This week a new content patch dropped for Honkai Star Rail that finishes and I believe more or less concludes the main storyline on the Xianzhou Luofu aka “Space China”. This patch specifically adds two big new overworld areas and a new boss fight. The story content itself was enjoyable but felt a bit on the short side. I guess I was not sure what to expect, but I thought I remembered story patches in Genshin Impact being a little bit beefier. I mostly wrapped this up in a few hours on a single evening, and largely involved a few short quests leading up to the big boss encounter.
The new boss was pretty fun, but what I was really hoping for was a great new theme. It is good… but nowhere near as memorable or epic as Wildfire. In fact, while the fight was going on… I caught precisely zero percent of the theme really and it was only when I came back later that I was able to give it a proper listen. While doing the fight it mostly felt like background noise, instead of Wildfire or even the Doomsday Beast fight where the theme itself felt like a strong part of the experience. Maybe this one just isn’t my jam. It is well orchestrated but won’t likely be something I ever play on the Astral Express, whereas I generally have Wildfire on a constant loop.
The underwater zone specifically is gorgeous. This also gives me a new area to farm Luofu zone currency so I can maybe buy the remaining Eidolon upgrades for Fire Main Character. Actually, now that I think about it… this does make me wonder a bit if we are actually done with this area. If you follow the Genshin model, when you finish with an area you often end up unlocking a new elemental power. Then again maybe those are going to happen here every two planets since Physical form spanned the first two areas, and the Luofu sells up Eidolon tokens for Fire mode. Mostly I think I am mentally done with Space China and am ready to move on to more planetary shenanigans.
The banner this time around is for Blade… which is a character I have zero interest in. I already have Dan Heng that I use as my heavy melee character and I am fine with that. I am in currency hoarding mode for when the Kafka banner starts which I am guessing will be the tail end of August. The only sad thing about this banner is that I like the 4 stars… and would not mind picking more Eidolons up for them. I also do not have Arlan and he is a pretty solid character overall for lightning. I also really like Arlan personality-wise.
One of the really nice things that was added in with the patch is trials for all of the 5-star characters that are on the normal banner. I believe these are also all of the ones that can be chosen from on the 300 pull choose-a-5-star reward. If nothing else… they are a pretty easy way to get 140 free pull currency. It always seems like it is worth taking the time to do trials when they are available because it is essentially free currency and materials.
All told I think it has been a pretty solid patch, but I am looking forward to some of the events starting. Right now the only event available is the login reward bonus that essentially gives you a 10 pull on the Blade banner. There is a new mini-game that was introduced that involves flying around a Cycrane and identifying targets. It isn’t exactly my jam, but it also isn’t annoying. I am hoping we get at least one event during this patch cycle that is even vaguely close to as good as the Museum event was in Belebog.
What are your thoughts so far? Have you finished the story content? Drop me a line below.
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I’ve been done with Diablo IV for a few weeks now and I reached that point when I finally entered World Tier IV… and nothing really changed for me. I kept waiting for the game to get fun, and really without a significant investment of more time I was uncertain I would ever arrive at that point. I put around 200 hours into the game over the course of leveling and gearing, and never really landed on an end-game activity that I truly enjoyed. Barbarian never felt the way I expected it to feel and my survivability always ended when I got crowd controlled, and given my CC break was part of my rage generation mechanism that made playing feel worthwhile… it was always on cooldown. For the last few weeks of playing the game, I had fallen into a pattern where the only time I actually played was when my friend Cyl happened to be on and a world boss was just about to spawn. Essentially I was playing the game in daily quest mode.
I held out a glimmer of hope that maybe Season 1 would bring some significant changes to the game that would improve my enjoyment. However that is absolutely not the case, and in fact, the patch notes nerfed essentially everything that was working without really replacing them with significant changes to any other abilities to bring them up to par. So this tells me that the gameplay loop that the devs working on this game are going for… is a slow slog of a game where you die a lot. While the outrage has been almost universal even from folks who were able to suffer through Diablo Immortal… and there is an emergency Fireside Chat scheduled for Friday… I feel like any backpedaling is only going to serve to delay the end goal of slowing down the players. I already considered Diablo IV to be a bit of a slog… so anything slower is going in the wrong direction for me personally.
