Build Test Time

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Morning Folks! One of the weirdest laments of this league has been the forever sliding state of my Lightning Arrow build. Last weekend I shifted it into a magic find setup, which was enjoyable… but I still struggle with the fact that the character is squishy as heck. My general tolerance for random deaths is extremely low, and as a result, I end up trying to build most of my characters with a boatload of defensive layers. As for my Lightning Arrow character… the only real defensive layer is being able to kill things extremely quickly. While getting bucketloads of loot has been enjoyable… I still do not really love the constant chain of deaths that set back any progress I have made level-wise.

A good deal of our focus of late has shifted to planning for the private league idea that I threw out on the podcast a few weeks back. This immediately got labeled as “Bel League” by the AggroChat crew… which is a little self-referential and egotistical for my tastes… but I get blamed for most dumb ideas. While we don’t exactly know when 3.23 is going to land, we do know that it should be sometime in either late November or early December. This has shifted my focus to thinking about builds that I could cobble together with little to no gear. Really the perfect answer to this is SRS Guardian, but I have no confidence that it is not going to eat some pretty significant nerfs prior to the next league. Lightning Arrow was also a build that I was able to get up and running on four links and start progressing into mapping. It was not however a build that I could run delve on… and given that I love delve… I am not sure if it would be a good fit for another league start.

So I am doing the extremely dumb thing of running up a new character as a test of what Lightning Arrow would feel like on a Champion. Champion has so many different defensive layers and can be built in a way to feel exceptionally tanky. I am wondering if I can somehow manage to split the difference and make a character that has the effective killing power of Lighting Arrow Deadeye, without feeling like I am going to die if a monster looks in my direction. Permanent Fortify is pretty huge, and the fact that I can throw on a specific belt to give me permanent Onslaught because I have Fortify should also help. Also being able to scale my attack damage slightly off whichever is lower between Evasion and Armor, allows me to focus on those defenses and still get some sort of damage from them.

The only negative about starting Duelist, is that it has to travel quite a long way to get to the bow nodes that I need. This has ended up with an extended ugly duckling period where the build just felt awkward for quite a while as I pathed through a bunch of nodes that did not really bestow much in the way of power. I am also sorta “half-assing” this build by looking at my Lightning Arrow build, and a few of the folks who are playing it on Champion and trying to split the difference between the two. Unless this build just knocks my socks off… it is highly unlikely that I play this as a league starter. However if I can make it work with minimal gear… it might be fun to throw together as a mapper for some magic find to help get good stuff for the rest of the AggroChat crew.

I think more than anything, that is going to be the most enjoyable aspect of a “GuildSF” gameplay experience. I like dumping things in the bank and finding items that my friends need. That is the biggest part that keeps me from ever going true SSF, is that I want to be able to pool resources among my friends. SSF or Solo Self Found means what it says… you cannot interact or group with other players in any way. Having a private trade league however gives us all of the benefits of trade, but limiting it to a much smaller pool of players. Granted it is going to cost us about $60 to keep the league going for the entire time, but that seems reasonable especially when diluted amongst the handful of us that are going to be playing.

More than likely I will go with the tried and true Righteous Fire, mostly because it allows me to get into Delve pretty early. Delve generates a ton of useful things, and for crafting gear it will benefit the entire group as a whole if we can farm up a ton of Fossils and Resonators early. Additionally, it will give me a stockpile of Goddess Offerings and Divine Vessels which can be really hard to find through mapping. I also know the gear needs of Righteous Fire really well at this point and can make it work on limited gear well enough to get down at least to the 100 depth in Delve. I also know that I can complete at least two void stones and finish all of the maps with the build.

Maybe Lighting Arrow Champion will surprise me… but for the moment I mostly just want to test this theory out and see how stable I can make it feel before losing access to the trade market.

