Good Morning Folks! I’m getting to the point where I think I am almost “done” with Diablo IV, at least until the next season rolls around. This is the inevitable place that I end up with seasonal model games like this and depending on how engaging they all have different cycles associated with them. In Diablo 3, Last Epoch, and Diablo 4 I pretty much get a few weeks out of them before deciding I have run out of things that I actually care to do. Path of Exile gives me at least a month, maybe two, before I start to lose interest. This is not a failing of the games mind you, this is just the way that I play them. I love fresh starts and I have a lot of fun during the gearing and leveling phase, and then progressively less fun as I accomplish whatever goals I set out for myself. Thankfully we have reached a point where there is almost always another ARPG just about to fire up so that I can hop into it with much glee.
There are a handful of items that I want to check off the list before I move on completely. Ace is far better at this sort of tedium gaming and has long since completed all of these. Essentially I need to finish grinding out Reputation for Nahantu so that I can permanently increase my Obol cap for all seasons from this point forward. I also want to finish gathering up the Tenets of Akarat so that these stay unlocked in future seasons as well. I had started down this path shortly after finishing the campaign, but many of them were bugged and could not be completed. Both of these are sort of the fodder for a lazy weekend afternoon, and I have plenty of time to knock them out before the next season starts in January.
The other thing that I want to complete just for the sake of doing it… because there are probably seasonal titles associated with it… is completing the final level of the Zakarum Remnants grind. This has been the absolute worst reputational grind in any Diablo IV Season. What I think I will probably do is churn through a bunch of Nightmare Dungeons on T4 as I have an achievement for doing those that I have yet to complete. I believe I get another shard of “unobtainium” used to craft mythic from completing this reputation. I might grind out some Undercity Rune Tributes in an effort to compile six copies of every rune so that I can potentially target craft other mythics given that we ran over 100 bosses this weekend and saw zero as opposed to the five from the weekend before last.
You can tell that I am mostly done with a season because I started taking on stupid side projects. The Tree of Whispers is essentially the Bounties system for Diablo IV, and at any given time there are a bunch of objectives around the world that reward varying numbers of whispers. The best ones are the ones that reward five at a time, as you need ten in total to get a bounty cache. Interesting tidbit that my friend Eliyon pointed out, is that you can farm these caches on one character and then have another character benefit from opening them. I believe he was thinking in terms of passing gear, but it turns out you get quite a boost of experience from opening them as well.
So as I am likely to do… I set forth on a totally degenerate play pattern and spent good chunks of the weekend farming Whispers Caches, only to flip over to my baby Barbarian and have him open them. It is honestly shocking how fast you can amass a huge stack of Whispers Caches and in truth, it is pretty damned fun popping around the map completing various bounty objectives. I always used to like running bounties in Diablo III, and it turns out I still enjoy that same sort of gameplay in its newer sibling. I was even doing the PVP Objectives because in truth… no one is out there actually PVPing. No matter what the loud faction of PVPers say… ARPG players do not give a shit about PVP. I could kill the boss for 5 whispers and then cleanse the blood shards that I got for a few more… and make it back to town all without seeing another soul. I did this several times, so it was not like it was a fluke, literally no one cares about PVP.
I wish I had kept better count of the total number of caches that were required to go from around level 7 when I started all the way to level 60 at which point I inherited all of the Paragon points I had accumulated on the Spiritborn. Quick mental math would tell me that it was between 20 and 25 caches in total that I had to farm, which honestly was not that bad. The first few caches gave me ten levels or so per cache… then it settled into about a level per cache until 53… at which point I started getting slightly less than a level. At 53 I farmed up eight caches which took me to 59 1/3, and then I proceeded to farm two more caches just to make sure that it would push me over the line. The cool thing about this process is that by the time I hit 60, I had pretty much gathered up all of the aspects that I would need for the build. Were I smarter I would have specifically kept out the best legendaries while leveling, but I was not that smart and ran around in a bunch of random uniques for a bit until I got things straightened out.
The only annoyance with this method for leveling is that you have to unlock Torment levels on the new character. I assumed as soon as I dinged 60, I would be able to flip over to Torment 1 and start rolling. However, I had to complete a Pit 20 in order to unlock that difficulty level. While I was at it I went ahead and tried Pit 35, the gate for unlocking Torment 2 and was able to do that just fine. My build does not really feel stable enough to push on to Torment 3, and in truth my Double Swing Twisters build is mostly a transitional build. The new Barbarian hotness is Mighty Throw, but it requires a specific unique called The Third Blade in order to make it function, something I have not seen drop yet. For now, Twisters works well enough for any content I would want to do on T1 or T2.
