Good Morning, Folks. Monday at 6:30 pm my time, Diablo IV Lord of Hatred launched, and it has been a bit of a mess. I think things have mostly stabilized, but for the first evening, I was getting disconnected when trying to start story quests. What made this so infuriating is that Diablo 4 has no checkpointing system when it comes to story content and dungeons. This means if you get disconnected anywhere during the content, you have to start over from the very beginning. Worse than that, there is this whole problem of your character being stranded in the world and having to keep attempting to log back in. This was not just an “overloaded servers” issue, because Tuesday morning, I woke up about 3 am and could not get back to sleep, and decided to go ahead and get up and play some Diablo 4. At 4 am, I got disconnected from a quest dungeon and experienced the same behavior as during peak times. They have since dropped a few hotfix patches, and things seem to mostly be stable now.
My original plan was to play a Warlock and lean heavily on Command Fallen, which, at least on paper, sounded similar to my beloved Summon Raging Spirits from Path of Exile. In practice, however, this ability feels NOTHING like a minion ability, and is instead mostly a targeted attack that just happens to send an explosive minion at the target. This feels super freaking awkward and nothing like the spammy SRS gameplay style where you are running around and flooding the map with temporary minions. This, combined with the disconnects, made me rage quit out on the warlock for the time being and roll a Paladin instead, since I already know that I enjoy that playstyle. At some point, I will revisit the Warlock and probably do some sort of hellfire caster build. I was pretty happy with the name Beldemona and shocked that I had never used that before for one of my “evil” caster characters.
At the current moment, I am level 37 and slowly chipping my way through the story content. I played a bit Tuesday morning and then again after maybe 7 pm last night. I have no clue where I am in the totality of the story, but so far, it is pretty solid. I hate the whole Akarat as Jesus simulacrum thing, but the story surrounding the Amazons and even the engagement with Lilith so far have been pretty great. It feels like a massive improvement over the Nahantu storyline from the first expansion. They did, however, kind of do Neyrelle dirty, and I am annoyed about that. The layout of the zones in Skovos is way more focused on the story content than I would have come to expect. I am not sure how these zones are going to feel after completing the story when you are dealing with evergreen open-world content. Then again, Nahantu kind of suffered from the same problem, and I never spent much time returning to those zones.
I am not entirely certain how I feel about the “no passives” build structure that went in with Lord of Hatred. At least with my Thorns Paladin, you spend a lot of time leveling as something else and then swapping a bunch of things over at 36 when you unlock some of the specific paths on the tree. It just feels like we are leaning way more heavily on gearing, but then again, since you can choose to craft whatever temper you need, instead of randomly rolling these, it might all shake out in the end. I’ve not really gotten any useful legendaries yet, and I am not sure what level those really begin to factor into the drop pool. I did spend a bit of grinding in Helltide when I got frustrated with the disconnects on Monday night, and the rewards, at least at low levels, felt pretty crummy. I was mostly getting blues from opening loot boxes, and I would have expected almost entirely yellow or better. I am looking forward to finishing the campaign so that I can see what endgame loot starts to look like.
Being brutally honest, I am not really certain if I like this version of Diablo IV better than the last version I played when the Paladin was introduced. It is different, and I will have to see what it feels like once I conquer the storyline demon. I never play through the story with repeat seasonal characters. My inner murder hobo is way too strong, and I mostly grind out the levels in Helltide or do whispers. I am really looking forward to seeing what War Plans introduces to the game, but I figure all of that unlocks the moment you finish the story. I don’t REALLY play ARPGs for the story, even though I occasionally enjoy it as I do in Path of Exile 1/2. Currently, it feels like I am taking my medicine and just biding my time for the story content to be finished. Lord of Hatred is better than the base game and the first expansion, but it is still not as good as something like Diablo III was storyline-wise. I don’t love all of the ambiguity of the morality in this game. I prefer to smash demons and angels and not have to care about who is betraying me in the process.
