Good Morning Folks! This weekend I got pulled back into Diablo III. The new season dropped a few weeks ago but I did not actually get around to playing it on launch day. Instead over the course of the week my friend Ace got engaged with Diablo III again, which then pulled me back in on Saturday afternoon. This is without a doubt the most chill leveling experience I have ever had because I started a little after 2 pm my time and by the time I finished recording the podcast that evening, I was just a stone’s throw away from 70. That isn’t anywhere close to record time or anything, but it is a heck of a lot faster than I normally end up leveling. When we would do a season launch on a Friday I would maybe make it to 50 that first night.
The key difference this season is a new event type called a “Vision of Enmity”. I recorded some footage of me doing one on Saturday, largely so I would have an example for this inevitable blog post. Essentially any mob you kill in the open world has a chance of spawning a portal, and when you teleport inside you are presented with a series of “rooms” for lack of a better term. Each room will either spawn another portal or spawn a treasure goblin. Killing the Treasure Goblin drops a chest full of bounty materials that signal the end of the event. The rooms seem to have a handful of possible outcomes:
One or more elite packs spread out through the map.
A room where everything is magic or higher, and drops death’s breath.
A room with three Greater Rift Portal bosses.
A room where every mob is a treasure goblin, most of them being the material goblins.
A room with a single treasure goblin spawn, signaling the normal end of the run.
The treasure goblin room is by far the most ridiculous thing I have seen in Diablo III full stop. That said… even the normal rooms are insanely rewarding. Almost my entire leveling process was me attempting to do one full round of bounties. I would start down the path to a bounty objective, and at some point, a portal would spawn. Early on I would get distracted by the portal forcing me to do the objective all over again because, at the end of the event, you get shunted back to town. Later I got in a rhythm of doing the objective, going to town, vendoring, and then going back to the portal because thankfully it gets marked on your minimap with an arrow pointing towards it. One single round of five acts of bounties plus all of the assorted portals that spawned… added up to I think 65 levels. For the last few I did Nephelem rifts to finish things off.
The most beneficial part of Enmity portals is that you end up with so many materials. I started getting Death’s Breath at level 2 and when I would get one of the rooms with three Greater Rift bosses they would drop Greater Rift Keystones. At the time of writing this, I have 166 GRift stones and almost all of those were gained through Enmity portals. Similarly, I have around 100 of each of the bounty materials and I have consumed a bunch of them cubing items and doing other crafting recipes. Materials are not really a problem because if you run out… just run a few more portals and in the process of doing those you will likely also get a number of legendary items. This legitimately feels like the most generous Diablo III season ever.
We talked about this on the show a bit, but it feels like the Diablo III team did not hold anything back. This is reportedly the last new season for the game and in doing so they created something purely fun for the players. It makes me a little sad to be honest, because the very limited team working on Diablo III has managed to create some extremely fun content over the last several leagues. I wonder what this game would have been like if they had gotten the full backing of Blizzard. Seeing how rich and varied the content is in Path of Exile makes me sort of wish for an alternate universe version of Diablo III where it got the same love and attention. That is not to say that the team working on D3 has not done some amazing stuff, but you can clearly tell they have limited resources.
I am very much in that awkward phase of not having all of my gear and not having enough gold to finish crafting my set of gems. I love Crusader and more specifically the Invoker set, so when I saw it was the Haedrig’s Gift set for the season I knew what class I would be playing. I have my six-piece and am currently trying to farm a Ring of Royal Grandeur in order to swap to Half Invoker/Half Crimson. I have none of my cube items and I am missing the correct jewelry and chestpiece. I think a lot of my squishiness will be alleviated when I get an Aquilas’ chest to drop. For now, I am very much in the area where my killing potential is extremely high… but my survival is very very low. I just swapped back to using the Paladin as a heal bot so here is hoping that resolves some of the issues.
