Tonight Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra and Thalen discuss the November/December AggroChat Game Club Title – Diablo 2.
Tonight we wrap up season 3 of AggroChat with the November/December AggroChat Game Club Title Diablo 2. This pick was made by Grace and is largely an attempt at seeing just how well this game still holds up as compared to the titles we are used to. Join us as we talk about reconciling our memories of the game with the reality of playing it again. Additionally we get into a bunch of slantwise connected discussions during the process.
This was a bit of an odd weekend. Lets get the bad out of the way. For several months we have been trying to figure out how to get Luna to a point where she does not attack the other two cats on sight. We’ve kept her sequestered in my wife’s office and each night I grab her and we hang out in my office while I play games. She almost always ends up snuggled on my desk, and in truth is just about the sweetest cat ever… when not around our other two. This is an important distinction before I tell you this next bit… because she is adorable and cuddly… when she is by herself. In my infinite lack of wisdom I decided that I wanted to make one last attempt to socialize them since she had seemingly bonded with me so tightly after our many many weeks of chilling in my office. We locked our eldest cat up in the bedroom and brought Luna out, at first carrying her and holding her on the sofa. Before long thought she wanted to explore… and for the most part our youngest and her were not interacting at all. However there came a point where we were moments away from a cat fight, and I tried to gather Luna up and carry her off to my office. She struggled to try and get away but I got her up to the office without much issue. I turned to shut the door and I felt this searing pain on my leg around my lower calf. She had bit me… and now I was left with the decision of how the hell to get out of my office without letting her out so she could go after Kenzie.
I snuck out and by the time I got downstairs I was bleeding pretty badly. There are five marks… so I am guessing one is maybe a claw mark or she drug off of me and raked me with her fang again. Two of them are about a half inch in length and pretty deep… and two others are deep puncture wounds where she chomped down hard on my leg. It hurts quite a bit to walk and just generally exist in the world right now, but I don’t think there is any real damage. After going through the crap with my wife when she got bitten we are being extra cautious, and using the super duper antibiotic creme that they gave us back then. Walking is not comfortable and today is going to be interesting. I had to venture out to get more extra large band-aids, because in theory you can hit all of the spots with two of the largest size. After getting bandaged up I went back upstairs where she seemed as freaked as I was by the event. She sat on the floor in the back of my office up against the accordion closet door for a long while looking freaked. Eventually I peeked down underneath the desk towards where she was at and said “it’s okay, I’m not mad” and almost instantly her demeanor changed and she bounded over and hopped up on the desk laying down beside me. The thing that is breaking my heart is that I now know that this is probably never going to get any better, and we really do need to find her a new home. Unfortunately the friend that we thought was going to take her… had her landlord say no. It was in their contract that they could have pets if landlord approved… but I am guessing the asshole is biased against cats, because he assumed they were talking a dog.
Other than the cat thing…. and hurting… I streamed a lot of Iron Banner. I think it was Friday night at some point that I managed to hit Rank 5 with the Banana, and from that point on it was just gravy as far as loot went. I guess in theory I should have been swapping to the Warlock or Hunter to get them to Rank 5 but instead I simply made a poor attempt at farming some more gear to increase my light levels. This last 10 points is going to be slow as hell, but I entered the weekend at 390 and exit at 392 which I guess is reasonable. According to beam I have now streamed seven hours of game play, which I guess isn’t a bad start for my first week. Now a good chunk of that on Sunday at least was to an empty audience, but I entertained myself and have a bunch of footage to sift through. There was one Iron Banner match where for whatever reason I started humming the Super Mario Brothers theme song inserting “Nope” instead of some of the notes. All in all I think I like Rift for an Iron Banner match type, but like I said before I struggled a bit at first because the game play feels so vastly different from anything I had been used to. The best item I got all weekend is still the above Branded Lord with Hammer Forged, Enhanced Battery and Range Finder… which I now have fully leveled and am almost using exclusively.
