Grim Dawn

My ARPG Hours Played

by

Good Morning Friends! I was not entirely certain I would be doing a blog post this morning because technically this is the beginning of my “weekend”. However last night I embarked upon some madness and this morning I am sharing the fruits of it. I think I’ve been a little dishonest with myself when it comes to the extent to which Path of Exile has become my new gaming “main squeeze” over the last two years. This is part of a larger evolution that I did understand considerably better, but I was not fully aware of the sheer extent to which I have been choosing to play Path of Exile over other games. For the last decade, I have been on this transition from playing MMORPGs as my primary gaming vehicle to ARPGs in part because ARPGs feel much better to play solo.

Playing MMORPGs like I often do… completely alone… with only very rare human interaction… feels like I am misunderstanding the purpose of that genre. There are just so many activities that I can’t realistically participate in without also building the social infrastructure required and committing to the regular play schedule required for them. Playing a Diablo-style Action RPG however… is a largely solo endeavor that occasionally benefits from friends, but features a rich series of activities that you can engage with entirely on your own. Part of why I have come to love Guild Wars 2 so much is that it allows me to FEEL like I am part of a larger group experience, without actually having to do any of the social maintenance required to truly be part of a group. In the ARPG genre, however… solo is the norm and as a result, most of the mechanics are designed to be completed without the need of any other players. In an era of progressively forcing you more and more into group gameplay… the humble ARPG stands as somewhat of a beacon in the storm.

Now we scan forward to yesterday where on Gamepad.club I was commenting about being somewhat gobsmacked that a month into the Crucible league and I have already found seven Tabula Rasas. For those who are uninitiated in the nonsense that is Path of Exile, the Tabula Rasa is essentially the ultimate starter item. It gives you access to six sockets of any color at level 1, and this is really the basis of most “second characters” because it allows you to stack powerful support gems on an ability long before you can realistically get that many sockets on a single item. During this league, I have found six Corrupted Tabulas (+2 Minion Gems, +2 AOE Gems, and +2 Aura Gems) and four vanilla ones. Now one of these corrupted Tabulas came from the Vanity Divination card set, and two of the normal ones came Humility set. The weird thing about it however is that I have spent ZERO hours purposefully farming for one like I did last league in Blood Aqueducts.

To this entire exchange, my friend Carth innocently commented that he could not imagine how much time I’ve put in this league to see that many. Now I know that number is large because when Steam tried to shame me into leaving a review for the game, it shows that I have now played over 1100 hours in total. I’ve honestly contemplated giving the game a review, but quite honestly… how does one leave a review for a game as complicated as Path of Exile? Over 1100 hours into the game, I still feel very much like a “new” player. There are so many aspects of the game that I legitimately have no understanding of yet. Knowing that Steam was tracking my time played, I assumed that Grinding Gear Games was as well… which led me down the path of the /played command. If you have followed this blog for any length of time you will know that I am an aficionado of the spreadsheet, so I decided to try and get some better data on HOW my time was played.

So unfortunately last league I decided to delete all of my characters that pre-date the Sentinel league, in part because none of them made any sense and were also using names I might want to recycle. So I can only really go back as far as May of 2022 but you can see total hours spent in each of the four most recent Path of Exile leagues. Forbidden Sanctum was the league in which the game really made sense to me, and I started to fully understand a lot of the key mechanics of how to make a character “feel good” to play. It was also the league in which I discovered how much I loved Delve. My main of that league represents 276 of those 647 hours… with likely MOST of that being time in Delve. With the latest Crucible League, I have already eclipsed the time spent playing both Sentinel and Kalandra combined. Since we are only one month into the league and I have already almost reached the halfway point of time spent in Sanctum… I might even eclipse that league as well.

