Diablo Franchise

Realmwalkers

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So after the dramatic delays for the launch of Diablo IV Vessel of Hatred that I talked about yesterday, I finally was able to get in and get some game time last night. The only problem with that is that I have had a massive amount of issues playing the game since it was updated. I am not entirely certain what has changed in the game since the roll-out of Vessel of Hatred but I am seeing way more hitching and rubberbanding in game than I originally did playing the base game. Namely, this happens when I load into a new area or zone out of the sanctuary bubble surrounding a town. This tells me that it is a loading asset or network throughput problem more than anything else. When you transition zones you are essentially loading into a new “map” with a variable number of new players loading into it with you.

This prompted me to run some actual tests on the two “fast” drives in my system. For years I thought my “T drive” aka the drive that I put into this stock system was the faster of the two drives. It turns out that is absolutely not the case. In fact, it is pretty slow, or slower than I thought. The maximum throughput of a SATA III SSD is around 600 MB/s and my drive is running around 556 MB/s which admittedly is not that much slower than the maximum. Considering I have not spent much time inside my own machine since I bought it as a prebuilt… I assumed BOTH of my drives were SSDs when in truth apparently my “C Drive” is an NVME. So all of this time I have been favoring the worst drive. I guess I need to figure out if I have the room to add one of those PCIE to NVME interface cards to add some more fast storage at some point.

Moving Diablo IV to the faster drive helped quite a bit, but it did not remove all of the problems. I still am constantly dealing with freezes whenever I cross zone boundaries and it is frustrating as heck. I don’t think it is a network throughput problem because I am connected directly to my router with a 1-gigabit connection and per speed test I am seeing roughly 360 Mbps down and 35 Mbps up… which is pretty much the maximum rating of my internet connection. If I could play this game offline… I feel like it would probably clear all of these issues up. Whenever I am in a dungeon or other instanced area, I experience zero hitching and freezes, which tells me the problem is the other players. Hell really is other people.

Annoyances aside, I am really enjoying the Spiritborn. Sure I would have rather had a Paladin/Crusader just like every other Diablo player on the planet, but the new class is pretty fun. It feels like this blend between the Diablo III Monk and the World of Warcraft DPS Demon Hunter. I am loosely following this leveling build from Maxroll, and at some point, I will swap to their Deathtouch Centipede endgame build. The only annoyance that I have currently is that I keep having to swap weapon transmogs because there are three different types of weapons that they can use. I love that you can access transmogs at any point while you are out in the world, but I wish you could lock in your weapon appearance in a similar fashion to how you can do your armor.

I’ve legitimately made almost zero progress in the campaign. I made it over the border into Nahantu and unlocked the Mercenary system, and then proceeded to spend the rest of the evening unlocking all of the mercenaries. At this point, my favorite is Varyana the grump elderly cannibal. The Demon child seems like he is a model swap from the Tiefling kids in Baldur’s Gate III, but I am currently running with him so I can get at least one level of reputation. I remember reading something about wanting to get one rank in all of them so that you can unlock bartering at some point. Going forward though I will probably use a combination of Subo because he makes enemies and harvestable resources show up on your map. I am also using Varyana as my backup tied to my charge attack so that I am constantly proccing her to come cleave things.

One of the good at bad things about an expansion launching at the same time as a season is that the two mechanics often blend together. It turns out my favorite part of the expansion so far is in stead something associated with Season 6. Every so often a Realmwalker will spawn, if you remember from Diablo III these are giant demons that summon a portal to another realm when you beat them up. This time around they roam around the map spawning random baddies and if you kill enough of these baddies it will make the Realmwalker mad enough to fight you. At that point, you can beat it up and it will summon a portal to a dungeon.

Inside of the dungeon you can choose the type of rewards you want for completing it, which also determines the type of Opals that drop at the end. Opals essentially function as potions but stack with the rest of the consumables in the game. While you have the 30-minute effect active you gain experience towards the seasonal rewards track and also have a chance of spawning extra rewards out in the world. Essentially the ones I have encountered so far are Opals that give you extra gold, extra crafting materials, and extra gear drops. Seeing as I have gotten several legendaries after using one of the equipment potions, I am guessing this is going to be a good way to farm more gear. There are two higher tiers of Opals apparently available later, one that gives you gem fragments, and another that gives you bossing materials.

Ultimately these “seething realm” dungeons feel like what the Nightmare Dungeons should have been… just a quick boss rush with interesting side effects that feel rewarding for your time. All in all, I am enjoying the expansion but I’ve not really seen any of the story yet. I guess tonight I will spend my evening focused on that to see how well it grabs me. I’ve always been a “do the story last” type person when it comes to games because I like being able to just overpower it with levels and gear. If there is a way for me to trivialize content I will do so all the time. I also just like roaming around aimlessly way more than I like questing in general. When I am in a questing mood, I want to keep my head down and push through all the way to the end in effectively a single sitting.

