Good Morning, Folks! This is going to seem like a bit of whiplash, but my opinion of Diablo IV Lord of Hatred has evolved yet again. At this point, I am over Paragon 150 with the Paladin, which means I have picked up most of the best nodes on the Paragon board. I’ve done a lot of content, both in queuing directly for things for the purpose of knocking out seasonal journey achievements, and through the War Plan system. Essentially, there is this awkward phase around Torment 1 where it is a bit of a struggle to get Ancestral gear, and I found that frustrating. Once I pushed through this by using the crafting system to craft up blue and yellow ancestrals into usable gear, things started to move more smoothly. I have to give them credit; the crafting system is phenomenal, and essentially, you can take any item and make it function for your build so long as it is the right item level. Essentially, the game has the POE2 version of the Chaos Orb, which removes an affix and adds a random affix, and through this, you can kind of brute force your way to something useful. If you only have one bad affix, there is still the enchanting system that can be used to target, remove it, and get something usable.
At this point, I have a fairly optimal set of legendaries and a few key uniques that buff the amount of thorns damage that I am dealing. I can relatively easily do Torment VII, but mostly do VI because speed is king when it comes to farming content. That said, I feel like I have hit the ceiling of the initial thorns leveling build that I have been running. There is an endgame version of this that changes out a lot of stuff, and I could move over to it. Though I am tempted if I have to respec my character anyway, to migrate over to an Arbiter Hammerdin build, which is supposedly extremely good at speed farming. The biggest problem that I have with the current version of Thorns is that it relies entirely upon Blessed Shield to deliver most of the damage, which moves slowly, and ends up creating a delayed damage output. So you either have to lead with shield throw so that mobs run into it as they are coming at you, or have a trail of mobs who are slowly being whittled down by the shields as they follow behind you. If I want to continue playing Paladin and push it to the higher tiers… I need to make a decision and deal with what will probably be a minor setback as I start acquiring gear again.
I’ve also been leveling a Warlock, in part because this is the build that the streamer Raxxanterax has been playing and it looks insanely powerful. Legitimately, it seems like Dread Claws Warlock is this league’s version of the early Spiritborn builds that were so insanely powerful at the launch of the last expansion. Initially, this relies upon Command Fallen as its builder and Dread Claws as its spender. I did not really love the feeling of Command Fallen, because I went into it expecting them to feel a bit like Summon Raging Spirits. However, once you get the Fallen Rush notable, it transforms them into an Abyss ability, making it so you summon 3 at a time, and allows you to target them by resummoning them. This makes it feel much better, and pretty much I am constantly spamming both my right and left clicks to either summon/target my pack of Fallen or fire off cascading dread claws, which gives it a pretty comfortable gameplay style. You are always targeting things before they can get to you, and your Dread Claws are mostly doing all of the work to mop things up before they can damage you.
The entire build gets a bit more Summoner feeling when you unlock the Warlock quest chain at 15. This involves you going and defeating a series of demons and binding them to your will, so that you can then choose one to permanently follow you. The Dread Claws build uses Laalish, which is a giant worm that is constantly following you and leaping out of the ground to eat mobs. Having one big minion, a turret-style minion, and a swarm of fallen minions makes the entire thing feel a bit more like I wanted it to feel from the start. Your Ultimate is a swarm of minions that effectively shred the target, making short work of whatever you throw them on. The only negative about it is that the swarm is stationary, so you have to sometimes nudge a mob back into it to get the full effect. All in all, I am pretty damned happy with the Warlock and look forward to pushing it to 70, and then building the proper endgame build with all of my paragon points.
One other side note, there is an event running right now that adds an extra battle pass to the game that unlocks a bunch of World of Warcraft-themed weapon skins. There is also a rather expensive pack that gives you all of the Tier 2 armor sets, and I am specifically the kind of sucker who fell for that. The T2 era was the golden days of World of Warcraft for me, and those are some of my favorite sets. So I was more than happy to be able to run around as a Judgement Paladin or a Nemesis Warlock. It also seemed fitting to have the Warlock using Corrupted Ashbringer. I have enough disposable income to make these bad decisions, because really… it is not worth what they are charging. However, given how much bullshit is happening in my life right now… I will take my joy however I can get it, even if that means retail therapy for some overpriced digital baubles.
