Diablo IV

Scorching Ray and Malignant Hearts

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Good Morning Friends. Yesterday I did not really have the mental fortitude for Baldur’s Gate III, so I largely focused on ARPGs for a quick dose of fun. I’ve continued working on leveling my Righteous Fire Templar and that continues to go swimmingly. The big difference with this test character is that I am focused on Scorching Ray in lieu of the more traditional Fire Trap for single-target-DPS. I am still not sure if I will actually go in this direction in nine days when the league start happens, but there are absolutely aspects of it that I greatly enjoy. Being able to burn things down at range is rather nice as they are heading toward you, but I am not entirely certain this makes up for the complete lack of mobility while doing the damage. I think in order to really get the most from this, you would need to invert your body armor and helmet quickly and get Scorching Ray in the six-link. I feel like for bosses this might have significantly higher damage potential, but for anything else… probably less because it was so easy just to drop fire traps as you were pathing through a map.

We have yet another new Atlas Passive spoiler and once again SirGog does an excellent job diving into its potential. If you don’t follow his channel, I highly suggest you remedy that because I find him one of the more valuable resources that deep dives into specific theory-crafting. There is this trend between the passive reveals so far that I am digging. They all seem to be making it easier for someone who has zero experience to get into specific league mechanics from the “big boom” option for Expedition to the “Tower Defense Only” Blight and “No Timer Delirium” and now “No Timer Legion” there is a clear pattern. It feels like we are going to see a new passive for most of the “on map” League mechanics that somehow simplify them without the need for a lot of atlas tree investment. Making Path of Exile a little more “noob friendly” seems like a great course to me.

Speaking of “Noob Friendly” I recorded another one of my dumb videos the other day where I ramble on about my journey so far in Path of Exile over the last four leagues. I had someone on social media helpfully suggest that I need to follow a script and that I need to talk faster… but that is going to be advice that I ignore. I’m not trying to turn YouTube or this blog for that matter into a business and I don’t much care about optimizing my output. However, if you are interested in listening to a twenty-minute discussion of how I progressed from half-assing my way through a build, following a guide, and now branching out to do some of my own things… this might be something for you. I talk through some of the websites and tools that I use and at least talk a little bit about Path of Building. I get that I am absolutely an acquired taste, but I know there are at least a few people out there that enjoy listening to me ramble.

In the “things I did not expect to do” department, over lunch yesterday I decided to check out Diablo IV Patch 1.1.1 aka the one that supposedly fixes a bunch of things. All told thus far it feels like a better experience, but then again… I am only level sixteen and am far from the end of the game that wound up frustrating me. I am trying a Hammer of the Ancients aka HOTA Barbarian, because really… if Barb does not feel better then I legitimately have no interest in this game going forward. Originally I thought to myself that I was going to play through the campaign again because starting a character without the campaign feels a little directionless. However, I got bored with the campaign quests and all of the times when you are having to wait on NPCs to path… and wound up hitting the “skip campaign” button. Diablo IV still feels prodigiously slow to me, and probably always will.

Skipping the campaign at least allowed me to fiddle around with the seasonal mechanic. Malignant Hearts are in the “aggressively fine” territory. One of the nice things so far is that I don’t exactly feel like I am giving anything up since I would normally run Skulls in all of my jewelry, and thus far all of the hearts I have picked up have added additional armor. The effects that they grant tend to be a bit on the lackluster side… but again I am only level sixteen. They are certainly nice to haves, but nothing so far that I would consider “build defining”. It most definitely does not feel like it allows me to create some “broken builds” as hinted at by the devs. The biggest problem I have noticed is… the increase in renown means that you cap out an area long before you can reasonably unlock World Tier 3… and continue gaining renown. So at least in the short term, I feel like I would need to bounce around a lot.

I’ve not consumed my extra special battle pass nonsense, and unless I suddenly decide this is the best thing ever… I am unlikely to do so. It isn’t so much that the seasonal mechanic is bad… it is more that it feels like it should have been a small part of much larger mechanics. Like if you collected hearts and then could use your excess hearts (side note I am only 16 and I already have more than I can use) to craft some sort of key that allowed you to run a loot-filled dungeon full of nothing but corrupted/infected/whatever monsters… it might be a really fun season. They could have taken a page from Path of Exile and given us a way to use a heart to corrupt a dungeon boss similar to corrupting an Essence Monster, that then has a chance to drop special corrupted versions of their normal loot table. The mechanic just feels half-baked and it should have been saved to combine with other seasonal mechanics to make something cooler.

