Diablo III Archives - Tales of the Aggronaut

Regularly Playing: March 2025 Edition

March 7, 2025 by Belghast

Good Morning Folks. One of the long running themes of this blog is how much I like the concept of reoccurring posts. Another running theme is how bad I am at actually following through with them. One of these series was “Regularly Playing” where in theory I update the sidebar of my blog with the current crops of games that I am playing on the regular that then show my account information when you mouse over them so folks can find me if they so choose. The general idea is that you have a list of games that you are likely to hear information about advertised on the front page… even though we all know that I tend to fixate on a single game for weeks at a time before jumping to the next one. However behind the scenes I am flipping back and forth between games as my mood hits me.

The core problem with this is… my updates in this series tend to happen way less often. The idea was to have a monthly roundup of things that I was playing but what it ends up being instead is a semi-yearly truing up of the sidebar. For example my last update in this series was June 27th of 2024… when I acted as though I would now make it a regularly feature of the blog again. We can all see that this did not happen. Before that the last update was during the great blur in October of 2022. This is funny given that at least part of my claim to fame is being a consistent blogger. Anyways… I am not making any false promises here but I did think it was far past time to crank out one of these posts and to more importantly update the damned sidebar.

Traditionally these posts have been broken down into four categories:

To Those Remaining – The games that I am still actively playing or at least expect to be playing within the month.
To The New and Returning – The games that I am either dusting off and revisiting or are brand new experiences that I am enjoying.
To Those Departing – The games that I am finally removing from the list for one reason or another.
Ships Passing in the Night – Games that I don’t expect to regularly play but I spent some time with over the month and enjoyed enough to talk about.

Some of these categories only really make sense if I am doing this on the regular, but we are going to attempt to make one of these happen regardless.

To Those Remaining

After being very frustrated with the launch state of Diablo IV in 2023, it has honestly turned in to a pretty decent game. This has more or less taken the place of Diablo III as being that short term game that I am happy to play for a week or two before finishing everything up that I want to finish and moving on with my life. It also has some of the easiest group game play out there, and while it lacks the depth of Path of Exile it is a fun time to be had with my friend Ace as we tackle the seasonal journey. I am not saying this is a phenomenal game, but it is far from “bad” at this point and is honestly pretty damned great if you are interested in some super chill ARPG fun. That is not to say that the game does not have problems… all of which can be chalked up to the shitty design practices of Blizzard. Ace and I have a joke about Blizzard design philosophy. They give you this super sweet kitten that is loving and adorable… but it has permanent explosive diarrhea. They have some really cool ideas, but they always come with some shitty downside to them.

Being brutally honest… were it not for the fact that I own a home on Cactuar… and extremely hard world to get housing on… and had lost said home from not logging in previously… I would likely not be actively playing Final Fantasy XIV. I am very much in the mindset of playing Final Fantasy XIV during an expansion… and then at the end of an expansion right before the release of the next expansion. The rest of the time I am just paying yearly rent for the privilege of home ownership. I know this is dumb, and I know that I should stop doing this… but I keep doing it anyway. I think my mind might just be broken when it comes to the traditional MMORPG gameplay model. I enjoy them when I enjoy them… but struggle each time to get reconnected and back into the normal rhythms of logging in daily and treating it as my only game. I also really hate gearing… which is weird given that used to be one of my favorite aspects of playing MMORPG expansions.

Guild Wars 2 on the other hand… is designed in a way that makes me love it. It has way more of an ARPG design aesthetic and it is so easy to drop in and participate in some epic feeling content… and then tag out without letting anyone down. I love large world group content and I love doing things like WVW where I can just blend in with the crowd and not have to give a shit about human connections. For me it is largely a solo game… that just happens to have lots of friendly and helpful people also playing it. Everything about the design model for this game rewards players for doing the right thing and stopping to rez players or help them out. When you see other players doing something, it is always a positive and a force multiplier. The long tailed grinds also give you projects to focus on when you want to play more seriously. Right now with the way my mind works, this is hands down the best MMORPG.

Last Epoch is going to be the best ARPG on the market at some point. This is just a fact. It has the best class design, and the best itemization and crafting already. What it lacks is endgame content, but given how solid the foundation is it is only a matter of time before they gather up enough to make this game into a proper rival of Path of Exile. Ten years down the line we will be thinking about EHG and Last Epoch in the same manner that we do about GGG and Path of Exile. I am extremely excited for the upcoming Season 2 launch on April 2nd, and with it a focus on more endgame content as well as a bunch of interesting crafting options. It looks like this is going to be landing in a lull in other games, but I would give up a Path of Exile league start to play this next season. If you have read this blog for the last few years you would know what a bold statement that is for me, given that I practically play every single league and event that comes out for Path of Exile.

