campaign

Ancients Did Return

by

Good Morning, Folks. I did not blog yesterday because the entire day was a hot mess. I did not sleep Monday night due to severe nausea, and then spent Tuesday mostly attempting to make up for that fact with several naps. Chemo is some bullshit, do not recommend. I had every intention of blogging yesterday, but it did not happen, so you are getting a mishmash of what I would have said yesterday, with some additional focus from what little I played yesterday. To stop beating around the bush, last Friday was the launch of the 0.5.0 Patch for Path of Exile II, signalling the start of the Runes of Aldurr league and the Return of the Ancients content update. I started a pure Minions character like I said I was going to, and honestly… it was a bit of a mistake. In theory, you probably should level for the first several levels as something other than minions because everything is awful until you pick up Raging Spirits from Freythorn. I was stubborn and did not… and I also attempted to make Skeletal Arsonists work, but seemingly they have been nerfed into oblivion. You can see the current state of my character here.

This league start was a bit of a mess, if I am being perfectly honest. They once again did a free weekend for Path of Exile II, which had the benefit of giving them a massive spike in concurrent players. It also seemingly taxed the hell out of the infrastructure, and I spent a lot of time staring at this screen waiting for the zone to load. I can’t 100% be certain this was due to the influx of non-paying players because there was also a massive patch that happened to land right around the end of the free period. Whatever the case, when the free period ended… all of these woes went away. It was also a weird league start for me because of chemo and the low energy that I have… I struggled to focus on the game in quite the same way that I would have normally. I did not make it to maps, for example, until yesterday, which is quite a bit slower than I think I have done in other leagues. Most definitely compared to my Path of Exile times, when I am usually in maps by Saturday evening or at the latest Sunday morning. It is not like I am racing anyone, and I managed to snap up the uniques that I needed pretty cheaply, so it is not like my slow speed stopped me.

I am not really following a build guide, but instead mostly just chasing all of the really good minion nodes in the Witch/Templar area of the tree. I am only using two uniques with the build. The first I picked up really early on is Enfolding Dawn, and I think I gave a single exalt for it. The main reason we are using it for our chest is that it is pretty much the only way to get 100 spirit easily on a chestpiece, and we need that for summoning minions. The second piece is a mace called Trenchtimber, and we are exclusively using it because it has +2 minion gems on it. Literally nothing else about the unique matters really. You cannot dual-wield sceptres, or if we could, we would immediately drop this item. We are still very much in a world where plus gem levels matter more than any other stat in the game. The nice thing about rune forging in this expansion is that you can improve low-level uniques to be higher-level ones. I have done this to the chestpiece but not the mace, because, as I said, the mace is just a stat stick, and the upgrade has too high of strength requirements.

I’ve had some good luck. First off, I ended up getting a drop that sold for 4 divines, and that helped me fund a lot of my early gear. Since then, I have seen my first raw divine drop in maps, so that is always exciting. I’ve been using Scalpel for price checking, but honestly, I might switch back to something else because so far the pricing portion seems to be worse than what I saw with POE1. I might also just scale up the UI to make the elements show a little easier. It has been pretty accurate pricing-wise, because I have been able to price items based on its suggestions, and they eventually move. The economy is always the aspect of Path of Exile in general that is the trickiest, and also something that I have enjoyed more and more the deeper into the game I get. I know for Ace, the economy is the thing that causes them to bounce the hardest, and I wish that were not the case. At some point, I will probably attempt to perfect my gearing, but for the moment, I have 75% resists for chaos and all elements, and that seems to have made me pretty solid.

The new atlas has been pretty freaking cool so far. One of the big problems that I had with Path of Exile II up to this point is how aimless the endgame felt. That is no longer the case, and every time you interact with a league mechanic NPC, it launches its own quest chain, wanting you to do specific content for them to level up that mechanic. More than this, you can acquire Atlas passive points so much easier now, and the new passive tree feels infinitely more enjoyable than the previous one. I am just getting started, but I have already reached the point of pretty chill mapping. For the moment, I have gone into shrines to make them appear more often and also give me bigger buffs. Currently, there is no way to respec your Atlas tree, so I have been very careful not to choose anything that might end up bricking my progress. This version of the Atlas is so much better than what we have had previously, so I feel like, more than anything else, this gave us something that is viable for the 1.0 release at the end of this year.

