Good Morning Folks. On Tuesday the 10th Season dropped for Diablo IV and I have been spending a good chunk of my time playing a Pulverize Druid. I am still mostly in my leveling build phase, but that is largely for lack of reasonable gear drops which I will talk about later. I would love to tell you how many hours I have played, but there is no equivalent of the /played command in this game, nor is there a stats panel like we have in Diablo III. Once upon a time there was a third party tool that filled in this gap, but it seems like either they have stopped supporting it or Blizzard asked them to take it down… because it now simply redirects to the D4 page on Battle.net. I’d sat out the last few seasons, and in my mind that makes me think that must have been sometime last year. No… I last played during season seven… which was January of 2025. It feels like maybe they are speed running seasons… and should maybe stop and have a think about this pacing.
If you are coming to this blog post having not played Diablo IV since launch, you probably only want one question answered. Is Diablo IV Good Yet? That is a complicated question, because I can definitely with resounding authority tell you that it is no longer an objectively bad game. The classes seem relatively balanced, at least in the fact that there is a long list of class builds that are performing well. However, would I consider the game to be “good” when judged against other ARPGs? Then probably not. It is a flawed experience and continues to spend its time creating disposable content without really adding anything to the game that really feels like it moves the needle forward. In fact there are a few things that they have done that actively feel like a step backwards. They no longer refer to things as “powers” but in truth the new Chaos perks shown above… are just a rebranded versions of temporary powers. What I would love to see is the game introducing content that adds more things to do permanently to the game, and not just a less than three month long temporary chase.
So the first problem that I find with this game is that gearing is a bit of a mess. What I mean by this is that I can relatively comfortably do the World on Torment 3, and Bosses on Torment 2… and have long passed the point where any piece of gear that is not ancestral could possibly be useful. Ancestral gear… even at T3… feels exceptionally rare. In fact I can’t really feel any difference in loot availability between T2 and T3 other than the fact that I can speed farm T2. At some point during the seasons that I missed, they flatted the gearing to remove the awkward step of getting Sanctified gear… but also apparently made Ancestral gear feel a bit like unobtainium. It was a few days until I had reached a point where every non-Unique item that I was wearing was Ancestral. This was legitimately a thing that used to take two or three runs, not multiple days worth of fruitless grinding to get to.
Worse than this… I am probably 40 hours into the game at this point… maybe more… and I have a single item that I would consider to be worth investing time and effort into upgrading. Everything else I am wearing… is utterly disposable. What I really need are some Ancestral versions of the other Uniques that my build wants… and while I have run countless copies of the bosses that supposedly drop them. I maybe see a single Ancestral every three to four runs… meaning almost everything I loot is utterly useless. By this point in previous seasons when I was still actively playing the game, I was hunting for Mythics or looking for more perfect versions of Uniques… not struggling to find the items needed to actually make the build function. This frustration is compounded by the fact that the game lacks anything really resembling a proper trade system. You can shout into the void in the trade channel and might possibly get a response, but generally speaking the amount of gold that someone is asking is just stupid. It is not like gold is actually useful in the game, as I am sitting on 150 million right now… but because it has no real value it just seems to be a wild number that people throw around with folks trying to sell things for 500 million.
I am slowly chipping away at the seasonal quests, and have made it up to the Champion level which requires Torment III for everything. I still feel like I need to get a bit stronger before I tackle some of the bossing on this one, and while I have done a Pit 50… the boss on it was a bit painful. Technically I am still running the leveling version of the build, and should likely at some point swap over to the proper setup. I was trying to find the last few pieces of gear as Ancestral before doing this, but in theory I could do it right now I suppose and see if it makes a difference. The new Chaos Rift content is not terribly enjoyable, and the fact that we do not have a new helltide like mechanic to farm makes everything in the season feel slow. I still do not love Helltide in general, but I like the alternate versions of it like the Vampire or Witch themed ones we have gotten in previous seasons, because they seem way more focused.
