season 2

The Bloodtide Is Great

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Hey Folks! I am still more or less mainlining Diablo IV each evening. The game has finally started to slow down a bit as I am now level 56 but it still feels like I am gaining experience much faster than I did previously. While I am not gaining core levels quickly, it does feel like I am chewing through Paragon points pretty fast. The only complaint really that I have with the game is that there is some bug that is impacting my system where the entire game will lock up while playing… I think it has something to do with network play and new players showing up on screen, but I can’t be certain. Whatever the case I’ve taken a few deaths from the screen locking up for 5 to 10 seconds at a time. This did not happen in previous releases so I am hoping this is something that gets fixed over time or can be attributed to server congestion.

I think what I am enjoying the most is that I have a very enjoyable mechanic loop going on where I start by popping over to the Blood Harvest zone completing the three Tree of Whispers quests available there. Generally speaking, there will be a quest to kill two Blood Seekers, and as I am working my way through the other quests I will inevitably anger the Vampires and get Blood Seekers summoned to take me out. Unfortunately, few players seem to be focused on the big zone event, so I can rarely complete that but I have noticed that when someone is attempting it the green horned skull icon indicating the Blood Harvest begins to pulse. I wish there was a less subtle indication that the event is going on, but it is better than nothing.

While I am working on the Blood Harvest area I keep my eyes peeled for any Legion Events that are about to spawn. These take place every thirty minutes and are a great source of both experience and loot, so much so that I will leave the Blood Harvest area to knock these out when they are available. This creates a really good cadence of popping back and forth between the “Bloodtide” area as folks have taken to calling it, and then popping out whenever a Legion Event is going on. The community as a whole seems to realize how valuable these are now because I have yet to do one that did not manage to get the mastery objectives completed… which largely just means you are killing things quickly enough to get the mini-bosses to spawn before the final encounter.

I am also keeping my eyes peeled for the next World Boss spawn, though these are honestly not as good as they once were. The difficulty of the encounter has been increased significantly which means they are no longer the loot pinata that they once were. As a result, there is FAR lower turnout for World Bosses and I’ve had several cases of once it started… and it was not immediately dying… folks bailed to do other things. On one hand, I get that players were frustrated by how easy these encounters were… but on the other hand, they require random players to know the fight in order to complete it. I think they are maybe a bit tuned for randos… and so far I have fought three bosses since coming back and only managed to down one of them. The others I kept fighting the entire 15 minutes but we wound up with like 3 players banging away in futility as folks bailed on us. If they want these to be challenging content they need to make them something you queue for and are locked into the encounter until completion.

One of the few problems that I see with the current state of the game, is that I have zero desire to actually engage with the “true” Blizzard-endorsed endgame. I’ve run a few Nightmare Dungeons, but my keys are piling up way faster than I am using them. Nightmare Dungeons are just not fun, at least not compared to Legion events and the “Bloodtide” area. The problem with this is that I am eventually going to have to run Nightmare Dungeons because they are required to interact with the Paragon sigil system and level them up. In order to gain the power contained in that system, I am going to have to force myself to grind them out and this just feels lousy. It feels as though you were forced to do Set Mastery Dungeons in Diablo III in order to get Paragon points or something like that.

Then there are the Helltides… which are now largely made redundant. The “bloodtide” area does everything that this limited-time event does… but does it better. Helltides are only up every two hours… and then if you take a death in the area you lose half of your helltide currency. The “bloodtide” on the other hand lets you drop in and play at any point and your currency associated with that event is additive over time so that your deaths really do not cost you anything. This all serves to make the Helltide feel weirdly punitive and not rewarding enough to make up for it. Sure you can target farm very specific gear slots… but you end up getting so many Seeker keys and you are generating so many Whispers Caches that I am not even certain that is needed functionality anymore. Add to this the fact that every time I have gone into a Helltide area… I was the only player doing them, which makes me think this is just an outmoded content type.

While I am “picking nits”, Blizz really needs to adjust the vendors to match the sweeping changes they made to Sacred and Ancestral gear drops. In the world, I am only seeing Sacred gear right now, which is amazing… save for Legendary items that often drop at base rarity but can still be recycled into either material or have aspects extracted from them. However when I go to the vendors, which should be viable sources of gear… it is all mostly baseline items. This is especially true for the Obol merchant, making that entire system even less useful than it was. Like Helltide… Obol gambling really needs a rework because at the moment I feel like the best option is just to buy keys when you need to spend down the currency. It is just a system that no longer really works with the way the game is currently played.