In other news, we have been in teaser season for a bit with Path of Exile II slowly releasing some very short videos. SirGog has finally decided to make a video covering everything that has been released to date, so if you have not been watching as they slowly drip-feed us information, I suggest checking out his summary. The entire League Reveal presentation takes place on the 7th, and the full release of the content drops on the 29th. As SirGog indicates in the video, this is a really weird sequence of events for Grinding Gear Games. This is not the way that previous leagues have been teased, nor is the timing of the release following their normal patterns either. Generally speaking, we get the content revealed one week, and then the next week we have the start of the league. Anzac Day was the last public holiday until June, so I am not entirely certain why the big gap between the two events. Either way, I am hoping to wrap up my Diablo IV shennannigans well before the 29th so that I can hop into Path of Exile II fully, with no regrets.
What have you been playing? Have you tried out Diablo IV: Lord of Hatred? If so, what are your thoughts? Drop me a line below.
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Good Morning, Folks. At this point, I have completed the Diablo IV Storyline and am slowly grinding up paragon levels. I have unlocked Torment 1 and can reasonably farm that without much issue. Note that it is without any real semblance of a build because legendaries in general have felt really sparse and hard to acquire. I don’t necessarily love that, but it was a decision to dial back the look, and at least for me, it feels like they just spread the same amount of butter across a lot more toast. My Thorns Paladin feels reasonable and not completely broken, and a lot of the power that it lost I think, is in the form of the missing passives. I honestly feel sort of meh about Diablo IV as a whole right now. I thought this expansion and patch were going to usher in a new great age for the game, and it certainly shook up a lot of things… but I can’t necessarily say that the moment-to-moment gameplay in the endgame is better. I don’t hate it, but I also don’t necessarily love it either and feel like Path of Exile 1/2 and Last Epoch are doing a much better version of this genre across the board.
I had to cherry-pick a screenshot for talking about the story that does not give much of anything away, because I do really feel like this is worth experiencing for the story alone. I did not like the story for Vessel of Hatred, and it very much felt like a letdown in every single way. Lord of Hatred, however, is really freaking good, and there are way more interesting interactions with famous people from the Diablo franchise than we have had to date. There were actual moments here in this game that made me feel things… I actually had to choke back tears at one point. That is pretty rare for an ARPG story, and I felt like the game earned its story beats more than we have at any point since the launch of D4. Sure, I hated the whole Akarat as Jesus nonsense, but in truth, you don’t really spend that much time having to interact with that narrative. What was way more interesting was the manner in which we reintroduced Lilith and also dealt with some of the challenges around Rathma as the child of Lilith and directly connected back to our character. It is really good stuff and expands the general lore of Diablo in some interesting ways.
Skovos is also a really great new area to add to the game. I had some doubts about it as I was going through the content, but watching it open up a bit as I entered the endgame, I really do think there is some interesting stuff going on here. The legion event, for example, in Skovos is this whole pirate-attack-themed thing, and it is so much more interesting than the baseline legion events. Similarly, the Helltide areas feel really good on Skovos, but the only negative of all of this… is that essentially this one location sunsets the need to go to any other location. It has effectively shrunk the world down to only ever needing to exist in this one area. The hub of Temis literally has access to all of the things that forced you to go to other cities, and also serves as the only place you can access the Horadric Cube. So essentially, Skovos is now the game in its totality, in a way that did not occur with Vessel of Hatred and Nahantu.
Gear feels extremely hard to get in a way that I have never quite experienced since the launch of Diablo IV, and I am not sure I am a fan of it. Blasters who are grinding this game ten plus hours per day are finding plenty of gear, but I do worry about the folks who are only playing for a few hours at a time. I have exactly ONE ancestral item, and it dropped from the Obol vendor as a white item that I then upgraded into a Mythic via the cube. I am sure this will change as I go up in Torment tiers, but I also sort of need the gear to be able to go up in difficulty. I feel like I am being artificially gated by just not finding any legendary drops that are usable. I am wearing a bunch of stuff, but it does not necessarily equate to anything resembling a build right now. I am mostly being carried hard by the power of the baseline thorns build, instead of actually feeling like I have synergy with any of my gear. I liked loot raining down from the skies, and it is a bit of a bummer to be playing in extreme poverty league.
