Action RPGs

Action RPGs along the lines of the Diablo Franchise

Diablo III Season 26 So Far

by

Good Morning Friends! On Monday I talked about my general sense of unhappiness and how my prohibition of Blizzard titles, and specifically my beloved Diablo III had brought me nothing but misery. So the interesting part about that is… I was holding stable up until the point that I tried Diablo Immortal. I largely tried Immortal in the first place so that I could write my impressions given how much Diablo III and honestly D2 and D1 I have played over the years.

I posted a snippet of an article from the Washington Post yesterday on Twitter, and for me at least it rings so true. I think my falling back into Diablo III has been at least in part a way to wash the bad taste of the Diablo Immortal monetization out of my mouth. This seems to have been the case for at least a few of my friends as well. I legitimately had no intention of breaking my Blizzard prohibition but it has now happened… and I am happier for having done so. I missed this game so damned much.

I am still in the “building power” phase of the season. It took me a few nights to level from 1 to 70, and it has been a really long time since I have done that completely solo. When I usually played Diablo III I had Grace along with me, and we at a minimum duo’d most things… and occasionally had others like Byx joining in the nonsense. I was nowhere near as efficient in my leveling as I could have been, in part because I knew I needed a Ring of Royal Grandeur for my target build, and I figured since it was going in the cube I might as well try and get one from bounties as I leveled up. I wish I had managed to get some of the other items I needed for the build because it would have made the start of the season considerably easier.

For those who might have never started a Diablo III season, the general theory is that you create a Seasonal character and then immediately hop into whatever challenge rift was available for that given week. A Challenge Rift is essentially a snapshot of a specific build, often taken from the community… and you have to navigate that build successfully through a fixed Greater Rift in order to beat a specific time. Your reward for doing this… is a cache full of resources that gives you a headstart on the season and allows you to do some specific things. Essentially you get:

  • 5,100,000 gold
  • 475 blood shards
  • 35 deaths breath
  • 125 veiled crystals
  • 350 arcane dust
  • 370 reusable parts
  • 15 of each of the different act bounty currencies

Essentially the standard order of operations is to use this to level the Blacksmith and Mystic all of the ways up, and then attempt to convert a Rare item into a legendary item in Kunai’s Cube. Based on what you get there this generally determines what item you go for in gambling with Kadala using those 475 blood shards. There are specific items that are suggested and I did not get any of them.

What I did get instead however was a nifty parlor trick that I was able to stick in Kunai’s Cube. I am not sure I have ever used Flail of the Ascended, and if I did I largely just used it as a temporary beater until I got something better. This ultimately lead me to build around Shield Glare and Shield Bash, so that I could bash my way through the level and then use Shield Glare as a big nuke to take out bosses or large packs. Honestly, it felt pretty good right up until the point that it stopped feeling good around level 66. In my challenge rift cache shenanigans, I managed to get a level 70 weapon that I could equip at level 49, so once I grew into that I had an express elevator to the top. I’ve had worse seasonal leveling experiences for certain, but I have also had much much better ones.

At this point, I can pretty reliably clear Torment VII Neph Rifts at a decent speed for farming and I have cleared through Solo 43 in Greater Rifts. I have three decent legendary gems and I just need to work on getting those leveled up a bit. This is the Diablo that I love, and this is ultimately what I hoped Diablo Immortal would be… but on the phone. This is what the loot from a Rift should feel like and only exists in Immortal if you spend $25 on Legendary Crests per run. I am having a freaking blast folks, and my hope is to finish off Season 26 before the timer runs out. The prediction is that this season will end sometime in August. With the current double bounty cache reward going on, I should be able to farm up Avarice pretty easily, but I need to really get my power up to where I can comfortably run T13 at a minimum before starting that grind. It is kinda dumb how returning to a game can make me so happy… but it is a thing that has happened. God, I love Diablo III.

Earnest Money and Orichalcum

by

Well, friends… I did it. I put my money on the line for a house in the lottery. On Cactuar, there were a number of homes that opened up in pretty much all of the housing districts yesterday. I’ve always been partial to The Mist housing area because I have also been partial to Limsa Lominsa. It is the town I started the game in and was the location of our first Free Company house. After scoping out a number of plots during the downtime when the lottery system was offline, I found one that I think is my favorite, and yesterday I put down my almost 4 million Gil in earnest money. At that point it told me I was the fifth bid on the property so here is hoping that my “Bel Luck” pays off. I am not super hopeful to be honest because I have chased a house at this point for quite a long time. Maybe having housing would make me want to be more active in the game again? I am not sure but it would at least mean I was logging in every week to visit the home and do some nonsense to make sure I did not lose it.

