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.
Good Morning Folks! While I still have quite a few things that I want to tick off before I am completed with it, I feel like the 3.22 Trials of the Ancestor League is starting to wind down a bit. You can see this in the community as the various streamers detach from the game and start playing other things. I know personally I plan on giving Diablo IV Season 2 a shot tomorrow, and seeing how I feel about that game. As far as objectives go, I have 4 pips of experience to go from level 100 on my Righteous Fire Juggernaut which will be a first for me in a season. Apart from that, I want to knock out at least one more objective so I can get a sad little totem pole for my third league in a row. So I know that I will still be playing quite a bit, but I am finding my desire to build new builds waning.
As a result, I thought I would spend this morning reviewing my builds for this league and talking a bit about them. This is mostly going to be me posting links to videos that I have recorded throughout the current league, and talking about my feelings regarding the build and how successful it was. This grading will be governed by my own personal feelings about how best to approach Path of Exile. I like tanky builds and I am learning that even when I play a successful build… if it feels too squishy it ruins the experience for me.
Vaal Lightning Arrow Raider
Toward the end of last league I did a brief test to see how it would feel to league start Lightning Arrow, and honestly, the leveling process and early maps felt extremely solid. This prompted me to commit to league starting this build for Trail of the Ancestors and for the most part it went smoothly… until I hit a wall around red maps. Knowing what I know now… this is the point where I should converted my tree over to the critical strike variant, but I did not… and floundered greatly. This built felt amazing when it came to clearing maps… and then struggled significantly with map and atlas bosses. I thought that Raider would give me some additional defensive layers that would make it feel better… but it just was not enough.
The positive of the build is that it allowed me to farm up enough currency to pay for my swap over to Righteous Fire. The negative is… I could have easily just league-started Righteous Fire. This build would essentially color my league experience because I spent a lot of time frustrated that this did not feel good to me. I am not a map blaster and I do not love playing builds that feel like they have paper-thin defensive layers. For those who are curious, this is what the POB looked like at the time of recording this video.
Personal Rating: C Tier
Righteous Fire Juggernaut
So after the feelings of failure regarding Lightning Arrow Raider, I rolled right back to the old familiar and comfortable in the form of a Righteous Fire Juggernaut. With this build it is a cakewalk to finish your atlas and get your first two voidstones, and it also allowed me to set up shop in delve and start producing raw materials in bulk. I think I have come to the realization that I am going to want an RF Jugg in every league given how much I have bonded with the playstyle, and given that it enables me to spend a large amount of time down in Delve. I did not record a video on this build until fairly late in the league and after I spent some currency on getting a Hinekora, Death’s Fury setup with Forbidden Flesh and Flame jewels. Once I ding 100 hopefully this week… I am going to shift over to trying to knock out all of the bosses with this character. I get into this pattern of not wanting to risk a death when I am gaining experience given that it slows down so much after level 95.
You can find the POB over on the POE.Ninja Page for this character.
Personal Rating: S Tier Plus
Summon Raging Spirits Guardian
The Trial of the Ancestors League saw significant reworks of two Acendancies, the Templar Guardian and the Marauder Chieftain. In a desire to play with these, I decided to roll a Summon Raging Spirits build as I have often done in past leagues, but play it instead with the new Guardian Ascendancy. This build… is a miraculous powerhouse. This entirely rests upon the shoulders of the fact that the Guardian unique minions are so damned strong. From the very first Labyrinth, you end up getting something with the relative power of a Righteous Fire Juggernaut, and it can essentially carry you from that point forward. There is a reason why Guardian is the most popular Ascendancy in Ruthless League, making up over 14% of the player base and even higher if you get into the hardcore modes.
What I was not expecting necessarily is how good this felt mapping, because essentially you are using Convocation to keep dragging your pet RF Juggernaut as you shield charge through the map. Summon Raging Spirits always feels great when it comes to killing bosses, but the Sentinel of Radiance pet really makes the map clear in general feel so good. If this does not get nerfed… it is a strong contender for starting “Bel League” because after playing this in the Toucan Treasure Hunt, it can be functional with zero gear.
You can find my POB over on the POE.Ninja page for this character.