All told I am very happy with this season so far, but I also know that I am going to maybe get a week out of it before returning to Path of Exile as my primary game. Playing Diablo III made me realize how lucky I am to have so many good ARPGs to swap between. It used to be Diablo III was pretty much it for me, and I would hunger for a new season. Now when I get tired of one game I can swap to one of many other ARPGs and keep the joy rolling. At some point, I will make my way back to Last Epoch and see some of the changes over there. For now, though, I am happy to be playing some Diablo III and happy to be working on my Invoker build. If you’ve ever loved Diablo III, I highly suggest reinstalling and checking this season out because the Enmity rifts are extremely fun. I love that it is content that you can do pretty much immediately. I can only hope that the Diablo III team will be consumed by Diablo IV where hopefully they can right that sinking ship.
The post Diablo 3 Season 29 is Awesome appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Hey Friends! Right now there is a bit of strife happening in the fledgling Diablo IV community over the concept of what is going to happen with the upcoming start of Season 1, and the Battle Pass associated with it. This morning I thought I would take a moment because I honestly had no clue that the concept of a season in ARPG terms… or even that ARPG was a specific genre… was foreign to some gamers. This is me showing my ignorance as being a long-term member of this sub-genre community. Over the years you will have noticed that I play a lot of ARPGs and play an awful lot of seasons, so I thought I would take a bit this morning and talk through some of the terminology.
ARPG as a Genre
First, let’s start off with defining “ARPG” as it is referred to by the “in group” that plays them as a hobby unto itself. It is admittedly a bad genre title, but it is one that was pinned onto Diablo as being one of the first real-time Action RolePlaying Games, and the name just sort of stuck. Over the years Action RPG has been pinned to a lot of games from Dark Souls to Devil May Cry… to even the Fallout Series… and to be honest, they are not wrong to do so. When I say ARPG however I more specifically mean the lineage of Diablo and the subgroup of largely isometric viewpoint hack-and-slash loot chase games that involve some degree of randomly generated content and a bunch of repetition in chase of building the perfect character. I guess it might be easier if I just rattle off some of the games in this genre to help define it.
Chronicon
Diablo Series
Dungeon Seige Series
Fate Series
Grim Dawn
Last Epoch
The now-defunct Marvel Heroes game
Path of Exile
Titan Quest
Torchlight Series
Undecember
Victor Vran
Wolcen
This is by no means a complete list but represents a broad swath of the type of games included in the ARPG genre. I view “Looter Shooter” as a divergent genre that started with Borderlands and continued on into Destiny, Anthem, Division, and Outriders. When this genre broke apart from the pack of Isometric games, it picked up its own traditions and design ideas that carry forward from that point. Now I have questioned before whether or not Diablo IV should even be considered an ARPG by the definition of this genre or not. I personally think it aligns more closely with an MMORPG which is a definition for another day.
What is a Season?
In a core ARPG, especially one with multiplayer play… there is this concept of a periodic reset of progress. Generally speaking, there is some sort of transition of characters from the previous period moving to the more standard or as D4 calls it… “Eternal” realm, and then a new realm spinning up that is only for brand new characters. This construct goes by many names depending on the game you are playing.
Diablo 2 – Ladders
Diablo 3 – Seasons
Diablo Immortal – Seasons
Diablo 4 – Seasons
Grim Dawn – Seasons but they are community-led only
Last Epoch – Cycles but won’t be in-game until the 1.0 release
Path of Exile – Leagues or Challenge Leagues if you look at old posts
Torchlight Infinite – Seasons
Undecember – Seasons
The idea is to have a fresh start that puts everyone on even footing. There are often race events surrounding these “seasons” and specific content that can only be obtained by starting from scratch. How this actually works varies wildly by game. In Diablo 3 you had a series of challenges that you completed in order to get rewards. The first four gave you a full set of gear, and the last six unlocked a cosmetic of some sort and another stash tab (up to a certain point). In Path of Exile, there are extremely detailed mechanics that only take place during a season some of which may or may not actually make it into the “standard” game as they refer to it. Right now in the “Crucible League,” the mechanic involves putting talent trees on your weapons which unlocks the ability to create some truly bizarre builds.
