D4

Diablo Disconnects

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Good Morning, Folks. Monday at 6:30 pm my time, Diablo IV Lord of Hatred launched, and it has been a bit of a mess. I think things have mostly stabilized, but for the first evening, I was getting disconnected when trying to start story quests. What made this so infuriating is that Diablo 4 has no checkpointing system when it comes to story content and dungeons. This means if you get disconnected anywhere during the content, you have to start over from the very beginning. Worse than that, there is this whole problem of your character being stranded in the world and having to keep attempting to log back in. This was not just an “overloaded servers” issue, because Tuesday morning, I woke up about 3 am and could not get back to sleep, and decided to go ahead and get up and play some Diablo 4. At 4 am, I got disconnected from a quest dungeon and experienced the same behavior as during peak times. They have since dropped a few hotfix patches, and things seem to mostly be stable now.

My original plan was to play a Warlock and lean heavily on Command Fallen, which, at least on paper, sounded similar to my beloved Summon Raging Spirits from Path of Exile. In practice, however, this ability feels NOTHING like a minion ability, and is instead mostly a targeted attack that just happens to send an explosive minion at the target. This feels super freaking awkward and nothing like the spammy SRS gameplay style where you are running around and flooding the map with temporary minions. This, combined with the disconnects, made me rage quit out on the warlock for the time being and roll a Paladin instead, since I already know that I enjoy that playstyle. At some point, I will revisit the Warlock and probably do some sort of hellfire caster build. I was pretty happy with the name Beldemona and shocked that I had never used that before for one of my “evil” caster characters.

At the current moment, I am level 37 and slowly chipping my way through the story content. I played a bit Tuesday morning and then again after maybe 7 pm last night. I have no clue where I am in the totality of the story, but so far, it is pretty solid. I hate the whole Akarat as Jesus simulacrum thing, but the story surrounding the Amazons and even the engagement with Lilith so far have been pretty great. It feels like a massive improvement over the Nahantu storyline from the first expansion. They did, however, kind of do Neyrelle dirty, and I am annoyed about that. The layout of the zones in Skovos is way more focused on the story content than I would have come to expect. I am not sure how these zones are going to feel after completing the story when you are dealing with evergreen open-world content. Then again, Nahantu kind of suffered from the same problem, and I never spent much time returning to those zones.

I am not entirely certain how I feel about the “no passives” build structure that went in with Lord of Hatred. At least with my Thorns Paladin, you spend a lot of time leveling as something else and then swapping a bunch of things over at 36 when you unlock some of the specific paths on the tree. It just feels like we are leaning way more heavily on gearing, but then again, since you can choose to craft whatever temper you need, instead of randomly rolling these, it might all shake out in the end. I’ve not really gotten any useful legendaries yet, and I am not sure what level those really begin to factor into the drop pool. I did spend a bit of grinding in Helltide when I got frustrated with the disconnects on Monday night, and the rewards, at least at low levels, felt pretty crummy. I was mostly getting blues from opening loot boxes, and I would have expected almost entirely yellow or better. I am looking forward to finishing the campaign so that I can see what endgame loot starts to look like.

Being brutally honest, I am not really certain if I like this version of Diablo IV better than the last version I played when the Paladin was introduced. It is different, and I will have to see what it feels like once I conquer the storyline demon. I never play through the story with repeat seasonal characters. My inner murder hobo is way too strong, and I mostly grind out the levels in Helltide or do whispers. I am really looking forward to seeing what War Plans introduces to the game, but I figure all of that unlocks the moment you finish the story. I don’t REALLY play ARPGs for the story, even though I occasionally enjoy it as I do in Path of Exile 1/2. Currently, it feels like I am taking my medicine and just biding my time for the story content to be finished. Lord of Hatred is better than the base game and the first expansion, but it is still not as good as something like Diablo III was storyline-wise. I don’t love all of the ambiguity of the morality in this game. I prefer to smash demons and angels and not have to care about who is betraying me in the process.

In other news, it is Evil Lemon time, aka when I am hooked up to a portable chemotherapy pump that is slowly poisoning me. The worst part of chemotherapy is realizing that I have 10 days where I feel various versions of crap, and then 4 days at the very end where I have to cram two weeks of necessary activities into before prepping for the next round. I am on the downward slide, and remembering this morning how much food hurts. Essentially, early on in the cycle, it hurts to chew anything and swallow anything, which is often why I shift over to a mostly liquid diet for a few days until the worst of that passes. I know I will be at my weakest this coming Saturday and Sunday, and it helps that the flow of this process is predictable. The cold reaction was instant and much worse than round two, which was in itself worse than round one. Luckily, it is not exhibiting in neuropathy, really, but mostly just pain because the skin has peeled off my fingertips. I am regularly applying lotion in an attempt to help with the healing, but it is bad enough that my phone rarely recognizes my thumbprint for unlocks.

