Diablo – Page 34 – AggroChat

AggroChat #74 – Force Binds Us

May 21, 2019September 13, 2015 by AggroChat

We start of this weeks show by talking about our continued adventures in Diablo 3, and while a some of us have slowed down our progress Grace talks about falling back into the familiar rhythm of chilling out in solo play. With the upcoming September 29th release of Wildstar Free to Play she also talks about spending a lot of time on the test server, and the recent hoverboard racing event testing. Thalen this week spent time venturing into some single player games that had never got around to playing. First we revive our discussion of Wolfenstein New Order and why you should play it for so many different reasons. In a shocker we find out that Thalen never actually played Fallout New Vegas, which spawns a discussion about our appreciation of the game.

Kodra on the other hand spent his week mostly playing a bunch of indie titles and talks about Circa Infinity and The Magic Circle. Magic Circle being the game that he spent a significant amount of time at Pax talking to the Dev about. Additionally we are all jealous of him as he talks about his experience playing Mario Maker, which is essentially Infinite Mario. This spawns a discussion about each of our early attempts at creating content for our friends to play like Excitebike, Wolfenstein, Doom and Descent. Related to Magic Circle, a seperate discussion breaks out about the Stanley Parable and what it says about gamers themselves.

Ashgar is still heavily involved in LBX: Little Battlers Experience and has even gotten in his model kits from last week putting at least one of them together. He helped to clear up some of my confusion that there is in fact a Roleplaying game there, and it is very similar to the style of game that Pokemon is. We also get into a length discussion about Pokemon Go and how the Ingress type game is likely going to change what we are playing next year. There is really no way this is not going to be a huge title, and for the most part we agree that Ingress has been a tech demo leading up to this.

Finally several of us have spontaneously gotten sucked back into Star Wars the Old Republic. Right now it is impossible to go anywhere in the world without being bombarded by Force Awakens merchandise, and after a point I simply could not resist the pull of nostalgia. The best thing about coming back to a game after years of being away is the huge backlog of content available to be played. The current twelve times experience bonus for subscribers helps as well, because you quite literally only have to focus on your class story to get leveled which was always the best part of the game. Ash, Bel and Tam are all caught in the gravity well of this game for the moment, and it sounds like some of our other hosts might have gotten the bug as well. We will have to see next week if we are still talking out it, or if we have gotten it out of our systems.

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Hide and Seek

September 9, 2015 by Grace

After the mad rush of Blaugust, I’ve been taking a lot of time to decompress and refresh my mental batteries. One of the great things I’ve experienced by engaging with Twitter is that I know I’m not alone in my introverted ways. Sometimes it is reassuring to know your stresses and anxieties are shared and feel like you’re part of something, and that there are people who will totally understand when you need to hide away for a little while.

My default hiding game lately has been Diablo 3, but all the time I’ve been spending there has presented a problem: my enthusiasm has attracted friends to join me. When I’m feeling well, this is great! I’ve had a ton of fun wandering around smiting demons with 1 – 3 friends at a time. The down side is when I need to be alone, those folks are still in my BNet friends list, asking me to join them. I’ve found that having one or two friends or family members is usually fine, especially when they’re folks who understand when I need to hide. More than that and I start to get anxious whenever I’m not up for company. This has stressed me out in the past, so much so that I occasionally purge everyone from my friends list and start from scratch once in a while. I love that Steam has an invisible mode, and I dearly wish that Blizzard would do the same.

In WildStar I have a few account friends, but for some reason it doesn’t stress me out quite as much. I think it helps that there’s no rewards for being constantly grouped up like there are in D3. The other big thing of course is that WildStar is just one game, and I barely play any alts. If people know and friend my main character, they can pretty much find me 95% of the time I’m in-game anyway. BNet friends can see you in any of Blizzard’s games, though, which means I can’t even sneak in a quick game of Hearthstone without everyone on my friends list knowing about it. Anyway, being pushed back into WildStar right now feels fine by me. I can’t wait for the doldrums to pass and the new Drop to land in a few weeks. I might as well spend the time remembering how things are and saving up a nest egg to spend on fancy new toys. Plus I still have too many alts that need to be leveled off the arkship so they don’t get deleted!

What I’m Playing: August 30, 2015

August 31, 2015 by Grace

Blaugust 2015, Day 30

What a difference just a couple days can make

The pic says it all. This week was dominated by one game.

