Path of Exile

Diablo IV Beta Thoughts

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Diablo IV Login Screen showing my level 24 Barbarian

Good Morning Friends! This weekend I spent quite a bit of time playing the beta for Diablo IV and have some thoughts about my experience. I honestly was not sure if I would be playing the game, but I had a friend gift me a copy unexpectedly so it would have been rude to not play after that. I love ARPGs and over the years Diablo 3 Seasons have been something that I almost set my calendar by. More recently I have gotten extremely engaged in Path of Exile Leagues and spent copious amounts of time playing Grim Dawn, Wolcen, and more recently Last Epoch. Back in the day, I spent a truly excessive amount of time playing Titans Quest, Fate, Torchlight, and the assorted Dungeon Siege games.

Diablo III Rift showing a Loot Explosion

Suffice it to say I am an aficionado of the genre or more specifically the kill-fast-get-big-prizes style of gameplay that comes with the modern ARPG. I like grinding out content for big prizes and tend to play either ranged classes that can do screen-wide explosions or tanky classes that are effectively invulnerable as the multitudes break themselves on my body. I like turning off my brain and just becoming one with the controls and greatly enjoy the mechanical loop of gameplay that I can find in many modern ARPGs. Last night for example I spent the entire evening leveling a Necromancer in Last Epoch while listening to an Audiobook, and I was honestly in heaven. I am trotting out my resume if only to let you understand what sort of engagement with these games I enjoy, and that I am very familiar with the genre.

Diablo IV Barbarian in the tundra with a flaming sword

I have to be honest… at this point, I am not sure if I like Diablo IV. It is at the very least not the game I was expecting it to be. If you stripped off the branding of this game and presented it to me from another publisher with a slightly altered setting and I am not sure if I would have described it as “like Diablo”. The core gameplay loop that I enjoy so much in a Diablo-style game, isn’t really the core gameplay loop of this game. It instead is a game with much more deliberate slow-paced combat and a world that is much more dangerous than I have come to expect from even Path of Exile. Everything about the game feels much more akin to an Isometric MMORPG that you more commonly find on a mobile platform than what I have come to expect from a PC ARPG. So for me at least it is way less of a contemporary of Path of Exile, Diablo II, Diablo III, and Torchlight and more a challenge-focused version of Lost Ark. I am almost certain at some point during its development process someone uttered the phrase “the Dark Souls of ARPGs” even though it lacks the traditional soulslike trappings apart from “don’t get hit”.

The First Boss fight – X’Fal, the Scarred Baron

Diablo IV feels like it has doubled down on the “bossing” style of gameplay from Path of Exile. Every boss has 4 sections of their health bar, and whittling down a quarter will produce some sort of intermission mechanic or phase shift. This has more or less been true with all of the dungeon bosses I have fought as well. They feel a lot like fighting a Legendary mob in Guild Wars 2, so read… super tanky bag of hitpoints that will take you quite a while to whittle through while avoiding a number of other mechanics. Bossing in general in an ARPG is probably my least favorite part of the game, and I gave up on progressing past the Searing Exarch in Path of Exile because I simply did not really enjoy building for that sort of mechanic. So far all of the bosses in Diablo IV seem to be punitive towards a melee playstyle because my brief amount of time spent playing a ranged rogue saw me breezing through them whereas I had to play much more carefully on the Barbarian.

The conquering of Stronghold Malnok

Dungeon delving however is just a small part of the gameplay in Diablo IV, and you are going to spend a much larger amount of time roaming around the open world. Here you will stumble across events that are spawning constantly in an almost Guild Wars 2 style, where you and any players sharing your map can work together to complete them. So far all of the events I have tried can be completed solo, but simply go much faster with a host of randoms. The coolest of these however is the Strongholds which are one-time completed events that will open up new areas to the players. Malnok for example required me to defeat a number of Goatmen shamen that were channeling into a boss in the center of the map. After killing all of these it shifted into a big boss fight, and upon completing it the area turned into a town. This reminds me quite a bit of the area in Witcher 3 where after defeating all of the monsters in a town, the locals come back and set up shop again. It feels cool, but also a bit like any modern Assassin’s Creed or Farcry game with similar zone control mechanics.

