Abandoning Diablo

Good Morning Folks. I will give you some fair warning… this is going to be a bit of a bummer of a topic especially if you are a big fan of Diablo or more specifically Diablo IV. If so you might want to give this topic a hard pass. I consume a lot of gaming content, and in doing so I notice certain trends. I’ve been thinking about this topic since the beginning of Season 3, and I am not sure what shape it will take. For years there have been what I could only term “Blizzard Content Creators” or folks who are very dedicated to that company or dedicated to one particular gaming franchise within their portfolio. Diablo had one of the strongest communities of dedicated content creators for years. For example up until season 29… rain or shine… every single week Raxxanterax released a guide video on how to complete that week’s challenge dungeon (650 of them in fact… 1 each week for EU and one for NA).

The thing is… one by one the dedicated content creators have been giving up on Diablo, or at least deciding that they cannot continue to function by ONLY creating content for that game. Affliction League was the first time that Raxxanterax did some dedicated coverage of Path of Exile, and similarly, he has gone extremely hardcore on Last Epoch with its launch. Diablo Immortal and later Diablo IV were the games that really put Darth Microtransaction on the map… and he’s made the decision that he had to stop focusing on that game and instead pivoted to other titles. He is maybe one of the most savvy YouTubers I have seen and it is very clear that he is following the trends and the metrics… and Diablo 4 seems to be tanking in relevancy. The popularity of the game peaked in June 2023 and then has largely tanked since. When the game launched everyone that I had on my large Battle.net friends list was playing it… and by the time season one rolled around it was just my cousin that was consistently logged in.

Rhykker has been one of the most corporate message focused YouTubers when it comes to Diablo. I had stopped subscribing to his channel at one point because it always felt like he was following the company line on pretty much everything. Even his content has reached a point where it is mostly negative about Diablo IV and with the launch of Last Epoch I saw him releasing guide content for that game. While he has always covered lots of general ARPG news, this is probably the first time I can recall him making dedicated guide videos for a game that was not some sort of alpha/beta preview coverage. It feels like the creators that used to make up the core of Diablo… have largely given up on the game. The first season was bad… season two gave everyone a bit of hope… but season three and the poor reception of the heavily delayed gauntlet have caused interest to plummet into the sub-basement.

Of all of the above though… the one that shocked me the most was this video from Wudijo. Up until this point he has been quite possibly the most dedicated content creator for Diablo IV. He was the first solo hardcore player to hit level 100 at the launch of the game and has been entirely devoted to the game through all of the ups and downs. For him, it seemed like Last Epoch was the tipping point, and seeing how well a game from a much smaller team with a smaller budget was providing a much better gaming experience. In the above video, he outlines that he is going to be stepping away from Diablo IV and making content not only for Last Epoch but also diving back into Path of Exile and eventually Path of Exile II. I get that the average couch gamer does not give a shit about these content creators… but it certainly feels like a good number of folks who made their entire career focused on Diablo are now abandoning the franchise.

I feel like at least part of this is because Blizzard has become complacent. They spent two decades not really needing to properly compete with anyone in a number of niches. Diablo was the archetypal ARPG, World of Warcraft the genre-defining MMORPG, and Starcraft the game that largely spawned e-sports. In every single one of these verticals… the games stagnated allowing Last Epoch and Path of Exile to take the spotlight away from Diablo, Final Fantasy XIV to cause a mass migration away from World of Warcraft… and Starcraft to have limited relevancy in the modern e-sports landscape dominated by DOTA2, League of Legends, and Valorant. It feels like Blizzard is a company that long ago began feeding off its own hype cycle and now just isn’t creating games that are that great anymore. To be fair… World of Warcraft has seen a similar drain of formerly dedicated content creators over the last few years.

Diablo will always have a special place in my heart, and there is no theme that “means” ARPG more than the Tristram theme. However, I am just not sure Blizzard is going to pull out of this spiral. Last Epoch for years has been a game with an amazing core but one that needed a lot of polish and window dressing… and more than anything just more content. Diablo IV however is a game with a flawed core… that is going to need to have almost a top-down rework of several systems to bring it in line with what the players are expecting. It is a game that looks gorgeous… but is made up of duct tape and paper mache once you punch through that lovely facade. I am just not sure that Blizzard is the sort of company that is willing to commit to an “A Realm Reborn” or “No Mans Sky” level of reinvention to make the game what it needs to be. So yeah… in writing this I have wound up bumming myself out.

