Month: October 2024

Chill Torment Four

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Good Morning Folks. One of the things that went in with the Vessel of Hatred expansion is the ability to open up your wardrobe settings from anywhere in the world. This has been huge for me personally because I am highly motivated by making my characters look cool while playing the game. This morning out of curiosity I decided to flip off all of my transmogs to see what my gear looks like by default. The current state of the items I have equipped is on the left side and the outfit that I have chosen to wear is on the right side. There is a massive difference in how much I enjoy the character. Cosmetics are important yall.

Since it is Fall Break and my wife is out of school, I decided to take a few days off. While we did some assorted errands yesterday, and I worked on a video for her Church I still had quite a bit of time to play some Diablo IV. I’ve basically gotten my build squared away at this point and it all came down to having one talent point in the wrong place. Disturbing as that sounds… that is legitimately ALL that was wrong with it. I’ve since then unlocked Torment IV and am able to hum along nicely. While it is much slower than Torment III, it is still perfectly fine. The only problem I see however is that there does not appear to be an equivalent bump in loot to make up for the bump in difficulty.

I spent a bit of time this morning in a Torment IV Helltide and farmed the resources to open two of the 250 chests and a few of the smaller 75 chests. This image pretty much represents the best-case scenario from the loot that I saw. There would be potentially a single Ancestral item followed by a bunch of normal legendaries and the same quantities of other materials that you got on lower Torment levels. At Torment IV, if an item is not Ancestral… and quite honestly perfectly rolled at this point… it is barely worth picking up. Right now I am vendoring them because I am broke again and need the gold. However it still feels like the loot is not worth the effort it takes to get it.

I also did a Pit 70 with about 9 minutes left on the timer. The thing is though… I am not sure how beneficial it is to push up my glyphs higher than they currently are, and running lower-level pits is a heck of a lot more enjoyable. I feel like Diablo IV Vessel of Hatred scaled the Risk portion up, but has not really scaled the Reward to commensurate levels. While I do really like the gearing of Legendary > Ancestral > Mythic mirroring the Diablo III rarities of Legendary > Ancient Legendary > Primal Ancient Legendary I feel like they might be a bit too stingy on the loot side. Pushing Greater Rifts in Diablo III felt way more rewarding than doing almost any content save for boss summons currently in Diablo IV. So my motivation right now feels like it is ratholing enough boss summon materials so that Ace and I can have another fun night and hope for Mythic drops chaining through a hundred bosses in an evening.

Right now I have pushed all of my Glyphs up to Legendary and am still slowly chipping away at my Paragon boards. I’ve yet to unlock my last board and my last glyph, but that should in theory cause a significant bump in power. I am not entirely certain how far I care to push my glyphs past this point. I feel like my power level will probably outscale the difficulty level at some point, so maybe Pit 100s will begin to feel like running Infernal Hordes on Torment III does now. I’ve overcapped my resistances by a significant chunk and am also sitting well past the armor cap so my survival feels pretty solid at the moment. There are times when a random explosion can catch me by surprise but for the most part, Torment IV feels pretty reliable.

I also finished up the cosmetic track yesterday, so the only remaining thing in the season is to finish leveling my Mercenaries and then grind out all of the new Lilith Statues in Nahantu. I would rather do them in this league so that they are doing permanently for all of my future alts, than leave that for a later season. I am not even sure you really get much of anything for finding them this time. You might get a mythic crafting material, and I know you get one of those for finishing leveling your mercenaries as well. I might hold off on using those however in case I decide to push up another character later. Supposedly you can also farm Whispers Caches on T4, and then have your low-level characters open them for a boost in Ancestral gear. I’ve not really confirmed this but a friend that I trust said it works, and it honestly makes sense.

All in all, I am pretty happy with the current state of my character and look forward to bumping the bar up to Torment IV when running around with Ace. I am happy that I finally feel as strong as they have seemed to be this entire time. I am still a big bummed that I had to migrate away from Centipede to get there, but I would rather have a more chill experience than the spammy nature of that build provided. There is supposedly also an amazing Crushing Hands build that folks are saying is broken as heck. I’ve also encountered some sort of fire-based Spiritborn build that at least looks powerful when I see other players playing it. It is a bit sad though that I am not sure there are ANY builds for the other classes that really come close to the level of what you can do on the Spiritborn currently.