The Hero of Ages

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Good Morning Folks! I stayed up fairly late last night to finish The Hero of Ages, the final book of the first Mistborn trilogy. This was the first series by Brandon Sanderson I had read, and I guess I can now say I am a fan. When I get into a series, it is often because I fall for the setting more than the characters, but in this novel, it was probably a combination of the two. I genuinely like the characters in this series, and they will be characters that I remember for eternity. I do find the original artwork a bit jarring because this is not at all how I pictured either character. I never would have pictured Vin as Battle Ready Shannon Doherty, and I always pictured Elend as Edgar Figaro from Final Fantasy IV. I guess that is always the challenge with books… your brain associates images with everything that rarely matches up to the later visualizations. Given that I consumed these in digital form, I was not quite so confronted by a book cover at every turn to cement a specific impression.

This has been a bit of a wild ride as far as years go because I went from maybe consuming two books in 2022 to now having finished my thirty-fifth. It feels like in many ways I am making up for lost time, because while I have always loved books and bookstores specifically… I never really forced a place in my life to read. I always had something else that was going to take priority and the only other time in my life when I really voraciously consumed books was when I got into the Dresden series several years back. It is bizarre how the simple act of wanting to get a current Library card created this chain reaction of getting access to the Libby App and then burning through a chain of books.

While I really want to read the sequel series that takes place after Mistborn, I think I am going to dive into something a little bit more chill for the moment. I just consumed two multi-book epics back to back, so I think I need to read a singleton for the moment. Given that I started with Scalzi’s lighter fare, I plan on giving Starter Villain a try tonight. I have no clue how long of a read this is going to be, or more so how quickly I will move through it. It sounds great though, and I have seen a lot of folks giving it praise on the Fediverse. After that, I think my plan is to probably pop into the next book in James Butcher’s Unorthodox Chronicles series as it released on the 10th. The first book was a bit of a mess and took me a while to get into it, but once I settled in I enjoyed it enough to keep reading the series.

Some other books that I am looking forward to are Rubicon by J.S. Dewes, because while I would rather have the next book in The Divide series… I enjoyed those books enough to try out something else by them. I have no clue when Alecto the Ninth is going to release, but whenever it does I will likely drop everything else and switch over to that as I am very sold on that universe and more specifically the characters of Gideon Nav and Harrowhark Nonagesimus. I thought book three of Linday Ellis’ Noemena series would be coming out soon, but while the book has cover art and everything… it appears that maybe it won’t be released until next summer. We have no clue at all what is going on with the Dresden Files series and while there is a tentative title for book 18, I’ve not seen anything regarding potential release dates.

There is always the Iron Druid Chronicles series that I could return to as well, and absolutely intend to at some point. I enjoyed Hounded quite a bit in a very Not-Quite-Dresden-Files sort of manner, but I’ve just never actually gotten around to reading the second book. I know in November I will make a beeline for Bookshops and Bonedust the next book in the Legends and Lattes series from Travis Baldree. There is also a bunch of stuff from N.K. Jemisin and Sangu Mandanna that I want to explore as well. After that, I have a whole slew of books that have been orbiting in the back of my brain and can essentially endlessly keep pulling forward as needed. This year really has been the year of the book for me. As always though you can follow my journey over on Bookwyrm.

Season of Blood Patch Notes

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Good Morning Folks. Diablo IV Season 2 is on the very near horizon, and I feel like this is going to be a make-or-break moment for the game going forward. Diablo IV was easily one of the best-selling games Blizzard has ever created… but like a poorly sealed party balloon left out overnight, all of that hype has deflated. So much so that creators who have made their careers upon the Diablo brand… have started shifting focus to diversify into other games. The first season of the game was “not good” and now we have had two live streams talking about the future of the game and what we should be expecting for Season 2. Blizzard also dropped over 40 pages worth of patch notes shortly after the discussion.

I cannot deny that there are a lot of changes coming with this season. Several systems like Resistances and the concept known as Damage Pools are getting completely reworked. Additionally, there is a sweeping set of changes to the way that some legendaries and the paragon boards work in order to attempt to spur more build diversity. So I give the team a lot of credit for seemingly listening to some of the feedback from the players and then attempting to iterate on their design philosophy to address these. This also tells me that the player drop-off was likely even larger than I imagined because this is some significant “desperate to save the franchise” level of hustle. I do worry about what this meant as far as long hours for that team, but if they can nail this season and the changes I have hope for the brand.

