Good Morning, Folks! This is going to seem like a bit of whiplash, but my opinion of Diablo IV Lord of Hatred has evolved yet again. At this point, I am over Paragon 150 with the Paladin, which means I have picked up most of the best nodes on the Paragon board. I’ve done a lot of content, both in queuing directly for things for the purpose of knocking out seasonal journey achievements, and through the War Plan system. Essentially, there is this awkward phase around Torment 1 where it is a bit of a struggle to get Ancestral gear, and I found that frustrating. Once I pushed through this by using the crafting system to craft up blue and yellow ancestrals into usable gear, things started to move more smoothly. I have to give them credit; the crafting system is phenomenal, and essentially, you can take any item and make it function for your build so long as it is the right item level. Essentially, the game has the POE2 version of the Chaos Orb, which removes an affix and adds a random affix, and through this, you can kind of brute force your way to something useful. If you only have one bad affix, there is still the enchanting system that can be used to target, remove it, and get something usable.
At this point, I have a fairly optimal set of legendaries and a few key uniques that buff the amount of thorns damage that I am dealing. I can relatively easily do Torment VII, but mostly do VI because speed is king when it comes to farming content. That said, I feel like I have hit the ceiling of the initial thorns leveling build that I have been running. There is an endgame version of this that changes out a lot of stuff, and I could move over to it. Though I am tempted if I have to respec my character anyway, to migrate over to an Arbiter Hammerdin build, which is supposedly extremely good at speed farming. The biggest problem that I have with the current version of Thorns is that it relies entirely upon Blessed Shield to deliver most of the damage, which moves slowly, and ends up creating a delayed damage output. So you either have to lead with shield throw so that mobs run into it as they are coming at you, or have a trail of mobs who are slowly being whittled down by the shields as they follow behind you. If I want to continue playing Paladin and push it to the higher tiers… I need to make a decision and deal with what will probably be a minor setback as I start acquiring gear again.
I’ve also been leveling a Warlock, in part because this is the build that the streamer Raxxanterax has been playing and it looks insanely powerful. Legitimately, it seems like Dread Claws Warlock is this league’s version of the early Spiritborn builds that were so insanely powerful at the launch of the last expansion. Initially, this relies upon Command Fallen as its builder and Dread Claws as its spender. I did not really love the feeling of Command Fallen, because I went into it expecting them to feel a bit like Summon Raging Spirits. However, once you get the Fallen Rush notable, it transforms them into an Abyss ability, making it so you summon 3 at a time, and allows you to target them by resummoning them. This makes it feel much better, and pretty much I am constantly spamming both my right and left clicks to either summon/target my pack of Fallen or fire off cascading dread claws, which gives it a pretty comfortable gameplay style. You are always targeting things before they can get to you, and your Dread Claws are mostly doing all of the work to mop things up before they can damage you.
The entire build gets a bit more Summoner feeling when you unlock the Warlock quest chain at 15. This involves you going and defeating a series of demons and binding them to your will, so that you can then choose one to permanently follow you. The Dread Claws build uses Laalish, which is a giant worm that is constantly following you and leaping out of the ground to eat mobs. Having one big minion, a turret-style minion, and a swarm of fallen minions makes the entire thing feel a bit more like I wanted it to feel from the start. Your Ultimate is a swarm of minions that effectively shred the target, making short work of whatever you throw them on. The only negative about it is that the swarm is stationary, so you have to sometimes nudge a mob back into it to get the full effect. All in all, I am pretty damned happy with the Warlock and look forward to pushing it to 70, and then building the proper endgame build with all of my paragon points.
One other side note, there is an event running right now that adds an extra battle pass to the game that unlocks a bunch of World of Warcraft-themed weapon skins. There is also a rather expensive pack that gives you all of the Tier 2 armor sets, and I am specifically the kind of sucker who fell for that. The T2 era was the golden days of World of Warcraft for me, and those are some of my favorite sets. So I was more than happy to be able to run around as a Judgement Paladin or a Nemesis Warlock. It also seemed fitting to have the Warlock using Corrupted Ashbringer. I have enough disposable income to make these bad decisions, because really… it is not worth what they are charging. However, given how much bullshit is happening in my life right now… I will take my joy however I can get it, even if that means retail therapy for some overpriced digital baubles.
