Diablo Franchise

Fruitless Grinding

by

Hey Folks! I thought I would give a bit of an update on my Diablo Immortal madness. I am not even sure why I am continuing to go down this path other than to serve as an example of what not to do for others. I am still a “free” player and have managed to get up to Paragon level 40 and am still getting bonus XP as the Server Paragon I believe is 50 currently. I however have hit a bit of a wall, in that I am not getting anywhere near the number of materials that I need to keep upgrading my gear. Additionally, I have noticed that once I hit Paragon 30, I have stopped getting near the number of legendary drops that I once did as well. I am not sure if this is a “dry spell” or something inherently built into the game, but I am struggling a bit to get the gear and more importantly combat level needed to progress in the game.

Because I am over Paragon 30, I should in theory be accessing the Hell 2 difficulty for greater rewards. However, that is not happening because I do not have the gear to actually complete this. Everything in this game boils down to your combat rating and your resonance and combined these determine how effective you are in combat. Combat rating can be increased through upgrading your gear, acquiring better actual items, or equipping/upgrading better legendary gems. The whales were farming Hell 2 long before they managed to reach Paragon 30 because the gems that they had equipped pushed their combat rating well beyond that which was required to do the content. Weirdly enough I can actually function fairly well within a Hell 2 zone, but eventually, get overwhelmed. This is because the game has decided to penalize me for not being at 1220 Combat Rating and is causing me to take 61% more damage and deal 38% less damage.

Since I am unwilling to spend any money on Legendary Crests and the $25 gamble to get 5 Star gems… my only real recourse is to either find better Legendaries/Set Pieces or to continue upgrading my gear. As a solo player, I am not running around constantly in a group of four players, and the game numbers have dropped off enough that it is actually a bit of a challenge to fill a party. That means my best option is to go out into the world and grind for gear. This is cumbersome and tedious, and also involves competing for resources against every other free-to-play player who has come to the same conclusion. In order to take all six legendary slots from Rank 7 to Rank 8, I am going to need the following.

  • 24 – Glowing Shards – Gained from salvaging Legendaries
  • 660 – Enchanted Dust – Gained from salvaging a Yellow or bought for 10 scraps each.
  • 3,600 – Scrap Materials – Gained through salvaging White (1 per) or Blues (3 per).
  • 132,000 – Gold – Gained through many sources

Since getting yellow drops are completely unpredictable, the source of most of the Enchanted Dust that I have gained in the game has come from converting 10 Scrap Material into a single one. So if you flatten the materials required you are essentially looking at 10,200 Scrap and then salvaging 24 Legendary items.

Sitting down this morning before writing this post I decided to run an experiment. I completed a round of four bounties, not because the bounties themselves really are that fruitful in materials, but instead because it gave me a fixed purpose to go out into the world and kill a lot of things in a structured manner. The full round of bounties took me roughly 15 minutes. During the course of that run, I happened upon a random world event and a treasure goblin both of which will have increased the total count of items gained. Every time you open a world event chest until you hit the daily cap… you are rewarded with 4 enchanted dust and 2 blues. After you hit the cap you stop getting the enchanted dust and only get blues, so these are not a viable long-term means of grinding out enchanted dust really. On my 15 Minute run, I got the following:

  • 19 White quality items – 19 Scrap
  • 18 Blue quality items – 54 Scrap
  • 2 Yellow quality items – 2 Enchanted Dust – 20 Scrap
  • 4 Event Dropped Enchanted Dust – 40 Scrap

So flattening this for the sake of easier calculations, in 15 minutes I gained the equivalent of 133 Scrap Materials worth of items. So I know from playing this game that it is not realistic to take that 15-minute swath as representative of what I can expect to gain every single outing. There will be times when it is much more fruitful and there will be times when I walk away with a considerable amount less. However once again for the sake of making the math more simple while understanding that my sample size is bad… if we took for granted that I gained 133 Scrap every 15 minutes, it would take me a little over 19 hours to grind out the 10,200 scraps I need to upgrade my six legendary slots to the next rank.

I’ve also approached trying to do whatever I could to get some Hell 2 gear dropping from the activities that I could complete. If you manage to do a Level 30 Challenge Rift, it unlocks the ability to get Hell 2 drops from Challenge Rifts, Elder Rifts, Cycle of Strife, Vendors, Bounty Rewards, and the Horadric Tome. However, as I said before I have seen a massive drop in the total number of Legendaries that I have gained. Prior to Paragon 30, I seemed to have about a 50/50 chance of getting a Legendary when I ground out 10 Monster Essences and turned them in for a Horadric Tome page. Since dinging Paragon 30 I have yet to see a single Legendary drop in this manner just as an example. Similarly while out in the field I seem to be getting far fewer Legendaries off the Orange skull mobs that are designated as having a higher Legendary drop chance. Basically, I feel like there is very little that I can do to move forward that does not require a ludicrous amount of time spent.

