Diablo

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.


What I’m Playing: August 7, 2016

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Hooray, I made it through the first week of Blaugust! WoW has definitely been my main focus, but some other games have still been on my radar too.

World of Warcraft: This is where I spent most of my time this week. I got my legendary mace on my forsaken priest, but otherwise have mostly been playing alliance side. It makes me frustrated and sad, because I just plain like the horde races and story better, but at this point absolutely all of my friends are playing alliance so there’s no escaping it. Once again I find myself really wishing WoW would just add cross faction play already, even if it were tied to battlenet friends or something. I already have prepared myself for the inevitable point in Legion where I get sick of being alliance and go back to level my horde mains all alone. I guess it is a good thing I like alting.

What I’m Playing: August 7, 2016

LFR gets a (mostly deserved) bad rap, but sometimes you luck out and it’s nothing but Gamon and rainbows as far as the eye can see.

Anyway, I’ve been doing a little LFR on my druid and wandering around on my baby spacegoat mage and enjoying it. I’ve been using the baby mage as a chance to really see the low-level alliance quests, and to knock out some of the individual zone loremaster achieves that I never did. I got the overall loremaster achievement and title back before Cataclysm, so there’s a lot of quests I’ve never seen before. See yesterday’s post from Felwood for just one example.

FFXIV: I want to be playing this more, but WoW is really taking up too much of my time and attention for me to bother. Over the past week I’ve logged in for raid and pretty much nothing else at all. Don’t get me wrong, raid time was amazing and probably more fun than all of the time I played WoW put together, but we only raid 2 hours a week. I had been hoping that raiding on a schedule again would reignite my drive to log in more and upgrade my gear and such but it didn’t work out that way.

WildStar: I’m going to come clean and admit I hadn’t logged in to WildStar in a couple months. That just felt wrong, so when WoW got hit by a DDoS attack a few evenings this week I logged back in to WildStar. I didn’t do anything new and exciting, just a couple of expeditions. It still felt amazing and comfortable, like nothing had changed. I will be trying to spend at least one night a week poking around in this game again, because it remains my favorite MMO of all time.

Diablo 3: Season 7 started on Friday! The response to this season seems to be very low compared to all of the previous ones, but I’ve still been playing and having a great time. On Friday I got to play with some friends that I haven’t hung out with in way too long, and had a blast leveling together. This season was the first time in a while that I didn’t get to 70 on the first night, but that was all on me because I decided to get some sleep instead. I hit 70 and completed the first 5 chapters of the season journey yesterday, which included the cosmetic rewards and the full free class set of gear (after chapter 4). Since that was my entire goal for this season, I don’t know if I will stay invested or not, especially with the pre-Legion WoW event coming on Tuesday. A lot of the goals for the stash tab this time around feel easier, but also grindier, and I’m guessing I’m not going to bother when there are new shiny things to distract me in other games.

 


Evil and Phones

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Society and Cell Phones

This morning I am going to talk about something that I have been kicking around in my head for awhile, but haven’t really been able to shape into a full fledged commentary.  It feels like each week there is some new alarmist piece of media talking about the degradation of society, and placing the blame squarely on the cell phone.  For awhile I have had this working theory, that these articles for the most part are written by extroverts, and I am sure for that group of people the landscape has changed in a very scary way.  I use my cell phone as a cloaking device, and what I mean by that is I am fiddling with my phone in order to create just enough social friction to convince you that it isn’t worth the time to engage in small talk while standing in the elevator next to you.  For years I’ve been frustrated by the fact that apparently standing in the same vicinity as someone is passive consent to be deluged with a bunch of conversation that I have no interest in.  Having my smart phone at the ready has greatly cut down on that unwanted interaction, because they see that I am engaged… or at least LOOK like I am engaged.  It is the same cloaking device mentality that I apply at work by wearing headphones every single moment I am sitting at my desk.  I may not actually be listening to anything, and honestly often times am not.  However the act of wearing the headphones stops a lot of “drive by” conversation.

More so than that I feel like access to the internet and social media allows me to engage people safely.  I’ve had to learn how to be “normal” but face to face conversation with someone I am not extremely familiar with is a massive anxiety ridden trap.  While talking I am actively trying to be normal, running through a checklist of things and constantly aware of how much or how little eye contact I am making.  When I am hanging out with someone I am familiar with most of this goes away, and I can just let my guard down.  The thing is…  non face to face communication lowers all of these barriers for me.  I can be a social butterfly in a text only interaction.  When I first stepped foot onto IRC back in 1994, it greatly broadened my horizons and introduced me to a world of new people and new places to learn about.  So for me, as an introvert… it allows me a certain measure of extrovertedness because it hacks my brain into thinking it is perfectly okay.  However for the Extroverts out there… I have a feeling that this does in fact seem like an epidemic.  They no longer have all these passive participants that they can forcibly engage in dialog, and instead have to seek out other Extroverts who are equally hungry for that interaction.  What I think is happening is that finally introverts are getting a vehicle where they can express themselves more comfortably.  I might be wrong, but this is my working theory.

Return of Thorns

Evil and Phones

The last couple of days has seen me completing my Invoker set for my Crusader, and gathering up most of the items needed for the build I have been working towards.  I am just not a fan of the Akkhan’s set and I lacked a handful of the pieces really needed to make it a viable option.  A big part of the Season are the Seasonal rewards, and the last major bottleneck for me was the set dungeon for Akkhan.  In spite of having tried it numerous times I simply could not stay alive long enough to complete it.  However with the Invoker set I was able to muscle through that dungeon and come damned near close to getting “mastery” on my first attempt.  The thorns set just feels better to me and as such I have been testing the limits to which I can push it.  I am still missing a handful of items, but last night I managed to solo a level 50 Greater Rift without much issue.  Earlier in the evening my friend Grace and I who are similarly geared… managed to complete a Greater Rift 60 together.  In theory I could probably do the 60 right now solo, but even as a duo there were some pretty sweaty moments.  The big problem for me are still a handful of mob types that can straight up one shot me, or come damned close to it.  I think that is the sort of thing that only improves with slightly better gear and more paragon levels.

Evil and Phones

I am still in a constant search for the goblin that drops pets.  Some of my friends have found one but so far neither myself nor grace has seen one.  Last night we burned through two of the rings that summon the goblin realm thinking that there are three to four goblins in there.  However we still had zero luck, but I did fine a cute easter egg.  Notice the name of the boss I am fighting in the above image.  Essentially right now I need to spend a significant amount of time running Torment X bounties with the hopes of getting the rest of my gem patterns to drop.  I think that would go a long ways into improving my overall survival and output, by upgrading to the highest tier of gems available.  I am also still in search of the best in slot main hand, and I need to get a shield to throw in the cube.  For optimum performance I also need to get another Aquilla chest, because right now I have those reversed with the Aquilla in the cube and the Heart of Iron on my person… when it really should be in the cube.  In any case I am just happy that I am functional at Torment X and above.  Now begins the long wait to get just the right items to drop when I need them.  I also need to start working on the various conquests if I hope to get the extra bank slot for this season.  This honestly is a point of frustration for me…  I hate that you can ONLY get the slots through conquests.  I think that they should sell the extra stash tabs, but also allow players to do the conquest to get one as well.  That means if you are doing conquests you are getting the new cap twice as fast.