Morning Folks! I am so damned close to 100. I ended the night with roughly two pips to go which equates to around 37 million experience. Progress is so damned slow at level 99 and I am constantly on edge that something that I might do will set me back. I’m carrying around an Omen of Amelioration which will prevent 75% of the normal XP loss from taking a death. On one hand, I hoped that simply having that in my inventory would keep me from needing it, but if I do take a death it would be well worth the 40 Chaos that I spent on it. For reference, all evening I ground delve and it only got me two pips worth of experience, so essentially it will take another full evening of delve to push across the finish line.
The positive is that I am currently completely full on sulphite and my Lightning Arrow Champion can seemingly refill me much faster and safer than my other options have been. For refilling purposes, I have been running rusted scarabs and slowly chipping away at the Ritual challenge. I ran around ten maps last night with a full complement of blue altars and did not take a single death, which feels miraculous to have something that strong. I also swapped over some gear from my Lightning Arrow Deadeye allowing me to at least have some measure of magic find. Essentially I swapped over the rings which takes me to around +30% quant and +80% rarity which while not super extreme should make a bit of a difference in the long run.
One of the things that I have learned is that I value different things from other Path of Exile players. If you watch any of my videos you will mostly hear me talking about my defensive layers and how I am planning on surviving things… and very little about how I have stacked the deck to be able to kill things. Last night my friend Kodra uploaded a video of his Hexblast Miner since he considered my kill speed “very slow” for bosses. Compared to a boss killer I am exceptionally slow… but even during this video all of the close calls he had where he “almost” died would have driven me up a wall. I’ve played builds that are much much more “killy” but ride the edge of death, and they are very much NOT FOR ME. At some point, I should build something like this Hexblast build just so I have a boss nuker.
Today is also the release of Diablo IV Season 2, and I know I am going to spend some time checking that out. Right now I plan on rolling another Barbarian largely to use it as a point of reference. I played a Barbarian at launch, and in Season 1, and want to at least play one a bit so I can see how the differences in the class feel between the three. I’ve heard that necromancers have a number of significant buffs, namely that the minions can actually stay alive now… so I am probably going to spend some time playing one of those as well. I am honestly not sure how seriously I am going to play D4, because I still have some goals that I want to accomplish in Path of Exile namely that once XP no longer matters I want to beat my head against Maven until I learn that fight.
Anyways! If you are going to be playing some D4 hit me up. I am not even sure if I have room on my B.Net Friends list but I’m Belghast #1752 over there.
Good Morning Folks. Diablo IV Season 2 is on the very near horizon, and I feel like this is going to be a make-or-break moment for the game going forward. Diablo IV was easily one of the best-selling games Blizzard has ever created… but like a poorly sealed party balloon left out overnight, all of that hype has deflated. So much so that creators who have made their careers upon the Diablo brand… have started shifting focus to diversify into other games. The first season of the game was “not good” and now we have had two live streams talking about the future of the game and what we should be expecting for Season 2. Blizzard also dropped over 40 pages worth of patch notes shortly after the discussion.
I cannot deny that there are a lot of changes coming with this season. Several systems like Resistances and the concept known as Damage Pools are getting completely reworked. Additionally, there is a sweeping set of changes to the way that some legendaries and the paragon boards work in order to attempt to spur more build diversity. So I give the team a lot of credit for seemingly listening to some of the feedback from the players and then attempting to iterate on their design philosophy to address these. This also tells me that the player drop-off was likely even larger than I imagined because this is some significant “desperate to save the franchise” level of hustle. I do worry about what this meant as far as long hours for that team, but if they can nail this season and the changes I have hope for the brand.
One of the things to come out of these patch notes is an attempt to clearly tier the game into three phases… 1-50 campaign game, 50-70 sacred era, and 71-100 ancestral era. One of the big complaints that I had was that once you crossed into World Tier 3, anything that was dropping that was not Sacred quality was absolutely useless. This is being fixed by making any gear drops that are not of the maximum rank will instead drop as materials, which works similarly to how Diablo III Season 28 Altar worked. This seems like a really good change, and while you are in one of these tiers your level increases are going to keep raising the minimum item level so that you are in theory more likely to keep seeing better stuff. The idea is that you won’t move into World Tier 3, and immediately find the best loot you can possibly get for the next 20 levels, before moving into World Tier 4… and having the same impact once you equip your first full set of Ancestral gear.
