Regretfully Seeking Luocha

Good Morning Folks! This morning’s blog post is going to be a bit of a smorgasbord of smaller topics. The first is that the Silver Wolf banner is sadly over in Honkai Star Rail. That means that any attempts at getting this excellent character are diminished for the time being. I am uncertain if she can be pulled on a normal banner, but I am extremely happy that I picked her up while it was available. It cracks me up that when she visits the Astral Express she does so in hologram form. This morning she was hanging out in the parlor car and wanting to play board games… then realized that holograms can’t move physical pieces. Then turned around and berated me for not having any arcade cabinets on the express. She has rapidly become one of my favorite characters for her ability to brute force a weakness onto a target.

With the Silver Wolf banner gone, that means the Luocha banner is now available. I have to admit there is absolutely nothing about this character or his design that interests me. I am however pulling for him just because I need a second healer. I would far rather have Bailu, but as it stands I think you have to be just exceptionally lucky with the default banner to make this happen. Honestly, I am not even that big of a fan of his style of healing, but having a second healer seems like it would make the split runs where you are required to have two teams much easier to complete. I am however hoping to pick up a Pela from the banner while it is available. I bonded with Pela during the museum event and now like the character far more than I originally did.

So far however all I have pulled are multiple copies of Qinqque. Since you got her for free that means I now have her with two Eidolons, which is fine… but she isn’t exactly a character I am actively using for anything other than running assignments. I only had enough currency saved up to do two 10 pulls and the other pull the only thing I picked up was a four-star light cone. Just like in Genshin Impact, pulling a weapon or light cone is always the least exciting possible thing you can pull. I’m close to another 10 pull on the Luocha banner so maybe I will get him so I can go back to the standard banner. As it stands there are probably more things on that banner that I actually care about at this point.

I’m finding the event that went in with Luocha a bit frustrating. It is called Stellar Flare and it is based on defeating a number of mobs during a certain number of cycles aka turns. Since I tend to build teams for survival and not speed… this means that I keep failing these fights. I am going to have to shift things up a bit and pull together a speedy team rather than a sturdy team. The problem is that the fight itself dishes out a ton of damage. So you almost need to come up with a team that can “board wipe” every single cycle. I’m also nowhere near maxed out on my characters so it isn’t like I can just brute force this. I need to devote some time to farming the resources needed to upgrade my newly level 70 character squad the rest of the way.

In very very brief Diablo IV news, I managed to get to level 70 finally. I am just not really enjoying the grind at this point. Barbarian is essentially in a state where if you get crowd controlled once… you are dead almost instantly. This is just about as unfun of a situation as it gets, and while I enjoy hanging out with my friend Cyl… I don’t much enjoy Nightmare Dungeons. Really other than the occasional world boss Nightmare Dungeons are the only end-game activity that is reliably available. I felt very strong when I first got to World Tier IV but I already feel like I lost all of that power and am consistently getting weaker every single level. The thing is… I am wearing about as good of gear as you can get for my level with the appropriate aspects on each item. Sure I could min-max the stats or grind out more paragon points, but it largely feels like a losing battle. I exist in two states… either immortal or instantly dead the moment anything stuns/freezes/poisons me.

All of the news about Secrets of the Obscure has made me renew my focus on Guild Wars 2. Since I have been recording my dumb little videos talking about various game modes I enjoy, I decided that last night I would record myself doing the server reset Tequatl fight. This is sort of the quintessential Guild Wars 2 experience for me personally. It was the encounter that made me finally appreciate how god of a game Guild Wars 2 could be, and was probably my first real large-scale world boss experience. Since then I have done hundreds of boss and meta trains, but Tequatl will always hold a very special place in my heart. It is sort of the pinnacle of how cool the drop in group play can be in this game.

Last night I also started working a bit on the next set of story quests for What Lies Within. I didn’t get super far though because I wound up going outside to hang in the backyard for the remainder of the night. I am sure I will pick up and get through that content drop today. I’m also looking forward to the weapons test beta this weekend. I want to get in and play with Necromancer Greatsword/Pistol and see if I can figure out how to make it viable. Mostly I just want a ranged weapon that feels better than staff to combo with Greatsword. The axe is just too short of a ranged weapon, and I really wish Necromancer got access to Longbow. Maybe eventually someday.

Did you have luck pulling Luocha in Honkai Star Rail? Are you still playing Diablo IV? Are you going to participate in the weapon test beta in Guild Wars 2? Drop me a line with your thoughts.

