Good Morning Friends! This weekend I moved up into World Tier 4 of Diablo 4, which means I have finally entered the proper endgame. This happened largely due to the fact that my friend Cyl told me that Friday night we would be getting through the Fallen Temple, aka the Capstone dungeon blocking World Tier 4. She had been holding off on trying it, and I had failed it a few times… but together we wrecked the place. Essentially the combination of Sorceress and Barbarian was pretty potent and she would freeze things… and then I would spin on top of them with impunity wrecking their life pool. The final boss encounter was a bit tricky at times, and I had to abuse the fact that I am fairly sturdy and resurrect Cyl a few times. There are a lot of things that just having another person really helps for, and I like that self rezzing does not subtract from your life pool.
Nightmare Dungeons in theory probably should not exist prior to World Tier 4. They are a boring mess at low tiers that you can begin running in World Tier 3. As soon as you complete a Tree of Whispers in Tier 4 everything begins dropping at Tier 21 or higher. Completing one of these unlocks your ability to start salvaging and crafting Sigils. You can’t run a low-tier Sigil without dropping back down into World Tier 3, so essentially… everything that had been clogging my inventory was rendered worthless. Nightmare Dungeons in World Tier 4 is actually pretty enjoyable. This is maybe the content that has been missing from the game to this point and seems to be what the game is actually balanced around. It just sucks that it takes over 100 hours of gameplay to really see this content. That said it also still feels pretty grindy to be focused ONLY on Nightmare Dungeons.
Lately, most of my gameplay in Diablo IV has been centered around the boss and legion timers. The best site that I have found so far is D4 Armory, which also happens to be the site that offers the ability to link your character armory. Essentially it seems like bosses either spawn on a 5, 6, or 7 hour timer… and I cannot keep track of this shit so I am offloading that part of my brain to a timer website. Again I still feel like Blizzard needs to sort this shit a bit better than it currently is. If they want to rotate between Bosses, Helltides, and Legions… then in theory one of these should always be happening or no more than 15 minutes away from happening. Over the weekend I tried to catch as many of these as I could, and the Legion events specifically seem to be amazing experience gain.
The World Bosses themselves are not exactly what I would consider extremely fun encounters… but they also feel like something you really should not miss. One of the things that puzzled me is that I thought we would have more of them. As it stands there are three of them… Wandering Death, Avarice aka New Greed, and Ashava whom we fought in beta. Probably my favorite of these is Avarice simply because the teleport mechanic looks really cool. My least favorite is Ashava, mostly because Poison feels wildly overpowered right now as compared to the rest of the conditional damage types. None of them are terribly exciting however and I really feel like the Diablo IV team needs to play some Guild Wars 2. No game does large-scale spectacle fights as that game does, and it would feel better if there was some sort of zone meta that led to the boss encounter rather than just something randomly spawning every six hours or so.
My luck continues to hold… and I think Cyl is starting to get a little salty about it… in a joking way of course. When we took down Ashava the other night I walked away with two unique items, and she pretty much walked away with nothing but some rares to sell/salvage. I’ve not lucked into either of the two uniques that I still need, however. Essentially I need a new copy of Rage of Harrogath as I am still wearing a Sacred version of that and I need a copy of Gohr’s Devastating Grips to drop. I did pick up Temerity though so very happy to have that slot filled. However, as much effort has gone into gearing… does make me start to align with the “no reset seasons” camp. I just can’t fathom going through this much effort every season.
One thing that I do have to give massive credit to for Diablo IV is the cosmetic options. It has been rare that I have played a game with cosmetic outfits… that have felt so much worse than what was available in the game for free. New World comes to mind because a lot of the Twitch Prime drops are so much cooler looking than anything you can purchase on the in-game cash shop. In Diablo IV I am constantly finding items out in the world that are cosmetics for my horse. Similarly, most of the armor sets you find in the world are better looking than the cash offerings. It does sort of make me wonder if this will be counterproductive to the goals of Diablo IV being a more monetized ARPG than Diablo III was. It makes me wonder if they over-corrected into the realm of free cosmetics to try and minimize comparisons to the shit show of egregious microtransactions that was Diablo Immortal.
