AggroChat

Netflix Castlevania

July 11, 2017 by Belghast

It would be a bit of an understatement to say I was excited about the new Netflix anime series based loosely on the events of Castlevania III. I have a deep relationship with this game series and while I have not played a lot of them, it was nonetheless extremely important during my formative video game playing years. The original was the very first game that I saved up money to purchase for the Nintendo Entertainment System. Back then at roughly age 11, it took a long time to scrounge up the money to buy a $50 video game… but that was really only half of the obstacle. To get the game itself required going someplace that had video games… or at least in the case of Castlevania a trip to Toys R Us… the closest of which was an hour and some change away from home. To say I devoured the game is a bit of an understatement as well… there are sequences in the original game that are burned into my brain just as indelibly as the Vampire Killer theme is. I have said this plenty of times… but I count Castlevania Symphony of the Night as my favorite game of all time and consider it pretty damned closed to perfect. When Koji Igarashi started the kickstarter for Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night… I threw money at my screen and backed it as soon as I could. Since then I have played through the demo version that backers got a few times… so to say I am the target audience is also probably a bit of an understatement.

The show released officially over the weekend on the 7th but I just finally was able to sit down for a period of time and watch through it last night. Prior to doing so I had been seeing a bit of confusing press floating around with folks generally being unsatisfied with the new netflix offering. Firstly this is probably the most bingeable Netflix “series” I have ever seen… with only 4 episodes weighing in around 100 minutes of total watching. This honestly felt more like a pilot and less like a complete series, but I won’t get hung up on those details. What the season is more than anything is setting the stage for the second season. Since this series is roughly based on the third Nintendo Entertainment System Castlevania game… we go into it knowing some of the major plot points and it seems like the show more or less is following them. During the four episodes we are introduced to a cast of characters that will play out over the series… but I found it curious that at least one major character was completely absent. I am hoping this was just a situation of not having met him yet through the course of the very short few episodes that we got, and will join the team as a later reveal. The show sets up the central conflict between the early science hating church and Dracula… and to a lesser extent the general forces of the enlightenment. For the Christian viewers… I could see some of the dialog being a little hard to swallow. For me personally… it did an excellent job of setting up the central conflict that made Castlevania III so different than some of the others in the series.

One of the complaints that I have seen online about the show is that Dracula is not set up to be a sympathetic character… and frankly I disagree. I found myself sympathizing with Dracula quite a bit honestly, and were I in his position I probably would have wanted to burn everything to the ground as well. As far as matching the tone of the games… you are supposed to hate Dracula because ultimately that is the core conflict. Castlevania more or less is about the central conflict between the Belmont family and Dracula. More or less every 100 years Castlevania materializes in our plane of existence, and the Belmont clan trains to be able to stop him each time. This series has a Belmont and a Dracula… so I feel like it met all of the necessary requirements for being able to call itself a Castlevania anything. I honestly thought all of the character introductions worked extremely well, especially Alucard… who isn’t 100% on our side and we get that impression. The real problem with the series as I see it is that I want more of it. Four episodes was just not enough because it essentially serves as the pregame cinematic setting everything up… and we haven’t really gotten to any of the meat of the game yet… or in this case the series. I mean they had to functionally tell an origin story given that they cannot really guarantee that anyone who is watching the show has ever actually consumed any of the source material. I feel like they did a great job of setting the stage… but I am not really looking forward to the likely two year wait until the next batch of episodes. This time I am hoping they give us way more than four in a single sitting. This won’t be the show for everyone… but I am not looking to nitpick something that I never thought I would actually see in my lifetime. I am more than happy just to sit back and enjoy it.

Witch Doctor Set Mastery

July 10, 2017 by Grace

I’m still slowly moving forward with the goal of mastering all of the set dungeons in Diablo 3. So far I’ve finished the Demon Hunter, Wizard, and Crusader ones. Next I decided to work on the Witch Doctor mastery, since I play that class fairly often and had all of the sets laying around. Sadly even with all of the time I spent with the class, I had only mastered one dungeon so I still had plenty of work to do. At least the pennant reward for this mastery looks neat!

