Diablo IV

Minions For Days

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Last Epoch – Many Dead Friends

Hey Folks. This is an extended weekend for me due to MLK Jr day here in the United States and as such I am getting a much later start at sitting down to write words. Additionally it also happens to be inauguration day, but we are not going to talk about that part. I’m still very much spending my time playing ARPGs and have reached that point with Last Epoch where I am not quite powerful enough to push my way into empowered monoliths with zero friction. I essentially am slowly working my way through objectives and can’t roll over the top of maps in quite the same way as I was up until this point. Everything is great… until I start losing minions… at which point it becomes a battle of attrition as I attempt to keep summoning minions and hope I can distract the baddies long enough for them to be killed before they notice me standing in the background.

Last Epoch – Empowered Monolith

To be fair, this feels like something every build goes through in that level 80-90 range where you have completed Normal Monoliths but are still below the optimal level for level 100 Empowered Monoliths. I am sure I could fine tune my build to make this go a bit more smoothly, but for the moment I am using five minions and zero support spells. I am also struggling with mana issues which I need to figure out a way to solve because I cannot really spam my exploding zombies. I am generating quite a bit of ward and I wish I had access to something like Eldritch Battery in this game. Overall I feel much sturdier than my average version of this build thanks to the additional ward. I am not super great at bossing however because the minions just can’t grind them down as fast as I would like. I am also missing a bunch of uniques from the bog standard minions build… namely I have burned through around 60 Runes of Ascendance in an attempt to get an Aaron’s Will with zero luck.

Path of Exile II – Fourth Ascendancy

I’ve also been playing quite a bit of Path of Exile II, even though I largely thought I was finished with it. Yesterday I managed to complete my Fourth Ascendancy, so I am pretty happy with that. I ran a Trial of Chaos and after the nerfing of the Tornado boss it seems pretty reasonable. I did buy the 3 tokens required to fight the Trialmaster off the currency exchange, because I did not really feel like grinding level 80 Trials in order to collect all three parts. Everything went smoothly… until my cat walked in front of my keyboard and then I realized that I could not pause the game during a boss fight. So I rapidly shooed Gracie out of the way in time to dodge a boss attack. Overall though it seemed very doable.

Path of Exile II – Arbiter of Ash

What was NOT doable… was the Arbiter of Ash fight. I assumed this would be just as free as Xesht was on zero difficulty. That was not the case and all of the attacks were very much oneshot mechanics. I feel like I either lack the dps to phase the boss fast enough, or lack the movement speed to be able to complete the encounter. There is this phase where you have to run between safe bubbles that are very much like the meteor attack from FFXIV, and I simply was not fast enough to hit them all. Similarly there is a diagonal attack that you have to find the safe spot in, and I was just not fast enough to be able to move between these if I got one on the far edge of the screen and then the next one on the opposite far edge. Basically I wasted three tokens trying this fight and will now just sell them on the market like I was previously… especially since the price of all three tokens has gone up significantly.

Path of Exile II – Lucky Raw Divine Orb drop

I’ve respecced my character a bit gaining way more life and energy shield… dropping a few points of block and then mixing in a Skeletal Storm Mage to debuff everything with shock. I had to sacrifice one Arsonist but the mix seems to work really well as everything appears to be dying much faster now. The biggest difference is on Rares where my boots are poisoning them, the storm mages are shocking them, and then I am keeping them ignited with flame wall… which keeps the shock from dropping. I am curious how this feels for bossing as I have not really done many since the swap over this morning. I also need to start shopping for a Sceptre upgrade because I would really like to at least get my skeletal warriors up to 19 instead of the 18 version that I am currently using. Additionally it would be really nice to get some more spirit in that slot.

Diablo IV – Season of Witchcraft

For the moment I am having a pretty good time alternating back and forth between Last Epoch and Path of Exile II, and I know tomorrow I will be spending time leveling something in Diablo IV as the new seasons starts. Overall the Season of Witchcraft seems to be a partial reboot of the Vampire season which was quite possibly the best season so far. Leveling through the “bloodtide” was a heck of a lot of fun, and as such I fully expect to level almost entirely through the new witchcraft map mechanics. I am not sure if I will be playing a Spiritborn again or returning to my old standby of Barbarian. Since I am seemingly in a minions state of mind, I might try running up a Necromancer and giving that a proper shot. Whatever the case I fully expect this to distract me for awhile, or at least until we get another Path of Exile II patch.

Contrary to popular belief, Diablo IV is in a pretty good state these days. It took over a year and a major expansion to get there, but it is pretty fun for a week or so. It essentially is a more modern version of Diablo III at this point, and I am on board with that.

Fears for Next Season

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Good Morning Folks! It has taken a while for Diablo IV to reach the point of feeling amazing, but it truly is there. I should take a step back… it feels amazing if you are playing the new class Spiritborn. My Barbarian that I power leveled through Whispers Caches feels like complete ass comparatively. It is slower and clunkier, and mobs just don’t die anywhere near as fast as they should. Diablo IV feels amazing because Blizzard has done the thing that they do time and time again… release a wildly overpowered class. They did this in World of Warcraft with both the Deathknight and Demon Hunter, where playing literally anything else during that patch cycle felt awful compared to the new hotness. I was a Warrior tank in Wrath of the Lich King and eventually switched over to Deathknight just because it felt so much better and honestly had more tools to play with. I did this again during Legion where I started out on tried and true Warrior but eventually swapped to Demon Hunter tanking because it just felt so much better.

