Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, and Thalen
Hey Folks! We are down a few folks this night, which leads to a bit of a short show. It is, however, a show filled with some pretty good conversations. We start off with Bel talking a bit about Diablo IV Lord of Hatred expansion and how his opinion of the game has swung a bit from good to frustrated to really good again. An event currently running in Diablo drives us down the familiar classic era World of Warcraft discussion, as we agree that Black Rock Depths was an amazing dungeon. Kodra talks a bit about Pokémon ZA and how there may or may not be a vampire character in it. We also talk a bit about Heroes of Might and Magic and why III was the best game… and how the new Olden Era is a direct throwback to that time. We close out with a bit of a discussion where Bel talks about interest in Sorcery: Contested Realm and how he plans to give a report later once he has gotten his decks and played some rounds with friends. Essentially, it is a throwback to the old school era of Magic: The Gathering from one of the Path of Exile devs.
Good Morning, Folks. At this point, I have completed the Diablo IV Storyline and am slowly grinding up paragon levels. I have unlocked Torment 1 and can reasonably farm that without much issue. Note that it is without any real semblance of a build because legendaries in general have felt really sparse and hard to acquire. I don’t necessarily love that, but it was a decision to dial back the look, and at least for me, it feels like they just spread the same amount of butter across a lot more toast. My Thorns Paladin feels reasonable and not completely broken, and a lot of the power that it lost I think, is in the form of the missing passives. I honestly feel sort of meh about Diablo IV as a whole right now. I thought this expansion and patch were going to usher in a new great age for the game, and it certainly shook up a lot of things… but I can’t necessarily say that the moment-to-moment gameplay in the endgame is better. I don’t hate it, but I also don’t necessarily love it either and feel like Path of Exile 1/2 and Last Epoch are doing a much better version of this genre across the board.
I had to cherry-pick a screenshot for talking about the story that does not give much of anything away, because I do really feel like this is worth experiencing for the story alone. I did not like the story for Vessel of Hatred, and it very much felt like a letdown in every single way. Lord of Hatred, however, is really freaking good, and there are way more interesting interactions with famous people from the Diablo franchise than we have had to date. There were actual moments here in this game that made me feel things… I actually had to choke back tears at one point. That is pretty rare for an ARPG story, and I felt like the game earned its story beats more than we have at any point since the launch of D4. Sure, I hated the whole Akarat as Jesus nonsense, but in truth, you don’t really spend that much time having to interact with that narrative. What was way more interesting was the manner in which we reintroduced Lilith and also dealt with some of the challenges around Rathma as the child of Lilith and directly connected back to our character. It is really good stuff and expands the general lore of Diablo in some interesting ways.
Skovos is also a really great new area to add to the game. I had some doubts about it as I was going through the content, but watching it open up a bit as I entered the endgame, I really do think there is some interesting stuff going on here. The legion event, for example, in Skovos is this whole pirate-attack-themed thing, and it is so much more interesting than the baseline legion events. Similarly, the Helltide areas feel really good on Skovos, but the only negative of all of this… is that essentially this one location sunsets the need to go to any other location. It has effectively shrunk the world down to only ever needing to exist in this one area. The hub of Temis literally has access to all of the things that forced you to go to other cities, and also serves as the only place you can access the Horadric Cube. So essentially, Skovos is now the game in its totality, in a way that did not occur with Vessel of Hatred and Nahantu.
Gear feels extremely hard to get in a way that I have never quite experienced since the launch of Diablo IV, and I am not sure I am a fan of it. Blasters who are grinding this game ten plus hours per day are finding plenty of gear, but I do worry about the folks who are only playing for a few hours at a time. I have exactly ONE ancestral item, and it dropped from the Obol vendor as a white item that I then upgraded into a Mythic via the cube. I am sure this will change as I go up in Torment tiers, but I also sort of need the gear to be able to go up in difficulty. I feel like I am being artificially gated by just not finding any legendary drops that are usable. I am wearing a bunch of stuff, but it does not necessarily equate to anything resembling a build right now. I am mostly being carried hard by the power of the baseline thorns build, instead of actually feeling like I have synergy with any of my gear. I liked loot raining down from the skies, and it is a bit of a bummer to be playing in extreme poverty league.
