Diablo 3 Season 29 is Awesome

Good Morning Folks! This weekend I got pulled back into Diablo III. The new season dropped a few weeks ago but I did not actually get around to playing it on launch day. Instead over the course of the week my friend Ace got engaged with Diablo III again, which then pulled me back in on Saturday afternoon. This is without a doubt the most chill leveling experience I have ever had because I started a little after 2 pm my time and by the time I finished recording the podcast that evening, I was just a stone’s throw away from 70. That isn’t anywhere close to record time or anything, but it is a heck of a lot faster than I normally end up leveling. When we would do a season launch on a Friday I would maybe make it to 50 that first night.

The key difference this season is a new event type called a “Vision of Enmity”. I recorded some footage of me doing one on Saturday, largely so I would have an example for this inevitable blog post. Essentially any mob you kill in the open world has a chance of spawning a portal, and when you teleport inside you are presented with a series of “rooms” for lack of a better term. Each room will either spawn another portal or spawn a treasure goblin. Killing the Treasure Goblin drops a chest full of bounty materials that signal the end of the event. The rooms seem to have a handful of possible outcomes:

  • One or more elite packs spread out through the map.
  • A room where everything is magic or higher, and drops death’s breath.
  • A room with three Greater Rift Portal bosses.
  • A room where every mob is a treasure goblin, most of them being the material goblins.
  • A room with a single treasure goblin spawn, signaling the normal end of the run.

The treasure goblin room is by far the most ridiculous thing I have seen in Diablo III full stop. That said… even the normal rooms are insanely rewarding. Almost my entire leveling process was me attempting to do one full round of bounties. I would start down the path to a bounty objective, and at some point, a portal would spawn. Early on I would get distracted by the portal forcing me to do the objective all over again because, at the end of the event, you get shunted back to town. Later I got in a rhythm of doing the objective, going to town, vendoring, and then going back to the portal because thankfully it gets marked on your minimap with an arrow pointing towards it. One single round of five acts of bounties plus all of the assorted portals that spawned… added up to I think 65 levels. For the last few I did Nephelem rifts to finish things off.

The most beneficial part of Enmity portals is that you end up with so many materials. I started getting Death’s Breath at level 2 and when I would get one of the rooms with three Greater Rift bosses they would drop Greater Rift Keystones. At the time of writing this, I have 166 GRift stones and almost all of those were gained through Enmity portals. Similarly, I have around 100 of each of the bounty materials and I have consumed a bunch of them cubing items and doing other crafting recipes. Materials are not really a problem because if you run out… just run a few more portals and in the process of doing those you will likely also get a number of legendary items. This legitimately feels like the most generous Diablo III season ever.

We talked about this on the show a bit, but it feels like the Diablo III team did not hold anything back. This is reportedly the last new season for the game and in doing so they created something purely fun for the players. It makes me a little sad to be honest, because the very limited team working on Diablo III has managed to create some extremely fun content over the last several leagues. I wonder what this game would have been like if they had gotten the full backing of Blizzard. Seeing how rich and varied the content is in Path of Exile makes me sort of wish for an alternate universe version of Diablo III where it got the same love and attention. That is not to say that the team working on D3 has not done some amazing stuff, but you can clearly tell they have limited resources.

I am very much in that awkward phase of not having all of my gear and not having enough gold to finish crafting my set of gems. I love Crusader and more specifically the Invoker set, so when I saw it was the Haedrig’s Gift set for the season I knew what class I would be playing. I have my six-piece and am currently trying to farm a Ring of Royal Grandeur in order to swap to Half Invoker/Half Crimson. I have none of my cube items and I am missing the correct jewelry and chestpiece. I think a lot of my squishiness will be alleviated when I get an Aquilas’ chest to drop. For now, I am very much in the area where my killing potential is extremely high… but my survival is very very low. I just swapped back to using the Paladin as a heal bot so here is hoping that resolves some of the issues.

All told I am very happy with this season so far, but I also know that I am going to maybe get a week out of it before returning to Path of Exile as my primary game. Playing Diablo III made me realize how lucky I am to have so many good ARPGs to swap between. It used to be Diablo III was pretty much it for me, and I would hunger for a new season. Now when I get tired of one game I can swap to one of many other ARPGs and keep the joy rolling. At some point, I will make my way back to Last Epoch and see some of the changes over there. For now, though, I am happy to be playing some Diablo III and happy to be working on my Invoker build. If you’ve ever loved Diablo III, I highly suggest reinstalling and checking this season out because the Enmity rifts are extremely fun. I love that it is content that you can do pretty much immediately. I can only hope that the Diablo III team will be consumed by Diablo IV where hopefully they can right that sinking ship.