I hope your week is going well and if you have made it to this point in the post… sorry for being a downer.

Diablo 3 Season 29 is Awesome

Good Morning Folks! This weekend I got pulled back into Diablo III. The new season dropped a few weeks ago but I did not actually get around to playing it on launch day. Instead over the course of the week my friend Ace got engaged with Diablo III again, which then pulled me back in on Saturday afternoon. This is without a doubt the most chill leveling experience I have ever had because I started a little after 2 pm my time and by the time I finished recording the podcast that evening, I was just a stone’s throw away from 70. That isn’t anywhere close to record time or anything, but it is a heck of a lot faster than I normally end up leveling. When we would do a season launch on a Friday I would maybe make it to 50 that first night.

The key difference this season is a new event type called a “Vision of Enmity”. I recorded some footage of me doing one on Saturday, largely so I would have an example for this inevitable blog post. Essentially any mob you kill in the open world has a chance of spawning a portal, and when you teleport inside you are presented with a series of “rooms” for lack of a better term. Each room will either spawn another portal or spawn a treasure goblin. Killing the Treasure Goblin drops a chest full of bounty materials that signal the end of the event. The rooms seem to have a handful of possible outcomes:

  • One or more elite packs spread out through the map.
  • A room where everything is magic or higher, and drops death’s breath.
  • A room with three Greater Rift Portal bosses.
  • A room where every mob is a treasure goblin, most of them being the material goblins.
  • A room with a single treasure goblin spawn, signaling the normal end of the run.

The treasure goblin room is by far the most ridiculous thing I have seen in Diablo III full stop. That said… even the normal rooms are insanely rewarding. Almost my entire leveling process was me attempting to do one full round of bounties. I would start down the path to a bounty objective, and at some point, a portal would spawn. Early on I would get distracted by the portal forcing me to do the objective all over again because, at the end of the event, you get shunted back to town. Later I got in a rhythm of doing the objective, going to town, vendoring, and then going back to the portal because thankfully it gets marked on your minimap with an arrow pointing towards it. One single round of five acts of bounties plus all of the assorted portals that spawned… added up to I think 65 levels. For the last few I did Nephelem rifts to finish things off.

The most beneficial part of Enmity portals is that you end up with so many materials. I started getting Death’s Breath at level 2 and when I would get one of the rooms with three Greater Rift bosses they would drop Greater Rift Keystones. At the time of writing this, I have 166 GRift stones and almost all of those were gained through Enmity portals. Similarly, I have around 100 of each of the bounty materials and I have consumed a bunch of them cubing items and doing other crafting recipes. Materials are not really a problem because if you run out… just run a few more portals and in the process of doing those you will likely also get a number of legendary items. This legitimately feels like the most generous Diablo III season ever.

We talked about this on the show a bit, but it feels like the Diablo III team did not hold anything back. This is reportedly the last new season for the game and in doing so they created something purely fun for the players. It makes me a little sad to be honest, because the very limited team working on Diablo III has managed to create some extremely fun content over the last several leagues. I wonder what this game would have been like if they had gotten the full backing of Blizzard. Seeing how rich and varied the content is in Path of Exile makes me sort of wish for an alternate universe version of Diablo III where it got the same love and attention. That is not to say that the team working on D3 has not done some amazing stuff, but you can clearly tell they have limited resources.

I am very much in that awkward phase of not having all of my gear and not having enough gold to finish crafting my set of gems. I love Crusader and more specifically the Invoker set, so when I saw it was the Haedrig’s Gift set for the season I knew what class I would be playing. I have my six-piece and am currently trying to farm a Ring of Royal Grandeur in order to swap to Half Invoker/Half Crimson. I have none of my cube items and I am missing the correct jewelry and chestpiece. I think a lot of my squishiness will be alleviated when I get an Aquilas’ chest to drop. For now, I am very much in the area where my killing potential is extremely high… but my survival is very very low. I just swapped back to using the Paladin as a heal bot so here is hoping that resolves some of the issues.