While I groused a bunch about this on the podcast, the worst part of Path of Exile II is the first few acts. Once you get your build online, the game becomes pretty great. I feel like they should not make Act 1 anywhere near as rough as it is. Sure, there will always be builds that can one-shot everything, but the baseline build should not struggle to take down bosses. There have been so many times that one of us could not get through Geonir with our build and had to call for help to get a carry. Luckily, that was not me this time, but it is most definitely still a thing. For me, the boss that I personally struggle with the most is the Act 2 final boss, Jamanra. Once you get to Act 3, though, your build tends to have more than enough power to push through anything. I just think the early acts of this game need some tweaking, because I am sure there are a lot of folks who bounce before they reach the break point.

All told, I am pretty happy with this league so far. Minions have ended up being extremely powerful, especially the gas arrows from the skeletal snipers. That command ability is causing me to dive into some of the passives that I have never done before to increase command ability damage. I do, however, want to roll a second character and play with the Pokémon aspect of the Spiritwalker. I am happy enough with my current build, but the nonsense going on with the monkey seems too fun not to play along. They have said they do not plan on nerfing anything with companions mid-league, so in theory, I should be safe enough to build that second character. The challenge is that I am not really looking forward to going through the campaign again.

Have you been playing the Path of Exile II new league? What are your thoughts so far? Drop me a line below.

Juggling Weapons for Harbingers

by

Good Morning Folks. This weekend, I should have spent the entire weekend prepping for the fact that I will be in a bad way, because tomorrow I start my bi-weekly dose of poison known as chemotherapy. I did not do that thing. I instead fucked around and played Last Epoch all weekend, because I did not feel like doing much else due to allergies… and I figured starting tomorrow, I might be too miserable to play much of anything. I technically did all of the things that I absolutely needed to do, like dishes, laundry, etc… and today I am going to get a haircut and pick up some groceries on my way back to the house at lunch. I will also be dealing with gathering the trash and putting the cart to the curb so that I do not have to deal with it in the morning, along with everything else, since I have to be at the chemo location starting at 7 am tomorrow morning.

At this point, I am level 91 and working on raising the corruption on the monolith with the current one I am working on sitting around 160 corruption, and I need to raise it to 175 so that I can do my next harbinger. Generally speaking, the hurdles that I deal with that end my Deathless streaks are Lagon in the Campaign, Rahyeh in early Monoliths, and if I manage to skirt past those… it is just some sort of massive damage happening at the same time that kills me. I made it past Lagon, and Rahyeh, and even the often dicey Emperor of Corpses for its big explosions, and finally took my first death at level 82 to the final step of an Omen Chain when there was just too much damage output for me to heal through. This character is exceptionally tanky… not Judgement Paladin tanky, but still pretty formidable so long as I can keep leeching life, and as I have improved my gear to allow me over 3000 hitpoints, I can heal through a lot.

I am playing a variant Forge Guard Forged Weapons, which is this weird hybrid of a melee class and a minion class. The minions in my case are Molten Armor, which is a build-your-own golem sort of thing that allows you to grant it stats from your own gear while also buffing the damage output that it does. The other “minion” is Forged Weapons, which are effectively a proc of a proc… making them slightly less than reliable to summon. Essentially, I am leaning heavily on Vengeance, which procs them based on my Attunement rating, and the only negative about this is that the build ends up with a “ramping” phase as I am summoning all 12 weapons, and while my Molten Armor is building ignite stacks on the target. I’ve specifically specced into Shrapnel, which is a node that gives my Weapon minions a shorter duration, but causes them to make a bit explosion at the end… which also means I can oversummon them to cause the oldest copies to explode.

