Last night I wound up playing Diablo IV again. I am not really certain how much longer I will be lingering in this game, but I realized after yesterday’s post how close I was to finishing the 90 levels of the Battle Pass system. For reference, I dinged 80 this morning while I was in the game taking some screenshots, and dinged 90 on the Battle Pass around the time I hit 79, so it is easily done on a single character without partaking of the nonsense “accelerated” version. This honestly makes me feel much better about the battle pass as a whole because it seems significantly less grindy than what I experienced with Destiny 2. As far as the seasonal achievements… it is really asking me to get a character through all of the end-game boss fights, and if I actually stick around to grind out the next 20 levels… I might care about those.
While I greatly enjoy Legions and the “Bloodtide” events, I have reached a point in progression where I only really care about the World Bosses. The World Bosses can drop item level 925 gear, and so far I have picked up six pieces in total with a few spares sitting in the bank. No event other than the World Boss seems to be capable of dropping gear that high level, or at least I have not ground up Nightmare Dungeons to the point where they can given that I am around the level 21-25 range with them currently. Legions, Bloodtide, and Helltide all seem incapable of dropping anything decent yet so that puts me in the awkward position of not really caring about much loot that is dropping save for hunting for the handful of legendary affixes that I care about and lining up some spare aspects to extract.
Mechanically the game is still quite fun, but I am reaching the point where I am grinding for the sake of grinding. Otherwise, I can just keep the D4Armory Events page up and pop in right before a World Boss spawn. I ran a handful more Nightmare Dungeons and they are sort of in the “aggressively fine” state where I am getting enough map drops that I can salvage the ones with the affixes that I don’t care for, and then craft more of hopefully the ones that I don’t mind too much. I know I complained the other day about Drifting Shadows… but honestly, that is one of the better options that does not seem to impede too much on the fun of romping through the dungeon. I still do not think the state of dungeons in general is good, but it is at least something to do and I should probably spend more time leveling my glyphs.
Path of Exile released a trailer and some general announcement notes about the November events that will be taking place starting next Friday. There is no Endless Delve as folks had thought, and instead, the first event is a return of the Krangled league… where all of the passive tree and ascendancy nodes are jumbled making it almost impossible to build a viable character. This is going to get a hard pass from me, but the next one is a revisiting of the league mechanics from Sentinel and Kalandra… both of which I actually enjoyed so I am probably going to try league starting an RF Chieftain during this event. Lastly is a league called Shifting Stones where every map will have a super juiced version of the Atlas passives applied to it, and what each map gives you will shift every 15 minutes. If I am feeling up to it I might throw together something quickly just to play with that. If you get a character to at least level 50 in two of the three events, you will get a loot box… which legitimately is not that big of a reward but at least something.
I am legitimately hoping that the Sentinel/Kalandra league means that we might see a revisiting of these two mechanics in Standard with 3.23. I always thought that the Kalandra mechanic specifically was very interesting, but just happened to land at a time when the sandbox state of the game was not great. Had it released in place of say Crucible, when the balance of the league was very strong… I think it would have been significantly better received. It has a really bad taste in most players’ mouths because the game itself was in a bad state at that moment, so maybe this event will give it a bit of a redemption arc. Players have also been begging for Sentinel’s recombinator system to go standard for a while. If nothing else it will be an interesting week to get in and revisit all of this for seven days.
Lastly, I wrapped up The Peripheral by William Gibson last night and enjoyed it enough to start the second part of the unfinished “Jackpot Trilogy” immediately following. I’ve been a fan of Gibson since first reading Neuromancer, but I got out of the habit of rabidly consuming everything he released. I caught part of The Peripheral series on Amazon and liked it quite a bit, which prompted me to try out the novel given that the series was not picked up for additional seasons. All in all, it was a good novel with memorable characters, but maybe not the high point of my year so far. I am going to at least make my way through the second novel and then be sitting and waiting for the release of the third.