All told I am very happy with this season so far, but I also know that I am going to maybe get a week out of it before returning to Path of Exile as my primary game. Playing Diablo III made me realize how lucky I am to have so many good ARPGs to swap between. It used to be Diablo III was pretty much it for me, and I would hunger for a new season. Now when I get tired of one game I can swap to one of many other ARPGs and keep the joy rolling. At some point, I will make my way back to Last Epoch and see some of the changes over there. For now, though, I am happy to be playing some Diablo III and happy to be working on my Invoker build. If you’ve ever loved Diablo III, I highly suggest reinstalling and checking this season out because the Enmity rifts are extremely fun. I love that it is content that you can do pretty much immediately. I can only hope that the Diablo III team will be consumed by Diablo IV where hopefully they can right that sinking ship.

Getting Started with Path of Exile

The launch of Diablo IV was a huge event, and it brought a lot of players who latently enjoy the ARPG genre out of the woodwork. Unfortunately, this mishandling of the game leading up to the launch of the first season has created a bit of a vacuum. If you survey the ARPG landscape you find many options with various benefits. Last Epoch, for example, shows a lot of promise but is still very much “in development” and lacks a lot of excitement regarding its endgame options. Grim Dawn feels a little dated, and while Wolcen has a great campaign it lacks a bit once you wrap things up. Path of Exile is by far the most complete package out there, but it has an extremely steep learning curve in order to get to the point where you feel comfortable with all of the concepts. For example, I am well over 1200 hours into the game and I still feel like I am just getting started.

The popular logic within the Path of Exile community is that new players should follow a build guide. I have done this thing… but quite honestly the “newbie” focused content isn’t quite “newbie enough” for someone just getting started with this game. The thing is Path of Exile has a lot of concepts that are fairly unique to this game. The problem is that a veteran of this game will just accept as common knowledge a number of concepts that you may have never experienced before. I feel like I am setting myself up for failure, but my hope is that I can help to bridge that gap. I do feel like the best way to play this game IS to follow a guide, but my goal will be to fill in some of the necessary 100-level coursework required to make it so that you CAN realistically hop into the game and follow a guide.

What is a League?

I am going to be addressing the new character creation process, but I am going to go a bit out of order. One of the first screens that can throw a player for a loop is this one, which asks you to make some decisions about your characters. Many ARPGs have the concept of a season and Path of Exile refers to this as a “League”. Essentially this is how the game adds new content, and there will be some form of a seasonal mechanic that lasts for somewhere in the neighborhood of three months before being replaced by another “league”. Currently, we are in the Crucible League and this adds a weird mechanic where you can add randomly generated talent trees to your weapons. When a specific league is over, everything migrates to the Standard league where your characters will reside from that point forward.

Path of Exile has a wide variety of different game modes, and all of these started out at one point as “League” mechanics. If for example, Crucible was well enough received, it might at some point get reworked slightly and brought into the Standard league and as such become a permanent part of the game going forward. There are a number of optional challenges that make content more difficult. Hardcore for example is treated as a separate league where you only have one life, and if you die your character can migrate to either the Standard or current League mechanic. “Solo Self Found” or SSF is a special challenge that makes it so that you cannot trade items with players or have access to your guild’s shared stash. Ruthless is a relatively new mode where you have extreme item scarcity in your drops and player skills are not available on vendors and have to be found either from quests or drops.

Generally speaking, I recommend players start characters in whatever League happens to be going on at the time and without any optional difficulty settings. Right now the Crucible League is taking place, and on the 18th of August, the next league will start. We find out this Friday what those league mechanics are going to look like. When a League ends, all of your characters are migrated to Standard and all of your stash tabs will be migrated intact as special “remove-only” tabs that allow you to withdraw items but not store new items.

What Class Should I Play?

This is the screen that allows you to choose what character class you want to play. This screen is a bit of a trap because if you are used to playing games like Diablo… your character class means something very specific. You might see the big beefy Marauder and think, that I need to choose this class in order to play a melee character. You might see the Templar aka the Old Man… and think this is going to be a cleric class and will heal people. You would be wrong, and I feel like this sets players up to make some wildly incorrect assumptions about the game. All classes in Path of Exile can essentially use every single skill available in the game. You can make a spell-slinging Marauder or a two-handed weapon melee-focused Witch. There are no hard lines drawn in the sand about what each of these can do other than the ascendancies… which is a rabbit hole we will talk about later.

Instead, it is best to think about the different classes in Path of Exile based on where they start on the passive tree. Please note… this is a wildly truncated version of the passive tree because I cannot really get a screenshot that has ALL of it in the same 16:9 aspect ratio image. There are six sectors to the passive tree and these are labelled based on the core stats that they tend to focus on. Often times these are referred to as “Pure Characters” and “Hybrid Characters”.

