly possible to feed my love of Destiny. From there I am also juggling in some time for Guild Wars 2 and Final Fantasy XIV… while at the same time trying to keep a foot in Rift for when the expansion lands there. This scattered approach at gaming has a lot to be desired at times, because it ends up leaving me feeling like no one game is getting the attention it deserves. Diablo 3 fell off the radar once I managed to get last seasons cosmetic items, and I had not even realized the season had closed until Grace talked about merging in her seasonal inventory. This in itself is one hell of a chore, but I find myself getting significantly more mercenary about this process as the seasons go along. Pretty much any legendary that is not ancient quality or part of the actively equipped set of gear… gets sharded.

The above screenshot is just because I wound up setting up a new outfit in Rift, and thought it was cool. I’ve loved the whole shade touched effect since the very first world event, and this time around for their “fall” event they are offering a shade touched skull that I could add to my wardrobe collection. I also picked up the scythe made of bone… because I kinda have a thing for scythes. The other interesting thing that I learned this morning is that apparently FRAPs does not handle DSR well. Dynamic Super Resolution is a thing that Nvidia cards can do, where they essentially run the game in 4k on a 1080p resolution. That is an oversimplification of what it ACTUALLY does but we are just going to go for that simplistic definition for the time being. I am going to need to go out hunting and see if I can find another all purpose screenshot program, because fraps apparently only takes a single 1080p panel of the larger image. This wound up with some rather comedic screenshots while trying to capture something for this mornings post. I finally wound up doing Alt+PrintScreen and pasting it into photoshop to get the results this morning… which also caused the FRAPs framerate counter to come along with it. DSR works great for a game like League of Legends or Diablo 3, but it does some weird stuff as a result. I guess I need to do some experimenting with the nvidia screenshot tool that comes with the new version of “Experience” and see if it works well enough to kick fraps to the curb. Thing is that is really all I use it for… dumping screenshots from every game into a single “gameshots” directory for me to sort through for the purpose of this here blog. In any case… the plan is to hang out in Diablo 3 tonight and do another grind ritual with the start of this brand new season. I always have a blast doing it, even when I am not exactly prepared for it.

Two More Fall

October 20, 2016 by Belghast

Last night was a pretty great night. For the last several weeks since Emerald Nightmare released, Wednesday nights have been raid night. At this very moment we are just raiding one night a week, and at first that probably held us back a little. However given the last two weeks I think overall gearing was a bigger issue. Last week we went from only being able to take down Nythendra to adding Elerethe Renferal, Ursoc, and the Dragons of Nightmare to the list. Though admittedly both the Ursoc and Dragons kill felt like sheer dumb luck and bursty dps. This week however we largely added to the mix what felt like repeatable versions of those kills. Myself and Art the other tank finally sorted out something resembling a workable taunt rotation on Ursoc, and the fight went from being insanely spikey…. to pretty damned easy. Similarly with Dragons of Nightmare we just straight up did the fight like we knew what was happening this time… and it went down in a single attempt. Elerethe would have been a one shot were it not for both of us tanks getting knocked off the platform. That was not my proudest moment.

However I am in fact super proud that we managed to get things together for Il’gynoth and added our very first kill this week. Overall it felt like our dps increased between the two weeks, and with it a better sense of what needed to die when. Instead of leaving the Horror up for quite a while we had nice gaps to burn it in… and while we cut it a little close for comfort at around the 10 seconds until wipe mark, it was still a victory. From there we decided to take a stab at Cenarius and actually extended past our normal run time because we made decent progress on the fight. It still feels like there are a lot of levers we could and should tweak to make sure that fight is more repeatable, however we got the kill and hopefully will begin work on Xavius next week. I realize this is “just normal” as the chorus of the more serious raiders might say… but screw it I am happy with our progress. I feel like we are even probably going to start mixing in some heroics before too much longer. Especially with the release of Karazhan on the 25th and it adding some additional gearing options for folks. I am hoping to get a team going there pretty quickly, because I am more excited about that place than pretty much any content in any MMO. I loved the original Karazhan and good or bad, ran it quite literally every Sunday afternoon for what felt like two years to help gear folks and their alts, only to later be replaced by Zul’Aman runs. I think more than anything… most of us are simply going to be happy that before long we can complete the balance of power quest step and move on to the next batch of mythics.