The information we have currently surrounding seasons and Diablo IV is a bit hazy. We know there will be some sort of seasonal journey similar to that of Diablo III, where you have micro objectives that add up to rewards with bigger rewards from completing a bunch of meta achievements. We also know there will be a battle pass system, that unlocks rewards as you gain experience by completing these objectives and probably from just grinding the world as well. There is some sort of season-exclusive story arc that will only be available during that given season. We now also know that none of this will be available on the “Eternal” realm, aka the realm that everyone has been playing on since the launch. Like other ARPG seasons, you will need to create a brand new character to experience any of this and only seasonal characters will progress your season’s journey.
Seasons have a Fixed Duration
Another important concept that you should understand is that seasons… or whatever a game calls it have an expiration date associated with them. Generally speaking, these tend to last three to four months, with the best having four seasons during a year. This gives you just enough time to build up a character… get bored of that character… have some time off from the game, and then get excited again when the next season happens. Path of Exile does this probably better than anyone else currently and they really hype up the launch of a new league with trailers, dedicated cosmetics, and an official race that is often commentated like an e-sports event. While I have never really been one to watch e-sports in the past… I have to admit that I do find myself drawn to the league races. I even participated a little bit in one of the ExileCon qualifier races just to get the achievement for getting to level 10 during a race.
Why Play a Season?
I am honestly not entirely certain if I am the best person to explain this, given that I am so bought into this concept that I never spend any time playing my non-seasonal characters, and effectively when the season is over they either rot or are deleted. I guess I could talk a bit about why I personally enjoy seasons. One of the funniest times for me is the launch of a new game, the hype cycle leading up to it… and the hardcore focus of grinding up a new character. There is a reason why I have played almost every MMORPG that came down the pipe over the years… and then petered out slowly as the rush of excitement around the game died down. I love the excitement surrounding something that is shiny and new, and how it brings all sorts of folks out of the woodwork. Honestly, the best part of the Diablo IV launch for me… is seeing folks showing up in my Battle.net friends list that I had not talked to for years.
An ARPG season is this entire process in a microcosm. For Diablo III, seasons would always begin around 7 pm on a Friday night. So on that Friday night I would get together with Ace and often times Byx as we leveled brand new characters. There was always a crush of excitement around getting back together after being apart for three or more months. Diablo III seasons were almost the perfect example because generally speaking we got good enough at the game to be largely finished by Monday. So we had this really focused gaming weekend, and then plenty of time to chill and do other things… and then be excited about the start of the next season. Path of Exile leagues are a considerably less social experience, but still, I have had a lot of fun talking through build ideas with Ash, Thalen, or Ace throughout the season and slowly ticking off achievements as I completed maps or knocked out challenges for cosmetics.
I also love the almost manic levels of content in the community and the excitement that surrounds the launch of a new season. I am using the season as a generic term, but Path of Exile leagues are specifically so focused on the experience of playing through the league, digging down and finding out critical information about the new mechanics, and coming up with the most efficient methods of play. In Diablo III, it was admittedly a much smaller community but there was still a lot of excitement centered around the completion of the season’s journey and figuring out the best new builds taking into account all of the changes that were made.
Probably the best aspect of the reset is that it puts everyone on the same footing. No matter how much you played the previous season… it is all washed away and everyone starts back at level 1. So that allows someone to sit out a few seasons and then return at the launch of a brand new season without feeling like they have to play “catch up”. This is the problem I have with Destiny seasons, in that they keep moving the bar forward in gear level making it seem like to return… I would need to dedicate a large amount of time to catch up to the same gear level as everyone else starting the season. In an ARPG you can just show up and know you are going to be on equal footing with all of your friends.
The Drama Surrounding Resets
Right now we find ourselves in a gulf between those who are dedicated ARPG players and understand the constructs of that genre, and those who are playing Diablo IV without ever being part of that community in the past. We’ve had this same disconnect among the AggroChat folks because once upon a time I said that Tam wasn’t really an “ARPG Player” when he absolutely felt he was. He had played through every Diablo when it came out to completion… which sure is a thing, but is also different from being engaged with the particular community and customs surrounding the seasons. Right now there are a lot of folks who have experienced seasons as a construct in other genres and are freaking out slightly that they will have to throw away the hard-fought progress that they have made on their current crop of Eternal characters in order to experience anything associated with the first Diablo IV Season.