One interesting side effect of the new class… is that they ACTUALLY know how to hold a fucking Halberd. When the Barbarian equips one of these they hold it so that the Axe blade is facing their head. It has driven me insane the entire time I have played this game. I checked and the Barbarian is still clueless so it appears that the Spiritborn just has better common sense. Anyway, I am hoping the hitching problems that I have been having lessen as the servers are a bit less crowded. There are drops available each week on Twitch so while you are doing other things, open a browser tab and farm them. I left Twitch running overnight and farmed up the drops from yesterday. Annoyingly you have to watch six hours… or in my case AFK six hours… to farm up a full set of the weekly drops.

Is Diablo IV Vessel of Hatred the best thing ever? No. Not even close. However, I am having quite a bit of fun and for now, I am calling that good enough.

A Not-So-Small Delay

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Good Morning Folks. When last we spoke I was excited and preparing for the launch of Diablo IV Vessel of Hatred expansion. More than anything I was excited that the launch was happening at a reasonable hour so that both myself who is in Central Time Zone and Ace who is in Eastern Time Zone could actually participate in the game together. Throughout the day we made plans to hang out and chitchat while making our way through the campaign that evening. It is really moments like this that we both look forward to when we are both reasonably excited about something at the same time and can do nonsense together. So often we are playing totally different things, but the stars seemed like they were aligning to give us a new game launch to dig our teeth into in a manner that was going to be enjoyable and not trying to stay up until midnight.

Then roughly thirty minutes before the game was set to go live at 6 PM CDT, the bomb was dropped that the launch was going to be delayed. In what has become one of the least correct posts in a while, they stated that there was a “small technical issue” that would lead to a “small delay” to the launch of the game. In true Blizzard fashion, they gave us no real information to work with, and as a result, the rumor mill started filling in the gaps. PC players were stating that it was a problem with one of the console releases that was to blame for the delay, Console players were stating that it was something to do with Steam’s rigid update schedule… and in the vacuum, we were left without any facts to go on. The rest of the evening was dictated by 2-hour blocks… of just needing a few more hours… which ultimately led to the game launching roughly six hours late.

Diablo IV has had a fraught history since its launch last year. So much so that “D4 Bad” has become a prevalent meme in the ARPG community with countless music videos released on the theme of it being “dogshit”. Admittedly some of these are bangers and largely feature a cast of characters from the ARPG streaming scene. The Vessel of Hatred expansion launch was a grand coming out for the game again, a cotillion where it was being presented to the world to show how much it had improved. Last night’s botched launch pretty much destroyed that goodwill in an instant. Pretty much every streamer to some extent had to deal with the return of the “D4 Bad” crew to their chats, and honestly… they weren’t wrong. How many games has Blizzard launched throughout the years, and how many of them have they bungled at the finish line?

What is even worse is that Streamers were left holding the bag for the botched communications surrounding this situation. Blizzard was simply not giving any real information about what is going on. Contrast this with the way in which Eleventh Hour Games communicated at the launch of Last Epoch when it had so many server issues. I was way more willing to show forgiveness towards a group of developers that were sharing what was actually going on, and how they were trying to resolve it… rather than last night’s refrain of “just a few hours more”. Raxx spent the evening playing various games with his stream, doing a bracket of games for him to play and eventually falling into chess.

Darth Microtransaction attempted to keep the attention of the crowd by giving away copies of the expansion, handing out battle passes, and then playing a betting game with his audience. He would bet that the game would launch within the next thirty minutes, and then when that time had passed he would give another five subscriptions away to his viewers. At one point I know he had over three thousand folks tuned in and watching his stream, in which he was playing a video he had recorded of Vessel of Hatred in the background while playing Old School Runescape in the lower right-hand corner of the screen and attempting to keep chat engaged.

Pohx who is quite possibly the sweetest person in all of the Path of Exile community, decided to give the launch of the expansion a go. He spent the evening playing Warcraft 3 custom maps and then eventually said fuck it and went to bed. I ultimately gave up around 9 pm and went to bed, I am not sure when Ace did but I don’t think they stayed up that late. I am glad that I gave up because the game did not roll out until after 11 PM my time and with it came a 23 gig patch… essentially negating the whole process of preloading the game that we did earlier this week. This is a massive black eye towards the game and towards the team behind it.

