Good Morning Friends! Yesterday was the launch of Diablo IV and I did in fact play the game as the servers came up. There was a bit of weirdness with battle.net as things launched but it had resolved itself within the first fifteen minutes. After that for the most part it felt like logging in and playing any game that had been active for months. I feel like whatever work Blizzard did ahead of the launch was deeply beneficial to the stability of the servers, because while we have yet to see what a difference the “standard copy” players make on the 6th… for the most part every was solid. In fact, I would say that the game itself performed far better than I had experienced in any of the closed or public testing phases that I had participated in. The entire game just felt snappier than I remember from the last public test and I am not sure if this was engine optimization on the side of Blizzard or the fact that Nvidia released brand-new drivers for the game launch. Whatever the case it felt pretty great, which I guess is making me question some of my early opinions of the game.
I made a Barbarian, and effectively the same one I have made a half dozen times in various testing phases which allowed me to breeze through the character creation boss. As far as a skill set I decided to give Maxroll a shot and follow their Upheaval guide since of all of the fury spenders that one felt the best to me in previous phases. Now I am uncertain which is the case, but either Blizzard significantly buffed the Barbarian to make it feel better at the early stages of the game… or the entire game has been nerfed a bit. Whereas before combat felt sluggish and plodding… it now feels snappy and fluid. I gotta say… I don’t hate this game. It still isn’t really an ARPG in my book… at least not one in the traditional sense but for an Isometric MMORPG it feels pretty solid. Maybe I have just had enough time to get over my initial disappointment, or maybe it is the fact that I have largely finished with the current Path of Exile League and have mentally put that game to bed for a while. Whatever the case I had quite a bit of fun last night. Not so much fun that I did not have a pause mid-evening to go out and play with the outdoor cats.
When I say… something significant has changed what I mean is that I am level 15 and have mainlined the story through the first zone and have not taken a single death yet. This is very much NOT the case in previous testing phases. Barbarians had to basically spam potions to survive the early phases of combat and it feels like I have barely had to pay attention to my health other than during boss fights. Someone from the team had announced that this was pretty much the same build as the most recent stress test, but I do not believe them at all. It does make me want to fire up a Necromancer to see what the state of minions looks like and determine if that is also fixed. Whatever the case… my opinion of Diablo IV as a whole would be massively different had I experienced THIS build in any of my testing phases. I’m not sure what last-minute balance changes were made but they certainly feel significant.
The cash shop is now available in the game, and it is in fact a cash shop. Some of the cosmetics are pretty good looking, like this crusader-esc outfit for the Barbarian. However, most of the cosmetics are kinda fugly. Like maybe I am just not as big of an equestrian person, but it feels like a lot of effort went into the horses in this game and they are all sorta awful looking. I am hoping there will be mounts OTHER than horses… because really… I almost NEVER ride a horse in an MMO. Give me a big bear mount or something like that, and you might pry some money from my hands. Maybe it is a side effect of growing up around horses my entire life… but they are sorta boring. Essentially there is a single outfit for the Necromancer and a single outfit for the Barbarian that I consider worthy of a purchase, but the rest of the dross is kinda “mid” at best. Essentially the conversion rate of Platnium to dollars is $1 to 100, so the big fancy cosmetic armor packages are $24.
All I really did last night was make a beeline through the story bits that I have seen multiple times for this first zone. I’ve not even unlocked most of the map, so in theory tonight I will be spending my time branching out and exploring things… and now I feel like I have the motivation to actually complete all the dungeons to get the imprint unlocks. Mostly I wanted to finish up the story while I was still relatively low level in case they had not resolved the problem of leveling up and making you feel weaker. So far that has not really been the case, which I am hoping means that is the side effect of more balance changes. I am sure I will be focused on this game for most of the weekend and will likely give you a more formal review on Monday.
I created a Clan last night if any of the usual suspects want a home. However, I am rapidly realizing how long I have been away from Blizzard games and how pretty much everyone has a new guild family that they play with. I will admit it was a little weird to see that <House Stalwart> had been created and that I had nothing to do with it. Granted I have been “Not-The-Guild-Leader” of the guild that I founded far longer than I was actually the leader, and it has always been in great hands with Kylana. I figure <GREY> will be pretty small in Diablo IV given that I am not sure if any of the AggroChat regulars intend to play the game. That said if you need a chill home feel free to apply in the game or hit me up while I am playing for an invite. I left it public so folks could sign up while I was offline.
