warlock – Page 6 – AggroChat

Flowers and Rank 5s

May 2, 2016 by Belghast

Backyard Whim

One of the interesting developments that has happened this summer is that we are spending a good deal more time outside than we have ever before. I mean we have lived in our house for seventeen years now… and we’ve never really taken advantage of our backyard. My wife and I tried to sort out why this was, and I think in truth it was that the back of our house looked bad. Before moving in during the inspections they found a lot of termite damage on the wooden siding, and the bulk of this was located on the back of the house. The repair job looked adequate at first, but as it aged… the back wall ended up looking like a patchwork quilt that even with a fresh coat of paint just looked “wrong”. So in many ways I think it just put us off from being outside and having to look at it. With the recent renovations and new siding, we also had a door installed off of the bedroom. Years ago we created a quick and dirty patio with pavers, and now it feels like everything has finally come together. Sunday morning for example by the time I had woken up and gotten out of bed, my wife was already on the patio off the bedroom reading. There have been many times during the weekends that we end up eating lunch on the back patio as well.

Now I am not exactly certain where it came from… but recently we have talked about trying to put flowers sprinkled around the backyard. Granted we have always had a brown thumb, but this resurgence of backyarding… has made us want to at least try it. This reached a boiling point Saturday when while running errands we found a couple of planters that we really liked at Sam’s Club, and you can see one of them in the foreground of the above image. Given that Sams always has a rotating stock we went ahead and picked them up, thinking that if we waited they probably wouldn’t have two of the color we wanted later. Now I had zero intention of doing anything with them this weekend… I mean because I had Iron Banner and Diablo Season 6 to play. However before I knew it Sunday we were making a trip to go get rock and potting soil, and plants. We are massively cheating in that the start of each of the pots is a hanging plant, but so far so good. Now we just have to make sure they keep watered, but the hope is that since we are spending so much time out in the backyard anyway… that it won’t be that big of a deal. For those that are curious I created a nifty panoramic shot of the entire back yard.

Rank 5 For All

Even though we spent a chunk of the afternoon working on flowers and such, I still managed to make it upstairs on the PS4 by around 4pm. This allowed me some dedicated time to play the Warlock, and push forward towards Iron Banner rank 5. I closed with the weekend with my Titan and 333 light, Hunter at 324 and Warlock also at 324 which is significant movement. I have a feeling that those last two points of light on the Titan are going to end up being pure hell. However on a similar photo from the 22nd… I was sitting at 324 on the Titan, and 314 and 304 on the Hunter and Warlock respectively. So I have to say… I am pretty damned pumped about the rapid progress. The Iron Banner as a whole was very good to me, especially in the equippable gear and infusion material categories. I managed to get all of the available gear for this week, minus a pair of legs for the Warlock. There are numerous copies of the Auto Rifle, Rocket Launcher, and even managed to pick up a sidearm and sniper rifle from Rank 5 packages. It has been interesting playing all three classes this weekend, and I have to say that in truth… I think maybe the Warlock and Hunter are just inherently better at crucible than my Titan. It feels like they have a lot more tricks up their sleeve, whereas the Titan is just pure brute force. Warlock Blink seems to be the best escape method for getting out of an engagement, and Hunter throwing knives seems to be the best finishing move ever.

As far as the sniper rifle goes that I managed to pick up, I am not exactly a huge fan. It has Eye of the Storm, Speed Reload and Spray and Play which in theory would make it an insanely fast sniper rifle, but given its low impact… I question how useful it really is. For crucible at least you would have to land so many shots to make the kill, and it is hard enough to nail a single shot let along multiple at range. I will probably end up holding onto it just because it looks really cool, but I have a feeling that sooner or later this will get infused into something else to bring up its light levels. As far as new snipers go, I am still a much bigger fan of the 333 Her Fury that I managed to pick up from my Challenge of Elders this week. High impact, paired with Triple Tap and Armor Piercing rounds makes it something enjoyable to use. Tonight I have plans to hang out upstairs at least for a bit and try my luck at getting more of that tasty Iron Banner loot. It would be amazing if before the end of the weekend I manage to get more of the 335 items to help push up other gear. As far as the rest of my Destiny schedule for this week it feels a little up in the air. I did not set foot into Kings Fall last week, and I would really love to remedy that this week. The thing that sucks is that I am now in a position where the only benefit I will see is from a hard mode run, given that all three of my characters are now over the 320 light level that normal drops.