For years when someone has asked me what my favorite video game is, I have always answered Castlevania: Symphony of the Night without missing a beat. While I still love that game with all of my heart, I have to admit the true answer is Path of Exile. I started taking this game seriously in 2019 and since then it has effectively dominated this blog for months at a time. During that time I have dedicated over 250 posts to this game and will likely keep doing so each time new content releases. It is a very hard hill to crest, and getting engaged in the game is going to take a lot of effort and research… but once you finally reach a point of comfort with it the endgame potential is limitless. Each new league also radically shakes up the game and changes how you need to interact with the character building process. I’m easily over 4000 hours into the game… and still feel like a beginner at times. There are almost no games on the market with the level of depth that Path of Exile offers.

To The New and Returning

One of the things that I am trying to do with this post is be a bit more honest about the games that I am playing. I almost never talk about mobile games on this blog. I think the only ones that I have actually ever really talked about at length are Pokemon Go and Dragalia Lost… the later of which is no longer even in operation. I had more or less stopped playing mobile games because my old Razer Phone 2 was performing so poorly that it almost was not worth it. However when I swapped to my OnePlus 12R, it opened back up the world of mobile games and I started adding them into my pre-sleep rotation. Essentially every night for the last year I have played a little bit of AFK Journey and find it an extremely enjoyable daily activity. I am not a big spender when it comes to games like this, but I have given them a few bucks here or there namely if there is a cool looking costume on their $7 pseudo-battlepass system. Essentially I level up my characters and play a round of all of the various battle modes and whatever events happen to be going on and when sleep claims me put it away for another day.

I know this game has only recently come out, but playing it has made me remember all of the things I loved about Monster Hunter Worlds and how much it dominated my life for a point in time. There are around 150 blog posts that I have made over my time playing that game, and I can already tell that this is going to be a regular rotation for me for awhile. At a minimum I want to get geared up so I can start participating in the event quests as they get released, because Monster Hunter games have some wild collabs and some interesting cosmetic gear to collect. Now that I am in High Rank I am getting back into the swing of finding my own fun in the game and setting my own goals rather than following the main story quest. This is honestly my preferred method of playing and I am glad I am past the forced section of the game. I’m just about to HR 20 and looking forward to collecting the REAL version of the Arkveld armor that I am wearing in the above image.

I had so many hopes for Path of Exile II, and honestly… it satisfied almost none of them. I am not actively playing this game but I know with the impending release of 0.2.0 I will give it another spin to see how much I want to keep playing it for the long run. Recently returning to Path of Exile 1 though… has made me realize just how lacking Path of Exile II actually is. Right now there is a battle for the soul of this game happening and depending on how it goes… will ultimately determine if I write this off in the long run. Right now the core game feels like a sluggish mess for anyone not playing one of four builds that are actually functioning pretty well. Even those builds take specific gear and a lot of levels to really make them feel phenomenal. Grinding Gear Games needs to do some real soul searching with this one and determine what sort of game they want it to be. If it is a cumbersome souls-like experience, then I am out. If they improve the leveling experience, add some decent movement abilities, and fix the endgame… then maybe it is going to be a great experience. I am thankful however that they split this game from Path of Exile because at least that game is largely in a great state.

Pokemon Trading Card Game Pocket – Android

I will be honest. I am the wrong generation for Pokemon in general. I played Pokemon Blue a few years after it came out on a Gameboy emulator but did not play another game until Pokemon X and Y released. I watched my fair share of the Pokemon cartoon because it was playing while I was getting ready for work. I played some of the early WOTC version of the Pokemon TCG, but only because it was released by WOTC and briefly popular with the MTG community before the kiddies invaded the card shops. I am too old to really be in the core audience for Pokemon. However I do like opening card packs, and have a basic understanding of the card game mechanics. Essentially every night I open a few packs of cards as part of my nightly mobile gaming routine. I occasionally play some hands of the game against the NPC opponents. Calling this a game for me… is questionable. I am not going to spend money on virtual packs, but I do like opening virtual shiny cards every so often… but it will never mean quite as much as if something like this existed for Magic the Gathering that was mostly just a pack opening simulator. If Arena gave me two five card packs each day… I would probably be playing that.