In other news, it is Evil Lemon time, aka when I am hooked up to a portable chemotherapy pump that is slowly poisoning me. The worst part of chemotherapy is realizing that I have 10 days where I feel various versions of crap, and then 4 days at the very end where I have to cram two weeks of necessary activities into before prepping for the next round. I am on the downward slide, and remembering this morning how much food hurts. Essentially, early on in the cycle, it hurts to chew anything and swallow anything, which is often why I shift over to a mostly liquid diet for a few days until the worst of that passes. I know I will be at my weakest this coming Saturday and Sunday, and it helps that the flow of this process is predictable. The cold reaction was instant and much worse than round two, which was in itself worse than round one. Luckily, it is not exhibiting in neuropathy, really, but mostly just pain because the skin has peeled off my fingertips. I am regularly applying lotion in an attempt to help with the healing, but it is bad enough that my phone rarely recognizes my thumbprint for unlocks.
Anyways, hoping to maybe wrap the story tonight in Diablo IV and see what the endgame has in store for me.
The post Diablo Disconnects appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning, folks. I had to deal with labwork and a doctor’s visit this morning, so I am getting a bit of a late start on the whole blogging thing. Over the last few days, I have gone from not really being interested in Diablo IV Lord of Hatred to legitimately being pumped to play next Monday evening when it drops. Yesterday we got a Campfire Chat, but I have to admit it was a much better version of this construct than we have had previously. Generally, these have been deeply tone deaf and smarmy with a constant refrain of “we hear you”, but also not actually significantly changing the game. Lord of Hatred to Diablo IV feels like Reaper of Souls was to Diablo III, where they effectively changed everything about the game for the better. Of course, there were some weird product placements like some sort of collaboration with a guitar manufacturer, Korn writing a song for the soundtrack, and an inexplicable crossover with Trolli gummy worms. This is just a Blizzard thing, and sadly, we are not getting back the Horde flavor of Mountain Dew, which was fucking amazing.
I highly suggest watching the entire campfire chat, or at least something like the summary that Raxx released, because there is a lot of information there. I am going to talk through a couple of the things that really stood out to me. Probably the biggest is the fact that we are ACTUALLY getting crafting in the game with the addition of the Horadric Cube. This has been a problem-solving plot device many times in the Diablo franchise, and this time around, it seems to be replacing something like the crafting bench, harvest crafting, and crafting currency from Path of Exile. You can, in theory, take an item from blue to yellow, to unique, all while crafting additional affixes onto it to eventually roll something interesting. One of the big things that I noticed going back for Midnight is how much Blizzard has seemingly learned from other MMORPGs, and it feels like FINALLY Diablo admits that they exist in a genre… and should look to the exemplars of that genre for inspiration. Blizz has always had a bit of an ego that they were innovators, and should blaze a new trail… but at least in the case of Diablo, it just felt like they were providing a game void of expected “basic” features.
The other thing that really excites me is the introduction of War Plans. Diablo has had a bunch of relatively uninteresting activities, and not a lot of pressing reason for you to be doing any of them. Some of these are actually pretty fun, like Nightmare Dungeons, but it always sort of felt like there was nothing really pushing you to do them other than occasionally the open world objectives. War Plans, in theory, will be that guiding force that rewards you for doing a certain number of things in a row, with fixed rewards for doing them. This reminds me far less of Path of Exile mapping and more of Echo Chains that just introduced into Last Epoch. Still having any sort of guiding force in this game is a massive positive in my book, especially since they are also giving us a way to throw our thumb on the scale and determine what sorts of activities and rewards we receive. While this is not the Breach or Expedition or Blight style reusable content that grows season after season that I really hope they start creating, it is at least a massive leap in a better direction.
The other big takeaway from yesterday is that it looks like there has been a complete changing of the guard from the Campfire Chats that I found so grating. I hope everything that we are seeing is a sign that we have some fresh ideas feeding into the game and trying to actually make it competitive with the other franchises. Right now, as an ARPG player, I care about when Path of Exile 1 Leagues start, Path of Exile 2 Leagues, and Last Epoch leagues… but Diablo IV has never factored into that calculus of how I plan my gaming. I would love there to be some pressure that makes me want to choose a Diablo season over some other game. I think that would be pretty freaking cool because it will continue to push ALL of the games in this pack forward to try and create more interesting stuff. What makes this genre so different from MMORPGs is that they are ultimately designed for short bursts of massive engagement… and then folks fade away until the next exciting release. Thing is, so long as you keep giving us good shit…. we will keep showing up for our infusion of crack.
