Seasonal Stinker

I’ve been done with Diablo IV for a few weeks now and I reached that point when I finally entered World Tier IV… and nothing really changed for me. I kept waiting for the game to get fun, and really without a significant investment of more time I was uncertain I would ever arrive at that point. I put around 200 hours into the game over the course of leveling and gearing, and never really landed on an end-game activity that I truly enjoyed. Barbarian never felt the way I expected it to feel and my survivability always ended when I got crowd controlled, and given my CC break was part of my rage generation mechanism that made playing feel worthwhile… it was always on cooldown. For the last few weeks of playing the game, I had fallen into a pattern where the only time I actually played was when my friend Cyl happened to be on and a world boss was just about to spawn. Essentially I was playing the game in daily quest mode.
I held out a glimmer of hope that maybe Season 1 would bring some significant changes to the game that would improve my enjoyment. However that is absolutely not the case, and in fact, the patch notes nerfed essentially everything that was working without really replacing them with significant changes to any other abilities to bring them up to par. So this tells me that the gameplay loop that the devs working on this game are going for… is a slow slog of a game where you die a lot. While the outrage has been almost universal even from folks who were able to suffer through Diablo Immortal… and there is an emergency Fireside Chat scheduled for Friday… I feel like any backpedaling is only going to serve to delay the end goal of slowing down the players. I already considered Diablo IV to be a bit of a slog… so anything slower is going in the wrong direction for me personally.
I still feel like Diablo IV is a game designed for folks who only casually interact with ARPGs… but with way more hardcore vibes designed for someone playing Path of Exile Ruthless mode for thousands of hours to accomplish anything. There is no real solid core endgame loop, and Nightmare Dungeons feel miserable. The only really fun activities are the World Bosses and Helltides, but they are gated by lengthy timers… and the last patch nerfed Mystery Chests so that Helltides now feel like a waste of your time as well. There is nothing like Path of Exile Maps, Last Epoch Monolith, or even Diablo III Greater Rifts that provides an efficient and fun way to grind out experience and gear. At level 70 I unliked the highest tier of gear in the game and was able to gear myself relatively quickly… which left only fruitless grinding for Paragon points and trying to hit level 100 as my remaining goals. There was nothing really aspirational to chase at that point, and Season 1 does nothing to really fix that.
Even more so… Season 1 does nothing to really fix some of the core problems with the game. The UI for the stash is awful. The manner in which you build a character requires you to be holding onto legendary items in either raw item form or very limited legendary aspect storage. This means every time you get an item that is numerically an upgrade, you have to extract and imprint the correct aspect on it… which effectively forces you to mouse over every single item in your inventory looking for the right one. None of the game’s systems have search functionality. This is even more important than the fact that you have a measly 200 slots of stash storage that rapidly gets used by your very first character. All of this seemed like low-hanging fruit for them to implement some rapid improvements, but we are seeing nothing of the sort in Season 1. In fact critical problems with the game like the fact that resistances are meaningless… are being kicked down the road to Season 2 before addressing.
I’ve uninstalled Diablo IV and now only have Diablo III remaining on my system. Largely I did this so that I did not for some reason accidentally use my Battle Pass entitlement that came with the game. I have no interest in playing Season 1, and quite honestly… it is probably going to be a few seasons before I dip my toes back into the game. Right now the team has designed and is trying to reinforce a game different from the sort of game that I want to play. I think the game as a whole is going to have to fall on its face like Diablo III did before we can get a Reaper of Souls update that brings the game back in line with what a fun gameplay experience looks like. Maybe in a year’s time, they will have been forced to reconcile where they went wrong… and begin to bring the game back in line with what an ARPG experience should feel like. I’ve been done for a while… it wasn’t until the seasonal patch drop that I decided to just uninstall and free up the drive space.
Unfortunately for Blizzard, they have also somewhat run out of time to get their shit together. Next week is ExileCon in Auckland New Zealand and with it will come a deluge of new information about the 3.22 Patch and the new league that will be dropping on August 18th. Additionally, there will be more news about Path of Exile 2… which means all of the POE Streamers and YouTubers who have been giving Diablo IV airtime due to the Crucible league being a bit lacking… will suddenly disappear from the community. Additionally, there is a slew of Destiny 2 content creators that came over to play Diablo IV, and they have already filtered back into their own community. So the Diablo IV “community” is about to get much smaller and I am just not sure who is going to be left as a dedicated player.
There is no doubt for me personally, that Path of Exile continues to be the best Action RPG on the market. You just cannot compete with the sheer amount of detailed content that is available in that game, and when POE2 adds an entirely new alternate leveling path with some massive core system changes… I am not sure if anyone can really compete. Please note… I LOVE Last Epoch but it is nowhere near ready to really be mainlined as a primary game because there just isn’t enough breadth of content available. It is fun for a while but the repetition of the limited amount of content available wears thin really quickly. With Path of Exile, you can focus on one small niche of that community and carve out enough gameplay to keep you busy the entire league. There are folks who will spend an entire league doing almost nothing but Heist, Delve, or even specific mapping mechanics like Legion or Blight.
The core problem with Path of Exile will always be one of accessibility. The tyranny of the tree is real… and it is purposefully there a few minutes into the gameplay as a way of warning players that they are in for a very specific type of gameplay experience. However, having played a lot of this game… I feel like it is nowhere near as daunting as someone just starting out might think it is. There are a lot of guide makers out there, but most of them have forgotten how fucked up the game seems when you first start out. I am contemplating trying to create some content targeted at trying to ease players into some of the critical steps in building a character, to at least give them enough of a foundation to be able to follow most build guides. It is going to take way more time than I have this week, so view that as a future project of mine. The post Seasonal Stinker appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Seasonal Swan Song