A story mission in Diablo IV

One of the places where Diablo IV excels is in its storytelling. Traditionally the bar for storytelling in the ARPG is something you might be at risk of tripping over. While they often have amazing world-building and lore… they often have a pretty hamfisted narrative that is the bare minimum to keep the game from completely falling apart. Diablo IV is a great story game, and some of the side quests honestly are better than the main story. Once again I am going to pull out the Witcher 3 as a reference because a number of the side quests remind me of just how detailed that game got with its off-the-beaten-path narrative. I feel for a lot of people that this is going to be one of those games that they play through all of the stories once and then feel satisfied and walk away never to touch it again. That is going to be a completely reasonable way to approach this game honestly.

Combat on the Barbarian showing a Legendary Drop

I think my core problem with the game in its current state is the moment-to-moment gameplay loop doesn’t feel amazing. The time to kill in combat feels sluggish and not exactly what I have come to expect from the ARPG genre. Sure a Diablo III Demon Hunter feels awful for the first ten levels or so… but those are over in maybe ten minutes. With Diablo IV I was three or four hours into the game and it still felt like I was fighting while mired in quicksand. Admittedly most of my experience comes from playing the Barbarian but if you don’t nail that class… the most straightforward of Diablo archetypes… I have concerns. Playing as a ranged Rogue felt a little bit more snappy, and I’ve heard tales that the Sorceror is extremely overpowered… so then that raises a whole other line of concerns around class balance. What I expected was honestly something that played and felt a bit more like Diablo Immortal, since there is deep parity between the systems of that game and this game… and quite frankly I would probably rather spend my time playing Diablo Immortal were it not for the egregious monetization strategies. I think it is probably a better game across the board.

All of the Legendary Drops I have Seen So Far

The itemization is also lacking at least in what I have come to expect. Magic and Rare items aka Blues and Yellows are effectively what you would expect from any other game. Where things get weird is Legendary Drops. Generally speaking both Legendaries and Uniques from other games are “curated” rolls that are capable of dropping with very specific parameters making them almost always useful for specific builds. Legendaries in this game however are randomly generated items that just have a single legendary trait on the item. So that means it is entirely possible for you to get a Legendary trait on an item that does not make any sense and is generally useless otherwise. Roll curation is a big part of what made legendaries so special in the first place because getting one meant you knew exactly what you were getting ahead of time. A lot of the chase of item drops is a search for specific cornerstone pieces that you need for your build. Screwing with this mechanic is going to at least in part cheapen the search for those build-defining items.

Extracting Imprints from Legendary Items and the Codex of Power

Now one cool aspect of the crafting system is that you can extract any legendary trait from an item, and then imprint it upon another item. So for example, if you have a yellow item that is perfectly rolled but is missing the legendary trait, you can effectively upscale that item into a legendary by adding the trait. The process is destructive and rather cost prohibitive at least with the sorts of money we are able to get in the beta so far. The problem is this is a somewhat flawed process because they also have another system in the game called the Codex of Power. This effectively allows you to collect legendary imprints that are permanent recipes that you can create as many times as you like. What would have been a much better system is that eating a legendary added it to your Codex of Power instead of how it works now and producing a one-time-use item that will ultimately clog your inventory. The codex of power would have been akin to cubing an item in Diablo III and would have added a whole pokemon aspect to trying to find all of the patterns out in the world and add them to your codex. For now, you unlock the Codex through running dungeons and it is a different set of “Legendaries” than the ones you consume and turn into imprints.

Completing an Event by killing monsters to spill blood into a pillar

Throughout the weekend I spent some time threading my comments over on Gamepad.club. In doing so I was reminded by friends of a simple truth. While I might not terribly enjoy the game at the moment, I also did not really love Diablo III at launch either. It was only the significant changes brought on by the Reaper of Souls expansion at the “Loot 2.0” mindset that led me to love that game. Similarly, the Destiny 2 that launched looks very little like the game that exists today. This is sort of the way of the live services game, that it morphs and changes over time to hone in on the types of gameplay that the players want. So while I may not love Diablo IV at this very moment, it does not mean that there is not a Diablo IV in the future that I will not deeply enjoy to the point of setting my calendar around its schedule.