I think the thing that concerns me the most about this plan, is that it spreads out the worst part of the game for me. I really hate the way gear works in Diablo IV. My “build” is less about making sure I have the right talent points chosen, or the right paragon boards assembled… and way more about making sure I have the correct legendary affixes attached to the right slots. Many of these cannot be pulled from the codex of power, which means that when an item drops… I cannot simply slot that item in and get an immediate boost of power without having to go back to town and scrounge around in my vault hoping I have a good enough aspect to pull from an item in order to make the new item actually useful. In Diablo 3 or even Path of Exile, the leveling process is extremely quick allowing you to stabilize the state of your gear quickly. After that you are just swapping out items on the very rare occasion that you manage to pick up an aspirational item that gives you a significant boost. While moving through the levels I fear that this is going to feel awful to keep shifting to marginally better gear.
The other problem I’ve had with both Season of the Malignant and now the Season of Blood… is that the “new content” that is being added to the game is borrowed power. Neither is expanding the scope of the game in a permanent way and instead giving you a neatly encapsulated seasonal chase that goes away as soon as the next flavor of the quarter mechanic rolls in. I hated the rut that World of Warcraft fell into by having a rotating series of mechanics that only mattered so long as that one expansion was live, and Diablo IV is heading down that same path. Sure you occasionally get a Path of Exile season like Crucible League where you have a borrowed power system in the form of skill trees associated with weapons, but I have faith that those mechanics will likely resurface again in the future in a more permanent form. For example, the Sanctum league introduced a whole rogue-like mode to the game, and while it was gone for the Crucible League it made its return during the current league as a permanent mechanic.
What the Diablo IV seasons are lacking is something that can realistically stick around and become a permanent fixture. Sure they are adding a few more boss fights in this league, and that is fine… but it doesn’t really do much to make me excited about grinding to 100 in order to complete them. Path of Exile has these pinnacle bosses as well, but it also has a lot of other ways that completely shift and change how you approach the game. Betrayal is an obtuse mechanic, but it gives you deterministic ways to modify your gear and obtain new abilities that you can’t get through other means. For example, I’ve been shuffling my entire board in an attempt to get Vorici into Research so that I can in theory get White colored sockets on one of my items, which eases socket pressure and allows me to shift my builds slightly.
This is just one example because there are countless mechanics that started out as the focus of a single League but eventually found their way into the game as evergreen content. I am a Delve-enjoyer, and I build characters for the purpose of being able to crawl through the darkness looking for interesting loot. Other folks might build entirely around the Breach league mechanic which opens portals allowing demons to bleed into our reality, which then in turn allows you to collect materials to fight specific bosses that award unique items. Over the last decade, there have been forty-one leagues, and each of them has left some permanent mark on the game as a whole. What I see instead with Diablo IV is a focus on creating disposable FOMO-inducing content… which gives me great concerns about the long-term success of the title.
None of this is to dilute the fact that the team has put in an awful lot of work on this second season. I hope it improves a lot of the problems with the game, and that subsequent seasons also continue to move that bar forward. It feels like we are sort of dealing with issues that should never have made it out of beta testing, but that is where we are unfortunately. There were just some poorly designed systems in this game that will need to be fixed in order to make the game better in the long-haul. I do have to say though… that the faith that Blizzard will put forth the work in order to improve the game is not really there for me. I worry that what we are seeing is a knee-jerk reaction to the massive fall-off in players, and if Season 2 does not magically fix things… the game might just be abandoned entirely.
All of this said I am certain I will poke my head into the season when it launches in a week or so to see how the game feels in its updated state. I think a huge thing for the life of this game is going to be erecting a PTR and letting players test the content as it is being developed. While Blizzard ignored a lot of the feedback coming from the community during the beta tests of the game leading into launch, I think they have realized that they did so at their own peril.
