Good Afternoon Folks. This is a bit of a rare post because generally speaking if I do not make my morning post… I just don’t post at all for that day. I spent my morning up at my folks house helping them with some stuff and now that I am back I figured I might as well knock out a post, because I have some potentially time sensitive information. First off if you do not own Guild Wars 2 or are missing any of the content drops… there is a pretty massive sale happening right now on the official storefront. Coinciding with it there is also a sale taking place on Steam but there is a bit of a higher markup there. If you have never played this game you really should especially now that you can get a decades worth of content for $50. That is legitimately one of the best deals out there.
While I was in game I noticed that they once again had the Cat Angel Jadebot skin up… so I broke into my gem reserves and picked it up. I have gone back and forth about whether or not I wanted this for awhile, but I entirely blame Dungeon Crawler Carl and Princess Donut for making me want this. There is no way that given the chance… Donut would not flap around me with wings. I need to dive into the new content which also dropped this week because there is a new Ranger pet Bee that you can get. I’ve been several different mains throughout the years… starting as a Warrior then transitioning to Necro… but I think my true spirit is that of the Ranger. Longbow and Greatsword for life yo! Regardless of how generally selfish that build is since it doesn’t produce Quickness or Alacrity.
I played some Titanquest II and so far I do not think this game is really my jam. Melee combat felt a bit too sluggish for my tastes and pretty much everything seemed to want me to spam the dodge button instead of engaging with mobs up close and personal. Maybe this feels good as ranged, but so far it is not necessarily my jam. However if you are curious for yourself you might check out the Steam page to see if you can still request access to the playtest. The game seems solid enough but leans more towards the never get hit sort of play style that I do not personally enjoy. I am sure it will find an audience, especially with the crowd that feels like the ARPG genre reached its peak with Diablo II.
Another game that I have been fiddling with a bit is Gunlocked. Essentially this is what if Vampire Survivors was a Bullet-Hell shooter. The game starts out a bit weird in that your only attack for a bit is a radar that sweeps around your ship and then marks targets with a lock on, that your ship then fires attacks at to mostly one-shot. As you pick up power-ups you gain a whole slew of interesting attacks slowly giving you a bunch of different ways to take out the ever present deluge of ships and obstacles on your screen. I found out about this game when the sequel was announced on the fediverse, which caused me to go look at the original since I dug the art style. I also checked out Boons and Burdens which is sort of a similar concept but this time smash tv meets vampire survivor but you play as one of several element themed wizards. There is a bundle for both games that is currently just shy of $6.
Another thing that I picked up from the ongoing steam sale is Dragon’s Dogma II. I had played a bit of the first game but never really got fully into it. I thought given my recent foray back into Monster Hunter with Wilds, I might check this out and see if I can get into the sequel. All in all so far I am pretty intrigued. There seems to be more of a clear story element going on here, whereas I felt like I was largely roaming around aimlessly in the first game. So far it sort of feels like a weird version of a Bethesda game in a good way. Not sure how far I will get but I am liking it so far.
I’m also not entirely done with Monster Hunter Wilds either, and I am hoping this weekend I can connect up with my friend Ace and do some more group hunts. In a perfect world maybe also connect up with Thalen, Ammo, or Sita for shenanigans since they all have compatible time zones. I am not in a massive push to clear anything right now, but do want to try out some Charge Blade nonsense to see if I actually like the weapon.
Do you have significant weekend plans? What are you playing currently? Drop me a line below.
Good Morning Folks. There is a bit of a kerfuffle happening right now in ARPG land. Essentially this was bound to happen at some point, but the overlapping seasons combined with various setbacks have essentially conspired to multiple things happening all at once. Two days ago Grinding Gear Games released an announcement that 0.2.0 was not months away like we had thought, but would instead be landing at the beginning of April. With it came some new footage and the tease of one of the missing classes being released as part of this. The Huntress has long been an announced class for Path of Exile II and is playing into the Spear Amazon play-style that was popular in Diablo II. My personal guess is that the first successful builds are going to be Lightning Strike and chaining full screen pops with Heralds…. essentially copy pasting the current popular Path of Exile 1 builds.
