leveling

You Should Play Last Epoch

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Good Morning Folks. I said I was going to talk about Last Epoch this morning, and essentially I am going to attempt to present a case for why you should try the game out for the upcoming Season 2 launch on Thursday. I feel like I should set out some credentials before we go forward. I play a lot of ARPGs and have been deeply engaged in the seasonal model since the launch of Diablo III Reaper of Souls expansion. It took me awhile to get into Path of Exile, but when it did… it grabbed a hold of me super freaking hard and never fully let go. When I say I have played a lot of these games I have played roughly 1000+ hours of Diablo III, 500+ hours of Diablo IV, 3000+ hours of Path of Exile, 500+ hours of Path of Exile II, and 650+ hours of Last Epoch. Truth be told I probably have more hours of Path of Exile than that… but several leagues ago I swapped over to the non-Steam client and lost my easy gauge of time spent and have ground up multiple level 95s and two characters to level 100 since doing that.

I lay out my credentials mostly to say that I am very much a purveyor of the loot explosion and a connoisseur of full screen clears. Essentially I love these games for a few reasons. I love getting loot and I love clearing huge packs of monsters… and there is something that I find satisfying about progressing a character and seeing where I can push it. I love the subtle art of gearing and even playing the same build… how each specific instance of a character has its own feel to it. I love the various things you can to do tweak endgame strategies, and I love how I can effective turn my brain off and just fall into a trance-like flow state when I play the game. I do not claim to be particularly skilled at any of this, but I do find it deeply enjoyable and I regularly am listening to some audio-book while I grind away in peace and harmony. There is something about that combined experience that uniquely satisfies my cravings like nothing else.

Before I talk about Last Epoch, I am going to talk a bit about Diablo games because be it Diablo III or Diablo IV they have some of the same pitfalls. They are essentially relatively shallow experiences and are fun for a weekend or two before I really lose any desire to keep moving forward. In both cases it is relatively easy to get your character set up and functional… but absolute unobtanium to actually get perfectly optimized. In the case of D3 getting a set up and running and then upgrading it to ancient legendaries is pretty straight forward and is just a matter of spinning the loot wheel enough times. Getting Primal Ancient Legendaries however… is effectively not something you are ever going to see. Similarly in Diablo IV getting a set of Ancestral gear is pretty straight forward but acquiring Mythical items is damned near impossible to get your full set without dipping into trade… which is its own ridiculous experience.

Path of Exile on the other hand is not straight forward at all… in fact you would pretty much be lost if you were not following a guide. After around 2000 hours of gameplay I finally reached the point where I felt comfortable building my own characters relatively successfully. I understood the fundamentals of defensive and offensive layers… but the whole process of gearing the character was its own problem. The game has a deep and rich crafting system but it requires a freaking degree in craftology to figure it out. Maybe if you started back at the beginning and learned each system as it was introduced… it was not that big of a deal. It also requires you to understand what feels like a bajillion different unique currencies, all of which do different things and can be used at exactly the right time to influence the outcome of an item.

Because of the complexity of crafting and the very low odds that you will ever find an item that has exactly the stats that your build needs to succeed… it pushes you to utilize the trade system. Even thousands of hours into the game I find this system to be deeply obtuse. Essentially you price an item and stick it into a stash tab… which causes it to show up on the trade website where you can search for items and then whisper a player… hoping that they are actually paying attention and willing to stop what they are doing at that moment to teleport to their hideout and invite you there to trade in person with them. Its a bad system… but it is the best system that the game has and ultimately is the only way that people can get exactly the items that they need for the builds that they are trying to build… which require VERY specific stat breaks in order to succeed by out-mathing their way through problems. I love Path of Exile with every fiber of my being… but even I can admit it is a giant cluster-fuck of gaming experience.

I would never ask you to sit down and play Path of Exile without a predetermined build in front of you, likely on your second monitor in Path of Building… a third party tool which keeps track of this information. However with Last Epoch, my suggestion is just to play the game and figure things out as you go. Going into Season 2, the only permanent decision that you cannot undo is your initial choice of class. In the current version you cannot change Ascendancy, but they even made that flexible with season 2. It is very easy just to “fuck around and find out” what you like and what you want to build. Coming from games like POE1 and POE2 where there are a handful of viable builds at any given time… I am consistently shocked at just how many options there are in this game. Shit I have built the same effective build idea five different ways, and all of them were relatively successful in their own ways.

