Diablo 4

An Evening with the Scions

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I’ve most definitely reached this place in Diablo IV where my only real progression comes in the form of lucky drops from the World Boss. At this point, I have item level 925 items in every slot but my Chestpiece and Two-Handed Hammer weapon and it is all up to the luck of the draw when I finally replace those. I am using a unique main weapon that is going to be a bit harder to replace than your average hammer. Given that I am getting zero benefit from Whispers Caches and the Bloodtide event… I am guessing that means I would have to grind up to high levels of Nightmare Dungeons to actually find some viable drops again. As a result, I am mostly only logging in for World Boss kills.

I could always fall back on playing some Path of Exile, but I do not really want to burn myself out further knowing that I really want to play next Friday when the Sentinel/Kalandra event starts. At the moment I think I am going to try out leveling a Righteous Fire Chieftain as an alternative for when we start “Bel League” at the beginning of 3.23 in December. Mostly I want to test that out as an alternative to Juggernaut because it is so much easier to get maximum resistances on and we won’t likely have access to Legacy of Fury boots for quite some time. Hinekora’s Wrath gives a nice big explosion that is actually better than the Maven Boots but I will be missing a lot of the bonuses that you get as a Juggernaut for survival purposes. It won’t be as sturdy, but hopefully, the big explosions will make up for it.

What I did instead last night was poke my head back into Final Fantasy XIV and do something more than playing the daily cactpot and reset the demolition timer on my house. I’ve been in this weird place with FFXIV for a while now because I leveled a Paladin through Endwalker. Playing a tank is not really conducive to easing back into a game in a low-pressure manner. I did not last long enough in Endwalker to actually get to the point of leveling a DPS alt, which has made it a bit hard for me to summon the desire to come back in earnest.

Yesterday however I remembered that Duty Support exists, and is no longer the massive pain in the ass that leveling the trust system was. This has allowed me to pick up where I left off on my Machinist and run some low-key chill dungeons with my Scion friends. Sure it is a bit boring to keep running the same dungeon over and over… but that is probably what I would be doing anyway with a pack of random strangers. I might as well ease back into the game with friendly bots that are not going to hassle me over dumb mistakes I make while I get used to the game again.

It has to be said that right now Final Fantasy XIV feels really odd. It has been a very long time since I have played a purely hotbar combat MMORPG. Over the last few years, I have either been playing ARPGs or Guild Wars 2 and New World… both of which are way more closely related to an Action MMO than their earlier hotbar cousins. The first time I needed to get out of an AOE I instinctively tried to hit my usual dodge roll button… and was really sad when I remembered that Final Fantasy XIV does not have something like that. The game feels very “old” when it comes to design… but again I think it is more something that I will have to get used to.

Largely I want to get to the point where I can catch up in the story, and grind out some gear so that I can get ready for the next expansion. I am going to give it a shot even though I largely felt like FFXIV storywise wrapped up in a good place with Endwalker. I think Guild Wars 2 might be more my speed as far as MMORPGs go, because I have gotten used to more active combat but by the end of the evening I did finally start to hit my stride. I know FFXIV is probably never going to be my main game again because my tastes have changed a bit but I do want to get back to a point where I can have fun with it again.

Kalandra Redemption Arc?

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Last night I wound up playing Diablo IV again. I am not really certain how much longer I will be lingering in this game, but I realized after yesterday’s post how close I was to finishing the 90 levels of the Battle Pass system. For reference, I dinged 80 this morning while I was in the game taking some screenshots, and dinged 90 on the Battle Pass around the time I hit 79, so it is easily done on a single character without partaking of the nonsense “accelerated” version. This honestly makes me feel much better about the battle pass as a whole because it seems significantly less grindy than what I experienced with Destiny 2. As far as the seasonal achievements… it is really asking me to get a character through all of the end-game boss fights, and if I actually stick around to grind out the next 20 levels… I might care about those.

