Good Morning Folks. I do not like change, but when I get off my butt and do it… I make rapid and sweeping changes without much forethought. I was frustrated with how low the survival of my stinger build was feeling… not realizing that a huge part of this was due to the fact that I had swapped to Subo instead of Rahir as my Mercenary. I did not realize how much survival Rahir provides. In any case I used one of my legendary scrolls that resets paragon and talent points and spent the next fifteen minutes painstakingly placing points in my paragon boards to switch to the Orange Quill build. I struggled a bit when I first switched, immediately questioning my life choices.
When I said that Stinger was a spammy build… it was a whole other level of spammy. Essentially the only way that I had resources for casting Stinger was by spamming all of the other abilities as they came off cooldown. That ended up in practice that every moment I was trying to piano key my way through six abilities… not just mostly spamming one and then weaving in other abilities as needed. So obviously when I swapped over to Quill, I noticed it was using a lot of the same abilities… and immediately assumed that I needed to do the same thing. I do not in fact need to spam everything, and instead, I can play the character as god intended and just spam one key. It is not a one-button build necessarily because some of the other keys are pretty important but it is mostly one button that matters.
The result is so much more chill, in spite of the build still being fairly spammy. I am far less likely to get a repetitive stress injury, so that has been a massively positive swap. I am however needing to effectively rewire my brain since I have been playing Spiritborn in a specific manner for awhile now. The end result feels more akin to a Fan of Knives build or something like Frost Blades from Path of Exile where you need to face the direction of your target rather than trying to leap into the middle of a pack of mobs and grind it down. What is great about it however is it is so much easier to do the Hordes event and rack up more than enough aether to get good rewards. With this build… Hordes MIGHT be my favorite game mode currently.
Right now I am very much in “Gold Acquisition” mode because I need 50 million gold to buy a Mythic Cache. I had the bright idea that I should convert all of the Aether that I got from doing the Infernal Hordes into gold and see how much that nets me. Essentially this gave me 5,495,600 gold for converting 316 Aether that I had collected during the event. While that is a lot of gold… it isn’t near as much as I thought it would be. I think I am probably going to be better off buying the 200 Aether chest, and then just selling anything that I did not need since several uniques sell for over 100k gold each. Similarly I am shifting into selling mode for most drops and instead only salvaging the things that give me immediate aspect upgrades or cosmetics that I have not gathered yet.
I was extremely lucky I and was able to pick up an Ancestral Harmony of Ebewaka through the Obol vendor, which was one of the required uniques that I did not have already in Ancestral form. Then through running Infernal Hordes, I almost immediately snagged an upgrade to my Rakanoth’s Wake which rolled with Resistance to All Elements as its upgraded stat. When I masterworked it up to the first breakpoint it upgraded Movement Speed so I am already way more zoomy than my previous incarnation. I am keeping my eyes open for an upgraded Rod of Kepeleke and also a Midnight Sun ring. Really at this point, I need to luck my way into Tyrael’s Might Mythic chest to swap out of the ancestral legendary that I am using currently. Other than that I just need more levels and more paragon points to keep unlocking deeper into my boards.
I’ve got a bajillionty boss summon materials, so I think Ace and I are getting together tonight for a round of those. Will be good to free up the inventory space since several of those have rolled over to new stacks. It will also be a source of quite a bit of gold and uniques that can be sold for gold. At some point I need to clean out my bank and sift through so that I am only keeping the best copy of things, instead of my current scenario where I am dumping in anything that looks vaguely interesting. I have way too much of everything, but it was handy when I swapped builds because I could just build up brand new ancestral items instead of trying to reroll the ones I was using with Stinger.
I made a bit of progress on the rewards track last night, but still have fourteen levels to go. Basically, I got ten levels done and if we do the bossing nonsense, I might even be able to push the rest of the way through this evening. I have a bunch of tributes stockpiled, including one that supposedly can drop a mythic unique so at some point I plan on trying to run those. The state of tributes is awkward because some of them can be done in a group and others are purely solo. Having activities where you cannot share the rewards feels sort of awful given the group play is really the shining example of what makes Diablo IV good. In the meantime though I am having fun being a Garuda Simulator as I throw feathers everywhere and watch things fall around me.