LET IT DIE_20161211162544
Lastly I played some “Let It Die” as evidenced by the first screenshot in the post today, and streamed it as well… except for whatever reason my audio was being overpowered completely by the game audio. I will have to fiddle with that and adjust it some. This game is just strange as hell, and I guess in many ways it feels a little Dark Soulsian, in that the mobs that you encounter are somewhat brutally powerful at times. There will be times that you get stunlocked to the point where you simply cannot do anything to deal with the encounters other than die. The strangest part so far is the types of weapons you encounter… hot irons, router drills, hammers… firework launchers. As you ascend the Tower of Barbs you encounter all sorts of monsters that should be in a silent hill game with bizarre implements that are trying to kill you, all the while you are using a zombie corpse thing as your avatar. You start out buck naked each time and have to scrounge up armor and weapons to be able to survive for terribly long in the tower. This is of course a “free to play” game and where the money aspect comes in is that in order to resurrect yourself using “death insurance” you need to spend a rainbow skull currency, that the game gives you a handful of to start out. However in the brief period of time I played yesterday I wound up using two of them before realizing… that in truth I had not really made any actual progress and should stop doing that. I’ve not quite figured out what the point is yet… as far as how you actually improve your character. I thought after I cleared a level I would be taken back to the lobby… but apparently I have to do that manually so I essentially lost all progress on that character and had to grab a fresh corpse to start the climb all over again. It has some deep rogue like elements, all the while mixing in bizarre Neo Tokyo and Silent Hill tropes…. with a dash of Dark Soulsian difficulty. Given that several of those checkboxes are things that Kodra likes, I think he maybe should try this game out. What I am wanting to know is if you can play it multiplayer, because this would probably be super enjoyable with friends.
This weekend represents quite possibly the quickest I have “finished” the Diablo 3 seasonal journey. I say finished with quotes because there is still a lot more that I could be doing, but I think I am ultimately as far as I intend to go. Of note… when I logged in this morning I got an anniversary achievement and the above Diablo pet so if you are interested you might check it out and make sure you log in within the next few days. For lack of a better word… Season 8 completely caught me off guard. Unfortunately the rotating three month schedule means that this is going to happen more often than not these days. Season 7 released during the Legion pre-launch event… so it too was a fairly truncated effort. I know my friend Grace managed to make it in on the day before Season 7 ended and push hard enough to get her extra bank tab. It would have been a great season to do that for, given just how good the hunter set was for pushing content. I however just let my attempt at getting that bank slot slip away because I couldn’t bring myself to push any further. This time around… we have a new set and a new optimal build. We started the season once again on a Friday night, logging in and beginning the push within moments of the season going live. Generally speaking we make it pretty close to 70 on that first night… but this time both Grace and I lost our “oomph” at around 54.
I managed to pick up the next day with another group and we ground together from the 50s through to 70 making it to roughly paragon 20 before needing to bail and get some dinner. Yesterday afternoon I focused on getting the various achievement bits needed to get the first four chapters of the seasons journey and unlock the cosmetic options, and finished gear set. This time around with the Demon Hunter it was Natalya’s set, which is a bit of an odd one given that it focuses on dealing damage with rain of vengeance. This is the basic build that I followed, substituting a few abilities for ones I prefer, namely I found Stampede way harder to control than Shade for Rain of Vengeance. I played a little of both but given how much I was in constant motion having the stampede actually pointed in the right direction was always a thing. Towards evening yesterday though I finally started to feel like I was getting a handle on the play style and soloing my GR20 was actually far easier than I had expected. The biggest problem is that this build just clears so much more slowly than the equivalent Multishot build did last season. If I were to actually push for the full compliment of seasonal achievements… I would more than likely try and farm up a full set of Unhallowed Essence again and just go back to the tried and true multishot.
