Morning Folks! I completed what is probably the last of the challenges that I am going to face in this league. I am happy to sit at 34/40 because other than the memories challenge everything else is T17 or Uber Boss related. I took the lame way out and just bought some bulk constrictor maps at 21 of them for a Divine Orb which allowed me to grind out the last few guardian maps that I needed for this challenge. I feel pretty great with the progress that I made during the Necropolis League and would be perfectly fine at this point if I did not play again until the start of 3.25. I am not saying for certain that is going to happen but that I would would feel accomplished for the progress I’ve made.
Today is the launch of Diablo IV Season 4 and I know that I will be spending at least a bit of time playing it. Generally speaking… I tend to start a Barbarian since that has been the last that I have enjoyed the most to date. They feel a bit weak at the start of the game but once you start gearing them they feel great. Earlier this week Raxx released a Tier list video and apparently… Necromancers especially of the minion variety have been significantly buffed. This is making me consider a Necro start given that I do love me some minion gameplay. I am not sure which class I will spend most of my time playing, and really how good the state of the game feels is going to be what determines my level of engagement. I had a heck of a lot of fun during Season 2 so here is hoping that Season 4 feels equally good.
Other than that I have been spending quite a bit of time playing Guild Wars 2. Kodra has been back and active a good deal lately, which has prompted me to want to go back and explore Tyria. I would love to be able to find a time when I can be online with various folks that I know and actually do some of the content. Fractals are probably the lowest common denominator, but I would love to get more engaged in Strikes and potentially even Raids now that there is a training wheels mode. I have a commander tag so that is pretty much what is required for doing multi-group activities.
My favorite aspect of the game is just how easy it is to engage in open-world group activities. I had a Wizard’s Vault challenge that asked me to kill 100 Risen. I figured I would pop over to Orr and do some gathering while slowly completing that challenge, and before I knew it someone was calling out that the Arah event was starting up, so I joined the crowd and made my way to the legendary High Wizard easily soaking up enough kills along the way. It is moments like that which really sell me on Guild Wars 2, because it is so easy to start doing one thing and get wrapped up in a bunch of other things along the way that you were not planning on doing at all.
Later in the evening, I wound up in WVW because I had cashed in my Wizard’s Vault tokens in order to get the third legendary weapon box. This meant that I needed to farm up another Gift of Battle, which meant following around and helping a group of folks take objectives. I had not really played WvW since the most recent round of changes but pending you are going there to actually do the combat, it seems like you gain progress faster than you did previously. I’m about halfway to my next gift of battle and figure in the coming weeks I will poke my head back into WvW a bit more as I tend to find it shockingly chill.
Unfortunately, when I cashed in my Wizard’s Vault tokens I did not pay attention to the other rewards. This chair is amazing and I must have it, which means I need to be fairly active each day to make sure I am gaining enough progress in order to pick it up. Why yes I do want to be surrounded by lounging cats while I am waiting on World Events to start. Chairs in this game are such an odd pastime, but I am happy to see a really great one available that is not in the cash shop.
The post Seeking Cat Tree Chair appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks. I will give you some fair warning… this is going to be a bit of a bummer of a topic especially if you are a big fan of Diablo or more specifically Diablo IV. If so you might want to give this topic a hard pass. I consume a lot of gaming content, and in doing so I notice certain trends. I’ve been thinking about this topic since the beginning of Season 3, and I am not sure what shape it will take. For years there have been what I could only term “Blizzard Content Creators” or folks who are very dedicated to that company or dedicated to one particular gaming franchise within their portfolio. Diablo had one of the strongest communities of dedicated content creators for years. For example up until season 29… rain or shine… every single week Raxxanterax released a guide video on how to complete that week’s challenge dungeon (650 of them in fact… 1 each week for EU and one for NA).