The one thing that continues to worry me a bit about Diablo IV, is that I am just never in the mood to solo grind in this game. I’ve had a lot of fun recently when playing on a focused activity with Cyl, but when it comes time to actually do stuff on my own… I tend to log out and play something else. I am not sure if this is a side effect of just how grindy everything is and knowing that it will all be for naught when the season starts, or if it is a greater side effect that the game isn’t nearly as enjoyable as I feel it should be. Whatever the case… I am mostly playing in burst when I happen to check the Armory and see that an event is just about to start. Cyl and I have been pinging each other when we notice a boss is just about to come up, and those moments have been enjoyable. However, Cyl is also grinding this as a mainline game and as a result roughly ten levels ahead of me at any given moment. I fully expect to be left in the dust at some point in the future, and I am not entirely certain I will have the desire to catch back up.
Friends… I find myself in an awkward place right now. I keep poking at Diablo IV even though I am admittedly not really enjoying myself. I end up in these patterns sometimes with games where I feel like I should be enjoying them, but for whatever reason don’t. I probably spent 200 hours poking at Guild Wars 2 over the years trying to figure out what I was missing that others really enjoyed about that game. Eventually, I reached a place of happiness with that experience, but often times I never really do. I do not enjoy Warframe for example, even though on paper everything about that game should be something I am heavily into. I’ve never quite been able to put my finger on what was wrong with the experience, but something is… and something is also wrong with Diablo IV. I feel like I am poking the dead corpse of Diablo IV with a stick, trying to figure out why I don’t love it after waiting over a decade for it to arrive.
Most recently I have poured all of my efforts into catching up with the story quests that I missed along the way, and more importantly, grinding out my renown levels. At this point, I have completed everything but Kehjistan, and I have to say… this is a miserable process. Nothing about this is enjoyable in the least but it also feels like they have hung just enough carrot… in the form of 4 bonus Paragon Points at the end of this stick that I cannot avoid it. I also found the hunt for 160 Altars of Lilth was complete misery as well… but again all of the permanent stat boosts were too beneficial to ignore them. Both of these are examples of thoroughly uninteresting gameplay, but also something that feels like you can’t really skip it because they attached something to it that you can’t really get otherwise. I certainly hope that these are a one-time thing and do not reset each season, because I cannot ever fathom doing this again.
Then there are my frustrations with the Paragon Board system. Namely the force mechanic around unlocking the bonus for each Glyph. None of these are really worth the effort unless you unlock the bonus, but in order to do it… it causes you to make some deeply uninteresting choices with your points. My frustration right now is that I need to acquire 40 strength from nodes on the board, but there is only 35 strength worth of nodes in the radius of this glyph. That means I need to level this glyph to level fifteen in order to expand the radius. The system of leveling glyphs is in theory supposed to replace the process of leveling Legendary Gems from Diablo III. Same mechanic but implemented in a maddening slow manner. When you leveled a Legendary Gem you got 3 level raises each time you ran a Greater Rift, with Glyphs… you get part of a level each time you run a Nightmare Dungeon.
Most of the glyphs that I have access to are Tier 1, and those gave me half a glyph level at 1, and a quarter of a glyph level at 2. Meaning that in order to level these up you just have to chain-run Nightmare Dungeons. These are not fun. They are just normal dungeons with some added nonsense that you have to watch out for but are as mind-numbing as the normal dungeons. Greater Rifts in Diablo III were also admittedly repetitive but there was a lot of randomization in each run and you could rip through them quickly as they did not require you to do any backtracking. Dungeons in Diablo IV however require you to complete a series of boring mechanics which often require you to backtrack in the dungeon and are effectively the same experience every time you run them. I ran six of these back to back last night before ultimately deciding I had my fill and moved on to other things.
