Morning Folks. It rained most of the day and so far it seems like the fix from the roofers is working. That said, it has only ever leaked when it was torrential rain, and instead we got a light drizzle. I finally washed the towels, but here is a picture of Gracie guarding against leaks. Yesterday was a lot. Not only did I have the fasting blood draw that I talked about yesterday, but I was trying to deal with a bunch of “death stuff” as I collectively call it. Namely I have had a few checks come in that were in my spouse’s name… after I had done what I thought was the right thing and removed her name from our banking accounts. It seems as though I will have to file a case with the probate court and create an “estate” account in order to cash these now… something that at a bare minimum will cost me $200 just for file the paperwork, let alone whatever I will need to pay a lawyer to draw up said paperwork. Thus far the checks don’t even total $100… so this is not likely something I will be doing. I dealt with a bunch of other miscellaneous stuff yesterday, including calling the medical examiner to see if they have finally given a proper cause of death…. which they have… but now I am waiting for official death certificates. All of this… extremely fucking draining.
The absolute high point of my evening was hanging out with my virtual sibling Ace and doing some Destiny Rising. We essentially hung out together and ground out a bunch of strikes, until we were both completely out of pinnacle currency… and then ran a few after that for good measure. For whatever reason we seemed to keep getting The Pit over and over, and stumbled onto a weird glitch in the matrix. It seems that if you have gone down the path of becoming a Mentor… your light requirement is higher for queuing for heroics than when you were a “New Light”. This seems exceptionally lame, and led to a scenario to where they could not queue as anything other than Estela, the champion that they have most recently poured resources into to bump up. This was a bit annoying when one of the dailies involved killing things with a void champion, and they could not play one.
My highest light champion is Jolder, which I am largely still maining. However Estela, Wolf, and Umeko are all pretty close in ranking. I’ve still not really found an Arc champion that I enjoy very well, and I am hoping that maybe the next premium banner will bring one that is a bit more enjoyable to play than anything I have gotten so far. Ace pulled the Arc Staff guy and said that so far they seem pretty fun. I am not too far from the Mythic choice pity on the normal banner, so in theory I will likely pick him as my choice when it comes down to that. I really wish that the banner was just for pulling additional copies of champions for powering them up, and that there was a way to unlock every champion by default through a quest chain or something. It really feels like that sort of thing would better serve a game like Destiny Rising, where so much of the game is based on team composition.
Yesterday was the launch of Diablo IV Season 10, and I rolled a new character to see how the game has progressed since I last paid attention to it. I’ve sat out the last few seasons and for the most part… everything is perfectly cromulent. I heard that the pulverize druid was really strong, so I ended up rolling one of those. I think the challenge that both Druid and Barbarian have is that they feel sort of awful to play early game… but become godlike in the late game. So you have to suffer a bit until your build comes online. I am very thankful that at some point in the past I spent money on a nice looking cosmetic set… because the base druid vibe is not really my thing. I wish there was a way to just run around in Werebear form all of the time, because that shit is awesome. I feel like this is missing out on something significantly here. The game would be better if you could just always be Werebear or Werewolf.
I have not made it super far, but I am also not really rushing it. This morning my build started to come a bit more online and the Druid as a whole is feeling much better as I am now in my 20s. I figure this is going to be something that I poke out off and on until I hit the level cap and build a reasonable build. That said… when a new Path of Exile season drops I am abandoning this. Additionally I know that Legion Remix is happening early in October and it is likely that if I have not hit the level cap and am farming the endgame by the time that comes out… D4 is also getting dropped in favor of that. I’ve contemplated firing up World of Warcraft and trying to get caught up on the story there, but it still just doesn’t really feel right. I am interested in a lot of the things that are going on in that game, but am not sure I am really in the mood for a traditional MMORPG experience.
New World on the other hand seems to be clicking pretty well. I’ve swapped back to my level 65 main on Pangaea and spent a bit of time just roaming around and getting used to the combat again. Mostly it is muscle memory that came back extremely quickly. One of my favorite aspects of the game has always been roaming around and harvesting resources, and I am starting to do that again. I did figure out how to upgrade gear, but the process is confusing and arduous and nowhere near as clear as it used to be. I think Amazon Game studios suffers from some poor game design at times… and there are weird gates for things that should be more accessible. The whole concept of needing to craft dungeon keys for example seems to still be a thing, and it is weird that you would not want your players just playing your content all of the time. This is especially fraught given the great experiences we have had recently with the Fractal Incursion event in Guild Wars 2.