Anyways, hoping to maybe wrap the story tonight in Diablo IV and see what the endgame has in store for me.

SRS Warlock Maybe

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Good Morning, folks. I had to deal with labwork and a doctor’s visit this morning, so I am getting a bit of a late start on the whole blogging thing. Over the last few days, I have gone from not really being interested in Diablo IV Lord of Hatred to legitimately being pumped to play next Monday evening when it drops. Yesterday we got a Campfire Chat, but I have to admit it was a much better version of this construct than we have had previously. Generally, these have been deeply tone deaf and smarmy with a constant refrain of “we hear you”, but also not actually significantly changing the game. Lord of Hatred to Diablo IV feels like Reaper of Souls was to Diablo III, where they effectively changed everything about the game for the better. Of course, there were some weird product placements like some sort of collaboration with a guitar manufacturer, Korn writing a song for the soundtrack, and an inexplicable crossover with Trolli gummy worms. This is just a Blizzard thing, and sadly, we are not getting back the Horde flavor of Mountain Dew, which was fucking amazing.

I highly suggest watching the entire campfire chat, or at least something like the summary that Raxx released, because there is a lot of information there. I am going to talk through a couple of the things that really stood out to me. Probably the biggest is the fact that we are ACTUALLY getting crafting in the game with the addition of the Horadric Cube. This has been a problem-solving plot device many times in the Diablo franchise, and this time around, it seems to be replacing something like the crafting bench, harvest crafting, and crafting currency from Path of Exile. You can, in theory, take an item from blue to yellow, to unique, all while crafting additional affixes onto it to eventually roll something interesting. One of the big things that I noticed going back for Midnight is how much Blizzard has seemingly learned from other MMORPGs, and it feels like FINALLY Diablo admits that they exist in a genre… and should look to the exemplars of that genre for inspiration. Blizz has always had a bit of an ego that they were innovators, and should blaze a new trail… but at least in the case of Diablo, it just felt like they were providing a game void of expected “basic” features.

The other thing that really excites me is the introduction of War Plans. Diablo has had a bunch of relatively uninteresting activities, and not a lot of pressing reason for you to be doing any of them. Some of these are actually pretty fun, like Nightmare Dungeons, but it always sort of felt like there was nothing really pushing you to do them other than occasionally the open world objectives. War Plans, in theory, will be that guiding force that rewards you for doing a certain number of things in a row, with fixed rewards for doing them. This reminds me far less of Path of Exile mapping and more of Echo Chains that just introduced into Last Epoch. Still having any sort of guiding force in this game is a massive positive in my book, especially since they are also giving us a way to throw our thumb on the scale and determine what sorts of activities and rewards we receive. While this is not the Breach or Expedition or Blight style reusable content that grows season after season that I really hope they start creating, it is at least a massive leap in a better direction.

The other big takeaway from yesterday is that it looks like there has been a complete changing of the guard from the Campfire Chats that I found so grating. I hope everything that we are seeing is a sign that we have some fresh ideas feeding into the game and trying to actually make it competitive with the other franchises. Right now, as an ARPG player, I care about when Path of Exile 1 Leagues start, Path of Exile 2 Leagues, and Last Epoch leagues… but Diablo IV has never factored into that calculus of how I plan my gaming. I would love there to be some pressure that makes me want to choose a Diablo season over some other game. I think that would be pretty freaking cool because it will continue to push ALL of the games in this pack forward to try and create more interesting stuff. What makes this genre so different from MMORPGs is that they are ultimately designed for short bursts of massive engagement… and then folks fade away until the next exciting release. Thing is, so long as you keep giving us good shit…. we will keep showing up for our infusion of crack.

The other thing making me excited is that it looks like Warlock might support one of my favorite minion playstyles. Summon Raging Spirits is an ability in Path of Exile that summons short-term minions, and you can give them something called Minion Instability Support to make them explode. This also exists in Last Epoch in the form of Volatile Zombies, and I really like the spammy playstyle of summoning minions and then making them prematurely explode when I oversummon to the limit. Command Fallen for the Warlock appears to be this sort of short-term, exploding minions gameplay, and I am all here for it. I think I have mostly cobbled together something that looks like a build. Granted, this is all based on the Maxroll D4 Planner, and I have no clue how up-to-date this information is, but I expect at least the shell of this build to survive. I am sure I will tweak and adjust as I go, but I think this more or less represents a reasonable template of abilities. I can’t honestly remember how many ability picks we get, but there is a ritual ability that I will add if I have more slots. This is pretty much what I am going to yolo come Monday evening, and we will see if I can make something stick.

