Diablo 4

Regretfully Seeking Luocha

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Good Morning Folks! This morning’s blog post is going to be a bit of a smorgasbord of smaller topics. The first is that the Silver Wolf banner is sadly over in Honkai Star Rail. That means that any attempts at getting this excellent character are diminished for the time being. I am uncertain if she can be pulled on a normal banner, but I am extremely happy that I picked her up while it was available. It cracks me up that when she visits the Astral Express she does so in hologram form. This morning she was hanging out in the parlor car and wanting to play board games… then realized that holograms can’t move physical pieces. Then turned around and berated me for not having any arcade cabinets on the express. She has rapidly become one of my favorite characters for her ability to brute force a weakness onto a target.

With the Silver Wolf banner gone, that means the Luocha banner is now available. I have to admit there is absolutely nothing about this character or his design that interests me. I am however pulling for him just because I need a second healer. I would far rather have Bailu, but as it stands I think you have to be just exceptionally lucky with the default banner to make this happen. Honestly, I am not even that big of a fan of his style of healing, but having a second healer seems like it would make the split runs where you are required to have two teams much easier to complete. I am however hoping to pick up a Pela from the banner while it is available. I bonded with Pela during the museum event and now like the character far more than I originally did.

So far however all I have pulled are multiple copies of Qinqque. Since you got her for free that means I now have her with two Eidolons, which is fine… but she isn’t exactly a character I am actively using for anything other than running assignments. I only had enough currency saved up to do two 10 pulls and the other pull the only thing I picked up was a four-star light cone. Just like in Genshin Impact, pulling a weapon or light cone is always the least exciting possible thing you can pull. I’m close to another 10 pull on the Luocha banner so maybe I will get him so I can go back to the standard banner. As it stands there are probably more things on that banner that I actually care about at this point.

I’m finding the event that went in with Luocha a bit frustrating. It is called Stellar Flare and it is based on defeating a number of mobs during a certain number of cycles aka turns. Since I tend to build teams for survival and not speed… this means that I keep failing these fights. I am going to have to shift things up a bit and pull together a speedy team rather than a sturdy team. The problem is that the fight itself dishes out a ton of damage. So you almost need to come up with a team that can “board wipe” every single cycle. I’m also nowhere near maxed out on my characters so it isn’t like I can just brute force this. I need to devote some time to farming the resources needed to upgrade my newly level 70 character squad the rest of the way.

In very very brief Diablo IV news, I managed to get to level 70 finally. I am just not really enjoying the grind at this point. Barbarian is essentially in a state where if you get crowd controlled once… you are dead almost instantly. This is just about as unfun of a situation as it gets, and while I enjoy hanging out with my friend Cyl… I don’t much enjoy Nightmare Dungeons. Really other than the occasional world boss Nightmare Dungeons are the only end-game activity that is reliably available. I felt very strong when I first got to World Tier IV but I already feel like I lost all of that power and am consistently getting weaker every single level. The thing is… I am wearing about as good of gear as you can get for my level with the appropriate aspects on each item. Sure I could min-max the stats or grind out more paragon points, but it largely feels like a losing battle. I exist in two states… either immortal or instantly dead the moment anything stuns/freezes/poisons me.

All of the news about Secrets of the Obscure has made me renew my focus on Guild Wars 2. Since I have been recording my dumb little videos talking about various game modes I enjoy, I decided that last night I would record myself doing the server reset Tequatl fight. This is sort of the quintessential Guild Wars 2 experience for me personally. It was the encounter that made me finally appreciate how god of a game Guild Wars 2 could be, and was probably my first real large-scale world boss experience. Since then I have done hundreds of boss and meta trains, but Tequatl will always hold a very special place in my heart. It is sort of the pinnacle of how cool the drop in group play can be in this game.

