leveling – Page 9

Raider on Red Maps

August 13, 2023 by Belghast

Hey Folks! We did not record an episode of AggroChat last night, and as a result, I don’t have the usual Sunday post. Instead, I am going to talk some more about Lightning Arrow Raider. Last night I finished leveling through the campaign and then started running some maps to test the build further. I am still very much wearing the same SSF gear that I picked up through the campaign, with some minor crafting in order to try and fix my resistances a bit. As it stands I have woefully negative Chaos Resistance, very low Cold resistance, and then capped Fire and Lightning. If you want to check out the current state of my build, I dumped a fresh POB or you can check out my character on Path of Exile website.

I also recorded a video of me running a T11 Red Map, where I took a single death from a random rare. I had no clue what hit me, but after the fact while editing I noticed that it was an Innocence Touched monster, which is one of the more annoying god-touched mobs. All told I am pretty happy with where this build ended up with only some assorted bench and essence crafting. It gives me a lot of hope for a smooth transition into maps as I do this all “for real” on Friday evening. I’ve always liked leveling a Ranger because generally speaking all of the tools you need you have easy access to. I will likely run Lesser Multiple Projectiles/Mirage Archer/Caustic Arrow until I can get Lightning Arrow from the quests. I also plan on muleing a bunch of Lightning Arrow gems as I can so that I can hopefully corrupt my way into a Vaal version if I don’t get one to drop.

My goal with the build is for it to be a fast mapper that I can hopefully use to progress my Atlas quickly. At some point, I am likely going to create a Righteous Fire Juggernaut again to have something that I can do Heist and Delve with. I have to say though I am looking forward to playing something with big screen-clearing potential because there are a lot of league mechanics that I have never really explored very much. Legion, Blight, and Breach all really want you to be able to kill lots of the screen quickly in order to get the best possible rewards, and Righteous Fire has always sort of sucked at this. I am legitimately wondering how well this build will do with Heist as well, and I’ve spent a tiny bit of time in Delve and it seemed mostly fine so long as I did not press out into the darkness too much.

If nothing else there is a satisfying explosion of lights whenever I fire my Lightning Arrows, and that will be fun to map around on. I am not necessarily trying to race or anything, but it will be fun to wreck maps for a change. Don’t get me wrong, Righteous Fire is plenty good at mapping but it never felt anywhere near as satisfying as some of the videos I have watched of dedicated mapping builds. I think my early strategy will be Essences, Expedition, and maybe some Lockboxes in order to get a stash of crafting materials to help fix my own gear. I am also going to try and lean as little on buying from trade this league as I can. The main reason why I am not rolling SSF however is so that I can start selling things that I might find along the way that could be worth some change. I am definitely a trade enjoyer, but it was also refreshing to level the Lightning Arrow Raider on mostly found gear. Anyways… I feel like I am probably annoying everyone with talk of Trial of the Ancestor league. I am excited I guess, and just can’t stop talking about it. The post Raider on Red Maps appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Rethinking Diablo IV

June 2, 2023 by Belghast

Good Morning Friends! Yesterday was the launch of Diablo IV and I did in fact play the game as the servers came up. There was a bit of weirdness with battle.net as things launched but it had resolved itself within the first fifteen minutes. After that for the most part it felt like logging in and playing any game that had been active for months. I feel like whatever work Blizzard did ahead of the launch was deeply beneficial to the stability of the servers, because while we have yet to see what a difference the “standard copy” players make on the 6th… for the most part every was solid. In fact, I would say that the game itself performed far better than I had experienced in any of the closed or public testing phases that I had participated in. The entire game just felt snappier than I remember from the last public test and I am not sure if this was engine optimization on the side of Blizzard or the fact that Nvidia released brand-new drivers for the game launch. Whatever the case it felt pretty great, which I guess is making me question some of my early opinions of the game.

I made a Barbarian, and effectively the same one I have made a half dozen times in various testing phases which allowed me to breeze through the character creation boss. As far as a skill set I decided to give Maxroll a shot and follow their Upheaval guide since of all of the fury spenders that one felt the best to me in previous phases. Now I am uncertain which is the case, but either Blizzard significantly buffed the Barbarian to make it feel better at the early stages of the game… or the entire game has been nerfed a bit. Whereas before combat felt sluggish and plodding… it now feels snappy and fluid. I gotta say… I don’t hate this game. It still isn’t really an ARPG in my book… at least not one in the traditional sense but for an Isometric MMORPG it feels pretty solid. Maybe I have just had enough time to get over my initial disappointment, or maybe it is the fact that I have largely finished with the current Path of Exile League and have mentally put that game to bed for a while. Whatever the case I had quite a bit of fun last night. Not so much fun that I did not have a pause mid-evening to go out and play with the outdoor cats.