I’m still not entirely sure what I think of Diablo IV. I think better of it now after having played this latest version… but it is still not necessarily what I was hoping it would be. I think this is going to be a great game for most of the players who decide to pick it up because the vast majority of Diablo players as a whole… get in… play through the campaign once or twice… and then uninstall the game feeling satisfied maybe to revisit it at some point in the future when they get the itch. I do wonder what the endgame and seasonal cadence is going to look like going forward. I’m not entirely certain this is going to be a game for the players who have adapted to the ways of Last Epoch and Path of Exile. In fact, I think there are probably going to be some players who were waiting around to see what Diablo IV was… before finally committing to those games. I do have to give Blizzard credit for starting to change my opinion though with some last-minute tweaks and balance changes… and an incredibly stable launch night.
The post Rethinking Diablo IV appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
So when I wrote yesterday morning, I was lamenting whether or not I would actually be able to catch up in the story for Honkai Star Rail by the time the next content drop happens on June 6th. Then last night… I apparently caught up. The conflict on the Xianzhou Luofu has not completely resolved itself, but I did manage to get a massive story drop that ultimately concludes with the game telling me it is time for an intermission. I am certain there are still a number of side quests that I have to catch up on, and I need to do more daily content on the Luofu to be able to gain enough of the shop currency to purchase the rest of the Eidolons for the Fire form of your main character. This is probably a good thing honestly because it means I can likely rip through the content remaining in an hour or so… rather than needing to mainline the game.
What I did not expect was to care so much about some of the characters. There are some storylines that just hit you right in the feels. That is something that I did not really remember from Genshin… actually caring about any of the characters. There were a bunch of storylines that were “cute” or “entertaining” but I never really felt like I had any actual emotional connection with those characters. Most of my choices were because I liked the way certain abilities felt or the way specific characters looked. I love how side missions are presented in this game, through text messages from the characters because as you meet new people you are teaching them how to join this global network that all of the planets are connected to. It is allowing extended stories to roll out slowly over time and fill in the details that took place after the main conflict involving those characters was resolved.
The other thing that I am deeply enjoying about this game is how Hoyoverse seems to be making some very specific statements about things. Like yesterday I talked about their characterization of “Space China” as a large inefficient bureaucracy. The more I think about this, the more certain I am that this was very purposeful. For example above is an example of them making comments about ChatGPT, and there are other places where they have thrown digs at the “Metaverse” as a concept. One of my favorite tropes is the fact that March 7th… keeps pointing out every time we are walking into a situation that seems like the beginning of a horror movie. At first, I thought this was a single throwaway line… but she has pointed something like this out like three times so far. The characters in Honkai Star Rail feel so much more vibrant than what I remember from Genshin Impact, and I think in part that is what is making this game so enticing for me.
In other news… since I own Diablo IV and it was given to me as a gift… I figure I am going to go in for this madness and see if the game has improved or gets better as it approaches the end game. I have the game installed and ready for the launch this evening. Blizzard can play the game by saying the launch date is the 6th, but really it is launching today and this early access nonsense is really just penalizing players who would not pony up the extra bucks to play it. Anyways I am not overly positive about this game but I am also a sucker for anything actively in the zeitgeist so… shocking to no one I will be joining the madness. Of my immediate circle of AggroChat friends, I fully expect I will be the only one save for maybe Eliyon who is way more of a “Blizzard gamer” than the rest of us. I know my friend Cylladora is really excited for it, so if nothing else I hope to spend some time hanging out with her.
I am a glutton for punishment and plan on rolling another Barbarian, because at the end of the day… that is really my class of choice in most Diablo games. If the Crusader existed, I would probably play that but for the moment I am loosely planning on leveling as Upheaval since I enjoyed that fairly well during the last test period and it also gave me some ranged gameplay options for fights when I could not stand in melee. I fully expect to recreate something close to this beefcake murder hobo from the last testing round. I’m hoping there have been some significant changes since the last round of testing, but I am not banking on it. My personal preference would be to bip around the map doing all the side content and leveling myself up… to over level the content and then steamrolling the story. However, Diablo IV doesn’t exactly work that way and all that seems to do is serve to make story fights more annoying. So I will likely mainline the story at least until I have consumed everything in the first area… then spend some time catching my level up doing side content.
