blizzard

Ancestral or Bust

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Good Morning Folks. On Tuesday the 10th Season dropped for Diablo IV and I have been spending a good chunk of my time playing a Pulverize Druid. I am still mostly in my leveling build phase, but that is largely for lack of reasonable gear drops which I will talk about later. I would love to tell you how many hours I have played, but there is no equivalent of the /played command in this game, nor is there a stats panel like we have in Diablo III. Once upon a time there was a third party tool that filled in this gap, but it seems like either they have stopped supporting it or Blizzard asked them to take it down… because it now simply redirects to the D4 page on Battle.net. I’d sat out the last few seasons, and in my mind that makes me think that must have been sometime last year. No… I last played during season seven… which was January of 2025. It feels like maybe they are speed running seasons… and should maybe stop and have a think about this pacing.

If you are coming to this blog post having not played Diablo IV since launch, you probably only want one question answered. Is Diablo IV Good Yet? That is a complicated question, because I can definitely with resounding authority tell you that it is no longer an objectively bad game. The classes seem relatively balanced, at least in the fact that there is a long list of class builds that are performing well. However, would I consider the game to be “good” when judged against other ARPGs? Then probably not. It is a flawed experience and continues to spend its time creating disposable content without really adding anything to the game that really feels like it moves the needle forward. In fact there are a few things that they have done that actively feel like a step backwards. They no longer refer to things as “powers” but in truth the new Chaos perks shown above… are just a rebranded versions of temporary powers. What I would love to see is the game introducing content that adds more things to do permanently to the game, and not just a less than three month long temporary chase.

So the first problem that I find with this game is that gearing is a bit of a mess. What I mean by this is that I can relatively comfortably do the World on Torment 3, and Bosses on Torment 2… and have long passed the point where any piece of gear that is not ancestral could possibly be useful. Ancestral gear… even at T3… feels exceptionally rare. In fact I can’t really feel any difference in loot availability between T2 and T3 other than the fact that I can speed farm T2. At some point during the seasons that I missed, they flatted the gearing to remove the awkward step of getting Sanctified gear… but also apparently made Ancestral gear feel a bit like unobtainium. It was a few days until I had reached a point where every non-Unique item that I was wearing was Ancestral. This was legitimately a thing that used to take two or three runs, not multiple days worth of fruitless grinding to get to.

Worse than this… I am probably 40 hours into the game at this point… maybe more… and I have a single item that I would consider to be worth investing time and effort into upgrading. Everything else I am wearing… is utterly disposable. What I really need are some Ancestral versions of the other Uniques that my build wants… and while I have run countless copies of the bosses that supposedly drop them. I maybe see a single Ancestral every three to four runs… meaning almost everything I loot is utterly useless. By this point in previous seasons when I was still actively playing the game, I was hunting for Mythics or looking for more perfect versions of Uniques… not struggling to find the items needed to actually make the build function. This frustration is compounded by the fact that the game lacks anything really resembling a proper trade system. You can shout into the void in the trade channel and might possibly get a response, but generally speaking the amount of gold that someone is asking is just stupid. It is not like gold is actually useful in the game, as I am sitting on 150 million right now… but because it has no real value it just seems to be a wild number that people throw around with folks trying to sell things for 500 million.

I am slowly chipping away at the seasonal quests, and have made it up to the Champion level which requires Torment III for everything. I still feel like I need to get a bit stronger before I tackle some of the bossing on this one, and while I have done a Pit 50… the boss on it was a bit painful. Technically I am still running the leveling version of the build, and should likely at some point swap over to the proper setup. I was trying to find the last few pieces of gear as Ancestral before doing this, but in theory I could do it right now I suppose and see if it makes a difference. The new Chaos Rift content is not terribly enjoyable, and the fact that we do not have a new helltide like mechanic to farm makes everything in the season feel slow. I still do not love Helltide in general, but I like the alternate versions of it like the Vampire or Witch themed ones we have gotten in previous seasons, because they seem way more focused.

I am also not the biggest fan of what they did to the battle pass, where it is technically four separate battle passes that have to be unlocked individually. You gain Favor which seems to roll out pretty quickly enough, and then spend that favor to unlock items on the passes. The whole segmentation of this system feels like it was explicitly designed to make players spend more money unlocking it. While I am sure Blizzard will refer to this as “content” it very much feels like taking the same small amount of butter and trying to spread it over way more slices of bread. I will be honest… I was feeling pretty charitable about this season until I sat down and started to write about my individual feelings about various components of it. This is going to come across as a hit piece on the game, and I really do not intend it to be… it is a fun but ultimately flawed gaming experience.