When I say… something significant has changed what I mean is that I am level 15 and have mainlined the story through the first zone and have not taken a single death yet. This is very much NOT the case in previous testing phases. Barbarians had to basically spam potions to survive the early phases of combat and it feels like I have barely had to pay attention to my health other than during boss fights. Someone from the team had announced that this was pretty much the same build as the most recent stress test, but I do not believe them at all. It does make me want to fire up a Necromancer to see what the state of minions looks like and determine if that is also fixed. Whatever the case… my opinion of Diablo IV as a whole would be massively different had I experienced THIS build in any of my testing phases. I’m not sure what last-minute balance changes were made but they certainly feel significant.

The cash shop is now available in the game, and it is in fact a cash shop. Some of the cosmetics are pretty good looking, like this crusader-esc outfit for the Barbarian. However, most of the cosmetics are kinda fugly. Like maybe I am just not as big of an equestrian person, but it feels like a lot of effort went into the horses in this game and they are all sorta awful looking. I am hoping there will be mounts OTHER than horses… because really… I almost NEVER ride a horse in an MMO. Give me a big bear mount or something like that, and you might pry some money from my hands. Maybe it is a side effect of growing up around horses my entire life… but they are sorta boring. Essentially there is a single outfit for the Necromancer and a single outfit for the Barbarian that I consider worthy of a purchase, but the rest of the dross is kinda “mid” at best. Essentially the conversion rate of Platnium to dollars is $1 to 100, so the big fancy cosmetic armor packages are $24.

All I really did last night was make a beeline through the story bits that I have seen multiple times for this first zone. I’ve not even unlocked most of the map, so in theory tonight I will be spending my time branching out and exploring things… and now I feel like I have the motivation to actually complete all the dungeons to get the imprint unlocks. Mostly I wanted to finish up the story while I was still relatively low level in case they had not resolved the problem of leveling up and making you feel weaker. So far that has not really been the case, which I am hoping means that is the side effect of more balance changes. I am sure I will be focused on this game for most of the weekend and will likely give you a more formal review on Monday.

I created a Clan last night if any of the usual suspects want a home. However, I am rapidly realizing how long I have been away from Blizzard games and how pretty much everyone has a new guild family that they play with. I will admit it was a little weird to see that <House Stalwart> had been created and that I had nothing to do with it. Granted I have been “Not-The-Guild-Leader” of the guild that I founded far longer than I was actually the leader, and it has always been in great hands with Kylana. I figure <GREY> will be pretty small in Diablo IV given that I am not sure if any of the AggroChat regulars intend to play the game. That said if you need a chill home feel free to apply in the game or hit me up while I am playing for an invite. I left it public so folks could sign up while I was offline.

I’m still not entirely sure what I think of Diablo IV. I think better of it now after having played this latest version… but it is still not necessarily what I was hoping it would be. I think this is going to be a great game for most of the players who decide to pick it up because the vast majority of Diablo players as a whole… get in… play through the campaign once or twice… and then uninstall the game feeling satisfied maybe to revisit it at some point in the future when they get the itch. I do wonder what the endgame and seasonal cadence is going to look like going forward. I’m not entirely certain this is going to be a game for the players who have adapted to the ways of Last Epoch and Path of Exile. In fact, I think there are probably going to be some players who were waiting around to see what Diablo IV was… before finally committing to those games. I do have to give Blizzard credit for starting to change my opinion though with some last-minute tweaks and balance changes… and an incredibly stable launch night. The post Rethinking Diablo IV appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Grind to a Halt

December 4, 2017 by Belghast

When we last visited my Orc Warrior on this blog I was just about to start the Warlords content, and this week when I have not been poking my head into Destiny I have spent it pushing forward in World of Warcraft. It’s honestly been a shock just how fast leveling went until I hit Legion content. The old world was a confusion slog where I jumped zones each time I saw an exclamation point show up on the adventure guide. This meant I was constantly jumping zones every few levels and most of that journey was a complete blur. When I started Outland I did the majority of Hellfire Plateau then jumped over to Terrokar Forest for a little bit before finishing up the grind in Nagrand. From there I jumped to Northrend and did a good chunk of Borean Tundra before jumping to Grizzly Hills and doing most of it and finally leaping over to Scholazar Basin to finish the run out. From there we entered the Cataclysm zones and did all of the 80-85 grind in Vashj’ir without actually completely finishing that zone. Then came Pandaria and I managed to do the entirety of the 85-90 grind without leaving Jade Forest. From there I went to Draenor where I managed to hit 98 by doing the entirety of Frostfire Ridge and finishing up with just a tiny tiny bit in Spires of Arak.

This is the point where the express elevator has come to a grinding halt and I’ve been confronted with normal speed leveling because all of my heirlooms petered out at 100. I chose to do Stormheim first largely because it is both my favorite and least favorite zone at the same time. All of the Norse themed Vrykul bits are awesome, but all of that faction nonsense is not. It did give me access to another Order Hall champion quickly however so I am down with that. At this point I have finished both the main story arc of the zone and the faction bullshit arc and am likely to move on to the next area. There are a lot of things I have noticed… not the least of which is how ridiculously huge this shield is on my female orc warrior. It is as thought they scaled the shield for the insanely bulky male models and then just called it good enough for the female ones. The second of which is how much more intricate and slower paced the Legion content is compared to Pandaria or Warlords. When I leveled through the content it seemed really quick, but what makes things slog a bit in comparison to what came before is how fragmented the quest hubs quickly become. This might also be an aspect of the map itself feeling so busy with so many world bosses and objectives hidden out there to slow your journey down. I cannot resist wasting a few minutes to find a chest that is nearby or going after a mini boss, and as a result my leveling pace has gone to hell.