I am also not the biggest fan of what they did to the battle pass, where it is technically four separate battle passes that have to be unlocked individually. You gain Favor which seems to roll out pretty quickly enough, and then spend that favor to unlock items on the passes. The whole segmentation of this system feels like it was explicitly designed to make players spend more money unlocking it. While I am sure Blizzard will refer to this as “content” it very much feels like taking the same small amount of butter and trying to spread it over way more slices of bread. I will be honest… I was feeling pretty charitable about this season until I sat down and started to write about my individual feelings about various components of it. This is going to come across as a hit piece on the game, and I really do not intend it to be… it is a fun but ultimately flawed gaming experience.
They did get me to spend some money, because a few days into this season they introduced a series of Starcraft themed skins, similar to the World of Warcraft theme ones they released in the past. They coaxed me out of some money then to buy the Lich King skin… and this time around it was Raynor and Corrupted Marine skins. The game is a gorgeous game, and they do create a bunch of really cool cosmetics for it… but it also clearly tells me that they are spending way more effort on the cash shop than they are the rest of the game experience. Diablo has been Fortnite-fied where the gameplay loop is largely kept the same, but you are presented with a constant drumbeat of nostalgia bombs, begging for you to open your wallet and give them some of your money. I am a sucker… I suggest you not be one. I blame Destiny 2 and Gacha games for slowly grinding down my resistance to this complete bullshit.
I think the biggest challenge that I am having right now… is I am not really sure what I should be doing to get over the humps I am dealing with and move on to Torment IV. There is no clear thing that I need to be farming to improve my chances at getting the gear that I need. Maxroll has a boss loot table guide, and in theory I need to be targeting those, but given that again… any item that does not drop at Ancestral is useless… it does not feel great to farm bosses. I think the two biggest outliers that I need are an Ancestral version of Insatiable Fury which drops from Grigoire… which means I need to farm stupid amounts of Helltide to get more summons. I also need an Ancestral copy of Vasily’s Prayer which drops from Varshan… which is largely farmed through getting Tree of Whispers caches. I am doing lots of both… but they are somewhat mind-numbing and the key drop rate is pretty low. Nothing feels worse than seeing the items technically dropping… but without Ancestral rarity… once again making them not worth my time even picking up really.
This is one of those times where Path of Exile and having access to a functional… and now automated… trade economy is a mass improvement. I could save up resources and pick up the items that I am missing, and maybe start selling off some of the items that do drop that I have no use for in order to fund those upgrades. More than that, I feel like Path of Exile is a bit easier to tell what is wrong with your character, and why you can’t do higher tier content. Granted that just might be my level of familiarity with the game. Builds in Diablo III and IV both work on gimmick interactions between abilities, that cause wild exponential scaling to amp up your damage, and in order to trigger that… you need very specific items in specific slots with specific stat combinations. Last Epoch is quite possibly the best game for gearing because you can get up and running really quickly, and then it becomes just a matter of perfecting your gear over time rather than making it super hard to find the pieces that you need.
So to the original question of “Is it Good Now?”. I would say honestly it is good enough to have fun with it. There are frustrations, but you can at very least make it through the campaign without having to deal with them. Everything that I have talked about in this post with disdain… are end game issues. You should be able to at a minimum get to Torment 1 with very little effort. I was doing that almost immediately after dinging level 60. Everything else is just how willing you are to grind it out. I used to have a lot of fun grouping up with my friend Ace and chain running bosses… but that is pretty much a nonstarter these days because everyone has to spend boss mats in order to get loot, so there is no longer that force multiplier that there used to be. Once the 0.3.1 patch drops in Path of Exile II, I will probably be back over there testing out the endgame changes. I am enjoying playing a Bear Druid, but not so much that the next thing that interests me would not immediately pull my attention away from the game. If Destiny Rising did not have clear caps on how much you can do in a given day… I would likely be over there playing it instead of grinding here.
