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.
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Sometimes a Rift just does not go your way. Yesterday I was trying for a level 72 to keep moving that needle forward and just ran into a chain of deaths and then got behind the timer. That is one of those things that happens in Diablo 3 sometimes, and it sort of highlights just how dependent upon RNG some of your success ends up being. I dusted myself off immediately and tried to just a straight 70 instead of the maximum I could do and breezed through it. I am having a freaking blast right now, in spite of the occasional death storm. There is just something about Diablo III that I have never found in another game. I’ve been spending some time playing Torchlight III a bit more, and it is a better game than I gave it credit for… but the dopamine cycle just isn’t the same.
When it comes to the Season 26 Journey, I have knocked out most of the low-hanging fruit. The one that is ALWAYS the bane of my existence is the set dungeon mastery. I hate doing set dungeons so much and I avoid them until I absolutely cannot any longer. This is a reoccurring theme and if you look up me talking about ANY past season… there is always a point where Slayer and Champion are done apart from the set dungeon. As far as conquests go I will probably start chewing away on those as well. I need to see if I am at a point where I can farm bounties on T16, and then start stockpiling caches for Avarice. Ultimately in an Avarice season, I tend to wait to do the cube 20 and 40 powers until after I have finished with that conquest because I will be swimming in materials. I need to also focus on doing a really fast T13 Neph Rift in order to knock out that under 4-minute run, which will tick two boxes.
Right now I am running a Thorns Bombardment build, mostly because it was something easy to build into from the Akkhans set granted by Haedrigs Gift. I have almost everything I need to switch over to a straight Invoker Thorns build, and I am contemplating making that shift at some point. I think Invoker might be an easier dungeon to do, but I am not entirely certain. I at least know it is a dungeon I have done several times. I have always thought Omnislash thorns build would be cool and apparently, some patch changes have now made that a viable thing. It is sorta dumb the amount of enjoyment I have by running back-to-back rifts trying to farm additional gear for gaining some power. I have a shockingly sparse number of Ancients at the moment, and my Primal gained from the 70 greater rift… was awful. My second primal wasn’t much better, but at least it was something I could hand to my Templar.
In other news, I am still logging into New World at least once a day and running around and collecting a few easy pieces of Gypsum. I’ve managed to slowly work all of my armor slots up to 600 expertise, and am now starting on weapons. I got my Sword all the way to 600 already, and Greataxe/Warhammer is in the 575ish range. I am not entirely certain WHY I continue to play other than running around and harvesting materials is still pretty enjoyable. I think ultimately I am waiting for the dungeon patch that removes keys, and then I will probably be spending some time trying to get groups tanking dungeons to finish out my expertise grind. I am also farming keys on the side because they have stated that each key will become a box full of dungeon loot. Especially now that all of my armor is at 600, there might be some interesting items that come from those.
The other game I am spending time in each day is Guild Wars 2, but lately, that has been limited to farming daily PVP Potions. For the time being the only members of the Greysky Armada that PVP at all… are me and Kodra and we are trying to farm up as many pots as we can. We’ve already farmed up to 50 a few times and unlocked some of those upgrades and now we are chewing away at one of the 100 potion requirements. At a minimum each day I do enough dailies in order to get the completion reward and the free 2 gold that comes with it. If I happen to be paying attention at Tequatl time, I still try and catch that whenever I can. However, the last few days of being in “Diabble land”, have caused me to miss those.
All in all, I am having quite a bit of fun, but I do need to revisit some other projects like finishing out Horizon Forbidden West.
The post Always the Set Dungeon appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Friends! On Monday I talked about my general sense of unhappiness and how my prohibition of Blizzard titles, and specifically my beloved Diablo III had brought me nothing but misery. So the interesting part about that is… I was holding stable up until the point that I tried Diablo Immortal. I largely tried Immortal in the first place so that I could write my impressions given how much Diablo III and honestly D2 and D1 I have played over the years.
I posted a snippet of an article from the Washington Post yesterday on Twitter, and for me at least it rings so true. I think my falling back into Diablo III has been at least in part a way to wash the bad taste of the Diablo Immortal monetization out of my mouth. This seems to have been the case for at least a few of my friends as well. I legitimately had no intention of breaking my Blizzard prohibition but it has now happened… and I am happier for having done so. I missed this game so damned much.
I am still in the “building power” phase of the season. It took me a few nights to level from 1 to 70, and it has been a really long time since I have done that completely solo. When I usually played Diablo III I had Grace along with me, and we at a minimum duo’d most things… and occasionally had others like Byx joining in the nonsense. I was nowhere near as efficient in my leveling as I could have been, in part because I knew I needed a Ring of Royal Grandeur for my target build, and I figured since it was going in the cube I might as well try and get one from bounties as I leveled up. I wish I had managed to get some of the other items I needed for the build because it would have made the start of the season considerably easier.