I was clearly annoyed enough to devote an entire blog post to that fact this morning, but in truth I was mostly having a chill night. I kept various Streams open in the background throughout the night so I could find out tidbits of information as they trickled out. The majority of the evening I spent in Path of Exile slowly chipping away at challenges, ultimately knocking two of them out. My map runners also brought about four divines last night so it was a pretty great time all around. I think my biggest frustration about this whole situation is the complete and total communications fail from Blizzard. I am not sure what they were thinking by trying to constantly diminish the impact of this outage because clearly, it backfired. Had they just been honest and set reasonable expectations… folks would have gone about their night and done other things rather than feverishly waiting for the launch of a game that was not coming… or at least that was arriving almost six hours late.

This morning I got in briefly and created a Spiritborn because I figured I might as well try the class while it was likely to have some grossly overpowered builds. I was happy to see that there was the option to create a character and start with the new campaign without also having to complete the original campaign. I’ve created a seasonal character because essentially my stable of standard characters is dead to me. I am probably going to go the whole poison Centipede build with it because it looks wild. I used to like playing the Monk in Diablo III, and I figure this is going to feel a bit like that based on the video footage I have seen.

I sincerely hope that the community did not devolve into death threats last night, but the Diablo IV team deserves some ire for their fumbling of this launch. More than anything they need to reassess how they communicate with players because what I saw last night was insufficient and sad.

A Cup of Hatred

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Good Morning Folks! I’ve been in a bit of a holding pattern this week. I have a very long post kicking around in my skull but have not quite committed to writing it yet, or honestly even know how to approach it. However tonight the Vessel of Hatred expansion launches for Diablo IV and I am planning on giving that a go. I did not last terribly long in Season 5, but I am interested to see how things sort out for all of the changes that they are making to the game to make it a bit more Diablo III-ish. Remember I was a D3 seasonal player for over a decade so that is not necessarily a bad thing for me. I am trying to decide if I am going to try out the new Spiritborn class or do my normal Barbarian run. If I go Spiritborn I will probably go the nonsensical-sounding centipede poison build, because might as well play it before it gets nerfed.

In other weekend news, my Minecraft nether tunneling project has finally paid off. Essentially I had been branching out of my main portal in every direction looking for the Warpwood biome, so that I could collect some resources from it and be able to grow the blue-green trees in my base. I really need to plant down some sign posts because my tunnel network is getting a little hard to navigate by memory. The thing I forgot about the Warpwood Biome though, is that Endermen spawn there so I might have to create some structures to be able to farm them for Ender Pearls. I doubt I have a dedicated post to the nonsense I have been up to, because quite honestly… digging tunnels is a big boring, but I find it relaxing.

I also spent a little bit of time this weekend playing around with Tiny Glade. This game essentially is a diorama-building tool that lets you procedurally generate really cool-looking castles and cottages and then terraform the land surrounding it. I wish there was a bit more “game” here like the ability to have tiny NPCs inhabit your world akin to Sim Tower. I used to love that game and then watching the tiny pixel people going about their day. The game is gorgeous though and if you get the hankering to build some cottage-core palaces then this is probably the game you have been looking for. Players have already recreated Rivendell and other massive structures from fiction. One of the neat things about the game is that there is a daily theme to help you get started in your creations.

I’ve also played a bit more Soulframe, but honestly… one of my core complaints about the game thus far appears to be a feature. One of the plots of the game is that this group that you are fighting back against has destroyed knowledge in the world, and as a result, all of your quest objectives show up as this foreign language that you cannot read. Then as you recover knowledge, you begin to be able to translate things a letter or two at a time. This is a cool idea from a storytelling aspect, but it largely just leads to a frustrating in-game experience as you have no clue what you are supposed to be doing or where you should be going. Even more frustrating is that it appears that objectives can be completed multiple times, so your sparrow friend who is supposed to show you the way to the next thing you should care about sometimes sends you back to things you have already completed before. It sure is pretty and combat feels fairly fun, but right now… I am struggling to attach to it due to the obtuse nature of the narrative. Souls players who love obtuse bullshit will probably be in their element here.

Instead of doing new things though, this weekend I fell back on the old and familiar and spent a lot of time playing Path of Exile. It is shocking how good the Currency Exchange system is and how well it works this late in the league. Normally speaking trade would be completely dead and it would be a chore to do any sort of large-volume currency swaps. However, the asynchronous nature of the Currency Exchange means that players are still actively putting things up for sale and creating open buy orders for things that they need. I sold so many Valdo’s Puzzle Boxes for 190 Chaos each, and they did not sit on the exchange for very long before getting snapped up each time.