In other news, we have been in teaser season for a bit with Path of Exile II slowly releasing some very short videos. SirGog has finally decided to make a video covering everything that has been released to date, so if you have not been watching as they slowly drip-feed us information, I suggest checking out his summary. The entire League Reveal presentation takes place on the 7th, and the full release of the content drops on the 29th. As SirGog indicates in the video, this is a really weird sequence of events for Grinding Gear Games. This is not the way that previous leagues have been teased, nor is the timing of the release following their normal patterns either. Generally speaking, we get the content revealed one week, and then the next week we have the start of the league. Anzac Day was the last public holiday until June, so I am not entirely certain why the big gap between the two events. Either way, I am hoping to wrap up my Diablo IV shennannigans well before the 29th so that I can hop into Path of Exile II fully, with no regrets.
What have you been playing? Have you tried out Diablo IV: Lord of Hatred? If so, what are your thoughts? Drop me a line below.
The post Warlock Pretty Great appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning, Folks. At this point, I have completed the Diablo IV Storyline and am slowly grinding up paragon levels. I have unlocked Torment 1 and can reasonably farm that without much issue. Note that it is without any real semblance of a build because legendaries in general have felt really sparse and hard to acquire. I don’t necessarily love that, but it was a decision to dial back the look, and at least for me, it feels like they just spread the same amount of butter across a lot more toast. My Thorns Paladin feels reasonable and not completely broken, and a lot of the power that it lost I think, is in the form of the missing passives. I honestly feel sort of meh about Diablo IV as a whole right now. I thought this expansion and patch were going to usher in a new great age for the game, and it certainly shook up a lot of things… but I can’t necessarily say that the moment-to-moment gameplay in the endgame is better. I don’t hate it, but I also don’t necessarily love it either and feel like Path of Exile 1/2 and Last Epoch are doing a much better version of this genre across the board.
I had to cherry-pick a screenshot for talking about the story that does not give much of anything away, because I do really feel like this is worth experiencing for the story alone. I did not like the story for Vessel of Hatred, and it very much felt like a letdown in every single way. Lord of Hatred, however, is really freaking good, and there are way more interesting interactions with famous people from the Diablo franchise than we have had to date. There were actual moments here in this game that made me feel things… I actually had to choke back tears at one point. That is pretty rare for an ARPG story, and I felt like the game earned its story beats more than we have at any point since the launch of D4. Sure, I hated the whole Akarat as Jesus nonsense, but in truth, you don’t really spend that much time having to interact with that narrative. What was way more interesting was the manner in which we reintroduced Lilith and also dealt with some of the challenges around Rathma as the child of Lilith and directly connected back to our character. It is really good stuff and expands the general lore of Diablo in some interesting ways.
Skovos is also a really great new area to add to the game. I had some doubts about it as I was going through the content, but watching it open up a bit as I entered the endgame, I really do think there is some interesting stuff going on here. The legion event, for example, in Skovos is this whole pirate-attack-themed thing, and it is so much more interesting than the baseline legion events. Similarly, the Helltide areas feel really good on Skovos, but the only negative of all of this… is that essentially this one location sunsets the need to go to any other location. It has effectively shrunk the world down to only ever needing to exist in this one area. The hub of Temis literally has access to all of the things that forced you to go to other cities, and also serves as the only place you can access the Horadric Cube. So essentially, Skovos is now the game in its totality, in a way that did not occur with Vessel of Hatred and Nahantu.
Gear feels extremely hard to get in a way that I have never quite experienced since the launch of Diablo IV, and I am not sure I am a fan of it. Blasters who are grinding this game ten plus hours per day are finding plenty of gear, but I do worry about the folks who are only playing for a few hours at a time. I have exactly ONE ancestral item, and it dropped from the Obol vendor as a white item that I then upgraded into a Mythic via the cube. I am sure this will change as I go up in Torment tiers, but I also sort of need the gear to be able to go up in difficulty. I feel like I am being artificially gated by just not finding any legendary drops that are usable. I am wearing a bunch of stuff, but it does not necessarily equate to anything resembling a build right now. I am mostly being carried hard by the power of the baseline thorns build, instead of actually feeling like I have synergy with any of my gear. I liked loot raining down from the skies, and it is a bit of a bummer to be playing in extreme poverty league.