The set dungeon I had already completed was the Jade Harvester’s. I decided to try it again for this project just to remind myself what it was like so I could record it here. The objectives are to harvest 15 enemies (x10) and kill a total of 100 enemies while they’re affected by both haunt and locust swarm. I got it on my first attempt. It definitely helped that this is the set I’m most comfortable with and I had plenty of choices for legendaries to make it work. I suspect the biggest issue with this one would normally be clearing everything within the timer since the map is fairly large and convoluted. I used Shukrani’s Triumph in the cube which let me spirit walk until I attacked or found an enemy, which made for a speedy, easy run.

Next up was the Helltooth Harness set dungeon. The first objective here is easy. “Do not take any poison damage” can be utterly trivialized by cubing Mara’s Kaleidoscope. I’m sure it is possible to do without this item but why bother if you have one available? The second objective is to kill 20 enemies with a single wall of death (x4). This was the sort of objective that gives me trouble. First, you have to be able to 1-shot the small enemies with your wall, which hopefully shouldn’t be too hard. I used a Jeram’s Bracers to increase damage to make sure of this. More importantly though, you actually have to find or make groups of 20 enemies. It was tricky to do since the dungeon has a lot of little pockets and pillars that make it hard to find and group up the mobs. I had no trouble running through and killing everything in time, but it took me 5 or 6 tries to meet this objective. If RNG is kind and you get good pack placement this one should be easy.

After that I worked on the Arachyr’s Mantle dungeon. The easier objective here was to let your hex toad lick 30 enemies. On my first attempt I was so eager to get this done that I botched the other objective. Killing all of the elites while they are both webbed and piranha’d was tricky simply because they got accidentally killed by other things first. On the plus side there aren’t that many enemies and the layout is fairly straightforward so eventually I just ran through to find the elites first and then let the toad mop up for my 30 licks. The other good thing about this one is it didn’t require much in the way of specialized legendaries other than the set itself. It took a few tries to get the hang of what I needed to do but was definitely easier than the Helltooth dungeon.

The last of the Witch Doctor dungeons was Zunimassa’s. This one asks you to grip 150 enemies in grasp of the dead, and to avoid getting into melee range with anything. That second requirement really slows you down, because you can never risk running ahead and getting too close to an enemy. With reasonable gear things should die quickly to your swarm of pets before they get to you though. I managed to 1-shot this one without even looking at the map ahead of time, so I’d call this one very easy.

Overall these were way easier than I expected them to be. Since I already had all the gear I needed I managed to knock all of them out in a single evening. I’m getting close to my goal but the next two classes are ones I’ve never played so there will be some down time while I level and farm gear for them. Still, I’m getting close enough that those awesome wings look like an achievable goal now!

Leveling DPS is Butts

July 10, 2017 by Belghast

One of the best parts about Final Fantasy XIV is that you can literally be every possible class be it crafting or battlecraft on the same character. One of the worst parts of Final Fantasy XIV is that for the most part leveling alt jobs has been a pretty grindy proposal. When you first set down to level in Final Fantasy XIV, you have all of these side quests and main story quests to keep the game feeling fresh and keep the content moving forward at a decent clip. Unfortunately when you sit down to level any of your other Jobs you find out just how much of your original quest experience came from that unrepeatable main story. As always I leveled my Warrior first because well… like it or not I am a tank at heart and for three expansions now I have not deviated from that mission. There was some brief flirtation with potentially going Dark Knight, but in the end Warrior just suits me best. However now I have reached that point where I have functionally geared the warrior as far as I can without the aid of Omega drops, and as a result I have turned my attention to trying to run my first DPS up. You can tell by the above image that my DPS of choice this go round is the brand new Samurai job. The only problem there is… quite honestly leveling as a DPS without the aid of the Main Story Quest… is butts and highlights some of the problems that Final Fantasy XIV still has when it comes to a lack of reasonable alternate leveling paths.

