Diablo III

The Last Season

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Good Morning Friends! I am going to warn you that this post is going to be a bit on the melancholy side. Yesterday over lunch I finished up Diablo III Season 28 or at least finished the Guardian step in the journey. There is still a ton that I have left to unlock on the Altar of Sacrifice, but I largely plan on doing that at my leisure over the coming months. While this was not the easiest season ever, it was definitely on the easier scale. Ace finished their season I believe on Sunday, so I was lagging a bit behind. My goal is to help Thalen and maybe Byx if she wants it… finish up their seasons and largely chill out doing low-key content for awhile. I feel like I have three pretty powerful builds on the Demon Hunter having crafted the Gears of Dreadlands Haedrigs set, the Unhallowed Essence Multishot set, and then a Marauder set yesterday for the purpose of the set dungeon.

Shocking to no one who has been with me for very long in my Diablo journey, saved the set dungeon for the very last thing. It always feels really weird to have completed almost all of the harder achievements with this relatively simple one sitting there holding up the process. I hate set dungeons because I have a mental block about being timed while being expected to accomplish a certain set of tasks. This is deeply rooted in my brain and dates back to some third-grade trauma. While I fully understand WHY it exists, I have never truly been able to remove it entirely. I always make the set dungeon out to be this epic obstacle, then like yesterday end up one-shotting the damned thing. I specifically built a Marauder set because, for a Demon Hunter, it is probably the easiest option especially now that the damned worms are marked with a skull on the map.

While this was an enjoyable season… there is just something about it that feels hollow. I think it dawned on me WHY it feels weird. The entire community is treating this like this is the end of Diablo III. Raxxanterax for example has been a pillar of the content creation community, and yesterday announced that the video for Challenge Rift 297 would be the very last of those guides that he released. Even between Ace and I, we largely wanted to make sure that we were going to finish this season because we thought that with the impending release of Diablo IV, this might be the last opportunity to rekindle the old fun. It seems like everyone seems to have that same idea and I am seeing folks returning from the Path of Exile community that had not played the game in years. This feels like a send-off for a beloved friend, but also… is exceptionally depressing.

Diablo III has meant so much to me on a deeply personal level. Sure I have always loved Diablo since I first got into testing for the original game back in college. Diablo III however set the pace of a reoccurring destination event surrounding its seasons. Ace and I would do this late-night leveling thing on Friday they released, and while we’ve made less progress over the years as we have gotten more used to sleep… it was still this thing I think we both looked forward to. It felt like an MMORPG launch happening every three or four months like clockwork, and no matter what else we were playing it would bring a handful of us together for this destination event. While the magic also lasted a shorter period of time as we got better at the time, often finishing the season before the end of the first season… it was still something that I set my calendars by and made sure I was ready to go without distractions.

I think part of the struggle we’ve gone through over the last few years is that Diablo was severely tainted by the events surrounding the shitstorm that is Blizzard Entertainment. We’ve struggled at length to find another game that triggered the same sort of mental joy that Diablo III Season Journey did, and have failed. While I love Path of Exile as the ugly child that it is, it really feels bad to play with friends. We’ve tried Wolcen, Torchlight III, Torchlight Infinite, and hell even some Grim Dawn and none of them have managed to rekindle the magic surrounding our quarterly destination event. It is my hope that maybe just maybe Last Epoch releasing its multiplayer update on the 9th of March will give us the first real viable option. I’ve played enough of it to know that I enjoy it quite a bit, but it is really going to take us all playing it together to determine if it feels “right”.

Due to some lucky circumstances… I got gifted a copy of Diablo IV so I will be poking my head into it when it releases and the upcoming beta periods. However I have enough friends that are simply not willing to give Blizzard any more money, so I figure it is going to be a pretty hollow experience. I am also not entirely certain that it would capture the magic of Diablo III. When the third game was released, there were large parts of the broader Diablo community that hated it. Diablo IV feels very much like a play to bring them back into the fold and maybe make a dent in the popularity of Path of Exile. That means it is very unlikely to be the big dumb fun that a Diablo III season is, and will be more focused on a more grimdark hardcore audience. Diablo Immortal was probably the true spiritual successor, but given that it wound up being a shit sandwich of truly evil monetizations… that one is off the table.