Essentially the only permanent decision you need to make is which of the five base classes you are going to play. From left to right you have the Sentinel which is this games tanky heavily armored Warrior/Paladin type character that also has a path which makes it more of a Deathknight/Shadowknight type character. Then you have the Rogue which tends to excel at light melee and bow based combat so your Ranger/Thief/Assassin type character. In the middle we have the Mage which is your finger wiggler deluxe that wields elemental magic and also has some hybrid magic melee builds. With a bear companion we have the Primalist which serves the dual roles of Barbarian and Druid and features some Hunter style companion gameplay as well as nature and transformation magics. Lastly we have the Witch that fills the role of the dark caster either diving into Necromancy or deep Cthonic magics. The only real negative about this line up is that they are gender locked, and that you have no real choice as to their default graphical appearance. Eleventh Hour Games has said this is on the roadmap but no clue if and when it will ever happen. Right now the models they are using do not support any real customization.

From there once you hit around level 15 in the campaign you can choose a mastery for your class. This allows you to further specialize your character and ultimately determines which abilities you will have access to. For example if you choose Sentinel you can begin to draw on abilities from the Forge Guard, Void Knight, and Paladin trees… with there being a chain that locks off access to half of the tree for any of the masteries that you did not choose. I will talk about that in a few, but essentially this allows you to further shape the type of build that you want to craft. Each mastery gives you access to four abilities that are unique to that tree which then dictate what types of builds you can make. This used to be a permanent choice, but with Season 2 launch you will be able to respec this with gold which is the common in game dropped currency. I believe they said that at max level this caps out at requiring 500k gold to respec… which is a decent sum but also pretty easily obtained if you are doing endgame content.

The character build itself is effectively divide up into two pieces… the passive tree and then your skill specializations. Once you have chosen your mastery you gain access to the three other trees for your class. For example this is a screenshot that I took from one of my Void Knight characters which shows that I have full access to the entire tree. If I were to look at my Paladin and Forge Guard trees I would have a chain down the middle of the screen which locks off access to anything in the later half of the tree. As you spend points you unlock abilities along the bottom, which means that in order to really flesh out your build you need to dump points into the tree in order to get some of those abilities. However this also means that some of the abilities are pretty easy to get allowing you to effectively multi-class in abilities from the other specs. All of these abilities have detailed tool-tips, with hotlinks to an in-game wiki explaining what every term actually means so that you don’t have to keep shelling out to a third party site.

The other part of your build is which skills you chose to specialize. You can use ANY ability you have unlocked but you only get five slots for you to specialize those abilities unlocking a detailed skill tree for each of them. For example the above tree is for an ability called Warpath which is effectively this games equivalent to whirlwind or cyclone. The tree allows you to tweak how it works for example I have gone down a path which allows me to convert all of the physical damage to fire damage, but I could have just as easily gone down a different path which converted all of the damage to void damage. Essentially specializing your abilities allows you to lean into various synergies between the abilities on your character and the types of gear that you are using. My warpath also casts Smite automatically… which then leans upon the Smite spec tree which allows me to customize those automatic procs even further. As with the passives, all of this is in relatively easy to understand language and has definitions that link back to the in-game wiki.

The campaign pulls you through a Chrono Trigger style story as we time travel between different eras of the same world known as Eterra. We acquire a device called the Epoch which allows us to shift back and forth through reality between different times… and potentially different dimensions as we attempt to stop events from happening that ultimately destroy the world. Right now the game dead ends at Chapter Nine, and fair warning the game is not finished currently. If you are a “one and done” player who considers getting the campaign to be your engagement with a title… then you might want to wait until later. However I tend to use the campaign as a gauge for how successful my character is doing. There is a bunch of side content that you do not have to engage with as well as a number of campaign skips that you can use if you know where they are, but this ends up dumping you into the endgame really under-leveled so I am not going to explain how to do any of that. It is a fun campaign though and I do not mind repeating it with each new character, which is not something I can say for many ARPGs.