If you are looking for a fun Spiritborn build, I highly suggest this nonsense. I should have gone down that path, but I thought the whole Centipede nonsense was really cool.
Yesterday I realized that I was a heck of a lot closer to finishing up the Seasonal Journey in Diablo IV Season Six than I thought I was. Essentially all that was required was leveling my fifth glyph up to 15, which I had not even started leveling because I am only on paragon board four. What I was not expecting was just how many boss-summoning materials that I would end up getting. It now totally makes sense that Ace had so many more summons than me the other night because they are absolutely the sort of tryhard person who cares about the seasonal track. They had finished it up a few days ago I think, and I was not even vaguely paying attention to the items there. In fact this is the very first time I have finished the seasonal track in Diablo IV. I used to push to do it in Diablo III because there were cosmetics on the line, but the sheer practice of ticking off boxes… that has never driven me terribly hard.
What DOES drive me however is the cosmetic rewards track. I still have around twenty more levels to go before finishing that out and I think whenever I accomplish this I will probably bid adieu to Diablo IV. This time around especially there is some really cool armor associated with this rewards track and I had the currency for it when the season launched so I figured “what the heck”. I really like this spear, which oddly enough reminds me quite a bit of the spear that I regularly use in Guild Wars 2. Sadly I never made it super far in last season’s battlepass, but there were some cosmetics there that I would have liked to have gotten. What is cool about this rewards track more than any season previously, is that the free track is actually good. It is this whole really detailed pirate outfit, which is a significant change from the boring “casual clothes” look that previous free cosmetics have been in this game.
I am also nowhere near finishing the Zakarum Remnants faction, because I hate the consumable league mechanic. In theory, I need to grind out a lot of Hordes trying to get an Ancestral version of my boots, and that is probably a decent mode of play to burn some opals on. I gotta admit that I am days away from just macroing all of my attacks to a single button. It feels like the optimal mode of play for my build is just to mash all of my keys as fast as possible to make sure I never miss a single ability cast. Folks will clown on the one-button builds in Path of Exile, but there has to be a happy medium between that and “toddler pretending to type” gameplay that we currently have in Diablo IV. The reality is everything about my build is designed to lower the cooldown of abilities so that I can hit them faster… and hitting them faster means more damage output.
My current build is sort of a bad ideas build, where I am using this unique item called Jacinth Shell that is trying to kill me. Essentially it deals 10% of my maximum life per second when I have abilities on cooldown… which lowers the cooldowns of those abilities… so I can hit them faster. It also heals me every time I spend vigor. The problem with my current chest is that I really need a maximum roll of 10% on the healing bit… and I really wish this game had Divine Orbs. Essentially this would feel much better if I was healing and damage at the same rate… but I am not. So I mostly just survive due to the fact that I am also building up like 3000 barriers at any given time and 8000 fortify. Unfortunately, there are times when I just take random death similar to how those feel in Path of Exile, and it is sort of miserable.
I have been contemplating just shifting over to the IWIN build that Ace has been running often referred to as Orange Quill. I would absolutely do this thing in a heartbeat if Diablo IV had the Armory system from Diablo III. The thought of going through the hassle of setting back up my Paragon Boards is probably the main thing keeping me from doing it. I have one of the scrolls that resets everything for free, so I could do it… but lord is it a pain in the ass to build a character in this game. That is coming from me… who thinks nothing of the complete nonsense of the Path of Exile passive and atlas trees. It just feels so much more tedious because you are spending so many more points, most of which don’t really feel meaningful until you have amassed the entire structure. I need to look at the build and see if I actually have all of the uniques ready to go because I think I have ratholed a copy of pretty much everything that build needs.
I feel like I have hit a bit of a cap. I barely made it through The Pit 55, and it is wild because I can pretty reliably do Torment 3 content aka Pit 50. I just can’t quite kill things fast enough to keep from falling behind, and the bosses themselves take forever. I have technically done a 55, but it isn’t something that I can guarantee every single run, and relies on a lot of luck regarding what types of mobs spawn. So I am not sure what I need to do to push my build a bit higher. I spent a good chunk of last night trying to level my Glyphs thinking that might help, but I just don’t seem to have the raw damage output or killing speed that Ace has had when we have grouped up. So I am in an awkward spot with my build where I need to essentially decide how committed I am to that Centipede life.
