Hey Folks. Getting a bit later of a start today than I normally do for a blog post. I had a weird day with a weird schedule… but things seem to have calmed down enough for me to sit down over lunch and make a proper post. Last night I spent some time hanging out with Ace and specifically trying to target a few different seasonal objectives. Initially the idea was that we would knock out the “Pit 75 with 5 mins remaining” and got that on our first attempt with about a minute to spare. From there we decided to make a go at opening 25 of the seasoning root pods within 15 minutes… thinking surely that grouping up we would both get credit. It turns out that we did not… and my spamming the pods meant that I got the achievement and Ace didn’t. So at some point over the next few days we will make another go at it and I will just murder things while they spam the pods.
Since last night I managed to knock out the achievement for opening 10 chests in a single Helltide, which pushed me over the edge and completed my seasons journey. In theory I still have a few objectives left but I really have no pressure to complete them as I have accomplished the thing I set out to do in Season Seven. I have a new raven pet, and also picked up another resplendent spark. Essentially I could stop playing right now and feel entirely satisfied. That said I am probably going to keep playing a bit to see if I can improve my gear and maybe do another round of boss summons trying to more Mythics. We should probably try and link up with Eliyon or Kodra and let them get in on the summoning nonsense to get some good loot from it.
For the New Years event and seasonal reputations I am sitting at rank 7 and rank 18 respectively. I’ve found the most luck so far just hanging out in a Helltide or Witchtide zone and farming the special seasonal altars, rather than grinding out Nightmare Dungeons. More than likely in the coming days I am going to finish up my Coven Reputation and hopefully at the same time finish out the Lunar New Year rep as well. This is going to give me a couple more resplendent sparks that in theory will let me craft another mythic… which hopefully gives me one of the others I want for my build. If I max both reputations that will give me 3 sparks… giving me a second chance pending I get a bad option when crafting the first one.
Past that I think I am done with Helltide and am going to mostly make myself available to help Ace complete the rest of their season journey objectives. Diablo IV is a pretty great game at this point, but very much feels like it takes the same role as Diablo III does. Its a fun game to play for a few weeks with a nice clear progression of objectives to finish. However once the Seasons Journey is over, I find that I lose my desire to keep grinding. Mythics are just unobtainium enough to make them feel like they are not a realistic goal… it is like getting a Headhunter or Mageblood to drop. Whereas Path of Exile has little hits of dopamine along the way… Diablo IV doesn’t really have much in the way of interesting things to farm once you have gotten your build to the point of functional.
Morning Folks! The truth of Diablo IV is that it is not necessarily the most compelling game on the planet, but it absolutely nails one aspect. It is easy, seamless, and non-punitive to group up and do content with your friends. I think above all else that is the main reason why this is going to remain in the rotation of games for me, because it gives a good meet up destination for me and Ace to hang out and slaughter demons together. I love Path of Exile, but it feels bad to group with other players. Everything about the calculus of grouping makes it feel overly punishing, whereas Diablo IV has nothing but benefits when it comes to hanging out with friends. Ace had a bad day, and I also have not had the most wonderful week so far… so as a result we decided to hunker down and burn through a bunch of bosses last night.
That really is the biggest benefit of Diablo IV, that grouping especially when it comes to bossing is a force multiplier… not necessarily in the time to kill but definitely in the access to loot. I took a screenshot of my materials tab before the night and at the end of the night, and we burned through so many bosses it was silly. We gave up on Varshan though, because after four trips to vendor/salvage it just felt silly to keep going given how largely unrewarding that boss feels. Essentially we did the rotation of Beast in the Ice, Varshan, Grigoire, and Zir first so that we would then have more summons for the two best bosses Andariel and Duriel.
Going into the night I really only wanted two things. I needed a good Ancestral copy of Ring of Mendeln, and a good Ancestral copy of Blood Moon Breeches. Thankfully I walked away with multiple copies of both so that I could spend some painstaking time evaluating all of them to determine which one I would end up using. Additionally I think I picked up a few good copies of every Necromancer specific unique just in case I needed to swap builds at some point. I might try and kit out a full second set of gear and try Blood Wave, since it is so relatively easy to swap between builds now thanks to the armory. Essentially if you need uniques… you need to be running the summoned bosses because that seems to be the only reliable way to get them. Ace got my luck and walked away with two Mythics, and unfortunately I walked away with none… but last league I think I got 5 to their 2 so we will call it even.
I wish I had a good count of just how many boss summons we did last night, but I did not keep track. I know I carried Ace through a 50 Pit before the evening so we could attempt to farm on Torment 3… which was doable but just went a bit too slow and we bumped it down to T2. At the end of the evening I drug them through a Pit 65 so that they could begin to play with Torment 4. Past that we did run a 10 Wave Infernal Hordes on Torment 3, just so we could stockpile some obducite to masterwork the ancestral uniques we got. It was a pretty great night and essentially wall to wall boss and monster killing. No better way to soothe the soul.
I’ve knocked out three objectives on the final tier of the Seasons Journey, but I swear that this season seems to be much harder than the previous one. I seem to be able to run open world Torment 4 content without much issue, but Nightmare Dungeons seem a bit rippy at times. I am either immortal… or getting one-shot with little room between. There is an objective where you have to kill 50 Elites in Nightmare Dungeons without taking any deaths. Similarly there is a one that requires opening 25 of the roots from the events… in 15 minutes that is going to be hard as hell to get done. Everyone is out there spamming those things and you don’t get credit when someone else opens one. It is going to be rough getting through this one, and it might be something that I do once the season has died down a bit.
