Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! We start the show with the dangers of bowling in a fursuit and then dive straight into the Not-E3 shows. The entire crew has finally watched the Dungeon and Dragons movie so we talk a bit about how damned good it was. Tam and Bel talk about Knights of the Old Republic 2 and how maybe not all of the content in the restored patch should have been restored. Thalen talks about how faithful of a remaster System Shock is and how Nightdive is doing great work. Bel talks a bit about his experiences with Diablo 4 Endgame and how it is not that great. Tam talks about playing Wizorb on the Steam Deck and Bel talks a bit about the Honkai Star Rail patch. Finally, Kodra finishes the show with some talk about Co-Op games that allow players to share the cognitive load of problem-solving.
Topics Discussed:
Not-E3 Shows
Dungeons and Dragons Movie Finally
Knights of the Old Republic 2 and the restored content
Good Morning Friends. There is a concept among my inner circle of friends called “Bel Luck” where I am known for having an unnatural amount of luck when it comes to succeeding against the random number generators built within games. My personal theory is that I just play an excessive amount of one game at a time and as a result am just more likely to see better drops. My friends however will swear that it is something other than that. For the most part, I don’t believe them… but I have been party to a long line of exceedingly rare drops over the years. In Guild Wars 2 for example I pulled a Permanent Auction House from one of the random Black Lion Chest keys while leveling my Necromancer and have pulled four Ascended chests from Tequatl. In World of Warcraft, I pulled not one but two Spectral Tiger mounts from the card game and won the roll the one time the mount from Attumen dropped in OG Karazhan.
Last night in Honkai Star Rail… I got something so seemingly rare that I am maybe starting to believe them. I had a good deal of currency saved up waiting on the Silver Wolf banner to start, and while I did not get one night before last when the banner opened… I had gathered up enough 10 pull worth last night from doing various activities and raiding the limited purchases from the currency shop. When I saw Gold behind Pom-Pom I went through a rollercoaster of emotions… first being extremely happy hoping that I got Silver Wolf. Then being sad when I saw the banner image for Bronya instead… then happy again when immediately after clicking off Bronya I saw the banner image for Silver Wolf. The cherry on the top is that I pulled a four-star Light Cone at the same time so essentially 3 rare pulls in the same ten pull. I feel like I have spent down my luck for a while, but that said… I also managed to pick up the 5 Star from the last banner.
I am not necessarily playing the to the maximum right now in Honkai Star Rail because my brain is being dumb and seemingly hung up on Diablo IV. I am at least playing a little bit each night and have made it a bit into the new story content. Essentially where I left off last night this new character Screwllum was asking me to run a Simulated Universe. I knew this would take a bit and my brain was not necessarily in the mood to go through a thirty-minute-long Simulated Universe so I logged in for the evening. My goal is to pop in an do a few of these today given that I need to hit the weekly cap of progress there anyway. This is sort of where I struggle with Genshin or Star Rail, is that if I am not playing it as my primary game… and a new content pack is released… I am just not playing enough to catch up fully and feel like I am floundering a bit.
I legitimately thought that I would be winding down my time in Diablo IV. I am still not entirely certain I am enjoying myself but also seem to be hung up on it. This seems to be a case of “the heart wants what the heart wants” even though I am not sure if it is wise. Essentially I am doing some of the busy work that involves running around and doing various things. I am slowly working my way towards an eventual respec to Whirlwind. I stayed away from that ability because it seemed bugged… but also even after several rounds of nerfs seems to be strong. Upheaval is something that I enjoyed in testing but seems to not really be viable at the moment. I struggle to kill/survive anything in higher world tiers so there is no way I am going to complete the capstone dungeon in my current state. I think as my last attempt at making this game feel good, I am prepping to respec by unlocking the aspects that I need.
Last night I finished up the overwhelming mission of collecting all of the Altars of Lilith spread throughout the five regions of the game. Each region has around 35 of these altars so I spent a lot of time checking a map on my second monitor and attempting to guess where that location related to on the in-game map and putting a pin there. From what I understand, after having done this on my main character… I will never have to get another Altar of Lilith on my alternate characters. My hope is that this progress will carry forward into seasons… because this is part of my hang-up with what a new seasonal experience will look like. There is no way I can see collecting all of these altars every three months. Doing it once was painful enough.