Last night I also started working a bit on the next set of story quests for What Lies Within. I didn’t get super far though because I wound up going outside to hang in the backyard for the remainder of the night. I am sure I will pick up and get through that content drop today. I’m also looking forward to the weapons test beta this weekend. I want to get in and play with Necromancer Greatsword/Pistol and see if I can figure out how to make it viable. Mostly I just want a ranged weapon that feels better than staff to combo with Greatsword. The axe is just too short of a ranged weapon, and I really wish Necromancer got access to Longbow. Maybe eventually someday.

Did you have luck pulling Luocha in Honkai Star Rail? Are you still playing Diablo IV? Are you going to participate in the weapon test beta in Guild Wars 2? Drop me a line with your thoughts.

Diablo IV – World Tier 4

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Good Morning Friends! This weekend I moved up into World Tier 4 of Diablo 4, which means I have finally entered the proper endgame. This happened largely due to the fact that my friend Cyl told me that Friday night we would be getting through the Fallen Temple, aka the Capstone dungeon blocking World Tier 4. She had been holding off on trying it, and I had failed it a few times… but together we wrecked the place. Essentially the combination of Sorceress and Barbarian was pretty potent and she would freeze things… and then I would spin on top of them with impunity wrecking their life pool. The final boss encounter was a bit tricky at times, and I had to abuse the fact that I am fairly sturdy and resurrect Cyl a few times. There are a lot of things that just having another person really helps for, and I like that self rezzing does not subtract from your life pool.

Nightmare Dungeons in theory probably should not exist prior to World Tier 4. They are a boring mess at low tiers that you can begin running in World Tier 3. As soon as you complete a Tree of Whispers in Tier 4 everything begins dropping at Tier 21 or higher. Completing one of these unlocks your ability to start salvaging and crafting Sigils. You can’t run a low-tier Sigil without dropping back down into World Tier 3, so essentially… everything that had been clogging my inventory was rendered worthless. Nightmare Dungeons in World Tier 4 is actually pretty enjoyable. This is maybe the content that has been missing from the game to this point and seems to be what the game is actually balanced around. It just sucks that it takes over 100 hours of gameplay to really see this content. That said it also still feels pretty grindy to be focused ONLY on Nightmare Dungeons.

Lately, most of my gameplay in Diablo IV has been centered around the boss and legion timers. The best site that I have found so far is D4 Armory, which also happens to be the site that offers the ability to link your character armory. Essentially it seems like bosses either spawn on a 5, 6, or 7 hour timer… and I cannot keep track of this shit so I am offloading that part of my brain to a timer website. Again I still feel like Blizzard needs to sort this shit a bit better than it currently is. If they want to rotate between Bosses, Helltides, and Legions… then in theory one of these should always be happening or no more than 15 minutes away from happening. Over the weekend I tried to catch as many of these as I could, and the Legion events specifically seem to be amazing experience gain.

The World Bosses themselves are not exactly what I would consider extremely fun encounters… but they also feel like something you really should not miss. One of the things that puzzled me is that I thought we would have more of them. As it stands there are three of them… Wandering Death, Avarice aka New Greed, and Ashava whom we fought in beta. Probably my favorite of these is Avarice simply because the teleport mechanic looks really cool. My least favorite is Ashava, mostly because Poison feels wildly overpowered right now as compared to the rest of the conditional damage types. None of them are terribly exciting however and I really feel like the Diablo IV team needs to play some Guild Wars 2. No game does large-scale spectacle fights as that game does, and it would feel better if there was some sort of zone meta that led to the boss encounter rather than just something randomly spawning every six hours or so.

My luck continues to hold… and I think Cyl is starting to get a little salty about it… in a joking way of course. When we took down Ashava the other night I walked away with two unique items, and she pretty much walked away with nothing but some rares to sell/salvage. I’ve not lucked into either of the two uniques that I still need, however. Essentially I need a new copy of Rage of Harrogath as I am still wearing a Sacred version of that and I need a copy of Gohr’s Devastating Grips to drop. I did pick up Temerity though so very happy to have that slot filled. However, as much effort has gone into gearing… does make me start to align with the “no reset seasons” camp. I just can’t fathom going through this much effort every season.

