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.
Good Morning Folks. So I have talked about the fact that I feed several feral cats in my neighborhood… one of which that lives in my backyard and another couple that frequent the front porch. Around 8 pm last night I ducked into the backyard to see if Tripod was around with a full scoop of food… bumped my arm and spilled some of it and thought nothing about it since I knew the birds also liked to eat the cat food. I did not realize just how many birds I was feeding. I had to put out some more food just to bait them away from the backdoor so we could open it again without the fear of getting a bird in the house. This capture from the security camera does not account for all of them… there were so many birds swooping down and looking for cat food. Like I usually feed away from the back door so I was never really seeing the full effect. This is honestly a bit concerning… so I might need to get a bird feeder that I can bolt to the deck further away from the door.
I skipped yesterday blogging because I did not feel like I had much to say, but since then I have made a few swaps and figure I will go ahead and talk about them. Since I have most of my gear crafted, I have decided to drop Harvest from my Niko tree and instead turn it more into a “strongboxes matter” tree with map effect and map drop sustain taking the “high hat” and the “low hat” as a result. This combined with taking all of the quant wheels and all of the shrine nodes, lets me farm niko juice while running strongbox scarabs for fun and profit. Opening strong boxes, and forcing them onto your map with the map device is a heck of a lot of fun. I only have my five way device as I have not run a T17 yet so right now I am running three of the generic ambush scarab, and one ambush scarab of hidden compartments to crank up my chance of being able to open the same box more than once. The ambush scarabs are around 2 chaos each, and the hidden compartments 1 chaos… then combined with the 3 chaos map device craft… it is costing me 10 chaos per map.
I am extracting WAY more than 10 Chaos worth of goods out of each map. Granted I rarely get raw divine drops like in the above screenshot, but running orange altars means that I am often getting a large amount of raw chaos effectively sustaining this process. I am getting way more other things that I could be selling, but I am exceptionally lazy when it comes to liquidating my stash for the purpose of profit. According to Wealthy Exile I have 54 Divines worth of saleable things in my stash and that is up from 34 on Monday around when I swapped to a strongbox strategy. Now some of the raw divines that I have been getting are coming from 500k shipments of Blue Zanthimum to Kalguur which often returns at least one Divine Orb. The more important thing however is that running strongboxes is just plain fun.
This is also serving a larger goal that I have… which is to get that damned Primordial Blocks hideout. I have been running t16 maps that are NOT Primordial Blocks while having it set as every map favorite slot… causing me to produce quite a few drops. Essentially my goal is to farm up 30-40 maps and then chain run them so that I can really get the engine going of swapping back and forth between Blocks and Shipyard. I was doing a bit of this… but it was going much slower than I really wanted and was having to flip flop between map layouts more than I would prefer. My ideal scenario is that I am running 30 or more of the same map layout in a row so that I can turn off my brain and just farm before switching maps and zoning out while doing a different layout. Quite honestly I have to say… Shipyard is a way better map than I originally gave it credit for. Initially it was chosen as the best of the worst maps connected to Primordial Blocks, but in truth… I think I really like it.
The other thing that I am really enjoying is the fact that I am essentially getting two of my favorite classes… at once. Consistently the two builds that I have enjoyed playing the most are Bows either played with Lightning Arrow or Elemental Hit of the Spectrum and building it as tanky as I can reasonably do so while using a Headhunter. The other build that I love and keep going back to is Righteous Fire Chieftain, because it feels so good to zoom around the map with impunity while shit explodes around me. Running a bow merc… essentially gives me both playstyles at once as I get that good off screen clear that bows gives you, and RF explode for the packs that I dive into. The only negative is that occasionally my merc dies to random stuff, because it is more squishy than I am. I would be way closer to the “run 100 t14 maps with a merc” achievement if I could keep it alive 100% of the time. I am having a lot of fun, and essentially building out two characters at once… has tamped down my desire to run up an alt.
Speaking of achievements, I am currently sitting at 17 of 40 and have a bunch of items that are pretty close to finishing up. I am about to spend some time farming uber lab to quality up my gems because I have a stack of goddess tokens, and I am really cheap and do not want to buy gemcutters prisms en masse. In theory I might be able to knock out the 75 Divine Founts achievement this league, and given that I am sitting at 96 and making decent progress towards 97 I should be able to hit 100 to finish that thing. The one that is going to suck is Remarkable Realms. Instead of requiring you to do specific unique maps… it now just requires you to do 40 of them which is way more than previously required. I am sure they did this to keep Doryani’s Machinarium from kneecapping everyone… but as a Delver that was a good chunk of my profit selling those things. I think without those… almost all of the profit from delve relies on finding Aul and either getting the 26 Div Crown of the Tyrant or a well rolled Aul’s Uprising aka Haste, Grace, Purity of Fire, Envy, etc.
Speaking of Delve, I have not necessarily been pushing super hard but when I farm up a bunch of sulphite I tend to shift gears and then burn it down in the mines. I am farming around 160 depth and slowly descending, but not necessarily finding any real reason to push it. I can get all of the cities at this depth and am mostly descending diagonally downwards when given a chance. I’ve yet to find an Aul, but I have fought the Vaal and Abyss bosses a few times each. What has surprised me is how much better of a source of gold the mines are than they were previously. I ran a few nodes last night and before I knew it… I was up over 100k again. I am spending it down pretty frequently to keep my town running so that I can keep doing shipments and keep growing crops. When I am flush with gold I run mappers for awhile to burn through my stash of lower tier maps, but given that Kodra is playing now I will probably dump some of those in the guild bank for him.