  • Pure Characters
    • Marauder – Strength – Starts in the South West Sector.
    • Witch – Intelligence – Starts in the North Central Sector
    • Ranger – Dexterity – Starts in the South East Sector
  • Hybrid Characters
    • Templar – Strength and Intelligence – Starts in the North West Sector.
    • Shadow – Intelligence and Dexterity – Starts in the North East Sector
    • Duelist – Strength and Dexterity – Starts in the South Central Sector

The Scion is a character class that you cannot start the game with until you have unlocked that character by playing through the campaign on at least one other character. The Scion is a bit of an odd duck in that you start in the dead center of the passive tree. It also has some other weird things going on in that it has a bit of a hybrid ascension path allowing you to choose from traits available of any of the other ascensions.

While your character class does not dictate the type of character you can build, it does however dictate what you have easy access to based upon the starting position. For example, this is my Wintertide Brand Occultist, which is based on the Witch starter class. I have spread out my points all along the top of the passive tree going both into the Templar and Shadow sectors to grab things that made the build work. There are a lot of nodes in the Shadow area that allow you to scale up damage over time, and then nodes in the Templar area that allow me to buff up the brand spells that I am casting. Almost all builds are going to travel around between multiple different regions of the tree as they seek out nodes that specifically bolster whatever build they are trying to accomplish.

What are Ascendancy Classes?

Starting in Act III of the campaign you will gain access to “Ascendancy Classes” which shift your character from the fairly generic starter class to something a bit more focused. Each has its own talent tree that is independent of the rest of the passive skill tree, and over the course of your leveling process, you will be able to choose eight different skill nodes in those ascendancy trees. They tend to lean in a specific direction for example if you really love Totem builds, then you might want to specifically check out the Chieftan Marauder ascendancy or the Hierophant Templar ascendancy. Do you really want to play a super tanky character that has a lot of defensive layers? Then you might want to check out the Juggernaut Marauder ascendancy or the Champion Duelist ascendancy. If you really love Minion builds… then, unfortunately, you are probably going to be pigeonholed into playing a Witch and then ascending into a Necromancer.

While the Ascendency class focuses the character in a more specific direction, it is still important not to try and think of them as being ONLY one type of character. For example, Toxic Rain is a very popular ability that causes poisonous rain to deal chaos damage to everything in an area. There are many ways to build this type of character and currently, there are at least four different meta builds for different ascendency classes. I personally played Toxic Rain Pathfinder which is a ranger ascendency, but Raider is also popular as well as Toxic Rain Trickster in Shadow, and Toxic Rain Champion in Duelist. When someone is building a character they tend to focus more on what ability they want to use and less on which specific character and ascension path that they want to follow. I love Righteous Fire and there are very specific builds for Juggernaut, Inquisitor, and Elementalist… that all have different positives and negatives.

What are Skill Gems?

One of the things that makes Path of Exile different from other ARPGs is the fact that you can socket any skill gem into almost any piece of gear and your character can immediately start using that ability. There are a bunch of caveats around that statement that we will dive into a bit later, but essentially the gems that you socket into your gear are what give your character different abilities. All gems essentially fall into one of two broad categories:

  • Active Skill Gems – These are abilities that can be bound to a key and are performed when that key bind is pressed or the skill slot is clicked. These fire off spells, swing weapons, cast buffs, or move players around the screen. They DO things… thus Active Skills.
  • Support Gems – These gems specifically modify Active Skill gems and change either how they work or the types and amount of damage that they deal.

Not all support gems can modify all active skill gems, and how this is determined is based on a “tag” system. In the above image, you will notice that there is a comma-delimited list of terms that appear in the first line of the skill. In order to use a Support Gem on Ground Slam for example, that Support Gem must include at least one of the following terms: Attack, AoE, Slam, or Melee. This is going to be true for passive skills and gear as well, but we will get into that a bit further in.

Another key differentiator to get in your head is the type of active ability. Essentially everything is going to be one of the following:

  • Attack Skill – This is a physical attack and is the equivalent of swinging a sword, throwing a spear, or some other kinetic physical activity.
  • Spell Skill – This is the act of casting a spell or channeling your focus into something mystically.