One parting shot across the bow. This is a screenshot from the presentation that shows the release schedule. It looks like the game is dropping at 6 pm my time, and I expect to be there with bells on. There will also be Twitch drops and all the normal fanfare. Reportedly, the game was available for preloading yesterday, so you can have everything ready to go come Monday. I admit, this is the first time I have been legitimately amped to play Diablo IV since release. I hope to see at least some of you doing the nonsense with me.

Ancients and Warlocks Oh My

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Good Morning, Folks. Yesterday, we got the teaser trailer dropped for the next Path of Exile II league/expansion, and it was extremely brief. More importantly, though, the community has been clamoring for some sort of notice as to when it was dropping. Folks take off work for these things, and in many cases need a decent amount of notice to get the time off. The good news is we are getting a reveal stream on May 7th. The bad is that the league itself is not dropping until May 29th, which is a significant delay from the original intended “every four months” pace of a POE1 and POE2 league. There will be gnashing of teeth, especially among the folks who only play Path of Exile II about this delay. For the Path of Exile diehards, SirGog announced yesterday that he was going to do some sort of a private league, and those are usually interesting. I’ve participated in one of these leagues before, and in that case, everything dropped scoured so you were forced to craft your own gear. It was interesting in an academic sense, but if that ends up being the case again, I am likely going to skip it.

The trailer shows a giant megastructure rising up out of the ground, and I personally think what we are seeing is somehow representative of the new atlas. This has been a feature that has been promised for a while, because the Delve-like Endless Atlas has generally been poorly received by the playerbase. As someone who loves Delve… I have to say that for whatever reason, when you apply this same concept to mapping, it just does not work. At least based on player behaviors in Path of Exile 1, folks tend to gravitate to a few map layouts that they really like and then run them over and over. Truth be told, the new way that the Atlas works in POE1 is brilliant, and I would love to see something like that translated over to POE2. I think the concept of Endless Atlas is cool, but I would love to see it as a side content. The reason why Delve works so well is that any given node only takes a few minutes to run, whereas every map in POE2 feels like it takes an eternity. It would be cool if they translated the Endless Atlas over to a sequence of micro objectives, building a sort of Delve 2.0 in the game with clearly marked rewards on each of the nodes.

Since POE2 is so far out, that has pretty much cemented the idea that I am going to be diving into Diablo 4 Lord of Hatred when it drops on April 28th. Yesterday Blizz released the opening cinematic, and I am maybe more interested than any of the Akarat nonsense has given me to this point. Right now, unless something drastic changes, I plan to try out the new Warlock class when the expansion drops next Tuesday. That is a chemo day for me, but generally speaking, I feel okay for the first few days after the poison is delivered… and then go downhill drastically as I approach the weekend. If, for whatever reason, I do not vibe with the Warlock’s particular form of summoning minions, then I will probably fall back on playing a Paladin. I think I will dig this expansion more than previous ones because I have figured out how to macro multiple abilities to the same button on my G600 mouse, given that D4 tends to be “spam every button on cooldown” gameplay, and I can reduce that madness to a single click. I did this with the most recent Last Epoch season and it worked swimmingly.

I am honestly vaguely excited about Lord of Hatred, because it seems like Blizzard has made some significant steps in the right direction to turning this game into something that has some lasting draw. The big problem that I have had up until this point with D4 is that leveling is generally pretty fun, but once you hit the end game… it feels boring and repetitive, and they ruined the one thing that was actually fun. Ace and I used to group up together and pool our resources and do a bajillion boss summons for drops… and they recently made it so that you only get loot if you are providing materials. The force multiplier of playing with friends stopped functioning, and as a result… we mostly just stopped playing together. Wudijo is pretty much one of the diehard Diablo creators, and he has released a bunch of information once the press embargo was lifted. He released another short video this morning showing off the new map overlay, which is pretty huge. That was one of the things that annoyed me the most about D4. You could not simply toggle the map overlay to stay on, rather than having to keep manually popping it up.

In the meantime, nothing has really been hitting gamewise for me, so I am back to playing Last Epoch. I contemplated rolling a Warpath Void Knight, but instead have gone back to leveling my Fire Aura Spellblade. I keep chasing slightly better gear, so that hopefully I can improve my survival. Ward feels way squishier than Health and Regeneration/Leech. It just seems like all of my ward evaporates at exactly the wrong time, and Omen windows seem to be the hardest content for me. Essentially, I have gotten to the point where I clear everything else in the echo but the Omen, and then do that last so that if I die, I have at least completed the echo and can move on with my life. Right now, I am farming the Blood, Frost, and Death timeline in an attempt to get a better pair of Frostbite Shackles. I love the new corruption system, but I refuse to “yolo corrupt” items and risk not having a copy… so I want multiple copies to play with. I could also use more copies of Last Steps of the Living for the same reason.

Anyways, time for me to wrap this up and move on with life. Are you going to be playing the Diablo IV expansion when it drops next Tuesday? Are you looking forward to the Path of Exile II League and bummed by the delays? Drop me a line below.