The post Ancestral or Bust appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Well, friends… I think I am starting to wind down Diablo IV Season 2. I’ve hit level 73 and swapped out all of my gear… and while mechanically the game is still enjoyable there isn’t a lot of reason to keep grinding for 100. This morning’s post is going to seem negative, and to some extent, it will be… but before I go down that path let’s just take a moment to acknowledge that I had a heck of a lot of fun. According to the unofficial D4 Armory, at the time of writing this post, I have had around 38 hours worth of enjoyment out of this season. This has been nothing short of a remarkable turnaround in the trajectory of this game and I actually look forward to popping back in for Season 3. The team did a great job of picking up a completely derailed game and getting it back on the tracks.
To say that Diablo IV has no endgame is a bit disingenuous. However, I can fully state that it does not have an endgame that I feel is worth grinding for. Nightmare Dungeons are not good and are the sort of byproduct that you end up with when someone attempts to transplant Mythic Plus from World of Warcraft into an Action RPG. It just does not feel good and compounds the problems with the Dungeon system as a whole, only further serving to suck any remaining joy from them by adding mechanics that make them even less enjoyable. Mechanics like Drifting Shadows, Blood Blisters, and Lightning Storm are not difficult but are the definition of something that sounds good on paper but feels completely “unfun” when you experience them in practice.
The Blood Harvest zones and the recent changes to Legion prove that the team can design content that feels good to complete, so it gives me hope that at some point there might be something enjoyable to do once you have hit World Tier IV and sorted out your gear. Right now getting an arbitrary number to 100 doesn’t feel like good enough motivation to keep going when I am out of meaningful goals. I am not saying I will stop playing the game entirely, I might grind out some more of the battle pass but for the moment… a lot of the joy and focus are gone for me. When I completed the last keystone dungeon and started working on World Tier IV, it felt like I arrived at the top floor. I’ve never been a massive completionist and I am largely unmotivated by trying to get a “platinum” trophy in every game.
I am hoping that they can rework dungeons completely at some point because the spackle that they applied with this patch helped them out… but I am not sure there is enough good there to salvage without a top-down redesign. The joy of an ARPG is reaching a flow state as you tear through packs of monsters while getting the occasional dopamine hit of a loot explosion. Dungeons break this flow up constantly by having to focus on some arbitrary objective rather than steamrolling your way to the boss and breaking open the loot pinata. This is made worse by the Nightmare Dungeon mechanics that serve to slow you down further. The dungeon art is top-notch, which I think is why they have been so hesitant to trash the system completely. I am not sure how it can be saved without simply removing ALL objective-focused gameplay.
Another system that needs completely redone is the Helltide. The Blood Harvest “Bloodtide” zones have proven to be a massively superior gameplay experience. Going forward they should really make Helltides work exactly like the Bloodtide where there are a few objectives that spawn in… no loss of embers on death… and available at all times with them rotating between locations every hour. The team has shown us that they understand what went wrong with the Helltide, and we will always lament the “Bloodtide” zones as a far better experience. I’ve been to the Helltide a few times and there are never any other players out there… but every time I do the green Blood Harvest zones they are fairly packed. This has to be something reflected in the total numbers on the backend and should provide some interesting metrics that hopefully they can track.
The other system that I would love to see burned down and rebuilt is the Paragon system. It is just not interesting. While the Path of Exile passive tree is lamented as being far too obtuse for the average player, I also feel like I am only ever one or two points away from some interesting choices that often reframe what I am doing with my build. Most of the Paragon tree is filled with boring stat nodes that you have to take in order to make the fun nodes on the tree not actively suck. Even the “fun” nodes don’t really modify how my character plays. Truthfully that is a larger problem both with the design of Legendary items and Paragon points, in that nothing I am doing seems to make significant changes to the way I am approaching my build. I’m playing Upheaval and there is a similar ability in Last Epoch but in the talent tree associated with that ability I can configure it to fire off when I leap slam or turn it into a self-firing totem… or apply buffs to my minions. None of that sort of freedom of movement within a single ability exists in Diablo IV, which honestly feels like a step backward from even Diablo III.