Personal Rating: S Tier
Storm Brand Inquisitor
It took me a few leagues before I reached a point where I truly understood how to build a character in this game. During Kalandra League I tried Storm Brand Inquisitor, and apparently thought that things like capping your resistances were a suggestion rather than a requirement. Last league, I gave the Explosive Arrow Champion a bit of a redemption arc, as I revisited the character I attempted to play in the Sentinel League and made it feel amazing. So this league I really wanted to do the same for Storm Brand Inquisitor to see what that build could do if I actually built it correctly. The end result… was pretty disappointing. Can it do a T16? Technically yes. Does it feel good doing a T16? Absolutely not.
There is admittedly part of me that wants to poke this with a stick until I figure out how to make it work. I might revisit it in future leagues and try and build it out to be a bit more viable. That said… doing what I did with Explosive Arrow and taking the same build, but just fixing my resistances… did not solve the problems with this build. The disturbing thing about it is that I actually did spend quite a bit on the build to get it to the sorry state that it is in currently. I’m sure given enough time I could get it feeling better, but I am just not sure it would ever feel the way I want it to feel.
For those curious you can see the POB at the time I recorded the above video.
Personal Rating: D Tier
Fire Shield Crush Chieftain
Since there were two ascendancies that changed with this league, and Guardian was so freaking amazing… I decided that I wanted to create something with a Chieftain. The obvious choice would have been Righteous Fire, but I did not really want to recreate that and eventually, I just stole the best node with forbidden flame/flesh for my main RF build. Another build that I have been wanting to play for some time is something built around Shield Crush, so I crudely banged these two build concepts together until something emerged. The end result was an armor-stacking fire damage conversion build that focused on igniting things with Shield Crush and waiting for them to explode with Hinekora, Death’s Fury.
In truth… it is a pretty fun build hampered a bit by the fact that I refused to spend the currency to take it to the next level. The best armor stackers tend to be built around the Duelist class because they can double dip in both Armor and then also convert Evasion over to armor which produces bigger numbers. Stacking armor directly relates to additional damage. The other problem is that the ideal chest piece for this build starts around 20 Divine and has the ability “Armour is increased by Overcapped Fire Resistance”. As it stands my armor is over 100k with my flasks up, but with a chest like that, I could probably double that. All in all, it is a fun build, with a good map clear… but completely falls apart when it comes to killing bosses. If I were going to change anything, I would find a way to work in Vaal Breach as it would give me waves of fodder which would then hopefully proc Death’s Fury explosions helping me take down bosses faster.
During the Toucan Treasure Hunt private league, I opted to level up a SRS Guardian, just because that seemed so strong without needing to rely on any gear. There was a period while leveling where I was messing around with the Absolution skill, which while technically a minion ability is mostly just a big lightning strike that spawns minions that do similar lightning strikes. This prompted me to want to give the build a shot so I rolled a Witch and leveled it with Vaal Absolution eventually turning it into a Necromancer. First comment… I played a Necro because after playing two Guardians… I was reluctant to roll another one. That said… I feel like Absolution would be so much stronger if played with a Guardian mostly for the free elemental buffs and the chonky tanky fiery boi. That said the Necromancer version is quite a bit of fun and felt extremely comfortable clearing maps. If I were willing to put the same level of investment in this build that I had in other builds in this league, then I am sure it would be quite solid.
That said… the playstyle of standing still while you cast Absolution with Spell Echo left something to be desired. I didn’t really have any problems with taking Deaths while I was casting, but it did feel a little awkward and went afoul of my “always stay moving” sensibilities. I am not sure if I would ever play this again, but I certainly found it interesting.
Sometimes I get something stuck in my head, and this league… it was a general sense of frustration over my league starter not feeling amazing. As the league was beginning to wind down I decided to go big instead of going home… and poured roughly 40 Divine Orbs into converting my build into the Magic Find variant that so many players were having good luck with this league. The end result has been an interesting experience. Deadeye is in fact the best choice for this sort of build with the Ranger class… but it is way the hell squishier than I am comfortable playing. Sure I can do pretty much all of the content and stack as many eldritch altars as I want… but if I fail to kill something before it looks at me… I fall over rather spectacularly.
