I am getting around to posting a bit later than normal today, because I am a bit sick and fighting some generic respiratory crud. I think it is largely allergies because we are in Ragweed season… and it is by far my worst allergy. I also kicked up a bunch of dust last week in the garage and think I am paying for it. I am struggling a bit right now and find myself in a bit of a funk where nothing seems to “fit right”. I am certain I am dealing with a depression, because how could I not after losing my spouse earlier this year. There is likely no way I got out of that without mental and emotional baggage that I am dealing with pretty regularly. My emotions feel like a scalded tongue… that I cant quite taste things in the way that I used to before. Joy is hard to find… and I keep wandering back and forth between things without much luck. The other day Tipa commented “I don’t know how you fit so much into your day!” and the secret is… I keep bouncing around like mad between a dozen different things and never really making much traction in any of them. I also have no other human to suggest that I do something other than desperately look for something to kill the time.
I am still popping into Destiny Rising each day to play some of the various daily activities, but this is honestly a game that I find myself enjoying the most when Ace and I happen to connect with our schedules at the same time. I am doing the thing that is very familiar in Gacha games where I am trying not to spend any currency and bank it up, so that when the next character banner drops I can immediately purchase a bunch of pulls for it. I am 16 away from the five star choice on the default banner, and whenever I hit that, I am likely going to choose Ning Fei so I have an Arc Champion that is actually pretty decent. Mostly I am chipping away at various lore tasks from different champions and forcing myself to do the planetary dailies on Ikora just to get them done. I think my favorites are still Jolder and Estela right now… with Gwynn and Umeko being close in the running. Wolf has sadly been relegated to the sidelines, and I actually started playing some Tan-2 to get used to the way that he plays a bit.
In Diablo 4 I have officially respecced to the proper endgame build, but am still lacking some of the components. It gave me a bit of survival so that Torment III is now as comfortable as Torment II was previously. Bossing on T3 is still a bit of a crapshoot and depends upon the type of damage that a given boss is dealing. My resistances are still complete crap, and I should probably work on that. The biggest challenge that I am having at the moment is that everything I am doing… feels like a complete waste of time. I need two things… an Ancestral Vasily’s Prayer, and an Ancestral Tibault’s Will. The first comes specifically from Echo of Varshan which means I need to be running Whisper caches to get keys for that. The second is a general drop unique and can come specifically from anywhere… but specifically is apparently on Andariel and Harbinger of Hatred loot pools. The challenge in both cases is that it feels like Ancestral gear drops so freaking infrequently. The above image shows a T3 Beast in the Ice drop pool… with zero ancestrals dropping which is pretty much the norm.
Mostly I have been focused on chipping away at various seasonal trappings like the challenges, battlepass, and the Reign of Chaos quest chain. The amount of farming required to finish the last bit… seems excessive. I feel like Blizz has made the determination that they need to slow things down… to eek more player engagement out of a season, when in truth Season 7 was the best… because it felt like a really fun weekend, similar to how Diablo III seasons used to feel. The game is not detailed enough to be played in a manner like Path of Exile… so any slowing of things down just feels like overstaying its welcome. Wouldn’t you rather have your players saying “wow that was a blast, can’t wait for next season” instead of trying to decide if they give a crap enough to keep grinding. I am rapidly the approaching the point where I am questioning how much I still care.
Legion Remix starts next week on the 7th, and as a result I have been trying to poke my head back into World of Warcraft in an attempt to get into the swing of things. Friends… I really want to finish up the War Within campaign but I am finding it so hard to care about anything that is going on. I tried again last night, and I was just checking boxes off a spreadsheet in the way that I was engaging with the content. I am playing my Dark Iron Dwarf that I rolled during the Pandaria remix event, and honestly… I like playing a defensive warrior about as much as I like playing anything else. The combat though… just feels so much less interesting than it does in Guild Wars 2, which is the game I have mostly been mainlining in the MMORPG world for awhile. I think mostly movement just feels bad, since at its core… World of Warcraft is just prettier Everquest and there is not any real action elements of my movement that factor into how combat resolves. So long as I am in rage of the target and my bounding box is connected to their bounding box… mashing a button makes a thing happen. It does somewhat make me worry how Legion Remix is going to land… but regardless I am still going to give it a shot I think.
