We’re into the 3^rd week of back to school.  The summer months had both daughters spending nearly all their time together, which is great from a relationship perspective.  The downside is that my eldest has a bit of a hen-like attitude, wanting to take care of her little sister.  Some of that is good but too much and it’s smothering.  Now that both kids are split between school and the babysitter, it’s given both the ability to stretch their proverbial legs.

And for the youngest, this has caused a rather significant change in attitude.  Previous, she was rather shy but now it’s like we have a new extrovert in the house, a little clown at times.  It’s great!  While we were aware that the eldest was likely headed towards the “gifted” program in school, we weren’t quite sure where the youngest would head into.  Even though it’s a few weeks, they have had such a massive increase in cognitive abilities, we may end up with both in that stream.

I rather enjoy challenges and to see my kids follow suit, without pushing them, is pretty neat.  It’s fun to see them learn a new skill and relate it to a previous one.  It’s important for us to keep them on their own separate tracks, given the age difference, to avoid any competition.

Whimsyshire

I decided to try something a bit different in D3, farming the rare transmogs found in Whimsyshire.  To get access to this zone, you need the Staff of Herding.  Given that seasonal characters start from scratch, I needed to farm the staff once again.

Way back when, it was an absurd amount of farming to get the staff material.  I think I ended up killing Izual for the plans for nearly a week before I got the drop.  Last night I got it in 2 kills.   Following the guide above some portions of the farming are much better in the adventure mode, while other are in campaign.

Further complicating things is that the adventure mode was removed as a requirement for season 4, so none of my characters had made any progress on that front.  I would hazard to say that it took longer to get to campaign act 2 than it did to farm every other drop for the staff, combined.  And this was on my farming monk, the one that just flies through the map.

So with the staff in hand, I took a dip into rainbow land.

Each run is about 3-4 minutes with the farming monk.  Given that only a few named enemies actually have a chance to drop the Spectrum, and that only piñatas can drop the Hamburger, running through is pretty quick.  It takes nearly as long to log out, in, and teleport into the zone as it does to clear it, which says something about efficiency I suppose.

I didn’t get much luck mind you.  Drop rates are apparently separate from difficulty, so I was still able to chop down whatever was around me quick enough.  An extra 300 or so DBs won’t hurt.  I received one legendary, from a piñata no less, from all of that.  Which makes me think that drop rates are artificially dropped in that zone.  Not sure if the next session will focus on this but it’s a good break from the regular TX rift runs.

Star Wars and I have this thing.  They make shit products and I buy them.  Ok, ok, maybe not always but most of the time.

The arcade flight simulator of Star Wars was pretty good.  The SNES (super series) was nice.  Force Unleashed 1 and Star Wars Battlefront were respectable enough.  KOTOR was amazeballs, and the Lego series too.  SWG was ok for a while and I have a love/hate relationship with TOR.  Let’s just round it up to a dozen good/decent games.  Out of all these.

On the tablet front, there have been a few games here and there.  The “best” one for me was Star Wars Assault Team.  It was a card-based battle of sorts, with character upgrades and whathaveyou.  It was horribly balanced at the tail end but it looked neat and my kids liked to play it.  (side note, it got pulled from the store last fall with no warning – including Tiny Death Star)

Since then we’ve had Star Wars Commander, a clash of clans garbage heap of nightmares and now we have Star Wars Uprising, a clone of the diablo clones.  It’s somewhat ironic that I’m playing D3 now.  It’s less ironic that this type of action game is the one type I seem to enjoy most on tablets.  There are a metric ton of action/loot games out there, of various levels of quality.  And they all use a very similar business model.

• Have an energy system. Use it to gate players farming too much.
• Have a complex skill system
• Have a loot system, with item grades. Apply a significant penalty to finding top end gear.
• Upgrading these items requires material that needs to be farmed/crafted. “evolving” the gear takes rare items.

That’s about it for this type of game.  Sure, you’ll have others that will throw in boss fights, active skills, group combat, customization and maybe a story!  Dungeon Hunter might be one of the more recognizable ones in this category.

So what does Uprising do to stand out?

For one, the loading times are about triple of any other game I’ve played and without the graphics to justify it.  It uses a gating mechanic for level difficulty, where your gear score must be this high to enter.  The problem is that it’s next to impossible to move up to the next gear level without gear drops.  And the items you need to drop are at the next level.  (this is the exact same problem Diablo3 had at launch).  You need gear to move forward but you can only get that gear after having moved forward.  There are 2 options for this.  A single daily quest that had a random chance to have a second random chance to award an upgrade.  Or use the cash-bound currency to gamble on item upgrades.

