The Latest Coffee Break

I have to do Christmas decorations this year. I dont like Christmas, but the kids do, so..

Let’s start, I guess.

Welp. Fall damage is a thing.

So, the last two weeks or so, I’ve been incredibly low energy. Tired, sleepy, easily distracted, uncharacteristically moody – if it wasn’t bad enough, the last week I’ve also been having insane headaches, felt like my mind was “split and shifted”, as if the left side of my mind was slightly shifted to the right and my right side of my mind was shifted slightly backwards and down to the left. It sounds stupid writing it out like this, but I can’t really describe it better. It’s kind of like a broken glasspane.

It’s better now though, it’s as if I still feel the “crack”, but it’s not as bad. I’m still very tired and can’t focus properly though, so I havent been able to hang out with the guys in the company as much. I’ve tuned in on discord, talked with them some, but then I just feel like I’m so drained of mental energy I’m sleepy and even forget I’m in a call. There’s people talking, but I’ve stopped listening, like I’ve tuned out a TV in the background. Trying to do something ingame is equally weird – I’ve pulled stuff out of my storage from another settlement in order to have it on me so that I can put it on the trade post, and running between the storage and the trade post I’ve forgotten what I’m doing and just open up the trade post to browse wares. I also spent all my savings yesterday, because a song I’ve been looking for actually was on sale. Instantly bought it – didn’t even recognise the fact that it cost 97% of what I owned at first. I was then extremely surprised that I didn’t have any money left. It wasn’t just a case of impulsively buying something – I saw the cost. I knew how much it cost. I also knew how much money I had. I just didn’t realise it was going to be withdrawn and leave me with nothing left.

So yeah, that was a fun realisation.

So I just gave up New World for the moment and decided to occupy myself with other stuff. The kids are home with their mom this weekend, and because she picked them up Saturday instead of Friday, the kids aren’t going to come home today, on Sunday – she’ll keep them until Monday morning and prepare them all for school instead. Which means I’ve got all until Monday afternoon until I’ve got the kids back. What am I going to do until then? Movies? I’ve spent all week with my youngest at home because he was sick – and I’ve honestly didn’t mind, because that meant I didn’t have to walk him to and from kindergarten – and all we’ve done is walking the dog and watch movies. I would like some variety. Granted, we’ve mostly been watching childrens movies and Gigantosaurus on Disney+, and on the evenings I’ve watched anime, but still. I did get a game on extreme sale, but even that I can’t do – it’s an FPS, and I simply dont have the reactions for it at the moment. I can’t even doomscroll on Facebook anymore, because I got hit with the lock-out info that is “hey, subscribe for a bunch of money so that you still see ads, but we promise you we wont sell your info *wink, wink* – or you accept that we sell all your info to advertisers”. So, curiously, I looked up what they’re selling, and…they’re selling everything.

Ever thought it was kinda funnily weird that you suddenly got ads for something after you’ve posted a meme? It’s because they scan every photo you post, and then sell that info to advertisers. Post a beach picture, and you’ll get sun-travel ads. Post a birthday picture, and you might get “relevant ads” for it. Write a comment? That’s scanned and sold to “relevant advertisers”. Your religious and political view? Scanned and sold. Your liked groups? Scanned, compiled and sold. Ever wondered why stuff you wrote in Messenger to people ended up as ads and then chalked it up to just “weird”? No, it’s not. They go through everything you post in messenger as well and sell that stuff. Your cellphone data – that’s scanned and sold, everything from your model number to your current battery level. Everything they’ve got access to on your phone that you’ve ever told them once that they could get access to, they sell – including when you’re uploading cellphone images, you give them permission to access your images; those are scanned and sold. Think about that for a second.
Then I’ll tell you that they revealed that other cellphone info are sold as well – like your actual, current GPS info, or whatever your phone picks up through the microphone. Every sound you save, everything you say near the phone, everything. The microphone is very rarely actually off, there’s almost always something that keeps it active – ever used the “hey Siri” function? Then the mic is on, and facebook have access to your mic. Which they scan and sell info of.
So they basically give you the chance to “hey, pay a subscription fee that is ridiculous for what you get and still get ads, or you sign up to have everything about you, your phone and everything you’re currently doing sold to advertisers – nothing is private”. And that subscription fee? That’s insane. If you’ve got instagram, that counts as well, but as a separate fee. So if you’ve got an Instagram and it’s connected to your facebook, you’ve got to pay for both (although the instagram-fee is lower than the facebook-fee), because if you only pay the facebook-fee, and not the instagram-fee, they’ll still get your facebook-info through your instagram that you aren’t paying for, and sell that. So if you actually want to keep your privacy, you’ll have to pay €21 each month – it’s “lower” if you’re using browser only, but if you pay that fee, and then go on using the facebook, messenger or instagram apps, then that fee “doesnt apply” and they get access to your info and sell it regardless. That’s €252, or £220, every. Single. Year.

It’s “hey, either we drain you dry and still give you ads, or you give us everything about you and your phone and all that is on it and we’ll sell it to advertisers”, on top of the stupidity that is, if you pay the “web browser fee’s” and then use it on a cellphone – either through mobile browsers or the apps – it doesn’t count. They’ll sell your info because now they accessed it through the service you didn’t pay for them to exclude – the cellphone. So yeah. I actually downloaded all my photos and videos I’ve posted and then deleted both Instagram and Facebook. It wasn’t even a hard choice as such, social media is awful and doom-scrolling Facebook is mentally unhealthy after all. But you dont realise how much time you’re spending on it until you’ve deleted it.

So I did what I also realised I do every November. I booted up the Blizzard client and bought myself a month game-time on WoW. I’ve got to be honest, I dont have the reaction times to play that game either, because I’m dying over and over just trying to kill 3-4 enemies in a group. But I noticed that they’ve apperently changed their payment model – you dont have to buy every expansion they’ve released to “be caught up”, as long as you pay for a months playtime, you’re good to go for every expansion up to the current one. So if you dont want to pay a lot of money, you pay for one months gametime and you can do everything except for the things in the latest expansion – which, to date, is the Dragonflight. Meaning, you can get everything between World of Warcraft original, up to Shadowlands, for just the cost of one months playtime. The next expansion that comes out next year, The War Within, seems kind of nice as well, and when that thing launches, one months gametime will also include Dragonflight.

As I dont really have an interest in WoW anymore as such, I’m not going to buy the expansions. As it seems, I’m apparently content of playing WoW a few days every November and then forget about it for a year again. But I do admit that it’s a very kind monetisation model – you don’t exclude too many people from being up-to-date with huge paywalls. Although, if I were a “WoW-fan” still, I probably would still like to have the physical Collectors Edition boxes.

The reason I dont have the Vanilla and Burning Crusade box, is because I started to play in 2009, the summer after Lich King came out, so I didnt buy the separate boxes – that’d be way too much money, so I bought the physical “Battle Chest” that contained “everything previous in one”. I figured that I’d try the game out and buy Lich King if I like it, and oh did I. I spent basically that entire summer in Azeroth, mostly just slowly leveling my Night Elf.
Then I just kept playing for a while, although not as intensively. But for some reason, I stopped after Pandaria, having joined a guild an all, Immortalis on Argent Dawn. They were a wonderful bunch of people, and I did have lots of fun. I think that the lonewolf in me just couldn’t handle “lots of people” back then, and eventually I just… stopped coming back.

Now that I think about it, it’s almost the same thing I did with Destiny 2. I played solo for so long, and eventually found a great clan to play with – UK Nightfall Raiders. We played so much, did tonnes of raids, ganged up to grind all the weapons and such. Then life came barging in and I just…stopped. I tried to go back a year later, and they let me – but I just couldn’t get back into it. Not counting the times I’ve logged in and played for a few hours and uninstalled the game again, I haven’t played that game for the last few years. Looking back at my Playstation and Steam Purchase history, it seems that I swapped out Destiny 2 for Monster Hunter: World, Path of Exile and about that time I also bought New World for the first time. Between the last time I played Destiny 2 and when I bought New World, it was just a few months, as I dropped Destiny 2 somewhere around February-March 2020 and I bought New World Deluxe June 2020. Granted, New World didn’t actually release until late September 2021, but I played a few betas, and I played some of the new Tomb Raider games, BioShock collection, Vermintide 2, loads of Satisfactory, some Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen, kept playing the souls game a bunch, and as I said, Path of Exile and Monster Hunter: World for a while – and I cant forget Elden Ring when that game launched.

