MMORPG

Journey Completed

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Journey Completed

This weekend represents quite possibly the quickest I have “finished” the Diablo 3 seasonal journey.  I say finished with quotes because there is still a lot more that I could be doing, but I think I am ultimately as far as I intend to go.  Of note… when I logged in this morning I got an anniversary achievement and  the above Diablo pet so if you are interested you might check it out and make sure you log in within the next few days.  For lack of a better word…  Season 8 completely caught me off guard.  Unfortunately the rotating three month schedule means that this is going to happen more often than not these days.  Season 7 released during the Legion pre-launch event… so it too was a fairly truncated effort.  I know my friend Grace managed to make it in on the day before Season 7 ended and push hard enough to get her extra bank tab.  It would have been a great season to do that for, given just how good the hunter set was for pushing content.  I however just let my attempt at getting that bank slot slip away because I couldn’t bring myself to push any further.  This time around… we have a new set and a new optimal build.  We started the season once again on a Friday night, logging in and beginning the push within moments of the season going live.  Generally speaking we make it pretty close to 70 on that first night… but this time both Grace and I lost our “oomph” at around 54.

Journey Completed

I managed to pick up the next day with another group and we ground together from the 50s through to 70 making it to roughly paragon 20 before needing to bail and get some dinner.  Yesterday afternoon I focused on getting the various achievement bits needed to get the first four chapters of the seasons journey and unlock the cosmetic options, and finished gear set.  This time around with the Demon Hunter it was Natalya’s set, which is a bit of an odd one given that it focuses on dealing damage with rain of vengeance.  This is the basic build that I followed, substituting a few abilities for ones I prefer, namely I found Stampede way harder to control than Shade for Rain of Vengeance.  I played a little of both but given how much I was in constant motion having the stampede actually pointed in the right direction was always a thing.  Towards evening yesterday though I finally started to feel like I was getting a handle on the play style and soloing my GR20 was actually far easier than I had expected.  The biggest problem is that this build just clears so much more slowly than the equivalent Multishot build did last season.  If I were to actually push for the full compliment of seasonal achievements… I would more than likely try and farm up a full set of Unhallowed Essence again and just go back to the tried and true multishot.

However it is highly unlikely that I will spend much more time on this season.  There was just something lackluster about it, given that nothing had changed since the previous season.  All of the same builds worked as we left them in the previous patch.  I was one of the people cheering on the three month seasonal cycle, but having been through it a few times now…  I am thinking that maybe it is just too short a time period between them.  Previously enough time had passed for me to start to miss the seasonal grind… enough to be truly excited for another opportunity to hang out and push to 70 together.  This time… it just felt like we were doing it to get shiny cosmetic baubles instead of to really enjoy the experience.  This makes me a little sad given just how pumped I have been in the past for the season to roll around and start anew.  This time around I literally had no clue it was happening until Grace told me.  In the past I almost marked the date on my calendar and started to get excited for the whole process.  Who knows maybe in a weeks time I will feel differently and want to pick up where I left off… grinding out more seasonal achievements.  That said I am perfectly happy leaving Season 8 as is, because I feel like I did what I set forth to do…  collect another batch of exclusive cosmetic appearances.

 

AggroChat #129 – Deckbuilding MMO Design

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Tonight Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Tam and Thalen Discuss Diablo rumors, Overwatch Co-Op, Master Catching Games, and Guild Wars Deckbuilding in MMOs

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Tonight we have another in a long line of shows where we go into it not really having a clue what we are going to talk about… then wind up discussing topics for a couple hours.  This week we start off talking about Diablo… the largely forgotten Blizzard game and the beginning of Season 8.  We then veer off into tinfoil hat territory as we talk about some of the popular rumors surrounding Diablo 4.  We talk about how much we are enjoying the new Co-Op PVE mode in Overwatch, and how we wish it was a permanent addition.  We also shift course into a discussion about how games seem to have an obligatory e-sports friendly design these days.  We also discuss our recent progress in the World of Warcraft Emerald Nightmare raid, and now much we are looking forward to Karazhan landing this coming week.  Finally we get into a lengthy discussion about the deckbuilding style of MMO design, namely with Guild Wars, Guild Wars 2, Secret World and to some extent Rift.

Topics Discussed – Diablo 3 Season 8 – Diablo 4 Tinfoil Hat Theories – David Brevik – Bill Roper – Co-Op Overwatch – Designing For E-Sports – Co-Op Gameplay – Pokemon Sun and Moon Demo – World of Final Fantasy Demo – WoW Emerald Nightmare Raid – Guild Wars 1 Ability System – Deck Building MMOs

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Seasonal Bits

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Seasonal Bits

Tonight begins the next season for Diablo 3, and I have to admit much like season 7 this one completely snuck up on me.  Were it not for my friend Grace the beginning of the season would have passed me by completely.  For the last several of these we have done a Friday night vigil as we attempt to grind our way up to 70 on a brand new set of seasonal characters.  Once again I think I am going to go with a Demon Hunter, largely because they seemed super easy to push through the seasonal process and at least get high enough to collect the cosmetic goodies.  I am just not super into Diablo 3 right now, the evidence being that it just got removed from my side bar.  The challenge is that I can only have so many games that I actively care about at one time.  Right now I am spending the bulk of my time playing World of Warcraft, and attempting to steal as much time as humanly possible to feed my love of Destiny.  From there I am also juggling in some time for Guild Wars 2 and Final Fantasy XIV…  while at the same time trying to keep a foot in Rift for when the expansion lands there.  This scattered approach at gaming has a lot to be desired at times, because it ends up leaving me feeling like no one game is getting the attention it deserves.  Diablo 3 fell off the radar once I managed to get last seasons cosmetic items, and I had not even realized the season had closed until Grace talked about merging in her seasonal inventory.  This in itself is one hell of a chore, but I find myself getting significantly more mercenary about this process as the seasons go along.  Pretty much any legendary that is not ancient quality or part of the actively equipped set of gear… gets sharded.