A very groggy morning to you all. Wait maybe not everyone is sleepwalking through the morning. We had a big wind storm last night, enough so that we got alerts on our phones about it. This happened around 1 am and I managed to sleep through the first wave of it. The second wave around 3 am woke me up, and enough so that I did not manage to get back to sleep until maybe 4:30. Even then I am not sure if I actually slept or if I just laid in bed thinking thoughts with my eyes closed. I will have to do the walk around the house to check for damage later, but my wife sent me this photo as she was leaving for work with some damage at the rental house across the street. We didn’t lose power, but around the time I went upstairs at 3:30 we lost internet and I spent a truly dumb amount of time cycling the modem before it came back. The cable company website claimed everything was fine, but I assume in truth… something happened due to the storm damage. It is back currently and I am hoping it stays that way.
I spent most of my weekend screwing around with my Lightning Arrow Raider build, but I’ve written two other blog posts about that which each come with their own companion video. I am really looking forward to Friday, and hopefully, I don’t jinx it… but I went ahead and took the day off work. I know this is usually a bad idea when a game launches… but generally speaking a Path of Exile League Launch has been smooth as butter. I’m really looking forward to seeing how well the early mapping goes with this build. If evidenced by the red maps, I think it is going to be really solid and should give me enough time to look for upgrades along the way. Fixing my resists is probably the thing that I am the most worried about, that and trying to find a Vaal Lightning Arrow early. If I can solve those problems… I should be good to go with this build. Thankfully the colors that I ultimately need on the bow should be pretty straightforward to hit.
At some point yesterday afternoon I took a break from ARPGs to pop into Final Fantasy XIV and do the seasonal quest. There is no way I was going to turn down having a Power Ranger outfit. More specifically I think this is going to be my monk Transmog from this point forward. You have to dye it green, however, because everyone wants to be the green ranger. I guess I could go for Ninja as well and then try and find some daggers that look like the Green Dragon Dagger. I wish I could get back into this game. I saw my friend Bear had created a new character, and I contemplated doing this just so that I could get back into the swing of the game. I need to figure out what content I need to complete to unlock the newest Deep Dungeon.
Other than that I am still screwing around a bit in Diablo IV Season of the Malignant. While I am still pretty nonplussed by the seasonal mechanic, the state of the game does feel considerably better than it did. I am now mostly just trying to figure out an easy path to level and then I can complete the keystone dungeon and move to World Tier III. At that point, I will feel like I have at least progressed a bit further and can start doing Helltides. I am trying to catch the World Boss whenever I can, but in truth… it doesn’t seem like it rewards that much experience, and anything I get loot-wise is going to be upgraded rapidly. I seem to be having way more issues maintaining a good amount of gold than I did previously. Not sure if they rebalanced gold drops, but it feels much tighter than I remember it being.
Apart from the storms last night… it was a pretty solid weekend overall. I am really happy about the state of Lightning Arrow and looking forward to the league start on Friday. I have not really been in the mood for Baldur’s Gate 3 lately… mostly because it requires more thought than I am willing to give it at the moment. I’ve needed gameplay that I can mostly turn my brain off for, which for me is ARPG gameplay in general. Anything that I can commit to muscle memory and instinct… allows me to free up the rest of my brain to consume content on the side. I think more than anything that is the part of this league I am looking forward to the most. I’ve stalled out super hard on book consumption over the last few months, and listening to an Audiobook while playing Path of Exile is sort of my happy place.
I hope you all have a great week ahead of you, and I hope that we don’t have anything much in the way of damage from last night’s storm.
Diablo 4 has had a bit of a rocky start. The launch went relatively well and while I have shared at length my issues with the game, it seemed to largely be well received. That all changed when the patch notes were released for Season 1 and its pre-patch. Diablo IV was a game where there were only a handful of options that actually felt good to play, and every single one of them was nerfed into oblivion for no apparent reason. This caused an emergency “yeah we fucked up” fireside chat, and with it some massive changes in the way they are addressing the game. The problem is… this was not really enough to stem the bleeding and almost overnight… the game seems to have purged most of its player base. I have a few hundred friends on Battle.Net and at the launch of the game… I saw well over a hundred people playing it including folks I had not seen online in years. At the launch of season one… there were still about six players actively playing the game on my friend’s list.