For those who might have never started a Diablo III season, the general theory is that you create a Seasonal character and then immediately hop into whatever challenge rift was available for that given week. A Challenge Rift is essentially a snapshot of a specific build, often taken from the community… and you have to navigate that build successfully through a fixed Greater Rift in order to beat a specific time. Your reward for doing this… is a cache full of resources that gives you a headstart on the season and allows you to do some specific things. Essentially you get:
5,100,000 gold
475 blood shards
35 deaths breath
125 veiled crystals
350 arcane dust
370 reusable parts
15 of each of the different act bounty currencies
Essentially the standard order of operations is to use this to level the Blacksmith and Mystic all of the ways up, and then attempt to convert a Rare item into a legendary item in Kunai’s Cube. Based on what you get there this generally determines what item you go for in gambling with Kadala using those 475 blood shards. There are specific items that are suggested and I did not get any of them.
What I did get instead however was a nifty parlor trick that I was able to stick in Kunai’s Cube. I am not sure I have ever used Flail of the Ascended, and if I did I largely just used it as a temporary beater until I got something better. This ultimately lead me to build around Shield Glare and Shield Bash, so that I could bash my way through the level and then use Shield Glare as a big nuke to take out bosses or large packs. Honestly, it felt pretty good right up until the point that it stopped feeling good around level 66. In my challenge rift cache shenanigans, I managed to get a level 70 weapon that I could equip at level 49, so once I grew into that I had an express elevator to the top. I’ve had worse seasonal leveling experiences for certain, but I have also had much much better ones.
At this point, I can pretty reliably clear Torment VII Neph Rifts at a decent speed for farming and I have cleared through Solo 43 in Greater Rifts. I have three decent legendary gems and I just need to work on getting those leveled up a bit. This is the Diablo that I love, and this is ultimately what I hoped Diablo Immortal would be… but on the phone. This is what the loot from a Rift should feel like and only exists in Immortal if you spend $25 on Legendary Crests per run. I am having a freaking blast folks, and my hope is to finish off Season 26 before the timer runs out. The prediction is that this season will end sometime in August. With the current double bounty cache reward going on, I should be able to farm up Avarice pretty easily, but I need to really get my power up to where I can comfortably run T13 at a minimum before starting that grind. It is kinda dumb how returning to a game can make me so happy… but it is a thing that has happened. God, I love Diablo III.
The post Diablo III Season 26 So Far appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Friends. Sometimes I get something stuck in my head and I have trouble letting go of it. For a decade now, Guild Wars 2 has been this puzzle that I have been trying to crack. I’ve fought and spent countless hours trying to sort out why many of my friends enjoyed it, but that I struggled to latch onto it. Now that I have arrived at the moment where it is really clicking for me… I’ve been puzzling over why exactly I bounced so hard for so many years. Last night I think I landed on the very specific reasons, and this morning I am going to take you on a journey as I dive into them. Ultimately like so many problems in my life it has come down to assumptions and expectations.
In 1996 when I got into the beta for a game from then upstart developer Blizzard called Diablo, it was essentially everything I had wanted in a video game up until that point. Suffice to say that I love Diablo with all of my heart and even though the original is rather kludgy by today’s comparisons, it will always right or wrong be up on a bit of a pedestal. There are times when it is important to understand the lineage of a game and I have talked about in the past how Final Fantasy XIV behaves oddly not because it draws its roots to World of Warcraft, but that it ultimately draws its roots to Everquest and that community by way of Final Fantasy XI which was directly inspired by EQ. As we talk about Guild Wars, we have to start with Diablo and ultimately the games that spun out of Diablo like Lineage and Dungeon Siege.
So while Guild Wars and World of Warcraft were technically contemporaries, there was never a time when I actively compared the two games or even treated them like they were in the same genre. Guild Wars very clearly drew its provenance from Diablo and Lineage by reference whereas World of Warcraft was based out of building a better Everquest. As a result the sort of gameplay that Guild Wars had felt like a fresh take on the dungeon crawler genre, or more so expanded upon it by adding much better story and new kinds of networked gameplay. I did not expect anything more from it than a game that let me kill monsters for stacks of loot, and I found the card based skill system to be interesting. I have always been a huge fan of Magic the Gathering and once I made that mental connection to deck building I was set.
