Good Morning Folks. I have no clue what I am doing anymore. I have my first counseling session this afternoon so we will see how that goes. I am still having the minor hallucinations that my wife is still here in this home, but like it is more a feeling than actually seeing or experiencing anything. Many folks have told me this is normal, and honestly it probably is. My brain is hardwired to expect her to be here and that does not go away in a few weeks time. I also have a meeting with a financial advisor in a few weeks to talk about how best to handle a bunch of stuff that I am dealing with. Most of which is in a holding pattern until we have a death certificate. Everything needs a death certificate and I am mostly just trying to function until that point. Tomorrow I have taken the day off because I have to move everything out of her classroom, so that they can prepare it for another teacher to move in. Thankfully her teacher pals have offered to pack everything up for me, and it will just be a matter of trucking things home and stacking the boxes up in the garage for now.
This morning I am probably going to be wildly flipping back and forth between my real world stuff… and gaming stuff because that is effectively how my brain works right now. I am latching onto distractions like a life raft, and we got some good distractions in abundance this week. Guild Wars 2 released a reveal trailer for their upcoming Visions of Eternity expansion and it looks awesome. Whoever is responsible for the motion graphics for their expansion logos… they need a fucking raise because this one is the best yet. SOTO and Janthir Wilds were both awesome, but the story being told by this logo is freaking phenomenal. I am really looking forward to the updates to the Skimmer mount because right now… it is the one that I use the least unless I have to be doing underwater stuff. I’m also looking forward to more shenanigans with the Inquest because they are one of my favorite bad guy groups. I am not sure how excited I am for more Elite specs, because quite honestly… I rarely change my builds and something is going to have to be really freaking cool to get me to change things up.
Depending upon how the counseling session goes, I might be ready to dip my toes back into Thursday night nonsense in Guild Wars 2. I have not mentioned any of this to Ammo, Sol, Ash, Thalen, or Sita… but I might do that throughout the day. I know there are a bunch of weeklies that we would even work on, like I could tag up and run bounties to knock out that one. I am also down with more Fractals or Dungeons because there are so many of those that I have not run. I’ve come to realize that my go to for knocking things out in Guild Wars 2 is running rifts in the Janthir area, because they are so much easier to get to than the Rifts in the SOTO area. They area great way to knock out general kills, defiance breaks, combos, and a few other general things because when you start one up… you almost always have a large group. Quite honestly Rifts in general are one of the best things that they have added to the game because they are so easy to get going.
Over in Path of Exile I am still slowly grinding up levels. I dinged level 99 yesterday over lunch and am starting to chip away at the large grind towards level 100. For now I am just pouring my last few points into 5% life nodes. They are generically useful, give me slightly more righteous fire damage… and quite a bit of just general survival. I might do something more clever but I can sort that out once I am actually level 100. I am trying to decide if I want to make a second character or not. I was running up an Elementalist to play with the Golems and was contemplating doing a Penance Brand of Dissipation power charge stacker to see how that goes. I would like to have some sort of a bossing focused character just to rip through invitations faster than righteous fire. There are a ton of challenges that I still need to work on to get my sad little totem pole a bit bigger before the end of the league.
There are a bunch of challenges that are pretty close to wrapping up. Some of them I just need some luck, like finding Infamous Mercs that I can steal gear from that I have not already stolen. Then there are things like the fact that I need to do a Cortex where my merc survives, and I think if I switch to my tanky bossing merc I should be good there. Sanctified Scarabs is in theory just me running a bunch of scarabs from various different league mechanics on a map with a minimum of 80% item quantity which should be reasonable enough to do. My Einhar tree makes a pretty decent base for generic usage of other scarabs so I might start working on those tonight. Remarkable Realms is worse this league because it is 40 maps instead of running one of a specific set of maps. I think previously it was 18 maps in total… so I just need to churn through the maps that I have banked up in order to finish that one out. Either that or pick a map that is not heinous and run that one over and over. Most of the unique maps are annoying in one way or another. I should grab Kodra at some point and force him to run them with me so he also gets credit.