The other thing that is annoying me a bit right now is the reintroduction of Capstone dungeons. These feel like they are a complete waste of time. Essentially, in an ARPG, anything that does not reward good experience or loot is not worth doing, and these feel like an artificial barrier that is placed in our way to keep us from progressing. They are not hard to do, mind you, but they take about three times as long as I feel like they should. These essentially gate your seasonal ranks, which themselves gate your ability to progress up into torment levels. So instead of just needing to run a T1 Pit in order to unlock Torment rank 1, you now also have to do a dungeon that will not reward much loot, and also takes about 10-15 minutes to run, since there are three distinct phases to it. I am not sure what the design goal was with reintroducing capstone dungeons, because they don’t feel challenging… they just feel like a waste of my time.
Another thing that has been a bit of a disappointment is the Warplan system. These are what I would term “aggressively fine”. Sure, it is best practice to never do any activity without a Warplan sending you there, but they don’t really feel like they meaningfully improve the baseline content. A Nightmare Dungeon is always going to be a Nightmare Dungeon, and the Pit is always going to be the Pit… and while you are stapling some extra rewards on them via the Warplan, it doesn’t really feel transformative at all. Maybe I have not seen enough of the trees yet that unlock as you do the content, but most of the options feel like they are just going to give you more chances at loot. There is also no methodology for banning specific content. For example, I kind of hate the Kurast Undercity and never want to do it… and there is no way for me to say “never show me this content, and make the other content more frequent”. My options are to avoid the content in the warplans, and if I cannot… reroll the entire thing. Even if they gave us the ability to reroll specific nodes on the Warplan tree, it would be better than what we have currently.
I think the reality is that Diablo IV is never going to be “my” game, not at least in the way that Diablo III once was. I am entirely too Path of Exile aligned at this point to really ever be satisfied with the limited set of things that the Diablo franchise is now providing. I think there are going to be some players who will enjoy the slowed-down progression systems because it gives them a longer tail before they reach the point of feeling wildly overpowered. For me, however, I want to play Diablo IV as a fun weekend or two and not as a primary game, and as such, artificially gating content that we already had access to previously and throttling the gearing just feels like a turn in the wrong direction for me personally. That game isn’t bad, and I enjoyed the story quite a bit… but I will also never play that story again because it is the least efficient way to do a seasonal character. I am not sure how long I will be playing Diablo IV, but I doubt I will finish out the seasonal journey before I am back to either Last Epoch or Path of Exile.
Good Morning, Folks. Monday at 6:30 pm my time, Diablo IV Lord of Hatred launched, and it has been a bit of a mess. I think things have mostly stabilized, but for the first evening, I was getting disconnected when trying to start story quests. What made this so infuriating is that Diablo 4 has no checkpointing system when it comes to story content and dungeons. This means if you get disconnected anywhere during the content, you have to start over from the very beginning. Worse than that, there is this whole problem of your character being stranded in the world and having to keep attempting to log back in. This was not just an “overloaded servers” issue, because Tuesday morning, I woke up about 3 am and could not get back to sleep, and decided to go ahead and get up and play some Diablo 4. At 4 am, I got disconnected from a quest dungeon and experienced the same behavior as during peak times. They have since dropped a few hotfix patches, and things seem to mostly be stable now.
My original plan was to play a Warlock and lean heavily on Command Fallen, which, at least on paper, sounded similar to my beloved Summon Raging Spirits from Path of Exile. In practice, however, this ability feels NOTHING like a minion ability, and is instead mostly a targeted attack that just happens to send an explosive minion at the target. This feels super freaking awkward and nothing like the spammy SRS gameplay style where you are running around and flooding the map with temporary minions. This, combined with the disconnects, made me rage quit out on the warlock for the time being and roll a Paladin instead, since I already know that I enjoy that playstyle. At some point, I will revisit the Warlock and probably do some sort of hellfire caster build. I was pretty happy with the name Beldemona and shocked that I had never used that before for one of my “evil” caster characters.
