gameplay

Zappy Zap Zap

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Morning Folks! Yesterday I wrapped up my third character of “Bel League” and this is ultimately the one I originally planned as my “first alt”. Essentially, I wanted a low-pressure map blaster that I knew I could make work on minimal or easily obtained gear. Essentially the idea is to go Champion for survival and Lightning Arrow for ease of getting off the ground. I am more or less following the template of Belgladius, with some items that I used in the original Raider version of the build that was my Ancestor league starter. Primarily the build uses Shadows and Dust for rampage and unholy might as well as some additional Mana Leech, and Perseverance to turn my permanent fortify stacks into permanent Onslaught as well as a bit of Attack Damage since I am stacking both Armor and Evasion. In this specific build I am throwing in a Poised Prism because it is just a generically good quiver with some resists on it and The Taming which similarly fixes some resists and offers up a bit of elemental damage.

The biggest challenge that I find myself in currently is getting enough levels to finish out my tree and I am one level away from 78 which will allow me to actually equip the belt. I also need to sort out my Pantheon and at a minimum get the freeze immunity. One of the huge benefits of a character like this is that it slides into maps extremely easily. I’ve been grinding tier 5 maps to get some levels and am about to transition up into yellow maps. By the time I am in my 90s I should be ripping through Red maps without much issue and hopefully running red/blue altars for drops. Between now and then I really need to find myself a new bow because while I found a lucky six link along the way 566 dps will not cut it for long. Realistically I need something more in the range of 800-900 to really rip through the t16 maps.

I also probably need to find some better gear, because right now after raiding my vault… I am in an “aggressively fine” state. When I ding 78 I will be able to equip Perseverance, and then with a little harvest crafting, I should be able to balance out my resistances. This will still leave me far in the red as far as Chaos goes, but pending I am careful with map modifiers that should not really impact me heavily even in red maps. I would really like to see my armor and resistances a little bit higher, somewhere in the range of 20k so I will need to be on the lookout for good replacements to slot in. If I find two amazing rings, I might be able to keep the resists while also pouring on some chaos. My amulet is also pretty crappy but I am mostly using it to get some attributes I need to equip other items. If you are curious here is a POB I dumped this morning with the current state of my gear.

None of this really matters though because this is what it looks like to play this build… admittedly with a MTX that makes the Lightning Arrow a bit more vibrant. The biggest challenge is how much I need that Mana Leech because there will be times when I run out of mana while mapping and have to wait for the Leech to catch up. In theory, I should have -7 mana on my Amulet and Rings to make this build feel a bit more stable. It works well enough while you are rolling but definitely suffers from the “never stop killing” problem because when there are lulls in the density I start to bottom out my reserves. While I enjoy Boneshatter quite a bit and it feels good to map on it… this is really the gameplay I want when I just want to delete a bunch of surplus maps for goodies. I need to finish out the fourth lab at some point today, but I don’t figure I will have any issues with it.

So with Lightning Arrow coming online, I am very likely to fall into the old familiar pattern of zipping through maps quickly to gain sulphite and then spending that sulphite while delving on the Boneshatter Juggernaut. For the past several leagues I have preferred to have some sort of fast mapper character and then a delve character and alternate back and forth between the two. I am hoping to get my Lightning Arrow character at least to around 95. I am doubting that I will make the pivot into magic find like I did last league, but If I just happen into a couple of extremely well-rolled Ventor rings and a very well-rolled Goldwyrm I might alter those plans. I mostly hope to be able to juice the maps through the league mechanic and see what all I can get doing that and maybe blending in some delirium.

Anyways! I am off to get ready and go do some shopping. I hope you are all having a great week as we slide forward towards Christmas. I am technically “off” now but I had to pop in and deal with some work this morning. I am looking forward to the long break and finishing my fiftieth book of the year and hopefully having a bit of a much needed mental reset.