I can’t say that they are wrong honestly. One of my core complaints about Diablo IV is the fact that it is way too grindy to be reasonably played in a seasonal model. Normally speaking in a seasonal ARPG, it takes around a week to reach the end game… and then you are spending the rest of the season completing achievements. In Diablo IV I am roughly 100 hours into the game and still have not reached the “true” endgame. That seems like one heck of a long commitment for folks to make every three months. Maybe Diablo IV given that it is more MMORPG than ARPG… needs to be the one that breaks this mold and introduces seasonal content that is available to non-seasonal characters. I have a feeling that the way the game is currently… season one might kill whatever momentum Diablo IV has. I am deeply uncertain if I will participate in the season because I am honestly not sure if I enjoyed the game enough to go all in for it. There is also supposed to be the start of a new Path of Exile league around the same time, and I am way more into that game.
I’ve said it before and I will say it again. I think Diablo IV is a great game for the type of player that wants to get in… and play through the story and then move on to another game. I feel like this game is not designed for the way that ARPG core players tend to play these games. The core gameplay loop is just not as interesting as some of the other options. With the upcoming release of Path of Exile II… which is really just a new client for the game and a whole new campaign… I think that will end up capturing all of the Core ARPG players for the long term. I think Diablo IV will probably be better for Path of Exile… than POE was for D4. There were a lot of players waiting around for the next coming of the Diablo franchise, and are now already filling the internet with grumpy think pieces about how it just doesn’t quite live up to their expectations. I would be one of those players as well.
I personally think a lot of things are going to have to change in the way that Diablo IV works in order for it to succeed in the traditional ARPG seasonal model. Firstly they need to greatly speed up the process of leveling, and speed up the renown gain process if they are in fact going to require that to be done each season. Additionally, they need to add new mechanics into each season in order to flesh out the end game, because right now… nightmare dungeons as the primary end game activity are not amazing. They also need to spend some time improving the feel of the various classes because everyone effectively is funneled into playing exactly the same spec. There are only one or two viable options for the end game in a given class. Diablo IV as a whole has way less build diversity than literally any other ARPG with a seasonal model. I just can’t see the game in its current state… existing in the normal seasonal model.
So maybe that means that seasons will need to change for Diablo IV. Maybe there will be enough pushback from gamers that are used to different seasonal models to make this happen. I foresee that the first few seasons will be a bit on the rocky side. I do not think that the team that is working on Diablo IV necessarily grasps all of these nuances. They built a game that is not necessarily how ARPG players actually play ARPGs. I get that they were attempting to expand the base… but I am not sure if the way in which they did so will be successful in the long run. Right now I am looking forward to ExileCon and more information about Path of Exile II, and way less about the first Diablo IV season.
However, since there seems to be a disconnect between those in the know and those who have never engaged in a Seasonal ARPG… I thought I would take some time this morning and talk about that divide and hopefully fill in some information.
The post What is an ARPG Season? appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Friends! I did not get nearly as much time as I would have liked last night to play some Diablo 4, but I did manage to push through to level 60 and then get another quarter of a level into that for an additional paragon point. I’ve largely been focused on finishing out my renown in the last few zones of the game and finished up Dry Steppes and have now moved on to my final zone of Kehjistan. One of the things that I have been mulling over in my brain is how I would have approached this game differently. For those of you who might not know, I’m one of the admins on the Mastodon/Fediverse server called Gamepad.Club which serves as a gaming-focused social media hub.
While I slept one of my good friends and fellow gamepadders posted a plea for suggestions. I figured I would answer this plea in the form of my morning blog post. Side note… this is the first time I have seen the term Gamepadders in reference to the denizens of Gamepad.club and I think I like it… and am just going to roll with it. Victor got plenty of responses from the larger mastodon community, but I figured I would still outline how I would approach the game knowing what I know now. Of note… I was in MANY phases of Diablo IV testing including several closed phases and a number of public phases. The game changed drastically each time I attempted to sit down and play it. So the truth is I went into the game expecting to play one ability that had been good in the early phases of testing… that was apparently nerfed into the ground.