That said, why don’t we close out this post with something a bit more enjoyable. I really do like the build that I am running and out of all possible legendary items in the game, there are only a few left that I might be interested in. I do really enjoy the Essence Transfer system because it allows me to essentially keep to the same build while occasionally swapping out items when something with a higher combat rating drops. My build looks a little something like this:

  • Primary Attack
    • Punish
      • Largely using it because it gives me an additional block rate for surviving massive pulls
  • Secondary Skills
    • Draw and Quarter
      • My main strategy is to use the holy steed that you summon to gather up large packs of mobs in order to burn them down with my AOE skills. My shoulders increase the duration of the steed by 30%, my pants cause it to catch everything on fire, and finally, my chest causes the steed to call down bombardment on packs around me.
    • Holy Banner
      • My helmet converts the banner into Holy Beacon which zaps everything within range with Holy Light damage which is excellent for big pack clear.
    • Consecration
      • My shield causes the consecration to slow enemies by 30%, just as a way of keeping them in the bad a bit longer to help whittle them down.
    • Falling Sword
      • My weapon converts how the falling sword works so that it is a charged line attack that grows the longer I charge it. Essentially this is the sweeper that I use to mop up anything that did not get killed by my Consecration and Holy Beacon.

Essentially the way that I play is to run around on my horse, gather up three or four packs worth of mobs, lead them back to a central location, drop holy beacon, drop consecrate, and then start hitting punish to try and keep up my block. Once I am down to only a few stragglers I angle my Empowered Sword so that it cleaves through the entire pack and finishes them off. Very fun gameplay and very fitting for the Crusader class.

I wish the game had some measure of tracking how long I have played because I figure that number is going to be large. I’ve managed to finish the free track of the Battle Pass and now every time I gain a new level I essentially get some gold and 150 Scrap Materials. I have to admit there is part of me that wants to pay for the battle pass now that I have unlocked it fully, and would be gaining all benefits. Traditionally this is how I approach a battle pass system. If I can manage to grind out the free track, then I “reward” myself by paying for the full access track. However, with Diablo Immortal I am deeply conflicted because I do think that even as a purely PVE-only player… I am being negatively impacted by the existence of all of the paywalls. If I was spending money I would have better Legendary Gems and would not be staring down the barrel of a 20-hour grind… to MAYBE be able to get access to Hell 2 and start getting the gear my paragon level would denote. Buying the battle pass would do almost nothing to help me out, because in the entirety of the track… it only includes two Legendary Crests.

I think ultimately that is the conundrum of Diablo Immortal. It is a game that I have really enjoyed quite a bit, but the monetization will forever taint that experience. Knowing that my experience is suffering in large part because entire systems in the game are effectively locked off from me… feels awful. I think very soon I am going to reach a point where I just put this game to bed for now. Mobile games ultimately soften their requirements over time, this is the nature of the beast. They launch in a state that is deeply prohibitive of the free-to-play players in order to extract the maximum amount of cash from the whales.

At some point in the near future, I expect there will be concessions and probably an apology letter, and the game will change drastically… while also introducing a brand new top-end money grind. I genuinely do like this game, I just think that maybe it is best to wait for Diablo 4 and forget this one exists for a while. In the meantime, I have Diablo 3 and am starting to finally grok Path of Exile. Diablo Immortal could have been a great game, and might still be at some point in the future. For now, however, the monetization path it has taken has ruined that experience. No one can dismiss the fact that I have put effort into understanding this game and trying to keep moving forward. There is a path forward, as Demone Kim outlines in the above video… but just not one I am willing to take.

Unsustainable Shadow Clans

by

I feel like at this point my attachment to Diablo Immortal is very much the definition of a “guilty pleasure”. I feel fairly guilty for continuing to play it, but I am having quite a bit of fun with it. The problem however is that none of the systems of this game seems sustainable. The core long-term rhythm of the social side of the game centers around the “cycle of strife”. Last Sunday across the world the very first Immortals were crowned, and on Monday following that everyone that was in a shadow clan was unceremoniously booted back to Adventurer status. This begins the Shadow Lottery all over again as folks start to build up a critical mass of players in order to challenge the Immortals for their status.

