Good Morning Friends! This weekend was the launch of the new Crucible League in Path of Exile. I had Friday off and as a result, I opted to hop in and attempt to play when it officially launched a 3 pm my time. In the grand scheme of things it honestly went pretty smoothly. At the time I took a screenshot, there were just shy of 68,000 players waiting in the queue, and based on the numbers Grinding Gear Games released they had a new peak concurrent players of 321,180 over the weekend. As far as stability goes, but the time I managed to chew through the queue things seemed pretty solid. I created a Witch and ran her up to level 4 to get some spells, and then started my soon-to-be Righteous Fire Marauder. When I did the character swap there was another very short queue but from that point forward I was able to stay connected and level without any issues.
As stated before I am largely following the tree that Pohx has come up with that you can find over on his website. This meant starting out with the meatball again… aka rolling magma and then rapidly transitioning into a combination of Holy Fire totem with Phantasmal Support and Flame Wall. In theory, I could have continued to use Rolling Magma until I transitioned into Righteous Fire, but honestly, I prefer the albeit slower totem/firewall gameplay. I grossly over-leveled the content so I failed to get access to Armageddon Brand before I could actually convert over to Righteous Fire. That is honestly the wild thing about the changes made to the tree, is that I was able to be running RF before leaving Act 2. Admittedly all that it really took was me getting access to the spell, which I found from a Vaal area which means I am running Vaal RF for now and at some point will swap out to the normal version.
Being able to run Righteous Fire and some semblance of the actual build early, made this quite possibly the most chill leveling experience I have had in Path of Exile. Until I got Firetrap up and running I kept Righteous Fire going while dropping Flame Wall and Holy Fire Totem, and technically still have Flame Wall currently for added damage. As is a habit, here is my very first Chaos Orb drop of the season, found in a level 16 area in Act 2. At that moment I was still running Pohx’s loot filter, which is based on the World of Warcraft coloring scheme. I’ve now swapped back to the standard issue Neversink, but Pohx’s did help a bit to specifically call out some drops that were the ideal gem socket colors for the build early on.
The crucible league mechanic is fairly interesting, but also fairly dangerous. Right now you channel an ability to add experience to the item you are forging. The longer you channel, the harder in theory the mechanics become. The problem is there is no clear way of determining just how hard you are making the encounter because all of the affixes applied to the mobs are obfuscated. This means there are times when I can channel all the way up with impunity, and other times that the encounter will one-shot me, without a clear understanding of why. My hope is that we see some rapid reworks of this system to maybe expose some of the mechanics of what say 20%, 40%, 60%, and 100% would do to the encounter with an ability to just pick a percentage. The nice thing is that these are not one attempt and you fail… you can effectively zerg the encounter until you have killed everything in order to collect your item. Mapping will of course limit you to the six gates problem, but I would imagine that most of the hardcore players are staying the hell away from this league mechanic in general, as it is way too unpredictable.
The other problem with the crucible is it has a way of bricking items. For example, if you are doing some sort of Elemental Equilibrium build and cannot have a specific damage time on your bow… getting that type from a crucible tree means there is little you can do to fix it. The above video shows a process of re-rolling your crucible trees but it seems extremely painful. I could see this as part of some extremely expensive crafting process where you find a good base item… then try and get the perfect crucible tree and THEN craft on the item to try and make the perfect rare item. I mean if you are willing to throw 100 Divines at crafting an item, then in theory you are probably willing to go through this amount of tedium and pain in order to get a sweet crucible tree on it. I figure all of the mirror items in this league will be crucible crafted as well as have the perfect rare stats on them.
I had deep concerns about the sweeping mastery changes and what they would do to the Righteous Fire build, and at least on the surface level it seems to have made things stronger. I guess I was not fully expecting the new fire mastery of “Regenerate 1 life per second for each 1% Uncapped Fire Resistance” to be quite as strong as it actually is. Admittedly this is prior to taking the second resistance hit from Act 10 Kitava, but right now this one node is giving me 305 life regeneration per second. This ends up making Fire Resistance a dump stat that adds a ton of survival with it and also makes it so I can hopefully better survive those map affixes that lower my resists. At this point, I am still in Act 8 and taking things extremely slowly. I spent a bit of time farming Blood Aqueducts trying to get a six link to drop. I have a perfectly colored corrupted six-socket chest but would need to get some tainted bindings in order to make an attempt at linking them.
