Vessel of Hatred

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.

Peak Mythicality

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Good Morning Folks. My friends will tell you that I have “Bel Luck” when it comes to anything involving random chance. I’ve spent years trying to deny this but there are times you just cannot ignore there is something. For example around 2015/2016 Magic the Gathering released a number of sets with ultra-rare chase cards that had a pull chance roughly equivalent to one in every two full cases of booster packs… so somewhere around one in four hundred packs. I pulled the most expensive card buying completely random packs that still go for around $800 after a significant price drop due to the card being banned recently, and had a peak of around $1200. Not only did I pull one of these… I pulled another one of these chase cards from Kaladesh… as well as one from Zendikkar, and two from Amonkhet just buying the occasional random pack. In all examples, I likely bought less than half a booster box worth of packs in total.

This is a common enough occurrence that my friends will talk about my “Bel Luck” rubbing off on them and them benefitting from being in close proximity of me when it comes to good drops in video games. Last night Ace and I spent the evening running summoned bosses. I have no clue HOW many we ended up killing but we wound up doing the same rotation we did last time. We started with Varshaan and we did at least twenty summons before moving on to Lord Zir for another twenty or so there. Then we did Beast in the Ice, followed by Grigore… and in both cases we had to go back to town a few times to clear our inventory. We wrapped up doing Duriel and only got about halfway through our summons before we ran out of steam. Either tonight or some other point this week/weekend we will finish up Duriel and do Andariel before to halt for another week or so and gather back up the materials for more summons. Ace got the first Mythic drop last night and made the traditional comment that my luck was rubbing off on them.

Then my luck kicked in. Over the course of the night, I got Five Mythic Uniques… the first of which was crafted. I’ve lined them up in the order in which I got them to drop. I attempted to use Andariel’s Visage but was taking too much damage due to the high damage reduction roll I had on my existing unique helmet. Then I got a Glaive drop which seemed really interesting, but unfortunately, Kepeleke is kind of required to make the build work. Then I got Heir of Perdition which is a helm that my previous build incarnation wanted, but is not really useful for Quillrain. Next up I got Ring of the Starless Skies which is pretty much a universally good item that I was able to work into my build. Lastly, I got Tyrael’s Might, the Mythic Unique that the build ones, and the one that Ace managed to get through crafting.

Even with all of these upgrades… there seems to be some special sauce that has Ace far ahead of me in performance. This morning I attempted Pit 60 something that they have been speed farming… and it was an absolute slog to get through. I would essentially have to gather everything up and then slowly grind it down. There is something I am missing… or some piece of gear that does not have a high enough roll. Whatever the case I can now comfortably do Torment III all day long, but as I approach Torment IV everything slows down to a crawl. I am just not certain what I am doing wrong with this build, but whatever the case I am annoying the hell out of me. If nothing else my survival has gone up significantly since getting the two mythic upgrades.

At some point, I need to inspect Ace in-game so that I can look through their gear and try and glean what I am missing. I also feel like I am missing talent points somewhere because when I follow a build guide I seem to always be a point or two short from what the guide is recommending. I am seeing that there is a bug that folks are talking about where a respec gave them 69 points instead of 71 so I am wondering if I am being impacted by that. I really do not want to respec everything again but I might try that. I wish Diablo IV had something akin to POE.Ninja which lets me poke around in other builds doing the same thing so I that I could see whatever they were doing differently. I am stronger than I was, but nowhere near what I am seeing from Ace.