Morning Folks! The truth of Diablo IV is that it is not necessarily the most compelling game on the planet, but it absolutely nails one aspect. It is easy, seamless, and non-punitive to group up and do content with your friends. I think above all else that is the main reason why this is going to remain in the rotation of games for me, because it gives a good meet up destination for me and Ace to hang out and slaughter demons together. I love Path of Exile, but it feels bad to group with other players. Everything about the calculus of grouping makes it feel overly punishing, whereas Diablo IV has nothing but benefits when it comes to hanging out with friends. Ace had a bad day, and I also have not had the most wonderful week so far… so as a result we decided to hunker down and burn through a bunch of bosses last night.
That really is the biggest benefit of Diablo IV, that grouping especially when it comes to bossing is a force multiplier… not necessarily in the time to kill but definitely in the access to loot. I took a screenshot of my materials tab before the night and at the end of the night, and we burned through so many bosses it was silly. We gave up on Varshan though, because after four trips to vendor/salvage it just felt silly to keep going given how largely unrewarding that boss feels. Essentially we did the rotation of Beast in the Ice, Varshan, Grigoire, and Zir first so that we would then have more summons for the two best bosses Andariel and Duriel.
Going into the night I really only wanted two things. I needed a good Ancestral copy of Ring of Mendeln, and a good Ancestral copy of Blood Moon Breeches. Thankfully I walked away with multiple copies of both so that I could spend some painstaking time evaluating all of them to determine which one I would end up using. Additionally I think I picked up a few good copies of every Necromancer specific unique just in case I needed to swap builds at some point. I might try and kit out a full second set of gear and try Blood Wave, since it is so relatively easy to swap between builds now thanks to the armory. Essentially if you need uniques… you need to be running the summoned bosses because that seems to be the only reliable way to get them. Ace got my luck and walked away with two Mythics, and unfortunately I walked away with none… but last league I think I got 5 to their 2 so we will call it even.
I wish I had a good count of just how many boss summons we did last night, but I did not keep track. I know I carried Ace through a 50 Pit before the evening so we could attempt to farm on Torment 3… which was doable but just went a bit too slow and we bumped it down to T2. At the end of the evening I drug them through a Pit 65 so that they could begin to play with Torment 4. Past that we did run a 10 Wave Infernal Hordes on Torment 3, just so we could stockpile some obducite to masterwork the ancestral uniques we got. It was a pretty great night and essentially wall to wall boss and monster killing. No better way to soothe the soul.
I’ve knocked out three objectives on the final tier of the Seasons Journey, but I swear that this season seems to be much harder than the previous one. I seem to be able to run open world Torment 4 content without much issue, but Nightmare Dungeons seem a bit rippy at times. I am either immortal… or getting one-shot with little room between. There is an objective where you have to kill 50 Elites in Nightmare Dungeons without taking any deaths. Similarly there is a one that requires opening 25 of the roots from the events… in 15 minutes that is going to be hard as hell to get done. Everyone is out there spamming those things and you don’t get credit when someone else opens one. It is going to be rough getting through this one, and it might be something that I do once the season has died down a bit.
I am pretty sure Ace walked away with every unique but one, which is pretty decent considering I think that specific build requires a bunch of uniques. They did get what felt like 20 different copies of the ring that they needed, at least one of which was double ancestral. I got a wild quad ancestral necklace, which sadly I have no use for… but still cool to see. This is honestly what I wish Path of Exile 1 or 2 or even Last Epoch could be. All three of those have various punitive reasons why grouping up is occasionally butts. Diablo III and IV though… its all good and honestly better the more people you can pack into an event. The only negative would be the sheer amount of time and running back to a vendor that would be required to do four different players worth of summon materials. It would literally take an entire afternoon to cycle through a similar payload of four players worth of mats. It essentially took all night… around three hours maybe, to do all of our summons for six bosses.
I still feel like I am probably starting to wind down a bit. I want to start ratholing decent ancestral gear so that I can build an entire second set of gear and try blood wave. As much as I do not love the concept of a minion-less Necromancer, I still feel like I owe it to myself to try this season’s god build. Pure minions should get better at some point soon hopefully, because right now the Ring of Mendeln is not interacting correctly with several other legendary items, keeping the stack of multipliers from happening on minion damage. I will say it is kind of butts right now if you happen to die in any content, because there is no easy way to get back your minions unless you left a stack of corpses laying around. This is also a problem I have had in Last Epoch, except there you have to summon them all painstakingly one at a time. Path of Exile II really has the right idea by making your minions summon automatically. At a minimum in both Last Epoch and Diablo IV there should be a channeled button that will summon up all of your minions at once so that it isn’t something you can realistically use in combat, but it does allow you to get back to fighting shape easily.