One legitimate concern that I still have is that I am uncertain if the game feels good right now because the base sandbox state of the game has been balanced, or that the Vampire Powers are just really strong. Path of Exile is in a phenomenal state right now, but it is more the base level of the game and less that any one league mechanic is better than the others. I feel like everything that I am enjoying right now in Diablo IV can be directly attributed to this specific season. Blood Harvest zones are amazing and Vampire Powers feel exceptionally strong… so much so that I do not want to interact with anything OTHER than the “Bloodtide”. It does concern me a bit that they have set up a borrowed power system that they are going to have to replace with something equally spectacular in Season 3, in order to keep the same elevated power levels and keep the game fun.

Diablo IV is very much a game in transition and still has some systems that are not functioning in quite the way that they should. I feel like the Nightmare Dungeons as a whole need a top-down rethink. They are just not fun, and the players really engaging with that mechanic seem to be doing so in degenerate methods that do not involve actually completing the entire dungeon. The most enjoyable part of the game… is not the part of the game that players will eventually be required to do in order to progress endgame systems. Helltides as a whole need a complete rethink as well, and the World Bosses either need to be watered down again or turned into some sort of serious smaller group content that players queue for. Maybe make the Open World spawns watered down, but drop an item needed to spawn a more difficult and much more rewarding version.

The optional bosses seem pretty cool and I have fought Varshan a few times now. Sadly he has dropped the unique twohander each time that I do not need, nor did it drop at a higher enough item level to use. I am hoping that I can keep the momentum going long enough to naturally reach level 70ish and transition into World Tier IV and be able to see the other optional bosses. Varshan requires you to collect three pieces and then enter a basement area at the Tree of Whispers, and I am assuming the three new bosses that open up in World Tier IV will be something similar. There is a tight synergy between the fun parts of the game which are keeping me going, but I am hoping with time Blizzard can make the largely unfun parts of the game like Nightmare Dungeons more enjoyable.

Season of Blood Feels Good

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Morning Folks! I am still fairly shocked to be able to say that the Season of Blood in Diablo IV seems good. As I near the point where I will do the capstone dungeon that allows me access to World Tier III, I have to say that my build is holding solid. Overpower still feels great, but I am uncertain how much of that is the core build and how much is how good the assorted vampiric powers feel. This brings up a whole other series of concerns about Blizzard and their dependence on borrowed power systems in World of Warcraft… and now seemingly Diablo IV… but that can be a concern for another season. For now, the game feels great, which is a wild turnaround from my previous feelings about the game.

Last night I recorded a quick and dirty video of some gameplay in the Blood Harvest area. I also talked a bit about some of the vampire powers and showed off some gameplay of what my Barbarian looks like killing things. I have to say that more than anything it is this seasonal mechanic that is making the game feel good. Previously the open world largely felt pointless apart from the Helltide Events, and now I feel like I have a reason to do the thing that I enjoyed the most… which was roaming around aimlessly and killing things. Blood Harvest areas are exceptionally rewarding both in experience and loot and gave me the thing I was missing in this game… aka a default thing to log in and do. No matter how hard I tried I just did not like Nightmare Dungeons. They felt weird and forced and too rigidly structured. Popping into a zone and hopping back and forth between mini-events while killing copious amounts of Vampires is my jam.

All of that said, while I have not reached Nightmare dungeons… the few normal dungeons that I have run to unlock legendary powers have felt much improved. I will essentially have to relearn the pathing, but it does feel like you have to go in the wrong direction far less often and that most of the objectives that you need to collect and take back to a location are closer to the destinations. The Dungeons however continue to feel fairly boring and tedious, and I do worry a bit that I am going to be forced into them in order to level up my paragon glyphs once I hit level 50. The Blood Harvest area feels so fresh and exciting… that the old dungeon design while improved, still feels like a massive step backward. Personally, I still feel like the dungeons need to be taken back to the drawing board. I would love to see all objectives removed and implement some sort of clear percentage system that spawns a boss similar to Nephelem Rifts from Diablo III.

One of the biggest changes for me personally is how much better town and settlement layouts feel. Firstly there are SO MANY more stashes available in the game, and you are rarely far away from one. Take this overhead map of Kyovashad, where there used to be a single stash in the Inn with your Wardrobe, now there is one at the Enchanter, Jeweler, and Smithy giving you rapid access no matter what task you are needing to complete. I would still rather have seen more compact layouts that put everything within a few steps of each other, but for that, we have the Tree of Whispers that now has an Enchanter. If they swapped the Jewelry merchant for an actual Jewel Crafting vendor… that “town” would be perfection because you could do everything that you might need to do in a single location.

However in the “weird hill to die on” department, Blizzard still seems to be pushing the RealID in spite of having long disabled it in my account settings within Battle.net. What this means is that after the Season 2 patch, if you do not go into your settings and enable one of the “Streamer Mode” options you are going to end up doxxing yourself if you happen to take a screenshot with your inventory open. All of the options around this are awful because this originally defaulted to “Character Name (Firstname Lastname)” and with streamer mode on… instead of getting just my character name, I get random character names each time I log into the game. Why this exists on this screen is beyond me and why someone might want to see their RealID in addition to their character name is beyond me. Does anyone use RealID by choice?

