It is weird to me how I have gone from thinking I would give the Crucible League a hard pass… to be extremely excited for the league start tomorrow. It reminds me quite a bit of back when no matter my mental state… the mere existence of BlizzCon and the news feed that would come from it would stir up a desire to log back in. I seem to have been inoculated from BlizzCon Madness over the last several years, and even though I was playing the Alpha for Dragonflight I had no real interest in playing the game at launch. That said I am still extremely susceptible to Diablo III Seasonitis, and it brought me back to the game to play with the Altar mechanics in Season 28. It seems that maybe with Sanctum, Path of Exile finally burrowed its way deep into my core and I am going to be just as vulnerable to the League Virus as well.
I’ve had people ask me before why I participate in Seasons and Leagues… when in truth you are just playing the same game over again but taking away any advantage you might have earned in the past. This is so much the case that I rarely if ever touch my “Standard” characters that largely just end up being a storehouse of materials that will never be used. For me personally, it has nothing to do with the challenge, but more that it is like this microcosm of a game launch. I love the launch of a new MMORPG and the excitement as folks scurry around trying to adapt to the game systems and the almost crushing amount of content flowing forth about the game. That same environment exists around the launch of a new season or league as everyone gets excited about the start, and then gibbers excitedly about what new lessons they have learned and exciting drops they might have found. It is all of the excitement of an MMORPG launch… crammed into a few weeks to a month every three or four months repeating like clockwork… and once you engage with it fully it can be addictive as fuck.
The unfortunate truth however is your “Standard” characters often feel like cleaning up after one hell of a party. Path of Exile has maybe the best method for dealing with the cleanup. Essentially you get a tab added to your standard inventory that is marked as “remove-only” and then you can withdraw things from it at your leisure. This is far better than the Diablo III norm of just mailing you all of your items. In a season or league, you end up just collecting a bunch of nonsense. For example, I apparently gathered up almost 9000 Chaos Orbs, that I never took the time to convert to Divine Orbs for easier storage. I spent some time yesterday straightening up my standard inventory in prep for the launch of the new league, which meant painstakingly withdrawing items from one tab and depositing them into another. I should have waited until AFTER the league patch dropped because the stack size is being increased from 10 to 20… and it would have literally taken half the time.
I am certain that I will be starting out the league as a Marauder and moving towards Juggernaut and Righteous Fire because it is just too good of a general build not to have at my disposal. During the last league, I ended up leveling and gearing a whole slew of characters. Other than the RF Jugg I had my SRS Necromancer, Seismic Saboteur, and two attempts at a Toxic Rain build that I liked in both Trickster and Pathfinder variants. Primarily I say this because I absolutely expect to have more than one character. Righteous Fire is an amazing build for Delve, Heist, and burning through the early maps but at some point, I want something that is more “Bossing” friendly. I only ended up getting two void stones last league, because quite honestly… I do not enjoy the bossing game nearly as much as I enjoy the rest of the game. However, I might want to change that and try and knock out the last two void stones so I can have T16 maps for everything. For those curious, the above video is Pohx simulating a run of all 10 acts as Righteous Fire.
If I was not starting Righteous Fire, I would probably try out this build from Ghazzy which is more of a traditional ARPG minion build. I don’t think it will probably be as good of a bosser as my SRS build was last league, but it looks like a pretty chill option. The only annoying thing is using Hungry Loop to essentially give you a 5 link for Animate Guardian. I do not love Animate Guardian, so if I did try this out I would probably run it largely ignoring that. The spell is cool in design but the fact that you erase uniques to equip it… and then lose them all if it ever dies… just feels bad. We will have to see how bad the Poison SRS variant is currency-wise, because I might try building this league as my “bosser” since I enjoyed my Fire variant in Sanctum.
I don’t get at all why I am caught up on this emotional rollercoaster of the league start when I am legitimately enjoying myself playing Last Epoch. The heart wants what the heart wants, unfortunately. I did get my primalist/beastmaster up to the second monolith last night however and am still enjoying that gameplay. Right now without going into totems like the build I was loosely following suggests, it feels quite a bit like a HotA Barb from Diablo III. It also seems to have just a ton of survival and feels way tankier than my Necromancer does. I’m technically working on the Monolith that has a higher than reasonable chance of dropping the Herald of the Scurry helm that I will ultimately need, but unfortunately, I think the level is too low yet and I will have to farm it once I get to empowered monoliths.
