Good Morning Friends! I am going to warn you that this post is going to be a bit on the melancholy side. Yesterday over lunch I finished up Diablo III Season 28 or at least finished the Guardian step in the journey. There is still a ton that I have left to unlock on the Altar of Sacrifice, but I largely plan on doing that at my leisure over the coming months. While this was not the easiest season ever, it was definitely on the easier scale. Ace finished their season I believe on Sunday, so I was lagging a bit behind. My goal is to help Thalen and maybe Byx if she wants it… finish up their seasons and largely chill out doing low-key content for awhile. I feel like I have three pretty powerful builds on the Demon Hunter having crafted the Gears of Dreadlands Haedrigs set, the Unhallowed Essence Multishot set, and then a Marauder set yesterday for the purpose of the set dungeon.
Shocking to no one who has been with me for very long in my Diablo journey, saved the set dungeon for the very last thing. It always feels really weird to have completed almost all of the harder achievements with this relatively simple one sitting there holding up the process. I hate set dungeons because I have a mental block about being timed while being expected to accomplish a certain set of tasks. This is deeply rooted in my brain and dates back to some third-grade trauma. While I fully understand WHY it exists, I have never truly been able to remove it entirely. I always make the set dungeon out to be this epic obstacle, then like yesterday end up one-shotting the damned thing. I specifically built a Marauder set because, for a Demon Hunter, it is probably the easiest option especially now that the damned worms are marked with a skull on the map.
While this was an enjoyable season… there is just something about it that feels hollow. I think it dawned on me WHY it feels weird. The entire community is treating this like this is the end of Diablo III. Raxxanterax for example has been a pillar of the content creation community, and yesterday announced that the video for Challenge Rift 297 would be the very last of those guides that he released. Even between Ace and I, we largely wanted to make sure that we were going to finish this season because we thought that with the impending release of Diablo IV, this might be the last opportunity to rekindle the old fun. It seems like everyone seems to have that same idea and I am seeing folks returning from the Path of Exile community that had not played the game in years. This feels like a send-off for a beloved friend, but also… is exceptionally depressing.
Diablo III has meant so much to me on a deeply personal level. Sure I have always loved Diablo since I first got into testing for the original game back in college. Diablo III however set the pace of a reoccurring destination event surrounding its seasons. Ace and I would do this late-night leveling thing on Friday they released, and while we’ve made less progress over the years as we have gotten more used to sleep… it was still this thing I think we both looked forward to. It felt like an MMORPG launch happening every three or four months like clockwork, and no matter what else we were playing it would bring a handful of us together for this destination event. While the magic also lasted a shorter period of time as we got better at the time, often finishing the season before the end of the first season… it was still something that I set my calendars by and made sure I was ready to go without distractions.
I think part of the struggle we’ve gone through over the last few years is that Diablo was severely tainted by the events surrounding the shitstorm that is Blizzard Entertainment. We’ve struggled at length to find another game that triggered the same sort of mental joy that Diablo III Season Journey did, and have failed. While I love Path of Exile as the ugly child that it is, it really feels bad to play with friends. We’ve tried Wolcen, Torchlight III, Torchlight Infinite, and hell even some Grim Dawn and none of them have managed to rekindle the magic surrounding our quarterly destination event. It is my hope that maybe just maybe Last Epoch releasing its multiplayer update on the 9th of March will give us the first real viable option. I’ve played enough of it to know that I enjoy it quite a bit, but it is really going to take us all playing it together to determine if it feels “right”.
Due to some lucky circumstances… I got gifted a copy of Diablo IV so I will be poking my head into it when it releases and the upcoming beta periods. However I have enough friends that are simply not willing to give Blizzard any more money, so I figure it is going to be a pretty hollow experience. I am also not entirely certain that it would capture the magic of Diablo III. When the third game was released, there were large parts of the broader Diablo community that hated it. Diablo IV feels very much like a play to bring them back into the fold and maybe make a dent in the popularity of Path of Exile. That means it is very unlikely to be the big dumb fun that a Diablo III season is, and will be more focused on a more grimdark hardcore audience. Diablo Immortal was probably the true spiritual successor, but given that it wound up being a shit sandwich of truly evil monetizations… that one is off the table.