To Those Departing

This one hurts a little bit to admit, but I think I am mostly done with Diablo III. With the release of Diablo IV, this game went into true maintenance mode. There will be no new seasonal mechanics coming out, and since the launch of Diablo IV they have simply been rotating through previous seasons. Diablo IV is finally in a state where playing it mostly feels like playing a fancier version of Diablo III, and as such has completely replaced the niche that this game filled for me. Instead of Ace and I getting together for D3 season launches, it is now D4 seasons. This game will always hold a very special place in my heart, and I am sure every so often I will fire it up again just to revisit it… but there are just better ARPG experiences out there. I am sorry my old friend, but it is time we officially parted and I stop pretending that I am every going to truly play you with the same vigor again.

I really love this game, but just have not really been in the mood to play it. I am not sure when I uninstalled it… but prior to that I was only logging in to collect daily freebies. I would absolutely play this again in the future, but never really got into the seasonal loop of this game. I also never leveled anything all the way to the upper levels to be able to participate in the “reindeer games”. I deeply respect the game that this has become, and were I playing on console I would probably be way more into it than I am. However given the choice between mindless grinding in Path of Exile and mindless leveling in Fallout 76… I just always chose Path of Exile. If I had a regular group of friends to play with, it would probably be different but this as a solo experience is not near as exciting. If the AggroChat crew started playing again I would likely happily reinstall and join in the nonsense.

Like I said for Final Fantasy XIV… I am just not in the right mindset for playing MMORPGs these days. I enjoyed playing through Dragonflight, but it never really caught my attention as anything other than playing through the Main Story Quest. I loved Pandaria Remix, and when the next one of those type events drop I will probably be back immediately. I attempted to play War Within but never made it out of the first zone. I have all of the social reasons in the world to be playing this game as some of my oldest gaming friends are happily playing it… but for whatever reason it just doesn’t scratch the itch anymore. That is not to say that World of Warcraft is probably in the best state it has ever been since at least Legion, if not Wrath of the Lich King. It really is peak Warcraft, but I think I have just outgrown it. When I think fondly of this game I think about specific people and a specific point in time when it was the center of my world… not the actual game itself.

Wrapping Up

I would love to tell you that it won’t be another year before I sit down to write one of these posts. I am still very much an ARPG gamer and will probably continue to cycle through whatever active season/league happens to be going in between Diablo IV, Last Epoch, Path of Exile, and Path of Exile II. I also find myself with way more affinity for games that are ARPG-adjacent like Guild Wars 2 and now Monster Hunter Wilds. The drop in nature and largely single player focuses progression really hits the spot for me, and will probably continuing doing so for a long while. I marvel that there was an era when I used to raid three or four nights each week and arranged my schedule happily around the schedules of others. I miss playing with other people regularly, but I think I might just be too far gone to ever adapt to doing it again. I am an old gamer that has become very set in my ways at this point.

I hope you all are having a great week and have a good weekend ahead of you. For me… I plan on spending most of it in Monster Hunter Wilds and hope to catch up with some of my friends and do some hunts together.

Abandoning Diablo

March 13, 2024 by Belghast

Good Morning Folks. I will give you some fair warning… this is going to be a bit of a bummer of a topic especially if you are a big fan of Diablo or more specifically Diablo IV. If so you might want to give this topic a hard pass. I consume a lot of gaming content, and in doing so I notice certain trends. I’ve been thinking about this topic since the beginning of Season 3, and I am not sure what shape it will take. For years there have been what I could only term “Blizzard Content Creators” or folks who are very dedicated to that company or dedicated to one particular gaming franchise within their portfolio. Diablo had one of the strongest communities of dedicated content creators for years. For example up until season 29… rain or shine… every single week Raxxanterax released a guide video on how to complete that week’s challenge dungeon (650 of them in fact… 1 each week for EU and one for NA).

The thing is… one by one the dedicated content creators have been giving up on Diablo, or at least deciding that they cannot continue to function by ONLY creating content for that game. Affliction League was the first time that Raxxanterax did some dedicated coverage of Path of Exile, and similarly, he has gone extremely hardcore on Last Epoch with its launch. Diablo Immortal and later Diablo IV were the games that really put Darth Microtransaction on the map… and he’s made the decision that he had to stop focusing on that game and instead pivoted to other titles. He is maybe one of the most savvy YouTubers I have seen and it is very clear that he is following the trends and the metrics… and Diablo 4 seems to be tanking in relevancy. The popularity of the game peaked in June 2023 and then has largely tanked since. When the game launched everyone that I had on my large Battle.net friends list was playing it… and by the time season one rolled around it was just my cousin that was consistently logged in.