I’ve also been back to logging into BelginnersLuck shown in the first screenshot of the post and trying to get a unique to drop from Hillock. If nothing else… I am definitely much faster at pathing through that first map in a league and much better at fighting that first obstacle. Tomorrow I will be rolling a brand new character and diving into the league. I don’t necessarily expect any of my friends to really join me in this madness, because I know it literally is that now… madness. I enjoy myself though so that I guess is the part that matters the most. If you plan on diving into the Crucible league drop me a line and say hey.
Friends… I have to admit that I was contemplating just sitting out of the Crucible League. I am still not entirely certain if I am going to go all in Path of Exile this time, but that itch in the back of my head… has returned. I still have some deep concerns about Crucible and the direction of the game, but also… I had a heck of a lot of fun in Sanctum League even though I was one of the few AggroChat folks who really got into it. I really loved the rhythm that I fell into of having a mapping/bossing character and then having my Righteous Fire Juggernaut do super chill Heist and Delve runs on. I have no clue what my plans are for the OP bossing character… but I am pretty sure I am starting the league with Righteous Fire at this point.
Pohx released his Righteous Fire video for 3.21 and an updated Path of Building guide over on his website. The main reason why I am interested in doing Righteous Fire again is that it is ultimately a playstyle that I enjoy greatly. Something that I have learned about myself is that I really like three types of builds:
Screen Clear Ranged Builds
Minions do the Work Builds
Super Tanky Damage Feedback Builds
My two favorite Diablo III builds sort of fall into the Tanky/Feedback builds with Whirlwind involving you spinning through packs of mobs and letting them break themselves on your whirling blades, and Invoker Crusader being a mega thorns build that causes them to essentially explode with damage if they touch you. Righteous Fire definitely falls into that sort of category where you are lighting yourself on fire and then running around and watching things burn up as they attempt to get to you. I’ve yet to really find a version of the Demon Hunter Multishot builds in Path of Exile that I really enjoy playing past about the midpoint in leveling.
The other reason why for a Righteous Fire start is because it does a good job of being an all-around character for doing a lot of different mechanics. More specifically it is good at the mechanics that I personally enjoy doing like Delve and Heist which each offer early access to a bunch of interesting types of loot that are much harder to get otherwise. To quote Jorgen, “Delve Provides” and with the Crucible mechanic focused around weapons… I have a feeling that Delve Crafting will be just as strong as ever as folks try and get that perfect Rare item with the perfect weapon tree on it. In Sanctum as soon as I had filled up on a decent amount of resonators I could pretty much liquidate them instantly which allowed me to funnel resources into shopping trips to fully equip builds.
The other benefit of just choosing to run up Righteous Fire which is a tried and true build… is it gives me some time to see how the other builds in the league shake out. I enjoyed Summon Raging Spirits last go-round, and I went with a fire-based build which was not nearly as strong as the poison variant but still good for doing Metamorph bosses. One of the things I contemplated last league was trying to build some sort of minion instability build turning the raging spirits into bombs. The above video talks about this sort of setup and honestly, I might consider that as my second build of the league.
I’ve never gone Boneshatter so I am contemplating playing around with one of those as well. I know this is one of traditionally the stronger league starts. I’ve also tried to play around with a Poison Rain build several times but never really got it playing in a manner that I enjoyed it. I think my problem with so many bow builds is that they tend to focus on ballistas doing the damage rather than hits doing the damage. I still want to find a fun and chill screen clear hit build that doesn’t cost 100 divines… but I have yet to really land on that. I figure in the next few days we are going to be flooded with builds but really we won’t know entirely what works until a week or so in.
Good Morning Friends! This weekend I played an exceptional amount of Last Epoch because at the moment that seems to be the game I am most engaged with. A few months back Eleventh Hour Games announced that everyone who had purchased the game before the launch of the 0.9 Multiplayer update would be getting a gift. Yesterday I noticed a post on the official discord stating that it was now live and in-game, and as a result, I have this really beautiful backpack with a ton of small details to roam around on a character that moves through content so fast that it is impossible to focus in on any small details. I mean it is really freaking cool honestly and I am happy to wear it and have it as an “I was here early” type thing, but it really does require you to zoom in to see anything.
Right now there are a number of microtransactions in the game, but most of them are limited to pets. For example, that amazing floating Runed Primordial Turtle means I was an Alpha backer of the game. If you backed the Kickstarter there were a number of Sylpine and Chronowyrm pets that you got. Currently the available supporter backs include weird anthropomorphic armadillo-badger sort of things called Skullen as pets. So far Eleventh Hour Games has been very clear that there will never be a way in the future to obtain any of these items, and while I think the Skullen looks sorta dumb, I am very happy to have my pet turtle and backpack… even though neither actually does anything. My hope is at some point pets might possibly work like they do in Diablo III and zoom around gathering gold for me.
