Yesterday I talked about my recent Diablo IV adventures, which are admittedly largely led by a desire to keep hanging out with my friend Cyl. That is the game that she is playing so I keep offering myself as tribute to do whatever shenanigans she has in her mind. We did some Nightmare Dungeons last night and I have to admit… while I enjoyed hanging out I didn’t really enjoy the content. We were doing a variety of 21-23 dungeons and honestly… they just were not that fun. It might be that my level is lagging behind hers significantly, or it might be that the content just isn’t actually that fun… but whatever the case the moment we broke for the night I returned to my comfy standby… Last Epoch. I got my Druid to level 84 last night and am still hunting for a few pieces of gear. I need to sit down and properly sort out what I want for each slot and then adapt my loot filter for those specific stats.
Over the weekend I got the Spriggan build through all of the normal mode monoliths and unlocked Empowered Monoliths aka the level 100 Legendary variants of each. I’ve been focused on farming Black Sun mostly for a chance at the squirrel hat aka Herald of the Scurry. I’ve yet to give up on the hope of eventually playing that build. More than anything at the moment I am just farming experience to gain levels. I would really like to have at least one character hit level 100 before the 1.0 drop. This is only the second character that I have hit Empowered Monoliths on so I am still relatively new to the Last Epoch endgame as a whole. That said I already feel like I could use some variety in my life with the content, and my hope is that we maybe see some of the randomization changes sooner rather than later. The Action RPG YouTube channel does a summary of the Friday dev chat live streams and it sounds like something akin to a Loot Goblin is a near-term addition.
I’ve been milking a little bit more experience out of the level 90 normal monoliths because they are so much more chill than empowered. I really need to get back into the habit of throwing on an audiobook while grinding, because when I am doing that… I don’t really notice the repetitive nature of doing monoliths or delve or whatever ARPG grind I happen to be engaged with. The Power sort of broke me as far as books go… and I’ve yet to really dive into another book after that. I tried starting a few but ended up bouncing pretty early. I have a target for the next novel to consume via Audio Book, but I just need to sit down and decide to do it.
At least until the next Path of Exile League, this is going to probably be my gaming happy place. I am still progressing in Honkai Star Rail and got my first character to level 70 last night. I’m going to need to do some devoted grinding in order to get the materials to pull up the rest of my team to 70 as well… then my secondary team after that. I’m pretty happy with the state of my gaming options at the moment. I have Final Fantasy XVI but since it is on console… I just never seem to feel like playing it. I realize I am the weirdo… but the idea of playing a game on a console just feels so exhausting. Controllers are not my natural mode of gameplay and while I grew up playing Atari, NES, SNES, and Genesis… the moment I got access to a 386 computer I was all in on PC gaming. I am honestly somewhat annoyed that Square chose to launch that game ONLY on the PS5 for the time being. If they had done PS5 and Epic Game Store… I would be probably actively playing it on the PC right now.
Anyways hopefully your week is going smoothly. Mine is considerably less hectic than last week was now that the world around me has largely recovered from the storm damage. What are you playing right now? Drop me a line below. Last little note… if you are on Blue Sky you can follow me there now. I had a nice person shove an invite code into my hand. I am not entirely certain what I think about it so far. It feels really really basic, and I still greatly prefer mastodon/gamepad. I am however checking it a few times a day.
The post Spriggan Empowered Monoliths appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Friends! This weekend I moved up into World Tier 4 of Diablo 4, which means I have finally entered the proper endgame. This happened largely due to the fact that my friend Cyl told me that Friday night we would be getting through the Fallen Temple, aka the Capstone dungeon blocking World Tier 4. She had been holding off on trying it, and I had failed it a few times… but together we wrecked the place. Essentially the combination of Sorceress and Barbarian was pretty potent and she would freeze things… and then I would spin on top of them with impunity wrecking their life pool. The final boss encounter was a bit tricky at times, and I had to abuse the fact that I am fairly sturdy and resurrect Cyl a few times. There are a lot of things that just having another person really helps for, and I like that self rezzing does not subtract from your life pool.
