A very groggy morning to you all. Wait maybe not everyone is sleepwalking through the morning. We had a big wind storm last night, enough so that we got alerts on our phones about it. This happened around 1 am and I managed to sleep through the first wave of it. The second wave around 3 am woke me up, and enough so that I did not manage to get back to sleep until maybe 4:30. Even then I am not sure if I actually slept or if I just laid in bed thinking thoughts with my eyes closed. I will have to do the walk around the house to check for damage later, but my wife sent me this photo as she was leaving for work with some damage at the rental house across the street. We didn’t lose power, but around the time I went upstairs at 3:30 we lost internet and I spent a truly dumb amount of time cycling the modem before it came back. The cable company website claimed everything was fine, but I assume in truth… something happened due to the storm damage. It is back currently and I am hoping it stays that way.
I spent most of my weekend screwing around with my Lightning Arrow Raider build, but I’ve written two other blog posts about that which each come with their own companion video. I am really looking forward to Friday, and hopefully, I don’t jinx it… but I went ahead and took the day off work. I know this is usually a bad idea when a game launches… but generally speaking a Path of Exile League Launch has been smooth as butter. I’m really looking forward to seeing how well the early mapping goes with this build. If evidenced by the red maps, I think it is going to be really solid and should give me enough time to look for upgrades along the way. Fixing my resists is probably the thing that I am the most worried about, that and trying to find a Vaal Lightning Arrow early. If I can solve those problems… I should be good to go with this build. Thankfully the colors that I ultimately need on the bow should be pretty straightforward to hit.
At some point yesterday afternoon I took a break from ARPGs to pop into Final Fantasy XIV and do the seasonal quest. There is no way I was going to turn down having a Power Ranger outfit. More specifically I think this is going to be my monk Transmog from this point forward. You have to dye it green, however, because everyone wants to be the green ranger. I guess I could go for Ninja as well and then try and find some daggers that look like the Green Dragon Dagger. I wish I could get back into this game. I saw my friend Bear had created a new character, and I contemplated doing this just so that I could get back into the swing of the game. I need to figure out what content I need to complete to unlock the newest Deep Dungeon.
Other than that I am still screwing around a bit in Diablo IV Season of the Malignant. While I am still pretty nonplussed by the seasonal mechanic, the state of the game does feel considerably better than it did. I am now mostly just trying to figure out an easy path to level and then I can complete the keystone dungeon and move to World Tier III. At that point, I will feel like I have at least progressed a bit further and can start doing Helltides. I am trying to catch the World Boss whenever I can, but in truth… it doesn’t seem like it rewards that much experience, and anything I get loot-wise is going to be upgraded rapidly. I seem to be having way more issues maintaining a good amount of gold than I did previously. Not sure if they rebalanced gold drops, but it feels much tighter than I remember it being.
Apart from the storms last night… it was a pretty solid weekend overall. I am really happy about the state of Lightning Arrow and looking forward to the league start on Friday. I have not really been in the mood for Baldur’s Gate 3 lately… mostly because it requires more thought than I am willing to give it at the moment. I’ve needed gameplay that I can mostly turn my brain off for, which for me is ARPG gameplay in general. Anything that I can commit to muscle memory and instinct… allows me to free up the rest of my brain to consume content on the side. I think more than anything that is the part of this league I am looking forward to the most. I’ve stalled out super hard on book consumption over the last few months, and listening to an Audiobook while playing Path of Exile is sort of my happy place.
I hope you all have a great week ahead of you, and I hope that we don’t have anything much in the way of damage from last night’s storm.
Diablo 4 has had a bit of a rocky start. The launch went relatively well and while I have shared at length my issues with the game, it seemed to largely be well received. That all changed when the patch notes were released for Season 1 and its pre-patch. Diablo IV was a game where there were only a handful of options that actually felt good to play, and every single one of them was nerfed into oblivion for no apparent reason. This caused an emergency “yeah we fucked up” fireside chat, and with it some massive changes in the way they are addressing the game. The problem is… this was not really enough to stem the bleeding and almost overnight… the game seems to have purged most of its player base. I have a few hundred friends on Battle.Net and at the launch of the game… I saw well over a hundred people playing it including folks I had not seen online in years. At the launch of season one… there were still about six players actively playing the game on my friend’s list.
