Slow Day

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Slow Day

This morning I am struggling a bit to find something worth writing about.  Last night instead of throwing myself against Trial 3 in FFXIV, I opted to play some more Necromancer in Diablo 3.  Necromancer the class is extremely good, and probably what I will be playing during the next season which should be starting sometime in mid July.  The biggest problem I am running into with Diablo is that I am going to start needing to do the seasonal reboot of characters thing, given that my slots are starting to run out.  As of last night around 11 pm I got Necromancer to 70, but literally dinged…  watched the cutscenes and went to bed.  That leaves the only classes in D3 that I have never taken to 70 being the Wizard and Witch Doctor…. something I probably need to remedy at some point.  I think my little break from Final Fantasy XIV did some good, because right now I am ready to get in…. and bash my face against the trial until I get through it.  More than anything I want to get to the other side of that trial because it is currently locking me from doing a bunch of end game content.  I’ve hear that my friend Morenhai has already defeated one of the extreme primal fights, which only serves to make me feel way further behind.  I will say thought that hanging out and milling around in Diablo 3 was just about the maximum amount of social interaction that I was capable of supporting the last few days.  I’ve been going through a bit of a rough patch, and I probably need to hang out again with people to push through it.

Slow Day

I really do not have a whole lot to talk about this morning other than the fact that I am going to make more attempts on Trial 3 tonight, and here is hoping I don’t end up needing another break from Stormblood as a result.

 

Rise of the Necromancer

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Yesterday saw the launch of the new Necromancer class in Diablo 3. If you’ve been around this blog a while you know I’m a huge D3 fan, so it was a no-brainer for me to spend $14.99 to pick up the new goodies. I spent most of my evening yesterday checking out the class and some of the other offerings that came along with the newest patch, and came away very pleased.

The first thing I tried when I booted up D3 last night was the new Challenge Rift system. Okay I lied the first thing I did was run to my stash and rearrange things to take advantage of the 2 new stash tabs I got with my necromancer purchase. But after that the next thing I did was try a challenge rift! The system took me a minute to figure out. Namely, to get to the challenge rift, you have to select a character, but before you log into a new game you must go to the game settings. Challenge rift will be a new option for your game type (beside the old story and adventure modes). Selecting this will assign you the character for the randomly-selected greater rift run of the week. When you zone in you’re in a new mini-area where you can learn about challenge rifts, check out your assigned skills and gear, and practice on some demons they keep laying around for that purpose. It was fun to see someone else’s build and try to make it work. This week’s rift was a demon hunter with an impale build. The fact that it was randomly selected means sometimes you end up with strange choices, for instance this person had a cubed ability that boosted fan of knives…but they were not using that skill. In any case I managed to get through the rift in about half the time of the original run so I made it work just fine. I really enjoyed this concept and my main hope is that they either make it more rewarding (the crafting mats were nice but not exciting), or update the offerings more frequently. I can see myself trying it out once every week but I’m not that interested in trying to climb the leaderboards or anything. The real joy of it is just seeing what random build they give you and making the most of it.

Anyway after the challenge rift was conquered I finally made my brand new necromancer. I decided to level via the story since it has been quite a while since I played all the way through it. Like I sometimes do with single-player games, I made things super easy for myself so I could play around and focus on the narrative instead of the gameplay. That meant normal mode and a gem of ease, so enemies just fell over when they so much as looked at me until I got above level 60. I ended up setting on a build that I’m sure will not be remotely functional at endgame but has been keeping me very entertained. I’ve got 1 generator, 1 movement ability, and the rest of my abilities all summon minions of one flavor or other. I had a blast running around and turning the corpses of my enemies into part of my rolling death swarm. By the end of the night I had made it into Act V so tonight I’ll finish up and switch to adventure mode. Hopefully I can get some set pieces and start figuring out a viable build for running rifts.