At this point I am contemplating investing in a set of Heirlooms which will set me back quite a bit of gold. It isn’t as much about leveling quickly, it is more about not outpacing the gear I am wearing…. and also not looking like I am picking up scraps from the battlefield while I level. I’ve liked making outfits for my character up until this point and then progressing my way through the content without having to care too much about swapping out items. In a perfect world Warcraft would have heirlooms for every slot and I could simply level my alts without ever having to worry about swapping gear out. With the new races coming in I fully expect to be leveling a lot more alts, and in truth investing in plate 110 heirlooms now will probably helm in the long run given that I tend to play plate wearing classes more than any others. I am still really bummed about the direction they are taking with artifact weapons. I would have loved to see them turn them into leveling heirlooms much the way that the items that dropped off Garrosh in Pandaria served this purpose. It would have been a fitting end to a really awesome chapter of the game to be able to then use those weapons to level your alts. Still having a lot of fun but I am also ready for the ride to be over and for my character to get geared up.

Memory is Fleeting

November 20, 2017 by Belghast

With all of the recent talk about the World of Warcraft classic server, I have found myself contemplating a lot of things about the game. We recorded a podcast episode where we basically spent the entire time trying to determine just how vanilla classic would end up being. The other side effect of all of this is that I seem to be playing my horde warrior over on scryers quite a bit more than usual. Now if you were to ask me to rank the current expansions to the game that ranking would look a little something like this…

Wrath of the Lich King
The Burning Crusade
Legion
Vanilla
Mists of Pandaria
Warlords of Draenor
Cataclysm

Notice that number one and number two are the second and third expansion, and that weirdly enough I rank Legion above Vanilla. What you are seeing is that my memory of these expansions and the nostalgia that colors them does not adequately represent the experience of actually playing through them. I’ve recently leveled through the Burning Crusade content in a fashion given that you end up dinging your way out of it long before you actually finish much of it. I did do Hellfire Peninsula in its entirety, the majority of Terrokar and a good chunk of Nagrand. I left the Cataclysm tainted Vanilla lands at 58 and similarly left the Outland at 68 and as a result have spent the last four levels completing pieces of Borean Tundra. The reality I am straddled with is that the zone design of the first two expansions is simply not good. I mean at the time it was released it was world better than anything Vanilla had given us and as a result felt like a breath of fresh air, however when you stack it up against modern zone design from say Legion… it is objectively not as well designed.

What I mean by this is that the quests don’t flow cleanly from hub to hub and instead it forces you to do a lot of travel time back and forth between a hub and its related spokes. All the while I was leveling through Outland and so far in Northrend it feels like I am spending a lot of time needlessly travelling between two destinations and this might have been the initial intent. However after seeing modern quest design it feels like I somehow failed and allowed my quests to get out of sync. If you fight your way through a micro dungeon with quest A you often find that upon turning in you now have another quest requiring you to go back there. It is maddening to have to wade through an army of minions to kill a boss that you were already next to and sometimes even killed while completing the first quest. The other that adds to this feeling of tedium is the mob density and having no real way to get in and out of these destinations without a heavy body count. Thankfully on my warrior racking up a heavy body count is fun, but on other more fiddly classes this causes the leveling experience to grind to a halt. The truth is it will probably have taken me twice as long to level through Outland and Northrend as it will have to push through the next three expansions.

As games mature their design ethic shifts significantly and we forget what it was actually like to play these games at the time. When it comes to Classic World of Warcraft for Project 99 in Everquest… what we are chasing is a feeling not an actual honest moment in history. I think when players say that they want to play Vanilla again… they want to return to a time when not everything was mapped out quite so clearly and they had a sense of accomplishment and discovery each time they looted a kobold (and the game subsequently froze). This is why World of Warcraft Classic is going to be the challenge it will be. That experience means different thing to different players, and none of the calculations that a game company can make actually take the social component into play. When I think of Vanilla or Burning Crusade or even Wrath, those memories involve very specific sets of individuals that no longer play the game and I might not even have contact with. For Vanilla it was the Late Night Raiders, and Burning Crusade it was No Such Raid and when Wrath launched we were excited to be the Duranub Raiding Company. Three non-guild based raids dominate those feelings and memories and the simple fact that I went through three separate raid groups tells you that there is no way to actually ever join those broken pieces back together again. All of this said I will have characters on the Classic server, and I will see how this experience actually shakes out in the end. I just feel like it is going to be exceedingly difficult to please even a fraction of the player base because we all want something different.