Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, and Thalen
Hey Folks! We are down a Tam this week but start off the show talking a bit about our various mental states with the happenings going on out in the world. From there Grace talks about Rusty’s Retirement a delightful idle game that has a lot of the same functionality as Stardew Valley but runs in a small window at the bottom of your monitor. From there we talk about Diablo IV Season 7 and how it is quite possibly the best D4 season ever… that no one is really giving much fanfare. We talk a bit about how the streamers have seemingly abandoned the game. Kodra shares with us the process of resolving combat in the Battletech tabletop game from the 80s… giving Thalen and Bel flashbacks in a bad way. Finally, Ash has been playing Sonic Frontiers and talks about it actually being a really good open-world Sonic game.
Good Morning Folks! This morning I am going to spend some time talking about something weird happening with Diablo IV right now. Season Seven aka the Season of Witchcraft is without a doubt peak Diablo IV. This is the best seasonal mechanic we have ever had and the game has more content than it has ever had in the past. Additionally the mechanical state of the game is better than we have seen previously and there are way more classes that have viable play patterns as a result. However… folks seem to be abandoning Diablo IV in droves, and this is has not been illustrated more clearly by the lack of streamers diving into the game. Previously a new Diablo IV season would see most of the Path of Exile streamers come back if for no reason other than to meme on the game for a day or two before returning to their core demographic.
What we are seeing instead is folks who used to be part of the core stalwart group of Diablo IV streamers… abandoning the game. Darth Microtransaction effectively made his brand on the back of first Diablo Immortal and then later Diablo IV. I went through his broadcast records and could not find any sign that he actually streamed even a moment of Diablo IV Season Seven. Raxxanterax was the definitive “Diablo III” guy for me and has been a regular source of information about Diablo IV since the launch of the game, and he streamed two days… looked annoyed while doing it, and then as of yesterday was back in Path of Exile II. This is translating to the game as well, because I am not sure I have fought a single world boss yet with a full party. Additionally during peak prime time gaming hours, I am one of the few people on my Battle.net friends list actually playing the game.
I think at least on some level… the expansion release broke a lot of people. It was not a great story, but worse than that… it felt like an incomplete story. Diablo games have traditionally been about killing a big bad at the end. The core Diablo IV story is about chasing Lilith and then ultimately killing her. Vessel of Hatred seemed like it was going to be an expansion about chasing Mephisto and then ultimately killing him… but instead we just took down his literal lapdog. The story arc of the expansion felt like something we might expect as a free incremental story patch in an MMORPG, not something that is boxed paid DLC. I think there were a lot of folks holding out hope that the DLC was going to change the trajectory of Diablo IV, and it didn’t really do that… causing them to check out. It is impossible to get numbers for this game, since the Steam version launched so late that it represents a fairly insignificant slice of the total player pie.
I am still having fun, but I also know that once I tick off the checkboxes of the seasons journey and finish out the battle pass that I will probably fade away as well. What I will fade back into… I have no clue honestly. Raxx showed recently that you can power level a character in just a bit more than two hours, so given the level of playtime streamers have… it is probably not shocking that they have all cycled through the game. Sure there are folks who have almost exclusively built their brand on the game like Rob that are still grinding away…. but within the week I figure most folks will have cycled back to something else. The Witchtide is fun as heck, but it seems like it is not quite enough to actually keep at least the public side of the player base engaged for very long.
I moved into chapter five aka slayer on my Seasons Journey last night, and I have been stockpiling my boss summon materials so that Ace and I can get together this weekend and run a bunch of bosses in a row. This mostly just makes it so that the loot goes further, since each of us gets our own copy of the loot. I’ve swapped out all but two of my slots for Ancestral gear, and it seems like maybe Ancestral Legendaries are dropping much less often in Torment 1 than they did during the expansion launch. I don’t have all of the items that I ultimately need, but I am still ripping through content pretty easily. I finally got all of the glyphs and now just need to work on leveling them. I’ve also got a few Infernal Hordes keys that I hope to run with Ace as well to see what sort of loot and levels we can get from that event.