This led me down another rabbit hole of being curious about how Path of Exile stacks up against other ARPGs that I have played. As far as I am aware there is no really good way to get hours spent playing early pre-steam ARPGs. For example, a lot of my time spent playing TorchLight II was not through Steam, and I repurchased that game at some point just to make it easier to play. Not included are Diablo and Diablo II, because while those hours probably exist somewhere in the bowels of battle.net I am not entirely sure how to retrieve them. Essentially what I have learned is that I have now played more Path of Exile than literally any other ARPG I have played… and by a decent margin. Last Epoch is still gaining time played but we are not even close to the order of magnitude.

The one that surprised me heavily was Diablo III, which has roughly a decade-long headstart on Path of Exile when it comes to my interacting with it. I’ve played a lot of Diablo III, but the challenge comes from HOW I actually play it. A Diablo III Season essentially can be compressed within a weekend at this point, and by Monday morning if I am taking the season seriously I have completed all of the accomplishments and walked away with my seasonal “Kitch” and then rarely spend much time after said season playing at all. Whereas with Path of Exile, there are just more sliders and each and every step in the journey requires more effort to achieve. After a week I had what felt like a reasonable “starter” character and then spent most of the first month refining that character and progressing through maps and ultimately getting into a comfortable place where I could farm delve.

I’ve now branched out heavily into additional characters, but each of them requires way more effort from me than gearing out a second character in Diablo III. Additionally, if I have played a Multishot Demon Hunter once, I’ve played every Multishot Demon Hunter. There is no real nuance to individual character building because every Multishot Demon Hunter is going to look essentially the same because there are only so many sliders you have access to in order to differentiate your character. While I played a Righteous Fire Juggernaut last league and I am playing one again this league… in both cases enough fundamental changes took place between the leagues that they both look significantly different in both gearing and how they mechanically feel. I played around with a Toxic Rain character last league, but the one this league just works better because I now understand so much more about that style of character. Path of Exile is just more of a “living game” whereas Diablo III has largely felt like it was in maintenance mode for the last half dozen years.

I think at some point down the line Last Epoch is going to feel just as good to me as Path of Exile does today. It definitely has a lower barrier of entry, but features some of the same deeply nuanced character-building. Additionally while more deterministic, the gear grind feels way less templated than it does in Diablo III, where in that game I need these eight items to make my build work and once I have collected them I am essentially “done”. Diablo III is a solved problem and while I still enjoy playing it, my periods of interacting with it have become significantly shorter each season as I am now better at solving those problems. Of note, I’ve also gotten significantly faster at solving problems in Path of Exile, but once solved… there is just a wider variety of interesting things to engage in. My hope is that Last Epoch will build out some of those extremely interesting things to engage in as well because for the moment the Monolith feels somewhat stale.

This morning’s post was an interesting exercise because while I already knew I played an excessive amount of ARPGs… I did not necessarily understand the full extent. Prior to this morning’s post I would have told you that I had played “way more” hours of Diablo III than I have of Path of Exile as well. Sometimes numbers are interesting and deeply satisfying to investigate. Does anyone actually care about this sort of post? Very likely not. However yall are stuck following my whims if you are a regular reader, so you should probably be used to it by now.

Harrow the Ninth

by

Good Morning Friends! I opted to take yesterday off because for me it was a holiday and I was off work, and also I was feeling like complete shit. I am either fighting off allergies turned asthma attack, or I have picked up something… but for the latter, I’ve not really been around anyone to catch anything. Over the weekend I finished up my second book from the Libby App, and it was a wild ride. I think last I said I had started Skin Game by Jim Butcher, but I abruptly paused that because my library hold came up on the next novel in the Locked Tomb series. Harrow The Ninth was a hard book to get through, because it has you questioning the events of the first novel… which ended on a bit of a frustrating cliffhanger. During at least the first fourth of the novel, I was going back and forth about whether or not Tamsyn Muir had a fucking clue what they were doing with this story. Thankfully it paid off in the end and the story that was woven between the two tales is extremely good.