Importance of the Journey

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I love Last Epoch, but one of the things that I have lamented for a while is that there just does not feel like there is enough to do in the game. So as a result, I have a couple of good weeks and then bounce because I run out of things that I actually care to do. On Tuesday nights, Ace and I have what we refer to as “Sibling Time” and more often than not lately it just ends up with us hanging out and chatting while we are doing out own things. Ace has been enjoying Path of Exile more than normal, but also was talking about how much they were looking forward to Last Epoch. At this point, I dug out my old lament, which led to us trying to dissect why it is that Last Epoch does not have the staying power that Path of Exile does. After some back and forth, I think we landed on the “why” behind this statement.

Ace and I have had a lot of bonding moments over the years. There is a natural back and forth between a tank that I always played and a healer that they always played. There is also the bonding of growing up in oddly similar circumstances, despite being in wildly different states. However, I would say probably our most pivotal bonding experience was a shared love of Diablo, and quite frankly, were it not for them and the fun that I had playing Diablo III Seasons, I would probably not be the ARPG junkie that I am today. I will always be deeply thankful for them indoctrinating me into the cyclical nature of Diablo III Seasons, and quite honestly, it was an event that I looked forward to more than pretty much anything else on the gaming calendar. I cannot say with any certainty which season was the first season we did this ritual together, but it became sacred.

So much of this experience centered around the Diablo III Seasons Journey, which was a series of achievements that ultimately unlocked some sort of cosmetic item. Generally speaking, this was some sort of a pet or a portal effect, and in the grand scheme of modern MTX, it was rather meager. What it did more than anything was give us something to focus on other than just grinding mobs and explosions of loot. Sure, we only got a week or two out of a Diablo III season, and by the end of that first weekend, we would have 90% of the list checked off, but it did force us to do some outliers in order to complete everything. This is what Last Epoch is missing, some sort of long ranged goal that we can focus on during the season and that pushes us to do specific content in order to knock out individual achievements.

I’ve also realized that is really what changed regarding my interaction with Path of Exile. Starting with the Sanctum league I started caring about trying to complete league challenges. This was an easy carryover from Diablo III, since I was already in that mindset, and for each league from that point forward, I have purposefully tried to get enough challenges completed to earn the little totem pole for my hideout. It started with just attempting to get one at all, to now where I am specifically trying to finish at least 34 of 40 each league, so I can earn the same size as I have in the last several leagues. I’ve never actually completed 40 of 40, because it involves doing a bunch of bossing, which is not really something I enjoy, given that bossing characters are different from mapping characters. It still gives me something to focus on and has pushed me outside of my comfort zone and forced me to learn a bunch of leagues’ worth of content that I had never interacted with previously.

Even Diablo IV has something similar in the form of the battlepass, and while I have issues with its specific implementation… it still gives a long tail to the league. There are specific things that you can focus on doing in order to unlock a sequence of cosmetic items. They made it worse since, in order to do most of these, you have to pay money to unlock them, but it still exists in one form or another. Last Epoch does not have something like this. Sure, Last Epoch has a ladder, but I am not the sort of competitive player who gives a shit about this sort of thing. What it is missing is some sort of long grind that has a destination in mind and rewards some sort of bauble for doing so. There is a certain measure of bragging rights in being able to show off your pet from a season, years later, after it is no longer available. Not that Last Epoch MTX are generally that great… it still would give me a bit more focus towards pushing down to specific levels in the Monolith, completing dungeons, or something that would push me out of the standard practice of playing for a few weeks and then going right back to Path of Exile.

Right now, the closest thing that Last Epoch has is the Forgotten Knights path of killing Harbingers and fighting Aberroth. However, this is often something that you can do in a single weekend with a good enough build and does not really require you to go out of your way in order to accomplish it. I feel like this is the equivalent of unlocking your Atlas and Voidstones in Path of Exile, and less a destination and more the starting place of the “true” endgame. I feel like Last Epoch really needs something that will take a few weeks to chip through in order to keep us grinding well past the natural expiration date of one of their seasons. I’ve jokingly said that I really like grinding and loot explosions, but it seems like the thing that really keeps me engaged is a series of tasks to tick off. I think this is in part why I love daily quests so much, because it gives me a reason to play the game and something specific to focus on without having to make any real decisions for myself. Similarly, this is why I have engaged in so many Legendary gear grinds in Guild Wars 2, because it gives me an overarching goal to focus on. Last Epoch really needs something more than trying to get slightly better gear, and I am hoping that, at some point, they give us some equivalent to all of these systems that I talked about today.

All of that said, I am still really looking forward to the launch of Last Epoch Season 4 when it drops on the 26th of this month. However, I still expect to mostly play for a few weeks and then go right back to Path of Exile.