Diablo IV

Vampires are Hunting You

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Yesterday was the release of Diablo IV Season 2 and as I said I would… I created yet another Barbarian. I patterned this one loosely after my previous seasonal character because I though she looked cool. One of my favorite abilities from beta testing was Upheaval, but by the time the game launched it had been nerfed into oblivion and I was just too damned stubborn to realize that. Now however it has apparently been buffed and tweaked back into a viable state, so I am leveling with that ability and things seem to be going fairly smoothly. Admittedly I am only level 23 after a relatively casual night of play, and the game did not really begin to bog down in previous attempts until the 40s. I am largely following the path blazed by Maxroll and they have a decent enough guide to Upheaval.

The main content feature of the new season is the Blood Harvest. These are essentially the Helltide zones but better in every possible way. In a Helltide you fight to gain embers and then have to turn those embers in to unlock chests that reward gear. If you die at any point you lose half of your embers and the embers themselves disappear after a single Helltide event. Then there is an hour wait for the next Helltide to spawn in which you are twiddling your thumbs looking for something to do. Blood Harvests however are always up and while each one might only last an hour, the progress you gain in Blood Lures… carries over to the next event making it no big deal if you manage to catch the end of one. There are similar chests that show up around the zone and you can summon “Blood Seekers” which are special Elite vampires that drop keys for them. Additionally, there is a whole reputation system with whatever the Vampire Hunters Guild is called that unlocks various reward caches as you level.

The other side of this is that as you kill vampires you will occasionally gain a resource called Potent Blood, which then can be gambled on obtaining either new Vampire Abilities or powering up your existing ones. It costs 25 Potent Blood to spin the wheel and you are given a selection of three abilities to either unlock or devote some experiences to. The abilities get stronger as they gain levels and depending on the configuration of your gear you can have up to five different vampire powers active at the same time. While the Season 1 mechanic was pretty lame, this duo of Blood Harvest and Vampire Powers really does give this a more Path of Exile seasonal mechanic feel. Ultimately you will reach a point where you have capped out everything if you play enough, but it does feel interesting and meaningful to get potent blood that you can then pour into your abilities to keep making them stronger.

Where the seasonal mechanic fails… is that once again we have some required bag bloat. There are three types of seals that need to appear on your gear in order to equip items. Think Magic the Gathering casting costs… each ability requires a certain number of Pacts of a given type. There are items that you can pick up in the world that allow you to add a pact of a specific type to your gear and as a result, you always end up with four of your already very limited bag slots taken up by carrying around stacks of these consumables. The fourth type removes pacts from an item allowing you to start from scratch and make sure you have all of the right ones for your build. The deeper we go into the season, the more infuriating this is going to be because when you find an upgrade… not only do you need to make sure you have the right Legendary Ability imprinted upon it, but that it also has the correct combination of “mana symbols” for you to equip your abilities. While not as bad as “socket pressure” can be in Path of Exile… it still feels equally awful.

One interesting mechanic that I ran into this morning while popping into the game to grab some screenshots is what appears to be an “you’ve pissed the vampires off” mechanic. I was doing an event and during the middle of it I got a message scrolling across my chat box that said something to the effect of “The Vampires are Hunting You” and then I was overwhelmed quickly as several big chonky elite vampires spawned in to “whoop my ass”. I’ve not found much written about this, but it appears like there is some sort of “heat” system in the game where if you are killing too many vampires too successfully, the game is going to raise the stakes. I fought valiantly as long as I could but eventually, it became too much and I died… which seemed to reset the hunt allowing me to come back and finish the event I was already doing.

All in all, it definitely seemed like a step forward. Both the Blood Hunts themselves and the vampire abilities are fun enough to warrant chasing them… and they are doable from level one so they make this season feel immediately focused around the mechanics. From the sidelines however it did not seem to be moving the needle forward much in getting players to come back for the season. At launch I had over 200 friends playing this game and last night we were doing good if a half dozen other folks were logged in. Maybe folks are sitting back and waiting to see what those of us who committed to playing on day one report. I will say that mechanically the new stuff is enjoyable and so far I have not hated the experience of playing a Barbarian. I will have to see if the gameplay bogs down as I pour on more levels, but pending it keeps about the same pace and combat loop I am probably going to be enjoying myself for awhile.

