Abandoning Diablo

Good Morning Folks. I will give you some fair warning… this is going to be a bit of a bummer of a topic especially if you are a big fan of Diablo or more specifically Diablo IV. If so you might want to give this topic a hard pass. I consume a lot of gaming content, and in doing so I notice certain trends. I’ve been thinking about this topic since the beginning of Season 3, and I am not sure what shape it will take. For years there have been what I could only term “Blizzard Content Creators” or folks who are very dedicated to that company or dedicated to one particular gaming franchise within their portfolio. Diablo had one of the strongest communities of dedicated content creators for years. For example up until season 29… rain or shine… every single week Raxxanterax released a guide video on how to complete that week’s challenge dungeon (650 of them in fact… 1 each week for EU and one for NA).
The thing is… one by one the dedicated content creators have been giving up on Diablo, or at least deciding that they cannot continue to function by ONLY creating content for that game. Affliction League was the first time that Raxxanterax did some dedicated coverage of Path of Exile, and similarly, he has gone extremely hardcore on Last Epoch with its launch. Diablo Immortal and later Diablo IV were the games that really put Darth Microtransaction on the map… and he’s made the decision that he had to stop focusing on that game and instead pivoted to other titles. He is maybe one of the most savvy YouTubers I have seen and it is very clear that he is following the trends and the metrics… and Diablo 4 seems to be tanking in relevancy. The popularity of the game peaked in June 2023 and then has largely tanked since. When the game launched everyone that I had on my large Battle.net friends list was playing it… and by the time season one rolled around it was just my cousin that was consistently logged in.
Rhykker has been one of the most corporate message focused YouTubers when it comes to Diablo. I had stopped subscribing to his channel at one point because it always felt like he was following the company line on pretty much everything. Even his content has reached a point where it is mostly negative about Diablo IV and with the launch of Last Epoch I saw him releasing guide content for that game. While he has always covered lots of general ARPG news, this is probably the first time I can recall him making dedicated guide videos for a game that was not some sort of alpha/beta preview coverage. It feels like the creators that used to make up the core of Diablo… have largely given up on the game. The first season was bad… season two gave everyone a bit of hope… but season three and the poor reception of the heavily delayed gauntlet have caused interest to plummet into the sub-basement.
Of all of the above though… the one that shocked me the most was this video from Wudijo. Up until this point he has been quite possibly the most dedicated content creator for Diablo IV. He was the first solo hardcore player to hit level 100 at the launch of the game and has been entirely devoted to the game through all of the ups and downs. For him, it seemed like Last Epoch was the tipping point, and seeing how well a game from a much smaller team with a smaller budget was providing a much better gaming experience. In the above video, he outlines that he is going to be stepping away from Diablo IV and making content not only for Last Epoch but also diving back into Path of Exile and eventually Path of Exile II. I get that the average couch gamer does not give a shit about these content creators… but it certainly feels like a good number of folks who made their entire career focused on Diablo are now abandoning the franchise.
I feel like at least part of this is because Blizzard has become complacent. They spent two decades not really needing to properly compete with anyone in a number of niches. Diablo was the archetypal ARPG, World of Warcraft the genre-defining MMORPG, and Starcraft the game that largely spawned e-sports. In every single one of these verticals… the games stagnated allowing Last Epoch and Path of Exile to take the spotlight away from Diablo, Final Fantasy XIV to cause a mass migration away from World of Warcraft… and Starcraft to have limited relevancy in the modern e-sports landscape dominated by DOTA2, League of Legends, and Valorant. It feels like Blizzard is a company that long ago began feeding off its own hype cycle and now just isn’t creating games that are that great anymore. To be fair… World of Warcraft has seen a similar drain of formerly dedicated content creators over the last few years.
Diablo will always have a special place in my heart, and there is no theme that “means” ARPG more than the Tristram theme. However, I am just not sure Blizzard is going to pull out of this spiral. Last Epoch for years has been a game with an amazing core but one that needed a lot of polish and window dressing… and more than anything just more content. Diablo IV however is a game with a flawed core… that is going to need to have almost a top-down rework of several systems to bring it in line with what the players are expecting. It is a game that looks gorgeous… but is made up of duct tape and paper mache once you punch through that lovely facade. I am just not sure that Blizzard is the sort of company that is willing to commit to an “A Realm Reborn” or “No Mans Sky” level of reinvention to make the game what it needs to be. So yeah… in writing this I have wound up bumming myself out. I hope your week is going well and if you have made it to this point in the post… sorry for being a downer. The post Abandoning Diablo appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Refracting Lens of Wealth

Good Morning Folks! This is going to be a bit of a brief blog post because I have to go into the office today. It is funny how doing a thing that I used to have to do every day… basically ruins my entire day after four years of remote work. I spent a heck of a lot of time last night on my Void Knight and managed to push him to level 99 before daylight savings sleep debt finally claimed me. I really want to get to 100, but I have found that if I don’t focus on leveling… it feels like it goes so much more quickly. There are a handful of Uniques that I would like to farm better versions of, so I will probably continue to focus on that and wait until my experience bar fills without realizing it.