I still feel like Diablo IV is a game designed for folks who only casually interact with ARPGs… but with way more hardcore vibes designed for someone playing Path of Exile Ruthless mode for thousands of hours to accomplish anything. There is no real solid core endgame loop, and Nightmare Dungeons feel miserable. The only really fun activities are the World Bosses and Helltides, but they are gated by lengthy timers… and the last patch nerfed Mystery Chests so that Helltides now feel like a waste of your time as well. There is nothing like Path of Exile Maps, Last Epoch Monolith, or even Diablo III Greater Rifts that provides an efficient and fun way to grind out experience and gear. At level 70 I unliked the highest tier of gear in the game and was able to gear myself relatively quickly… which left only fruitless grinding for Paragon points and trying to hit level 100 as my remaining goals. There was nothing really aspirational to chase at that point, and Season 1 does nothing to really fix that.
Even more so… Season 1 does nothing to really fix some of the core problems with the game. The UI for the stash is awful. The manner in which you build a character requires you to be holding onto legendary items in either raw item form or very limited legendary aspect storage. This means every time you get an item that is numerically an upgrade, you have to extract and imprint the correct aspect on it… which effectively forces you to mouse over every single item in your inventory looking for the right one. None of the game’s systems have search functionality. This is even more important than the fact that you have a measly 200 slots of stash storage that rapidly gets used by your very first character. All of this seemed like low-hanging fruit for them to implement some rapid improvements, but we are seeing nothing of the sort in Season 1. In fact critical problems with the game like the fact that resistances are meaningless… are being kicked down the road to Season 2 before addressing.
I’ve uninstalled Diablo IV and now only have Diablo III remaining on my system. Largely I did this so that I did not for some reason accidentally use my Battle Pass entitlement that came with the game. I have no interest in playing Season 1, and quite honestly… it is probably going to be a few seasons before I dip my toes back into the game. Right now the team has designed and is trying to reinforce a game different from the sort of game that I want to play. I think the game as a whole is going to have to fall on its face like Diablo III did before we can get a Reaper of Souls update that brings the game back in line with what a fun gameplay experience looks like. Maybe in a year’s time, they will have been forced to reconcile where they went wrong… and begin to bring the game back in line with what an ARPG experience should feel like. I’ve been done for a while… it wasn’t until the seasonal patch drop that I decided to just uninstall and free up the drive space.
Unfortunately for Blizzard, they have also somewhat run out of time to get their shit together. Next week is ExileCon in Auckland New Zealand and with it will come a deluge of new information about the 3.22 Patch and the new league that will be dropping on August 18th. Additionally, there will be more news about Path of Exile 2… which means all of the POE Streamers and YouTubers who have been giving Diablo IV airtime due to the Crucible league being a bit lacking… will suddenly disappear from the community. Additionally, there is a slew of Destiny 2 content creators that came over to play Diablo IV, and they have already filtered back into their own community. So the Diablo IV “community” is about to get much smaller and I am just not sure who is going to be left as a dedicated player.
There is no doubt for me personally, that Path of Exile continues to be the best Action RPG on the market. You just cannot compete with the sheer amount of detailed content that is available in that game, and when POE2 adds an entirely new alternate leveling path with some massive core system changes… I am not sure if anyone can really compete. Please note… I LOVE Last Epoch but it is nowhere near ready to really be mainlined as a primary game because there just isn’t enough breadth of content available. It is fun for a while but the repetition of the limited amount of content available wears thin really quickly. With Path of Exile, you can focus on one small niche of that community and carve out enough gameplay to keep you busy the entire league. There are folks who will spend an entire league doing almost nothing but Heist, Delve, or even specific mapping mechanics like Legion or Blight.
The core problem with Path of Exile will always be one of accessibility. The tyranny of the tree is real… and it is purposefully there a few minutes into the gameplay as a way of warning players that they are in for a very specific type of gameplay experience. However, having played a lot of this game… I feel like it is nowhere near as daunting as someone just starting out might think it is. There are a lot of guide makers out there, but most of them have forgotten how fucked up the game seems when you first start out. I am contemplating trying to create some content targeted at trying to ease players into some of the critical steps in building a character, to at least give them enough of a foundation to be able to follow most build guides. It is going to take way more time than I have this week, so view that as a future project of mine.