I think quite possibly the biggest negative that I can see is that even though it is lackluster as a whole… they have already said that it won’t be going to the Eternal realm. Diablo IV already feels like it just doesn’t have enough to do or enough interesting variety in its content. Making it so that there is a random chance of getting a Malignant heart to drop that then allows it to replace a gem socket or something going forward would at least add some interesting random chance that could break up other seasonal mechanics. The biggest thing that Path of Exile has going for it, is just how damned much content it has and how much random chance there is that something really interesting is going to happen when you run even the most boring of maps. There is something like twenty-four different league mechanics that have migrated to Standard and all of them CAN influence your content… adding that delightful layer of unpredictability to everything you do.

Blizzard decided that Nightmare Dungeons would be their pinnacle activity that everyone would want to do over and over. The problem is… they are boring, repetitive, and in spite of having over a hundred dungeons… they feature what is essentially a dozen different bosses. In the infamous David S. Pumpkins SNL skit one of the characters asks “Why did you go all in on David Pumpkins?” and I feel like I find myself asking that about Nightmare Dungeons. Clearly, the designers thought they were going to be the big thing, and that has not really worked into reality. Anyways do I think I will actually level my now seasonal character in Diablo IV? Probably not. I will likely return to more Baldur’s Gate III, until the 18th when the Ancestor League launches in Path of Exile, and rapidly forget that I even have Diablo IV installed again.

AggroChat #443 – Even Immortality Ends

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Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen

Hey Folks! This week we have the entire crew and can finally talk some more about Nimona and how much we love this movie. From there Bel talks about the Diablo 4 Season 1 Patch, and how it might be the worst live service patch ever. We get that everyone is tired of talking about this game but the hits keep coming.  This week Honkai Star Rail released the next batch of stories with its 1.2 patch, and we talk about some of the events and ramifications.  Thalen was gone last week because he spent nearly an entire weekend playing one game of Twilight Imperium so we talk a bit about that. Thalen also talks a bit about playing Kabuto Sumo and how it is very kid friendly.  Finally, we wrap things up with Kodra talking about using the Steam Deck as a second monitor in his streaming rig.

Topics Discussed:

  • Nimona is Great
    • You Should Watch It Again
  • Diablo 4 Season 1
    • Maybe the Worst Live Service Patch
    • Maybe as bad as the Champions Online Day One Patch
  • Honkai Star Rail
    • Immortality Ends 1.2 Patch
  • Twilight Imperium
    • Do you have a free weekend?
  • Kabuto Sumo
  • Steamdeck Streaming Rig

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Seasonal Stinker

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I’ve been done with Diablo IV for a few weeks now and I reached that point when I finally entered World Tier IV… and nothing really changed for me. I kept waiting for the game to get fun, and really without a significant investment of more time I was uncertain I would ever arrive at that point. I put around 200 hours into the game over the course of leveling and gearing, and never really landed on an end-game activity that I truly enjoyed. Barbarian never felt the way I expected it to feel and my survivability always ended when I got crowd controlled, and given my CC break was part of my rage generation mechanism that made playing feel worthwhile… it was always on cooldown. For the last few weeks of playing the game, I had fallen into a pattern where the only time I actually played was when my friend Cyl happened to be on and a world boss was just about to spawn. Essentially I was playing the game in daily quest mode.

I held out a glimmer of hope that maybe Season 1 would bring some significant changes to the game that would improve my enjoyment. However that is absolutely not the case, and in fact, the patch notes nerfed essentially everything that was working without really replacing them with significant changes to any other abilities to bring them up to par. So this tells me that the gameplay loop that the devs working on this game are going for… is a slow slog of a game where you die a lot. While the outrage has been almost universal even from folks who were able to suffer through Diablo Immortal… and there is an emergency Fireside Chat scheduled for Friday… I feel like any backpedaling is only going to serve to delay the end goal of slowing down the players. I already considered Diablo IV to be a bit of a slog… so anything slower is going in the wrong direction for me personally.

