The EVE Online New Dawn Quadrant to Start With Mining Changes

Earlier this week we got an announcement for an announcement when CCP promised us a dev blog today.  And CCP has lived up to that promise, hitting us with the first big dev blog for the quadrant.

Prosperity Promised

The title of the dev blog is From Extraction to Production and it covers a lot of ground on the resource gathering, processing, and production front.

On the prosperity front, the post promises a doubling of many resources found in New Eden

• All ore quantities are doubled in asteroid belts
• All ore quantities are doubled in all resource anomalies
• All ice quantities are doubled (in addition to the previous 200% increase)
• All Omber, Kernite, and Crokite quantities are doubled in sov anomalies, whilst Mercoxit quantities are increased by 20% (in addition to the previous 200% increase)
• All Mykocerocin quantities are doubled, whilst spawn chance of extra sites that was added earlier this year has been reduced
• All Cytocerocin quantities are doubled
• All Fullerine quantities are doubled
• Extraction rate is doubled from moons
  • Moon Extractions will take the same time as before, but will yield 2x the quantity of ore when fractured. Extractions which are in progress (and not yet fractured) at deployment time will receive the 2x yield when they fracture

But you will need all those extra rocks to chew on because CCP is also introducing the concept of “waste” in the mining equation.  As CCP puts it, it is “a chance per cycle for resources to be turned into space dust.”  You’ll still get a full yield in your ore hold, but some of what was left to be harvested will disappear.

The amount of waste will be dictated by the type of mining module you are using to harvest, with tech I modules being considerably less efficient than tech II or faction modules.

There is also a big change coming to mining skills and crystals.  Reprocessing skills will be condensed down from 19 varieties covering each individual ore type to 6 to cover the new categories of ore that are being introduced.  They are:

• Common
• Uncommon
• Rare
• Superior
• Abyssal
• Mercoxit

Mining crystals will be reworked to cover just those six categories as well.  In addition, there will be different variants of crystals that are currently targeted as:

• Standard yield
• Higher yield, high waste, less reliable
• Lower yield, very high waste, very unreliable

I may be misunderstanding that third one, but it does not sound like a viable option, but this is just the initial dev blog and things may change.

CCP is going to add compression ability to gas and moon ore.  The Rorqual, Orca, and Porpise will all be able to compress ore, but will require new modules for the type of resources they are attempting to compress. (And the modules will require new skills, so if you got any skill points refunded from the reprocessing skill changes, you can spend them here.)

Also ore and gas compression will no longer be perfect.  Compression efficiency will be:

• Ore 90%
• Gas 90%
• Ice 79%

So, once again, CCP giveth and CCP taketh away.  You’re going to need that extra ore out there in space to make up for this.

There is also quite a bit on ship and module changes, with some ships getting new ore and gas bays, industrial cores being changed for the Rorqual and added to the Orca and Porpise, new gas harvesting modules, and some stuff that has a supporting spreadsheet to illustrate, which is how you can tell we’re really getting into nerd levels of industry.  I always mildly resent people who dismiss EVE Online as “spreadsheets in space,” unless they are specifically referencing industry.  This is where the spreadsheets come into play.

There is basically a lot in the dev blog to unpack.  But it is just a dev blog, which is generally a statement of intent by CCP.  They do, occasionally, listen to feedback on them before pushing the ideas into the live game.  CCP usually does big changes like this in stages, starting with seeding blueprints for modules and skills required in advance.  The dev blog says they expect to start that by the end of the month.

Being more than a decade distant from care much about industry and mining, I am going to sit back and listen to those immersed in the topic discuss the changes and pass judgement.  Angry Mustache who, along with Kazanir, was on the Meta Show last week for a deep dive into scarcity already has his gut reaction to the changes up on Reddit.

Related:

• CCP – Dev Blog
• CCP – Forum Thread for Dev Blog Discussion
• Reddit – The r/eve thread on the Dev Blog

The Fate of Gundabad Expansion comes to Lord of the Rings Online

The day has arrived and the eighth expansion for Lord of the Rings Online is set to go live today.  Say hello to the Fate of Gundabad.