While I greatly enjoy Legions and the “Bloodtide” events, I have reached a point in progression where I only really care about the World Bosses. The World Bosses can drop item level 925 gear, and so far I have picked up six pieces in total with a few spares sitting in the bank. No event other than the World Boss seems to be capable of dropping gear that high level, or at least I have not ground up Nightmare Dungeons to the point where they can given that I am around the level 21-25 range with them currently. Legions, Bloodtide, and Helltide all seem incapable of dropping anything decent yet so that puts me in the awkward position of not really caring about much loot that is dropping save for hunting for the handful of legendary affixes that I care about and lining up some spare aspects to extract.

Mechanically the game is still quite fun, but I am reaching the point where I am grinding for the sake of grinding. Otherwise, I can just keep the D4Armory Events page up and pop in right before a World Boss spawn. I ran a handful more Nightmare Dungeons and they are sort of in the “aggressively fine” state where I am getting enough map drops that I can salvage the ones with the affixes that I don’t care for, and then craft more of hopefully the ones that I don’t mind too much. I know I complained the other day about Drifting Shadows… but honestly, that is one of the better options that does not seem to impede too much on the fun of romping through the dungeon. I still do not think the state of dungeons in general is good, but it is at least something to do and I should probably spend more time leveling my glyphs.

Path of Exile released a trailer and some general announcement notes about the November events that will be taking place starting next Friday. There is no Endless Delve as folks had thought, and instead, the first event is a return of the Krangled league… where all of the passive tree and ascendancy nodes are jumbled making it almost impossible to build a viable character. This is going to get a hard pass from me, but the next one is a revisiting of the league mechanics from Sentinel and Kalandra… both of which I actually enjoyed so I am probably going to try league starting an RF Chieftain during this event. Lastly is a league called Shifting Stones where every map will have a super juiced version of the Atlas passives applied to it, and what each map gives you will shift every 15 minutes. If I am feeling up to it I might throw together something quickly just to play with that. If you get a character to at least level 50 in two of the three events, you will get a loot box… which legitimately is not that big of a reward but at least something.

I am legitimately hoping that the Sentinel/Kalandra league means that we might see a revisiting of these two mechanics in Standard with 3.23. I always thought that the Kalandra mechanic specifically was very interesting, but just happened to land at a time when the sandbox state of the game was not great. Had it released in place of say Crucible, when the balance of the league was very strong… I think it would have been significantly better received. It has a really bad taste in most players’ mouths because the game itself was in a bad state at that moment, so maybe this event will give it a bit of a redemption arc. Players have also been begging for Sentinel’s recombinator system to go standard for a while. If nothing else it will be an interesting week to get in and revisit all of this for seven days.

Lastly, I wrapped up The Peripheral by William Gibson last night and enjoyed it enough to start the second part of the unfinished “Jackpot Trilogy” immediately following. I’ve been a fan of Gibson since first reading Neuromancer, but I got out of the habit of rabidly consuming everything he released. I caught part of The Peripheral series on Amazon and liked it quite a bit, which prompted me to try out the novel given that the series was not picked up for additional seasons. All in all, it was a good novel with memorable characters, but maybe not the high point of my year so far. I am going to at least make my way through the second novel and then be sitting and waiting for the release of the third.

Sad Little Totems

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I am exceptionally groggy this morning, which makes little sense considering how much I slept last night. Yesterday I got up around 3 a.m. so that I could run my wife to the airport. She is on business in the D.C. metro and was sending me photos from her adventures throughout the day. My personal favorites were some of the ones she sent me from one of the Smithsonian museums. There was a cool Rosie the Riveter Lego set but unfortunately, the glass was super polished and I did not feel like sharing a photo that had my wife’s reflection in it without her knowledge. Basically, yesterday was a bit of a blur. It is not often that I feel my age, but trying to survive on caffeine and very little sleep throughout the day is not something that I have done since my days in the Late Night Raiders in Vanilla WoW. I went to bed around 8 pm last night and as far as I am aware slept all the way through until 4 am ish and then even then managed to eek my way to 5:30 before actually getting up.