In another of my gaming crushes, there was a significant patch released yesterday in New World that added in PVP Arenas… which I do not give a shit about in the least. However, there were also a large number of interesting changes made, not the least of which was adding more tier 4 and 5 nodes in the world for crafters to harvest. The most immediate and stark change is that apparently by default the map is no longer flood filled with the color of the faction that holds it, and in order to return this functionality it seems you have to toggle on the filter for “faction influence” each time you log into the game. Another really interesting thing that went in is that there are now faction-wide benefits for holding territory. Here is a full list of the benefit given to a faction for holding a given location.

  • Brightwood: Camping no longer costs resources.
  • Cutlass Keys: Increases global gathering luck by 10%.
  • Ebonscale Reach: Decreases the cost of items in the faction store by 5%.
  • Everfall: Increases the amount of Azoth Salt gained by 10%.
  • First Light: Increases global refining yield by 10%.
  • Monarch Bluffs: Increases all experience gains by 5%.
  • Mourningdale: Increase the gearscore ceiling of crafting by 5. The maximum gearscore you can roll is still 600.
  • Reekwater: Increases the amount of PvP Experience gained by 5%.
  • Restless Shores: All fast travel is now free.
  • Weaver’s Fen: Decreases global tax values by 10%.
  • Windsward: Increases the chance that a consumable isn’t consumed on use by 10%.

So currently on Valhalla the Syndicate holds four territories and is given the benefit of free fast travel, a 10% reduction in all tax values, 5% increase in PVP experience gained, and creating a camp no longer requires any resources. Covenant holds six territories and would get 5% discount on faction store, 10% increase in azoth salt gained, 10% increase in global refining yield, 5% experience bonus, gearscore crafting increase by 5 levels, and 10% chance on not consuming a consumable. Then Marauders hold a single territory and get global luck increased by 10%. I think this does some interesting things because it makes terrorises that were otherwise worthless… like Restless Shores and Cutlass Keys exceptionally valuable because of the bonus they grant to your faction. With the ease of travel, it also makes moving around way easier than it once was essentially making ANY crafting hub viable.

The change I appreciate the most however is all of the new nodes opening up around the world. I harvested more Orichalcum yesterday than I probably have in the first few months of playing the game. There is also a side benefit of having a new PVP chase in the rewards track that is taking folks out of the world and focusing them on PVP. This means there is significantly less contention for resources as a result and it is probably a good time to be working on leveling skills. I’ve been stockpiling resources a bit of late because I know that very soon they are going to open up a double experience period which will make finishing off some of my skills significantly cheaper.

I think my next target for skills is Engineering which is currently level 188. I want to craft an Axe of the Abyss, which has improved significantly from the last time I looked at it. I have pretty much all of the materials needed to craft one ratholed in the various storage chests around the world. For the few missing components like Embossed Wrapping, I put in a buy order for 50g and had it filled quickly. I’ve been harvesting a ton of resources because it is very fruitful to grind out those aptitude caches each day. I am really enjoying my time spent in the game and while I wish I had a stable group to run expeditions with, I am content to push up my crafting while also collecting gypsum and slowly working on my expertise.

Lastly a final thought. Recently I have been having this inexplicable desire to poke my head into The Division 2. In theory, I should be amped for all of the things going on in Destiny 2, but the removal of further content really burned me on that game. I would however really like to have some sort of a shooter in my rotation, which sent me down the path of never really having given Division 2 a fair shake. I never even hit the level cap, and at some point, I should probably remedy that. Between Guild Wars 2, FFXIV, New World, and now adding Division 2 to the mix… I am going to be busy.

Outriders Worldslayer

by

The reveal that most folks are still talking about is World of Warcraft Dragonflight, but yesterday brought us another reveal trailer that I personally had been waiting for. Outriders is a game that I still very much have a burning candle for, and while I am not actively playing it I still very much enjoy popping in to make some earthquakes. When People Can Fly announced the New Horizon changes last November, they also announced that we would be getting a new expansion in 2022. Yesterday we got some more information about what exactly that is going to entail. Unfortunately there is still not a ton of detail but we do have a release date of 6/30/2022 or… the end of Q2 pushing it as far out as you possibly can while still counting it in the first half of 2022. I have no clue what fiscal year Square uses, but it is entirely possible that 7/1 is the beginning of a brand new fiscal year as well.

