Diablo

What I’m Playing: August 21, 2016

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Another week of nothing but Diablo 3 and World of Warcraft. It should be depressing that I haven’t played more games, but honestly I’ve been having tons of fun with these old comfortable titles.

WoW: I got my baby mage to 100 this week via the invasion roller coaster. I also got my legendary ring on my druid, so I can say I saw that story on at least one character this expansion. The story quest they added this week as part of the lead up to Legion was also really fun. It wasn’t as epic as the Broken Shore quest but it was nostalgic and entertaining. Now I’m just leveling various alts and enjoying myself in these last few days before the expansion. In addition to the baby mage I’ve gotten a warrior from 1 to 64 and a DK up to 79 with invasions. It will be interesting to see what the total level count from this event will be.

D3: There’s been slow but steady progress this week. I’ve gotten 3 legendary gems up to level 60, and managed to clear GR68 solo. The pants I screwed up a while back have been fixed, and 2 more pieces of ancient legendary gear have been augmented. I just wish I could find or craft an ancient bow, it is the one huge thing holding me back right now. I’m leaning more and more toward not bothering with the stash tab for this season, but I think I would at least like to finish the step of the journey that I’m on right now. I just need one conquest and a TXII speed rift to finish up.

 


What I’m Playing: August 21, 2016

What I’m Playing: August 14, 2016

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We’re almost halfway through Blaugust and I’ve managed to keep up with things so far, woo! This week my play time has still been pretty focused.

FFXIV: Once again the only time I played FFXIV this week was during raid. Once again, the time I did play was phenomenal. This game’s raiding is so fun and satisfying, and even old content still requires some thought and attention. I’m just too distracted by other things right now to give it the attention it deserves.

What I’m Playing: August 14, 2016

Steven Universe Soundtrack Attack: I almost forgot to mention this one, but I was talking with the Aggrochat folks about it last night before we recorded the podcast and figured other people might want to know about it too. I’m playing this fun little rhythm game on iOS. I like it because you can create and customize your own new gem (mine’s a Ruby!), and it has music from the show. Unfortunately it moves pretty quickly from “hey this is fun” to “furiously mashing at the screen not being able to keep up.” Maybe that’s a thing this type of game does? I admit I’ve not played any other rhythm games on my phone. Some of the songs are even sped up a bit from the show. I suspect it is because they want you to watch more adds and buy powerups that let you slow down the songs. Also not all of the levels are songs directly from the show, a lot of them are instrumental tracks, so don’t expect to hear all of the songs from the show right away when you start playing. In any case it is a fun enough little game and worth checking out for yourself if you are interested, just don’t expect a lot of depth.

Diablo 3: I’m still working away at my seasonal character. I’ve completed GR60 and the view ahead is all grinding for tiny upgrades and praying for ancient legendaries with good rolls. I have no idea if I will stick around long enough to finish another chapter of the season, but I’m still having fun for now.

WoW: Once again this is where I’m spending the bulk of my time. The demon invasions have gone from fun distraction to pretty great way to level, so I’ve been trying to hit them on my baby mage whenever new ones are up. between invasions and dungeons I’ve gone from 60 to 77 while barely setting foot on outlands or northrend. I actually like both of those expansions just fine, but it is pretty neat to have an alternate leveling pathway open up like this, even if it is only temporary. I suspect I’ll have at least one more character to 100 by Legion at this rate!


Bumbling Around

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Yeti Power

After a Tuesday night spent chasing Legion Invasions and being an Illidari, I felt like last night I needed a nice relaxing night of being a completely different sort of Demon Hunter.  By nice and relaxing I mean a night spent pushing rifts and causing anime style rocket explosions as I cleared entire rooms at the same time.  It is strange how Diablo has morphed over the years for me.  Originally it was that game that I wished I could play with friends… but didn’t have stable enough internet to be able to play it.  Then it when the second game was released it absolutely become a game I played almost exclusively with friends.  When three was released, I was in a place where I was largely soloing and found it a less than amazing experience.  Now several years later each time a new season is launched it becomes this focusing force that brings a bunch of us back together for another trip happily through the paragon and gear grind.  For most of the night last night I was joined by my fairly regular demon slaying buddy Grace, and we also managed to snag Thalen and bring him along for the fun.  The night as a whole was pretty great because on our first tag team attempt at bounties… a Menagerist Goblin spawned dropping this extremely awesome Yeti pet named “The Bumble” for me to go wandering with.  Additionally I was able to knock out several pieces of gear off of my list, and I finally managed to get the last of the three legendary gems needed for this build.  The highlight of the night however was getting an Ancient Yang’s Recurve to drop…  which admittedly made Grace super jealous.  However because of this it is now my duty to tag along in any D3 madness to push hard for folks so they too can get their sweet ancient drops.