With this precipitous decline… folks have rushed out of the sidelines to whack away at this misery pinata. “D4 Bad” has become a meme, and you cannot watch an ARPG stream without someone saying it. This charge is being led by several of the Path of Exile streamers and even made its way into the ExileCon official Livestream. This flood of public mockery has even managed to grind down some of the most prolific Diablo Enjoyers. The truth is nothing is ever as simple as the soundbite. I have publicly decried this game, but I don’t seem to hate it anywhere near as much as the zeitgeist seems to right now. On Tuesday Patch 1.1.1 was released, and quite honestly… it brought with it a number of good changes. Since I am sitting in the Path of Exile 3.22 waiting room… I decided to check it out.
As of writing this blog post, I am level 38 and some 13 hours into my playthrough of a seasonal character. Maybe I have mellowed out since my crushing disappointment at launch, or maybe I have just come to accept what Diablo IV is as compared to what I expected it to be. Whatever the case I am not hating what I am playing. I opted to start a Barbarian because ultimately if the game was going to have a redemption arc, it needed to start with the character class that felt awful to play in all of the betas and at launch. I did pivot away from the Whirlwind Barb and am now mostly focused on Hammer of the Ancients. There are a number of things that still feel pretty bad, like how often I have to use my builder in order to get a single hit of my consumer… but that is obviously not really going to change.
Let’s start off by talking about the unique seasonal questline. You are helping Cormond attempt to rid this plague from the world called the Malignant, which infects enemies and causes them to return to life over and over. I believe at this point I have completed the entire quest chain and defeated both forms of the final boss. If you were expecting deep story content that moved the needle forward for Sanctuary… you are pretty much going to have to wait for expansions. What this reminds me of are the storylines that get patched into Gacha games, where you have a handful of quests to introduce a new character or a new mechanic before being turned loose to explore that further. The Cormond storyline exclusively exists to introduce us to the Malignant and give us some structure as to why we are caging these hearts.
As far as the seasonal mechanic itself, every bit of content that you do seems to be able to spawn Malignant monsters which have a chance of dropping a heart that you can attempt to cage. I’ve encountered these in dungeons, cellars, and they are guaranteed to spawn in the new type of dungeon called Malignant Tunnels. What this means in practice is that you have to defeat an elite… remember to click the purple, orange, or blue heart that is left behind… and then fight them again to get a Caged Heart to drop. I wish the hearts were glowing brightly or something because quite honestly they tend to blend into the background and I am pretty sure I have killed Malignant monsters several times and forgot entirely to click on the doodad. When you are going through a dungeon… they feel absolutely the same as every other monster you fight. There is nothing really special about them other than the fact that they look like they have some guck covering them.
The object of your search is the Caged Heart. These come in three common varieties… Viscious (Orange), Devious (Purple), and Brutal (Blue). These fit into corresponding colored sockets that now exist in every piece of jewelry that drops. The key complaint that I heard early on is that these would harm survival given that everyone was socketing skulls into jewelry for armor bonuses. As a result, Blizzard thought far enough ahead to just give each caged heart a ton of armor negating that concern. Each colored heart has specific bonuses that can roll on them, and these are more of the “nice to have” territory than anything build-changing. Under certain rare circumstances, you can get a fourth type called the Wrathful Heart (Black) which is a bit like a watered-down Legendary Aspect, that could impact how you want to build your character. Incremental power gain is still power gain, so I guess this is a positive overall.
Originally I had said this seemed like a watered-down version of the Abyss league mechanic from Path of Exile, but in truth that is giving it a bit too much credit. The Caged Hearts are a nice bonus for doing content you are already going to do, but don’t really feel like something worth specifically chasing. I do however enjoy doing the Malignant Tunnel dungeons because they have a better flow to them than traditional dungeons just for leveling purposes. You can craft devices with the different colors of corruption that you loot, which allows you to spawn a bonus boss fight at the end of the Malignant Tunnel. Again these don’t really feel like chase mechanics, but more something I am doing for experience points given that I end up with a ton of the crafting materials from salvaging the hearts. Hearts take up inventory space, so I feel like I am always needing to destroy them to make room for more loot.
