Diablo 3

Week In Gaming 9/13/2015

September 13, 2015 by Belghast

Very Rough Week

As you could probably tell from some of the subtext of my posts this week… it was a pretty rough one for me emotionally. Work is still being stressful, but honestly that really had nothing to do with this one. For our country September 11th has some pretty tragic context, but for me it has completely different issues. Firstly September 11th was the birthday of my grandmother, and she would have been 90 this year. I miss her an awful lot, and there are days where it is just rough to think about her. Her birthday always brings back memories of her, which are honestly all good… but there is a bittersweet melancholy associated with it. She essentially raised me during the first years of my life, because she was my constant babysitter and companion. She is also the one member of my family that really seemed to appreciate my wife being a member of the family. If that were not enough to get me down in the dumps… this week also marks the anniversary of a pretty horrible period of my life. In September of 2012 I lost my Grandfather, and the day after the funeral… September 11th… a pretty horrific event happened at my work place. It quite literally with zero hyperbole ushered in the worst six months of my life. Someone screwed up, and screwed up badly… and I had to deal with the fallout and recovery. So each time this day comes I get a little gun shy. So this past Friday I was crawling in my skin as I waited for they day to end.

Demon Huntering

As far as gaming this week, I had a pretty cloistered time of it. I am still very much in my “hiding out” mentality, and I guess in part I think it was just me waiting for this week to pass me by, dreading Friday. I spent some time working on my Demon Hunter in Diablo 3 and I think when I last played I was about halfway through 69. At some point soon I hope to pop back in and finish leveling him to 70. I also spent some time farming away on Rifts, Greater Rifts and Bounties attempting to get blood shards… which I then disappointingly spent trying to get class set pieces. I have been stuck at 3 of 4 pieces of the set I am going after on my Barbarian for a few weeks now. I am not sure but Diablo might have worked its way out of my system for a bit. I finished off the seasonal stuff, but as of last night Grace on the podcast talked about additional seasonal rewards. I am just not sure if I will be willing to do any of the crazy things that are required to get them.

Star Wars the Old Republic

The big event of this week was that I apparently have fallen into a Star Wars the Old Republic shaped hole. I have played this game off and on since release, but this is really the first time I have felt I was actually back in the swing of things. I’ve played alts a lot in the past, but this is the first time I have actually continued the storyline on my Jedi Guardian main. As of last night I finished Makeb and am working through the precursor content leading up to Shadow of Revan. My plan is to finish the story content before the drop of Fallen Empire next month. Additionally I am taking advantage of the insane twelve times experience bonus. Last night during the podcast I started working on my Chiss Smuggler and I have to say… having access to Treek as a tanky companion makes that experience so much better. Seriously… I hate Corso Riggs so much… and was completely stalled out trying to play a smuggler because he annoyed me so much. Treek is simply a better tank.. in that she jumps AT the mobs instead of grappling them back to me. Who though a tank companion pulling back to the healer was a good idea? Anyways as soon as I wrap this post I intend to go downstairs and play some more Smuggler… that was how much I was into it last night. I may or may not have stayed up until 1:30 in the morning playing.

Final Fantasy XIV

I am very much in a lull right now with Final Fantasy XIV. I talked about this a bit on the podcast, but it is strange… that even while in this lull I still consider it my home base of operations. I figure when 3.1 lands which should be soonish… everyone will be invigorated once more and we will return to logging in every single night. In the mean time I am playing a lot of other games as not to force myself. I am still raiding on Monday and Wednesday nights, and this week we managed to get a few more people through Bismarck Extreme. I really want to defeat Ravana Extreme before the new content lands, but one of the big problems we are having is… that honestly it just feels like there isn’t much content for us to be doing. When we returned to Final Fantasy XIV July 2013 we had a years worth of content to explore since we had last played. While we managed to slowly whittle our way through all of it… it gave us tons of small goals to work towards. In Heavensward there really does not seem to be the much for us to work towards. We can clear Alexander Normal in our sleep, and are pretty successful with Bismarck Extreme. We are working on Ravana Extreme and I believe it is in our sights… but Savage Alexander just isn’t a realistic goal, namely because I can’t bring myself to do the gear grinding that it would require to really be viable there. I am well enough geared to do all of the content I feel like I could do… and I just don’t have the drive to push towards that bleeding edge. So instead I play other games and wait for another content drop.