It feels very much like folks fought their way to “server first” in trying to claim that Immortal throne, and now have stopped playing. Megashield, the Immortal for Doombringer the server that I play on… is more or less absent from the leaderboards right now whereas he previously dominated them. It is more than that, however. The dungeon queues seem to take much longer than they did, and there are just lacking a critical mass of players to do several of the more difficult zone events like the Blood Rose. There was a push to be first, and anyone who did not manage to get that title has seemingly moved on with their lives. The restarting of the cycle is asking an awful lot of players.

I wish I had a screenshot of the original “Become a Dark Clan” page, but I appear to have failed to snap a picture. Right now we have collected 6 out of 30 signets, which means that three of our members have managed to get through the Shadow Lottery. In order to convert our clan into a Dark Clan once again, we will need to get 12 more players through the Shadow Lottery and have them choose to turn in the two Akeba Signets that they get in order to finally convert the entire clan. I am pretty sure the first time we did this the number we needed was either six or eight in total. This means every few weeks… each clan is going to have to grind once again in order to convert to a Dark Clan and gain access to the benefits of being a shadow. I have a feeling that before too much longer folks are just going to stop going through these motions.

The problem with this however is that by NOT being a Shadow, you are missing out on a large number of activities that you could be participating in. In theory, if you forgo the clan experience… you can spend a single one of the two signets you get and join the Shadows on your own. I did not choose to do this, unfortunately, and I donated my signets before realizing just how many we needed. Right now there are three members in the clan who are actively playing, with a fourth on vacation. However, that means it is entirely unlikely that we will manage to convert the entire clan before this current cycle is over. That also means that if I am still playing the game when the time next Cycle of Strife begins… that I will probably just go solo missing out on the entire clan experience. I feel like this entire design is centered around a critical mass of players joining giant cattle call clans and deeply harms any smaller more chill groups from ever participating.

All of this is unfortunate, as is the horrible monetization scheme that I have not forgotten or forgiven… because the game is rather fun. I rolled a Barbarian alt the other night just to see how that class plays in contrast to my experiences with the Crusader. I have to say it is equally enjoyable and apparently now that the Server Paragon level has been increased to 40… everyone is getting a massive dose of catch-up experience. I managed to get to 30 in about an hour of playtime just poking around and following the quest chain. If this leveling rate is sustainable, I will easily ding 60 long before I finish the main story quest. It seems like the Server Paragon level is playing the role of boosting anyone who happens to be lagging behind the pack and funneling everyone towards a shared level bracket. I mean this is good for grouping purposes, but even with that in place… I am still finding it pretty hard to find any groups as I work through the story dungeons.

Given that we are already seeing a massive drop-off in player interest, I do wonder how long before server mergers are happening. The viewers on Twitch continue to drop as do the total number of channels streaming Diablo Immortal, and it seems like the zeitgeist is starting to move past it. There was a reported $24 million dollar earnings within the first two weeks, but I do wonder how much of that profit is legitimate. I watched a streamer yesterday for a little bit that was running $25 rifts… but was going through a money laundering shuffle of taking WoW gold, converting it to tokens, then converting those tokens to Blizzard Balance… and using the Blizzard Balance to buy the Legendary Crests for the runs. Then he converted any gems that he did not need to Platinum through the in-game auction house to purchase the things he actually needed. There is an awful lot of liquid World of Warcraft gold out there, especially among those communities that sell in-game runs for gold. There is no real way for someone to “cash out” other than selling an account, but it does make me wonder how much of that “revenue” was the recycling of existing “blizzard currency”.

Anyways I am still enjoying the actual gameplay, and still following the drama surrounding it. I do think that if this game is going to exist in six months, there will need to be some serious system redesign because the current structure is unsustainable as player interest plummets.

Barrel Bomb Bonanza

by

Good Morning Folks! This morning I am coming back from five days off and it is going to be weird as hell to actually “punch the clock” again. Five days was plenty of time for me to get my sleep schedule completely mixed up. My “bladder alarm clock” wakes me up around 5, but actually getting up at that time is a whole other story. What I would have talked about yesterday had I posted though is the end of my Diablo III Seasonal Journey. The pied piper song I sing… managed to ensnare a handful of other people into this madness including Thalen and Grace, and Sunday we had a blast running around together and doing “Diabble” nonsense.

The funniest part of the journey however has to have been Saturday night while we were recording the podcast… I was trying to carry Grace to 70 and knock out a good chunk of the seasonal boss kills. The problem with this is the fact that Akkhan Invoker Bombardment is a weird build and is highly unpredictable. Essentially my gameplay pattern was to run around with horsey until I found a champ/elite pack and wait for the bombardment to clear everything before moving to the next pack. At low-level rifts, the Thorn’s damage from the partial Invoker set was enough to have some “on demand” killing power, but there really is no way to really quickly clear stragglers which meant I left a minefield of death for anyone getting drug along.