All of that said, there are some pretty solid crafted gear options and I think in the short term I am going to focus more on leveling up my tradeskills. Ultimately I would need to push things up to 250 in order to craft the best stuff, and a lot of my harvesting abilities are already climbing past 200. I am in no rush to do any of this, but I am interested to see what the new content that drops looks like. The biggest problem I have had with the evolution of New World, is that it has removed zones from the game in order to rework them as something else. I am hoping this new zone is actually that… new territory to be explored that has never existed in the game before. That is not to say that I don’t think that the reworked zones are not good steps… but games need to expand… not just be revised to death.
Anyways. That is my yesterday. Today I am back at work like normal and will probably futz around with Diablo IV some more this evening and see if I can get closer to the level cap.
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Good Morning Folks. I’ve had a week, and as a result… I’ve missed several days of blogging. On Wednesday morning I had an issue come up that forced me to stop what I was doing and rush into the office physically to deal with it. Then yesterday from 7 am I was on a conference bridge for the entire morning dealing with a production rollout. In both cases… I could have probably blogged later in the day but the realities of the working world drained any desire to do so out of me. I spent last night hanging out on voice and doing nonsense in Guild Wars 2 and that helped quite a bit. I also spent about 30 minutes on voice with Ace venting about various work related stuff on both of our sides, and that probably helped more. The only problem with not blogging for several days is time gets somewhat squishy in my head as to what happened when and in what sequence.
If my memory is correct, Tuesday I hit the credit roll for the main story of Destiny rising, which means that I have officially entered the endgame. The story was pretty freaking great and in truth much better than all of the core stories in both Destiny 1 and Destiny 2. Destiny was a game series with a lot of really interesting lore, but if you were not willing to watch a literal 10 hour long Destiny Lore video from Byf.… you were going to not understand 90% of it. Both games were exceptionally bad at explaining the world and telling a coherent story, and Destiny Rising is not. Sure it starts out a little twee at times as do most mobile games… it builds into something rather formidable and I legitimately look forward to the next content drop. This game is essentially a prequel happening in a slightly different universe… allowing them leverage to change whatever they need to change and I think this is a good thing. The speaker for example is a child in this version, which should give you a bit of a reference for how many years before the original game this takes place. Guardians for example do not exist yet as a concept… there are just lightbearers and there is evidence than our character might become the official first Guardian.
Similarly the concept of the various orders of guardians, do not exist either. There are no Hunters, Titans, and Warlocks… even though characters largely follow those same templates in the way that they move. Wolf for example gets double jump as opposed to distinct flavors of boosted jumps that Titans or Warlocks get. A given character is a combination of an Element, two unique abilities, and a unique super that then gets combined with a fixed primary weapon and a fixed heavy weapon. This honestly creates some really unique templating of characters in that two characters with similar loadouts might feel completely different because they have unique abilities to go with those loadouts. I still play way more of Wolf the default character than I do any of the other heroes, but I have become fond of Kabr, and Xuan Wei. None of these are the “meta” which seems to revolve around the 5 star champions of Tan-2, Gwynn, and Jolder.
I do have Tan-2 and just pulled Jolder yesterday off the free banner, so I might actually start investing in that character a bit with my limited resources. That honestly becomes the challenge is that it is really cumbersome to swap characters at some point. I greatly prefer games like AFK Journey where you are buffing one entire class of characters, rather than investing in one specific champion to pour all of your daily resources into. I’ve not really encountered much in the way of things that Wolf cannot do… save for missions that specifically require precision damage to take down what are effectively this games version of break bars. I greatly prefer the Auto Rifle to pretty much every other weapon in the Destiny universe… and swapping to a champion like Jolder means giving that up as their combo is Submachine Gun, and Sword. I am hoping i can pick up Riskrunner which is my all time favorite of the exotic Submachine Guns.
There is a new banner available right now and on that banner are a couple of new characters… one of which I’ve pulled a few times with what available currency I had. Umeko is essentially the Destiny version of a Ninja. She fires off Shuriken and then has a finisher that is essentially a massive one. The loadout is Scout Rifle and Sniper Rifle, which makes her an almost purely ranged champion and one that feels more than a little bit squishy. I really need to have a precision champion that I am comfortable playing, but that is likely going to be Tan-2 instead since I have that 5 star champ who is very much on meta because he also comes with this games version of the well of light. It does not hurt that he also sort of looks like Sektor from Mortal Kombat which is its own coolness factor. After playing an Exo titan for years in both Destiny games, I am partial to Exos as a whole. I wish the game honestly would have allowed me to play one here for the Wolf character.