This is universally a really cool thing though, especially for players who are not mainlining Path of Exile II, and do not care about the other ARPGs in the genre. Where the kerfuffle comes in… is that it is launching 2 days after the start of the second Last Epoch season. For me it is a no-brainer… Path of Exile II can wait and I am going to be spending my time playing Last Epoch until I tire of it. However what proponents of EHG and Last Epoch were hoping… was a little bit of clear runway so that folks bored of POE2 and POE1… might take a chance on seeing how much has changed in what I feel to be the game with the best systems design. That is not happening… and for a lot of players they are going to follow whatever Path of Exile is doing. If they had a few weeks gap they might check out Last Epoch, but with it only being two days… I feel like there are going to be a large chunk of folks who just skip that game entirely.
This also sucks for the dedicated ARPG community Streamers who have been putting a lot of time and effort into the lead up to Last Epoch Season 2. Sure Last Epoch has a dedicated core of streamers like Aaron Action RPG, Dr3adful, and Perry the Pig but they are honestly small potatoes up against the likes of a Darth Microtransaction,Zizaran, or Raxxanterax. Drawing the attention of the Path of Exile streamer community means that you are throwing a bunch of eyeballs on the game that otherwise might not take an interest in it. So they are stuck in a position of whether or not they follow their hearts and stick with Last Epoch, or if they follow the money and flip over immediately to start streaming the new Path of Exile II content. Having major events land this close to each other means… that they have to choose one audience over another and lose out on part of it.
So I am hearing a lot from both the Path of Exile and Last Epoch community that Grinding Gear Games is a bit of a bad guy for doing this. I do think they might have delayed it by at least one week to make things a bit easier on everyone involved… but they are also up against a wall here as well. In 2019 during the ExileCon presentation about Path of Exile II, Chris Wilson outlined that they did not want to split the community with the release of the new game. However that is precisely what has happened, so much so that Path of Exile II players and topics have been kicked off the Path of Exile subreddit. The POE1 players who do not care about Path of Exile II essentially rioted by the delays and we got the Legacy of Phrecia event as a result. In the weeks leading up to this Path of Exile II 0.2.0 announcement, I have been starting to see a similar current happening on the POE2 SubReddit of folks frustrated by the attention that Grinding Gear Games was devoting to something other than the game that they care about the most. Regardless of when…. they needed to release this first proper league for the new game as quickly as possible.
To further complicate things, as of yesterday we have a playtest active for Titan Quest II, another game that is throwing its hat in the ring of next gen ARPG. You have to request access to get into the playtest, but I did so before heading to bed last night and had been flagged for access as of this morning. There is just a lot going on right now and for those who care both Diablo IV Season 8 and a massive update to No Rest for the Wicked are landing at the tail end of April. It is going to be a very tight slot for ARPG enthusiasts, but at least there will be no lack of things to devote our time to. Since I am largely wrapped up with Monster Hunter Wilds, I am probably going to be spending the next few days checking out Titan Quest II. I am also still playing a not-insignificant amount of Legacy of Phrecia as I continue to tweak and improve my Righteous Fire Scavenger.
However when it comes to the Path of Exile II vs Last Epoch debate that is raging in the community… I am drawing my personal line in the sand. I am extremely interested in experiencing what the new endgame for Last Epoch has to show us. So I will be playing Tombs of the Erased on April 2nd and effectively play it until I get tired of grinding. I have no clue how long that is going to be, but on average I get about a month out of a Path of Exile league and a few solid weeks so far out of a Last Epoch event… so I am hoping somewhere around that time frame. Whenever I finish with Last Epoch, I am sure I will check out what is going on with 0.2.0 or as it is officially being called Dawn of the Hunt League. I will of course be tuning in on the 27th to check out the live-stream to see what all it will include. I am not a streamer and no one really cares what I am playing, but I do tend to devote all of my time for awhile to whatever I happen to be obsessed about and as such the pages of this blog.
In a perfect world… Last Epoch would move their own launch up by a few days and Path of Exile II back by a few days to create a bit more room. However there are other forces at play. For example I am pretty certain they cannot reschedule Twitch Drops willy nilly… so the particular timing is probably going to be stuck where it is. I would love to see more folks choosing Last Epoch as well, but I am also realistic that the Streamers are going to chase that money while they can get it.