So I realize that this morning’s post has been me rattling off a litany of problems than the game has. That is only because I now care about the game. I actually feel for the first time that there is a game here worth trying to save. I don’t want Diablo IV to die in infamy… I want it to have a No Man’s Sky style comeback story and keep proving to players that it is putting in the hard work to bring itself back from the brink of oblivion. There is a good game here and there are some strong fundamentals now. That is a shocking change from the burning dumpster fire of a game that I felt existed at launch. My concern now is that most of what I am interacting with are seasonal mechanics that are very likely to go away in January.
What we need are some long-tailed progression systems that will keep the player coming back even after they have capped a character out. Path of Exile does this through the varied forms of endgame content harvested from their version of seasons called “Leagues” and the Atlas of Worlds which allows you to tailor your endgame experience to focus on exactly the kind of content that you want to spend time experiencing. The Blood Harvest while cool, doesn’t really fit a pattern of being content that can remain evergreen and neither does the Malignant Hearts. Diablo IV is going to start needing to design content expansions that can stick around for longer than a three-month period because it needs to keep fleshing out what it means to reach the endgame.
Diablo IV is in a state where it can provide one really fun week of gameplay, but it needs to give us a reason to keep coming back for more. Granted a more casual player will likely be able to stretch that week into a month… but no matter your pace you are going to reach a point where the path forward just isn’t really worth walking down. I have a glimmer of hope though for what the future might bring a year or two from now. So if anyone on the team happens to read this… you’ve already beat my expectations. I thought the game was dead in the water and was saddled with a generally “unfun” game design. You’ve had a massive turn around and I applaud all of the hard work. There are still a lot of difficult choices ahead of you, which are going to mean cutting some content that just isn’t working or at least drastically modifying it. I hope the company as a whole gives you the time to turn this game around completely because I feel like at some point Diablo IV can be a massive success story.
The post Diablo IV Needs an Endgame appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Hey Folks! I am still more or less mainlining Diablo IV each evening. The game has finally started to slow down a bit as I am now level 56 but it still feels like I am gaining experience much faster than I did previously. While I am not gaining core levels quickly, it does feel like I am chewing through Paragon points pretty fast. The only complaint really that I have with the game is that there is some bug that is impacting my system where the entire game will lock up while playing… I think it has something to do with network play and new players showing up on screen, but I can’t be certain. Whatever the case I’ve taken a few deaths from the screen locking up for 5 to 10 seconds at a time. This did not happen in previous releases so I am hoping this is something that gets fixed over time or can be attributed to server congestion.
I think what I am enjoying the most is that I have a very enjoyable mechanic loop going on where I start by popping over to the Blood Harvest zone completing the three Tree of Whispers quests available there. Generally speaking, there will be a quest to kill two Blood Seekers, and as I am working my way through the other quests I will inevitably anger the Vampires and get Blood Seekers summoned to take me out. Unfortunately, few players seem to be focused on the big zone event, so I can rarely complete that but I have noticed that when someone is attempting it the green horned skull icon indicating the Blood Harvest begins to pulse. I wish there was a less subtle indication that the event is going on, but it is better than nothing.
While I am working on the Blood Harvest area I keep my eyes peeled for any Legion Events that are about to spawn. These take place every thirty minutes and are a great source of both experience and loot, so much so that I will leave the Blood Harvest area to knock these out when they are available. This creates a really good cadence of popping back and forth between the “Bloodtide” area as folks have taken to calling it, and then popping out whenever a Legion Event is going on. The community as a whole seems to realize how valuable these are now because I have yet to do one that did not manage to get the mastery objectives completed… which largely just means you are killing things quickly enough to get the mini-bosses to spawn before the final encounter.