So thanks to my degeneracy, I find myself with two characters at max level and geared this season. The challenge there is that I feel like it isn’t necessarily pushing me to play more. I still feel like I am winding things down significantly. There is one more thing that I would like to try, since we used to pull up alts for each other in Diablo III by running Greater Rifts, at some point I want to see how effective that is by running an alt along with a Pit Run. This is mostly kicking the tires at this point, because I can’t say that I actually want to play additional characters. There is an achievement for having a level sixty of every class, so depending on how fast this process works it might be worth doing just for that.
Anyways… all of that said. Diablo IV still has problems, but it has finally reached a point where I can universally recommend it for folks who enjoy the seasonal model of ARPG gaming. The story for the expansion is still sort of shit, but the endgame gameplay loop is great.
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Good Morning Folks. My friends will tell you that I have “Bel Luck” when it comes to anything involving random chance. I’ve spent years trying to deny this but there are times you just cannot ignore there is something. For example around 2015/2016 Magic the Gathering released a number of sets with ultra-rare chase cards that had a pull chance roughly equivalent to one in every two full cases of booster packs… so somewhere around one in four hundred packs. I pulled the most expensive card buying completely random packs that still go for around $800 after a significant price drop due to the card being banned recently, and had a peak of around $1200. Not only did I pull one of these… I pulled another one of these chase cards from Kaladesh… as well as one from Zendikkar, and two from Amonkhet just buying the occasional random pack. In all examples, I likely bought less than half a booster box worth of packs in total.
This is a common enough occurrence that my friends will talk about my “Bel Luck” rubbing off on them and them benefitting from being in close proximity of me when it comes to good drops in video games. Last night Ace and I spent the evening running summoned bosses. I have no clue HOW many we ended up killing but we wound up doing the same rotation we did last time. We started with Varshaan and we did at least twenty summons before moving on to Lord Zir for another twenty or so there. Then we did Beast in the Ice, followed by Grigore… and in both cases we had to go back to town a few times to clear our inventory. We wrapped up doing Duriel and only got about halfway through our summons before we ran out of steam. Either tonight or some other point this week/weekend we will finish up Duriel and do Andariel before to halt for another week or so and gather back up the materials for more summons. Ace got the first Mythic drop last night and made the traditional comment that my luck was rubbing off on them.
Then my luck kicked in. Over the course of the night, I got Five Mythic Uniques… the first of which was crafted. I’ve lined them up in the order in which I got them to drop. I attempted to use Andariel’s Visage but was taking too much damage due to the high damage reduction roll I had on my existing unique helmet. Then I got a Glaive drop which seemed really interesting, but unfortunately, Kepeleke is kind of required to make the build work. Then I got Heir of Perdition which is a helm that my previous build incarnation wanted, but is not really useful for Quillrain. Next up I got Ring of the Starless Skies which is pretty much a universally good item that I was able to work into my build. Lastly, I got Tyrael’s Might, the Mythic Unique that the build ones, and the one that Ace managed to get through crafting.
Even with all of these upgrades… there seems to be some special sauce that has Ace far ahead of me in performance. This morning I attempted Pit 60 something that they have been speed farming… and it was an absolute slog to get through. I would essentially have to gather everything up and then slowly grind it down. There is something I am missing… or some piece of gear that does not have a high enough roll. Whatever the case I can now comfortably do Torment III all day long, but as I approach Torment IV everything slows down to a crawl. I am just not certain what I am doing wrong with this build, but whatever the case I am annoying the hell out of me. If nothing else my survival has gone up significantly since getting the two mythic upgrades.
At some point, I need to inspect Ace in-game so that I can look through their gear and try and glean what I am missing. I also feel like I am missing talent points somewhere because when I follow a build guide I seem to always be a point or two short from what the guide is recommending. I am seeing that there is a bug that folks are talking about where a respec gave them 69 points instead of 71 so I am wondering if I am being impacted by that. I really do not want to respec everything again but I might try that. I wish Diablo IV had something akin to POE.Ninja which lets me poke around in other builds doing the same thing so I that I could see whatever they were doing differently. I am stronger than I was, but nowhere near what I am seeing from Ace.