They did get me to spend some money, because a few days into this season they introduced a series of Starcraft themed skins, similar to the World of Warcraft theme ones they released in the past. They coaxed me out of some money then to buy the Lich King skin… and this time around it was Raynor and Corrupted Marine skins. The game is a gorgeous game, and they do create a bunch of really cool cosmetics for it… but it also clearly tells me that they are spending way more effort on the cash shop than they are the rest of the game experience. Diablo has been Fortnite-fied where the gameplay loop is largely kept the same, but you are presented with a constant drumbeat of nostalgia bombs, begging for you to open your wallet and give them some of your money. I am a sucker… I suggest you not be one. I blame Destiny 2 and Gacha games for slowly grinding down my resistance to this complete bullshit.

I think the biggest challenge that I am having right now… is I am not really sure what I should be doing to get over the humps I am dealing with and move on to Torment IV. There is no clear thing that I need to be farming to improve my chances at getting the gear that I need. Maxroll has a boss loot table guide, and in theory I need to be targeting those, but given that again… any item that does not drop at Ancestral is useless… it does not feel great to farm bosses. I think the two biggest outliers that I need are an Ancestral version of Insatiable Fury which drops from Grigoire… which means I need to farm stupid amounts of Helltide to get more summons. I also need an Ancestral copy of Vasily’s Prayer which drops from Varshan… which is largely farmed through getting Tree of Whispers caches. I am doing lots of both… but they are somewhat mind-numbing and the key drop rate is pretty low. Nothing feels worse than seeing the items technically dropping… but without Ancestral rarity… once again making them not worth my time even picking up really.

This is one of those times where Path of Exile and having access to a functional… and now automated… trade economy is a mass improvement. I could save up resources and pick up the items that I am missing, and maybe start selling off some of the items that do drop that I have no use for in order to fund those upgrades. More than that, I feel like Path of Exile is a bit easier to tell what is wrong with your character, and why you can’t do higher tier content. Granted that just might be my level of familiarity with the game. Builds in Diablo III and IV both work on gimmick interactions between abilities, that cause wild exponential scaling to amp up your damage, and in order to trigger that… you need very specific items in specific slots with specific stat combinations. Last Epoch is quite possibly the best game for gearing because you can get up and running really quickly, and then it becomes just a matter of perfecting your gear over time rather than making it super hard to find the pieces that you need.

So to the original question of “Is it Good Now?”. I would say honestly it is good enough to have fun with it. There are frustrations, but you can at very least make it through the campaign without having to deal with them. Everything that I have talked about in this post with disdain… are end game issues. You should be able to at a minimum get to Torment 1 with very little effort. I was doing that almost immediately after dinging level 60. Everything else is just how willing you are to grind it out. I used to have a lot of fun grouping up with my friend Ace and chain running bosses… but that is pretty much a nonstarter these days because everyone has to spend boss mats in order to get loot, so there is no longer that force multiplier that there used to be. Once the 0.3.1 patch drops in Path of Exile II, I will probably be back over there testing out the endgame changes. I am enjoying playing a Bear Druid, but not so much that the next thing that interests me would not immediately pull my attention away from the game. If Destiny Rising did not have clear caps on how much you can do in a given day… I would likely be over there playing it instead of grinding here.

A Not-So-Small Delay

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Good Morning Folks. When last we spoke I was excited and preparing for the launch of Diablo IV Vessel of Hatred expansion. More than anything I was excited that the launch was happening at a reasonable hour so that both myself who is in Central Time Zone and Ace who is in Eastern Time Zone could actually participate in the game together. Throughout the day we made plans to hang out and chitchat while making our way through the campaign that evening. It is really moments like this that we both look forward to when we are both reasonably excited about something at the same time and can do nonsense together. So often we are playing totally different things, but the stars seemed like they were aligning to give us a new game launch to dig our teeth into in a manner that was going to be enjoyable and not trying to stay up until midnight.

Then roughly thirty minutes before the game was set to go live at 6 PM CDT, the bomb was dropped that the launch was going to be delayed. In what has become one of the least correct posts in a while, they stated that there was a “small technical issue” that would lead to a “small delay” to the launch of the game. In true Blizzard fashion, they gave us no real information to work with, and as a result, the rumor mill started filling in the gaps. PC players were stating that it was a problem with one of the console releases that was to blame for the delay, Console players were stating that it was something to do with Steam’s rigid update schedule… and in the vacuum, we were left without any facts to go on. The rest of the evening was dictated by 2-hour blocks… of just needing a few more hours… which ultimately led to the game launching roughly six hours late.