Before finally calling it a night, I did spend some time in Path of Exile and wrapped up the seasonal challenge associated with Ritual. I had completely respecced my Atlas to go hard into Ritual nodes, so now I have to figure out what I want to do instead. Getting 19 of 40 seasonal challenges rewards a stubby little totem and it has been a minor point of pride that I have managed to get one for the last three leagues. Granted this is not actually a major achievement, but it is one for me on a personal level. I went from completely floundering in Path of Exile, to being able to complete my Atlas, to being able to actually do enough achievements to get a totem for my hideout. I would have finished up sooner but unfortunately, the Vaal boss down in Delve did not drop a Doriani’s Machinarium Map and I have been unwilling to pay the 6.5 divines that they are currently going for.

I also attempted to play a few alts in Diablo IV at which point I was struck by how generally alt-unfriendly this game is. The seasonal abilities are on a character-by-character basis… which makes little sense given that all of the abilities cap out a level 3, and you can pretty much max them out on a single character. One of the nice things about Diablo III was how easy it was to twink out your alts, so that when you started your next character you got to keep all of your paragon points from the first. Similarly, gear was easily applied in specific bands. Right now gear drops are based on the level at which you got them dropped regardless of how low item level an item is. Diablo 4 tends to set equippable levels in a loose relation to the level in which you acquired the item. So you can tend up with items that are dropping and make no sense to be using them… because they are either not Sacred or not Ancestral… that have a higher item level equipped than the range for which those items are useful.

One of the things that I think would be cool is have something associated with the season’s blessing that as you level up… you lower the equippable levels of all items by a percentage until when you hit level 100 it removes ALL equipment restrictions. One of the biggest joys of alting in an ARPG is twinking out your secondary lineup of characters. It would be nice if this were possible in Diablo IV, but in its current state… it really isn’t. Not that there is a lot of crossover between gear items to even make that viable, but still something would be better than the current state of the game. The XP boost is at least noticeable though which I guess is still rather nice.

I am honestly not sure what my focus is going to be next. I popped into New World and tried to get back into the swing of things there… but honestly, I have been gone just long enough to make a lot of things unintelligible. It seems as though with the new expansion they have removed the ability to level up gear which sorta sucks. It also seems like they have increased the caps of a lot of the crafting professions… which also somewhat sucks because I had fought so hard to cap out a few of them before to be done with it. When new levels are added into a game… it makes me appreciate things like Guild Wars 2 where there is a fixed level cap and then horizontal progression with systems. I do really like the flail though as far as weapons go.

Anyways… I am rambling. I hope you are all having a great week and hopefully, by tonight I will have sorted out what direction I am going game-wise for a bit. I am going to need something to distract me from how empty the house feels for the moment with my Wife traveling.

Diablo IV Needs an Endgame

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Well, friends… I think I am starting to wind down Diablo IV Season 2. I’ve hit level 73 and swapped out all of my gear… and while mechanically the game is still enjoyable there isn’t a lot of reason to keep grinding for 100. This morning’s post is going to seem negative, and to some extent, it will be… but before I go down that path let’s just take a moment to acknowledge that I had a heck of a lot of fun. According to the unofficial D4 Armory, at the time of writing this post, I have had around 38 hours worth of enjoyment out of this season. This has been nothing short of a remarkable turnaround in the trajectory of this game and I actually look forward to popping back in for Season 3. The team did a great job of picking up a completely derailed game and getting it back on the tracks.

To say that Diablo IV has no endgame is a bit disingenuous. However, I can fully state that it does not have an endgame that I feel is worth grinding for. Nightmare Dungeons are not good and are the sort of byproduct that you end up with when someone attempts to transplant Mythic Plus from World of Warcraft into an Action RPG. It just does not feel good and compounds the problems with the Dungeon system as a whole, only further serving to suck any remaining joy from them by adding mechanics that make them even less enjoyable. Mechanics like Drifting Shadows, Blood Blisters, and Lightning Storm are not difficult but are the definition of something that sounds good on paper but feels completely “unfun” when you experience them in practice.

The Blood Harvest zones and the recent changes to Legion prove that the team can design content that feels good to complete, so it gives me hope that at some point there might be something enjoyable to do once you have hit World Tier IV and sorted out your gear. Right now getting an arbitrary number to 100 doesn’t feel like good enough motivation to keep going when I am out of meaningful goals. I am not saying I will stop playing the game entirely, I might grind out some more of the battle pass but for the moment… a lot of the joy and focus are gone for me. When I completed the last keystone dungeon and started working on World Tier IV, it felt like I arrived at the top floor. I’ve never been a massive completionist and I am largely unmotivated by trying to get a “platinum” trophy in every game.