After rushing around the last league… I think I am going to take things pretty languidly because I figure the longer I wait the cheaper items will get. I did manage to pick up a single decent item for 1c and am now just gathering my resources so I can afford a viable six-link as I start early maps. My goal as always is to knock out my third lab before beating the campaign and taking another resist hit. The first two labs were easy as pie however so I expect the third won’t be too awful either. Having a heck of a lot of fun even if the league mechanic is sort of suspect. I enjoy the forging process itself, but it is way too dangerous to spend a lot of effort on it right now.
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Good Morning Friends! Yesterday the Diablo IV PR team dropped a video previewing the “endgame” activities that you will participate in after you hit the level cap. I had heard that it was getting more downvotes than likes, and as a result, I thought I might talk about my own feelings regarding what I saw in the video. I feel like it is important to cover some ground before I do so. I am a huge fan of ARPGs and if you sift through the last decade and a half of this blog you will see evidence of this scattered throughout its pages. Second I’ve played both very limited closed and open testing periods for Diablo IV but can only really reflect my thoughts on the open testing. It isn’t like the closed testing really gave me information that I did not gain through the open weekends, however. I’ve also already largely decided that Diablo IV is not a game being designed for me and the types of gameplay that I enjoy in ARPGs. You can read some of my comments on my experiences here, but I wanted to get this out of the way to explain that I am going to try and be balanced but I have my specific biases as does everyone talking about this game.
Let’s talk about what was outlined in the video while staring at my Beefcake Murder Hobo Barbarian from Open Beta. Essentially the video outlines a number of activities that will exist and will at least make up the early “endgame”. It also indicates that releases will be made on a semi-regular basis that will add additional “content” but we are uncertain exactly what any of that release schedule will entail. Diablo Immortal “launched” on July 7th of 2022 and has released a total of 11 “seasons” worth of content some with major changes and some with minor tweaks for an update roughly every 24 days. Diablo III has had a rather anemic release schedule going for long periods of time with no updates other than the rolling new season every 3-4 months… most of which only entail the release of a new cosmetic chase item. I expect that Diablo IV is going to land somewhere between these two with not nearly the frenetic schedule of a mobile game, but at least something dropping each quarter. How significant each drop is going to have not been explained yet. I also expect expansions that add the missing classes to the game like Crusader and potentially Witch Doctor.
I am going to start by Cataloging the Endgame Activities outlined in the video:
Four World Tiers
Open World
Events
World Bosses
Dungeons and Strongholds
Nightmare Dungeons
Requires consumable “Sigil” to unlock
Helltide Rifts (this one I am uncertain about)
Bounty Board in the form of an Angry Tree
PVP Areas
World Tiers
The video introduces the concept of World Tiers, and in the Open Beta, we immediately had access to two of these… Adventurer and Veteran. After completing the campaign moving to Nightmare sounds like it is gated by what they referred to as a “Capstone Dungeon”. Upon beating that dungeon you can set your world to the next difficulty which I would assume involves some grinding again and unlocking the next capstone dungeon and progressing forward. There is no clear indicator if you will need to progress through the story again at Nightmare difficulty, or if this just opens up the next Capstone Dungeon immediately. In Diablo III, the initial endgame was effectively just repeating the story over and over at different difficulties so I would hope that they do not make this critical mistake again.
It kinda feels bad that the different difficulties don’t just open up on their own. For example, in Diablo III the difficult tiers are level gated, and if you are absolutely Feeling your Wheaties you can run the entire initial campaign on Torment 1 if you so choose. This was absolutely a key mechanic before helping your friends catch up quickly to the endgame levels but zooming them through content and catchup experience is likely not going to be a thing in Diablo IV based on the limited testing I did with friends during the beta. Essentially higher world tiers feel like more of the same… same open-world areas, same events that reoccur on a schedule, and same world bosses.
It is really the World Bosses that concern me the most when it comes to Higher World Tiers. Essentially this template of keeping moving forward in World Tier is something that we experienced with Diablo Immortal. There if you fell behind the average level of your server, you simply did not have groups to do anything with. I simply could not get groups for the bosses at lower World Tiers, after taking a break from the game and seeing the majority of the server zoom ahead of me. This is probably going to be something that is rapidly a problem with this type of world design for Diablo IV unless all of the world tiers are blended together at the same time.
