Video Games

Winding Down Diablo

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Good Morning, Folks. For the last few weeks, my default gaming activity has been playing Diablo 4. More specifically, playing a Thorns Paladin at first and then switching it over to a Hammer/Arbiter Paladin to push a little further. I felt I hit a wall with Thorns around Torment IV, and that was what prompted me to the build that Raxx had been promoting to see if I could make it further. I could a bit, and now can pretty comfortably do Torment VIII Content, but tend to run Torment VII because it goes much faster. The big problem is that this build was supposed to be something that I could cakewalk Torment XII with, and so far, it has not been that. My time to kill, especially in the pit, is abysmal. I’ve technically unlocked Torment IX, but just barely by the skin of my teeth. I think I am just getting tired of pushing the build, and in theory, need to scrutinize and probably recraft every single piece of my gear to get further, since I cannot seem to get any Mythic Uniques to actually drop.

What I had been grinding so damned hard for was an Ancestral copy of Judgment of Auriel. I finally got that to drop off Lord Zir, and the difference that it made in the build was negligible. Maybe Torment VIII got a bit more comfortable, but nothing really to write home about. I thought maybe there was some hidden multiplier that I was not getting for not having a full set of Ancestral gear equipped, but that does not appear to be the case. The problem is that Ancestral drops still feel extremely rare events, especially from uniques at Torment VIII. It took me probably 60 kills before Lord Zir finally dropped the item I was after, and it took me farming the mercenary favors to get those boss summoning keys. It feels like I have a much harder time getting the keys for the low-level bosses than I do the grand keys for the bigger bosses. Something is not right here, and I hope they sort it out in the coming seasons.

I’ve also had zero luck with Echo of Lilith. I can get her down to around 20% life and then something oneshots me, so I guess I need to spend some time studying videos on this fight. I honestly hate shit like that, when bosses have oneshot mechanics. ARPGs for me are about gaining enough stats to steamroll over the top of content. This is why I hate Maven so much in Path of Exile, because there is no way I can cheese that fight. Bossing in general is not my jam, because I do not want to barely win. I want to crush the monsters and take away tasty loot as a result. At least in Path of Exile, I have done almost all of the fights; I just dislike them. I know Ace, and I have taken down Lilith as a team before, so I just need to figure out where I need to stand during that oneshot phase because it wasn’t really clearly telegraphed. It is also weird that I have to specifically do it on Torment VIII since many of the previous ranks required things way lower than that, and it feels like this one jumped several torment levels at once.

I had mostly been focused on grinding out tokens for the armor sets, because I have completed all of the other reliquaries, but not this one. I’ve gotten the shield and three of the armor sets, but I just do not know if I have it in me to keep grinding. These tokens come pretty slowly through doing content, and I am just not sure I have it in me to grind it out. The last one I picked up was for Spiritborn, which I did mostly because I lack a lot of armor sets that I really like for that class. I have plenty of armor sets for Barbarian, so that will probably be my last if I manage to grind these out. I did manage to grind out the limited-time World of Warcraft reliquary, but now there is nothing left to do with the tokens that I am generating through gameplay. I spent a bit of time playing Path of Exile, and doing maps… and I have to be honest, the moment-to-moment gameplay in that game just feels better. In truth, Diablo IV is at the bottom of the ARPG pecking list for me. If there is a Path of Exile, Last Epoch, or Path of Exile II league in that pecking order… I will choose those before playing Diablo IV. I might even choose fresh Titan Quest II content over Diablo IV, and that is not to say that D4 is a bad game… just that the others are giving me more of what I want.

There is also the problem that we are now roughly eleven days out from a new Path of Exile II league. Return of the Ancients looks wild, and I am here for everything that it is doing. I just have to figure out a class that will be both fun to level and powerful in the endgame. Since I am very much interested in Raven Righteous Fire, I am contemplating going Lich or Infernalist and a traditional Summon Raging Spirits start. I like spamming temporary minions because it feels like I am doing something other than just dragging around an army. I also know the leveling for this sort of build is pretty chill, and I like chill leveling. I am really curious how fast I can get through the campaign with the most recent round of updates to make signposting of content a bit easier to find. More than anything, though, I am somewhat excited to see the updated versions of various leagues and am wondering how much of that will trickle down into Path of Exile, the game I care about the most.

Anyways. I think I am out of things to talk about for this Monday morning. I hope you all have a wonderful week, and as always, feel free to drop me a line if you want to contest anything that I have said.