The primary complaints that I have however are all related to performance. The servers did not feel stable… and even this morning there were times where things locked up and it was as though I was waiting for the server to catch up to me. There were numerous times throughout the evening when I crashed out of the client while teleporting or loading into a dungeon, and a few of those required me to open up the program manager and manually kill the client that was still stranded in memory. I’m hoping they will have some rapid patches that address these performance issues. The beginning of the evening was really bad and it lessened a bit as the night went on. However like I said even this morning… there were still moments where the client went unresponsive.

I still had quite a bit of fun though, or at least enough to keep me playing for a bit. Last season I got through the first four challenges and I am going to see if I can get a bit further. If you were waiting in the wings to see how this season went, then I figured you might as well pop in and check it out for yourself. I am sure before long I will have some of the same complaints that I always seem to about this game, but for the moment I am having a better time this season than I did last.

So Close to 100

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Morning Folks! I am so damned close to 100. I ended the night with roughly two pips to go which equates to around 37 million experience. Progress is so damned slow at level 99 and I am constantly on edge that something that I might do will set me back. I’m carrying around an Omen of Amelioration which will prevent 75% of the normal XP loss from taking a death. On one hand, I hoped that simply having that in my inventory would keep me from needing it, but if I do take a death it would be well worth the 40 Chaos that I spent on it. For reference, all evening I ground delve and it only got me two pips worth of experience, so essentially it will take another full evening of delve to push across the finish line.

The positive is that I am currently completely full on sulphite and my Lightning Arrow Champion can seemingly refill me much faster and safer than my other options have been. For refilling purposes, I have been running rusted scarabs and slowly chipping away at the Ritual challenge. I ran around ten maps last night with a full complement of blue altars and did not take a single death, which feels miraculous to have something that strong. I also swapped over some gear from my Lightning Arrow Deadeye allowing me to at least have some measure of magic find. Essentially I swapped over the rings which takes me to around +30% quant and +80% rarity which while not super extreme should make a bit of a difference in the long run.

One of the things that I have learned is that I value different things from other Path of Exile players. If you watch any of my videos you will mostly hear me talking about my defensive layers and how I am planning on surviving things… and very little about how I have stacked the deck to be able to kill things. Last night my friend Kodra uploaded a video of his Hexblast Miner since he considered my kill speed “very slow” for bosses. Compared to a boss killer I am exceptionally slow… but even during this video all of the close calls he had where he “almost” died would have driven me up a wall. I’ve played builds that are much much more “killy” but ride the edge of death, and they are very much NOT FOR ME. At some point, I should build something like this Hexblast build just so I have a boss nuker.

Today is also the release of Diablo IV Season 2, and I know I am going to spend some time checking that out. Right now I plan on rolling another Barbarian largely to use it as a point of reference. I played a Barbarian at launch, and in Season 1, and want to at least play one a bit so I can see how the differences in the class feel between the three. I’ve heard that necromancers have a number of significant buffs, namely that the minions can actually stay alive now… so I am probably going to spend some time playing one of those as well. I am honestly not sure how seriously I am going to play D4, because I still have some goals that I want to accomplish in Path of Exile namely that once XP no longer matters I want to beat my head against Maven until I learn that fight.

Anyways! If you are going to be playing some D4 hit me up. I am not even sure if I have room on my B.Net Friends list but I’m Belghast #1752 over there.

Season of Blood Patch Notes

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Good Morning Folks. Diablo IV Season 2 is on the very near horizon, and I feel like this is going to be a make-or-break moment for the game going forward. Diablo IV was easily one of the best-selling games Blizzard has ever created… but like a poorly sealed party balloon left out overnight, all of that hype has deflated. So much so that creators who have made their careers upon the Diablo brand… have started shifting focus to diversify into other games. The first season of the game was “not good” and now we have had two live streams talking about the future of the game and what we should be expecting for Season 2. Blizzard also dropped over 40 pages worth of patch notes shortly after the discussion.

I cannot deny that there are a lot of changes coming with this season. Several systems like Resistances and the concept known as Damage Pools are getting completely reworked. Additionally, there is a sweeping set of changes to the way that some legendaries and the paragon boards work in order to attempt to spur more build diversity. So I give the team a lot of credit for seemingly listening to some of the feedback from the players and then attempting to iterate on their design philosophy to address these. This also tells me that the player drop-off was likely even larger than I imagined because this is some significant “desperate to save the franchise” level of hustle. I do worry about what this meant as far as long hours for that team, but if they can nail this season and the changes I have hope for the brand.