Crusaders and Guardians

May 1, 2016 by Belghast

Season Six

While I greatly enjoy the concept of the Developer Appreciation Week… I am always somewhat happen when it is over. During the week I feel like I have to be making posts along that them, so when things happen that I want to talk about… I end up pushing them down until the week is ultimately over. Now as I sit here for the first unfettered post in awhile… I am finding it super hard getting started. The biggest happening of this weekend is that Friday evening at 7pm my time the newest Diablo 3 season began. For season six I opted to roll a Female Crusader, because I had so much fun playing as one last season. I have this general goal of getting a male and female of each class eventually, but that also means that someday I will have to finish playing that mage and attempt to play a witch doctor. The only problem I am running into is that it feels like what made the crusader so amazing last go round… was the fact that the Invoker set was just phenomenal. Now that I have my six piece Akkhan set, it doesn’t feel anywhere near as powerful as I did last season. In fact while the set dungeon was a breeze for me last go around, this one is only causing chain wipes. Granted I am not nearly as geared as I was at this point last year, in part because I am not getting drug by Carthuun.

When the season started we ended up with six people on the guild discord, and as a result we split into two three player teams. Ultimately ending up with me and Grace playing together, with Solaria and Kodra joining up for short periods of time. Towards the end of the evening Kylana was with us as well as the other three player team ultimately disolved with Ashgar got pulled away for work, and Callalil went to bed. I myself only lasted through level 60, because that was ultimately the point at which I was starting to fall asleep at the keyboard. So I went to bed around 11pm and the rest of the group pushed onward. Yesterday morning Grace and I ended up playing together, and she helped me get the rest of the way to 70, and unlock my gear set. She was sitting over 100 paragon levels, which means that more than likely Carth is sitting around 300ish. At some point I will join in his Torment X shenanigans because I really need some gear. All in all it was a great start of the new season, and at some point I will sort out my spec and with gear should be able to solo more stuff. Right now the challenge is finding thorns on gear, and I have ended up burning through all of my materials trying to enchant away useless stats and turn them into thorns.

Banana Split

Another awesome happening this weekend is that yesterday while waiting on folks to show up for the AggroChat game of the month show, I managed to push my Hunter to rank 5. This is the first month that I managed to get to characters to rank 5, and I’ve since started working on getting the warlock there as well. My hope is that after I finish knocking out this blog post I will head upstairs and work on that. Iron Banner has been really damned good to me, letting me amass a lot of gear and weapons that will ultimately either get used as is or serve as infusion fodder. In theory I should probably be doing matches on my Titan with the hopes of getting more 335 items, but it feels good actually working on my other characters. After playing the hunter I can absolutely see why they do so damned well in the crucible. Throwing knives are amazing, and I had so much fun yesterday finishing off people with them. I still feel like golden gun however is the least exciting of the supers, but I am getting used to using it to optimal efficiency. There was one point where I managed to get three kills in a row with it and earned the way of the gun trophy.

Over the course of the week I have picked up so much gear, with the latest acquisition being a 335 Tormod’s Bellows. The only challenge here is that I am not sure if I will keep it or infuse it into one of my heavy weapons. I could really use a 335 sword… just saying. The funny thing is… I got the 335 drop on my absolute lowest level character while working on the Warlock yesterday. So I am wondering if maybe the buff in faction that you get for pushing up additional characters does something as well to the chances of getting max light drops as well? In any case another Iron Banner has come and almost gone, and I have loved every minute of it. I finally sorted out why I like PVP in Destiny and never have in other games. There is something about getting real loot at the end of matches, as opposed to a currency in lieu of loot that can maybe someday add up to be enough to get something interesting. I love random chance, and I love being rewarded with interesting stuff. More so than that… I love getting not quite perfect items… and then trying to figure out how to use them to my advantage.