AggroChat 74 – Force Binds Us

We start of this weeks show by talking about our continued adventures in Diablo 3, and while a some of us have slowed down our progress Grace talks about falling back into the familiar rhythm of chilling out in solo play. With the upcoming September 29th release of Wildstar Free to Play she also talks about spending a lot of time on the test server, and the recent hoverboard racing event testing. Thalen this week spent time venturing into some single player games that had never got around to playing. First we revive our discussion of Wolfenstein New Order and why you should play it for so many different reasons. In a shocker we find out that Thalen never actually played Fallout New Vegas, which spawns a discussion about our appreciation of the game.

Kodra on the other hand spent his week mostly playing a bunch of indie titles and talks about Circa Infinity and The Magic Circle. Magic Circle being the game that he spent a significant amount of time at Pax talking to the Dev about. Additionally we are all jealous of him as he talks about his experience playing Mario Maker, which is essentially Infinite Mario. This spawns a discussion about each of our early attempts at creating content for our friends to play like Excitebike, Wolfenstein, Doom and Descent. Related to Magic Circle, a seperate discussion breaks out about the Stanley Parable and what it says about gamers themselves.

Ashgar is still heavily involved in LBX: Little Battlers Experience and has even gotten in his model kits from last week putting at least one of them together. He helped to clear up some of my confusion that there is in fact a Roleplaying game there, and it is very similar to the style of game that Pokemon is. We also get into a length discussion about Pokemon Go and how the Ingress type game is likely going to change what we are playing next year. There is really no way this is not going to be a huge title, and for the most part we agree that Ingress has been a tech demo leading up to this.

Finally several of us have spontaneously gotten sucked back into Star Wars the Old Republic. Right now it is impossible to go anywhere in the world without being bombarded by Force Awakens merchandise, and after a point I simply could not resist the pull of nostalgia. The best thing about coming back to a game after years of being away is the huge backlog of content available to be played. The current twelve times experience bonus for subscribers helps as well, because you quite literally only have to focus on your class story to get leveled which was always the best part of the game. Ash, Bel and Tam are all caught in the gravity well of this game for the moment, and it sounds like some of our other hosts might have gotten the bug as well. We will have to see next week if we are still talking out it, or if we have gotten it out of our systems.

[AggroChat] [Direct Download] [iTunes] [Stitcher]

Demon Hunting

September 7, 2015 by Belghast

Digital Resurrection

Demon Hunting — Not the Culprit, but a close cousin

Yesterday was the day of me bringing back machines from the dead. During the week my secondary machine gave up the ghost, the one that I use to remote in from work on a regular basis and the one that I use to manage my media server. I came home from work on Tuesday and and my second machine was screaming, literally. Emitting an insanely loud noise, but I really did not have time to investigate it so I put that off until the weekend. My immediate thought was the processor fan, and that the system had overheated. Luckily I happened to have a spare one of these because I thought this processor fan had gone out before. Turns out that when I popped it open on my table, it was not the processor fan at all but the video card. The Asus 550 ti finally gave up the ghost and thankfully I have a whole slew of video cards to attempt. So I threw in my lowest power consumption, lowest heat card… which was a HD 7500 series card that came with an older machine that I replaced. Sure enough machine booted up just fine and the box is working once again.

For my second act of machine resurrection I decided to go a bit further back. In October 2014 my y500 laptop with SLI 650 gtx cards died. Well died is the wrong term, because it simply just stopped booting. It would hang on the Lenovo bios screen and refused to go any further. After spending a few weeks without ANY help from Lenovo or any other source… I ended up purchasing a really good deal of a laptop in a Lenovo y580 from Craigslist and moved on with my life. Problem being… this has been a bit of an obsession in my life. Every few months I go on a binge of searching for other people who have had the same problem. Numerous people had reported that it was the SSD, and when I cracked mine open I seemed to only have the one hard drive. I even went so far as replacing the hard drive with another one that I had laying around and nothing. Turns out there is a different kind of SSD than I even realized existed… a caching SSD which looks a lot like a funky RAM chip. While I was fiddling with machines yesterday I cracked open my laptop and saw the little SDD chip… removed it… and then BOOM it booted. In fact right now I am writing this blog post on the laptop. It seems perfectly fine, but just boots a little slower. Spending today patching things up to see which of the laptops actually performs faster. My theory is it will be this one because for the games that COULD support SLI it ran quite a bit faster.