The other thing that is annoying me a bit right now is the reintroduction of Capstone dungeons. These feel like they are a complete waste of time. Essentially, in an ARPG, anything that does not reward good experience or loot is not worth doing, and these feel like an artificial barrier that is placed in our way to keep us from progressing. They are not hard to do, mind you, but they take about three times as long as I feel like they should. These essentially gate your seasonal ranks, which themselves gate your ability to progress up into torment levels. So instead of just needing to run a T1 Pit in order to unlock Torment rank 1, you now also have to do a dungeon that will not reward much loot, and also takes about 10-15 minutes to run, since there are three distinct phases to it. I am not sure what the design goal was with reintroducing capstone dungeons, because they don’t feel challenging… they just feel like a waste of my time.
Another thing that has been a bit of a disappointment is the Warplan system. These are what I would term “aggressively fine”. Sure, it is best practice to never do any activity without a Warplan sending you there, but they don’t really feel like they meaningfully improve the baseline content. A Nightmare Dungeon is always going to be a Nightmare Dungeon, and the Pit is always going to be the Pit… and while you are stapling some extra rewards on them via the Warplan, it doesn’t really feel transformative at all. Maybe I have not seen enough of the trees yet that unlock as you do the content, but most of the options feel like they are just going to give you more chances at loot. There is also no methodology for banning specific content. For example, I kind of hate the Kurast Undercity and never want to do it… and there is no way for me to say “never show me this content, and make the other content more frequent”. My options are to avoid the content in the warplans, and if I cannot… reroll the entire thing. Even if they gave us the ability to reroll specific nodes on the Warplan tree, it would be better than what we have currently.
I think the reality is that Diablo IV is never going to be “my” game, not at least in the way that Diablo III once was. I am entirely too Path of Exile aligned at this point to really ever be satisfied with the limited set of things that the Diablo franchise is now providing. I think there are going to be some players who will enjoy the slowed-down progression systems because it gives them a longer tail before they reach the point of feeling wildly overpowered. For me, however, I want to play Diablo IV as a fun weekend or two and not as a primary game, and as such, artificially gating content that we already had access to previously and throttling the gearing just feels like a turn in the wrong direction for me personally. That game isn’t bad, and I enjoyed the story quite a bit… but I will also never play that story again because it is the least efficient way to do a seasonal character. I am not sure how long I will be playing Diablo IV, but I doubt I will finish out the seasonal journey before I am back to either Last Epoch or Path of Exile.
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Good Morning Folks. I am still struggling a bit with this respiratory crud, but am doing better enough to be able to function and actually work today. If it drags on, I will end up going to the doctor but given that I doubt there is anything that they can do other than put me on a dose pack of prednisone… which will royally fuck with my sleep patterns… I have been trying to avoid that. I mostly spent the night playing Diablo IV downstairs while snuggling with cats. Gracie was doing the thing in my office where she refused to not be the center of attention, and when this happens it is generally better if I go down to the couch where she can snuggle in my arms while I am playing, rather than me trying to hold her with one hand while using the computer with other other. In wild news… the last few mornings I have been able to pet the super skittish feral black cat that hangs out in front of the house with Greybie.
Last night I managed to finally have some luck with the trade channel and picked up a set of Ancestral Tibault’s Will for 30 million gold. That seems like a nonsensical number, but I had over 200 million and nothing really to do with it… so it effectively has no value to me. I opted to throw on a non-Ancestral copy of Vasily’s Prayer which at least allowed me to have the fully functional build, and this more or less has allowed me to bump up to Torment IV and farm the world content comfortably. Just before sitting down to write this blog post I ran Varshan again and finally got an Ancestral version of that helmet to drop, so in theory I have Ancestral of better of everything that is required for the build. I still cannot quite do bosses on T4… but they melt on T3. Now it is just a matter of getting better versions of all of the uniques and maybe hopefully getting a few mythics so I can bump up to that version of the build. I am also hunting for a better pair of boots with more movement speed on them.