Nightmare Dungeons in theory probably should not exist prior to World Tier 4. They are a boring mess at low tiers that you can begin running in World Tier 3. As soon as you complete a Tree of Whispers in Tier 4 everything begins dropping at Tier 21 or higher. Completing one of these unlocks your ability to start salvaging and crafting Sigils. You can’t run a low-tier Sigil without dropping back down into World Tier 3, so essentially… everything that had been clogging my inventory was rendered worthless. Nightmare Dungeons in World Tier 4 is actually pretty enjoyable. This is maybe the content that has been missing from the game to this point and seems to be what the game is actually balanced around. It just sucks that it takes over 100 hours of gameplay to really see this content. That said it also still feels pretty grindy to be focused ONLY on Nightmare Dungeons.
Lately, most of my gameplay in Diablo IV has been centered around the boss and legion timers. The best site that I have found so far is D4 Armory, which also happens to be the site that offers the ability to link your character armory. Essentially it seems like bosses either spawn on a 5, 6, or 7 hour timer… and I cannot keep track of this shit so I am offloading that part of my brain to a timer website. Again I still feel like Blizzard needs to sort this shit a bit better than it currently is. If they want to rotate between Bosses, Helltides, and Legions… then in theory one of these should always be happening or no more than 15 minutes away from happening. Over the weekend I tried to catch as many of these as I could, and the Legion events specifically seem to be amazing experience gain.
The World Bosses themselves are not exactly what I would consider extremely fun encounters… but they also feel like something you really should not miss. One of the things that puzzled me is that I thought we would have more of them. As it stands there are three of them… Wandering Death, Avarice aka New Greed, and Ashava whom we fought in beta. Probably my favorite of these is Avarice simply because the teleport mechanic looks really cool. My least favorite is Ashava, mostly because Poison feels wildly overpowered right now as compared to the rest of the conditional damage types. None of them are terribly exciting however and I really feel like the Diablo IV team needs to play some Guild Wars 2. No game does large-scale spectacle fights as that game does, and it would feel better if there was some sort of zone meta that led to the boss encounter rather than just something randomly spawning every six hours or so.
My luck continues to hold… and I think Cyl is starting to get a little salty about it… in a joking way of course. When we took down Ashava the other night I walked away with two unique items, and she pretty much walked away with nothing but some rares to sell/salvage. I’ve not lucked into either of the two uniques that I still need, however. Essentially I need a new copy of Rage of Harrogath as I am still wearing a Sacred version of that and I need a copy of Gohr’s Devastating Grips to drop. I did pick up Temerity though so very happy to have that slot filled. However, as much effort has gone into gearing… does make me start to align with the “no reset seasons” camp. I just can’t fathom going through this much effort every season.
One thing that I do have to give massive credit to for Diablo IV is the cosmetic options. It has been rare that I have played a game with cosmetic outfits… that have felt so much worse than what was available in the game for free. New World comes to mind because a lot of the Twitch Prime drops are so much cooler looking than anything you can purchase on the in-game cash shop. In Diablo IV I am constantly finding items out in the world that are cosmetics for my horse. Similarly, most of the armor sets you find in the world are better looking than the cash offerings. It does sort of make me wonder if this will be counterproductive to the goals of Diablo IV being a more monetized ARPG than Diablo III was. It makes me wonder if they over-corrected into the realm of free cosmetics to try and minimize comparisons to the shit show of egregious microtransactions that was Diablo Immortal.
