We hit the craziest streak last night. So if you have read this blog for any period of time you will know that my friend Grace is pretty much my driving force for half of the nonsense that I get up to in Diablo 3. We started the evening with a simple goal of leveling a bunch of Gems… or at least in my case getting the gems I actually needed for my set. In order to do a run of a bunch of Greater Rifts we were grinding some normal’s to get keystones when we happened upon a Cow Level themed Rift. After completing the Rift we just let it ride and kept going because we noticed a trend that pretty much every floor had a Goblin on it. This trend continued until Floor 11 with only Floor 9 not producing a Goblin that we were at least aware of. Sadly none of them were menagerist goblins, but we did get a bunch of crafting material, gem and blood shard goblins. Sometimes in Diablo 3 you just have to roll with whatever the randomizer gives you. I am not sure if the one goblin per floor thing happens in every single Cow Level Rift, but if you wind up getting one leave me a note in the comments as to your results.

This image… is a prime example of why people hate Kadala. I was trying to get an Aquila Cuirass for the cube which is normally something I have seen dozens of by this point in the season. As a result I spent down my new found wealth of blood shards and got an inventory full of yellow and blue with absolutely nothing even vaguely interesting. There are times when this would be half full of legendaries and set pieces, but nope… the Kadala express decided to let all of the passengers off at Trash Town.

The set dungeon continues to more or less be the bane of my existence. I did manage to get through enough of it to get Slayer knocked out, but now I am stalled out on gems and Set Dungeon Mastery on Champion. What I ultimately need is to spend some time working on some of these things when I don’t have a captive audience willing to do literally anything else. It feels like doing my homework when I have these handful of tasks that I really don’t enjoy, but I know I should take care of so I can progress past them. Ultimately I am trying to push all the way to the end so I can get the Tyrael themed Goblin pet which is being offered this season. Here is hoping I can mange to do that, but I am not loving the Wizard. I have half a mind to convince Grace to boost me a Demon Hunter, because thus far at least Wizard is really not my jam. There is an explosions build that I am trying to piece together which I think doesn’t have near the top end capability, but would maybe feel more mobile than the meteor build I am running with currently. This is probably going to be the last time I play up a Wizard however because I didn’t quite understand how different they were as far as squishitude. Demon Hunter can be pretty squishy but they have way better mobility to handle it. Wizard… just wants to die a lot.

Friday was the start of another Diablo 3 Season, and as is usually the case Grace and I met up and leveled together until I decided it was time for bed. This season we also grabbed our friend Byx to join along in the fun, which made for a really enjoyable grind. Since I had never gotten a Wizard or a Witch Doctor to level 70, I opted to play a Wizard this time around and to be honest… it is messing with my head. Finger Wigglers are not exactly the sort of classes I excel at, and I am having trouble adjusting to just how squishy I am and now much I am riding the razors edge between destroying everything with impunity and my down death.

The set this time is Tal Rasha which has a bunch of different viable builds. Essentially the idea behind it is to stack up a massive buff for casting an ability of each element. This sort of idea plays nicely into items like the Convention of Elements that give you alternating buffs, but there really is no way to actually time hitting the right ability while the right buff is up… or at least that is not something in my scope of functionality. Instead I teleport wildly while spamming every ability trying desperately to keep my buff at 4 stacks while destroying everything with a cavalcade of Meteors raining down from above.

This season we cheated and cheated hard in the form of Saturday morning getting one hell of a boost from a friend of ours named Kolrath. He seemingly ground all night long and by 9 am Saturday morning was a whirling avatar of death that managed to push me from 40 to 70 and Grace from 55 to 70 in a matter of two runs. After that I have spent a bunch of the weekend farming bounties in an attempt to get all of the items needed for my particular build. At this point I think I have them and now begins the slow process of grinding out the post seasons journey steps. The bane of my existence is the set dungeon and I will have to buckle down and master that as it is ultimately going to hold me back from completing two of the steps.

I really do not like being on a timer and having to be mindful of that while doing a bunch of other shit… is pretty much the exact opposite of the kind of gameplay that I want from a game. As a result it is the set dungeon that always hamstrings my progress. I can do them, I just need to sort of force myself to do them. If anyone is online and doing literally anything else… I will join in that and ignore my maintenance duties. Similarly I tend to push off the solo Greater Rifts as well, but at least in this case I have done through a solo 40 and need to knock out a solo 50 soonish. I am missing most of the gems that i need to finish this set so I am going to be doing a lot of grinding of Greater Rifts.