I’ve got loads of games bought and played since, but not to an extent that I’d say I “swapped over” to them. Buying and playing Vampire Survivors for 30hours in total, getting Back4Blood and playing 190h, or buying Borderlands 3 and getting disappointed for 65 hours isn’t really “swapping over” in my book. Sure, ok, 190 hours of Back4Blood might seem like I play alot, but in reality it’s not. It’s 190h over the span of one and a half year, and besides, there’s plenty of hours of that, that is just me sitting in a menue while I’m doing house chores, like cooking, doing the dishes or something. Sure, Back4Blood was kinda fun, but it got stale real fast, and even though I did buy the first expansion, Tunnels of Terror, and played that a lot, I didnt play the second expansion, Children of the Worm, at all. I bought the expansion. I just never played it. There’s supposed to be a third expansion out now, River of Blood, but I haven’t seen any of it, not even when I’ve tuned in on Twitch and watched some of the “B4B-streamers”. They’ve always been playing the tunnels or the stuff with the Children of the Worm, so I guess the third expansion didn’t really grab people?

Anyway. I’m way off tangent here. I’ve ranted for so long now, and what I initially wanted to say, was that I wanted to play one of the new races in WoW that came with the expansion Battle for Azeroth. They’ve changed up so much in the character creation that it actually took me over an hour to realise that you’re supposed to right-click the race-profiles to see their racial abilities, and it took me even more hours to realise that I didn’t have to buy the races, but that I’m supposed to play through longwinding quests to “unlock” them.

So that’s what I’ve been doing. Since yesterday, I’ve been playing hours and hours on end, just to level a character up to 40, so that I could start unlocking the new races.. and I’m lucky I already had a level 34-something Alliance Pandaren, and that I had a free character boost to 60, because actually leveling up a new character to 40 on both Alliance and Horde would’ve been a pain.

So I kept playing my Mistweaver Alliance Pandaren until I was 40, and then I played through all of the “unlock-quests”, so now I have all the Alliance races to my disposal. Then I used the character boost to boost my goblin mage to 60, and started to play through those quests, and I’m still not done.

You know what the funny thing about all this is? The last race to unlock is the Vulpera.

The actual race I wanted to play.

So, I was playing alot of New World lately as I’ve said, and having a real blast. It got a new expansion that seemed to sit well with a lot of people as well, however, it also brought issues.

The first issue you’re hit with is the queues. Like right now, I’m thinking if I should get on or not even bother – even if they increased the limit of players per server to house three thousand players, I’m looking at a queue of fifteen-hundred people. That’s over an hour in queue, if I’m lucky.
If I’m unlucky, I’m gonna sit through that queue just to crash immediately upon entering the game. Going in and out of dungeons – which is the main reason I’m playing the game basically – carries the risk of crashing as well. Teleporting anywhere is a coin-toss. That’s the second issue.
The third issue is that most of the items I would like, or even need you could say, is locked behind PvP. Now, I definitely dont mind that PvP is in the game; I think it’s healthy for a game to serve a lot of different populations, intertwine them of sorts, so that they need each other – gatherers need buyers, crafters needs customers, dungeoneers need crafters as well, PvP’ers need people filling the tradeposts, and so on. However, I dont find it reasonable to put items behind forced PvP, which basically is what has happened. Almost everything that you find in dungeons is Bind-on-Pickup, which means there’s nothing to sell, so little to no money are gained from doing it. So if you need something, you better get it yourself, because you’re not making money anymore. And if you wanted any of the new items that is best in slot, you now also need to play PvP in order to get them, unlock their perks and even to get the mods you need to get them, basically.

I havent played PvP in this game for a very long time, for a reason. To force me to play PvP just to be able to do the things I do like to do is utterly insane. And I dont really care what anyone says – it’s not the same thing to “force PvP’ers to play PvE to get an itemdrop”, as it is to force PvE’ers to play PvP.

First off, you need to get your way to an area. That’s never difficult. Then you need to “farm” a mob, which might be quite boring, but everyone else is doing that very same thing; you to type a few words in chat to ask to be added to the raid-group doing the farming. Then you sit there for at max an hour or two, while either participating in killing said mob within seconds on spawn, or you just go do something else, like read a book and watch tv and just pick up the loot that drops from the mob everyone else kills for you. When you get your stuff, you move on to the next spot and do the same thing there.

However, to get the item that I wanted, as a PvE-player, I had to play dozens and dozens of hours of PvP, just to have a chance to get said item to drop, and a random amount even more to actually get it to drop, and then I had to play even more dozens and dozens of hours just to get the player-kills I needed. And that was for one item. I was lucky and got two drop fairly close together, meaning I got a shield and a greatsword that I could equip at the same time to use while farming. But then there’s a pair of pants, a chest piece, an amulet, a headpiece, and a blunderbuss to get as well, and they’re just even further into the PvP than the other things. I wanted the shield Michael and the greatsword Serenity, which both could drop after track 20, and that took dozens of hours to just get to, and even more to actually drop as I said. However, I still havent seen the pants that has the same drop-range. I’m not at all close to the amulet or the blunderbuss – which drops at track 50+!
I can just forget the headpiece and chestpiece as well, since they’re deep down in track 100+! And that’s just to have a chance to get them drop, which isnt even a guarantee.

You cant compare playing PvE for a few hours to “farm” – meaning, standing there watching a group of fifteen to fifty other people actually do the killing – a mob to get your desired item to drop, with the absolute garbage that is being forced to play PvP for upwards of literally hundreds of hours just to get what you need and then upgrade it. Ofcourse it’s bad to “lock” an item behind a particular game mode alone, but it’s one thing to make it hard for the other “population” to get, and another to make it impossible for them to get unless they get involved with that kind of game. If you made the “PvP-track-only items/mods” extremely rare drop in PvE, and have the “PvE-farming items” extremely rare and expensive on the PvP tracks, that’s one thing. Atleast both populations have a chance to get them without being forced to do something they actively despise.

I actually caved in and ran a bunch of PvP-missions in the game, just to get my PvP-track levelled enough to get that greatsword. It’s three missions of “go here, pick something up, be in this are for ninety seconds, drop something off at that location and go back home”. I ran that bullshit for almost an entire week before the greatsword dropped – and before that dropped, the shield dropped as well. I got it, just to find out that I needed to play actual PvP in order to actually get the bricked piece of scrap metal to be something useful. I bit the bullet and actually did it, because that was what was required of me to “unbrick” them. And I succeeded, and now I’ve got two artifacts which is really good for what I wanted to use them for, and I thought all bullshit was done with. Until I realised that I needed to upgrade another artifact with a perk….that was also locked behind PvP-track, or if I wanted to spend forty thousand gold on the trade post. That’s per craft mod, meaning that every item I wanted that perk on, that’s another forty thousand gold, each. Unless they increased in price, which is very likely.

I just… dont have it in me. I used to love this game. But sitting in hours of queue, just to be plagued with bugs and crashes that gets me back into queue, and while playing be forced at every corner to play PvP? It’s taking a toll.
Especially since the “Summer Gang” almost stopped playing as well. Almost every time I log on, I look at the ingame list, and all I see is new names that I havent played with yet, or that I have played with…and most of I would prefer not to.

We got a new member a month ago or so, which is a really good recruiter. We were suffering a small player population in our company, and he’s been doing really well by getting people in. However, it’s been very indiscriminate – we wanted max level players who was interested in doing high level mutations, that was fun, friendly and interested in cooperating and learning if necessary. For a few weeks, we got a bunch of returning players, who wasnt maxed level. We got a solid amount who was mostly interested in PvP. We had a good bunch that wasnt interested in joining discord to hang out or coordinate anything. We’ve gotten a good bunch who was set in their ways of how to play – which either was very chaotic and stressful, or simply just…not really very good, and they just didnt want to listen or learn any tactics at all.

