Blaugust

Blurry Weekend

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Blurry WeekendDiablo 3 Season 7 is off to a pretty fantastic start. I’ve had relatively bad luck with my gear this time around, but it doesn’t seem to matter in the slightest. All the classes seem to get a huge power spike once they get their 6 piece set bonuses, but demon hunters always seem to feel it more in my opinion. I am currently farming TX rifts with no problems, even though I still don’t have either the weapon I need or the cubed weapon I need for my set, and at least one of my rings is still level 61.

My biggest concern for now is simply whether I will even bother with the rest of the season at this point. I got the pet and 2 of the portrait frames, but the stash tab is still a long way away. If I stop now this will officially be my shortest season ever. There’s quite a lot left to do and if other games weren’t about to become incredibly distracting I would definitely have a few more weeks at least of Diablo fun left ahead of me. This season’s conquests are pretty reasonable, and I know from experience I can manage greater rift 45 without set bonuses and leveling 3 gems to level 65. The season journey this time around is asking for quite a bit in the way of upgrading ancient legendaries, which means spending a lot of time grinding even more gem levels for this recipe. Grindy, but not difficult.

Not only is the journey not too difficult, but what’s left is mostly doable solo just in case the crowds die down tomorrow when WoW’s demon invasions start. Maybe this will be the season where I do a slow casual burn over the next couple months, and still get things done before the end.


Seasoned #Blaugust2016

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First off, it seems like something went wonky with my feed so my post yesterday didn't get picked up by my Twitter account. The twitterfeed integration is kind of slow at the best of times, but this time it just didn't work at all. No idea why, hopefully it'll work today. In any case, if you're coming here via Twitter, yes there was post yesterday, it's over here. What time I got to spend gaming this weekend was mostly spent in Diablo 3, since the latest season started the other day. Season 6 was the first one I'd participated in (apart from a sad Barbarian back in Season 4 that made it all the way to level 4). I tried out Crusader that time, so this time around I decided to give Demon Hunter a try. Pretty early on I found a legendary quiver that removes the chaneling cost from the Rapid Fire ability, so that became my main damage dealer supported with turrets and Multi-shot.
Diablo3DemonHunter.jpg
Fighting giant spiders, like you do
By the time I logged off Saturday night I had made it through the the first chapter of the season journey and was just shy of level 70. Today I've finished that level off and completed the second and third chapters, getting me 4 of the 6 pieces of the Unhallowed Essence set armor. That means I've got a set bonus that gives me a damage boost as long as I don't let things get too close, which works just fine with my typical method of play for ranged classes. I've gone heavy on the cold damage runes for my chosen skills, which means most of them slow or freeze enemies, plus I found a legendary ring that applies a fear debuff reasonably often. I'm up to Torment III difficulty at this point, and it's working fairly well. I did get reminded this evening of one of the things that really annoys me about Diablo 3, latency. For most of the weekend everything's been fine, but tonight while running a rift I started getting some terrible latency. In a game that's predominantly about avoiding various ground effects and pink murder balls that's not good at all. In any case, I've made a decent bit of progress and will hopefully be able to finish up the initial season journey pretty soon. It'd be nice if I could make it far enough to unlock the stash tab this time around; we'll see if I can stick with that long.

What I’m Playing: August 7, 2016

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Hooray, I made it through the first week of Blaugust! WoW has definitely been my main focus, but some other games have still been on my radar too.

World of Warcraft: This is where I spent most of my time this week. I got my legendary mace on my forsaken priest, but otherwise have mostly been playing alliance side. It makes me frustrated and sad, because I just plain like the horde races and story better, but at this point absolutely all of my friends are playing alliance so there’s no escaping it. Once again I find myself really wishing WoW would just add cross faction play already, even if it were tied to battlenet friends or something. I already have prepared myself for the inevitable point in Legion where I get sick of being alliance and go back to level my horde mains all alone. I guess it is a good thing I like alting.

What I’m Playing: August 7, 2016

LFR gets a (mostly deserved) bad rap, but sometimes you luck out and it’s nothing but Gamon and rainbows as far as the eye can see.

Anyway, I’ve been doing a little LFR on my druid and wandering around on my baby spacegoat mage and enjoying it. I’ve been using the baby mage as a chance to really see the low-level alliance quests, and to knock out some of the individual zone loremaster achieves that I never did. I got the overall loremaster achievement and title back before Cataclysm, so there’s a lot of quests I’ve never seen before. See yesterday’s post from Felwood for just one example.

FFXIV: I want to be playing this more, but WoW is really taking up too much of my time and attention for me to bother. Over the past week I’ve logged in for raid and pretty much nothing else at all. Don’t get me wrong, raid time was amazing and probably more fun than all of the time I played WoW put together, but we only raid 2 hours a week. I had been hoping that raiding on a schedule again would reignite my drive to log in more and upgrade my gear and such but it didn’t work out that way.