In other things happening on the 7th… the Monster Hunter Wilds crossover event is opening in Final Fantasy XIV. I thought this might have been a good signal to get back into the game and quest through things… given that I have not really played actively other than logging in to keep my house active since the patch that dropped the Arcadion. As a result I am fully decked out in that gear… but am going to be yet again… too short to ride the ride since the Guardian fight is going to require 725 gear. This is the thing that I always hate the most about playing Final Fantasy XIV, is that when it comes time for a new expansion… my gear is never good enough to make it through all of the content without either grinding a bunch… or buying my way out of the problem. I hate having to buy a crafted set from the auction house to bail my ass out for having not played reliably during the patch cycle. Since Stormblood… I have basically been a player that plays heavily at the beginning of an Expansion, and then returns at the very end of one… and it is honestly a play pattern that feels like crap because of the required catch up. Even Gacha games every so often throw you a bone with a full set of gear that is good enough to do whatever the latest content drop is.
Since you have made it this far, and listened to me whine about my frustrations and struggle to get attached to anything right now… I will reward you with another photo of Gracie. So often when I am gaming anymore, she will crawl up on the headrest of my new office chair and complain that I am not giving her attention. I am just looking for anything right now that gives me some focus.. and ultimately delays me thinking about the fact that my human is gone. I could be out doing things with friends… but I feel way more “alone” when I am out in public than I do when I am finding something to distract me at home. I spent a lot of time alone since shifting to remote work… but I almost never left the house without my spouse. So going into the world… makes me realize all that I am lacking and missing. There are a lot of things that I want to do around the house, but I end up in ADHD logjams while trying to do them. Mostly I am just trying to keep moving the needle forward with small amounts of progress every single day.
Anyways… if you have made it this far. Thanks for reading.
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Good Morning Folks. On Tuesday the 10th Season dropped for Diablo IV and I have been spending a good chunk of my time playing a Pulverize Druid. I am still mostly in my leveling build phase, but that is largely for lack of reasonable gear drops which I will talk about later. I would love to tell you how many hours I have played, but there is no equivalent of the /played command in this game, nor is there a stats panel like we have in Diablo III. Once upon a time there was a third party tool that filled in this gap, but it seems like either they have stopped supporting it or Blizzard asked them to take it down… because it now simply redirects to the D4 page on Battle.net. I’d sat out the last few seasons, and in my mind that makes me think that must have been sometime last year. No… I last played during season seven… which was January of 2025. It feels like maybe they are speed running seasons… and should maybe stop and have a think about this pacing.
If you are coming to this blog post having not played Diablo IV since launch, you probably only want one question answered. Is Diablo IV Good Yet? That is a complicated question, because I can definitely with resounding authority tell you that it is no longer an objectively bad game. The classes seem relatively balanced, at least in the fact that there is a long list of class builds that are performing well. However, would I consider the game to be “good” when judged against other ARPGs? Then probably not. It is a flawed experience and continues to spend its time creating disposable content without really adding anything to the game that really feels like it moves the needle forward. In fact there are a few things that they have done that actively feel like a step backwards. They no longer refer to things as “powers” but in truth the new Chaos perks shown above… are just a rebranded versions of temporary powers. What I would love to see is the game introducing content that adds more things to do permanently to the game, and not just a less than three month long temporary chase.
So the first problem that I find with this game is that gearing is a bit of a mess. What I mean by this is that I can relatively comfortably do the World on Torment 3, and Bosses on Torment 2… and have long passed the point where any piece of gear that is not ancestral could possibly be useful. Ancestral gear… even at T3… feels exceptionally rare. In fact I can’t really feel any difference in loot availability between T2 and T3 other than the fact that I can speed farm T2. At some point during the seasons that I missed, they flatted the gearing to remove the awkward step of getting Sanctified gear… but also apparently made Ancestral gear feel a bit like unobtainium. It was a few days until I had reached a point where every non-Unique item that I was wearing was Ancestral. This was legitimately a thing that used to take two or three runs, not multiple days worth of fruitless grinding to get to.
