Diablo 3

Paragon Levels with Friends

September 1, 2015 by Belghast

Blaugust Administrata

Blaugust is officially over… I mean it… put your pencils down and turn in your papers. Now begins the fun part of actually attempting to “grade”, and by that I mean tabulate the results. I started doing this yesterday afternoon with some of the early finishers, and if everyone that was a day away crossed that finish line… we have a pretty huge bunch of winners. Equally impressive as of yesterday we had 76 “Survivors” meaning that during the course of the month they managed to get in at least fifteen posts. Mostly I wanted to say a little bit this morning about just how proud I am of everyone who attempted any length of posts this month. The concept of daily posting is rather daunting and there are still days where I question my sanity as I plunk away at the keys each morning trying to make sense of the jumble of thoughts in my head. So while I will be terming people as “winning” the challenge you are all winners in my book even if you didn’t make it to fifteen posts.

My goal all along has been to get more people creating more content about the things they love doing. After a point folks stop caring so much about what you are writing, and focus in on the fact that it is YOU behind the screen that is writing it. The whole idea behind Blaugust is if you can prove to yourself that you can churn out thirty one posts in a single month… then posting a handful of posts every week on a fixed schedule is really not that terribly daunting. Whether or not they realize it, people crave consistency. I started this blog with a decent boost of readers, but over the years of my lack of posting… I pretty much pissed all of those regular readers away. When I became consistent, folks started tuning in every morning to read all of these seemingly useless thoughts I was dumping out of my head… and apparently enjoying it. Today is my day for calculations, but I wanted to close Blaugust with one thought. Don’t let Blaugust be this marathon that you run once a year and then stick back on the shelf until the next year. Let Blaugust be a spirit that you embrace every day, and an excuse to create regular posts throughout the year.

Boys Will Be Boys

First off I have to say that I have always hated this phrase… but sometimes it absolutely fits. Last night I talked to my mom on the phone, because it had been a few days since I had called my folks. They have had to deal with the fallout of a flood in one of the bathrooms, and this weekend they got into my childhood bedroom. My closet backed up to the bathroom so it was a assumed that pretty much everything in it would be ruined. The funny thing is… my Mom expected me to remember what I had in my closet over two decades ago. Luckily it seems that for the most part all of my comic books, and various sundry cards that I never bothered to “move out” were left untouched. Apparently some plywood seems to have wicked up the bulk of the water that made it through to the closet. As she was pulling stuff out of the closet she kept stopping and asking my dad what various things were. Then she got to an item that threw her for a loop.

I was a little skater kid, and there was a phase in my life where everything that mattered about anything… was skateboard related. She pulled out this baseball bat that was scrawled with all sorts of skater terminology and logos in a combination of sharpie and paint pen. She wanted to know why this bat was all scarred like it had been hitting concrete and “defaced” in such a way. My Dad just said that it looked like “little boys were playing”. So I had to explain to my mother what the bat was used for. We used to go to the tennis court with our skateboards, as much padding as we had, and baseball bats. My friend and I would ride towards each other, each of us on one side of the tennis net like we were “jousting”. At which point we would put as much padding on our left arms as we could and use the right arm to swing the baseball bat at the other person. The goal of course was to knock the other person off their skateboard and the padding was in a vague attempt to block the blows. It is a miracle we didn’t do serious harm to each other. This apparently did not phase my father, because it turns out his childhood friend and he would fire arrows at each other from recurve bows… so I guess in the grand scheme of things getting beaned with a baseball bat doesn’t seem that dangerous?

Paragon Levels with Friends

Since a good chunk of our raid was still doing the whole Pax Prime thing, we were not able to put in any attempts on Ravana Extreme last night. Instead I spent a good chunk of time fiddling with Bitdefender and ultimately uninstalling it. I guess I should have known better when my good friend Wulf struggled to keep it from blocking the Final Fantasy XIV game client, but I went ahead and gave it a shot. This time around it was the Glyph client for Trion Worlds that I could not get it to unblock. I finally uninstalled it and went back to AVG because at least I am used to it. That of course killed an hour, so by the time I finally logged into Diablo 3 it was fairly late in the evening. Grace was already hard at work doing rifts and such so I joined her until she left to go eat dinner. Then there was a block of time when the server was rebooted and patched, and I could not get reconnected to save my life. All the while I am watching The Strain on Hulu, which is a show I would absolutely suggest if you like Horror. The added benefit is you get to see Argus Filch playing a Van Helsing like badass… and yes I know the actors name is David Bradley but he will always be Filch to me.