I guess even if Diablo III fades away, I have all of the memories of me and Ace doing dumb things together for fun and profit. This is one of the oldest images I found on WordPress of us doing a greater rift together. I’m hoping that Last Epoch can become the next game that we shift our quarterly nonsense to. Path of Exile worked great for me, but never really became a good-feeling group activity. Last Epoch is going to be starting their seasons I believe around the launch of 1.0 and calling them “Cycles”. It sounds like at least with the start they are going to be relatively simplistic outings without a lot of extra mechanics going on. I think I am mostly okay with that because there is a thin line between doing next to nothing with early Diablo III seasons, and the wild feature bloat that is Path of Exile leagues.

Basically, I feel like a good friend is moving away, and that there isn’t much I can do about that. I fully expect when Diablo IV launches that what community existed around Diablo III will slowly fade away. So in many ways, this probably legitimately is the “Last Season” and I am going to try and be okay with that.

Diablo III Season 28 Start

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Good Morning Friends! On Friday evening Season 28 of Diablo 3 started, and I returned to my regular rhythm with my good friend Ace in attempting to complete it. We decided to come back to Diablo in part because this is probably the last great hurrah for the game before the launch of Diablo 4, and the title goes even further into “maintenance mode”. Speaking of maintenance… I had a bit of a rough start. I logged in early Friday morning and was encountering all sorts of issues where my stash tabs were not loading immediately and when they did load it looked like a 90s-era GeoCities site loading one icon at a time. This stabilized but when it came to the actual seasonal launch, I started encountering a problem where I would hard lock every 30 mins or so and then have to hard kill the application to get out of it and back into the game… occasionally having to go so far as to go into task manager and kill battle.net entirely.

I am not sure what caused this or honestly what solved it. I tried to do a client repair but it did not seem to be doing much of anything. Instead what I ended up doing is exiting Battle.net entirely, moving my D3 install, and then going through the process of reinstalling the game while pointing at the new directory. From there I attempted a client repair again, and this time around it took about 10 minutes to complete making me think that maybe it was actually doing something that time. When I got into the game I noticed that for some reason it was set to 32-bit mode instead of 64-bit mode. I swapped that and from that point forward the game has been extremely smooth and I’ve yet to crash out to the desktop again. I am not sure exactly which of the things I did actually solved the problem, or even what the problem was exactly… but for now I am going to stop asking questions.

When I want an easy mode season, I always lean heavily on the Demon Hunter. This time around the Gears of Dreadlands set was on Haedrigs Gift, which meant that I completed most of the early seasonal accomplishments on that set. It is perfectly cromulent and is technically supposed to be the best set currently for progression. I’m not exactly the biggest fan of it because it feels a bit piddly given that you have to keep weaving in normal attacks or you just stop functioning entirely. Weaving normal attacks is always a good idea mind you, but if you get to a point where you can’t easily the wheels sort of fall off.

I used my farming ability however to piece together the Unhallowed set and swap over to Multishot. While my brain had gotten used to the spin to win strafing GoD build, I am slowly getting adjusted once again to the more familiar Demon Hunter gameplay. For the longest time I was waiting for a Yangs to drop and then… waiting for a second Dawn. Once I got both I swapped over and can immediately more comfortably farm T16. Saturday night after recording the podcast several of us knocked out two conquests in rapid order, so I should be able to complete the third one without much issue when I finish leveling 3 gems to 65.

That puts me in a very familiar spot when it comes to finishing up the season. I’ve not touched a set dungeon at all because I hate them. Right now I plan on doing the Marauder set because if I remember correctly it is a pretty easy one. I’ve almost completed building out Marauder and am only missing a few pieces. I have everything that I need ready for the Augment minus one of the red gems, and then it is simply a case of extracting a bunch of cube powers and pushing the gems to 70. I feel like some of the pressure has lessened because I could slack off entirely and then finish up all of this stuff in the final weekend if that ended up happening.

This season’s gimmick is the Altar of Rites, which ends up driving a lot of your farming and grinding. Essentially you sacrifice items to the Altar to get permanent buffs. For example, now my pet can salvage whites, blues, and yellows in addition to picking up gold. The problem with this however is that it cannot keep up with the process and seems to miss a ton of gold and a ton of materials. Another buff is that it makes it so all gear has no level requirement… but what it actually does in practice is set everything to level 1. However Companions don’t seem to be able to take advantage of this, so it means while leveling you cannot tell if your companions can or cannot equip something. The Altar is cool, but also seemingly introduced a bunch of jank into the game that they seemingly were not quite prepared for.