Where the game really shines is its crafting system, and last year I wrote an entire primer on how it works. Effectively at its base level items drop with a stat called Forging Potential, and each action that you take upon an item uses some of this potential. When the item hits zero potential, then you effectively have locked the current state of the item and can do nothing more with it. Runes and Glyphs along with Affix Shards allow you to modify and upgrade the stats on an item slowly improving it to be a bit more ideal for your build. You can absolutely get through the campaign by just throwing on whatever happens to drop on the ground, but as you progress into the endgame you are going to need the correct stats for your build and the crafting system allows you to manufacture the items that you need. Generally speaking you are going to start with an item that has two or three abilities that you want, add a fourth that matches your build, and then attempt to improve it until you run out of potential.

But the optimization does not stop there, once you have acquired the uniques you want for your build and some reasonably rolled items. You can start collecting uniques with Legendary Potential on them and attempting to slam them together with exalted items… aka items that have a Tier 6 or Tier 7 roll on them and show up as purple… in order to create something called a Legendary. Legendary Potential is a stat that allows you to imprint a certain number of stats from an exalted item onto it. You stick both items in a specific crafting bench called the Eternity Cache that appears at the end of a specific dungeon… the Unique and Exalted item are sacrificed and you get a shiny new Red Legendary item out on the other side. It will have chosen randomly a number of affixes from your input Exalted item up to the amount of legendary potential on that item. The example above shows me doing this with an item with 2 Legendary potential, and the end result is an item that gained two random stats from my Exalted item.

What I love about this system is that it is super easy to get to “good enough” but it is an uphill to get perfection. Though you can easily keep making attempts and incrementally improving things on the same character for a really long time. Coming with Season 2 there is the ability to guarantee at least one stat on your legendary item, pending you run a tier 2 dungeon in order to craft it. This is pretty freaking huge because in many cases you only really absolutely need a single stat to make your gear really good. You can still keep chasing an item with four legendary potential and then chasing a perfectly rolled exalted item to slam into it… but all of this feels like it is way more achievable than doing the same thing in another ARPG. There are also methods to take unique items with no legendary potential on them… and craft them into entirely randomly rolled legendary items… some of which might be really good for your build, but is ultimately a complete crapshoot. Similarly with Season 2 they are adding in a system that allows you to attempt to upgrade the legendary potential on a unique and either end up with a higher amount… or stripping it off entirely… allowing you to throw it in an egg and try and craft a random legendary with it.

When you arrive at the endgame you are asked to make a choice between two factions, that will ultimately dictate how you interact with loot going forward. You can choice the Merchant’s Guild with opens up the ability to sell items on the market and buy things from other players. Or if you are like me and would prefer to acquire your own loot if reasonably possible… there is the Circle of Fortune. This faction essentially allows you to improve your chances of getting better loot outcomes and spend favor on items called prophecies which allow specific types of gear to drop under very specific circumstances. For example you might have a prophecy that drops 3 pairs of unique boots when you kill a specific boss, that can be repeated 3 times… allowing you to more specifically target farm specific items. Once you start gaining faction and leveling this up, it is immediately noticeable how much better your loot drops become. You can still trade with fellow members of the Circle of Fortune, but it requires you to actually spend time playing with them and build up resonance which you then consume to send them items. Items that drop because of your faction perks though become flagged for that faction and become unusable the Merchants guild, so that you can’t really game the system and farm up a bunch of stuff and then swap factions.

One of the problems with generating large amounts of loot is that you sometimes need a filter to help you organize and highlight items that you actually care about. This is really a concept that showed up with Path of Exile, and mostly you end up relying on a third party filter crafted by someone like Neversink because they are pretty complicated to generate on your own. Understanding this issue the good folks at Eleventh Hour Games built their loot filter into the game itself, and honestly it is pretty straight forward to configure on your own. Essentially I build custom filters for all of my characters and it is as simple as “I am interested in these base items” and that I am looking for at least two of these affixes on the same item. The in game tool actually shows every single affix that can drop on an item really allowing you to drill down to exactly what you are looking for. Sure there are technically some general community supported filters that you can download and import but I have consistently found it easier to create my own. Some build makers will generate a filter and include it along with the guides.