I hope you are also finding some comfortable distraction from the bullshit that is happening in the real world. I am not blind to it, I just figure it is better for my mental health not to engage right now. Enough information is filtering through to know that shit is really bad. Please do not take my lack of engagement with it as a sign of not caring. I care about you and your safety, and if you need me I am only a message away on the plethora of platforms that I have an account on. I am still checking everything sporadically, but I am also denying them my undivided attention.
The post Big Boisterous Boss Bonanza appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, and Thalen
Hey Folks! We are down a Tam this week but start off the show talking a bit about our various mental states with the happenings going on out in the world. From there Grace talks about Rusty’s Retirement a delightful idle game that has a lot of the same functionality as Stardew Valley but runs in a small window at the bottom of your monitor. From there we talk about Diablo IV Season 7 and how it is quite possibly the best D4 season ever… that no one is really giving much fanfare. We talk a bit about how the streamers have seemingly abandoned the game. Kodra shares with us the process of resolving combat in the Battletech tabletop game from the 80s… giving Thalen and Bel flashbacks in a bad way. Finally, Ash has been playing Sonic Frontiers and talks about it actually being a really good open-world Sonic game.
Good Morning Folks! This morning I am going to spend some time talking about something weird happening with Diablo IV right now. Season Seven aka the Season of Witchcraft is without a doubt peak Diablo IV. This is the best seasonal mechanic we have ever had and the game has more content than it has ever had in the past. Additionally the mechanical state of the game is better than we have seen previously and there are way more classes that have viable play patterns as a result. However… folks seem to be abandoning Diablo IV in droves, and this is has not been illustrated more clearly by the lack of streamers diving into the game. Previously a new Diablo IV season would see most of the Path of Exile streamers come back if for no reason other than to meme on the game for a day or two before returning to their core demographic.
What we are seeing instead is folks who used to be part of the core stalwart group of Diablo IV streamers… abandoning the game. Darth Microtransaction effectively made his brand on the back of first Diablo Immortal and then later Diablo IV. I went through his broadcast records and could not find any sign that he actually streamed even a moment of Diablo IV Season Seven. Raxxanterax was the definitive “Diablo III” guy for me and has been a regular source of information about Diablo IV since the launch of the game, and he streamed two days… looked annoyed while doing it, and then as of yesterday was back in Path of Exile II. This is translating to the game as well, because I am not sure I have fought a single world boss yet with a full party. Additionally during peak prime time gaming hours, I am one of the few people on my Battle.net friends list actually playing the game.
I think at least on some level… the expansion release broke a lot of people. It was not a great story, but worse than that… it felt like an incomplete story. Diablo games have traditionally been about killing a big bad at the end. The core Diablo IV story is about chasing Lilith and then ultimately killing her. Vessel of Hatred seemed like it was going to be an expansion about chasing Mephisto and then ultimately killing him… but instead we just took down his literal lapdog. The story arc of the expansion felt like something we might expect as a free incremental story patch in an MMORPG, not something that is boxed paid DLC. I think there were a lot of folks holding out hope that the DLC was going to change the trajectory of Diablo IV, and it didn’t really do that… causing them to check out. It is impossible to get numbers for this game, since the Steam version launched so late that it represents a fairly insignificant slice of the total player pie.
I am still having fun, but I also know that once I tick off the checkboxes of the seasons journey and finish out the battle pass that I will probably fade away as well. What I will fade back into… I have no clue honestly. Raxx showed recently that you can power level a character in just a bit more than two hours, so given the level of playtime streamers have… it is probably not shocking that they have all cycled through the game. Sure there are folks who have almost exclusively built their brand on the game like Rob that are still grinding away…. but within the week I figure most folks will have cycled back to something else. The Witchtide is fun as heck, but it seems like it is not quite enough to actually keep at least the public side of the player base engaged for very long.