I am also keeping my eyes peeled for the next World Boss spawn, though these are honestly not as good as they once were. The difficulty of the encounter has been increased significantly which means they are no longer the loot pinata that they once were. As a result, there is FAR lower turnout for World Bosses and I’ve had several cases of once it started… and it was not immediately dying… folks bailed to do other things. On one hand, I get that players were frustrated by how easy these encounters were… but on the other hand, they require random players to know the fight in order to complete it. I think they are maybe a bit tuned for randos… and so far I have fought three bosses since coming back and only managed to down one of them. The others I kept fighting the entire 15 minutes but we wound up with like 3 players banging away in futility as folks bailed on us. If they want these to be challenging content they need to make them something you queue for and are locked into the encounter until completion.
One of the few problems that I see with the current state of the game, is that I have zero desire to actually engage with the “true” Blizzard-endorsed endgame. I’ve run a few Nightmare Dungeons, but my keys are piling up way faster than I am using them. Nightmare Dungeons are just not fun, at least not compared to Legion events and the “Bloodtide” area. The problem with this is that I am eventually going to have to run Nightmare Dungeons because they are required to interact with the Paragon sigil system and level them up. In order to gain the power contained in that system, I am going to have to force myself to grind them out and this just feels lousy. It feels as though you were forced to do Set Mastery Dungeons in Diablo III in order to get Paragon points or something like that.
Then there are the Helltides… which are now largely made redundant. The “bloodtide” area does everything that this limited-time event does… but does it better. Helltides are only up every two hours… and then if you take a death in the area you lose half of your helltide currency. The “bloodtide” on the other hand lets you drop in and play at any point and your currency associated with that event is additive over time so that your deaths really do not cost you anything. This all serves to make the Helltide feel weirdly punitive and not rewarding enough to make up for it. Sure you can target farm very specific gear slots… but you end up getting so many Seeker keys and you are generating so many Whispers Caches that I am not even certain that is needed functionality anymore. Add to this the fact that every time I have gone into a Helltide area… I was the only player doing them, which makes me think this is just an outmoded content type.
While I am “picking nits”, Blizz really needs to adjust the vendors to match the sweeping changes they made to Sacred and Ancestral gear drops. In the world, I am only seeing Sacred gear right now, which is amazing… save for Legendary items that often drop at base rarity but can still be recycled into either material or have aspects extracted from them. However when I go to the vendors, which should be viable sources of gear… it is all mostly baseline items. This is especially true for the Obol merchant, making that entire system even less useful than it was. Like Helltide… Obol gambling really needs a rework because at the moment I feel like the best option is just to buy keys when you need to spend down the currency. It is just a system that no longer really works with the way the game is currently played.
One legitimate concern that I still have is that I am uncertain if the game feels good right now because the base sandbox state of the game has been balanced, or that the Vampire Powers are just really strong. Path of Exile is in a phenomenal state right now, but it is more the base level of the game and less that any one league mechanic is better than the others. I feel like everything that I am enjoying right now in Diablo IV can be directly attributed to this specific season. Blood Harvest zones are amazing and Vampire Powers feel exceptionally strong… so much so that I do not want to interact with anything OTHER than the “Bloodtide”. It does concern me a bit that they have set up a borrowed power system that they are going to have to replace with something equally spectacular in Season 3, in order to keep the same elevated power levels and keep the game fun.
Diablo IV is very much a game in transition and still has some systems that are not functioning in quite the way that they should. I feel like the Nightmare Dungeons as a whole need a top-down rethink. They are just not fun, and the players really engaging with that mechanic seem to be doing so in degenerate methods that do not involve actually completing the entire dungeon. The most enjoyable part of the game… is not the part of the game that players will eventually be required to do in order to progress endgame systems. Helltides as a whole need a complete rethink as well, and the World Bosses either need to be watered down again or turned into some sort of serious smaller group content that players queue for. Maybe make the Open World spawns watered down, but drop an item needed to spawn a more difficult and much more rewarding version.
The optional bosses seem pretty cool and I have fought Varshan a few times now. Sadly he has dropped the unique twohander each time that I do not need, nor did it drop at a higher enough item level to use. I am hoping that I can keep the momentum going long enough to naturally reach level 70ish and transition into World Tier IV and be able to see the other optional bosses. Varshan requires you to collect three pieces and then enter a basement area at the Tree of Whispers, and I am assuming the three new bosses that open up in World Tier IV will be something similar. There is a tight synergy between the fun parts of the game which are keeping me going, but I am hoping with time Blizzard can make the largely unfun parts of the game like Nightmare Dungeons more enjoyable.