Probably the biggest weakness of Last Epoch was the endgame. The monolith system is good enough but it could get really repetitive. Ultimately I would usually get my characters to 95ish before losing focus and either rolling a new character, or wandering back to Path of Exile. However with the Tombs of the Erased expansion, it is in large part a mostly endgame focused update. This is adding itemized maps similar to Path of Exile, as well as a bunch of extra content that can show up and impact your endgame. There are also a number of unique map types which give you various crafting options, which means you will have specific things that you are chasing in addition to your gearing goals. I am super freaking excited to see all of this new stuff coming, and more than that I am really looking forward to this game finally shifting into a more standard three to four month release model.

The new season starts on April 17th at 11 am CDT and features over one hundred pages of patch notes. The thing is… while there are a few builds that were nerfed a bit, way more were buffed and even the nerfed builds largely just went from endless amounts of damage to doing reasonable amounts of damage and are still going to be viable. Its essentially been six months since the last major update, and I feel like they did more than six months worth of work in the process. Effectively when they launched 1.1.7 they realized that their original roadmap needed to change. Players were almost universally complaining that there just was not enough to do at the endgame, which forced them to shift gears and really dive into that type of content. Seeing the end results… I am really freaking excited to get my hands on the new content and play it.

I realize that this post comes off as a bit of propaganda, but honestly… it is intentional. I love Last Epoch and I really appreciate the story of Eleventh Hour Games. Legitimately this entire company started as a Reddit thread about a bunch of people wanting to build the ARPG they always wanted to play. Hands down I feel like Last Epoch has the best systems of any game on the market in this genre. I want it to succeed, and I legitimately feel like it sits in this perfect happy medium between the simplicity and often dumbed down nature of Diablo, and the over complicated and obtuse nature of Path of Exile. What it has been missing is a really robust endgame, and it seems like Tombs of the Erased is finally bringing that. Sure there are still things missing like the last bits of the campaign and there is no social construct for guilds/clans but that can arrive over time. I have a blast each time a new content patch drops in this game, and I think you will too.

If you want more information from me on this game I wrote a more detailed Primer on the game when it launched into full release early last year. I also created a much more detailed crafting primer around the same time. If you are more video motivated, I record dumb little videos all the time about the games I am playing when I want to talk about a build or something that I am doing, and there is a section for “Bel Bungles Last Epoch” collecting a bunch of these. Lastly there is of course the Last Epoch archives here on this blog where I have collected all of the posts throughout the years where I have talked specifically about the game, as well as any episodes of AggroChat where we discussed it. I know I will be playing the game this Thursday and will very likely be actively blogging about my adventures here. I hope to see you all there as well.

It’s Getting Better

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Good Morning Folks. Early yesterday evening, we had a 15 minute downtime for Path of Exile II which deployed patch 0.2.0e. The patch included a lot of pretty solid changes from shrinking some of the larger zones by cutting out dead ends, to slowing down specific mob types so that they could not just bum-rush you forever. There are still issues with the game, but most of those are design decisions not necessarily things that feel like they are bugs. I still feel like I am maybe not the intended target audience for this game, but given enough patches like that… it might actually get closer to that. I still feel like crafting is entirely missing from the experience and what we have instead is just praying for the RNG gods to smile upon you with a fortuitous drop. Generally speaking I can get pretty far into maps in Path of Exile 1 before I need to resort to trade… but I did not even make it through the campaign without buying a few items here.

Because of how miserable the campaign felt, I spent most of last night approaching it with fresh eyes to see how the recent round of changes impacted the experience of starting fresh. The only twink item that I threw on my character was Enfolding Dawn, which honestly causes more problems than it solves by taking away your mana gain from Intelligence for the benefit of having 100 Spirit. I mostly ended up yoloing my way through a build without following any guide, and essentially followed in the footsteps of my character from last league. All in all it was a MUCH better experience than when I had rolled this character last week and made it through the first zone. I was not necessarily exploding the entire world, but I managed to work my way through the entire first act without taking any deaths. Sure I had to dodge quite a few effects and work around when my minions died on me… but it was reasonable and I mostly found myself leaning on the combo of Raging Spirits and Arsonists like I did last time.