Raxx released his usual State of the Game, and even he admits that the season mechanic is probably the best one yet. However he still sounds really unsatisfied with the state of the game. His big complaint is that at least compared to other ARPGs right now, Diablo IV does not have much replayability. I would probably agree with that and once you have ground your way through to Torment 4, completed the season journey, hit level 100, and finished the battle pass… there isn’t much reason to keep playing. There is nothing in the game that is so chase as to serve as that thing that keeps you spinning the randomizer for weeks on end hoping that maybe just maybe you will see it. All of that said… I am okay with that. I have Path of Exile, Path of Exile II, and Last Epoch that serve to scratch that itch for me. Diablo IV will probably always be a fun and chill romp of a game because the “Exile” games at least are deeply punitive when it comes to grouping with your friends.
Diablo III was a game that I played every three months with my friend Ace for a weekend, and then was more than happy to bounce until the next season start. It was this super fun if short event that we participated in that brought me a lot of joy. I’ve never been able to find that same level of super chill but focused gameplay in Path of Exile or the sequel Path of Exile II. We’ve been able to get to that point with Last Epoch, but even it feels a bit too punitive at times. Diablo IV however, has reached the point where we both have a focused but fun interaction during the season, and then group up to do a bunch of fun content together helping the other one get through the seasonal accomplishments before fading away and playing something else. As such I am perfectly okay if this is a short term game for me, and honestly appreciate the fact that it is because I know I can slot it in easily each time a new season comes out.
Quite honestly I appreciate the brevity. By next weekend I will be finished with Season Seven and be perfectly fine bouncing to do something else. I know that I have the next Path of Exile season 3.26 somewhere around the corner, and Last Epoch Cycle 2 in April. I also want to pop back into Guild Wars 2 and catch up on the expansion content since I have yet to engage with the second content drop from Janthir Wilds. I think I might mentally be ready to spend some time in an MMORPG again after copious grinding between Settlers League, Necro Settlers, and the launch of Path of Exile II early access. That is not to say that I am entirely done with Path of Exile II either. I do really enjoy that character and have a heck of a lot of fun mapping on it now. It just seems like ARPGs are going through the same false dichotomy that MMORPGs did years ago… with the concept of the “one true game” and that everyone feels the need to pick only one and focus on it entirely.
While I deep dive through the rabbit hole on pretty much every game that I devote time to… I also play a bunch of different games. This works for me, and quite honestly means that there is always something interesting right around the corner. It feels bad that Season Seven is getting panned so heavily, and I am concerned that the Diablo IV team is going to take the wrong lesson from that. If you have been on the fence about jumping into the Season of Witchcraft I suggest that you give it a shot. Like I said at the top of this post, it legitimately is peak Diablo IV and is pretty much the best that the game has ever been. I think the challenge is… that “best” is not what many players and streamers are looking for.
Good Morning Folks! Yesterday was the launch of Diablo IV Season 7, and last night I rolled the Necromancer that I was planning and started leveling. If anyone is wanting to play along at home, I am mostly following this guide on Maxroll because I do not want to think about anything right now. I am not really going to worry about my gear until I hit level 60 because at this point I have effortlessly gotten to 44 without really trying. I am absolutely half-assing my way through the content and it is delightful, in large part because Season of Witchcraft is effectively the spiritual successor to Season 2. The Season of Blood as Season 2 was properly referred to was essentially peak Diablo IV for me, and the rapid recurrence of the Blood Tide events made it feel great to level.
Instead of Bloodtides… we have Headhunts which I am affectionately referring to as the Witchtide. These will spawn in four places on the map and are up for 40 minutes at a time. However these appear to be staggered so that when one ends there is always going to be another one up that you can be farming. This also means that once you complete all of the Grim Favor objectives in one area, you can bounce to a new area and start the entire process over again. This is by far the smoothest leveling experience ever and even more important… taking a death does not cause you to lose your hard earned event currency like you do in a Helltide. That said… I have not taken a death yet but you are collecting resources that you then spend to unlock Witchcraft abilities.
Part of what made the Season of Blood so great was that in addition to the blood tide events… you had a borrowed power system in the form of vampire abilities. These were gained randomly in a pick one of three scenario and it often took you quite a bit of grinding to get the set that you really wanted to use. Witchcraft abilities work so much better in that you simply get currency for doing events and then can outright purchase the ability that you actually want. Within the first hour and a half of game-play I had all five of the abilities that I wanted, and then could simply focus on leveling them up instead of acquiring new abilities. I highly suggest Aura of Siphoning for your first ability because it is essentially “What if Righteous Fire Healed You”, as you deal damage to everything around you but also gain some of that as life.
