Good Morning Folks! We’ve been dealing with some sort of flu-like crud that has swept through our house. I feel awful, but I am doing much better than my wife is… which means that I have become the defacto caregiver. So this weekend I pretty much needed some comfort gaming, which meant that I spent most of my time screwing around with a new character in Path of Exile. For a while now I have contemplated either building a cyclone character or a blade vortex character for that whole whirlwind “spin to win” equivalent gameplay. While neither is really quite like the Whirlwind Barbarian, Cyclone mostly gets used as a vehicle for delivering other attacks via cast-on-channeling… which pushed me towards Blade Vortex.
More specifically I was interested in the cold conversion version of the build that can freeze entire packs in seconds allowing you to ignore a lot of the defensive layers as locking down targets goes a long way. At the moment I have a 93% chance to freeze targets, and given how often blade vortex hits that is pretty much a guaranteed freeze as soon as I hop into a pack of mobs. More than that I am running a medium cluster with Blast-Freeze which works similar to Fan the Flames does for ignites and my freezes spread to everything in a 1.2 meter radius. I wish this was chained, but unfortunately, it only applies to freezes from the initial attack and not freezes that proc from Blast-Freeze. I also have an “explody chest” with the crusader modifier that causes enemies to deal 1/10th of their life as physical damage… which then gets converted entirely to cold damage via hrimsorrow.
I am loosely following this POB, and am now trying to decide if I want to go the route of +1 physical wand and shield, or if I want to shift things up and go for a +3 bow and quiver setup. The biggest benefit of staying with a physical wand or scepter and a caster shield is that it allows me to keep using shield charge. Given that all of my physical is being converted to cold, it is not unusual for the shield charge itself to freeze something. The biggest negative about +physical gear right now is that is also what Penance Brand of Dissipation is using, which has jacked up the price of everything on the market. I have a +1 physical scepter that I attempted to throw some fossils at but have not really had much in the way of luck yet. I might yolo some “reforge cold” harvest crafts to see what that yields given that I have +1 physical as a fracture.
Probably the best aspect of this build is that it can pretty much perma-freeze a boss long enough to kill it. Which helps greatly considering that my survival is in a really bad state. I have capped my resistances at 75% all but have nothing much in the way of armor or evasion to speak of… and am not even close to having capped spell suppression. If I get looked at the wrong way I am going to go down in a blaze of glory. Mostly right now I need to grind out the first few charms and then put on some levels because I think currently I am level 73 so just barely started. I can however fairly comfortably do red maps even without upgrading to a decent wand/shield. I should probably also swap out all of my gems for fully leveled and qualitied ones as I just have whatever I leveled with. I did splurge for a 21/20 Blade Vortex but so far that is the only “endgame” gem that I have.
At some point today I will work my way through the fourth labyrinth and get the Primal Aegis up and running. That should help quite a bit as I already have quite a number of notables allocated. It will also make me immune to reflected elemental damage which will help greatly as I am converting all of my physical to cold. Other than that I really need more life, and would love to figure out a way to work in haste because I feel slow currently. For a very squishy build it is shockingly viable given the screen-wide freezing effect. I get now why this has at various points in the past been a popular league starter.
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Good Morning Folks. I’ve been spending a bit of time over the last few days thinking about a game that could have been, but never really was… Outriders. I reinstalled it recently and it is still an enjoyable looter shooter experience, with its roots in the fundamentals of ARPG build diversity and design. It was the hoped Destiny Slayer that would come along and offer a more interesting gameplay experience. It had some connectivity issues out of the gate as often is the case with most new online games, but it recovered relatively quickly and offered a really enjoyable gameplay loop. Lets talk about some of the high points of the game.
First off it had a pretty freaking long story, at least compared to Destiny or any of its expansions. There was a lot of interesting gameplay wrapped up in that story as well and all of it was repeatable. It became commonplace to grind out your favorite story missions for loot in the endgame. While it told an exceptionally bleak tale that turned off some of my friends, it was a mechanically enjoyable experience from start to finish. It did a good job of easing you into combat and giving you progressively more difficult encounters as you learned the ropes of how to use your new powers. The male voice acting was less than amazing, but the female voice actor was pretty freaking great.