Diablo IV has had a fraught history since its launch last year. So much so that “D4 Bad” has become a prevalent meme in the ARPG community with countless music videos released on the theme of it being “dogshit”. Admittedly some of these are bangers and largely feature a cast of characters from the ARPG streaming scene. The Vessel of Hatred expansion launch was a grand coming out for the game again, a cotillion where it was being presented to the world to show how much it had improved. Last night’s botched launch pretty much destroyed that goodwill in an instant. Pretty much every streamer to some extent had to deal with the return of the “D4 Bad” crew to their chats, and honestly… they weren’t wrong. How many games has Blizzard launched throughout the years, and how many of them have they bungled at the finish line?

What is even worse is that Streamers were left holding the bag for the botched communications surrounding this situation. Blizzard was simply not giving any real information about what is going on. Contrast this with the way in which Eleventh Hour Games communicated at the launch of Last Epoch when it had so many server issues. I was way more willing to show forgiveness towards a group of developers that were sharing what was actually going on, and how they were trying to resolve it… rather than last night’s refrain of “just a few hours more”. Raxx spent the evening playing various games with his stream, doing a bracket of games for him to play and eventually falling into chess.

Darth Microtransaction attempted to keep the attention of the crowd by giving away copies of the expansion, handing out battle passes, and then playing a betting game with his audience. He would bet that the game would launch within the next thirty minutes, and then when that time had passed he would give another five subscriptions away to his viewers. At one point I know he had over three thousand folks tuned in and watching his stream, in which he was playing a video he had recorded of Vessel of Hatred in the background while playing Old School Runescape in the lower right-hand corner of the screen and attempting to keep chat engaged.

Pohx who is quite possibly the sweetest person in all of the Path of Exile community, decided to give the launch of the expansion a go. He spent the evening playing Warcraft 3 custom maps and then eventually said fuck it and went to bed. I ultimately gave up around 9 pm and went to bed, I am not sure when Ace did but I don’t think they stayed up that late. I am glad that I gave up because the game did not roll out until after 11 PM my time and with it came a 23 gig patch… essentially negating the whole process of preloading the game that we did earlier this week. This is a massive black eye towards the game and towards the team behind it.

I was clearly annoyed enough to devote an entire blog post to that fact this morning, but in truth I was mostly having a chill night. I kept various Streams open in the background throughout the night so I could find out tidbits of information as they trickled out. The majority of the evening I spent in Path of Exile slowly chipping away at challenges, ultimately knocking two of them out. My map runners also brought about four divines last night so it was a pretty great time all around. I think my biggest frustration about this whole situation is the complete and total communications fail from Blizzard. I am not sure what they were thinking by trying to constantly diminish the impact of this outage because clearly, it backfired. Had they just been honest and set reasonable expectations… folks would have gone about their night and done other things rather than feverishly waiting for the launch of a game that was not coming… or at least that was arriving almost six hours late.

This morning I got in briefly and created a Spiritborn because I figured I might as well try the class while it was likely to have some grossly overpowered builds. I was happy to see that there was the option to create a character and start with the new campaign without also having to complete the original campaign. I’ve created a seasonal character because essentially my stable of standard characters is dead to me. I am probably going to go the whole poison Centipede build with it because it looks wild. I used to like playing the Monk in Diablo III, and I figure this is going to feel a bit like that based on the video footage I have seen.

I sincerely hope that the community did not devolve into death threats last night, but the Diablo IV team deserves some ire for their fumbling of this launch. More than anything they need to reassess how they communicate with players because what I saw last night was insufficient and sad.

For Azeroth

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So last weekend was BlizzCon and over the last few days I have been dealing with the announcements made there.  On the morning before the festivities started…  I threw out a flurry of tweets of things that I would have liked to have seen, and then one that was my nightmare scenario.  Essentially…  the nightmare scenario is what happened.  As a result I’ve spent the last few days going through the stages of denial and have finally reached a point where I can talk about it.  World of Warcraft for me is a story about being artificially cut off from a chunk of my friends regardless of the decisions I make.  When the game released in 2004 we had a group of players that wanted to play Alliance and a group that wanted to play Horde, and while we attempted playing both sides after a point folks wound up greatly preferring one over the other.  This was a completely foreign concept to me and felt just wrong to have choosing a side mean you were also saying goodbye to a chunk of your friends in the process.  Everquest had factions but they were all personal choices, and even Dark Age of Camelot had Gaheris the Co-Op server that let us all play what we wanted together without the artificially faction boundaries.

