Good morning everyone. It's still hot AF around here and in fact the entire world. The Arctic Ocean is about 15 degrees F warmer than it should be, global heat records have been broken for weeks now and it's another 100 plus day here. Yesterday it was around 124 degrees in Death Valley (that's 51C) and Palms Springs was 120 (48C). A nice chill temperature to run a CPU, but not chill for people and animals who are having a hard time adapting. Take care of your pets folks, it's too hot to not pay close attention. It's supposed to reach 102 here today (~39C). That's hot enough to reach nearly 200 in a car - Don't leave people or animals in a car. They will die. Stay cool out there. There are pools, cooling centers, splash pads and other public options. Movie theaters have great AC. Even simply getting in the shade will help dramatically. Take a short cool shower, use fans... whatever you have to do outside of jumping into a canal or some other wildly unsafe option. Definitely stay hydrated. That means boring old water, by the way, not sodas and sports drinks. As much as I love a good beer, it also doesn't mean beer, sadly. Okay I'm done with my PSA. Time for WRUP.
Season one is live for Diablo 4 and it came with a balance patch that more or less destroyed the viability of a few builds. I'm not advocating for billion damage builds in the least here, I think that's silly and not even close to fun in terms of playing a game where you can one-shot literally everything. However, I do think that some of the changes made feel unnecessary. I spent a long time building my bear druid into a survivable, tanky maniac with the disobedience aspect that stacked an extra 50% total armor on during combat. This was allowing me to handle nightmare dungeons and crowds of enemies and have fun while still needing to pay attention to my health and potion stack. It was a good time because there was still a challenge but I felt like I could survive as long as I was watching my P's and Q's. The nerf patch, as it's being called, has reduced the effectiveness of disobedience by 23% making my tanky build ostensibly less tanky and making survival feel like Diablo 2 when one would go out of town and fight three minutes, then portal back to refill a potion belt - rinse, repeat. My damage output is still fine, criticals and overpowers in the 200,000 - 500,000 range, but I can't do that unless I'm surrounded by loads of enemies so it's risk reward balance is lowered while I can barely survive the crowd. I also feel like the unstoppable status effect of Grizzly Rage is broken as it's only lasting a few seconds instead of the advertised eight seconds.
Of course Druids who are bears did not get the shortest end of the stick. Necros had bone spear fixed pretty legitimately. Complain if you like Necros, but your bone spear was bugged while firing through some enemy ability particle effects. And you're fine doing 2 million damage vs 5 million, I promise. Sorcerers were the ones who took a hit. Ice sorcerers could lay waste to entire fields, but they have all of one build that works and it's now less effective. All sorcerer builds rely on burn damage, even the ice ones. So of course burn over time damage was nerfed. Sorcerers also have very low health pools relative to all other classes and no damage reduction in the skill tree. Item based damage negation and the strength stat are the only ways for sorcerers to be able to take a hit. Strength directly improves armor rating for all classes, meaning that high armor values and plus strength are taking up a couple of essential gear stat affix places that could be better utilized by helping with the actual build itself. This needs addressing.
Barbarians have lost a lot of the effectiveness of Hammer of the Ancients. Massive damage output in the millions is still quite possible, just not billions. That's okay as far as I'm concerned. Again, nobody needs to one shot the end boss. There is no enjoyment in being a walking nuclear weapon. I do think if I read correctly though that the HoTA nerf was actually a bug fix somewhat like the bone spear fix.
As far as season one itself, Season of the Malignant - In order to play you'll need to make a new character and place it in the seasonal realm. You'll also need to purchase the battle pass in order to gain the seasonal rewards, though thankfully you don't need to reach level 100. Playing the season quest line itself is free. Season one will last until October and then progress will be wiped and the next season will be introduced. Good luck if you plan on doing this, I'm not sure I will because I'm not keen on putting a hundred hours into a new character that will be wiped in October.
Armored Core 6 got a new preview cinematic and it's pretty hard core. The story line looks even darker than has been suggested, seemingly showing the melding between a human operator who has lost their life with a frame so they can continue to fight. I'm pretty excited for this game and I plan on losing myself in its very grim plot line. Here is a link to the cinematic from Bandai Namco
What are we playing?
Scroo: I'm hoping to play more Diablo. As usual though I'm busy AF, though the heat may dictate staying out of the sun a bit more.
AJ: Just picked up Cris Tales on sale on the PlayStation store so I'll probably check that out. Also, the excellent 2013 adventure game The Cave is now on GOG (and also on sale), so I'll probably pick that up as well.
Greywolfe: well, i wound down bug fables. that was pretty fun except for two spots. can heartily recommend. now playing culdcept on hardcore with retroachievements, to see if i'm into that idea. culdcept is VERY SLOW, though, so i'm going to have to pick another game to play on top of it. otherwise, just doing a re-run of stories: the path of destinies, since i played omensight, to sort of see how those two games layer together. it's still pretty fun and i like it. i've learned that the company who made those two games is now making a third that - sadly - doesn't take place in that universe, but looks like a cool step up for them. edited in later: yeah, ok. i'm going to play blood omen: legacy of kain again. i know i hated one of the dungeons and some of the end game is incredibly dumb and tedious. but most of the rest of the game is pretty good.