Light Improving

April 20, 2016 by Belghast

Catching Up

One of my favorite things about the April patch is that I finally feel like I am catching up to all of the folks who have been playing since the dawn of time. More important than that… I feel like I have a clear path to be able to reach 335. There are things within my control that I can do solo that will allow me to slowly but certainly make progress. Namely one of the big ones right now is faction packages. Many of the factions have the code that make sure an item that comes from that package is better than your current light level. So this means I am constantly getting upgrades that I can either use as is, or infuse into my existing item from doing Vanguard and the three Tower faction missions. This also means that those daily bounties are more important than they have ever been, and the same goes with the crucible bounties whenever I am feeling my Wheaties and decide to do some serious pvp. More importantly than any of this… I feel in control of my own “Destiny”… pun intended.

Much of my early frustration with this game is it felt like there were missing rungs on the ladder that I had to have someone show me where I should be climbing. Now I feel like there are objectives that I completely understand that I can be knocking out regularly to better myself. At this point as the above image shows I have managed to take my Titan to 321, Hunter to 310 and as of last night Warlock to 302. The Warlock and Hunter will likely always be second stringers for me, but I do want to spend more time pushing them up. Namely I would really like to unlock all of the stuff on all three sub classes but that simply requires a lot of play. As for now I am still very much enjoying the process of infusing up old weapons and dusting them off to enjoy them once more. I have a lot of really great weapons, that were just lacking light level to be used on a regular basis. At some point however I am going to have to reconcile a bunch of the stuff and figure out which versions of which weapons I intend to keep permanently. For example I have six different Havoc Pidgeons sitting in the bank and five different 1000 Yard Stares… as well as a large assortment of Zarinaea-D. I don’t really need ALL of them… just keep the best rolls and swap weapons as needed via the web site or mobile apps.

Pipe Dream

Every so often I come up with an idea that while I lack the technical know how to actually build it… I know it is functionally possible. Within the server services world.. there is a marvel of modern science referred to collectively as the IP KVM or remote keyboard/video/mouse switch. While remote desktop is a thing that works great most of the time… there are times when you need to literally lay hands on a box because something has hung on boot up. This is where the IP KVM steps into play, because it emulates sitting physically at the keyboard from quite literally anywhere on the network that can reach it. The other awesome thing about them is that generally speaking they are almost as good as sitting on the box with many of them getting to the point where you can hardly tell the difference. What I want is for some budding entrepreneur or kickstarter campaign to come up with this technology… but for consoles. Sure PS4 Remote Play is cool, but I also want to be able to play remotely from my PS3… or even say older analog systems. The idea would be a rack mounted type system so in theory you could dump all of your consoles in the equivalent of a server room. Instead of harddrive arrays you could build special four unit high rack cases that allowed you to plug in a whole slew of console games and have them selectable remotely.

The other idea would be that each console had custom hookups and the hardware KVM device would allow you to configure emulation of the devices. So you could remake your Nintendo controller to be fully functional from something like a PC connected Xbox 360 controller. Now there are oddities like the Wii/Wii U that would be difficult to emulate but in theory most controllers work just fine for other controllers. For years I’ve loved this idea of having all of the games I want to play “on tap” and thanks to both the Twisted and official PS4 Remote Play app I am using the hell out of this functionality. It is cool as hell to be able to sit downstairs on the sofa with my laptop and have full access to all of my PS4 games, and be able to play them with minimal latency. I just wish this same concept worked with everything. It feels like this is the sort of thing that would be doable, just no one has tried to make it work. Even if you started with only consoles that supported USB controls and HDMI output… that would give you a decent base unit that could then maybe be expanded with retro modules that daisy chained onto the base unit. So here you go… I give this idea freely to the world… just someone make it happen because I want to throw money at you.