I’ve also launched the beginnings of a Diablo IV Tools section for the website under my Game Tools menu. Right now I am collecting resources that I am using as I stumble across them. I have a few build sites that I regularly reference, a nicely interactive and searchable game map, and then the numbered lists of altars that I followed while collecting the statues over the last few days. As more tools come available I will be adding them to the list, and as I stabilize my builds I will probably start doing what I do with Path of Exile and use this section as a way to catalog what I am playing. I am legitimately not sure if anyone actually uses these pages, but for me, they serve as an external bookmark system for the resources that I regularly consume.
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Good Morning Friends! This is going to be a bit of a personal blog post and less of a gaming one. One of my biggest joys over the last few weeks has been evening time with one of the outdoor feral cats that we call Greybie. He has started coming out into the backyard to hang out with us. My wife spends way more time in the backyard than I do, and generally speaking, pings me over messages to let me know when he arrives. I’ve been spending about an hour each night hanging out and loving on Greybie and it completely warms my heart that when I get out there and set down, he comes running across the yard to be by my side.
There is so much of me that wants to adopt him and take him inside, but I have deeply conflicted feelings. Firstly we have three indoor cats already, so we would have to get him tame enough to go to the vet first without freaking him out completely. We are not quite there yet. Secondly, he is a “notched” baby which means he is a community cat. He was purposefully caught, neutered, vaccinated, and then released back into the community. Our neighborhood in general seems to be a collection point for these cats and in theory… you are not supposed to adopt them. So instead we give them safe places to stay during the winter with a few cat shelters and then make sure they are getting food and water to supplement whatever they are catching. Greybie roams around quite a bit and honestly, I am not sure if he would enjoy being an indoor cat… so instead I just give him lots of attention when he wants it.
Right now we are going through a lot of construction… that unintentionally coalesced at the same time. The city is blacktopping our neighborhood, so we have dust being kicked up endlessly by heavy machinery that is sanding the surface of the streets in preparation for the asphalt to come through. Then in our backyard, we are finally dealing with our bedraggled decking. It was never really usefully located and involved having to skim the edge of the pool in order to get over to it. We are hopefully making things work a little more smoothly and it was more economical to have folks just rip out the current deck than to try and do careful surgery and fix the old one. So as a result we have this super awkward empty space in our yard, that will begin to be filled today as the team comes back to begin construction of the new deck.
The negative is that Tripod has disappeared once again. We saw her bound over the neighbor’s fence and into the greenbelt that exists between neighborhoods. This is not the first time that things have gotten “too noisy” for her and she has checked out for a while. It is our hope that once things have settled down a bit, she will return as she has for the last five years. In the meantime, I am continuing to put food and water out just in case she needs to come back for a quick visit before bouncing again. It hurts our hearts to have her gone from the backyard, but this was something that needed to happen with the deck and I am hopeful she will fall back into her normal order eventually. The biggest sadness though is that she and Greybie were slowly working towards getting along together. The above photo is probably the closest we have ever seen them together, and one of the closest times she has been near us as humans. That photo was taken from my chair so she was maybe four or five feet away. I’m hoping by the end of the week we have our new deck and our backyard at least can return to peaceful quiet.
On the gaming front, a new patch dropped for Honkai Star Rail and we get access to the Silver Wolf banner. I spent through my stockpile of pull currency and have not picked her up yet, but essentially I will be spending every bit of free currency to do so until this banner is over. Basically, I want access to her because she has the ability to create a vulnerability in one of your team members, making it a bit easier to push through encounters without changing up your team significantly. My guess is I would replace March with her in my current comp. The arcade graphics of her attacks are also pretty freaking cool.
I’m also still poking around at Diablo IV, namely working at knocking out Lilith Altars in the various zones and getting my renown up to at least rank 3 so I can finish getting the remaining skill points. After I do this I think there is probably a significant respec in my future. Right now I am using Upheaval which seems to be completely out of the current meta of “best barbarian builds”. So once I wrap up this project of finishing the Lilith Statues, I will likely spend time trying to decide what build I want to spec into, and then making sure I have the legendary aspects needed for that build unlocked in my codex of power. At the moment I am leaning towards Whirlwind because that traditionally is my favorite Barbarian build, however, I am going to wait a bit before deciding because they are still pretty actively balancing things. I know Upheaval hit some nerfs going into the previous open test, and it certainly feels weak at times so I am open to other options.
I hope Tripod is doing okay out there. She has left and returned so many times in the past that I feel pretty confident that she is going to be just fine and then eventually return to our home and take up residence again. That said… I still worry about her.
