Good Morning Friends! This is going to be a bit of a mixed-topic post, and we are starting off with my chonky boi above. If you are an existing Guild Wars 2 player or have been considering starting it with Steam… then maybe you should log in and collect the item that is being given away currently. Essentially mount skins are almost always microtransactions found on the gem store. There are essentially three varieties: a specific skin on sale for a limited time, a scroll that gives you a random skin from several available on that scroll, and a scroll that allows you to select a mount of your choice. The last one tends to be the most expensive and I believe is somewhere in the neighborhood of $16-20.
What you are getting as part of the 10-year anniversary is a scroll that essentially lets you select a mount skin from many different pools of skins. This includes skins that are part of other bundle packs, as well as some that I have only ever seen sold individually. It was a hard choice for me but I have wanted a Warclaw skin for a while, and those seem to have a much slower rotation than other options. While the base warclaw probably looks more Battlecat-like, you can’t dye the actual tiger portion. So instead I went with this chonky unmasked sabertooth tiger and then dyed him up to look like a proper Battlecat. Sure I will stick out like a sore thumb on the WvW battlefield but it will make me happy doing so.
I spent most of last night swapping map runs with Ace in Path of Exile and I have to say… grouping is the biggest problem I have with that game. Everything about the process feels bad. Firstly you have the contra code problem, and for those who did not experience this, here comes an explanation. Back in the day you could input the Konami code (Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, Start) and it would give you 30 lives or if you were in two-player mode, you got 30 lives per player. However, when one player ran out of their allotted lives, it started bleeding lives from the other player so collectively you had a pool of 60 lives. When you open a map in Path of Exile it spawns six portals, each portal can only transport a single player… so the more players you have the fewer chances you have of getting through a map. It feels really freaking bad to be the person who dies on a map and has to consume another portal, and there is no mechanic for resurrecting a player.
On top of this, there is the constant frustration of loot. Unlike Diablo 3 or many modern ARPGs, Path of Exile has a single shared loot pool and there seems to be no rhyme or reason as to which items it flags for which players. We’ve watched a lockbox open and every single item is flagged for one player. We’ve seen the same item flagged to be lootable by BOTH players… even though we were running with “permanent allocation” turned on in the group settings. Then there are weird things like trying to pick up an item and not having inventory space seems to count it was looting it… then dropping it on the ground flagging that item as free for all looting. It just feels bad that you are constantly on the verge of ninja looting something because it is never really clear what belongs to you. There are other problems like “fog of war” exploration not being shared… that all lead to Path of Exile just being a game that feels bad to play with friends.
Contrast that with Diablo 3 which has always felt amazing to play with friends. It is super easy to drag someone along with you and the catch-up mechanics serve to quickly lower the gap in power. I mean the game also has its own problems, I love the ability to just trade any item to friends in Path of Exile whether or not they happened to be there at the time it dropped. I feel like I keep finding myself in a situation of really enjoying Path of Exile, but it is nowhere near the group dynamic replacement game that I was hoping it would be. Diablo 3 sadly still sits at the top of that heap and has yet to be dethroned, even though I keep desperately looking for a replacement. After needing a break from the frenzy of running maps together last night, I swapped over to D3 when I went downstairs and finished out the haedrig’s gift portion of my seasonal journey.
For anyone who has never really done the “proper” season start routine, the above video from Raxx outlines the process. Essentially you complete a challenge rift and then attempt to use the materials that you get through that process… to get some items that will give you a bit of a boost while leveling. This season I stuck out big time. I did my challenge rift on Sunday and then failed to hit anything useful. I stuck out completely on gambling and got zero legendaries, and then my upgraded weapon didn’t land on anything useful either. Still, I managed to level fast enough over the course of two days and then began my season’s journey properly. By the time I dinged 70 I had completed all of the achievements required to get my four-piece set.
At this point, I had only four set pieces and nothing else useful. I had managed to pull a set of Nemesis Bracers which I immediately threw on my Templar. I’ve been trained to feel like I need specific gear items and have used them as a crutch, so instead of going after some of the missing achievements directly, I did a round of bounties, as I would need the jewelry patterns contained in the bags in order to complete one of the achievements. My hope was that through this process I would ultimately get some gear… and I poured all of my deaths breath that I got into upgrading mighty weapons in the hope of getting an Ambo’s Pride. However I finished my round of bounties and was in no better state than I started, and I was shocked at just how easy it was for me to complete a level 20 Greater Rift.
Basically, I had this moment where I realized… that I am much better at Diablo III than I used to be. I mean that is to be expected considering just how many hours I have played this game over the last several years, but it never really sunk in until last night. Early on when I did the seasonal grind, I would have floundered on a 4 piece set trying to get my 6-piece, but instead I made the best of what I had available to me and cobbled together a custom load out of abilities that would accentuate my strengths. Essentially I used Leap and Whirlwind to gather up packs of mobs and then Rend to do the killing, and managed to finish the Rift with eight minutes to spare. I hope maybe one day I can have this same moment with Path of Exile because I still feel completely overwhelmed most of the time I am playing it.
I am hoping beyond hope that either Diablo 4 or Path of Exile 2 ends up being the best of both worlds. What I want is a game with some of the nuance and complexity of Path of Exile, but the fun drop-in non-punitive gameplay of Diablo III. After the debacle that has been the Lake of Kalandra league, I am starting to lose hope that we are going to find that from Grinding Gear Games. I think there are some aspects of “the vision” that are directly at odds with what I consider to be the optimal grouping experience. Maybe the Microsoft buyout of Blizzard will go through… cause some significant changes in the structure of that company and once again make me feel okay about supporting their games. I am hoping that Diablo IV ends up being a great game, in spite of the conditions it was developed under. Even though they have come out with public statements to the contrary… the experience we all had with Diablo Immortal still gives me some significant concerns about what we will get.