The post The Bloodtide Is Great appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Friends! I finished up the campaign in Diablo IV on June 4th and have now had roughly a week of time poking around in the “end-game”. This morning I thought I would talk about that experience and how it mostly feels like “more of the same”. As of this morning, I am about half of the way through level 59, and at level 60 I thought I would take a stab at the next Keystone Dungeon to unlock the final World Tier. During my time at end-game, I have done a pretty wide variety of activities, but I can’t say that I have “ground” any of them terribly hard. Honestly, nothing about the experience so far has made me want to grind them. What I have been doing instead is casually picking away at the three end-game activities while working on my zone renown and collecting all of the Altars of Lilith.
Tree of Whispers
The first end-game activity that you will unlock is the Tree of Whispers, and you gain access to this immediately upon completing the campaign. This is somewhat akin to the Bounty system from Diablo III, and it will highlight various objectives on your map in graduated shades of pink to red. Essentially pink activities reward you a single Grim Favor, mauve activities reward you three Grim Favors and maroon activities reward you five Grim Favors. When you have collected ten of these you can go back to the Tree of Whispers to cash in for a box of loot. These boxes are for a specific gear slot and have the chance to drop glyphs for your paragon board and Nightmare Dungeon sigils. There is a chance at a Legendary item but it seems pretty low as I have opened several boxes and gotten nothing. When you reach the break point for Sacred and Ancestral gear, those don’t appear to be guaranteed as I have opened a box containing nothing but vanilla rares.
I feel like this is not exactly a great activity. It is busy work that you can do… but also seems to take an exceptionally long time for you to gather up rewards. Running normal dungeons feel way more rewarding than poking around the map and completing Grim Favors. The shortest route to one of these loot boxes is to complete two of the flagged dungeons, so I guess if just consider Grim Favors and the eventual loot box that they reward as a bonus, then it isn’t so bad. I feel like this system needs to have the threshold for getting a loot box lowered to 5, either that or have every box guarantee at least one legendary or unique. Basically, the system as it stands doesn’t exactly feel as rewarding as the time it takes to complete.
The next activity that unlocks is Helltide zones, which you gain access to upon unlocking World Tier III. These appear on a cycle of being on for an hour and then off for another hour, and will flag two contiguous regions on the map as containing the Helltide. Essentially this replaces the majority of the spawns in the zone with demons and causes a number of chests to spawn scattered throughout the region. Killing these demons causes Aberrant Cinders to drop, and then you collect these to unlock the various Tortured Gift chests. If you die while in a Helltide zone, you will lose half of the Cinders that you are carrying at that moment, so there is a certain measure of risk to reward for farming these areas. They have much higher mob density than you can normally find in the zones. The chest reward thresholds are as follows:
Armor and Ring Chests – 75 Cinders
Amulet, One-Handed, and Off-Handed Chests – 125 Cinders
Two-Handed Weapon Chests – 150 Cinders
Mystery Chests – 175 Cinders
The Mystery Chest rewards 1-5 Legendary/Unique items and several of the zone-specific crafting materials needed for upgrading gear. All in all, this is probably the end-game activity that feels the most rewarding. While you are in the zone it also feels like there is a higher-than-average chance of getting good gear drops in general independent of the chests themselves. My key complaint with this activity and honestly ALL of the “on-timer” activities is that it feels like they don’t happen often enough. I feel like there is never a point where a Helltide zone should not be active. Similarly, I feel like World Bosses should be spawning constantly to the point of being able to have a boss train. The World Boss scene in Guild Wars 2 only works because there is constantly a boss either active or just about to go active which allows people to zip around the map chasing the train. Helltide events should be a constant activity that you can pop in and farm at will.