This largely matters because the items you pick up out in the world will give you bonuses for different sorts of skills. For example, the Sceptre on the left says that it increases the Elemental Damage of the player by 40% so that specifically means that the tags of the skill have to have Fire, Cold, Lightning, or Elemental in order to benefit from that bonus. Similarly the Gauntlets on the right show that they add 11 to 17 Cold Damage to Attacks. In order for the player to receive this bonus, they have to be using a Skill that has the tag “Attack” in it. So scrolling back up in this case the gauntlets would give that bonus to someone using Ground Slam, but not someone using Holy Flame Totem. Often times you end up with gear with stats that you can’t necessarily use… because it is extremely rare that an item roll is perfectly applicable to whatever build you are trying to create.

What are Item Links?

The items that you pick up are going to have a number of sockets available, each of them with a specific color, and the possibility of having those sockets linked. There are also white sockets that allow you to put any color gem in them, but they are a bit rare so we are not going to get into them. In order for a support gem to apply to a specific skill, it needs to be “linked” to the socket that the active skill gem is in. Now this link does not have to be direct… for example, in the above image I have a chest with six links, and the very last green socket is still applying to the active skill gem which happens to be the green gem in the first socket. The order of the sockets does not matter in a link, only that they are linked. Folks tend to refer to items based on the color of sockets that are available. So in the above sequence of items, I would refer to them as RRRB, RRGB, and GGGBBR. More correctly folks often refer to things with a dash indicating the links so since the gloves above have two different two-links they would be referred to as R-R B-R.

You can change the color and links of an item but for the sake of being the most basic of primers… I am not going to dive into that at all. On the Scion that I have been leveling recently, I am using Armageddon Brand as my primary skill, and as such I am using it as my six-link. Essentially there are only two pieces of gear that can have six links. The most common of these is your chestpiece, but if your build can use a two-handed weapon you can have a second six-link there. Let’s dive into the chain of skills that I am specifically using with that ability and I will explain a little bit of the logic behind them.

  • Armageddon Brand – A brand is a type of spell that is fairly unique to Path of Exile, but essentially it is a magical disease that can spread between enemies. There are lots of different kinds, but this one in particular calls down a meteor from above that smashes into the enemy and deals area-of-effect damage. As such this spell has these tags: Spell, AOE, Fire, Duration, Brand
    • Swiftbrand Support – This skill essentially makes it so that brands apply their effect faster and then fizzle out faster as well. Essentially imagine dealing more damage over a shorter period of time.
    • Increased Critical Damage Support – Pretty self-explanatory, it increases the Critical Damage Multiplier for the spell. This bends the rules a bit because Arma Brand does not specifically have a tag that says “Critical” but it does have verbiage down in the body of the spell.
    • Concentrated Effect Support – This support gem makes it so Armageddon Brand deals more area damage, but makes the total radius where the damage is applied a bit smaller.
    • Elemental Focus Support – This will make it so Arma Brand deals more elemental damage, but can’t apply any elemental ailments. This is fine because most of our damage is coming from the meteor strike so that is what we want to increase the damage of.
    • Lifetap – This is a utility gem that makes it so any active skill in the link will cost life instead of mana. This is a common tactic that allows you to reserve your mana for other purposes and has the nice side benefit of giving you a buff to total damage after you have effectively damaged yourself to cast the spell. We won’t necessarily go into this… but you can also use Lifetap to give any Active Skill Gem the “duration” tag.

It is around this point that you are thinking to yourself “Gee Bel, that is a lot of nonsense to keep straight in my head” and you would be correct. Thankfully there is a faster way in the game to see what support gems work with which active skills. There will be a vendor in every act that sells skill gems that you have unlocked, as well as one in Act III in the Library that sells all gems that you have access to, and another one much later that does the same role. When you mouse over a support gem in the vendor inventory, it will tell you which skills you have actively slotted into your gear that it will be capable of supporting. For example, Generosity Support makes it so that Auras no longer benefit you, but instead affect your allies… which are anyone in your party or your minions. If you notice it tells me with a green checkmark that Defiance Banner, Determination, and Vitality can use this support gem… aka all of my Aura-based buffs.

Following a Guide or Yoloing It

Essentially there are two ways to play Path of Exile. The first is following a guide and trying to understand the thought processes that led to the creation of that guide. The second is to just get into the game and start making choices, knowing that eventually you will probably hit a wall and need to start over from scratch. I did not really come to love this game until I followed a guide… and even then it took me three leagues of semi-serious play before I felt like I really got a handle on how exactly this game works. Before then I made a lot of failed attempts to get into the game and created some pretty crappy characters in the process. This guide is less a guide trying to tell you how you should be playing, and more an attempt at helping you across the chasm of knowledge between where the guide creators think you are… and where you actually are as a brand-new player.