I am pretty sure Ace walked away with every unique but one, which is pretty decent considering I think that specific build requires a bunch of uniques. They did get what felt like 20 different copies of the ring that they needed, at least one of which was double ancestral. I got a wild quad ancestral necklace, which sadly I have no use for… but still cool to see. This is honestly what I wish Path of Exile 1 or 2 or even Last Epoch could be. All three of those have various punitive reasons why grouping up is occasionally butts. Diablo III and IV though… its all good and honestly better the more people you can pack into an event. The only negative would be the sheer amount of time and running back to a vendor that would be required to do four different players worth of summon materials. It would literally take an entire afternoon to cycle through a similar payload of four players worth of mats. It essentially took all night… around three hours maybe, to do all of our summons for six bosses.
I still feel like I am probably starting to wind down a bit. I want to start ratholing decent ancestral gear so that I can build an entire second set of gear and try blood wave. As much as I do not love the concept of a minion-less Necromancer, I still feel like I owe it to myself to try this season’s god build. Pure minions should get better at some point soon hopefully, because right now the Ring of Mendeln is not interacting correctly with several other legendary items, keeping the stack of multipliers from happening on minion damage. I will say it is kind of butts right now if you happen to die in any content, because there is no easy way to get back your minions unless you left a stack of corpses laying around. This is also a problem I have had in Last Epoch, except there you have to summon them all painstakingly one at a time. Path of Exile II really has the right idea by making your minions summon automatically. At a minimum in both Last Epoch and Diablo IV there should be a channeled button that will summon up all of your minions at once so that it isn’t something you can realistically use in combat, but it does allow you to get back to fighting shape easily.
I hope you are also finding some comfortable distraction from the bullshit that is happening in the real world. I am not blind to it, I just figure it is better for my mental health not to engage right now. Enough information is filtering through to know that shit is really bad. Please do not take my lack of engagement with it as a sign of not caring. I care about you and your safety, and if you need me I am only a message away on the plethora of platforms that I have an account on. I am still checking everything sporadically, but I am also denying them my undivided attention.
Good Morning Folks! Since I did not do my normal weekend recap post yesterday, I figured this morning I would start out with a bit of a progress post on Diablo IV Season Seven. I have to admit… I am starting to run out of steam. I had a pretty great first week, but now I am reaching the point where I am not really as driven to keep moving forward. Minions Necromancer seems to have stalled out at Torment III, and I am struggling to push it up to something that feels halfway decent at Torment IV. I could of course swap to Blood Wave of one of the more powerful builds with zero minions… but I have been stubborn. Like I said last week… a Necromancer without Minions is basically just a shitty Mage.
Really the core problem that I am dealing with is not being able to get the drops that I need to progress the build. I am kitted out in full Ancestral gear, and honestly well rolled items at that… but the challenge that I am having is that I cannot get the Ancestral Uniques that I need for the build. I’ve got copies of the normal mode versions, and in theory I should probably try rearranging my gear in a way so that I could equip them and give that a shot to see how it feels. Largely across the board Ancestral drops feel like they are way less common than they were last league, and this feels bad. More than that it does not feel like I am having much success target farming the items. In theory Ace and I were talking about doing another round of boss summons this evening, and if I get lucky that would solve my problems.
I’ve completed the Battle Pass and unlocked all of this seasons cosmetics. I generally pay for the cheap version of the battle pass without any acceleration, because generally speaking the seasonal cosmetics are pretty freaking great. I am not entirely certain what I think about this armor set, but the weird raptor-horse thingy is pretty sweet. One thing that annoys me about the Battle Pass, is that since the cats are only available through the expansion… the seasonal tracks never seem to include any cosmetics for them. This is the problem with splitting features between expansion and core versions of the game, and seems like a bad design overall.
Where I am stalled out however is on the Season Journey. I’ve reached the final step called Destroyer, and every single objective requires Torment IV to complete. Since I cannot reliably run much of anything on Torment IV, that means I am pretty much hard locked. Then the final steps will require me to do copious farming while sitting on T4, and luck into a few edge cases like having two legendary shrines appear in a single Roothold. Maybe I am feeling a little more charitable to the streamers that I felt abandoned this season too soon, because honestly… I was just a bit slower reaching the point they must have on day one or two. I am not sure what is wrong with the season, but something feels off now that I am out of the super fun leveling phase.
I did however take down Lilith so that was a positive step forward. Last season I got hard carried by Ace on this fight, and this season I was able to one-shot it. This means I have my resplendent spark, so that if I can ever complete the seasons journey… I will be able to craft a mythic unique. Part of me is wondering if I should have gone with Spiritborn. Truth be told the core problem that I have with Diablo IV is how spammy it feels. Maybe I am just too used to one or two button builds in Path of Exile, but it is highly annoying that I need to spam six abilities every time they are off cool-down. I could always use the numlock trick, but that feels cheesy. Especially after getting used to the more combo based system of Path of Exile II… Diablo IV spammy combat feels odd.
I admit… I am not 100% certain how much longer I am going to keep poking at this. I should at least try a respec to something else before giving up the ghost. I am not sure what happened, but in the last two days the fun levels have diminished significantly. It was great so long as I felt like I was regularly knocking out objectives, but once I stalled out… it made me start to evaluate the type of combat that I was actually doing.
Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, and Thalen
Hey Folks! We are down a Tam this week but start off the show talking a bit about our various mental states with the happenings going on out in the world. From there Grace talks about Rusty’s Retirement a delightful idle game that has a lot of the same functionality as Stardew Valley but runs in a small window at the bottom of your monitor. From there we talk about Diablo IV Season 7 and how it is quite possibly the best D4 season ever… that no one is really giving much fanfare. We talk a bit about how the streamers have seemingly abandoned the game. Kodra shares with us the process of resolving combat in the Battletech tabletop game from the 80s… giving Thalen and Bel flashbacks in a bad way. Finally, Ash has been playing Sonic Frontiers and talks about it actually being a really good open-world Sonic game.