The other thing that is annoying me a bit right now is the reintroduction of Capstone dungeons. These feel like they are a complete waste of time. Essentially, in an ARPG, anything that does not reward good experience or loot is not worth doing, and these feel like an artificial barrier that is placed in our way to keep us from progressing. They are not hard to do, mind you, but they take about three times as long as I feel like they should. These essentially gate your seasonal ranks, which themselves gate your ability to progress up into torment levels. So instead of just needing to run a T1 Pit in order to unlock Torment rank 1, you now also have to do a dungeon that will not reward much loot, and also takes about 10-15 minutes to run, since there are three distinct phases to it. I am not sure what the design goal was with reintroducing capstone dungeons, because they don’t feel challenging… they just feel like a waste of my time.
Another thing that has been a bit of a disappointment is the Warplan system. These are what I would term “aggressively fine”. Sure, it is best practice to never do any activity without a Warplan sending you there, but they don’t really feel like they meaningfully improve the baseline content. A Nightmare Dungeon is always going to be a Nightmare Dungeon, and the Pit is always going to be the Pit… and while you are stapling some extra rewards on them via the Warplan, it doesn’t really feel transformative at all. Maybe I have not seen enough of the trees yet that unlock as you do the content, but most of the options feel like they are just going to give you more chances at loot. There is also no methodology for banning specific content. For example, I kind of hate the Kurast Undercity and never want to do it… and there is no way for me to say “never show me this content, and make the other content more frequent”. My options are to avoid the content in the warplans, and if I cannot… reroll the entire thing. Even if they gave us the ability to reroll specific nodes on the Warplan tree, it would be better than what we have currently.
I think the reality is that Diablo IV is never going to be “my” game, not at least in the way that Diablo III once was. I am entirely too Path of Exile aligned at this point to really ever be satisfied with the limited set of things that the Diablo franchise is now providing. I think there are going to be some players who will enjoy the slowed-down progression systems because it gives them a longer tail before they reach the point of feeling wildly overpowered. For me, however, I want to play Diablo IV as a fun weekend or two and not as a primary game, and as such, artificially gating content that we already had access to previously and throttling the gearing just feels like a turn in the wrong direction for me personally. That game isn’t bad, and I enjoyed the story quite a bit… but I will also never play that story again because it is the least efficient way to do a seasonal character. I am not sure how long I will be playing Diablo IV, but I doubt I will finish out the seasonal journey before I am back to either Last Epoch or Path of Exile.
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Good Morning Folks! Since I did not do my normal weekend recap post yesterday, I figured this morning I would start out with a bit of a progress post on Diablo IV Season Seven. I have to admit… I am starting to run out of steam. I had a pretty great first week, but now I am reaching the point where I am not really as driven to keep moving forward. Minions Necromancer seems to have stalled out at Torment III, and I am struggling to push it up to something that feels halfway decent at Torment IV. I could of course swap to Blood Wave of one of the more powerful builds with zero minions… but I have been stubborn. Like I said last week… a Necromancer without Minions is basically just a shitty Mage.
Really the core problem that I am dealing with is not being able to get the drops that I need to progress the build. I am kitted out in full Ancestral gear, and honestly well rolled items at that… but the challenge that I am having is that I cannot get the Ancestral Uniques that I need for the build. I’ve got copies of the normal mode versions, and in theory I should probably try rearranging my gear in a way so that I could equip them and give that a shot to see how it feels. Largely across the board Ancestral drops feel like they are way less common than they were last league, and this feels bad. More than that it does not feel like I am having much success target farming the items. In theory Ace and I were talking about doing another round of boss summons this evening, and if I get lucky that would solve my problems.