Magic Find is also way more subtle than I would have expected. While I managed to make back a ton of currency largely in the form of Blue Altars that handed out Divine Orbs like candy… I didn’t really manage to find any big-ticket items apart from enough copies of The Fortunate to turn in for a couple of Divine Orbs. While I have run many Crimson Temples… I have yet to see a single Apothecary and I’ve not pulled four Headhunters or Magebloods like the magic find YouTubers would lead you to believe. Is it worth running Magic Find with this sort of build? That is highly likely because I made back the 40 Divines Spent on the build in roughly a week. Is playing a squishy glass cannon character doing it for me? Not really.
You can find the POB over on the POE.Ninja Page for this character.
Personal Rating: A Tier
Vaal Lightning Arrow Champion
You would think that the whole magic find exercise would finally push Lightning Arrow out of my brain, but you would also be wrong. When I started my Raider version of this character, I thought long and hard about going with Champion. Champion is the “tanky” class for building a bow character, and I really loved my Explosive Arrow Champion last league. As the AggroChat crew is talking more and more about “Bel League” I decided I wanted to test a theory… that theory being that Champion would have made a much more drift-compatible version of Lightning Arrow than anything I had tried to date. So last week in a day and a half I leveled a new Champion character with Vaal Lightning Arrow and by Friday evening I had it geared and mapping.
This is a great character. It has all of the tankyness of a Champion with all of the killing power of the traditional Lightning Arrow builds. It suffers from the same challenge taking down bosses, but the sturdy nature of the build gives you plenty of time to dance around while waiting on your Artillery Ballista to burn the boss. Over the weekend I mapped with basically nothing but this character, and there were several times when I managed to run enough T16 maps to completely refill my sulphite without taking a single death. That in itself is huge, and I’m already sitting at level 90 and fully expect to be able to smoothly ascend past that level as though I were playing one of my Righteous Fire Juggernaut characters. I will absolutely build another one of these in “Bel League” pending there are no major nerfs to either Lightning Arrow or the Champion Class itself. I’ve also played this with Tornado Shot and Ice Shot… and while both are strong I just don’t enjoy them anywhere near as much.
As I said at the start of this post, I think I am probably done rolling new characters for the rest of this league. I have a solid stable of characters and at least three of them that I enjoy greatly. I want to finish out level 100 on my Righteous Fire Juggernaut, and I want to knock out a few more achievements toward the league challenges. I’m currently specced heavily into Ritual on my Atlas, so it should not take terribly long to reroll 25 more favors or get 4 more Blood-Filled Vessels. I could just buy the latter from the market, but I never really like doing that. I know starting tomorrow I want to spend some time playing Diablo IV Season 2 and giving it a fair shake. After that, I still want to pop into New World and see what the expansion is all about, and mostly level the new Flail weapon. Combined, these will likely take me all the way until December when the next league starts and we properly begin the “Bel League” private league thing. If there is a lull in the middle somewhere I might pick back up Baldur’s Gate 3 or Starfield… or potentially even start a new Cyberpunk 2077 playthrough to see all of the changes.
This morning however I wanted to give a proper rundown of my thoughts on all of the builds of the league. If I end up doing anything further, I might steal the Magic Find gear from my Deadeye and see if I can make something that still feels sturdy with the Champion. Anyways! I hope this week is great for you all. If you have made it this far in the post, I thank you for reading because I am certain there are folks out there who get very very sick of my nonsense.
Featuring: Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! This week we start off the show with some discussion about the most recent Honkai Star Rail patch and how it does a Pokemans. From there we dive into the Stellaris offshoot Star Trek Infinite and how it is more than just a reskin. This leads to a long winding conversation about how games feel wildly different once you tweak a few variables. All of that takes a brief detour into how frustrating it is that the Sea of Thieves PVE mode has some limitations. Bel goes into a bit of a rant about how all live service releases are awful until they have a year or two under their belt and how “the vision” show be burned to a crisp. We talked a bit about the Microsoft Deal for ActiBlizz finally closing and the possibility of World of Warcraft for Gamepass. Finally, we get moored in a discussion of Path of Exile as we always seem to lately and talk a bit about Kodra clearing his first two voidstones.
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.