If we are mutuals on any social platform, feel free to add me to your friend list. My Battle Tag information is over in the sidebar of this blog under the Diablo III graphic, or you can go to my one size fits all rarely updated list of game account information here. If you use a name that I don’t recognize however you might expect a “new phone who dis” message from me.
The post Luofu Caught Up appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Friends. Yesterday in the AggroChat Slack there was this whole thread about growing up in the gifted and talented program, but also being just “gifted” enough to fully understand your own inadequacies. I felt this so damned hard because this is essentially the story of my life. I was on the mediocre end of the gifted pool and while I participated in all of the elevated events, and was actually good enough at the academic bowl to place in the district banquet and force the horrible football coach to have to accept an award on my behalf… I never really felt good enough to actually be recognized as such. For most of my life, I have been “winging it” and bumblefucked my way into the occasional success. Take for example this cosmetic outfit that I am wearing on my Explosive Arrow Champion. There was no real planning here, just me clicking on a few random cosmetics because I hate the default look of low-level gear in Path of Exile. By sheer accident, I came up with something that I really love, which is this whole microcosm of my life as a whole. Any real success that I have had… has been purely by accident.
I know yesterday I released this entire blog post talking about my experiences from the Diablo IV Server Slam weekend. Yesterday I decided that I wanted to refine those thoughts a bit and opted to do so in a video of me playing around on my Scion in Path of Exile. Something that I have noticed about myself is that often when I sit down to write about something, it causes me to re-evaluate that topic in my head. This video is largely the place I arrived at after writing an entire blog post about the experience. It allowed me to really refine my thoughts into a sharper point and get to the crux of what my primary problem with the game is. I decided to skip the clever title card and just go with something way more honest. If you want to hear me ramble on for fifteen minutes about the core of my frustrations feel free. But I will skip to the chase and tell you that ultimately it boils down to the level scaling feeling really bad.
In the video, I am poking around at a new character that I have been leveling that I called BelGlamrock mostly because the default Scion appearance looks like an outfit straight out of the hair metal band era. The weird thing about this character is that I honestly have no real intention of ever gearing it fully or turning it into a real character for playing the game. Truth be told, I am not sure if I really like the Scion as a starter class at all. It feels kind of directionless, but I guess that makes sense given it doesn’t have a fixed starter location on the passive tree. The benefit of the class is that you can mix and match the ascendency style of the other classes and build a sort of hybrid to do very specific things. This also feels like the weakness of the class because it doesn’t really have an identity of its own.
Ultimately I have accomplished what I set out to accomplish with the character. It was a means to an end and the fact that I had never gotten the achievement for killing Dominus on the Scion bugged me for some reason. I don’t fully understand why I have been motivated to get specific achievements in Path of Exile given that I have never really been an achievement-focused person in any other games. Generally speaking, the only achievements that I spend time on, are the ones that give me something tangible as a reward. This is in part why I have enjoyed the Achievement structure of Guild Wars 2 because almost always they end in some sort of interesting tangible reward. My drive to get achievements in Path of Exile however completely flies in the face of my well-established patterns. I get nothing from having knocked these out other than the sense of checking something off a long list of achievements that I have yet to complete. Similarly, I have this irrational desire to run two characters through Act 2, just to side with the Bandits I have never sided with before in order to knock that achievement as well.
Speaking of achievements, I am nearing 19 league challenges which will give me another sad little totem pole for my hideout. In order to finish this off I respeccced my Atlas Passive tree to drop support for incursion and pile on some of the Abyss nodes. I realize that Abyss is not exactly great in this league, but I am pretty close to knocking out the challenge associated with it. Essentially I need to find several more 4 pit Abysses and I think by trying to force the chance of seeing an Abyssal Depths… it will cause this to happen. In the grand scheme of things I really like Abyss as a mechanic, but it does feel way less rewarding than it did before their most recent revamp. I am going to be running maps anyways to build up sulphite for delving so I might as well be getting the mechanics I need for challenges in the process. I also have a stockpile of abyss scarabs that I can use to force it as well.