Rhykker has been one of the most corporate message focused YouTubers when it comes to Diablo. I had stopped subscribing to his channel at one point because it always felt like he was following the company line on pretty much everything. Even his content has reached a point where it is mostly negative about Diablo IV and with the launch of Last Epoch I saw him releasing guide content for that game. While he has always covered lots of general ARPG news, this is probably the first time I can recall him making dedicated guide videos for a game that was not some sort of alpha/beta preview coverage. It feels like the creators that used to make up the core of Diablo… have largely given up on the game. The first season was bad… season two gave everyone a bit of hope… but season three and the poor reception of the heavily delayed gauntlet have caused interest to plummet into the sub-basement.

Of all of the above though… the one that shocked me the most was this video from Wudijo. Up until this point he has been quite possibly the most dedicated content creator for Diablo IV. He was the first solo hardcore player to hit level 100 at the launch of the game and has been entirely devoted to the game through all of the ups and downs. For him, it seemed like Last Epoch was the tipping point, and seeing how well a game from a much smaller team with a smaller budget was providing a much better gaming experience. In the above video, he outlines that he is going to be stepping away from Diablo IV and making content not only for Last Epoch but also diving back into Path of Exile and eventually Path of Exile II. I get that the average couch gamer does not give a shit about these content creators… but it certainly feels like a good number of folks who made their entire career focused on Diablo are now abandoning the franchise.

I feel like at least part of this is because Blizzard has become complacent. They spent two decades not really needing to properly compete with anyone in a number of niches. Diablo was the archetypal ARPG, World of Warcraft the genre-defining MMORPG, and Starcraft the game that largely spawned e-sports. In every single one of these verticals… the games stagnated allowing Last Epoch and Path of Exile to take the spotlight away from Diablo, Final Fantasy XIV to cause a mass migration away from World of Warcraft… and Starcraft to have limited relevancy in the modern e-sports landscape dominated by DOTA2, League of Legends, and Valorant. It feels like Blizzard is a company that long ago began feeding off its own hype cycle and now just isn’t creating games that are that great anymore. To be fair… World of Warcraft has seen a similar drain of formerly dedicated content creators over the last few years.

Diablo will always have a special place in my heart, and there is no theme that “means” ARPG more than the Tristram theme. However, I am just not sure Blizzard is going to pull out of this spiral. Last Epoch for years has been a game with an amazing core but one that needed a lot of polish and window dressing… and more than anything just more content. Diablo IV however is a game with a flawed core… that is going to need to have almost a top-down rework of several systems to bring it in line with what the players are expecting. It is a game that looks gorgeous… but is made up of duct tape and paper mache once you punch through that lovely facade. I am just not sure that Blizzard is the sort of company that is willing to commit to an “A Realm Reborn” or “No Mans Sky” level of reinvention to make the game what it needs to be. So yeah… in writing this I have wound up bumming myself out.

I hope your week is going well and if you have made it to this point in the post… sorry for being a downer.

Diablo 3 Season 29 is Awesome

September 25, 2023 by Belghast

Good Morning Folks! This weekend I got pulled back into Diablo III. The new season dropped a few weeks ago but I did not actually get around to playing it on launch day. Instead over the course of the week my friend Ace got engaged with Diablo III again, which then pulled me back in on Saturday afternoon. This is without a doubt the most chill leveling experience I have ever had because I started a little after 2 pm my time and by the time I finished recording the podcast that evening, I was just a stone’s throw away from 70. That isn’t anywhere close to record time or anything, but it is a heck of a lot faster than I normally end up leveling. When we would do a season launch on a Friday I would maybe make it to 50 that first night.

The key difference this season is a new event type called a “Vision of Enmity”. I recorded some footage of me doing one on Saturday, largely so I would have an example for this inevitable blog post. Essentially any mob you kill in the open world has a chance of spawning a portal, and when you teleport inside you are presented with a series of “rooms” for lack of a better term. Each room will either spawn another portal or spawn a treasure goblin. Killing the Treasure Goblin drops a chest full of bounty materials that signal the end of the event. The rooms seem to have a handful of possible outcomes:

One or more elite packs spread out through the map.
A room where everything is magic or higher, and drops death’s breath.
A room with three Greater Rift Portal bosses.
A room where every mob is a treasure goblin, most of them being the material goblins.
A room with a single treasure goblin spawn, signaling the normal end of the run.