For the last thirteen years I have carried a torch in hopes that maybe just maybe the two sides would get their shit together and realize that there is way more at stake than their own petty grievances.  We have come so close so many times as we worked together with the other side to tackle the big bads of the world, but always we are artificially drawn back in to the big dumb red versus blue narrative.  Battle for Azeroth is doubling down on this tired formula and apparently that is what the player base wants.  I have no real faction pride because neither faction has actually done anything that I am proud of.  Sure the cinematic they released for this game is epic, and there are moments I feel shivers of excitement from each side.  I am just wired to be nostalgic about all of this even though it signals the death of the dream I have held for so long.  The faction wall will never fall, and my friends list will always be artificially segregated.  We could do so much more if we were allowed to work together, and bring our Tauren and Orc friends along with our Dwarf and Worgen friends to do awesome things.  I guess that thing that frustrates me is just how tragic and pointless it always is…  all it would take is some communication between the sides and we would stop killing each other and start killing things that deserve to be killed.  Fuck “For the Horde” and fuck “For the Alliance”…  it should be “For Azeroth”…  because the planet is dying while we are fighting .

All of this said…  there are a lot of things that they are talking about that do excite me, but it has been a lot of soak given the first massive blow.  I love the concept of Allied races because it gives the players something that we have requested for so long…  sub races.  From the moment I first knew that the Dark Iron Dwarves were a thing…  I wanted to play one.  The only only problem is that in my perfect scenario they would have been on the Horde.  In truth in my perfect scenario all of the sub races that we are getting…  would have gone to the other faction.  I want to see High Mountain Tauren fighting along side the Alliance and Dwarven fighting along side the Horde.  I want to break down the barriers between the two factions and blend them all up together to where your faction choices are just that…  choices and not something you are locked into.  Basically I am down for anything that degrades the barrier between the camps of players and lets us all do things together.  Unfortunately I am having to come to the realization that it will probably never happen, but in the meantime I guess I am going to be leveling a bunch of new characters to take advantage of the new races.

The biggest obstacle between me and playing the horde was the fact that I didn’t like most of the races.  The reason why I didn’t like the races was the bestial hunch that the male versions of each seemed to be permanently stuck in.  Apparently there is a posture system that is coming that will allow us to go to the barber shop in game and change this…  and in truth that breathes new life into all of these races that I refused to play.  In theory if I can get an upright Orc like the modern Thrall model…  it is going to feel awesome.  Similarly Trolls and Undead become perfectly viable options for me to play.  The number one problem I have with Worgen is that they too suffer from this forced lurch, and I am wondering if maybe just maybe that might be a thing of the past as well.  I love my Horde family, but what always ends up being a problem is the fact that I have years worth of characters on the Alliance side and a handful of false starts on the Horde.  I like being self sufficient, and only on one side do I have an army of alts that can craft anything that I could ever want.  In theory if I enjoy the races more…  I could start working on the same on Horde side.  The draw to either side is the people who play there… not the story.  I am just frustrated that it seems like I will always have to choose one path over the other when I really want to do both at the same time.

 

Brief Goldrush

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briefgoldrush
Screen Grab from WoWToken.info

Yesterday was kind of a shit day.  I got to work around 7 am, ran around like a chicken with my head cut off and didn’t get home until after 6:30 pm.  To make matters worse I wound up skipping breakfast with the idea of just grabbing something from the cafeteria in the basement…  but apparently they changed hands and are no longer open at a reasonable hour for breakfast eating.  When I got home I ate some left overs and planned on largely chilling out on the sofa with my laptop, however within minutes I was falling asleep at the keyboard.  Instead of opting to consume caffeine to forcibly prop my eyelids open like I do so many nights…  I simply went with it and crashed hard.  I know I woke up a few times, one of which I vaguely remember going to the kitchen to get a drink…  but for the most part I was completely dead to the world not really becoming aware of my surroundings until about five minutes before the alarm was set to go off this morning.  Bel is still a very sick Bel, and while I am taking some stuff whatever respiratory hell that I picked up at PAX South seems to be lingering.  Unfortunately work is absolutely madness right now and we are pushing towards a hard deadline…  one that honestly made me think if going to PAX was a good idea at all in the first place.  So I am suffering through it, and largely just collapsing into my desk chair and trying to think clear thoughts…  that is until yesterday when a firestorm erupted not even vaguely related to said deadline.  All of the sudden I am back in the same meetings I attended six months ago… and being told to develop the same solution I suggested six months ago but was largely told wasn’t needed.  Suffice to say… it was a miserable day to be a Bel.