The one thing that continues to worry me a bit about Diablo IV, is that I am just never in the mood to solo grind in this game. I’ve had a lot of fun recently when playing on a focused activity with Cyl, but when it comes time to actually do stuff on my own… I tend to log out and play something else. I am not sure if this is a side effect of just how grindy everything is and knowing that it will all be for naught when the season starts, or if it is a greater side effect that the game isn’t nearly as enjoyable as I feel it should be. Whatever the case… I am mostly playing in burst when I happen to check the Armory and see that an event is just about to start. Cyl and I have been pinging each other when we notice a boss is just about to come up, and those moments have been enjoyable. However, Cyl is also grinding this as a mainline game and as a result roughly ten levels ahead of me at any given moment. I fully expect to be left in the dust at some point in the future, and I am not entirely certain I will have the desire to catch back up.
The post Diablo IV – World Tier 4 appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! We started with what I thought was a pretty short show, but as we continued on… new topics kept showing up in the dock. We start off with some talk about the most recent Nintendo Direct, then fade into some initial impressions of Final Fantasy XVI. Bel talks about a problem with the Diablo VI community where new players not already engaged with ARPG communities are deeply confused by how seasons work. From there we talk a bit about the ever-increasing prize bounty around the MTG One Ring. Tam shares some of his experiences with the new Warhammer 40k 10th Edition and the shocking return of Lion El’Jonson. Thalen talks a bit about the new Fallout 76 season and we dive into a discussion about Steam Next Fest and how large it has become. Bel revisits the topic of Last Epoch and Spriggan builds since Grace is back this week, and they share some of their thoughts about Genshin Impact.
Hey Friends! Right now there is a bit of strife happening in the fledgling Diablo IV community over the concept of what is going to happen with the upcoming start of Season 1, and the Battle Pass associated with it. This morning I thought I would take a moment because I honestly had no clue that the concept of a season in ARPG terms… or even that ARPG was a specific genre… was foreign to some gamers. This is me showing my ignorance as being a long-term member of this sub-genre community. Over the years you will have noticed that I play a lot of ARPGs and play an awful lot of seasons, so I thought I would take a bit this morning and talk through some of the terminology.
ARPG as a Genre
First, let’s start off with defining “ARPG” as it is referred to by the “in group” that plays them as a hobby unto itself. It is admittedly a bad genre title, but it is one that was pinned onto Diablo as being one of the first real-time Action RolePlaying Games, and the name just sort of stuck. Over the years Action RPG has been pinned to a lot of games from Dark Souls to Devil May Cry… to even the Fallout Series… and to be honest, they are not wrong to do so. When I say ARPG however I more specifically mean the lineage of Diablo and the subgroup of largely isometric viewpoint hack-and-slash loot chase games that involve some degree of randomly generated content and a bunch of repetition in chase of building the perfect character. I guess it might be easier if I just rattle off some of the games in this genre to help define it.
Chronicon
Diablo Series
Dungeon Seige Series
Fate Series
Grim Dawn
Last Epoch
The now-defunct Marvel Heroes game
Path of Exile
Titan Quest
Torchlight Series
Undecember
Victor Vran
Wolcen
This is by no means a complete list but represents a broad swath of the type of games included in the ARPG genre. I view “Looter Shooter” as a divergent genre that started with Borderlands and continued on into Destiny, Anthem, Division, and Outriders. When this genre broke apart from the pack of Isometric games, it picked up its own traditions and design ideas that carry forward from that point. Now I have questioned before whether or not Diablo IV should even be considered an ARPG by the definition of this genre or not. I personally think it aligns more closely with an MMORPG which is a definition for another day.
What is a Season?
In a core ARPG, especially one with multiplayer play… there is this concept of a periodic reset of progress. Generally speaking, there is some sort of transition of characters from the previous period moving to the more standard or as D4 calls it… “Eternal” realm, and then a new realm spinning up that is only for brand new characters. This construct goes by many names depending on the game you are playing.
