Good Morning Friends! This is going to be a bit of a mixed-topic post, and we are starting off with my chonky boi above. If you are an existing Guild Wars 2 player or have been considering starting it with Steam… then maybe you should log in and collect the item that is being given away currently. Essentially mount skins are almost always microtransactions found on the gem store. There are essentially three varieties: a specific skin on sale for a limited time, a scroll that gives you a random skin from several available on that scroll, and a scroll that allows you to select a mount of your choice. The last one tends to be the most expensive and I believe is somewhere in the neighborhood of $16-20.
What you are getting as part of the 10-year anniversary is a scroll that essentially lets you select a mount skin from many different pools of skins. This includes skins that are part of other bundle packs, as well as some that I have only ever seen sold individually. It was a hard choice for me but I have wanted a Warclaw skin for a while, and those seem to have a much slower rotation than other options. While the base warclaw probably looks more Battlecat-like, you can’t dye the actual tiger portion. So instead I went with this chonky unmasked sabertooth tiger and then dyed him up to look like a proper Battlecat. Sure I will stick out like a sore thumb on the WvW battlefield but it will make me happy doing so.
I spent most of last night swapping map runs with Ace in Path of Exile and I have to say… grouping is the biggest problem I have with that game. Everything about the process feels bad. Firstly you have the contra code problem, and for those who did not experience this, here comes an explanation. Back in the day you could input the Konami code (Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, Start) and it would give you 30 lives or if you were in two-player mode, you got 30 lives per player. However, when one player ran out of their allotted lives, it started bleeding lives from the other player so collectively you had a pool of 60 lives. When you open a map in Path of Exile it spawns six portals, each portal can only transport a single player… so the more players you have the fewer chances you have of getting through a map. It feels really freaking bad to be the person who dies on a map and has to consume another portal, and there is no mechanic for resurrecting a player.
On top of this, there is the constant frustration of loot. Unlike Diablo 3 or many modern ARPGs, Path of Exile has a single shared loot pool and there seems to be no rhyme or reason as to which items it flags for which players. We’ve watched a lockbox open and every single item is flagged for one player. We’ve seen the same item flagged to be lootable by BOTH players… even though we were running with “permanent allocation” turned on in the group settings. Then there are weird things like trying to pick up an item and not having inventory space seems to count it was looting it… then dropping it on the ground flagging that item as free for all looting. It just feels bad that you are constantly on the verge of ninja looting something because it is never really clear what belongs to you. There are other problems like “fog of war” exploration not being shared… that all lead to Path of Exile just being a game that feels bad to play with friends.
Contrast that with Diablo 3 which has always felt amazing to play with friends. It is super easy to drag someone along with you and the catch-up mechanics serve to quickly lower the gap in power. I mean the game also has its own problems, I love the ability to just trade any item to friends in Path of Exile whether or not they happened to be there at the time it dropped. I feel like I keep finding myself in a situation of really enjoying Path of Exile, but it is nowhere near the group dynamic replacement game that I was hoping it would be. Diablo 3 sadly still sits at the top of that heap and has yet to be dethroned, even though I keep desperately looking for a replacement. After needing a break from the frenzy of running maps together last night, I swapped over to D3 when I went downstairs and finished out the haedrig’s gift portion of my seasonal journey.
For anyone who has never really done the “proper” season start routine, the above video from Raxx outlines the process. Essentially you complete a challenge rift and then attempt to use the materials that you get through that process… to get some items that will give you a bit of a boost while leveling. This season I stuck out big time. I did my challenge rift on Sunday and then failed to hit anything useful. I stuck out completely on gambling and got zero legendaries, and then my upgraded weapon didn’t land on anything useful either. Still, I managed to level fast enough over the course of two days and then began my season’s journey properly. By the time I dinged 70 I had completed all of the achievements required to get my four-piece set.
At this point, I had only four set pieces and nothing else useful. I had managed to pull a set of Nemesis Bracers which I immediately threw on my Templar. I’ve been trained to feel like I need specific gear items and have used them as a crutch, so instead of going after some of the missing achievements directly, I did a round of bounties, as I would need the jewelry patterns contained in the bags in order to complete one of the achievements. My hope was that through this process I would ultimately get some gear… and I poured all of my deaths breath that I got into upgrading mighty weapons in the hope of getting an Ambo’s Pride. However I finished my round of bounties and was in no better state than I started, and I was shocked at just how easy it was for me to complete a level 20 Greater Rift.