The fate is per-determined by the quest chain I’m sure

As I noted previously, this expansion “farms the appendix” of the Lord of the Rings books, to which Turbine/SSG/Daybreak/EG7 have the rights to use for their game.  While the team yet has events in the main story to cover, they have never shown any desire to rush to the end of the tale… reaching “done” being anathema to MMO devs… so the game carries on with its side journey into the war between the the dwarves and the orcs, started last year with the War of the Three Peaks expansion-ette.

From the expansion page:

Following the grueling battles and heavy tolls of the initial assault, Prince Durin and his allies now regroup and prepare their final offensive on the mountain-home of Gundabad, seeking to reclaim their ancestral legacy from the corruption of the Orcs, hobgoblins, and Angmarim that have been infesting it. As the great dwarven army musters, tensions remain high between the Longbeards, Stout-axes, and Zhélruka, threatening to break the already fragile alliance before they can recover and restore their birthright. Meanwhile, thought to be fractured and pushed back by the dwarven victories, the host of Orc-Chieftain Gorgar the Ruthless now unites under the true Lord of Gundabad – the fearsome, great dragon Hrímil Frost-heart – who will stop at nothing to bring an end to Prince Durin and his followers.

Everybody loves and orc with a grudge.

The expansion features the following:

• New Brawler class
• Level cap raised from 130 to 140
• New mobs to face, new zones to explore
• New instances and raids

In addition, there is the newly revamped (and hopefully now fixed) legendary item system to work with.

The expansion is available for purchase and comes in three different flavors:

Standard Edition – $40

• Fate of Gundabad Content
• Brawler Class
• Extra Character Slot
• Standard Expedition Supplies

Collector’s Edition – $80

• Fate of Gundabad Content
• Brawler Class
• Extra Character Slot
• Improved Expedition Supplies
• Brawler Gauntlet Box
• Level boost to 130
• Gundabad Cosmetics
• Gundabad Mount & War-steed
• And more bonus items!

Ultimate Fan Bundle – $130

• Fate of Gundabad Content
• Brawler Class
• Extra Character Slot
• Ultimate Expedition Supplies
• Brawler Gauntlet Box
• Level boost to 130
• Gundabad Cosmetics
• Gundabad Mount & War-steed
• Fateful Gundabad Cosmetics
• Thunder Boar & War-steed Appearance
• Dye Carry-all
• 10,000 Virtue XP
• And more bonus items!

As I said before, the fact that the expedition supplies in the two more expensive bundles include XP accelerators seems a bit ironic… your new content is so good let me help you speed through it… but the have to load up on some extras to get people to pay a premium price and boosters like that cost nothing at all to throw in the box.

The Coming WoW Community Council

In the further adventures of Blizzard trying to fix the mess that World of Warcraft has become, last week saw them announce the creation of a World of Warcraft Community Council.

The council will be seated

They even created a minute and a half video to accompany the announcement, so they must be serious.

One of the common complaints about WoW from many in the community is the lack of responsiveness to player feedback.

This, by the way, is also a common complain for literally every MMORPG I have ever played, though some are more egregious that others.

In EVE Online there is a long standing tradition of CCP putting things on the test server, collecting feedback, filing it somewhere, then pushing the new feature to the live server only to have to address most of what was given as feedback in patches.

SOE used to be notable for listing to player feedback only after announcing something, then changing their mind in front of a live studio audience as its rebellion brewed in its player base.

Customer feedback is hard to deal with.  It is often emotional, semi-coherent, and based on flawed assumptions about what is easy or hard or impossible to implement.  And suggestion that begins with something like, “All company X has to do is Y” inevitable fails to understand the issue at hand in any meaningful way.

Customer feedback can be contradictory.  One of my repeated observations over the years has been that there is no single feature in any MMORPG that is so bad that it isn’t somebody’s favorite aspect of the game.