Worse than this… I am probably 40 hours into the game at this point… maybe more… and I have a single item that I would consider to be worth investing time and effort into upgrading. Everything else I am wearing… is utterly disposable. What I really need are some Ancestral versions of the other Uniques that my build wants… and while I have run countless copies of the bosses that supposedly drop them. I maybe see a single Ancestral every three to four runs… meaning almost everything I loot is utterly useless. By this point in previous seasons when I was still actively playing the game, I was hunting for Mythics or looking for more perfect versions of Uniques… not struggling to find the items needed to actually make the build function. This frustration is compounded by the fact that the game lacks anything really resembling a proper trade system. You can shout into the void in the trade channel and might possibly get a response, but generally speaking the amount of gold that someone is asking is just stupid. It is not like gold is actually useful in the game, as I am sitting on 150 million right now… but because it has no real value it just seems to be a wild number that people throw around with folks trying to sell things for 500 million.
I am slowly chipping away at the seasonal quests, and have made it up to the Champion level which requires Torment III for everything. I still feel like I need to get a bit stronger before I tackle some of the bossing on this one, and while I have done a Pit 50… the boss on it was a bit painful. Technically I am still running the leveling version of the build, and should likely at some point swap over to the proper setup. I was trying to find the last few pieces of gear as Ancestral before doing this, but in theory I could do it right now I suppose and see if it makes a difference. The new Chaos Rift content is not terribly enjoyable, and the fact that we do not have a new helltide like mechanic to farm makes everything in the season feel slow. I still do not love Helltide in general, but I like the alternate versions of it like the Vampire or Witch themed ones we have gotten in previous seasons, because they seem way more focused.
I am also not the biggest fan of what they did to the battle pass, where it is technically four separate battle passes that have to be unlocked individually. You gain Favor which seems to roll out pretty quickly enough, and then spend that favor to unlock items on the passes. The whole segmentation of this system feels like it was explicitly designed to make players spend more money unlocking it. While I am sure Blizzard will refer to this as “content” it very much feels like taking the same small amount of butter and trying to spread it over way more slices of bread. I will be honest… I was feeling pretty charitable about this season until I sat down and started to write about my individual feelings about various components of it. This is going to come across as a hit piece on the game, and I really do not intend it to be… it is a fun but ultimately flawed gaming experience.
They did get me to spend some money, because a few days into this season they introduced a series of Starcraft themed skins, similar to the World of Warcraft theme ones they released in the past. They coaxed me out of some money then to buy the Lich King skin… and this time around it was Raynor and Corrupted Marine skins. The game is a gorgeous game, and they do create a bunch of really cool cosmetics for it… but it also clearly tells me that they are spending way more effort on the cash shop than they are the rest of the game experience. Diablo has been Fortnite-fied where the gameplay loop is largely kept the same, but you are presented with a constant drumbeat of nostalgia bombs, begging for you to open your wallet and give them some of your money. I am a sucker… I suggest you not be one. I blame Destiny 2 and Gacha games for slowly grinding down my resistance to this complete bullshit.
I think the biggest challenge that I am having right now… is I am not really sure what I should be doing to get over the humps I am dealing with and move on to Torment IV. There is no clear thing that I need to be farming to improve my chances at getting the gear that I need. Maxroll has a boss loot table guide, and in theory I need to be targeting those, but given that again… any item that does not drop at Ancestral is useless… it does not feel great to farm bosses. I think the two biggest outliers that I need are an Ancestral version of Insatiable Fury which drops from Grigoire… which means I need to farm stupid amounts of Helltide to get more summons. I also need an Ancestral copy of Vasily’s Prayer which drops from Varshan… which is largely farmed through getting Tree of Whispers caches. I am doing lots of both… but they are somewhat mind-numbing and the key drop rate is pretty low. Nothing feels worse than seeing the items technically dropping… but without Ancestral rarity… once again making them not worth my time even picking up really.