Anyways. I do sort of feel like my engagement with Diablo IV is winding down. I had a lot of fun getting to this point, save for the main story quest… but I am also not sure how much I want to keep pushing for the sake of pushing.
Good Morning Folks! I railed on Diablo IV Vessel of Hatred both in Friday’s blog post and during the podcast on Saturday. So you are probably thinking, Bel… why in the hell are you still playing this game? Truth be told while they completely botched the story in my estimation, the game itself from a mechanical standpoint is in a pretty great state. The new class is extremely fun, and while I might keep referring to it by the pejorative of “Green Monk” I am having a ton of fun playing it. I thought this morning I should probably spend a bit of time talking about the good parts of the game. One of the traps of being a blogger and honestly an internet denizen in general… is that it is way easier to talk about the bad things when you are frustrated than it is to stop yourself from having fun long enough to share the fun bits with others.
One of the key aspects of the Diablo franchise in general, is that it is really fun to play with your friends. Path of Exile oftentimes makes it a liability to have other players on the same map as you, and you feel it when someone screws up and eats a portal. Diablo on the other hand has generally been way more forgiving of other players with the ability since Diablo 3 to resurrect folks when they drop without any real penalty towards the overall progress of the encounter. This weekend I spent a lot of time with my friend Ace and we ran through a good deal of the content types. Thing is… there was never a moment where it felt bad to have another person along for the ride. In fact it always felt like having more people was a force multiplier to both the loot gained and the fun that we were having.
We got together and did all three wings of the new “raid” encounter, and while there were things I would change about the overall format I still had a lot of fun figuring out the mechanics. Sunday afternoon we got together and chained a bunch of bosses on Torment II and the sheer amount of loot that we got as a result was staggering. Basically, each time we would summon a boss, using the materials that one of us had spent time collecting, the other person would get their own copy of randomized loot as well. So that means from this point forward I will not be spending any resources to summon anything on my own because it is just too valuable to do it as a group. I largely view this as a positive because it is way more efficient and also gives me a strong reason to make time to hang out with a friend.
The other big positive of where we are currently in Vessel of Hatred is that there is a huge variety of activities. Some of these feel less rewarding than others, but they still give you a variety of activities that you can do. When the game launched you essentially had World Bosses, Nightmare Dungeons, a scuffed version of Helltide compared to the current version, and the ability to take on Lilith. Here are some of the content types that just feel amazing, either to run alone or with friends.
The Pit – Really fun and way more linear version of Greater Rifts from Diablo III. You essentially MUST run this content to level up your Glyphs as they removed that functionality from Nightmare Dungeons entirely. I like doing these, but my only real complaint is that the rewards feel pretty bad at least at lower levels.
Infernal Hordes – These got longer and it seems like it is way more common to get an 8 or 10-wave Hordes than the 4 or 6-wave ones. These first went into the game in Season 5, and unfortunately in Season 6, we seem to have lost the ability to craft them. This means you basically are stuck running whatever happens to drop. However if you can get 200 Aether the rewards from this feel insanely good, and running this with a friend means you just speed through the waves much faster.
Black Citadel – This is a three-wing “raid” that you can complete once a week for a big cache of rewards. This requires at least two players and can be done with random players. However, I would not have wanted to figure out how these mechanics worked without voice chat. Ace and I are probably going to run this as a weekly thing at least for a while because it was very rewarding in spite of the first wing being complete butts to get through.
Undercity – This is sort of like another version of Greater Rifts from Diablo 3, but this time instead of filling a bar to summon a boss, you are going through a fixed circuit of three dungeon floors with a boss at the end. When you enter the bosses floor the timer stops, meaning that you really do have ALL of the timer, not needing to factor in also fighting a boss. I really like that the mobs that give you bonus time are clearly marked, and I would love to see them do something like that with The Pit to more clearly mark which mobs you should absolutely kill along the way.
Helltide – This is still great and was improved by adding some of the functionality of the Season 2 “Bloodtide”. Basically, it is up 100% of the time and is now up in both the old world and in Nahantu at the same time, giving you two areas to farm Tree of Whispers rewards from. Very rewarding especially if you can find a group that is running the summoned boss over and over. This feels like the best way to throw some initial levels on and get to 60.