Getting Started with Path of Exile

The launch of Diablo IV was a huge event, and it brought a lot of players who latently enjoy the ARPG genre out of the woodwork. Unfortunately, this mishandling of the game leading up to the launch of the first season has created a bit of a vacuum. If you survey the ARPG landscape you find many options with various benefits. Last Epoch, for example, shows a lot of promise but is still very much “in development” and lacks a lot of excitement regarding its endgame options. Grim Dawn feels a little dated, and while Wolcen has a great campaign it lacks a bit once you wrap things up. Path of Exile is by far the most complete package out there, but it has an extremely steep learning curve in order to get to the point where you feel comfortable with all of the concepts. For example, I am well over 1200 hours into the game and I still feel like I am just getting started.

The popular logic within the Path of Exile community is that new players should follow a build guide. I have done this thing… but quite honestly the “newbie” focused content isn’t quite “newbie enough” for someone just getting started with this game. The thing is Path of Exile has a lot of concepts that are fairly unique to this game. The problem is that a veteran of this game will just accept as common knowledge a number of concepts that you may have never experienced before. I feel like I am setting myself up for failure, but my hope is that I can help to bridge that gap. I do feel like the best way to play this game IS to follow a guide, but my goal will be to fill in some of the necessary 100-level coursework required to make it so that you CAN realistically hop into the game and follow a guide.

What is a League?

I am going to be addressing the new character creation process, but I am going to go a bit out of order. One of the first screens that can throw a player for a loop is this one, which asks you to make some decisions about your characters. Many ARPGs have the concept of a season and Path of Exile refers to this as a “League”. Essentially this is how the game adds new content, and there will be some form of a seasonal mechanic that lasts for somewhere in the neighborhood of three months before being replaced by another “league”. Currently, we are in the Crucible League and this adds a weird mechanic where you can add randomly generated talent trees to your weapons. When a specific league is over, everything migrates to the Standard league where your characters will reside from that point forward.

Path of Exile has a wide variety of different game modes, and all of these started out at one point as “League” mechanics. If for example, Crucible was well enough received, it might at some point get reworked slightly and brought into the Standard league and as such become a permanent part of the game going forward. There are a number of optional challenges that make content more difficult. Hardcore for example is treated as a separate league where you only have one life, and if you die your character can migrate to either the Standard or current League mechanic. “Solo Self Found” or SSF is a special challenge that makes it so that you cannot trade items with players or have access to your guild’s shared stash. Ruthless is a relatively new mode where you have extreme item scarcity in your drops and player skills are not available on vendors and have to be found either from quests or drops.

Generally speaking, I recommend players start characters in whatever League happens to be going on at the time and without any optional difficulty settings. Right now the Crucible League is taking place, and on the 18th of August, the next league will start. We find out this Friday what those league mechanics are going to look like. When a League ends, all of your characters are migrated to Standard and all of your stash tabs will be migrated intact as special “remove-only” tabs that allow you to withdraw items but not store new items.

What Class Should I Play?

This is the screen that allows you to choose what character class you want to play. This screen is a bit of a trap because if you are used to playing games like Diablo… your character class means something very specific. You might see the big beefy Marauder and think, that I need to choose this class in order to play a melee character. You might see the Templar aka the Old Man… and think this is going to be a cleric class and will heal people. You would be wrong, and I feel like this sets players up to make some wildly incorrect assumptions about the game. All classes in Path of Exile can essentially use every single skill available in the game. You can make a spell-slinging Marauder or a two-handed weapon melee-focused Witch. There are no hard lines drawn in the sand about what each of these can do other than the ascendancies… which is a rabbit hole we will talk about later.

Instead, it is best to think about the different classes in Path of Exile based on where they start on the passive tree. Please note… this is a wildly truncated version of the passive tree because I cannot really get a screenshot that has ALL of it in the same 16:9 aspect ratio image. There are six sectors to the passive tree and these are labelled based on the core stats that they tend to focus on. Often times these are referred to as “Pure Characters” and “Hybrid Characters”.