I still feel like Diablo IV is a game designed for folks who only casually interact with ARPGs… but with way more hardcore vibes designed for someone playing Path of Exile Ruthless mode for thousands of hours to accomplish anything. There is no real solid core endgame loop, and Nightmare Dungeons feel miserable. The only really fun activities are the World Bosses and Helltides, but they are gated by lengthy timers… and the last patch nerfed Mystery Chests so that Helltides now feel like a waste of your time as well. There is nothing like Path of Exile Maps, Last Epoch Monolith, or even Diablo III Greater Rifts that provides an efficient and fun way to grind out experience and gear. At level 70 I unliked the highest tier of gear in the game and was able to gear myself relatively quickly… which left only fruitless grinding for Paragon points and trying to hit level 100 as my remaining goals. There was nothing really aspirational to chase at that point, and Season 1 does nothing to really fix that.

Even more so… Season 1 does nothing to really fix some of the core problems with the game. The UI for the stash is awful. The manner in which you build a character requires you to be holding onto legendary items in either raw item form or very limited legendary aspect storage. This means every time you get an item that is numerically an upgrade, you have to extract and imprint the correct aspect on it… which effectively forces you to mouse over every single item in your inventory looking for the right one. None of the game’s systems have search functionality. This is even more important than the fact that you have a measly 200 slots of stash storage that rapidly gets used by your very first character. All of this seemed like low-hanging fruit for them to implement some rapid improvements, but we are seeing nothing of the sort in Season 1. In fact critical problems with the game like the fact that resistances are meaningless… are being kicked down the road to Season 2 before addressing.

I’ve uninstalled Diablo IV and now only have Diablo III remaining on my system. Largely I did this so that I did not for some reason accidentally use my Battle Pass entitlement that came with the game. I have no interest in playing Season 1, and quite honestly… it is probably going to be a few seasons before I dip my toes back into the game. Right now the team has designed and is trying to reinforce a game different from the sort of game that I want to play. I think the game as a whole is going to have to fall on its face like Diablo III did before we can get a Reaper of Souls update that brings the game back in line with what a fun gameplay experience looks like. Maybe in a year’s time, they will have been forced to reconcile where they went wrong… and begin to bring the game back in line with what an ARPG experience should feel like. I’ve been done for a while… it wasn’t until the seasonal patch drop that I decided to just uninstall and free up the drive space.

Unfortunately for Blizzard, they have also somewhat run out of time to get their shit together. Next week is ExileCon in Auckland New Zealand and with it will come a deluge of new information about the 3.22 Patch and the new league that will be dropping on August 18th. Additionally, there will be more news about Path of Exile 2… which means all of the POE Streamers and YouTubers who have been giving Diablo IV airtime due to the Crucible league being a bit lacking… will suddenly disappear from the community. Additionally, there is a slew of Destiny 2 content creators that came over to play Diablo IV, and they have already filtered back into their own community. So the Diablo IV “community” is about to get much smaller and I am just not sure who is going to be left as a dedicated player.

There is no doubt for me personally, that Path of Exile continues to be the best Action RPG on the market. You just cannot compete with the sheer amount of detailed content that is available in that game, and when POE2 adds an entirely new alternate leveling path with some massive core system changes… I am not sure if anyone can really compete. Please note… I LOVE Last Epoch but it is nowhere near ready to really be mainlined as a primary game because there just isn’t enough breadth of content available. It is fun for a while but the repetition of the limited amount of content available wears thin really quickly. With Path of Exile, you can focus on one small niche of that community and carve out enough gameplay to keep you busy the entire league. There are folks who will spend an entire league doing almost nothing but Heist, Delve, or even specific mapping mechanics like Legion or Blight.

The core problem with Path of Exile will always be one of accessibility. The tyranny of the tree is real… and it is purposefully there a few minutes into the gameplay as a way of warning players that they are in for a very specific type of gameplay experience. However, having played a lot of this game… I feel like it is nowhere near as daunting as someone just starting out might think it is. There are a lot of guide makers out there, but most of them have forgotten how fucked up the game seems when you first start out. I am contemplating trying to create some content targeted at trying to ease players into some of the critical steps in building a character, to at least give them enough of a foundation to be able to follow most build guides. It is going to take way more time than I have this week, so view that as a future project of mine.