Summoned Bosses: Varshan, Grigoire, Beast, Lord Zir, Andariel, Duriel – These feel fine and are especially cool if you can find someone to run them with. Mostly being able to summon five or six in a row feels great and will have you swimming in uniques. Like I said above this is going to be something I save resources for so that Ace and I can run them together.
Unfortunately, much of the new and improved content has made some of the other stuff in the game feel worse for the wear. Here are some of the elements that I feel need to be improved upon.
Tree of Whispers – Still a cool mechanic, but I have to admit this is starting to feel a bit old compared to some of the other methods for acquiring loot. Largely I just wish that ALL of the activities gave you some amount of whispers progress each time you completed anything. For example, if a Pit run gave you 4 whispers you could keep raking in additional rewards rather than having to wait for that particular dungeon/boss to be flagged for rewards.
World Bosses – These honestly feel awful in their current state. They are not fun, and given that I have farmed most of the unique cosmetics from them… don’t really feel worth running unless your timing just so happens to line up with one of these spawning. I think this entire system needs to be re-evaluated because it just isn’t really keeping up.
Legion Events – These feel really bad now, which is a bit sad because I used to love doing these whenever they were up. Essentially they are outshined by pretty much every other piece of content in the game. I would like to see these be repeatable where you click on a portal and zone into the area or queue and are thrown into a random group of people. The whole open-world thing doesn’t really work in quite the way that I think they wanted it to. Anything they could repurpose to be instanced would just improve the content as a whole.
Nightmare Dungeons – Why do these still exist? I am not trying to be hyperbolic here, but by moving leveling your glyphs over to The Pit took away the reason for this content to exist. You might run the occasional Nightmare Dungeon in an effort to unlock a Legendary Aspect that you have not found in the world, but past that, there just isn’t much reason to ever do these. Initially I would say put Glyph leveling back in Nightmare Dungeons so that you had two different paths you could take to level up. Past that I would love to see them make it so repeated running of a Nightmare Dungeon each time increments your saved Aspect by one step, so that given enough time you could eventually upgrade everything to the maximum tier.
In addition to all of these methods of play, Season 6 introduced the Realmwalker and Seething realms. Essentially at fixed intervals in the world, a Realmwalker will spawn, which is a critter that we first encountered in Diablo III. When we make it sufficiently angry, it will stop and fight us, and after death summons a portal to the Seething Realm. I have mixed feelings about this event type because I really like the Seething Realms but the whole following the Realmwalker as it moves slowly to a fixed destination in the world feels bad. I would like to see this changed significantly so that you can power through the event, burn it down faster, and get your portal faster. Even if it relied upon intermissions where it summons the three large adds, have that maybe happen every 1/3rd of its health bar or something like that.
The Seething Realms themselves are amazing and I would not change anything about them. Essentially you have one short dungeon, a prompt to choose a reward type, and then a bit longer dungeon that ends in a boss fight. Quite honestly if I would do anything with Seething Realms, it would be to modify the Nightmare Dungeons to function EXACTLY like this. Nothing about Nightmare Dungeons was ever fun or novel, and they just felt like copypasta of the same design and bosses over and over with only the names really changing. If I could run Seething Realms without the whole faffing about with the Realmwalker I would do this constantly. The Open World portion feels like it is completely extraneous to this content.
What I would completely change and honestly nuke from orbit are the Seething Opals of various types. I like the concept where you can choose the types of rewards that you want to see in all of the other content in the game, but I hate the methodology that they deployed this with. Nothing is less fun than juggling 30-minute-long buffs, and all weekend while Ace and I were playing we were having to constantly remind each other to throw back up another set of buffs. I honestly hate using consumables in every game, but these feel especially egregious. Make them stack up to two hours long, persist through logouts, and drop more of them at a time so you are not feeling the press of time to try and make sure you hit every Realmwalker that spawns to stay stocked up.