What I was not really prepared for… is how much more I seem to enjoy Path of Exile as compared to Diablo III. I just don’t feel nearly as engaged this season in Diablo, and it is almost as though the gameplay loop is nowhere near as rich as I remember it being. I had fun running amok with Ace, and I had missed that sort of experience, but for whatever reason, the gearing process in D3 has felt way more hollow this season than it has in previous ones. I could micromanage getting exactly the right stats, but it doesn’t feel as repeatably enjoyable as roaming around in Delve, Heist, or doing Maps in Path of Exile.

I am really hoping that when the Last Epoch Multiplayer launches, it can be that happy medium between the more casual grouping play of Diablo III, and the more rich systems of Path of Exile. I also hope to get into testing for Diablo IV so I can try that out and see how it feels. Basically, I am not sure if I was just in the wrong frame of mind for this season of Diablo III, but something feels missing and I can’t quite put my finger on it. I am going to wrap things up, but I think I would rather be playing Guild Wars 2 when I am not actively playing 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.

A Very ARPG Year

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Good Morning Friends! I spent a bit of time yesterday setting up my bookwyrm profile and loading the books that I have already read this year into it. So far I dig it. Unlike Good Reads it does appear to be an entirely manual process. This morning for example I updated my progress in The Exiled Fleet and it just required me to plug in a page number that I was sitting on. As a result, I am probably not really going to be updating progress that often and simply adding a book when I start reading it and then marking it as read, and writing some general comments about my experience. The other aspect of the tool that I want to explore a bit more is using it as a cache of books that I want to read. Libby does not exactly have the best discovery engine, so my goal is to use the “To Read” section as a sort of memory-jogging mechanism when I find I am looking for something new to consume.

What I had feared might happen… has happened. I am around 60% through The Exiled Fleet and my hold for the last Dresden novel has come open. Essentially as I understand it I have three days from the time of receiving the notice to claim it or else the book goes to the next person in line and I keep my “next in line” spot. My hope is that I can push through the novel I am currently reading in the next few days so that I can go ahead and claim my spot and go back to the gaming/audiobook nonsense that I enjoy so greatly. This is the part of the library system that I do not love… is the inherent pressure of trying to churn through something in a specific amount of time. As a result last night I spend most of the evening reading rather than gaming, which was its own sort of charming. My wife is admittedly a bit flabbergasted by this sudden transformation because reading all night is her jam, not necessarily mine.

That is not to say I am doing zero gaming. I am starting to poke my head back into Guild Wars 2 a bit, because I’ve been craving that sort of gameplay. I seem to be very much in this ARPG/Action MMO mindset right now and after coming from Path of Exile, I have to admit Lord of the Rings Online was a little slow for my tastes right now. I am easing back into Guild Wars 2 by spending some time doing the world boss train. I think ultimately however I will pick up and start working on the main/expansion stories with my Ranger. I am not sure what shifted mentally but I just started enjoying running around with my Ranger a bit more than I did my Necromancer.

I’ve also been playing a bit more Last Epoch and currently am really enjoying the Acolyte class which will eventually become a Necromancer. After decades of avoiding casters like the plague… which admittedly is probably a defunct saying given that we had a plague and no one avoided it… I actually find that I enjoy casters quite a bit these days. Most of the classes that I have played in Path of Exile ultimately end up being some sort of a caster given that melee is just not great there. While I enjoyed my Paladin character in Last Epoch, I think I am enjoying being a Necromancer a bit more. With the upcoming Multiplayer release, I figured it was time for me to finally get a character to the game’s endgame. I don’t think Last Epoch will be anywhere near as rich as Path of Exile but I am hoping it will be a better “with friends” experience.

I do not exactly feel great playing Blizzard games right now. I know that there have been significant changes inside of the company, but so long as Kotick still profits from it… I feel more than a little dirty spending time on those games. That said… I will be pausing my prohibition for a bit and diving into Diablo III Season 28 soon. It looks fucking amazing and this may be the last new season we get for a while, given that Diablo IV will be launching before we see another season. I figure a lot of the live team currently supporting Diablo III will end up getting transitioned. Mostly I am really interested in the Altar of rites which is a system where you sacrifice various things and get permanent account-wide buffs. Some of these give you significant amounts of power and others are just quality of life like the ability for your pets to pick up and salvage white, blue, and yellow items. I am deeply interested in this season, and in theory… once it has run its course I will have either Multiplayer in Last Epoch or another Path of Exile league to focus on.

Basically, it feels like this is going to be a very ARPG year for me. I knew at some point I would be playing Jedi Survivor but with it being bumped back by another month yesterday that gives me a bit more wiggle room to fully dive into this nonsense.