The biggest challenge that I am going to face right now is that most of the final set of challenges involve running content on t4 while having a piece of Chaos Armor equipped. I am not really certain which slot I can theoretically sacrifice to the achievement gods in order to make that happen, but I will do some testing. I need to run a few more Infernal Hordes to do the chaos rifts inside of them and also farm some T3 or higher Helltide in order to finish out the next to the last step in the seasons journey. I am on the very last step of the Reign of Chaos quest chain, and I am working on the last section of the Battle Pass. In theory within the next week I will have milked every last bit of this season that I really need to, and be able to walk away happily knowing that I pretty much did everything I could do.
In other news, 0.3.1 dropped in Path of Exile II, and with it comes the significant rework of the endgame and removal of towers as the primary means of adding content to maps. I ran a few maps as a test and for the most part they seem way less rippy than they were previously. I am still largely running t14 content and it seemed pretty easy overall. I have not played for about a month now, so who knows what other previous patches could have added to this feeling. It seems like maybe they have not removed ALL of the content that they intended to remove because it seems like Expeditions are still showing up as icons on the map, whereas I thought ALL additional content would be added by the Tablets instead. Additionally it seems like the whole corruption thing stays on the atlas, which makes sense given that is how you unlock most of your atlas passives.
While the overall density and rippyness of the map was lowered, it did not necessarily feel like the rewards were lowered as a result. I ran a few maps and pulled quite a bit of currency and what felt like more uniques than normal from them. Granted two of them came from a Rogue Exile, but I walked out of the map with five uniques which seems pretty solid for a 4 mod t14 map. I am not really sure if I am going to dip my toes back into the game at this point, because once I unattach from a League in Path of Exile, it sort of feels hard to get back into the swing of things. My mind has adjusted to Diablo IV at this point and I am probably going to ride that into the ground, or at least until I give Legion Remix a shot next week.
I think yesterday I might have just been in a low point, so apologies for whining about life on the blog. I put together a shelving unit which felt like significant progress so that probably cheered me up a bit. I am feeling better about my existence in the world today… even though the country seems to be burning around me.
The post Thirty Million Gold appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
I am getting around to posting a bit later than normal today, because I am a bit sick and fighting some generic respiratory crud. I think it is largely allergies because we are in Ragweed season… and it is by far my worst allergy. I also kicked up a bunch of dust last week in the garage and think I am paying for it. I am struggling a bit right now and find myself in a bit of a funk where nothing seems to “fit right”. I am certain I am dealing with a depression, because how could I not after losing my spouse earlier this year. There is likely no way I got out of that without mental and emotional baggage that I am dealing with pretty regularly. My emotions feel like a scalded tongue… that I cant quite taste things in the way that I used to before. Joy is hard to find… and I keep wandering back and forth between things without much luck. The other day Tipa commented “I don’t know how you fit so much into your day!” and the secret is… I keep bouncing around like mad between a dozen different things and never really making much traction in any of them. I also have no other human to suggest that I do something other than desperately look for something to kill the time.
I am still popping into Destiny Rising each day to play some of the various daily activities, but this is honestly a game that I find myself enjoying the most when Ace and I happen to connect with our schedules at the same time. I am doing the thing that is very familiar in Gacha games where I am trying not to spend any currency and bank it up, so that when the next character banner drops I can immediately purchase a bunch of pulls for it. I am 16 away from the five star choice on the default banner, and whenever I hit that, I am likely going to choose Ning Fei so I have an Arc Champion that is actually pretty decent. Mostly I am chipping away at various lore tasks from different champions and forcing myself to do the planetary dailies on Ikora just to get them done. I think my favorites are still Jolder and Estela right now… with Gwynn and Umeko being close in the running. Wolf has sadly been relegated to the sidelines, and I actually started playing some Tan-2 to get used to the way that he plays a bit.