Follow the Meta
I feel like you first have to ask yourself a simple question. Is the core of my enjoyment of the ARPG experience based on making my own builds? If the answer is yes, then skip this entirely. I am pretty sure you can half-ass your way through the campaign with any build you choose. I made it through the campaign on my heavily nerfed Upheaval build, though I struggled when it came to defeating the first capstone dungeon. Essentially Diablo IV is very poorly balanced right now and not every build is viable when it comes to harder content. If you want the easiest possible experience I would suggest going over to Maxroll.gg and looking at their build guides. They have both leveling builds and end-game builds, and I would choose one of the “in the meta” builds currently that has one of each. That way as you level you get used to the abilities that you will ultimately end up with at the end-game. Icy Veins also has a good build section but I personally like the layout of Maxroll a bit better.
Start on World Tier 1
There are no tangible benefits to playing the game on “Veteran” difficulty. While the placard says that you will get more experience and more loot… you will also take so much more time killing mobs that this benefit becomes entirely negated. Your goal is ultimately to get to World Tier 3 as fast as possible, and as a result, the early game is just an obstacle in your way. There is no point in trying to be a billy badass and insist on World Tier 2. You are only setting yourself up for frustration in the end. If difficult content is your kink, then, by all means, ignore this advice.
Focus on the Main Story Content
Since content scales with you… the later in the game you attempt something the harder it is going to be. As such it is my suggestion that on your first playthrough of the game, you just focus on the main story content. This will be marked in Yellow in your quest log, and you can progress through the game without touching any other content. While you are doing this I suggest you take the time to go ahead and unlock any waypoints you find as you will need these later. Upon completing the main quest you unlock the Tree of Whispers which will give you some additional benefits as you complete the rest of the content in the game. Ultimately you are going to want to do every single side quest available at some point. My personal preference is to unlock the end-game and then roam around doing side content then. If you want a longer journey that will also increase in difficulty as you go, then you can, of course, do side content as you are doing the main content.
Extract Near Perfect Aspects
After finishing the prologue of the game, you will unlock the occultist which allows you to imprint aspects on rare items to turn them into legendaries, and to extract aspects from any legendary drops you might get but no longer need. First things first we are going to need to enable some of the advanced options so go into settings and toggle on the following:
Options > Gameplay
Advanced Tooltip Compare
Advanced Tooltip Information
This is going to tell you how good of a roll a given item is. For example, if you look at the aspect I am highlighting above the ability has a range of 20-30% and the item that I found has a near-perfect roll of 29%. This is very worth holding onto and saving for when you need it on your end-game gear. My suggestion is to go ahead and extract any Legendary item that is at least a roll that is 50% of the maximum and most definitely anything that is perfect or near perfect. Everything else should be salvaged as you are going to need those materials later.
Salvage Everything
There are a lot of guides that I have seen that suggest salvaging gear up until you hit level 50. It is my personal suggestion that you never stop salvaging gear. You are going to reach a point where you have more gold coming in than you need, and are going to still be desperate for materials. I switched to selling everything when I finished the campaign and given how often you need to change gear… found myself completely out of several basic materials. Gold will come over time especially as you find Greed Shrines… but you will never stop needing raw materials at least until you have finished out a set of maxed-out ancestral gear.
Buy Whispering Keys
Obols are the currency for doing events in Diablo IV, and much like Blood Shards from Diablo III, you are limited in how many you can carry at a time. Spending them at the Purveyor of Curiosities is a way to gamble on getting legendary items… but the occurrence of legendary drops seems to be skewed by your level. As such spending Obols on gear early on is a bad use of resources. What I would instead do is buy Whispering Keys which are used to unlock the Silent Chests that you find out in the world. You can hold onto these en masse and then use them later on to get a gear boost when needed as you will likely be finding a lot of these Silent Chests in your journey. So it is my suggestion that any time you have a stack of Obols gathered, you spend it down buying these keys and then holding onto them for later.