All things considered, though I am enjoying myself and I didn’t really think that was possible. I think my biggest frustration is… had the game launched in this state I think it might have been a game of the year candidate. Now however it is probably going to take a lot to get some players to return. I know my friend Cyl for example pretty much wrote the game off, and has moved on to other games and is probably unlikely to pop back in and give it a second chance. This is the challenge with games that launch in a rough state, you never really get that second chance to amend those first impressions. New World is a prime example of this, and it has more or less improved everything that was wrong with that game at launch… but will never again see the numbers it did in those first few weeks. It is going to take a lot of work to remediate the meme of “D4 Bad”.

Vampires are Hunting You

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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.

Ranger vs Mordremoth

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Good Morning Friends! This weekend I fell out of my ARPG grind and back into some Guild Wars 2. Diablo IV was largely a disappointment and while I got lots of hours out of the game, I can’t say that most of them were really enjoyable. I am still very much engaged with Honkai Star Rail, but there is only about an hour’s worth of play that I can get out of that game on a day-to-day basis without spending additional money or banked resources. I got my Spriggan in Last Epoch up to Monoliths but I can only handle so much of that at once because they end up feeling very repetitive in their current state. With the announcement of the Secrets of the Obscure expansion, it has stoked my desire to get back engaged with Tyria. While my Necromancer has completed all of the content but Living World Season 2, I spend way more time on my Ranger and I am using that character to complete all of the content in the order of release.

Over the weekend I finished up Living World Season 2 and completed all of the Heart of Thorns expansion. I have to say, it is a much more enjoyable experience having played through all of Living World Season 1 then seeing the characters evolve in Living World Season 2… and finally having the major events play out during Heart of Thorns. It all has so much more impact because when I did the content initially… I had no real clue what I was doing and at the same time kept trying to treat Heart of Thorns like a traditional MMORPG expansion pack. I also have a much more stable grasp on the lore of the world thanks to having completed all of it once before. Having already unlocked most of the Heart of Thorns zones through gameplay on the Ranger, it also meant that I could largely focus on only completing the story missions.

The other huge benefit of this playthrough is that I now have access to a SkyScale, which means that most content becomes trivialized by significantly greater movement ability. I thought maybe it would make Tangled Depths more palatable, but that isn’t really the case. I have come to love the zone for what it is, and I greatly enjoy doing the Chak Gerent event… but it is still a nuisance to try and figure out where the quest marker is actually sending me. I still do not feel like games in general do a great job of visualizing the Z-Axis when to quests, and there are many times that I just sort of had to rely on previous knowledge of the game to get me in the vicinity of where I was supposed to go. That said… there are some really cool areas of Tangled Depths like this cavern with glowing mushrooms.

Another thing that greatly enhances my enjoyment of the game has been having BlishHUD turned on. For example, in the Roots of Terror map, I came across this chamber filled with Chak. There was a handy Blish HUD reminder that I could get achievements for killing 1, 10, and 50 Chak… so I spent the next bit of time exterminating every single Chak in the chamber until I got the Mastery achievement. There have been a few cases where I was already doing one thing… that seeing how close I was to completing another achievement caused me to press on and go for it. I generally enjoy playing the Ranger more than I did the Necromancer, and as a result, I feel like I am way more likely to go back and retry some of these maps later to pick up the remaining mastery achievements as a result.

Last night I started Living World Season 3 before deciding that sleep needed to happen. I remember this season really fondly, at least in part because the map designs were so good. Bloodstone Fen is a bit of a butt, but with maxed-out gliding and access to a Skyscale, it should be pretty trivial. This is part of why I am excited about Secrets of the Obscure and giving everyone an easier path to the Skyscale. It just makes everything so much more enjoyable when you don’t have to fiddle around with frustration mechanics. Guild Wars 2 does this amazing job of adding different layers to the map, and then also makes it a bit of a slog to move between them based on Mastery mechanics alone. The Skyscale is admittedly a bit of an easy button, but for me personally, it is making my enjoyment of the content so much higher.

I think my ultimate goal is to get caught up on all of the content on my Ranger before Secrets of the Obscure drops on August 22nd. That is going to be a bit of a rapid pace to go through the content, but I think if I am ONLY focusing on the story… it might be doable. It would also serve as a bit of a nice refresher before the new content drops as well. I get that the new content is supposedly not going to require you to have completed any earlier content to understand, but it would still be nice to have everything unlocked fully on the character I am enjoying playing the most. I mean that might change when I can swap things up with new weapon options in the expansion, but for the time being… I like being a longbow/greatsword dude.