Penance Brand of Dissipation might be one of my fastest-leveling characters ever. I started it pretty late on Monday night, leveled it through Kitava on Tuesday night, and then geared it yesterday and started mapping. The skill is not the best thing in the world for map clear, but it does a phenomenal job at deleting anything that is even the littlest bit tanky. This build has become a bit of a bossing meme during this league and given that I have never really played anything with a serious bossing focus… I decided that I would give it a shot. I had around 20 Divines left to spend and I think as of this morning I am sitting at 8 left, so I spent quite a bit gearing this character out. The challenge is that because this is so popular it means all of the optimal gear for it is also wildly overpriced. A Replica Dragonfang’s Flight for Penance brand with max reservation efficiency runs around 20 Divine Orbs for example.
The biggest challenge for me is that I do not know anything about gearing characters for damage output. I know this is a bit of an irony given how many characters I have leveled… but for the most part, my focus has always been on survival and defensive layers leaving the damage that I dealt as a bit of an afterthought. My “kink” if you will for games is being able to take the maximum amount of punishment without falling down. I mean I play almost exclusively tanks in MMORPGs for example… so I am big into being a chonky juggernaut of meaty goodness, and could give a shit what I am dealing for damage output. Bossers, however… are about dealing as much damage to a single target as they can in as short of a period as they can. So I have no clue if I am even dealing enough damage to the boss successfully and even more so no clue how to set up POB to accurately display my damage output. In theory, if I am even vaguely close I should be somewhere around the 8 Million DPS range currently.
Right now I am mostly focused on leveling and running a bunch of the random t14-t16 maps that I have laying around in the bank. I would really like to get this character to the level 90-95 range before I deal with focusing on bossing. I might start dipping my toes into the water with some Guardian maps soon as I can seemingly handle t16s without any real issues. One of the most annoying things about shifting from a private league to the trade league is that it reset all of my master missions. I had around 80 Kirac missions that just poofed when we left private league, and this would have been the perfect opportunity to utilize those since I don’t really care about the output of the map and just care about the experience gained.
The biggest thing that I am trying to get used to is not spamming my brand ability. In theory in a perfect scenario, you only want one brand on your target at any given time, and you want it to tick for the maximum number of pulses because each pulse ramps the damage. I am so damned used to spamming abilities that this is requiring a bit of a rework of my brain. On a boss fight you would be spending most of that downtime moving around and avoiding things so that seems doable. I need to get better at keeping up my Hatred as well which I have on Divine Blessing. I am contemplating dropping some of my defensive layers to stack on additional offensive auras and MAYBE go low life with this build. Taste of Hate and the damage conversion that I have on my chestpiece along with good resists and maxed spell suppression go a long way toward helping with incidental damage. If I take a bit hit though I am going to die regardless of how much Evasion and Armor I have.
I am so out of my depth though because again… the thing I care about most is NEVER dying. So playing a squishy character that cares about damage output is just completely outside my wheelhouse.
Yesterday was the launch of Diablo IV Season 3, and like a moth to the flame, I was drawn to create a new character and check it out. This time around it is the “Season of the Construct” with the unique seasonal mechanic involving building up a little robot friend called a Senechel and equipping it with abilities and modifiers you collect along the way. I’ve kept up the hope that Diablo IV will turn into an amazing game at some point, and while it has improved greatly since its launch, it isn’t quite there yet. I have to be honest… I did not play a ton of this last night because I was not exactly feeling the experience, so please go into this post knowing that I was a bit “meh” on the experience and it might have simply been my mindset.
I think the first challenge is that I decided to mix things up a bit and break out of my normal Barbarian gameplay pattern and try the druid. This led to a lot of respeccing and trying to find a way to play the character that felt good to me. I want to love this class but at least at low levels it never really is the thing I want it to be. I want to be a werebear and NEVER leave that form, and have big smashy melee abilities. Unfortunately, Pulverize which is essentially that gameplay methodology took some significant nerfs. As a result, I started out trying to play a Tornado Wolf and not really jiving with that… then leading to the reportedly best leveling style Lightning Druid… and feeling that even less. The problem with Druid is that it feels like I have to use caster abilities in order to power up the fun melee abilities… leading to this mangled awkward experience. What I really want I guess is Bear Druid from WoW, but I think you have to get pretty deep into the game before it can really feel like that. Tornado Wolf looks cool, but it seems like you sort of have to suffer through some crappy gameplay to get there.
Instead this morning I rerolled completely and went back to good ole Barbarian. There are a lot of changes to Upheaval and I wanted to play with them anyways. Already the gameplay feels so much better to me. I guess maybe I am just a Barb main and should stop trying to fight it. Sure I like the idea of trying other classes but this seems to be the core experience that I enjoy the most in Diablo IV. At some point I want to revisit Necromancer since I love pet classes, but I figure I will wait until I get deeper into the season before doing that. The biggest frustration I have with alting in Diablo IV is the fact that the seasonal mechanics are tied to each character so I had to start over from scratch with the Senechel. This felt awful with Vampire Abilities in Season 2, and it still feels awful with your pet mechanic. They should be account-based to make alting feel more enjoyable and that is a hill I am willing to die on.