I expect I’ll be heading back to FFXIV before the end of the weekend, both because all my friends are still deeply entrenched there and because I don’t want to burn out on D3 before the start of the new season next month. Still, I’d say I’ve already gotten my money’s worth out of this content pack. The cosmetic stuff is nice, the stash space is amazing for this pack rat, and the new class has been great fun. I am already looking forward to playing as a necromancer next season!


Rise of the Necromancer

Army of Bone

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Army of Bone

As I said yesterday morning I took a break from Final Fantasy XIV and the trial that has a good number of us completely high center on finishing the game.  For those unaware Diablo 3 released its first in what I hope is a series of smaller addon packs that infuse the game with a little new blood…  or skeletons in this case.  While not really an expansion pack, Rise of the Necromancer adds the much wanted class to Diablo 3 and it is implemented in a way so that it blends seamlessly with the rest of the game.  I will talk a bit more about that later, but here is functionally what you get for your $14.99…  which is amusingly easily within the bounds of converting a single WoW Token to Blizzard Balance.

  • Non-Combat Pet – disgusting half baked flesh golem thing
  • A Pair of Cosmetic Wings – you can see me rocking them in the above screenshot
  • Necromancer Themed Banner Shape, Sigil and Accent
  • Necromancer Portrait Frame
  • Pennant – looks similarly Necromancery
  • Two additional character slots – which I was apparently close to being out of
  • Two additional bank stash tabs

Lets be honest… I probably would have paid $15 for two more bank tabs but as far as I am concerned that is plenty of goodness for the price.  The Necromancer itself is insanely fun and most of last night I went around being followed by an army of undead minions.  I cheated a bit in that I crafted a full set of Cain set gear and hung on to my Leoric’s Crown which had a 95% multiplier on it…  for the Flawless Royal Ruby that I slotted in it…  giving me 130% bonus experience and 112 bonus experience per kill.  Now in my travels I have never leveled a Gem of Ease, which was the route that my friend Grace took to leveling significantly faster than me.  Regardless the experience is flying and last night I managed to make it to level 56.

The key difference this time as compared to my normal seasonal characters is that I opted to play through the original game story as is to try and catch any changes that were put in place for the necromancer.  I have been pleasantly surprised at just how well this new class blends with the original experience because they have shimmed in Necromancer specific responses from NPCs and Companions alike.  This is the first time I have actually run the game with the scoundrel as my companion and he regularly makes comments about not needing any more empty skulls following us around.  There was an event in Act II where I encountered a Necromancer out in the desert… which I greeted as a long lost friend rather than a strange traveler.  Sure it feels a little weird to have the Paladin accept you as a friend… when you functionally defile the dead and bind them into your service…  but whatever if you can manage a minor bit of hand waving what is left is a really enjoyable experience.  The other thing that was awesome… is that it has been years since I last saw these cinematic and I was impressed with just how well they still hold up.  I have so much love for Diablo 3 and it is the game that I am always rooting for good things to happen to… and small content packs like this one definitely seem like a viable way to continue growing the game.  I am more than willing to keep plunking down this $15 price point to get new classes and assorted stuff to go with it.

I am really hoping this means we might see the Druid or Amazon as a result.  Even more than rehashing characters from Diablo’s past… I would love to see them branch out and start giving us brand new concepts for characters.  What about giving us a redeemed demon, or a fallen angel to control for ourselves.  I just feel like there is a lot of life left in this game and I want to see them keep moving forward with expanding it.  What I think is cool is that functionally this expansion pack was split into two halves… the first being the content listed above… and the rest being simply patch 2.6.0 which adds three new areas to the game for everyone regardless if they purchase the pack or not.  Something called Challenge Rifts also went into the game as well as the usual number of tweaks and balances preparing us for the next season.  I like this idea of expanding both the free content at the same time as giving us an additional way to keep spending money with the game and supporting its development.  This is a weird balancing act that all of these “buy once, play forever” type of games seems to struggle with…  as in what is content that should just be free because you bought the game, and what is content that is reasonable to charge an extra fee for.  I feel like this balance with Diablo 3 seems about right and I think at this stage in the game it probably works far better than releasing a full expansion with a complete new act and 10 more levels to grind through each time you start a new character.  I would love to hear my readers thoughts on this one.  I for one am a happy camper, but I would be curious to hear some dissenting opinions.