Probably the worst part about the seasonal mechanics is the way that you gain faction with the Zakarum Remnants. For the most part every season has a copypaste faction system that unlocks various rewards at various steps, and each pushes you to interact with the specific mechanics for that season. This time around however you do not reliably get faction increases unless you are running a Seething Opal. This means I am way behind the curve on unlocking rewards, because I cannot remember to make sure I have a these “potions” going 100% of the time. All of the problems that I have with the Seasion 6 mechanics are fixable. Just shorting the walking time for Realmwalkers would improve it greatly. Increasing the length that an Opal lasts and giving you some visual warning that you are not running one would also go a long ways towards making it feel better. This is far from their best season, but it is in the “fun enough” category and I am hoping Seething Realms stick around in some form of another.
The game feels best when I am focused on running specific content either solo or with a specific group of friends. The game feels worst when I am needing to interact with strangers on the open world. I still have issues where the entire game freezes as new players show up on the scene of some open world event, which feels awful and can honestly be deadly if it happens to hitch at exactly the wrong moment. What I want most for Diablo IV is for them to quit trying to push the MMORPG aspect of this game, because every time they do… it feels bad. What I want instead is something akin to the Hideout system from Path of Exile that gives me easy and instant access to all of the instanced content in the game. I want to be able to stay in one place with the necessarily resources and be able to run content back to back with friends without needing to pop around the world and wait for superfluous loading screens.
Diablo IV does a damned good job when it focuses on Core-ARPG content… aka blasting through a map, killing lots of demons, and getting loot at the end. However there are still moments when I feel like the team does not understand the type of content that Core-ARPG players are looking for. Anything that destroys the efficiency of the grind is just something that players are going to look for the fastest way of shortcutting possible. I feel like the team that build this game really envisioned Diablo the MMORPG, and refuses to completely let go of that notion, in spite of everything that has pushed the game in that direction largley being shunned by the player base. Even if they don’t want to give us the ability to queue directly for things, there are still a lot more steps that could be improved to make navigating the forced world interaction a bit more smoothly. Clicking on one of the items required to summon a boss, should at a minimum highlight that location on your map similar to how a Nightmare Dungeon sigil does.
The game in its current state is honestly quite a bit of fun, once you get past the bad storytelling and the few systems that have not aged well. It is honestly probably one of the better ARPG grouping experiences and feels a lot like running content with friends did in Diablo III. I don’t think I will necessarily last terribly long when a new season rolls around, but I could definitely see Diablo IV being a bit like Diablo III was for me and Ace where it gave us a fun week of engagement before we wandered off to do other things. At the end of the day I am probably fine with that, because anything that gives us an excuse for shenaningans is a good thing in my book.
So yeah… I tore Diablo IV apart on Friday, but I feel like I spun out a bit of a more even handed discussion this morning. Are you playing Diablo IV? What are some of the things that you enjoy, and what are some of the things that you do not? Drop me a line below.
So after the dramatic delays for the launch of Diablo IV Vessel of Hatred that I talked about yesterday, I finally was able to get in and get some game time last night. The only problem with that is that I have had a massive amount of issues playing the game since it was updated. I am not entirely certain what has changed in the game since the roll-out of Vessel of Hatred but I am seeing way more hitching and rubberbanding in game than I originally did playing the base game. Namely, this happens when I load into a new area or zone out of the sanctuary bubble surrounding a town. This tells me that it is a loading asset or network throughput problem more than anything else. When you transition zones you are essentially loading into a new “map” with a variable number of new players loading into it with you.
This prompted me to run some actual tests on the two “fast” drives in my system. For years I thought my “T drive” aka the drive that I put into this stock system was the faster of the two drives. It turns out that is absolutely not the case. In fact, it is pretty slow, or slower than I thought. The maximum throughput of a SATA III SSD is around 600 MB/s and my drive is running around 556 MB/s which admittedly is not that much slower than the maximum. Considering I have not spent much time inside my own machine since I bought it as a prebuilt… I assumed BOTH of my drives were SSDs when in truth apparently my “C Drive” is an NVME. So all of this time I have been favoring the worst drive. I guess I need to figure out if I have the room to add one of those PCIE to NVME interface cards to add some more fast storage at some point.