And, finally, player councils are nothing new.  Any number of games have had them in some form.  I think EVE Online’s Council of Stellar Management is probably the most interesting, if only because the members are elected, an aspect that gives players something additional to complain about as large groups use their organization power to influence the results.  But players will complain if then studio chooses the council as well.  Complaining is kind of our brand at this point.

In the end though, all such player advisory groups have one thing in common: a complete lack of power to accomplish anything.  My one big example of a council wielding some influence is when the EVE Online player base was mad about the Incarna expansion and the CSM sided with the players against CCP, and even that wouldn’t have amounted to anything if players hadn’t unsubscribed in significant numbers due to the expansion.  To this day, if you go to unsubscribe from EVE Online, one of the default answers to the “Why are you leaving?” questions is “Because of the last update.”  They want to know who is really leaving because of whatever they just pushed to the live server.

And, in this fact, the WoW Community Council will be no different.

So is this all window dressing, a promotional stunt to appease unrest in the player base, a way to deflect those who say that Blizzard does not listen to player feedback?

Maybe.

I do not doubt that there is some desire within Blizzard and the World of Warcraft team to figure out what would make the game more interesting and playable and popular with their audience.  But how do you get there?

The Blizzard plan is to gather together 100 people with the following plan:

• Submissions are open to any player interested in taking part in the program.
• Once players are selected, they’ll be given the ability to post in a new discussion forum that is publicly visible to everyone.
  • In this new forum, we’ll ask members to share their experiences and perspectives on anything in the game, and some topics may be started by Blizzard developers and community managers.
  • Responses and updates from Blizzard will be posted there so they can easily be discussed by the entire community.
• A private discussion will also be setup for Council members to encourage direct interaction between members.
• Separate conversations between smaller groups of members and Blizzard developers will be encouraged to ensure players with differing perspectives are being heard.

Anybody can apply to be one of the 100, see the announcement post I linked above, and those chosen will be members of the council for a year, after which new members will be selected.

The rest of us get to watch what goes on in the special forum… and complain about it elsewhere… which kind of makes me think that the more interesting discussions, the ones that explore changes, will happen in the more discreet channels.  (I will also be interested to see which member of the council gets doxxed first for saying something unpopular in the public forum.)

Blizzard will be setup with a new channel to get feedback from players.  That is the easy part.

With “only” one hundred people to listen too, that will give them something less than a fire hose of angry customer noise to deal with.

But will that group of one hundred be the right one hundred.  Will they be able to articulate things that will help the game?

And, will the Blizz side of the equation be able to spot those gems if they do arise?

The latter is probably the biggest hurdle.  The problem is that game developers and designers are people with their own values and opinions and you don’t rise to a decision making tier in a company without holding some strong views, and all the more so in a bro culture that is self-reinforcing.  In that position, the voice of even a single person reinforcing their vision probably outweighs a dozen or more expressing some other view on a given topic.

So the real effort will be on that front.  We’ll see if the Blizzard has the vision and the discipline to find something substantial in the feedback that they can bring themself to agree with and work towards.

The Unexpected 5K Award

I have mentioned that WordPress.com has achievements of some sort, though I don’t think they have a list of them published anywhere, so save for the consecutive days of posting, I am really not sure what they’re looking.

And then last week I received one for 5,000 page views.  It wasn’t for this blog, which is working its way towards the 6 million page view mark (I wonder if I’ll get an achievement for that) but for a blog I started on a whim back in August of 2011, Stuff MMO Bloggers Like.

You have made it to 5K

I am pretty sure I was inspired at the time by a blogging trend that was popular at the time which included titles such as Stuff White People Like, Stuff Black People Like, Stuff Southerners Like, and so on.

The entries for those blogs were always numbered, and so I followed suit, thinking this might be fertile ground.

And I made it to four posts.

I probably could have made it further.  While I am not sure there were a hundred posts of content in that series, I can think of half a dozen more that would have at least been relevant at the time, if less so now.

I suspect that I realized, as I always do with these side projects, that I have about one blog’s worth of effort in me, and if I expend that effort elsewhere then this blog will likely suffer.  Better to concentrate my efforts.