As far as endgame progressions go, I am now officially in Empowered Monoliths, and boy do they occasionally just kick your ass. I need to focus on building out the rest of my kit before going too crazy with corruption. At the moment I am short on a couple of resists and when I encounter anything that really exploits those… I do not last terribly long. I think it is pretty cool that at any point you can flip between the Normal and Legendary versions of the Monoliths. This only supports my case for Monolith progression being account wide instead of tied to a specific character. That way if you want to run lower-level monoliths on your brand-new characters, you can do so at will by just choosing the normal versions.
I finished the first of the Empowered Monoliths and defeated its boss, and now am target farming Ending of the Storm which has nodes apparently that can drop unique or set gloves. Essentially I am trying to farm up Ravens’ Rise a unique set of gloves that blends nicely with my Necromancer build. In theory, I need to farm the Reign of Dragons timeline as well to try and get Dragonflame Edict the weapon that I am supposed to be using that drops from the boss. Out on Last Epoch Tools, there is a handy filter in the Item Database that lets you look at each timeline and what items come from it for farming purposes. If I did not already have Aaron’s Will, I would be trying to farm the Blood, Frost, and Death timeline as it drops chest pieces.
I personally cannot handle non-stop progression content, so I spent a chunk of the weekend working on a few different primalists. Right now I am leaning heavily towards Belgloam my Beastmaster because I am just having more fun with it than Belgraves my Druid. The idea with each of them is to go Squirrel build on the Beastmaster, and Swarm Queen on the Druid. However, for the moment I am enjoying the gameplay of beastmaster quite a bit more as I run around using upheaval with my pack of four wolves. I do not have Herald of the Scurry which changes my Wolves into Squirrels, but I will probably try and target farm that on the Necromancer. I can only imagine cackling with joy as my army of squirrel friends decimate my foes.
In the column of assorted dumb things I did this weekend, I recorded a series of videos. Essentially I have talked at length about the things I did not enjoy in Diablo IV, but I never really talked about or showcased the things that I love doing in ARPGs. So as a result I recorded a series of four videos… one in Last Epoch doing a Monolith Echo, and Three in Path of Exile doing an Atlas Map, a Delve, and a Heist. So if you have any interest in listening to me ramble on while I play through some content, here is your chance. I’ve also sort of come to the realization that I have been doing my “Bel Bungles” series all wrong. I should have just had a single video series given that I swap around games relatively often. I think at some point I might renumber all of my “Bel Bungles” videos and put them in a playlist.
I will admit recording the videos, and the announcement of the 3.21 Crucible League… caused a bit of a relapse this weekend. There is nothing in any ARPG that I enjoy quite as much as Delve. There is just something about the endless nature of crawling from node to node seeking out the treasure that soothes me. My hope is with the Crucible league that I can build up a Righteous Fire character again and then use it to fund other types of characters as I did in the Sanctum league. I know without a doubt I will be heading into Delve as soon as possible.
Anyways! I hope you had a wonderful weekend and that the coming week is at a bare minimum tolerable. I will likely be here continuing to do my nonsense.
Diablo IV Login Screen showing my level 24 Barbarian
Good Morning Friends! This weekend I spent quite a bit of time playing the beta for Diablo IV and have some thoughts about my experience. I honestly was not sure if I would be playing the game, but I had a friend gift me a copy unexpectedly so it would have been rude to not play after that. I love ARPGs and over the years Diablo 3 Seasons have been something that I almost set my calendar by. More recently I have gotten extremely engaged in Path of Exile Leagues and spent copious amounts of time playing Grim Dawn, Wolcen, and more recently Last Epoch. Back in the day, I spent a truly excessive amount of time playing Titans Quest, Fate, Torchlight, and the assorted Dungeon Siege games.
Diablo III Rift showing a Loot Explosion
Suffice it to say I am an aficionado of the genre or more specifically the kill-fast-get-big-prizes style of gameplay that comes with the modern ARPG. I like grinding out content for big prizes and tend to play either ranged classes that can do screen-wide explosions or tanky classes that are effectively invulnerable as the multitudes break themselves on my body. I like turning off my brain and just becoming one with the controls and greatly enjoy the mechanical loop of gameplay that I can find in many modern ARPGs. Last night for example I spent the entire evening leveling a Necromancer in Last Epoch while listening to an Audiobook, and I was honestly in heaven. I am trotting out my resume if only to let you understand what sort of engagement with these games I enjoy, and that I am very familiar with the genre.