The big take away of the evening is that we managed to get Mor to 70 on his Crusader, and I managed to get up to 47ish Paragon levels before the end of the night. I still cannot deal anywhere close to as much damage as Grace can at this point so I feel like I need to do some research into how best to gear and spec out a Barbarian. I mean I do respectable damage but I think my gear just isn’t quite at the same level as hers. She is still absolutely carrying both of us hard when it comes to doing group content. Though last night I did manage to stay alive most of the time, I think I took two deaths throughout the night, which is significantly better than previous outings. We spent most of the night on Torment IV, and I can personally solo Torment I pretty effectively… it is just that bosses seem to take forever. I am not sure how long this current addiction to Diablo 3 will last, but for the time being I am rolling with it.

Blaugust and Nephalem

August 31, 2015 by Belghast

Last Day of Blaugust

As the subheading says, it is in fact the last day of Blaugust and as such very soon I am going to begin tabulating the results. It has been an interesting month, but also a very quick one. It seems like just yesterday I was kicking off this challenge, and now we are staring at the finish line. It has also been interesting just how many people have participated in one way or another. Even if you did something as simple as retweet a Blaugust post, you are part of this and I thank you. In truth I was not really sure how the turn out for year two would end up looking. The biggest surprise honestly was just how many year one folks came back for this year. You’d think that they would have learned better by the time the second event rolled around. As I sift through the results it is going to be interesting to see just how many folks have completed both years at this point.

The big take away this year is that we have already reached a point where we are just too big to be planned somewhat “on the fly”. Up until July I was still questioning if I would actually go through with a second Blaugust. I was somewhat shocked at the number of people who were looking forward to it. So I pulled things together and we ended up with this year, that went significantly more smoothly than the first. As a result I think for the 2016 Blaugust I will be starting to pull things together about four months in advance. Folks offering to sponsor prizes was a brand new concept to me, and this year we had Anook and KingsIsle Entertainment both chipping in prizes. I greatly appreciate them both, but I am hoping if I start the wheels moving several months ahead I will be able to get a few more people to come on board. It would be awesome to get some game keys donated for a sort of “Blaugust Game Club” like our AggroChat Game Club. Where every Blaugust writer has the opportunity to play a specific game and write about it, because it is super interesting when you collect a bunch of opinions on the same title. I realize we are just how wrapping up, and folks are I am sure sick of it for the time being… but I am already thinking about how to make next year better.

Nephalem Ascended

Friday night when I got home from eating with friends I started a brand new Female Barbarian, and as of last around 8 pm I managed to hit 70 securing at least some of the Season 4 rewards. While I managed to get drug along for a handful of levels, this is still the fastest and most dedicated I have ever leveled in Diablo. In part a huge chunk of it has been that I have largely been leveling with my friend Grace, who keeps pushing me to go do content rather than just piddling around like I normally do. Pushing is the wrong word because she was not even insistent… she just gave me a reason to keep grouping up and doing interesting things. The other big change this season is that I pretty much completely ignored the story line. In Season 3 I attempted to level my way through the story, which is apparently the worst possible way to level these days. Instead I largely started adventure mode from the moment I created the character, and the result is as I leveled I tended to always have legendary weapons that I could craft for my character.

One of the big changes that came with Season 4 was the introduction of the “Season Journey” interface that serves as a way of unlocking the various rewards. Just for hitting level 70 on a seasonal character I unlocked the transmogrification pieces, but in order to get the Portrait Frame and the Pet I have to complete all four Chapters of the Season Journey. As of last night I have completed the first three and they were honestly all pretty easy. The final element that I needed was to defeat one of the major bosses on Master difficulty or harder. Since Belial is the fastest to get to on Adventure mode I popped over there and took him out with relative ease. Now I have to do some of the more grindy things like taking out each of the key masters on Torment difficulty. I also need to finally use the Kanai cube to extract a Legendary power, but I am trying to sort out what sort of power I want to keep. Honestly I feel like I need to read up on how exactly that process works before making any decisions surrounding getting powers from it. I know that once you do this you can choose at least one power as a permanent buff, and I have a few that are really nice.

I really did not spend much time playing Reaper of Souls, and as such I had never actually done a Rift of any sort until this weekend. Grace on the other hand is an expert at such things and as a result I spent some of my “post 70” time last night with her working on Rifts and then the Greater Rifts that follow. I have to say they are crazy amounts of fun, and I am trying to sort out how best to use my legendary gems. Right now I have two of them, and I need to run more Greater Rifts to power up the second one. The first one is now at level 6, but once again I think I need to do some research in how best to utilize them. The game is so much more intricate than I remember it being, and in truth I have never played Diablo 3 seriously. I am having a blast so I guess that is really all that matters. My hope is that tonight our Final Fantasy XIV raid can down Ravana Extreme… but after that… I hope to put in big ole dent in some of these Chapter IV objectives.