If I had been smart at the time I would have just made that a weekly series of posts here, something for Saturday maybe.  Instead I felt the experiment needed a new blog and a new pseudonym… I don’t know why the latter always seems important to me, but it does… to have its full effect.

That effect being 5,000 page view in a little over a decade.  Whatever.

The odd thing, however, is that when I went and checked the statistics for the site, it has 5,530 page view, well over the 5K number.  And its current rate of traffic indicates that it probably hit the 5K mark years back, given that it seems to get about a dozen page views a month on average over the last few years.  Its peak was a whopping 532 page views in March of 2013 and it was easily past the 5K mark by the end of 2014.

Anyway, just another odd WP.com thing.

Addendum: There is even a half finished 5th post still in the drafts folder titled, “That guy in the PUG.”  Maybe I should finish that.

The Group Rolls Through Act III and Mephisto in Diablo II

When it comes to Diablo II, Act III is kind of the misfit.

In coming from the original Diablo, Act I puts you back in the world and connects the two games.  Act II then raises the bar, showing you new places, while Act IV is the “Go directly to hell and slay Diablo” big finish.

And, in the middle, there is Act III and Kurast and jungle and a series of quests that are mostly skippable.  It feels like the team had to meet a quota for six quests and six waypoints, so kind of made some stuff up quickly and moved on.  Though, honestly, with Act IV only having three quests, it is as though a lot of work went into the first two acts and then time was running out and they had to get things ready to ship… which is, in fact, the story I have heard before.

And the other thing that came up around Act III was we were starting to feel like things were a bit too easy.  The necro with nine skeletons and a golem, the paladin with the might aura buffing up the skeletons, the druid now featuring the “mobs be gone” spell that is fissure along with three wolves, the amazon stabbing like crazy, and two Act I mercenaries providing ranged support and two Act II mercenaries providing two additional auras was a group that went into Act III bowling over any groups of mobs that cared to show their faces.  We have forged our spirits in the traditions of our ancestors and built a fighting force of extraordinary magnitude.

As noted previously, our horde frequently outnumbered the locals as we moved through zones.  We looked a bit into difficulty settings, but to get to nightmare you have to make it through normal, so off we went.  I thought that at least Mephisto, the boss at the end of Act III would give us a challenge.

It isn’t that, as a group, we never die.  But when we do it is usually because somebody is off on their own or gets ahead to the skeleton flying wedge that clears our way through most situations.

On getting logged in we did a bit of work on our gear.  I found some mail and a helm upgrade at the vendor, allowing me to join Ulfar in the horned helm club.

I’m not just a member…

But the best thing we came up with was an actual piece of runeword gear.  I had been telling the group to be on the lookout for a chest piece with two sockets because I had found a Tal and an Eth rune along the way.  Despite having played the game on and off for years, I had never managed/bothered to actually make any runeword items.  But for most of the time I was playing seriously there were not the plethora of resources on the web to look all of that up.

But now even WoW Head has a page listing out all the runeword items you can make.  So we put all of that together and made the Stealth armor item.

The first I have ever seen

I am not sure it was the bestest best gear ever, but it was an upgrade for Talon, our Amazon.  She seems to have to run a lot to get in there and stab people with her spear.

Gear set, we headed out into Act III.

We had actually gone to the first waypoint when we were done with Act II, so we popped in there and began looking for the Spider Cavern, the first necessary stop on the way to Mephisto.

Thus began the wandering in the jungle part of Act III, which is not a favorite of mine.  Lots of up and down paths, across bridges and logs, only to find dead ends.  We did find the Great Marsh waypoint along the way, but never used it.  The layout this time made the Great Marsh completely optional.

We eventually found the Spider Cavern which was, as advertised, a cavern full of spiders.

In the spider cavern, look at all those skellies

From there it was another stumble through to find the Flayer Jungle.  More running up and down paths and storming through crowds of pygmies until we found the Flayer Jungle waypoint and then, finally, the Flayer Dunegon.

Many pygmies died trying to block our way

That got us the second pieces we needed… a brain, or maybe an eyeball… and set us looking for Kurast proper at the far end of the jungle paths.