Nightmare Dungeons
So based on the video, there are apparently “over” 120 dungeons in the game. Now I have talked about them before and how similar they felt… with it feeling a bit like the World of Warcraft cave problem of every single cave in the game having the same layout. That aside… there is apparently the chance of having a “sigil” drop that allows you to turn a dungeon into a “Nightmare Dungeon”. Doing so adds “affixes” to the dungeon that modifies the experience. If you have played World of Warcraft since the Legion expansion, you will know this system as Mythic Dungeons. Now it does not necessarily sound like keys upgrade in this system, but using a key to unlock a game mode that adds challenging modifiers to the dungeon… is basically the same thing as Mythic. This does nothing to disprove my hypothesis that Diablo IV is an MMORPG, but whatever people generally enjoy Mythic as a game mode.
It does concern me a bit because this absolutely sounds like a “bring your own group” type experience. I am hoping that the game offers some form of matchmaking other than just spamming chat and looking for a group.
Helltide Rifts
So this one I am completely uncertain about as to if it is an actual game mode or not. During the section talking about dungeons, Joseph Piepiora specifically calls out one of his favorite modifiers called Helltide Rifts. So that would lead me to believe that this is just a subsection of Nightmare Dungeons. However on Reddit folks are specifically listing this as a game mode, and further on in the video, there is footage making it seem like this is taking place in Open World areas as well. So I am utterly confused by this, but it sounds like Rifts shown above open up, and harder mobs that don’t necessarily exist normally in an area spawn forth. So other than that I legitimately have no clue what is going on here.
It does not strike me as anything close to the usage of the word “Rifts” from Diablo III, where they were instanced content that you ran through either on a timer or until you collected a specific number of orbs. The Open World footage reminded me a bit of the raid rifts from the game Rifts, so again I am clear as mud on what this even is… or if it is just a subsection of Nightmare dungeons. Maybe the footage I think looks like Open World is just dungeons that have a more open layout. Diablo Immortal definitely had dungeon areas that looked more like just an Open World map, so maybe Diablo IV does as well.
Bounty Boards / Bounty Tree
Apparently, there is a tree that is angry with us, and it wants us to do bounties for it to make it less mad at us. I mean that is what I got from the words that were said in the video. Mechanically what I understood it as… is that there is a tree somewhere in the world that serves as the new bounty board. In Diablo Immortal conveniently located in the town was a board… and you could accept mini-quests to kill some stuff, collect some monster giblets… or do something similarly menial. Doing bounties looks like it allows folks to purchase gear. I mean I am fine with bounties as a concept, and honestly, I enjoy doing them. They were probably part of Diablo Immortal that I enjoyed the most. However, generally speaking, these are less an objective in themselves and more something that you do while you are doing other objectives. I can’t really get excited very much about this feature.
PVP Areas
We knew there would be PVP in the game, but I have to tell you right now… this is very much not a game mode for me. I will never participate in it, because I don’t really do PVP in general. I do not care about flopping my virtual schlong on the table and measuring it against other players. I am not terribly competitive in nature, and the main reason why I enjoy WvW in Guild Wars 2, is that traditionally… there is a lot of killing of NPCs and capturing of objectives and very little actual fighting. From the sounds of what was described in the video… it seems like Diablo IV pvp is something akin to the Dark Zone from The Division. This has more collectively become known as “extraction mode” where you go into a dangerous area and are trying to get back out with a resource of some sort. In this case, it is some sort f shard that you need to purify inside the danger zone, and while doing that you are flagged on the map to all players in the vicinity so they can come to kill you and take your stuff.
Again… this is not a game mode I am ever going to engage in. They specifically call out spending these shards to buy cosmetics. I kinda hate when cosmetic appearances are locked behind specific systems that I have no interest in engaging with… but I lived with that in WoW with the cool PVP armor and mounts and I guess I can live with it in the Diablo MMORPG as well.
More of the Same
I’ve already told you my biases, but there is part of me that had held out hope that the endgame was going to blow me away. The leveling game in Path of Exile for example feels NOTHING like the variety and fun of the endgame. However, what it sounds like, at least based on this PR video… is the Diablo IV endgame is more of the same type of content that you have already experienced to that point. Since I was not really feeling the experience of playing Diablo the MMORPG, then I don’t think it is going to drastically change when I hit the level cap. I’m a bit disappointed and maybe this is going to be another situation like Diablo III and we have to wait until the expansion comes through before the game actually gets good.
Don’t get me wrong. I think Diablo IV is going to sell extremely well, and there are going to be a lot of players that play through the campaign and then uninstall the game never to be seen again. I do not think they have designed a compelling endgame experience that is going to target the ARPG audience in the way that Diablo III, Path of Exile, or Last Epoch have. I think there will likely be some World of Warcraft players that eat this game up, because legitimately as I have said before it is the Diablo MMORPG. I just don’t know if there are going to be enough players sticking around after the credits roll to make the endgame feel like it is thriving.