Hey Folks. I’m in a bit of a weird place right now with Monster Hunter Wilds. I am 56 hours into the game and HR 66 and essentially “done” with the game. That is not to say that I have stopped playing it, but I am also sort of out of stretch goals. I’ve completed the set of gear that I want and the weapons that I wanted… and have taken down the hardest tempered fight currently in the game. I feel like either Monster Hunter Wilds is a much easier game than Monster Hunter World was… either that or my muscle memory kicked in and I am just much better at the game than I was when World launched in 2018. I am also playing from the beginning on my platform of choice (PC) with my control scheme of choice (Mouse and Keyboard) so I figure some of it has to account for that.
Here is an attempt at a Photoshop image that pulls together all of the relevant data points about my gear load out. I am wearing the full Tier 8 Arkveld Alpha armor set and rocking a Guiding Artorious Sword and Shield and a Binder Mace Hammer. I’ve gone hard into defensive stats because I really enjoy being up in the face of the monster and “tanking it” in a manner that I would normally Tank an MMORPG boss. I spent a good chunk of last night running around with Ace and doing various hunts that happened to be up, and it was delightful. They are far better at breaking parts, and my job was to attempt to hold the attention of the monster as best as possible while they peppered it in the butt with arrows. I remembered there being some form of taunt in this game, and I need to look up to see if there is a gem I can add to my weapon that does that.
The most important part of my daily routine however is going to Suja and petting Poogie. In this version you get random items from petting the recurring pig. So far I have not uncovered any outfits and the only customization seems to be the ability to rename Poogie… which would be blasphemy. Hopefully in future patches we get the proper retinue of outfits to deck out our piggie pal. I do love the frog on head though with this rendition. For those who have not found Poogie yet, you have to get to chapter 3-2 and from that point forward you can port to Suja and pet until your heart is content… pending you know when you stop.
I also spent a bit of time and updated my hunter profile. I was still wearing Chatacabra armor up until this point, which was the first set of gear that I made when I started playing the game. The profile name system is a bit awkward so I attempted to come up with something sufficiently stupid. I think it mostly has a cohesive feel now. I am not sure that anyone actually looks at hunter profiles. I’ve not really checked any out of my friends and squadmates other than Ammo when she first joined. I should really do that, to see if anyone has something brilliant on theirs. At some point I need to finish up all of the optional quests that I have yet to run at least once. I lost momentum when I hit the endgame and focused entirely on getting my gear. Now that I am geared… I am a bit rudderless until more content is added.
Mostly I have been chipping away at various gear sets for cosmetic purposes. Essentially once you hit High Rank, any gear set that is blue, purple, or orange can be used for transmog. There are generally two color channels on each item and there is a wide variety of looks you can choose from, as well as some relatively crappy gear that seems to exist purely for cosmetic purposes. I wish however you could transmog your weapons, and dye them. I find it annoying that I was able to dye the entire Arkveld set, but I still have a glaringly white weapon that no longer matches it. Fashion Hunter is probably the true endgame, and I am slowly chipping away at the Jin Dahaad set. I’ve also crafted the full Odog set which I have always thought looked cool. I do kinda wish the Red variant from Worlds still existed. Maybe in a later update we will get the non-Guardian Odog.
I have no clue why… but in every game I end up with what feels like a default activity. For me it is beating up this dumb chicken. I have no clue WHY I like killing it so much… but I really do. I always “feel like chicken tonight”. It doesn’t hurt that Tempered variants are up almost constantly and they all seem to have really good rewards. This morning for example before I sat down to write this post I knocked one out and got three Wyvern gems from it. Basically the rewards that I have been getting is what has been dictating what monsters I hunt. I think I have largely collected a full set of the Tempered monster Investigations, and the Frenzied variants seem way less common. Maybe as I knock out some more of the two monsters at once optional quests, other things will open up. I should probably set my focus on doing those soon-ish just to see if the landscape shifts at all.