One of the things to come out of these patch notes is an attempt to clearly tier the game into three phases… 1-50 campaign game, 50-70 sacred era, and 71-100 ancestral era. One of the big complaints that I had was that once you crossed into World Tier 3, anything that was dropping that was not Sacred quality was absolutely useless. This is being fixed by making any gear drops that are not of the maximum rank will instead drop as materials, which works similarly to how Diablo III Season 28 Altar worked. This seems like a really good change, and while you are in one of these tiers your level increases are going to keep raising the minimum item level so that you are in theory more likely to keep seeing better stuff. The idea is that you won’t move into World Tier 3, and immediately find the best loot you can possibly get for the next 20 levels, before moving into World Tier 4… and having the same impact once you equip your first full set of Ancestral gear.

I think the thing that concerns me the most about this plan, is that it spreads out the worst part of the game for me. I really hate the way gear works in Diablo IV. My “build” is less about making sure I have the right talent points chosen, or the right paragon boards assembled… and way more about making sure I have the correct legendary affixes attached to the right slots. Many of these cannot be pulled from the codex of power, which means that when an item drops… I cannot simply slot that item in and get an immediate boost of power without having to go back to town and scrounge around in my vault hoping I have a good enough aspect to pull from an item in order to make the new item actually useful. In Diablo 3 or even Path of Exile, the leveling process is extremely quick allowing you to stabilize the state of your gear quickly. After that you are just swapping out items on the very rare occasion that you manage to pick up an aspirational item that gives you a significant boost. While moving through the levels I fear that this is going to feel awful to keep shifting to marginally better gear.

The other problem I’ve had with both Season of the Malignant and now the Season of Blood… is that the “new content” that is being added to the game is borrowed power. Neither is expanding the scope of the game in a permanent way and instead giving you a neatly encapsulated seasonal chase that goes away as soon as the next flavor of the quarter mechanic rolls in. I hated the rut that World of Warcraft fell into by having a rotating series of mechanics that only mattered so long as that one expansion was live, and Diablo IV is heading down that same path. Sure you occasionally get a Path of Exile season like Crucible League where you have a borrowed power system in the form of skill trees associated with weapons, but I have faith that those mechanics will likely resurface again in the future in a more permanent form. For example, the Sanctum league introduced a whole rogue-like mode to the game, and while it was gone for the Crucible League it made its return during the current league as a permanent mechanic.

What the Diablo IV seasons are lacking is something that can realistically stick around and become a permanent fixture. Sure they are adding a few more boss fights in this league, and that is fine… but it doesn’t really do much to make me excited about grinding to 100 in order to complete them. Path of Exile has these pinnacle bosses as well, but it also has a lot of other ways that completely shift and change how you approach the game. Betrayal is an obtuse mechanic, but it gives you deterministic ways to modify your gear and obtain new abilities that you can’t get through other means. For example, I’ve been shuffling my entire board in an attempt to get Vorici into Research so that I can in theory get White colored sockets on one of my items, which eases socket pressure and allows me to shift my builds slightly.

This is just one example because there are countless mechanics that started out as the focus of a single League but eventually found their way into the game as evergreen content. I am a Delve-enjoyer, and I build characters for the purpose of being able to crawl through the darkness looking for interesting loot. Other folks might build entirely around the Breach league mechanic which opens portals allowing demons to bleed into our reality, which then in turn allows you to collect materials to fight specific bosses that award unique items. Over the last decade, there have been forty-one leagues, and each of them has left some permanent mark on the game as a whole. What I see instead with Diablo IV is a focus on creating disposable FOMO-inducing content… which gives me great concerns about the long-term success of the title.

