Good Morning, Folks. Monday at 6:30 pm my time, Diablo IV Lord of Hatred launched, and it has been a bit of a mess. I think things have mostly stabilized, but for the first evening, I was getting disconnected when trying to start story quests. What made this so infuriating is that Diablo 4 has no checkpointing system when it comes to story content and dungeons. This means if you get disconnected anywhere during the content, you have to start over from the very beginning. Worse than that, there is this whole problem of your character being stranded in the world and having to keep attempting to log back in. This was not just an “overloaded servers” issue, because Tuesday morning, I woke up about 3 am and could not get back to sleep, and decided to go ahead and get up and play some Diablo 4. At 4 am, I got disconnected from a quest dungeon and experienced the same behavior as during peak times. They have since dropped a few hotfix patches, and things seem to mostly be stable now.
My original plan was to play a Warlock and lean heavily on Command Fallen, which, at least on paper, sounded similar to my beloved Summon Raging Spirits from Path of Exile. In practice, however, this ability feels NOTHING like a minion ability, and is instead mostly a targeted attack that just happens to send an explosive minion at the target. This feels super freaking awkward and nothing like the spammy SRS gameplay style where you are running around and flooding the map with temporary minions. This, combined with the disconnects, made me rage quit out on the warlock for the time being and roll a Paladin instead, since I already know that I enjoy that playstyle. At some point, I will revisit the Warlock and probably do some sort of hellfire caster build. I was pretty happy with the name Beldemona and shocked that I had never used that before for one of my “evil” caster characters.
At the current moment, I am level 37 and slowly chipping my way through the story content. I played a bit Tuesday morning and then again after maybe 7 pm last night. I have no clue where I am in the totality of the story, but so far, it is pretty solid. I hate the whole Akarat as Jesus simulacrum thing, but the story surrounding the Amazons and even the engagement with Lilith so far have been pretty great. It feels like a massive improvement over the Nahantu storyline from the first expansion. They did, however, kind of do Neyrelle dirty, and I am annoyed about that. The layout of the zones in Skovos is way more focused on the story content than I would have come to expect. I am not sure how these zones are going to feel after completing the story when you are dealing with evergreen open-world content. Then again, Nahantu kind of suffered from the same problem, and I never spent much time returning to those zones.
I am not entirely certain how I feel about the “no passives” build structure that went in with Lord of Hatred. At least with my Thorns Paladin, you spend a lot of time leveling as something else and then swapping a bunch of things over at 36 when you unlock some of the specific paths on the tree. It just feels like we are leaning way more heavily on gearing, but then again, since you can choose to craft whatever temper you need, instead of randomly rolling these, it might all shake out in the end. I’ve not really gotten any useful legendaries yet, and I am not sure what level those really begin to factor into the drop pool. I did spend a bit of grinding in Helltide when I got frustrated with the disconnects on Monday night, and the rewards, at least at low levels, felt pretty crummy. I was mostly getting blues from opening loot boxes, and I would have expected almost entirely yellow or better. I am looking forward to finishing the campaign so that I can see what endgame loot starts to look like.
Being brutally honest, I am not really certain if I like this version of Diablo IV better than the last version I played when the Paladin was introduced. It is different, and I will have to see what it feels like once I conquer the storyline demon. I never play through the story with repeat seasonal characters. My inner murder hobo is way too strong, and I mostly grind out the levels in Helltide or do whispers. I am really looking forward to seeing what War Plans introduces to the game, but I figure all of that unlocks the moment you finish the story. I don’t REALLY play ARPGs for the story, even though I occasionally enjoy it as I do in Path of Exile 1/2. Currently, it feels like I am taking my medicine and just biding my time for the story content to be finished. Lord of Hatred is better than the base game and the first expansion, but it is still not as good as something like Diablo III was storyline-wise. I don’t love all of the ambiguity of the morality in this game. I prefer to smash demons and angels and not have to care about who is betraying me in the process.
In other news, it is Evil Lemon time, aka when I am hooked up to a portable chemotherapy pump that is slowly poisoning me. The worst part of chemotherapy is realizing that I have 10 days where I feel various versions of crap, and then 4 days at the very end where I have to cram two weeks of necessary activities into before prepping for the next round. I am on the downward slide, and remembering this morning how much food hurts. Essentially, early on in the cycle, it hurts to chew anything and swallow anything, which is often why I shift over to a mostly liquid diet for a few days until the worst of that passes. I know I will be at my weakest this coming Saturday and Sunday, and it helps that the flow of this process is predictable. The cold reaction was instant and much worse than round two, which was in itself worse than round one. Luckily, it is not exhibiting in neuropathy, really, but mostly just pain because the skin has peeled off my fingertips. I am regularly applying lotion in an attempt to help with the healing, but it is bad enough that my phone rarely recognizes my thumbprint for unlocks.
Anyways, hoping to maybe wrap the story tonight in Diablo IV and see what the endgame has in store for me.
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