Monster Hunter Wilds is a phenomenal game… but also one that I find myself lacking the desire to grind for grind’s sake. I’ve got a couple of friends in the 70s, one in the 80s… and one that is 119 as of this morning. My guess is that they are playing with a fixed group of friends, because the act of doing group hunts is way more enjoyable than solo hunting. I could happily log in to do group content with my friend Ace every night, but my will to keep pushing just for myself is waning. I am likely going to take a break from the game for a bit, at least until the April update that adds new content. I will probably keep doing weekly quests as they show up. However I knocked out most of those in a single evening. I remember all of this taking me so much longer to get to in World, but again… that was really my very first Monster Hunter game.
Good Morning Folks. This is a topic that I am really frustrated and sad to have to bring you, because I thought Diablo IV was well on its way to an epic redemption arc. By the time the Vessel of Hatred expansion rolled around, Diablo IV was in a pretty great state when it comes to the sandbox aspect of the game. Mechanically the classes felt pretty solid and the expansion added a whole slew of new activities. Season 6 mechanically was somewhat forgettable, but there was so much other stuff going on with the game that we mostly lost focus of the season itself in the midst of everything happening with the expansion. Season 7 was quite possibly peak Diablo as it represented the closest we have seen to the ideal flow of the game. The game still really lacks anything resembling a proper endgame loop, but the leveling and gearing aspects of the game were spot on.
The seasonal mechanic was essentially a retread of the most successful season ever… Season Two and the vampire themed Bloodtide. This new “Witchtide” as I called it represented a super fun repeatable mechanic that made leveling and gearing feel amazing. So much so that it essentially eclipsed every other bit of content in the game. Similar to Diablo III, it took about a week to get geared and capable of tackling Torment IV the highest difficulty and at that point it was mostly just hanging out and running bosses, which always felt amazing because you could pool your resources with your friends and get a ton of loot out of it. All they really needed to add is something resembling a proper endgame with something akin to an Atlas of Worlds from Path of Exile, or a Monolith from Last Epoch and the game would be rocking. Add in some more chase items and and varied repeatable endgame system and the game would have been on good footing.
However this week we got the Campfire Chat for Season 8, and it seems as thought Blizzard is unlearning everything that they have learned and largely fucking everything up. Basically when you lack a proper endgame loop… what do you do? Release incremental upgrades to the game that keep adding more functionality until you reach a critical mass of so much content that the player never lacks something to do? Fuck no. You release another season with a borrowed power system and slow everything else down as to delay the inevitable point of boredom behind a more tedious treadmill. You can see the entire live stream here, or I would instead suggest just watching Raxx’s breakdown video. I am going to talk about some of my points of frustration from the presentation.
What do you do when you don’t have enough butter and too much toast? Well you spread it thinner of course. As such Diablo IV is having its leveling curve slowed down significantly. Why were players leveling so fast? Because of the Witchtide and how perfectly repeatable that endgame loop ended up being. Without that… the leveling curve would have been considerably slower, but it does not seem like the team realized that. Instead they are planning on slowing down the entire progression curve so that you spend more time in the doldrums of the mid-levels instead of zooming to the level cap and then spending the rest of your time working on actually building out your character. Essentially in a seasonal model the level cap is the beginning of the game… not the end of it. The slower you make leveling, the more folks that are just going to give up before they finish it.
It is weird how people can look at the same statistic and take wildly different things away from it. 50% of players made it to Torment IV, which to me seems like a wild success of the game as a whole. Torment IV is again… to me, the beginning of the real game. That is when you can farm things the most efficiently and get the best loot rewards. The fact that 50% of the players made it to that point seems like a real win. The team however wants Torment IV to be an aspirational goal… and that number to be around 10% so as such are cranking up the difficulty curve. Again… when you lack an endgame you have to slow things down so that players don’t realize they have nothing that they are grinding for. Diablo IV has a lot of disposable treadmills, that are not that fun in themselves. They have vehicles for generating loot, but no real fun mechanics that are sustainable in the long run. There is no Betrayal, or Heist, or Delve, or even no surprise content like Essences, Legion, or Breach that make the mundane aspect of playing the game feel more exciting. They have awful mini-events that have no real payoff and apparently the act of leveling is the reward in itself.