Moving Diablo IV to the faster drive helped quite a bit, but it did not remove all of the problems. I still am constantly dealing with freezes whenever I cross zone boundaries and it is frustrating as heck. I don’t think it is a network throughput problem because I am connected directly to my router with a 1-gigabit connection and per speed test I am seeing roughly 360 Mbps down and 35 Mbps up… which is pretty much the maximum rating of my internet connection. If I could play this game offline… I feel like it would probably clear all of these issues up. Whenever I am in a dungeon or other instanced area, I experience zero hitching and freezes, which tells me the problem is the other players. Hell really is other people.
Annoyances aside, I am really enjoying the Spiritborn. Sure I would have rather had a Paladin/Crusader just like every other Diablo player on the planet, but the new class is pretty fun. It feels like this blend between the Diablo III Monk and the World of Warcraft DPS Demon Hunter. I am loosely following this leveling build from Maxroll, and at some point, I will swap to their Deathtouch Centipede endgame build. The only annoyance that I have currently is that I keep having to swap weapon transmogs because there are three different types of weapons that they can use. I love that you can access transmogs at any point while you are out in the world, but I wish you could lock in your weapon appearance in a similar fashion to how you can do your armor.
I’ve legitimately made almost zero progress in the campaign. I made it over the border into Nahantu and unlocked the Mercenary system, and then proceeded to spend the rest of the evening unlocking all of the mercenaries. At this point, my favorite is Varyana the grump elderly cannibal. The Demon child seems like he is a model swap from the Tiefling kids in Baldur’s Gate III, but I am currently running with him so I can get at least one level of reputation. I remember reading something about wanting to get one rank in all of them so that you can unlock bartering at some point. Going forward though I will probably use a combination of Subo because he makes enemies and harvestable resources show up on your map. I am also using Varyana as my backup tied to my charge attack so that I am constantly proccing her to come cleave things.
One of the good at bad things about an expansion launching at the same time as a season is that the two mechanics often blend together. It turns out my favorite part of the expansion so far is in stead something associated with Season 6. Every so often a Realmwalker will spawn, if you remember from Diablo III these are giant demons that summon a portal to another realm when you beat them up. This time around they roam around the map spawning random baddies and if you kill enough of these baddies it will make the Realmwalker mad enough to fight you. At that point, you can beat it up and it will summon a portal to a dungeon.
Inside of the dungeon you can choose the type of rewards you want for completing it, which also determines the type of Opals that drop at the end. Opals essentially function as potions but stack with the rest of the consumables in the game. While you have the 30-minute effect active you gain experience towards the seasonal rewards track and also have a chance of spawning extra rewards out in the world. Essentially the ones I have encountered so far are Opals that give you extra gold, extra crafting materials, and extra gear drops. Seeing as I have gotten several legendaries after using one of the equipment potions, I am guessing this is going to be a good way to farm more gear. There are two higher tiers of Opals apparently available later, one that gives you gem fragments, and another that gives you bossing materials.
Ultimately these “seething realm” dungeons feel like what the Nightmare Dungeons should have been… just a quick boss rush with interesting side effects that feel rewarding for your time. All in all, I am enjoying the expansion but I’ve not really seen any of the story yet. I guess tonight I will spend my evening focused on that to see how well it grabs me. I’ve always been a “do the story last” type person when it comes to games because I like being able to just overpower it with levels and gear. If there is a way for me to trivialize content I will do so all the time. I also just like roaming around aimlessly way more than I like questing in general. When I am in a questing mood, I want to keep my head down and push through all the way to the end in effectively a single sitting.
One interesting side effect of the new class… is that they ACTUALLY know how to hold a fucking Halberd. When the Barbarian equips one of these they hold it so that the Axe blade is facing their head. It has driven me insane the entire time I have played this game. I checked and the Barbarian is still clueless so it appears that the Spiritborn just has better common sense. Anyway, I am hoping the hitching problems that I have been having lessen as the servers are a bit less crowded. There are drops available each week on Twitch so while you are doing other things, open a browser tab and farm them. I left Twitch running overnight and farmed up the drops from yesterday. Annoyingly you have to watch six hours… or in my case AFK six hours… to farm up a full set of the weekly drops.
Is Diablo IV Vessel of Hatred the best thing ever? No. Not even close. However, I am having quite a bit of fun and for now, I am calling that good enough.