But hey, at least the combat is good right?  No, not really.  The skill system give the illusion of choice but anyone who isn’t taking the ranged-spread attack is going to be taking a dirt nap.  And people move so SLOW, with no combat feedback.

It is far from the worst game I’ve played in this genre.  And it has Star Wars on the label.  It’s just boring.  Some performance tuning is definitely required.  And a rather significant balance push.  Sort of gives the impression of a beta, which further adds to my disappointment.  Just seems like wasted opportunity.

I’m reading a book on meditation currently, Wherever You Go, There You Are – by Jon Kabat-Zinn.  I talked about my alignment with the eastern philosophies, in particular Buddhism, and this book certainly explores that concept in depth.  It comes with tapes to help meditate and exercises every few pages to get you in the correct mindset.  There are also quite a few passages from other “zen-like” authors, so there’s some tranquility if you will, in the pages.

I do find that it takes wild swings of the pendulum mind you.  There are sections that deal with nirvana, or simply emptiness and yet others than focus more on being mindful of your surroundings.  The latter seem to be much more approachable than the former, at least given the culture in the west.  It’s not that I think it isn’t a noble goal, just that in 2015, I think we may have moved beyond that now.  Being mindful, living in the present – and I mean truly living in the present – that’s something I’ve been trying to do for a long time.

As is clear, I’m very analytical, which in turn has me looking forward a lot, living in the future.  Instead of appreciating the moment, I’m often thinking about what’s next.  It’s a sort of hunger inside of me that I’m not quite sure how to handle.  So I have to make a conscious effort to be present.  This is less difficult with my kids, and slightly more challenging with my wife.  It’s a significant challenge in the workplace, given the type of job I do.

More of the Farm

It might sound odd, but I’m still learning more about how to play a monk, even after it being my primary character since 2012.  There are certain patterns in play that really make a difference in achieving success with less fuss.  The U6/EP build I’m using is different on TX than on all other levels, due to my damage output.  Everywhere else, I just mash a button and things explode.  (Aside – I have a great dislike for Belial.  I spent 2 nights trying to clear that guy when the game came out.  Now it’s 1 hit in T8. Boom.)  On TX, I need to group them up a lot more, so that the damage spreads across a group.  It’s quite a visceral feeling when the screen just blows up mind you, then you have 40+ enemies down at the same time.

While TX is dandy for legendaries, with still yet no luck on any upgrades, I am taking a different approach to upgrading through bounties.  I mentioned in another post how I have a dislike for Act 5 bounties and any bounty that asks you to clear level 2.  When those two are combined…and you end up chasing tiny rats in a corner… it is not pleasant.

After quite a few runs, I’ve noticed where my monk shines and where other classes are much more appropriate.  Any zone that requires movement around things is a monk’s forte.  Acts 1 & 3 are full of such places, with stairs and pits and so on.   Dashing around is fairly easy as monk, and I guess as a Wizard as well.  The big open zones are better suited for other classes, where they can move in a straight line through things fairly easily.  This means that the “clear level 2” bounties are near always better suited for those classes.  Monks are also tremendously good at boss fights.  1-2 hits and they go down.

So the final run I made last night, I focused solely on the ones where a monk excels in terms of speed.  In our group of 4, I ended up clearing 11 of the bounties (where the average is 6).  It isn’t that I should do more or less, it’s that I should do the ones I’m good at, which in turn helps the entire team complete all the bounties that much faster.

Though, I’m always looking for the Belial bounty.  That guy still owes me.

A long time back, I had posted a small series on the concept of power in gaming.  Interestingly, I had another post that talked about D3 in that regard.  When RoS came out, the concept of monster power went out the door and instead new difficulty tiers were added to the game.  4 on easy mode, then 6 in Torment, which were near equal to MP 1 through 10 but had some additional tweaks.

Greater Rifts (GR) went above and beyond that, with a scaling difficulty that had no cap.  A T6 normal rift was around level a level 30 GR.   People were hitting GR 40-50, so the difficulty curve was outside of “normal” content.  Quick aside, GRs were a pain because you needed to complete a normal rift, get trail keystone, then do the realm of trials just right, to get the correct difficulty of GR, then get lucky in the GR for the appropriate tileset and monster density.  It took 4 times as long to get INTO a GR as it did to complete one.