Like I said before, I am over 1200 hours into this game and there are still segments of the game that I have never experienced… and honestly may never experience. The depth is a huge factor for why I keep recommending this game in spite of the fact that it is so easy for a new player to completely drown in it. Having played and knowing what I know now… I do find a certain amount of merit in the “fuck around and find out” school of thought when it comes to a game like this. I think ultimately which path I would suggest you take, entirely depends upon you as a player. Are you easily frustrated when the journey comes to a hard impassible wall? If so then you would likely have a much better experience following a guide from someone like Zizaran or Pohx. However, if you are someone who loves to experiment and can accept failure and start over from scratch several times… then maybe your best option is just to roll something and go with it until you hit a wall.

But Can’t I Just Respec?

Technically the only decision that you cannot undo in Path of Exile is your starter class. You can respec your entire passive tree… all 124 points of it and even respec your Ascendency to choose another one. However, this is not as easy a thing as that sounds. During the course of the campaign, pending you do all of the side quests, your character will gain 20 Passive Skill Refund points. Generally speaking in order to do a full respec you are going to need to lean on Orbs of Regret that drop randomly in the wild. By the end of a league I have more of these than I can use, but before you get up and running… and can successfully farm content you will be strapped to get enough of these to reasonably change up a character. This is why the common logic is that if you hit a wall, and need to do more than minor tweaks to your character… you are just better off starting from scratch and carrying with your the knowledge of where you strayed from your objectives.

The world record for leveling through the campaign and getting to level 100 is roughly an hour. This is not something I could ever accomplish, but I can zip through the campaign and get to maps in about five hours. I’ve gotten to that point after playing many characters and realizing the flow of zones and some improved questing tips. Your first time through the ten acts of Path of Exile is likely going to take you multiple days. However, every time you do it… you get faster and I think before long I will probably be able to do it in around three hours. I’ve reached the point where I find leveling a new character to be one of my most relaxing activities, but it took me a while to get there. I know it seems daunting to start over, but the more often you do it… the faster you will get at zipping through all of the early activities.

Sometimes your accidents just lead you down paths you didn’t think to go… if you are willing to keep poking at it. For example, I started this dumb Scion character entirely for the purpose of beating Act III so I could get that achievement. I had no real plan for that character and am not following any sort of a build guide, and have already pivoted hard away from the skill that I was originally intending to follow. It has introduced me to Armageddon Brand, a skill I had never used and now like enough to consider properly designing a character around it. I consider that extremely valuable experience that came only because I gave myself the leverage to just start fucking around until I found a path to move forward. It took me a long time before I was willing to let go of the ladder and accept the possibility of a failed state. I am having a heck of a lot of fun, with a character that I never planned on caring about and gave the truly dumb name of “BelGlamRock”.

Barely Scratched the Surface

This is already a massive post… so I am going to wrap things up. As the heading says, I have barely scratched the surface of this game. I am not sure how many more guides like this I intend to create. The goal here is just to throw some terms out, explain them a bit, and give players a bit of an easier time starting the game. There are a slew of way more qualified guide makers out there that can pick up where I left off. I am looking forward to the announcements from ExileCon this Friday and the start of whatever the new league is on August 18th. I hope something I said helps you in your journey, and feel free to reach out to me if you have any specific questions. That is one positive about the Path of Exile community, is that generally speaking, most players are happy to help new folks get started.

Diablo IV Advice

Good Morning Friends! I did not get nearly as much time as I would have liked last night to play some Diablo 4, but I did manage to push through to level 60 and then get another quarter of a level into that for an additional paragon point. I’ve largely been focused on finishing out my renown in the last few zones of the game and finished up Dry Steppes and have now moved on to my final zone of Kehjistan. One of the things that I have been mulling over in my brain is how I would have approached this game differently. For those of you who might not know, I’m one of the admins on the Mastodon/Fediverse server called Gamepad.Club which serves as a gaming-focused social media hub.