AggroChat #568 – Anti-Fun Features

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Featuring: Ace, Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, and Thalen

Good Morning, Folks! Last night we recorded what I think might be one of our better shows ever, because there were a lot of interesting discussions.  We start off talking about Eurovision and how it felt like it almost ended in a riot.  It’s a bit dated, but we talk about some of the details that came out of the Dan Frazier plagiarism situation in Magic: The Gathering. Ace talks a bit about Subnautica 2 and how some of the features caused them to bounce early.  Path of Exile II 0.5.0 reveal happened, and there are tons of things to talk about as they completely redo the endgame.  We talk a bit about the game Everything is Crab, and then follow up with an unrelated topic about how Everything is Roguelike now.  Bel goes down this rabbit hole that starts with Item Repair but follows up with pretty much all of the Anti-Fun Features that are in games and why they need to go. We talk a little bit about some of the Steam Controller reviews that are showing up, and Kodra discusses his further descent into Pokémon ZA.

Topics Discussed:

  • Eurovision
  • Dan Frazier Situation
  • Subnautica 2
  • Path of Exile II Spoilers
  • Everything is Crab
  • Everything is Roguelike
  • Item Repair is Bad
  • Anti-Fun Features
  • Steam Controller Review Units
  • Pokemon ZA

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Ancients League Is Gonna Be Wild

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Yesterday, we got the reveal stream for Path of Exile II 0.5.0, and it was wild. It was essentially an hour and nineteen minutes of back-to-back, constant reveals, some of which are super intricate. I feel like there is honestly just way too much to even begin to talk about, but I will attempt to discuss some of the high points. Essentially, at a high level, they are reworking every single endgame system that launched with the game in order to make it distinct from the Path of Exile 1 counterpart. Abyss was quite possibly their most successful league launch in Path of Exile II, and they have seemingly taken some of the core tenets of that mechanic and applied them to existing ones. Quite honestly… on some level, I hope we see some of these changes backported to Path of Exile. The new Ritual and Expedition, for example, look freaking awesome, and I cannot wait to play them and see how they feel.

One of the major disappointments from yesterday is that the community had worked itself into a frenzy that we were going to get the Duelist class, and potentially Gladiator ascendancy, and maybe something else. At a minimum, they thought one of the trailers leading up to the release of the content reveal hinted that we were getting swords. This did not happen, and quite frankly, during the Q/A they said that with all of the other endgame changes, there was never going to be any time to do a full class introduction. Instead, we are getting the Martial Artist for Monk, and Spiritwalker for Huntress. In both cases, they represent the third and final ascendancy choice for those classes. I am not that into the whole Monk aesthetic, but Spiritwalker seems really interesting to me because, in theory, it is a minion class? There is a whole tame beast mechanic that is going into the game that allows you to “tame” beasts that are bosses and then use them as what appears to be a spectre-like minion that fights for you. Here is hoping that these are actually powerful and not useless, like 90% of the spectre mobs end up being.

The sweeping endgame changes excite me greatly because the current endgame in Path of Exile II was a bit of a mess. When you hit maps in Path of Exile, there are some clear progression elements that lead you to do specific content in order to unlock the rest of your atlas. The Path of Exile II equivalent felt like it was essentially saying “ya know, do some stuff”, and then dumping you out into an infinitely expanding Atlas and hoping for the best. Now there will be directed quests that effectively lead you towards progressing every single endgame mechanic. On top of that, there is a proper Atlas Passive Tree… not some piddly little nodes that only unlocked as you did specific mechanics. It looks potentially twice the size of the Path of Exile Atlas Passive Tree, so I am sure there is some interesting stuff in there that completely changes the game. They introduced a ton of new endgame crafting systems as well, but all of that shit is mostly too complicated to talk about yet, and it will probably be years before we fully understand how to make the most of them.

The thing that probably excites me the most is something that I have wanted ARPG games to do for decades. Essentially, there is now a standardized build file format that encompasses everything about a build and its leveling progression. You will then be able to drop this .Build file in your Path of Exile II directory and access it in-game. This then highlights all of the nodes that are required for that build and gives creators the ability to attach notes to various elements in the game, to help players along the way in following the guide. The amount of time that I spend at the start of a league flipping between the game and a build guide up on another screen… is a lot. Effectively, this is no more, and I am almost certain that this functionality will be backported to Path of Exile. I imagine it will only be a short amount of time before Path of Building will spit out these build files, so that guide creators can use that as an authoring tool since they are already used to it. Additionally, they are adding in some rudimentary price checking via the in-game trade menu, but this does not look anywhere near as efficient as my current favorite Scalpel. I am hoping beyond hope that the author of that tool updates it to support Path of Exile II.