It doesnt matter how many times you’d tell them that “we cant do this enormous pull you’re trying, you cant hold the aggro and we cant kill them fast enough” and they still do it. And then complain that someone else does something bad – like the damage dealers aren’t doing a good enough job killing, or the healer not healing. Like… you’re getting zerged and fail to hold aggro. That’s on you since you decided on this massive pull. Not ours.

We have healers that waste all of their massive heals and high cooldowns on…the players who is full health. The best in slot healing staff always have a perk that lowers every cooldown with every normal attack you’re doing, and we’ve got some players that understands the function of it, but still does not seem to use normal attacks, and some have even stated that they dont think it is a good perk. Like, listen dude, the fact that you can not succeed in doing overlapping spells, does not mean that it can’t be done – it only means that you dont want to put in the effort in doing so. I dont even understand why you chose that role, if you cant play it and refuses to learn it or improve on top of it?

We have damage dealers who thinks the best weapon to do damage with in dungeons is the ones that have mathematically been proven is the absolute worst in the game. I dont care how sweet that musket looked, you dont randomly pull it out for a boss fight that is known to also behave irratically if too many players are at too long distance away, especially not unannounced.
We also have damage dealing players who’ve been explicitly told, that you cannot bring certain weapons into a dungeon, because there’s already another player bringing one – and multiple of those interferes with each other – or that it’s not useful, or that we need them to bring something else, and they’ve promised that they wont. And “oops, I did it anyway”.
We’ve had players being told that we need a certain combination of weapons, and they offer to bring them – just to realise, that at first opportunity arisen they’ve swapped away from those.

Sure, it’s their game. They play their game that they bought for their own money the way they want. I understand that sentiment. But if they want to play in groups as if they’re playing with randoms, why dont they just join in with random groups and do that? Why do they have to play with people who have specifically said that they want to coordinate efforts to play a certain way, when their “random playstyle” completely wrecks that effort of coordination?

It basically means that even though I play with the company in name, I’m effectively playing with a group of randoms, who all talks over each other, disregard any tactics, uses the worst possible weapons imaginable.. if it was actually a “PUG” I was playing with, I would’ve assumed it was someone trolling everyone and would’ve just dropped that group upon finishing the dungeon and found someone else to play with. But this is people in a voice chat, people in my own company. They’re meant to be the people I play with, and somehow, over the last few weeks, it’s all become this…frustration-pit, of random people playing their own game while being more and more annoyed with each other because noone listens.

Out of dungeons and other missions, they’re fun. I like them – atleast most of them. But as soon as we start playing, it’s like…
I dont really have a proper word for it. But some of them, I feel like they could just have been one of the random PUGs you find while just randomly group-finding.
And I know, I’ve had a few fun such PUGs; at one point during last season, I found a medium armor rapier tank, once I played with a hatchet damage dealer, I have played Void Gauntlet damage dealer myself. This season I’ve played as a flail-healer, which actually worked in the dungeon I did it. This season I played with a blunderbuss and flail-and-shield-tank, and it was fun – although, not in the absolute highest mutation there was, we stuck to M2.
But most of the time, it’s just frustrating to play with randoms, and playing with my own company is starting to feel more and more like playing with randoms. And it sucks, because it used to be so good, so fun.

I know I’m hardly in a position to “make demands”, seeing as I always was the newest member with the least experience and knowledge this summer, and I did a lot of mistakes which needed to be compensated for in all the dungeon runs – and a lot of these new company members is probably in the same situation as I was. I know it’s a poor way to “pay it forward”, to be impatient and not show the same courtesy to new players that was shown me.
However, the difference is; I listened. I took note. I didnt necessarily understand immediately always, but I brought this new knowledge and tried to apply it, until I got it. Until I saw why specific weapon combinations were necessary, why certain skills was not as good as I thought, because I understood the importance of the “recommended” spells.

I adapted myself as much as I could – I never vehemently disagreed with the one guy in our company that is basically a walking encyclopedia of the game and then make insunations that he simply dont know enough, I dont dismiss it when someone points out to me that the skills I’m using is actually not suitable for what we’re doing because I have hundreds of hours of subpar healing. I never pulled the “I’ve got top-leaderboard rewards, so I dont care about your suggestions”-card to our company leader – although, I’m convinced that if I also did that to said player, now that I do have a good few of those, that he would not listen to the advice I’d give, because he’d still find a way to dismiss me.
I dont completely disregard it when people say that we need to have a certain weapon combination to succeed, just to then pull out a musket that takes seconds to reload between shots, miss most of them and do my thing just because “I think it’s more fun” – good, great, think that, I’ve got no issues with it, just.. take your musket elsewhere.
Not into the dungeon you promised you’d use certain weapons that we needed. Especially not when you had a chance to say in the beginning of the dungeon that you wouldn’t use said weapons, so that literally anyone else could have had stepped in and brought those very weapons.

It’s not all bad – we’ve got a couple of really fun and friendly players along with all of these other players. We’ve got Machi, who suffered PvP-missions with me for a week, we’ve got Thera who came back after a long hiatus just as me, and is currently suffering through side-quest levelling since AGS completely broke the main story quest, and despite now succeeded to grind all the way from late-thirty to early-forty level range, up to sixty-one, still cannot even access either Brimstone Sands nor Elysian Wilds, which is the two highest level areas in the game at the moment. The fact that it’s been over twenty levels of leveling through sidequests is honestly amazing, and I’m surprised she didnt just quit the game already. There’s also returning company players that was known in the company before, such as Bogdan, which has been loads of fun to play with.
But we lost someone from the “Summer Gang” because of the games new system requirement. That, and the fact that the expansion didnt really bring anything interesting enough to warrant buying a completely new PC. The same kind of frustration I’ve experienced has also driven two, maybe even three others, to take longer breaks this last week. Another has been working alot lately as well, and havent been able to log on for a good while as well.
I have definitely not been alone playing with these new company people, but it’s very rare now the last week or two that I actually end up playing with more than one other from the “Summer Gang” – often it’s me and four new ones, or me and one other and three new ones. It feels like if I could just as well have been playing with PUGs without voice comms.

I know this post is mostly negative, something I’ve been trying to keep off of this site. But I guess that the fact that AGS wants to force me to play PvP in their game, which never really was fun to play PvP in, that has loads of new bugs and crashing issues after having spend hours in login queue for, combined with the fact that suddenly our company is full of people not really interested in playing with others, bite back in voice comms instead of cooperating or is just simply bad at their role and dismiss any critique or advice and just try to have you believe it’s not their fault, it’s yours, and the fact that the “old people” I actually enjoyed playing with almost stopped playing..

Yeah, I know, I’m not completely without blame either. I decided to stick it out and play through that damned PvP to get it over with, and I’ve spent the majority of these two week doing just that. But then again, logging on and seeing twenty-five people online have been fun, until you realize that half of them is the ones you dont really want to dungeons with and the other half playing PvP – since that’s their main focus already – and then a few people still leveling up to do the activities you log on to do..well, might as well get that PvP done then, no?

I just.. cannot bear playing more dungeons with an overzealous tank, or a healer that thinks that the best healing spells are best used on already full-health teammates far away from the current battle, or damage dealers who think the best weapon to bring is a slingshot, and reading discord or ingame chat and see people arguing the weirdest takes – like the one that almost speccing themselves out as half-a-tank is the best use of their role as a damage dealer, or that the perk Refreshing Move is, in fact, a “noob trap” and you should bring a damage perk on the Lifestaff to bring up it’s “damage based healing number”, and thus “heal for more” – is, in lack of a better description, disheartening.

I love the Company. But the Company is people. And in my case, the people I spent the summer playing with.
These new dynamics in the company doesn’t sit too well with me, but I’m not sure if it’s just my autism getting the better of me – change is bad – or if it’s a change that has happened that is an actual bad one. Until I figure that one out, I’m going to keep this to myself for now – well, I guess it’s kinda out of the bag, since I know that this website has been found by a few (Hi, guys!), but you know what I mean.