I am only really able to oversustain weapons because of an exceptionally lucky drop. When I said I was doing a variant, I specifically mean that I am using a Two-Handed Weapon with a Shield, through the passive point that Forge Guard has access to. This gives me a bit more survival since I can use block as a defensive layer, but in order to proc things quickly… I need a pretty fast weapon. The lucky corrupt that I got on Volcanus gives me a second vector for summoning Forged Weapons, and allows me to skip the 3 points in Molten Strike that also serve to summon weapons, and instead invest those points in AOE scaling that also applies to the weapons. Other than that, I am constantly seeking better versions of Falcon Fists and Phantom Grip, and then I figured I might as well show off another lucky amulet that gives me +2 to all skills. Collectively, I think my gear is in a pretty strong place, and you can check out my profile over on LastEpochTools.

I was a bit slow getting to Empowered Monoliths because I spent a bunch of time doing every possible Woven Echo that I could, so that I could rush my Weaver Tree. My goal, as always, is to unlock every single imprint slot because I spend much time grinding the Monolith. For those unfamiliar, you can put an item in these slots, and it makes it so it is way more likely for that to occur when that specific type of item drops. These become way more powerful when you combine them with Circle of Fortune Prophecies that force specific content to drop specific items. For example, I am not sure I found a single Phantom Grip ring until I started running prophecies that force various encounters to drop legendary rings. Then once I got my first one… dedicating two imprint slots to them made it way more likely to see them. Now I am actually fishing for set pieces so that I can craft slightly better versions of my helm, which requires a shard from the helm slot of the Sunforged set to craft. At some point, I really need to start farming T4 Julra so that I can maybe get a high LP Vessel of Strife.

As far as progression goes, I am four Harbingers into the endgame monolith progression. I am building towards the 175 Corruption Harbinger and going to go ahead and knock out the Emperor of Corpses, since late versions of that can be pretty dicey with all of the explosions. Right now, at 160 Corruption, I can soak the big “get out” explosion without any issue, so I can just stand and tank everything, and that should hold true when I hit 175 as well. I have to admit I still hate the way that corruption works. It feels like you spend a lot of time fiddling around and trying to get your corruption level up high enough to do the next sequence of content. If I could pay someone to take me all of the way to 300… as you can with a carry service in Path of Exile, I would probably do that, just so I could knock out all of my Harbingers in a single go and take down Aberroth. I find the process of raising corruption to be way the fuck too fiddly and unfun… and wish it were more akin to Greater Rifts, where you could just keep bumping up a number manually without having to do the song and dance of killing a bunch of bosses so that when you take down a Shade of Orbyss, you get a decent jump.

The frustrations over raising corruption, though, might just be because this is not the fastest clearing build I have ever played. It is forbidable and tanky as hell, but nothing that I am doing is doing any sort of screen-wide clearing. I need to be in base-to-base combat with my targets to proc the weapons, which then decimate the targets. They drop pretty quickly… unless you are Draal, which I think are inherently resistant to fire. The biggest challenge, honestly, is wrangling my weapons and keeping them on a single target rather than letting them spread out to run amok. However, I will say they are pretty good at mopping up secondary targets while I am moving to the next area. For example, I almost never have to specifically target the little weavers’ egg cases, because the weapons are off destroying them either with melee attacks or their big explosions when they run out of summoning time.

I’ve made exceptionally fast progress in the Circle of Fortune, which has really helped in the gear acquisition department. Going into this season, they indicated that they were nerfing some of the drop rates, especially off imprint slots… and there were times that I could absolutely feel that. However, the deeper that I get into CoF, the better the drops in general feel, and I am slowly clawing back some of the missing loot. The only real frustration that I have right now is that it feels like I cannot gain gold fast enough to keep up with the need to buy more storage tabs. Those are now over 100k gold per tab, and it takes me a while to gather up a couple of hundred thousand. Maybe I should focus on the monolith echoes that reward gold or something to build that up more quickly. I also wish that we had some sort of guild system in this game with shared stashes and such, but then again, that would probably fight against the whole design goals of Circle of Fortune. Having a guild where everyone was limited to the same faction, though, might be able to get past that.