Right now the game seems to give you about 120 of the daily activity currency, and it costs 20 to run any of the individual activities. When you complete one there is the option of spending twice as much currency when you loot the chest to get twice as many rewards. This is pretty nice and allows you to really efficiently make some progress on farming whatever you need to farm. I’ve been targeting the activities that reward Mythic weapons and engrams as I am trying to collect the full set. The Mythic Weapon Engrams allow you to buy new copies of any mythic weapon you have already found, whereas the Mythic Choice engrams allow you to choose any weapon that can drop from a given activity. There are about a half dozen weapons that I have not seen yet, and it is likely just going to be random chance to come across those.
The game seems to really want me to play Kabr, because at this point I have gotten enough duplicates to slot 4 of his 6 talent points… which means before long I will have him maxed out. This does the whole Genshin thing where getting duplicates of a character gives you currency to spend on buffing that one character. Thankfully I enjoy Kabr quite a bit, because his barrier really takes the pressure off on several boss fights because you can safely stand behind it blocking onerous beam attacks and such. The pulse rifle is not exactly my favorite weapon, but I’ve always liked the Heavy Machinegun because it feels especially good during boss burn phases where you need to do a lot of damage to weak points from range. I am also really partial to the fact that he walks around with a shield all of the time… which is admittedly one of the reasons why I am wanting to invest in Jolder a bit, because she gets the Captain America shield throw.
I am having a lot of fun with Destiny Rising, and it seems especially poignant right now how good this game is… when so many players are exceptionally frustrated with how bad the latest content drop is in the mainline Destiny 2. There has already been talk from mainline content creators about swapping over to more of a Destiny Rising focus, and I feel like this is only going to accelerate that. It isn’t really often when a mobile port completely cannibalizes the player base… but I do wonder if we are going to see something similar play out with the Mobile version of Final Fantasy XIV. For now at least I am having a blast and am happy to reach the relaxing daily grind portion of the game. I like consistent grinds way more than I like pushing through story content. I think my brain is just wired that way.
In other news I am contemplating giving the next Diablo 4 season a spin. I’ve skipped the last few but given that I am mostly done with POE2 and Last Epoch and POE 3.28 will not drop until the end of October… there is a bit of a lull where I might as well give it a shot. There is another livestream coming up on the 16th and I think that is really going to seal whether or not I am going to give this a go. Supposedly they are taking a lot of the feedback from players into account and trying to improve things. The problem is… Blizzard is a massive ship and seems to take forever for it to turn and adjust to things. I have no clue what I am going to play. I’ve only ever really played Barbarians, Necromancers, and Spiritborn so I might give something else a shot. I really wish they had a Paladin/Crusader because that is the other traditional Diablo character that I really enjoy. Druid always looks cool, but it is a pain to level at start. That really is the problem with so many ARPG classes is that they feel bad for those first 20 levels… which makes it hard to keep pushing forward.
As far as weekend plans. I really need to start making a pile in the backyard so that I can contact the folks that we have used to haul stuff away in the past. There is just a bunch of shit that I need to get out of the garage so I can have some swap space to start putting up shelving units. I really need to free up space in the garage so it can be more organized… and so that I can be ready to put away all of the furniture in the backyard as the temps start to drop. I also really want to clear off the workbench out there so I can set up at a minimum a FDM printer. There have been so many cases lately where I just want one to build brackets and storage options.
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Good Morning Folks. I had taken a break in Diablo IV because I knew the Lunar New Year event was right around the corner, and a lot of my remaining achievements for the seasons journey would simply require me to grind a ton. I figured if I was going to be grinding, I might as well be getting credit for the Lunar Awakening event. This was great in theory, but it turns out that it is a really bad event to be doing with friends. All of the things that are actually fun to do with other people… reward zero credit towards the event. The only truly reliable method for grinding this out is to run a stupid amount of Nightmare Dungeons. These feel bad on the best of terms, but somehow feel even worse with a party. As a result we did a few of these… decided it was not a good time… and then moved on with our lives.