I’ve been slowly chipping away at objectives and in theory, if I can get to 31 total challenges for the league I will be able to get the same sized totem as I had last league. I have a few candidates to get there, namely the two related to Scarabs that I am getting closer to finishing. I need to look at Sublime Starlight and see what the cheapest path to completing that is as well, given I have a pretty good backlog of the runes from the league mechanic. Arduous Atlas is easy enough, just requires a lot of brute force mapping and is only a matter of time not necessarily effort. I am slowly getting closer and closer to level 100 so the gear grinding goals or whatever that achievement is called might be within reach as well. I’m not super far from several o the ones un Unbelievable Undertakings, but those all for the most part will require me to spec into specific league mechanics to get through them.

I also spent a bit of time this weekend exploring The Legend of Zelda Echoes of Wisdom and I am already a proud member of team Beds for life. I honestly have mixed feelings about the game. It is extremely well built and I think the idea of roaming around as Zelda, but so far combat feels fiddly. Legend of Zelda for me was always a combat experience first and foremost and a puzzle-solving experience as a fun secondary activity that blended along with the combat. I am not sure if Zelda gets better tools but right now killing anything feels a bit annoying so I find myself just avoiding combat whenever possible. Maybe that is the overarching theme that they were going for. I want to get deeper into the game but right now I am only a few hours in and not super far past the initial tutorial.

I have to admit I also don’t feel amazing giving Nintendo money right now. I had already bought Echoes of Wisdom, but their crusade against Switch emulation is a major bummer for me. Playing Switch games on PC has been my primary source of enjoying these games. I would buy the game on Switch and then play it on my PC via emulator because it was simply a more comfortable option than dealing with the short battery life and heft of the Switch console in handheld mode. Additionally playing via emulators allowed me to “patch” things out of games that annoyed me… for example, I ran mods to Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom that removed durability from the game entirely. My guess is whatever the Switch 2 ends up being will be backward compatible and the current crop of emulators will likely successfully run all of the games on day one.

All that Nintendo will have done with their action is push the scene underground. They went from having three emulators that were open-source projects that they could easily keep tabs on… to having to deal with what will be countless unofficial forks that are being maintained by piracy distro groups. You can already buy the Miig Switch and Miig Dumper through AliExpress and the price of them keeps dropping. Basically, Nintendo has destroyed the methodology that allowed folks to buy legitimate copies and play them on legitimate Open Source emulators and will now force those folks to either play the inferior version on official hardware… or rely exclusively on distro groups and torrent sites to get the games.

Wrong Porridge Weekend

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Last Epoch – Fire Warpath Auto-Smite Paladin

Friends… I had a weekend where nothing was quite right. It was one of those weekends akin to wandering into your kitchen and knowing you want something… but you cannot figure out what it is. I was all over the freaking place. For example, I played some Last Epoch and got to Empowered Monoliths on my Fire Warpath Auto-Smite Paladin, and even took down my very first Harbinger. However, shortly after that I just lacked the will to keep pushing forward. Not that there is anything wrong with Last Epoch, but after playing a lot of Path of Exile during this league it just felt lacking. I wasn’t sure why I was trying to push forward, because I wasn’t sure what I actually wanted to accomplish. The moment-to-moment gameplay is fun enough, and there are brief chucks of excitement when you find a nemesis device on your map, but that is quickly over once you realize that you are killing monsters to fill bars so that you can fill other bars. Don’t get me wrong I love Last Epoch, but I think Path of Exile has just spoiled me.

Path of Exile – Widowhail Deadeye and Bleed Gladiator

Then there was Path of Exile, which has its own problems. I have my Righteous Fire Chieftain main that I have largely taken as far as I really can save for completely redoing my entire tree and diving further into the madness of cluster jewels. I have two alts my Widowhail Deadeye and Tanky Bleed Gladiator that are both fine, but both have their own problems that will need to be solved. The problem is, I am just not sure if I am willing to stick around and solve them. Widowhail Deadeye has NO defenses which means if anything looks slightly in their direction they fall over. Bleed Gladiator feels like a worse version of Righteous Fire in that I am plenty tanky… but also have to hit a bajillion buttons to make anything that feels like optimal progression. I was having more fun when it was just a Two-Handed Sunder build… but that had significant survival problems. Both of these characters can be fixed with an investment of time and gear and levels… but I am just not sure I am willing to go through the motions.