The other thing that I have contemplated… is streaming again. Mostly just as a way of interacting with other human beings while I am playing mostly single player gaming experiences like my beloved ARPGs. I have a pretty beefy gaming desktop and it would not be a big deal to stream while playing most of the games that I play. I used to really enjoy doing this, but it always got really weird and made me feel like I was making myself unavailable to my wife while I was doing it. Now that it is just me… I have lots of time to kill before sleep claims me. I can’t say that I would ever be a good streamer, and there is no way in hell that I will ever turn on a camera. Just thinking it might be something fun to dabble in again on the side. Mostly it is just one of those intrusive thoughts that has started appearing in my head and I am not sure if I am going to allow it to take purchase there or not. If I did stream it would be over on my sad little Twitch channel which I believe is still an affiliate. I streamed consistently enough during the launch of Elder Scrolls Online to actually qualify for that. Apparently I have $71.31 in payouts that I am due… that I sort of wish I could just send to a charity somewhere. Accepting subs always seemed really fucking weird.
I legitimately have no clue what I am doing half the time these days. I think once some of the looming things finally are dealt with… I will maybe begin to allow myself to develop a new normal, but right now everything is too damned fresh. I should really spend my weekends working through some of the things that I need to work through. One of my good friends mentioned a pen and paper game, so I might be tagging in on that soon. I also need to sort out a good place to paint and assemble some miniatures for that purpose. I just do not know what I am going to do long term with my life and I am trying to figure out a lot of things. Thanks for sticking around and reading my nonsense as I flail.
The post Visions of Flailing appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Friends! Yesterday I reached the point of realization that I am just not enjoying Diablo IV. On one level this should not shock me… given how much I have talked about this game not being the game I was wanting it to be. However yesterday over lunch I was playing for a bit and it hit me that I was really not enjoying myself. I think so long as I had the clear objective of “finishing the campaign” I was able to find some joy in the experience. Now that I am turned loose in the world post paragon… and realizing I have a fairly scuffed build that I am uncertain how to fix other than grinding for legendaries or respeccing to whirlwind… I am just not certain the struggle is worth it. I am not necessarily saying I am “done” with Diablo IV, but I am saying that I sincerely doubt I will make it super far running the grinding and gearing treadmill with this game because the moment-to-moment gameplay just doesn’t feel great to me.
I’ve said this in my own fifteen-minute-long video complaining about Diablo IV, but the core problem I have with this game is the way that the world scales as compared to how your power scales. Yesterday Action RPG released a video essentially underlining the same points. Diablo is a game about feeling powerful and smashing demons to jangly chords, and while after the second act, the jangly chords come into play… the cost of entry of the feeling powerful bit seems like it is a bit much. Every level I put on in this game makes the game feel worse until I get a drop… which patches over the problem until I ding again. There is just something about the moment-to-moment gameplay that feels off and maybe it is that the cooldowns are longer than I would expect or that the resource generation isn’t high enough… or that the resource spenders don’t deal enough damage. Whatever the case… I just can’t seem to get to a point where the game feels good.
I still have a lot of maps to see out there, and a ton of dungeons to complete in order to unlock the patterns contained within them. I’ve also not really made a concerted effort to go after the Lilith Statues, so in theory that is probably what I am going to be devoting my time to in the coming weeks as I continue to poke at this game’s carcass. There is a whole lot of map that I have not uncovered, especially in the last few acts of the game where I focused entirely on the yellow quests. Additionally, the Tree of Whispers is not an awful way to progress, and I’ve done a bit of that though really do not enjoy the short timers on all of those missions. I did not realize that your progress expired because I had completed 8 grim favors before logging out when the servers went to shit last night, and logging in this morning all of that progress is gone.
I will say that I had more fun than I would have expected watching the World’s First Hardcore race and I got to see several of the streamers that I follow hit level 100 over the last several days. I find it pretty awesome that a team of Path of Exile streamers ultimately got the first four spots on the unofficial Hardcore Leaderboard. Carn was technically the first to level 100, but Zizarin, Steelmage, and Nugiyen followed a few hours after. Then several hours after that I watched Raxxanterax who is probably the D3 player that I have consumed the most content from hit 100, and a few hours after that seeing Wudijo become the first SSF Hardcore 100 player. I normally do not watch streamers and largely consume content from them when it makes its way over to YouTube, but this time around I was curious how the race was going given that I am familiar with a lot of these people from other ARPGs.
