Good Morning, folks. I had to deal with labwork and a doctor’s visit this morning, so I am getting a bit of a late start on the whole blogging thing. Over the last few days, I have gone from not really being interested in Diablo IV Lord of Hatred to legitimately being pumped to play next Monday evening when it drops. Yesterday we got a Campfire Chat, but I have to admit it was a much better version of this construct than we have had previously. Generally, these have been deeply tone deaf and smarmy with a constant refrain of “we hear you”, but also not actually significantly changing the game. Lord of Hatred to Diablo IV feels like Reaper of Souls was to Diablo III, where they effectively changed everything about the game for the better. Of course, there were some weird product placements like some sort of collaboration with a guitar manufacturer, Korn writing a song for the soundtrack, and an inexplicable crossover with Trolli gummy worms. This is just a Blizzard thing, and sadly, we are not getting back the Horde flavor of Mountain Dew, which was fucking amazing.
I highly suggest watching the entire campfire chat, or at least something like the summary that Raxx released, because there is a lot of information there. I am going to talk through a couple of the things that really stood out to me. Probably the biggest is the fact that we are ACTUALLY getting crafting in the game with the addition of the Horadric Cube. This has been a problem-solving plot device many times in the Diablo franchise, and this time around, it seems to be replacing something like the crafting bench, harvest crafting, and crafting currency from Path of Exile. You can, in theory, take an item from blue to yellow, to unique, all while crafting additional affixes onto it to eventually roll something interesting. One of the big things that I noticed going back for Midnight is how much Blizzard has seemingly learned from other MMORPGs, and it feels like FINALLY Diablo admits that they exist in a genre… and should look to the exemplars of that genre for inspiration. Blizz has always had a bit of an ego that they were innovators, and should blaze a new trail… but at least in the case of Diablo, it just felt like they were providing a game void of expected “basic” features.
The other thing that really excites me is the introduction of War Plans. Diablo has had a bunch of relatively uninteresting activities, and not a lot of pressing reason for you to be doing any of them. Some of these are actually pretty fun, like Nightmare Dungeons, but it always sort of felt like there was nothing really pushing you to do them other than occasionally the open world objectives. War Plans, in theory, will be that guiding force that rewards you for doing a certain number of things in a row, with fixed rewards for doing them. This reminds me far less of Path of Exile mapping and more of Echo Chains that just introduced into Last Epoch. Still having any sort of guiding force in this game is a massive positive in my book, especially since they are also giving us a way to throw our thumb on the scale and determine what sorts of activities and rewards we receive. While this is not the Breach or Expedition or Blight style reusable content that grows season after season that I really hope they start creating, it is at least a massive leap in a better direction.
The other big takeaway from yesterday is that it looks like there has been a complete changing of the guard from the Campfire Chats that I found so grating. I hope everything that we are seeing is a sign that we have some fresh ideas feeding into the game and trying to actually make it competitive with the other franchises. Right now, as an ARPG player, I care about when Path of Exile 1 Leagues start, Path of Exile 2 Leagues, and Last Epoch leagues… but Diablo IV has never factored into that calculus of how I plan my gaming. I would love there to be some pressure that makes me want to choose a Diablo season over some other game. I think that would be pretty freaking cool because it will continue to push ALL of the games in this pack forward to try and create more interesting stuff. What makes this genre so different from MMORPGs is that they are ultimately designed for short bursts of massive engagement… and then folks fade away until the next exciting release. Thing is, so long as you keep giving us good shit…. we will keep showing up for our infusion of crack.
The other thing making me excited is that it looks like Warlock might support one of my favorite minion playstyles. Summon Raging Spirits is an ability in Path of Exile that summons short-term minions, and you can give them something called Minion Instability Support to make them explode. This also exists in Last Epoch in the form of Volatile Zombies, and I really like the spammy playstyle of summoning minions and then making them prematurely explode when I oversummon to the limit. Command Fallen for the Warlock appears to be this sort of short-term, exploding minions gameplay, and I am all here for it. I think I have mostly cobbled together something that looks like a build. Granted, this is all based on the Maxroll D4 Planner, and I have no clue how up-to-date this information is, but I expect at least the shell of this build to survive. I am sure I will tweak and adjust as I go, but I think this more or less represents a reasonable template of abilities. I can’t honestly remember how many ability picks we get, but there is a ritual ability that I will add if I have more slots. This is pretty much what I am going to yolo come Monday evening, and we will see if I can make something stick.
One parting shot across the bow. This is a screenshot from the presentation that shows the release schedule. It looks like the game is dropping at 6 pm my time, and I expect to be there with bells on. There will also be Twitch drops and all the normal fanfare. Reportedly, the game was available for preloading yesterday, so you can have everything ready to go come Monday. I admit, this is the first time I have been legitimately amped to play Diablo IV since release. I hope to see at least some of you doing the nonsense with me.