One thing that I do have to give massive credit to for Diablo IV is the cosmetic options. It has been rare that I have played a game with cosmetic outfits… that have felt so much worse than what was available in the game for free. New World comes to mind because a lot of the Twitch Prime drops are so much cooler looking than anything you can purchase on the in-game cash shop. In Diablo IV I am constantly finding items out in the world that are cosmetics for my horse. Similarly, most of the armor sets you find in the world are better looking than the cash offerings. It does sort of make me wonder if this will be counterproductive to the goals of Diablo IV being a more monetized ARPG than Diablo III was. It makes me wonder if they over-corrected into the realm of free cosmetics to try and minimize comparisons to the shit show of egregious microtransactions that was Diablo Immortal.

The one thing that continues to worry me a bit about Diablo IV, is that I am just never in the mood to solo grind in this game. I’ve had a lot of fun recently when playing on a focused activity with Cyl, but when it comes time to actually do stuff on my own… I tend to log out and play something else. I am not sure if this is a side effect of just how grindy everything is and knowing that it will all be for naught when the season starts, or if it is a greater side effect that the game isn’t nearly as enjoyable as I feel it should be. Whatever the case… I am mostly playing in burst when I happen to check the Armory and see that an event is just about to start. Cyl and I have been pinging each other when we notice a boss is just about to come up, and those moments have been enjoyable. However, Cyl is also grinding this as a mainline game and as a result roughly ten levels ahead of me at any given moment. I fully expect to be left in the dust at some point in the future, and I am not entirely certain I will have the desire to catch back up.

Path of Exile II Hype Intensifies

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Path of Exile II Logo

Friends… I am starting to get so overwhelmingly pumped about Path of Exile II. With Not-E3 going on right now, we’ve got two new teaser trailers kicking around after a few years of relative silence. I talked about the first one last week(Ngamakanui), and then we got another one during the PC gaming show (Aggorat). I’m expecting ExileCon on the 28th of July to be a massive deal and essentially outline not only the full feature set of this mega-expansion as well as a general release schedule. It would be truly wild if they just shadow-dropped the game at the show… but I sort of doubt that will be the case. We do know that the Crucible league that is wrapping up was a bit smaller than normal because we are expected to get a really massive league launching with ExileCon, and I wonder if it will be directly tied to Path of Exile II.

Screenshot from ExileCon 2019 Presentation Showing the text One Game, Two Campaigns

One of the things that have been a bit hard to wrap our heads around has been the fact that we keep referring to it as a new game… but in reality, it is just a continuance of the original game. The idea is that everything about Path of Exile 1 continues trucking along, and all of the expansion league content applies to both games going forward. This solves one of the problems that I had when Destiny 2 was released because it felt like we gave up too much of the good stuff that was in Year 3 of Destiny 1… to end up getting a crude shell of a game that wasn’t fully fleshed out and lacked a lot of the quality of life features we had gotten used to. So I will not only get a brand new campaign, and a whole slew of new abilities to play with… but also get to keep access to the leagues that I love like Delve and Heist.

Screenshot from the Path of Exile II Teaser Trailer Aggorat showing a large creature raising up out of a pool of filth and a Monk like characters standing to fight it

One of the things that I find interesting is that in the two latest trailers that we have seen so far… I feel like we are seeing brand-new classes on display. For example in the Ngamakanui trailer, I just assumed I was seeing the Witch on display because it was a female caster… but Aggorat pictured above has made me reassess those assumptions. The “Monk” class that we see on display in that trailer does not really match the visual signature of any of the starter characters that we currently have in the game. This makes me think one of two things is happening. The first idea is that we are getting several new starter classes and both of these trailers have showcased a different one.