I’ve completed the Battle Pass and unlocked all of this seasons cosmetics. I generally pay for the cheap version of the battle pass without any acceleration, because generally speaking the seasonal cosmetics are pretty freaking great. I am not entirely certain what I think about this armor set, but the weird raptor-horse thingy is pretty sweet. One thing that annoys me about the Battle Pass, is that since the cats are only available through the expansion… the seasonal tracks never seem to include any cosmetics for them. This is the problem with splitting features between expansion and core versions of the game, and seems like a bad design overall.
Where I am stalled out however is on the Season Journey. I’ve reached the final step called Destroyer, and every single objective requires Torment IV to complete. Since I cannot reliably run much of anything on Torment IV, that means I am pretty much hard locked. Then the final steps will require me to do copious farming while sitting on T4, and luck into a few edge cases like having two legendary shrines appear in a single Roothold. Maybe I am feeling a little more charitable to the streamers that I felt abandoned this season too soon, because honestly… I was just a bit slower reaching the point they must have on day one or two. I am not sure what is wrong with the season, but something feels off now that I am out of the super fun leveling phase.
I did however take down Lilith so that was a positive step forward. Last season I got hard carried by Ace on this fight, and this season I was able to one-shot it. This means I have my resplendent spark, so that if I can ever complete the seasons journey… I will be able to craft a mythic unique. Part of me is wondering if I should have gone with Spiritborn. Truth be told the core problem that I have with Diablo IV is how spammy it feels. Maybe I am just too used to one or two button builds in Path of Exile, but it is highly annoying that I need to spam six abilities every time they are off cool-down. I could always use the numlock trick, but that feels cheesy. Especially after getting used to the more combo based system of Path of Exile II… Diablo IV spammy combat feels odd.
I admit… I am not 100% certain how much longer I am going to keep poking at this. I should at least try a respec to something else before giving up the ghost. I am not sure what happened, but in the last two days the fun levels have diminished significantly. It was great so long as I felt like I was regularly knocking out objectives, but once I stalled out… it made me start to evaluate the type of combat that I was actually doing.
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Good Morning Folks! This morning I am going to spend some time talking about something weird happening with Diablo IV right now. Season Seven aka the Season of Witchcraft is without a doubt peak Diablo IV. This is the best seasonal mechanic we have ever had and the game has more content than it has ever had in the past. Additionally the mechanical state of the game is better than we have seen previously and there are way more classes that have viable play patterns as a result. However… folks seem to be abandoning Diablo IV in droves, and this is has not been illustrated more clearly by the lack of streamers diving into the game. Previously a new Diablo IV season would see most of the Path of Exile streamers come back if for no reason other than to meme on the game for a day or two before returning to their core demographic.
What we are seeing instead is folks who used to be part of the core stalwart group of Diablo IV streamers… abandoning the game. Darth Microtransaction effectively made his brand on the back of first Diablo Immortal and then later Diablo IV. I went through his broadcast records and could not find any sign that he actually streamed even a moment of Diablo IV Season Seven. Raxxanterax was the definitive “Diablo III” guy for me and has been a regular source of information about Diablo IV since the launch of the game, and he streamed two days… looked annoyed while doing it, and then as of yesterday was back in Path of Exile II. This is translating to the game as well, because I am not sure I have fought a single world boss yet with a full party. Additionally during peak prime time gaming hours, I am one of the few people on my Battle.net friends list actually playing the game.
I think at least on some level… the expansion release broke a lot of people. It was not a great story, but worse than that… it felt like an incomplete story. Diablo games have traditionally been about killing a big bad at the end. The core Diablo IV story is about chasing Lilith and then ultimately killing her. Vessel of Hatred seemed like it was going to be an expansion about chasing Mephisto and then ultimately killing him… but instead we just took down his literal lapdog. The story arc of the expansion felt like something we might expect as a free incremental story patch in an MMORPG, not something that is boxed paid DLC. I think there were a lot of folks holding out hope that the DLC was going to change the trajectory of Diablo IV, and it didn’t really do that… causing them to check out. It is impossible to get numbers for this game, since the Steam version launched so late that it represents a fairly insignificant slice of the total player pie.