This is one of those times where Path of Exile and having access to a functional… and now automated… trade economy is a mass improvement. I could save up resources and pick up the items that I am missing, and maybe start selling off some of the items that do drop that I have no use for in order to fund those upgrades. More than that, I feel like Path of Exile is a bit easier to tell what is wrong with your character, and why you can’t do higher tier content. Granted that just might be my level of familiarity with the game. Builds in Diablo III and IV both work on gimmick interactions between abilities, that cause wild exponential scaling to amp up your damage, and in order to trigger that… you need very specific items in specific slots with specific stat combinations. Last Epoch is quite possibly the best game for gearing because you can get up and running really quickly, and then it becomes just a matter of perfecting your gear over time rather than making it super hard to find the pieces that you need.
So to the original question of “Is it Good Now?”. I would say honestly it is good enough to have fun with it. There are frustrations, but you can at very least make it through the campaign without having to deal with them. Everything that I have talked about in this post with disdain… are end game issues. You should be able to at a minimum get to Torment 1 with very little effort. I was doing that almost immediately after dinging level 60. Everything else is just how willing you are to grind it out. I used to have a lot of fun grouping up with my friend Ace and chain running bosses… but that is pretty much a nonstarter these days because everyone has to spend boss mats in order to get loot, so there is no longer that force multiplier that there used to be. Once the 0.3.1 patch drops in Path of Exile II, I will probably be back over there testing out the endgame changes. I am enjoying playing a Bear Druid, but not so much that the next thing that interests me would not immediately pull my attention away from the game. If Destiny Rising did not have clear caps on how much you can do in a given day… I would likely be over there playing it instead of grinding here.
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Good Morning Folks. For awhile now I have used a wireless headset downstairs with my laptop, and I have come to love it. The only real problem with it is that I wish it were semi-open like the Superlux headphones that I use upstairs. When led me down the path of wishing there was a way to convert a normal wired headset to a wireless one. After a bit of back and forth on mastodon, I found an option that is pretty tiny and weighs almost nothing. There are a bunch of versions of this, but the one that I purchased is from MIPEACE and it essentially hangs off the short cord directly from the headphones as seen in the image above. I thought I would need to attach it somehow to the outside of my headset, but since it is so lightweight it seems to be able to just hang there comfortably. I charged it up last night, and now I am curious if it can get through the entire day on a single charge. I will of course report back how well this works out. I am keeping music running in the background so I know when it cuts out.
I am still a bit all over the place right now, spending time in Diablo IV, New World, and Destiny Rising. If I had to claim a main game right now, it would probably be Diablo IV since I am trying to level up and push into the end game. I am taking it super chill right now. I am sure I could grind up in a single afternoon if I really focused on it, but I do that during Path of Exile leagues… and since I don’t take Diablo near as seriously there is no point not to just slow roll this. The Druid felt sort of awful for the first few levels but now it feels pretty solid. Namely when I got some sort of spirit recovery I have been able to mostly just run around pulverizing things. I have enough defenses that I can largely just gather things up in a big pack and them smash them to bits with my beary goodness.
One of the things that I always wish I did…. while leveling, was focus on the various strongholds. This is one of those things that are nice to have unlocked… but also something that I never really want to go back and do later. So this time around I finally smartened up and that has essentially been my focus. As of this morning prior to sitting down to write this blog post, I have now opened every single stronghold and it got me to level 46. Now I just need to find some other activity to grind out the rest of the levels and start the endgame proper. Other than Strongholds, I have also popped around the map unlocking the various waypoints so that when I do hit the endgame, I won’t be hamstrung by not having a port open while doing events.
Between lunch breaks and this evening, I am going to see if I can hit level 60 and start working on Paragon levels. In theory if I hang out in the hellfire areas it should go quickly enough. I’ve done a world boss and a legions event, but the experience gain there seemed pretty slow. At some point I should probably bump up the difficulty, but really since the same gear drops on the first two difficulties there has not been much of a reason to do it. I think I am tanky enough to handle it without much issue, but I am also exceptionally lazy. I need to probably start running some content that reliably drops legendaries so I can collect the necessary affixes needed for my eventual build. I need to look at the maxroll guide I have been following and seeing which affixes come from dungeons, and then get those knocked out while I am still leveling.