Unlock World Tier III
Upon finishing the campaign your next core goal is going to be to unlock World Tier III. This means you need to defeat the Cathedral of Light Capstone Dungeon. Unlike the rest of the world, this dungeon is capped at level 50 but can be completed earlier than that if your build is strong. This is ultimately why you want to be following the meta builds as most of them can complete this dungeon somewhere around level 40-45 without much issue. Even if you do not want to start playing on World Tier III, this is gating your access to the last two tiers of renown which is effectively what you are wanting to unlock as quickly as possible. World Tier III also unlocks Helltide Zones and makes it so that Nightmare Dungeon Sigils drop more often as well as granting you access to the Sacred tier of gear. Sacred gear is a massive damage and survival boost and essentially makes all gear before that point obsolete unless you simply have to have a given legendary aspect. Now this goal might take you a bit to accomplish but I am placing it here to outline its importance.
Tree of Whispers
Defeating the Campaign is going to unlock access to the Tree of Whispers. Now this is not an activity that I think you should ever really focus on, but just something to be aware of as you are doing other activities in the world. If you have the opportunity to collect Grim Favors by doing something that aligns with an activity you are already doing, it is just a bonus. Every so often you will fill the bar and get a free box of loot from the tree. Again this should not be your core focus, but just something to be aware of as you do the next few things.
Collect Altars of Lilith
Scattered throughout the world are the Altars of Lilith which are statues that glow slightly red until you have collected them. The campaign make sure you find a few of these along the way, but after you beat the campaign one of your first goals should be making sure you collect all of them. Once they have been collected on a single character, all of your characters from that point forward get the benefit of them. Since they have to be done on a single character though, you might as well devote the time to collecting all 160 of them early on while you are still working on leveling. Yes, this is tedious busywork, but the stat boost that you gain for them will be extremely important when you are trying to unlock abilities that have stat requirements on the paragon boards. I personally found the maps that Polygon created the easiest to follow as they have them numbered and also have zoomed-in images of each location.
You can of course do these while you are completing the campaign if you really keep your eye out for any areas of the map that snake off into a little alcove. There is definitely a pattern to the placement of these statues that you might pick up on along the way.
Max Out Zone Renown
This is the step that I am actively working on if you were curious. As you are completing the campaign you will be capped at a maximum of rank three renown with each region. It is important that you work up your renown because getting every zone to rank three will net your character an extra 10 skill points and getting them all to rank five will give you an extra 20 paragon points. Both of these are significant and like the Lilith Statues, you need to do this on one character before it applies to all of your characters. This will essentially require you to complete all of those blue quests and unlock most of the dungeons in order to hit rank five. I’ve personally completed four of the five regions and am now working on Kehjistan, the area that I spent the least amount of time in so far.
Play The Game Finally
Congratz! You’ve graduated from the busywork phase of Diablo IV. Now you can just do whatever suits your fancy. You could do a bunch of normal dungeons in order to level most efficiently… or you could hit up the Helltide zone every time it is available for fun mob density and loot boxes. You could also bip around the map doing tasks for the Tree of Whispers or dive into progressing your Nightmare Dungeons and with that leveling your glyphs. Personally, I kind of do a mix of all of the above because that seems to be the most enjoyable. I’ve neglected Nightmare Dungeons a bit so far but I need to focus on them soon. I also need to give an attempt or two at trying to unlock World Tier IV now that I have hit level 60. The last capstone dungeon is hard-scaled at level 70, but I am curious if I can finish it early.
There are some aspects of Diablo IV that I really enjoy, more specifically I like the way the world feels and fits together. There are other aspects of Diablo IV that drive me insane and half convince me to stop playing entirely. I talked about a lot of this in a video yesterday, but most of them can be summed up under the banner of being grossly inefficient and wasteful of my time. So much of the ARPG experience to me is about optimization and the last thing I care about is immersion. Immersion only really holds weight until you have finished the campaign, then you want efficient grinds and in this game nothing is efficient. However since my friend wanted advice, this morning is my attempt at outlining how I would approach the game knowing what I know now. You can of course ignore ALL of this and just fumble your way through the game. Diablo IV is maybe an experience best fumbled through the first time because it will allow you to appreciate the world crafting a bit more. When you attempt to play it efficiently… that is when the wheels fall off.
So maybe… just ignore everything that I just said and approach this game however seems best to you at the time. The shortcomings will make themselves very evident eventually… and when that happens feel free to pop back over here for some advice.