Demon Hunter

As far as gaming goes, yesterday I spent my day piddling around in Diablo 3. For some reason I got the desire to start a new character and as of last night I got it to 40. I had never really played a demon hunter before yesterday, but I have to say I kinda dig it. I am playing a largely degenerate build where I am doing whatever I can to keep up the ability of Rapid Fire. I have heard this ability becomes less awesome as gain levels… but for the time being it is an insane machine gun ability that whittles down mobs quickly. Mostly this all came about as I was working my way through farming materials by doing bounties. I figured I might as well get the benefit of leveling as well, so I rolled a new character and once I hit 10 proceeded to spend my time doing bounty after bounty. This seems like an insanely fast way to level a character. Not sure how much I will actually play the demon hunter in the long run, but for the time being it is a fun diversion. I am not really sure why I am so drawn to Diablo at the moment. There are things I should probably be doing in Final Fantasy XIV, and other things I should be doing in Wildstar. However for the time being this seems to be the right amount of interactivity. Diablo I can just shut my mind off and play, and that seems extremely intoxicating at the moment. It also lets me hang out downstairs and watch stuff on the chromecast, because I guess I need the relaxation.

Week In Gaming 9/6/2015

September 6, 2015 by Belghast

The Long Weekend

This week was pretty crazy, and involved a whole heap of work related stress. That said it is also the week before the labor day holiday here in the United States. With that in mind the stresses seemed to be more manageable knowing that I had a four day weekend waiting for me. The funny thing about doing these review posts is that I don’t realize I played quite as many games as I did until I actually sit back trying to sort it all out. I am not sure how effective of an adult I am going to be today, because a combination of allergies and exhaustion are settling in and leaving me groggy as hell this morning. Yesterday we did one of our whirlwind circuits of Walmart stores looking for back to school clearance… and of course for me… clearance Legos. During the course of the day we hit six different stores in several towns just outside of the Tulsa Metro area, and I managed to get a Lego Star Wars Snow Speeder and Tie Interceptor which made me pretty damned happy.

Destiny

Week In Gaming 9/6/2015 — Bel Failing at Destiny

With all of the talk of the Destiny expansion, I decided to give the game a spin again since there are several content packs that I have yet to even touch. That said a combination of lack of gear, and lack of skill kept me from really progressing. I am not sure what sort of gear levels they are expecting players to have upon starting the new story content, but at 22 light it felt like I simply lacked the punch needed to chew through it. I did have several nice weapons waiting for me when I logged in, so I guess that was awesome. One of which was a nice hand cannon, which when I last played Destiny was the weapon I really enjoyed running around with. I want to get in and figure out how best to increase my light score, and throw on a few levels before trying this out again. Supposedly right now Xur has a night Titan helm available so I might boot this up after the blog post and see what that does for my total light bonus.

Grow Home

While on the subject of PlayStation 4 games, this week also saw the release of a whole batch of brand new PlayStation Plus free games. If you own ANY Sony products… and are not a PlayStation Plus member, I highly suggest you do. One of the big positives about the PlayStation platform is how well the various products ultimately interact with each other. One nifty trick that my friend Ashgar showed me is that you can log in via the web interface and quickly “purchase” all of the free games even if you don’t happen to own a given platform. So for example for the longest time I only had a PS3, but I was still picking up Vita and PS4 games every month so that when I finally broke down and bought the consoles I had an existing game library. $50 a year ends up getting you a minimum of six new games each month. You cannot beat that anywhere.

This month saw something slightly different for the PS+ process in that they allowed the subscribers to vote between a choice of three games for one of the September slots. I personally voted for Armello, but it seems like the community as a whole really got behind the game Grow Home. These is by the UbiSoft branch that does more “indie” titles, and quite honestly… it is not ready for prime time. In my short period of time playing the game it locked up and froze numerous times on me. It is in theory a quirky exploration game where you play a robot that has been dropped on a planet to explore it. You collect crystals, climb surfaces, pick up items… all in an attempt to explore more. It has some strange controls but I got used to them pretty quickly. The only problem I have is the whole open world blocky exploration thing doesn’t quite hook me the way it used to… seeing as I have now played Minecraft for half a decade.