Basically, I had this moment where I realized… that I am much better at Diablo III than I used to be. I mean that is to be expected considering just how many hours I have played this game over the last several years, but it never really sunk in until last night. Early on when I did the seasonal grind, I would have floundered on a 4 piece set trying to get my 6-piece, but instead I made the best of what I had available to me and cobbled together a custom load out of abilities that would accentuate my strengths. Essentially I used Leap and Whirlwind to gather up packs of mobs and then Rend to do the killing, and managed to finish the Rift with eight minutes to spare. I hope maybe one day I can have this same moment with Path of Exile because I still feel completely overwhelmed most of the time I am playing it.
I am hoping beyond hope that either Diablo 4 or Path of Exile 2 ends up being the best of both worlds. What I want is a game with some of the nuance and complexity of Path of Exile, but the fun drop-in non-punitive gameplay of Diablo III. After the debacle that has been the Lake of Kalandra league, I am starting to lose hope that we are going to find that from Grinding Gear Games. I think there are some aspects of “the vision” that are directly at odds with what I consider to be the optimal grouping experience. Maybe the Microsoft buyout of Blizzard will go through… cause some significant changes in the structure of that company and once again make me feel okay about supporting their games. I am hoping that Diablo IV ends up being a great game, in spite of the conditions it was developed under. Even though they have come out with public statements to the contrary… the experience we all had with Diablo Immortal still gives me some significant concerns about what we will get.
The post Chonky Battlecat Friend appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Friends! Yesterday was a bit of a departure and now I return you to your regularly scheduled ARPG nonsense. Of all of the games that I play on the regular, I think I have the biggest soft spot for Diablo-style games. I remember getting into the test phases of the first Diablo game in college and it represented pretty much everything I had ever wanted in a game up until that point. When Diablo 2 came out, I made the difficult decision of choosing to buy it over Icewind Dale as they released the same week… and I had limited funds to buy a game with. I remember playing countless hours of “also ran” titles like Fate, Sacred, Titans Quest, and Dungeon Siege. Basically, I am a junkie for the pattern of clicking on baddies and getting a shower of loot as a result. I am surprised on one level that it took me this long to get into Path of Exile, and on other levels… not surprised at all because it can be a deeply frustrating game.
In order to move my Storm Brand into the next phase of its evolution, I really needed a six-link chest piece. The base that is most highly suggested for the build I am running is the Sadist Garb, and holy crap have prices been all over the place. I’ve been trying to craft my own and have legitimately used probably close to 200 orbs of fusing so far trying to get the links correct. When I first started shopping the trade league these were going for somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 chaos for the right colors and right links. At that time I did not have the funds and by the time I did have some money… they had jumped up to somewhere between 1.5 divines and 4 divines. Basically, the loot changes have thrown the trade economy into a state of chaos where no one seems to know how to price anything.
This morning before sitting down to write this post, I decided to check prices so I could snag a screenshot, and sitting there amongst the expensive options… was this Sadist Garb. It is not the best-itemized thing I have ever seen and is corrupted… which limits my ability to do much of anything to change that, but it was only 10 chaos… which seems like an extreme bargain at the moment. Basically, I decided to jump on the opportunity to get six links, so I could start settling my build in a bit more and shift from my 4 links main spell chain to the 6 links version. The only problem here is that I essentially need to shift around all of my gear to make this work because I am not using my body armor for my main spell chain. I’ve been rat-holing some gear but none of it is quite ready for prime time. However, it is much much easier to get some 4 links as opposed to a single 6 link.
As far as atlas progress goes I am sitting at 45/155 nodes. I’ve been weirdly obsessed with filling out the early rungs of the ladder. I’ve completed the first three tiers and have a map each in tiers 4 and 5, and then 3 in tiers 6 and 7. I suppose I should really check in with the rest of the guild to see what they need because they might be able to plug the holes in my progress and the same with my spare maps. As far as unique maps I have managed to catch 3 available so far from Kirac and have knocked out Coward’s Trial, The Twilight Temple, and Whakawairua Tuaha. Whenever I see one of those I try to complete it just because I am uncertain when I will see it again.