2.3 added up to Torment 10, which I think is something like GR47.

More to the point, take a look see at the difficulty chart above.  The health of an enemy is directly tied to the amount of time needed to clear a rift.  Assuming you have infinite health, all you need is more time for your damage to equate to the enemy’s health.   You can see an exponential increase at the tail end. It’s not to diminish the increase previous to that tail end, it’s a challenge just getting into T6.  It’s when you start comparing one level to the next that you really get to see a massive jump in difficulty.  Every increase in Torment level is a near doubling of enemy HP.

Enemy damage is more linear, as player defensive stats are much more limited.  Due to the system mechanics, there’s a point where you simply cannot take any more damage and a single off hit will likely kill you.  Which is what people are seeing at very high GRs right now, stacking massive defensive skills that scale multiplicatively (e.g. +50% armor).

Here’s a graph that better demonstrates those trends.

Greed

Part of the farming of gear path is collecting a decent set of Focus and Restraint rings.  Combined, they are one of the largest sources of damage for nearly all players.  So much so, that even a poorly rolled set of stats is likely better than the best rolls on other rings.  Given that rings are a pain to acquire, the best bet is to use Death’s Breath and the cube to try and find some.  This is a great way to collect Puzzle Rings, especially if RNGsus is not there that day.

Putting a Puzzle Ring into the cube gives you a portal to Greed’s realm, which is mostly just a gold run with a few treasure goblins along the way.  Greed, the final boss, can spawn 5-8 goblins total for her fight, so it’s a so-so loot run to get through.  I run it with my brother and we usually end up with a few legendaries each for minimal time invested.  That and about 150m in gold per run.

The thing about Greed is that it’s a good test of player builds.  You need to burn down the goblins before they run away and you need to survive Greed’s attacks at the same time.  We’d started off at T1 a while ago and we’ve moved up the difficulty since.  I’m able to clear T10s but his Barb is just starting to do T8.

You’d think that was a reasonable gap but due to the scaling below, it’s nearly 5x the hit points on an enemy and double the damage taken.  And T8 isn’t exactly a cake walk either, so the idea that he still needs to boost his DPS by such a large margin is fairly interesting.

I’m rather entertained at the scaling in D3, not having paid much attention to it when GRs first came out, due to the PITA mechanics to start one.  Now that GRs are more readily available, I think the challenge of pushing yourself for 1-2 more levels is a decent incentive to keep trying.  It’s clearly not for everyone but with a ceiling that is continuously moving, it always feels like you’re making progress.

We have a decent sized lot for a city house, and we share the backyard with the neighbour, so all told mowing the lawn can take about an hour.  I don’t mind the act really, it’s ok exercise and a clean yard is certainly nicer to look at.  The issue is that my neighbour doesn’t go outside, at least not in the backyard, and it’s terribly overgrown.  She also had a pool at one time and when she got rid of it, just let the weeds take over, and that’s crept all over the place.  So now, while I mow my lawn(+25% weeds), I’m also mowing her weeds (+5% lawn).  The good news is that it’s getting more and more overgrown so there’s less of her yard to mow.

Fences make good neighbours I hear.

Bounties

I need some better gear rolls on my Monk to keep moving along.  For armor items, it’s best to just keep trying with Kadala and bloodshards.  For weapons, the cube is the way to go, but that needs the act specific crafting mats (5 of each, plus 50 forgotten souls), and that’s far from cheap.  My rings, that’s death breath farming sadly.  The good news is that a solid source of bloodshards also comes from running bounties, which is the only way to get crafting mats.

You get extra materials from T 1-6 (3 per) and then an extra one from T7+ (4 per).  Combined with the rotating bonus cache per act, you should be getting 8 per full clear.  After a couple runs, I’ve come to the following conclusions.