Essentially between the two novels, there is a character perspective shift, from the very likable Gideon Nav to the very unlikeable Harrowhark Nonagesimus. It feels like a massive “bait and switch” at the end of the first book and the beginning of the second book, which knocks the reader off balance. However, I would assume this was all on purpose to make you now start to deeply care about Harrow and move her from the Villain column more solidly into the hero column. Now I just want to read the next one the sequence, Nona the Ninth… but the Libby App tells me it is going to be about a six-week wait. Granted the last book told me it would be a four-week wait and that is why I had started Skin Game, but my hold suddenly came available after about a week. I figure I will finish Skin Game and evaluate where I am at that point, but I might end up just buying this next book so I can consume it faster.

In other random events this weekend, it appears that Tam and a few others have been screwing around in Lord of the Rings Online. I opted to go ahead and install the game and start a brand new character, a Guardian named Belglaive on Landroval. Immediately stepping into this game feels like I went back two decades in MMORPG design, which has its ups and downs. I opted to start the recently released new character starter experience, and honestly… I think I like the Shadows of Angmar option a bit better. This is really slow-paced and I feel like I am completely disconnected from the rest of the game at the moment. With the previous experience, I could at least rush to Bree and train professions, and I guess in theory I can probably do that now… but I am trying to follow the breadcrumbs that are laid out in front of me. All told though I am enjoying myself in what feels like an anachronistic jaunt into MMORPG gaming.

In Path of Exile, I spent a bit more money… swapped out some gems for Awakened versions, and got my flasks in order so that now I am much tankier even than I was before. Righteous Fire is still really bad at bossing, and as such, I have continued trying to tweak my Fire SRS Necromancer to set it up as my bossing character. In the grand scheme of things it works… most of the time. I did a Maven Invitation last night and wrecked it as the Necro, something that I would have struggled at length on the Juggernaut. I’ve done several invitations, but it just takes forever whereas on the Necro I kept a pretty good pace as the new bosses were being released. I could pour some more funds into the character and improve this I am certain. I think my short-term goal is to keep getting levels on the Juggernaut, and I would really love to hit level 100 this season.

I officially have more currency than I have ever had before in Path of Exile. That catch is it isn’t mine. Thalen lucked into an Unrequited Love card, that at the time was going for 18 Divine Orbs. However since he got it, and when he decided to have me sell it… the price dropped considerably. I originally priced it at 18, hoping the price would go back up but in the meantime, a number of 17 Divine cards have created this price barrier that I knew we would not be breaking anytime soon. I priced it at 16.5 Divines and within moments had sold it. Now I am essentially acting as a concierge broker and Thalen sends me a link to something he wants, and I attempt to acquire it for him. I’ve set aside all of his currency and my purchases from it in a stash tab to keep it separate from everything else. This also allows me to just ignore that tab when running Exilence to see if I have any other high-value items that I should be trying to sell.

I made a bit more progress in Grim Dawn on the Soldier/Oathkeeper combination and I have to say… I am not sure if I like the build at all. I am not really enjoying myself that much, so I might fall back on playing my original level 42 Warder character which is Soldier/Shaman. I also need to try some ranged and caster options because at the moment I am just not feeling the game. I feel way more squishy than I want to feel, so I either need to kill things much faster or have better layers of defense. Unfortunately, it is nowhere near as active of a community as say Path of Exile, and while there is a build guide website it is much harder to gauge how successful a given build is going to be. Admittedly that is my lack of knowledge of the game because I am sure if you are already well indoctrinated into Grim Dawn it would be fine.

Anyways I hope you all had a most excellent weekend, and now if I can just kick this crud life would be grand. As is often the case I have way too many gaming irons in the fire at the moment. It is a much better problem to have than languishing in that “nothing I want to play” feeling.

Going Warlord

by

I am getting a bit of a late start this morning, and also contemplated just not blogging at all. It has been one of those days. I usually exit the holidays in “turtle mode”, where I have pulled my head up into my shell and largely ignore the world. Generally speaking, this is brought on by the fact that traditionally I tend to spend my large blocks of free time over the break diving into single-player games. However, I find myself in a similar funk and have spent most of my time playing Path of Exile, which is ostensibly a multiplayer game. I think the key difference is that other than trading and sharing things through the guild stash, I very much play the game in a single-player manner. I’ve also been spending my gaming time listening to Audiobooks, which are also largely a solo activity where I spend most of my time focused on the book rather than the game. In order to do this successfully I need a game that I have largely committed to muscle memory, which often means either some sort of well-trod MMORPG or an ARPG.