At some point I want to see what shenanigans I can get up to in pulling up alts because I have heard running the Pit is the way to go for that. I need to do a bit more research because I would love to have Ace pull something up for me, and I pull something up for them.

Peak Mythicality

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Good Morning Folks. My friends will tell you that I have “Bel Luck” when it comes to anything involving random chance. I’ve spent years trying to deny this but there are times you just cannot ignore there is something. For example around 2015/2016 Magic the Gathering released a number of sets with ultra-rare chase cards that had a pull chance roughly equivalent to one in every two full cases of booster packs… so somewhere around one in four hundred packs. I pulled the most expensive card buying completely random packs that still go for around $800 after a significant price drop due to the card being banned recently, and had a peak of around $1200. Not only did I pull one of these… I pulled another one of these chase cards from Kaladesh… as well as one from Zendikkar, and two from Amonkhet just buying the occasional random pack. In all examples, I likely bought less than half a booster box worth of packs in total.

This is a common enough occurrence that my friends will talk about my “Bel Luck” rubbing off on them and them benefitting from being in close proximity of me when it comes to good drops in video games. Last night Ace and I spent the evening running summoned bosses. I have no clue HOW many we ended up killing but we wound up doing the same rotation we did last time. We started with Varshaan and we did at least twenty summons before moving on to Lord Zir for another twenty or so there. Then we did Beast in the Ice, followed by Grigore… and in both cases we had to go back to town a few times to clear our inventory. We wrapped up doing Duriel and only got about halfway through our summons before we ran out of steam. Either tonight or some other point this week/weekend we will finish up Duriel and do Andariel before to halt for another week or so and gather back up the materials for more summons. Ace got the first Mythic drop last night and made the traditional comment that my luck was rubbing off on them.

Then my luck kicked in. Over the course of the night, I got Five Mythic Uniques… the first of which was crafted. I’ve lined them up in the order in which I got them to drop. I attempted to use Andariel’s Visage but was taking too much damage due to the high damage reduction roll I had on my existing unique helmet. Then I got a Glaive drop which seemed really interesting, but unfortunately, Kepeleke is kind of required to make the build work. Then I got Heir of Perdition which is a helm that my previous build incarnation wanted, but is not really useful for Quillrain. Next up I got Ring of the Starless Skies which is pretty much a universally good item that I was able to work into my build. Lastly, I got Tyrael’s Might, the Mythic Unique that the build ones, and the one that Ace managed to get through crafting.

Even with all of these upgrades… there seems to be some special sauce that has Ace far ahead of me in performance. This morning I attempted Pit 60 something that they have been speed farming… and it was an absolute slog to get through. I would essentially have to gather everything up and then slowly grind it down. There is something I am missing… or some piece of gear that does not have a high enough roll. Whatever the case I can now comfortably do Torment III all day long, but as I approach Torment IV everything slows down to a crawl. I am just not certain what I am doing wrong with this build, but whatever the case I am annoying the hell out of me. If nothing else my survival has gone up significantly since getting the two mythic upgrades.

At some point, I need to inspect Ace in-game so that I can look through their gear and try and glean what I am missing. I also feel like I am missing talent points somewhere because when I follow a build guide I seem to always be a point or two short from what the guide is recommending. I am seeing that there is a bug that folks are talking about where a respec gave them 69 points instead of 71 so I am wondering if I am being impacted by that. I really do not want to respec everything again but I might try that. I wish Diablo IV had something akin to POE.Ninja which lets me poke around in other builds doing the same thing so I that I could see whatever they were doing differently. I am stronger than I was, but nowhere near what I am seeing from Ace.

Garuda Simulator

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Good Morning Folks. I do not like change, but when I get off my butt and do it… I make rapid and sweeping changes without much forethought. I was frustrated with how low the survival of my stinger build was feeling… not realizing that a huge part of this was due to the fact that I had swapped to Subo instead of Rahir as my Mercenary. I did not realize how much survival Rahir provides. In any case I used one of my legendary scrolls that resets paragon and talent points and spent the next fifteen minutes painstakingly placing points in my paragon boards to switch to the Orange Quill build. I struggled a bit when I first switched, immediately questioning my life choices.

