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.
Featuring: Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! We are down Ash and Ammo but carry on with what we originally thought would be a short show. The curse of saying that means that without a doubt we end up going over. We start off talking about Tam’s new toy, the PlayDate Console, and some of the interesting design choices it presents. From there Bel talks about the Diablo 4 reveal trailer and the weak reception. This leads to a larger discussion about issues with Blizzard as a whole and how everything somewhat feels like short-sighted decision-making. Bel and Tam talk about Trinity Fusion a game that feels like a halfway point between Deadcells and Hades that Bel stumbled upon through Mastodon. We dive into a large topic about how games end up shackled by specific traditions and how they have limited various designs. Then we get into a few shorter topics like Gamepad.Club is a lovely community if you are looking for a place to land on Mastodon. Then we all give you a plea to watch Nimona. We are likely going to talk about that movie in a full spoiler sense next week.
Good Morning Folks! This morning’s blog post is going to be a bit of a smorgasbord of smaller topics. The first is that the Silver Wolf banner is sadly over in Honkai Star Rail. That means that any attempts at getting this excellent character are diminished for the time being. I am uncertain if she can be pulled on a normal banner, but I am extremely happy that I picked her up while it was available. It cracks me up that when she visits the Astral Express she does so in hologram form. This morning she was hanging out in the parlor car and wanting to play board games… then realized that holograms can’t move physical pieces. Then turned around and berated me for not having any arcade cabinets on the express. She has rapidly become one of my favorite characters for her ability to brute force a weakness onto a target.
With the Silver Wolf banner gone, that means the Luocha banner is now available. I have to admit there is absolutely nothing about this character or his design that interests me. I am however pulling for him just because I need a second healer. I would far rather have Bailu, but as it stands I think you have to be just exceptionally lucky with the default banner to make this happen. Honestly, I am not even that big of a fan of his style of healing, but having a second healer seems like it would make the split runs where you are required to have two teams much easier to complete. I am however hoping to pick up a Pela from the banner while it is available. I bonded with Pela during the museum event and now like the character far more than I originally did.
So far however all I have pulled are multiple copies of Qinqque. Since you got her for free that means I now have her with two Eidolons, which is fine… but she isn’t exactly a character I am actively using for anything other than running assignments. I only had enough currency saved up to do two 10 pulls and the other pull the only thing I picked up was a four-star light cone. Just like in Genshin Impact, pulling a weapon or light cone is always the least exciting possible thing you can pull. I’m close to another 10 pull on the Luocha banner so maybe I will get him so I can go back to the standard banner. As it stands there are probably more things on that banner that I actually care about at this point.
I’m finding the event that went in with Luocha a bit frustrating. It is called Stellar Flare and it is based on defeating a number of mobs during a certain number of cycles aka turns. Since I tend to build teams for survival and not speed… this means that I keep failing these fights. I am going to have to shift things up a bit and pull together a speedy team rather than a sturdy team. The problem is that the fight itself dishes out a ton of damage. So you almost need to come up with a team that can “board wipe” every single cycle. I’m also nowhere near maxed out on my characters so it isn’t like I can just brute force this. I need to devote some time to farming the resources needed to upgrade my newly level 70 character squad the rest of the way.
In very very brief Diablo IV news, I managed to get to level 70 finally. I am just not really enjoying the grind at this point. Barbarian is essentially in a state where if you get crowd controlled once… you are dead almost instantly. This is just about as unfun of a situation as it gets, and while I enjoy hanging out with my friend Cyl… I don’t much enjoy Nightmare Dungeons. Really other than the occasional world boss Nightmare Dungeons are the only end-game activity that is reliably available. I felt very strong when I first got to World Tier IV but I already feel like I lost all of that power and am consistently getting weaker every single level. The thing is… I am wearing about as good of gear as you can get for my level with the appropriate aspects on each item. Sure I could min-max the stats or grind out more paragon points, but it largely feels like a losing battle. I exist in two states… either immortal or instantly dead the moment anything stuns/freezes/poisons me.
All of the news about Secrets of the Obscure has made me renew my focus on Guild Wars 2. Since I have been recording my dumb little videos talking about various game modes I enjoy, I decided that last night I would record myself doing the server reset Tequatl fight. This is sort of the quintessential Guild Wars 2 experience for me personally. It was the encounter that made me finally appreciate how god of a game Guild Wars 2 could be, and was probably my first real large-scale world boss experience. Since then I have done hundreds of boss and meta trains, but Tequatl will always hold a very special place in my heart. It is sort of the pinnacle of how cool the drop in group play can be in this game.
Last night I also started working a bit on the next set of story quests for What Lies Within. I didn’t get super far though because I wound up going outside to hang in the backyard for the remainder of the night. I am sure I will pick up and get through that content drop today. I’m also looking forward to the weapons test beta this weekend. I want to get in and play with Necromancer Greatsword/Pistol and see if I can figure out how to make it viable. Mostly I just want a ranged weapon that feels better than staff to combo with Greatsword. The axe is just too short of a ranged weapon, and I really wish Necromancer got access to Longbow. Maybe eventually someday.
