Last night I wound up playing Diablo IV again. I am not really certain how much longer I will be lingering in this game, but I realized after yesterday’s post how close I was to finishing the 90 levels of the Battle Pass system. For reference, I dinged 80 this morning while I was in the game taking some screenshots, and dinged 90 on the Battle Pass around the time I hit 79, so it is easily done on a single character without partaking of the nonsense “accelerated” version. This honestly makes me feel much better about the battle pass as a whole because it seems significantly less grindy than what I experienced with Destiny 2. As far as the seasonal achievements… it is really asking me to get a character through all of the end-game boss fights, and if I actually stick around to grind out the next 20 levels… I might care about those.
While I greatly enjoy Legions and the “Bloodtide” events, I have reached a point in progression where I only really care about the World Bosses. The World Bosses can drop item level 925 gear, and so far I have picked up six pieces in total with a few spares sitting in the bank. No event other than the World Boss seems to be capable of dropping gear that high level, or at least I have not ground up Nightmare Dungeons to the point where they can given that I am around the level 21-25 range with them currently. Legions, Bloodtide, and Helltide all seem incapable of dropping anything decent yet so that puts me in the awkward position of not really caring about much loot that is dropping save for hunting for the handful of legendary affixes that I care about and lining up some spare aspects to extract.
Mechanically the game is still quite fun, but I am reaching the point where I am grinding for the sake of grinding. Otherwise, I can just keep the D4Armory Events page up and pop in right before a World Boss spawn. I ran a handful more Nightmare Dungeons and they are sort of in the “aggressively fine” state where I am getting enough map drops that I can salvage the ones with the affixes that I don’t care for, and then craft more of hopefully the ones that I don’t mind too much. I know I complained the other day about Drifting Shadows… but honestly, that is one of the better options that does not seem to impede too much on the fun of romping through the dungeon. I still do not think the state of dungeons in general is good, but it is at least something to do and I should probably spend more time leveling my glyphs.
Path of Exile released a trailer and some general announcement notes about the November events that will be taking place starting next Friday. There is no Endless Delve as folks had thought, and instead, the first event is a return of the Krangled league… where all of the passive tree and ascendancy nodes are jumbled making it almost impossible to build a viable character. This is going to get a hard pass from me, but the next one is a revisiting of the league mechanics from Sentinel and Kalandra… both of which I actually enjoyed so I am probably going to try league starting an RF Chieftain during this event. Lastly is a league called Shifting Stones where every map will have a super juiced version of the Atlas passives applied to it, and what each map gives you will shift every 15 minutes. If I am feeling up to it I might throw together something quickly just to play with that. If you get a character to at least level 50 in two of the three events, you will get a loot box… which legitimately is not that big of a reward but at least something.
I am legitimately hoping that the Sentinel/Kalandra league means that we might see a revisiting of these two mechanics in Standard with 3.23. I always thought that the Kalandra mechanic specifically was very interesting, but just happened to land at a time when the sandbox state of the game was not great. Had it released in place of say Crucible, when the balance of the league was very strong… I think it would have been significantly better received. It has a really bad taste in most players’ mouths because the game itself was in a bad state at that moment, so maybe this event will give it a bit of a redemption arc. Players have also been begging for Sentinel’s recombinator system to go standard for a while. If nothing else it will be an interesting week to get in and revisit all of this for seven days.
Lastly, I wrapped up The Peripheral by William Gibson last night and enjoyed it enough to start the second part of the unfinished “Jackpot Trilogy” immediately following. I’ve been a fan of Gibson since first reading Neuromancer, but I got out of the habit of rabidly consuming everything he released. I caught part of The Peripheral series on Amazon and liked it quite a bit, which prompted me to try out the novel given that the series was not picked up for additional seasons. All in all, it was a good novel with memorable characters, but maybe not the high point of my year so far. I am going to at least make my way through the second novel and then be sitting and waiting for the release of the third.
Diablo 4 has had a bit of a rocky start. The launch went relatively well and while I have shared at length my issues with the game, it seemed to largely be well received. That all changed when the patch notes were released for Season 1 and its pre-patch. Diablo IV was a game where there were only a handful of options that actually felt good to play, and every single one of them was nerfed into oblivion for no apparent reason. This caused an emergency “yeah we fucked up” fireside chat, and with it some massive changes in the way they are addressing the game. The problem is… this was not really enough to stem the bleeding and almost overnight… the game seems to have purged most of its player base. I have a few hundred friends on Battle.Net and at the launch of the game… I saw well over a hundred people playing it including folks I had not seen online in years. At the launch of season one… there were still about six players actively playing the game on my friend’s list.