Nightmare Dungeons
While doing bounties for the Tree of Whispers, there is a chance that you can get a Nightmare Dungeon Sigil to drop. This will unlock access to a nightmare version of a normal dungeon, that has specific affixes applied to it. These remind me of Mythic Plus keys from World of Warcraft, but in reality, they are also not dissimilar to Maps from Path of Exile. Generally speaking, you have positive effects marked in Green and negative effects marked in Grey which change the difficulty of the encounters. At the end of a Nightmare Dungeon, you seem to be guaranteed at least one Legendary or Unique item, which Uniques having a higher-than-average drop rate. The catch is you are given a fixed number of revives for the dungeon, and each time a player revives themselves it takes one of those away from the group. However, if a player revives a character, it won’t strike against that total.
The Path of Exile player in me is annoyed that Diablo IV has no real crafting system to speak of and that I cannot do anything to “re-roll” a bad sigil. The other aspect that annoys the heck out of me is the fact that when you consume one of these… it doesn’t just teleport you to the dungeon. It only flags the dungeon as a “Nightmare Dungeon” and you still have to run there on your own. Those quibbles aside, this is a pretty great activity and it feels fairly rewarding. Experience grinders are largely ignoring Nightmare Dungeons, but in truth, for a more casual player, they feel like a good use of your time. They are also required for leveling up your Paragon Glyphs, which makes that system feel a bit like the Legendary Gems from Diablo III. The only challenge with this system is it takes a bit for you to get enough drops to be able to sustain running the dungeons. I also really wish that they would simplify this system with something akin to the Nephalim Rift device so you could launch directly into them without having to screw with trying to find the damned dungeon on the map.
More of the Same
I recorded another one of my dumb videos, this time attempting to coalesce my feelings about the endgame into a twenty-minute video. I think one of my core problems with the end game that exists currently, is that it does not feel sufficiently different from the leveling game. You are essentially doing most of the same activities that you were doing before be it running dungeons or completing bounties. The only “new” activity is the Helltide zones, which again are just a retread of the zones you have already visited. If Helltide had actually been… going to hell and exploring a whole new map then it wouldn’t feel quite so rehashed. Essentially I guess what I am saying is… finishing the campaign doesn’t really feel like it is a significant milestone other than the fact that you get to skip the campaign on your alts.
The Atlas of Worlds in Path of Exile feels significantly different from the campaign even though it is effectively a retread of the maps you had already seen to that point. The expansion content like Delve and Heist absolutely feels like unique end-game experiences as well, but I would not expect Diablo IV to have anything that rich at launch. The Monoliths in Last Epoch similarly feels like a very unique end-game destination even though again… it is recycling the same content that you have seen over and over again. Even in Diablo III after the Reaper of Souls update, the Nephalim Rift and Greater Rift systems felt like a specific end-game destination that had an enjoyable flow to it. Right now with Diablo IV, I don’t feel like there is a clear “virtuous cycle” that clearly outlines how you should be spending your time. It feels like it is supposed to be empowering that we can “do anything we want” but that is pending that you want to do “more of the same”.
I am sure over time that Diablo IV will be worked and reworked into something that is much more enjoyable than its current state. I think part of my disappointment is that Diablo Immortal was a much more fleshed-out game at launch than Diablo IV is currently. There were a number of enjoyable activities that you could complete that set up a cycle of activities that all felt somewhat unique and allowed you to incrementally move different systems forward. I guess I expected more. There were lessons that could be taken away from Diablo Immortal that would have blended nicely with this game, because quite honestly… other than the egregious monetization… it was a damned solid experience. Admittedly those money-grubbing traits ruined the game for me, but there could have been some good design patterns to take away from that game that would have improved Diablo IV.
I am still playing the game as for the moment I am enjoying myself more than the annoyance… but the annoyance is starting to add up. I really want to see what the next world-tier break feels like, so I will likely be continuing to poke at this until I hit 70… or until some other shiny object takes my attention. Tomorrow I am contemplating doing a “how I would fix Diablo IV” type post.
The post Diablo IV Endgame appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