The post Diablo IV Advice appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Friends! Last night I stayed up a bit later than normal because I was winding down the last few bits of the Diablo IV campaign. I started Thursday evening when the game launched into early access, played quite a bit Friday, Saturday, and Sunday ultimately wrapping up around 11 pm last night. I would love to be able to tell you how many hours I played, but the absence of a /played command or any other sort of player stats prevents me from doing this. That is a microcosm for Diablo 4 as a whole… some aspects of the game are deeply thought out and others seem curiously missing… like the seeming purposeful decision not to have a map overlay. I think this game is going to be a lot of different experiences for a lot of different types of players. If you are the type of player that traditionally expects to play through the campaign of a Diablo game and then bounce… this might be the best Diablo you have ever experienced. If you are more of a Diablo/ARPG hobbyist you will be presented with a cavalcade of choices that might lead you to believe that this game was not designed with you in mind.
I think ultimately for me, Diablo IV is a mixed bag of both brilliance and abject stupidity. For me, a Diablo game is a power fantasy about getting strong, leveling up, and then laying waste to the hordes of hell. In order for that to work, the moment-to-moment combat has to feel amazing and allow you to indulge in the power fantasy of firing off big attacks regularly in order to make the entire screen explode. Combat vacillates between feeling completely brilliant… and feeling plodding and painful and this is largely dependent upon if your abilities are off cooldown and if you have the resources to spend them. Given that the game has not yet officially launched and we already have a significant round of nerfs to slow down that experience… I feel like the game Blizzard had in mind is not the game I wanted to play. We will see if this changes as I begin the gear for the endgame, but the campaign while better than at any stage during testing… was still largely a frustrating mess.
As I have said before I followed a guide for this play through because ultimately I was wanting to give Diablo IV the best possible chance to grab me. Of all of the “spenders” I had played with during testing, the one that I found I enjoyed the most was Upheaval which is a big frontal cone attack. This involves a bit of kiting around but largely that style of gameplay does not bother me. So I ended up following the Upheaval Barbarian Leveling Guide from Maxroll, and for the most part, I think it did as good of a job as possible for easing my leveling experience. At this point, I could respec and try something else and really the cost of just over 94k gold to refund 52 talent points… seems fine given that I am sitting at 1.1 million gold while spending most of the game salvaging everything. I purposefully stayed away from Whirlwind because it clearly seemed bugged… and it was one of the abilities that ate the hardest nerf in the pre-launch patch proving that to be a wise thing to stay away from it.
My path through the game was a bit uneven. For the first three acts of Diablo IV, I spent my time plodding along and completing almost all of the side quests. Then as I reached the end of Act III… I decided that I really wanted a mount which is awarded to you at the beginning of Act IV. From that point forward I pretty much rushed through the game only focusing on the main story arc, because the leveling process had overstayed its welcome. Admittedly this is coming from someone who is used to doing the entire Diablo III leveling process in about 2 hours and the entire Path of Exile leveling process in about 5 hours. The endgame is the beginning of the game to me, and I figured there was plenty of time to start picking away at the rest of the side quests after having completed the story. Truth is… finishing all the sidequests is essentially mandatory for an endgame build as there are ten talent points hidden in the renown system that you are going to need.
As far as the story goes… this is without a doubt the best Diablo story to date and quite possibly the best ARPG story as well. That is admittedly not saying a lot given that most ARPGs only have just enough story to keep the wheels from falling off in transit. Would I consider this one of the best story games when judged against all of the great story games I have played? No… absolutely not. It is a serviceable story, but it is also a Blizzard story, and that comes with all of the baggage attached to that statement. It is a story about big forces moving against the player and plot twists that you can see miles away. However, it is still a fun epic romp through some really large set pieces that serve as an excuse to set up some big fun battles. The only real complaint that I have is that much of the denouement of each conflict plays out in the form of a cutscene that you watch through Blood-O-Vision 3000… as you touch Lilith’s Pedals. Diablo has always been known for its cool cutscenes and this is no different, but they also serve as the key method in which the larger plot moves forward which may or may not be your personal taste.