I moved into chapter five aka slayer on my Seasons Journey last night, and I have been stockpiling my boss summon materials so that Ace and I can get together this weekend and run a bunch of bosses in a row. This mostly just makes it so that the loot goes further, since each of us gets our own copy of the loot. I’ve swapped out all but two of my slots for Ancestral gear, and it seems like maybe Ancestral Legendaries are dropping much less often in Torment 1 than they did during the expansion launch. I don’t have all of the items that I ultimately need, but I am still ripping through content pretty easily. I finally got all of the glyphs and now just need to work on leveling them. I’ve also got a few Infernal Hordes keys that I hope to run with Ace as well to see what sort of loot and levels we can get from that event.
Raxx released his usual State of the Game, and even he admits that the season mechanic is probably the best one yet. However he still sounds really unsatisfied with the state of the game. His big complaint is that at least compared to other ARPGs right now, Diablo IV does not have much replayability. I would probably agree with that and once you have ground your way through to Torment 4, completed the season journey, hit level 100, and finished the battle pass… there isn’t much reason to keep playing. There is nothing in the game that is so chase as to serve as that thing that keeps you spinning the randomizer for weeks on end hoping that maybe just maybe you will see it. All of that said… I am okay with that. I have Path of Exile, Path of Exile II, and Last Epoch that serve to scratch that itch for me. Diablo IV will probably always be a fun and chill romp of a game because the “Exile” games at least are deeply punitive when it comes to grouping with your friends.
Diablo III was a game that I played every three months with my friend Ace for a weekend, and then was more than happy to bounce until the next season start. It was this super fun if short event that we participated in that brought me a lot of joy. I’ve never been able to find that same level of super chill but focused gameplay in Path of Exile or the sequel Path of Exile II. We’ve been able to get to that point with Last Epoch, but even it feels a bit too punitive at times. Diablo IV however, has reached the point where we both have a focused but fun interaction during the season, and then group up to do a bunch of fun content together helping the other one get through the seasonal accomplishments before fading away and playing something else. As such I am perfectly okay if this is a short term game for me, and honestly appreciate the fact that it is because I know I can slot it in easily each time a new season comes out.
Quite honestly I appreciate the brevity. By next weekend I will be finished with Season Seven and be perfectly fine bouncing to do something else. I know that I have the next Path of Exile season 3.26 somewhere around the corner, and Last Epoch Cycle 2 in April. I also want to pop back into Guild Wars 2 and catch up on the expansion content since I have yet to engage with the second content drop from Janthir Wilds. I think I might mentally be ready to spend some time in an MMORPG again after copious grinding between Settlers League, Necro Settlers, and the launch of Path of Exile II early access. That is not to say that I am entirely done with Path of Exile II either. I do really enjoy that character and have a heck of a lot of fun mapping on it now. It just seems like ARPGs are going through the same false dichotomy that MMORPGs did years ago… with the concept of the “one true game” and that everyone feels the need to pick only one and focus on it entirely.
While I deep dive through the rabbit hole on pretty much every game that I devote time to… I also play a bunch of different games. This works for me, and quite honestly means that there is always something interesting right around the corner. It feels bad that Season Seven is getting panned so heavily, and I am concerned that the Diablo IV team is going to take the wrong lesson from that. If you have been on the fence about jumping into the Season of Witchcraft I suggest that you give it a shot. Like I said at the top of this post, it legitimately is peak Diablo IV and is pretty much the best that the game has ever been. I think the challenge is… that “best” is not what many players and streamers are looking for.
The post The Season Seven Paradox appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks! Yesterday was the launch of Diablo IV Season 7, and last night I rolled the Necromancer that I was planning and started leveling. If anyone is wanting to play along at home, I am mostly following this guide on Maxroll because I do not want to think about anything right now. I am not really going to worry about my gear until I hit level 60 because at this point I have effortlessly gotten to 44 without really trying. I am absolutely half-assing my way through the content and it is delightful, in large part because Season of Witchcraft is effectively the spiritual successor to Season 2. The Season of Blood as Season 2 was properly referred to was essentially peak Diablo IV for me, and the rapid recurrence of the Blood Tide events made it feel great to level.
Instead of Bloodtides… we have Headhunts which I am affectionately referring to as the Witchtide. These will spawn in four places on the map and are up for 40 minutes at a time. However these appear to be staggered so that when one ends there is always going to be another one up that you can be farming. This also means that once you complete all of the Grim Favor objectives in one area, you can bounce to a new area and start the entire process over again. This is by far the smoothest leveling experience ever and even more important… taking a death does not cause you to lose your hard earned event currency like you do in a Helltide. That said… I have not taken a death yet but you are collecting resources that you then spend to unlock Witchcraft abilities.