Speaking of the Senechel, it is an interesting idea that feels a bit poorly implemented. Right now it is an entirely passive experience of having this pet follow you around and occasionally do things… but also does not feel like it directly improves your gameplay much. How the pet works is that you can equip two Governing Stones that give your pet some core ability. For example, right now I have Lightning Bolt equipped which fires a shock attack, and Protect which seems to give me a shield at random intervals. Were these something that I could control as the player it would feel a bit more impactful. If I could hit the shield button whenever I reach low life or something like that, it could in theory actually save me a death. As it is now… it is a poorly coded companion that sort of does whatever the heck it wants whenever it wants. Tuning Stones you collect along the way allow you to tweak how the abilities work, but again they don’t really feel like they are changing much. I gave the lightning bolt a taunt, but it doesn’t seem like it actually does much of anything to take monsters away from attacking me.
The new open-world mechanic for this season is something called an Arcane Tremor. Essentially these are the new “Blood Tide” but a sort of worse version of them. There is an area in each zone of the game that I have marked with circles on the above map image where seasonal-related mini-events can spawn. You go here to collect the materials that you need to level up your Senechel and collect new abilities for it. Why these are worse than the Blood Tide from Season 2, is that they don’t have the clear sense of purpose that those had. The mob density is so much lower and instead of having a fixed area of the map that draws the attention of ALL players for 30 minutes… you have five static spawns that don’t really have any quest support behind them. With the blood tide I would pop in, do three objectives… probably fight a series of mini-bosses, and then feel like I was okay to move on with my life until the next one spawned. This instead has a very “mill around and wait for shit to happen” vibe that I do not like anywhere near as much. I get that they caught shit for having 3 different Helltide-like mechanics in a row just with different colors… Helltide, Season 2 Seasonal Mechanic, and then the Christmas Event Mechanic… but they were all far better than this approach.
The other new seasonal feature is the Vault, which is essentially a Nightmare Dungeon with traps. There is a mechanic called Zoltun’s Warding which is a number that shows in your hud, and each time you get hit by a trap it takes one away from your current Warding level. If you manage to finish the vault with even 1 left on your warding, you get some extra rewards. The problem that I see however is that Vaults are exactly Nightmare Dungeons… in fact, there is a “Nightmare” version of the Vault that allows you to level up your Glyphs. I do not really like Nightmare Dungeons in the first place, and think the entire Dungeon system needs to be reworked from the ground up. I am not excited to do all of the same bullshit “find the MacGuffin and return it to the pillar” mechanics while avoiding traps. I feel like there would have to be very good rewards in order to get me to do this thing. It reminds me a bit of the Labyrinth in Path of Exile, which is quite possibly my least favorite system in that game.
I feel like I am being a bit harsh honestly… but at this very moment, Season 3 has been a bit of a letdown. Season 2 was a hell of a lot of fun and felt like a clear step forward for the game. Season 3 however… feels like a step backward and maybe all of the seasonal stuff greatly improves as you invest more time and effort into it but for the moment it is “less fun”. The “Bloodtide” gave me this clear call to action and a super fun mechanic that I should spend all of my time focused on. Vaults and Arcane Tremors just feel less enjoyable and more akin to the plague tunnels from Season 1… which were aggressively mid.
Quite possibly the best universally good feature of this season is the introduction of a new hub area called The Gatehall. This is going to be the only place most players hang out because it has everything that you could need in a tightly contained space. I am hoping this becomes a permanent feature of the game and something that they build upon rather than something that we only get for this one season. The Tree of Whispers was close, but it was missing several vendors… and this basically fixes that problem. Honestly, the main quest chain has been enjoyable as well but I don’t really play this sort of game for the story, or at least the story stops mattering once I have finished it the first time. ARPGs are for mechanical enjoyment, and as cool as the story has been it is going to be a bit of a pain in the ass to have to do this on every character. Again these features really need to exist at an account level.
So far at this moment after an evening of screwing around with it… I would say that Season 3 is a solid 4 or 5 out of 10 experience. It doesn’t really add anything to the game that is exceptionally enjoyable save for the new hub. The pet is a completely passive experience, and mostly just feels like you have a random NPC following you around on your questing. Vaults are just worse than Nightmare Dungeons and I already did not like Nightmare Dungeons. Helltides and World Bosses still take too long to spawn and both feel like mandatory content, and there is nothing really that is fresh and new and exciting to act as a focal point for your moment-to-moment gameplay. I am likely going to grind out all of the steps of the Battle pass and then call it good for the season. The Gauntlet and Ladder that are coming are not really content for me given that I am not exactly a competitive player.