  • Pure Characters
    • Marauder – Strength – Starts in the South West Sector.
    • Witch – Intelligence – Starts in the North Central Sector
    • Ranger – Dexterity – Starts in the South East Sector
  • Hybrid Characters
    • Templar – Strength and Intelligence – Starts in the North West Sector.
    • Shadow – Intelligence and Dexterity – Starts in the North East Sector
    • Duelist – Strength and Dexterity – Starts in the South Central Sector

The Scion is a character class that you cannot start the game with until you have unlocked that character by playing through the campaign on at least one other character. The Scion is a bit of an odd duck in that you start in the dead center of the passive tree. It also has some other weird things going on in that it has a bit of a hybrid ascension path allowing you to choose from traits available of any of the other ascensions.

While your character class does not dictate the type of character you can build, it does however dictate what you have easy access to based upon the starting position. For example, this is my Wintertide Brand Occultist, which is based on the Witch starter class. I have spread out my points all along the top of the passive tree going both into the Templar and Shadow sectors to grab things that made the build work. There are a lot of nodes in the Shadow area that allow you to scale up damage over time, and then nodes in the Templar area that allow me to buff up the brand spells that I am casting. Almost all builds are going to travel around between multiple different regions of the tree as they seek out nodes that specifically bolster whatever build they are trying to accomplish.

What are Ascendancy Classes?

Starting in Act III of the campaign you will gain access to “Ascendancy Classes” which shift your character from the fairly generic starter class to something a bit more focused. Each has its own talent tree that is independent of the rest of the passive skill tree, and over the course of your leveling process, you will be able to choose eight different skill nodes in those ascendancy trees. They tend to lean in a specific direction for example if you really love Totem builds, then you might want to specifically check out the Chieftan Marauder ascendancy or the Hierophant Templar ascendancy. Do you really want to play a super tanky character that has a lot of defensive layers? Then you might want to check out the Juggernaut Marauder ascendancy or the Champion Duelist ascendancy. If you really love Minion builds… then, unfortunately, you are probably going to be pigeonholed into playing a Witch and then ascending into a Necromancer.

While the Ascendency class focuses the character in a more specific direction, it is still important not to try and think of them as being ONLY one type of character. For example, Toxic Rain is a very popular ability that causes poisonous rain to deal chaos damage to everything in an area. There are many ways to build this type of character and currently, there are at least four different meta builds for different ascendency classes. I personally played Toxic Rain Pathfinder which is a ranger ascendency, but Raider is also popular as well as Toxic Rain Trickster in Shadow, and Toxic Rain Champion in Duelist. When someone is building a character they tend to focus more on what ability they want to use and less on which specific character and ascension path that they want to follow. I love Righteous Fire and there are very specific builds for Juggernaut, Inquisitor, and Elementalist… that all have different positives and negatives.

What are Skill Gems?

One of the things that makes Path of Exile different from other ARPGs is the fact that you can socket any skill gem into almost any piece of gear and your character can immediately start using that ability. There are a bunch of caveats around that statement that we will dive into a bit later, but essentially the gems that you socket into your gear are what give your character different abilities. All gems essentially fall into one of two broad categories:

  • Active Skill Gems – These are abilities that can be bound to a key and are performed when that key bind is pressed or the skill slot is clicked. These fire off spells, swing weapons, cast buffs, or move players around the screen. They DO things… thus Active Skills.
  • Support Gems – These gems specifically modify Active Skill gems and change either how they work or the types and amount of damage that they deal.

Not all support gems can modify all active skill gems, and how this is determined is based on a “tag” system. In the above image, you will notice that there is a comma-delimited list of terms that appear in the first line of the skill. In order to use a Support Gem on Ground Slam for example, that Support Gem must include at least one of the following terms: Attack, AoE, Slam, or Melee. This is going to be true for passive skills and gear as well, but we will get into that a bit further in.

Another key differentiator to get in your head is the type of active ability. Essentially everything is going to be one of the following:

  • Attack Skill – This is a physical attack and is the equivalent of swinging a sword, throwing a spear, or some other kinetic physical activity.
  • Spell Skill – This is the act of casting a spell or channeling your focus into something mystically.

