Diablo IV

Monolith Friends and Glitched Cthulhu

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Good Morning Friends! I talked briefly about this yesterday but I’ve not spent some time with my friend Ace hanging out in the endgame systems of Last Epoch. Once you have made it through the story to the End of Time, you can in theory jump off and start doing monoliths almost exclusively. Granted the first monoliths start a level 55, so you have to have gotten to a high enough level to be able to survive in there or have someone carry you. It appears that at least on some level unlocks are shared regardless if you are working off your monolith or those of your group mates.

We started the evening working off my monolith since Ace was a bit under level. However about halfway through the night we swapped over and started working on their monolith instead. We defeated the boss of Fall of the Outcasts, which unlocked the second monolith for me even though I am still technically on the quest to finish the first monolith. Right now I am largely holding onto this quest so we can run it together because when I finished the Monolith on their campaign I still got rewarded with a blessing unlock. I want to see if we run it again if we both get a new set of blessings.

The main thing that we wanted to see with our little excursion was whether or not multiplayer was punitive. In all the echoes that we ran, the only situation we noticed where it felt a little bad was when Ace had died during a fight and came back into the Echo. It treated this like we had wiped and they did not get any rewards. However I still got rewards because I did not die, so while it feels a little awful that we did not technically wipe but one player was punished, it does not appear to brick the encounter for the rest of the party. When you are not running your own monolith you end up getting a choice of two seemingly random rewards at the end of each echo which does not seem to map up at all to what the other player is getting. In many cases as the ride-along player, it felt like I was actually getting better rewards.

One significant glitch that we noticed however is if the other player is not in the monolith when the owner starts up the echo and player two teleports to player one… you end up with this mess. This happened several times where I could not see the map and the encounters was effectively floating over top of the black hole skybox that you have at the End of Time zone. This was really weird because if something was on a lower level from you, it would appear visibly smaller… but also you had no real path to get down to it. I had to essentially hug Ace because only they could see where the walls were and how to actually navigate the level. The weirdest thing was that I could not see breakables like barrels and crates or the various shrines… I would just see an explosion of loot from seemingly nowhere.

My first thought is that you could probably drag someone along in monoliths to unlock progress, but we found out when attempting to take on the boss a second time, that the act of defeating the boss had reset Ace’s stability from 500 required to fight the boss down to 300 the previous break point. So we would have had to have ground out a few more echoes in the first monolith to progress to the fight again. I’ve started running some of the content in The Black Sun, aka the second monolith, and don’t seem to be encountering any weirdness for never having actually defeated the first boss on my account.

The prime weirdness that I am experiencing currently is that I cannot seem to complete the Lagon encounter. It is this giant Cthuloid monstrosity at the end of Act 8… which is unfortunately at the end of two long maps, and a mini-boss… all without a waypoint directly before this mega boss. Essentially the fight bugs out and refuses to give you the dialog required to progress. At the time of writing this, there is no patch fixing this interaction but I am reading that I can manually travel to the next location to effectively force the story forward. I am going to try this out in a bit and see if I can make progress into Act 9 finally.

I’ve said that I had a copy of Diablo IV gifted to me, and with that came early access to the beta this weekend. I noticed yesterday that I had access to install it and a few hours later I got an email indicating that as well. So starting tomorrow I will be poking my head into the beta a bit and playing at least enough to get to level 25 which I believe unlocks the cosmetic wolf cub backpack. I am guessing that I will probably be playing a Barbarian, so I guess I should sort out exactly what I want to do. I’ve heard there is a whirlwind build that is pretty solid, and I do love me some “spin to win”… so that is more than likely the path I will take.

Are you playing Last Epoch and if so what do you think of it so far? Are you going to be playing the Diablo IV Beta weekend? Drop me a line below with your thoughts.

Less Repetitive ARPG Keybinds

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Good Morning Friends! If you have read my blog for any length of time you will understand that I truly and deeply love Diablo-style Action Roleplaying Games, or ARPGs as the genre tends to be collectively referred to. Even a good deal of my current love of Guild Wars 2 is rooted in the fact that for the most part, it owes way more lineage to Diablo than it does World of Warcraft. The only problem with all of this is that the older I have gotten, the less forgiving the deeply repetitive process of clicking to move and attack has become on my hands. At this point, I am on the late side of 40 sliding over forward towards 50, and after decades of heavy computer usage, I just can’t handle spamming the mouse button in quite the same way that I used to. For many, this has meant a shift to controller gaming for their ARPG fix which tends to be considerably more forgiving. However for me… I still deeply prefer the mouse and keyboard experience and have landed on a control scheme that works for me. I thought this morning I would share some of this wisdom for anyone looking for a way to play these games without killing your hands in the process.