And I think I want to clarify – I like these people I speak negatively about. They’re nice…they’re just so frustrating to try to play coordinated with, since they seem to think they dont have to put any effort into it. It’s less them, and more their playstyle and seeming uninterest in doing anything for the team.

And quite frankly, it just makes me want to go back to playing League of Legends.

It’s getting close – the New World expansion is next week, and I’m so looking forward to it I kind of dont even know what I’m doing ingame anymore. I dont even save the loot I get – I’ve got basic crap-gear I’m running around with, but I cant really be bothered with trying to find anything more useful to use, because it’s literally just a few days away. Four days.

I’ve got my eyes set on a few things though – I want to get a good flail, a good sword and a good round shield, get all the signs..and then make the Elite Island my home.
I know a lot of people are itching to try out the new “artifacts”, but other than a few good pieces I’ve seen, I’m not too interested in trying to obtain anything. It’ll be more like “if I find something and I find use for it, great”-kind of deal. There’s a chest-armor that supposedly doesnt weigh anything, which means I could probably use light armor, that chestpiece and a good shield without losing the healing bonus, so I might want to go for that one – that way I might be able to get a Lifestaff and Flail and shield healer going. At the level 100 on the Season Pass, there’s also an earring that seems pretty neat – it causes health potions to give 33% more health and gives empowerment and fortify on potion uses, as well as a free perk you can chose eventually. The drawback is that the potion cooldown is 20% longer – I’m also only interested in this, if you can stack Refreshing Toast on it, getting a lowered cooldown on potions, which should bring the cooldown to 108% of the regular timer, which still isnt that great, but a heck of a lot better than 120% of the regular timer. There’s probably better perks than that though, so I might change my mind about that in the future.

Besides those two, the only artifact I’m actually are keen to try out, is the Greatsword Serenity – which is unfortunately locked behind PvP as a random reward, deep into PvP as well. They’ve got something called “PvP tracks”, which is basically the equivalence of short “battle passes” for doing PvP – it only has three checkpoints, and then it refreshes and gives you a new “track”. And only after having fullfilled more than twenty of them, you can get the Serenity. As one of three possible rewards in each of the three checkpoints. But it’s all random; meaning you might be able to get it on the first checkpoint on the 21st “track”, but you might not even see it until your hundreth. I’m not touching that. Like, I legitimately rather eat physical gravel.

It’s just so insane to me, that the best PvE Greatsword they could create, which has basically no use in PvP, and they lock it behind PvP. It’s got stacking empowerment on hits, bonus damage on heavy attacks and heavy critical attacks – which it is when hitting something from behind – as well as CD refreshing on any attacks, including heavy attacks. The heavy attacks are almost never used in PvP, because it’s too telegraphed to actually land on people, and that’s where this Greatsword shines the most. So you have to play PvP in order to get it, but using it as a PvP player isnt going to be a thing. It feels like either AGS doesnt even understand their own weapons, or they’re trying to force PvE players to play PvP, regardless of how little they want to play PvP. But I’m curious though.. there’s a slot for another perk, and in the faction store there is an item that grants gem-sockets as a perk. Does that mean that we can socket gems into that Greatsword, and would that be better or worse than a perk that anyone could slot in?

Eh, better not to worry about it. I’ll try to grab it if AGS gets their shit together and enables us to get that weapon in any other way other than playing PvP.

In other news, I’ve noticed that my kids are increasingly more and more interested in playing videogames. The six year old usually plays on my PS5, but it’s mostly Minecraft and the occasional Dark Souls and Elden Ring. I’m letting it slide, because mostly he’s interested in the mount in Elden Ring and gathering stuff – and if he gets a real taste for that kind of game early, I dont mind. The four year old though, he has mostly been uninterested in anything media-related except for his pad, which he uses to watch kid stuff on youtube and Disney+ and such, like Blippi, Grizzly and the Lemmings, Bluey and that sort of thing. However, I got a game on the PS5 that even interested him, a Dinosaur game called Gigantosaurus The Game. While he’s not progressing that far yet, atleast he got interested enough to learn the connection between the controller and what’s happening on the screen, and he’s quickly been picking up how to control the character!

While most people probably go “yeah, he’s four, they usually pick that up fast”, well.. my son is mostly non-verbal autist that doesnt really do that. The fact that it interested him enough is what caused him to pick up on the connection between the controller and the screen, which is a huge step forward in itself. Now I’m curious if that means that he’ll be interested in trying out more stuff, so…

I bought an arcade cabinet for kids! It has yet to arrive though, but when it does, I hope I can set it up as I want it and then I’ll let the kids play with it as much as they want, whenever they want.

It only has three games on it, which is a bummer, but it’s mostly just for starters to see if there’s interest. It has Pac-man, Dig Dug and Galaga. Admittedly, not the best games, but good enough for something like this, and if they’re interested in this sort of setup, atleast I know what to save up for in the future – there’s tonnes of youtube videos detailing how to build arcade cabinets such as this one, either with a raspberry pi and emulation of loads of games, or faking one with Evercades or Switches. I already have a Switch, and I’ve got my eyes on Evercade-stuff, so.. Maybe that’ll be something in the future?

Also looking around to see if I can find a bunkbed for the younger boys, which is nearly impossible. Either they’re super expensive, as in €300-530 depending on the model – I’ve seen some goes for €930! – or they’re just not cheap enough for the wear they’ve got as a second-hand bed. I’m not paying almost full price for a bunkbed that is five years old with noticable wear and tear and is wobbly like a bobble-head doll. Sorry, but that’s just not happening.

Since they share room, I thought it’d be good to give them more floor-space, and in not too long, I probably need to get the six year old a desk for schoolwork as well, which is.. not really possible if they’ve got a bed each. Especially not after I bought them a play-house to use indoors, that thing takes up so much floor-space.. But it’s used as a hide-out for the boys, and they like it.

Dont mind the lack of bedsheets in the bed. It’s the weekend the kids goes to their moms place – which means an all-weekend playing and singing session! – so I’ve stripped the beds for laundry.

In other news – I actually got my reading habit started up again. I dusted off my old Kindle, and apparently it’s been almost three years since last, according to the in-app tracker. I have read since, physical books and webnovels (Shadow Slave, by Guiltythree is surprisingly good, by the way), but it has not been on the same scale as when I was reading books upon books on the Kindle. I used to read hundreds of pages every day, on breaks, while sitting next to the kids putting them to bed, often pulled it up while waiting for the train or stuff like that. I got loads of reading done – according to the app, I had twenty-eight titles read only in the first six months in 2020. Not short books either, it was Warhammer 40K Omnibuses mostly, but several other fantasy books by Sara C Roethle as well. (I really do recommend her Tree of Ages-series, as well as her trilogy The Thief’s Apprentice!)

After having dusted off my Kindle, I booted up Calibre to convert a bunch of my old e-books I’ve bought over the years, into the Kindle format and loaded them into the Kindle. I even treated myself to a new cover! Nothing wrong with the old cover, it’s neat and black, but kind of scuffed for all the use over the years – it’s the Kindle Paperwhite 4, 2018th edition after all. Looking at it now, trying to find an image to post to show what the art looks like, I realise that it probably wasnt a licensed art on that cover.. The image on the cover actually is this one (second image), and I’m going to reach out to the artist who says he drew it and check with him if he knows the art is being sold as a Kindle Cover. If not… I dont know. That’ll be uncharted territory for me.

Looking to get the Wheel of Time book series on the Kindle as well, but for now, I noticed that both Sandy Mitchell and Sara C Roethle has new books out – Mitchell has released Ciaphas Cain; Vainglorious and Roethle has released an eighth book in the Tree of Ages, City of Ashes! – so those two are on the list for now. I also have the Amber-series loaded up if I want to read that again, as well as the Narnia Chronicles and twenty-three R. A. Salvatores Drizzt books that I got off of Humble Bundle a few years ago. Hopefully that’ll last me the rest of the year, and I’ll look into the Wheel of Time bundle after that. Who knows, maybe that bundle will last me atleast half a year on its own?

