Good Saturday morning everyone. Summer began in such a mild way this year with our 70's and 80's throughout the month of June. That's almost unheard of here. But, July is upon us and soon the skin will melt directly from our bodies. It's supposed to be 102 here today and up to 107 tomorrow. I'm glad I'm off to Colorado tomorrow morning where I'll be able to enjoy the 80's for another week at least. But hey, you're not here to read a middle aged dude talking about the weather. It's WRUP time.
I've been playing Diablo 4 a whole bunch. More or less any free time I have that isn't being used for cooking or various other small chores between actual work is spent bombing around Sanctuary on my Druid. I haven't followed any build guides. I've just created the most fun character I could while still feeling viable and like I can contribute during world bosses and legion events. When I turned level 69 (heh yeah) I went into the capstone dungeon for world tier 4 and it kicked the crap out of me. I adapted though and I made it to the boss after a few tries and that's where I failed. I couldn't get old Elias down to more than about 50 % health before I was just out of healing. He was outlasting me. I had plenty of burst damage but it wasn't sustainable enough to run the fight. So I decided to level up a bit more. I got to 70 and 71 even with the same results. It was time to change my build. So I conformed and made a pulverize bear druid. I do have Vasyli's Prayer and Insatiable Fury so it worked out pretty well. I do like the build, it absolutely melted Elias and his constant add spawns, but I don't like that I've had to fall into a standard druid category. Still, I can't deny that it's bringing me happily into Torment difficulty and proving quite effective.
Speaking of Diablo 4, it's recently been reported that all six of the ultra rare unique items have finally been found. It has taken hundreds of millions of cumulative hours from the game's release to see it happen but they're out there in the world. What makes these items so rare? They're kind of the ultimate gear chaser's goal. They're ultra powerful, guaranteed to be 840 item power, and they can be used by all classes. They also don't even begin to show up in the loot tables for any character under level 85 and only drop in world tier 4. And actually, saying that it's taken hundreds of millions of hours to find the items is kind of a falsehood given that there are only a few hundred players at level 100 and even though there are more at level 85 it's still a small enough percentage that even grinding top tier nightmare dungeons with magic find affixes all day is still going to result in purposely "ultra rare" items being... ultra rare. The problem though isn't rarity. The blindingly glaring issue is that these items still have ranges to their stat rolls, so it's still possible to get a "bad" Grandfather sword or Harlequin's Crest. Why do they call it Shako? I don't know man. Here's a list of the drops from IcyVeins
Also some other new games have dropped, I guess. Some up and comer called Final Fantasy XVI. You'd think the final one would have the first one with a name like that. I'm not sure this one's going to make it very far. For a look at this and more check out AJ's, Noteable New Gaming Releases.
Okay that's all I have. I have to get a boat load of laundry of done and get my bag packed. I've got to check in for my flight tomorrow and double, triple and quadruple check that I'm not forgetting my phone charger or something. See you all next weekend.
What are we playing?
Greywolfe: finishing off the very evil run of infernax. and starting the stupid part of bug fables. basically everyone on the internet says it's pretty miserable. sooooo, we'll see?
AJ: Just grabbed The Rumble Fish 2 at a discount, so I'll probably check that out a bit. I'll likely also take advantage of the soon-to-end GOG sale and pick up the recently released Contra Anniversary Collection along with one or more Yakuza titles.
Scroo: Hopefully some more Diablo before I'm off to Colorado to visit friends, hike around Rocky Mountain national park and pub crawl for a while.