Bumbling Around

The other thing that happened last night is that I attempted the “Numlock Trick”.  One of the more annoying things in Diablo 3 is that most builds have some sort of buff that they want to cast essentially anytime it is available.  The goal of the build is usually to get enough cooldown reduction so that you can keep it up 100% of the time.  For the Multishot build I am using for my Demon Hunter, it is focused largely around getting keeping Vengeance up 100% of the time… and right now I have it close enough that I maybe have a second without it up at any given time.  The other day I heard something mentioned in a build video talking about “using the numlock trick” on one of these buffs… and I had to investigate to satiate my curiosity.  There is apparently a strange glitch in the game that allows you to essentially constantly be spamming a button press.  I mean in theory you could do the same thing with hardware macros on a keyboard, but this just sort of “works”.  The idea is to bind the 1-4 hotkeys to have a secondary key which relates to Numpad 1-4.  To toggle on autocast for any of the abilities you turn your Numlock key on, hold down the keys you want to autocast and then turn off your Numlock.  Just like that the key keeps repeating over and over… which causes some weird behavior.  Firstly if you are holding any key the cast will not fire… so if you are holding force move or the left mouse button down… just ease up on it to let the next cast go off.  Secondly… it has the strange behavior of interrupt abilities like identification or teleport.  What I do to get past those is to start the channeled cast, and then hold any key.  In my binding I have S set as an alternate bind for Shift… which is to stop moving and hold still.  Holding this down while channeling works well to keep my auto casts from interrupting whatever ability I want to do.

Bumbling Around

The other “strangeness” that happens is that any time you shift games, and sometimes when you just downgrade difficulty it can turn the autocasting off completely.  In this case you just flip back on numlock, hold your keys down, and turn it back off to set the glitch back up.  Now that I know this exists…  I am wondering what other uses can be had for it.  Supposedly folks use this regularly for Taeguk builds on the monk side to keep the stacks.  In theory I could do the same trick to make sure I am evasive fire shots in with my hunter, to build hatred and keep up the damage shield.  For the time being however I am keeping it simple and only using this to try and keep Vengeance up as often as possible as well as my Companion ability.  I was always horrible at using these cooldowns, and tended to save them until I reached a point where I had a lot of elites to attack rather than just constantly using them knowing that I had another cooldown just around the corner.  I need to spend some time working on achievements so I can catch up to the point Grace is currently in the seasonal journey.  I am still not sure if I am going to go for the stash slot this time around…  but for the moment I am going to keep playing so long as the game feels fun and fresh.  Tonight however I have earmarked to go do Broken Shores scenario on my various alts… because I have yet to actually see the new cinematics.

Blurry Weekend

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Blurry WeekendDiablo 3 Season 7 is off to a pretty fantastic start. I’ve had relatively bad luck with my gear this time around, but it doesn’t seem to matter in the slightest. All the classes seem to get a huge power spike once they get their 6 piece set bonuses, but demon hunters always seem to feel it more in my opinion. I am currently farming TX rifts with no problems, even though I still don’t have either the weapon I need or the cubed weapon I need for my set, and at least one of my rings is still level 61.

My biggest concern for now is simply whether I will even bother with the rest of the season at this point. I got the pet and 2 of the portrait frames, but the stash tab is still a long way away. If I stop now this will officially be my shortest season ever. There’s quite a lot left to do and if other games weren’t about to become incredibly distracting I would definitely have a few more weeks at least of Diablo fun left ahead of me. This season’s conquests are pretty reasonable, and I know from experience I can manage greater rift 45 without set bonuses and leveling 3 gems to level 65. The season journey this time around is asking for quite a bit in the way of upgrading ancient legendaries, which means spending a lot of time grinding even more gem levels for this recipe. Grindy, but not difficult.

Not only is the journey not too difficult, but what’s left is mostly doable solo just in case the crowds die down tomorrow when WoW’s demon invasions start. Maybe this will be the season where I do a slow casual burn over the next couple months, and still get things done before the end.