With this precipitous decline… folks have rushed out of the sidelines to whack away at this misery pinata. “D4 Bad” has become a meme, and you cannot watch an ARPG stream without someone saying it. This charge is being led by several of the Path of Exile streamers and even made its way into the ExileCon official Livestream. This flood of public mockery has even managed to grind down some of the most prolific Diablo Enjoyers. The truth is nothing is ever as simple as the soundbite. I have publicly decried this game, but I don’t seem to hate it anywhere near as much as the zeitgeist seems to right now. On Tuesday Patch 1.1.1 was released, and quite honestly… it brought with it a number of good changes. Since I am sitting in the Path of Exile 3.22 waiting room… I decided to check it out.
As of writing this blog post, I am level 38 and some 13 hours into my playthrough of a seasonal character. Maybe I have mellowed out since my crushing disappointment at launch, or maybe I have just come to accept what Diablo IV is as compared to what I expected it to be. Whatever the case I am not hating what I am playing. I opted to start a Barbarian because ultimately if the game was going to have a redemption arc, it needed to start with the character class that felt awful to play in all of the betas and at launch. I did pivot away from the Whirlwind Barb and am now mostly focused on Hammer of the Ancients. There are a number of things that still feel pretty bad, like how often I have to use my builder in order to get a single hit of my consumer… but that is obviously not really going to change.
Let’s start off by talking about the unique seasonal questline. You are helping Cormond attempt to rid this plague from the world called the Malignant, which infects enemies and causes them to return to life over and over. I believe at this point I have completed the entire quest chain and defeated both forms of the final boss. If you were expecting deep story content that moved the needle forward for Sanctuary… you are pretty much going to have to wait for expansions. What this reminds me of are the storylines that get patched into Gacha games, where you have a handful of quests to introduce a new character or a new mechanic before being turned loose to explore that further. The Cormond storyline exclusively exists to introduce us to the Malignant and give us some structure as to why we are caging these hearts.
As far as the seasonal mechanic itself, every bit of content that you do seems to be able to spawn Malignant monsters which have a chance of dropping a heart that you can attempt to cage. I’ve encountered these in dungeons, cellars, and they are guaranteed to spawn in the new type of dungeon called Malignant Tunnels. What this means in practice is that you have to defeat an elite… remember to click the purple, orange, or blue heart that is left behind… and then fight them again to get a Caged Heart to drop. I wish the hearts were glowing brightly or something because quite honestly they tend to blend into the background and I am pretty sure I have killed Malignant monsters several times and forgot entirely to click on the doodad. When you are going through a dungeon… they feel absolutely the same as every other monster you fight. There is nothing really special about them other than the fact that they look like they have some guck covering them.
The object of your search is the Caged Heart. These come in three common varieties… Viscious (Orange), Devious (Purple), and Brutal (Blue). These fit into corresponding colored sockets that now exist in every piece of jewelry that drops. The key complaint that I heard early on is that these would harm survival given that everyone was socketing skulls into jewelry for armor bonuses. As a result, Blizzard thought far enough ahead to just give each caged heart a ton of armor negating that concern. Each colored heart has specific bonuses that can roll on them, and these are more of the “nice to have” territory than anything build-changing. Under certain rare circumstances, you can get a fourth type called the Wrathful Heart (Black) which is a bit like a watered-down Legendary Aspect, that could impact how you want to build your character. Incremental power gain is still power gain, so I guess this is a positive overall.
Originally I had said this seemed like a watered-down version of the Abyss league mechanic from Path of Exile, but in truth that is giving it a bit too much credit. The Caged Hearts are a nice bonus for doing content you are already going to do, but don’t really feel like something worth specifically chasing. I do however enjoy doing the Malignant Tunnel dungeons because they have a better flow to them than traditional dungeons just for leveling purposes. You can craft devices with the different colors of corruption that you loot, which allows you to spawn a bonus boss fight at the end of the Malignant Tunnel. Again these don’t really feel like chase mechanics, but more something I am doing for experience points given that I end up with a ton of the crafting materials from salvaging the hearts. Hearts take up inventory space, so I feel like I am always needing to destroy them to make room for more loot.