So, Diablo 4 did release, and it was indeed fun. I reached level cap on a couple of characters, aaaaand..
Got burned out on the game before Season 1.

It’s definitely a great game! I think it goes back to Diablo 1 and 2 alot more than Diablo 3, but it feels like they’ve learned quite a few things from 3 that they use. I think that if I hadnt played as much during the betas, I would’ve not been as burnt out, but here we are.

As I was looking around for other games to play after having been burnt out, I found a couple of other games – Brotato has been a lot of fun, Starship Troopers: Extermination was fun for a while, I tried to pick up Solasta again, but was missing the last DLC, Palace of Ice – which ofcourse had the things I wanted to play, the Tiefling. My idea was that I’d create a completely broken party.

– As a tank, I’d go with a Dragonborn Silver Oath of the Motherland Paladin – as a Silver Dragonborn, they’d have resistance to Cold Damage and a frost cone attack, and as an Oath of the Motherland Paladin, they’d get access to fire spells at level 3, gain a fire resistance aura for the party at level 7, and become immune to fire at level 15. Perfect cold/fire tank!
– The rogue I want to be a Thief, to be able to open any locks for me, and at level 13 they get access to magical items, disregarding class restrictions. Perfect for backstabbing and dealing damage as well. This one also had access to the language Spy’s Codebook, which I thought would get quite handy!
– I went with a Half-Elf for the Charisma bonus and boosted by Dexterity and Constitution with the extra points, which I hope to make her more useful with a few weapons – but the main point was for her to be my partys “talker” and boost the rest of the party with all of her songs and inspirations. I was actually thinking of bringing her down the path of College of Hope for heals, resistance buffs and ressurrects at level 3. Not quite a Cleric, but close enough, and I kinda wanted a bard for the novelty. Never had a bard in my games before.
– And the reason I needed that DLC – I wanted to make a Tiefling Sorcerer with Lightning Draconic bloodline. That way, I can get Misty Step at level 3 “for free”, extra hitpoints per level and 15 in AC for not wearing armor at all – which is pretty damn good for someone who’s going to go full glass cannon! – and at level 6 I get Lightning Resistance for an hour, and at level 14 my Tiefling Sorcerer sprouts Dragonwings. Her background is also “Academic”, which gives her access to using Manaclon Rosary – which is needed to enchant items. For spells I decided to go into a variety of elemental spells in the beginning – Fire Bolt, Ray of Frost, Shocking Grasp, Burning Hands – and eventually I’m just going to specialize her to do as much damage as possible. She’s not going to be a glass cannon anymore in the end, she’ll be a nuking fortress, hopefully.

This way, I can get fire resistances to everyone, my tank is immune to fire and resistant to cold, my sorcerer is resistant to lightning, my thief is a magic item-user who knows the way around locks, spy-ciphers and can hide anywhere in order to go in for the kill, and a smooth-talking bard who can buff and heal, as well as talk the party out of any dangers. Oh, and the coolest part – I’ve got a flying devil as my main damage source, a legitimate mini-dragon as a magic tank, a thief who can see in complete darkness, a bard that cannot sleep and thus can always be ready for healing or buffing or debuffing. I also made sure to try to get all languages between them, and only missed out on Gnomish and Druidic, one being a racial language and one being a class language, neither were actually used in the main campaign anyway.

Ofcourse, I got stomped by the fact that I could not create a Tiefling due to the lack of that DLC. When I eventually got around to buy the DLC, Baldur’s Gate 3 had already come out..

So I brought my party over to that game!

I decided to get Karlach, the Tiefling Barbarian, and respec her into a Paladin. Then I decided to actually do keep a Cleric in my party, so Shadowheart gets to stay. I do wonder if it’ll affect the story if I respec her into a bard…? If I even can, that is. As a rogue, I guess Asterion is quite doable – he’s an elf and a thief already, however, he doesnt seem to like my actions very much, as I’m running around helping people. I think I need to have him stay put during dialogues from now on, or I’ll tank my reputation with him completely. If he doesnt work out, I’ll probably just pick up.. I dont know, literally anyone else. As for “myself”, I decided to go full Tiefling Draconic Bloodline Sorcerer, but I’ve got to admit, it’s the first time I’m playing Sorcerer in any of these games, and it’s… definitely a challenge.

As of right now, that party is only level 4 though, the main reason is that I have not been playing Baldur’s Gate 3 as much as I would have liked. It is fighting for my time with family and another game.

Namely, New World! I’ve been deep-diving into that game again this summer, got offered to join a company and thought about it for a few days, decided to throw myself into the deep end and join them. Me, being the nervous, anxious wreck that I am, talking to other people? Joining the same people day after day and get to know them and play with them?

Where’s Lunnainn and what have you done to him?!

I ran into them a couple of times during some event runs, and spoke to them. Eventually I ran into them again while doing some PvP, where I was supposed to capture forts as part of my Season Journey. I showcased my absolute lack of knowledge in anything non-healing related and they still offered me a spot in their company, and for some reason, I decided to actually take the step. Usually, I’d get terrified, log off immediately and stop playing the game, but something, not sure what, got me to disband my one-man company and join theirs. They had been really friendly and fun during all the other occasions I had ran into them, and they were patient with me being the absolute newb I was, so I figured I’d give them a real chance.

I’ve been playing with them basically every day since, a couple of hours during the evening after the kids have gone to sleep – instead of watching movies, play mindless ARAM’s in League or playing something else, I’ve been playing and learning more about New World.

I was playing at launch for a good couple of months, but the lack of players to play with and the lack of endgame back then had me quit. I tried to come back a couple of times – for instance when the Blunderbuss released – but nothing really stuck with me, and at those times I was playing other stuff – most notably, Elden Ring.

This time, though, it was different. The had implemented “Seasons” which I thought would indicate that the game had come a long way. They had an entire new region to explore (although, that had come out last October – I just didnt play any, and I was knee-deep in other games, like Diablo 4 beta preparations and other stuff), and while there werent that many more weapons, I knew there was a Void Gauntlet that was supposedly pretty good to pair with a Life Staff – the healer weapon – and besides the Blunderbuss and Void Gauntlet, there was the Greatsword. On top of that, there was bound to be atleast one new expedition I had never done, in Brimstone. It turned out there was actually more than that, though – Barnacles and Blackpowder were definitely one I didnt even know about. I also always played solo, randomly teaming up with other players in the area doing the same quests as me, or queueing up for the same dungeon as me, but that was the extent of my experience that was “playing with others”.

But this one guy. He was outgoing, but also respectful enough to not be pushing when I didnt jump on the offer to join his company. He still offered me a spot in the group for events – just like I’ve teamed up with any other randoms, and he didnt get offended when I turned down his offer to join his company. The usual reaction I get from turning down offers like that is just insults and tantrums, but he was understanding and said that if I changed my mind, I was more than welcome. As it turns out, almost a week or so later, I actually did join them. We met again while doing this Fort Capturing as I said, and he asked me if I had thought about his offer to join, and I decided to..well.. take the leap.

They had discord info placed in the company tab, and I joined immediately. I had warned them that I was nervous and didnt really liked to talk much, so while I definitely could join in on voice chat to listen and acknowledge shotcalls, I was probably not going to talk much – which was also completely fine, the important part was for them to being able to shotcall and not having to take the time to type, basically. My thoughts were along the line, “this keeps getting better and better – what’s the catch?”, and honestly? So far, it’s been none. They’re a wonderful bunch of people. The company leader even joked once about me saying I was the silent type who ended up talking almost the most.

