The worst part of back to school is the infectious disease ward.  Kids are remarkably strong against this sort of stuff, basically ending up with coughs and sniffles.  Adults, or maybe just me, it’s like being under attack for a few weeks.

These past few days have been rough.  It’s not man-cold level, but it’s quite uncomfortable and makes it hard to concentrate.  I’d much prefer to just be in bed but there’s some work I can’t get out of. Sleep…

Barb is Benched

Seasons are an interesting breed, in particular season 4.  Once you have a character that can reliably complete TX difficulty, getting the next character up to speed is a much faster process.

I made a Barbarian the other day, got him to 70 rather quickly.  Then I used a combination of Bloodshards and Cube crafting to slot him in some decent gear.  It didn’t take long, maybe a couple hours, and he was in the full Wastes gear for a Whirlwind setup.  T6 was easy enough and I was able to get him some level 25 gems to make the process go even easier.  Finally I had enough upgrades to try TX, and damage-wise, it was ok.  Survival though?  That was a joke.

Barbs have a limited set of skills to prevent damage, chiefly through Ignore Pain.  When it’s up, things are decent enough.  When it’s down, you’re a tissue paper.  After about 30 minutes of tweaking, and constant deaths, I decided to sit the barb down and go back to the monk.

My monk can stand in the middle of crap and due to his very high dodge rating (compounded by high Dex), it takes a fair bit to knock him down.  The difference in power output between both is pretty close, but the survival aspect seems miles apart.  So the barb is sitting, maybe used for a bit of farming here and there, while the monk is pushing GR59/60.

I guess that’s the downside of melee players.

Which leaves me with one of the 3 ranged classes as an option.  Wizards have a weird stacking jumble playstyle linked to Archon mode.  Witch Doctors I don’t have a clue anymore, though they seem quite popular.  And Demon Hunters seem to be worse than Barbs.  I think once I clear a GR60 on the monk, I’ll swap to another class for kicks.

Wildstar

It’s Free to Play!  The servers are overloaded with people!  I don’t get how a 2,000 player queue is 25 hours exactly, nor do I get how megaservers are supposed to work (not the way they are now at least), but this does bode well for the game.

My gripe in my last run through the game was the lack of people for instanced content.  I could wait hours without anything happening, so I fell into mods to find a community.  Hopefully this F2P switch adds enough players to hit that critical mass point, where there’s enough people to keep the people interested.

(Interesting note, Wildstar going F2P caused a massive spike in views here.  Good things I guess.)