Anyways… me and Tunnel Bear are having a grand ole time. I’ve enjoyed this league quite a bit, in spite of the weird connection issues that GGG seems to be having. They blame it on DDOS attacks, and I believe them… but it still sucks and unfortunately there isn’t much you can reasonably do to stop that. I am not sure if it is some fan base outside of Path of Exile that is angry… or if maybe it is the POE2 player base that feels ignored now that everyone has gone back to POE1 for awhile. Whatever the case I am mostly getting by just fine, but I hear it is really bad for the European players. The problem with this league however is that I am mostly doing a lot of the things I have done before… and really don’t know what new information I can pass along that might be helpful. Keeping my head down and farming lots of content seems to be my modus operandi right now.
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Good Morning Friends! We are closing in on the end now. I have this farm and one for tomorrow… and then we are done. I committed to this process not realizing how many there would be and I have to admit I have gotten a bit tired of this “bit” as I am sure you all have been as well. The end is nigh however so we are going to push through. This is another good farm not too terribly far from the Taedas farm we’ve already talked about, this time focused around another shaman-type Dryad named Cael. This one also has a Void Gauntlet and a Life Staff and I think the jury is out on which are the best set for which purposes. I largely came here because it was a relatively easy bow to farm, and also had another trade skill set item.
To get to this farm we are best off using the spirit shrine that sits smack in the middle of the zone, but it is also a fairly reasonable run from Valor Hold. I would however suggest making a detour and picking up that mid-shrine if you don’t have it. This is a much higher-level farm than most of the others we have been doing, and everything surrounding Seniab is level 60, so adjust accordingly. I would suggest plopping down a tent just outside the area because it is a fairly long run from the shrine if you are trying to recover. If you happen to be there will a full group, at the top of the tower, is a true boss named Baines that is way too hard to be duo’d. If you had four of five people you likely could take him down on the same respawn timer as Cael. Cael however is easily solo’d and if you sneak up the tower you can loot both of the chests behind Baines without aggroing him pending you sneak and watch your approach angles.
I personally find this to be a much easier camp than Taedas, even though the actual level of the mobs inside of it is much higher. There is also more to do if you are willing to do it, in that each doorway to Seniab has a dryad in it, with two warrior-types and two prowler-types. You can get in a rhythm where you kill Cael and the one warrior-type that spawns with it, then go around the room killing the door guardians, and by the time you finish with all of that… Cael is likely to be spawning again soon. Additionally, there are I think four chests in the vicinity without climbing the tower, and even more, if you do choose to climb the tower up to where Baines is. So if you are at the farm for very long it is well worth taking a trip up the tower every hour to get the chests. Let’s dive into the drops:
As I said before this is a really easy camp if you are needing any of the weapons that are dropped and probably the only bow that is very easily solo’d. I’ve been out here several times with friends and the Life Staff seemed the most common, followed by the Void Gauntlet, and lastly, I have only seen a single bow drop. Again with the loot weirdness that happens in New World, it is entirely possible that you will have wildly different luck with what seems to be commonplace for you. Again all of these weapons can be taken up to 625 with Umbral Shards pending you cap out your expertise at 600 for that weapon type. I did not see this boss drop any Obsidium Gypsum, so I am not entirely certain what flags a mob for dropping that. If you need some the easiest way I have found is the Putris camp.
One more of these to go and I will be posting it tomorrow regardless of it being Thanksgiving. I will be EXTREMELY thankful to have this series behind me. Once I have wrapped everything up I will be adding a section to my New World Gametools page with these guides categorized by the weapons that they drop to make things a little easier going forward for someone coming along after this series has finished. I have collected them into a Loot Farms category on my blog. As always if you know any great spots that I have not visited that drop level 590 gear, please drop me a line below.
The post Edengrove Seniab Ruins Farm appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Friends! I hope today is getting started in a reasonable manner. We continue on with the series of New World gear farms that I have spent the last few weeks documenting. This one is a bit of an odd one because technically you will be located within the boundaries of Everfall, but more naturally you are actually on the edge of Ebonscale Reach. On this farm, you will be hanging out near a waterfall and taking down a giant white crocodile over and over. I specifically came out here seeking a good necklace and a strength-based Great Axe, but having a Tanner Shirt drop is also a nice added bonus.
The core problem with this farm is where it is located. You have a few options namely that you can either run through Ebonscale Reach and an area infested with very aggro Alligators, or you can drop down a waterfall coming from the Everfall side. My suggestion and the directions that I have drawn in are to drop down from the Everfall side. You will of course need to understand how to break up your fall into smaller segments to keep from dying in the process as you cannot survive just jumping in from above given that there are no actual swimming mechanics. You will need to slide down the mountain and hit ledges on the way down to break up the momentum of your fall. Once there you can safely hang out next to the waterfall where the Tazorjaw won’t actually aggro you when it spawns in.
The worst part about this camp is that the terrain around the waterfall is a little janky, and it is entirely possible for a loot bag to spawn in half embedded in the ground. If this happens hold still and look for sparkles on the ground, which will indicate where the bag is located. Then in theory you should be able to hover over that patch of ground and loot what just dropped. I tried to kill him backed into the corner of the waterfall as the terrain there seemed to lead to more reasonable drop locations. All in all, this was a pretty quick farm and I got all of the drops in less than two hours. You will of course also get a lot of leather from the gator each time you skin it. Let’s look at the drops.
The big bonus of this camp is the Tanner Shirt, which sells pretty well on the trading post if you get spares. I know in my short farm I think I picked up three of them in total. The most common drop for me was the necklace, and the hardest thing to get dropped was the Greatsword. However, as I have talked about before since the game tends to “get stuck” on a single item your mileage may vary significantly. I have a handful more of these guides that I will be posting over the coming days and have collected them into a Loot Farms category on my blog. As always if you know any great spots that I have not visited that drop level 590 gear, please drop me a line below.
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