Screenshot showing the Diablo IV Character Creation Interface

The other more intriguing idea is that maybe we are getting a detailed character creation system similar to the one that we just go with Diablo IV. I don’t want to get my hopes up too much, but it would be so freaking amazing to be able to craft my starter character to look however I want it to look. Not that I mind playing a feeble old man, a girl in rags, or a beefcake in a diaper… but the entire ARPG experience is so much richer if you get to pick your own appearance. This would also solve the problem of not being able to play the gender you would prefer to play. That doesn’t necessarily impact me directly given that I pretty regularly flip back and forth between gendered options just to mix things up when a game gives me that ability. However, I know this is a big deal to a lot of players and it would be amazing to see these character models trickle out into the rest of the game.

Screenshot from recent Path of Exile II Teaser trailers showing the text Find Out More July 28 www.pathofexile2.com

Suffice it to say I am pumped for July 28th… but am trying really hard to reign in my expectations. I have considered taking the day off from work just so I can watch the presentation uninterrupted. A lot of the reason why I have been so engaged with Diablo IV right now… is that I am in somewhat of a holding pattern until the next Path of Exile league. The only negative I can see about the “two campaigns one game” thing, is that for players who were maybe hoping POE2 would be a fresh start and wildly different. I expect a lot of new toys to play with, and a lot of changes to the game engine to make it feel a bit more responsive and have much better visuals, but I also sort of expect POE2 will feel a lot like the original release in the way that the end-game works. It took me over a thousand hours in this game to really come to a place of loving it wholeheartedly, but that is sort of a big ask for most players.

I do think the relatively shallow nature of Diablo IV, is ultimately going to make a lot of players feed into Path of Exile. There were a lot of folks holding out hope that D4 would be the next best ARPG and I am not sure that is the case. It has a lot of great moments, and yesterday I released a video talking about some of my favorite things. However even in a video where I tried my best to stay positive… a number of complaints still made it into the recording. I am almost vibrating with hype for what I am seeing for Path of Exile II though, so the future still seems exceptionally bright. I’m also extremely pumped about the release of Last Epoch 1.0 later this year. We are truly living in the golden age of the ARPG, and the loot will flow!

Beating the Ghost of a Dead Horse

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Friends… I find myself in an awkward place right now. I keep poking at Diablo IV even though I am admittedly not really enjoying myself. I end up in these patterns sometimes with games where I feel like I should be enjoying them, but for whatever reason don’t. I probably spent 200 hours poking at Guild Wars 2 over the years trying to figure out what I was missing that others really enjoyed about that game. Eventually, I reached a place of happiness with that experience, but often times I never really do. I do not enjoy Warframe for example, even though on paper everything about that game should be something I am heavily into. I’ve never quite been able to put my finger on what was wrong with the experience, but something is… and something is also wrong with Diablo IV. I feel like I am poking the dead corpse of Diablo IV with a stick, trying to figure out why I don’t love it after waiting over a decade for it to arrive.

Most recently I have poured all of my efforts into catching up with the story quests that I missed along the way, and more importantly, grinding out my renown levels. At this point, I have completed everything but Kehjistan, and I have to say… this is a miserable process. Nothing about this is enjoyable in the least but it also feels like they have hung just enough carrot… in the form of 4 bonus Paragon Points at the end of this stick that I cannot avoid it. I also found the hunt for 160 Altars of Lilth was complete misery as well… but again all of the permanent stat boosts were too beneficial to ignore them. Both of these are examples of thoroughly uninteresting gameplay, but also something that feels like you can’t really skip it because they attached something to it that you can’t really get otherwise. I certainly hope that these are a one-time thing and do not reset each season, because I cannot ever fathom doing this again.

Then there are my frustrations with the Paragon Board system. Namely the force mechanic around unlocking the bonus for each Glyph. None of these are really worth the effort unless you unlock the bonus, but in order to do it… it causes you to make some deeply uninteresting choices with your points. My frustration right now is that I need to acquire 40 strength from nodes on the board, but there is only 35 strength worth of nodes in the radius of this glyph. That means I need to level this glyph to level fifteen in order to expand the radius. The system of leveling glyphs is in theory supposed to replace the process of leveling Legendary Gems from Diablo III. Same mechanic but implemented in a maddening slow manner. When you leveled a Legendary Gem you got 3 level raises each time you ran a Greater Rift, with Glyphs… you get part of a level each time you run a Nightmare Dungeon.