Where we run into problems however is with the release of Guild Wars 2. During the run up to the game there was a lot of very lofty bullshit bandied about by the team. Rather intentional or not, they painted a target on their back of having to bear the burden of being the “WoW Killer”. So as a result I stopped comparing Guild Wars 2 to that provenance of Guild Wars dating back to Diablo… and instead started comparing it directly to World of Warcraft. The comparison did not really hold up because as we all know Guild Wars 2 is doing something very different, and as a result was missing a lot of the underpinnings of that traditional World of Warcraft experience. I gave it a shot but it just did not have the same magic I was hoping it would rekindle from those early days of Warcraft. Like I said I am not sure if this really was intention on the part of the developers or if something that some marketing agency decided needed to happen but in truth they should have spent more time distancing themselves from the MMORPG pack than they did.
The problem for me however is that the damage was already done. Guild Wars 1 mentally was ArenaNet showing me what they could do with the Diablo formula, and as a result I had equated the second game to them showing me their take on World of Warcraft. The word “Warrior” means something very specific to me as a result of that connection. Tales of the Aggronaut started its life as a World of Warcraft Warrior Tanking blog, so I had a very specific style of gameplay that I wanted to experience when I rolled this new character type in Guild Wars 2. The disconnect being that Warrior is no more tanky than any other class in the game because there is no traditional trinity of roles, nor should there really be. I kept trying to force Guild Wars 2 into the mold of my experiences from other MMORPGs when I never thought to take a step back and trace the path back to Diablo.
In Diablo you have the Barbarian and it is no more tanky than any other class in that game. It is instead a class defined by melee combat and short duration largely shout based buffs for your team. Effectively you could swap the word Barbarian for Warrior and have a better understanding of what the Guild Wars 2 class is trying to be. However for me the well was poisoned and Guild Was 2 was a game that was “doing warriors wrong!” even though I had been perfectly happy to play the “Warrior as Barbarian” in the original Guild Wars. It is shocking just how much difference the right frame of mind makes when approaching something, and how our assumptions can be the destroyer of possibilities.
One of the problems that I have is that I get hung up on fetishizing specific weapons. For example in Destiny 2, there is never going to be a point where I am not either actively wielding or have in my inventory an Auto Rifle. That is the weapon for me and I will go through some weird contorted lengths to make sure I am using one. Similarly with MMORPGs, I want to be using a sword and a shield… and occasionally an Axe or a Mace will do but the important part is the shield. That is a deep part of what I consider to be a “tank” and why I play them. While I enjoy the non-traditional tanks like the Warrior in FFXIV or the Demon Hunter in World of Warcraft, I will never feel quite as at home as when I have a large chunk of metal strapped to my left arm. This is what is largely referred to as a “class fantasy” and it is one that is completely unsupported by Guild Wars 2.
What changed is that I had a conversation with my friend Tam about what I actually want from a class and he managed to narrow in on one piece of the narrative that I had not caught myself. I want a character with extremely high suitability. So while it is very much not my “class fantasy” he said I should check out the Necromancer and I did precisely that. There is something about playing a caster which is entirely out of my comfort range, and a pet class specifically… and caused me to completely re-frame the experience of playing Guild Wars 2. No longer was I playing a game that was pretending to be World of Warcraft but instead playing a game that very much drew its roots to the Diablo 2/3 Necromancer, another class that I love. Being forcibly pushed out of my comfort zone has allowed me to completely re-imagine the experience of playing Guild Wars 2 for the better.
For years I have believed that Guild Wars 2 was an attempt to build the WoW Killer, because that is what the marketing told me it was. What the game is instead however is a direct successor to Guild Wars 1, taking a lot of the things that worked well there and expanding upon them and building them into a big open world event based game. It is a game where your class doesn’t really matter all that much, but what does matter is the way you build it and the gear that you equip… which is entirely translatable to the experience I have with builds and Diablo 3. With this frame of context everything about the Guild Wars 2 experience suddenly feels better. I’ve been able to chuck it mentally into the appropriate bin of equivalent experiences and now it is absolutely scratching that Diablo itch for me.
Last night I had a freaking blast running around and doing the big World Boss events. At the suggestion of Bhagpuss in my comments yesterday, I spent the 400 gems on the doodad that auto teleports me to any available events. It is maybe some of the best money I have ever spent on a game like this, and the end result was three hours of mayhem and so much loot. Granted a large chunk of it was salvage fodder, but I did manage to pull a really cool exotic staff and more importantly a ton of gossamer and a handful of high end leather as well as a few more crafting patterns. What Guild Wars 2 does best is the drop in nature of the big zone events, and now that I have tackled the mental obstacles that I had placed in front of my enjoyment… it is a glorious experience.
The post Understanding the Bounce appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