I also managed to get my Beastmaster to level 73 and now have a full complement of squirrels. I need to get better gear for this character, but I now get to experience a chittering mass of nonsense each time I attack anything. Weirdly it seems like the squirrels are much better behaved than the wolves. I’ve been having this bug where apparently all of my wolves would just wander the fuck off aimlessly at the beginning of a map. I would have to hit A to make them attack a location to summon them all back to my side before starting the monolith proper. The squirrels largely just hang out at my side until I engage something and then they behave like minions normally behave. I have to say though… I think maybe wolves were stronger, but I am having more fun with squirrels so that is really what matters the most.
The other thing that I have been playing with is the Lens system. When I hit Rank 9 with Circle of Fortune I unlocked my last Lens and can now modify prophecies with three of them at a time. “Juiced” prophecies can be complete nonsense. This all came from a single prophecy. That is fifteen of the Weavers Will unique armor pieces with a minimum Weavers Will level of 16 each. Note that sets the minimum level because at least one of them rolled with 20 levels worth of upgrades on it. It is just nonsense how much more rewards you can get by stacking your lenses.
Here is another Photoshop job showing the three lenses that I am currently running. First I have been blocking dungeon event prophecies because quite honestly… I hate the dungeons in this game. I will run Temporal Sanctum out of necessity to craft Legendary items, but the rest of them don’t really feel like they are rewarding enough to deal with the hassle of running them. I feel about them the same way I feel about Labyrinth in Path of Exile and will avoid them if at all possible. The next lens makes it so that I see significantly more Unique items which in theory at Rank 9 is a 135% boost to the occurrence of prophecies with Unique rewards. The one that has made the biggest difference however is the Refracting Lens of Wealth which increases the cost of a Prophecy by 90% favor but causes them to offer double the rewards for completion.
The end result is some nonsense like this… where a single prophecy for a single Orbyss kill awarded ten unique pieces of body armor. On top of “doubling” the rewards for a single prophecy proc, they also seem to in many cases double the number of uses you get out of a single prophecy. So basically that one lens greatly increases the sheer amount of rewards that you can get from running prophecies… a system that was already extremely rewarding. So essentially I am probably going to be spending a lot of that level 99 to 100 grind targeting different encounters that give me some very high-end rewards. What I really need to find is a prophecy for Orbyss that rewards a large number of two-handed axes per kill just to test whether or not prophecies can trigger boss-specific drops in addition to general drop-anywhere uniques. I need a ton of upgrades on the Void Knight but almost all of them are boss-specific drops. Anyways! Time for me to close this out and move on with my morning. Don’t be sleeping on those prophecies and more specifically… don’t bypass the Refracting Lens of Wealth. The post Refracting Lens of Wealth appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Squirrels Are Go

Good Morning Folks! Shocking to no one… I am still playing an awful lot of Last Epoch. The game is in a truly phenomenal state and all of the random uniques that I am picking up… just keep driving me towards wanting to play various builds. While I am still slowly working on getting my Void Knight to 100, and am a little over halfway to dinging 99… I’ve been playing Beastmaster quite a bit lately. This is a build that I really enjoyed in previous releases of the game, and it was the very first alt that I created in this cycle. While leveling on the Void Knight I picked up most of the early uniques required to make a “Bleed Wolves” build feel really solid. However, I was largely following the templating of the Squirrel build over on Maxroll because I had hopes of maybe one day being able to transition into that.
Over the weekend I got a drop that I had been hunting for longer than probably any other drop in this game save for the illusive Bastion of Honor. I spent so much time farming for the Herald of the Scurry in The Black Sun timeline on my Necromancer but never managed to see one drop. Earlier in the league my friend Ace managed to pick one up which gave me some hope that maybe just maybe all of the drop chance juicing that we go through the Circle of Fortune faction would let me see one. Sunday afternoon that happened and I picked up this helm which will allow me to shift from summoning a bunch of Wolves to summoning twice as many Squirrels. I want to command a chittering army of death by adorableness, but alas I have to get to level 73 before I can actually shit from my Artor’s Legacy over to the Scurry proper.