One of the things to come out of these patch notes is an attempt to clearly tier the game into three phases… 1-50 campaign game, 50-70 sacred era, and 71-100 ancestral era. One of the big complaints that I had was that once you crossed into World Tier 3, anything that was dropping that was not Sacred quality was absolutely useless. This is being fixed by making any gear drops that are not of the maximum rank will instead drop as materials, which works similarly to how Diablo III Season 28 Altar worked. This seems like a really good change, and while you are in one of these tiers your level increases are going to keep raising the minimum item level so that you are in theory more likely to keep seeing better stuff. The idea is that you won’t move into World Tier 3, and immediately find the best loot you can possibly get for the next 20 levels, before moving into World Tier 4… and having the same impact once you equip your first full set of Ancestral gear.

I think the thing that concerns me the most about this plan, is that it spreads out the worst part of the game for me. I really hate the way gear works in Diablo IV. My “build” is less about making sure I have the right talent points chosen, or the right paragon boards assembled… and way more about making sure I have the correct legendary affixes attached to the right slots. Many of these cannot be pulled from the codex of power, which means that when an item drops… I cannot simply slot that item in and get an immediate boost of power without having to go back to town and scrounge around in my vault hoping I have a good enough aspect to pull from an item in order to make the new item actually useful. In Diablo 3 or even Path of Exile, the leveling process is extremely quick allowing you to stabilize the state of your gear quickly. After that you are just swapping out items on the very rare occasion that you manage to pick up an aspirational item that gives you a significant boost. While moving through the levels I fear that this is going to feel awful to keep shifting to marginally better gear.

The other problem I’ve had with both Season of the Malignant and now the Season of Blood… is that the “new content” that is being added to the game is borrowed power. Neither is expanding the scope of the game in a permanent way and instead giving you a neatly encapsulated seasonal chase that goes away as soon as the next flavor of the quarter mechanic rolls in. I hated the rut that World of Warcraft fell into by having a rotating series of mechanics that only mattered so long as that one expansion was live, and Diablo IV is heading down that same path. Sure you occasionally get a Path of Exile season like Crucible League where you have a borrowed power system in the form of skill trees associated with weapons, but I have faith that those mechanics will likely resurface again in the future in a more permanent form. For example, the Sanctum league introduced a whole rogue-like mode to the game, and while it was gone for the Crucible League it made its return during the current league as a permanent mechanic.

What the Diablo IV seasons are lacking is something that can realistically stick around and become a permanent fixture. Sure they are adding a few more boss fights in this league, and that is fine… but it doesn’t really do much to make me excited about grinding to 100 in order to complete them. Path of Exile has these pinnacle bosses as well, but it also has a lot of other ways that completely shift and change how you approach the game. Betrayal is an obtuse mechanic, but it gives you deterministic ways to modify your gear and obtain new abilities that you can’t get through other means. For example, I’ve been shuffling my entire board in an attempt to get Vorici into Research so that I can in theory get White colored sockets on one of my items, which eases socket pressure and allows me to shift my builds slightly.

This is just one example because there are countless mechanics that started out as the focus of a single League but eventually found their way into the game as evergreen content. I am a Delve-enjoyer, and I build characters for the purpose of being able to crawl through the darkness looking for interesting loot. Other folks might build entirely around the Breach league mechanic which opens portals allowing demons to bleed into our reality, which then in turn allows you to collect materials to fight specific bosses that award unique items. Over the last decade, there have been forty-one leagues, and each of them has left some permanent mark on the game as a whole. What I see instead with Diablo IV is a focus on creating disposable FOMO-inducing content… which gives me great concerns about the long-term success of the title.

None of this is to dilute the fact that the team has put in an awful lot of work on this second season. I hope it improves a lot of the problems with the game, and that subsequent seasons also continue to move that bar forward. It feels like we are sort of dealing with issues that should never have made it out of beta testing, but that is where we are unfortunately. There were just some poorly designed systems in this game that will need to be fixed in order to make the game better in the long-haul. I do have to say though… that the faith that Blizzard will put forth the work in order to improve the game is not really there for me. I worry that what we are seeing is a knee-jerk reaction to the massive fall-off in players, and if Season 2 does not magically fix things… the game might just be abandoned entirely.

All of this said I am certain I will poke my head into the season when it launches in a week or so to see how the game feels in its updated state. I think a huge thing for the life of this game is going to be erecting a PTR and letting players test the content as it is being developed. While Blizzard ignored a lot of the feedback coming from the community during the beta tests of the game leading into launch, I think they have realized that they did so at their own peril.