What is genuinely enjoyable are the World Boss fights. I grouped up with my friend Cyl and took down The Wandering Death, which is an encounter I had not seen before. Sure the mechanics were relatively easy, but it was still a fun five minutes of gameplay that felt extremely rewarding for the time spent. The problem here however is that these world boss events… are so few and far between that I’ve literally played likely over a hundred hours at this point and this was the first one that I happened to be on at the right time to catch. Instead of taking a page from the very excellent Guild Wars 2 event spawning book, Blizzard seems to have these vague three-hour windows when a boss MIGHT spawn… and when this happens you are not exactly given a clear indication unless you happen to be looking at the map. Personally, I feel like World Bosses should ALWAYS be spawning and you should never be more than 20 minutes away from the next one. The same is true with Helltides and I feel like there should never be a moment when you log in and there is not one available.
Then let’s talk about one of my key complaints… how generally fucked the stash tab situation is. Not only is the UI for your Stash completely useless and without any sort of search functionality… you are painfully limited in what you can store. This image that I have cobbled together from screenshots represents all of the storage space that you have. 200 slots of storage space are allocated for all of the characters on your account, and right now it is largely filled with crap for my barbarian. Then you have the 88 slots of storage space that you are carrying on your character which is divided up into 33 inventory slots for drops, 33 slots that are for consumables but this is shared between Potions and Nightmare Dungeon Sigils, and finally, 22 slots that you can use to store aspects that you have extracted. Most of my actual stash tab storage is consumed by legendary items that I am holding on to in order to extract legendary aspects from later because the aspect storage is so painfully limited.
Let’s contrast this with three other games in the genre. Path of Exile has a virtually unlimited amount of storage space so long as you are willing to buy more stash tabs with real-world money. Last Epoch also seems to have a virtually unlimited amount of storage space available pending if you are willing to keep farming in-game gold to purchase them. Even Diablo III, which I considered fairly limited… gives you 910 stash tab slots… though some of those I earned through seasonal play and others I got from the Reaper of Souls expansion and the Necromancer pack. However, even if you only have the base game… you still have 350 stash slots. I think part of what makes the D4 situation feel so bad is all the damned gems… and admittedly they ate up a ton of space in my bank in D3 as well. However, there is no real reason why they don’t just live in your ingredients tab.
I find myself in this rough spot with Diablo IV, and the longer I play it the more frustrated with the current state of the game I get. I should just stop playing it and do something else, but I am not sure exactly what else I want to dive into at the moment. I should go back and finish out the league in Path of Exile and get the last achievement I want to get. I should work on progressing through the monolith further in Last Epoch. However, my brain seems to be caught up in this pattern of logging into Diablo IV and then getting frustrated. I keep thinking if I push through this…. the game will get better. However, the further I push… the shallower the game seems to get. I still stand by my original assessment of this game. It is a pretty great game for playing through the story and then moving on to another game. I question how good of a game it is for playing like most ARPG players play those games. I feel like as soon as the new Path of Exile league lands with ExileCon in July, Diablo IV is going to be a ghost town.
Good Morning Friends! I did not get nearly as much time as I would have liked last night to play some Diablo 4, but I did manage to push through to level 60 and then get another quarter of a level into that for an additional paragon point. I’ve largely been focused on finishing out my renown in the last few zones of the game and finished up Dry Steppes and have now moved on to my final zone of Kehjistan. One of the things that I have been mulling over in my brain is how I would have approached this game differently. For those of you who might not know, I’m one of the admins on the Mastodon/Fediverse server called Gamepad.Club which serves as a gaming-focused social media hub.
While I slept one of my good friends and fellow gamepadders posted a plea for suggestions. I figured I would answer this plea in the form of my morning blog post. Side note… this is the first time I have seen the term Gamepadders in reference to the denizens of Gamepad.club and I think I like it… and am just going to roll with it. Victor got plenty of responses from the larger mastodon community, but I figured I would still outline how I would approach the game knowing what I know now. Of note… I was in MANY phases of Diablo IV testing including several closed phases and a number of public phases. The game changed drastically each time I attempted to sit down and play it. So the truth is I went into the game expecting to play one ability that had been good in the early phases of testing… that was apparently nerfed into the ground.