Previously in A Realm Reborn era especially… I used to hop in a FATE grinding party and move on with life. There were fabled zones like South Shroud or Northern Thanalan that were largely devoted to groups of players running around and trying to kill the FATEs as fast as possible. Unfortunately with the transition to Heavensward, there was a massive nerf of FATE experience and with it the grind party devotees started to disappear. When Palace of the Dead was introduced it gave us a ladder to follow to slowly bring those alts up to speed through grinding sets of 10 floors at a time. Unfortunately however the PotD experience is pretty horrible with the bar barely moving at level 61. There is a bit of a FATE presence in The Fringes, but everyone is fairly disorganized with no groups available through the party finder. There was some talk over the weekend of maybe starting up a guild FATE party just to get all our various alts leveled in a reasonable manner. My current MO has been to queue for a dungeon or roulette and grind FATEs until it pops and in the grand scheme of things this has worked well enough. Over the weekend I went from 60 on my Samurai to 65 as of last night, which a huge chunk of that happening during recording the podcast and simply bouncing from FATE to FATE until we finished. I remember that is also how I leveled my gathering professions, since while I am podcasting I can seem to grind something without even noticing it. I would also try this with Palace of the Dead, but before long I would find myself running circles in Quarymill while we recorded… much the same as I used to run circles in Dalaran.

I honestly thought I was being clever in this expansion, and after the end of Raubahn Savage… I found myself up enough in experience that I started attempting to ignore every side quest and only push through with a laser focus on the main story. My thought was this would ultimately help out the first alt that I leveled, and over the weekend I returned to Ruby Sea where I had dozens and dozens of quests to complete. Unfortunately… these quests provide next to no experience and simply only add bits of story to help flesh out the world a bit. I spent about an hour and completed a dozen or so quests… when I realized that my experience bar had moved less than if I had gotten gold in a single FATE. Hell to be truthful just wandering the world grinding random mobs seemed to be better experience than the side quests were providing. In the past this would be the moment that I would start leaning heavily on Battlecraft Leves… but unfortunately much to my frustration it seems that they simply do not exist in Stormblood. There are crafting leves in Kugane but neither there nor Rhalgar’s Reach have anything for the battlecraft jobs. I mean leves were a horrible experience in Heavensward and the thought of having to keep popping back to the Foundation between rounds was maddening. However they were there if you got desperate and there were many times I got desperate enough to see some steady progress on the experience bar. There are hunts of course, and I have been doing my daily hunt logs but again… while they are an excellent source of seals… they are a pretty crappy source of experience.

If I am playing a tank or a healer… then this whole question of how to level becomes moot. You simply queue for dungeons and ride the constant string of instant queues until you hit 70. However there seems to be something missing to help the DPS get a leg up. Now the leveling roulette and 50/60 roulette seem to go significantly faster than queuing for a specific dungeon. Over the weekend leveling roulette seemed to be about a 10-15 minute queue for dps, and 50/60 somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 minutes… with queuing for an individual level and gear appropriate dungeon taking somewhere in the neighborhood of 30-40 minutes. If I was able to run FATEs while waiting on the queue to tick down it did not feel too horrible, or at least it felt like I was making steady forward momentum. However if I happened in one of the patches where the folks were not touching the FATEs at all… it was noticeably dragging. Compare that to the experience of playing a healer or a tank… with their push button get dungeon mechanics and it just feels lousy. At least with Palace of the Dead providing reasonable experience, you could skirt a lot of the issues and get by just fine with four dps parties in there. I am not sure where it is on the roadmap, but I am really hoping we see the next iteration of Palace of the Dead launching with 4.1. Until then… I think once I finish leveling the Samurai I will probably focus on my other tanks and my healers before returning to the DPS queue hell again. This is also why I have been trying to offer my short tank queues whenever possible to the free company… because leveling DPS is butts.

AggroChat #164 – Fish With Hats

May 21, 2019July 9, 2017 by AggroChat

Featuring: Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, Thalen

Tonight we talk about a bunch of assorted topics. Firstly we talk about the issues with leveling second jobs in Final Fantasy XIV Stormblood. We reprise our discussion about how they should have introduced a new tank this expansion. We talk a bit about the new raid Omega and why we generally think it’s better than Alexander was. From there we get into a discussion about phones and mobile gaming, and the game Grace is currently playing where you collect interesting fish with hats. We venture forth into a discussion about the Diablo 3 Necromancer and the upcoming Season 11. Thalen and Ashgar have been hanging out with space ninjas and we get into a discussion about Warframe. Finally we go into a lengthy discussion about Warhammer 40,000 and how much the game has improved.

Topics Discussed: