season 4 – Page 3

Actually Fun Now

May 15, 2024 by Belghast

Good Morning Friends! Yesterday was the launch of Diablo IV Season 4, and I had more or less decided that this was going to be the last chance I gave the game. It took almost a year of reworking almost every system in the game, but I am pleased to announce that the game is actually enjoyable now. It still is extremely shallow as compared to a Path of Exile or even a Last Epoch, but the mechanical loop of the game feels pretty solid. Leveling in Diablo IV feels akin to what it is like to level in Diablo III, where you zip up through the levels so fast that nothing can really get stale or sluggish as a result. I only managed to make it to level 46 last season before giving up on the game, and after one night I am already level 44 and would have been considerably higher had I not also played quite a bit of Guild Wars 2 to knock out my dailies.

So you might be asking yourself… what changed? What makes it now suddenly a good experience? If I had to boil it down to a single change it would be the Helltide improvements. At the launch of the game Helltide was an event that did not spawn until you had reached World Tier 3 and had an hour on/hour off schedule so there were huge gaps where you could not participate in the event. It was also really static and largely became about killing the fairly sparse monsters, collecting embers, and then turning them in at various chests around the zone. It did not really feel like a dynamic event and did not reward you for sticking around or really interacting with other players.

In Season 2 there was an event that collectively became referred to as the “Blood Tide” where this green area was marked on your map and it moved locations every hour. Essentially it was a Helltide that was always up and in addition to having really high mob density, there were objectives for the Tree of Whispers that could be completed each time the area moved. Additionally, there was an aggro system that the more vampires you killed the more desperately they tried to kill you, until they eventually spawned a boss. More than that there was an area where players could work together to chain summon a boss encounter that became exceptionally efficient to farm. Better than all of these things… you could do it at level one and during Season 2 I spent 90% of my time farming the blood tide.

So now we zoom forward to Season 4, and they have effectively taken the good bits of the Helltide and merged them with the far superior gameplay of the Bloodtide to create an event that is better than both. Helltide is now available as soon as you complete the campaign on your first character, or choose to skip the campaign on secondary characters. This means for seasonal characters you can pop straight into Helltide and effectively never leave it until you reach level 100. Gone is the meta of farming the start of a single dungeon over and over and resetting it just to get the highest mob density, and born is the meta of hanging out and playing with other players in an open-world zone. This feels so much better and really suits the strong points of Diablo IV considerably more than the “dopamine tunnels” ever did.

I feel like the Helltide changes on their own would not have been enough to repair the game’s reputation. In addition, there are a slew of quality-of-life improvements where the Diablo IV devs seem to have actually paid attention to feedback. For example, one of the things that I railed on the hardest in beta was how far apart all of the resources that you need to interact with regularly were on the map. This was improved slightly for Season 3, but has been completely fixed with Season 4. For example I have drawn a green circle showing the area just southeast of the teleport into Kyovashad. In this tight ring you have a Stash chest, Vendor, Gemcrafter, Blacksmith, Enchanter, and the Obol vendor which has been greatly improved. Sure there are reasons to leave this tight ring like going down to the stables or messing around with your wardrobe, but the majority of things you are going to interact with constantly while actively playing the game are in an efficient cluster allowing you to get back into the action faster.

More important than this is that the Codex of Power is actually a really important system in the game now. Previously it only gave you access to weak versions of legendary aspects that you unlocked through running dungeons, requiring you to still keep a bajillion random legendary items for later extracting and upgrading. Now when you salvage a legendary item you collect the aspect that was on it, at its current power level. This means that over time as you keep finding better legendaries you will keep upgrading the base level you can imprint on items. Almost more important than that you can look in your codex and find which aspects you are missing and where you can acquire them, even pinning the location of the dungeon on your map.

On top of this there is a new tempering system that replaces the previous upgrade system allowing you to place interesting affixes on your items. For example there in the above image I just placed one that increased the Upheaval Size by 28%. There is one that I specifically want on all of my gear that turns my default Bash ability that I use as my builder into a cleave. The tempering patterns drop in the world expanding the things that you can tweak on these items. They all seem to be a 1 in 4 chance of getting the specific affix that you want, which is something that I don’t necessarily love. I would have rather had them be similar to the bench crafting in Path of Exile. That cleave temper for example is something I am going to need on one of my weapons at all times. I get three attempts to reroll the temper but I have actually ended up failing to get the one that I needed.

It was extremely liberating hopping on my standard character and salvaging every single legendary that I had stockpiled in my bank in order to fill out my permanent codex of power. This combined with the changes that they made last go round to turn gems into a crafting material, means that honestly… there is very little that you really need to hold onto other than maybe some perfectly rolled gear for alts or things that you want to try and sell to other players. I am encountering a bit of friction in earning enough gold to pay for everything, so I feel like there will be a time when I am having to decide between selling items to vendors or salvaging them for materials. That is an improvement that they can tweak later on down the line because I feel like they don’t have the gold values dialed in quite yet.

Do I think Diablo IV is perfect now? Hell no. Do I think the game has evolved in the right direction with Season 4? Absolutely. I have no clue if there is going to be enough endgame there to keep me engaged, but I am looking forward to checking out the new Greater Rift Adjascent system. I figure I will hit level 100 for the first time in this season if things keep going as they are. I also plan on trying out a Necromancer as they have apparently improved greatly with this season. I’ve only run a few Nightmare Dungeons but they also seem to have improved significantly. I am actually looking forward to playing more, and I am sure as the season goes I will share more of my thoughts. The post Actually Fun Now appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

AggroChat #93 – Games of the Year 2015 Part 2

May 21, 2019January 31, 2016 by AggroChat

Tonight Ashgar, Belghast, Dallian, Grace, Kodra, Thalen and Tam talk about their favorite games of 2015. This is the second part of a two part podcast.

Once again it is time for us to record our “Games of the Year” show, and this time around we did it slightly differently. Last year we tried to come up with some title that represented the podcast as a whole, but it ended up being pure madness to get us all to agree on something. This time we instead each picked three games to add to the list and now we are recording a show about all of those games. Of note… this is not necessarily show about games that were released in 2015, but instead a show about games that were important to us during the calendar year.

This is being divided into two parts to cover the gap as myself and several others will be attending Pax South. In this second part we talk about:

Tales of Zestiria
Witcher 3
Destiny – The Taken King
Diablo 3 Seasonal Play
Infinity Updated Ruleset
Fallout 4
Ori and the Blind Forest
Final Fantasy XIV: Heavensward
Various Honorable Mentions

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Hammerknell and Keywardens

September 4, 2015 by Belghast

Nightmare Larva

I had a strangely disconnected evening last night essentially happened in two distinct parts. My great niece was in town doing a track meet, and we had arranged to meet up with the family for dinner. Initially I thought I would get home and we would essentially leave right away. That wasn’t quite the case and we ultimately did not walk to dinner until around 7ish, which left me with a fair amount of time to kill. I have once again been feeling the Rift itch lately, as I go through every few weeks. The shiny new mount that I talked about yesterday may or may not have been the catalyst. So I poked around Meridian for a bit and ultimately decided to do an Instant Adventure. For those not familiar with the concept, Rift has this really cool thing where you hit a button and get thrown together with a raid group of people and teleported to a specific area of the world. There you complete a series of objectives, and get teleported to a new place where the process starts over again. Each time you complete a segment you are rewarded loot just like in a Rift, except this time they are generally caches of gear for your class.

Last night I noticed there was a new option called “Intrepid Adventures”. I say this is a new option, but I really mean it was new to me… because I had not noticed it before. That said I have not really run any instant adventures since the launch of Nightmare Tide. What it appears to be is a Instant Adventure style tour of raid encounters. I got teleported into the caverns under Hammerknell, where I fought all sorts of tougher but still manageable monsters leading up to several “boss” fights. I have to say it gives a nice flavor to leveling especially as I have not actually seen any of the raids since Vanilla. I had a lot of fun and will probably use this option when I return to leveling again. I am right now about halfway through 62 and the grind to 65 has been slower going than I had hoped. I honestly have problems with the layout of content since vanilla, or more so I just liked the feel of leveling in Vanilla better. This is of course personal preference, and since Storm Legion and Nightmare Tides feel really similar… I am guessing they have done the market research that tells them that the Rift demographic wants that style of content. Anyways… I have contemplated trying to set up at least one night a week to play Rift. The problem there is that I am not sure there are enough nights in the week to go around for all of the games I want to be regularly playing.

Hunting Keywardens

When I got home from dinner however it was all about Diablo 3. Before dinner I had managed to pop in shortly and get my good friend Neph invited to our Stalwart Diablo clan that makes finding folks to group with significantly easier. My friend Shandrah popped on and started the leveling trail for Neph, Damai and Ashgar which was a full group so I happily worked on Season IV objectives. Right now I am working on the fourth and final chapter of objectives, and I spent most of the night tracking down the various Key Wardens which I had to defeat on Torment I or better. After a significant rearrange of my abilities I am finding that Torment I is actually fairly easy. I am essentially doing a variation of the classic “spin to win” Whirlwind build. I am using Frenzy with the added fury bonus of Berserk as my builder, for the purpose of being able to build fury as fast as humanly possible so I can spend the most time in whirlwind. From there I use Whirlwind with Blood Funnel which heals me every time I crit, which is often. From there I have Overpower with Killing Spree, Threating Shout with Falter, Ignore pain with Ignorance is Bliss, and Wrath of the Berserker with Insanity. For passives I take Boon of Bul-Kathos, Rampage, Ruthless and Weapons Master.

The end result is a built that can chew thing mobs pretty effectively, but the most important part is that it has really solid “sustain” which seems to be the most important thing as a melee character. None of my gear is ideal at the moment, and I am not using the right legendary procs because I simply haven’t gotten them to drop. That said it is a good start and better than the previously build I was working with. I am still relatively new to the whole Rifts and Greater Rifts thing, and at this point I have two objectives standing in the way of my spiffy portrait and pet. One of which is “Reach Greater Rift Level 10 Solo” which I find really confusing. Last night I attempted to do this one and completed a Greater Rift… albeit without getting the bonus. But I am not sure if this means that I need to complete the rift with the bonus or if I physically need to manage to get to dungeon level 10 within the Rift. The last one however will take some doing considering I am in a mishmash of gear right now, and it is to have a level 70 legendary equipped in every slot. I have been spending my blood shards on gear slots that I am currently missing in the hopes of slowly knocking this achievement out. In any case… I am close and I am having a blast just killing stuff for loot and paragon levels!

Week In Gaming 8/30/2015

August 30, 2015 by Belghast

Stressed but Still Here

This week turned out to be a shockingly stressful one, but thankfully all of said stress happened at work… and I could more or less leave it there as well. There has been a twinge of sadness as well because months ago I had hoped to be able to attend Pax Prime and get to hang out with friends there. However that didn’t quite work out, and since I lacked tickets to go there… because AggroChat was not apparently qualified as a media outlet, I stopped pushing quite so hard. The beginning of the school year is especially rough on my wife, and it would have been even more stressful to be travelling during this time. As such I am doubting that Pax Prime will ever really be in my cards unless for some reason they decide to move it either earlier or later in the year. I will always have Pax South however, and I fully intend to go this coming year. I am going to be trying to talk as many people into attending as I can, and hopefully can organize a meetup or something while there. There were plenty of people at Pax South last year but I was completely overwhelmed by it being my first real convention, and the internet was pretty horrible… so I missed most of them. Anyways… on with what is I hope becoming a Sunday tradition, where I review the games I played over the past week.

Final Fantasy XIV

Currently “The Rising” event is going on in Final Fantasy XIV that marks the yearly anniversary festival. This year the quest that goes along with it is one of the most touching quests I have experienced in a game before. I don’t want to spoil too many details about it, but suffice to say there is a little bit of fourth wall breaching going on. Diehard Final Fantasy XIV fans have this hero worship for Naoki Yoshida and the rest of the team, and it is absolutely well earned. It feels like there is very much a symbiotic relationship going on there, and they understand fully just how important the loyal fans are to the continued success of the title. The game is in this interesting place where it is extremely humbled by the fact that it launched in 2010 and failed to capture hearts and minds. They are putting everything into the game and leaving nothing on the table, and it shows. Other than the anniversary event we worked on Ravana Extreme attempts, and I have every hope that we will be able to down him this coming Monday. Past that I have honestly been taking a bit of a break from Final Fantasy XIV, or at least not really logging in every day.