Another thing that has me SUPREMELY interested is this unique called The Raven’s Flock. If you have followed my escapades, you know two things for certain… I am a Thorns/Righteous Fire enjoyer in ARPGs, and I love me some Minion builds. This new unique seems to essentially be combining these two worlds together in a delightful way. Essentially, the Staff gives you an ability called Spiralling Conspiracy, which summons a flock of ravens that circle you, dealing damage over time to everything in the aura, similar to Righteous Fire. It supposedly scales off Minion damage because the Aura itself… are Minions. I already enjoy playing the various Necro-style builds in the game, but I cannot wait to try and build something around this nonsense. I wonder how well this will work with the new Spiritwalker ascendancy and the big ole beast minion that you can tame. I am sure Papa Pohx will figure out a build to make this all work, but in the meantime, I might start something like Bear, which hopefully is still a beast at farming maps. Then later swap to a character built around this unique once I actually have access to it.

I am honestly pretty freaking pumped for this upcoming league. If you are interested, I highly suggest watching the over-hour-long video because it was packed with information. If you need something a bit more condensed, Raxx released the above video where he sort of runs down the high points. Are you excited for Path of Exile II: Return of the Ancients? What was your favorite thing out of the many reveals? Drop me a line below.

Diablo IV Has Good Numbers

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Good Morning, Folks. I feel like Diablo IV right now is in a very good state. I know this because every time I log into the game in the new hub city of Temis, regardless of what time of day it is… it is freaking packed with players moving around and interacting with things. It does not hurt at all that they managed to launch for once during a lull in the other games. The last Path of Exile 2 league is from December, Path of Exile 1 from February, and even Last Epoch at this point is stale, having launched its last season in March. It feels like the normal time associated with playing an ARPG season is about three weeks, and all of the more popular games… are well past that. So if there was a perfect time to launch Lord of Hatred, they somehow managed to hit it, which is wild given that there were no delays around POE2 0.5.0, it would have been launching against it. Sure, the game legitimately is in a great state, but the timing has to have massively helped.

It is not like you can really use Steam to represent a significant portion of the Diablo IV player base. The game launched originally only on Battle.net, and most “Blizzard” players use that launcher. We don’t have accurate numbers for the folks on Xbox or PlayStation, so as a result, we have to rely on the general trends from Steam DB since it aggregates its statistics. You can see that on Steam it hit its all-time peak high four days ago, which is wild considerly that that high was reached after the official launch of the expansion. My personal guess is that enough good press and hype about the game had managed to saturate the latent player base to get the message that no… D4 was actually sort of good now. D4 Bad was a meme for so long, and I am happy to see that it has managed to more or less right the ship. It doesn’t have Path of Exile 2 numbers on Steam, but that makes sense as a much larger portion of the GGG playerbase plays via the Steam Client.

I’ve recently spent a lot of time working with the crafting system that exists in-game, and I have to say it is pretty phenomenal. The above are some examples of items that I recently crafted. In the case of the two legendaries, I started with a base yellow or blue ancestral item and worked it up from there. The fact that I managed to hit a quad masterworked chest is wild, but it is more than that… one of the masterworked stats got chosen when I did the final masterworking step at the blacksmith. The enchanting system is also extremely powerful for fixing problems with items. Are any of my items technically perfect? Absolutely not, but they are pretty damned good. Temerity, I managed to pull by taking an ancestral pair of pants, dropping it to white rarity, and then using the cube recipe to promote that item up to a Unique. The mace I managed to get as a drop already at Ancestral rarity. The recipe that I would really like to see, however, is something that will take a normal unique and upgrade it to an Ancestral, because I am struggling to get my last few required uniques to drop at that 900 item level.

Essentially, I am at the point where I just need to put my head down and grind. I need to work through so many runs of the Pit to level all five of my glyphs up to level 50, which is the break point for the legendary traits. At the moment, I can do a Torment 8 pit and am close to unlocking Torment 9, but it is a bit of a slog. The positive I went from running Torment 6 as my comfy speed run level to doing the same for Torment 7, so incremental progress. I feel like I am not that far from being able to bump up to Torment 8 as my baseline. Right now, I am struggling to keep enough materials and gold to masterwork everything, but once I do that… in theory, I should see a significant power boost as a result. Honestly, the best source of resources right now is via the Mercenary favor caches, so again, I just need to do some head-down grinding in order to put on some favor levels and get more caches.

Today, however, is all about the Path of Exile II reveal stream. I feel like there is an awful lot riding on this one, because 0.4.0 was not the best-received league, even though I enjoyed it quite a bit. They have been teasing all of these endgame system reworks, and I fear that they have cranked up expectations to the moon. They really have to stick the landing on this presentation, and it seems like they are pulling out all the stops. The Twitch drop that they announced yesterday is among the most intricate that I have seen them give away for free, so they are most definitely trying to get a bunch of eyeballs on the stream. I will be doing my best to tune in, but I am sure I will miss some of it as it happens smack dab in the middle of the workday. I am sure tomorrow I will be offering up my own commentary to the reveal, so if you care about such things, tune in then. Because tomorrow is a lab work and office visit day, my blog will be landing later in the day than normal.