I’ve also made an attempt at starting a Primalist, because in my many travels I managed to get the Apiarist set which summons a bunch of bees. Much like the Squirrel build before it… I want to see if I can make a Bee build work. If not there is always “Cocaine Bear” to fall back on. I legitimately started writing this blog post this morning… and then got sidetracked and completely missed the fact that I never actually finished it and hit publish. Welcome to how my brain seems to be working right now… or not working. Tomorrow I start chemotherapy and that has been consuming almost all of my mental cycles. I am as prepared for that as I think I can be… and here is hoping I make it out the other side in several months. Suffice to say that since I have to be at the location at 7 am tomorrow morning… I will not be doing a blog post. I could in theory drag a laptop to the doctors office and blog from there… but I am not going to do that.

Last Epoch Season Four is really good, but is effectively the same game as before. If you liked it then, you will like it probably even more. However there is no massive revelation that will change your opinion of the title if you gave it a pass before. I will be playing it for the next several days I am sure… that is pending I can stay upright enough to do so.

Corruptions Are Wild

by

Good Morning Folks! Yesterday, we got Shattered Omens, the new season for Last Epoch. Last night I did our Thursday Funday nonsense, and during the middle of it, I was asked what should be a simple question… How long has Last Epoch Been Out? Technically, I have been playing small amounts of the game since November 8th, 2018, when I bought into Alpha 0.5.3. However, I really started playing the game seriously on July 12th, 2022, in its pre-multplayer variant, because things were really starting to cook. Collectively, the AggroChat crew started playing more regularly when the Multiplayer release dropped on March 9th, 2023. The answer that Sita was probably looking for was February 21st, 2024, when the game officially launched into its 1.0 version. So, at this point, we are a little over two years into the lifecycle of Last Epoch as a “complete” game, and I say that in quotes because we still do not have all of the acts that will eventually be in the final version of the story. We are on Season 4, but I have no clue what the actual number should be because originally, they did this whole patch number “cycle” nonsense instead of just calling them seasons.

One of the most delightful things about playing a new Last Epoch season is that I get to once again roam around with my adventuring companions. I’ve been a pretty avid supporter of the game and purchased pretty much every MTX offering backer set that they offer us, because they are priced so much cheaper than the Path of Exile league packs. For example, the Fractured Legend’s supporter pack, which features everything available for this Season is $59.99 as compared to one of the Mirage supporter packs, which runs $90 for technically less stuff. I love this game and want it to survive so I keep giving it money, but after many years of doing this, I have a fancy Capybara, Toucan, and Sloth that hangs out on my back… and running around with this trio of animal companions makes me happy in ways that I cannot quite adequately explain. Maybe I am too old school, but I believe that you really should support the games that you enjoy playing in some way or another, and have always done so as best I can.

Each time a new season drops, they have added new content to the game, and slowly, bit by bit, the frequency of “interesting things” in maps has increased. This time around, starting with Act 2, we have the appearance of something called the Omen Window. This is your classic ARPG “kill things in a circle” mechanic and reminds me a bit of a mix between Ritual and the new Unstable Breach, for Path of Exile players. Ritual, because you are confined to a specific fixed location, and Unstable Breach, because random monsters are summoned and you fill a bar, which breaks the “boss” encounter out of its invulnerability phase. When you take down the boss, the encounter ends, and you are rewarded with a bunch of corrupted loot and some of the crafting currency for this league that allows you to corrupt your own items. Essentailly these are Vaal Orbs for the Path of Exile player, or for someone not familiar with the concept… it is a final step that you can do in crafting an item which can produce some wild outcomes… but also keeps you from further modifying the item.