In other news, I’ve also started a character in the new Diablo III season 27. I have some awesome friends who offered me a boost since I did not start until Sunday… but ultimately I thanked them and turned them down. Diablo III has been my “chill” game for when I need a break from the stressful pace of mapping in Path of Exile. Basically, my survival is not amazing so I have to be on point… and lag-free… in order to finish most of the higher-tier maps. I’ve been hesitant to grind through the lower-tier maps for fear that someone in my crew might need them. So essentially I opted to chill out downstairs playing Diablo III the last two nights.
Last night I hit 70 and am slowly chipping away at Haedrig’s Gift. The first three chapters were a cakewalk, but I can basically only reliably do T1 right now with the current state of my gear. I am in mostly yellows minus the four pieces of set gear, so I figure I will do a round of bounties for jewelry patterns to knock that one out, and see how much gear I manage to get them. Hopefully by the time I finish that I will be able to bump things up to T4 and knock out the rest of Chapter IV. Once I have a full set of gear and some viable pieces to go with it, I will be able to escalate quickly through the ranks. I’ve done the “whirlrend” barb thing so many times that it is just a matter of devoting the time to farming in order to get there. Once I am up and running I should be able to knock the rest of the achievements out quickly and get my sword doggo.
The post Sniping a Six Link appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Path of Exile – PC
Good Morning Friends! I find myself in a weird position right now where I am picking at the bones of several games but not terribly engaged with most of them. There was a time when I used to create these “regularly playing” posts, and in theory that is what today’s post is going to largely be. However, I just don’t really feel like reviving that format. If I was going to say I had a primary game at the moment it would be Path of Exile. I am very much in a bit of a honeymoon phase with that game… or as “honeymoon” as you can be with a game that is actively trying to make interactions with its systems difficult. I am not in my 60s on the Explosive Arrow Champion build and I have a few baby alts that are doing different things that I am poking around with as well. We have several folks from the AggroChat podcast playing right now and as a result, we have a “Greysky Armada” guild up and running. Not that I actually understand half of what there is to do with a guild… but we have a Guild Hideout and at least some Guild Stash storage.
Outriders Worldslayer – PC
Since Outriders Worldslayer just released, I am spending some time playing around in that game. I enjoy the mechanical systems but am a bit frustrated with how limited the expansion actually was. Essentially at its core, it adds one new activity to the game… the Trial of Tarya Gratar. If for whatever reason you don’t want to engage with the time commitment of that event, then you are stuck doing the same familiar grinds that have been in place since the release of the game. However, with the game being way more generous about dropping legendaries, I am actually trying to build a proper gear set focused around the Seismic Commander set. At the moment I am wearing mostly the “purple legendaries” gear until I can get a decent roll on all slots of the actual gear set.
Guild Wars 2 – PC
I am still logging in pretty regularly to Guild Wars 2, but I am not really doing much of anything. At a minimum, I farm resources in the three guild halls that I can farm each day, and gather what home instance nodes I have. Most days I try and figure out a quick path to getting 3 dailies done and get my 2 gold. However lately I have not even been doing that. Essentially I need to pick a goal and then focus on that because while I have a wealth of things that I could be doing… I am pretty directionless in actually doing any of them. I could focus on my Skyscale or knocking out the karka hunting achievement which would give me some way of disposing of excess ascended materials. The problem is that I fail miserably at actually sitting down and focusing on any of them.
New World – PC
I am in a similar “maintenance mode” with New World, where I am logging in most days and harvesting enough materials to get 3 of the Hidden Stashes which turn into diamond gypsum, and one of the proficiency caches that gives me emerald gypsum. I then take these out to Shattered Mountain where my inn is bound, craft some gear for expertise boosts and then log out for the day. Doing this has allowed me to take all of my armor slots, sword, shield, and warhammer to 600 expertise. Right now I am working on pushing up greataxe and hatchet. At some point when the major patch drops that take away dungeon keys I will probably start running some of these again through the new group finder tool. The devs made a joke about calling them tuning orbs and expeditions… but I am sorry… that is obtuse and weird. They are dungeons and they are keys and “ya done fucked up” by not naming them the industry standards.
