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.
Hey Folks! I have been recording a series of videos of me playing various games as part of a larger “Bel Bungles” series. I have no clue why but I find some modicum of enjoyment to record short videos of me talking about a thing from a game. Today I am experimenting a bit because normally speaking I do not make a specific blog post when I do one of these. I occasionally reference a video and embed it in another post, but I’ve never really made a post exclusively for one of these uploads. So I am shifting things up a bit and doing just that thing.
Today I figured it had been a bit since I had recorded one of these dumb Bel Bungles videos talking about my Righteous Fire Juggernaut in Path of Exile. So since I mostly do Delve on that character, I decided to post a video of me clearing out a few city nodes down in the mines and talk through some of my thought processes. I have no clue why anyone watches these, but I enjoy making them… and will likely keep making them until I stop enjoying them. Thanks to everyone who is just along for the ride, and hopefully they don’t get too terribly annoying.
Good Morning Friends! I was not entirely certain I would be doing a blog post this morning because technically this is the beginning of my “weekend”. However last night I embarked upon some madness and this morning I am sharing the fruits of it. I think I’ve been a little dishonest with myself when it comes to the extent to which Path of Exile has become my new gaming “main squeeze” over the last two years. This is part of a larger evolution that I did understand considerably better, but I was not fully aware of the sheer extent to which I have been choosing to play Path of Exile over other games. For the last decade, I have been on this transition from playing MMORPGs as my primary gaming vehicle to ARPGs in part because ARPGs feel much better to play solo.
Playing MMORPGs like I often do… completely alone… with only very rare human interaction… feels like I am misunderstanding the purpose of that genre. There are just so many activities that I can’t realistically participate in without also building the social infrastructure required and committing to the regular play schedule required for them. Playing a Diablo-style Action RPG however… is a largely solo endeavor that occasionally benefits from friends, but features a rich series of activities that you can engage with entirely on your own. Part of why I have come to love Guild Wars 2 so much is that it allows me to FEEL like I am part of a larger group experience, without actually having to do any of the social maintenance required to truly be part of a group. In the ARPG genre, however… solo is the norm and as a result, most of the mechanics are designed to be completed without the need of any other players. In an era of progressively forcing you more and more into group gameplay… the humble ARPG stands as somewhat of a beacon in the storm.
Now we scan forward to yesterday where on Gamepad.club I was commenting about being somewhat gobsmacked that a month into the Crucible league and I have already found seven Tabula Rasas. For those who are uninitiated in the nonsense that is Path of Exile, the Tabula Rasa is essentially the ultimate starter item. It gives you access to six sockets of any color at level 1, and this is really the basis of most “second characters” because it allows you to stack powerful support gems on an ability long before you can realistically get that many sockets on a single item. During this league, I have found six Corrupted Tabulas (+2 Minion Gems, +2 AOE Gems, and +2 Aura Gems) and four vanilla ones. Now one of these corrupted Tabulas came from the Vanity Divination card set, and two of the normal ones came Humility set. The weird thing about it however is that I have spent ZERO hours purposefully farming for one like I did last league in Blood Aqueducts.
To this entire exchange, my friend Carth innocently commented that he could not imagine how much time I’ve put in this league to see that many. Now I know that number is large because when Steam tried to shame me into leaving a review for the game, it shows that I have now played over 1100 hours in total. I’ve honestly contemplated giving the game a review, but quite honestly… how does one leave a review for a game as complicated as Path of Exile? Over 1100 hours into the game, I still feel very much like a “new” player. There are so many aspects of the game that I legitimately have no understanding of yet. Knowing that Steam was tracking my time played, I assumed that Grinding Gear Games was as well… which led me down the path of the /played command. If you have followed this blog for any length of time you will know that I am an aficionado of the spreadsheet, so I decided to try and get some better data on HOW my time was played.