I guess even if Diablo III fades away, I have all of the memories of me and Ace doing dumb things together for fun and profit. This is one of the oldest images I found on WordPress of us doing a greater rift together. I’m hoping that Last Epoch can become the next game that we shift our quarterly nonsense to. Path of Exile worked great for me, but never really became a good-feeling group activity. Last Epoch is going to be starting their seasons I believe around the launch of 1.0 and calling them “Cycles”. It sounds like at least with the start they are going to be relatively simplistic outings without a lot of extra mechanics going on. I think I am mostly okay with that because there is a thin line between doing next to nothing with early Diablo III seasons, and the wild feature bloat that is Path of Exile leagues.
Basically, I feel like a good friend is moving away, and that there isn’t much I can do about that. I fully expect when Diablo IV launches that what community existed around Diablo III will slowly fade away. So in many ways, this probably legitimately is the “Last Season” and I am going to try and be okay with that.
The post The Last Season appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Friends! I am exceptionally excited that today we are getting the first drop in the new content that follows End of Dragons over in Guild Wars 2. I had the sudden realization yesterday that this was a thing, and not only coming soon… but today. I am nowhere even close to catching up on the story with my Ranger, so I will be venturing back to my Necromancer to experience the tasty new content. I think more than anything I am interested in seeing the sort of content drops we should come to expect from the loose roadmap posted on the 13th. In theory, the content we are getting today should be representative of the drops we will be getting each quarter. There has been much speculation on what exactly this roadmap and shift away from full expansion and full living world season means for the game, but I am interested in arriving at a more predictable release cadence. I guess my hope is that we see something akin to either Season 4 or 5 maps with lots of stuff going on in the game, vendors selling useful things to plug holes in your gearing process, and maybe even a really good meta or world boss.
After completing my Skyscale I set my sights on getting my racing beetle. This honestly was a pretty quick quest at least compared to what I went through with collecting scales and eggs. This chain of meta-achievements is almost entirely focused on the Domain of Kourma. Once again I employed BlishHUD to mark the locations of the various bits and bobs required for the quest. The piece I struggled with the most was the event centered around the invasion of the Moon Temple. I kept popping into the zone periodically while working on things with my Ranger, and almost without fail, I would arrive after the event had just finished. On Sunday I managed to catch the event just starting and pushed my way through the sequence of events and finally was able to break the plague beetle jars required to get the final component in the Beetle Feed quest.
So now I am the proud owner of Petey the amazing Roller Beetle. In theory, I should be able to use this to pick up a few Mastery points that I am missing that required breaking down walls with this little guy. I’ve not spent a lot of time on this, because given that I have a Skyscale… I am using it most often. I did however spend about fifteen minutes just zooming around the zone immediately following the quest. It feels very F-Zero when zooming about and less like the Mario Kart experience I was sort of expecting. I need to go try some of the racing tracks. Ultimately my focus has been on getting mounts because they are very much something that you immediately feel account-wide. I spent some time on my Guardian last night and having access to the Skyscale just drastically improved the experience of roaming around and poking away at map completion.
More than a fair amount of my time is honestly just exploring the world on the back of my Skyscale since getting it. It is extremely shocking how much detail has gone into this world. For example these tarps hanging up in Divinity’s Reach. Prior to the existence of the Skyscale, there was no way in hell you would ever be able to get this close. There are little subtle details that you barely notice from the ground, like all the guy wires attached to the surrounding buildings. This was an almost unneeded level of detail at the time this game was released and is just eating up resources that few people would even have a good enough setup to notice them. However the fact that they are there is interesting to me. Sure there are a few that sort of jut off into infinity and never make contact with anything, but the vast majority look like they would legitimately hold tension.