I know that I will likely spend at least some time poking around in the game when it releases in June, but this video has done absolutely nothing to sell me on a vision for the type of gameplay experience I actually want. I didn’t even talk about the paragon board system in part because we really don’t know a ton about it. However, the footage from the video shows really boring options like what we consider “travel nodes” in Path of Exile that just reward flat stats. I still do not feel like this game is targeting me or the other players that regularly participate in seasons, ladders, and leagues. That said… I am still uncertain who the players are that are going to be sticking around and feeding Blizzard long-tailed transactional money to keep this game making money in the long term. I am glad that is not my problem to solve.
The post More of the Same appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
It is weird to me how I have gone from thinking I would give the Crucible League a hard pass… to be extremely excited for the league start tomorrow. It reminds me quite a bit of back when no matter my mental state… the mere existence of BlizzCon and the news feed that would come from it would stir up a desire to log back in. I seem to have been inoculated from BlizzCon Madness over the last several years, and even though I was playing the Alpha for Dragonflight I had no real interest in playing the game at launch. That said I am still extremely susceptible to Diablo III Seasonitis, and it brought me back to the game to play with the Altar mechanics in Season 28. It seems that maybe with Sanctum, Path of Exile finally burrowed its way deep into my core and I am going to be just as vulnerable to the League Virus as well.
I’ve had people ask me before why I participate in Seasons and Leagues… when in truth you are just playing the same game over again but taking away any advantage you might have earned in the past. This is so much the case that I rarely if ever touch my “Standard” characters that largely just end up being a storehouse of materials that will never be used. For me personally, it has nothing to do with the challenge, but more that it is like this microcosm of a game launch. I love the launch of a new MMORPG and the excitement as folks scurry around trying to adapt to the game systems and the almost crushing amount of content flowing forth about the game. That same environment exists around the launch of a new season or league as everyone gets excited about the start, and then gibbers excitedly about what new lessons they have learned and exciting drops they might have found. It is all of the excitement of an MMORPG launch… crammed into a few weeks to a month every three or four months repeating like clockwork… and once you engage with it fully it can be addictive as fuck.
The unfortunate truth however is your “Standard” characters often feel like cleaning up after one hell of a party. Path of Exile has maybe the best method for dealing with the cleanup. Essentially you get a tab added to your standard inventory that is marked as “remove-only” and then you can withdraw things from it at your leisure. This is far better than the Diablo III norm of just mailing you all of your items. In a season or league, you end up just collecting a bunch of nonsense. For example, I apparently gathered up almost 9000 Chaos Orbs, that I never took the time to convert to Divine Orbs for easier storage. I spent some time yesterday straightening up my standard inventory in prep for the launch of the new league, which meant painstakingly withdrawing items from one tab and depositing them into another. I should have waited until AFTER the league patch dropped because the stack size is being increased from 10 to 20… and it would have literally taken half the time.
I am certain that I will be starting out the league as a Marauder and moving towards Juggernaut and Righteous Fire because it is just too good of a general build not to have at my disposal. During the last league, I ended up leveling and gearing a whole slew of characters. Other than the RF Jugg I had my SRS Necromancer, Seismic Saboteur, and two attempts at a Toxic Rain build that I liked in both Trickster and Pathfinder variants. Primarily I say this because I absolutely expect to have more than one character. Righteous Fire is an amazing build for Delve, Heist, and burning through the early maps but at some point, I want something that is more “Bossing” friendly. I only ended up getting two void stones last league, because quite honestly… I do not enjoy the bossing game nearly as much as I enjoy the rest of the game. However, I might want to change that and try and knock out the last two void stones so I can have T16 maps for everything. For those curious, the above video is Pohx simulating a run of all 10 acts as Righteous Fire.
If I was not starting Righteous Fire, I would probably try out this build from Ghazzy which is more of a traditional ARPG minion build. I don’t think it will probably be as good of a bosser as my SRS build was last league, but it looks like a pretty chill option. The only annoying thing is using Hungry Loop to essentially give you a 5 link for Animate Guardian. I do not love Animate Guardian, so if I did try this out I would probably run it largely ignoring that. The spell is cool in design but the fact that you erase uniques to equip it… and then lose them all if it ever dies… just feels bad. We will have to see how bad the Poison SRS variant is currency-wise, because I might try building this league as my “bosser” since I enjoyed my Fire variant in Sanctum.