Path of Exile – Settlers of Kalguur Shipments

The League Mechanic has also become a bit stale. I loved it while leveling and gearing because so much of the gear that I am especially wearing on my alts and to a lesser extent my RF main… came directly off a boat. The problem is we were given a bit of a bait and switch when it came to the shipping mechanic because the reveal trailer promised three screens full of loot… and even when folks are shipping over 50 million in value they just end up with a single screen. I’ve not maxed out my workers but I am not sure I am willing to spend the gold prices that it would cost… or farm enough content in order to get said gold. Right now I am sending shipments to Riben Fell for 100k to 120k value and getting a reasonable amount of stuff back… but it is nowhere near as interesting as the giant loot pinatas we were promised. Acquiring stuff just seems to take more time than I am currently willing to put into it.

Diablo IV – Season 5 – Level 55 Barbarian

My friend Ace had been having a really good time with Diablo IV so I figured… what the hell since I seem to be floundering anyways I might as well give it a shot. I started off another Barbarian because of course I did… and I was originally going to go Whirlwind and I still might… but it felt MISERABLE to level as that. I fell back on good ole reliable and comfy Upheaval and as of last night was sitting at level 55. The leveling went extremely quickly, and in theory, I could probably even limp through the dungeon to convert over to World Tier 4 at this point. The problem is… I find the loot uninteresting in this game, and the tempering system is a bit miserable. So I am not sure what I am grinding towards save for completing seasonal achievements and progressing the Battle Pass.

Diablo IV – Tier 1 Infernal Hordes

Infernal Hordes is rather enjoyable. I am glad they are making this an evergreen part of the game going forward because it adds yet another thing that players can focus on. So far it doesn’t feel terribly rewarding given the amount of time it takes to complete one. The final boss phase can also be pretty miserable depending upon which negative affixes you choose along the way. That is probably my biggest problem… you only ever get to choose negatives. It reminds me of a worse version of the Red/Blue Atlars in t14+ maps in Path of Exile. With those you get some negative thing that is going to happen but also some massive bonus… either in the form of specific items dropping or the ability to duplicate loot or increase the quantity and rarity of drops. The carrot to this particular stick is just more aether… which lets you open more chests… which themselves feel rather anemic when it comes to rewards. Maybe these get better as I move into World Tier IV, but for now, mechanically they are a lot of fun up until the boss wave and seem to reward a lot of experience so just for fun’s sake they are worth doing.

Since coming back to Final Fantasy XIV, I have been entering the housing lottery again in the hopes of maybe winning back a plot after losing mine due to my own negligence. I realize it is kind of silly for me to do this given that I have already had a home and lost it, because I got distracted and busy around Christmas time. However this past period the same plot that I used to own was up for grabs, and I thought maybe just maybe fate would smile upon me and let me have it back. I did not in fact have the lucky number for the plot and yesterday I got back my deposit once again. I will once again try in a few days to find another housing plot, because what else am I going to do with the money that I have saved up? It is a bit frustrating, but I am largely resigned to doing this song and dance and never being the lucky winning number.

The thing that probably shocked me the most this weekend is that I actually booted up Warframe and played through a few missions. Of all of the games I have played over the years… Warframe is the one that I really wish that I could get into. It has such an amazing community and really some significant support from Digital Extremes. It is essentially Path of Exile levels of complicated but for a genre more akin to Destiny… and I would love to get into it, but I still find it largely obtuse and incomprehensible. I wish I could reset the progress and play through the game with the updated new player experience, but given that my account is 11 years old and I have all manner of legacy items… that is not going to happen. I might try and find some sort of new player experience guide to see if I can limp my way through unlocking whatever I have not unlocked.

What I should have been playing this past weekend was Guild Wars 2, because tomorrow the new expansion drops, and with it comes a glow-up for the Warclaw and what appears to be an amazing housing system. I’m about five quests away from completing Secrets of the Obscure and probably if I really set my mind to it tonight I could push through it. The biggest problem I have is that I essentially ground to a halt when I hit Inner Nayos. That zone is miserable, full stop. I was playing through it the night I had my little retina detach freak out and all of the shit floating in the air… really seems to aggravate me being able to see the floaters shifting around in my left eye. It does not help that at times it has Heart of Thorns levels of aggro and density just making it extremely unfun to play through. Secrets of the Obscure did some interesting things, but across the board, it is probably my least favorite expansion content from Guild Wars 2. I will be happy to move past it.

So basically where I stand currently… is that I have zero clue what I will be focusing on this week. Hell, it might be something that I have not even mentioned here. I’ve had a rough few weeks and continue to struggle with insomnia issues, so right now I just want something comfortable that can alleviate my frustrations. I am not sure such a thing exists. Hopefully, things chill out so I can get back to normal, but for the moment… I am not even really paying attention to everything going on with Blaugust. I am extremely thankful for the mentors who are largely keeping things running in my absence.