I was Deathless on my Beastmaster until I attempted Rahyeh in The Black Sun timeline. This is the boss that has pretty much ended every Deathless streak that I have gotten this far with. My inner 13-year-old is delighted that I made it to level 69 before taking my first death. I thought maybe I would be able to make it through, but I was somewhat of a dumbass to attempt this feat with only 4% void resistance. So I am in the process of balancing out my gear a bit and trying to stack some more resistances in the right places. My idols are a mess and I need to focus farm some with prophecies. My health is also atrocious but that should resolve itself as I pick up some more exalted bits of armor and replace my leveling uniques/weavers will items. I am very much looking forward to transitioning into the Squirrels build as this is something I have wanted to play from the moment I heard it existed.
In another bit of weird loot luck, I picked up a wild pair of gauntlets. They have 2 T6 affixes on them and a T7 affix. While they don’t exactly fit anything I am actively playing… I gotta say it is making me contemplate a shield throw build as I have a bunch of gear for that build sitting in my exalted stash tabs. I guess at some point I should research how that build even works and what it cares about. I am guessing it is probably a Paladin build and I don’t really have one of those yet… but similarly, I am not sure I want a third Sentinel build quite yet. I am getting a serious itch to play a Necromancer as I have picked up a bunch of items that had eluded me in the past like the Ravens’ Rise gauntlets. If I end up picking up an Aaron’s Will chest with any legendary potential I will probably consider it a sign that I need to work up another Bone Golem build. Similarly, I would love to see the David Harbour helmet and try a Wraithlord Build.
I managed to hit Rank 9 in the Circle of Fortune guild and honestly… I was not even paying attention not my progress. I only knew that I hit it because I had one monolith reward every item of two different sets. I have to say though, this rank is a bit more annoying than it is really worth. By the time you are capable of hitting rank 9… You’ve very likely seen every single set item in the game. It isn’t like they are very useful in the first place as compared to a combination of uniques and exalted items. I would love to see them either buff the heck out of set pieces or lower their equippable level significantly so you could use them for leveling alts. As it stands they are mostly just vendor trash so making the entire set drop every time… just ends up clogging your inventory. I am happy to have unlocked my final lens slot however so that was cool.
One thing I was a bit disappointed in was Lightless Arbor. I spent around 800k gold on the gambler there and while it certainly looks like a lot of loot… by the time I had hoovered up all of the affixes and glyphs it truthfully wound up being around five or six items worth keeping. I see more usable loot in a single monolith than that. This combined with the fact that very rarely see Legendary Potential items through Runes of Ascendance lead me to believe that Circle of Fortune bonuses only impact mob-dropped loot. As a result Lightless Arbor keys are probably better sold to the vendor than used because you get spoiled by the sheer amount of drops that you see thanks to Circle of Fortune. Maybe these are great for the folks who wound up going to trade league but I am progressively feeling like they made the wrong choice.
I am consistently amazed by how much more I am enjoying the game right now as opposed to in previous versions. The sheer volume of loot I think is the real difference here. Circle of Fortune makes it feel like it is just an inevitability that you will eventually see the item you are seeking. More than that… you are probably going to see enough copies of it with legendary potential that you can probably make a bunch of attempts to get a really good item. That all makes the mechanical loop of the game that much more enjoyable for me personally. I’m highly loot-motivated and I love rolling the dice and seeing what items I end up getting this time. Maybe I would not have appreciated it quite so much had I not played in versions of the game where the loot was significantly more stingy. All of that said, however… I am keenly watching the various spoilers for the next Path of Exile League. That has been announced for the end of this month and I am certain I will be back in that game at league start. Unless there are some pretty significant changes I will probably be going for the Chieftain Righteous Fire build that I ended up playing so much this past league. I feel like maybe GGG delayed their spoilers a bit to give EHG some breathing room for the Last Epoch launch. I know the two companies are friendly so It gives me hope that maybe they will play nicely together with the timing of future Cycles/Leagues. The post Squirrels Are Go appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Why I Now Main ARPGs

I’ve been kicking around this topic for a while now, and it seems like a good one to close out what has been a fairly busy week. This blog got its start originally as not only a World of Warcraft blog but more specifically a World of Warcraft Warrior Raid Tanking blog. From 2000 until around 2015 this blog was largely dominated by an endless cavalcade of MMORPGs. They were truly my primary gaming outlet and any time a new one queued up I was there with the rest of my friends grinding out a new batch of characters and classes. It was a love affair that started with Everquest and just kept continuing each time a new latest and greatest game was on the horizon. In part, I was enamored with the concept of playing with so many other people and most of my long-term friends stem from one or more of these games. Hell the entirety of the podcast I have been recording for over a decade, are folks that I met through Massively Multiplayer Online Games.