Diablo 2 – Ladders
Diablo 3 – Seasons
Diablo Immortal – Seasons
Diablo 4 – Seasons
Grim Dawn – Seasons but they are community-led only
Last Epoch – Cycles but won’t be in-game until the 1.0 release
Path of Exile – Leagues or Challenge Leagues if you look at old posts
Torchlight Infinite – Seasons
Undecember – Seasons
The idea is to have a fresh start that puts everyone on even footing. There are often race events surrounding these “seasons” and specific content that can only be obtained by starting from scratch. How this actually works varies wildly by game. In Diablo 3 you had a series of challenges that you completed in order to get rewards. The first four gave you a full set of gear, and the last six unlocked a cosmetic of some sort and another stash tab (up to a certain point). In Path of Exile, there are extremely detailed mechanics that only take place during a season some of which may or may not actually make it into the “standard” game as they refer to it. Right now in the “Crucible League,” the mechanic involves putting talent trees on your weapons which unlocks the ability to create some truly bizarre builds.
The information we have currently surrounding seasons and Diablo IV is a bit hazy. We know there will be some sort of seasonal journey similar to that of Diablo III, where you have micro objectives that add up to rewards with bigger rewards from completing a bunch of meta achievements. We also know there will be a battle pass system, that unlocks rewards as you gain experience by completing these objectives and probably from just grinding the world as well. There is some sort of season-exclusive story arc that will only be available during that given season. We now also know that none of this will be available on the “Eternal” realm, aka the realm that everyone has been playing on since the launch. Like other ARPG seasons, you will need to create a brand new character to experience any of this and only seasonal characters will progress your season’s journey.
Seasons have a Fixed Duration
Another important concept that you should understand is that seasons… or whatever a game calls it have an expiration date associated with them. Generally speaking, these tend to last three to four months, with the best having four seasons during a year. This gives you just enough time to build up a character… get bored of that character… have some time off from the game, and then get excited again when the next season happens. Path of Exile does this probably better than anyone else currently and they really hype up the launch of a new league with trailers, dedicated cosmetics, and an official race that is often commentated like an e-sports event. While I have never really been one to watch e-sports in the past… I have to admit that I do find myself drawn to the league races. I even participated a little bit in one of the ExileCon qualifier races just to get the achievement for getting to level 10 during a race.
Why Play a Season?
I am honestly not entirely certain if I am the best person to explain this, given that I am so bought into this concept that I never spend any time playing my non-seasonal characters, and effectively when the season is over they either rot or are deleted. I guess I could talk a bit about why I personally enjoy seasons. One of the funniest times for me is the launch of a new game, the hype cycle leading up to it… and the hardcore focus of grinding up a new character. There is a reason why I have played almost every MMORPG that came down the pipe over the years… and then petered out slowly as the rush of excitement around the game died down. I love the excitement surrounding something that is shiny and new, and how it brings all sorts of folks out of the woodwork. Honestly, the best part of the Diablo IV launch for me… is seeing folks showing up in my Battle.net friends list that I had not talked to for years.
An ARPG season is this entire process in a microcosm. For Diablo III, seasons would always begin around 7 pm on a Friday night. So on that Friday night I would get together with Ace and often times Byx as we leveled brand new characters. There was always a crush of excitement around getting back together after being apart for three or more months. Diablo III seasons were almost the perfect example because generally speaking we got good enough at the game to be largely finished by Monday. So we had this really focused gaming weekend, and then plenty of time to chill and do other things… and then be excited about the start of the next season. Path of Exile leagues are a considerably less social experience, but still, I have had a lot of fun talking through build ideas with Ash, Thalen, or Ace throughout the season and slowly ticking off achievements as I completed maps or knocked out challenges for cosmetics.
I also love the almost manic levels of content in the community and the excitement that surrounds the launch of a new season. I am using the season as a generic term, but Path of Exile leagues are specifically so focused on the experience of playing through the league, digging down and finding out critical information about the new mechanics, and coming up with the most efficient methods of play. In Diablo III, it was admittedly a much smaller community but there was still a lot of excitement centered around the completion of the season’s journey and figuring out the best new builds taking into account all of the changes that were made.