Ancestor League Staying Power

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Hey Folks! This morning I was struggling to find something to write about and I thought I would Trials of the Ancestors league has been going for me so far. We are now forty-six days into the league, and it shows no real signs of slowing down. Generally speaking after the first month there is a massive drop off in players, and based on Steam Charts we’ve maintained at least 40k players for the average concurrency. As compared to this point in the Crucible League the numbers were down to around 16k, and in Sanctum around 21k. There are a lot of factors that are likely generating this. Firstly the base state of the game is amazing right now, and there are so many viable builds available. While Deadeye is currently dominating with 17% of players on the ladder… there is a pretty decent spread among other ascendancies with some reasonable build diversity within each of them.

The other thing that is happening right now, is a bit of an abandoning of the Diablo franchise by content creators and players. Diablo IV was initially well-received but really had some issues. I have talked about this at length on my own blog but the truth is the game was not designed for the Core ARPG player audience. What this has translated to is a massive influx of players trying out Path of Exile and Last Epoch for the first time, and oftentimes realizing that they enjoy it more. Final Fantasy XIV went through a similar glow-up when World of Warcraft was floundering, and we are essentially seeing the same sort of effect happening now in the ARPG market as folks move away from Diablo. The biggest shock for me however is when I saw Raxxanterax essentially announcing that he was going to be moving on to other games. He was the core pillar of the Diablo III Youtube community, and is the CEO of Maxroll.gg so to see him abandoning Diablo IV was rather telling.

Similar to during the great migration from World of Warcraft to Final Fantasy XIV a few years ago, I started seeing a number of videos gaining traction like the one above where someone who played a lot of Diablo tried out Path of Exile for the first time. Even more than that… I’ve seen a broadening of the community as more folks try their had at creating content for the game. As a Path of Exile enjoyer, it has been extremely cool to see essentially a broadening of the base. I think the next few years for the game are going to be exceptionally strong as we get the launch of Path of Exile 2 and see just what the release cadence of a two-game experience is going to look like. I think more than anything I am thankful that Path of Exile is going to keep running because no matter what happens with the second game I am always going to be able to return to the first.

As for me, I am still having a blast churning through content and trying out assorted builds. I recorded a new video this morning that shows off my Righteous Fire Juggernaut in its current state. Mostly I recorded it because I realized I did not have a video for Righteous Fire Jugg yet in this league. As far as my other builds I have played Lightning Arrow Raider, Guardian Summon Raging Spirits, Storm Brand Inquisitor, and Shield Crush Chieftain. I have this problem where I get excited about a build… pour some currency into getting it stabilized… and then start wanting to move on to the next build. All of my builds could be so much better than they currently are… if I were playing it and tuning it as my only build. I really like screwing around with new builds and figuring out what makes them tick, and ultimately this has been a huge part of my learning process with the game as a whole.

So of course I am now eyeing the “next” build. While I was leveling an SRS Guardian in the Toucan league over the weekend, there was a short stint where I was trying to weave Absolution into the build. I mean I was doing it completely wrong, but I had enough fun with the ability that I would like to try and build something around it. Seeing as I have now leveled two Minion Guardians and have no Witches yet in this league, I was leaning toward building on that class. I’ve been out looking at what folks are actively playing on POE.Ninja but have not really landed on a final build. I was an altoholic in MMORPGs and it seems like I am even more so in ARPGs given now many individual builds I wind up making in a given league.

I get that Path of Exile is not the game for everyone, but I have enjoyed watching folks warm to it. Closer to home I have been enjoying watching Kodra get the swing of things. What seemed to really cause him to begin to grok the game was the Magic the Gathering Analogy that we talked about on the show some weeks back. It has been a joy to watch him dive into various concepts of the game and assimilate them into his own game style preferences. Every league I seem to learn something new, and this league has been about getting into Blight and Legion more than anything else. There is just too much content in the game to sort of grasp all of it at once. I am where I am today because I have been doing this for five leagues and gathering bits of information along the way. Path of Exile is not a game that you master in a few hundred hours, but instead, one that you keep learning thousands of hours into the gameplay.

Anyways. I am still having a stupid amount of fun. I think maybe Trial of the Ancestors has been my favorite league thus far. They’ve all been on an upward trajectory since Kalandra. I do really wish that particular league mechanic would get its own glow-up and return to the core game. I thought building Lakes was deeply interesting, but the mechanical state of the game was rough. Anyways… I have no clue who actually makes it to the end of one of my Path of Exile posts but I figure it is a small group. Thanks for sticking around as I continue to obsess about this nonsense.