However it is highly unlikely that I will spend much more time on this season. There was just something lackluster about it, given that nothing had changed since the previous season. All of the same builds worked as we left them in the previous patch. I was one of the people cheering on the three month seasonal cycle, but having been through it a few times now… I am thinking that maybe it is just too short a time period between them. Previously enough time had passed for me to start to miss the seasonal grind… enough to be truly excited for another opportunity to hang out and push to 70 together. This time… it just felt like we were doing it to get shiny cosmetic baubles instead of to really enjoy the experience. This makes me a little sad given just how pumped I have been in the past for the season to roll around and start anew. This time around I literally had no clue it was happening until Grace told me. In the past I almost marked the date on my calendar and started to get excited for the whole process. Who knows maybe in a weeks time I will feel differently and want to pick up where I left off… grinding out more seasonal achievements. That said I am perfectly happy leaving Season 8 as is, because I feel like I did what I set forth to do… collect another batch of exclusive cosmetic appearances.
This weekend represents quite possibly the quickest I have “finished” the Diablo 3 seasonal journey. I say finished with quotes because there is still a lot more that I could be doing, but I think I am ultimately as far as I intend to go. Of note… when I logged in this morning I got an anniversary achievement and the above Diablo pet so if you are interested you might check it out and make sure you log in within the next few days. For lack of a better word… Season 8 completely caught me off guard. Unfortunately the rotating three month schedule means that this is going to happen more often than not these days. Season 7 released during the Legion pre-launch event… so it too was a fairly truncated effort. I know my friend Grace managed to make it in on the day before Season 7 ended and push hard enough to get her extra bank tab. It would have been a great season to do that for, given just how good the hunter set was for pushing content. I however just let my attempt at getting that bank slot slip away because I couldn’t bring myself to push any further. This time around… we have a new set and a new optimal build. We started the season once again on a Friday night, logging in and beginning the push within moments of the season going live. Generally speaking we make it pretty close to 70 on that first night… but this time both Grace and I lost our “oomph” at around 54.
I managed to pick up the next day with another group and we ground together from the 50s through to 70 making it to roughly paragon 20 before needing to bail and get some dinner. Yesterday afternoon I focused on getting the various achievement bits needed to get the first four chapters of the seasons journey and unlock the cosmetic options, and finished gear set. This time around with the Demon Hunter it was Natalya’s set, which is a bit of an odd one given that it focuses on dealing damage with rain of vengeance. This is the basic build that I followed, substituting a few abilities for ones I prefer, namely I found Stampede way harder to control than Shade for Rain of Vengeance. I played a little of both but given how much I was in constant motion having the stampede actually pointed in the right direction was always a thing. Towards evening yesterday though I finally started to feel like I was getting a handle on the play style and soloing my GR20 was actually far easier than I had expected. The biggest problem is that this build just clears so much more slowly than the equivalent Multishot build did last season. If I were to actually push for the full compliment of seasonal achievements… I would more than likely try and farm up a full set of Unhallowed Essence again and just go back to the tried and true multishot.
However it is highly unlikely that I will spend much more time on this season. There was just something lackluster about it, given that nothing had changed since the previous season. All of the same builds worked as we left them in the previous patch. I was one of the people cheering on the three month seasonal cycle, but having been through it a few times now… I am thinking that maybe it is just too short a time period between them. Previously enough time had passed for me to start to miss the seasonal grind… enough to be truly excited for another opportunity to hang out and push to 70 together. This time… it just felt like we were doing it to get shiny cosmetic baubles instead of to really enjoy the experience. This makes me a little sad given just how pumped I have been in the past for the season to roll around and start anew. This time around I literally had no clue it was happening until Grace told me. In the past I almost marked the date on my calendar and started to get excited for the whole process. Who knows maybe in a weeks time I will feel differently and want to pick up where I left off… grinding out more seasonal achievements. That said I am perfectly happy leaving Season 8 as is, because I feel like I did what I set forth to do… collect another batch of exclusive cosmetic appearances.