Neither of us had been playing a ton, and as a result we had not gathered up that many boss materials… but still made the effort to summon what we had. Ace’s cat however had other ideas and we got cut short after three bosses in the rotation. However this was enough for me to get my first Mythic item to drop… which was unfortunately Doombringer and not something I could use… but I turned it into a shard and got the chest-piece I wanted for my build. I am uncertain that yesterdays event patched in the fixes to the Mendeln ring, because I did not feel any stronger. I also did not see anything in the patch notes specifically calling it out.
At this point I have unlocked three of the caches on the Ancestral Favor path, and honestly it might be most efficient to just run around looking for the world events associated with this instead of purposefully grinding. The big problem that I am having with this event is that it is so limited in scope as to how you can progress it. In theory if I were doing this event, every activity would reward at least some credit towards the reputation system. Instead the only thing that you can do with other players that seems to reward anything is Nightmare Dungeons, which are legitimately the bottom of the rung when it comes to “fun things you can do with friends”. I think I will probably push a little bit towards this goal each day, and hopefully over the course of the event I will unlock everything. I am going to get bored if I try and mainline it however.
With that in mind, once we adjourned for the evening due to cat aggro, I went downstairs and spent the rest of the evening in Path of Exile. My build feels relatively solid at this point and while I have moments where I take stupid amounts of damage… this is largely caused by bad map rolls rather than endemic to the build itself. I’ve been running my Delve atlas tree and slowly working on “breaking delve” which is the process of slowly upgrading the various levers enough to where delve begins to feel like a reasonable activity.
Ultimately my goal is 150 depth for now, and I need to upgrade my darkness resistance significantly more in order to do that level comfortably. I am also slowly upgrading my sulphite capacity so that I can spend more time down in the mines once I have filled up from mapping. I like the Delve virtual cycle of doing some maps then doing some delve until I run out of sulphite. Ultimately my goal is to get to 150-200 depth and start chasing cities, because at that level I can get all three types of cities and their associated boss fights. In theory once I start gathering up resonators, I will also start getting a reliable income to spend on upgrades… or at least the few upgrades that are available in a semi-private league.
I am not sure how long Pohx League is going to stay active, but GGG has upgraded the cap to 40k players and I believe made it available to everyone. On top of that they have also started to spoil information about the event league with nineteen new ascendancies. It is going to be called the Legacy of Phrecia Event and this morning they shared the Harbinger ascendancy for Witch, and the Gambler ascendancy for Duelist. Sir Gog has also released a video doing a bit of a deep dive into these two ascendancies. Given how wildly different these are going to be… it makes me think this is probably going to be a void league aka a league where the characters do not transfer into standard. They seem far less generalist, and more designed for each to be played in a very specific manner. For example how good the Harbinger ascendancy is… will rely heavily upon whether or not the Harbingers you summon are permanent minions… or if they are on similar cooldowns to the uniques that the abilities originally came from.
I’m 60 maps deep into the Atlas at this point and have knocked out most of the white and yellow options. At this point I need to start tempting fate and running corrupted red tier maps to keep expanding out my passives. The thing is I am not really pushing it nearly as hard as I would during a normal league start, because I have done this progression a few times for Settlers. I unlocked the full Atlas when the league launched and then did it again with the Necro Settlers event launched. I will likely finish up 115 of 115 in this league as well, just because it is a thing that ends up happening if you play often enough. With me doing Delve, I am hopefully going to encounter more map caches which will speed up the process.
So right now my plan is to do Lunar stuff until I get bored… and then drop back down into old comfortable Path of Exile grind mode.
The post Lunar Awakening is Not Great appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Morning Folks! The truth of Diablo IV is that it is not necessarily the most compelling game on the planet, but it absolutely nails one aspect. It is easy, seamless, and non-punitive to group up and do content with your friends. I think above all else that is the main reason why this is going to remain in the rotation of games for me, because it gives a good meet up destination for me and Ace to hang out and slaughter demons together. I love Path of Exile, but it feels bad to group with other players. Everything about the calculus of grouping makes it feel overly punishing, whereas Diablo IV has nothing but benefits when it comes to hanging out with friends. Ace had a bad day, and I also have not had the most wonderful week so far… so as a result we decided to hunker down and burn through a bunch of bosses last night.