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Good Morning Friends! Yesterday I reached the point of realization that I am just not enjoying Diablo IV. On one level this should not shock me… given how much I have talked about this game not being the game I was wanting it to be. However yesterday over lunch I was playing for a bit and it hit me that I was really not enjoying myself. I think so long as I had the clear objective of “finishing the campaign” I was able to find some joy in the experience. Now that I am turned loose in the world post paragon… and realizing I have a fairly scuffed build that I am uncertain how to fix other than grinding for legendaries or respeccing to whirlwind… I am just not certain the struggle is worth it. I am not necessarily saying I am “done” with Diablo IV, but I am saying that I sincerely doubt I will make it super far running the grinding and gearing treadmill with this game because the moment-to-moment gameplay just doesn’t feel great to me.
I’ve said this in my own fifteen-minute-long video complaining about Diablo IV, but the core problem I have with this game is the way that the world scales as compared to how your power scales. Yesterday Action RPG released a video essentially underlining the same points. Diablo is a game about feeling powerful and smashing demons to jangly chords, and while after the second act, the jangly chords come into play… the cost of entry of the feeling powerful bit seems like it is a bit much. Every level I put on in this game makes the game feel worse until I get a drop… which patches over the problem until I ding again. There is just something about the moment-to-moment gameplay that feels off and maybe it is that the cooldowns are longer than I would expect or that the resource generation isn’t high enough… or that the resource spenders don’t deal enough damage. Whatever the case… I just can’t seem to get to a point where the game feels good.
I still have a lot of maps to see out there, and a ton of dungeons to complete in order to unlock the patterns contained within them. I’ve also not really made a concerted effort to go after the Lilith Statues, so in theory that is probably what I am going to be devoting my time to in the coming weeks as I continue to poke at this game’s carcass. There is a whole lot of map that I have not uncovered, especially in the last few acts of the game where I focused entirely on the yellow quests. Additionally, the Tree of Whispers is not an awful way to progress, and I’ve done a bit of that though really do not enjoy the short timers on all of those missions. I did not realize that your progress expired because I had completed 8 grim favors before logging out when the servers went to shit last night, and logging in this morning all of that progress is gone.
I will say that I had more fun than I would have expected watching the World’s First Hardcore race and I got to see several of the streamers that I follow hit level 100 over the last several days. I find it pretty awesome that a team of Path of Exile streamers ultimately got the first four spots on the unofficial Hardcore Leaderboard. Carn was technically the first to level 100, but Zizarin, Steelmage, and Nugiyen followed a few hours after. Then several hours after that I watched Raxxanterax who is probably the D3 player that I have consumed the most content from hit 100, and a few hours after that seeing Wudijo become the first SSF Hardcore 100 player. I normally do not watch streamers and largely consume content from them when it makes its way over to YouTube, but this time around I was curious how the race was going given that I am familiar with a lot of these people from other ARPGs.
Other than Diablo IV, I spent some time last night screwing around in Last Epoch. I am still working on my wannabe squirrel build and attempting to get the stupid helm to drop. I’ve also contemplated respeccing my Necromancer over to a necrotic/life leech build that I saw yesterday but I do not know how much work that would end up being to relevel my skills after the swaps. The current state of Endgame in Last Epoch feels a little lacking. I feel like I need an overarching goal that I am working towards to disguise the fact that I am grinding. Since there is no real targeted way of farming the exact items that I need, I find it hard to stay focused. In Diablo III, sure I farmed the same greater rifts over and over but often times there were goals that I was working towards like pushing up my GR level higher or leveling Legendary gems. Those took the focus away from the repetitive behavior. In Path of Exile I am doing maps to gain Sulphite and then doing Delve while hunting for City or Boss nodes. The hunt gives me focus and takes me out of the mindset that I am repeating the same loop over and over.
Speaking of Path of Exile… I need to spend some more time in that game soon. I know with Exilecon in July will represent the launch of a new league and I need at least ONE MORE challenge in order to get the pitiful little 19 challenge totem pole. There are three that seem like they are the most likely to finish up so I guess over the coming weeks I will spend some time working on knocking one or more of these out. After that, I am not sure what my focus is going to be. I had hopes that Diablo IV would coalesce into something that I wanted to be playing on the regular but unfortunately, that is not really the case. To be truthful… I didn’t really enjoy Diablo III until the first expansion dropped and changed a number of systems, so maybe there is hope on the horizon. Talking with a few friends, I seem to not be the only one for which the game is losing its mirth. Even then though… I might try leveling something else and see if it is more my speed.
Anyways I hope you are having a great week, and if you are playing Diablo IV that it is giving you what you want from it.
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