Diablo IV – World Tier 4

Good Morning Friends! This weekend I moved up into World Tier 4 of Diablo 4, which means I have finally entered the proper endgame. This happened largely due to the fact that my friend Cyl told me that Friday night we would be getting through the Fallen Temple, aka the Capstone dungeon blocking World Tier 4. She had been holding off on trying it, and I had failed it a few times… but together we wrecked the place. Essentially the combination of Sorceress and Barbarian was pretty potent and she would freeze things… and then I would spin on top of them with impunity wrecking their life pool. The final boss encounter was a bit tricky at times, and I had to abuse the fact that I am fairly sturdy and resurrect Cyl a few times. There are a lot of things that just having another person really helps for, and I like that self rezzing does not subtract from your life pool.

Nightmare Dungeons in theory probably should not exist prior to World Tier 4. They are a boring mess at low tiers that you can begin running in World Tier 3. As soon as you complete a Tree of Whispers in Tier 4 everything begins dropping at Tier 21 or higher. Completing one of these unlocks your ability to start salvaging and crafting Sigils. You can’t run a low-tier Sigil without dropping back down into World Tier 3, so essentially… everything that had been clogging my inventory was rendered worthless. Nightmare Dungeons in World Tier 4 is actually pretty enjoyable. This is maybe the content that has been missing from the game to this point and seems to be what the game is actually balanced around. It just sucks that it takes over 100 hours of gameplay to really see this content. That said it also still feels pretty grindy to be focused ONLY on Nightmare Dungeons.

Lately, most of my gameplay in Diablo IV has been centered around the boss and legion timers. The best site that I have found so far is D4 Armory, which also happens to be the site that offers the ability to link your character armory. Essentially it seems like bosses either spawn on a 5, 6, or 7 hour timer… and I cannot keep track of this shit so I am offloading that part of my brain to a timer website. Again I still feel like Blizzard needs to sort this shit a bit better than it currently is. If they want to rotate between Bosses, Helltides, and Legions… then in theory one of these should always be happening or no more than 15 minutes away from happening. Over the weekend I tried to catch as many of these as I could, and the Legion events specifically seem to be amazing experience gain.

The World Bosses themselves are not exactly what I would consider extremely fun encounters… but they also feel like something you really should not miss. One of the things that puzzled me is that I thought we would have more of them. As it stands there are three of them… Wandering Death, Avarice aka New Greed, and Ashava whom we fought in beta. Probably my favorite of these is Avarice simply because the teleport mechanic looks really cool. My least favorite is Ashava, mostly because Poison feels wildly overpowered right now as compared to the rest of the conditional damage types. None of them are terribly exciting however and I really feel like the Diablo IV team needs to play some Guild Wars 2. No game does large-scale spectacle fights as that game does, and it would feel better if there was some sort of zone meta that led to the boss encounter rather than just something randomly spawning every six hours or so.

My luck continues to hold… and I think Cyl is starting to get a little salty about it… in a joking way of course. When we took down Ashava the other night I walked away with two unique items, and she pretty much walked away with nothing but some rares to sell/salvage. I’ve not lucked into either of the two uniques that I still need, however. Essentially I need a new copy of Rage of Harrogath as I am still wearing a Sacred version of that and I need a copy of Gohr’s Devastating Grips to drop. I did pick up Temerity though so very happy to have that slot filled. However, as much effort has gone into gearing… does make me start to align with the “no reset seasons” camp. I just can’t fathom going through this much effort every season.

One thing that I do have to give massive credit to for Diablo IV is the cosmetic options. It has been rare that I have played a game with cosmetic outfits… that have felt so much worse than what was available in the game for free. New World comes to mind because a lot of the Twitch Prime drops are so much cooler looking than anything you can purchase on the in-game cash shop. In Diablo IV I am constantly finding items out in the world that are cosmetics for my horse. Similarly, most of the armor sets you find in the world are better looking than the cash offerings. It does sort of make me wonder if this will be counterproductive to the goals of Diablo IV being a more monetized ARPG than Diablo III was. It makes me wonder if they over-corrected into the realm of free cosmetics to try and minimize comparisons to the shit show of egregious microtransactions that was Diablo Immortal.