This largely matters because the items you pick up out in the world will give you bonuses for different sorts of skills. For example, the Sceptre on the left says that it increases the Elemental Damage of the player by 40% so that specifically means that the tags of the skill have to have Fire, Cold, Lightning, or Elemental in order to benefit from that bonus. Similarly the Gauntlets on the right show that they add 11 to 17 Cold Damage to Attacks. In order for the player to receive this bonus, they have to be using a Skill that has the tag “Attack” in it. So scrolling back up in this case the gauntlets would give that bonus to someone using Ground Slam, but not someone using Holy Flame Totem. Often times you end up with gear with stats that you can’t necessarily use… because it is extremely rare that an item roll is perfectly applicable to whatever build you are trying to create.

What are Item Links?

The items that you pick up are going to have a number of sockets available, each of them with a specific color, and the possibility of having those sockets linked. There are also white sockets that allow you to put any color gem in them, but they are a bit rare so we are not going to get into them. In order for a support gem to apply to a specific skill, it needs to be “linked” to the socket that the active skill gem is in. Now this link does not have to be direct… for example, in the above image I have a chest with six links, and the very last green socket is still applying to the active skill gem which happens to be the green gem in the first socket. The order of the sockets does not matter in a link, only that they are linked. Folks tend to refer to items based on the color of sockets that are available. So in the above sequence of items, I would refer to them as RRRB, RRGB, and GGGBBR. More correctly folks often refer to things with a dash indicating the links so since the gloves above have two different two-links they would be referred to as R-R B-R.

You can change the color and links of an item but for the sake of being the most basic of primers… I am not going to dive into that at all. On the Scion that I have been leveling recently, I am using Armageddon Brand as my primary skill, and as such I am using it as my six-link. Essentially there are only two pieces of gear that can have six links. The most common of these is your chestpiece, but if your build can use a two-handed weapon you can have a second six-link there. Let’s dive into the chain of skills that I am specifically using with that ability and I will explain a little bit of the logic behind them.

  • Armageddon Brand – A brand is a type of spell that is fairly unique to Path of Exile, but essentially it is a magical disease that can spread between enemies. There are lots of different kinds, but this one in particular calls down a meteor from above that smashes into the enemy and deals area-of-effect damage. As such this spell has these tags: Spell, AOE, Fire, Duration, Brand
    • Swiftbrand Support – This skill essentially makes it so that brands apply their effect faster and then fizzle out faster as well. Essentially imagine dealing more damage over a shorter period of time.
    • Increased Critical Damage Support – Pretty self-explanatory, it increases the Critical Damage Multiplier for the spell. This bends the rules a bit because Arma Brand does not specifically have a tag that says “Critical” but it does have verbiage down in the body of the spell.
    • Concentrated Effect Support – This support gem makes it so Armageddon Brand deals more area damage, but makes the total radius where the damage is applied a bit smaller.
    • Elemental Focus Support – This will make it so Arma Brand deals more elemental damage, but can’t apply any elemental ailments. This is fine because most of our damage is coming from the meteor strike so that is what we want to increase the damage of.
    • Lifetap – This is a utility gem that makes it so any active skill in the link will cost life instead of mana. This is a common tactic that allows you to reserve your mana for other purposes and has the nice side benefit of giving you a buff to total damage after you have effectively damaged yourself to cast the spell. We won’t necessarily go into this… but you can also use Lifetap to give any Active Skill Gem the “duration” tag.

It is around this point that you are thinking to yourself “Gee Bel, that is a lot of nonsense to keep straight in my head” and you would be correct. Thankfully there is a faster way in the game to see what support gems work with which active skills. There will be a vendor in every act that sells skill gems that you have unlocked, as well as one in Act III in the Library that sells all gems that you have access to, and another one much later that does the same role. When you mouse over a support gem in the vendor inventory, it will tell you which skills you have actively slotted into your gear that it will be capable of supporting. For example, Generosity Support makes it so that Auras no longer benefit you, but instead affect your allies… which are anyone in your party or your minions. If you notice it tells me with a green checkmark that Defiance Banner, Determination, and Vitality can use this support gem… aka all of my Aura-based buffs.

Following a Guide or Yoloing It

Essentially there are two ways to play Path of Exile. The first is following a guide and trying to understand the thought processes that led to the creation of that guide. The second is to just get into the game and start making choices, knowing that eventually you will probably hit a wall and need to start over from scratch. I did not really come to love this game until I followed a guide… and even then it took me three leagues of semi-serious play before I felt like I really got a handle on how exactly this game works. Before then I made a lot of failed attempts to get into the game and created some pretty crappy characters in the process. This guide is less a guide trying to tell you how you should be playing, and more an attempt at helping you across the chasm of knowledge between where the guide creators think you are… and where you actually are as a brand-new player.