I am not entirely certain what my exit strategy is for this league. I’ve still not earned my last two void stones, so given the state my Explosive Arrow Champion is in, I might lend some focus to that. I’ve tried to accumulate the fragments needed for shaper and ultimately uber elder organically, but that is really slow going. I am wondering if I should just use some of my war chest of resources and buy the fragments that I need outright. I still find Delve deeply relaxing but also I am starting to feel a little listless there. I’ve taken down three crystal kings in recent days and failed to get a good amulet, but even if I did get a good one… what exactly would I do with it? I am not sure there are other builds that I really want to spend time doing given that in this league I have made four completely functional builds for doing the various content that I really want to be doing.
I think maybe when I finish up this 19th challenge for the league I might take a bit of a break. I can do so happy that I accomplished pretty much everything that I really wanted to accomplish save for the Uber bosses. I might take a run at those, but to be honest… I don’t really love bossing in the first place. I like the big loot explosions that come from lower tiers of activities and I can’t really bring myself to buy an endless supply of fragments from the trade league in order to chain-run bosses. I might want to do some more heist and burn down my contracts a bit, but other than that… I think I can maybe put the Crucible league to bed for awhile.
The post Forever Winging It appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks! This past weekend there was another Diablo IV Stress Test event, and I thought I would poke my head in to see how it felt. On the show Saturday night I talked about it feeling much better as a whole and that is true. However better, in this case, does not necessarily equate to “great”. I am still not super sold on Diablo IV but since I was gifted a copy, I figure I will be playing some at launch regardless so I can see if yet again they make a number of tweaks to potentially improve things further. One thing that shocked me about the “Server Slam” event is how short it actually was. I fully expected this thing to last until mid-day on Monday as most “weekend” events do. Instead, it cut off in the middle of Sunday afternoon unexpectedly. The only reason why I realized this had happened is that I finished a quest and could not port anywhere, after trying ten times I opted to log out and back in when I was hit with the “event is over” banner on the Battle.net launcher. I found it weird that it did not actually disconnect me from the server, it just stopped my character from doing anything meaningful.
Since I was testing out the changes, I decided to play Barbarian again because of the classes available it is really the one that is nearest and dearest to my heart. If there was a Crusader you would likely see me playing nothing but that all the time as I did when I played Diablo Immortal. The last round of testing the Barbarian felt awful. It felt like I had no survivability and struggled to keep up gear levels so that I could actually kill anything before it killed me. Of note… during neither beta did I spend any time “farming” gear drops and instead just sort of subsisted with whatever happened to fall while playing the game. One of the biggest weaknesses that Diablo IV has in my opinion is the fact that the world is constantly leveling up with you. I think this is an attempt at creating an evergreen game that “lasts longer” for the player, but the end result feels like the world gets more difficult faster than you gain power. While it was less noticeable during this test, it still felt like from levels 15-20 I lost power and the time to kill in the world kept getting worse.
One massive change in this test was that they nerfed drop rates into the ground. Like I knew without a doubt that legendary drops were increased for testing purposes in the last open beta weekend. However, I did not expect them to be quite this anemic going forward. It was level 17 before I found a single legendary item, and even then… by the time I finished with the weekend I had seen two and they were both rings. The only gear slot that seems to matter significantly is your weapon slot, and I struggled consistently to find upgrades there. The game just does not really seem to drop a lot of gear in general or when it does… drops them in a manner that is not upgrading. I saw lots of items that were just slightly worse than what I was wearing but extremely rarely ever saw something with more power. Even when you stumbled across a Loot Goblin, they seemed deeply anticlimactic for the amount of effort they took to kill. I took one down on Sunday and it dropped 2 blue items, 2 gems, and some Obols the new pseudo-Kadala currency.