Final Fantasy XIV – PC
I am even in a worse state with Final Fantasy XIV right now. Basically, I am logging in every 4 days… either to go house shopping among the ever-dwindling number of housing plots… or to collect my money from the lottery system because I lost yet again. None of these interactions make me happy. I am very sad about the state of housing in Final Fantasy XIV. The lottery while it helped in some ways by keeping me from having to set up an auto clicker in order to succeed… but I also feel pretty hopeless still about my prospects of acquiring a house. Now that there are additional catch-up mechanics, I really should dive back into the systems and catch a character up. However, there is a mental barrier between me and this game at the moment. If I win a house I will once again have the desire to spend time in this world, but so long as I am homeless I am lacking that traction.
Diablo III – PC
My return to Diablo III was a whirlwind romance. While it was not my fastest season in the world, now that I have finished up with those achievements and gotten the rewards… I have very little desire to keep playing. I had started a Hardcore Seasonal character, simply because I had never actually played in that game mode. I have to admit what knocked the wind out of my sails was when I realized it worked vastly different than I was expecting. I assumed that when I took a death, the hardcore seasonal would turn into a softcore seasonal. I mean this is how it works in Path of Exile and my brief jaunt into Hardcore Minecraft… but my assumptions were wrong. Instead, your character is just gone, and I cannot stomach the idea of wasting time on a character that poofs. This combined with the fact that I just got into Path of Exile has more or less stopped this project dead in its tracks.
Diablo Immortal – PC/Android
Lastly, we have Diablo Immortal. This one is mostly just a footnote because I have uninstalled this game from all of my devices and not looked back after my “fruitless grinding” post. There were a lot of things I liked about this game and the way some of the systems interacted. I specifically loved the way that legendary items worked, and how you could extract the “legendaryness” and apply it to other items. It appears that Diablo 4 is going to do something similar to this, so it makes me very excited for what that game might end up feeling like in the end. However, the monetization of Immortal is going to give me a great pause for what the future of Blizzard games looks like. I have to admit though I had some fun while it lasted, and if they at some point in the future come to their damned senses and make this a more reasonable option… I might return. Considering most of the reputable sources have stopped covering the game aside from the occasional dunk on it… I will be interested to see what the revenue stream looks like on this going forward. I am also curious to see what lasting impact this will have on the Diablo player base… since this essentially nuked the goodwill from orbit.
The post Many Games and Little Focus appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks! This morning I am coming back from five days off and it is going to be weird as hell to actually “punch the clock” again. Five days was plenty of time for me to get my sleep schedule completely mixed up. My “bladder alarm clock” wakes me up around 5, but actually getting up at that time is a whole other story. What I would have talked about yesterday had I posted though is the end of my Diablo III Seasonal Journey. The pied piper song I sing… managed to ensnare a handful of other people into this madness including Thalen and Grace, and Sunday we had a blast running around together and doing “Diabble” nonsense.
The funniest part of the journey however has to have been Saturday night while we were recording the podcast… I was trying to carry Grace to 70 and knock out a good chunk of the seasonal boss kills. The problem with this is the fact that Akkhan Invoker Bombardment is a weird build and is highly unpredictable. Essentially my gameplay pattern was to run around with horsey until I found a champ/elite pack and wait for the bombardment to clear everything before moving to the next pack. At low-level rifts, the Thorn’s damage from the partial Invoker set was enough to have some “on demand” killing power, but there really is no way to really quickly clear stragglers which meant I left a minefield of death for anyone getting drug along.
Granted Grace knew what they were getting themselves in for, but it was still hilarious the number of times we both died. See the other side effect of this specific build is the fact that it is fairly squishy. Every four seconds I rained death down from above, but the other three seconds… I was mostly just trying to stay alive which meant I spent an exceptional amount of time in horse form trying not to stand still. Granted I managed to clear a solo GR90 with this build and probably could have easily cleared higher, but it is maybe the worst pulling experience I have ever had, and eventually rotated out to a more standard Invoker build.
The other part of the season that was interesting was the inclusion of Petrified Screams which open a special kind of Rift called an Echoing Nightmare. This effectively is a horde mode wave clear sort of encounter and the number of waves you successfully clear gives you a gem with a matching level. In practice, these are a way of cheating your way through attunements, but you would also need a great source of raw gems in order to fuel them. What I did not expect however is for these to count towards seasonal achievements. By this point, I had already finished leveling my gems to 75 but when we ran down all of the Petrified Screams that each of us had gathered up on Sunday… it instantly completed a large number of seasonal achievements including a few conquests for Grace and Thalen. We also tried for a speed demon run and nailed it on the first attempt, and as such… while Grace only started Saturday night, they managed to wrap up their seasonal journey Sunday afternoon as well.