Fourth Day of Affliction

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Hey Folks! Apologies for the bit of a break that I took towards the tail end of last week. I have to admit it was a bit of a shit week, and some things happened at work that have pushed my morale into about the tenth-floor sub-basement. However, starting on Friday I mostly poured all of my attention into the launch of the Path of Exile Affliction league and all of the shenanigans that come along with that. This league is fairly unique in that it is the first time we are doing a private league giving us a semi-solo-self-found style playstyle as we either have to acquire something ourselves or it has to come from one of the other folks playing in the league. I have never really done a true SSF playstyle other than the random events that take place… I admit it is a bit weird not having access to the trade economy to fix my mistakes. I think I will be able to arrive at the same place as a normal league, but it will just take much longer.

There are a bunch of interesting things that come with playing a private league… not the least of which is the fact that we seemed to be immune to the game-crashing bugs that most of the other players experienced while going into a town. Additionally, we have our own copy of the ladder, so unfortunately I spent most of the weekend spamming the guild as I entered new zones. I was leading the “level race” until I went to bed Friday night, and then for a while, Kodra leapfrogged me until I could catch up Saturday morning. At this point, I think I have pulled far enough ahead that I will be here for a while at least until I hit level 95 and things start to slow down significantly. We also have our own copy of the trade website, which has allowed me to post a bunch of interesting things I find in dump tabs that I have priced for 1 Scroll of Wisdom instead of constantly clogging the guild bank.

As far as my league starter goes… I am largely enjoying myself. Since Affliction League essentially killed Righteous Fire, I had it suggested to me that I check out Boneshatter Juggernaut instead. That it should in theory be a similar playstyle and in large part,` I would agree. Instead of shield charging around and burning things up with my fire aura and then dropping fire traps when I encounter anything harder… the equivalent for Boneshatter is leap slamming and tapping my attack watching entire packs explode… and then dropping totems when I encounter anything that takes a bit. The biggest challenge is that I had three leagues to learn what Righteous Fire could and could not take… and I am having to rapidly reach a point of understanding what I can take and what I need to perform evasive maneuvers to avoid.

I did the thing that I often do this morning and recorded some gameplay of doing a Tier 8 map. You can see what I call the “Spiral of Death” take place as I stand in Voll’s slam and then can’t quite recover. In theory, I should leap out to safety to allow my recovery to solve my problems. My instinct from Righteous Fire is to just pop a potion and muscle through it, but Boneshatter seems to need some “quiet time” as I bounce away from the fight, let my life stabilize, and then leap back into the battle. It might even be a scenario where stopping attacking for a second might have given me enough time to bounce back from the slam. Essentially I am in this phase of trying to learn how to pilot this new ship when I had multiple hundreds of hours of experience with the previous one.

I have some fairly solid defensive layers, but I am using the crutch that is Purity of Elements to resolve my resistances. That will change as I craft better gear, but I need either an influx of essences, harvest juice, fossils, or just sheer dumb luck to pull myself out of that hole. Where I am currently is that I have a good deal of armor, decent enough regen especially when combined with my boneshatter recovery, and fairly decent damage. What I need the most at the moment however is a better axe, and I have been pouring yellow harvest juice into trying to craft one. At some point, I will have gathered up enough fossils to hopefully be able to at least attempt a 600 Physical DPS axe. Again this would be a trivial problem to solve if I had access to the trade economy, but instead, I have to sort this all out myself. As such I am currently running nothing higher than a four-link.

This is where I am progress-wise for three days. Essentially by the time we were recording the podcast on Saturday night, I was progressing my Atlas and mapping at the end of day two. On day three I focused on knocking out more maps and starting to progress my Delve seriously. While I ran out of sulphite, I was sitting just shy of depth 100, which is my target farming depth for the time being. My goal is to live in that 100-150 range and start hunting out Delve cities. Most of my atlas strategy has been focused on getting delve online, but now I am pivoting a bit into Harvest for crafting gear once I get some better bases. Essence spamming would also be an option, but since I am not playing a “map blaster” I can’t say that Essences are the best option. I mean I can take down Essence monsters extremely well, but I am not sure I can run enough maps efficiently to make it worth my time.