I also love that it lets me run around with a giant poison dart frog. The crossover abilities from the D3 Witchdoctor are greatly appreciated. I am sure at some point I will build something around the Firebats ability if I end up running a second character. I am pretty curious how nerfed the state of the Spiritborn ends up being from what it was during the expansion launch. Diablo IV has reached the point of light popcorn fare and I am here for it. I was having a lot of fun from the moment I dropped into game and so far that seems to have no sign of stopping. I really need to run a few Nightmare Dungeons to see how they have been buffed because Ace reported that they got a stupid amount of legendaries from them.
Kind of the crux of the Witchtide events is to spawn these headless husks, which you kill to reclaim heads at least in a narrative sense for the tree of whispers. There is also a background story happening surrounding a coven of witchdoctors that do the bidding of the tree. I have to be honest… I do not care at all about the story side of this, because really it is a loose framework that allows me to keep going out and killing more monsters that are spawning unique to this season. The core mechanical loop feels extremely rewarding, and I am curious to see how this transitions as we move into the endgame. I am sure there will still be the need to farm a lot of summoned bosses for unique drops. Ace and I learned last league that the best option was for us to hold onto everything and then meet up to amplify the number of summons we were able to do in a single sitting.
Another thing that I greatly appreciate is that they have added additional functionality to the Tree of Whispers location. This is where all of the event resources are set up, but also they changed the layout a bit and added an Obols vendor and Alchemist to essentially allow us to never leave this location. I was already setting my default teleport to the Tree of Whispers for dumping Grim Favors, but now there really is no reason to use any other location other than if you are happening to farm the Pit. I still would really like to have something akin to the player hideout from Path of Exile 1 and 2 because honestly… unless I have invited them to my group I don’t really care about other players.
Speaking of not caring about other players… I am guessing the community got the memo that running World Bosses is not really worth the effort. I killed Ashava this morning and it was just me and a Barbarian… and thankfully we managed to take down the boss without much issue. I don’t feel like I am probably too far ahead of the curve… and more that it is just a case that no one seems to care about world bosses. I said this last league, that the older content like World Bosses, Nightmare Dungeons, and Legion Events really do not feel like they are worth doing right now. Sure you can get some drops, but the amount of drops pale in comparison to just farming literally anything else. I mostly wanted to kill the world boss because I am certain that somewhere in the seasons journey there is a requirement for doing so.
By farming effectively nothing but the Witchtide, I am actually progressing pretty quickly through the Coven’s Favor track… aka the event faction for this league. Mostly this serves as a way of unlocking the various quests associated with the league which I am sure will gate some things behind them… so might as well grind it out as quickly as possible. Once I get into the endgame I am probably going to be farming content that is not the Witchtide, so it would probably be beneficial to get the faction now while I am not having to go out of my way to farm it.
All in all I feel like this is a pretty solid outing for Diablo IV. The game will still have its critics, and that is fine… I just wish they were coming from a place of legitimate gripes and not largely piling on the campaign of streamers. The raw game is in a pretty decent state at this point, and I am having quite a bit of fun. It will never be a technical experience like Path of Exile, but for big dumb fun it is pretty spectacular. I am sure I will bore of it quickly once I have finished the season journey… but not everything has to be a forever game. While I can appreciate Citizen Kane… I also really like movies where they have cool CGI and big explosions. Diablo IV is a big explosions type game, and if you can appreciate it for what it is… there is fun to be had here.
Good Morning Folks! I’m getting to the point where I think I am almost “done” with Diablo IV, at least until the next season rolls around. This is the inevitable place that I end up with seasonal model games like this and depending on how engaging they all have different cycles associated with them. In Diablo 3, Last Epoch, and Diablo 4 I pretty much get a few weeks out of them before deciding I have run out of things that I actually care to do. Path of Exile gives me at least a month, maybe two, before I start to lose interest. This is not a failing of the games mind you, this is just the way that I play them. I love fresh starts and I have a lot of fun during the gearing and leveling phase, and then progressively less fun as I accomplish whatever goals I set out for myself. Thankfully we have reached a point where there is almost always another ARPG just about to fire up so that I can hop into it with much glee.
There are a handful of items that I want to check off the list before I move on completely. Ace is far better at this sort of tedium gaming and has long since completed all of these. Essentially I need to finish grinding out Reputation for Nahantu so that I can permanently increase my Obol cap for all seasons from this point forward. I also want to finish gathering up the Tenets of Akarat so that these stay unlocked in future seasons as well. I had started down this path shortly after finishing the campaign, but many of them were bugged and could not be completed. Both of these are sort of the fodder for a lazy weekend afternoon, and I have plenty of time to knock them out before the next season starts in January.