It is hard to fully explain just how game-changing this has been for the campaign. These are all items that I got from my first two Omen Windows. If you get a good corrupted weapon in Act 2… You can literally keep using it all of the way from the campaign because it is dropping with stats that you cannot get until the Monolith. For example, the ring on the left with +11 Strength on it… is something that I am still using in Act 7 and will probably keep using until I finally get some other way of replacing that huge boost in attributes. I have held onto these for when I ultimately level alts, because the stat packages are just too wild. For example, that axe with 96% increased Physical Damage and 26% Damage Leech is pure nonsense. Sure, it would have been much better if it had rolled with flat damage, but I am not going to complain at all. You can corrupt your own items, but be VERY careful because I corrupted a level 10 dagger…. and it ended up swapping it to a level 56 required dagger base, effectively bricking it for me.

I started screenshotting some of the early drops from Omens, because it was freaking wild. This one for example dropped two completed legendary items. Granted, they were more akin to the random legendaries that you get from the Nemesis system, but they were still extremely strong… and I am using several items that I got early on from corruptions. The only negative that I see about the power of the Omen Windows is that it sort of makes every other encounter feel worse as a result. Exiled Mages were already pretty bad, because you only really care about them if they can drop something that your build specifically needs. I am thankful that you get a little warning message in chat when you enter a map with Omens, and in theory… it might not be a bad strategy to just farm the same map over and over for corruptions in one of the first areas. What was so interesting about this while leveling, is if you get a really strong item… it might convince you to try some things that you had never tried previously.

For example…. I probably never would have leveled a Sentinel with Prism Wraps and Calamity. However, I got a Prism Wraps off my second Omen, which had +1 to all skills… making it insanely powerful for leveling, and I am still wearing it. Calamity similarly has a huge amount of physical resistance on it, and given that I am dealing fire damage, I just rolled with it… especially when I got a pair of Falcon Fists later from a Nemesis egg. I would likely never run a Vipertail on a Sentinel either, but since so much of my power comes from procs… and I greatly benefit from hitting really fast… I started using it for the melee attack speed and kept using it because the poison damage was pretty overpowered since I was hitting very fast. Code of an Erased sentinel, I only included because I am pretty proud of that being the first one I picked up off the ground, and turning into a pretty formidable item. I am sure I will have to wear proper gear once I get to the Monolith, but for now this leveling package feels really strong.

I am level 47 and made it to Heoborea in Act Seven, without taking any deaths. I am sure once I hit monoliths, I will lose my “deathless”, or potentially before, because I keep doing dumb things. Path of Exile II introduced the ability to pause the game while playing by hitting escape to bring up a menu. A few leagues ago, this was also added to Path of Exile, and it was a very welcome addition that I adapted to quickly. As a result, I keep hitting Escape, thinking I am pausing the game, only to watch the corners of my screen turn red as I start getting hit. This is muscle memory… and at some point I am going to do this… alt tab out and come back sad and dead. I would love it if EHG added pause to the online portion of the game, but then again… they have a lot on their plate. There are a ton of quality-of-life tweaks that I would love to see, but some of them seem to be lines that they do not want to cross. For example, I would love to have my pets pick up any of the loot that gets vacuumed into your inventory, like affix shards. I won’t be holding my breath on that one.

I should be able to wrap the campaign up tonight. I don’t usually take any skips and go out of my way to unlock the various dungeons as I am near them on the map. Though I do remember the latest acts taking quite a bit longer than the early ones. I am still going to complete them, though, because you can apparently speed through the monolith faster if you have completed the campaign and are not required to do as many of the early monos. It feels like I am gaining levels much faster than normal, so I am interested to see what level I am when I open up Monos for the first time. I am sure I will be playing this hard and heavy all weekend long, so if you are around, feel free to friend me. My Account ID is Belghast, and the character I am playing this time around is a Forge Weapons Forge Guard called BelForgedNonsense.