Chasing Happy

April 8, 2016 by Belghast

Obliviously Chill

This week has been an interesting one so far. I’ve been trying to take these mood enhancers that I had fallen out of the habit of taking on a daily basis. According to my wife it makes a huge difference when I am taking them, versus when I am not. However on Wednesday night they caused me to more or less forget that I had a raid to attend. I was sitting there happily on the sofa watching Daredevil Season 2 and screwing around in Destiny through the official remote play application… and next thing I know around 9pm I check into Slack and realize that I had completely blown off the Wednesday night WoW Raid thing. Thankfully they were able to make it work without me, which is awesome… but I was otherwise completely oblivious to having anything going on that night. Like in the back of my head there was a vague feeling that I was supposed to be doing something, but I was so chill that apparently I never actually acted upon that thought. I partially blame Daredevil because really, this season so far has been enthralling. I only started watching it Wednesday night because our cable box was uncooperative, and I couldn’t seem to get anything else up on the screen.

I’ve been feeling generally disconnected from the world, and my hope is that the happy pills will help to curb that instinct and allow me to actually participate in it again. I’m not even certain what caused me to stop taking them, other than one day I simply forgot… and the next day I forgot… and so on until I was out of the habit. I’ve had quite a bit of work stress lately, combined with the stress of all of the home renovation “change” has kinda pushed me into another funk. After a sequence of bad mental health days, I came to the realization that I really should be taking them again. When I am not doing great, I tend to throw up this wall and paint a happy face on it… then duck behind it hoping the world will go away. I realize this is largely a defense mechanism, but it feels so much safer behind the wall than out in front of it interacting openly. Everything feels like it is buzzing past so fast that I can’t really grasp what is going on, or who is attempting to interact. So when I am sitting in this mode I spend a lot of time staring at things, without actually understanding what I am looking at or how it actually relates to me. One of the things I have tried to do with this blog is be pretty open about whatever is going on with me… even if it is the not so great stuff.

Warlock vs Oryx

Through the course of playing Destiny I managed to push all three classes to 40, but some of them get a lot less use. Namely my Warlock has kinda become the unloved child of the bunch, because no matter how much I try… I never can seem to get the hang of their damned jump. It always feels like a much less useful version of the Titan jump. Hunter makes perfect sense… they have triple or quadruple jump depending on if you have the Bones of Eao equipped. Warlock jump however never seems to do the thing I want it to do when I want it to do it. However lately thanks to the magic of the Remote Play application I have been poking around on that character, because in the grand scheme of things… it has the least impact on my other activities. The problem is that I really have not done much questing. I ground my way to 40 through the various patrol missions and had not even completed the Taken King content. So last night I decided to pick up where I had left off in that quest chain, which turns out about four quests from the end of it. This was a big nuisance since anytime I got one of those ever so lucrative “Patrol the Dreadnaught” bounties, I couldn’t actually do that… and would end up having to complete a story mission to get kill credit. Over the course of the night however I managed to finish the main story arc of the Taken King and it is ridiculously easy when you are sitting at 292 light.

Also while doing stuff on the Warlock, I decided to go ahead and do the Stormcaller quest chain so that I could unlock that class. I have to say having done all of them now, this one was probably my favorite. I loved the whole “taming the storm” aspect of the quest because it really seems to it the class as a whole. Now unfortunately I need to just do a bunch of leveling to top off my various subclasses. I have all three maxed on the Titan, but for the others… I have Nightstalker on the Hunter maxed, and absolutely none of the Warlock classes maxed with Sunsinger being the closest since I figured the whole self rez thing would be the most needed like a Titan bubble. I wish there were versions of the mark/bond/cloak that increased leveling for classes other than the ones added with Taken King. Even if you had to do some sort of a quest to earn them, it would be a welcome addition for anyone trying to top off all three classes. The only problem with running Strikes/Crucible to level is that I feel like I am not entirely effective because I am missing large chunks of my abilities. So instead I just end up running bounties and screwing around in the patrol missions which seems like the slowest way to level sub classes. However all of this is great “playing from the couch on the remote play app” fodder so it will probably see a lot more screen time than it previously did. Before the ability to reliably play remotely, the only time I was really playing Destiny was to go do group activities. Now I can do a lot of solo questing from the comfort of the living room and it is making me play catch up on all of those things I largely ignored.