Like I said before, I am over 1200 hours into this game and there are still segments of the game that I have never experienced… and honestly may never experience. The depth is a huge factor for why I keep recommending this game in spite of the fact that it is so easy for a new player to completely drown in it. Having played and knowing what I know now… I do find a certain amount of merit in the “fuck around and find out” school of thought when it comes to a game like this. I think ultimately which path I would suggest you take, entirely depends upon you as a player. Are you easily frustrated when the journey comes to a hard impassible wall? If so then you would likely have a much better experience following a guide from someone like Zizaran or Pohx. However, if you are someone who loves to experiment and can accept failure and start over from scratch several times… then maybe your best option is just to roll something and go with it until you hit a wall.

But Can’t I Just Respec?

Technically the only decision that you cannot undo in Path of Exile is your starter class. You can respec your entire passive tree… all 124 points of it and even respec your Ascendency to choose another one. However, this is not as easy a thing as that sounds. During the course of the campaign, pending you do all of the side quests, your character will gain 20 Passive Skill Refund points. Generally speaking in order to do a full respec you are going to need to lean on Orbs of Regret that drop randomly in the wild. By the end of a league I have more of these than I can use, but before you get up and running… and can successfully farm content you will be strapped to get enough of these to reasonably change up a character. This is why the common logic is that if you hit a wall, and need to do more than minor tweaks to your character… you are just better off starting from scratch and carrying with your the knowledge of where you strayed from your objectives.

The world record for leveling through the campaign and getting to level 100 is roughly an hour. This is not something I could ever accomplish, but I can zip through the campaign and get to maps in about five hours. I’ve gotten to that point after playing many characters and realizing the flow of zones and some improved questing tips. Your first time through the ten acts of Path of Exile is likely going to take you multiple days. However, every time you do it… you get faster and I think before long I will probably be able to do it in around three hours. I’ve reached the point where I find leveling a new character to be one of my most relaxing activities, but it took me a while to get there. I know it seems daunting to start over, but the more often you do it… the faster you will get at zipping through all of the early activities.

Sometimes your accidents just lead you down paths you didn’t think to go… if you are willing to keep poking at it. For example, I started this dumb Scion character entirely for the purpose of beating Act III so I could get that achievement. I had no real plan for that character and am not following any sort of a build guide, and have already pivoted hard away from the skill that I was originally intending to follow. It has introduced me to Armageddon Brand, a skill I had never used and now like enough to consider properly designing a character around it. I consider that extremely valuable experience that came only because I gave myself the leverage to just start fucking around until I found a path to move forward. It took me a long time before I was willing to let go of the ladder and accept the possibility of a failed state. I am having a heck of a lot of fun, with a character that I never planned on caring about and gave the truly dumb name of “BelGlamRock”.

Barely Scratched the Surface

This is already a massive post… so I am going to wrap things up. As the heading says, I have barely scratched the surface of this game. I am not sure how many more guides like this I intend to create. The goal here is just to throw some terms out, explain them a bit, and give players a bit of an easier time starting the game. There are a slew of way more qualified guide makers out there that can pick up where I left off. I am looking forward to the announcements from ExileCon this Friday and the start of whatever the new league is on August 18th. I hope something I said helps you in your journey, and feel free to reach out to me if you have any specific questions. That is one positive about the Path of Exile community, is that generally speaking, most players are happy to help new folks get started.

The Last Season

Good Morning Friends! I am going to warn you that this post is going to be a bit on the melancholy side. Yesterday over lunch I finished up Diablo III Season 28 or at least finished the Guardian step in the journey. There is still a ton that I have left to unlock on the Altar of Sacrifice, but I largely plan on doing that at my leisure over the coming months. While this was not the easiest season ever, it was definitely on the easier scale. Ace finished their season I believe on Sunday, so I was lagging a bit behind. My goal is to help Thalen and maybe Byx if she wants it… finish up their seasons and largely chill out doing low-key content for awhile. I feel like I have three pretty powerful builds on the Demon Hunter having crafted the Gears of Dreadlands Haedrigs set, the Unhallowed Essence Multishot set, and then a Marauder set yesterday for the purpose of the set dungeon.