The one thing that continues to worry me a bit about Diablo IV, is that I am just never in the mood to solo grind in this game. I’ve had a lot of fun recently when playing on a focused activity with Cyl, but when it comes time to actually do stuff on my own… I tend to log out and play something else. I am not sure if this is a side effect of just how grindy everything is and knowing that it will all be for naught when the season starts, or if it is a greater side effect that the game isn’t nearly as enjoyable as I feel it should be. Whatever the case… I am mostly playing in burst when I happen to check the Armory and see that an event is just about to start. Cyl and I have been pinging each other when we notice a boss is just about to come up, and those moments have been enjoyable. However, Cyl is also grinding this as a mainline game and as a result roughly ten levels ahead of me at any given moment. I fully expect to be left in the dust at some point in the future, and I am not entirely certain I will have the desire to catch back up.

What is an ARPG Season?

Diablo IV Character Select Screen

Hey Friends! Right now there is a bit of strife happening in the fledgling Diablo IV community over the concept of what is going to happen with the upcoming start of Season 1, and the Battle Pass associated with it. This morning I thought I would take a moment because I honestly had no clue that the concept of a season in ARPG terms… or even that ARPG was a specific genre… was foreign to some gamers. This is me showing my ignorance as being a long-term member of this sub-genre community. Over the years you will have noticed that I play a lot of ARPGs and play an awful lot of seasons, so I thought I would take a bit this morning and talk through some of the terminology.

ARPG as a Genre

Diablo II Resurrected

First, let’s start off with defining “ARPG” as it is referred to by the “in group” that plays them as a hobby unto itself. It is admittedly a bad genre title, but it is one that was pinned onto Diablo as being one of the first real-time Action RolePlaying Games, and the name just sort of stuck. Over the years Action RPG has been pinned to a lot of games from Dark Souls to Devil May Cry… to even the Fallout Series… and to be honest, they are not wrong to do so. When I say ARPG however I more specifically mean the lineage of Diablo and the subgroup of largely isometric viewpoint hack-and-slash loot chase games that involve some degree of randomly generated content and a bunch of repetition in chase of building the perfect character. I guess it might be easier if I just rattle off some of the games in this genre to help define it.

  • Chronicon
  • Diablo Series
  • Dungeon Seige Series
  • Fate Series
  • Grim Dawn
  • Last Epoch
  • The now-defunct Marvel Heroes game
  • Path of Exile
  • Titan Quest
  • Torchlight Series
  • Undecember
  • Victor Vran
  • Wolcen
Victor Vran

This is by no means a complete list but represents a broad swath of the type of games included in the ARPG genre. I view “Looter Shooter” as a divergent genre that started with Borderlands and continued on into Destiny, Anthem, Division, and Outriders. When this genre broke apart from the pack of Isometric games, it picked up its own traditions and design ideas that carry forward from that point. Now I have questioned before whether or not Diablo IV should even be considered an ARPG by the definition of this genre or not. I personally think it aligns more closely with an MMORPG which is a definition for another day.

What is a Season?

Path of Exile Character Creation Screen Showing of various Leagues

In a core ARPG, especially one with multiplayer play… there is this concept of a periodic reset of progress. Generally speaking, there is some sort of transition of characters from the previous period moving to the more standard or as D4 calls it… “Eternal” realm, and then a new realm spinning up that is only for brand new characters. This construct goes by many names depending on the game you are playing.

  • Diablo 2 – Ladders
  • Diablo 3 – Seasons
  • Diablo Immortal – Seasons
  • Diablo 4 – Seasons
  • Grim Dawn – Seasons but they are community-led only
  • Last Epoch – Cycles but won’t be in-game until the 1.0 release
  • Path of Exile – Leagues or Challenge Leagues if you look at old posts
  • Torchlight Infinite – Seasons
  • Undecember – Seasons
Diablo 3 Season Journey Tracker Website

The idea is to have a fresh start that puts everyone on even footing. There are often race events surrounding these “seasons” and specific content that can only be obtained by starting from scratch. How this actually works varies wildly by game. In Diablo 3 you had a series of challenges that you completed in order to get rewards. The first four gave you a full set of gear, and the last six unlocked a cosmetic of some sort and another stash tab (up to a certain point). In Path of Exile, there are extremely detailed mechanics that only take place during a season some of which may or may not actually make it into the “standard” game as they refer to it. Right now in the “Crucible League,” the mechanic involves putting talent trees on your weapons which unlocks the ability to create some truly bizarre builds.