All told I am pretty damned happy with where I am gear-wise and progress-wise for the beginning of the fourth day. Unfortunately, I seem to be ignoring the league mechanic. Doing it just seems to make the maps way less predictable. For farming purposes, I have been going back to the campaign and running Desecrated Chamber. Normally league mechanics stop spawning when a zone is 10 levels under your current level, but because of the way that the forest works… the portal still exists even when a zone stops rewarding experience. So you can pop over into a campaign mission, run the forest, and then reset the zone giving you a new forest. I plan on doing this a bit today in order to complete my “kill all the treants” mission and get the next set of ascendancy points.

Since I am melee and hit-based… I ended up going with Warden of the Magi and Tinctures. While I had some fun shouting at corpses for loot… having a utility flask that I can change up seems to be more useful. I cannot reasonably work Culling Strike into my build as it stands, but having access to it at the cost of giving up a flask seems like something I can live with. I am not sure what all can roll on the Oakbranch Tincture but I figure I will keep perfecting this one as I go. For now, the one I have works pretty well for my purposes. I might switch over to Wildwood Primalist at some point if I get enough charms to make something interesting happen. The least interesting of the three seems to be Warlock of the Mists but that is probably because I am not using spectres currently.

All in all, though I am pretty damned happy with where I am sitting currently in a semi-SSF environment. I am hoping some other options will begin to come online as more folks get up to better content. For the moment Kodra and I are leading the Vanguard which means we are not really getting to benefit from having access to other players finding interesting things. The highlight of my weekend though was getting a six-link bow that then allowed Ace to build into that for their character or finding the weapon that Kodra was looking for that became build-defining. At some point, I hope to find a better axe and maybe a viable six-link chest. If not… I still seem to be shockingly viable for nothing more than four-links.

Are you playing Affliction league? How has your league start gone? Drop me a line below.

Diablo IV Needs an Endgame

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Well, friends… I think I am starting to wind down Diablo IV Season 2. I’ve hit level 73 and swapped out all of my gear… and while mechanically the game is still enjoyable there isn’t a lot of reason to keep grinding for 100. This morning’s post is going to seem negative, and to some extent, it will be… but before I go down that path let’s just take a moment to acknowledge that I had a heck of a lot of fun. According to the unofficial D4 Armory, at the time of writing this post, I have had around 38 hours worth of enjoyment out of this season. This has been nothing short of a remarkable turnaround in the trajectory of this game and I actually look forward to popping back in for Season 3. The team did a great job of picking up a completely derailed game and getting it back on the tracks.

To say that Diablo IV has no endgame is a bit disingenuous. However, I can fully state that it does not have an endgame that I feel is worth grinding for. Nightmare Dungeons are not good and are the sort of byproduct that you end up with when someone attempts to transplant Mythic Plus from World of Warcraft into an Action RPG. It just does not feel good and compounds the problems with the Dungeon system as a whole, only further serving to suck any remaining joy from them by adding mechanics that make them even less enjoyable. Mechanics like Drifting Shadows, Blood Blisters, and Lightning Storm are not difficult but are the definition of something that sounds good on paper but feels completely “unfun” when you experience them in practice.

The Blood Harvest zones and the recent changes to Legion prove that the team can design content that feels good to complete, so it gives me hope that at some point there might be something enjoyable to do once you have hit World Tier IV and sorted out your gear. Right now getting an arbitrary number to 100 doesn’t feel like good enough motivation to keep going when I am out of meaningful goals. I am not saying I will stop playing the game entirely, I might grind out some more of the battle pass but for the moment… a lot of the joy and focus are gone for me. When I completed the last keystone dungeon and started working on World Tier IV, it felt like I arrived at the top floor. I’ve never been a massive completionist and I am largely unmotivated by trying to get a “platinum” trophy in every game.