Shocking to no one who has been with me for very long in my Diablo journey, saved the set dungeon for the very last thing. It always feels really weird to have completed almost all of the harder achievements with this relatively simple one sitting there holding up the process. I hate set dungeons because I have a mental block about being timed while being expected to accomplish a certain set of tasks. This is deeply rooted in my brain and dates back to some third-grade trauma. While I fully understand WHY it exists, I have never truly been able to remove it entirely. I always make the set dungeon out to be this epic obstacle, then like yesterday end up one-shotting the damned thing. I specifically built a Marauder set because, for a Demon Hunter, it is probably the easiest option especially now that the damned worms are marked with a skull on the map.

While this was an enjoyable season… there is just something about it that feels hollow. I think it dawned on me WHY it feels weird. The entire community is treating this like this is the end of Diablo III. Raxxanterax for example has been a pillar of the content creation community, and yesterday announced that the video for Challenge Rift 297 would be the very last of those guides that he released. Even between Ace and I, we largely wanted to make sure that we were going to finish this season because we thought that with the impending release of Diablo IV, this might be the last opportunity to rekindle the old fun. It seems like everyone seems to have that same idea and I am seeing folks returning from the Path of Exile community that had not played the game in years. This feels like a send-off for a beloved friend, but also… is exceptionally depressing.

Diablo III has meant so much to me on a deeply personal level. Sure I have always loved Diablo since I first got into testing for the original game back in college. Diablo III however set the pace of a reoccurring destination event surrounding its seasons. Ace and I would do this late-night leveling thing on Friday they released, and while we’ve made less progress over the years as we have gotten more used to sleep… it was still this thing I think we both looked forward to. It felt like an MMORPG launch happening every three or four months like clockwork, and no matter what else we were playing it would bring a handful of us together for this destination event. While the magic also lasted a shorter period of time as we got better at the time, often finishing the season before the end of the first season… it was still something that I set my calendars by and made sure I was ready to go without distractions.

I think part of the struggle we’ve gone through over the last few years is that Diablo was severely tainted by the events surrounding the shitstorm that is Blizzard Entertainment. We’ve struggled at length to find another game that triggered the same sort of mental joy that Diablo III Season Journey did, and have failed. While I love Path of Exile as the ugly child that it is, it really feels bad to play with friends. We’ve tried Wolcen, Torchlight III, Torchlight Infinite, and hell even some Grim Dawn and none of them have managed to rekindle the magic surrounding our quarterly destination event. It is my hope that maybe just maybe Last Epoch releasing its multiplayer update on the 9th of March will give us the first real viable option. I’ve played enough of it to know that I enjoy it quite a bit, but it is really going to take us all playing it together to determine if it feels “right”.

Due to some lucky circumstances… I got gifted a copy of Diablo IV so I will be poking my head into it when it releases and the upcoming beta periods. However I have enough friends that are simply not willing to give Blizzard any more money, so I figure it is going to be a pretty hollow experience. I am also not entirely certain that it would capture the magic of Diablo III. When the third game was released, there were large parts of the broader Diablo community that hated it. Diablo IV feels very much like a play to bring them back into the fold and maybe make a dent in the popularity of Path of Exile. That means it is very unlikely to be the big dumb fun that a Diablo III season is, and will be more focused on a more grimdark hardcore audience. Diablo Immortal was probably the true spiritual successor, but given that it wound up being a shit sandwich of truly evil monetizations… that one is off the table.

I guess even if Diablo III fades away, I have all of the memories of me and Ace doing dumb things together for fun and profit. This is one of the oldest images I found on WordPress of us doing a greater rift together. I’m hoping that Last Epoch can become the next game that we shift our quarterly nonsense to. Path of Exile worked great for me, but never really became a good-feeling group activity. Last Epoch is going to be starting their seasons I believe around the launch of 1.0 and calling them “Cycles”. It sounds like at least with the start they are going to be relatively simplistic outings without a lot of extra mechanics going on. I think I am mostly okay with that because there is a thin line between doing next to nothing with early Diablo III seasons, and the wild feature bloat that is Path of Exile leagues.

Basically, I feel like a good friend is moving away, and that there isn’t much I can do about that. I fully expect when Diablo IV launches that what community existed around Diablo III will slowly fade away. So in many ways, this probably legitimately is the “Last Season” and I am going to try and be okay with that.