The other thing that I want to complete just for the sake of doing it… because there are probably seasonal titles associated with it… is completing the final level of the Zakarum Remnants grind. This has been the absolute worst reputational grind in any Diablo IV Season. What I think I will probably do is churn through a bunch of Nightmare Dungeons on T4 as I have an achievement for doing those that I have yet to complete. I believe I get another shard of “unobtainium” used to craft mythic from completing this reputation. I might grind out some Undercity Rune Tributes in an effort to compile six copies of every rune so that I can potentially target craft other mythics given that we ran over 100 bosses this weekend and saw zero as opposed to the five from the weekend before last.
You can tell that I am mostly done with a season because I started taking on stupid side projects. The Tree of Whispers is essentially the Bounties system for Diablo IV, and at any given time there are a bunch of objectives around the world that reward varying numbers of whispers. The best ones are the ones that reward five at a time, as you need ten in total to get a bounty cache. Interesting tidbit that my friend Eliyon pointed out, is that you can farm these caches on one character and then have another character benefit from opening them. I believe he was thinking in terms of passing gear, but it turns out you get quite a boost of experience from opening them as well.
So as I am likely to do… I set forth on a totally degenerate play pattern and spent good chunks of the weekend farming Whispers Caches, only to flip over to my baby Barbarian and have him open them. It is honestly shocking how fast you can amass a huge stack of Whispers Caches and in truth, it is pretty damned fun popping around the map completing various bounty objectives. I always used to like running bounties in Diablo III, and it turns out I still enjoy that same sort of gameplay in its newer sibling. I was even doing the PVP Objectives because in truth… no one is out there actually PVPing. No matter what the loud faction of PVPers say… ARPG players do not give a shit about PVP. I could kill the boss for 5 whispers and then cleanse the blood shards that I got for a few more… and make it back to town all without seeing another soul. I did this several times, so it was not like it was a fluke, literally no one cares about PVP.
I wish I had kept better count of the total number of caches that were required to go from around level 7 when I started all the way to level 60 at which point I inherited all of the Paragon points I had accumulated on the Spiritborn. Quick mental math would tell me that it was between 20 and 25 caches in total that I had to farm, which honestly was not that bad. The first few caches gave me ten levels or so per cache… then it settled into about a level per cache until 53… at which point I started getting slightly less than a level. At 53 I farmed up eight caches which took me to 59 1/3, and then I proceeded to farm two more caches just to make sure that it would push me over the line. The cool thing about this process is that by the time I hit 60, I had pretty much gathered up all of the aspects that I would need for the build. Were I smarter I would have specifically kept out the best legendaries while leveling, but I was not that smart and ran around in a bunch of random uniques for a bit until I got things straightened out.
The only annoyance with this method for leveling is that you have to unlock Torment levels on the new character. I assumed as soon as I dinged 60, I would be able to flip over to Torment 1 and start rolling. However, I had to complete a Pit 20 in order to unlock that difficulty level. While I was at it I went ahead and tried Pit 35, the gate for unlocking Torment 2 and was able to do that just fine. My build does not really feel stable enough to push on to Torment 3, and in truth my Double Swing Twisters build is mostly a transitional build. The new Barbarian hotness is Mighty Throw, but it requires a specific unique called The Third Blade in order to make it function, something I have not seen drop yet. For now, Twisters works well enough for any content I would want to do on T1 or T2.
So thanks to my degeneracy, I find myself with two characters at max level and geared this season. The challenge there is that I feel like it isn’t necessarily pushing me to play more. I still feel like I am winding things down significantly. There is one more thing that I would like to try, since we used to pull up alts for each other in Diablo III by running Greater Rifts, at some point I want to see how effective that is by running an alt along with a Pit Run. This is mostly kicking the tires at this point, because I can’t say that I actually want to play additional characters. There is an achievement for having a level sixty of every class, so depending on how fast this process works it might be worth doing just for that.
Anyways… all of that said. Diablo IV still has problems, but it has finally reached a point where I can universally recommend it for folks who enjoy the seasonal model of ARPG gaming. The story for the expansion is still sort of shit, but the endgame gameplay loop is great.
