Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! It is that time again, time for our yearly Games of the Year show. Last year we learned that it was far better to record two weeks in a row instead of creating a marathon three-plus hour long show and cutting it in half. This week we dive into the second half of the show covering the final eleven games. These are games that were important to us this year and may or may not have actually been released this calendar year. A lot of them were, but I just wanted to set the expectations.
This year we did not have a lot of overlap, which is to be expected given that the seven of us have some wildly different tastes. It was a big year and I am sure there are a lot of games that you think might need to be on this list that we did not choose. Hopefully, you enjoy our thoughts all the same.
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.
Penance Brand of Dissipation might be one of my fastest-leveling characters ever. I started it pretty late on Monday night, leveled it through Kitava on Tuesday night, and then geared it yesterday and started mapping. The skill is not the best thing in the world for map clear, but it does a phenomenal job at deleting anything that is even the littlest bit tanky. This build has become a bit of a bossing meme during this league and given that I have never really played anything with a serious bossing focus… I decided that I would give it a shot. I had around 20 Divines left to spend and I think as of this morning I am sitting at 8 left, so I spent quite a bit gearing this character out. The challenge is that because this is so popular it means all of the optimal gear for it is also wildly overpriced. A Replica Dragonfang’s Flight for Penance brand with max reservation efficiency runs around 20 Divine Orbs for example.
The biggest challenge for me is that I do not know anything about gearing characters for damage output. I know this is a bit of an irony given how many characters I have leveled… but for the most part, my focus has always been on survival and defensive layers leaving the damage that I dealt as a bit of an afterthought. My “kink” if you will for games is being able to take the maximum amount of punishment without falling down. I mean I play almost exclusively tanks in MMORPGs for example… so I am big into being a chonky juggernaut of meaty goodness, and could give a shit what I am dealing for damage output. Bossers, however… are about dealing as much damage to a single target as they can in as short of a period as they can. So I have no clue if I am even dealing enough damage to the boss successfully and even more so no clue how to set up POB to accurately display my damage output. In theory, if I am even vaguely close I should be somewhere around the 8 Million DPS range currently.
Right now I am mostly focused on leveling and running a bunch of the random t14-t16 maps that I have laying around in the bank. I would really like to get this character to the level 90-95 range before I deal with focusing on bossing. I might start dipping my toes into the water with some Guardian maps soon as I can seemingly handle t16s without any real issues. One of the most annoying things about shifting from a private league to the trade league is that it reset all of my master missions. I had around 80 Kirac missions that just poofed when we left private league, and this would have been the perfect opportunity to utilize those since I don’t really care about the output of the map and just care about the experience gained.
The biggest thing that I am trying to get used to is not spamming my brand ability. In theory in a perfect scenario, you only want one brand on your target at any given time, and you want it to tick for the maximum number of pulses because each pulse ramps the damage. I am so damned used to spamming abilities that this is requiring a bit of a rework of my brain. On a boss fight you would be spending most of that downtime moving around and avoiding things so that seems doable. I need to get better at keeping up my Hatred as well which I have on Divine Blessing. I am contemplating dropping some of my defensive layers to stack on additional offensive auras and MAYBE go low life with this build. Taste of Hate and the damage conversion that I have on my chestpiece along with good resists and maxed spell suppression go a long way toward helping with incidental damage. If I take a bit hit though I am going to die regardless of how much Evasion and Armor I have.
I am so out of my depth though because again… the thing I care about most is NEVER dying. So playing a squishy character that cares about damage output is just completely outside my wheelhouse.
The post Trying to Care About DPS appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Yesterday was the launch of Diablo IV Season 3, and like a moth to the flame, I was drawn to create a new character and check it out. This time around it is the “Season of the Construct” with the unique seasonal mechanic involving building up a little robot friend called a Senechel and equipping it with abilities and modifiers you collect along the way. I’ve kept up the hope that Diablo IV will turn into an amazing game at some point, and while it has improved greatly since its launch, it isn’t quite there yet. I have to be honest… I did not play a ton of this last night because I was not exactly feeling the experience, so please go into this post knowing that I was a bit “meh” on the experience and it might have simply been my mindset.
I think the first challenge is that I decided to mix things up a bit and break out of my normal Barbarian gameplay pattern and try the druid. This led to a lot of respeccing and trying to find a way to play the character that felt good to me. I want to love this class but at least at low levels it never really is the thing I want it to be. I want to be a werebear and NEVER leave that form, and have big smashy melee abilities. Unfortunately, Pulverize which is essentially that gameplay methodology took some significant nerfs. As a result, I started out trying to play a Tornado Wolf and not really jiving with that… then leading to the reportedly best leveling style Lightning Druid… and feeling that even less. The problem with Druid is that it feels like I have to use caster abilities in order to power up the fun melee abilities… leading to this mangled awkward experience. What I really want I guess is Bear Druid from WoW, but I think you have to get pretty deep into the game before it can really feel like that. Tornado Wolf looks cool, but it seems like you sort of have to suffer through some crappy gameplay to get there.
Instead this morning I rerolled completely and went back to good ole Barbarian. There are a lot of changes to Upheaval and I wanted to play with them anyways. Already the gameplay feels so much better to me. I guess maybe I am just a Barb main and should stop trying to fight it. Sure I like the idea of trying other classes but this seems to be the core experience that I enjoy the most in Diablo IV. At some point I want to revisit Necromancer since I love pet classes, but I figure I will wait until I get deeper into the season before doing that. The biggest frustration I have with alting in Diablo IV is the fact that the seasonal mechanics are tied to each character so I had to start over from scratch with the Senechel. This felt awful with Vampire Abilities in Season 2, and it still feels awful with your pet mechanic. They should be account-based to make alting feel more enjoyable and that is a hill I am willing to die on.