Mapping is also so much better now that Rares are highlighted on your map immediately. This gives you a clear direction that you should head up entering the map, and gives the entire experience a bit more purpose. The drops are still a bit on the low side, but I do have to say that their waystone changes are perfect. I’m never running into any issues where I am not getting waystone drops enough to sustain my mapping. In fact I am massively over-sustaining which is pretty nice. You get tier upgrades often enough that if you can JUST get through one map in the new tier… that you are probably going to have a bunch of waystones to run to keep progressing through that tier. I’ve yet to be in a position where I need to drop down a tier because I ran out of waystones to run.

Having fewer towers in the endgame mapping is a huge positive. I still do not love running these maps, and as such having to do fewer of them is a good thing. I feel like that does not necessarily make towers actually good though, because I don’t want to do them. I am also not super hyped on the progression system. Path of Exile 1 has this whole grid of maps where you mark them off one by one, which feels good with each new map giving you Atlas Passive points. Instead of running 10 Tier 1 maps, you now have to seek out a Nexus of Corruption and clear that… which in truth often means you are needing to run MORE than 10 maps to find the next one. I get what they are going for here… but it does not feel amazing. It still feels like I am running more maps and getting less benefit from them… which is especially bad when each individual map feels largely unrewarding.

There are however some payoff moments in the maps, and when you find one it feels good. I’ve you’ve been around the community at all you have probably seen screenshots of Ventor’s Contraption, which is a unique lockbox that takes gold to open. Each time you open it, the amount of gold goes up significantly. I only had enough on me to do three spins of the gacha box, and I feel like I got fairly decent outcomes. I know there are folks who have gotten 10 stacks of Divine Orbs from these things, or perfect jewelers orbs… so I did not get that lucky. The only problem is… not every map has anything even vaguely as exciting as the gacha box. A lot of maps are pretty boring still, and lack the chance of decent drops… so it kind of feels like you are just slogging through the objectives hoping it will improve at higher tiers.

After a major patch though, things are in a better state overall. Next week on this blog is likely going to be focused on talking about the Last Epoch Season 2 launch and trying to sell you on why you should be playing it. If anything dramatic happens in Path of Exile II however I will probably at least talk about some of that as well. I hope you all have a wonderful weekend and get the loot drops you have been hoping for.

Better But Not Great

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Hey Folks. Well… I did not actually stop playing Path of Exile II. I am a deeply stubborn human being at times, and I kept pushing forward and have managed to get things into a semi-viable state. Warrior right now is probably the most functional class in the game. Until yesterday 9 of the top 10 spots on the Hardcore leader-board were playing the Smith of Kitava. Now several Lich builds have snuck into the top 10, now that the chaos dot contagion tech has become more common. Conversely there are only three Huntresses in the top 100, and the first one of those is sitting down at spot 21. Not that I play Hardcore, but you can generally use it as a gauge of the success and viability of builds more than you really can the softcore characters.

So how did I reach a point of viability with my build? Essentially it was the second set of ascendancy points that pushed me over the edge, and had I realized how much of a difference this would have made I probably would have chosen these as my first points. Basically I farmed a decent normal body armor from Act 3, and kept farming until I had enough socket and quality currency to attempt a corruption. I did not win the one in four, and got nothing added to my chest piece but it has still worked well enough. That 5% life generation was just enough to take the edge off my incoming damage and give me time to react with a health potion when I started taking shotgun damage. What has been frustrating however is just how much time I have spent vendor shopping for quality and socket currency. Essentially each time I ding a new level I bounce back to all of the act vendors looking for anything I can salvage… so I can hopefully set up for my next upgrade at some point.

This largely set me up to finish Act III, and in truth things were pretty easy from that point forward. That is not to say it was not tedious. Essentially my gameplay is Leap Slam and then when I land hitting Boneshatter to blow everything up. Now that I have some leech on my weapon I can sustain my mana reasonably well, and I am no longer having to survive on potions alone. That really is the point at which both Path of Exile 1 and 2 start to feel decent, is when you can automate your regeneration of life and mana to the point where you ONLY have to care about potions to deal with large hits. Potions are awful and have always felt bad, and I hate it when you are struggling and just have to keep downing one after every fight. Doryani took forever, but it was reasonably easy… so essentially my only real roadblock was Viper and once I had some regeneration I managed to push through that without much issue.