Most of the boss encounters are legitimately good. There is enough room to scale them up in order to create something akin to the Uber bosses from Path of Exile. On lower difficulties, they serve to feel just challenging enough to not fall over immediately as the bosses in Diablo III did. There are a few fights that felt needlessly tanky… but I chock that up to the general lack of balance, the game seems to have. I feel like Diablo IV is a case in point of why you don’t get rid of Q&A employees as Activision Blizzard has had a habit of doing over the last half dozen years. I think Diablo IV could be a great game given enough time and focus to balance the game into something that actually feels fun all of the time… rather than feeling fun under exactly the right conditions.
I’ve now officially entered the endgame of Diablo IV, but can’t really talk much about it yet. I unlocked the Tree of Whispers which gives you access to the Whispers of the Dead system. From what I understand a zone is marked by the tree and you are sent there to reclaim “the debt that is owed” I won’t go into that in any more detail as it could provide some spoilers. Essentially it is a bounty system that involves you going and doing specific activities in a given zone in order to collect Grim Favors. Grim Favors are then turned in for rewards from the tree that I believe give you access to legendaries and nightmare dungeon glyphs. Nightmare Dungeons are effectively mythic plus from World of Warcraft and the glyph is somewhat like a map in Path of Exile and will set the affixes being applied to the dungeon. I legitimately have only played long enough after the campaign to unlock the dialog box explaining this system and then took a screenshot of the area of the map it was being applied to this morning. I am sure later this week I will have a more cogent set of thoughts about this system.
If you want bonus points… you can listen to me ramble for twenty minutes about the live service dystopia we find ourselves in, and some of my fears about what a battle pass system will mean for this game. Of note… this was recorded before I started focus firing the campaign and doesn’t really reflect much on the game itself other than my general concerns. There are times I feel like recording one of these videos and I did so yesterday morning. Basically, my thesis is that a given player only has time to play one live service game at a time, and as a result, EVERY live service game is ultimately competing with every other one.
I think ultimately my stance is the same as it has been for a while. I think Diablo IV is a great game for the players who will play through the campaign once, and then move on with their lives… maybe to revisit much much later but won’t be mainlining the game. Was it the game I had hoped it would be? No… not in the least. Does that make it any less of a good game? No not really. I think Diablo IV is a very solid game that is just fun enough to get you past some of the major frustrations. I think the first map sucks ass and they would have been far better starting the player in the second map… Scosglen. Scosglen feels and more importantly, SOUNDS like a Diablo game. Diablo is a game about killing demons to jangly chords… and Diablo music finally starts to kick in during Act II.
If I had any bit of advice for new players approaching this game… it would be to do NOTHING but yellow quests aka the main questline… until you reach the beginning of Act IV and complete the quest “Donan’s Favor” and then from that point forward you can return to screwing around and doing side quests at your leisure. Mounts make a massive difference in improving the quality of life of this game and in truth Blizzard fashion… you are robbed of that experience until you are almost done with the campaign. Knowing what I know now… I would essentially rush to the point of having a mount and then return to a leisurely leveling pace. However for all characters from this point forward… I probably won’t actually do the campaign given that unlocking the mount once unlocks it for all of your characters.
I know that I am a very specific edge case when it comes to Diablo players. I liked Diablo III and felt like it got a lot of things right. Diablo IV feels like an overcorrection in attempting to erase the legacy of Diablo III from memory… while at the same time reconning some of the story elements to essentially make that game more or less not exist. As a result, Diablo IV is a direct sequel to Diablo II, in both stories… and the plodding feel of combat. If you loved Diablo II… and have played it recently and still can affirm that it is your ideal Diablo game… then Diablo IV is probably going to be a gift from the heavens planted at your feet. If you liked Diablo III… this game is going to feel like an uncoordinated mess at times. If you are a big fan of Path of Exile… this is going to feel like a bit of a slog compared to how relatively fast moving through that game can feel. Still, I don’t think Diablo IV is a bad game… and pending Blizzard gives the game some TLC over the next few years it might even become a great game.
I figure I will spend some time exploring the end game, but also am more than likely to happily jump on the next game that comes along which catches my attention. This is probably blasphemy… but I think Diablo Immortal was actually a more mechanically enjoyable game than Diablo IV. Too bad they chose evil and went full-on into microtransaction hell with that one because it is more the direct sequel to Diablo III that I really wanted.
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