The post Seasonal Stinker appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Friends! Whelp I took a bit of a gamble and it paid off. I was running out of time to get Luocha with the new banner arriving soon. To be honest… I don’t really love this character but after playing with him… he is freaking broken as far as healers go and I needed a second healer. So I spent $30 in additional pulls and managed to luck out and get him. I had hit pity off free pulls at the beginning of his banner only to get a different 5-Star champion, so I was hoping that would not happen again. Now I can rest on my laurels and gather up pull currency because Blade is next up, and I don’t need him at all. My hope is to be able to gather up a stockpile and take a run at Kafka when her banner opens.
I’m really looking forward to the next patch dropping because it looks like we might be finishing up the Luofu story arc with another big boss fight. I am not super enthralled with “Space China”, and am very happy to be leaving it behind. What I am probably looking forward to the most… is a new boss theme because both the Herta Station and Jarillo-VI boss fights are absolute bangers. It will be interesting to see what themes they choose to go with for this boss theme. I’m also looking forward to some of the events that are going to be happening. The museum event essentially proved to me that this team can do some really interesting stuff with mini-events. If my information is correct, this should drop tomorrow, which may or may not actually be “tonight” my time.
In Blaugust news, the other day I did this dumb image showing off the ten different logos we’ve had over the years. So far the whole Vaporwave/Arcade/Yearbook thing I have going on this year seems to generally be better received than my Stranger-Things-inspired look last year. Truth be told… I don’t really consult anyone when I start crafting the yearly nonsense. Maybe I should, but honestly… this has always sorta been my thing and I am shocked as fuck that anyone follows along. One thing that is a bit different this year from previous years is that I have taken over the generation of the OPML file to make importing into an RSS reader a bit easier. My long-term goal is to automate this, but for the time being I am doing some dumb stuff with Google Sheets and =CONCATENATE().
We still have fourteen days until the official beginning of Blaugust, and each day more sign-ups are flowing in. I sorta regret the way the event is falling with me being in training all day every day this week. Normally speaking I would be a bit more active on social media to keep the interest levels high. However I just can’t really do that, and after not “peopling” for the last three years… by the time I get out of training, I am just drained. I didn’t even do anything resembling coherent gameplay last night as I bounced from one game to another. I am pumped however that regardless of my lack of support this week we are already sitting at 38 sign-ups as of the time of this posting. Given that we always have a number of “buzzer beaters”, and even some folks who decide to start after it is already in progress… I have a feeling this is going to be a rather “lorge” year.
There is still plenty of time to sign-up and add your blog, and no shade at “buzzer beaters”… because I habitually am one. I’ve seen a lot of new traction on Discord which is really nice as well. I feel bad that I am not active this week, but I hope to make up for it next week when my life begins to shift back to normal. I’m really looking forward to this Blaugust because even if no one else signed up… we already have an interesting mix of new people interested in our yearly nonsense. Still not sure how many of these morning posts I will be able to knock out this week, but I am going to try and get as many of them as I can before exhaustion claims me. It does not help that Gracie was an asshole and started screaming at the top of her lungs at around 10 pm… and finally got locked out of the bedroom around 1 am.
I hope yall are having a most excellent week though! Unfortunately, since I have to pass three certification exams by the end of the week… it isn’t like I can do my trick of just disassociating until I am on the other side of the frustrating thing that I don’t want to deal with. I need to soak up knowledge so I can regurgitate it back on an exam.
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Good Morning Friends! This is potentially going to be the last reliable blog post from me for a bit. Next week I am going to be dealing with the in-person training that I talked about in a post the other day. As such I expect to not be able to blog in the morning, and when I come home I fully expect to crash very fast and very hard. Last night was a bit of evidence of that happening already. I had a fairly stressful day of work and by the time I wrapped up around 6 pm, I was just dead to the world. I left off in Guild Wars 2 sitting outside the Tomb of Primeval Kings having only made it part of the way through that quest sequence before crashing the other night. While the will was there, I was struggling to stay asleep so I really made no forward momentum yesterday. I’m thankful I at least hit a checkpoint in the quest that I was on so that I can continue at a relatively straightforward place.