Tam and Kodra date back to my early days raiding with Late Night Raiders, and Thalen was a member of a competing raid that occasionally subbed in for assorted content. Ashgar is someone that Tam and Kodra met when they left Argent Dawn and was someone I was ultimately introduced to when I talked them back to the server for Cataclysm. Ammo I knew her mom first, but also stems originally from World of Warcraft on Argent Dawn. Grace/Ace is someone I met on Twitter but roped into our nonsense in Final Fantasy XIV and ultimately became someone that I am close enough to that I consider my sibling. The entire reason why I got on Twitter in the first place back in 2009… was to have a better way of communicating with other bloggers and more specifically the Blog Azeroth folks. I am uncertain I ever would have been attracted to the platform were it not for the rich MMORPG gaming community that I found there.
The problem is that as my life changed, and the bulk of my active gaming group shifted two timezones away… I found myself in a position where I was drawn to MMORPGs but largely ended up never playing with anyone else. I reached the point in my life where I could no longer stomach the late nights of staying up until 1 am and then getting back up at 5:30 am to start the next day. I needed to take better care of myself and also started getting more real-world responsibilities that required it. Around 2013 I shifted from being a worker bee, to a team lead, and eventually to an official supervisor. Then in 2017, I made another big shift to Management. All of this… brought a dislike for actually having any modicum of responsibility in my downtime. So I went from being a Guild Leader and occasional Raid Leader first… to trying to stay in the background and take on as little responsibility as possible.\
I loved raiding in World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy XIV and spent a lot of time leading raids over the years. However, I reached a point where I was no longer willing to give up multiple evenings of my time for the express purpose of progression. From 2004 until around 2012 I was devoting at least three nights every single week to raiding, and pushing everything else to the side. Once I stopped raiding… it became harder to work it back into my schedule. I made attempts to raid seriously again during Warlords of Draenor and Legion… and over in Final Fantasy XIV during A Realm Reborn and Heavensward but all were relatively short-lived. Legion I made it through a few tiers of content and Heavensward we never really made it past the Extreme Primals before I faded into the background. I would always get to the point where I was dreading raid night, because of the loss of freedom it posed.
In spite of not really having active groups on demand like I used to during most of my World of Warcraft days, I still actively pugged. My class of choice has always been some form of a Tank, which meant that I needed to take on a lot of responsibility in dungeon runs. I am not sure if the groups got more aggressively toxic… or if I just became less tolerant of other human beings, but over the years I found myself not wanting to run dungeons with other random players anymore. I built up this mental block to the responsibility of leading a dungeon, and I’ve found it extremely hard to get past it. While I still like the concept of tanking dungeons I just never do it… not unless I have at least one friend along with me. As my time tables shifted out of the range of most of my friends… it just meant that I didn’t run group content anymore.
I am legitimately not sure how it started, but in 2015 I got pulled into running Seasonal content in Diablo III with my friend Grace/Ace. I had always been a fan of the Diablo-like ARPG genre and often played them in my downtime from raiding or other MMORPG shenanigans. I fell in love with Diablo in college and obsessed over the game and then followed the long sequence of games that came after it from Dungeon Siege to Sacred to Titanquest to more modern games like Grim Dawn and Wolcen. Running Diablo III Seasons with Grace gave me all of the excitement of an MMORPG launch… all the fun of rushing through the objectives and trying to build a powerful character as fast as you could… all condensed within a few weeks. Then I could walk away, so other things, and know that in three or four months we could do it all again.
More than that ARPGs gave me all of the complexity and loot chase that I craved, but the ability to take all of it at my own pace. I could play rich and mechanically interesting characters and did not need other players to accomplish any goals that I set out for myself. Sure it was fun as hell to play with friends whenever our paths happened to cross… but I never found myself in a holding pattern needing more people to make something happen. That was always the worst part about playing MMORPGs… was the waiting around for something to happen. In the early days of World of Warcraft, I had fostered this arcane tapestry of social channels that I relied upon to be able to form groups… but even then having access to all of those people and so many different relationships… it would still sometimes take upwards of an hour to get things started.