 

Frustration

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Frustration

I am rapidly entering the territory of being unable to talk about things that I want to talk about…  without getting deep into spoiler territory.  Before I get into that sort of thing… I thought I would leave you with this picture of me…  in an 80s music video…  or a Olan Mills photo backdrop whichever way you want to spin it.  Yes I did in fact stop in the middle of a pull to take this screenshot…  no I don’t feel at all guilty about it.  Last night featured some amazing highs… and some crushing lows.  At the start of the evening I rather effortlessly pulled together a group of friends to run the sixth and final leveling dungeon, and it was amazing.  It felt so much like they learned their lessons from the two 8 player dungeons that happened at the end of A Realm Reborn and managed to cram that same sort of epic feel into a 4 player dungeon.  It is weird how people never seem to have a problem waiting for cut scenes in a normal dungeon, but god forbid you watch them in any of the 8 player or 24 player content.  Whatever the case it was awesome, and featured a lot of really cool mechanics and several extremely challenging but still reasonable encounters.  I theorized this as them wanting to make sure a group of random players could complete it since this will of course be part of the expert roulette.  Then after these warm fuzzies…  they dropped the bottom out and pushed me right into the third trial after a lengthy cut scene doing the story set up for it.

Frustration

Now we are entering the realm of spoilers, because I am not sure how else to talk about my frustrations.  There is a common thread among my Free Company… and that is folks who have technically finished the expansion but not yet seen the credit roll.  For those uninitiated, there is in fact a credits roll at the end of each expansion…  and then again at the end of an expansion cycle of patches.  The reason why we have not seen the credit roll is because so far very few have lucked out to actually defeat the final primal fight.  This is a pug killer, and last night saw me making my first attempts.  On the first attempt we walked in with me playing a tank, Tam playing a Red Mage, Grace playing a Scholar and Solaria playing a White Mage…  and while we got close several times we just could not push it across the finish line.  This is one of those fights where you judiciously hold a healer limit break in reserve…. because at some point you are straight up going to need to rez most of the party.  What makes this fight so much worse than “mechanics the fight” aka Thoradin is that everything literally hits so much harder.  I feel like this is simply an issue of scaling and expecting everyone in the party to have potentially farmed Dungeon 6, rather than to attempt it immediately upon completion.  The amount of damage that the party was taking and the tankbusters when they hit me…  just added up to a frightening amount of healing that needed to be done in perfect situations.  When players were taking damage when they didn’t need to…  it just became more than anyone could handle.

The fight as a whole combines some of my least favorite mechanics from other fights, namely the destructible floor concept that we encountered in Sohr Khai.  The other part of the fight that I really do not like is that there seems to be a significant RNG element to it.  The boss has an aether meter and when it reaches full it does an attack…  but which attack it does seems to be randomed from a large pool of possible attacks.  The problem with this is that some of these are far easier to deal with than others… and this also completely flies in the face of FFXIV encounter design as we have known it to date.  FFXIV encounters are traditionally a dance that is done that the players have to learn the steps to… but once they do it feels like an elegant chorus rather than a win on some chance table.  There are some elements in this encounter that do happen in sequence but then there are others that seem to be pulled out of a hat  that you just have to deal with.  It feels like in order to get through the fight with a PUG we need firstly solid players… but also a hell of a lot of luck.  As a result there is a group of us that might be high center until we can field most of an 8 player group made up of entirely our free company folks.  That might be awhile since everyone tends to be leveling at vastly different speeds… and we have an excessive number of tanks and healers as opposed to some dps.  After last night though…. I think I am going to take the night off and play some Diablo 3 since the Necromancer pack releases today.