Part of what made the Season of Blood so great was that in addition to the blood tide events… you had a borrowed power system in the form of vampire abilities. These were gained randomly in a pick one of three scenario and it often took you quite a bit of grinding to get the set that you really wanted to use. Witchcraft abilities work so much better in that you simply get currency for doing events and then can outright purchase the ability that you actually want. Within the first hour and a half of game-play I had all five of the abilities that I wanted, and then could simply focus on leveling them up instead of acquiring new abilities. I highly suggest Aura of Siphoning for your first ability because it is essentially “What if Righteous Fire Healed You”, as you deal damage to everything around you but also gain some of that as life.
I also love that it lets me run around with a giant poison dart frog. The crossover abilities from the D3 Witchdoctor are greatly appreciated. I am sure at some point I will build something around the Firebats ability if I end up running a second character. I am pretty curious how nerfed the state of the Spiritborn ends up being from what it was during the expansion launch. Diablo IV has reached the point of light popcorn fare and I am here for it. I was having a lot of fun from the moment I dropped into game and so far that seems to have no sign of stopping. I really need to run a few Nightmare Dungeons to see how they have been buffed because Ace reported that they got a stupid amount of legendaries from them.
Kind of the crux of the Witchtide events is to spawn these headless husks, which you kill to reclaim heads at least in a narrative sense for the tree of whispers. There is also a background story happening surrounding a coven of witchdoctors that do the bidding of the tree. I have to be honest… I do not care at all about the story side of this, because really it is a loose framework that allows me to keep going out and killing more monsters that are spawning unique to this season. The core mechanical loop feels extremely rewarding, and I am curious to see how this transitions as we move into the endgame. I am sure there will still be the need to farm a lot of summoned bosses for unique drops. Ace and I learned last league that the best option was for us to hold onto everything and then meet up to amplify the number of summons we were able to do in a single sitting.
Another thing that I greatly appreciate is that they have added additional functionality to the Tree of Whispers location. This is where all of the event resources are set up, but also they changed the layout a bit and added an Obols vendor and Alchemist to essentially allow us to never leave this location. I was already setting my default teleport to the Tree of Whispers for dumping Grim Favors, but now there really is no reason to use any other location other than if you are happening to farm the Pit. I still would really like to have something akin to the player hideout from Path of Exile 1 and 2 because honestly… unless I have invited them to my group I don’t really care about other players.
Speaking of not caring about other players… I am guessing the community got the memo that running World Bosses is not really worth the effort. I killed Ashava this morning and it was just me and a Barbarian… and thankfully we managed to take down the boss without much issue. I don’t feel like I am probably too far ahead of the curve… and more that it is just a case that no one seems to care about world bosses. I said this last league, that the older content like World Bosses, Nightmare Dungeons, and Legion Events really do not feel like they are worth doing right now. Sure you can get some drops, but the amount of drops pale in comparison to just farming literally anything else. I mostly wanted to kill the world boss because I am certain that somewhere in the seasons journey there is a requirement for doing so.
By farming effectively nothing but the Witchtide, I am actually progressing pretty quickly through the Coven’s Favor track… aka the event faction for this league. Mostly this serves as a way of unlocking the various quests associated with the league which I am sure will gate some things behind them… so might as well grind it out as quickly as possible. Once I get into the endgame I am probably going to be farming content that is not the Witchtide, so it would probably be beneficial to get the faction now while I am not having to go out of my way to farm it.
All in all I feel like this is a pretty solid outing for Diablo IV. The game will still have its critics, and that is fine… I just wish they were coming from a place of legitimate gripes and not largely piling on the campaign of streamers. The raw game is in a pretty decent state at this point, and I am having quite a bit of fun. It will never be a technical experience like Path of Exile, but for big dumb fun it is pretty spectacular. I am sure I will bore of it quickly once I have finished the season journey… but not everything has to be a forever game. While I can appreciate Citizen Kane… I also really like movies where they have cool CGI and big explosions. Diablo IV is a big explosions type game, and if you can appreciate it for what it is… there is fun to be had here.
The post Farming the Witchtide appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