Regretfully Seeking Luocha

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Good Morning Folks! This morning’s blog post is going to be a bit of a smorgasbord of smaller topics. The first is that the Silver Wolf banner is sadly over in Honkai Star Rail. That means that any attempts at getting this excellent character are diminished for the time being. I am uncertain if she can be pulled on a normal banner, but I am extremely happy that I picked her up while it was available. It cracks me up that when she visits the Astral Express she does so in hologram form. This morning she was hanging out in the parlor car and wanting to play board games… then realized that holograms can’t move physical pieces. Then turned around and berated me for not having any arcade cabinets on the express. She has rapidly become one of my favorite characters for her ability to brute force a weakness onto a target.

With the Silver Wolf banner gone, that means the Luocha banner is now available. I have to admit there is absolutely nothing about this character or his design that interests me. I am however pulling for him just because I need a second healer. I would far rather have Bailu, but as it stands I think you have to be just exceptionally lucky with the default banner to make this happen. Honestly, I am not even that big of a fan of his style of healing, but having a second healer seems like it would make the split runs where you are required to have two teams much easier to complete. I am however hoping to pick up a Pela from the banner while it is available. I bonded with Pela during the museum event and now like the character far more than I originally did.

So far however all I have pulled are multiple copies of Qinqque. Since you got her for free that means I now have her with two Eidolons, which is fine… but she isn’t exactly a character I am actively using for anything other than running assignments. I only had enough currency saved up to do two 10 pulls and the other pull the only thing I picked up was a four-star light cone. Just like in Genshin Impact, pulling a weapon or light cone is always the least exciting possible thing you can pull. I’m close to another 10 pull on the Luocha banner so maybe I will get him so I can go back to the standard banner. As it stands there are probably more things on that banner that I actually care about at this point.

I’m finding the event that went in with Luocha a bit frustrating. It is called Stellar Flare and it is based on defeating a number of mobs during a certain number of cycles aka turns. Since I tend to build teams for survival and not speed… this means that I keep failing these fights. I am going to have to shift things up a bit and pull together a speedy team rather than a sturdy team. The problem is that the fight itself dishes out a ton of damage. So you almost need to come up with a team that can “board wipe” every single cycle. I’m also nowhere near maxed out on my characters so it isn’t like I can just brute force this. I need to devote some time to farming the resources needed to upgrade my newly level 70 character squad the rest of the way.

In very very brief Diablo IV news, I managed to get to level 70 finally. I am just not really enjoying the grind at this point. Barbarian is essentially in a state where if you get crowd controlled once… you are dead almost instantly. This is just about as unfun of a situation as it gets, and while I enjoy hanging out with my friend Cyl… I don’t much enjoy Nightmare Dungeons. Really other than the occasional world boss Nightmare Dungeons are the only end-game activity that is reliably available. I felt very strong when I first got to World Tier IV but I already feel like I lost all of that power and am consistently getting weaker every single level. The thing is… I am wearing about as good of gear as you can get for my level with the appropriate aspects on each item. Sure I could min-max the stats or grind out more paragon points, but it largely feels like a losing battle. I exist in two states… either immortal or instantly dead the moment anything stuns/freezes/poisons me.

All of the news about Secrets of the Obscure has made me renew my focus on Guild Wars 2. Since I have been recording my dumb little videos talking about various game modes I enjoy, I decided that last night I would record myself doing the server reset Tequatl fight. This is sort of the quintessential Guild Wars 2 experience for me personally. It was the encounter that made me finally appreciate how god of a game Guild Wars 2 could be, and was probably my first real large-scale world boss experience. Since then I have done hundreds of boss and meta trains, but Tequatl will always hold a very special place in my heart. It is sort of the pinnacle of how cool the drop in group play can be in this game.

Last night I also started working a bit on the next set of story quests for What Lies Within. I didn’t get super far though because I wound up going outside to hang in the backyard for the remainder of the night. I am sure I will pick up and get through that content drop today. I’m also looking forward to the weapons test beta this weekend. I want to get in and play with Necromancer Greatsword/Pistol and see if I can figure out how to make it viable. Mostly I just want a ranged weapon that feels better than staff to combo with Greatsword. The axe is just too short of a ranged weapon, and I really wish Necromancer got access to Longbow. Maybe eventually someday.

Did you have luck pulling Luocha in Honkai Star Rail? Are you still playing Diablo IV? Are you going to participate in the weapon test beta in Guild Wars 2? Drop me a line with your thoughts.