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Good Morning Folks. I do not like change, but when I get off my butt and do it… I make rapid and sweeping changes without much forethought. I was frustrated with how low the survival of my stinger build was feeling… not realizing that a huge part of this was due to the fact that I had swapped to Subo instead of Rahir as my Mercenary. I did not realize how much survival Rahir provides. In any case I used one of my legendary scrolls that resets paragon and talent points and spent the next fifteen minutes painstakingly placing points in my paragon boards to switch to the Orange Quill build. I struggled a bit when I first switched, immediately questioning my life choices.
When I said that Stinger was a spammy build… it was a whole other level of spammy. Essentially the only way that I had resources for casting Stinger was by spamming all of the other abilities as they came off cooldown. That ended up in practice that every moment I was trying to piano key my way through six abilities… not just mostly spamming one and then weaving in other abilities as needed. So obviously when I swapped over to Quill, I noticed it was using a lot of the same abilities… and immediately assumed that I needed to do the same thing. I do not in fact need to spam everything, and instead, I can play the character as god intended and just spam one key. It is not a one-button build necessarily because some of the other keys are pretty important but it is mostly one button that matters.
The result is so much more chill, in spite of the build still being fairly spammy. I am far less likely to get a repetitive stress injury, so that has been a massively positive swap. I am however needing to effectively rewire my brain since I have been playing Spiritborn in a specific manner for awhile now. The end result feels more akin to a Fan of Knives build or something like Frost Blades from Path of Exile where you need to face the direction of your target rather than trying to leap into the middle of a pack of mobs and grind it down. What is great about it however is it is so much easier to do the Hordes event and rack up more than enough aether to get good rewards. With this build… Hordes MIGHT be my favorite game mode currently.
Right now I am very much in “Gold Acquisition” mode because I need 50 million gold to buy a Mythic Cache. I had the bright idea that I should convert all of the Aether that I got from doing the Infernal Hordes into gold and see how much that nets me. Essentially this gave me 5,495,600 gold for converting 316 Aether that I had collected during the event. While that is a lot of gold… it isn’t near as much as I thought it would be. I think I am probably going to be better off buying the 200 Aether chest, and then just selling anything that I did not need since several uniques sell for over 100k gold each. Similarly I am shifting into selling mode for most drops and instead only salvaging the things that give me immediate aspect upgrades or cosmetics that I have not gathered yet.
I was extremely lucky I and was able to pick up an Ancestral Harmony of Ebewaka through the Obol vendor, which was one of the required uniques that I did not have already in Ancestral form. Then through running Infernal Hordes, I almost immediately snagged an upgrade to my Rakanoth’s Wake which rolled with Resistance to All Elements as its upgraded stat. When I masterworked it up to the first breakpoint it upgraded Movement Speed so I am already way more zoomy than my previous incarnation. I am keeping my eyes open for an upgraded Rod of Kepeleke and also a Midnight Sun ring. Really at this point, I need to luck my way into Tyrael’s Might Mythic chest to swap out of the ancestral legendary that I am using currently. Other than that I just need more levels and more paragon points to keep unlocking deeper into my boards.
I’ve got a bajillionty boss summon materials, so I think Ace and I are getting together tonight for a round of those. Will be good to free up the inventory space since several of those have rolled over to new stacks. It will also be a source of quite a bit of gold and uniques that can be sold for gold. At some point I need to clean out my bank and sift through so that I am only keeping the best copy of things, instead of my current scenario where I am dumping in anything that looks vaguely interesting. I have way too much of everything, but it was handy when I swapped builds because I could just build up brand new ancestral items instead of trying to reroll the ones I was using with Stinger.
I made a bit of progress on the rewards track last night, but still have fourteen levels to go. Basically, I got ten levels done and if we do the bossing nonsense, I might even be able to push the rest of the way through this evening. I have a bunch of tributes stockpiled, including one that supposedly can drop a mythic unique so at some point I plan on trying to run those. The state of tributes is awkward because some of them can be done in a group and others are purely solo. Having activities where you cannot share the rewards feels sort of awful given the group play is really the shining example of what makes Diablo IV good. In the meantime though I am having fun being a Garuda Simulator as I throw feathers everywhere and watch things fall around me.
If you are looking for a fun Spiritborn build, I highly suggest this nonsense. I should have gone down that path, but I thought the whole Centipede nonsense was really cool.