Last night I picked up a pair of Trampletoe boots off trade for one exalt, and I have been using these to pretty solid effect. Yes these were nerfed so that they do not do the massive chains that they used to. However this does not really matter because it gives me a second bit of explode so that when combined with my Herald of Ash it essentially blows up most packs. The only thing that I have to stop and fight is rare mobs, which mostly just mean I have to throw out a single perfect strike. I’ve managed to get into a pretty good rotation of leap slam/boneshatter repeated forever. The only things that I really have to watch out for are poison and chaos damage… both of which completely shred me because I have zero chaos resistance. At some point that is going to be something I focus on… hopefully with my next set of armor upgrades.

Now that I have gotten past some of the mechanical frustration… we are left with the loot frustrations. This game feels largely unrewarding. My POE1 brain gets excited when I see a rare chest in a zone… and then upon opening it all of the dopamine drains rapidly out of my system when I get two blues and 15 gold. Note… I am not filtering out any loot here. I am running Filterblade but was simply not getting enough loot that I backed off all the way down to the softest filter, which only serves to shrink the font size of items that it deems worthy of filtering out. When I killed Doryani at the end of act 3, he dropped 2 rare items, 2 magic items… and around 100 gold. The loot just feels so phenomenally throttled, that I am not sure what the heck is going on. This is why I hate magic find as a stat… because it is clear that the GGG folks are assuming that we are stacking it and throttling loot by default to make up for having this stat in the game.

At this point I am level 52 and heading off to Fight Count Geonor at the end of Act IV. I’ve been following a relatively generic boneshatter tree and at some point I will respec a bit to be able to pick up Giants Blood and go Two Handed Hammer and Shield. I am really interested in some of the build tech that OneManaLeft is using, that Carnarius also used a bit towards the end of last league. Essentially they drop Leap Slam and pick up Blink so that you can blink from pack to pack and then mace strike to explode the packs. You can check out Connor’s POB for the full version of the build. As I get more currency I am going to start shopping trying to pick up an Infernoclasp which I will eventually need to hit 90% fire resistance. If nothing else it will serve as a pretty decent belt for the time being… but as of right now the prices are all over the place.

Am I having fun yet? The jury is still out on that one… I am having less frustration than I was having so for the moment that has to count for something. I still feel like there are deep problems with the design of this game. Do I think it is as simple as Chris Wilson good Jonathan Rogers bad? No… not really. Games are not the product of a single person, and no matter how much the community points this out does not really make it true. It does feel like GGG does not understand their own game however, nor really understand what made Path of Exile so great. They are trying to build a different game, but right now… they are whiffing in empty air because this is not working. The longer the game goes on… the more it is clear that the original design is not going to be the thing people actually want to play for the long run. I fully expect that as soon as Last Epoch launches its second season… Path of Exile II is going to be a ghost town.

At some point today Zizaran is supposed to be sitting down with Jonathan Rogers for an interview about the Dawn of the Hunt league. I am going to be extremely interested to see how this shakes out, especially given that Ziz has rated this league 4 out of 10. I am hoping that GGG goes through with the interview because quite frankly, Ziz is probably the person who is going to be the most respectful towards them, and they cannot avoid the bad press if they were to cancel it. Tonight I will be wrapping up Geonor and moving on to Act 2 Cruel, so we will see if the “better” continues.

Farming the Witchtide

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Good Morning Folks! Yesterday was the launch of Diablo IV Season 7, and last night I rolled the Necromancer that I was planning and started leveling. If anyone is wanting to play along at home, I am mostly following this guide on Maxroll because I do not want to think about anything right now. I am not really going to worry about my gear until I hit level 60 because at this point I have effortlessly gotten to 44 without really trying. I am absolutely half-assing my way through the content and it is delightful, in large part because Season of Witchcraft is effectively the spiritual successor to Season 2. The Season of Blood as Season 2 was properly referred to was essentially peak Diablo IV for me, and the rapid recurrence of the Blood Tide events made it feel great to level.

Instead of Bloodtides… we have Headhunts which I am affectionately referring to as the Witchtide. These will spawn in four places on the map and are up for 40 minutes at a time. However these appear to be staggered so that when one ends there is always going to be another one up that you can be farming. This also means that once you complete all of the Grim Favor objectives in one area, you can bounce to a new area and start the entire process over again. This is by far the smoothest leveling experience ever and even more important… taking a death does not cause you to lose your hard earned event currency like you do in a Helltide. That said… I have not taken a death yet but you are collecting resources that you then spend to unlock Witchcraft abilities.