The other thing making me excited is that it looks like Warlock might support one of my favorite minion playstyles. Summon Raging Spirits is an ability in Path of Exile that summons short-term minions, and you can give them something called Minion Instability Support to make them explode. This also exists in Last Epoch in the form of Volatile Zombies, and I really like the spammy playstyle of summoning minions and then making them prematurely explode when I oversummon to the limit. Command Fallen for the Warlock appears to be this sort of short-term, exploding minions gameplay, and I am all here for it. I think I have mostly cobbled together something that looks like a build. Granted, this is all based on the Maxroll D4 Planner, and I have no clue how up-to-date this information is, but I expect at least the shell of this build to survive. I am sure I will tweak and adjust as I go, but I think this more or less represents a reasonable template of abilities. I can’t honestly remember how many ability picks we get, but there is a ritual ability that I will add if I have more slots. This is pretty much what I am going to yolo come Monday evening, and we will see if I can make something stick.
One parting shot across the bow. This is a screenshot from the presentation that shows the release schedule. It looks like the game is dropping at 6 pm my time, and I expect to be there with bells on. There will also be Twitch drops and all the normal fanfare. Reportedly, the game was available for preloading yesterday, so you can have everything ready to go come Monday. I admit, this is the first time I have been legitimately amped to play Diablo IV since release. I hope to see at least some of you doing the nonsense with me.
The post SRS Warlock Maybe appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning, Folks. Yesterday, we got the teaser trailer dropped for the next Path of Exile II league/expansion, and it was extremely brief. More importantly, though, the community has been clamoring for some sort of notice as to when it was dropping. Folks take off work for these things, and in many cases need a decent amount of notice to get the time off. The good news is we are getting a reveal stream on May 7th. The bad is that the league itself is not dropping until May 29th, which is a significant delay from the original intended “every four months” pace of a POE1 and POE2 league. There will be gnashing of teeth, especially among the folks who only play Path of Exile II about this delay. For the Path of Exile diehards, SirGog announced yesterday that he was going to do some sort of a private league, and those are usually interesting. I’ve participated in one of these leagues before, and in that case, everything dropped scoured so you were forced to craft your own gear. It was interesting in an academic sense, but if that ends up being the case again, I am likely going to skip it.
The trailer shows a giant megastructure rising up out of the ground, and I personally think what we are seeing is somehow representative of the new atlas. This has been a feature that has been promised for a while, because the Delve-like Endless Atlas has generally been poorly received by the playerbase. As someone who loves Delve… I have to say that for whatever reason, when you apply this same concept to mapping, it just does not work. At least based on player behaviors in Path of Exile 1, folks tend to gravitate to a few map layouts that they really like and then run them over and over. Truth be told, the new way that the Atlas works in POE1 is brilliant, and I would love to see something like that translated over to POE2. I think the concept of Endless Atlas is cool, but I would love to see it as a side content. The reason why Delve works so well is that any given node only takes a few minutes to run, whereas every map in POE2 feels like it takes an eternity. It would be cool if they translated the Endless Atlas over to a sequence of micro objectives, building a sort of Delve 2.0 in the game with clearly marked rewards on each of the nodes.
Since POE2 is so far out, that has pretty much cemented the idea that I am going to be diving into Diablo 4 Lord of Hatred when it drops on April 28th. Yesterday Blizz released the opening cinematic, and I am maybe more interested than any of the Akarat nonsense has given me to this point. Right now, unless something drastic changes, I plan to try out the new Warlock class when the expansion drops next Tuesday. That is a chemo day for me, but generally speaking, I feel okay for the first few days after the poison is delivered… and then go downhill drastically as I approach the weekend. If, for whatever reason, I do not vibe with the Warlock’s particular form of summoning minions, then I will probably fall back on playing a Paladin. I think I will dig this expansion more than previous ones because I have figured out how to macro multiple abilities to the same button on my G600 mouse, given that D4 tends to be “spam every button on cooldown” gameplay, and I can reduce that madness to a single click. I did this with the most recent Last Epoch season and it worked swimmingly.