Did you have luck pulling Luocha in Honkai Star Rail? Are you still playing Diablo IV? Are you going to participate in the weapon test beta in Guild Wars 2? Drop me a line with your thoughts.
The post Regretfully Seeking Luocha appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Friends! This weekend I moved up into World Tier 4 of Diablo 4, which means I have finally entered the proper endgame. This happened largely due to the fact that my friend Cyl told me that Friday night we would be getting through the Fallen Temple, aka the Capstone dungeon blocking World Tier 4. She had been holding off on trying it, and I had failed it a few times… but together we wrecked the place. Essentially the combination of Sorceress and Barbarian was pretty potent and she would freeze things… and then I would spin on top of them with impunity wrecking their life pool. The final boss encounter was a bit tricky at times, and I had to abuse the fact that I am fairly sturdy and resurrect Cyl a few times. There are a lot of things that just having another person really helps for, and I like that self rezzing does not subtract from your life pool.
Nightmare Dungeons in theory probably should not exist prior to World Tier 4. They are a boring mess at low tiers that you can begin running in World Tier 3. As soon as you complete a Tree of Whispers in Tier 4 everything begins dropping at Tier 21 or higher. Completing one of these unlocks your ability to start salvaging and crafting Sigils. You can’t run a low-tier Sigil without dropping back down into World Tier 3, so essentially… everything that had been clogging my inventory was rendered worthless. Nightmare Dungeons in World Tier 4 is actually pretty enjoyable. This is maybe the content that has been missing from the game to this point and seems to be what the game is actually balanced around. It just sucks that it takes over 100 hours of gameplay to really see this content. That said it also still feels pretty grindy to be focused ONLY on Nightmare Dungeons.
Lately, most of my gameplay in Diablo IV has been centered around the boss and legion timers. The best site that I have found so far is D4 Armory, which also happens to be the site that offers the ability to link your character armory. Essentially it seems like bosses either spawn on a 5, 6, or 7 hour timer… and I cannot keep track of this shit so I am offloading that part of my brain to a timer website. Again I still feel like Blizzard needs to sort this shit a bit better than it currently is. If they want to rotate between Bosses, Helltides, and Legions… then in theory one of these should always be happening or no more than 15 minutes away from happening. Over the weekend I tried to catch as many of these as I could, and the Legion events specifically seem to be amazing experience gain.
The World Bosses themselves are not exactly what I would consider extremely fun encounters… but they also feel like something you really should not miss. One of the things that puzzled me is that I thought we would have more of them. As it stands there are three of them… Wandering Death, Avarice aka New Greed, and Ashava whom we fought in beta. Probably my favorite of these is Avarice simply because the teleport mechanic looks really cool. My least favorite is Ashava, mostly because Poison feels wildly overpowered right now as compared to the rest of the conditional damage types. None of them are terribly exciting however and I really feel like the Diablo IV team needs to play some Guild Wars 2. No game does large-scale spectacle fights as that game does, and it would feel better if there was some sort of zone meta that led to the boss encounter rather than just something randomly spawning every six hours or so.
My luck continues to hold… and I think Cyl is starting to get a little salty about it… in a joking way of course. When we took down Ashava the other night I walked away with two unique items, and she pretty much walked away with nothing but some rares to sell/salvage. I’ve not lucked into either of the two uniques that I still need, however. Essentially I need a new copy of Rage of Harrogath as I am still wearing a Sacred version of that and I need a copy of Gohr’s Devastating Grips to drop. I did pick up Temerity though so very happy to have that slot filled. However, as much effort has gone into gearing… does make me start to align with the “no reset seasons” camp. I just can’t fathom going through this much effort every season.
One thing that I do have to give massive credit to for Diablo IV is the cosmetic options. It has been rare that I have played a game with cosmetic outfits… that have felt so much worse than what was available in the game for free. New World comes to mind because a lot of the Twitch Prime drops are so much cooler looking than anything you can purchase on the in-game cash shop. In Diablo IV I am constantly finding items out in the world that are cosmetics for my horse. Similarly, most of the armor sets you find in the world are better looking than the cash offerings. It does sort of make me wonder if this will be counterproductive to the goals of Diablo IV being a more monetized ARPG than Diablo III was. It makes me wonder if they over-corrected into the realm of free cosmetics to try and minimize comparisons to the shit show of egregious microtransactions that was Diablo Immortal.
The one thing that continues to worry me a bit about Diablo IV, is that I am just never in the mood to solo grind in this game. I’ve had a lot of fun recently when playing on a focused activity with Cyl, but when it comes time to actually do stuff on my own… I tend to log out and play something else. I am not sure if this is a side effect of just how grindy everything is and knowing that it will all be for naught when the season starts, or if it is a greater side effect that the game isn’t nearly as enjoyable as I feel it should be. Whatever the case… I am mostly playing in burst when I happen to check the Armory and see that an event is just about to start. Cyl and I have been pinging each other when we notice a boss is just about to come up, and those moments have been enjoyable. However, Cyl is also grinding this as a mainline game and as a result roughly ten levels ahead of me at any given moment. I fully expect to be left in the dust at some point in the future, and I am not entirely certain I will have the desire to catch back up.
The post Diablo IV – World Tier 4 appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