The thing that is a bit intangible is that 1.1.1 feels better, and I can’t exactly put my finger on why. Granted I am nowhere near the endgame, but my survival feels better and my ability to kill things also feels significantly better. I’ve been in a loop the last several nights where I did not have the mental bandwidth to play Baldur’s Gate 3, but did not want to burn myself out on Path of Exile right before a new league starts. As a result, Diablo IV has felt pretty great as the sort of game interaction that I am craving but also given that I don’t deeply care about it… it is simple enough to log out and walk away from it when I have something else that I would rather be doing. Essentially I feel like the game is in a better state than it was when I left it, and not near as meme-worthy as the internet would lead you to believe. Sure there are things that still bug the fuck out of me, like their overreliance on crowd control… but it also isn’t an awful experience.
Blizzard did win however and convinced me to consume my battle pass token. The armor set that you get as part of the seasonal journey is actually rather sweet. This annoys me however because the set of armor you get the free track… looks like shit. If you want nice things you are going to have to keep buying a quarterly battle pass in order to have access to potentially “earn” it. That whole interaction feels bad, that not only will I have to pay money for it… but I will also be expected to grind away in order to earn the things I paid for. The battle pass as it stands is probably one of my least favorite constructs in gaming, and really… it needs to die in a fire.
I guess the only positive thing that I have to say about the Battle Pass is that it seems like progress is moving extremely quickly through it. Like I said I am roughly thirteen hours into this character and I am sitting at level 43 of 90 in the rewards track. The curve for these rewards seems to also be fairly flat as I’ve not noticed them slowing down significantly as I moved through the content. Basically, I am just about finished with the lower tier of the armor skins and going to be starting on getting the slightly nicer ones. When I ding 40, which should happen today… I will unlock the Smouldering Ashes system that allows me to gain account-wide bonuses. I will of course be going after the Urn of Aggression first which gives a flat XP boost and should speed up the rest of my leveling.
As far as the Season Journey goes, I am already through the first four steps which would have originally been part of the “Haedrig’s Gift” process in Diablo III. Each time you ding you seem to get a set of jewelry and a few aspect unlocks which is nice but also feels a little lackluster. It just really drives home how commoditized gear in general feels in Diablo IV. I will say just the existence of the Seasons Journey makes the game feel like it has a bit more purpose because it gives me some activities to focus on. Weirdly you can progress to the next tier without actually finishing the previous one. I think in most cases when I got all but 2 or 3 of the achievements checked off I was able to leap ahead to the next tier and get the rewards. I like that it gives me a bit of a sense of purpose and causes me to play in a way I would not normally play… like seeking out Cellars each time I happen across one because I know X number of them to tick off a seasonal journey step.
All told… I don’t hate it though. There are a few weeks of focused gameplay here, and quite honestly I am moving through levels way faster than I thought I would. It doesn’t feel as good as Diablo III, where you could burn up a character in a weekend and be doing endgame content the rest of the season, but it doesn’t feel anywhere near as slow as leveling did at launch. I hope over time they will continue to accelerate this process because really… it should take you a week to max out a seasonal character and then the rest of the time should be spent interacting with the seasonal mechanic. However, given how shallow the seasonal mechanic is… I can’t really see players sticking around for long because of it. Maybe it is better to think of the endgame as beginning at level 50 when you hit World Tier 3, and then everything after that point is gravy.
I do want the game to find its stride, because even though it has faded significantly… I still have a lot of love and nostalgia for the franchise. I don’t think Diablo IV was the right game to continue that legacy, but I also don’t think it is awful. I think a lot of the Metacritic user score reflects the anger over a bad patch, and I hope given time… the team can recover from that. I am extremely curious about what Path of Exile 3.22 is going to look like because I am already seeing a flood of “D4 player tries POE” videos. I fully expect Diablo IV stumbling will be extremely good for peak numbers in the Ancestor League. I am most definitely looking forward to it, but for the time being… I am actually enjoying the Season of the Malignant. It is nowhere near as bad as I had feared, but also… isn’t as good as I might have hoped. So while I can’t say “D4 Bad” I can probably be fine with saying “D4 Mid”.
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.
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