While I slept one of my good friends and fellow gamepadders posted a plea for suggestions. I figured I would answer this plea in the form of my morning blog post. Side note… this is the first time I have seen the term Gamepadders in reference to the denizens of Gamepad.club and I think I like it… and am just going to roll with it. Victor got plenty of responses from the larger mastodon community, but I figured I would still outline how I would approach the game knowing what I know now. Of note… I was in MANY phases of Diablo IV testing including several closed phases and a number of public phases. The game changed drastically each time I attempted to sit down and play it. So the truth is I went into the game expecting to play one ability that had been good in the early phases of testing… that was apparently nerfed into the ground.

Follow the Meta

I feel like you first have to ask yourself a simple question. Is the core of my enjoyment of the ARPG experience based on making my own builds? If the answer is yes, then skip this entirely. I am pretty sure you can half-ass your way through the campaign with any build you choose. I made it through the campaign on my heavily nerfed Upheaval build, though I struggled when it came to defeating the first capstone dungeon. Essentially Diablo IV is very poorly balanced right now and not every build is viable when it comes to harder content. If you want the easiest possible experience I would suggest going over to Maxroll.gg and looking at their build guides. They have both leveling builds and end-game builds, and I would choose one of the “in the meta” builds currently that has one of each. That way as you level you get used to the abilities that you will ultimately end up with at the end-game. Icy Veins also has a good build section but I personally like the layout of Maxroll a bit better.

Start on World Tier 1

There are no tangible benefits to playing the game on “Veteran” difficulty. While the placard says that you will get more experience and more loot… you will also take so much more time killing mobs that this benefit becomes entirely negated. Your goal is ultimately to get to World Tier 3 as fast as possible, and as a result, the early game is just an obstacle in your way. There is no point in trying to be a billy badass and insist on World Tier 2. You are only setting yourself up for frustration in the end. If difficult content is your kink, then, by all means, ignore this advice.

Focus on the Main Story Content

Since content scales with you… the later in the game you attempt something the harder it is going to be. As such it is my suggestion that on your first playthrough of the game, you just focus on the main story content. This will be marked in Yellow in your quest log, and you can progress through the game without touching any other content. While you are doing this I suggest you take the time to go ahead and unlock any waypoints you find as you will need these later. Upon completing the main quest you unlock the Tree of Whispers which will give you some additional benefits as you complete the rest of the content in the game. Ultimately you are going to want to do every single side quest available at some point. My personal preference is to unlock the end-game and then roam around doing side content then. If you want a longer journey that will also increase in difficulty as you go, then you can, of course, do side content as you are doing the main content.

Extract Near Perfect Aspects

After finishing the prologue of the game, you will unlock the occultist which allows you to imprint aspects on rare items to turn them into legendaries, and to extract aspects from any legendary drops you might get but no longer need. First things first we are going to need to enable some of the advanced options so go into settings and toggle on the following:

  • Options > Gameplay
    • Advanced Tooltip Compare
    • Advanced Tooltip Information

This is going to tell you how good of a roll a given item is. For example, if you look at the aspect I am highlighting above the ability has a range of 20-30% and the item that I found has a near-perfect roll of 29%. This is very worth holding onto and saving for when you need it on your end-game gear. My suggestion is to go ahead and extract any Legendary item that is at least a roll that is 50% of the maximum and most definitely anything that is perfect or near perfect. Everything else should be salvaged as you are going to need those materials later.

Salvage Everything

There are a lot of guides that I have seen that suggest salvaging gear up until you hit level 50. It is my personal suggestion that you never stop salvaging gear. You are going to reach a point where you have more gold coming in than you need, and are going to still be desperate for materials. I switched to selling everything when I finished the campaign and given how often you need to change gear… found myself completely out of several basic materials. Gold will come over time especially as you find Greed Shrines… but you will never stop needing raw materials at least until you have finished out a set of maxed-out ancestral gear.

Buy Whispering Keys

Obols are the currency for doing events in Diablo IV, and much like Blood Shards from Diablo III, you are limited in how many you can carry at a time. Spending them at the Purveyor of Curiosities is a way to gamble on getting legendary items… but the occurrence of legendary drops seems to be skewed by your level. As such spending Obols on gear early on is a bad use of resources. What I would instead do is buy Whispering Keys which are used to unlock the Silent Chests that you find out in the world. You can hold onto these en masse and then use them later on to get a gear boost when needed as you will likely be finding a lot of these Silent Chests in your journey. So it is my suggestion that any time you have a stack of Obols gathered, you spend it down buying these keys and then holding onto them for later.