I am honestly vaguely excited about Lord of Hatred, because it seems like Blizzard has made some significant steps in the right direction to turning this game into something that has some lasting draw. The big problem that I have had up until this point with D4 is that leveling is generally pretty fun, but once you hit the end game… it feels boring and repetitive, and they ruined the one thing that was actually fun. Ace and I used to group up together and pool our resources and do a bajillion boss summons for drops… and they recently made it so that you only get loot if you are providing materials. The force multiplier of playing with friends stopped functioning, and as a result… we mostly just stopped playing together. Wudijo is pretty much one of the diehard Diablo creators, and he has released a bunch of information once the press embargo was lifted. He released another short video this morning showing off the new map overlay, which is pretty huge. That was one of the things that annoyed me the most about D4. You could not simply toggle the map overlay to stay on, rather than having to keep manually popping it up.
In the meantime, nothing has really been hitting gamewise for me, so I am back to playing Last Epoch. I contemplated rolling a Warpath Void Knight, but instead have gone back to leveling my Fire Aura Spellblade. I keep chasing slightly better gear, so that hopefully I can improve my survival. Ward feels way squishier than Health and Regeneration/Leech. It just seems like all of my ward evaporates at exactly the wrong time, and Omen windows seem to be the hardest content for me. Essentially, I have gotten to the point where I clear everything else in the echo but the Omen, and then do that last so that if I die, I have at least completed the echo and can move on with my life. Right now, I am farming the Blood, Frost, and Death timeline in an attempt to get a better pair of Frostbite Shackles. I love the new corruption system, but I refuse to “yolo corrupt” items and risk not having a copy… so I want multiple copies to play with. I could also use more copies of Last Steps of the Living for the same reason.
Anyways, time for me to wrap this up and move on with life. Are you going to be playing the Diablo IV expansion when it drops next Tuesday? Are you looking forward to the Path of Exile II League and bummed by the delays? Drop me a line below.
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Good Morning Folks! Happy Midnight Official Release Day! I have been playing Midnight since Thursday, when the head start began, because I am a sucker and am willing to pay the premium to get access to things early. There are folks out there with way more self-control than I have… and as a result, I hope you all enjoy your journey into Midnight. This morning’s blog post is going to talk about some of the themes in Midnight, so if you want to go into the game completely unspoiled, this morning be something that you want to come back to later. I feel like it is also important to state that I have been out of the World of Warcraft game for a while now. I very briefly played through the Dragonflight campaign at release and then attempted to come back and play a bit for War Within, and crashed out on the second zone because I was overloaded by the sheer number of quests. So I have been gone from seriously attempting to play World of Warcraft since the Shadowlands expansion in 2020.
The last time I played the game seriously was during Pandaria Remix in 2024, and I am actually maining the character that I played during that event, which is a Dark Iron Dwarf Warrior named Belgraven. There has been a lot of adjusting to the sweeping changes in the game that have happened since I last played, and Remix doesn’t fully count since it was its own thing. First up, I think the User Interface changes are brilliant, and I have managed to play the game without reinstalling any sort of hotbar or nameplate addons. The only thing that I wish I had was some equivalent of the threat bar that FFXIV has where you can see how much threat you are holding on all of the targets that you currently have threat on. This would be amazing, but the base UI seems perfectly cromulent for the role of a tank. I have no clue how good it is for healing, but seemingly it works just fine for DPS, given that after the campaign, I have swapped over to Arms Warrior. I’ve also been using the one button assist quite a bit because I have wanted to completely shut off my brain while playing World of Warcraft. If I do anything serious, I will set my hotbars up properly and care about rotations again.
As far as the campaign goes, I think Midnight is pretty freaking great. It is a massive step up in World of Warcraft storytelling, even over The War Within… which was itself a massive step up over Dragonflight. While I am not feeling the feels that I did during Final Fantasy XIV, they are trying to tackle far more nuanced topics in this expansion than we usually get. The Amani zone and the redemption arc featured within it was phenomenal, and it might go down as one of my favorite World of Warcraft zones, period, from any expansion. Zul’Aman will always have a special place in my heart, and I completely forgot that it was associated with the Silvermoon area… so this was a massively pleasant surprise. Another zone that I did not expect to really love was the rambling mess that featured around Silvermoon, which takes you across all of the Plaguelands as you deal with the sins of the past. It tells a way more mature story about the horrors of war and what it brings people to do than I expected from Warcraft. Blizzard is known for big bombastic hero tales… and significantly less so for dealing with sensitive topics, but I applaud them for trying something new and interesting.