Once you hit Kurast navigation becomes simple.  The three main sections are just rectangles laid out in a grid.  We made it through lower Kurast into the Kurast Bazaar where we found our way into the sewers to get the next piece on our quest shopping list.  We also made a couple of side trips into the smaller dungeons along the way.

Making a side trip

The loot drops, while as chaotic as they tend to be in the game, did yield us up a few good items.  You can see in the screen shot above that we found a bard door sized shield drop for a paladin.

Also along the way we managed to hit most of the side quests, which was a bit surprising, but it somehow worked out that way.

Then it was to Upper Kurast and then across the Kurast causeway into Travincal, which none of us could pronounce on comms.  Another one of those words I’ve seen many times over the years and have never once had the chance to say aloud… and when the chance finally came I stumbled.

Travincal is one of the places in the game that is always laid out the same, so after we broke through the first couple layers of defenders I led the group over to where I knew the waypoint to be.  Best to have that in our pocket in case something went wrong.

From there it was time to take on the city council there on the steps of the main government building in Kurast.

A vote of no confidence is in progress

Solo this fight can be chaos and usually involves my mercenary dying a few times.  As a group we pressed on through at the cost of a couple of skeletons.

At that point it was time to talk to Deckard Cain, use the cube to create the flail that would let us into Mephistos dungeon, and get started finding him.  We came back and beat on the orb to get in.

The orb awaits

We got into the Durance of Hate, the final dungeon for Act III and had our usual luck, finding our way through in what seemed like record time to me.  I have spend long stretches trying to find my way through that dungeon, but as a group we found our way to the waypoint and then down to level three, where we put up a portal in order to unload and resupply in town.

That done we put up two town portals, just in case, then launched ourselves into the main chamber, hacking our way through the restored town council again, then working our way around to Mephisto.

The Mephisto fight was soon on.

Fighting Mephisto

And, honestly, soon finished.  Once again the might and size of our group were more than a match for the final boss.  We lost five skeletons and my minion, but otherwise came through intact.  Having brought him down, we sorted through his loot.

The loot of Mephisto

From there it was through the portal and into the Pandemonium Fortress and Act VI.

We did use the waypoint to go back to Kurast to wrap up the sixth and final quest, so we managed to knock them all out, which is something I almost never bother with.

Then it was back to Act IV where we sold loot and went shopping for better gear.  Talon joined the horned helm club, finding a deal on one at the shop.

The might of our horns

Now just hell lays between us and Diablo.  We will see how tough he is.  The game is supposed to scale up in difficulty as your group size grows, but I think we might have picked a sent of complimentary classes that let us scale up more than the difficulty.

Nostalgia and the Legacy of Blizzard North Keeps Blizzard Strong in the Q3 2021 Results

For Diablo, our plan to enter an era of unprecedented content scale for the franchise has experienced a strong start with the September release of Diablo II: Resurrected, the return of one of the most acclaimed titles in PC gaming history. First week sales of the title were the highest recorded for a remaster from the company.

-Activision-Blizzard Q3 2021 Presentation

As anticipated, yesterday saw the Activision-Blizzard Q3 2021 financials announced, which covers the period from July 1 through September 30 2021.

I put those dates in there just to be clear as to why I expected at least a little drama on the Blizzard front being that is the timeline when the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing hostile workplace lawsuit was headline news in the gaming community.

If players were really mad at Blizzard for being a horrible company, then it feels like there should have been some pain on their bottom line.  Instead, Blizzard posted its strongest quarter in 2021, bringing in $493 million, up $60 million from the $433 posted in Q2 and $10 million ahead of the $483 million posted in Q1.

Those were not “launch a new WoW expansion” numbers like Q4 2020, but they were still ahead of “its a pandemic and we’re all stuck at home playing video games” numbers.

Activision Blizzard Q3 2021 Financial Results Presentation – Slide 13

Margins were down a bit, 38% in Q3 compared to 43% in Q1, but still up when measured against Q2, when they dipped to 33%.