Probably the best aspect of the reset is that it puts everyone on the same footing. No matter how much you played the previous season… it is all washed away and everyone starts back at level 1. So that allows someone to sit out a few seasons and then return at the launch of a brand new season without feeling like they have to play “catch up”. This is the problem I have with Destiny seasons, in that they keep moving the bar forward in gear level making it seem like to return… I would need to dedicate a large amount of time to catch up to the same gear level as everyone else starting the season. In an ARPG you can just show up and know you are going to be on equal footing with all of your friends.
The Drama Surrounding Resets
Right now we find ourselves in a gulf between those who are dedicated ARPG players and understand the constructs of that genre, and those who are playing Diablo IV without ever being part of that community in the past. We’ve had this same disconnect among the AggroChat folks because once upon a time I said that Tam wasn’t really an “ARPG Player” when he absolutely felt he was. He had played through every Diablo when it came out to completion… which sure is a thing, but is also different from being engaged with the particular community and customs surrounding the seasons. Right now there are a lot of folks who have experienced seasons as a construct in other genres and are freaking out slightly that they will have to throw away the hard-fought progress that they have made on their current crop of Eternal characters in order to experience anything associated with the first Diablo IV Season.
I can’t say that they are wrong honestly. One of my core complaints about Diablo IV is the fact that it is way too grindy to be reasonably played in a seasonal model. Normally speaking in a seasonal ARPG, it takes around a week to reach the end game… and then you are spending the rest of the season completing achievements. In Diablo IV I am roughly 100 hours into the game and still have not reached the “true” endgame. That seems like one heck of a long commitment for folks to make every three months. Maybe Diablo IV given that it is more MMORPG than ARPG… needs to be the one that breaks this mold and introduces seasonal content that is available to non-seasonal characters. I have a feeling that the way the game is currently… season one might kill whatever momentum Diablo IV has. I am deeply uncertain if I will participate in the season because I am honestly not sure if I enjoyed the game enough to go all in for it. There is also supposed to be the start of a new Path of Exile league around the same time, and I am way more into that game.
I’ve said it before and I will say it again. I think Diablo IV is a great game for the type of player that wants to get in… and play through the story and then move on to another game. I feel like this game is not designed for the way that ARPG core players tend to play these games. The core gameplay loop is just not as interesting as some of the other options. With the upcoming release of Path of Exile II… which is really just a new client for the game and a whole new campaign… I think that will end up capturing all of the Core ARPG players for the long term. I think Diablo IV will probably be better for Path of Exile… than POE was for D4. There were a lot of players waiting around for the next coming of the Diablo franchise, and are now already filling the internet with grumpy think pieces about how it just doesn’t quite live up to their expectations. I would be one of those players as well.
I personally think a lot of things are going to have to change in the way that Diablo IV works in order for it to succeed in the traditional ARPG seasonal model. Firstly they need to greatly speed up the process of leveling, and speed up the renown gain process if they are in fact going to require that to be done each season. Additionally, they need to add new mechanics into each season in order to flesh out the end game, because right now… nightmare dungeons as the primary end game activity are not amazing. They also need to spend some time improving the feel of the various classes because everyone effectively is funneled into playing exactly the same spec. There are only one or two viable options for the end game in a given class. Diablo IV as a whole has way less build diversity than literally any other ARPG with a seasonal model. I just can’t see the game in its current state… existing in the normal seasonal model.
So maybe that means that seasons will need to change for Diablo IV. Maybe there will be enough pushback from gamers that are used to different seasonal models to make this happen. I foresee that the first few seasons will be a bit on the rocky side. I do not think that the team that is working on Diablo IV necessarily grasps all of these nuances. They built a game that is not necessarily how ARPG players actually play ARPGs. I get that they were attempting to expand the base… but I am not sure if the way in which they did so will be successful in the long run. Right now I am looking forward to ExileCon and more information about Path of Exile II, and way less about the first Diablo IV season.
However, since there seems to be a disconnect between those in the know and those who have never engaged in a Seasonal ARPG… I thought I would take some time this morning and talk about that divide and hopefully fill in some information.
The post What is an ARPG Season? appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