The World has always been the most interesting character in Guild Wars 2. It is such an intricate living thing that it never ceases to impress me. While I struggled with grasping the combat and role mechanics and honestly still do at times. From the day I first set foot into Alpha, I thought the world itself was exceptionally special. The other day I swam down someplace I had apparently never before and realized there was an entire underwater section of a living world zone that I had never explored before. Moments like that really cement how cool and intricate the zone design is, and similarly as a result I think this is why the shift to smaller more reliable content drops interests me. I am hoping as a result we keep getting these self-contained areas of content that are deeply intricate. I think I’ve come to realize that I enjoy specifically designed zones more than I enjoy the ability to roam an entire world without zone barriers.
The only thing that the ability to fly across an entire continent has really given us is a bunch of weird liminal spaces where nothing much is happening. I would rather see zone designs where every corner of a zone is packed with interesting detail, than the ability to free fly over wide sweeping vistas that are more or less empty. Sure there are moments that look cool as the clouds roll in over the world as you are flying across it… but also you stop existing in the zone itself. In World of Warcraft, I would point my mount in a direction, climb to as high as I could… hit the auto run button, and then alt-tab out while moving in a direction. The active flight of the Skyscale forces me to stay focused on what I am doing, and as a result, I am also way more likely to dip down and join an event that I pass. In WoW I made a straight line between quest objectives and rarely interacted with the world as a result.
Both have their places and there are times that I find myself teleporting to Mistlock Sanctuary just to have a moment of safe reprieve from the otherwise hectic pace of the world. I also find myself trying to figure out how to get to places that I have never gotten to before, if for no reason other than to give me a new vantage point on scenes that I have already seen. Both design models have their place, but I think I am just more engaged in the action focus of a game like Guild Wars 2 than I am in the traditional MMORPG mold at this point. I am sure at some point my brain with shift again and I will put away all of my ARPGs and crave something more sedate, for now, I am just going with my instincts.
The post Beetle Racing Time appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Friends! On Friday evening Season 28 of Diablo 3 started, and I returned to my regular rhythm with my good friend Ace in attempting to complete it. We decided to come back to Diablo in part because this is probably the last great hurrah for the game before the launch of Diablo 4, and the title goes even further into “maintenance mode”. Speaking of maintenance… I had a bit of a rough start. I logged in early Friday morning and was encountering all sorts of issues where my stash tabs were not loading immediately and when they did load it looked like a 90s-era GeoCities site loading one icon at a time. This stabilized but when it came to the actual seasonal launch, I started encountering a problem where I would hard lock every 30 mins or so and then have to hard kill the application to get out of it and back into the game… occasionally having to go so far as to go into task manager and kill battle.net entirely.
I am not sure what caused this or honestly what solved it. I tried to do a client repair but it did not seem to be doing much of anything. Instead what I ended up doing is exiting Battle.net entirely, moving my D3 install, and then going through the process of reinstalling the game while pointing at the new directory. From there I attempted a client repair again, and this time around it took about 10 minutes to complete making me think that maybe it was actually doing something that time. When I got into the game I noticed that for some reason it was set to 32-bit mode instead of 64-bit mode. I swapped that and from that point forward the game has been extremely smooth and I’ve yet to crash out to the desktop again. I am not sure exactly which of the things I did actually solved the problem, or even what the problem was exactly… but for now I am going to stop asking questions.
When I want an easy mode season, I always lean heavily on the Demon Hunter. This time around the Gears of Dreadlands set was on Haedrigs Gift, which meant that I completed most of the early seasonal accomplishments on that set. It is perfectly cromulent and is technically supposed to be the best set currently for progression. I’m not exactly the biggest fan of it because it feels a bit piddly given that you have to keep weaving in normal attacks or you just stop functioning entirely. Weaving normal attacks is always a good idea mind you, but if you get to a point where you can’t easily the wheels sort of fall off.