I know I said yesterday that I thought I was done with my Seismic Saboteur experiment… but instead, I largely focused on playing it last night and have gotten to the blood aqueducts in Act 9. I’ve yet to successfully do the second Labyrinth, largely because I still have significant survival issues. I just do not know how to survive from a pure evasion build, to be honest. I am used to Armor, Regen, and Energy Shield, and Evasion always feels exceptionally squishy. My last attempt frustrated me so completely because I managed to die in the third trial of Labyrinth, probably moments away from a victory. I decided to put on some levels and as a result, I have been abusing the excellent layout of the blood aqueducts in order to do this. Considering I have gotten four Tabula Rasas this league, it isn’t like I need another one… but I have already picked up a handful more Humility cards.

A few days ago I put a call out on Mastodon for folks to suggest ARPGs, and one that I have seen pop up multiple times is Grim Dawn. I’ve actually played a lot of this game, but never really got to the point where the endgame actually begins. As a result, I have created a fresh character and am going down the Soldier path once again. I just got to the point where I could choose my second class and went with Oathkeeper which makes me a Warlord now in the game’s mastery system. I am hoping to go for something akin to the Diablo 3 Crusader in feel. Overall I am easing back into the game but I remember very little of how anything worked mechanically. I know there are a ton of crafting materials and I largely just keep banking them for some point in the future when I might need them.

I’ve also poked my head back into Last Epoch because they keep easing closer to the release of multiplayer. There is a beta event scheduled for the end of this month, with a larger test happening in early February and the intended launch of the feature in March. I have a lot of hope that this game is going to feel good as a multiplayer experience. In the meantime, however, I would like to get at least one character up to endgame levels so that I can see if there is even an endgame that I might enjoy there. My highest character currently is in my mid-20s, so I need to devote a bit more time to pushing that up. What I have read of the end game makes it sound interesting, and sort of a blend of maps from Path of Exile and Rifts from Diablo III. My biggest hope is that playing with friends actually feels good rather than a punitive mess as it does in Path of Exile.

I would also like to really give Wolcen another shot, after having been away from it for a few years. I have no clue if that game evolved at all. I remember specifically the core problem was that it had some pretty atrocious net code, and playing with friends meant that the entire experience was a laggy mess. I think I would also like to start fresh and see the entire game as it stands today, rather than trying to pick up where I left off not remembering how I even got there. I might even do a bit of research into what constitutes a viable build in that game so that I can give it the best possible shot. I keep looking for a good replacement for Diablo III, when none of them really give me the sort of experience that I have been craving. I could of course just play Diablo III, but I still do not feel extremely comfortable giving Blizzard the time of day right now.

Lastly, I would really like to slide back into Guild Wars 2, which feels deeply ARPG adjacent. It has always felt more like a game in the lineage of Diablo than a game in the lineage of Everquest for me. I never finished Living World Season 1, and I would like to do that. I would also like to make progress on my Skyscale because I feel like completing that would greatly improve my long-term enjoyment of the game. I need to do something other than Tequatl, even though I love that fight so much. I’ve fallen into the rut of logging in, doing a few world bosses, and logging back out. Without a wealth of stories to rely on, I sort of lost focus. I guess in theory I could start from scratch on my Ranger, because I’ve not done ANY of the living world stories on that character, and it tends to be who I spend most of my time on these days.

I find myself still very cemented to the ARPG style of gameplay regardless of the form it takes. I have plenty of long-term goals, I just need to focus on completing some of them. I might be in the process of slowly winding down this league in Path of Exile. I should probably at least buy the maps that I am missing and try and finish the last few normal mode atlas bosses before I leave.