I am hoping that they can rework dungeons completely at some point because the spackle that they applied with this patch helped them out… but I am not sure there is enough good there to salvage without a top-down redesign. The joy of an ARPG is reaching a flow state as you tear through packs of monsters while getting the occasional dopamine hit of a loot explosion. Dungeons break this flow up constantly by having to focus on some arbitrary objective rather than steamrolling your way to the boss and breaking open the loot pinata. This is made worse by the Nightmare Dungeon mechanics that serve to slow you down further. The dungeon art is top-notch, which I think is why they have been so hesitant to trash the system completely. I am not sure how it can be saved without simply removing ALL objective-focused gameplay.

Another system that needs completely redone is the Helltide. The Blood Harvest “Bloodtide” zones have proven to be a massively superior gameplay experience. Going forward they should really make Helltides work exactly like the Bloodtide where there are a few objectives that spawn in… no loss of embers on death… and available at all times with them rotating between locations every hour. The team has shown us that they understand what went wrong with the Helltide, and we will always lament the “Bloodtide” zones as a far better experience. I’ve been to the Helltide a few times and there are never any other players out there… but every time I do the green Blood Harvest zones they are fairly packed. This has to be something reflected in the total numbers on the backend and should provide some interesting metrics that hopefully they can track.

The other system that I would love to see burned down and rebuilt is the Paragon system. It is just not interesting. While the Path of Exile passive tree is lamented as being far too obtuse for the average player, I also feel like I am only ever one or two points away from some interesting choices that often reframe what I am doing with my build. Most of the Paragon tree is filled with boring stat nodes that you have to take in order to make the fun nodes on the tree not actively suck. Even the “fun” nodes don’t really modify how my character plays. Truthfully that is a larger problem both with the design of Legendary items and Paragon points, in that nothing I am doing seems to make significant changes to the way I am approaching my build. I’m playing Upheaval and there is a similar ability in Last Epoch but in the talent tree associated with that ability I can configure it to fire off when I leap slam or turn it into a self-firing totem… or apply buffs to my minions. None of that sort of freedom of movement within a single ability exists in Diablo IV, which honestly feels like a step backward from even Diablo III.

So I realize that this morning’s post has been me rattling off a litany of problems than the game has. That is only because I now care about the game. I actually feel for the first time that there is a game here worth trying to save. I don’t want Diablo IV to die in infamy… I want it to have a No Man’s Sky style comeback story and keep proving to players that it is putting in the hard work to bring itself back from the brink of oblivion. There is a good game here and there are some strong fundamentals now. That is a shocking change from the burning dumpster fire of a game that I felt existed at launch. My concern now is that most of what I am interacting with are seasonal mechanics that are very likely to go away in January.

What we need are some long-tailed progression systems that will keep the player coming back even after they have capped a character out. Path of Exile does this through the varied forms of endgame content harvested from their version of seasons called “Leagues” and the Atlas of Worlds which allows you to tailor your endgame experience to focus on exactly the kind of content that you want to spend time experiencing. The Blood Harvest while cool, doesn’t really fit a pattern of being content that can remain evergreen and neither does the Malignant Hearts. Diablo IV is going to start needing to design content expansions that can stick around for longer than a three-month period because it needs to keep fleshing out what it means to reach the endgame.

Diablo IV is in a state where it can provide one really fun week of gameplay, but it needs to give us a reason to keep coming back for more. Granted a more casual player will likely be able to stretch that week into a month… but no matter your pace you are going to reach a point where the path forward just isn’t really worth walking down. I have a glimmer of hope though for what the future might bring a year or two from now. So if anyone on the team happens to read this… you’ve already beat my expectations. I thought the game was dead in the water and was saddled with a generally “unfun” game design. You’ve had a massive turn around and I applaud all of the hard work. There are still a lot of difficult choices ahead of you, which are going to mean cutting some content that just isn’t working or at least drastically modifying it. I hope the company as a whole gives you the time to turn this game around completely because I feel like at some point Diablo IV can be a massive success story.