Highly Detailed Dungeon Environment

What I currently see is a game that I think a lot of people are going to play through once and then walk away from. However, it is very clear that Blizzard wants long-tailed transactional income from this game in the form of battle passes and cosmetics. What I do not see is a game that is going to really appeal in large part to the “Core ARPG” demographic that competes in Diablo II: Resurrection Ladders, Diablo III Seasons, and Path of Exile Leagues. The game instead seems to be tailored more to the sensibilities of the MMORPG game player and feels very much akin to the sorts of interactions you might have with a World of Warcraft. If I adjust my expectations to that sort of a game, then Diablo IV honestly holds up pretty well. I would probably rather play this than I would World of Warcraft at that point. However, in that space, I think Guild Wars 2 is doing a far better job of a lot of the things that this game is trying to do with its Strongholds and Zone events.

Lilith from one of the early cinematics

I have to be honest, the game was a little disappointing for me because I was ultimately expecting it to be something that it is not. What I was hoping for was a happy medium between Diablo III and Path of Exile with a glossy coat of paint. What I got instead is something more akin to a darker version of Lost Ark and the mobile isometric MMORPGs. In truth, I already have my happy medium between Diablo III and Path of Exile and it is called Last Epoch… but just because Diablo IV is not what I was expecting does not mean it is a bad game. I highly suggest you judge for yourself and next weekend you will be able to. While this weekend was only for those who had purchased the game, next weekend is as I understand it open to anyone with a Battle.net account. The next period begins on March 24th at 9 am PDT and will conclude on March 27th at 12 pm PDT. If it is anything like this week, you will be able to preload the game roughly a day ahead of time.

Screenshot from Quin69’s stream hitting a 108-minute login queue

I will say if you do plan on participating next weekend… maybe don’t take any time off from work. This is good advice in general, to never take off time specifically for a game launch because it will most likely only end in heartbreak. I was off on Friday already, so I did the dumb thing and tried to play when the servers opened. However, there was a period of time on Twitch where the entire Diablo IV section looked like the above shot of various streamers stuck waiting in extremely long queues. While the servers stabilized by Saturday, I would expect them to be bleeding again when the next phase opens up. This first phase was only for folks who have purchased the game, the next one will open the floodgates and let anyone play. If you are interested in this game, I would highly suggest giving it a test drive before you make the purchase. It likely does not match your expectations.

Did you spend time this weekend playing the Diablo IV Beta? What were your thoughts? Am I being weird for not really being all that into it? Drop me a line below.

Less Repetitive ARPG Keybinds

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Good Morning Friends! If you have read my blog for any length of time you will understand that I truly and deeply love Diablo-style Action Roleplaying Games, or ARPGs as the genre tends to be collectively referred to. Even a good deal of my current love of Guild Wars 2 is rooted in the fact that for the most part, it owes way more lineage to Diablo than it does World of Warcraft. The only problem with all of this is that the older I have gotten, the less forgiving the deeply repetitive process of clicking to move and attack has become on my hands. At this point, I am on the late side of 40 sliding over forward towards 50, and after decades of heavy computer usage, I just can’t handle spamming the mouse button in quite the same way that I used to. For many, this has meant a shift to controller gaming for their ARPG fix which tends to be considerably more forgiving. However for me… I still deeply prefer the mouse and keyboard experience and have landed on a control scheme that works for me. I thought this morning I would share some of this wisdom for anyone looking for a way to play these games without killing your hands in the process.

Generally speaking, the ARPG is a genre that allows for quite a bit of customization of your keybinds. So far I have figured out a way to configure pretty much every game I have played in this manner. I can’t take full credit for this because my good friend Ace set me on this path some years back, but I have adapted their processes and made them my own over the course of adapting them to several different games. Essentially to understand this process you need to understand two common concepts within ARPGs.