I’m exceptionally happy that I managed to get everything ready to go for Blaugust this week instead of having to deal with it in the evenings next week. While the sign-ups have only been open for a few days at the time of writing we have 25 bloggers, four of which are brand new this year. There has also been a significant bump in activity in the Discord which has been cool to watch. There was a bit of a screw-up on Wednesday when I announced everything… somewhere buried within the wall of nonsense was apparently a link to the old sign-up form. Thankfully I could tell by date range who had signed up and copied them over to the participant list that I maintain. I use this list to drive my blogroll which I keep updated as often as I can. I’ve been keeping everything updated on the Media Kit page as it serves as the true permanent resting place of all information assorted with Blaugust in general.
I’ve come to the realization that I think this is the 10th Blaugust. I probably should have made a much bigger deal about that when it came to the design.
What always throws me off is 2017… the year that I didn’t do a Blaugust event. I had allowed the naysayers to convince me that I was doing more harm than good with this event. That entire year was a rough one for me, but by the time 2018 rolled around… I had so many people come out of the woodwork to tell me how much they missed Blaugust and hoped that I would be running one that year. It was really that moment that lit a fire in me to keep me moving forward in spite of how exhausted I might be. So while we missed a year… there was also 2020 when we technically had two Blaugust events… one of which we called Blapril and the other gave us the prompt list.
Every year I seem to try something slightly different, while also keeping all of the things that worked well in the past. Whatever year we added Discord was probably the single best change for the longevity of the event. The first Blaugust was run more or less through the ill-fated Anook platform, and they even went so far as to sponsor an award in 2015 the second year. I still think that platform idea was really cool and is sort of what we are trying to do with Gamepad now… carving out a community. The “new thing” this year is that I set up a Blaugust account on Mastodon, and the idea is that I will use it to boost all of the posts that come across with the #Blaugust2023 hashtag. I tried to do this, but I always sort of hated spamming everyone that had no clue what the fuck Blaugust was from my personal account. This also gives folks an option to follow Blaugust without following me… given that I can sometimes be an acquired taste and I know of at least a handful of people who occasionally participate in the event that have zero love for me personally.
Not directly related to Blaugust, but it has been cool to watch Gamepad grow over the last half a year. I think we went live in November of last year, and during that time we’ve picked up a little over 120 accounts, and currently, at the time of writing this, 106 of them are active…. which is a pretty dang good retention rate. Mastodon and the larger Fediverse are really the social media of choice for me. Sure I am putting my thumb on the scale by choosing to run this out of Gamepad, but ultimately it is my event… so I am going to do the thing that I find most comfortable. A lot of bloggers had already moved to the platform so it doesn’t really seem too far-fetched to make it a home base for the event going forward. I’ve posted about the event on Twitter, Bluesky, Threads, and Instagram… but none of those really feel comfortable to me. I am not sure how many folks we will get from those anyways.
I think my hope in running it out of Mastodon, is that it will introduce us to an entirely new community of folks. We already have several sign-ups from folks who had no connection to our core group before we started talking about it on the fediverse. That is EXTREMELY exciting for me. My hope has always been for this thing to spread to different communities and spider out so that we have LOTS of blogs active and happily posting away throughout the year. In this year of internet bonfires… and the if not death of Twitter… the mutation of it into something I no longer want to be associated with… having a place to call your own is way more important than it ever was before. I had the realization that because of my blog… I am exceptionally easy to find. If I lost touch with someone along the way, they can always find me here. For most folks… the tapestry of connections that we have woven between each other is relatively tenuous. If you put your faith in corporate social media as your digital sense of place… then when you lose one of them you also lose your foundation. While self-hosted bloggers have gone out of fashion… we represent a sense of permanency and stability that is hard to remove.
Anyways… did not mean to ramble off in the direction of techno-religiosity… but there you have it. I feel like we need to take back control of more of our internet presence. Gamepad for example is run by folks that I trust and I believe in… and if something needs to happen to it, the portability of Mastodon allows me to migrate elsewhere. Worse comes to worse I can fire up my own private instance just for me, and continue to truck along with the same social connections. My blog is my digital front step, and anyone can find me here along with any of the other connections that I might be active on. That is a weird peace of mind in this time of digital uncertainty.
The post Ten Years of Blaugust appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