I had a blast working my way through this season, and while I will likely never use the ugly Lollipop pet, there is a sense of accomplishment in checking all of the boxes. In theory, there should be a new season starting before too much longer given that this current one started in April. Diablo III really is getting more creative in the sorts of things they are attempting during seasonal play, which reminds me quite a bit of the broad changes that take place during a Path of Exile league. The only thing that I wish is that all of the things they add in for seasons… stuck around during non-seasonal play essentially slowly adding more content to the game. The Echoing Nightmares are a really fun game mode, and I could see people doing these if the petrified screams continued to drop. I briefly contemplated starting a Hardcore seasonal character, because I have never done such a thing… but that is a doubtful proposition.
In other Diablo news, I continue to poke and prod at Diablo Immortal. The truth is it is actually a really good game if you can somehow look past the monetization scheme. I’ve spent zero dollars and I absolutely feel like I am at a lower power level than a good number of people in my level bracket. However, it doesn’t seem to be really impacting what I could be doing right now. Sure if I had some of them fancy legendary gems, I could probably be farming Hell II difficulty right now instead of Hell I, but then again I still need gear from Hell I. This has very much turned into a before bedtime game for me as I fairly casually complete content and do bounties on my phone and using the Gamesir X2 controller. All in all, this runs pretty well on my phone, or well enough to be doing any of the content I have encountered thus far.
I have to say though there is this weird uncanny valley going on where I know I am playing a Diablo game, on some level I would think I was playing a traditional MMORPG like World of Warcraft. The whole aspect of always encountering other players everywhere I go, and the fact that I am effectively running dungeons the same way that folks run dungeons in WoW, triggers that experience. Yesterday there was bonus loot for Forgotten Tower, and essentially we would pull everything up to the next barrier and burn it down there just like you would run a dungeon in WoW or FFXIV. Given however that every class is effectively self-sustaining… it also gives me deep Guild Wars 2 vibes when it comes to doing large group content. When a zone event is happening there ends up being a huge swarm of players… and there are even mechanics that you have to pay attention to in order to succeed.
We also saw the end of the first Cycle of Strife, which crowned the Dark Clan Eden as the new Immortals and the massive whale Megashield as the new server Immortal. If you are curious you can watch the video of the final battle where Megashield won on our server. He reportedly spent 100k on that character, which seems like complete madness to me. That is honestly one of the most disturbing elements of this game is how expensive it is. When Techtone talked about spending 20,000 in a few months of Genshin Impact I thought that was complete madness, but this takes it to a whole new level. Streamer Quin (aka the same dude who boosted in FFXIV then got mad that he struggled to play the game) was doing 10 crest runs attempting to get a 5-star gem. It reportedly cost him $15,870.66 before getting one or roughly 635 10 Legendary Crest greater rift runs.
Admittedly this is a bit of a false narrative, but it makes for good headlines. Just like boosting in FFXIV and then complaining about not understanding anything… doing nothing but 10 crest runs over and over is a bit of a “wrong way to play the game” scenario. He specifically was chasing a natural drop of a 5-star gem with all 5 stars populated. However, in those 635 runs, it is extremely likely that he managed to get multiple copies of Echoing Shade, and probably enough to have made a 5/5 star version of that a long time ago. I think at least on some level… a lot of the spending associated with this game is players trying to brute force their way to ultimate victory. Paying no money… I am still getting an awful lot of enjoyment out of the game on its own merits without feeling the need to chase these Legendary Gems.
Please note… I do not exclude any of the monetizations that are going on. This is absolutely a game that was designed to prey on the worst instincts of gamblers. While watching the Immortal Battle from a few different perspectives, I spent some time watching a Twitch stream of a clan made up of almost nothing but massive whales. Listening to those guys goading each other into spending money on voice chat… felt sickening. At the same time, there were multiple references of the same folks doing crypto gambling, which I did not even know was a thing and seems like a really great way to lose a lot of money. In just the fifteen minutes or so that I watched, it was very clear that the folks talking were gambling addicts. There were folks talking about spending at least $250 to $1000 a day on the game… and that just isn’t sustainable by anyone for long.
The post Barrel Bomb Bonanza appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