When I said that Stinger was a spammy build… it was a whole other level of spammy. Essentially the only way that I had resources for casting Stinger was by spamming all of the other abilities as they came off cooldown. That ended up in practice that every moment I was trying to piano key my way through six abilities… not just mostly spamming one and then weaving in other abilities as needed. So obviously when I swapped over to Quill, I noticed it was using a lot of the same abilities… and immediately assumed that I needed to do the same thing. I do not in fact need to spam everything, and instead, I can play the character as god intended and just spam one key. It is not a one-button build necessarily because some of the other keys are pretty important but it is mostly one button that matters.

The result is so much more chill, in spite of the build still being fairly spammy. I am far less likely to get a repetitive stress injury, so that has been a massively positive swap. I am however needing to effectively rewire my brain since I have been playing Spiritborn in a specific manner for awhile now. The end result feels more akin to a Fan of Knives build or something like Frost Blades from Path of Exile where you need to face the direction of your target rather than trying to leap into the middle of a pack of mobs and grind it down. What is great about it however is it is so much easier to do the Hordes event and rack up more than enough aether to get good rewards. With this build… Hordes MIGHT be my favorite game mode currently.

Right now I am very much in “Gold Acquisition” mode because I need 50 million gold to buy a Mythic Cache. I had the bright idea that I should convert all of the Aether that I got from doing the Infernal Hordes into gold and see how much that nets me. Essentially this gave me 5,495,600 gold for converting 316 Aether that I had collected during the event. While that is a lot of gold… it isn’t near as much as I thought it would be. I think I am probably going to be better off buying the 200 Aether chest, and then just selling anything that I did not need since several uniques sell for over 100k gold each. Similarly I am shifting into selling mode for most drops and instead only salvaging the things that give me immediate aspect upgrades or cosmetics that I have not gathered yet.

I was extremely lucky I and was able to pick up an Ancestral Harmony of Ebewaka through the Obol vendor, which was one of the required uniques that I did not have already in Ancestral form. Then through running Infernal Hordes, I almost immediately snagged an upgrade to my Rakanoth’s Wake which rolled with Resistance to All Elements as its upgraded stat. When I masterworked it up to the first breakpoint it upgraded Movement Speed so I am already way more zoomy than my previous incarnation. I am keeping my eyes open for an upgraded Rod of Kepeleke and also a Midnight Sun ring. Really at this point, I need to luck my way into Tyrael’s Might Mythic chest to swap out of the ancestral legendary that I am using currently. Other than that I just need more levels and more paragon points to keep unlocking deeper into my boards.

I’ve got a bajillionty boss summon materials, so I think Ace and I are getting together tonight for a round of those. Will be good to free up the inventory space since several of those have rolled over to new stacks. It will also be a source of quite a bit of gold and uniques that can be sold for gold. At some point I need to clean out my bank and sift through so that I am only keeping the best copy of things, instead of my current scenario where I am dumping in anything that looks vaguely interesting. I have way too much of everything, but it was handy when I swapped builds because I could just build up brand new ancestral items instead of trying to reroll the ones I was using with Stinger.

I made a bit of progress on the rewards track last night, but still have fourteen levels to go. Basically, I got ten levels done and if we do the bossing nonsense, I might even be able to push the rest of the way through this evening. I have a bunch of tributes stockpiled, including one that supposedly can drop a mythic unique so at some point I plan on trying to run those. The state of tributes is awkward because some of them can be done in a group and others are purely solo. Having activities where you cannot share the rewards feels sort of awful given the group play is really the shining example of what makes Diablo IV good. In the meantime though I am having fun being a Garuda Simulator as I throw feathers everywhere and watch things fall around me.

If you are looking for a fun Spiritborn build, I highly suggest this nonsense. I should have gone down that path, but I thought the whole Centipede nonsense was really cool.

