Good Morning Folks! I railed on Diablo IV Vessel of Hatred both in Friday’s blog post and during the podcast on Saturday. So you are probably thinking, Bel… why in the hell are you still playing this game? Truth be told while they completely botched the story in my estimation, the game itself from a mechanical standpoint is in a pretty great state. The new class is extremely fun, and while I might keep referring to it by the pejorative of “Green Monk” I am having a ton of fun playing it. I thought this morning I should probably spend a bit of time talking about the good parts of the game. One of the traps of being a blogger and honestly an internet denizen in general… is that it is way easier to talk about the bad things when you are frustrated than it is to stop yourself from having fun long enough to share the fun bits with others.
One of the key aspects of the Diablo franchise in general, is that it is really fun to play with your friends. Path of Exile oftentimes makes it a liability to have other players on the same map as you, and you feel it when someone screws up and eats a portal. Diablo on the other hand has generally been way more forgiving of other players with the ability since Diablo 3 to resurrect folks when they drop without any real penalty towards the overall progress of the encounter. This weekend I spent a lot of time with my friend Ace and we ran through a good deal of the content types. Thing is… there was never a moment where it felt bad to have another person along for the ride. In fact it always felt like having more people was a force multiplier to both the loot gained and the fun that we were having.
We got together and did all three wings of the new “raid” encounter, and while there were things I would change about the overall format I still had a lot of fun figuring out the mechanics. Sunday afternoon we got together and chained a bunch of bosses on Torment II and the sheer amount of loot that we got as a result was staggering. Basically, each time we would summon a boss, using the materials that one of us had spent time collecting, the other person would get their own copy of randomized loot as well. So that means from this point forward I will not be spending any resources to summon anything on my own because it is just too valuable to do it as a group. I largely view this as a positive because it is way more efficient and also gives me a strong reason to make time to hang out with a friend.
The other big positive of where we are currently in Vessel of Hatred is that there is a huge variety of activities. Some of these feel less rewarding than others, but they still give you a variety of activities that you can do. When the game launched you essentially had World Bosses, Nightmare Dungeons, a scuffed version of Helltide compared to the current version, and the ability to take on Lilith. Here are some of the content types that just feel amazing, either to run alone or with friends.
- The Pit – Really fun and way more linear version of Greater Rifts from Diablo III. You essentially MUST run this content to level up your Glyphs as they removed that functionality from Nightmare Dungeons entirely. I like doing these, but my only real complaint is that the rewards feel pretty bad at least at lower levels.
- Infernal Hordes – These got longer and it seems like it is way more common to get an 8 or 10-wave Hordes than the 4 or 6-wave ones. These first went into the game in Season 5, and unfortunately in Season 6, we seem to have lost the ability to craft them. This means you basically are stuck running whatever happens to drop. However if you can get 200 Aether the rewards from this feel insanely good, and running this with a friend means you just speed through the waves much faster.
- Black Citadel – This is a three-wing “raid” that you can complete once a week for a big cache of rewards. This requires at least two players and can be done with random players. However, I would not have wanted to figure out how these mechanics worked without voice chat. Ace and I are probably going to run this as a weekly thing at least for a while because it was very rewarding in spite of the first wing being complete butts to get through.
- Undercity – This is sort of like another version of Greater Rifts from Diablo 3, but this time instead of filling a bar to summon a boss, you are going through a fixed circuit of three dungeon floors with a boss at the end. When you enter the bosses floor the timer stops, meaning that you really do have ALL of the timer, not needing to factor in also fighting a boss. I really like that the mobs that give you bonus time are clearly marked, and I would love to see them do something like that with The Pit to more clearly mark which mobs you should absolutely kill along the way.
- Helltide – This is still great and was improved by adding some of the functionality of the Season 2 “Bloodtide”. Basically, it is up 100% of the time and is now up in both the old world and in Nahantu at the same time, giving you two areas to farm Tree of Whispers rewards from. Very rewarding especially if you can find a group that is running the summoned boss over and over. This feels like the best way to throw some initial levels on and get to 60.
- Summoned Bosses: Varshan, Grigoire, Beast, Lord Zir, Andariel, Duriel – These feel fine and are especially cool if you can find someone to run them with. Mostly being able to summon five or six in a row feels great and will have you swimming in uniques. Like I said above this is going to be something I save resources for so that Ace and I can run them together.
Unfortunately, much of the new and improved content has made some of the other stuff in the game feel worse for the wear. Here are some of the elements that I feel need to be improved upon.
- Tree of Whispers – Still a cool mechanic, but I have to admit this is starting to feel a bit old compared to some of the other methods for acquiring loot. Largely I just wish that ALL of the activities gave you some amount of whispers progress each time you completed anything. For example, if a Pit run gave you 4 whispers you could keep raking in additional rewards rather than having to wait for that particular dungeon/boss to be flagged for rewards.
- World Bosses – These honestly feel awful in their current state. They are not fun, and given that I have farmed most of the unique cosmetics from them… don’t really feel worth running unless your timing just so happens to line up with one of these spawning. I think this entire system needs to be re-evaluated because it just isn’t really keeping up.
- Legion Events – These feel really bad now, which is a bit sad because I used to love doing these whenever they were up. Essentially they are outshined by pretty much every other piece of content in the game. I would like to see these be repeatable where you click on a portal and zone into the area or queue and are thrown into a random group of people. The whole open-world thing doesn’t really work in quite the way that I think they wanted it to. Anything they could repurpose to be instanced would just improve the content as a whole.