We were also apparently getting gear too quickly… so they are slowing that shit down as well. Once you hit level 60.. everything that drops that is not an Ancestral drop is useless. Most of your time dealing with loot is looting things that do not matter at all. They say that they want Magic and Rare items to matter, but in order to do that… Magic and Rare items have to be competitive with Ancestral Legendary items. When your game is effectively collecting the right stat sticks with the correct Legendary Aspects on them… the more stats you have on an item the better it is going to be. In Path of Exile Magic and Rare items can be competitive because they have systems in place to make them competitive through Unique items that have specific parameters and a robust crafting system that allows you to turn exceptionally well rolled Magic items into a Rare with perfect stats on it. Slowing down the acquisition of the Legendary items needed to get your build online is going to feel awful. It legitimately feels like they do not play their own game and most definitely do not play the other games in the same market.
Quite possibly the worst change is one that is hidden behind something that adds real quality of life. Obtaining the right widgets to summon a boss is sort of annoying, and you always end up with a lopsided and mismatched number of items. So limiting it so that every boss is keyed off a single item is a great change. However making it so that you only get loot if you have one of the boss keys… is fucking awful. Additionally it is slowing down the loot acquisition of uniques that are required to make builds work. One of the highlights of the last several seasons has been when Ace and I have pooled our boss materials together and did an entire evening of nothing but summoning bosses chasing the ancestral uniques required to make our builds feel good. It was an amazing feeling because you end up drowning in loot because every summon I did paid off for Ace and vice versa. Now we are going to get half the amount of loot, because in order to get ANY of the drops from any given summon we are going to have to pay our own boss materials. I get that this is designed to fix some hypothetical problem with random strangers not paying their way in boss summoning groups… but wildly fucks over the more likely scenario of friend groups pooling their resources.
I can’t really complain about the seasonal power mechanic because it seems like they have taken to heart the lessons learned from the vampire event, and then reinforced recently with the witchcraft event. Being able to pick and choose which abilities you want to buy is a good model and it appears that there is a currency to spend on unlocks that let you target which abilities you need for your build. However my core complain with borrowed power systems is that they are fleeting and are throw away content. In a game that is lacking content, it feels wildly inappropriate to squander resources on something that does not stick around the bolster the future of the game. This is not how you turn the tide of there being “nothing to do” when you finish leveling. This is why you end up with this design path of slowing things down, because you simply do not have enough content to soak up player attention. You are wasting resources and creating a temporary heatsink for a fire that keeps raging season after season.
All of this feels so much worse because it was released on the same day that Last Epoch dropped this phenomenal trailer. They get it. They get that they need to invest time in broadening the game and making interesting things for players to do once they have finished leveling. Similarly Season 7 was overshadowed by the release of Path of Exile II Early Access. Thankfully Last Epoch Season 2 lands on April 2nd… a few weeks ahead of the reason of Diablo IV Season 8. By the time the season of summoning Belial hits, I will be otherwise engaged and am I guess fine with this one being a stinker. If you are a Diablo IV player, I highly suggest you check out Last Epoch. Unfortunately there is no console version but the PC release is $35 and worth every penny.
I am legitimately really saddened to see that Diablo IV is going in the wrong direction now. I had a lot of hope for the game. Season 7 was a freaking blast and I was legitimately looking forward to spending a week or two playing Season 8 once Last Epoch Season 2 died down a bit. At this point I am probably going to take a hard pass and see if they can pull their heads out of their collective asses by the time Season 9 rolls around. I guess I should be thankful for all of the stuff we are getting in Last Epoch Season 2, and how damned good the Legacy of Phrecia event has been in Path of Exile. On top of that I am still having a lot of fun hunting monsters for parts that seem almost impossible to get. I have plenty of shit going on, but it sucks to see Diablo IV going off the rails. For the last year I had been a cheerleader for the game actually being pretty solid, against a sea of D4 bad memes. Sure I criticized the hamfisted nature of the Vessel of Hatred campaign, but the game-play was solid.
Hopefully they see the error of their ways when this rolls out and no one shows up. I was shocked at how few people were actively playing Diablo IV Season 7… but I can’t see that anything they have announced is going to draw much interest. The ARPG zeitgeist is likely to be playing Last Epoch still, and by the time that fire dies down Path of Exile II 0.2.0 will drop… and then hopefully shortly after that Path of Exile 3.26.