Week In Gaming 8/30/2015

August 30, 2015 by Belghast

Stressed but Still Here

This week turned out to be a shockingly stressful one, but thankfully all of said stress happened at work… and I could more or less leave it there as well. There has been a twinge of sadness as well because months ago I had hoped to be able to attend Pax Prime and get to hang out with friends there. However that didn’t quite work out, and since I lacked tickets to go there… because AggroChat was not apparently qualified as a media outlet, I stopped pushing quite so hard. The beginning of the school year is especially rough on my wife, and it would have been even more stressful to be travelling during this time. As such I am doubting that Pax Prime will ever really be in my cards unless for some reason they decide to move it either earlier or later in the year. I will always have Pax South however, and I fully intend to go this coming year. I am going to be trying to talk as many people into attending as I can, and hopefully can organize a meetup or something while there. There were plenty of people at Pax South last year but I was completely overwhelmed by it being my first real convention, and the internet was pretty horrible… so I missed most of them. Anyways… on with what is I hope becoming a Sunday tradition, where I review the games I played over the past week.

Final Fantasy XIV

Currently “The Rising” event is going on in Final Fantasy XIV that marks the yearly anniversary festival. This year the quest that goes along with it is one of the most touching quests I have experienced in a game before. I don’t want to spoil too many details about it, but suffice to say there is a little bit of fourth wall breaching going on. Diehard Final Fantasy XIV fans have this hero worship for Naoki Yoshida and the rest of the team, and it is absolutely well earned. It feels like there is very much a symbiotic relationship going on there, and they understand fully just how important the loyal fans are to the continued success of the title. The game is in this interesting place where it is extremely humbled by the fact that it launched in 2010 and failed to capture hearts and minds. They are putting everything into the game and leaving nothing on the table, and it shows. Other than the anniversary event we worked on Ravana Extreme attempts, and I have every hope that we will be able to down him this coming Monday. Past that I have honestly been taking a bit of a break from Final Fantasy XIV, or at least not really logging in every day.

If you are wondering where the bulk of my game time was spent, you can look no further than Diablo 3. I am not sure if it was my time playing Hellgate London, or the fact that I finally pulled my head out of the sand and realized there was such a thing as a “season”. Whatever the combination I have been pumped to be playing Diablo 3 again and have been spending a lot of time with my friend Grace was we worked on pushing up our seasonal characters. At the beginning of the week I managed to get my Crusader from last season to 70 with the help of Grace and her crazy torment farming ways. Then Friday when the new season opened I started work immediately on a female Barbarian. As of last night I am now level 60 and making the final push to 70. That is really what I intend to spend most of my time today working on, and hopefully by tonight I will be sitting at 70 and starting to work on gearing up for doing torment and beyond. I am having a blast, and I am not sure whatever mental block cleared that has allowed me to get involved once more with the click to attack madness.

Wildstar

I can’t say that I have made stellar progress since last week, but I am continuing with my new tradition of trying to play Wildstar Tuesday nights. At this point I am level 25 still in Whitevale but I think maybe I can see the end of the zone. My hope is to move on past it this week and hopefully into something less desolate. I feel about Whitevale the way I feel about most desert zones in MMOs. I have come to realization this week that it is never the biome necessarily that I like or dislike, but instead the zone design. I was warned that Malgrave is coming up, and a desert… but from what I have seen of the imagery inside it seems like something I will enjoy. I want to devote more time to this game, but for now I am going to settle with making it a Tuesday night thing.

Hearthstone

The game that I played that shocked me the most this week was Hearthstone. I have not really spent much time playing it since release, and with the addition of a new expansion of cards I decided to poke my head in. This is where I found a brand new game mode called Tavern Brawl. Apparently you have a different weekly challenge, and this week was essentially playing with a randomized deck. I played hunter and had a good amount of success. Playing with a random assortment of cards, including many of the brand new Grand Tournament cards gave me a nostalgic feeling much like the early days of Magic the Gathering. I used to love the days when I was limited based on the cards I physically owned and as a result made some odd decks to try and weave in my favorite elements. In truth I would probably play Hearthstone more often if this random brawl option thing was a fixed item. I know this coming week there will be a completely different Tavern Brawl, but I will likely poke my head in to see what it is and give it a shot. This might breathe new life into the game for me, and for that I am kinda pumped.

Fallout Shelter

My week in review would not be complete without at least talking a bit about Fallout Shelter. Now I have been technically playing this game for awhile now but since I do not regularly use my iPad, the sessions were limited and I went weeks between opening the app. With the release of Fallout Shelter for android I have been playing it far more often on my phone, and it has now become my default “moment of downtime” game as I check in on my little post apocalyptic ant farm. All things said I learned a lot of lessons playing it on the iPad that I have now applied to this new vault. Where Vault 999 was a relative failure, Vault 861 is pretty damned idyllic. Through a bit of luck of drops, and some careful planning I have managed to create a pretty safe environment that can absolutely shred raider attacks. I had a random person show up at the vault that was fairly warriorly, and once I equipped her with power armor and a plasma pistol she has been roaming the wastes dispensing justice. At the same time she has become a major source of income and the gear she brings back I am slowly outfitting all of my settlers in. I have jokingly started calling the restaurant on the first floor Cafe Death, because the raiders always go there…. only to get shredded by all of my shotgun toting vault dwellers. The only thing that I feel bad about is that I essentially have one couple that is slowly populating my vault. I have left them in the room for weeks now and they have half a dozen offspring roaming around as a result.