I think the biggest challenge that Diablo IV has at the moment is the fact that Path of Exile just has more content and is going through what is quite literally the wildest league that it has ever had. Then near the end of next month, you have the launch of Last Epoch officially, and a ton of new systems going into that game. I think folks will probably play Season 3 for a few weeks and then fade back into either Path of Exile or prep for Last Epoch. Diablo IV needs to make some changes that feel like they are moving the needle forward and adding more permanent evergreen content to the game. I still say that the Helltide needs to be reworked to essentially be the Bloodtide and always be up. Dungeons still need to be nuked from orbit and rethought because the objects are still awful in spite of numerous rounds of changes. What the game really needs is something akin to a Greater Rift that can be run from a hub environment. There is too much required dicking around and not enough focused fruitful grinding. Then again… maybe Diablo IV will never be the game I hope it can be.
Good Morning Folks! I talked about this plan in yesterday’s blog post, and last night I actually started down the path. During Crucible League there was a wildly overpowered build that involved exploding totems that could face-roll pretty much all content in the game. I had somewhat been kicking myself for never building that out while it was a viable build. In this league, there is a wildly overpowered boss killer centered around one of the new gems, Penance Brand of Dissipation. I like playing Inquisitors and I like playing Brand spells… and in theory, this ability will probably be reworked by 3.24 so I thought I should get on that bandwagon while the getting was good.
Normally speaking trade makes everything easier and I thought I would be able to pick up a level one Penance Brand of Dissipation Gem for relatively cheap and level it with the character. That was wrong. Right now a level 1 version of this gem with no quality is going for over 4 Divine Orbs. This opens up an interesting arbitrage system for someone who does not hate Labyrinth… but a rough situation for me who is just a cheapskate. While I have the divines to buy this… I just can’t bring myself to spend so frivolously when there are relatively easy options to acquire it myself.
So as a result… most of my evening was spent rocketing my way through the first lab all for the purpose of flipping fireball gems into transfigured gems. The very first lab seems to have a guaranteed instance of the craft that turns any gem into a random transfigured version of the same color. The problem with this is that there are more Blue gems than any other color… so when you flip a gem you are presented with a choice of three different gems from a pool of roughly seventy possible gems. As a result it honestly takes quite a bit of time to luck into the specific gem you are wanting. For me, it took roughly twenty labs in order to finally get Penance Brand of Dissipation. However, along the way I did pick up Storm Brand of Indecision which I leveled for a bit with and is a phenomenal ability.
So when I finally got started, I had about an hour and a half until I normally head to bed. I managed to speed through the first three acts of the game in that time while also spending a lot of time in the league mechanic trying to unlock the Primalist ascendancy. I’m currently on the step where I need to kill 500 of the blue juice monsters which always takes a while to whittle through. I don’t care enough to stop my forward progress and just grind out a single zone over and over until I finish it, but I am going to drop into the league mechanic in every new map. I gotta say this is maybe the fastest I have ever killed Dominus because I cast a brand on him… then frost blinked over to the spot where he spawns during the second phase and by the time I got there he was spawning there. Then before he had a chance to cast anything he was dead and I was talking to Diala and moving into the aqueduct.
I am loosely following the Manni/Zizaran guide and have a pretty sweet six-link WWWWBB Thousand Ribbons that I am using as a twink chestpiece. I’m using the leveling unique suggestion and just ripping through the levels and content with 57% movement speed and permanent onslaught. If I actually get some playtime at lunch, I might legitimately be into maps by bedtime. This is a truly silly build and what it lacks in clear it makes up for just deleting anything that is even the slightest bit tanky. This would have been an amazing boss rush/essence/beast farmer. Mostly I am hoping to get enough levels to be able to comfortably start deleting Guardians with it and eventually start farming bosses. I need to do some research into how folks are playing this build. I might pick up an Oriath’s End just to make big explosions and help with the clear.
All in all, I’m having a blast and this has breathed some new life into the game for me. I really do like the leveling game honestly. I also know that today is the launch of Diablo IV Season 3, so at some point, I will probably be checking that out as well in the coming days.
This weekend, I saw some odd things happening over in Path of Exile. First, my good friend Kodra hit the jackpot and got what is quite possibly the most valuable item you can drop in Path of Exile. He was running a t16 Carcass map with 2332 Yellow juice and 3438 Blue juice and lucked into a Mirror of Kalandra. This led to a whole sequence of events happening… because a Mirror is worth too much currency to sell it in a single trade. This forced him to go to The Forbidden Trove to find a trade, which wound up being in Mirror Shards which are fractional Mirror currency, and some raw Divines to add up to I believe 913 Divine Orbs worth of value. This is essentially more currency than you can reasonably spend… and opened the door to all sorts of nonsense. He purchased a Mageblood and pretty much offered the rest of us Bel-Leaguers one as well… which truthfully I am not even sure what I would do with one at least not yet.