With this precipitous decline… folks have rushed out of the sidelines to whack away at this misery pinata. “D4 Bad” has become a meme, and you cannot watch an ARPG stream without someone saying it. This charge is being led by several of the Path of Exile streamers and even made its way into the ExileCon official Livestream. This flood of public mockery has even managed to grind down some of the most prolific Diablo Enjoyers. The truth is nothing is ever as simple as the soundbite. I have publicly decried this game, but I don’t seem to hate it anywhere near as much as the zeitgeist seems to right now. On Tuesday Patch 1.1.1 was released, and quite honestly… it brought with it a number of good changes. Since I am sitting in the Path of Exile 3.22 waiting room… I decided to check it out.
As of writing this blog post, I am level 38 and some 13 hours into my playthrough of a seasonal character. Maybe I have mellowed out since my crushing disappointment at launch, or maybe I have just come to accept what Diablo IV is as compared to what I expected it to be. Whatever the case I am not hating what I am playing. I opted to start a Barbarian because ultimately if the game was going to have a redemption arc, it needed to start with the character class that felt awful to play in all of the betas and at launch. I did pivot away from the Whirlwind Barb and am now mostly focused on Hammer of the Ancients. There are a number of things that still feel pretty bad, like how often I have to use my builder in order to get a single hit of my consumer… but that is obviously not really going to change.
Let’s start off by talking about the unique seasonal questline. You are helping Cormond attempt to rid this plague from the world called the Malignant, which infects enemies and causes them to return to life over and over. I believe at this point I have completed the entire quest chain and defeated both forms of the final boss. If you were expecting deep story content that moved the needle forward for Sanctuary… you are pretty much going to have to wait for expansions. What this reminds me of are the storylines that get patched into Gacha games, where you have a handful of quests to introduce a new character or a new mechanic before being turned loose to explore that further. The Cormond storyline exclusively exists to introduce us to the Malignant and give us some structure as to why we are caging these hearts.
As far as the seasonal mechanic itself, every bit of content that you do seems to be able to spawn Malignant monsters which have a chance of dropping a heart that you can attempt to cage. I’ve encountered these in dungeons, cellars, and they are guaranteed to spawn in the new type of dungeon called Malignant Tunnels. What this means in practice is that you have to defeat an elite… remember to click the purple, orange, or blue heart that is left behind… and then fight them again to get a Caged Heart to drop. I wish the hearts were glowing brightly or something because quite honestly they tend to blend into the background and I am pretty sure I have killed Malignant monsters several times and forgot entirely to click on the doodad. When you are going through a dungeon… they feel absolutely the same as every other monster you fight. There is nothing really special about them other than the fact that they look like they have some guck covering them.
The object of your search is the Caged Heart. These come in three common varieties… Viscious (Orange), Devious (Purple), and Brutal (Blue). These fit into corresponding colored sockets that now exist in every piece of jewelry that drops. The key complaint that I heard early on is that these would harm survival given that everyone was socketing skulls into jewelry for armor bonuses. As a result, Blizzard thought far enough ahead to just give each caged heart a ton of armor negating that concern. Each colored heart has specific bonuses that can roll on them, and these are more of the “nice to have” territory than anything build-changing. Under certain rare circumstances, you can get a fourth type called the Wrathful Heart (Black) which is a bit like a watered-down Legendary Aspect, that could impact how you want to build your character. Incremental power gain is still power gain, so I guess this is a positive overall.
Originally I had said this seemed like a watered-down version of the Abyss league mechanic from Path of Exile, but in truth that is giving it a bit too much credit. The Caged Hearts are a nice bonus for doing content you are already going to do, but don’t really feel like something worth specifically chasing. I do however enjoy doing the Malignant Tunnel dungeons because they have a better flow to them than traditional dungeons just for leveling purposes. You can craft devices with the different colors of corruption that you loot, which allows you to spawn a bonus boss fight at the end of the Malignant Tunnel. Again these don’t really feel like chase mechanics, but more something I am doing for experience points given that I end up with a ton of the crafting materials from salvaging the hearts. Hearts take up inventory space, so I feel like I am always needing to destroy them to make room for more loot.