In Diablo 4 I have officially respecced to the proper endgame build, but am still lacking some of the components. It gave me a bit of survival so that Torment III is now as comfortable as Torment II was previously. Bossing on T3 is still a bit of a crapshoot and depends upon the type of damage that a given boss is dealing. My resistances are still complete crap, and I should probably work on that. The biggest challenge that I am having at the moment is that everything I am doing… feels like a complete waste of time. I need two things… an Ancestral Vasily’s Prayer, and an Ancestral Tibault’s Will. The first comes specifically from Echo of Varshan which means I need to be running Whisper caches to get keys for that. The second is a general drop unique and can come specifically from anywhere… but specifically is apparently on Andariel and Harbinger of Hatred loot pools. The challenge in both cases is that it feels like Ancestral gear drops so freaking infrequently. The above image shows a T3 Beast in the Ice drop pool… with zero ancestrals dropping which is pretty much the norm.
Mostly I have been focused on chipping away at various seasonal trappings like the challenges, battlepass, and the Reign of Chaos quest chain. The amount of farming required to finish the last bit… seems excessive. I feel like Blizz has made the determination that they need to slow things down… to eek more player engagement out of a season, when in truth Season 7 was the best… because it felt like a really fun weekend, similar to how Diablo III seasons used to feel. The game is not detailed enough to be played in a manner like Path of Exile… so any slowing of things down just feels like overstaying its welcome. Wouldn’t you rather have your players saying “wow that was a blast, can’t wait for next season” instead of trying to decide if they give a crap enough to keep grinding. I am rapidly the approaching the point where I am questioning how much I still care.
Legion Remix starts next week on the 7th, and as a result I have been trying to poke my head back into World of Warcraft in an attempt to get into the swing of things. Friends… I really want to finish up the War Within campaign but I am finding it so hard to care about anything that is going on. I tried again last night, and I was just checking boxes off a spreadsheet in the way that I was engaging with the content. I am playing my Dark Iron Dwarf that I rolled during the Pandaria remix event, and honestly… I like playing a defensive warrior about as much as I like playing anything else. The combat though… just feels so much less interesting than it does in Guild Wars 2, which is the game I have mostly been mainlining in the MMORPG world for awhile. I think mostly movement just feels bad, since at its core… World of Warcraft is just prettier Everquest and there is not any real action elements of my movement that factor into how combat resolves. So long as I am in rage of the target and my bounding box is connected to their bounding box… mashing a button makes a thing happen. It does somewhat make me worry how Legion Remix is going to land… but regardless I am still going to give it a shot I think.
In other things happening on the 7th… the Monster Hunter Wilds crossover event is opening in Final Fantasy XIV. I thought this might have been a good signal to get back into the game and quest through things… given that I have not really played actively other than logging in to keep my house active since the patch that dropped the Arcadion. As a result I am fully decked out in that gear… but am going to be yet again… too short to ride the ride since the Guardian fight is going to require 725 gear. This is the thing that I always hate the most about playing Final Fantasy XIV, is that when it comes time for a new expansion… my gear is never good enough to make it through all of the content without either grinding a bunch… or buying my way out of the problem. I hate having to buy a crafted set from the auction house to bail my ass out for having not played reliably during the patch cycle. Since Stormblood… I have basically been a player that plays heavily at the beginning of an Expansion, and then returns at the very end of one… and it is honestly a play pattern that feels like crap because of the required catch up. Even Gacha games every so often throw you a bone with a full set of gear that is good enough to do whatever the latest content drop is.
Since you have made it this far, and listened to me whine about my frustrations and struggle to get attached to anything right now… I will reward you with another photo of Gracie. So often when I am gaming anymore, she will crawl up on the headrest of my new office chair and complain that I am not giving her attention. I am just looking for anything right now that gives me some focus.. and ultimately delays me thinking about the fact that my human is gone. I could be out doing things with friends… but I feel way more “alone” when I am out in public than I do when I am finding something to distract me at home. I spent a lot of time alone since shifting to remote work… but I almost never left the house without my spouse. So going into the world… makes me realize all that I am lacking and missing. There are a lot of things that I want to do around the house, but I end up in ADHD logjams while trying to do them. Mostly I am just trying to keep moving the needle forward with small amounts of progress every single day.
Anyways… if you have made it this far. Thanks for reading.
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