The thing is… one by one the dedicated content creators have been giving up on Diablo, or at least deciding that they cannot continue to function by ONLY creating content for that game. Affliction League was the first time that Raxxanterax did some dedicated coverage of Path of Exile, and similarly, he has gone extremely hardcore on Last Epoch with its launch. Diablo Immortal and later Diablo IV were the games that really put Darth Microtransaction on the map… and he’s made the decision that he had to stop focusing on that game and instead pivoted to other titles. He is maybe one of the most savvy YouTubers I have seen and it is very clear that he is following the trends and the metrics… and Diablo 4 seems to be tanking in relevancy. The popularity of the game peaked in June 2023 and then has largely tanked since. When the game launched everyone that I had on my large Battle.net friends list was playing it… and by the time season one rolled around it was just my cousin that was consistently logged in.
Rhykker has been one of the most corporate message focused YouTubers when it comes to Diablo. I had stopped subscribing to his channel at one point because it always felt like he was following the company line on pretty much everything. Even his content has reached a point where it is mostly negative about Diablo IV and with the launch of Last Epoch I saw him releasing guide content for that game. While he has always covered lots of general ARPG news, this is probably the first time I can recall him making dedicated guide videos for a game that was not some sort of alpha/beta preview coverage. It feels like the creators that used to make up the core of Diablo… have largely given up on the game. The first season was bad… season two gave everyone a bit of hope… but season three and the poor reception of the heavily delayed gauntlet have caused interest to plummet into the sub-basement.
Of all of the above though… the one that shocked me the most was this video from Wudijo. Up until this point he has been quite possibly the most dedicated content creator for Diablo IV. He was the first solo hardcore player to hit level 100 at the launch of the game and has been entirely devoted to the game through all of the ups and downs. For him, it seemed like Last Epoch was the tipping point, and seeing how well a game from a much smaller team with a smaller budget was providing a much better gaming experience. In the above video, he outlines that he is going to be stepping away from Diablo IV and making content not only for Last Epoch but also diving back into Path of Exile and eventually Path of Exile II. I get that the average couch gamer does not give a shit about these content creators… but it certainly feels like a good number of folks who made their entire career focused on Diablo are now abandoning the franchise.
I feel like at least part of this is because Blizzard has become complacent. They spent two decades not really needing to properly compete with anyone in a number of niches. Diablo was the archetypal ARPG, World of Warcraft the genre-defining MMORPG, and Starcraft the game that largely spawned e-sports. In every single one of these verticals… the games stagnated allowing Last Epoch and Path of Exile to take the spotlight away from Diablo, Final Fantasy XIV to cause a mass migration away from World of Warcraft… and Starcraft to have limited relevancy in the modern e-sports landscape dominated by DOTA2, League of Legends, and Valorant. It feels like Blizzard is a company that long ago began feeding off its own hype cycle and now just isn’t creating games that are that great anymore. To be fair… World of Warcraft has seen a similar drain of formerly dedicated content creators over the last few years.
Diablo will always have a special place in my heart, and there is no theme that “means” ARPG more than the Tristram theme. However, I am just not sure Blizzard is going to pull out of this spiral. Last Epoch for years has been a game with an amazing core but one that needed a lot of polish and window dressing… and more than anything just more content. Diablo IV however is a game with a flawed core… that is going to need to have almost a top-down rework of several systems to bring it in line with what the players are expecting. It is a game that looks gorgeous… but is made up of duct tape and paper mache once you punch through that lovely facade. I am just not sure that Blizzard is the sort of company that is willing to commit to an “A Realm Reborn” or “No Mans Sky” level of reinvention to make the game what it needs to be. So yeah… in writing this I have wound up bumming myself out.
I hope your week is going well and if you have made it to this point in the post… sorry for being a downer.
The post Abandoning Diablo appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks. I will give you some fair warning… this is going to be a bit of a bummer of a topic especially if you are a big fan of Diablo or more specifically Diablo IV. If so you might want to give this topic a hard pass. I consume a lot of gaming content, and in doing so I notice certain trends. I’ve been thinking about this topic since the beginning of Season 3, and I am not sure what shape it will take. For years there have been what I could only term “Blizzard Content Creators” or folks who are very dedicated to that company or dedicated to one particular gaming franchise within their portfolio. Diablo had one of the strongest communities of dedicated content creators for years. For example up until season 29… rain or shine… every single week Raxxanterax released a guide video on how to complete that week’s challenge dungeon (650 of them in fact… 1 each week for EU and one for NA).