Teslagrad

While Grow Home didn’t really grasp me… Teslagrad absolutely did and I made the mistake of booting this up late one night… and then ending up playing for over an hour before realizing just how late it had gotten. The story of the game is that you live in the Kingdom of Elektropia and find yourself being hunted by the King’s guard. You feel from them and find your way into Teslagrad the massive tower fortress of the technological wizards. The game of course does not tell you all of this, but instead asks you to piece things together from bits and pieces of information you see in the levels of the game on tapestries and through little animatronic theaters. The gameplay itself is simple and brutal at the same time. The core mechanic of the game centers around polarity… hitting certain objects with your left trigger button will shift it “blue” and with your right trigger button shift it “red”. This simply mechanic is used throughout this metroidvania puzzler to complete levels. There is also a level of twitch gameplay as you have to use other abilities at just the right moment to get through the levels. The challenge being that ANY damage taken will kill you. Much like Ori and the Blind Forest the game employs a really nice checkpoint system so very rarely do you have to repeat much gameplay, allowing you to quickly learn your way through a given puzzle element through rapid succession. The art style is this lovely hand drawn, hand painted feel that works really nicely. I highly suggest you check it out even if you don’t have access to Playstation Plus.

Rift

While I did not really play a lot of it, I did spend time in Rift. I ended up getting a code for the fourth anniversary aethercycle, which prompted me to want to return and play the game some more. Funny how cosmetic items can do that. I mostly spent time working on the “Intrepid Adventures” which sends you through a series of “Instant Adventure” style interactions deep within otherwise Raid only zones. The experience was fairly slow going, but it might be an entertaining way to get to the level cap. Right now I am 62.5 and I would really like to reach the level cap on at least one character before the next expansion lands. I am not sure why but I have really struggled leveling in the post vanilla Rift game.

Final Fantasy XIV

With folks at Pax Prime, it ended up being a bit strange as far as raiding weeks went. We did not have the Monday raid and with tomorrow being a holiday I don’t think we plan on raiding that night either. By the time we get back to work on Ravana Extreme we are going to be rusty as hell. Wednesday night also lacked the people to meet, so instead we worked on Alexander for folks. The 2nd anniversary event is going on in game and I highly suggest that you check it out because I think it is going away quickly. Easily some of the most touching content I have completed in any game, because it breaks the fourth way in a good way. Still going through a bit of a Final Fantasy XIV break, but poking my head in periodically to check and make sure everything is still going well.

Once again this week I spent the vast majority of my time in Diablo 3. At this point I am completely decked out in legendaries… thought not really the right ones. I am also at Paragon 91 which makes my seasonal character far and away my most progressed character yet. I think on the normal servers I am only something like Paragon 19. At this point I am working on bounties and then grouping up with friends whenever folks are around, mostly for the highest chance of seeing set pieces drop. I currently have a charge build, which helps me keep up with my wizard friends and also as soon as I can get one more piece of gear… deals a silly amount of damage. I am having a blast, but still completely baffled that for some reason the game has just “clicked” with me where it did not for so long. I am one achievement away from getting my season four rewards, and after I wrap this blog post I am probably going to pop in and work on just that. It was a fun week, and I am really starting to enjoy doing these posts, hopefully you all my readers also like them.

Star Wars Disappointments

September 5, 2015 by Belghast

Force Friday

Star Wars Disappointments — Borrowed from the Disney Blog – Force Friday Merch at a disney store

Once upon a time I was a die hard Star Wars fan and more importantly collector. Throughout my childhood, my parents enabled the collecting of Star Wars figures, and in truth I think my parents got more into it than I did. There was a certain thrill in chasing down those last few figures that I did not have. So it was not a huge surprise in 1996 when the figured were re-released to the marketplace that I got back into it. In fact there were so many of my college friends who went damned near bankrupt buying various bits of star wars merchandise. This fervor was only made more insane by the re-release of the movies in the theaters. My wife was a trooper and tolerated the shit out of my habits, and I even got her into sifting through the racks looking for this or that figure. However when I went to see Phantom Menace it pretty much killed my desire to keep doing that. I know it is cliche’d but I still have not reconciled the disappointment I feel over the prequels. I am sure taken without the viewpoint of a lifetime of nostalgia and hero worship over the original movies… they are probably not that horrible. However for me personally… they were just a bunch of cool lightsaber battles and the bits of movie I tolerated until I got to see more of said lightsaber battles. The problem is it is a habit you never really kick, and on a regular basis I filter through the toy isle and look at the star wars figures. I still have a handful of figures hanging out around my office.