I am hoping that they can rework dungeons completely at some point because the spackle that they applied with this patch helped them out… but I am not sure there is enough good there to salvage without a top-down redesign. The joy of an ARPG is reaching a flow state as you tear through packs of monsters while getting the occasional dopamine hit of a loot explosion. Dungeons break this flow up constantly by having to focus on some arbitrary objective rather than steamrolling your way to the boss and breaking open the loot pinata. This is made worse by the Nightmare Dungeon mechanics that serve to slow you down further. The dungeon art is top-notch, which I think is why they have been so hesitant to trash the system completely. I am not sure how it can be saved without simply removing ALL objective-focused gameplay.

Another system that needs completely redone is the Helltide. The Blood Harvest “Bloodtide” zones have proven to be a massively superior gameplay experience. Going forward they should really make Helltides work exactly like the Bloodtide where there are a few objectives that spawn in… no loss of embers on death… and available at all times with them rotating between locations every hour. The team has shown us that they understand what went wrong with the Helltide, and we will always lament the “Bloodtide” zones as a far better experience. I’ve been to the Helltide a few times and there are never any other players out there… but every time I do the green Blood Harvest zones they are fairly packed. This has to be something reflected in the total numbers on the backend and should provide some interesting metrics that hopefully they can track.

The other system that I would love to see burned down and rebuilt is the Paragon system. It is just not interesting. While the Path of Exile passive tree is lamented as being far too obtuse for the average player, I also feel like I am only ever one or two points away from some interesting choices that often reframe what I am doing with my build. Most of the Paragon tree is filled with boring stat nodes that you have to take in order to make the fun nodes on the tree not actively suck. Even the “fun” nodes don’t really modify how my character plays. Truthfully that is a larger problem both with the design of Legendary items and Paragon points, in that nothing I am doing seems to make significant changes to the way I am approaching my build. I’m playing Upheaval and there is a similar ability in Last Epoch but in the talent tree associated with that ability I can configure it to fire off when I leap slam or turn it into a self-firing totem… or apply buffs to my minions. None of that sort of freedom of movement within a single ability exists in Diablo IV, which honestly feels like a step backward from even Diablo III.

So I realize that this morning’s post has been me rattling off a litany of problems than the game has. That is only because I now care about the game. I actually feel for the first time that there is a game here worth trying to save. I don’t want Diablo IV to die in infamy… I want it to have a No Man’s Sky style comeback story and keep proving to players that it is putting in the hard work to bring itself back from the brink of oblivion. There is a good game here and there are some strong fundamentals now. That is a shocking change from the burning dumpster fire of a game that I felt existed at launch. My concern now is that most of what I am interacting with are seasonal mechanics that are very likely to go away in January.

What we need are some long-tailed progression systems that will keep the player coming back even after they have capped a character out. Path of Exile does this through the varied forms of endgame content harvested from their version of seasons called “Leagues” and the Atlas of Worlds which allows you to tailor your endgame experience to focus on exactly the kind of content that you want to spend time experiencing. The Blood Harvest while cool, doesn’t really fit a pattern of being content that can remain evergreen and neither does the Malignant Hearts. Diablo IV is going to start needing to design content expansions that can stick around for longer than a three-month period because it needs to keep fleshing out what it means to reach the endgame.

Diablo IV is in a state where it can provide one really fun week of gameplay, but it needs to give us a reason to keep coming back for more. Granted a more casual player will likely be able to stretch that week into a month… but no matter your pace you are going to reach a point where the path forward just isn’t really worth walking down. I have a glimmer of hope though for what the future might bring a year or two from now. So if anyone on the team happens to read this… you’ve already beat my expectations. I thought the game was dead in the water and was saddled with a generally “unfun” game design. You’ve had a massive turn around and I applaud all of the hard work. There are still a lot of difficult choices ahead of you, which are going to mean cutting some content that just isn’t working or at least drastically modifying it. I hope the company as a whole gives you the time to turn this game around completely because I feel like at some point Diablo IV can be a massive success story.