The post Garuda Simulator appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Yesterday I realized that I was a heck of a lot closer to finishing up the Seasonal Journey in Diablo IV Season Six than I thought I was. Essentially all that was required was leveling my fifth glyph up to 15, which I had not even started leveling because I am only on paragon board four. What I was not expecting was just how many boss-summoning materials that I would end up getting. It now totally makes sense that Ace had so many more summons than me the other night because they are absolutely the sort of tryhard person who cares about the seasonal track. They had finished it up a few days ago I think, and I was not even vaguely paying attention to the items there. In fact this is the very first time I have finished the seasonal track in Diablo IV. I used to push to do it in Diablo III because there were cosmetics on the line, but the sheer practice of ticking off boxes… that has never driven me terribly hard.
What DOES drive me however is the cosmetic rewards track. I still have around twenty more levels to go before finishing that out and I think whenever I accomplish this I will probably bid adieu to Diablo IV. This time around especially there is some really cool armor associated with this rewards track and I had the currency for it when the season launched so I figured “what the heck”. I really like this spear, which oddly enough reminds me quite a bit of the spear that I regularly use in Guild Wars 2. Sadly I never made it super far in last season’s battlepass, but there were some cosmetics there that I would have liked to have gotten. What is cool about this rewards track more than any season previously, is that the free track is actually good. It is this whole really detailed pirate outfit, which is a significant change from the boring “casual clothes” look that previous free cosmetics have been in this game.
I am also nowhere near finishing the Zakarum Remnants faction, because I hate the consumable league mechanic. In theory, I need to grind out a lot of Hordes trying to get an Ancestral version of my boots, and that is probably a decent mode of play to burn some opals on. I gotta admit that I am days away from just macroing all of my attacks to a single button. It feels like the optimal mode of play for my build is just to mash all of my keys as fast as possible to make sure I never miss a single ability cast. Folks will clown on the one-button builds in Path of Exile, but there has to be a happy medium between that and “toddler pretending to type” gameplay that we currently have in Diablo IV. The reality is everything about my build is designed to lower the cooldown of abilities so that I can hit them faster… and hitting them faster means more damage output.
My current build is sort of a bad ideas build, where I am using this unique item called Jacinth Shell that is trying to kill me. Essentially it deals 10% of my maximum life per second when I have abilities on cooldown… which lowers the cooldowns of those abilities… so I can hit them faster. It also heals me every time I spend vigor. The problem with my current chest is that I really need a maximum roll of 10% on the healing bit… and I really wish this game had Divine Orbs. Essentially this would feel much better if I was healing and damage at the same rate… but I am not. So I mostly just survive due to the fact that I am also building up like 3000 barriers at any given time and 8000 fortify. Unfortunately, there are times when I just take random death similar to how those feel in Path of Exile, and it is sort of miserable.
I have been contemplating just shifting over to the IWIN build that Ace has been running often referred to as Orange Quill. I would absolutely do this thing in a heartbeat if Diablo IV had the Armory system from Diablo III. The thought of going through the hassle of setting back up my Paragon Boards is probably the main thing keeping me from doing it. I have one of the scrolls that resets everything for free, so I could do it… but lord is it a pain in the ass to build a character in this game. That is coming from me… who thinks nothing of the complete nonsense of the Path of Exile passive and atlas trees. It just feels so much more tedious because you are spending so many more points, most of which don’t really feel meaningful until you have amassed the entire structure. I need to look at the build and see if I actually have all of the uniques ready to go because I think I have ratholed a copy of pretty much everything that build needs.
I feel like I have hit a bit of a cap. I barely made it through The Pit 55, and it is wild because I can pretty reliably do Torment 3 content aka Pit 50. I just can’t quite kill things fast enough to keep from falling behind, and the bosses themselves take forever. I have technically done a 55, but it isn’t something that I can guarantee every single run, and relies on a lot of luck regarding what types of mobs spawn. So I am not sure what I need to do to push my build a bit higher. I spent a good chunk of last night trying to level my Glyphs thinking that might help, but I just don’t seem to have the raw damage output or killing speed that Ace has had when we have grouped up. So I am in an awkward spot with my build where I need to essentially decide how committed I am to that Centipede life.
Anyways. I do sort of feel like my engagement with Diablo IV is winding down. I had a lot of fun getting to this point, save for the main story quest… but I am also not sure how much I want to keep pushing for the sake of pushing.
The post Finishing Season Six appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