The information we have currently surrounding seasons and Diablo IV is a bit hazy. We know there will be some sort of seasonal journey similar to that of Diablo III, where you have micro objectives that add up to rewards with bigger rewards from completing a bunch of meta achievements. We also know there will be a battle pass system, that unlocks rewards as you gain experience by completing these objectives and probably from just grinding the world as well. There is some sort of season-exclusive story arc that will only be available during that given season. We now also know that none of this will be available on the “Eternal” realm, aka the realm that everyone has been playing on since the launch. Like other ARPG seasons, you will need to create a brand new character to experience any of this and only seasonal characters will progress your season’s journey.

Seasons have a Fixed Duration

Another important concept that you should understand is that seasons… or whatever a game calls it have an expiration date associated with them. Generally speaking, these tend to last three to four months, with the best having four seasons during a year. This gives you just enough time to build up a character… get bored of that character… have some time off from the game, and then get excited again when the next season happens. Path of Exile does this probably better than anyone else currently and they really hype up the launch of a new league with trailers, dedicated cosmetics, and an official race that is often commentated like an e-sports event. While I have never really been one to watch e-sports in the past… I have to admit that I do find myself drawn to the league races. I even participated a little bit in one of the ExileCon qualifier races just to get the achievement for getting to level 10 during a race.

Why Play a Season?

Loot explosion from Diablo 3

I am honestly not entirely certain if I am the best person to explain this, given that I am so bought into this concept that I never spend any time playing my non-seasonal characters, and effectively when the season is over they either rot or are deleted. I guess I could talk a bit about why I personally enjoy seasons. One of the funniest times for me is the launch of a new game, the hype cycle leading up to it… and the hardcore focus of grinding up a new character. There is a reason why I have played almost every MMORPG that came down the pipe over the years… and then petered out slowly as the rush of excitement around the game died down. I love the excitement surrounding something that is shiny and new, and how it brings all sorts of folks out of the woodwork. Honestly, the best part of the Diablo IV launch for me… is seeing folks showing up in my Battle.net friends list that I had not talked to for years.

An ARPG season is this entire process in a microcosm. For Diablo III, seasons would always begin around 7 pm on a Friday night. So on that Friday night I would get together with Ace and often times Byx as we leveled brand new characters. There was always a crush of excitement around getting back together after being apart for three or more months. Diablo III seasons were almost the perfect example because generally speaking we got good enough at the game to be largely finished by Monday. So we had this really focused gaming weekend, and then plenty of time to chill and do other things… and then be excited about the start of the next season. Path of Exile leagues are a considerably less social experience, but still, I have had a lot of fun talking through build ideas with Ash, Thalen, or Ace throughout the season and slowly ticking off achievements as I completed maps or knocked out challenges for cosmetics.

I also love the almost manic levels of content in the community and the excitement that surrounds the launch of a new season. I am using the season as a generic term, but Path of Exile leagues are specifically so focused on the experience of playing through the league, digging down and finding out critical information about the new mechanics, and coming up with the most efficient methods of play. In Diablo III, it was admittedly a much smaller community but there was still a lot of excitement centered around the completion of the season’s journey and figuring out the best new builds taking into account all of the changes that were made.

Probably the best aspect of the reset is that it puts everyone on the same footing. No matter how much you played the previous season… it is all washed away and everyone starts back at level 1. So that allows someone to sit out a few seasons and then return at the launch of a brand new season without feeling like they have to play “catch up”. This is the problem I have with Destiny seasons, in that they keep moving the bar forward in gear level making it seem like to return… I would need to dedicate a large amount of time to catch up to the same gear level as everyone else starting the season. In an ARPG you can just show up and know you are going to be on equal footing with all of your friends.

The Drama Surrounding Resets

Right now we find ourselves in a gulf between those who are dedicated ARPG players and understand the constructs of that genre, and those who are playing Diablo IV without ever being part of that community in the past. We’ve had this same disconnect among the AggroChat folks because once upon a time I said that Tam wasn’t really an “ARPG Player” when he absolutely felt he was. He had played through every Diablo when it came out to completion… which sure is a thing, but is also different from being engaged with the particular community and customs surrounding the seasons. Right now there are a lot of folks who have experienced seasons as a construct in other genres and are freaking out slightly that they will have to throw away the hard-fought progress that they have made on their current crop of Eternal characters in order to experience anything associated with the first Diablo IV Season.