I connected up with Ace again last night. We had not really been planning on doing so, but I just happened to notice that they were online when I was starting to grind out my pinnacle rewards for the day. We ran a handful of strikes and mostly it was just a good excuse to hang out on voice and chat while doing activities. I promise I am not super vain… but I still have to screenshot any time I get MVP at the end of a match, especially if it is as Jolder. Generally speaking MVPs tend to favor those characters that deal large amounts of damage, and/or provides some sort of support benefit. I do find it hilarious that “Damage Taken” is a thing that the game is tracking as something that is good. My job as a defensive character though is to get up in the bosses face and try and get it to focus on me… since I have my health bar and a full over-shield bar most of the time.
I’ve been doing the planetary dailies on Finnala, and while I do not really love the character… It has still been fun. Essentially each of the champions has some sort of activities in their lore panel that it asks you to do. For Nala it is do 10 days worth of the destination daily quests in the Red Sea Rift area. Jolder had the same quest chain and I have already completed hers, so I figured I might as well be knocking them out for another character since I am going to do a set of these every day regardless. At some point though I really need to shift focus on the Jiangshi Metro area because my faction level there is pretty pitiful. That first zone is just nowhere near as well designed as the second zone, so it is way less enjoyable just to run around killing stuff in. When I need to do a bounty… I tend to pop down to Red Sea Rift instead.
I went through the process of setting up Overwolf last night, so that I could start running Aeternum Map on the second monitor. Essentially this allows me to keep up a map that tracks my progress through the world, and also shows me the locations of all of the resource spawn points. I have some zones in the game memorized just from running them so much… for example there is a loop in Brightwood that I can run in my sleep. However they have added a lot of higher tier resources into zones like Edengrove, and I figured I might as well have the map up so I can see if there is something that I want to make a beeline for. I hate Overwolf… so I only keep it running so long as I need it for the purpose of this map. Overwolf is essentially keeping track of your location in the world, and all of the tools seem to rely on it to make the maps interactive.
The positive of the map though is it has led me to explore some areas I probably never would have been. For example there is a cave up near Shattered Mountain in Edengrove that is chock full of Mithril nodes. Sure you have to find waves of the exploding blight mobs… and have to keep waiting on your blight bar to tick down, but I think I pulled almost 1000 ore just from this one location last night in a single pass. Similarly I have made beelines off the path to find other precious nodes while exploring things. One cool thing is that since the level cap is now 65… things like Shattered Mountain are no longer as scary as they once were. I need to get out there and explore a bit more, and maybe take down some of the bosses out there for funsies. Every major boss spawn point… seems to always have a group at it. Over the weekend I did a bunch of kills of Baines at the top of a tower in Edengrove, just because I happened to stumble upon a full party hanging out there. Boss farming was one of my favorite things in this game.
Hades 2 is also leaving Early Access today, so at some point I will probably give that a spin. I am installing it currently so I have it at the ready when I am in the mood to give it a go. I know tonight we will be doing our normal Guild Wars 2 shenanigans. I am hoping the crew is further along in the quest chain so that we can knock out some of the things that you cannot get through running quick play. I already have my Legendary Gloves, so mostly I just want to do whatever I can to help push the others through the process. I feel like I am all over the place right now and having trouble focusing on any one thing in particular. That is probably okay, given how much I hyper fixate on a single thing at a time for weeks.
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Morning Folks. It rained most of the day and so far it seems like the fix from the roofers is working. That said, it has only ever leaked when it was torrential rain, and instead we got a light drizzle. I finally washed the towels, but here is a picture of Gracie guarding against leaks. Yesterday was a lot. Not only did I have the fasting blood draw that I talked about yesterday, but I was trying to deal with a bunch of “death stuff” as I collectively call it. Namely I have had a few checks come in that were in my spouse’s name… after I had done what I thought was the right thing and removed her name from our banking accounts. It seems as though I will have to file a case with the probate court and create an “estate” account in order to cash these now… something that at a bare minimum will cost me $200 just for file the paperwork, let alone whatever I will need to pay a lawyer to draw up said paperwork. Thus far the checks don’t even total $100… so this is not likely something I will be doing. I dealt with a bunch of other miscellaneous stuff yesterday, including calling the medical examiner to see if they have finally given a proper cause of death…. which they have… but now I am waiting for official death certificates. All of this… extremely fucking draining.