Diablo 3

If you are wondering where the bulk of my game time was spent, you can look no further than Diablo 3. I am not sure if it was my time playing Hellgate London, or the fact that I finally pulled my head out of the sand and realized there was such a thing as a “season”. Whatever the combination I have been pumped to be playing Diablo 3 again and have been spending a lot of time with my friend Grace was we worked on pushing up our seasonal characters. At the beginning of the week I managed to get my Crusader from last season to 70 with the help of Grace and her crazy torment farming ways. Then Friday when the new season opened I started work immediately on a female Barbarian. As of last night I am now level 60 and making the final push to 70. That is really what I intend to spend most of my time today working on, and hopefully by tonight I will be sitting at 70 and starting to work on gearing up for doing torment and beyond. I am having a blast, and I am not sure whatever mental block cleared that has allowed me to get involved once more with the click to attack madness.

Wildstar

I can’t say that I have made stellar progress since last week, but I am continuing with my new tradition of trying to play Wildstar Tuesday nights. At this point I am level 25 still in Whitevale but I think maybe I can see the end of the zone. My hope is to move on past it this week and hopefully into something less desolate. I feel about Whitevale the way I feel about most desert zones in MMOs. I have come to realization this week that it is never the biome necessarily that I like or dislike, but instead the zone design. I was warned that Malgrave is coming up, and a desert… but from what I have seen of the imagery inside it seems like something I will enjoy. I want to devote more time to this game, but for now I am going to settle with making it a Tuesday night thing.

Hearthstone

The game that I played that shocked me the most this week was Hearthstone. I have not really spent much time playing it since release, and with the addition of a new expansion of cards I decided to poke my head in. This is where I found a brand new game mode called Tavern Brawl. Apparently you have a different weekly challenge, and this week was essentially playing with a randomized deck. I played hunter and had a good amount of success. Playing with a random assortment of cards, including many of the brand new Grand Tournament cards gave me a nostalgic feeling much like the early days of Magic the Gathering. I used to love the days when I was limited based on the cards I physically owned and as a result made some odd decks to try and weave in my favorite elements. In truth I would probably play Hearthstone more often if this random brawl option thing was a fixed item. I know this coming week there will be a completely different Tavern Brawl, but I will likely poke my head in to see what it is and give it a shot. This might breathe new life into the game for me, and for that I am kinda pumped.

Fallout Shelter

My week in review would not be complete without at least talking a bit about Fallout Shelter. Now I have been technically playing this game for awhile now but since I do not regularly use my iPad, the sessions were limited and I went weeks between opening the app. With the release of Fallout Shelter for android I have been playing it far more often on my phone, and it has now become my default “moment of downtime” game as I check in on my little post apocalyptic ant farm. All things said I learned a lot of lessons playing it on the iPad that I have now applied to this new vault. Where Vault 999 was a relative failure, Vault 861 is pretty damned idyllic. Through a bit of luck of drops, and some careful planning I have managed to create a pretty safe environment that can absolutely shred raider attacks. I had a random person show up at the vault that was fairly warriorly, and once I equipped her with power armor and a plasma pistol she has been roaming the wastes dispensing justice. At the same time she has become a major source of income and the gear she brings back I am slowly outfitting all of my settlers in. I have jokingly started calling the restaurant on the first floor Cafe Death, because the raiders always go there…. only to get shredded by all of my shotgun toting vault dwellers. The only thing that I feel bad about is that I essentially have one couple that is slowly populating my vault. I have left them in the room for weeks now and they have half a dozen offspring roaming around as a result.

Hatoful Boyfriend

The last game that I played a significant amount of this week was of course Hatoful Boyfriend, and last night we recorded the AggroChat game club show for it. This was Grace’s pick and I think a lot of us went into this assuming that we would end up hating the game. We were mostly wrong as the vast majority of us had lots of good things to say about the game. To make it even crazier this is the first game that the majority of us have actually played through more than one… but given that an individual play session tends to only be around the hour long mark that makes sense. If you want to hear our length discussion about dating “Birbs” after the apocalypse you should totally listen into the show.

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