Speaking of Obols… this is a screenshot from the last test of that vendor. It became my prime source of upgrades and was how I got most of the legendary items that I pulled last time around. In this test… it was nerfed into the ground and became a largely worthless interaction. Since I was not getting gear through other sources I kept spending my Obols trying to target specific slots, and the vast majority of the time I would end up getting a white item and trigger the “bad luck” voice line from the vendor. At level 20, I kept trying to target a chest piece and never got anything that would be considered an upgrade. At a minimum, this vendor should be dropping Magic and Rare items much more frequently, because every activity in the game seems to be balanced around paying out a stock of this dumb alternative currency. If this vendor is pure shit, then it makes every interaction with the game feel much worse.
One interaction however that was massively improved was the completion of “Cellars”. These are little mini dungeons where you rush in, kill a pack of monsters and get a chest to drop. These went from being the most useless thing in the game to quite possibly the most lucrative when it comes to farming items. These chests almost always rewarded two yellows, two blues, some gems, and some gold. I feel like Blizzard does not really want us farming Cellars over and over… but also right now as it stands those are way more beneficial than running an actual dungeon given that they both provide about the same amount of rewards but for a significantly lower time investment. I fully expect the cellar system to be nerfed into the ground before launch and for them to once again fade into something that is not worth your time to complete.
The goal of this weekend was to successfully kill Ashava, and for doing so you got some nifty-looking horse armor. I have to admit this was not necessarily my personal goal for the weekend. I wanted to see if Barbarian felt any better, and at least partially it does… not great… but better. After editing the AggroChat podcast on Sunday I decided to finally make my way over to the staging grounds for the Ashava fight. My hope was that if I showed up early enough I might happen upon a decent group and that seems to have paid off as everyone that was milling around in the area was at least level 20. This was apparently a huge problem for players this weekend as level 2 players could wander into the area and essentially destroy the chances of that group succeeding at the encounter since Ashava is templated at level 25 and does not scale.
This is the one where I am going to complain at length about this encounter and the way it works. The difficulty level of this encounter does not necessarily match the open-world nature of the encounter. This fight feels like it is designed to have a team full of ringers that actually know what is going on. Instead, you get a group of random players and hope that fate smiles upon you and you end up with a group that is at least going to give it their best effort. The limited-time nature of the fight however makes it so that if you failed… you don’t get another chance any time soon. If I were Blizzard I would change the way this works entirely and make it so that you queue into the “serious mode” version of Ashava and then have a much more watered-down version that exists in the real world showing up on a specific timer… but also make that timer fire every thirty mins rather than every three hours.
The group I was in managed to take down Ashava with roughly three of the fifteen-minute clock left. What I did not realize however is that I got in on the very last Ashava kill of the entire testing period. I wandered over through the sheer happenstance of finishing editing and having time to play and made zero plans to actually accomplish this over the weekend. I am deeply fortunate that I happened upon a group of players who did not give up and just kept throwing themselves at the boss. What did annoy me however is that before the fight I purposefully slotted Poison Resistance into every gem slot that I had, and it did not seem to make a damned bit of difference on this fight. This only leads me back down the path of that gear doesn’t really mean anything and only your weapon slot seems to make any significant difference in your performance. For example, in Path of Exile, if you equip a couple of frost resistance rings before you face Merveil, it will absolutely make that encounter much easier and oftentimes just straight-up trivializes it. Poison Resistance did not seem to do a damned thing against getting clipped by one of Ashava’s attacks and only through spamming potions were you able to survive getting poisoned.
I hope at some point that this game is good and worthy of the Diablo name. I like the story well enough, but the moment-to-moment gameplay still just feels bad. Maybe that is the wrong statement to make. It doesn’t feel like an Action RPG should, or at least how I have come to expect one to play. It seems to be going for more consequential gameplay, which is counter-intuitive to this genre for me at least. I care about shredding monsters and getting “phat lewts”, and this game doesn’t really deliver in that department. Fights feel like a battle of attrition more than a power fantasy, and as a result, I am not sure it is ever going to be my jam. The weekend of playing Diablo IV made me dive back into Path of Exile after the event was over and it just felt so much better. Maybe this is just a franchise I need to let go of in the way I have at least partially let go of Zelda after Breath of the Wild and Metroid after Dread. It sucks… but maybe it is time for me to move on considering I apparently have preferences that are not going to be served going forward.
The post Accidental Ashava Timing appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