None of this is to dilute the fact that the team has put in an awful lot of work on this second season. I hope it improves a lot of the problems with the game, and that subsequent seasons also continue to move that bar forward. It feels like we are sort of dealing with issues that should never have made it out of beta testing, but that is where we are unfortunately. There were just some poorly designed systems in this game that will need to be fixed in order to make the game better in the long-haul. I do have to say though… that the faith that Blizzard will put forth the work in order to improve the game is not really there for me. I worry that what we are seeing is a knee-jerk reaction to the massive fall-off in players, and if Season 2 does not magically fix things… the game might just be abandoned entirely.

All of this said I am certain I will poke my head into the season when it launches in a week or so to see how the game feels in its updated state. I think a huge thing for the life of this game is going to be erecting a PTR and letting players test the content as it is being developed. While Blizzard ignored a lot of the feedback coming from the community during the beta tests of the game leading into launch, I think they have realized that they did so at their own peril.

Cresting the Chasm

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Good Morning Folks. I am not entirely certain that Magic Find as a concept is for me. Running the same two maps over and over is exceedingly repetitive. I guess the good news is that I am “over-sustaining” maps, meaning that if I hop back and forth between a Crimson Temple and a City Square, I am always walking away with more of those two maps than I went into the process with. The bad news is… I have the layouts of both zones and most of the variants memorized at this point. It feels to me that magic find as a concept involves trying to sand down all of the rough edges on the map running process and then speeding through them as fast as humanly possible in the hopes of winning the jackpot.

When you DO win the jackpot it feels absolutely phenomenal. I hit yet another Divine Orb dropping map last night and it was only tarnished slightly by the fact had I gone down the right path first instead of the left path… I would have also hit a duplication altar to go with my Divine Orb dropping one. However, any map you walk away with eight Divine Orbs feels phenomenal. The only negative is thus far I have yet to really see anything exceptionally rare. I still have zero Apothecary cards, and while I have gotten a couple of copies of The Fortunate… I’ve not really seen more than I did previously. I guess I expected to start seeing better uniques than what I have gotten to this point but that hasn’t really worked out. I am not expecting to see a Headhunter or a Mageblood drop, but I did expect to start seeing more tier-three uniques and maybe a few tier-two ones.

There is no denying however that it has made a sizeable difference. If you look at my PoeStack this morning, I have officially dug myself out of the hole created by pouring forty Divines into this build. Granted a lot of currency is locked up in pools that are a bit harder to liquidate, but still, I am almost back to the same amount of raw Divine Orbs that I was previously and have enough Chaos to comfortably cash it into Divines as well as a haul of Delve merch that I could sell quickly. It isn’t so much that Magic Find… at least doing so outside of a party who is also magic finding… is that dramatically different from other methods, it is more than it adds up over time. I am consistently getting more of everything which also means that I am seeing more rarer items as a result.

I still greatly prefer Delve to Mapping, but I’ve always had to at least rely somewhat on maps to fill back up the Sulphite tank. Now instead of just running a bunch of random maps, I am approaching the sulphite refill process a bit more methodical as I burn through the maps quickly on my Magic Find Lightning Arrow character. I do somewhat wonder how viable it would be to try and build a Magic Find character in the Guild SSF private league we are considering. The core magic find items are common enough, that I would just need to devote a tab to collecting them for the three to one recipe until I wound up with something good. I do wonder if Deadeye and Lighting Arrow are going to eat a bit of a nerf considering just how wildly popular that one build was in this league.

In other news, I ran my first Trial of the Ancestors in well over a week and was rewarded with a Divine Orb in the next to the last round. I guess that means I might be getting up high enough to start seeing good rewards. Kodra has managed to run a Sanctum all the way through, and that is one thing Magic Find has produced more Sanctum Tomes. I am contemplating trying one out with the state of my Lighting Arrow character to see just how fast I can burn through it. It is really good at making things explode and is also VERY fast moving. I feel like my POB is probably underestimating how much damage I am dealing because other than tanky bosses… I am pretty much making entire screens evaporate.

Anyways! Tuesdays are hard. I hope you all have a great day and are having a pretty great week. The weekend seems so far away at the moment.