That really is the biggest benefit of Diablo IV, that grouping especially when it comes to bossing is a force multiplier… not necessarily in the time to kill but definitely in the access to loot. I took a screenshot of my materials tab before the night and at the end of the night, and we burned through so many bosses it was silly. We gave up on Varshan though, because after four trips to vendor/salvage it just felt silly to keep going given how largely unrewarding that boss feels. Essentially we did the rotation of Beast in the Ice, Varshan, Grigoire, and Zir first so that we would then have more summons for the two best bosses Andariel and Duriel.
Going into the night I really only wanted two things. I needed a good Ancestral copy of Ring of Mendeln, and a good Ancestral copy of Blood Moon Breeches. Thankfully I walked away with multiple copies of both so that I could spend some painstaking time evaluating all of them to determine which one I would end up using. Additionally I think I picked up a few good copies of every Necromancer specific unique just in case I needed to swap builds at some point. I might try and kit out a full second set of gear and try Blood Wave, since it is so relatively easy to swap between builds now thanks to the armory. Essentially if you need uniques… you need to be running the summoned bosses because that seems to be the only reliable way to get them. Ace got my luck and walked away with two Mythics, and unfortunately I walked away with none… but last league I think I got 5 to their 2 so we will call it even.
I wish I had a good count of just how many boss summons we did last night, but I did not keep track. I know I carried Ace through a 50 Pit before the evening so we could attempt to farm on Torment 3… which was doable but just went a bit too slow and we bumped it down to T2. At the end of the evening I drug them through a Pit 65 so that they could begin to play with Torment 4. Past that we did run a 10 Wave Infernal Hordes on Torment 3, just so we could stockpile some obducite to masterwork the ancestral uniques we got. It was a pretty great night and essentially wall to wall boss and monster killing. No better way to soothe the soul.
I’ve knocked out three objectives on the final tier of the Seasons Journey, but I swear that this season seems to be much harder than the previous one. I seem to be able to run open world Torment 4 content without much issue, but Nightmare Dungeons seem a bit rippy at times. I am either immortal… or getting one-shot with little room between. There is an objective where you have to kill 50 Elites in Nightmare Dungeons without taking any deaths. Similarly there is a one that requires opening 25 of the roots from the events… in 15 minutes that is going to be hard as hell to get done. Everyone is out there spamming those things and you don’t get credit when someone else opens one. It is going to be rough getting through this one, and it might be something that I do once the season has died down a bit.
I am pretty sure Ace walked away with every unique but one, which is pretty decent considering I think that specific build requires a bunch of uniques. They did get what felt like 20 different copies of the ring that they needed, at least one of which was double ancestral. I got a wild quad ancestral necklace, which sadly I have no use for… but still cool to see. This is honestly what I wish Path of Exile 1 or 2 or even Last Epoch could be. All three of those have various punitive reasons why grouping up is occasionally butts. Diablo III and IV though… its all good and honestly better the more people you can pack into an event. The only negative would be the sheer amount of time and running back to a vendor that would be required to do four different players worth of summon materials. It would literally take an entire afternoon to cycle through a similar payload of four players worth of mats. It essentially took all night… around three hours maybe, to do all of our summons for six bosses.
I still feel like I am probably starting to wind down a bit. I want to start ratholing decent ancestral gear so that I can build an entire second set of gear and try blood wave. As much as I do not love the concept of a minion-less Necromancer, I still feel like I owe it to myself to try this season’s god build. Pure minions should get better at some point soon hopefully, because right now the Ring of Mendeln is not interacting correctly with several other legendary items, keeping the stack of multipliers from happening on minion damage. I will say it is kind of butts right now if you happen to die in any content, because there is no easy way to get back your minions unless you left a stack of corpses laying around. This is also a problem I have had in Last Epoch, except there you have to summon them all painstakingly one at a time. Path of Exile II really has the right idea by making your minions summon automatically. At a minimum in both Last Epoch and Diablo IV there should be a channeled button that will summon up all of your minions at once so that it isn’t something you can realistically use in combat, but it does allow you to get back to fighting shape easily.
I hope you are also finding some comfortable distraction from the bullshit that is happening in the real world. I am not blind to it, I just figure it is better for my mental health not to engage right now. Enough information is filtering through to know that shit is really bad. Please do not take my lack of engagement with it as a sign of not caring. I care about you and your safety, and if you need me I am only a message away on the plethora of platforms that I have an account on. I am still checking everything sporadically, but I am also denying them my undivided attention.
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