Maxroll just updated their Endgame Tier list and had to create a new ranking called “S+” to isolate how much different the good Spiritborn builds are as compared to the other available builds in the game. There are Spiritborn builds right now capable of doing legitimate quadrillions of damage. Even when you drop down to “S” rank, there are two Necromancer builds and one Warrior build… and at least in the case of the Warrior build I know it is mostly exploiting a bugged mechanic to be able to place that high. Essentially if you are playing Diablo IV and not playing the shiny new hotness… you are playing a different game than I am playing. The game I am playing feels amazing… the clunky mess when I drop down to playing my Dual Swing Twisters Barbarian… does not feel amazing. I lack the unique required to swap over to the broken Mighty Throw build so I cannot judge how that feels.

It is reaching the point where some of the player base is demanding nerfs… and I get it honestly. Were I playing the wrong class during this patch I would probably feel the same. However, the gameplay that Spiritborn has should be the benchmark for how the rest of the game should feel. This is an ARPG… a game about blasting your way through thousands of demons while chasing loot. The game I am playing is what Diablo IV should have been from the very start. These games are entirely centered around the joy of building up a character to the point where they can crush everything in seconds. That is the end goal of every good build regardless of which ARPG you happen to be playing. Season Six feels amazing… and I fear that as a result, Season Seven is going to feel awful. It is going to be the hangover we are left with after the bender this season has been.

Blizzard is stuck in this position where they cannot really nerf the Spiritborn because it is this class that they have defended time and time again to the players. It is the new hotness and the entire reason for buying the expansion for many. What I fear for next season is that they are going to hammer down the nail that is sticking up, when instead they really should be buffing all of the other classes to where they feel as good as Spiritborn does currently. Even the gaming pundits that have called for more challenging content, seem to be having a blast on the Spiritborn and zipping through things at record speed. The truth is… ARPGs are a power fantasy and if you cannot get powerful… it is not fun. If I cannot clear the highest level content quickly… then I am playing a bad build.

There have been a lot of really fun and broken builds that have arisen during the course of Diablo IV’s short history and all of them have been beat back down into submission. I question when Blizzard is going to realize that this is the game that the player base actually wants. There would not be this constant chase for the most bugged and aggressively rewarding build if it were not so damned fun to play in that way. The Spiritborn family of builds is just the latest in a long line of “god builds” that have come along and captured the attention of the player base. What feels worse though is the fact that in order to have fun playing this game you have to play one of like three or four builds any given season. I would love to see them buffing the underperforming builds so that they are within the range of the highest-performing builds. As it stands currently, half of the classes in the game do not have a high-performing build.

Blizzard has created a scenario that is much like it is in other more hardcore ARPGs like Path of Exile, where if you are not following a guide strictly… you are playing the game incorrectly. Sure you can limp through the campaign on pretty much anything, in either game… but you will never be able to reach the heights of farming efficiency if you are not playing whatever broken mechanic is in vogue that season. I suffered through this for a bit when I switched over to my Quill Volley build that I am playing now, where a SINGLE talent point… made the difference between struggling to run T3 content to being able to dominate T4 content. What I really want is for the same feel of playing a current well-built Spiritborn build to trickle out into all of the content in the game and all of the classes and builds. I prefer playing Upheaval Barbarian because I like the mechanics of firing a bit of sweeping attack in front of me and nuking the entire screen… but that build has not been terribly viable ever. So instead playing what I wanted to play is needlessly tedious to get through when I could just play the “IWIN” build of the season.

I am still winding down from this season. I finished out the reputation in Nahantu, am about halfway through the last level of the seasonal reputation grind, and then have to do all of the remaining Tenets of Akarat. I feel pressure to get all of this done so that I don’t have to deal with it in a future season when I am playing a less fun character. I’ve been thinking a lot about how bad Season Seven is going to feel when Blizzard inevitably does what they always seem to do and nerf the fun out of the game. Diablo IV has had a few shining moments when it was really fun to play… this season, season two… but inevitably they keep trying to bring the game into line with some vision that they have for what the experience is supposed to be. I hope I am wrong. I hope we see a line of massive buffs to bring the other classes in line with the power levels of Spiritborn… but I don’t think that will happen.

Anyways if you have ever played Diablo IV in the past, you might want to pop in and give Spiritborn a spin before it is nerfed into oblivion. It is one of those magic moments when everything is just right, and I am afraid will be a fond memory we talk about around the campfire in the future as the “good ole days”.