The class design and the powers that came with it were extremely fun. I spent most of my time playing the Devastator which uses Earth powers to “devastate” the enemies. My build of choice was to use Earthquake as an opening salvo, Tremor as a lifetap aura or a sort for everything fighting up against me, and Impale to lock down the biggest enemies while mopping up the weaker ones. The game had a talent point system that allowed you to really accentuate the abilities that you wanted to focus on, letting you lean into a specific gameplay style. For me it was all about being tanky and being able to take a lot of damage while dishing it back out in the form of elemental attacks. Other gameplay styles leaned into stealthy fast killers that flit across the battlefield or maybe being the best sniper you could possibly be. Classes had an identity and this was supported by custom gear sets and such making you feel like you were able to lean into a particular fantasy.
Then there were the weapons that not only looked cool but had some wild unique abilities on them. The craft system allowed you to replace any one node on your weapon with any other node you had unlocked to that point allowing you to craft some wild combinations. What I liked the most about this is that it was pretty easy for me to keep using the same sort of weapon over and over as I leveled through the game because I could keep bringing forward the attributes that I enjoyed the most. I imprint heavily on specific weapons in this sort of game and the fact that I could keep using them was huge for me. This is my big problem with a game like Halo where you end up having to spend most of your time using random trash weapons rather than the really good ones.
With later updates, there was a full cosmetic system that allowed you to swap up what your character looked like. This included weapons appearance swaps so if you had a specific loadout that you needed for your build, but you really liked the look of another weapon you could change that up and run around with whatever you liked. I personally with with a cowboy thing going on with a duster and everything. I think more than anything I appreciated how well the game played and how all of the cosmetics were unlocked through playing the campaign and for completing achievements. That said this is absolutely a game I would have happily paid for microtransactions in similar to how I happily pay for them in Path of Exile.
Now let’s talk about the downfall of Outriders. Prior to the launch of the game, the two biggest talking points were that it would have zero microtransactions and was “Not A Live-Service” which is a weird message for a game that required online connectivity and also was being touted as something that could compete with Destiny. Looter Shooters need content updates to keep bringing players back. You can look at the SteamCharts for Destiny or even The Division and see that there is a pattern. When new content is added to the game, players come back… there is a surge in player numbers and a slow drop off in numbers as players feel like they have gotten their fill and move on to other games. This is how this sort of game survives. Path of Exile has quite possibly the most predictable pattern each time a new league launches, there is a spike, and then after a few months a valley.
The game as a whole was reviewed reasonably well considering there were active campaigns attempting to review bomb the game during the first few weeks of connectivity issues. There were a lot of publications that reviewed this as an overwhelmingly positive game. The biggest concern that kept being raised however was whether or not the game was going to be supported in the long term. The constant drum beak of “Not A Live-Service” set up a bit of a paradox. Players engage in these sorts of games now as live services, as experiences to be revisited every few months each time a new drip of content is released… but as this game is reportedly a “finished product” it was setting up a scenario where it just could not sustain the players necessary to make things like matchmaking function.
Ultimately that is what we saw when it came to concurrent player numbers. There was an impressive peak of just over 125k players, and then by month three a constant fall off down to around 1000 players just before the first major patch, and a bump back to around 10k shortly after that. Then again a a bleed of players down to 1000 players again before some pre-expansions patches that introduced new things to the game and another bump of around 12k players with the release of Worldslayer dropping down to under 1000 players starting in November 2022 and continuing in that state to this point where at the time of pulling these numbers there was a 24 peak of just over 300 players. Without the rhythm of a live service game, there just wasn’t anything to glue the players to this game.
I will always be wistful of what might have been with this game. This game is my new Hellgate London, a game that I greatly enjoyed… felt was far better than the other offerings that were available… but just was not supported and died an early death as a result. The main difference is that I can still revisit Outriders and enjoy it, and at least so far its corpse has not been crudely reanimated by a KMMO company. Outriders is still a damned fun game, but it would be a better game if people actually played it. I go through periods where I reinstall it, and play a bit of it… get my fill… and then wander off again because there is literally no reason to keep playing it after that point. The devs announced to the community/influencer groups in March 2023 that they were not releasing any more content for the game. So it is effectively a “dead” game at this point.