Diablo III Season 28 Start

Good Morning Friends! On Friday evening Season 28 of Diablo 3 started, and I returned to my regular rhythm with my good friend Ace in attempting to complete it. We decided to come back to Diablo in part because this is probably the last great hurrah for the game before the launch of Diablo 4, and the title goes even further into “maintenance mode”. Speaking of maintenance… I had a bit of a rough start. I logged in early Friday morning and was encountering all sorts of issues where my stash tabs were not loading immediately and when they did load it looked like a 90s-era GeoCities site loading one icon at a time. This stabilized but when it came to the actual seasonal launch, I started encountering a problem where I would hard lock every 30 mins or so and then have to hard kill the application to get out of it and back into the game… occasionally having to go so far as to go into task manager and kill battle.net entirely.

I am not sure what caused this or honestly what solved it. I tried to do a client repair but it did not seem to be doing much of anything. Instead what I ended up doing is exiting Battle.net entirely, moving my D3 install, and then going through the process of reinstalling the game while pointing at the new directory. From there I attempted a client repair again, and this time around it took about 10 minutes to complete making me think that maybe it was actually doing something that time. When I got into the game I noticed that for some reason it was set to 32-bit mode instead of 64-bit mode. I swapped that and from that point forward the game has been extremely smooth and I’ve yet to crash out to the desktop again. I am not sure exactly which of the things I did actually solved the problem, or even what the problem was exactly… but for now I am going to stop asking questions.

When I want an easy mode season, I always lean heavily on the Demon Hunter. This time around the Gears of Dreadlands set was on Haedrigs Gift, which meant that I completed most of the early seasonal accomplishments on that set. It is perfectly cromulent and is technically supposed to be the best set currently for progression. I’m not exactly the biggest fan of it because it feels a bit piddly given that you have to keep weaving in normal attacks or you just stop functioning entirely. Weaving normal attacks is always a good idea mind you, but if you get to a point where you can’t easily the wheels sort of fall off.

I used my farming ability however to piece together the Unhallowed set and swap over to Multishot. While my brain had gotten used to the spin to win strafing GoD build, I am slowly getting adjusted once again to the more familiar Demon Hunter gameplay. For the longest time I was waiting for a Yangs to drop and then… waiting for a second Dawn. Once I got both I swapped over and can immediately more comfortably farm T16. Saturday night after recording the podcast several of us knocked out two conquests in rapid order, so I should be able to complete the third one without much issue when I finish leveling 3 gems to 65.

That puts me in a very familiar spot when it comes to finishing up the season. I’ve not touched a set dungeon at all because I hate them. Right now I plan on doing the Marauder set because if I remember correctly it is a pretty easy one. I’ve almost completed building out Marauder and am only missing a few pieces. I have everything that I need ready for the Augment minus one of the red gems, and then it is simply a case of extracting a bunch of cube powers and pushing the gems to 70. I feel like some of the pressure has lessened because I could slack off entirely and then finish up all of this stuff in the final weekend if that ended up happening.

This season’s gimmick is the Altar of Rites, which ends up driving a lot of your farming and grinding. Essentially you sacrifice items to the Altar to get permanent buffs. For example, now my pet can salvage whites, blues, and yellows in addition to picking up gold. The problem with this however is that it cannot keep up with the process and seems to miss a ton of gold and a ton of materials. Another buff is that it makes it so all gear has no level requirement… but what it actually does in practice is set everything to level 1. However Companions don’t seem to be able to take advantage of this, so it means while leveling you cannot tell if your companions can or cannot equip something. The Altar is cool, but also seemingly introduced a bunch of jank into the game that they seemingly were not quite prepared for.

What I was not really prepared for… is how much more I seem to enjoy Path of Exile as compared to Diablo III. I just don’t feel nearly as engaged this season in Diablo, and it is almost as though the gameplay loop is nowhere near as rich as I remember it being. I had fun running amok with Ace, and I had missed that sort of experience, but for whatever reason, the gearing process in D3 has felt way more hollow this season than it has in previous ones. I could micromanage getting exactly the right stats, but it doesn’t feel as repeatably enjoyable as roaming around in Delve, Heist, or doing Maps in Path of Exile.

I am really hoping that when the Last Epoch Multiplayer launches, it can be that happy medium between the more casual grouping play of Diablo III, and the more rich systems of Path of Exile. I also hope to get into testing for Diablo IV so I can try that out and see how it feels. Basically, I am not sure if I was just in the wrong frame of mind for this season of Diablo III, but something feels missing and I can’t quite put my finger on it. I am going to wrap things up, but I think I would rather be playing Guild Wars 2 when I am not actively playing with friends.