• I need to make more sacrifices to RNGsus.
• Run the bounties alone. If someone else is there, move to another one.
• Movement speed is key, ignore everything that isn’t the target (except maybe Keywardens)
• Since you’re moving so fast, is has a big impact on what skills you use. Things that stack are likely not going to work out well.
• The bonus cache is only awarded upon turn-in, so you can clear all the bounties and wait
• The last two points combine for this one. Some classes are really bad at certain bounties, in particular the “find level 2 and clear”.  If you can’t do those efficiently, skip to another act.
• Boss kills should saved for last if possible, so people can shared the extra boss loot chest.
• Pay attention to the shrines. Bandit Shrines are pretty common and you do not want to click one alone.
• Act 5 bounties are some of the absolute worst the game has to offer, and it’s 99% due to the way tilesets are built, with everything extremely cramped and lots of multiple exits.
• Don’t bother opening the caches until all the bounties are done. Saves clicking.  Unless you have bag space issues.
• I need to make more sacrifices to RNGsus.

I spent enough time last night in bounties to try to reroll my weapon 5 times.  Each one was progressively worse than the other.  Ugh.  Combined with ~3000 bloodshards and no upgrades – heck, there wasn’t even an item I would have had to consider as an upgrade.

But bad luck can’t last forever and I did make a decent hit to my paragon levels, surpassing what I had in non-seasons.  So that’s a small win.

First weekend after a long week’s worth of work and my eldest changing schools.  It rained ALL weekend, which actually was pretty good all told.  In the run up, I had 3 games of hockey, the last on Saturday which the wife and kids came to see.  It was a nice day out but nothing too hectic (aside from the aches on Sunday).  It’s a much different pace compared to the spring and it’s one that I’m thankful for.  I guess I’m being more conscious now of my actions than I was previously.  Reading up on the art of mindfulness.

I am not a religious person by any means, though I’ve been more akin to the concepts of karma and zen for a while.  I much prefer the eastern styles than the western & middle eastern guilt/punishment based approach (I’m being very generic here.) Something for another post as my thoughts mature on the subject.

Player vs Character

In recent years, games have learned to focus more on the player than the character.  Gone are the old D&D days of a character being completely segregated from another character being played by the same person.  More and more things are shared across – achievements, pets, costumes, skills.  FF14 takes this to the extreme, where a change of weapon changes you classes but more are taking some sort of middle ground.

D3 uses a shared stash across all players.  I find it rather limiting truth be told, since the amount of options per character are substantial and you have 10 characters per account.  Gone are the days of Tetris in Diablo2 but I’m still juggling tons of items.  One thing I do like is how legendary gems work.  If it’s in the stash, it can’t drop.  Easier to focus farm specific gems that way.

Making an Alt

Further on this point, I need to farm a few materials from time to time.  I’ve made a set of gear for my monk to do this but it’s a few minutes time to set up each session and remember to not muck up for the next GR run.  My brother asked about powerleveling and it dawned on me that the only real limit to an alt is their level, not their gear (if you’re the same class).

The Gem of Ease makes easy work of this as well, giving about 1750xp per kill and allowing you to equip a level 70 item on a level 1 player.  So both of us ranked up the gem, found a legendary with a gem slot , and got a few more items to help out.

• Cubed Leoric’s Crown (for max bonus)
• Helm with a socket and max level Ruby (41%x2)
• Cain’s set (the level 23 version). 2 or 3 pieces, depending if you have the RRoG or not (30%)
• Hellfire Ring and Amulet (both equipable at level 1) (45%)

Sitting at ~160% experience, we hit up a T6 new game with both alts.  Searching for a Curse Chest event is key, as they continually spawn new enemies at the appropriate level.  One event and we both were around 47.

Then we started dying in a single hit and had to drop the difficulty.  A few more cursed events to get into the high 50s and Halls of Agony 3 is the way to go.  While we tried with the alts, it was obvious that a few runs with high level characters would be best.  I think it was 3 runs to go from 60-70.  All told, around an hour total, compared to 6 hours or so doing it the first time.  Which is even less than when the game came out.

I’d actually be curious if it’s possible to do with a GR…

Anyhoot, we now both have alts.  His alt is better than his main it seems.  Mine is just a lightning jet for farming Death’s Breath.  A few minor tweaks through additional play and I was able to clear a T4 rift in about 2 minutes, collecting about 50 DB in the process.   I need some better rolls to move up the chain, which funnily enough means I need more DBs!

To go full circle, I used my high level character to make the material needed for an alt to get to max level in about an hour.  I have to say, this is a nice bonus to players as the leveling portion of the game is really the most boring once you’ve gone through it.

Way back when, in 2012, D3 launched to some fanfare.  The core gameplay (combat, movement, art) was good but the underlying mechanics needed a lot of work.  The auction house in particular highlighted the issues with the core mechanics.