Overall, things were looking up for Blizzard in Q3, which might have been expected to have been the summer of their discontent.  What saved Blizzard’s bacon?

Apparently Diablo II Resurrected is a very popular title.  According to the earnings call it was a huge hit in South Korea, which might explain why I see Battle.net queues close to midnight Pacific time.  While people have been upset about BNet’s performance, it is apparently one of those problems related to being too successful.

That, however, was the extent of the good news at Blizzard as their achievements slide in the presentation deck shows.

Activision Blizzard Q3 2021 Financial Results Presentation – Slide 8

It opens with the quote I have at the top of the post, which honestly could have been taken as faint praise given how the Warcraft III remaster went.  Even the StarCraft remaster wasn’t a huge hair deal.  But Diablo II Resurrected, which launched on PC and consoles in September, was enough to carry the quarter, because the rest of that slide is excuses and qualified successes.

Diablo Immortal, which I keep reminding people had a playable demo at BlizzCon 2018, is now slated for some point in the first half of Q2 2022, while Diablo IV is nowhere in sight.  It seems unlikely for 2022.

The Overwatch 2 entry is likewise vague on when it might be a thing that can generate revenue.  2022 doesn’t seem to be the target anymore.

Hearthstone is hard to judge, so whatever “stable” means, that was what it was.  We’ll see if the new game mode warrants a big mention when they review Q4.

And World of Warcraft, which is running both retail and classic modes now, recorded the strongest engagement for a non-expansion year which, given the cliffs the subscriber base has been driven off of for some of those years, might not be as big of a brag as you might think, especially when they’re running Shadowlands and Burning Crusade Classic in parallel.  That the Monthly Active Users for Q3 2021 stayed stable at 26 million for Blizz while D2R was booming probably means WoW was down by quite a bit.

So I guess a qualified good quarter for the Blizzard side of the house, even if they are the third place studio, such that people are starting to refer to the company as “ABK,” for Activision Blizzard King.

It also seems that bad behavior didn’t harm them as much as it might have.  But gamers are not, as a larger group, an especially politically aware group I imagine.  I noted yesterday that Riot didn’t seem to suffer from bad behavior, with League of Legends remaining hugely popular even as headlines haunted them.  Maybe being a bad place to work doesn’t hurt your bottom line, which I am sure will make everybody toiling in the video games industry happy.

You can certainly argue that the lack of a strong plan for Shadowlands and having no other fresh titles on deck hurt them as much, if not more than, the investigation by the state of California did.

We will see have to see what Q4 looks like, with the new Hearthstone game mode, WoW Classic Season of Mastery, and the cat mount being the only big items visible.  I’m surprised the cat mount didn’t get a mention on the Blizzard slide.

But we won’t get the Q4 news until February, so we’ll see what happens then.

Related:

• Activision Blizzard Investor Relations Quarterly Results Page
• Massively OP coverage including notes on the investor call topics
• Ars Technica Coverage of the state of the company

The View From Delve as YC123 Draws Towards an End

YC123, the 123rd year since the Youli Conference, which marked the founding of CONCORD and the establishment of the current status quo of the empires of New Eden, opened with null sec space locked in a titanic war.  The second day of the year saw one of the biggest battles ever witnessed in the star cluster as the system of M2-XFE again became the place where many titans were destroyed.

That battle was at the end of a crescendo of spectacular, trillion ISK clashes in Delve that set world records.  October of YC122 saw thousands of ships destroyed and trillions of ISK vaporized in the vacuum of virtual space.

To put those ISK amounts into some context, using a scale I saw somebody using to make a very dumb political point, a million seconds ago was less than two weeks in the past, a billion seconds ago George H. W. Bush was still president of the United States, and a trillion seconds adds up to over 30K years, which would put us back in the late stone age when Fred Flintstone worked in a stone quarry and attended meetings of the Loyal Order of Water Buffalo.

So a trillion ISK is kind of a lot, and to commit that much ISK in assets across multiple battles takes some stamina.

The from late April of this year until the beginning of August, just three months back now, the Imperium holdings in Delve were just the O-EIMK constellation.