I can’t say that they are wrong honestly. One of my core complaints about Diablo IV is the fact that it is way too grindy to be reasonably played in a seasonal model. Normally speaking in a seasonal ARPG, it takes around a week to reach the end game… and then you are spending the rest of the season completing achievements. In Diablo IV I am roughly 100 hours into the game and still have not reached the “true” endgame. That seems like one heck of a long commitment for folks to make every three months. Maybe Diablo IV given that it is more MMORPG than ARPG… needs to be the one that breaks this mold and introduces seasonal content that is available to non-seasonal characters. I have a feeling that the way the game is currently… season one might kill whatever momentum Diablo IV has. I am deeply uncertain if I will participate in the season because I am honestly not sure if I enjoyed the game enough to go all in for it. There is also supposed to be the start of a new Path of Exile league around the same time, and I am way more into that game.

I’ve said it before and I will say it again. I think Diablo IV is a great game for the type of player that wants to get in… and play through the story and then move on to another game. I feel like this game is not designed for the way that ARPG core players tend to play these games. The core gameplay loop is just not as interesting as some of the other options. With the upcoming release of Path of Exile II… which is really just a new client for the game and a whole new campaign… I think that will end up capturing all of the Core ARPG players for the long term. I think Diablo IV will probably be better for Path of Exile… than POE was for D4. There were a lot of players waiting around for the next coming of the Diablo franchise, and are now already filling the internet with grumpy think pieces about how it just doesn’t quite live up to their expectations. I would be one of those players as well.

I personally think a lot of things are going to have to change in the way that Diablo IV works in order for it to succeed in the traditional ARPG seasonal model. Firstly they need to greatly speed up the process of leveling, and speed up the renown gain process if they are in fact going to require that to be done each season. Additionally, they need to add new mechanics into each season in order to flesh out the end game, because right now… nightmare dungeons as the primary end game activity are not amazing. They also need to spend some time improving the feel of the various classes because everyone effectively is funneled into playing exactly the same spec. There are only one or two viable options for the end game in a given class. Diablo IV as a whole has way less build diversity than literally any other ARPG with a seasonal model. I just can’t see the game in its current state… existing in the normal seasonal model.

So maybe that means that seasons will need to change for Diablo IV. Maybe there will be enough pushback from gamers that are used to different seasonal models to make this happen. I foresee that the first few seasons will be a bit on the rocky side. I do not think that the team that is working on Diablo IV necessarily grasps all of these nuances. They built a game that is not necessarily how ARPG players actually play ARPGs. I get that they were attempting to expand the base… but I am not sure if the way in which they did so will be successful in the long run. Right now I am looking forward to ExileCon and more information about Path of Exile II, and way less about the first Diablo IV season.

However, since there seems to be a disconnect between those in the know and those who have never engaged in a Seasonal ARPG… I thought I would take some time this morning and talk about that divide and hopefully fill in some information.

Beating the Ghost of a Dead Horse

Friends… I find myself in an awkward place right now. I keep poking at Diablo IV even though I am admittedly not really enjoying myself. I end up in these patterns sometimes with games where I feel like I should be enjoying them, but for whatever reason don’t. I probably spent 200 hours poking at Guild Wars 2 over the years trying to figure out what I was missing that others really enjoyed about that game. Eventually, I reached a place of happiness with that experience, but often times I never really do. I do not enjoy Warframe for example, even though on paper everything about that game should be something I am heavily into. I’ve never quite been able to put my finger on what was wrong with the experience, but something is… and something is also wrong with Diablo IV. I feel like I am poking the dead corpse of Diablo IV with a stick, trying to figure out why I don’t love it after waiting over a decade for it to arrive.

Most recently I have poured all of my efforts into catching up with the story quests that I missed along the way, and more importantly, grinding out my renown levels. At this point, I have completed everything but Kehjistan, and I have to say… this is a miserable process. Nothing about this is enjoyable in the least but it also feels like they have hung just enough carrot… in the form of 4 bonus Paragon Points at the end of this stick that I cannot avoid it. I also found the hunt for 160 Altars of Lilth was complete misery as well… but again all of the permanent stat boosts were too beneficial to ignore them. Both of these are examples of thoroughly uninteresting gameplay, but also something that feels like you can’t really skip it because they attached something to it that you can’t really get otherwise. I certainly hope that these are a one-time thing and do not reset each season, because I cannot ever fathom doing this again.

