Yesterday was the beginning of the first Iron Banner of Season 11, and with it I decided to start my grind once again on my least favorite character. It had been a few seasons since I last participated in Iron Banner, but when I last did it involved a quest line that required you to do a bunch of weapon based kill quests on each character. I figured I would devote last night to trying to get the Hunter through the quest and then work on the Warlock and Titan on following evenings. However it turns out that has all changed and there is now a single simple quest that involves killing 25 folks with sidearms and another 25 with auto rifles.
The reward for this is getting the new seasonal copy of an auto rifle and a sidearm. While the old quests were a bit of a slog, it was nice because you wound up with a full set of armor and a random roll for each individual weapon that would be dropping. This felt pretty good because if you got a shitty drop on one character you might get an amazing drop when you get over to the next character. Example right now I have gotten a single drop of The Forward Path and it is truly heinous. Essentially it is an auto rifle without any range or impact with all of the stability and handling you could ever want which seems extremely bad.
For the side arm I got what feels like a thoroughly mediocre roll. I am still not entirely certain I like playing with side arms, but I most definitely do not like playing with anything that looks this stupid. Suros designs are either awesome or horrific looking with little middle ground. This however shows the problem of having only one quest and one set of drops per account. There are two new weapons that will last for several seasons and both of the rolls that I got from them were duds. Granted I can keep grinding the Iron Banner forever and getting more drops.
The problem with that is Bungie disabled Skill Based Matchmaking, which is a hot button issue in the crucible community. Essentially it favors players with a better connection over players that are actually within your skill range. The end result is that folks like me who are not terribly good at pvp get matched with folks like Aztecross who is a pvp focused streamer and YouTuber. There is no way in hell that someone who regularly gets to the lighthouse in Trials of Osiris should ever be matched up with a scrub like me. However in the land of magical thinking and mystery it happens because apparently we have similar connections. He absolutely carried our team to victory, and I did next to nothing in the process.
Bungie has gone back and forth on this point over the years, and I feel like there has to be a happy middle ground because right now doing the crucible if you are not a crucible player feels miserable. However when skill based matchmaking is enabled all of the PVP Streamers and YouTubers scream their heads off about it because it is in their words “too sweaty”. As they move further and further up the bracket they get matched with progressively closer and closer groups of players until there is a point where there are no casual matches and only the most white knuckle gaming ever. This seems fair to me to be honest, given that as you improve you should be matched up higher and higher moving to a group of your peers.
The end result is that I wind up having to put myself in a mindset where I just do not give a shit about if I win or lose, and that I am tightly focused on completing whatever objectives I might have for quests. I also try really hard to break up the crushing defeat by venturing forth into other activities. I took a break last night to knock out some of my strike objectives for example, and when I returned to the Iron Banner I was once again ready to get my face beat in. I hope that Bungie looks at the data and decides disabling Skill Based matchmaking is a bad idea, because other than big events like Iron Banner it seems like it is only going to drive off the more casual gamers.
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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.
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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