Granted Grace knew what they were getting themselves in for, but it was still hilarious the number of times we both died. See the other side effect of this specific build is the fact that it is fairly squishy. Every four seconds I rained death down from above, but the other three seconds… I was mostly just trying to stay alive which meant I spent an exceptional amount of time in horse form trying not to stand still. Granted I managed to clear a solo GR90 with this build and probably could have easily cleared higher, but it is maybe the worst pulling experience I have ever had, and eventually rotated out to a more standard Invoker build.

The other part of the season that was interesting was the inclusion of Petrified Screams which open a special kind of Rift called an Echoing Nightmare. This effectively is a horde mode wave clear sort of encounter and the number of waves you successfully clear gives you a gem with a matching level. In practice, these are a way of cheating your way through attunements, but you would also need a great source of raw gems in order to fuel them. What I did not expect however is for these to count towards seasonal achievements. By this point, I had already finished leveling my gems to 75 but when we ran down all of the Petrified Screams that each of us had gathered up on Sunday… it instantly completed a large number of seasonal achievements including a few conquests for Grace and Thalen. We also tried for a speed demon run and nailed it on the first attempt, and as such… while Grace only started Saturday night, they managed to wrap up their seasonal journey Sunday afternoon as well.

I had a blast working my way through this season, and while I will likely never use the ugly Lollipop pet, there is a sense of accomplishment in checking all of the boxes. In theory, there should be a new season starting before too much longer given that this current one started in April. Diablo III really is getting more creative in the sorts of things they are attempting during seasonal play, which reminds me quite a bit of the broad changes that take place during a Path of Exile league. The only thing that I wish is that all of the things they add in for seasons… stuck around during non-seasonal play essentially slowly adding more content to the game. The Echoing Nightmares are a really fun game mode, and I could see people doing these if the petrified screams continued to drop. I briefly contemplated starting a Hardcore seasonal character, because I have never done such a thing… but that is a doubtful proposition.

In other Diablo news, I continue to poke and prod at Diablo Immortal. The truth is it is actually a really good game if you can somehow look past the monetization scheme. I’ve spent zero dollars and I absolutely feel like I am at a lower power level than a good number of people in my level bracket. However, it doesn’t seem to be really impacting what I could be doing right now. Sure if I had some of them fancy legendary gems, I could probably be farming Hell II difficulty right now instead of Hell I, but then again I still need gear from Hell I. This has very much turned into a before bedtime game for me as I fairly casually complete content and do bounties on my phone and using the Gamesir X2 controller. All in all, this runs pretty well on my phone, or well enough to be doing any of the content I have encountered thus far.

I have to say though there is this weird uncanny valley going on where I know I am playing a Diablo game, on some level I would think I was playing a traditional MMORPG like World of Warcraft. The whole aspect of always encountering other players everywhere I go, and the fact that I am effectively running dungeons the same way that folks run dungeons in WoW, triggers that experience. Yesterday there was bonus loot for Forgotten Tower, and essentially we would pull everything up to the next barrier and burn it down there just like you would run a dungeon in WoW or FFXIV. Given however that every class is effectively self-sustaining… it also gives me deep Guild Wars 2 vibes when it comes to doing large group content. When a zone event is happening there ends up being a huge swarm of players… and there are even mechanics that you have to pay attention to in order to succeed.

We also saw the end of the first Cycle of Strife, which crowned the Dark Clan Eden as the new Immortals and the massive whale Megashield as the new server Immortal. If you are curious you can watch the video of the final battle where Megashield won on our server. He reportedly spent 100k on that character, which seems like complete madness to me. That is honestly one of the most disturbing elements of this game is how expensive it is. When Techtone talked about spending 20,000 in a few months of Genshin Impact I thought that was complete madness, but this takes it to a whole new level. Streamer Quin (aka the same dude who boosted in FFXIV then got mad that he struggled to play the game) was doing 10 crest runs attempting to get a 5-star gem. It reportedly cost him $15,870.66 before getting one or roughly 635 10 Legendary Crest greater rift runs.