They let me play as their dungeon healer for the entirety of the summer, even though one of them was actually their main healer originally – apparently, quite a few people in the company had joined them as a healer and branched out into other roles – and while healing for them I actually built up a decent storage of useful items. Mostly for healing, but I do have a few un-upgraded tank sets, and a couple of upgraded damage dealing sets as well. Actually, all the way up until a few weeks ago, all I did was healing. We’re mostly running what is called “mutations”, which is that every week two new dungeons gets chosen to get mutated – there’s three modifiers to each dungeons that makes it harder, and while really hard – compared to the regular dungeons I’ve been running until I joined this company – they’re also really rewarding to do.
A couple of weeks ago though, the two dungeons that was chosen werent really what anyone of us wanted to play, so we joked around and got one of our main damage dealers to agree to heal for one of the dungeons for the entire week. And while he healed, I was running damage dealing, and honestly? It was more fun than I thought it would be, and I got to understand that role better – which in turn actually helped me understand the healer role more! At the same time, our tank and another damage dealer swapped places as well, and as this new composition, we actually managed to get through all the mutation levels and beat M10 – the highest difficulty – as this role-swapped team. In both dungeons!

The week after, the teams “original” main healer wanted to heal again, which meant that I was playing as a damage dealer again, which was completely workable – I was fortunate enough to being able to run the same gear I had as a healer for both weeks, with the exception of the Life Staff, which I just swapped out to a Great Axe with Focus as a stat. This meant that I was able to run the highest mutation dungeons with my healing gear, do crowd controlling with my Focus-stat Great Axe and deal damage with my Void Gauntlet, and just focus on leveling up my “actual” damage dealing gear. And unfortunately, I managed to get that levelled up only at the end of that week, but I did manage to get a few runs in with armor that gave me dexterity, a Great Axe for crowd control and Greatsword for damage. I ended up 6th place on scoreboard that week!

We even succeeded in doing a speedrun of the hardest dungeon, The Ennead, with me running that gear! If it can be called “succeeded” in getting silver-score that is. My weekly runs were over at that point, but atleast I was able to help find the path we’d take, how many points we were able to get – the “groundwork” for an actual run. In the end, the company managed to get 9th place in Speedruns, at 16:53 for gold in M10! Not my win – but I’ll still take it!

This week though, unfortunately only one of the dungeons work with the damage dealing sets I’ve upgraded – Ennead required two sets, one with Ancient Ward defenses, and one with Corrupted Ward defenses – and it’s also the one dungeon that has the most difficult mutations this week. So far we’ve been running the other dungeon – I do admit though, I kind of expected us to decide to run the more difficult one – so I’m back at running healing again. This time though, I’m saving my upgrade material, so that if I need to upgrade any other set to run as a damage dealer, either next week or just later this week, I should be able to upgrade an entire set immediately. I’m halfway there though, I need about twice as much materials for one entire set that I have currently.
All gear that can be upgraded starts out at the lowest of “gear score” 590, with the maximum “gear score” being 625. The amount of materials needed to upgrade any item from 590 to 625 is roughly the equivalence of the rewards you get from managing to get gold in M10 around one and a half times – fifteen times for a full new set – and so far I’ve got almost half, so probably I’ll have enough by the end of tomorrow, if we manage to squeeze in four gold-runs tonight and four tomorrow evening as well. Meaning, come weekend, I’ll be able to be both healer and damage dealer in either dungeon this week!

Sorry for the terrible screenshot quality – it’s because I run two games at once here just to get these shots.

I dont think they’ll ever read this, but..
Napkin, Fleur, Andicus, Jefery, Hellraizer, Obed, Ansved.
Thank you guys so much for all you’ve done for me. Thank you for teaching me all you’ve taught me.

And most of all, thank you for the friendship and company you’ve given me.

Which isnt that great, to be honest. There’s no use of having a website that costs money, if I’m not going to use it. That’s hopefully going to change soon, but.. We’ll see.

I did end up getting into the D4 beta – I’m not going to say I played the closed beta in November, because if I did it would consitute a breach in the NDA – but I’m allowed to say whether or not I played the open beta; which I did. I played both a Sorcerer, Rogue, and a Necromancer, got all of them to the max level. It was glorious.

There’s a new beta coming along this weekend, and I’ll be playing that one too. Last beta, if you got to level 20, you could get two titles and a back cosmetic item (I’ll drop the image down below), and this beta offers the same rewards, with one additional one; If you kill Ashava, the world boss, with a level 20 character, you earn the “Cry of Ashava Mount Trophy”, which is something you can hang on your mount. I’m dropping that image down below as well. Atleast this beta, Ashava will spawn on a fairly regular interval, which will start between 9 am PDT May 13th, and every third hour until 9 am PDT May 14th. Atleast that gives us good time to actually kill it – last beta I only got to kill it once because of scheduling at home, I simply didnt have time to play when the world boss appeared the other times.

Speaking of Diablo 4, by the way, I actually did end up buying the game. Twice. One for PC and one for PS5 – this way, I’m able to play the game more “seriously” when I’m at the PC, and I can play some melee characters more relaxed infront of the TV.

But enough of Diablo 4 for now. I’ll fill in more of the game as the time comes – especially during the next beta. Or when I play it as it launch in less than a month now! It launches June 6th!

As for other news, I’ve begun collecting some childhood memories! Mainly tabletop rpg-stuff, and finally after loads of time and – for me – an obscene amount of money, I’ve managed to collect the entire “base set” of stuff I was out to get – the complete published collection of the settings and campaign books of the edition I wanted! Now I just need the editions before and after this one..

Unfortunately, I’m not going to post a photo of it.
What I can say, is that the same tabletop rpg-publisher also published an entire fantasy book collection – 51 books – which I have begun collecting as well, and as of now, I own 36 of said books. The books I now search for are mostly about Conan, 10 books, and it’s proven difficult to find some of them. I did find someone who sold all ten of them, but he wants $250 for them..unless someone offers more, in which case, I have to bid more for them.

Look, I want to complete the set as much as the next guy, but for me to fork over that much in one go, I have to plan my budget a lot more, and save up money for a while for it to not hurt too much in one go. And this month is definitely not one of those, sadly. And even then, I still have the published adventures of the edition I’m collecting to buy – all in all, there’s just too much money pouring out of my wallet for me to actually pursue this 10-book collection of Conan for now.

At the same time, I’ve also begun buying miniatures to have around in my shelves. The excuse is that I might end up using them in some tabletop sessions, but honestly, I might not even get a session going at all. I want to, and the plan is for me to be a Game Master for a homebrew campaign with my oldest kid – potentially also my younger kids when they get older – and their mom. Perhaps someone else as well, who knows. But knowing myself, it might actually end up being either scrapped or tuned down to something not requiring miniatures, in which case, I’ll only end up with a shelf full of pretty minis – which isnt such a bad thing, really.

I got a couple of 3d-printed minis, and while they’re “cheap” to get in volume compared to some plastic minis that, say, Games Workshop sells, they’re also harder to work with I realized. Plastic glue doesnt take well on them, so if something breaks off I cant glue it in place with the plastic glue I had. I had to buy UV-glue and a small UV-light in order to glue those things, and it always tend to leave a small “bulge” around the glued area. Not super huge, but it is minis we’re talking about, so relatively, it’s huge. Also, I know I’m a newbie about this, but spray-priming it seems to just give a weird coating, like a thick coating instead of the thin layer I expected. So, while cheaper, and arguably a lot more costumizable due to it being print-on-demand for whatever thing you’ve got designed, the down side being that it’s harder to glue and prime, and honestly, it feels more brittle.

Ofcourse, I can do this comparison, even if it’s not universally true or in line with others experiences, because I also bought plastic injection molded minis, and wow.. the difference is huge! In my experience, priming it was a lot smoother, because it didnt get that thick layer, it was like the plastic just accepted a thin layer of paint, while the 3d printed resin stuff let the paint “pool” on the surface, requiring more priming to get a complete coverage. I dont know if that is what happened, but it felt like it. Also, while I have used UV-glue on the plastic miniatures – and it did work fine – I also used actual plastic glue and… well, it didnt “set” as fast as using UV-glue and a UV-light does, when it eventually does set, it’s really stick those pieces tight! I bought a Be’lakor and used the plastic glue on the wings, and despite the entire thing being as large and comparatively heavy as it is, I can actually lift it in the wings and not risk breaking the wing off!