Diablo IV Campaign Finished

by

Good Morning Friends! Last night I stayed up a bit later than normal because I was winding down the last few bits of the Diablo IV campaign. I started Thursday evening when the game launched into early access, played quite a bit Friday, Saturday, and Sunday ultimately wrapping up around 11 pm last night. I would love to be able to tell you how many hours I played, but the absence of a /played command or any other sort of player stats prevents me from doing this. That is a microcosm for Diablo 4 as a whole… some aspects of the game are deeply thought out and others seem curiously missing… like the seeming purposeful decision not to have a map overlay. I think this game is going to be a lot of different experiences for a lot of different types of players. If you are the type of player that traditionally expects to play through the campaign of a Diablo game and then bounce… this might be the best Diablo you have ever experienced. If you are more of a Diablo/ARPG hobbyist you will be presented with a cavalcade of choices that might lead you to believe that this game was not designed with you in mind.

I think ultimately for me, Diablo IV is a mixed bag of both brilliance and abject stupidity. For me, a Diablo game is a power fantasy about getting strong, leveling up, and then laying waste to the hordes of hell. In order for that to work, the moment-to-moment combat has to feel amazing and allow you to indulge in the power fantasy of firing off big attacks regularly in order to make the entire screen explode. Combat vacillates between feeling completely brilliant… and feeling plodding and painful and this is largely dependent upon if your abilities are off cooldown and if you have the resources to spend them. Given that the game has not yet officially launched and we already have a significant round of nerfs to slow down that experience… I feel like the game Blizzard had in mind is not the game I wanted to play. We will see if this changes as I begin the gear for the endgame, but the campaign while better than at any stage during testing… was still largely a frustrating mess.

As I have said before I followed a guide for this play through because ultimately I was wanting to give Diablo IV the best possible chance to grab me. Of all of the “spenders” I had played with during testing, the one that I found I enjoyed the most was Upheaval which is a big frontal cone attack. This involves a bit of kiting around but largely that style of gameplay does not bother me. So I ended up following the Upheaval Barbarian Leveling Guide from Maxroll, and for the most part, I think it did as good of a job as possible for easing my leveling experience. At this point, I could respec and try something else and really the cost of just over 94k gold to refund 52 talent points… seems fine given that I am sitting at 1.1 million gold while spending most of the game salvaging everything. I purposefully stayed away from Whirlwind because it clearly seemed bugged… and it was one of the abilities that ate the hardest nerf in the pre-launch patch proving that to be a wise thing to stay away from it.

My path through the game was a bit uneven. For the first three acts of Diablo IV, I spent my time plodding along and completing almost all of the side quests. Then as I reached the end of Act III… I decided that I really wanted a mount which is awarded to you at the beginning of Act IV. From that point forward I pretty much rushed through the game only focusing on the main story arc, because the leveling process had overstayed its welcome. Admittedly this is coming from someone who is used to doing the entire Diablo III leveling process in about 2 hours and the entire Path of Exile leveling process in about 5 hours. The endgame is the beginning of the game to me, and I figured there was plenty of time to start picking away at the rest of the side quests after having completed the story. Truth is… finishing all the sidequests is essentially mandatory for an endgame build as there are ten talent points hidden in the renown system that you are going to need.

As far as the story goes… this is without a doubt the best Diablo story to date and quite possibly the best ARPG story as well. That is admittedly not saying a lot given that most ARPGs only have just enough story to keep the wheels from falling off in transit. Would I consider this one of the best story games when judged against all of the great story games I have played? No… absolutely not. It is a serviceable story, but it is also a Blizzard story, and that comes with all of the baggage attached to that statement. It is a story about big forces moving against the player and plot twists that you can see miles away. However, it is still a fun epic romp through some really large set pieces that serve as an excuse to set up some big fun battles. The only real complaint that I have is that much of the denouement of each conflict plays out in the form of a cutscene that you watch through Blood-O-Vision 3000… as you touch Lilith’s Pedals. Diablo has always been known for its cool cutscenes and this is no different, but they also serve as the key method in which the larger plot moves forward which may or may not be your personal taste.

Most of the boss encounters are legitimately good. There is enough room to scale them up in order to create something akin to the Uber bosses from Path of Exile. On lower difficulties, they serve to feel just challenging enough to not fall over immediately as the bosses in Diablo III did. There are a few fights that felt needlessly tanky… but I chock that up to the general lack of balance, the game seems to have. I feel like Diablo IV is a case in point of why you don’t get rid of Q&A employees as Activision Blizzard has had a habit of doing over the last half dozen years. I think Diablo IV could be a great game given enough time and focus to balance the game into something that actually feels fun all of the time… rather than feeling fun under exactly the right conditions.