Diablo IV Barbarian in the tundra with a flaming sword
I have to be honest… at this point, I am not sure if I like Diablo IV. It is at the very least not the game I was expecting it to be. If you stripped off the branding of this game and presented it to me from another publisher with a slightly altered setting and I am not sure if I would have described it as “like Diablo”. The core gameplay loop that I enjoy so much in a Diablo-style game, isn’t really the core gameplay loop of this game. It instead is a game with much more deliberate slow-paced combat and a world that is much more dangerous than I have come to expect from even Path of Exile. Everything about the game feels much more akin to an Isometric MMORPG that you more commonly find on a mobile platform than what I have come to expect from a PC ARPG. So for me at least it is way less of a contemporary of Path of Exile, Diablo II, Diablo III, and Torchlight and more a challenge-focused version of Lost Ark. I am almost certain at some point during its development process someone uttered the phrase “the Dark Souls of ARPGs” even though it lacks the traditional soulslike trappings apart from “don’t get hit”.
The First Boss fight – X’Fal, the Scarred Baron
Diablo IV feels like it has doubled down on the “bossing” style of gameplay from Path of Exile. Every boss has 4 sections of their health bar, and whittling down a quarter will produce some sort of intermission mechanic or phase shift. This has more or less been true with all of the dungeon bosses I have fought as well. They feel a lot like fighting a Legendary mob in Guild Wars 2, so read… super tanky bag of hitpoints that will take you quite a while to whittle through while avoiding a number of other mechanics. Bossing in general in an ARPG is probably my least favorite part of the game, and I gave up on progressing past the Searing Exarch in Path of Exile because I simply did not really enjoy building for that sort of mechanic. So far all of the bosses in Diablo IV seem to be punitive towards a melee playstyle because my brief amount of time spent playing a ranged rogue saw me breezing through them whereas I had to play much more carefully on the Barbarian.
The conquering of Stronghold Malnok
Dungeon delving however is just a small part of the gameplay in Diablo IV, and you are going to spend a much larger amount of time roaming around the open world. Here you will stumble across events that are spawning constantly in an almost Guild Wars 2 style, where you and any players sharing your map can work together to complete them. So far all of the events I have tried can be completed solo, but simply go much faster with a host of randoms. The coolest of these however is the Strongholds which are one-time completed events that will open up new areas to the players. Malnok for example required me to defeat a number of Goatmen shamen that were channeling into a boss in the center of the map. After killing all of these it shifted into a big boss fight, and upon completing it the area turned into a town. This reminds me quite a bit of the area in Witcher 3 where after defeating all of the monsters in a town, the locals come back and set up shop again. It feels cool, but also a bit like any modern Assassin’s Creed or Farcry game with similar zone control mechanics.
A story mission in Diablo IV
One of the places where Diablo IV excels is in its storytelling. Traditionally the bar for storytelling in the ARPG is something you might be at risk of tripping over. While they often have amazing world-building and lore… they often have a pretty hamfisted narrative that is the bare minimum to keep the game from completely falling apart. Diablo IV is a great story game, and some of the side quests honestly are better than the main story. Once again I am going to pull out the Witcher 3 as a reference because a number of the side quests remind me of just how detailed that game got with its off-the-beaten-path narrative. I feel for a lot of people that this is going to be one of those games that they play through all of the stories once and then feel satisfied and walk away never to touch it again. That is going to be a completely reasonable way to approach this game honestly.
Combat on the Barbarian showing a Legendary Drop
I think my core problem with the game in its current state is the moment-to-moment gameplay loop doesn’t feel amazing. The time to kill in combat feels sluggish and not exactly what I have come to expect from the ARPG genre. Sure a Diablo III Demon Hunter feels awful for the first ten levels or so… but those are over in maybe ten minutes. With Diablo IV I was three or four hours into the game and it still felt like I was fighting while mired in quicksand. Admittedly most of my experience comes from playing the Barbarian but if you don’t nail that class… the most straightforward of Diablo archetypes… I have concerns. Playing as a ranged Rogue felt a little bit more snappy, and I’ve heard tales that the Sorceror is extremely overpowered… so then that raises a whole other line of concerns around class balance. What I expected was honestly something that played and felt a bit more like Diablo Immortal, since there is deep parity between the systems of that game and this game… and quite frankly I would probably rather spend my time playing Diablo Immortal were it not for the egregious monetization strategies. I think it is probably a better game across the board.