The treasure goblin room is by far the most ridiculous thing I have seen in Diablo III full stop. That said… even the normal rooms are insanely rewarding. Almost my entire leveling process was me attempting to do one full round of bounties. I would start down the path to a bounty objective, and at some point, a portal would spawn. Early on I would get distracted by the portal forcing me to do the objective all over again because, at the end of the event, you get shunted back to town. Later I got in a rhythm of doing the objective, going to town, vendoring, and then going back to the portal because thankfully it gets marked on your minimap with an arrow pointing towards it. One single round of five acts of bounties plus all of the assorted portals that spawned… added up to I think 65 levels. For the last few I did Nephelem rifts to finish things off.

The most beneficial part of Enmity portals is that you end up with so many materials. I started getting Death’s Breath at level 2 and when I would get one of the rooms with three Greater Rift bosses they would drop Greater Rift Keystones. At the time of writing this, I have 166 GRift stones and almost all of those were gained through Enmity portals. Similarly, I have around 100 of each of the bounty materials and I have consumed a bunch of them cubing items and doing other crafting recipes. Materials are not really a problem because if you run out… just run a few more portals and in the process of doing those you will likely also get a number of legendary items. This legitimately feels like the most generous Diablo III season ever.

We talked about this on the show a bit, but it feels like the Diablo III team did not hold anything back. This is reportedly the last new season for the game and in doing so they created something purely fun for the players. It makes me a little sad to be honest, because the very limited team working on Diablo III has managed to create some extremely fun content over the last several leagues. I wonder what this game would have been like if they had gotten the full backing of Blizzard. Seeing how rich and varied the content is in Path of Exile makes me sort of wish for an alternate universe version of Diablo III where it got the same love and attention. That is not to say that the team working on D3 has not done some amazing stuff, but you can clearly tell they have limited resources.

I am very much in that awkward phase of not having all of my gear and not having enough gold to finish crafting my set of gems. I love Crusader and more specifically the Invoker set, so when I saw it was the Haedrig’s Gift set for the season I knew what class I would be playing. I have my six-piece and am currently trying to farm a Ring of Royal Grandeur in order to swap to Half Invoker/Half Crimson. I have none of my cube items and I am missing the correct jewelry and chestpiece. I think a lot of my squishiness will be alleviated when I get an Aquilas’ chest to drop. For now, I am very much in the area where my killing potential is extremely high… but my survival is very very low. I just swapped back to using the Paladin as a heal bot so here is hoping that resolves some of the issues.

All told I am very happy with this season so far, but I also know that I am going to maybe get a week out of it before returning to Path of Exile as my primary game. Playing Diablo III made me realize how lucky I am to have so many good ARPGs to swap between. It used to be Diablo III was pretty much it for me, and I would hunger for a new season. Now when I get tired of one game I can swap to one of many other ARPGs and keep the joy rolling. At some point, I will make my way back to Last Epoch and see some of the changes over there. For now, though, I am happy to be playing some Diablo III and happy to be working on my Invoker build. If you’ve ever loved Diablo III, I highly suggest reinstalling and checking this season out because the Enmity rifts are extremely fun. I love that it is content that you can do pretty much immediately. I can only hope that the Diablo III team will be consumed by Diablo IV where hopefully they can right that sinking ship.

Diablo IV Advice

June 13, 2023 by Belghast

Good Morning Friends! I did not get nearly as much time as I would have liked last night to play some Diablo 4, but I did manage to push through to level 60 and then get another quarter of a level into that for an additional paragon point. I’ve largely been focused on finishing out my renown in the last few zones of the game and finished up Dry Steppes and have now moved on to my final zone of Kehjistan. One of the things that I have been mulling over in my brain is how I would have approached this game differently. For those of you who might not know, I’m one of the admins on the Mastodon/Fediverse server called Gamepad.Club which serves as a gaming-focused social media hub.