Season of Blood Feels Good

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Morning Folks! I am still fairly shocked to be able to say that the Season of Blood in Diablo IV seems good. As I near the point where I will do the capstone dungeon that allows me access to World Tier III, I have to say that my build is holding solid. Overpower still feels great, but I am uncertain how much of that is the core build and how much is how good the assorted vampiric powers feel. This brings up a whole other series of concerns about Blizzard and their dependence on borrowed power systems in World of Warcraft… and now seemingly Diablo IV… but that can be a concern for another season. For now, the game feels great, which is a wild turnaround from my previous feelings about the game.

Last night I recorded a quick and dirty video of some gameplay in the Blood Harvest area. I also talked a bit about some of the vampire powers and showed off some gameplay of what my Barbarian looks like killing things. I have to say that more than anything it is this seasonal mechanic that is making the game feel good. Previously the open world largely felt pointless apart from the Helltide Events, and now I feel like I have a reason to do the thing that I enjoyed the most… which was roaming around aimlessly and killing things. Blood Harvest areas are exceptionally rewarding both in experience and loot and gave me the thing I was missing in this game… aka a default thing to log in and do. No matter how hard I tried I just did not like Nightmare Dungeons. They felt weird and forced and too rigidly structured. Popping into a zone and hopping back and forth between mini-events while killing copious amounts of Vampires is my jam.

All of that said, while I have not reached Nightmare dungeons… the few normal dungeons that I have run to unlock legendary powers have felt much improved. I will essentially have to relearn the pathing, but it does feel like you have to go in the wrong direction far less often and that most of the objectives that you need to collect and take back to a location are closer to the destinations. The Dungeons however continue to feel fairly boring and tedious, and I do worry a bit that I am going to be forced into them in order to level up my paragon glyphs once I hit level 50. The Blood Harvest area feels so fresh and exciting… that the old dungeon design while improved, still feels like a massive step backward. Personally, I still feel like the dungeons need to be taken back to the drawing board. I would love to see all objectives removed and implement some sort of clear percentage system that spawns a boss similar to Nephelem Rifts from Diablo III.

One of the biggest changes for me personally is how much better town and settlement layouts feel. Firstly there are SO MANY more stashes available in the game, and you are rarely far away from one. Take this overhead map of Kyovashad, where there used to be a single stash in the Inn with your Wardrobe, now there is one at the Enchanter, Jeweler, and Smithy giving you rapid access no matter what task you are needing to complete. I would still rather have seen more compact layouts that put everything within a few steps of each other, but for that, we have the Tree of Whispers that now has an Enchanter. If they swapped the Jewelry merchant for an actual Jewel Crafting vendor… that “town” would be perfection because you could do everything that you might need to do in a single location.

However in the “weird hill to die on” department, Blizzard still seems to be pushing the RealID in spite of having long disabled it in my account settings within Battle.net. What this means is that after the Season 2 patch, if you do not go into your settings and enable one of the “Streamer Mode” options you are going to end up doxxing yourself if you happen to take a screenshot with your inventory open. All of the options around this are awful because this originally defaulted to “Character Name (Firstname Lastname)” and with streamer mode on… instead of getting just my character name, I get random character names each time I log into the game. Why this exists on this screen is beyond me and why someone might want to see their RealID in addition to their character name is beyond me. Does anyone use RealID by choice?

All things considered, though I am enjoying myself and I didn’t really think that was possible. I think my biggest frustration is… had the game launched in this state I think it might have been a game of the year candidate. Now however it is probably going to take a lot to get some players to return. I know my friend Cyl for example pretty much wrote the game off, and has moved on to other games and is probably unlikely to pop back in and give it a second chance. This is the challenge with games that launch in a rough state, you never really get that second chance to amend those first impressions. New World is a prime example of this, and it has more or less improved everything that was wrong with that game at launch… but will never again see the numbers it did in those first few weeks. It is going to take a lot of work to remediate the meme of “D4 Bad”.