I used my farming ability however to piece together the Unhallowed set and swap over to Multishot. While my brain had gotten used to the spin to win strafing GoD build, I am slowly getting adjusted once again to the more familiar Demon Hunter gameplay. For the longest time I was waiting for a Yangs to drop and then… waiting for a second Dawn. Once I got both I swapped over and can immediately more comfortably farm T16. Saturday night after recording the podcast several of us knocked out two conquests in rapid order, so I should be able to complete the third one without much issue when I finish leveling 3 gems to 65.
That puts me in a very familiar spot when it comes to finishing up the season. I’ve not touched a set dungeon at all because I hate them. Right now I plan on doing the Marauder set because if I remember correctly it is a pretty easy one. I’ve almost completed building out Marauder and am only missing a few pieces. I have everything that I need ready for the Augment minus one of the red gems, and then it is simply a case of extracting a bunch of cube powers and pushing the gems to 70. I feel like some of the pressure has lessened because I could slack off entirely and then finish up all of this stuff in the final weekend if that ended up happening.
This season’s gimmick is the Altar of Rites, which ends up driving a lot of your farming and grinding. Essentially you sacrifice items to the Altar to get permanent buffs. For example, now my pet can salvage whites, blues, and yellows in addition to picking up gold. The problem with this however is that it cannot keep up with the process and seems to miss a ton of gold and a ton of materials. Another buff is that it makes it so all gear has no level requirement… but what it actually does in practice is set everything to level 1. However Companions don’t seem to be able to take advantage of this, so it means while leveling you cannot tell if your companions can or cannot equip something. The Altar is cool, but also seemingly introduced a bunch of jank into the game that they seemingly were not quite prepared for.
What I was not really prepared for… is how much more I seem to enjoy Path of Exile as compared to Diablo III. I just don’t feel nearly as engaged this season in Diablo, and it is almost as though the gameplay loop is nowhere near as rich as I remember it being. I had fun running amok with Ace, and I had missed that sort of experience, but for whatever reason, the gearing process in D3 has felt way more hollow this season than it has in previous ones. I could micromanage getting exactly the right stats, but it doesn’t feel as repeatably enjoyable as roaming around in Delve, Heist, or doing Maps in Path of Exile.
I am really hoping that when the Last Epoch Multiplayer launches, it can be that happy medium between the more casual grouping play of Diablo III, and the more rich systems of Path of Exile. I also hope to get into testing for Diablo IV so I can try that out and see how it feels. Basically, I am not sure if I was just in the wrong frame of mind for this season of Diablo III, but something feels missing and I can’t quite put my finger on it. I am going to wrap things up, but I think I would rather be playing Guild Wars 2 when I am not actively playing with friends.
The post Diablo III Season 28 Start appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! This week we accidentally recorded an hour-and-a-half-long show. I guess this is what happens when you punt a bunch of topics to another week because we were missing the folks attached to said topics. We start off with the discussion about Theatrhythm Final Bar Line that we hinted at last week. From there we talk about Media from our Childhood that is not cursed… aka The Princess Bride. From there Tam talks about his further Steam Deck adventures with Eastward and What The Golf. Bel talks about his experience buckling down and getting his Skyscale in Guild Wars 2. We talk briefly about the Valve Honeypot catching over 40,000 DOTA cheaters, and Kodra talks about playing Troll Mario Maker levels, more specifically Super Wagon World. From there we go down this nostalgic trip about pulling dungeons and the puzzles that they used to present and our niche desire for randomized dungeon runs in MMORPGs.
Topics Discussed:
Theatrhythm Final Bar Line
Princess Bride and Kids
Media from our Childhood Still Valid for Modern Standards
Eastward
What the Golf
Bel Gets a Skyscale in Guild Wars 2
Tam is Experiencing Good Crabs Again
Diablo 3 Season 28
The Altar
Bel’s Rough Start
Valve Crafts a Cheater Honeypot
Over 40,000 Bans for DOTA
Super Wagon World
Troll Levels for Mario Maker
Xenoblade III is a Pulling Puzzle
Nostalgic Trip Down Memory Lane about Pulling Dungeons