Generally speaking, the ARPG is a genre that allows for quite a bit of customization of your keybinds. So far I have figured out a way to configure pretty much every game I have played in this manner. I can’t take full credit for this because my good friend Ace set me on this path some years back, but I have adapted their processes and made them my own over the course of adapting them to several different games. Essentially to understand this process you need to understand two common concepts within ARPGs.

  • Force Move – This keybind will be called different things in different games, for example in Last Epoch that I have been playing most recently it is just called “Move”. Conceptually what this does is start your character moving to a point defined by where your mouse cursor is sitting on the screen. So if you drag your mouse all the way to the other side of the screen and tap force move, your character will path in a straight line to your cursor.
  • Force Attack – This keybind is the opposite of force move, and it will stop all motion and cause you to execute a basic attack regardless of whatever movement inputs were in progress. While I am not actively using it, it can be important to know what this keybind is for the game you are playing in case you need to immediately stop executing a movement command.

One of the quirks of Force Move is if you hold the button down it will be constantly executing a move command toward wherever your mouse cursor is pointing. So effectively it is like your character’s movement is tied to the heading of your mouse cursor allowing you to “steer” the character by moving your mouse. In truth, once you have started doing this it feels way more intuitive than it sounds because your character goes where your mouse cursor goes, and once you are comfortable with it can execute some tight turns as a result.

Because my fingers are already very comfortable in the traditional WASD configuration, I opt for using W as my “Force Move” key allowing me to place my fingers in that orientation and then map other important buttons to be comfortably pressed within the orbit of the W key. There might be some variance between games depending on what is supported but effectively I tend to follow the same configuration setup when possible. It will depend slightly upon the abilities you have access to on a given “class”/build but my standard process follows something like this:

  • W – Force Move – The button I am holding pretty much at all times to allow me to steer my character with my mouse.
  • Right Mouse – Primary Attack – This is the button that I bind my primary attack to that I am executing the most often.
  • Spacebar – Movement Ability – This is the key that I will tap when I need to execute whatever movement ability my character has. If it has no movement abilities I tend to bind a reactional ability to it that I might need to hit on a moment’s notice.
  • E – Secondary Attack – This one is going to vary quite a bit, but if I need to hit an ability periodically other than my primary attack it is going to go on this key. For example, if I am placing totems or mines or something of the sort, it goes on this key because I find it most comfortable to press while holding W.
  • Q – Primary Cooldown – This one also varies quite a bit, but if I have some sort of a survival cooldown I generally put it on this key. This is in part because Diablo III trained this to be my potion hotkey so mentally I associate it with survival.
  • R – Situational Attack/Cooldown – Since this key is further away, I tend to place whatever I need to use that infrequently.
  • 1-5 – Potions – You can blame Path of Exile for this shift, but effectively if there is a health potion button I place it on 1, and if there are other kinds of potions I place them on 2-5. I am very used to reaching up to hit 1 when things are going poorly at this point.
  • Left Shift – Force Attack – If the game offers some sort of force attack key, I tend to put it on left shift so that when I press it, my movement will be canceled for the moment. This is useful for situations where you might need to pause on a moment’s notice to avoid getting into an area effect for a trap.

I’ve pretty much been able to adapt every game I have played over the last handful of years to some version of this keybinding system. You might have to dig around a bit, but almost every game seems to have some version of “Force Move”. In Path of Exile unfortunately I have to sacrifice a possible keybind, because they do not have a separate button that I could bind to it independent of the hotbar. The only game that I have not been able to configure in this manner was Lost Ark, which is probably in part why I never spent much time playing that game. That game had some very specific opinions on what you should be doing gameplay-wise with your keys. I don’t feel like I am losing much of anything though because there are other things about that game that did not exactly jive with me either.

So as we approach the early access testing period of Diablo IV, the very first thing I will be doing is configuring my keybinds to match something akin to the process I just highlighted above. This is what works for me personally, but I suggest it as a less damaging alternative to spamming your mouse click constantly to keep registering a movement input. I had a copy of the game gifted to me, so I will be checking it out along with everyone else when the early access period opens. I am not entirely certain it is going to be my jam, but I am willing to give it a shot. At the moment, however, I am very much enjoying my time in Last Epoch. I am sure tomorrow I will have a post talking about my experience playing it with friends.