Other than Diablo IV, I spent some time last night screwing around in Last Epoch. I am still working on my wannabe squirrel build and attempting to get the stupid helm to drop. I’ve also contemplated respeccing my Necromancer over to a necrotic/life leech build that I saw yesterday but I do not know how much work that would end up being to relevel my skills after the swaps. The current state of Endgame in Last Epoch feels a little lacking. I feel like I need an overarching goal that I am working towards to disguise the fact that I am grinding. Since there is no real targeted way of farming the exact items that I need, I find it hard to stay focused. In Diablo III, sure I farmed the same greater rifts over and over but often times there were goals that I was working towards like pushing up my GR level higher or leveling Legendary gems. Those took the focus away from the repetitive behavior. In Path of Exile I am doing maps to gain Sulphite and then doing Delve while hunting for City or Boss nodes. The hunt gives me focus and takes me out of the mindset that I am repeating the same loop over and over.
Speaking of Path of Exile… I need to spend some more time in that game soon. I know with Exilecon in July will represent the launch of a new league and I need at least ONE MORE challenge in order to get the pitiful little 19 challenge totem pole. There are three that seem like they are the most likely to finish up so I guess over the coming weeks I will spend some time working on knocking one or more of these out. After that, I am not sure what my focus is going to be. I had hopes that Diablo IV would coalesce into something that I wanted to be playing on the regular but unfortunately, that is not really the case. To be truthful… I didn’t really enjoy Diablo III until the first expansion dropped and changed a number of systems, so maybe there is hope on the horizon. Talking with a few friends, I seem to not be the only one for which the game is losing its mirth. Even then though… I might try leveling something else and see if it is more my speed.
Anyways I hope you are having a great week, and if you are playing Diablo IV that it is giving you what you want from it.
The post Diablo Spectator Sport appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Featuring: Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Tamrielo and Thalen
This week we have a more normal show after last weeks super serious one. Â We do however have a little bit of a call back in the form of a short discussion about how vocal minorities can negatively impact the press surrounding a game. Â We talk a bit about the launch of Destiny 2 on the PC and how relatively smoothly it has gone. Â We touch ever so briefly on the madness happening in Warframe right now with Twitch streams and free loot. Â From there we delve into Warhammer Shadespire and spend a good deal of time talking about it and past Games Workshop games. Â This leads to a bit of a discussion about the problem Magic the Gathering has with onboarding new players. Â Thalen talks about his experiences playing Orwell, and Tam and Ash talk a bit about the Legend of Five Rings Living Card Game. Â Finally we wrap things up with some talk about clicker games in general and two specifically: Â Paperclips and Succubox.
Tonight Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra and Tam talk Pokemon and a whole list of other topics.
Tonight we got a bit of late start, but once things got rolling we recorded a proper show.  Last week we had pushed off the topic of Pokemon Sun and Moon because we literally ran out of time.  We start recording around 9 pm CST and when it is past midnight…  we know we are in trouble.  So we talk a bit about the game and things that folks have noticed about it.  Several of us are not terribly far along… others have beaten the game.  Grace talks about her addiction to Justice Monsters Five and how no other games really matter at all. Â
Bel goes on a discussion about his feelings about various streaming options and why he is moving towards Beam.  Bel talks about how this is the year that he stopped browsing steam, because there is just too much random stuff out there.  This spawns a conversation about games that get lost in the mix…  like Obsidian’s recent release of Tyranny.  This oddly spawns another contorted shift as Bel talks about that he figures out why he doesn’t really enjoy Halo games.  We shift gears and talk a bit about Final Fantasy XIV and the Alexander Turn 11 fight.  Finally we wrap things up with some talk about the new Star Wars Destiny Collectible Card Game.
Discussion points: Pokemon Sun and Moon – Justice Monsters Five – Twitch vs Hitbox vs Beam – Browsing Steam – Tyranny – Bel and Halo – Final Fantasy XIV – Alexander Turn 11 – Star Wars Destiny