Essentially all we really have to go on right now is two trailers:

In both cases there is pretty scant details about specifics but we know that we are going to be getting the following features that were discussed.

  • New Story Campaign
  • New Zones – Ice Themed
  • Talent Tree Expansion System
  • New Apocalypse Challenge Tier System which unifies story and expeditions
    • With this a new Apocalypse Tier of gear that features an extra perk slot
  • Alternate Advancement System – allowing you to gain stat points after you finish leveling
  • New Legendary Gear – Class Sets, Shared Sets, and Weapons
  • “Endgame” – They name drop something called the Trial of Tarya Gratar that sounds like maybe a raid but uncertain
  • Pre-Order head start – 10% discount and 48 hour early access

All of this sounds great, but honestly the core problem that I had with Outriders is that I never really fell into a regular group that was playing it. The game is fun solo, but I struggled with trying to push myself forward much further by myself. At launch I really hated the Expeditions mechanic because it was timed, and I HATE being timed in a game. There are some seriously mental issues that I have over that that I am likely never going to get over… very deep scars. When New Horizon released they removed the timers and as a result Expeditions got immediately better. I spent some time hanging out with Warenwolf, and Thalen started leveling… but we never really connected as a proper trio to do serious content. Maybe with the release of Worldslayer I can convince them both to give it a shot as well.

I think the thing that I like the most about Outriders is that it really takes so many of the things I loved about building characters in Diablo 3, and carries them forward to the looter shooter genre. When this game released so much press was focused on how this was not a live service game, and I have to say… maybe it should have been. Square does a phenomenally poor job at creating live service games in general, but Outriders is one that I think could have been improved by having a regular feed of new content. I would likely bought some cash shop cosmetics to fund additional development work. Instead what we have is a game that is going to seemingly go long periods of time with no updates and be extremely easy to sit back down on the shelf in those lull periods. That is not a bad thing either, but since gaming seems to be dominated by MAU counts it harms a game like this in the long run.

I am absolutely going to be poking my head into this when it releases late in June. I am going to pretend that the date is a late birthday present even rather than probably bumping up against some fiscal deadline. I am curious, are any of you also looking forward to this? The thing I still really want to see is cross save support because I would probably even pick up a copy for Xbox Series X to play with friends over there, but I have no interest in leveling another set of characters or collecting a new set of gear.

Understanding the Bounce

by

Good Morning Friends. Sometimes I get something stuck in my head and I have trouble letting go of it. For a decade now, Guild Wars 2 has been this puzzle that I have been trying to crack. I’ve fought and spent countless hours trying to sort out why many of my friends enjoyed it, but that I struggled to latch onto it. Now that I have arrived at the moment where it is really clicking for me… I’ve been puzzling over why exactly I bounced so hard for so many years. Last night I think I landed on the very specific reasons, and this morning I am going to take you on a journey as I dive into them. Ultimately like so many problems in my life it has come down to assumptions and expectations.

In 1996 when I got into the beta for a game from then upstart developer Blizzard called Diablo, it was essentially everything I had wanted in a video game up until that point. Suffice to say that I love Diablo with all of my heart and even though the original is rather kludgy by today’s comparisons, it will always right or wrong be up on a bit of a pedestal. There are times when it is important to understand the lineage of a game and I have talked about in the past how Final Fantasy XIV behaves oddly not because it draws its roots to World of Warcraft, but that it ultimately draws its roots to Everquest and that community by way of Final Fantasy XI which was directly inspired by EQ. As we talk about Guild Wars, we have to start with Diablo and ultimately the games that spun out of Diablo like Lineage and Dungeon Siege.

So while Guild Wars and World of Warcraft were technically contemporaries, there was never a time when I actively compared the two games or even treated them like they were in the same genre. Guild Wars very clearly drew its provenance from Diablo and Lineage by reference whereas World of Warcraft was based out of building a better Everquest. As a result the sort of gameplay that Guild Wars had felt like a fresh take on the dungeon crawler genre, or more so expanded upon it by adding much better story and new kinds of networked gameplay. I did not expect anything more from it than a game that let me kill monsters for stacks of loot, and I found the card based skill system to be interesting. I have always been a huge fan of Magic the Gathering and once I made that mental connection to deck building I was set.