Speaking of the Senechel, it is an interesting idea that feels a bit poorly implemented. Right now it is an entirely passive experience of having this pet follow you around and occasionally do things… but also does not feel like it directly improves your gameplay much. How the pet works is that you can equip two Governing Stones that give your pet some core ability. For example, right now I have Lightning Bolt equipped which fires a shock attack, and Protect which seems to give me a shield at random intervals. Were these something that I could control as the player it would feel a bit more impactful. If I could hit the shield button whenever I reach low life or something like that, it could in theory actually save me a death. As it is now… it is a poorly coded companion that sort of does whatever the heck it wants whenever it wants. Tuning Stones you collect along the way allow you to tweak how the abilities work, but again they don’t really feel like they are changing much. I gave the lightning bolt a taunt, but it doesn’t seem like it actually does much of anything to take monsters away from attacking me.
The new open-world mechanic for this season is something called an Arcane Tremor. Essentially these are the new “Blood Tide” but a sort of worse version of them. There is an area in each zone of the game that I have marked with circles on the above map image where seasonal-related mini-events can spawn. You go here to collect the materials that you need to level up your Senechel and collect new abilities for it. Why these are worse than the Blood Tide from Season 2, is that they don’t have the clear sense of purpose that those had. The mob density is so much lower and instead of having a fixed area of the map that draws the attention of ALL players for 30 minutes… you have five static spawns that don’t really have any quest support behind them. With the blood tide I would pop in, do three objectives… probably fight a series of mini-bosses, and then feel like I was okay to move on with my life until the next one spawned. This instead has a very “mill around and wait for shit to happen” vibe that I do not like anywhere near as much. I get that they caught shit for having 3 different Helltide-like mechanics in a row just with different colors… Helltide, Season 2 Seasonal Mechanic, and then the Christmas Event Mechanic… but they were all far better than this approach.
The other new seasonal feature is the Vault, which is essentially a Nightmare Dungeon with traps. There is a mechanic called Zoltun’s Warding which is a number that shows in your hud, and each time you get hit by a trap it takes one away from your current Warding level. If you manage to finish the vault with even 1 left on your warding, you get some extra rewards. The problem that I see however is that Vaults are exactly Nightmare Dungeons… in fact, there is a “Nightmare” version of the Vault that allows you to level up your Glyphs. I do not really like Nightmare Dungeons in the first place, and think the entire Dungeon system needs to be reworked from the ground up. I am not excited to do all of the same bullshit “find the MacGuffin and return it to the pillar” mechanics while avoiding traps. I feel like there would have to be very good rewards in order to get me to do this thing. It reminds me a bit of the Labyrinth in Path of Exile, which is quite possibly my least favorite system in that game.
I feel like I am being a bit harsh honestly… but at this very moment, Season 3 has been a bit of a letdown. Season 2 was a hell of a lot of fun and felt like a clear step forward for the game. Season 3 however… feels like a step backward and maybe all of the seasonal stuff greatly improves as you invest more time and effort into it but for the moment it is “less fun”. The “Bloodtide” gave me this clear call to action and a super fun mechanic that I should spend all of my time focused on. Vaults and Arcane Tremors just feel less enjoyable and more akin to the plague tunnels from Season 1… which were aggressively mid.
Quite possibly the best universally good feature of this season is the introduction of a new hub area called The Gatehall. This is going to be the only place most players hang out because it has everything that you could need in a tightly contained space. I am hoping this becomes a permanent feature of the game and something that they build upon rather than something that we only get for this one season. The Tree of Whispers was close, but it was missing several vendors… and this basically fixes that problem. Honestly, the main quest chain has been enjoyable as well but I don’t really play this sort of game for the story, or at least the story stops mattering once I have finished it the first time. ARPGs are for mechanical enjoyment, and as cool as the story has been it is going to be a bit of a pain in the ass to have to do this on every character. Again these features really need to exist at an account level.
So far at this moment after an evening of screwing around with it… I would say that Season 3 is a solid 4 or 5 out of 10 experience. It doesn’t really add anything to the game that is exceptionally enjoyable save for the new hub. The pet is a completely passive experience, and mostly just feels like you have a random NPC following you around on your questing. Vaults are just worse than Nightmare Dungeons and I already did not like Nightmare Dungeons. Helltides and World Bosses still take too long to spawn and both feel like mandatory content, and there is nothing really that is fresh and new and exciting to act as a focal point for your moment-to-moment gameplay. I am likely going to grind out all of the steps of the Battle pass and then call it good for the season. The Gauntlet and Ladder that are coming are not really content for me given that I am not exactly a competitive player.
I think the biggest challenge that Diablo IV has at the moment is the fact that Path of Exile just has more content and is going through what is quite literally the wildest league that it has ever had. Then near the end of next month, you have the launch of Last Epoch officially, and a ton of new systems going into that game. I think folks will probably play Season 3 for a few weeks and then fade back into either Path of Exile or prep for Last Epoch. Diablo IV needs to make some changes that feel like they are moving the needle forward and adding more permanent evergreen content to the game. I still say that the Helltide needs to be reworked to essentially be the Bloodtide and always be up. Dungeons still need to be nuked from orbit and rethought because the objects are still awful in spite of numerous rounds of changes. What the game really needs is something akin to a Greater Rift that can be run from a hub environment. There is too much required dicking around and not enough focused fruitful grinding. Then again… maybe Diablo IV will never be the game I hope it can be.
The post Diablo IV Season 3 Initial Thoughts appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