Then there are my frustrations with the Paragon Board system. Namely the force mechanic around unlocking the bonus for each Glyph. None of these are really worth the effort unless you unlock the bonus, but in order to do it… it causes you to make some deeply uninteresting choices with your points. My frustration right now is that I need to acquire 40 strength from nodes on the board, but there is only 35 strength worth of nodes in the radius of this glyph. That means I need to level this glyph to level fifteen in order to expand the radius. The system of leveling glyphs is in theory supposed to replace the process of leveling Legendary Gems from Diablo III. Same mechanic but implemented in a maddening slow manner. When you leveled a Legendary Gem you got 3 level raises each time you ran a Greater Rift, with Glyphs… you get part of a level each time you run a Nightmare Dungeon.

Most of the glyphs that I have access to are Tier 1, and those gave me half a glyph level at 1, and a quarter of a glyph level at 2. Meaning that in order to level these up you just have to chain-run Nightmare Dungeons. These are not fun. They are just normal dungeons with some added nonsense that you have to watch out for but are as mind-numbing as the normal dungeons. Greater Rifts in Diablo III were also admittedly repetitive but there was a lot of randomization in each run and you could rip through them quickly as they did not require you to do any backtracking. Dungeons in Diablo IV however require you to complete a series of boring mechanics which often require you to backtrack in the dungeon and are effectively the same experience every time you run them. I ran six of these back to back last night before ultimately deciding I had my fill and moved on to other things.

What is genuinely enjoyable are the World Boss fights. I grouped up with my friend Cyl and took down The Wandering Death, which is an encounter I had not seen before. Sure the mechanics were relatively easy, but it was still a fun five minutes of gameplay that felt extremely rewarding for the time spent. The problem here however is that these world boss events… are so few and far between that I’ve literally played likely over a hundred hours at this point and this was the first one that I happened to be on at the right time to catch. Instead of taking a page from the very excellent Guild Wars 2 event spawning book, Blizzard seems to have these vague three-hour windows when a boss MIGHT spawn… and when this happens you are not exactly given a clear indication unless you happen to be looking at the map. Personally, I feel like World Bosses should ALWAYS be spawning and you should never be more than 20 minutes away from the next one. The same is true with Helltides and I feel like there should never be a moment when you log in and there is not one available.

Then let’s talk about one of my key complaints… how generally fucked the stash tab situation is. Not only is the UI for your Stash completely useless and without any sort of search functionality… you are painfully limited in what you can store. This image that I have cobbled together from screenshots represents all of the storage space that you have. 200 slots of storage space are allocated for all of the characters on your account, and right now it is largely filled with crap for my barbarian. Then you have the 88 slots of storage space that you are carrying on your character which is divided up into 33 inventory slots for drops, 33 slots that are for consumables but this is shared between Potions and Nightmare Dungeon Sigils, and finally, 22 slots that you can use to store aspects that you have extracted. Most of my actual stash tab storage is consumed by legendary items that I am holding on to in order to extract legendary aspects from later because the aspect storage is so painfully limited.

Let’s contrast this with three other games in the genre. Path of Exile has a virtually unlimited amount of storage space so long as you are willing to buy more stash tabs with real-world money. Last Epoch also seems to have a virtually unlimited amount of storage space available pending if you are willing to keep farming in-game gold to purchase them. Even Diablo III, which I considered fairly limited… gives you 910 stash tab slots… though some of those I earned through seasonal play and others I got from the Reaper of Souls expansion and the Necromancer pack. However, even if you only have the base game… you still have 350 stash slots. I think part of what makes the D4 situation feel so bad is all the damned gems… and admittedly they ate up a ton of space in my bank in D3 as well. However, there is no real reason why they don’t just live in your ingredients tab.

I find myself in this rough spot with Diablo IV, and the longer I play it the more frustrated with the current state of the game I get. I should just stop playing it and do something else, but I am not sure exactly what else I want to dive into at the moment. I should go back and finish out the league in Path of Exile and get the last achievement I want to get. I should work on progressing through the monolith further in Last Epoch. However, my brain seems to be caught up in this pattern of logging into Diablo IV and then getting frustrated. I keep thinking if I push through this…. the game will get better. However, the further I push… the shallower the game seems to get. I still stand by my original assessment of this game. It is a pretty great game for playing through the story and then moving on to another game. I question how good of a game it is for playing like most ARPG players play those games. I feel like as soon as the new Path of Exile league lands with ExileCon in July, Diablo IV is going to be a ghost town.