Playing MMORPGs in a post-dungeon finder economy meant that most people were not actively creating groups. Those who did exist in the group finder were divorced from any personal connection and often had a wealth of toxic behavior associated with them. It just became easier for me to be off doing my own thing and having a less rewarding gameplay experience… than to subject myself to having to deal with other people. Even when the groups went smoothly and everyone was kind… the imagined specter of potentially being called out for missing a cooldown or not mashing my buttons hard enough or in the correct order was enough to keep me from ever trying most nights. Occasionally I would get brave and put myself out there… and those were often the times that I ran into the worst possible individuals.
For years Final Fantasy XIV was the exception to the growing toxicity of gaming communities. It was downright wholesome in comparison and there were so many moments like above where someone needed to AFK and all of the players just chilled out and chatted while waiting. However with the downfall of World of Warcraft and the mass migration of players to XIV… with it has seemed to come a lot more of those cultural norms. Now I have friends talking about struggling to find a static raid group that does not require you to use tools that violate the terms of service. I’ve absolutely seen a lot more talk of damage numbers and open calling out of folks who are not performing up to some imagined bar in the few groups I have exposed myself to. All of this just makes it that much harder to get over my growing mental block to putting myself out there.
If I were the type of player who could happily subsist on casual “Stardew Valley” style gameplay, I could probably still find fulfilling gameplay in MMORPGs. I am not that player. I love loot and quite honestly the only reason why I started raiding in the first place back in World of Warcraft is that I wanted access to shiny purple items. Sure raiding with other people is its own kind of rewarding, and sure it feels great to finally take down a boss… but it feels much better to get that item you have been trying to get for months. Legitimately I probably had more fun in World of Warcraft raids by soloing them years after the fact… than I ever did actually doing them legitimately. I liked collecting things and I absolutely loved collecting appearances. That sort of mindset was not always conducive to a need-based or points-based raiding economy.
You know what case endless mountains of loot to climb? Action ARPGs absolutely do, so much so that we set up complicated loot filter systems in order to show us only the “best” items, and even then… nonsense like this occasionally happens. So it was a few months back that I realized that a lot of my shift from MMORPGs as my core focus to ARPGs is that it largely scratches all of the itches for me. I can play with friends and have a heck of a lot of fun when our schedules happen to align, but the rest of the time I have endless progression and complexity buried behind a constant dopamine hit of loot acquisition. I get all the things that I loved about MMORPGs but none of the obstacles standing in my way.
More than that I get to feel like I am part of a larger community and get to help others in their own progression. I get so deep in the weeds at times when I am writing about ARPGs, but I feel like someone out there is benefitting from the nonsense I am doing. Then there is the whole concept of guilds and shared stashes that let me legitimately help my friends who happen to be playing along with me. Games like Last Epoch and the resonance system allow me to share items that I have collecting dust in my massive treasure trove… even if I was not playing with a friend at the time it dropped. Bel League in Path of Exile was a heck of a lot of fun, and while it seems like most of the AggroChat crew is over that game… there will be times in the future when I can share things through the Guild Stash with other players who are active in the game at that time. If nothing else my blog and my constant ramblings serve as a locus of information for anyone who might want to get into these sorts of games.
That is not to say that I don’t still play MMORPGs, but when I do so I go into them knowing that I am likely never going to actively group with another player. I think this is why I have had a bit of a renaissance with Guild Wars 2 because it is a game that lets me do large-scale raid-like events in the open world… without ever having to organize or manage other players. I had a heck of a lot of fun recently playing through the Dragonflight story, and doing some of the World Quests in World of Warcraft but also reached a point where I felt like I had experienced enough of that game. At some point prior to the release of Dawntrail this summer I will pop back into Final Fantasy XIV and complete all of the content I have missed and then happily play through the new expansion, but also know that once the credits roll I am probably out again.
For the foreseeable future, I am very likely to be devoted almost entirely to ARPGs, because they scratch the right itches for me and fit my usage patterns. I’ve had similar phases with Monster Hunter World or whatever the latest Looter Shooter happens to be because they operate in similar patterns. I had several weeks of joy when Enshrouded launched into early access because it gave me a lot of the same dopamine hits. I don’t think it is that any of the MMORPGs have changed… and more that my patterns of play have changed. I’ve just finally reached a point where I am ready to accept it and stop trying to push myself to do things that I no longer find as comfortable as I once did. Anyways! I had been kicking around this topic for a while now and like I said at the start… it seemed like a decent way to close out the week. I hope you all have a wonderful weekend, and I will see you all on Monday for a recap of whatever the hell I end up doing this weekend. The post Why I Now Main ARPGs appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.