I’ve now officially entered the endgame of Diablo IV, but can’t really talk much about it yet. I unlocked the Tree of Whispers which gives you access to the Whispers of the Dead system. From what I understand a zone is marked by the tree and you are sent there to reclaim “the debt that is owed” I won’t go into that in any more detail as it could provide some spoilers. Essentially it is a bounty system that involves you going and doing specific activities in a given zone in order to collect Grim Favors. Grim Favors are then turned in for rewards from the tree that I believe give you access to legendaries and nightmare dungeon glyphs. Nightmare Dungeons are effectively mythic plus from World of Warcraft and the glyph is somewhat like a map in Path of Exile and will set the affixes being applied to the dungeon. I legitimately have only played long enough after the campaign to unlock the dialog box explaining this system and then took a screenshot of the area of the map it was being applied to this morning. I am sure later this week I will have a more cogent set of thoughts about this system.

If you want bonus points… you can listen to me ramble for twenty minutes about the live service dystopia we find ourselves in, and some of my fears about what a battle pass system will mean for this game. Of note… this was recorded before I started focus firing the campaign and doesn’t really reflect much on the game itself other than my general concerns. There are times I feel like recording one of these videos and I did so yesterday morning. Basically, my thesis is that a given player only has time to play one live service game at a time, and as a result, EVERY live service game is ultimately competing with every other one.

I think ultimately my stance is the same as it has been for a while. I think Diablo IV is a great game for the players who will play through the campaign once, and then move on with their lives… maybe to revisit much much later but won’t be mainlining the game. Was it the game I had hoped it would be? No… not in the least. Does that make it any less of a good game? No not really. I think Diablo IV is a very solid game that is just fun enough to get you past some of the major frustrations. I think the first map sucks ass and they would have been far better starting the player in the second map… Scosglen. Scosglen feels and more importantly, SOUNDS like a Diablo game. Diablo is a game about killing demons to jangly chords… and Diablo music finally starts to kick in during Act II.

If I had any bit of advice for new players approaching this game… it would be to do NOTHING but yellow quests aka the main questline… until you reach the beginning of Act IV and complete the quest “Donan’s Favor” and then from that point forward you can return to screwing around and doing side quests at your leisure. Mounts make a massive difference in improving the quality of life of this game and in truth Blizzard fashion… you are robbed of that experience until you are almost done with the campaign. Knowing what I know now… I would essentially rush to the point of having a mount and then return to a leisurely leveling pace. However for all characters from this point forward… I probably won’t actually do the campaign given that unlocking the mount once unlocks it for all of your characters.

I know that I am a very specific edge case when it comes to Diablo players. I liked Diablo III and felt like it got a lot of things right. Diablo IV feels like an overcorrection in attempting to erase the legacy of Diablo III from memory… while at the same time reconning some of the story elements to essentially make that game more or less not exist. As a result, Diablo IV is a direct sequel to Diablo II, in both stories… and the plodding feel of combat. If you loved Diablo II… and have played it recently and still can affirm that it is your ideal Diablo game… then Diablo IV is probably going to be a gift from the heavens planted at your feet. If you liked Diablo III… this game is going to feel like an uncoordinated mess at times. If you are a big fan of Path of Exile… this is going to feel like a bit of a slog compared to how relatively fast moving through that game can feel. Still, I don’t think Diablo IV is a bad game… and pending Blizzard gives the game some TLC over the next few years it might even become a great game.

I figure I will spend some time exploring the end game, but also am more than likely to happily jump on the next game that comes along which catches my attention. This is probably blasphemy… but I think Diablo Immortal was actually a more mechanically enjoyable game than Diablo IV. Too bad they chose evil and went full-on into microtransaction hell with that one because it is more the direct sequel to Diablo III that I really wanted.