I don’t get at all why I am caught up on this emotional rollercoaster of the league start when I am legitimately enjoying myself playing Last Epoch. The heart wants what the heart wants, unfortunately. I did get my primalist/beastmaster up to the second monolith last night however and am still enjoying that gameplay. Right now without going into totems like the build I was loosely following suggests, it feels quite a bit like a HotA Barb from Diablo III. It also seems to have just a ton of survival and feels way tankier than my Necromancer does. I’m technically working on the Monolith that has a higher than reasonable chance of dropping the Herald of the Scurry helm that I will ultimately need, but unfortunately, I think the level is too low yet and I will have to farm it once I get to empowered monoliths.
I’ve also been back to logging into BelginnersLuck shown in the first screenshot of the post and trying to get a unique to drop from Hillock. If nothing else… I am definitely much faster at pathing through that first map in a league and much better at fighting that first obstacle. Tomorrow I will be rolling a brand new character and diving into the league. I don’t necessarily expect any of my friends to really join me in this madness, because I know it literally is that now… madness. I enjoy myself though so that I guess is the part that matters the most. If you plan on diving into the Crucible league drop me a line and say hey.
The post The Heart Wants appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Friends… I have to admit that I was contemplating just sitting out of the Crucible League. I am still not entirely certain if I am going to go all in Path of Exile this time, but that itch in the back of my head… has returned. I still have some deep concerns about Crucible and the direction of the game, but also… I had a heck of a lot of fun in Sanctum League even though I was one of the few AggroChat folks who really got into it. I really loved the rhythm that I fell into of having a mapping/bossing character and then having my Righteous Fire Juggernaut do super chill Heist and Delve runs on. I have no clue what my plans are for the OP bossing character… but I am pretty sure I am starting the league with Righteous Fire at this point.
Pohx released his Righteous Fire video for 3.21 and an updated Path of Building guide over on his website. The main reason why I am interested in doing Righteous Fire again is that it is ultimately a playstyle that I enjoy greatly. Something that I have learned about myself is that I really like three types of builds:
Screen Clear Ranged Builds
Minions do the Work Builds
Super Tanky Damage Feedback Builds
My two favorite Diablo III builds sort of fall into the Tanky/Feedback builds with Whirlwind involving you spinning through packs of mobs and letting them break themselves on your whirling blades, and Invoker Crusader being a mega thorns build that causes them to essentially explode with damage if they touch you. Righteous Fire definitely falls into that sort of category where you are lighting yourself on fire and then running around and watching things burn up as they attempt to get to you. I’ve yet to really find a version of the Demon Hunter Multishot builds in Path of Exile that I really enjoy playing past about the midpoint in leveling.
The other reason why for a Righteous Fire start is because it does a good job of being an all-around character for doing a lot of different mechanics. More specifically it is good at the mechanics that I personally enjoy doing like Delve and Heist which each offer early access to a bunch of interesting types of loot that are much harder to get otherwise. To quote Jorgen, “Delve Provides” and with the Crucible mechanic focused around weapons… I have a feeling that Delve Crafting will be just as strong as ever as folks try and get that perfect Rare item with the perfect weapon tree on it. In Sanctum as soon as I had filled up on a decent amount of resonators I could pretty much liquidate them instantly which allowed me to funnel resources into shopping trips to fully equip builds.
The other benefit of just choosing to run up Righteous Fire which is a tried and true build… is it gives me some time to see how the other builds in the league shake out. I enjoyed Summon Raging Spirits last go-round, and I went with a fire-based build which was not nearly as strong as the poison variant but still good for doing Metamorph bosses. One of the things I contemplated last league was trying to build some sort of minion instability build turning the raging spirits into bombs. The above video talks about this sort of setup and honestly, I might consider that as my second build of the league.
I’ve never gone Boneshatter so I am contemplating playing around with one of those as well. I know this is one of traditionally the stronger league starts. I’ve also tried to play around with a Poison Rain build several times but never really got it playing in a manner that I enjoyed it. I think my problem with so many bow builds is that they tend to focus on ballistas doing the damage rather than hits doing the damage. I still want to find a fun and chill screen clear hit build that doesn’t cost 100 divines… but I have yet to really land on that. I figure in the next few days we are going to be flooded with builds but really we won’t know entirely what works until a week or so in.
The post Starting Righteous Fire for Crucible appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
