What I’m Playing: August 30, 2015

Blaugust 2015, Day 30

What I’m Playing: August 30, 2015

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!


What I’m Playing: August 30, 2015

Second Winds and Diablo

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

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.

Second Winds and Diablo

 

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.

New Beginnings

Blaugust 2015, Day 28

New Beginnings

My new Season 4 wizard

I’m writing this post at the last possible minute, in a brief break from leveling. It probably won’t end up getting posted until *technically* a day late, but since I’ve been keeping up so well with Blaugust I’m going to allow myself this one slip-up.

Season 4 of Diablo III has begun and it has been great to see so many people returning to the game. I had a blast running around doing bounties and leveling up. I’m not sure if this is new since the previous season, or if I just didn’t notice it before, but most of the low-level crafted sets have very cheap mat requirements now. It meant that even when I was unlucky for a few levels I could usually make myself some awesome gear and not worry about wasting legendary crafting mats. That’s an A+ change as far as I’m concerned.  I can’t wait to get to 70 and start tackling greater rifts again!


New Beginnings

Lazy Reset Day

Blaugust 2015, Day 26

Another super quick post today because I’m completely running out of things to say. Blaugust has just a few more days left and I know I can finish but it is not going to be easy.

Last night was a classic case of having way too many things to do on reset day and only feeling motivated to do the “wrong” one. I hopped into FFXIV exactly long enough to do my daily expert roulette and quickly ran away. I still really love that game but there’s way too many other shiny things stealing my attention right now.

The main new shiny is the new patch for Diablo 3. That’s where I really wanted to spend my evening, even though it is a bit of a waste of time right this second. If you’re not familiar with D3, they’ve added “seasons” where you have the option of starting over from scratch without the money and resources you’ve gathered over the years. Completing objectives during the season can earn you cosmetic rewards like transmog and new name plates. Right now season 3 has just ended but season 4 won’t start ’til the weekend, so it feels a little silly putting in much effort knowing that I’ll be starting over from scratch in a few days. Still, it is fun checking out the new stuff, and hopefully I’ll be a little more prepared once the new season starts.

I wanted nothing more than to just chill out with Diablo all night but figured I’d check in to WildStar just to get things started after the weekly reset. One thing led to another and I ended up raiding for the rest of the night. I had a really fun time so I don’t regret it, but now I’m really itching for some more D3!


Lazy Reset Day