With the announcement of Force Awakens, I have to say I have been getting pretty damned excite about it. So when I heard about this Force Friday thing where they would be releasing in bulk all of the Force Awakens merchandise out into the stores…. it made me think of the sheer excitement I felt when they released all of the Phantom Menace merchandise. Now I know people who went out Thursday night at midnight for the official first moments… me however… I am past the whole doing something at midnight time. The last item I purchased like that was probably the Wrath of the Lich King expansion. I did however need to run get cat food over lunch and while I was at Target, there as no way in hell you could keep me from going through the Star Wars isles. From the moment I stepped into the store things just felt strange. They had this huge cardboard stand-up of Chewbacca near the front entrance in the dollar section… asking patrons of the store to take a selfie with it… and do your best Chewie Roar. I mean I realize this is Disney we are talking about… a company that has made its entire career by capitalizing on our nostalgia. It just felt somehow more cheap… more commercial… more forced. It didn’t help that quite literally you could not go for very far in the store without running into some bit of Force Awakens merchandise stuffed here or there. I mean even in the home goods section they had cups on one of the end caps.

Low Quality Figures

The thing I regret is not having taken any good pictures, because for this next section it would help out quite a bit. They had a dedicated section set up in the seasonal area, and I of course made a bee line there expecting it to be some sort of a one stop shop for all of the merchandise. Now there was quite a bit there, but one thing was missing completely… the standard sized Star Wars action figures that I collected so many years. For those I had to go to the traditional “Star Wars” isle in the toy section, and they had a fair assortment. I had a Kylo Ren and a Captain Phasma in my hands, when I started to notice a few things about the figures. Firstly the cards they were on felt really cheap compared to modern Star Wars toys. Instead of a thick piece of cardboard with printing on both sides… it was some sort of a sandwiched construction made out of a bunch of thinner layers of cardboard which gave it a very irregular look. Then I started paying attention to the figures themselves…. and while the sculpts themselves were fairly nice… the paint jobs were atrocious. It looked like they had applied the worst sort of rush treatment to get them out the door in time for this “big event”. I’ve been looking for images that illustrate my point, but all i can really say is that it felt like they were a paint by number that just could not stay inside of the lines.

On the storm troopers for example… large chunks of black were globed over onto the white sections of armor. The Captain Phasma figures that I had seen preview shots of had a nice satin sheen to them to simulate the chrome armor. Instead the figure I had in my hand was a dull matte hunk of largely unpainted grey plastic. I looked at figure after figure and they all seemed to have these same basic defects that just made them look cheaply produced. The thing is… this is not the standard I am used to in Star Wars figures. I have a bunch of the more modern figures… and they all had excellent paint jobs. Granted the “newest” figure I have is of Savage Opress, but it still is a figure from the last few years. The twelve inch figures looked a little better, but they were still not really up to the standards I would expect from that sort of a figure. On the positive however… the Funko Pop figures looked amazing as always, and the Lego display I saw looked amazing. Lego is on of those companies that is always spot on when it comes to quality, and you know that for the most part anything you buy will be perfectly formed and defect free. Hasbro on the other hand… seems to have slipped massively, and if I were them I would be ashamed of the quality of this figure line.

Still Spinning

I find it extremely bizarre that I have yet to get Diablo 3 out of my system. When I came home last night from work, I immediately plunked myself down on the sofa, put something on Hulu and started working on bounties for crafting materials. At this point I am two achievements away from getting my season four toys, and I think probably I can knock one of them off soon. The biggest challenge seems to be getting legendaries to drop so that I can fill gear slots with them. More so than that… the real challenge is getting legendary rings and a necklace with gem slots in them… because with the introduction of legendary gems no piece of level 70 jewelry is really viable without a gem slot. I hear tell that there are items in the game that you can use to socket items, but I have yet to actually see any of them. Right now I would settle for a second level 70 ring so that I can maybe knock out the legendary in every slot achievement. Still enjoying the barbarian, but it gets frustrating the higher I dial up torment because I just take so damned much damage… since I require being in the thick of everything to deal any real damage. At this point Torment 1 is my new normal, and I keep thinking the more paragon levels I pour on… the easier things will get. In the mean time I will keep plugging away at Rifts and Bounties until I get the items I actually need to drop.