  • Force Move – This keybind will be called different things in different games, for example in Last Epoch that I have been playing most recently it is just called “Move”. Conceptually what this does is start your character moving to a point defined by where your mouse cursor is sitting on the screen. So if you drag your mouse all the way to the other side of the screen and tap force move, your character will path in a straight line to your cursor.
  • Force Attack – This keybind is the opposite of force move, and it will stop all motion and cause you to execute a basic attack regardless of whatever movement inputs were in progress. While I am not actively using it, it can be important to know what this keybind is for the game you are playing in case you need to immediately stop executing a movement command.

One of the quirks of Force Move is if you hold the button down it will be constantly executing a move command toward wherever your mouse cursor is pointing. So effectively it is like your character’s movement is tied to the heading of your mouse cursor allowing you to “steer” the character by moving your mouse. In truth, once you have started doing this it feels way more intuitive than it sounds because your character goes where your mouse cursor goes, and once you are comfortable with it can execute some tight turns as a result.

Because my fingers are already very comfortable in the traditional WASD configuration, I opt for using W as my “Force Move” key allowing me to place my fingers in that orientation and then map other important buttons to be comfortably pressed within the orbit of the W key. There might be some variance between games depending on what is supported but effectively I tend to follow the same configuration setup when possible. It will depend slightly upon the abilities you have access to on a given “class”/build but my standard process follows something like this:

  • W – Force Move – The button I am holding pretty much at all times to allow me to steer my character with my mouse.
  • Right Mouse – Primary Attack – This is the button that I bind my primary attack to that I am executing the most often.
  • Spacebar – Movement Ability – This is the key that I will tap when I need to execute whatever movement ability my character has. If it has no movement abilities I tend to bind a reactional ability to it that I might need to hit on a moment’s notice.
  • E – Secondary Attack – This one is going to vary quite a bit, but if I need to hit an ability periodically other than my primary attack it is going to go on this key. For example, if I am placing totems or mines or something of the sort, it goes on this key because I find it most comfortable to press while holding W.
  • Q – Primary Cooldown – This one also varies quite a bit, but if I have some sort of a survival cooldown I generally put it on this key. This is in part because Diablo III trained this to be my potion hotkey so mentally I associate it with survival.
  • R – Situational Attack/Cooldown – Since this key is further away, I tend to place whatever I need to use that infrequently.
  • 1-5 – Potions – You can blame Path of Exile for this shift, but effectively if there is a health potion button I place it on 1, and if there are other kinds of potions I place them on 2-5. I am very used to reaching up to hit 1 when things are going poorly at this point.
  • Left Shift – Force Attack – If the game offers some sort of force attack key, I tend to put it on left shift so that when I press it, my movement will be canceled for the moment. This is useful for situations where you might need to pause on a moment’s notice to avoid getting into an area effect for a trap.

I’ve pretty much been able to adapt every game I have played over the last handful of years to some version of this keybinding system. You might have to dig around a bit, but almost every game seems to have some version of “Force Move”. In Path of Exile unfortunately I have to sacrifice a possible keybind, because they do not have a separate button that I could bind to it independent of the hotbar. The only game that I have not been able to configure in this manner was Lost Ark, which is probably in part why I never spent much time playing that game. That game had some very specific opinions on what you should be doing gameplay-wise with your keys. I don’t feel like I am losing much of anything though because there are other things about that game that did not exactly jive with me either.

So as we approach the early access testing period of Diablo IV, the very first thing I will be doing is configuring my keybinds to match something akin to the process I just highlighted above. This is what works for me personally, but I suggest it as a less damaging alternative to spamming your mouse click constantly to keep registering a movement input. I had a copy of the game gifted to me, so I will be checking it out along with everyone else when the early access period opens. I am not entirely certain it is going to be my jam, but I am willing to give it a shot. At the moment, however, I am very much enjoying my time in Last Epoch. I am sure tomorrow I will have a post talking about my experience playing it with friends.

Re-evaluating Tankyness

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Good Morning Friends! Last night I spent my evening running around in the Last Epoch multiplayer beta and opted to start up another Acolyte. I’ve been enjoying the Necromancer play style lately, and as a result, I am leaning super hard into it with this game. I’m also wanting to spend some time exploring Wolcen soon and plan on doing the same given that Necromancer play styles tend to be pretty chill. It is thoroughly weird to me the way my brain has flipped over the last several years. There was a time when I would only play melee characters and more specifically only characters with a sword and shield. I was completely bought into the mythos of the “tank” and that meant a very specific thing to me namely a full plate-wearing character with a sword and a shield, and occasionally if the class lends itself to that fantasy, a bit damned two-hander.