O-EIMK Constellation from late April forward

That was the great stalemate, where the might of the Imperium, focused in such a small area proved to be more than PAPI could manage.  There was a lot of talk about being contained and the threat of blockading the constellation by camping the NPC stations in Delve, but the will of PAPI as a coalition wasn’t up to the task.  Only Legacy Coalition had real skin in the game, having committed themselves to live in Imperium space.

On August 2nd, at the start of week 57 of the war, PAPI made one last attack on the Imperium stronghold, then started unanchoring structures even before the fighting was done.  By the end of week 57 of the war all of the ihubs in Delve were back in Imperium hands and the clean up of PAPI structures was well under way.

The war cost a lot in ISK, but there were other casualties.  The online user count suffered, especially towards the was entered its second summer.

Over the timeline of the war

While the PCU recovered as both sides reoriented themselves, it remains below where it was before the war started.  Some put blame on CCP and their economic starvation plan for that.  But a lot of us are also tired out after more than a year of war.

And now, in Delve, normalcy has returned.

The view from Delve

After many months of having content on our doorstep, of minor clashes happening multiple times daily just a gate or two away, it is kind of quiet.  People rat.  People mine.  Somebody in a Rorqual gets tackled about once a day and Delve 911 lights up.  The intel channels are active and some of the usual suspects from before the war appear now and then.

I went on an op last week, the first op I had been on in over a month, that was set to blow up a Fortizar in Cloud Ring.  As I got into fleet and the FC asked us to set our destination to J5A-IX I groaned a bit and the thought of that journey.  But once I adjusted my route settings to include friendly Ansiblexes, which is a hugely underrated feature in my opinion, it was just seven gates away.

A seriously excellent feature

The Eye of Terror Mk. IV was setup and in business, its Ansiblex highway ready to take me from Cloud Ring down to Period Basis or across Querious and into Catch, the last being a new outpost for the coalition since the war.

New Eden with Imperium space highlighted in red

It isn’t all peace and crabbing.  The combat pilots who still crave action are out with the various SIGs and squads making sure the rest of null sec, the bloc formerly known as PAPI, remembers that we’re still around and looking for revenge.  Meanwhile, our enemies have fragmented somewhat.  They have reset some of their blue standings and some of their own frictions are coming to the surface.

War will come again to null sec.  But for right now Delve is a pretty quiet place.

Also, as an aside, I made that “The View from 1DQ1-A” image with the intent of making a New Eden version of the famous (to those of us of the right age) cover from the New Yorker, View of the World from 9th Avenue.  However, my limited artistic skills haven’t gotten me very far.

The Group Pushes on to Duriel in Diablo II

Having made it through the narrow tubes of the Maggot Lair previously, the group formed back up to tackle the back half of Act II.  The last waypoint we had found was in the Far Oasis, so we went there to get started again.  We just had to collect some corpses for Kevin so he could raise his skeleton army to support us.  This left quite a loot pile in the middle of the desert.

Starting to see more runes drop

From there it was the usual search around the edge of the Far Oasis looking for the path to the next zone, the Lost City, with its waypoint and connection to our next quest objective.

As tends to happen, we found our way back into the Dry Hills zone before finishing our circuit and finally finding the path that led in the right direction.  Entering the Lost City zone saw the lights go out as a new quest was triggered.  Moving in the darkness in the new zone seemed to get us more spread out than usual and we managed to lose first Talon then Ulfar to the groups of mobs lurking in the dark.

Covering Ulfar’s corpse

Portals back to town helped reunite us, as well as getting the quest update about the darkness from Drognan in town once we found the waypoint, but we kept on the run around the edge of the zone until we found the pathway down to the Valley of the Snakes where the Claw Viper temple is located.

Now enter the Valley of the Snakes

The valley is quite small and the temple is in the center.  The temple is also built out like most of the underground areas of Act II, with plenty of room to maneuver save for the occasional doorway.

Getting down to the second level we found our way to the room of the Tainted Sun Altar.  Once the room was cleared, clicking on the altar yielded up the Amulet of the Viper, one for each of us, and updated the quest from Drognan as well, restoring light to the zones of Act II.