The thing that is a bit intangible is that 1.1.1 feels better, and I can’t exactly put my finger on why. Granted I am nowhere near the endgame, but my survival feels better and my ability to kill things also feels significantly better. I’ve been in a loop the last several nights where I did not have the mental bandwidth to play Baldur’s Gate 3, but did not want to burn myself out on Path of Exile right before a new league starts. As a result, Diablo IV has felt pretty great as the sort of game interaction that I am craving but also given that I don’t deeply care about it… it is simple enough to log out and walk away from it when I have something else that I would rather be doing. Essentially I feel like the game is in a better state than it was when I left it, and not near as meme-worthy as the internet would lead you to believe. Sure there are things that still bug the fuck out of me, like their overreliance on crowd control… but it also isn’t an awful experience.
Blizzard did win however and convinced me to consume my battle pass token. The armor set that you get as part of the seasonal journey is actually rather sweet. This annoys me however because the set of armor you get the free track… looks like shit. If you want nice things you are going to have to keep buying a quarterly battle pass in order to have access to potentially “earn” it. That whole interaction feels bad, that not only will I have to pay money for it… but I will also be expected to grind away in order to earn the things I paid for. The battle pass as it stands is probably one of my least favorite constructs in gaming, and really… it needs to die in a fire.
I guess the only positive thing that I have to say about the Battle Pass is that it seems like progress is moving extremely quickly through it. Like I said I am roughly thirteen hours into this character and I am sitting at level 43 of 90 in the rewards track. The curve for these rewards seems to also be fairly flat as I’ve not noticed them slowing down significantly as I moved through the content. Basically, I am just about finished with the lower tier of the armor skins and going to be starting on getting the slightly nicer ones. When I ding 40, which should happen today… I will unlock the Smouldering Ashes system that allows me to gain account-wide bonuses. I will of course be going after the Urn of Aggression first which gives a flat XP boost and should speed up the rest of my leveling.
As far as the Season Journey goes, I am already through the first four steps which would have originally been part of the “Haedrig’s Gift” process in Diablo III. Each time you ding you seem to get a set of jewelry and a few aspect unlocks which is nice but also feels a little lackluster. It just really drives home how commoditized gear in general feels in Diablo IV. I will say just the existence of the Seasons Journey makes the game feel like it has a bit more purpose because it gives me some activities to focus on. Weirdly you can progress to the next tier without actually finishing the previous one. I think in most cases when I got all but 2 or 3 of the achievements checked off I was able to leap ahead to the next tier and get the rewards. I like that it gives me a bit of a sense of purpose and causes me to play in a way I would not normally play… like seeking out Cellars each time I happen across one because I know X number of them to tick off a seasonal journey step.
All told… I don’t hate it though. There are a few weeks of focused gameplay here, and quite honestly I am moving through levels way faster than I thought I would. It doesn’t feel as good as Diablo III, where you could burn up a character in a weekend and be doing endgame content the rest of the season, but it doesn’t feel anywhere near as slow as leveling did at launch. I hope over time they will continue to accelerate this process because really… it should take you a week to max out a seasonal character and then the rest of the time should be spent interacting with the seasonal mechanic. However, given how shallow the seasonal mechanic is… I can’t really see players sticking around for long because of it. Maybe it is better to think of the endgame as beginning at level 50 when you hit World Tier 3, and then everything after that point is gravy.
I do want the game to find its stride, because even though it has faded significantly… I still have a lot of love and nostalgia for the franchise. I don’t think Diablo IV was the right game to continue that legacy, but I also don’t think it is awful. I think a lot of the Metacritic user score reflects the anger over a bad patch, and I hope given time… the team can recover from that. I am extremely curious about what Path of Exile 3.22 is going to look like because I am already seeing a flood of “D4 player tries POE” videos. I fully expect Diablo IV stumbling will be extremely good for peak numbers in the Ancestor League. I am most definitely looking forward to it, but for the time being… I am actually enjoying the Season of the Malignant. It is nowhere near as bad as I had feared, but also… isn’t as good as I might have hoped. So while I can’t say “D4 Bad” I can probably be fine with saying “D4 Mid”.