To some extent, I blame Diablo III for beginning the slow battering down of these walls. I fell in love with the Demon Hunter and how amazing it was for clearing seasonal content. With the right build, you could make literally everything on the screen explode in a hail of fire, making it extremely safe to play. I still greatly prefer high survival characters, but I was forced to reconcile that sometimes overwhelming damage… is a survival ability. Mostly this forced me to re-evaluate what being “fun to play” meant to me personally and that largely meant the ability to kill things without much fear of death. I always got this style of play through traditional MMORPG tanks but found that under certain circumstances I could find that style of play in other families of classes.

I think my mental transformation was really cemented by my time playing Guild Wars 2 last year. I had been trying for a decade to make the Warrior in that game conform to the sort of gameplay that I wanted, a very high survival tanky play that had no fear of dying but could still clear content. It never really felt that way to me personally, and in a moment of frustration, I sat down and had a conversation with my friend Tam. He asked me to describe the goals I wanted in a class and after some serious side eye, I accepted the challenge to try playing a Necromancer. It turned out that while it conformed to none of my normal sensibilities, it was in fact the “tankiest” and highest survival class I had ever played in an MMORPG. This sort of sent my world into a tailspin and has caused me to re-evaluate what it means to be tanky and what it means to “feel good” to play.

Path of Exile has also continued this path forward as I seek out characters that are highly survivable yet still able to clear content. I think maybe the best version of this that I have experienced so far is my Righteous Fire Juggernaut because it is effectively exactly what I want in a game like that. One of my favorite Diablo III builds is the exceptionally tanky Thorns Crusader, which wanders around while everything effectively breaks itself on your damage shield. I’ve also enjoyed my time spent playing on my Summon Righteous Fire Necromancer quite a bit, because while squishier than RF… it can move around freely to avoid a lot of the damage while my pets focus on shredding the target. As I have gained additional levels on that character I have poured more focus into survivability since the damage seems to be solid.

So now that I am playing some Last Epoch, I figured a Necromancer might be a good call. After some research, it does in fact seem to be an extremely tanky option. At the moment I am running around with Skeleton Warriors, a Giant Skeleton Golem, and summoning that game’s equivalent of my “raging spirits” in the form of explosive Zombies. I started a fresh character last night and got it to around 22 before calling it for the night. Unfortunately, the transition to Necromancer seems to be gated behind a quest so I really need to push forward in the story before I spend any more points on the build. The few bosses I have encountered have been extremely relaxing as I simply avoid the telegraphed attacks and let my pets keep chewing away at it.

Last Epoch Build Planner is by the same folks who do the Grim Dawn Tools, and I am largely following this Necromancer build at least as far as Skills and Passive choices go. You can blame Path of Exile on making it so that I just feel more comfortable venturing forth with a build to at least loosely follow. Last Epoch as a whole seems like a much more straightforward game and offers the ability to respec a bit more easily. However, once I started down the path of following a build, I find it is probably going to be harder to shake mentally. Given that I am juggling a large number of ARPGs at the moment, I don’t really want to waste my time building something that won’t be viable and as a result, won’t be “fun”.

If you want to see an example of Necromancer gameplay in Last Epoch, check out the above video. Essentially it is designed around summoning exploding zombies and replenishing your pets as needed when they die. Otherwise, you just zoom around and avoid telegraphs while your army of horrible children kills your foe. I had a lot of fun last night screwing around on the beta server, and will likely be creating the same basic build when the multiplayer patch drops in March.

Yup Books and Games

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One of the challenges with this whole “goes super hard on books” pattern that I seem to be in, is that it does not exactly translate to an easy steady drip of content to write about. It feels really weird to sit down in the morning and essentially say “yup books”. From the standpoint of “talking about them when I’ve finished them” is great, but the whole me being in mid-flight thing is not exactly a delightful spectator sport. At this point, I am about half the way through Lies of Locke Lamora and it has grabbed me enough to make me want more. However, I also don’t really want to talk about the book as I am experiencing it, and rather will just batch up those thoughts once I have finished it.