All of the Legendary Drops I have Seen So Far
The itemization is also lacking at least in what I have come to expect. Magic and Rare items aka Blues and Yellows are effectively what you would expect from any other game. Where things get weird is Legendary Drops. Generally speaking both Legendaries and Uniques from other games are “curated” rolls that are capable of dropping with very specific parameters making them almost always useful for specific builds. Legendaries in this game however are randomly generated items that just have a single legendary trait on the item. So that means it is entirely possible for you to get a Legendary trait on an item that does not make any sense and is generally useless otherwise. Roll curation is a big part of what made legendaries so special in the first place because getting one meant you knew exactly what you were getting ahead of time. A lot of the chase of item drops is a search for specific cornerstone pieces that you need for your build. Screwing with this mechanic is going to at least in part cheapen the search for those build-defining items.
Extracting Imprints from Legendary Items and the Codex of Power
Now one cool aspect of the crafting system is that you can extract any legendary trait from an item, and then imprint it upon another item. So for example, if you have a yellow item that is perfectly rolled but is missing the legendary trait, you can effectively upscale that item into a legendary by adding the trait. The process is destructive and rather cost prohibitive at least with the sorts of money we are able to get in the beta so far. The problem is this is a somewhat flawed process because they also have another system in the game called the Codex of Power. This effectively allows you to collect legendary imprints that are permanent recipes that you can create as many times as you like. What would have been a much better system is that eating a legendary added it to your Codex of Power instead of how it works now and producing a one-time-use item that will ultimately clog your inventory. The codex of power would have been akin to cubing an item in Diablo III and would have added a whole pokemon aspect to trying to find all of the patterns out in the world and add them to your codex. For now, you unlock the Codex through running dungeons and it is a different set of “Legendaries” than the ones you consume and turn into imprints.
Completing an Event by killing monsters to spill blood into a pillar
Throughout the weekend I spent some time threading my comments over on Gamepad.club. In doing so I was reminded by friends of a simple truth. While I might not terribly enjoy the game at the moment, I also did not really love Diablo III at launch either. It was only the significant changes brought on by the Reaper of Souls expansion at the “Loot 2.0” mindset that led me to love that game. Similarly, the Destiny 2 that launched looks very little like the game that exists today. This is sort of the way of the live services game, that it morphs and changes over time to hone in on the types of gameplay that the players want. So while I may not love Diablo IV at this very moment, it does not mean that there is not a Diablo IV in the future that I will not deeply enjoy to the point of setting my calendar around its schedule.
Highly Detailed Dungeon Environment
What I currently see is a game that I think a lot of people are going to play through once and then walk away from. However, it is very clear that Blizzard wants long-tailed transactional income from this game in the form of battle passes and cosmetics. What I do not see is a game that is going to really appeal in large part to the “Core ARPG” demographic that competes in Diablo II: Resurrection Ladders, Diablo III Seasons, and Path of Exile Leagues. The game instead seems to be tailored more to the sensibilities of the MMORPG game player and feels very much akin to the sorts of interactions you might have with a World of Warcraft. If I adjust my expectations to that sort of a game, then Diablo IV honestly holds up pretty well. I would probably rather play this than I would World of Warcraft at that point. However, in that space, I think Guild Wars 2 is doing a far better job of a lot of the things that this game is trying to do with its Strongholds and Zone events.
Lilith from one of the early cinematics
I have to be honest, the game was a little disappointing for me because I was ultimately expecting it to be something that it is not. What I was hoping for was a happy medium between Diablo III and Path of Exile with a glossy coat of paint. What I got instead is something more akin to a darker version of Lost Ark and the mobile isometric MMORPGs. In truth, I already have my happy medium between Diablo III and Path of Exile and it is called Last Epoch… but just because Diablo IV is not what I was expecting does not mean it is a bad game. I highly suggest you judge for yourself and next weekend you will be able to. While this weekend was only for those who had purchased the game, next weekend is as I understand it open to anyone with a Battle.net account. The next period begins on March 24th at 9 am PDT and will conclude on March 27th at 12 pm PDT. If it is anything like this week, you will be able to preload the game roughly a day ahead of time.
Screenshot from Quin69’s stream hitting a 108-minute login queue
I will say if you do plan on participating next weekend… maybe don’t take any time off from work. This is good advice in general, to never take off time specifically for a game launch because it will most likely only end in heartbreak. I was off on Friday already, so I did the dumb thing and tried to play when the servers opened. However, there was a period of time on Twitch where the entire Diablo IV section looked like the above shot of various streamers stuck waiting in extremely long queues. While the servers stabilized by Saturday, I would expect them to be bleeding again when the next phase opens up. This first phase was only for folks who have purchased the game, the next one will open the floodgates and let anyone play. If you are interested in this game, I would highly suggest giving it a test drive before you make the purchase. It likely does not match your expectations.
Did you spend time this weekend playing the Diablo IV Beta? What were your thoughts? Am I being weird for not really being all that into it? Drop me a line below.