Finishing Season Six

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Yesterday I realized that I was a heck of a lot closer to finishing up the Seasonal Journey in Diablo IV Season Six than I thought I was. Essentially all that was required was leveling my fifth glyph up to 15, which I had not even started leveling because I am only on paragon board four. What I was not expecting was just how many boss-summoning materials that I would end up getting. It now totally makes sense that Ace had so many more summons than me the other night because they are absolutely the sort of tryhard person who cares about the seasonal track. They had finished it up a few days ago I think, and I was not even vaguely paying attention to the items there. In fact this is the very first time I have finished the seasonal track in Diablo IV. I used to push to do it in Diablo III because there were cosmetics on the line, but the sheer practice of ticking off boxes… that has never driven me terribly hard.

What DOES drive me however is the cosmetic rewards track. I still have around twenty more levels to go before finishing that out and I think whenever I accomplish this I will probably bid adieu to Diablo IV. This time around especially there is some really cool armor associated with this rewards track and I had the currency for it when the season launched so I figured “what the heck”. I really like this spear, which oddly enough reminds me quite a bit of the spear that I regularly use in Guild Wars 2. Sadly I never made it super far in last season’s battlepass, but there were some cosmetics there that I would have liked to have gotten. What is cool about this rewards track more than any season previously, is that the free track is actually good. It is this whole really detailed pirate outfit, which is a significant change from the boring “casual clothes” look that previous free cosmetics have been in this game.

I am also nowhere near finishing the Zakarum Remnants faction, because I hate the consumable league mechanic. In theory, I need to grind out a lot of Hordes trying to get an Ancestral version of my boots, and that is probably a decent mode of play to burn some opals on. I gotta admit that I am days away from just macroing all of my attacks to a single button. It feels like the optimal mode of play for my build is just to mash all of my keys as fast as possible to make sure I never miss a single ability cast. Folks will clown on the one-button builds in Path of Exile, but there has to be a happy medium between that and “toddler pretending to type” gameplay that we currently have in Diablo IV. The reality is everything about my build is designed to lower the cooldown of abilities so that I can hit them faster… and hitting them faster means more damage output.

My current build is sort of a bad ideas build, where I am using this unique item called Jacinth Shell that is trying to kill me. Essentially it deals 10% of my maximum life per second when I have abilities on cooldown… which lowers the cooldowns of those abilities… so I can hit them faster. It also heals me every time I spend vigor. The problem with my current chest is that I really need a maximum roll of 10% on the healing bit… and I really wish this game had Divine Orbs. Essentially this would feel much better if I was healing and damage at the same rate… but I am not. So I mostly just survive due to the fact that I am also building up like 3000 barriers at any given time and 8000 fortify. Unfortunately, there are times when I just take random death similar to how those feel in Path of Exile, and it is sort of miserable.

I have been contemplating just shifting over to the IWIN build that Ace has been running often referred to as Orange Quill. I would absolutely do this thing in a heartbeat if Diablo IV had the Armory system from Diablo III. The thought of going through the hassle of setting back up my Paragon Boards is probably the main thing keeping me from doing it. I have one of the scrolls that resets everything for free, so I could do it… but lord is it a pain in the ass to build a character in this game. That is coming from me… who thinks nothing of the complete nonsense of the Path of Exile passive and atlas trees. It just feels so much more tedious because you are spending so many more points, most of which don’t really feel meaningful until you have amassed the entire structure. I need to look at the build and see if I actually have all of the uniques ready to go because I think I have ratholed a copy of pretty much everything that build needs.

I feel like I have hit a bit of a cap. I barely made it through The Pit 55, and it is wild because I can pretty reliably do Torment 3 content aka Pit 50. I just can’t quite kill things fast enough to keep from falling behind, and the bosses themselves take forever. I have technically done a 55, but it isn’t something that I can guarantee every single run, and relies on a lot of luck regarding what types of mobs spawn. So I am not sure what I need to do to push my build a bit higher. I spent a good chunk of last night trying to level my Glyphs thinking that might help, but I just don’t seem to have the raw damage output or killing speed that Ace has had when we have grouped up. So I am in an awkward spot with my build where I need to essentially decide how committed I am to that Centipede life.

Anyways. I do sort of feel like my engagement with Diablo IV is winding down. I had a lot of fun getting to this point, save for the main story quest… but I am also not sure how much I want to keep pushing for the sake of pushing.