This game, however, continues my tradition of hating the “druid” zone. I am not the biggest fan of Harandar or the Navi… I mean Haranir. I get what they are going for with this zone and this race, and I might actually play one at some point because they have some really interesting druid transformation forms, but this is so not my jam. Harandar, in general, also suffers from the “Heart of Thorns” problem, where the zone uses aggressive verticality that makes waypoints mostly useless unless you have the layout memorized and know without a doubt what vertical tier of the zone the thing you are looking for is located on. I will always love the Guild Wars 2 Heart of Thorns expansion for the sweeping meta events that it introduced, but I fucking hate traversing these zones… and Harandar is that but for World of Warcraft. It also makes me feel like I need to sneeze the entire damned time because I can always feel the pollen in the air. There are going to be tree huggers out there that love this zone and good for them… but for someone whose favorite zone is Blackrock Depths… this is very much not my jam.
I dinged level 90 on Sunday morning and then wrapped up the campaign about an hour after that. This feels like a pretty good pace for leveling through the content, but I was left in the dust by Kylana and Erixi, who dinged, I believe, sometime on Friday. The biggest frustration that I have with the leveling experience is that you are still going to need about two zones worth of side quests to hit the max level. Go into the leveling process with that in mind and choose which zones you want to grind out completely in order to accomplish this. I personally chose Voidstorm and the Amani zone, and doing all of the quests in one and 90% of the quests in the other, combined with the Main Story quest, was enough to get me there. I did hit a wall at level 95, where I needed to be 96 in order to open up the last zone of the game, so you are better off just pushing through some side quests that are convenient as you are doing the MSQ. I wish the MSQ alone gave you enough experience, but then again, this is a problem that FFXIV has not solved either.
I’ve geared out Belgraven mostly through world quests, which are way less plentiful than when I was doing this in Shadowlands. That has opened up a lot more time to start leveling an alt, and I decided to push up Belgrace, my Horde side Paladin that was my main during Shadowlands. I have two guild families, House Stalwart on the Alliance side and Facepull on the Horde side, and I feel like it is only proper that I alternate back and forth between the two. I was apparently already in Dragonflight when I last played the character, and in theory, I should be able to hit level 80 while doing the campaign over there. I might actually do War Within as well because I would like to actually see the main story quest for that expansion without a multi-year lag between the first parts and then wrapping up rapidly right before Midnight. I’ve swapped up to Retribution because it feels like leveling as a tank is no longer as advantageous as it once was.
One thing that I had forgotten, though, is how much I enjoyed certain aspects of the Dragonflight storyline. While I do not give a shit about the Dragonflights in general… I really enjoyed a lot of the quests involving the races of the Dragon Isles that weave around the larger draconic narrative. I will never not love a Tuskarr storyline, and I really enjoy the tales of the Centaur tribes as well. Probably the worst zone is actually The Waking Shores, and that’s largely because you are so deeply involved in Dragon bullshit, with no real side narrative of the people you are impacting along the way. I feel like the Dragonflight storyline peaked in Northrend, and it has been downhill ever since. That is not to say that I did not enjoy this expansion, because clearly, there are some well-designed zones, and so much of it has an Outland and Northrend revisited vibe to it. The Ohn’ahran Plains is absolutely a rethinking of Nagrand, and large swaths of The Azure Span feel like Grizzly Hills, all of which are huge positives for the expansion in general.
As much credit as I give them for the updated UI, I am back to my old ways of installing a bunch of addons and using WoWUP to keep them patched, specifically the Curse Forge branch. Most of these are just quality of life improvements but the ones that I probably would not want to be without are Better Bags, which gives me similar functionality of having virtual bags sorted by item type, and Waypoint UI, which gives you a giant glowing beacon where the next step in your quest chain leads you to. The latter is especially handy when dealing with the bullshit verticality of Harandar. I am also a big fan of Dialog UI, which gives you a much more readable quest interface that also creates keybinds for all of the dialog options so you do not have to click the screen. Now that I am in the “endgame” and doing World Quests and such I started leaning on Handynotes and RareScanner again, which just are significant quality of life improvements when looking for rares and lootables in the zones. So I feel like all of the addons I am using now are window dressing on what is a completely functional base game, and I could play without them… but simply do not want to.
Are you just starting Midnight today? What are you most excited about for this expansion? Have you played through the expansion already? What did you enjoy the most? Drop me a line below.
The post Midnight Was Pretty Great appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