Diablo 3: This is where I spent almost all my free time this week. I played around with the new goodies added in the patch, and tried to get back into the groove and ready for Season 4. I managed to get online about an hour after the season started on Friday, and spent every possible moment playing all weekend. The end result is pretty darn sweet for only a few days worth of effort. I got to level 70, paragon level 90 and can easily do Torment V.

WildStar: I did get some raiding in on Tuesday, and even got an upgrade. Then I wasted way too much money on runes that are going to be replaced as soon as F2P happens. Ah well, it’s only videogame money.

FFXIV: I got some attempts in on Ravana with both my Monday and Wednesday raid teams, but neither group managed to finish him off yet. Hopefully that happens this week!

That’s it! I really did spend so much time playing Diablo 3 that there wasn’t any leftover for any other games!

Second Winds and Diablo

August 29, 2015 by Belghast

Desi Wonderfulness

Last night was a bit unusual as far as our Friday nights go. Generally speaking we come home from work, and I play video games while my wife attempts not to fall asleep… always failing that battle around 9/9:30 ish. Instead we went out for dinner with some friends, and I got to eat at one of my favorite restaurants… Desi Wok. I generally refer to it as an “Indian restaurant” but in truth it is a “Desi” restaurant as the name implies, focusing on an amalgam of traditional Indian cuisine mixed with some more Chinese inspired dishes. My wife got the always tasty Chicken Tikka Masala, and I went with my most recent favorite an ambiguous dish called “Chicken Desi Fried Rice”. The dish comes out bright red and spicy as hell, pretty much the way I like it. The problem is it is way more food than you can eat in one sitting so I always end up taking home about half of it. My wife decided to order a Mango Lassi which she had never actually done from Desi Wok, and in my confusion I wound up getting one for me too… but no actual other drink. This meant I consumed a lot of water in my vague attempt to control the spice of my dish.

By the time we finally got home last night I was drained. We made a stop off at Target, and all the while I was moving around the store at a snails pace. I literally think my wife would have been dragging me through the store if I had a rope tied onto me. She kept having to stop periodically and look back at me to see if I was keeping up. I am guessing it was the beginnings of a tasty food coma. But in all honesty it could simply be the weight of this week crashing down upon me. Each and every day there has been some major crisis that I had to deal with. We had a production database get wiped one day, and another day we were trying to diagnose why a piece of software built in Visual Basic 6 wasn’t working any more. For starters I had no clue that anything built in VB6 would run on a Windows 7 machine. Visual Studio 6 was the brand new technology…. when I was in college almost two decades ago. All the while during each of the issues I acted as the manager and facilitator, which is a bit of a new role for me. I am not used to being the one directing the action rather than the one with my hands buried deep in the guts of the software trying to sort things out manually. Putting your faith in someone else to fix things for you, is way the hell more stressful than being under the gun to fix something yourself.

Second Winds and Diablo

Yesterday was the beginning of the brand new Diablo 3 fourth season, and this time I wanted to get in on the ground floor instead of creating a character a few days from the end. Earlier in the week I had talked about my plans on what exactly to create for this new seasons and I finally settled on rolling a Femme Barbarian. I have an absolute love of Sonya in Heroes of the Storm so any attempt to recreate that character seems amazing to me. However I spent the first half hour or so of gameplay complaining to my friend Grace about her lack of armor. She was awesome about it and I am sure was just patting me on the head as I complained about something that every woman on the planet has complained about at some point… the shitty armor options they give female characters in video games. Yes I realize the male barbarian starts in essentially a furry diaper, but that changes pretty quickly as you find gear and at this point at level 37 I am still wearing a bra of some sort. I finally learned to ignore it mostly and got on with the game play.

Grace had started her traditional Wizard earlier in the night, and was about five levels ahead of me by the time we both managed to get on at the same time. We proceeded to spend the rest of the night running bounties and rather quickly I was able to catch up in levels. I am not sure what it is about Diablo right now but it is really hitting the spot. The only negative being that the Barbarian starts out in a fashion that I don’t really enjoy that much. The first attack and the first secondary attack… are both not really my thing. Thankfully you get Cleave pretty quickly, and before the end of the night I finally was able to pick up whirlwind which serves as not only a great group attack but also a decent way of getting out of things since you seem to ignore slowing effects when you are spinning. My hope is that at some point today we can hook back up and start leveling again. Other than that I am looking forward to tonight’s AggroChat show because we are finally going to talk about Birb boyfriends and why that game is pure madness.