It’s a simple fact that people, en masse, will take the shortest route to their goals, often without regards for that path’s difficulty.  If it takes 30 minutes of farming, or 2 days of questing, I’m going to farm, even if my eyes bleed.  Blizz learned this rather quickly with WoW, which was why it was so strange to see the same types of errors at launch.  So, while the “max level game” was balanced around a set of specific numbers for player statistics, players needed to find gear to meet those requirements.

Problem 1.  Gear drops were completely randomized, with massive scales.  You could get a bow with intelligence, or a legendary dagger that was worse than what you were using 10 levels beforehand.  There’s a rule in gambling, where you have to let the player think he can win.  Streaks make them put more money on the table.  Because D3 had such massive swings of RNG, you ended up looking for less than a fraction of a percent of all gear.

Problem 2.  Scaling of content was inverted and had plateaus.  Typically, you have a scale that increased as you move farther into difficult content, requiring progressively more and more gear to get to the next rank (i.e. torment).  Not so at first, where just getting to the starting line was a massive effort, and the climb from that point was rather small.

As both problems were number problems, people started doing math.  If 1 person farming gets 1 decent item every day, then 1000 people farming get 1000.  The Auction House circumvented all farming, and with a little luck, you could go up exponentially in power in a few hours of scanning the AH.  The downside was that if you did that, then you were at max gear and didn’t really have a reason to keep playing – gear was the only goal.  You could either farm it through eye-bleeding runs of Act 3 (cause screw Act 2 &4, and Act 1 dropped lower quality items), or farm the AH.  That was about it.

D3 Today

Different story today.  Gear itself is still a goal, but it’s not the only one.  Seasons are here, ladders, sets that provide very different build options, transmog and achievements.

The original problem of gear drops has been mostly solved through “smart drops”.  About 80% of what you find is gear specifically designed for your class with stats you can use.  The stat ranges themselves are much more narrow.  Legendary items impact playstyle with interesting effects.  Legendary items can also roll as “ancient”, providing a ~10-20% boost in power.  You can craft meaningful gear, farm rings and amulets through uberbosses, run bounties for crafting materials/unqiues (of which most have interesting rewards), or run rifts for an increased chance at legendaries and sets.  Kunai’s Cube and Kadala even let you gamble specific materials for a chance at something better.  There are MANY paths to increasing your power now.

The second problem of scaling is also fixed, where there are many levels of difficulty and moving through the first few is rather quick.  A few crafted items and drops and you can move up 2-3 levels in a shot.  A few hours later of decent drops, or gambled set and you are in the mid-game.  A week or 2 later, you’re in the later difficulties.

Session So Far

Given I am running an S4 monk, and I want to run a U6 build, I have a particular gear plan in mind.  I needed specific items to complete that set.  When I hit level 70, my path was as follows:

• Craft a set of rare equipment
• Increase difficulty slightly
• Run regular rifts & gamble with Kadala for Uliana’s set until I have 6 pieces (including duplicates)
• Use Kunai’s Cube to transform duplicate Uliana items to the ones I need
• Continue to gamble on belts and bracers for specific items
• Collect rare Fist Weapons and upgrade to legendary, hoping to get 2 specific items
• Complete basic set, and continue to gamble/upgrade for Kunai Cube support items
• Re-roll some stats for improved power
• Collect/upgrade legendary gems to rank 25

That part took a few hours, enough to get Paragon level 200 or so.

Sessions Now

Given that I have the basic set required for this playstyle (and 4 bank stashes of stuff) I can now do Torment 8 at a good level of comfort.  To continue to move up, I now need to optimize and collect some final pieces of gear.

• Craft a better Hellfire Amulet
• Upgrade set items to Ancient (mainly through Kadala Gambling)
• Find a better Restraint/Focus combo
• Upgrade legendary items to ancient through Kunai Cube
• Re-roll stats as appropriate
• Farm Death’s Breath with second gear set to help with Kunai’s Cube work (current gear set for that)

That list seems simple, I know.  Each step in the previous section was minutes long, or a few hours.  I didn’t care about the numbers as much as the item itself.  Now, I need better numbers.  Example:  Uliana’s Pants.  They are the most common drop and I’ve had ~20 or so thusfar.  Only 1 was ancient mind you, but it has decent stats.  So that means that each individual step in this list is likely to be measured in days.

It’s a long tail but every session I make some progress.  And that progress is what keeps people coming back.