Tonight we start off with a brief reprise of last week’s Diablo 3 Season 23 topic. Because of the changes to followers this is pretty much the easiest season yet to complete in full. We talk briefly about the Diablo 2 technical alpha going on and how it is mostly just D2 but prettier. Grace talks about her experiences with Cozy Grove which is effectively Animal Crossing but Ghost Bears. Tam and Thalen talk about their experiences with Super Adventure Box in Guild Was 2. Bel talks a bit about Games Preservation and more specifically the release of a demo copy of the long rumored Castlevania Resurrection. Finally we go down a topic path that has been sitting on our list for awhile and talk about directed gameplay versus guided gameplay.
Morning Friends! Now that I have finished the Diablo 3 Season 23 grind, that means I have more or less defaulted back to trying to finish my Nightblade off in Elder Scrolls Online. There are still several more days of the Anniversary Festival and with that the double experience buff that comes from eating cake. I personally find this pretty chill and relaxing to just hop in and join one of the auto groups and grind away until my bags fill. While doing this I have been spending quite a bit of time recently listening to music, which is odd to say that I have not done in a very long time. I have no clue what happened because music used to be such a critical part of my life, but over the years I gravitated more and more towards instrumental music… and then just stopped listening to something in the background all together.
This most recent foray has been thanks to my good friend Bells, which I realize is somewhat confusing given that I go by Bel with one L. She has created a handful of really good playlists that are theme based with the most recent one being centered around the music of Generation X, or at least those of us growing up at a very particular age. Listening to this feels like I transported back to being seventeen again and cruising around in my beat up 1977 Honda Civic Hatchback. If you are interested then I highly suggest this playlist, and I also really enjoy her punk playlist as well.
I admittedly am pretty new to using Spotify, which I know sounds weird given how ubiquitous it has become. I am by no means a stranger to streaming audio, I just went down a different path to arrive here. Originally I was a huge proponent of Pandora, because with the closing of Oink’s Pink Palace I was looking for a new discovery engine more than anything else. I was no longer listening to the radio and with it I needed a new vehicle for discovering new music that I might like. From there I shifted over to Google Music and was there until they started screwing with it and trying to turn it into YouTube Music. After that I had a brief stint with Amazon Music but kept running into gaps in their inventory of songs which lead me to finally subscribe to Spotify.
One of the things that I didn’t love about Google Music was the lack of a way to publicly share a playlist with someone else… and actually allow them to listen to it. This is something that is solved with Spotify and recently I have been working on my own stupidly large playlist. It is far from complete and likely never will be… but if you are so inclined I give you Bel’s Confusing Blend. I highly suggest listening to it on shuffle given that there are large blocks of the same artist right now in a row. It is intended more as a radio station style experience and shuffle mostly does that. I sorta wish I had the ability to pre-shuffle the list and at some point I might actually sort it by hand to make it flow a little better but for now it is what it is.
One of the things that I used to love as a kid is creating mix tapes and I might start doing that again. A mix tape was a specific vehicle where the songs flowed in a specific way as to invoke a particular feeling. I miss doing this and if I can find some of the ones I created in the past for friends, I might port them over, but I have no clue if I saved any of that. I lost most of my musical archives at one point which is ultimately what lead me to embrace streaming. Today is going to be a bit of a busy day, but at least I will have a personal soundtrack to nurture me.
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Morning Friends! Yesterday involved a significant number of rounds of bounties because that is ultimately what I needed in order to get Avarice done the predictable way. I took a screenshot of this fully cleared map because it was a bit of a rarity. I talked about this a bit but I am having an issue where I am crashing to desktop rather often while playing Diablo 3 this season. Other friends are reporting the same behavior so I am guessing it has something to do with the sweeping changes that were patched in surrounding followers. This however should be a public service announcement to go ahead and close your bounties and collect the caches because it was very rare that I actually made it through all five zones before getting a crash to desktop.