Stupid Alt Tricks

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Good Morning Folks! I’m getting to the point where I think I am almost “done” with Diablo IV, at least until the next season rolls around. This is the inevitable place that I end up with seasonal model games like this and depending on how engaging they all have different cycles associated with them. In Diablo 3, Last Epoch, and Diablo 4 I pretty much get a few weeks out of them before deciding I have run out of things that I actually care to do. Path of Exile gives me at least a month, maybe two, before I start to lose interest. This is not a failing of the games mind you, this is just the way that I play them. I love fresh starts and I have a lot of fun during the gearing and leveling phase, and then progressively less fun as I accomplish whatever goals I set out for myself. Thankfully we have reached a point where there is almost always another ARPG just about to fire up so that I can hop into it with much glee.

There are a handful of items that I want to check off the list before I move on completely. Ace is far better at this sort of tedium gaming and has long since completed all of these. Essentially I need to finish grinding out Reputation for Nahantu so that I can permanently increase my Obol cap for all seasons from this point forward. I also want to finish gathering up the Tenets of Akarat so that these stay unlocked in future seasons as well. I had started down this path shortly after finishing the campaign, but many of them were bugged and could not be completed. Both of these are sort of the fodder for a lazy weekend afternoon, and I have plenty of time to knock them out before the next season starts in January.

The other thing that I want to complete just for the sake of doing it… because there are probably seasonal titles associated with it… is completing the final level of the Zakarum Remnants grind. This has been the absolute worst reputational grind in any Diablo IV Season. What I think I will probably do is churn through a bunch of Nightmare Dungeons on T4 as I have an achievement for doing those that I have yet to complete. I believe I get another shard of “unobtainium” used to craft mythic from completing this reputation. I might grind out some Undercity Rune Tributes in an effort to compile six copies of every rune so that I can potentially target craft other mythics given that we ran over 100 bosses this weekend and saw zero as opposed to the five from the weekend before last.

You can tell that I am mostly done with a season because I started taking on stupid side projects. The Tree of Whispers is essentially the Bounties system for Diablo IV, and at any given time there are a bunch of objectives around the world that reward varying numbers of whispers. The best ones are the ones that reward five at a time, as you need ten in total to get a bounty cache. Interesting tidbit that my friend Eliyon pointed out, is that you can farm these caches on one character and then have another character benefit from opening them. I believe he was thinking in terms of passing gear, but it turns out you get quite a boost of experience from opening them as well.

So as I am likely to do… I set forth on a totally degenerate play pattern and spent good chunks of the weekend farming Whispers Caches, only to flip over to my baby Barbarian and have him open them. It is honestly shocking how fast you can amass a huge stack of Whispers Caches and in truth, it is pretty damned fun popping around the map completing various bounty objectives. I always used to like running bounties in Diablo III, and it turns out I still enjoy that same sort of gameplay in its newer sibling. I was even doing the PVP Objectives because in truth… no one is out there actually PVPing. No matter what the loud faction of PVPers say… ARPG players do not give a shit about PVP. I could kill the boss for 5 whispers and then cleanse the blood shards that I got for a few more… and make it back to town all without seeing another soul. I did this several times, so it was not like it was a fluke, literally no one cares about PVP.

I wish I had kept better count of the total number of caches that were required to go from around level 7 when I started all the way to level 60 at which point I inherited all of the Paragon points I had accumulated on the Spiritborn. Quick mental math would tell me that it was between 20 and 25 caches in total that I had to farm, which honestly was not that bad. The first few caches gave me ten levels or so per cache… then it settled into about a level per cache until 53… at which point I started getting slightly less than a level. At 53 I farmed up eight caches which took me to 59 1/3, and then I proceeded to farm two more caches just to make sure that it would push me over the line. The cool thing about this process is that by the time I hit 60, I had pretty much gathered up all of the aspects that I would need for the build. Were I smarter I would have specifically kept out the best legendaries while leveling, but I was not that smart and ran around in a bunch of random uniques for a bit until I got things straightened out.

The only annoyance with this method for leveling is that you have to unlock Torment levels on the new character. I assumed as soon as I dinged 60, I would be able to flip over to Torment 1 and start rolling. However, I had to complete a Pit 20 in order to unlock that difficulty level. While I was at it I went ahead and tried Pit 35, the gate for unlocking Torment 2 and was able to do that just fine. My build does not really feel stable enough to push on to Torment 3, and in truth my Double Swing Twisters build is mostly a transitional build. The new Barbarian hotness is Mighty Throw, but it requires a specific unique called The Third Blade in order to make it function, something I have not seen drop yet. For now, Twisters works well enough for any content I would want to do on T1 or T2.

So thanks to my degeneracy, I find myself with two characters at max level and geared this season. The challenge there is that I feel like it isn’t necessarily pushing me to play more. I still feel like I am winding things down significantly. There is one more thing that I would like to try, since we used to pull up alts for each other in Diablo III by running Greater Rifts, at some point I want to see how effective that is by running an alt along with a Pit Run. This is mostly kicking the tires at this point, because I can’t say that I actually want to play additional characters. There is an achievement for having a level sixty of every class, so depending on how fast this process works it might be worth doing just for that.

Anyways… all of that said. Diablo IV still has problems, but it has finally reached a point where I can universally recommend it for folks who enjoy the seasonal model of ARPG gaming. The story for the expansion is still sort of shit, but the endgame gameplay loop is great.

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.