The amulet obtained

Back in town we took the Staff of Kings from the Maggot Lair and the newly obtained Amulet of the Viper and combined them in the Horadric Cube to create the Horadric Staff, which we would need later.  Until then that went back into our respective stashes as we headed next to the palace, where Jerhyn wanted us to do something about an infestation issue.

Now he deigns to let us visit

The palace is kind of a quick pass most of the time when I play.  It looks nice, but the levels are small and there are two ways down at each level, so it is often very easy to just bypass most of the mobs loitering around waiting to surprise you.

Some stairs down in the palace

We managed to grab the waypoint in the palace cellar, but it is one that I often don’t mind missing.  There isn’t much reason to revisit the palace that I know of and when you get down to the bottom level you’re going to leave via a portal anyway.

We found the portal at the bottom floor, but had once again managed to get spread out enough that it took a minute to get everybody back together.

All over the map looking for the portal

Through the portal lays the strangest part of Act II, and perhaps the strangest location in the whole game, the Arcane Sanctuary.

Fortunately there is a waypoint right where you enter it from the portal, which is part of why the palace waypoint generally isn’t missed.

The Arcane Sanctuary waypoint

We took a minute to go back to town and get ourselves prepared.  We were on a bit of a time limit that afternoon and I was expecting that we might only just finish up the Arcane Sanctuary before we had to stop, the zone being a bit of a slog at times.  The place is made up of narrow paths and single file stairs and little portals.  It is also sizable, being laid out like a four leaf clover.  The waypoint is at the center, with four stems leading out, each of which split after a way, leading you around in loops that form the leaves of the clover, coming back around to the stem when you complete them.

At the tip of three of the leaves is a platform with several chests.  At the tip of the fourth is the lair of The Summoner, the target for this part of the adventure.

Clearing out all the loops can be a long task, and I seem to always pick the wrong stem to start with and often end up having to work through at least two of them before I find the right one.

We, however, were in luck.  We picked the right path on the first try and actually seemed to get the easy way through that loop, landing us at The Summoner in almost no time, at least relative to my usual experience in that zone.  I don’t think I have ever gotten it right on the first try.

We stormed his platform and took him down, our main problem being that of getting as many of our minions to bear in order to speed the fight.  They were all over the place.

The Summoner down as our minions mill about

That brought us to the Canyon of the Magi, the waypoint before us.  We were now close enough to the end of the act that we were going to press on, head directly to the correct tomb, and wrap things up.

In the old days I would sit and farm all the false tombs in the Valley of the Kings, but with time pressure on us, we went to the right tomb, as indicated by the symbol in our quest logs.

The symbol we sought

Inside we set about looking for the chamber where we could use the Horadric Staff to unlock access to the final boss of Act II.  The tomb is rather full up with mobs, but as a group we were able to cut through them until we found the right room, placing the staff in the orifice (literally what it is called) to crack through the wall and open a passage.

The lightning is the key

Then it was time for a bit of preparation, making sure everybody had enough potions on hand.  I changed over to the paladin frost resist aura to give us a bit of help on that front, though in hindsight the might aura might have just let the skeletons slay the boss faster.  Once we were set, it was through the opening and in to face Duriel.

Everybody on Duriel… except the necro

The Duriel fight is the first tough boss fight in the game.  It is often the point where I use the one respec you get per play through to get serious about my build.  Duriel does a lot of damage and I always open up a town portal as soon as I enter his chamber.

Our army of minions managed to take him down, though Kevin lost about half of his skeletons and his golem along the way, while a mercenary or two bit the dust as well.

Duriel down for the count… the post-fight maggots are an odd touch

From there were ran to the back of the chamber to find Tyrael and hear his speech about the story so far.

Tyrael admonishes us for our tardiness

I actually made a video of his speech from the game about ten years back if you want the original sound and graphics.

After that it was back to town to say goodbye to everybody, then find Meshif to sail off to the next part of the story.

The boat is ready to set sail

And so we will pick up next time in Kurast and Act III.