Two More Fall

October 20, 2016 by Belghast

Light Rising

October 19, 2016 by Belghast

I’ve been on a bit of a Destiny kick lately, and that has involved trying to do at a minimum all of the Rise of Iron bounties that Shiro hands out each week. These largely involve running around the plaguelands and doing “stuff” like specific patrols and participating in world events. I’ve also recently discovered the bounty that is the Archon’s Forge. I admit I was a little intimidated for awhile, given that when you enter the forge it essentially locks you out of leaving. My ultimate fear is that this place would murder me with great prejudice given my relatively low light levels. That fortunately was not really the case, and I was also pleased to see that the same sort of “key trading” behavior exists in the forge as it did in the Court of Oryx. I’ve been playing entirely solo so far since the launch of Rise of Iron, mostly because I am playing in short bursts rather than hanging out and making myself available to the clan for shenanigans. However pretty much any time I have rolled down to the Forge, there have been people there waiting and willing to summon stuff for us to fight. I still have trouble with the “purple” quality keys, but both green and blue ones seem largely feasible. Unfortunately it seems like you have zero control over what sort of key drops for you, and at this very moment I happen to be sitting on a purple key myself.

The forge is quite literally a modern day version of the “loot cave” because after thirty minutes or so of running keys back to back… you end up with a full mail box. This is not actually a screenshot from last night, but one I had laying around from one of my previous trips into the Forge. Last night however it became significantly more lucrative for me personally. Patch 2.4.1 did some juggling of things in preparation for the release of the Heroic Mode raid. As a result the light economy of items got bumped up a bit, allowing folks a slightly easier time catching up.

Rare Engrams will now decrypt up to 365 Light
Legendary Engrams will now decrypt up to 385 Light
Exotic Engrams will now decrypt up to 400 Light
Faction packages will now provide drops up to 390 Light

So as a result to these tweaks… I entered last nights play session at 554 and exited at 560 and on the cusp of pushing over the line with several 361 items. In the first screenshot I am decked out in Future War Cult colors… because I picked up some quest asking me to do a bunch of content both PVE and PVP repping the FWC. I have no clue what that actually will lead to but I am interested to see. The moment to moment gameplay of Destiny still feels as great as it ever did, and I am pumped that I can pop in for an hour and do a few things and feel like I moved the needle forward. I am super loot centric in my games, and so long as I am progressing my gear levels I feel like I am making meaningful progress.

The ultimate short term goal is to get to 365 so that I can join in all of the reindeer games… namely have access to the normal mode of the raid. I’ve heard amazing things about it, but I have just lacked the drive to grind things out in the strike play list. In fact I have yet to run a single strike since the implementation of Rise of Iron… which seems a little odd given how often I used to run them for nothing more than burning Three of Coins. I feel like I am torn in a bunch of different directions right now and trying to juggle actively playing four different games: Destiny, World of Warcraft, Guild Wars 2 and Final Fantasy XIV. As a result I am doing a somewhat shitty job of keeping up in any of them other than World of Warcraft, where I seem to be spending most of my time. That said in WoW I feel like I am bumping up against the ceiling for the gear levels I can realistically achieve other than through my Wednesday night raid… so some of my drive there is siphoning off. At the very least I am not really doing the world quests like I used to, because I know there is shit for gear out of them at my levels. This excess time seems to be getting funneled right back into Destiny, but I do need to steal a little bit of it and work on my gearing in Final Fantasy XIV as well. I am absolutely holding our group back from doing some of the new content because I am about 15 item levels short of being where I should be. If only I could clone myself… and keep those clones at home all day long playing all the things I want to be playing.