Where we run into problems however is with the release of Guild Wars 2. During the run up to the game there was a lot of very lofty bullshit bandied about by the team. Rather intentional or not, they painted a target on their back of having to bear the burden of being the “WoW Killer”. So as a result I stopped comparing Guild Wars 2 to that provenance of Guild Wars dating back to Diablo… and instead started comparing it directly to World of Warcraft. The comparison did not really hold up because as we all know Guild Wars 2 is doing something very different, and as a result was missing a lot of the underpinnings of that traditional World of Warcraft experience. I gave it a shot but it just did not have the same magic I was hoping it would rekindle from those early days of Warcraft. Like I said I am not sure if this really was intention on the part of the developers or if something that some marketing agency decided needed to happen but in truth they should have spent more time distancing themselves from the MMORPG pack than they did.

The problem for me however is that the damage was already done. Guild Wars 1 mentally was ArenaNet showing me what they could do with the Diablo formula, and as a result I had equated the second game to them showing me their take on World of Warcraft. The word “Warrior” means something very specific to me as a result of that connection. Tales of the Aggronaut started its life as a World of Warcraft Warrior Tanking blog, so I had a very specific style of gameplay that I wanted to experience when I rolled this new character type in Guild Wars 2. The disconnect being that Warrior is no more tanky than any other class in the game because there is no traditional trinity of roles, nor should there really be. I kept trying to force Guild Wars 2 into the mold of my experiences from other MMORPGs when I never thought to take a step back and trace the path back to Diablo.

In Diablo you have the Barbarian and it is no more tanky than any other class in that game. It is instead a class defined by melee combat and short duration largely shout based buffs for your team. Effectively you could swap the word Barbarian for Warrior and have a better understanding of what the Guild Wars 2 class is trying to be. However for me the well was poisoned and Guild Was 2 was a game that was “doing warriors wrong!” even though I had been perfectly happy to play the “Warrior as Barbarian” in the original Guild Wars. It is shocking just how much difference the right frame of mind makes when approaching something, and how our assumptions can be the destroyer of possibilities.

One of the problems that I have is that I get hung up on fetishizing specific weapons. For example in Destiny 2, there is never going to be a point where I am not either actively wielding or have in my inventory an Auto Rifle. That is the weapon for me and I will go through some weird contorted lengths to make sure I am using one. Similarly with MMORPGs, I want to be using a sword and a shield… and occasionally an Axe or a Mace will do but the important part is the shield. That is a deep part of what I consider to be a “tank” and why I play them. While I enjoy the non-traditional tanks like the Warrior in FFXIV or the Demon Hunter in World of Warcraft, I will never feel quite as at home as when I have a large chunk of metal strapped to my left arm. This is what is largely referred to as a “class fantasy” and it is one that is completely unsupported by Guild Wars 2.

What changed is that I had a conversation with my friend Tam about what I actually want from a class and he managed to narrow in on one piece of the narrative that I had not caught myself. I want a character with extremely high suitability. So while it is very much not my “class fantasy” he said I should check out the Necromancer and I did precisely that. There is something about playing a caster which is entirely out of my comfort range, and a pet class specifically… and caused me to completely re-frame the experience of playing Guild Wars 2. No longer was I playing a game that was pretending to be World of Warcraft but instead playing a game that very much drew its roots to the Diablo 2/3 Necromancer, another class that I love. Being forcibly pushed out of my comfort zone has allowed me to completely re-imagine the experience of playing Guild Wars 2 for the better.

For years I have believed that Guild Wars 2 was an attempt to build the WoW Killer, because that is what the marketing told me it was. What the game is instead however is a direct successor to Guild Wars 1, taking a lot of the things that worked well there and expanding upon them and building them into a big open world event based game. It is a game where your class doesn’t really matter all that much, but what does matter is the way you build it and the gear that you equip… which is entirely translatable to the experience I have with builds and Diablo 3. With this frame of context everything about the Guild Wars 2 experience suddenly feels better. I’ve been able to chuck it mentally into the appropriate bin of equivalent experiences and now it is absolutely scratching that Diablo itch for me.

Last night I had a freaking blast running around and doing the big World Boss events. At the suggestion of Bhagpuss in my comments yesterday, I spent the 400 gems on the doodad that auto teleports me to any available events. It is maybe some of the best money I have ever spent on a game like this, and the end result was three hours of mayhem and so much loot. Granted a large chunk of it was salvage fodder, but I did manage to pull a really cool exotic staff and more importantly a ton of gossamer and a handful of high end leather as well as a few more crafting patterns. What Guild Wars 2 does best is the drop in nature of the big zone events, and now that I have tackled the mental obstacles that I had placed in front of my enjoyment… it is a glorious experience.