Hatoful Boyfriend

The last game that I played a significant amount of this week was of course Hatoful Boyfriend, and last night we recorded the AggroChat game club show for it. This was Grace’s pick and I think a lot of us went into this assuming that we would end up hating the game. We were mostly wrong as the vast majority of us had lots of good things to say about the game. To make it even crazier this is the first game that the majority of us have actually played through more than one… but given that an individual play session tends to only be around the hour long mark that makes sense. If you want to hear our length discussion about dating “Birbs” after the apocalypse you should totally listen into the show.

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

Second Winds and Diablo

August 29, 2015 by Belghast

Desi Wonderfulness

Last night was a bit unusual as far as our Friday nights go. Generally speaking we come home from work, and I play video games while my wife attempts not to fall asleep… always failing that battle around 9/9:30 ish. Instead we went out for dinner with some friends, and I got to eat at one of my favorite restaurants… Desi Wok. I generally refer to it as an “Indian restaurant” but in truth it is a “Desi” restaurant as the name implies, focusing on an amalgam of traditional Indian cuisine mixed with some more Chinese inspired dishes. My wife got the always tasty Chicken Tikka Masala, and I went with my most recent favorite an ambiguous dish called “Chicken Desi Fried Rice”. The dish comes out bright red and spicy as hell, pretty much the way I like it. The problem is it is way more food than you can eat in one sitting so I always end up taking home about half of it. My wife decided to order a Mango Lassi which she had never actually done from Desi Wok, and in my confusion I wound up getting one for me too… but no actual other drink. This meant I consumed a lot of water in my vague attempt to control the spice of my dish.

By the time we finally got home last night I was drained. We made a stop off at Target, and all the while I was moving around the store at a snails pace. I literally think my wife would have been dragging me through the store if I had a rope tied onto me. She kept having to stop periodically and look back at me to see if I was keeping up. I am guessing it was the beginnings of a tasty food coma. But in all honesty it could simply be the weight of this week crashing down upon me. Each and every day there has been some major crisis that I had to deal with. We had a production database get wiped one day, and another day we were trying to diagnose why a piece of software built in Visual Basic 6 wasn’t working any more. For starters I had no clue that anything built in VB6 would run on a Windows 7 machine. Visual Studio 6 was the brand new technology…. when I was in college almost two decades ago. All the while during each of the issues I acted as the manager and facilitator, which is a bit of a new role for me. I am not used to being the one directing the action rather than the one with my hands buried deep in the guts of the software trying to sort things out manually. Putting your faith in someone else to fix things for you, is way the hell more stressful than being under the gun to fix something yourself.

Second Winds and Diablo

Yesterday was the beginning of the brand new Diablo 3 fourth season, and this time I wanted to get in on the ground floor instead of creating a character a few days from the end. Earlier in the week I had talked about my plans on what exactly to create for this new seasons and I finally settled on rolling a Femme Barbarian. I have an absolute love of Sonya in Heroes of the Storm so any attempt to recreate that character seems amazing to me. However I spent the first half hour or so of gameplay complaining to my friend Grace about her lack of armor. She was awesome about it and I am sure was just patting me on the head as I complained about something that every woman on the planet has complained about at some point… the shitty armor options they give female characters in video games. Yes I realize the male barbarian starts in essentially a furry diaper, but that changes pretty quickly as you find gear and at this point at level 37 I am still wearing a bra of some sort. I finally learned to ignore it mostly and got on with the game play.

Grace had started her traditional Wizard earlier in the night, and was about five levels ahead of me by the time we both managed to get on at the same time. We proceeded to spend the rest of the night running bounties and rather quickly I was able to catch up in levels. I am not sure what it is about Diablo right now but it is really hitting the spot. The only negative being that the Barbarian starts out in a fashion that I don’t really enjoy that much. The first attack and the first secondary attack… are both not really my thing. Thankfully you get Cleave pretty quickly, and before the end of the night I finally was able to pick up whirlwind which serves as not only a great group attack but also a decent way of getting out of things since you seem to ignore slowing effects when you are spinning. My hope is that at some point today we can hook back up and start leveling again. Other than that I am looking forward to tonight’s AggroChat show because we are finally going to talk about Birb boyfriends and why that game is pure madness.