Seasonal Bits

The above screenshot is just because I wound up setting up a new outfit in Rift, and thought it was cool.  I’ve loved the whole shade touched effect since the very first world event, and this time around for their “fall” event they are offering a shade touched skull that I could add to my wardrobe collection.  I also picked up the scythe made of bone… because I kinda have a thing for scythes.  The other interesting thing that I learned this morning is that apparently FRAPs does not handle DSR well.  Dynamic Super Resolution is a thing that Nvidia cards can do, where they essentially run the game in 4k on a 1080p resolution.  That is an oversimplification of what it ACTUALLY does but we are just going to go for that simplistic definition for the time being.  I am going to need to go out hunting and see if I can find another all purpose screenshot program, because fraps apparently only takes a single 1080p panel of the larger image.  This wound up with some rather comedic screenshots while trying to capture something for this mornings post.  I finally wound up doing Alt+PrintScreen and pasting it into photoshop to get the results this morning…  which also caused the FRAPs framerate counter to come along with it.  DSR works great for a game like League of Legends or Diablo 3, but it does some weird stuff as a result.  I guess I need to do some experimenting with the nvidia screenshot tool that comes with the new version of “Experience” and see if it works well enough to kick fraps to the curb.  Thing is that is really all I use it for… dumping screenshots from every game into a single “gameshots” directory for me to sort through for the purpose of this here blog.  In any case… the plan is to hang out in Diablo 3 tonight and do another grind ritual with the start of this brand new season.  I always have a blast doing it, even when I am not exactly prepared for it.

Light Rising

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Light Rising

I’ve been on a bit of a Destiny kick lately, and that has involved trying to do at a minimum all of the Rise of Iron bounties that Shiro hands out each week.  These largely involve running around the plaguelands and doing “stuff” like specific patrols and participating in world events.  I’ve also recently discovered the bounty that is the Archon’s Forge.  I admit I was a little intimidated for awhile, given that when you enter the forge it essentially locks you out of leaving.  My ultimate fear is that this place would murder me with great prejudice given my relatively low light levels.  That fortunately was not really the case, and I was also pleased to see that the same sort of “key trading” behavior exists in the forge as it did in the Court of Oryx.  I’ve been playing entirely solo so far since the launch of Rise of Iron, mostly because I am playing in short bursts rather than hanging out and making myself available to the clan for shenanigans.  However pretty much any time I have rolled down to the Forge, there have been people there waiting and willing to summon stuff for us to fight.  I still have trouble with the “purple” quality keys, but both green and blue ones seem largely feasible.  Unfortunately it seems like you have zero control over what sort of key drops for you, and at this very moment I happen to be sitting on a purple key myself.

Light Rising

The forge is quite literally a modern day version of the “loot cave” because after thirty minutes or so of running keys back to back… you end up with a full mail box.  This is not actually a screenshot from last night, but one I had laying around from one of my previous trips into the Forge.  Last night however it became significantly more lucrative for me personally.  Patch 2.4.1 did some juggling of things in preparation for the release of the Heroic Mode raid.  As a result the light economy of items got bumped up a bit, allowing folks a slightly easier time catching up.

  • Rare Engrams will now decrypt up to 365 Light
  • Legendary Engrams will now decrypt up to 385 Light
  • Exotic Engrams will now decrypt up to 400 Light
  • Faction packages will now provide drops up to 390 Light

So as a result to these tweaks… I entered last nights play session at 554 and exited at 560 and on the cusp of pushing over the line with several 361 items.  In the first screenshot I am decked out in Future War Cult colors… because I picked up some quest asking me to do a bunch of content both PVE and PVP repping the FWC.  I have no clue what that actually will lead to but I am interested to see.  The moment to moment gameplay of Destiny still feels as great as it ever did, and I am pumped that I can pop in for an hour and do a few things and feel like I moved the needle forward.  I am super loot centric in my games, and so long as I am progressing my gear levels I feel like I am making meaningful progress.

Light Rising

The ultimate short term goal is to get to 365 so that I can join in all of the reindeer games…  namely have access to the normal mode of the raid.  I’ve heard amazing things about it, but I have just lacked the drive to grind things out in the strike play list.  In fact I have yet to run a single strike since the implementation of Rise of Iron…  which seems a little odd given how often I used to run them for nothing more than burning Three of Coins.  I feel like I am torn in a bunch of different directions right now and trying to juggle actively playing four different games:  Destiny, World of Warcraft, Guild Wars 2 and Final Fantasy XIV.  As a result I am doing a somewhat shitty job of keeping up in any of them other than World of Warcraft, where I seem to be spending most of my time.  That said in WoW I feel like I am bumping up against the ceiling for the gear levels I can realistically achieve other than through my Wednesday night raid… so some of my drive there is siphoning off.  At the very least I am not really doing the world quests like I used to, because I know there is shit for gear out of them at my levels.  This excess time seems to be getting funneled right back into Destiny, but I do need to steal a little bit of it and work on my gearing in Final Fantasy XIV as well.  I am absolutely holding our group back from doing some of the new content because I am about 15 item levels short of being where I should be.  If only I could clone myself… and keep those clones at home all day long playing all the things I want to be playing.