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Tuesday, May 3, 2016

D3 Season 6 and other pursuits



Instead of playing Elite this session, I started up a season 6 character on Diablo III.  I played a bit on season 5 as a witchdoctor so took mage this time around.  Even with my fairly limited play time I’ve zoomed through the levels pretty quickly.  Level 30 in a bit over 3 hours compares pretty favourably to my original characters which are 20+ hours in and only barely in the 30’s. I’ve seen a season 6 preparation guide which says I’m doing it slowly – they are at 70 already in a bit over 3 hours. I’m still having fun my way and am not in any real hurry.

I’ve also played a little bit of Defiance in ½ to 1 hour bursts over the last week or so. Shooters aren’t my usual game but I’ve quite enjoyed this one in the year or so I’ve been dabbling casually. Prior to restarting my blogging I’d spent about 70% of my gaming time in SWTOR where I have multiple max-level alts.  Since I’ve not even started the current expansion story line yet, there’s plenty of content for me there and I expect I’ll pick it back up soon.

World of Warcraft however isn’t of much interest to me now. I’m still subscribed and log in a couple times each month but Legion may well be the end for my time in Azeroth.  My account was opened in the final months of Vanilla and has been subscribed continuously since then.  It was still new and fresh to me throughout the Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King expansions. I initially liked Cataclysm’s storyline and most gameplay changes but I began to find that the dramatic changes to most every zone broke my immersion into the world and it no longer felt like home. The introduction of goblins, worgen and later the pandas further broke my connection to the world. 

Some of the gameplay changes also reduced my connection to my characters, especially the nerfing of talent trees in later expansions. Making levelling content trivially easy hasn’t helped either. Warlords of Draenor was better in that for a while there I actually cared about the story but that soon wore off with all the scripted cut-scenes and confusing massed battles where I had no idea of objectives. Allied npc’s that simply face-roll the content for you doesn’t help much either. If simply spamming your basic attacks on random enemies still wins the event there’s not much incentive to care. Legion had better bring back some of the spark!

Its patch Tuesday for many games as I write this – right in peak evening game time here in east Australia so I’m not sure which I’ll play after posting.  Back to Elite for tomorrow most likely!
-        ~Cryptography

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