At the current moment, I am level 37 and slowly chipping my way through the story content. I played a bit Tuesday morning and then again after maybe 7 pm last night. I have no clue where I am in the totality of the story, but so far, it is pretty solid. I hate the whole Akarat as Jesus simulacrum thing, but the story surrounding the Amazons and even the engagement with Lilith so far have been pretty great. It feels like a massive improvement over the Nahantu storyline from the first expansion. They did, however, kind of do Neyrelle dirty, and I am annoyed about that. The layout of the zones in Skovos is way more focused on the story content than I would have come to expect. I am not sure how these zones are going to feel after completing the story when you are dealing with evergreen open-world content. Then again, Nahantu kind of suffered from the same problem, and I never spent much time returning to those zones.
I am not entirely certain how I feel about the “no passives” build structure that went in with Lord of Hatred. At least with my Thorns Paladin, you spend a lot of time leveling as something else and then swapping a bunch of things over at 36 when you unlock some of the specific paths on the tree. It just feels like we are leaning way more heavily on gearing, but then again, since you can choose to craft whatever temper you need, instead of randomly rolling these, it might all shake out in the end. I’ve not really gotten any useful legendaries yet, and I am not sure what level those really begin to factor into the drop pool. I did spend a bit of grinding in Helltide when I got frustrated with the disconnects on Monday night, and the rewards, at least at low levels, felt pretty crummy. I was mostly getting blues from opening loot boxes, and I would have expected almost entirely yellow or better. I am looking forward to finishing the campaign so that I can see what endgame loot starts to look like.
Being brutally honest, I am not really certain if I like this version of Diablo IV better than the last version I played when the Paladin was introduced. It is different, and I will have to see what it feels like once I conquer the storyline demon. I never play through the story with repeat seasonal characters. My inner murder hobo is way too strong, and I mostly grind out the levels in Helltide or do whispers. I am really looking forward to seeing what War Plans introduces to the game, but I figure all of that unlocks the moment you finish the story. I don’t REALLY play ARPGs for the story, even though I occasionally enjoy it as I do in Path of Exile 1/2. Currently, it feels like I am taking my medicine and just biding my time for the story content to be finished. Lord of Hatred is better than the base game and the first expansion, but it is still not as good as something like Diablo III was storyline-wise. I don’t love all of the ambiguity of the morality in this game. I prefer to smash demons and angels and not have to care about who is betraying me in the process.
In other news, it is Evil Lemon time, aka when I am hooked up to a portable chemotherapy pump that is slowly poisoning me. The worst part of chemotherapy is realizing that I have 10 days where I feel various versions of crap, and then 4 days at the very end where I have to cram two weeks of necessary activities into before prepping for the next round. I am on the downward slide, and remembering this morning how much food hurts. Essentially, early on in the cycle, it hurts to chew anything and swallow anything, which is often why I shift over to a mostly liquid diet for a few days until the worst of that passes. I know I will be at my weakest this coming Saturday and Sunday, and it helps that the flow of this process is predictable. The cold reaction was instant and much worse than round two, which was in itself worse than round one. Luckily, it is not exhibiting in neuropathy, really, but mostly just pain because the skin has peeled off my fingertips. I am regularly applying lotion in an attempt to help with the healing, but it is bad enough that my phone rarely recognizes my thumbprint for unlocks.
Anyways, hoping to maybe wrap the story tonight in Diablo IV and see what the endgame has in store for me.
Featuring: Ace, Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! This week we started off with some discussion about ITER-8 a Tower Defense game that has a bit of a different spin. From there Tam talks about The August Before and how it is essentially the reverse of Packing. We reprise our Pokopia topic from last week and talk about how Tam’s kid is probably in for a sad revelation as she desperately hunts for the missing humans. Bel figured out what is missing from Last Epoch and we talk a bit about the importance of a seasonal journey of some sort in forever games. Tam realizes that he has solved Star Trek Online and how it is way less fun for him now. Finally we talk a bit about Path of Exile and specifically Kodra’s journey into winging a build by trying to figure out which skills work with Holy Strike.