The thing that is a bit intangible is that 1.1.1 feels better, and I can’t exactly put my finger on why. Granted I am nowhere near the endgame, but my survival feels better and my ability to kill things also feels significantly better. I’ve been in a loop the last several nights where I did not have the mental bandwidth to play Baldur’s Gate 3, but did not want to burn myself out on Path of Exile right before a new league starts. As a result, Diablo IV has felt pretty great as the sort of game interaction that I am craving but also given that I don’t deeply care about it… it is simple enough to log out and walk away from it when I have something else that I would rather be doing. Essentially I feel like the game is in a better state than it was when I left it, and not near as meme-worthy as the internet would lead you to believe. Sure there are things that still bug the fuck out of me, like their overreliance on crowd control… but it also isn’t an awful experience.
Blizzard did win however and convinced me to consume my battle pass token. The armor set that you get as part of the seasonal journey is actually rather sweet. This annoys me however because the set of armor you get the free track… looks like shit. If you want nice things you are going to have to keep buying a quarterly battle pass in order to have access to potentially “earn” it. That whole interaction feels bad, that not only will I have to pay money for it… but I will also be expected to grind away in order to earn the things I paid for. The battle pass as it stands is probably one of my least favorite constructs in gaming, and really… it needs to die in a fire.
I guess the only positive thing that I have to say about the Battle Pass is that it seems like progress is moving extremely quickly through it. Like I said I am roughly thirteen hours into this character and I am sitting at level 43 of 90 in the rewards track. The curve for these rewards seems to also be fairly flat as I’ve not noticed them slowing down significantly as I moved through the content. Basically, I am just about finished with the lower tier of the armor skins and going to be starting on getting the slightly nicer ones. When I ding 40, which should happen today… I will unlock the Smouldering Ashes system that allows me to gain account-wide bonuses. I will of course be going after the Urn of Aggression first which gives a flat XP boost and should speed up the rest of my leveling.
As far as the Season Journey goes, I am already through the first four steps which would have originally been part of the “Haedrig’s Gift” process in Diablo III. Each time you ding you seem to get a set of jewelry and a few aspect unlocks which is nice but also feels a little lackluster. It just really drives home how commoditized gear in general feels in Diablo IV. I will say just the existence of the Seasons Journey makes the game feel like it has a bit more purpose because it gives me some activities to focus on. Weirdly you can progress to the next tier without actually finishing the previous one. I think in most cases when I got all but 2 or 3 of the achievements checked off I was able to leap ahead to the next tier and get the rewards. I like that it gives me a bit of a sense of purpose and causes me to play in a way I would not normally play… like seeking out Cellars each time I happen across one because I know X number of them to tick off a seasonal journey step.
All told… I don’t hate it though. There are a few weeks of focused gameplay here, and quite honestly I am moving through levels way faster than I thought I would. It doesn’t feel as good as Diablo III, where you could burn up a character in a weekend and be doing endgame content the rest of the season, but it doesn’t feel anywhere near as slow as leveling did at launch. I hope over time they will continue to accelerate this process because really… it should take you a week to max out a seasonal character and then the rest of the time should be spent interacting with the seasonal mechanic. However, given how shallow the seasonal mechanic is… I can’t really see players sticking around for long because of it. Maybe it is better to think of the endgame as beginning at level 50 when you hit World Tier 3, and then everything after that point is gravy.
I do want the game to find its stride, because even though it has faded significantly… I still have a lot of love and nostalgia for the franchise. I don’t think Diablo IV was the right game to continue that legacy, but I also don’t think it is awful. I think a lot of the Metacritic user score reflects the anger over a bad patch, and I hope given time… the team can recover from that. I am extremely curious about what Path of Exile 3.22 is going to look like because I am already seeing a flood of “D4 player tries POE” videos. I fully expect Diablo IV stumbling will be extremely good for peak numbers in the Ancestor League. I am most definitely looking forward to it, but for the time being… I am actually enjoying the Season of the Malignant. It is nowhere near as bad as I had feared, but also… isn’t as good as I might have hoped. So while I can’t say “D4 Bad” I can probably be fine with saying “D4 Mid”.