While I slept one of my good friends and fellow gamepadders posted a plea for suggestions. I figured I would answer this plea in the form of my morning blog post. Side note… this is the first time I have seen the term Gamepadders in reference to the denizens of Gamepad.club and I think I like it… and am just going to roll with it. Victor got plenty of responses from the larger mastodon community, but I figured I would still outline how I would approach the game knowing what I know now. Of note… I was in MANY phases of Diablo IV testing including several closed phases and a number of public phases. The game changed drastically each time I attempted to sit down and play it. So the truth is I went into the game expecting to play one ability that had been good in the early phases of testing… that was apparently nerfed into the ground.

Follow the Meta

I feel like you first have to ask yourself a simple question. Is the core of my enjoyment of the ARPG experience based on making my own builds? If the answer is yes, then skip this entirely. I am pretty sure you can half-ass your way through the campaign with any build you choose. I made it through the campaign on my heavily nerfed Upheaval build, though I struggled when it came to defeating the first capstone dungeon. Essentially Diablo IV is very poorly balanced right now and not every build is viable when it comes to harder content. If you want the easiest possible experience I would suggest going over to Maxroll.gg and looking at their build guides. They have both leveling builds and end-game builds, and I would choose one of the “in the meta” builds currently that has one of each. That way as you level you get used to the abilities that you will ultimately end up with at the end-game. Icy Veins also has a good build section but I personally like the layout of Maxroll a bit better.

Start on World Tier 1

There are no tangible benefits to playing the game on “Veteran” difficulty. While the placard says that you will get more experience and more loot… you will also take so much more time killing mobs that this benefit becomes entirely negated. Your goal is ultimately to get to World Tier 3 as fast as possible, and as a result, the early game is just an obstacle in your way. There is no point in trying to be a billy badass and insist on World Tier 2. You are only setting yourself up for frustration in the end. If difficult content is your kink, then, by all means, ignore this advice.

Focus on the Main Story Content

Since content scales with you… the later in the game you attempt something the harder it is going to be. As such it is my suggestion that on your first playthrough of the game, you just focus on the main story content. This will be marked in Yellow in your quest log, and you can progress through the game without touching any other content. While you are doing this I suggest you take the time to go ahead and unlock any waypoints you find as you will need these later. Upon completing the main quest you unlock the Tree of Whispers which will give you some additional benefits as you complete the rest of the content in the game. Ultimately you are going to want to do every single side quest available at some point. My personal preference is to unlock the end-game and then roam around doing side content then. If you want a longer journey that will also increase in difficulty as you go, then you can, of course, do side content as you are doing the main content.

Extract Near Perfect Aspects

After finishing the prologue of the game, you will unlock the occultist which allows you to imprint aspects on rare items to turn them into legendaries, and to extract aspects from any legendary drops you might get but no longer need. First things first we are going to need to enable some of the advanced options so go into settings and toggle on the following:

Options > Gameplay
- Advanced Tooltip Compare
- Advanced Tooltip Information

This is going to tell you how good of a roll a given item is. For example, if you look at the aspect I am highlighting above the ability has a range of 20-30% and the item that I found has a near-perfect roll of 29%. This is very worth holding onto and saving for when you need it on your end-game gear. My suggestion is to go ahead and extract any Legendary item that is at least a roll that is 50% of the maximum and most definitely anything that is perfect or near perfect. Everything else should be salvaged as you are going to need those materials later.

Salvage Everything

There are a lot of guides that I have seen that suggest salvaging gear up until you hit level 50. It is my personal suggestion that you never stop salvaging gear. You are going to reach a point where you have more gold coming in than you need, and are going to still be desperate for materials. I switched to selling everything when I finished the campaign and given how often you need to change gear… found myself completely out of several basic materials. Gold will come over time especially as you find Greed Shrines… but you will never stop needing raw materials at least until you have finished out a set of maxed-out ancestral gear.

Buy Whispering Keys

Obols are the currency for doing events in Diablo IV, and much like Blood Shards from Diablo III, you are limited in how many you can carry at a time. Spending them at the Purveyor of Curiosities is a way to gamble on getting legendary items… but the occurrence of legendary drops seems to be skewed by your level. As such spending Obols on gear early on is a bad use of resources. What I would instead do is buy Whispering Keys which are used to unlock the Silent Chests that you find out in the world. You can hold onto these en masse and then use them later on to get a gear boost when needed as you will likely be finding a lot of these Silent Chests in your journey. So it is my suggestion that any time you have a stack of Obols gathered, you spend it down buying these keys and then holding onto them for later.