One thing I did find out is that apparently there is an order of operations that must be maintained within Bookwyrm, and if you want a book to count towards your reading goals it has to hit the “read” shelf at some point. I ended up moving Nona the Ninth to my “Books of 2023” shelf and then “finished reading” and it completely skipped the goals queue. I had to do a bit of backpedaling and “finish” the book again to get it properly slotted as my 7th book of the year in my “20 books” goal. Other than that general weirdness, I am enjoying Bookwyrm quite a bit however I wish its federation worked a bit more as I was expecting. I thought maybe I would be able to follow my Bookwyrm account and then boost the comments that I leave when I finish a book. However while I am following myself, I never see any updates even when I drill down into the profile. A friend suggested that I check out Storygraph so I might dive into that at some point because it seems like it would potentially be a good recommendation engine.

I am trying to branch out a bit of late and do things that are not “Path of Exile Delve” while consuming an audiobook. So far doing events and map completion in Guild Wars 2 seems pretty drift compatible for the sort of interaction that I am looking for. Essentially an activity that flows nicely with listening to an audiobook needs to be one that is mechanically satisfying but asks nothing really of me to grasp narratively. Working on the main story or expansion quests doesn’t really fill this role, but all of the assorted drop-in group activity does beautifully. I’ve been trying to get into the habit of doing Tequatl at a minimum, and then knocking out my daily objectives and farming the three guild halls worth of resources as well as my home instance. For a long time, I have felt like I really wasn’t making much progress financially in the game, but there is a neat add-on for BlishHud that tracks “coin” earned during your session and it seems like every night I am clearing about 5 gold in an hours worth of time.

I’ve also been trying to ease back into playing Final Fantasy XIV more frequently. What I really need to do is get started on leveling my crafting or working on beast tribe quests again… but what I am actually doing is running retainer missions and fucking around liberally. One of the giant obstacles in front of me is the fact that I need to spend some serious time cleaning out my retainers and sorting out the gear that I actually might want to keep for cosmetic purposes from the dross that I should just turn in for company seals. I also noticed that apparently, I am no longer the highest possible rank in my grand company, so I guess I need to sort out how to change that. There are weird minion boxes that I cannot seem to purchase.

What I REALLY need to do is get into the Hunt Train nonsense, because they are super lucrative and also just enough activity to feel like I am doing something meaningful in the game. I have greatly enjoyed this activity in the past, and I need to probably ease back into doing it more often. It might even be a reasonable option for leveling alternate jobs. I only actually leveled Paladin to 90, but did manage to pull everything up to 80 before burning out in 2021. Hunt trains are a great way to get some gear to level those classes up easily as maxed Crystarium gear will pretty much hold you until you hit the level cap.

All of that said… I still actually am playing a lot of Path of Exile. I find the mechanical loop that I have fallen into deeply relaxing. I play the Summon Raging Spirits Necromancer until I fill up my sulfite and then play my Righteous Fire Juggernaut down in Delve until I run out of that resource again. I continue to periodically liquidate cool things I found down in the dark for profit and as a result, I have over 7000 Chaos Orbs and another 20 or so Divine Orbs. That is without me really going out of my way to do much other than these two activities, and passing up a ton of smaller trades because I am busy and don’t feel like stopping what I am doing for 5 chaos. I think more than anything I learned a lot about the trade economy in this league and feel like there will never be a point in future leagues where I struggle to gear myself.

With all of that… I somehow managed to cobble together a blog post on a day when I was not feeling particularly like blogging. Sometimes in life, you just need to start writing and eventually, it will coalesce into something hopefully worth reading. That I guess is the benefit of Tales of the Aggronaut being a blog about “me”, and less about any one particular subject. Hopefully, yall are having a delightful week out there, and if so… I hope it keeps on that trajectory until the weekend. If you are not, I hope whatever stresses are haunting you, ease the fuck up.