This is a case where you can get all of the fundamentals of this sort of game right, and release a technically proficient and at times phenomenal game experience but if you don’t have the follow-through support the game will flounder. The looter shooter and ARPG genres are all about nailing a release cadence and by publically announcing from the start that there was no “Live-Service” they sort of shot themselves in the foot. There are just certain genres that NEED to be a Live-Service with releases after the sale in order to survive. We’ve seen this backlash against that sort of game, but mostly in genres that did not need to have a cosmetic shop or carefully timed content drops. We are currently dealing with one of those games right now with the Suicide Squad, which everyone seems to wish was just another Arkham game… but instead attempted to be something akin to the Avengers.
Outriders though had everything aligned to be a great game that would grow over time… it had all of the hooks that could have supported a reasonable microtransaction shop in order to fund the development. Instead, it gets added to the list of games that should have worked… but never quite did. I will always lament the death of Anthem in a similar vein, but Outriders was way more technically competent than Anthem ever was and still could not quite make it. All of this said, if People Can Fly came out tomorrow and said that they were making an Outriders 2, and this time it would be given all the support that the first game deserved… I would be there and ready to go. That however is never going to happen because I think Square Enix has a bad taste in its mouth over how Outriders performed, and the IP lives in that murky territory of having too many cooks in the kitchen that would need to sign off on a sequel.
Anyways! I will always have a special place in my heart for this game. If you’ve never played it, it is probably super cheap on every platform it was released on. It is worth a gander because it is doing a lot of interesting things.
The post Lamentation of Outriders appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Hey Folks! It has been a bit since I have done one of my dumb little videos and I figured I finally had something worth showing off. I did not expect to be rolling a new character this late in the league, but I enjoy brand characters and Penance Brand of Dissipation is a little cracked right now. If I remember correctly, I started this character last Monday, leveled it through the campaign in two days, then threw on some pretty basic rare gear, and have been using that ever since. In any other league this would be a character walking around under a divine orb’s worth of gear… but given that dissipation is a flavor of the week build and wants specific things, it is causing a bit of inflation to happen. I think in total though I am wearing roughly 10 Divine Orbs worth of gear and a lot of it could be rolled either by yourself or through something like Rog crafting.
Right now I am using zero uniques in my build, but that is not to say there are not some that would probably work well with it. Since I am doing cold damage and lightning damage, I could see this potentially working well with an Inpulsa’s Broken Heart but I have not made that swap because I would end up losing some physical damage taken as elements conversion. I’ve wound up honestly fairly tanky for the sort of damage that I am dealing. The only three specific gear slots that I sought out was +1 level of physical gems on weapon, amulet, and caster shield which give my Penance Brand of Dissipation additional levels and more damage as a result. At some point I should probably spend some currency and try and get a +2 weapon or amulet but again… during an inflation league that would end up costing probably more than I am willing to spend. Another option would be a Replica Dragonfang’s Flight but those start around 10 Divine Orbs and higher for one with decent mana reservation efficiency.
To demonstrate the build I ran a quick Shaper Guardian map at t16. You can see that the mapping is honestly reasonable for a build that is not really focused on doing full-screen clears. The brands bounce between packs quickly shredding all of the monsters within them and my gameplay largely revolves around moving constantly while dropping fresh brands and attempting to keep my Divine Blessing Haste up all of the time. When I get to the boss it isn’t so much that I nuke it instantly, but it gets shredded pretty quickly. At this point, I have done Elder, Sirius, and Maven and in all of those cases, I was pretty much ending each phase before the mob had much chance to do anything. It took me a bunch of portals on Maven but only because I suck at the memory game and dropping puddles. Sirius and Elder I oneshot and it wasn’t even close. I’ve not done Shaper only because I have not gotten one of the four guardian maps to drop but I am grinding maps the atlas support hoping to see it.