WildStar: I’m going to come clean and admit I hadn’t logged in to WildStar in a couple months. That just felt wrong, so when WoW got hit by a DDoS attack a few evenings this week I logged back in to WildStar. I didn’t do anything new and exciting, just a couple of expeditions. It still felt amazing and comfortable, like nothing had changed. I will be trying to spend at least one night a week poking around in this game again, because it remains my favorite MMO of all time.

Diablo 3: Season 7 started on Friday! The response to this season seems to be very low compared to all of the previous ones, but I’ve still been playing and having a great time. On Friday I got to play with some friends that I haven’t hung out with in way too long, and had a blast leveling together. This season was the first time in a while that I didn’t get to 70 on the first night, but that was all on me because I decided to get some sleep instead. I hit 70 and completed the first 5 chapters of the season journey yesterday, which included the cosmetic rewards and the full free class set of gear (after chapter 4). Since that was my entire goal for this season, I don’t know if I will stay invested or not, especially with the pre-Legion WoW event coming on Tuesday. A lot of the goals for the stash tab this time around feel easier, but also grindier, and I’m guessing I’m not going to bother when there are new shiny things to distract me in other games.

 


Weekend Rusty

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Demon-Huntering

I promise that I had every intention of getting up this morning and writing a blog post immediately following breakfast.  However the world had other plans… or more truthfully my friends Grace and Sol had other plans.  Last night was the beginning of the Diablo 3 Season 7, but unlike so many other season starts I had other plans.  Firstly yesterday was the birthday of my amazing wife, and I ended up taking off a half day to go out to lunch and then to a movie.  We saw Ghostbusters, and I have things to say about that movie but it is probably going to be a discussion for another day.  After that we came home briefly where my folks came over and brought a cake, and then it was off to a semi-monthly dinner with some of my wife’s siblings.  By the time we got home it was after nine and after sitting down to start working on a character I found that I was fading extremely fast.  So I only managed to make it to around level 25 before crashing, and during all of this… I forgot to take any screenshots for the blog.  As a result I popped in early this morning with the purpose of taking a few screenshots and logging right back out.  However this is the one where Grace and Sol invited me to a group…  and when I joined and explained that I was only online to take a screenshot or two…  they both “noped” and proceeded to drag me up in levels a bit.

Weekend Rusty

As a result I am getting a late start to this whole weekend posting thing, which is not terribly surprising given that I have always had trouble staying on focus during the weekends.  Something about getting up and milling around the house causes the morning to lack a clear sense of purpose.  I think the key to the week days functioning at all is the fact that I get up and take a shower the moment I crawl out of bed, which serves to wake me up completely.  This whole leisurely getting up, having breakfast, and nestling into the couch with my laptop business is a recipe for slacking off.  Regardless I am blogging now because Grace decided to go out for coffee giving me a nice break in the leveling process to knock out this post.  Firstly I am not nearly as pumped about D3 this season as I was in previous seasons.  Right now there is just too much stuff going on that I want to be participating in.  Namely at the moment my seeming fresh re-addiction to World of Warcraft.  Tuesday we can start rolling Demon Hunters, and I figure that will pretty much be the end of my Diablo 3 season experience.  Additionally I still have my Warlock that I am enjoying leveling, and I want to continue pushing it to 100 as soon as possible.  At the moment I am knee deep in Talador around level 94, but once again I am doing the method of leveling where I jump zones as soon as possible so as soon as I hit 96 I will be shifting to Spires of Arak.

This feels very much like a scattered post and I guess in a way it is.  I am so very not used to doing this weekend blogging thing.  This is the first weekend post I have made since breaking my streak of blogging every single day in May.  These couple of months have been more than enough to push me out of the habit.  In truth I think I enjoy not blogging on the weekend because there is nothing really hanging over me.  That isn’t strictly true I guess because I still end up having to edit and get posted the AggroChat episode each Sunday morning, but that at least gives me Saturday to be relatively carefree.  From a standpoint of our lifestyle it has been pretty huge as well because it means that my wife and I can get up and around and go out and do things, without having to wait for the inspiration to hit me… and a blog post to mysteriously appear on the page and get posted.  So while I am doing this for Blaugust I absolutely expect to return to posting week days once the month of August is over.  I am a prime example of trying to find a livable schedule to blog on, and this is a huge part of why I decided to do the more chill version of the initiative.  Sure we can push ourselves to come up with thirty one blog posts, and it is an interesting exercise…  but if the end result is resentment towards your blog or blaugust in general then I think the overall mission of promoting blogging on a schedule has failed.  For the time being however I am returning to my games and calling this post to a close.