Admittedly this is a bit of a false narrative, but it makes for good headlines. Just like boosting in FFXIV and then complaining about not understanding anything… doing nothing but 10 crest runs over and over is a bit of a “wrong way to play the game” scenario. He specifically was chasing a natural drop of a 5-star gem with all 5 stars populated. However, in those 635 runs, it is extremely likely that he managed to get multiple copies of Echoing Shade, and probably enough to have made a 5/5 star version of that a long time ago. I think at least on some level… a lot of the spending associated with this game is players trying to brute force their way to ultimate victory. Paying no money… I am still getting an awful lot of enjoyment out of the game on its own merits without feeling the need to chase these Legendary Gems.

Please note… I do not exclude any of the monetizations that are going on. This is absolutely a game that was designed to prey on the worst instincts of gamblers. While watching the Immortal Battle from a few different perspectives, I spent some time watching a Twitch stream of a clan made up of almost nothing but massive whales. Listening to those guys goading each other into spending money on voice chat… felt sickening. At the same time, there were multiple references of the same folks doing crypto gambling, which I did not even know was a thing and seems like a really great way to lose a lot of money. In just the fifteen minutes or so that I watched, it was very clear that the folks talking were gambling addicts. There were folks talking about spending at least $250 to $1000 a day on the game… and that just isn’t sustainable by anyone for long.

Always the Set Dungeon

by

Sometimes a Rift just does not go your way. Yesterday I was trying for a level 72 to keep moving that needle forward and just ran into a chain of deaths and then got behind the timer. That is one of those things that happens in Diablo 3 sometimes, and it sort of highlights just how dependent upon RNG some of your success ends up being. I dusted myself off immediately and tried to just a straight 70 instead of the maximum I could do and breezed through it. I am having a freaking blast right now, in spite of the occasional death storm. There is just something about Diablo III that I have never found in another game. I’ve been spending some time playing Torchlight III a bit more, and it is a better game than I gave it credit for… but the dopamine cycle just isn’t the same.

When it comes to the Season 26 Journey, I have knocked out most of the low-hanging fruit. The one that is ALWAYS the bane of my existence is the set dungeon mastery. I hate doing set dungeons so much and I avoid them until I absolutely cannot any longer. This is a reoccurring theme and if you look up me talking about ANY past season… there is always a point where Slayer and Champion are done apart from the set dungeon. As far as conquests go I will probably start chewing away on those as well. I need to see if I am at a point where I can farm bounties on T16, and then start stockpiling caches for Avarice. Ultimately in an Avarice season, I tend to wait to do the cube 20 and 40 powers until after I have finished with that conquest because I will be swimming in materials. I need to also focus on doing a really fast T13 Neph Rift in order to knock out that under 4-minute run, which will tick two boxes.

Right now I am running a Thorns Bombardment build, mostly because it was something easy to build into from the Akkhans set granted by Haedrigs Gift. I have almost everything I need to switch over to a straight Invoker Thorns build, and I am contemplating making that shift at some point. I think Invoker might be an easier dungeon to do, but I am not entirely certain. I at least know it is a dungeon I have done several times. I have always thought Omnislash thorns build would be cool and apparently, some patch changes have now made that a viable thing. It is sorta dumb the amount of enjoyment I have by running back-to-back rifts trying to farm additional gear for gaining some power. I have a shockingly sparse number of Ancients at the moment, and my Primal gained from the 70 greater rift… was awful. My second primal wasn’t much better, but at least it was something I could hand to my Templar.

In other news, I am still logging into New World at least once a day and running around and collecting a few easy pieces of Gypsum. I’ve managed to slowly work all of my armor slots up to 600 expertise, and am now starting on weapons. I got my Sword all the way to 600 already, and Greataxe/Warhammer is in the 575ish range. I am not entirely certain WHY I continue to play other than running around and harvesting materials is still pretty enjoyable. I think ultimately I am waiting for the dungeon patch that removes keys, and then I will probably be spending some time trying to get groups tanking dungeons to finish out my expertise grind. I am also farming keys on the side because they have stated that each key will become a box full of dungeon loot. Especially now that all of my armor is at 600, there might be some interesting items that come from those.

The other game I am spending time in each day is Guild Wars 2, but lately, that has been limited to farming daily PVP Potions. For the time being the only members of the Greysky Armada that PVP at all… are me and Kodra and we are trying to farm up as many pots as we can. We’ve already farmed up to 50 a few times and unlocked some of those upgrades and now we are chewing away at one of the 100 potion requirements. At a minimum each day I do enough dailies in order to get the completion reward and the free 2 gold that comes with it. If I happen to be paying attention at Tequatl time, I still try and catch that whenever I can. However, the last few days of being in “Diabble land”, have caused me to miss those.

All in all, I am having quite a bit of fun, but I do need to revisit some other projects like finishing out Horizon Forbidden West.