As a result I don’t have much that is exciting to talk about other than the fact that something strange happened.  We had essentially a virtual run on the banks in the form of the WoW Token going from 60,000 gold to 115,000 gold and back down to around 66,000 gold all within a 36 hour period.  So what caused this?  Well quite simply the law of supply and demand, but more importantly the release of the ability to fund “Battle.net Balance” from consuming a WoW token instead of simply trading it in for subscription time.  If you will indulge me in a quick side bar here…  didn’t Blizzard say that as far as branding goes “Battle.net” was going away?  I find it bizarre that they are rolling out a new feature with this same branding instead of simply calling it “Blizzard Balance” or something super generic like that.  Essentially all of those folks with pent up desires for products on the Blizzard store, suddenly had the ability to cash in their bankroll and buy those things pushing the demand for tokens way higher than the demand for actual gold.  In truth this should have been foreseen given that there will always be a constant need for things on the store that previously cost cash, but there is a constantly dwindling number of aspirational gold needs in the game.  Sure you could really drop a silly amount of money and buy outright that 2 million gold spider mount…  but at the end of the day it does nothing but sit there as a supposed status symbol.  Whereas in the past with the Tundra Mammoth and Yak… those greatly improved game-play especially when it came to leveling alts.  However I won’t lie that the thought of being able to sell a token and purchase the Alliance motorcycle did cross my mind as something I might be willing to do.

What I want to talk about more than anything else is the absolute windfall that this means for Blizzard.  When you purchase a token for $20 it can be then traded for goods valuing $15…  be it in the form of a monthly subscription or now in $15 of Battle.net balance that can then be spent on anything from physical merchandise to the digital services they provide.  Every time a token changes hands Blizzard makes $5 off the top, regardless of what it is spent on.  My theory is that a lot of the tokens over the last two days were spent purchasing digital services… like character moves or renames… things that folks had been wanting to do for a long period of time but just been unwilling to cough up hard currency to make it happen.  If that is the case then every single one of these token purchases also essentially amounted to pure profit.  I have been a long time critic of the prices that Blizzard charges for character moves or renames… when essentially they are charging for access to what is now a completely automated and scripted interaction.  Once upon a time there was a labor cost associated with these services, because someone manually kicked off a SQL script to make it happen…  however that has not been the case for over a decade and the price never actually went down.  If folks spent their tokens on digital game purchases, or in game items for Hearthstone, Heroes of the Storm or Overwatch… then again that is mostly pure profit.  The only time there are serious physical expenses factoring in is if someone purchase tangible items on the store like a Murloc plush or an Overwatch hoodie.  Even then…  they are still making a decent profit on that item or they would not be selling it.  Basically the Token system allows Blizzard to double dip and make a profit on the front end and the back end of every purchase… and at the same time ensures that the folks that are grinding out the gold are actively playing their properties.

In truth I think we can expect one of these “runs on the bank” each time something new is released from Blizzard.  A new champion in Heroes of the Storm… bam the token price inflates as folks scurry to purchase it.  The Diablo 3 expansion pack that adds Necromancers releases…  same thing… a rush to sell off some gold to purchase the thing that folks want.  I think of this much like the lottery system, in that once the reward gets to a certain point… it brings people out of the woodwork that would never normally buy tickets.  Personally that price point is somewhere around 300 million dollars for a lottery, because that prompts me to start buying the occasional one off ticket here and there on the vague chance that I will actually win.  For WoW players that price point seems to be 100,000 gold for the US economy and 200,000 gold for the EU economy.  The bizarre part of this is that I don’t think the balance feature is even available on the EU realms yet, and it absolutely had no effect on China, Taiwan, or South Korea yet… but in truth those three markets are madness anyways. Regardless… the fact that players can now cash in their gold for tangible goods… that they could then in theory sell on secondary markets like Ebay tells me that we are going to change the dynamic considerably.  You have just essentially let players start turning game time in to real dollars, which is a strange paradigm and one that is not entirely dissimilar to the traditional third party gold markets.  Granted this is going to be a SUPER lossy process, but one that will exist nonetheless.  One that more than likely only the most sage of gold making wizards will ever figure out how to tap.  Things are going to be really strange from this point out.

[Edit] I just heard from my friend Nyn that you cannot apparently use Battle.net balance to fund physical items… so that at least negates some of my commentary.  However that does mean that tokens going to Battle.net balance are essentially going to be largely pure profit for Blizzard.