Follow the Meta
I feel like you first have to ask yourself a simple question. Is the core of my enjoyment of the ARPG experience based on making my own builds? If the answer is yes, then skip this entirely. I am pretty sure you can half-ass your way through the campaign with any build you choose. I made it through the campaign on my heavily nerfed Upheaval build, though I struggled when it came to defeating the first capstone dungeon. Essentially Diablo IV is very poorly balanced right now and not every build is viable when it comes to harder content. If you want the easiest possible experience I would suggest going over to Maxroll.gg and looking at their build guides. They have both leveling builds and end-game builds, and I would choose one of the “in the meta” builds currently that has one of each. That way as you level you get used to the abilities that you will ultimately end up with at the end-game. Icy Veins also has a good build section but I personally like the layout of Maxroll a bit better.
Start on World Tier 1
There are no tangible benefits to playing the game on “Veteran” difficulty. While the placard says that you will get more experience and more loot… you will also take so much more time killing mobs that this benefit becomes entirely negated. Your goal is ultimately to get to World Tier 3 as fast as possible, and as a result, the early game is just an obstacle in your way. There is no point in trying to be a billy badass and insist on World Tier 2. You are only setting yourself up for frustration in the end. If difficult content is your kink, then, by all means, ignore this advice.
Focus on the Main Story Content
Since content scales with you… the later in the game you attempt something the harder it is going to be. As such it is my suggestion that on your first playthrough of the game, you just focus on the main story content. This will be marked in Yellow in your quest log, and you can progress through the game without touching any other content. While you are doing this I suggest you take the time to go ahead and unlock any waypoints you find as you will need these later. Upon completing the main quest you unlock the Tree of Whispers which will give you some additional benefits as you complete the rest of the content in the game. Ultimately you are going to want to do every single side quest available at some point. My personal preference is to unlock the end-game and then roam around doing side content then. If you want a longer journey that will also increase in difficulty as you go, then you can, of course, do side content as you are doing the main content.
Extract Near Perfect Aspects
After finishing the prologue of the game, you will unlock the occultist which allows you to imprint aspects on rare items to turn them into legendaries, and to extract aspects from any legendary drops you might get but no longer need. First things first we are going to need to enable some of the advanced options so go into settings and toggle on the following:
Options > Gameplay
Advanced Tooltip Compare
Advanced Tooltip Information
This is going to tell you how good of a roll a given item is. For example, if you look at the aspect I am highlighting above the ability has a range of 20-30% and the item that I found has a near-perfect roll of 29%. This is very worth holding onto and saving for when you need it on your end-game gear. My suggestion is to go ahead and extract any Legendary item that is at least a roll that is 50% of the maximum and most definitely anything that is perfect or near perfect. Everything else should be salvaged as you are going to need those materials later.
Salvage Everything
There are a lot of guides that I have seen that suggest salvaging gear up until you hit level 50. It is my personal suggestion that you never stop salvaging gear. You are going to reach a point where you have more gold coming in than you need, and are going to still be desperate for materials. I switched to selling everything when I finished the campaign and given how often you need to change gear… found myself completely out of several basic materials. Gold will come over time especially as you find Greed Shrines… but you will never stop needing raw materials at least until you have finished out a set of maxed-out ancestral gear.
Buy Whispering Keys
Obols are the currency for doing events in Diablo IV, and much like Blood Shards from Diablo III, you are limited in how many you can carry at a time. Spending them at the Purveyor of Curiosities is a way to gamble on getting legendary items… but the occurrence of legendary drops seems to be skewed by your level. As such spending Obols on gear early on is a bad use of resources. What I would instead do is buy Whispering Keys which are used to unlock the Silent Chests that you find out in the world. You can hold onto these en masse and then use them later on to get a gear boost when needed as you will likely be finding a lot of these Silent Chests in your journey. So it is my suggestion that any time you have a stack of Obols gathered, you spend it down buying these keys and then holding onto them for later.