The absolute high point of my evening was hanging out with my virtual sibling Ace and doing some Destiny Rising. We essentially hung out together and ground out a bunch of strikes, until we were both completely out of pinnacle currency… and then ran a few after that for good measure. For whatever reason we seemed to keep getting The Pit over and over, and stumbled onto a weird glitch in the matrix. It seems that if you have gone down the path of becoming a Mentor… your light requirement is higher for queuing for heroics than when you were a “New Light”. This seems exceptionally lame, and led to a scenario to where they could not queue as anything other than Estela, the champion that they have most recently poured resources into to bump up. This was a bit annoying when one of the dailies involved killing things with a void champion, and they could not play one.
My highest light champion is Jolder, which I am largely still maining. However Estela, Wolf, and Umeko are all pretty close in ranking. I’ve still not really found an Arc champion that I enjoy very well, and I am hoping that maybe the next premium banner will bring one that is a bit more enjoyable to play than anything I have gotten so far. Ace pulled the Arc Staff guy and said that so far they seem pretty fun. I am not too far from the Mythic choice pity on the normal banner, so in theory I will likely pick him as my choice when it comes down to that. I really wish that the banner was just for pulling additional copies of champions for powering them up, and that there was a way to unlock every champion by default through a quest chain or something. It really feels like that sort of thing would better serve a game like Destiny Rising, where so much of the game is based on team composition.
Yesterday was the launch of Diablo IV Season 10, and I rolled a new character to see how the game has progressed since I last paid attention to it. I’ve sat out the last few seasons and for the most part… everything is perfectly cromulent. I heard that the pulverize druid was really strong, so I ended up rolling one of those. I think the challenge that both Druid and Barbarian have is that they feel sort of awful to play early game… but become godlike in the late game. So you have to suffer a bit until your build comes online. I am very thankful that at some point in the past I spent money on a nice looking cosmetic set… because the base druid vibe is not really my thing. I wish there was a way to just run around in Werebear form all of the time, because that shit is awesome. I feel like this is missing out on something significantly here. The game would be better if you could just always be Werebear or Werewolf.
I have not made it super far, but I am also not really rushing it. This morning my build started to come a bit more online and the Druid as a whole is feeling much better as I am now in my 20s. I figure this is going to be something that I poke out off and on until I hit the level cap and build a reasonable build. That said… when a new Path of Exile season drops I am abandoning this. Additionally I know that Legion Remix is happening early in October and it is likely that if I have not hit the level cap and am farming the endgame by the time that comes out… D4 is also getting dropped in favor of that. I’ve contemplated firing up World of Warcraft and trying to get caught up on the story there, but it still just doesn’t really feel right. I am interested in a lot of the things that are going on in that game, but am not sure I am really in the mood for a traditional MMORPG experience.
New World on the other hand seems to be clicking pretty well. I’ve swapped back to my level 65 main on Pangaea and spent a bit of time just roaming around and getting used to the combat again. Mostly it is muscle memory that came back extremely quickly. One of my favorite aspects of the game has always been roaming around and harvesting resources, and I am starting to do that again. I did figure out how to upgrade gear, but the process is confusing and arduous and nowhere near as clear as it used to be. I think Amazon Game studios suffers from some poor game design at times… and there are weird gates for things that should be more accessible. The whole concept of needing to craft dungeon keys for example seems to still be a thing, and it is weird that you would not want your players just playing your content all of the time. This is especially fraught given the great experiences we have had recently with the Fractal Incursion event in Guild Wars 2.
All of that said, there are some pretty solid crafted gear options and I think in the short term I am going to focus more on leveling up my tradeskills. Ultimately I would need to push things up to 250 in order to craft the best stuff, and a lot of my harvesting abilities are already climbing past 200. I am in no rush to do any of this, but I am interested to see what the new content that drops looks like. The biggest problem I have had with the evolution of New World, is that it has removed zones from the game in order to rework them as something else. I am hoping this new zone is actually that… new territory to be explored that has never existed in the game before. That is not to say that I don’t think that the reworked zones are not good steps… but games need to expand… not just be revised to death.
Anyways. That is my yesterday. Today I am back at work like normal and will probably futz around with Diablo IV some more this evening and see if I can get closer to the level cap.
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