Unlock World Tier III

Upon finishing the campaign your next core goal is going to be to unlock World Tier III. This means you need to defeat the Cathedral of Light Capstone Dungeon. Unlike the rest of the world, this dungeon is capped at level 50 but can be completed earlier than that if your build is strong. This is ultimately why you want to be following the meta builds as most of them can complete this dungeon somewhere around level 40-45 without much issue. Even if you do not want to start playing on World Tier III, this is gating your access to the last two tiers of renown which is effectively what you are wanting to unlock as quickly as possible. World Tier III also unlocks Helltide Zones and makes it so that Nightmare Dungeon Sigils drop more often as well as granting you access to the Sacred tier of gear. Sacred gear is a massive damage and survival boost and essentially makes all gear before that point obsolete unless you simply have to have a given legendary aspect. Now this goal might take you a bit to accomplish but I am placing it here to outline its importance.

Tree of Whispers

Defeating the Campaign is going to unlock access to the Tree of Whispers. Now this is not an activity that I think you should ever really focus on, but just something to be aware of as you are doing other activities in the world. If you have the opportunity to collect Grim Favors by doing something that aligns with an activity you are already doing, it is just a bonus. Every so often you will fill the bar and get a free box of loot from the tree. Again this should not be your core focus, but just something to be aware of as you do the next few things.

Collect Altars of Lilith

Scattered throughout the world are the Altars of Lilith which are statues that glow slightly red until you have collected them. The campaign make sure you find a few of these along the way, but after you beat the campaign one of your first goals should be making sure you collect all of them. Once they have been collected on a single character, all of your characters from that point forward get the benefit of them. Since they have to be done on a single character though, you might as well devote the time to collecting all 160 of them early on while you are still working on leveling. Yes, this is tedious busywork, but the stat boost that you gain for them will be extremely important when you are trying to unlock abilities that have stat requirements on the paragon boards. I personally found the maps that Polygon created the easiest to follow as they have them numbered and also have zoomed-in images of each location.

You can of course do these while you are completing the campaign if you really keep your eye out for any areas of the map that snake off into a little alcove. There is definitely a pattern to the placement of these statues that you might pick up on along the way.

Max Out Zone Renown

This is the step that I am actively working on if you were curious. As you are completing the campaign you will be capped at a maximum of rank three renown with each region. It is important that you work up your renown because getting every zone to rank three will net your character an extra 10 skill points and getting them all to rank five will give you an extra 20 paragon points. Both of these are significant and like the Lilith Statues, you need to do this on one character before it applies to all of your characters. This will essentially require you to complete all of those blue quests and unlock most of the dungeons in order to hit rank five. I’ve personally completed four of the five regions and am now working on Kehjistan, the area that I spent the least amount of time in so far.

Play The Game Finally

Congratz! You’ve graduated from the busywork phase of Diablo IV. Now you can just do whatever suits your fancy. You could do a bunch of normal dungeons in order to level most efficiently… or you could hit up the Helltide zone every time it is available for fun mob density and loot boxes. You could also bip around the map doing tasks for the Tree of Whispers or dive into progressing your Nightmare Dungeons and with that leveling your glyphs. Personally, I kind of do a mix of all of the above because that seems to be the most enjoyable. I’ve neglected Nightmare Dungeons a bit so far but I need to focus on them soon. I also need to give an attempt or two at trying to unlock World Tier IV now that I have hit level 60. The last capstone dungeon is hard-scaled at level 70, but I am curious if I can finish it early.

There are some aspects of Diablo IV that I really enjoy, more specifically I like the way the world feels and fits together. There are other aspects of Diablo IV that drive me insane and half convince me to stop playing entirely. I talked about a lot of this in a video yesterday, but most of them can be summed up under the banner of being grossly inefficient and wasteful of my time. So much of the ARPG experience to me is about optimization and the last thing I care about is immersion. Immersion only really holds weight until you have finished the campaign, then you want efficient grinds and in this game nothing is efficient. However since my friend wanted advice, this morning is my attempt at outlining how I would approach the game knowing what I know now. You can of course ignore ALL of this and just fumble your way through the game. Diablo IV is maybe an experience best fumbled through the first time because it will allow you to appreciate the world crafting a bit more. When you attempt to play it efficiently… that is when the wheels fall off.

So maybe… just ignore everything that I just said and approach this game however seems best to you at the time. The shortcomings will make themselves very evident eventually… and when that happens feel free to pop back over here for some advice.