Part of what made the Season of Blood so great was that in addition to the blood tide events… you had a borrowed power system in the form of vampire abilities. These were gained randomly in a pick one of three scenario and it often took you quite a bit of grinding to get the set that you really wanted to use. Witchcraft abilities work so much better in that you simply get currency for doing events and then can outright purchase the ability that you actually want. Within the first hour and a half of game-play I had all five of the abilities that I wanted, and then could simply focus on leveling them up instead of acquiring new abilities. I highly suggest Aura of Siphoning for your first ability because it is essentially “What if Righteous Fire Healed You”, as you deal damage to everything around you but also gain some of that as life.

I also love that it lets me run around with a giant poison dart frog. The crossover abilities from the D3 Witchdoctor are greatly appreciated. I am sure at some point I will build something around the Firebats ability if I end up running a second character. I am pretty curious how nerfed the state of the Spiritborn ends up being from what it was during the expansion launch. Diablo IV has reached the point of light popcorn fare and I am here for it. I was having a lot of fun from the moment I dropped into game and so far that seems to have no sign of stopping. I really need to run a few Nightmare Dungeons to see how they have been buffed because Ace reported that they got a stupid amount of legendaries from them.

Kind of the crux of the Witchtide events is to spawn these headless husks, which you kill to reclaim heads at least in a narrative sense for the tree of whispers. There is also a background story happening surrounding a coven of witchdoctors that do the bidding of the tree. I have to be honest… I do not care at all about the story side of this, because really it is a loose framework that allows me to keep going out and killing more monsters that are spawning unique to this season. The core mechanical loop feels extremely rewarding, and I am curious to see how this transitions as we move into the endgame. I am sure there will still be the need to farm a lot of summoned bosses for unique drops. Ace and I learned last league that the best option was for us to hold onto everything and then meet up to amplify the number of summons we were able to do in a single sitting.

Another thing that I greatly appreciate is that they have added additional functionality to the Tree of Whispers location. This is where all of the event resources are set up, but also they changed the layout a bit and added an Obols vendor and Alchemist to essentially allow us to never leave this location. I was already setting my default teleport to the Tree of Whispers for dumping Grim Favors, but now there really is no reason to use any other location other than if you are happening to farm the Pit. I still would really like to have something akin to the player hideout from Path of Exile 1 and 2 because honestly… unless I have invited them to my group I don’t really care about other players.

Speaking of not caring about other players… I am guessing the community got the memo that running World Bosses is not really worth the effort. I killed Ashava this morning and it was just me and a Barbarian… and thankfully we managed to take down the boss without much issue. I don’t feel like I am probably too far ahead of the curve… and more that it is just a case that no one seems to care about world bosses. I said this last league, that the older content like World Bosses, Nightmare Dungeons, and Legion Events really do not feel like they are worth doing right now. Sure you can get some drops, but the amount of drops pale in comparison to just farming literally anything else. I mostly wanted to kill the world boss because I am certain that somewhere in the seasons journey there is a requirement for doing so.

By farming effectively nothing but the Witchtide, I am actually progressing pretty quickly through the Coven’s Favor track… aka the event faction for this league. Mostly this serves as a way of unlocking the various quests associated with the league which I am sure will gate some things behind them… so might as well grind it out as quickly as possible. Once I get into the endgame I am probably going to be farming content that is not the Witchtide, so it would probably be beneficial to get the faction now while I am not having to go out of my way to farm it.

All in all I feel like this is a pretty solid outing for Diablo IV. The game will still have its critics, and that is fine… I just wish they were coming from a place of legitimate gripes and not largely piling on the campaign of streamers. The raw game is in a pretty decent state at this point, and I am having quite a bit of fun. It will never be a technical experience like Path of Exile, but for big dumb fun it is pretty spectacular. I am sure I will bore of it quickly once I have finished the season journey… but not everything has to be a forever game. While I can appreciate Citizen Kane… I also really like movies where they have cool CGI and big explosions. Diablo IV is a big explosions type game, and if you can appreciate it for what it is… there is fun to be had here.