Unlock World Tier III
Upon finishing the campaign your next core goal is going to be to unlock World Tier III. This means you need to defeat the Cathedral of Light Capstone Dungeon. Unlike the rest of the world, this dungeon is capped at level 50 but can be completed earlier than that if your build is strong. This is ultimately why you want to be following the meta builds as most of them can complete this dungeon somewhere around level 40-45 without much issue. Even if you do not want to start playing on World Tier III, this is gating your access to the last two tiers of renown which is effectively what you are wanting to unlock as quickly as possible. World Tier III also unlocks Helltide Zones and makes it so that Nightmare Dungeon Sigils drop more often as well as granting you access to the Sacred tier of gear. Sacred gear is a massive damage and survival boost and essentially makes all gear before that point obsolete unless you simply have to have a given legendary aspect. Now this goal might take you a bit to accomplish but I am placing it here to outline its importance.
Tree of Whispers
Defeating the Campaign is going to unlock access to the Tree of Whispers. Now this is not an activity that I think you should ever really focus on, but just something to be aware of as you are doing other activities in the world. If you have the opportunity to collect Grim Favors by doing something that aligns with an activity you are already doing, it is just a bonus. Every so often you will fill the bar and get a free box of loot from the tree. Again this should not be your core focus, but just something to be aware of as you do the next few things.
Collect Altars of Lilith
Scattered throughout the world are the Altars of Lilith which are statues that glow slightly red until you have collected them. The campaign make sure you find a few of these along the way, but after you beat the campaign one of your first goals should be making sure you collect all of them. Once they have been collected on a single character, all of your characters from that point forward get the benefit of them. Since they have to be done on a single character though, you might as well devote the time to collecting all 160 of them early on while you are still working on leveling. Yes, this is tedious busywork, but the stat boost that you gain for them will be extremely important when you are trying to unlock abilities that have stat requirements on the paragon boards. I personally found the maps that Polygon created the easiest to follow as they have them numbered and also have zoomed-in images of each location.
You can of course do these while you are completing the campaign if you really keep your eye out for any areas of the map that snake off into a little alcove. There is definitely a pattern to the placement of these statues that you might pick up on along the way.
Max Out Zone Renown
This is the step that I am actively working on if you were curious. As you are completing the campaign you will be capped at a maximum of rank three renown with each region. It is important that you work up your renown because getting every zone to rank three will net your character an extra 10 skill points and getting them all to rank five will give you an extra 20 paragon points. Both of these are significant and like the Lilith Statues, you need to do this on one character before it applies to all of your characters. This will essentially require you to complete all of those blue quests and unlock most of the dungeons in order to hit rank five. I’ve personally completed four of the five regions and am now working on Kehjistan, the area that I spent the least amount of time in so far.
Play The Game Finally
Congratz! You’ve graduated from the busywork phase of Diablo IV. Now you can just do whatever suits your fancy. You could do a bunch of normal dungeons in order to level most efficiently… or you could hit up the Helltide zone every time it is available for fun mob density and loot boxes. You could also bip around the map doing tasks for the Tree of Whispers or dive into progressing your Nightmare Dungeons and with that leveling your glyphs. Personally, I kind of do a mix of all of the above because that seems to be the most enjoyable. I’ve neglected Nightmare Dungeons a bit so far but I need to focus on them soon. I also need to give an attempt or two at trying to unlock World Tier IV now that I have hit level 60. The last capstone dungeon is hard-scaled at level 70, but I am curious if I can finish it early.
There are some aspects of Diablo IV that I really enjoy, more specifically I like the way the world feels and fits together. There are other aspects of Diablo IV that drive me insane and half convince me to stop playing entirely. I talked about a lot of this in a video yesterday, but most of them can be summed up under the banner of being grossly inefficient and wasteful of my time. So much of the ARPG experience to me is about optimization and the last thing I care about is immersion. Immersion only really holds weight until you have finished the campaign, then you want efficient grinds and in this game nothing is efficient. However since my friend wanted advice, this morning is my attempt at outlining how I would approach the game knowing what I know now. You can of course ignore ALL of this and just fumble your way through the game. Diablo IV is maybe an experience best fumbled through the first time because it will allow you to appreciate the world crafting a bit more. When you attempt to play it efficiently… that is when the wheels fall off.
So maybe… just ignore everything that I just said and approach this game however seems best to you at the time. The shortcomings will make themselves very evident eventually… and when that happens feel free to pop back over here for some advice.