I am still having fun, but I also know that once I tick off the checkboxes of the seasons journey and finish out the battle pass that I will probably fade away as well. What I will fade back into… I have no clue honestly. Raxx showed recently that you can power level a character in just a bit more than two hours, so given the level of playtime streamers have… it is probably not shocking that they have all cycled through the game. Sure there are folks who have almost exclusively built their brand on the game like Rob that are still grinding away…. but within the week I figure most folks will have cycled back to something else. The Witchtide is fun as heck, but it seems like it is not quite enough to actually keep at least the public side of the player base engaged for very long.
I moved into chapter five aka slayer on my Seasons Journey last night, and I have been stockpiling my boss summon materials so that Ace and I can get together this weekend and run a bunch of bosses in a row. This mostly just makes it so that the loot goes further, since each of us gets our own copy of the loot. I’ve swapped out all but two of my slots for Ancestral gear, and it seems like maybe Ancestral Legendaries are dropping much less often in Torment 1 than they did during the expansion launch. I don’t have all of the items that I ultimately need, but I am still ripping through content pretty easily. I finally got all of the glyphs and now just need to work on leveling them. I’ve also got a few Infernal Hordes keys that I hope to run with Ace as well to see what sort of loot and levels we can get from that event.
Raxx released his usual State of the Game, and even he admits that the season mechanic is probably the best one yet. However he still sounds really unsatisfied with the state of the game. His big complaint is that at least compared to other ARPGs right now, Diablo IV does not have much replayability. I would probably agree with that and once you have ground your way through to Torment 4, completed the season journey, hit level 100, and finished the battle pass… there isn’t much reason to keep playing. There is nothing in the game that is so chase as to serve as that thing that keeps you spinning the randomizer for weeks on end hoping that maybe just maybe you will see it. All of that said… I am okay with that. I have Path of Exile, Path of Exile II, and Last Epoch that serve to scratch that itch for me. Diablo IV will probably always be a fun and chill romp of a game because the “Exile” games at least are deeply punitive when it comes to grouping with your friends.
Diablo III was a game that I played every three months with my friend Ace for a weekend, and then was more than happy to bounce until the next season start. It was this super fun if short event that we participated in that brought me a lot of joy. I’ve never been able to find that same level of super chill but focused gameplay in Path of Exile or the sequel Path of Exile II. We’ve been able to get to that point with Last Epoch, but even it feels a bit too punitive at times. Diablo IV however, has reached the point where we both have a focused but fun interaction during the season, and then group up to do a bunch of fun content together helping the other one get through the seasonal accomplishments before fading away and playing something else. As such I am perfectly okay if this is a short term game for me, and honestly appreciate the fact that it is because I know I can slot it in easily each time a new season comes out.
Quite honestly I appreciate the brevity. By next weekend I will be finished with Season Seven and be perfectly fine bouncing to do something else. I know that I have the next Path of Exile season 3.26 somewhere around the corner, and Last Epoch Cycle 2 in April. I also want to pop back into Guild Wars 2 and catch up on the expansion content since I have yet to engage with the second content drop from Janthir Wilds. I think I might mentally be ready to spend some time in an MMORPG again after copious grinding between Settlers League, Necro Settlers, and the launch of Path of Exile II early access. That is not to say that I am entirely done with Path of Exile II either. I do really enjoy that character and have a heck of a lot of fun mapping on it now. It just seems like ARPGs are going through the same false dichotomy that MMORPGs did years ago… with the concept of the “one true game” and that everyone feels the need to pick only one and focus on it entirely.
While I deep dive through the rabbit hole on pretty much every game that I devote time to… I also play a bunch of different games. This works for me, and quite honestly means that there is always something interesting right around the corner. It feels bad that Season Seven is getting panned so heavily, and I am concerned that the Diablo IV team is going to take the wrong lesson from that. If you have been on the fence about jumping into the Season of Witchcraft I suggest that you give it a shot. Like I said at the top of this post, it legitimately is peak Diablo IV and is pretty much the best that the game has ever been. I think the challenge is… that “best” is not what many players and streamers are looking for.
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