I am having a heck of a lot of fun with this build and quite honestly… I am pretty happy with the state of all of my builds right now. I’ve spent some time tweaking Boneshatter to the point where it has much better survivability thanks to Defiance of Destiny. I am also very happy with the current state of my Righteous Fire Chieftain and the only thing I would really change on it would be to potentially add Oriath’s End for more explosions, then again I could also use one on Penance Brand just to help with the clearing. Then I have my Lightning Arrow Champion that I bought a Headhunter for because they are so damned cheap this league and that has been a lot of fun. I really don’t have a single build right now that feels like it is underperforming. There is room on each of them to improve but I am relatively happy with where they all are.
The post Dissipating A Minotaur appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
At this point in the Diablo IV Season, I am level 36, and have completed the main story quest and defeated the story version of the new boss. Quest length is about equivalent to one of the Final Fantasy XIV Holiday quests, which is perfectly fine and more than enough for a seasonal introduction. I’ve also largely finished acquiring the abilities that make up my current Upheaval build on the Barbarian, which also feels perfectly fine. The problem that I find myself in however is that I am not sure what else I want to do. In Season 2 there was this extremely fun seasonal mechanic that colloquially was referred to as the “Bloodtide” and it really created this central focus. When in doubt… do the bloodtide and it felt overwhelmingly rewarding.
I talked about this the other day, but instead of a rotating mechanic that really draws your focus… there are instead five areas on the map that ALWAYS have spawns related to the seasonal mechanic. One of those areas will have around three limited-time Tree of Whispers quests, and if I understand correctly these shift locations every hour. Mechanically this is exactly the same as the Blood Harvest aka the Bloodtide but the lack of a regional colored highlight… makes it less obvious where you should be spending your time. The density of mobs also feels less than that of the vampires which might simply be that the vampire packs had so many ghoul mobs that it just FELT like you were killing more. I feel like they need to bring back the green color coding to indicate where the player focus should be drawn on the map. This is one of those things where the vibe feels off and in spite of it mechanically functioning exactly the same it does not feel as “good” to experience.
The other challenge with this league mechanic is that the pet does not appear to scale with your level, which means that while they might start out fairly strong they quickly become useless. Even at 36, I can’t really see any noticeable difference between when my pet is attacking something versus when I am taking something out solo. I am specifically using the flame ability that chains a beam of fire between all of the mobs that the pet is engaged with so that I can for certain see that it is doing something, but still, it isn’t like it can really solo anything on its own unless you went afk. All of the defensive abilities seem to fire infrequently enough that I gave up on them and just went with Flash of Adrenaline which gives me a short-term buff. Some additional damage some of the time is better than nothing I guess?
I’ve now done several more vaults at this point and even did the whole Zoltun’s Warding mechanic successfully and I have to say… it does not really feel worth the effort. If there was a chase unique associated with the vault then it might be worth spending time in there, but as it stands it is just a more annoying version of the already bad dungeon system. The funny part about the Vaults is that you can absolutely cheese them. You can clear everything in the entire vault, then go back to the start and get the Zoltun’s Warding buff… then go back to the treasure chamber and get the loot 100% of the time. I did not do this and managed to get hit twice during the encounter leaving me with one warding, and my rewards were the same if someone went through the encounter flawlessly. I guess what I don’t get about the vaults is that players have given copious amounts of feedback that they want dungeons without ANY OBJECTIVES… that you just clear your way to a boss and get loot. Vaults seem the exact opposite of this, because in addition to the same “take the MacGuffin to the location” that all dungeons seem to have… you have to avoid traps while doing it.
I’ve seen this said a number of times, and can’t really find any origin to back up the validity one way or another. However, the “urban legend” is that the Diablo IV team has two sub-teams that work on seasonal content with one doing Seasons 1 and 3 and the other working on Seasons 2 and 4. I really hope this is not the case because I feel for that first team immensely given that Seasons 1 and 3 were both stinkers and Season 2 was pretty freaking great and brought a lot of players back to the game. At a minimum if this is the case, that first team really needs to assess their objectives and take some lessons from the second team. The plague tunnels and the gems that they rewarded were boring, and did not really add something new and fun to do to the game. This time around the pet is boring and the vaults really feel like a worse version of the dungeon system that is already in the game. I would like to say I would grind out the battlepass but I am just not sure I will be sticking around that long.
Here is hoping we get some mid-season patches that improve upon the mechanics enough to make them feel worth doing.
The post Still Not Feeling Season 3 appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