So unfortunately last league I decided to delete all of my characters that pre-date the Sentinel league, in part because none of them made any sense and were also using names I might want to recycle. So I can only really go back as far as May of 2022 but you can see total hours spent in each of the four most recent Path of Exile leagues. Forbidden Sanctum was the league in which the game really made sense to me, and I started to fully understand a lot of the key mechanics of how to make a character “feel good” to play. It was also the league in which I discovered how much I loved Delve. My main of that league represents 276 of those 647 hours… with likely MOST of that being time in Delve. With the latest Crucible League, I have already eclipsed the time spent playing both Sentinel and Kalandra combined. Since we are only one month into the league and I have already almost reached the halfway point of time spent in Sanctum… I might even eclipse that league as well.
This led me down another rabbit hole of being curious about how Path of Exile stacks up against other ARPGs that I have played. As far as I am aware there is no really good way to get hours spent playing early pre-steam ARPGs. For example, a lot of my time spent playing TorchLight II was not through Steam, and I repurchased that game at some point just to make it easier to play. Not included are Diablo and Diablo II, because while those hours probably exist somewhere in the bowels of battle.net I am not entirely sure how to retrieve them. Essentially what I have learned is that I have now played more Path of Exile than literally any other ARPG I have played… and by a decent margin. Last Epoch is still gaining time played but we are not even close to the order of magnitude.
The one that surprised me heavily was Diablo III, which has roughly a decade-long headstart on Path of Exile when it comes to my interacting with it. I’ve played a lot of Diablo III, but the challenge comes from HOW I actually play it. A Diablo III Season essentially can be compressed within a weekend at this point, and by Monday morning if I am taking the season seriously I have completed all of the accomplishments and walked away with my seasonal “Kitch” and then rarely spend much time after said season playing at all. Whereas with Path of Exile, there are just more sliders and each and every step in the journey requires more effort to achieve. After a week I had what felt like a reasonable “starter” character and then spent most of the first month refining that character and progressing through maps and ultimately getting into a comfortable place where I could farm delve.
I’ve now branched out heavily into additional characters, but each of them requires way more effort from me than gearing out a second character in Diablo III. Additionally, if I have played a Multishot Demon Hunter once, I’ve played every Multishot Demon Hunter. There is no real nuance to individual character building because every Multishot Demon Hunter is going to look essentially the same because there are only so many sliders you have access to in order to differentiate your character. While I played a Righteous Fire Juggernaut last league and I am playing one again this league… in both cases enough fundamental changes took place between the leagues that they both look significantly different in both gearing and how they mechanically feel. I played around with a Toxic Rain character last league, but the one this league just works better because I now understand so much more about that style of character. Path of Exile is just more of a “living game” whereas Diablo III has largely felt like it was in maintenance mode for the last half dozen years.
I think at some point down the line Last Epoch is going to feel just as good to me as Path of Exile does today. It definitely has a lower barrier of entry, but features some of the same deeply nuanced character-building. Additionally while more deterministic, the gear grind feels way less templated than it does in Diablo III, where in that game I need these eight items to make my build work and once I have collected them I am essentially “done”. Diablo III is a solved problem and while I still enjoy playing it, my periods of interacting with it have become significantly shorter each season as I am now better at solving those problems. Of note, I’ve also gotten significantly faster at solving problems in Path of Exile, but once solved… there is just a wider variety of interesting things to engage in. My hope is that Last Epoch will build out some of those extremely interesting things to engage in as well because for the moment the Monolith feels somewhat stale.
This morning’s post was an interesting exercise because while I already knew I played an excessive amount of ARPGs… I did not necessarily understand the full extent. Prior to this morning’s post I would have told you that I had played “way more” hours of Diablo III than I have of Path of Exile as well. Sometimes numbers are interesting and deeply satisfying to investigate. Does anyone actually care about this sort of post? Very likely not. However yall are stuck following my whims if you are a regular reader, so you should probably be used to it by now.
The post My ARPG Hours Played appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