Unlock World Tier III

Upon finishing the campaign your next core goal is going to be to unlock World Tier III. This means you need to defeat the Cathedral of Light Capstone Dungeon. Unlike the rest of the world, this dungeon is capped at level 50 but can be completed earlier than that if your build is strong. This is ultimately why you want to be following the meta builds as most of them can complete this dungeon somewhere around level 40-45 without much issue. Even if you do not want to start playing on World Tier III, this is gating your access to the last two tiers of renown which is effectively what you are wanting to unlock as quickly as possible. World Tier III also unlocks Helltide Zones and makes it so that Nightmare Dungeon Sigils drop more often as well as granting you access to the Sacred tier of gear. Sacred gear is a massive damage and survival boost and essentially makes all gear before that point obsolete unless you simply have to have a given legendary aspect. Now this goal might take you a bit to accomplish but I am placing it here to outline its importance.

Tree of Whispers

Defeating the Campaign is going to unlock access to the Tree of Whispers. Now this is not an activity that I think you should ever really focus on, but just something to be aware of as you are doing other activities in the world. If you have the opportunity to collect Grim Favors by doing something that aligns with an activity you are already doing, it is just a bonus. Every so often you will fill the bar and get a free box of loot from the tree. Again this should not be your core focus, but just something to be aware of as you do the next few things.

Collect Altars of Lilith

Scattered throughout the world are the Altars of Lilith which are statues that glow slightly red until you have collected them. The campaign make sure you find a few of these along the way, but after you beat the campaign one of your first goals should be making sure you collect all of them. Once they have been collected on a single character, all of your characters from that point forward get the benefit of them. Since they have to be done on a single character though, you might as well devote the time to collecting all 160 of them early on while you are still working on leveling. Yes, this is tedious busywork, but the stat boost that you gain for them will be extremely important when you are trying to unlock abilities that have stat requirements on the paragon boards. I personally found the maps that Polygon created the easiest to follow as they have them numbered and also have zoomed-in images of each location.

You can of course do these while you are completing the campaign if you really keep your eye out for any areas of the map that snake off into a little alcove. There is definitely a pattern to the placement of these statues that you might pick up on along the way.

Max Out Zone Renown

This is the step that I am actively working on if you were curious. As you are completing the campaign you will be capped at a maximum of rank three renown with each region. It is important that you work up your renown because getting every zone to rank three will net your character an extra 10 skill points and getting them all to rank five will give you an extra 20 paragon points. Both of these are significant and like the Lilith Statues, you need to do this on one character before it applies to all of your characters. This will essentially require you to complete all of those blue quests and unlock most of the dungeons in order to hit rank five. I’ve personally completed four of the five regions and am now working on Kehjistan, the area that I spent the least amount of time in so far.

Play The Game Finally

Congratz! You’ve graduated from the busywork phase of Diablo IV. Now you can just do whatever suits your fancy. You could do a bunch of normal dungeons in order to level most efficiently… or you could hit up the Helltide zone every time it is available for fun mob density and loot boxes. You could also bip around the map doing tasks for the Tree of Whispers or dive into progressing your Nightmare Dungeons and with that leveling your glyphs. Personally, I kind of do a mix of all of the above because that seems to be the most enjoyable. I’ve neglected Nightmare Dungeons a bit so far but I need to focus on them soon. I also need to give an attempt or two at trying to unlock World Tier IV now that I have hit level 60. The last capstone dungeon is hard-scaled at level 70, but I am curious if I can finish it early.

There are some aspects of Diablo IV that I really enjoy, more specifically I like the way the world feels and fits together. There are other aspects of Diablo IV that drive me insane and half convince me to stop playing entirely. I talked about a lot of this in a video yesterday, but most of them can be summed up under the banner of being grossly inefficient and wasteful of my time. So much of the ARPG experience to me is about optimization and the last thing I care about is immersion. Immersion only really holds weight until you have finished the campaign, then you want efficient grinds and in this game nothing is efficient. However since my friend wanted advice, this morning is my attempt at outlining how I would approach the game knowing what I know now. You can of course ignore ALL of this and just fumble your way through the game. Diablo IV is maybe an experience best fumbled through the first time because it will allow you to appreciate the world crafting a bit more. When you attempt to play it efficiently… that is when the wheels fall off.

So maybe… just ignore everything that I just said and approach this game however seems best to you at the time. The shortcomings will make themselves very evident eventually… and when that happens feel free to pop back over here for some advice.