- Nightmare Dungeons – Why do these still exist? I am not trying to be hyperbolic here, but by moving leveling your glyphs over to The Pit took away the reason for this content to exist. You might run the occasional Nightmare Dungeon in an effort to unlock a Legendary Aspect that you have not found in the world, but past that, there just isn’t much reason to ever do these. Initially I would say put Glyph leveling back in Nightmare Dungeons so that you had two different paths you could take to level up. Past that I would love to see them make it so repeated running of a Nightmare Dungeon each time increments your saved Aspect by one step, so that given enough time you could eventually upgrade everything to the maximum tier.
In addition to all of these methods of play, Season 6 introduced the Realmwalker and Seething realms. Essentially at fixed intervals in the world, a Realmwalker will spawn, which is a critter that we first encountered in Diablo III. When we make it sufficiently angry, it will stop and fight us, and after death summons a portal to the Seething Realm. I have mixed feelings about this event type because I really like the Seething Realms but the whole following the Realmwalker as it moves slowly to a fixed destination in the world feels bad. I would like to see this changed significantly so that you can power through the event, burn it down faster, and get your portal faster. Even if it relied upon intermissions where it summons the three large adds, have that maybe happen every 1/3rd of its health bar or something like that.
The Seething Realms themselves are amazing and I would not change anything about them. Essentially you have one short dungeon, a prompt to choose a reward type, and then a bit longer dungeon that ends in a boss fight. Quite honestly if I would do anything with Seething Realms, it would be to modify the Nightmare Dungeons to function EXACTLY like this. Nothing about Nightmare Dungeons was ever fun or novel, and they just felt like copypasta of the same design and bosses over and over with only the names really changing. If I could run Seething Realms without the whole faffing about with the Realmwalker I would do this constantly. The Open World portion feels like it is completely extraneous to this content.
What I would completely change and honestly nuke from orbit are the Seething Opals of various types. I like the concept where you can choose the types of rewards that you want to see in all of the other content in the game, but I hate the methodology that they deployed this with. Nothing is less fun than juggling 30-minute-long buffs, and all weekend while Ace and I were playing we were having to constantly remind each other to throw back up another set of buffs. I honestly hate using consumables in every game, but these feel especially egregious. Make them stack up to two hours long, persist through logouts, and drop more of them at a time so you are not feeling the press of time to try and make sure you hit every Realmwalker that spawns to stay stocked up.
Probably the worst part about the seasonal mechanics is the way that you gain faction with the Zakarum Remnants. For the most part every season has a copypaste faction system that unlocks various rewards at various steps, and each pushes you to interact with the specific mechanics for that season. This time around however you do not reliably get faction increases unless you are running a Seething Opal. This means I am way behind the curve on unlocking rewards, because I cannot remember to make sure I have a these “potions” going 100% of the time. All of the problems that I have with the Seasion 6 mechanics are fixable. Just shorting the walking time for Realmwalkers would improve it greatly. Increasing the length that an Opal lasts and giving you some visual warning that you are not running one would also go a long ways towards making it feel better. This is far from their best season, but it is in the “fun enough” category and I am hoping Seething Realms stick around in some form of another.
The game feels best when I am focused on running specific content either solo or with a specific group of friends. The game feels worst when I am needing to interact with strangers on the open world. I still have issues where the entire game freezes as new players show up on the scene of some open world event, which feels awful and can honestly be deadly if it happens to hitch at exactly the wrong moment. What I want most for Diablo IV is for them to quit trying to push the MMORPG aspect of this game, because every time they do… it feels bad. What I want instead is something akin to the Hideout system from Path of Exile that gives me easy and instant access to all of the instanced content in the game. I want to be able to stay in one place with the necessarily resources and be able to run content back to back with friends without needing to pop around the world and wait for superfluous loading screens.
Diablo IV does a damned good job when it focuses on Core-ARPG content… aka blasting through a map, killing lots of demons, and getting loot at the end. However there are still moments when I feel like the team does not understand the type of content that Core-ARPG players are looking for. Anything that destroys the efficiency of the grind is just something that players are going to look for the fastest way of shortcutting possible. I feel like the team that build this game really envisioned Diablo the MMORPG, and refuses to completely let go of that notion, in spite of everything that has pushed the game in that direction largley being shunned by the player base. Even if they don’t want to give us the ability to queue directly for things, there are still a lot more steps that could be improved to make navigating the forced world interaction a bit more smoothly. Clicking on one of the items required to summon a boss, should at a minimum highlight that location on your map similar to how a Nightmare Dungeon sigil does.
The game in its current state is honestly quite a bit of fun, once you get past the bad storytelling and the few systems that have not aged well. It is honestly probably one of the better ARPG grouping experiences and feels a lot like running content with friends did in Diablo III. I don’t think I will necessarily last terribly long when a new season rolls around, but I could definitely see Diablo IV being a bit like Diablo III was for me and Ace where it gave us a fun week of engagement before we wandered off to do other things. At the end of the day I am probably fine with that, because anything that gives us an excuse for shenaningans is a good thing in my book.
So yeah… I tore Diablo IV apart on Friday, but I feel like I spun out a bit of a more even handed discussion this morning. Are you playing Diablo IV? What are some of the things that you enjoy, and what are some of the things that you do not? Drop me a line below.