One of the things with Avarice is that I tend to overfarm significantly because I do not trust my own mathematics. Essentially I have developed this habit of running one full round past when I think I have hit my goal. Effectively I had 40 caches divided between 10 T13 caches and 30 T16 caches. This is way more than I actually needed because if you do the math you end up with something like this:
10 Torment 13 Bounty Caches at 1,190,000 gold each = 11,900,000 gold
30 Torment 16 Bounty Caches at 1,640,000 gold each = 49,200,000 gold
Combined gives me a grand total of 61,100,000 gold
In theory I could have stopped at 25 Torment 16 caches and 10 Torment 13 caches because that would have given me roughly 52 million gold but that was cutting it a little close for my tastes so I went ahead and farmed just one more round. The scary thing is… while I was loading up my inventory with caches to go for the final opening… I crashed to desktop. I did not take a picture of the loot everywhere because I was afraid to do ANYTHING until I had locked down all of that random loot.
Once I got Avarice done, all that was really left was to cube a bunch of legendaries to finish out the achievement for collecting 40 legendary abilities. Ultimately this is always the last thing that I knock out because I will end up with such an overwhelming amount of resources from the bounty caches that it just simply becomes a matter of finding enough items in my vault that I have not already cubed. Thankfully I have a bad habit of just dumping random legendaries in my vault rather than dealing with them as I go so I end up with plenty of fodder for the cube.
At this point you might be asking yourself… why do you do this every season? The answer is simple. It is for the pet. This time around it was an adorable angry kitty person that I could not pass up. For the last several seasons there has been a chase pet that you can only get by finishing the entire season and I love them. Will it matter once Diablo 4 releases and everyone migrates over to that game? Probably not but for now I am enjoying my wide array of gold collecting pet options. Now that the season is effectively over for me I am going to return to Elder Scrolls Online as my daily driver apart from popping back into Diablo 3 to help others with their seasonal journey. I had a lot of fun, because it is this super condensed leveling and grinding process. Then again I always enjoy the seasonal ride.
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Morning Friends! One of the aspects of this season that is super hard to get used to is just how prevalent Death’s Breath ends up being. Given that there are a limited number of items that make sense to be equipped on your follower, there is no reason why you shouldn’t be rocking the Sage set for the bonus to DB drops. This is what it looks like when you destroy a slime goblin and the sea of teal that I am not tired of yet. The challenge however is that every other crafting resource seems more scarce, especially the white quality “Reusable Parts”. This however has been a season where I am never having to worry about enchanting or rerolling items because I almost always have a full stock of items waiting to be used.
Yesterday I talked about my hang up with Set Dungeons, but given it was one of the things holding me back I set forth to complete one last night. I remembered Immortal Kings being fairly easy in the past so I cobbled together the set of gear that goes with that build. Thankfully I pretty much had everything I needed already sitting in my vault because I am a horrible packrat when it comes to Diablo loot. At least in this specific instance it really paid off because after all of the hemming and hawing about doing this… I walked in and got mastery on my first attempt. At some point on my non-seasonal characters I really should go through the process of completing all of the set dungeons so I can get those spiffy wings.
That leaves the only real thing left on my seasonal journey gathering enough bounty caches to get Avarice. Right now I have 10 Torment 13 caches and 13 Torment 16 caches sitting in my vault. If you follow the math that i posted yesterday that would give a grand total of 33,220,000 of the 55,000,000 needed for the Avarice achievement. However when it comes to this achievement I always overshoot the goal because I am scared to death that I will start the process and not have enough gold and end up having to farm everything all over again. So my plan right now is to fill up the 12 remaining slots in that vault with Torment 16 caches and maybe start into a second vault just to make certain.
Another part of the seasonal grind is getting Primal Ancient Legendary items and I have to admit my luck has been somewhat spotty in that department. So far I have gotten four with my first one being a Restraint… which would be awesome in any other season where that is a common item needed for a build but significantly less awesome this particular season. The second item was my Bull-Kathos main hand and probably the best possible item I could have hoped for. After that I have picked up two complete trash items in Kymbo’s Gold and Pledge of Caldeum. I WISH that the last of those was a one handed spear instead of a polearm so at least my follower could equip it. This is sorta the way of primals however because they very rarely drop as something that would be useful to you.
The main problem I am encountering right now in progressing is that whatever changes were made to implement follower loot seems to have damaged the overall stability of the game client. I am seeing a significantly higher instance of crashes to desktop and they seem to always happen at the worst possible time. As such I am not holding my bounties open because way too often I end up crashing out on the fifth zone of bounties each time. I have other friends talking about crashing out while doing Greater Rifts and I have had one of those occur as well. I am hoping that maybe just maybe I will farm up enough caches tonight in order to finish the season.
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