Admittedly, I havent painted any of the plastic models yet, save for priming them, but I have high hopes. Priming the 3d printed stuff got some details obscured, like the faces – while not perfectly detailed faces from the start, it got almost lumpy in comparison with primer paint on it – but the plastic models turned out great. I can still see the small chain pattern on the loincloth of my Be’lakor with ease, and the faces of my plastic skeletons and Nighthaunt ghosts are definitely well detailed still.

I even got a couple of buildings – 3d printed ones – for fairly cheap. They weren’t actually cheap, since I paid over $170 for them, but considering they would’ve cost about $300 otherwise, you could pretend they’re cheap. My youngest son has already called dibs on one of them as a play-house, which was not really something I intended, but I have already resigned to that. I’ve got a photo somewhere of it semi-built, but before he gets to play with it for real, I’ll have to fit some pieces together better, glue them, use some greenstuff to fill in some gaps, prime it, paint it.. And my oldest called dibs on “any of the houses”, so I gave him the smallest to paint – I only need to fill in gaps there as well, and prime it before he can paint it. Now, my middle kid has asked for a building to call his own as well, but I’m not sure what to do about it. My oldest is fine with the smallest house, and sure, my youngest kid claimed the absolutely largest house for his, but two of the remaining houses are much to fragile to give him, and the third house is way too small – still larger than the house my oldest got, but compared to the house my youngest claimed, it’s tiny; which is almost certain to cause friction between the two.

I just need to get around to fix these up, paint them.. and who knows, maybe I’ll succeed in fixing the tower up and give it to my middle kid. While still fragile, I hope he can manage to fit the floors on top of each other if I just fix the “dowels” better, but the tavern.. each of the floors consists of several pieces, and lifting and dropping it will almost certainly break it apart. That one is too fragile, almost too fragile for myself.

But I ended up noticing a few things during my first steps into my new-found hobby.

The first being that I do not like priming with a spray-can. I quickly got onto the GW website to look around for priming paint I could dab on with a brush, and I was actually pleasantly surprised when I was told through the chat system, that the Citadel “base” paints would actually work like primer as well! I had a bunch of those at home already, so I can do that easily from now on with the rest of any miniatures I buy. I still think I’ll keep spray-priming any large stuff I have or get, until that spray-can is empty atleast.

The second is that I understand how important a proper workplace is. I painted 11 miniatures sitting under a bad ceiling light, on my sofa with my low coffee table as a work area, and the back and neckpain is still haunting me, almost a week later. The next set of miniatures, I painted on my PC desk, next to my large windows that lets in lots of natural lights. While better, it was still not enough – I need larger work area and better spot-lighting that I can control better, as well a better height for my work area. Being an old goldsmith, I’m used to having the bench pin at almost eye-height, as I used the filings-drawer as a place to rest my arms. Which means that even if I’m seated at my desk, I want the minis propped up at eye level, which is almost a feet and a half above the actual desk surface. These took a total of 16h to do, and it almost killed my back and neck to do them.

Thirdly, I also realized that this is actually fun as all hell, and that even if I’m not digging the spray-can, I might actually get myself an airbrush. It’ll be the first I ever use one, and the upkeep of it is dreading me. But, getting a cheap one for $200 might be a good thing, since most of the paint I already own are useable with an airbrush anyway, the only thing I need to get – besides the airbrush itself – is some sort of cleaning kit. The airbrush I’m currently looking at does include both the gun, a compressor and the hose, two basic colours, paint diluting, cleaning liquid, two glass jars, and two pipettes. While it seems like good value, I think I’m going to need more cleaning eventually so as to not completely destroy my airbrush – and that’s not mentioning some sort of air-ventilated booth of some kind.

Oh, the reason I think of getting myself an airbrush, is because I somehow ended up kickstart-backing a 280+ miniature – plus bits, like almost 100 bits which is mostly weapons – from Archon Studios, which is one of the largest plastic injection molding miniature manufactorer there is, apparently. They’ve mostly done terrain before, with a few miniatures as well, but this time they’ve gone all out in doing miniatures only. And it does look sweet.

Unfortunately, those wont come until next year. By then, I hope I’ll have a good portion of my shelves filled with miniatures and a bunch of painting experience behind my belt, as well as a proper setup to work at.

And having looked at some Youtube videos about painting, especially Lyla Mev, Whyloch’s Armory and WatchItPaintIt, I’ve decided to try to get ahold of some Speed Paints. From what I can tell of these videos, speed painting seems like it’s more up my alley – as fun as painting is, I’m too impatient and shaky on my hands to do it “good” anyway, might as well do it fast with paint that is meant to paint fast with. Apparently, these $200+ paints are supposedly really good and are now on my shopping list – but that will unfortunately take a while… Oh, right – a paint-shaker is on it too, because my wrists are not up to the task of shaking paint..

I’m stoked for the D4 release! I did see some leaks from the game – not sure if they’re hacked-and-released, or if they’re “leaked teasers”, but it doesnt really matter. It’s obviously still in development, that much is clear, but from what we’ve seen it’s pretty damn neat! They dont have voice actors yet, so there’s that auto-voice for every dialogue and that’s pretty hilarious to be honest.

Soon there will be a Beta test going on, and hopefully I get in. It’s obviously under NDA, so if I will get in, or what I’ll do, or any thoughts I have on the game, I wont be able to say, but.. here’s to hoping.

I’ve been told it’s far closer to D2 than D3 in its style though, so I thought I’d play some D2. I’ve never have – I never got the game when it was released or the years after, but I did get the classic game through Blizzard a few years ago and tried it out, but it didnt work. It was clunky, crashed often, I couldnt get anything going. I basically only went outside the camp, found a cave and that’s the extent of my playtime. So, a week or so ago, I bought the game – the remake, D2R – on PS5 on sale. Pretty neat, worked fairly well with a controller. I made a paladin and got to level 3 and I was pretty happy with the game. I could definitely see how people loved this game back in the day! Then I found out that D2R even had cross save! Meaning, anything I did on the PS5 carried over to the game if I had it on the PC, etc, and I just jumped on the Blizz-app to get the game on PC too. Now I’m a level 13 Paladin with a SWEET setup so far!

I’ve got a scepter and a shield for my main damage and a crossbow as a backup. So far I never had to use the crossbow, so I dont know if that’s “wasted space” or not though. The scepter I got was something I found at level 5, and it’s still the best weapon I’ve found! It was a level 6 requirement, meaning I couldnt use it when I found it, BUT! There’s a skill I decided upon leveling with, Holy Bolt, which is a level 6 required spell – and the scepter had bonuses that is just too good! As an auto-attack thing, it does 6-11 damage, with a 1-3 fire damage added, it does +50% to undeads, which what I use for Holy Bolt anyway – but not only that, it had +3 Holy Bolt! Meaning, when I reached level 6, I used my skillpoint to get Holy Bolt level 1, just to equip the scepter and run around using Holy Bolt level 4! I had to be level 10 to get that levelled up to 4, but now I got it at level 6!

I imagine I need to switch out this scepter soon, but as long as this scepter will carry me, I’ll stick with it. I do contemplate on selling my crossbow to find a better weapon. This scepter and shield is really good for fighting undeads, but I think I need a better melee weapon to fight other things, like beasts.

The shield isnt too bad either – it has a 16 defence in itself, 50% block chance, +25% enhanced defences, and between 10 and 15% extra elemental defences, as well as 1 point thorn damage and even self-repair of 1 per 33 seconds! I feel like I really lucked out with my paladin for this early game!

Oh – and I’m at the Monastery so far. It’s actually a lot more fun game than I thought it would be!

So, art creation ended after a month. It was fun while it lasted, but in all honesty, I felt it was a bit too pricey for what I got out of it. I did get a couple of nice arts that I get to keep though, so that’s something.

I’ve taken up Diablo 3 again, been playing just over a week now. I got through the entire Season 27 Journey, so now I have the double portrait borders, the new pet, a stash tab.. all around, pretty good! I think it’s a decent season to be honest, basically “Primal’ing” any item at will, with a bonus power added to it. Drawback is that they roll three random extra powers, so if you dont get the power you’d like, it’s basically like playing with a primal – oh, and you can only play with one such item equipped.