The thing is… one by one the dedicated content creators have been giving up on Diablo, or at least deciding that they cannot continue to function by ONLY creating content for that game. Affliction League was the first time that Raxxanterax did some dedicated coverage of Path of Exile, and similarly, he has gone extremely hardcore on Last Epoch with its launch. Diablo Immortal and later Diablo IV were the games that really put Darth Microtransaction on the map… and he’s made the decision that he had to stop focusing on that game and instead pivoted to other titles. He is maybe one of the most savvy YouTubers I have seen and it is very clear that he is following the trends and the metrics… and Diablo 4 seems to be tanking in relevancy. The popularity of the game peaked in June 2023 and then has largely tanked since. When the game launched everyone that I had on my large Battle.net friends list was playing it… and by the time season one rolled around it was just my cousin that was consistently logged in.
Rhykker has been one of the most corporate message focused YouTubers when it comes to Diablo. I had stopped subscribing to his channel at one point because it always felt like he was following the company line on pretty much everything. Even his content has reached a point where it is mostly negative about Diablo IV and with the launch of Last Epoch I saw him releasing guide content for that game. While he has always covered lots of general ARPG news, this is probably the first time I can recall him making dedicated guide videos for a game that was not some sort of alpha/beta preview coverage. It feels like the creators that used to make up the core of Diablo… have largely given up on the game. The first season was bad… season two gave everyone a bit of hope… but season three and the poor reception of the heavily delayed gauntlet have caused interest to plummet into the sub-basement.
Of all of the above though… the one that shocked me the most was this video from Wudijo. Up until this point he has been quite possibly the most dedicated content creator for Diablo IV. He was the first solo hardcore player to hit level 100 at the launch of the game and has been entirely devoted to the game through all of the ups and downs. For him, it seemed like Last Epoch was the tipping point, and seeing how well a game from a much smaller team with a smaller budget was providing a much better gaming experience. In the above video, he outlines that he is going to be stepping away from Diablo IV and making content not only for Last Epoch but also diving back into Path of Exile and eventually Path of Exile II. I get that the average couch gamer does not give a shit about these content creators… but it certainly feels like a good number of folks who made their entire career focused on Diablo are now abandoning the franchise.
I feel like at least part of this is because Blizzard has become complacent. They spent two decades not really needing to properly compete with anyone in a number of niches. Diablo was the archetypal ARPG, World of Warcraft the genre-defining MMORPG, and Starcraft the game that largely spawned e-sports. In every single one of these verticals… the games stagnated allowing Last Epoch and Path of Exile to take the spotlight away from Diablo, Final Fantasy XIV to cause a mass migration away from World of Warcraft… and Starcraft to have limited relevancy in the modern e-sports landscape dominated by DOTA2, League of Legends, and Valorant. It feels like Blizzard is a company that long ago began feeding off its own hype cycle and now just isn’t creating games that are that great anymore. To be fair… World of Warcraft has seen a similar drain of formerly dedicated content creators over the last few years.
Diablo will always have a special place in my heart, and there is no theme that “means” ARPG more than the Tristram theme. However, I am just not sure Blizzard is going to pull out of this spiral. Last Epoch for years has been a game with an amazing core but one that needed a lot of polish and window dressing… and more than anything just more content. Diablo IV however is a game with a flawed core… that is going to need to have almost a top-down rework of several systems to bring it in line with what the players are expecting. It is a game that looks gorgeous… but is made up of duct tape and paper mache once you punch through that lovely facade. I am just not sure that Blizzard is the sort of company that is willing to commit to an “A Realm Reborn” or “No Mans Sky” level of reinvention to make the game what it needs to be. So yeah… in writing this I have wound up bumming myself out.
I hope your week is going well and if you have made it to this point in the post… sorry for being a downer.
The post Abandoning Diablo 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.