This led both of us down this rabbit hole of trying to figure out what the hell is going on with Affliction League. If you have watched anything in the way of streamer highlight videos in this league, you will see that many magic finders have found twenty or more mirrors a piece… simultaneously generating more “wealth” than the game has ever probably seen outside of the Standard League. The weird thing about this is it has had the inverse effect that I would have expected. By nature, I would have assumed this would push the price down from what we saw in Ancestor… which also generated more mirrors than normal. However, the opposite has been the case. During Ancestor League a single mirror was worth roughly 145 Divine Orbs and in Affliction League that same mirror is now worth 924 Divine Orbs as of the time of writing this… and still climbing.
What is happening is that since Mirrors are so plentiful… they are actually being used for their intended purpose. Traditionally the Mirror is a vehicle for parking “wealth” in Path of Exile especially once you start reaching 5000 Divine Orbs aka the maximum storage capacity for any single currency type in the specialized currency tab. I know I personally have spent a lot of time “selling chaos” for a simple reason to convert it up to Divine Orbs and keep from the mess of having 10s of thousands of chaos laying around. But notice in the above screenshot there are four random Deadeye’s that I picked out off POE.Ninja and they are all using the same mirrored bow Vengeance Barrage which I believe is the new “best in slot”. Thing is… for a lot of these maxed-out characters they are wearing MULTIPLE mirror tier items each consuming at least one Mirror and an amount of Divines as the required “tip” for a “Mirror service”.
Mirror Service is such a weird concept and I had trouble wrapping my head around it at first. Essentially a Mirror of Kalandra’s intended purpose is to create a copy of an item. This means that extremely skilled crafters can create what is a “near perfect” item and then sell the rights to copy that item to other players. For example here is a screenshot from The Forbidden Trove discord of the Mirror Service channel showing one player “selling” access to six different “Mirror Tier” items each with a fee listed. The player wanting one of these items is expected to provide their own Mirror of Kalandra and then also upwards of 150 Divine Orbs as a “tip” for the service. I’ve blurred out the specific details, but essentially this is how some players make their currency… but pouring divines into outrageous crafts and then selling access to the byproducts of that crafting to other players. Since there are so many Mirrors floating around in the economy, it means that they are being removed at a massive rate by folks getting their own copy of mirror gear.
On top of this…. the proliferation of magic-find characters is causing a downward pressure on pretty much everything else that used to hold value. The Mageblood for example generally was considered to be almost as stable as the Mirror and Mirror Shard for parking currency. However the whacked out juiced maps that people are running, can in times produce multiple magebloods in the same map. In Ancestor League the Mageblood was around 230 Divine Orbs and this league you can pick a well rolled one up for around 100 Divines. This price continues to plummet as more of them enter the market than the market can reasonably absorb. The same thing happens to every other item that can drop on a map because the magic finders are just finding more of them. Taste of Hate for example is generally around a 100 Chaos item… but I picked one up for 5 Chaos the other day. If it can be generated with Quantity and Rarity… it is likely cheaper than it has ever been in any other league.
My big splurge is that I dumped 50 Divines into a well-rolled non-corrupted Headhunter. I’ve always wanted to play with one of these and never felt like I could reasonably afford it. In a normal league, a well-rolled headhunter would be twice the price that it is currently. I still have a bit of a nest egg and I still have a lot of things that are selling, but I thought it might be fun to screw around with this belt on my babby magic find lightning arrow champion. So far it has been interesting. Headhunter seems to be feast or famine… either you get a bunch of really amazing buffs and feel like a god… or you mostly just drone through the map without a ton of benefit from the belt. I am sure I could get whatever I wanted from Kodra, but honestly, I have no clue what I even want or how much longer I really feel like screwing around in this league.
In truth, I have accomplished everything I had hoped for in the league. Over the weekend I hit 19 of 40 challenges which gives me my fourth tiny totem. Essentially since getting my first totem, that has become my primary goal for any league to keep adding to the collection. I keep kicking around the idea of trying to build a Penance Brand of Dissipation character just to do dumb things with Uber bosses. I did not jump on the Totem Explosion bandwagon during Crucible and honestly, I have always kicked myself a little for not doing that while it was available. I mean ultimately the first step in this process would be running enough lab to get a Penance Brand of Dissipation gem. I could just buy one off the market… but I would feel better about myself if I at least tried to get one from Lab first. I don’t have a Templar in this league so I might as well go for it. So that might be a project as the week goes on.
Anyways! I hope you all had a great weekend. We are still in freezing temperatures here and I am feeling more than a little cooped up. Hopefully, we get some better weather as the week drags on because I am not designed for this amount of cold.