For now, I’ve managed to get a couple of builds together; Sentry Marauder, Strafe Impale, Strafe Multishot, a Speed Multishot and Wudijo’s Natalyas Rapidfire – those just on Demon Hunter. I also got the Tal Rasha Meteor, Firebird Explosive Blast, Vyr Archo- and DMO Frozen- Arcane Orb, Typhon Hydra, the LoD Meteor, and a weird creation of my own which uses Firebird Disintegrate/Magic Missile on Wizard. All I do on that build is stand still and channel Disintegrate, constantly teleporting around, CC immune thanks to Invigorating Gemstone and when I’ve ticked everything with ignite I just send out a massive wave of firebased Magic Missiles. It’s not terribly strong, but I did do a GR104 with it.
..in 13 minutes.. I’m trying to get a Fragement of Destiny sanctified with Magic Missile power, so that I can do the “actual” Firebird Magic Missile, with Explosive Blast, Black Hole and Frost Nova build, but so far, luck hasn’t been on my side when it comes to rolling wands or powers..

Besides those two classes, the Demon Hunter and Wizard, I’m also trying to get a Witch Doctor going. I’m missing a key component when it comes to the Zunimassa Poison Dart, which is the Dagger of Darts. I just cant seem to get my hands on one. Ofcourse, I’m not only trying to get that build going, but also a speed-build that BigDaddyDen showed a couple of days ago, but I need three pieces of Mundungos for that – still trying to get shoulders, chest and pants. Weirdly, I’m probably closer to get those three, than I am the Dagger of Darts..
Oh, and ofcourse, trying to gamble this with Kadala has actually gotten me closer to get a full Arachyr build than anything. I’m missing head, chest and a ring, I believe. Which isnt to say it’s bad – although ranked as an A tier build and not an S tier, it’s there along with the other two builds the Witch Doctor has. I’m just wondering if I, as an arachnophobiac, will be able to play the build… with that massive spider and jars of spiders you’re throwing…

And who can forget the Crusaider. LoD Bombardment is the one I’m going for, but I havent even levelled the Crusaider up to 70 yet.

Other than that… Well, this week I’ve been diving head first into Diablo 3. I havent done much else, to be honest. I’m recovering from an incessant cold, mostly. I rearranged my furnitures, alone, when the kids were at their moms, and that took a heavy toll on me. Couple that with the fact that, apparently, my youngest kid had contracted a cold from kindergarten and had come up to sleep next to me every night that week, and my rearrangement of furniture apparently broke me. It’s been two weeks since, and I’m still coughing. I’ve taken tests and, no, it’s not that. It’s an actual cold.

So, a bit of news on D4 though – It’s set to come out next year, which is awesome! It’s MMO-esque, and not an ARPG like D3, so I imagine it’s like “WoW in Sanctuary”, which is ok with me. There’s also a beta coming out soon, I imagine it’s for select people only, but that beta is apparently for the entire game, start to finish. Oh, to be one of the chosen ones! It’s also no pay-to-win involved at all, according to what I heard, so I consider D4 officially redeemed from the DI-fiasco.

In other ARPG-news, Path of Exile had a terrible new league. The league mechanic itself bugged out alot apparently, I heard lots of people making T16-mirrors that gave basically nothing, and they had tuned both quantity and quality of item drops throughout the game – as well as overtuned “item culling”, scaled up mob health and nerfed mob-juicing.
Perhaps this doesnt make much sense to most, but basically, when you play the endgame content of PoE, you open up a map; there’s 6 portals to the new destination, you enter and kill as many enemies as possible. Before, the loot-system worked in a different way, every enemy had a set chance to drop stuff, chosen from a loot table. Both quantity and quality – amount and how rare each item was – came from that chart, and most mobs could drop several items each. Alot of it was “currency” – which in PoE is items used for crafting purposes, there are no actual currency like gold – but plenty of it was just items. Most were “rare”, yellow quality, which meant that if you played your card right when crafting with that item as a base, you could get lucky and get an item-upgrade from what you had, making you more powerful.
Now, both quantity and quality were tuned down – meaning, less items dropped, and each item were of a more common rarity, basically meaning it was worth less, and these “currency-items” were no different, they were fewer. So less good items to craft with, and less currency to use while crafting. That’s a recipe for disaster.

Earlier, each enemy had a set chance, as I said, to drop these items. These chances were in turn boosted by adding crafts to the map itself, before opening it. That made an enemy who were likely to drop some items, drop even more items. And when you kill lots of these enemies, lots of items are going to drop – making “juicing” a great investment. That means, that you put in more of your currencies to craft the map to have the most amount of enemies as possible. If a non-crafted, blank map had, say, 50 enemies, a fully “juiced” map could end up with well over 4-500 enemies, all with boosted drop chances. One correctly boosted map could very well be worth 100 times a “blank map”. But they changed this too – instead of letting this “drop-chance boost” and “juice-map” go on, they removed the drop chance boost, returning every enemy drop table to the original one, and changed it so that the most amount of loot doesnt drop from killing the monsters, but rather completing a mission, such as “killing that mob”, or “killing that boss”, or “finishing this league mechanic”.
Couple that with the fact that they had boosted enemy health so that instead of rushing and killing 50 enemies in 10s – which definitely wasnt unthinkable before – now you have to stand and fight with a single enemy for.. I mean, I had a fight with a group of enemies spawn during a league mechanic, and that fight took me 5 minutes. At that point I just quit.
Oh, and dont forget “item culling”. Before, the amount of loot that dropped was almost bordering on insane – there were more loot that dropped than you could feasibly carry through all the portals – but that just made the devs come up with the idea that “ok, so most people dont pick up items that have these stats and these ranges on other stats, or these combinations of stats, or these base items, so whenever a mob actually does drop one of them, we just remove those from the game completely, so they dont even drop!”. Sounds like a great idea, except for the fact that… most currency early game comes from picking such items up and vendoring them. There are “vendor recipes” that, when you turn in a certain amount of a type of item, or a combination of certain items, those can give you a pretty significant return of currencies. And not only that, even if that item aren’t necessary a good upgrade for you, you might still pick it up to sell to someone else, in turn generating currencies for you that way. And tune that “item culling” the wrong way, you end up culling items that people actually want. Or need.

If you mix all these things together with the fact that the new league mechanic seemed bugged and didn’t even work most of the time, people ended up getting frustrated because they felt like they couldn’t progress the game like they used to, and on top of that they got stonewalled by enemies who were too tough to beat with the items they had, because of all these system changes were making it nigh on impossible to get better gear. A lot of people quit the game, from 152’000 people playing at launch, there’s actually less than 40’000 less than 4 weeks later. That’s almost 75% of the entire player base that just up and left.

I mean, I get it. Grinding Gear Games wanted a slower paced game, where instead of everyone just trying to get everything min-maxed when it came to loots, actually slowed down and interacted with the game and it’s mechanics in a slower fashion. But…what I dont get is, they’re currently working on PoE 2 right now, where they will have all of this already. Why not let PoE 1 run haywire like it has been before, and let PoE 2 be the new game that actually have their original vision in it? No, instead they pissed off most of their player base and people left.

Now, to be fair, over the course of a league, many people do end up leaving the game when they feel like they’ve done everything they can. GGG wanted these people to “stay for longer”, that’s why they slowed down the pace of the game. People just left because they felt they couldnt progress instead. But the player base drop hasn’t been this hard or fast before, and not this angry.

Those two games, and League, as usual, are the only three games I’ve actually come around to play these last few months. I’ve booted up New World and played with the new instrument-mechanic, sure, and I bought the second expansion of Back 4 Blood – although, I never came around to play it – and a few smaller sessions on the PS5, one where I played Spiderman for 5 hours one evening, or tried Trials of Mana for a few hours.. but actually played? These three games are the things I’ve “focused” on. And honestly, D3 has only been the last week, so it hasn’t even been that much gaming.

Now, what I have done most.. is coughing. And TV-shows through Netflix and Prime. I can’t wait to get back on my feet properly and do something.

All I’m going to say, is that summer takes a toll on me. Allergies, heat, kids out of school and kindergarten..

Atleast I found a new toy – I’m making art!