Most of the glyphs that I have access to are Tier 1, and those gave me half a glyph level at 1, and a quarter of a glyph level at 2. Meaning that in order to level these up you just have to chain-run Nightmare Dungeons. These are not fun. They are just normal dungeons with some added nonsense that you have to watch out for but are as mind-numbing as the normal dungeons. Greater Rifts in Diablo III were also admittedly repetitive but there was a lot of randomization in each run and you could rip through them quickly as they did not require you to do any backtracking. Dungeons in Diablo IV however require you to complete a series of boring mechanics which often require you to backtrack in the dungeon and are effectively the same experience every time you run them. I ran six of these back to back last night before ultimately deciding I had my fill and moved on to other things.

What is genuinely enjoyable are the World Boss fights. I grouped up with my friend Cyl and took down The Wandering Death, which is an encounter I had not seen before. Sure the mechanics were relatively easy, but it was still a fun five minutes of gameplay that felt extremely rewarding for the time spent. The problem here however is that these world boss events… are so few and far between that I’ve literally played likely over a hundred hours at this point and this was the first one that I happened to be on at the right time to catch. Instead of taking a page from the very excellent Guild Wars 2 event spawning book, Blizzard seems to have these vague three-hour windows when a boss MIGHT spawn… and when this happens you are not exactly given a clear indication unless you happen to be looking at the map. Personally, I feel like World Bosses should ALWAYS be spawning and you should never be more than 20 minutes away from the next one. The same is true with Helltides and I feel like there should never be a moment when you log in and there is not one available.

Then let’s talk about one of my key complaints… how generally fucked the stash tab situation is. Not only is the UI for your Stash completely useless and without any sort of search functionality… you are painfully limited in what you can store. This image that I have cobbled together from screenshots represents all of the storage space that you have. 200 slots of storage space are allocated for all of the characters on your account, and right now it is largely filled with crap for my barbarian. Then you have the 88 slots of storage space that you are carrying on your character which is divided up into 33 inventory slots for drops, 33 slots that are for consumables but this is shared between Potions and Nightmare Dungeon Sigils, and finally, 22 slots that you can use to store aspects that you have extracted. Most of my actual stash tab storage is consumed by legendary items that I am holding on to in order to extract legendary aspects from later because the aspect storage is so painfully limited.

Let’s contrast this with three other games in the genre. Path of Exile has a virtually unlimited amount of storage space so long as you are willing to buy more stash tabs with real-world money. Last Epoch also seems to have a virtually unlimited amount of storage space available pending if you are willing to keep farming in-game gold to purchase them. Even Diablo III, which I considered fairly limited… gives you 910 stash tab slots… though some of those I earned through seasonal play and others I got from the Reaper of Souls expansion and the Necromancer pack. However, even if you only have the base game… you still have 350 stash slots. I think part of what makes the D4 situation feel so bad is all the damned gems… and admittedly they ate up a ton of space in my bank in D3 as well. However, there is no real reason why they don’t just live in your ingredients tab.

I find myself in this rough spot with Diablo IV, and the longer I play it the more frustrated with the current state of the game I get. I should just stop playing it and do something else, but I am not sure exactly what else I want to dive into at the moment. I should go back and finish out the league in Path of Exile and get the last achievement I want to get. I should work on progressing through the monolith further in Last Epoch. However, my brain seems to be caught up in this pattern of logging into Diablo IV and then getting frustrated. I keep thinking if I push through this…. the game will get better. However, the further I push… the shallower the game seems to get. I still stand by my original assessment of this game. It is a pretty great game for playing through the story and then moving on to another game. I question how good of a game it is for playing like most ARPG players play those games. I feel like as soon as the new Path of Exile league lands with ExileCon in July, Diablo IV is going to be a ghost town.