Seasonal Swan Song

I talked a bit about progress in Destiny 2 in yesterdays post but I didn’t really want to get too deep into it figuring I would talk more at length today.  Last week I managed to knock out a bunch of accomplishments, not the least of which was hitting 305 light finally on the Titan.  Granted I realize this is all going to be in vain starting next week as the level cap itself is raising and I assume as well that means the light level with it.  Last week was Iron Banner, the second for console players but the very first for those of us choosing to primary the PC version.  Now on the PS4 I managed to complete a full set of Iron Banner armor on my Titan and my goal was of course to do the same for the PC.  I consider myself extremely lucky because I managed to get the full set after turning in thirteen packages.  There are folks I know who have been grinding away at this all week long and are still missing pieces of armor.  In addition to this I managed to pick up all of the weapons but three…  sidearm, fusion rifle and submachinegun.  Of those the only one that I would have actually used is the Fusion Rifle, but even there I have several options that I like already including Merciless if I am willing to give up my exotic slot and Main Ingredient if I am not.  The most important weapons for me were getting the Pulse Rifle, Auto Rifle and Hand Cannon all of which will see use.  The scout rifle might, but I need to spend some more time playing with it.

Seasonal Swan Song

The other thing going on is the fact that this week is effectively the last chance to do anything in Season 1.  Now I am not entirely certain what this means from a player perspective other than the fact that we know a bunch of new stuff is going to happen.  All of the Eververse items are changing out apparently, so that only makes the fact that they have apparently been throttling our xp gain towards bright engrams all the more shitty.  In truth I have gotten the few items that I care about…  namely the Ramen bowl emote and Bandwagon ship.  On top of that I managed to pull three of the exotic ships total and two of the exotic sparrows.  All in all I feel like I made out pretty well for season 1, but what I am really curious about is whether or not all of package loot is changing as well.  There are a number of weapons that I have not managed to get that I really walk…  namely the Curtain Call rocket launcher, Jiangshi AR4 auto rifle and Halfdan-D auto rifle.  I would not mind getting a Morrigan-D rocket launcher either considering I believe it is the only one with tracking still intact.  Finally I really want to complete the hunter set from Io on the off chance that maybe those are changing out as well.  Granted I don’t know any of this, but I know in Destiny 1 they started re-rolling the weapons so that is a possibility here as well I would guess.

Seasonal Swan Song

Lastly the other big change for us personally… is that our clan will be resetting from rank 6 to rank 1 next week and we will need to begin the leveling process anew.  Supposedly we will be adding a brand new clan banner standard to the mix because we maxed things out in Season 1.  Additionally the perks for each of the clan ranks will be changing out to a new set more relevant to the content we will be doing, that is at least in theory Vex based.  The only thing that concerns me is that we do not have nearly as many people actively playing right now as we did at the launch of the clan, and as a result the grind is going to go more slowly.  The calculations I had done before said that we needed about 20-25 characters reaching maximum contribution each week to keep us hitting the progression cap each week, and I think in theory we will still have at least that.  I know I will continue to keep contributing my 5000 clan XP on three different characters per week and if things get dire I have a set of characters on the PS4 on a secondary account that could add experience as well.  This whole season thing is new concept to me and I am somewhat excited to see just how different the game is from a loot perspective.  That also means that this week I need to do some significant vault purging to get ready for the introduction of new items.  I am hoping that we get some more space… because we need it across the board from vault to shader storage.  If they really want money from me…  I would throw money at the screen for more storage space.