Good Morning Friends! I think I am probably done with Diablo IV for a while. I absolutely got some enjoyment out of the game, but as far as long-term replayability goes… it isn’t really doing it for me. The moment-to-moment gameplay and grind are just not what I want out of an ARPG, but I also sort of knew this going into the game. As a result, I am back to my usual nonsense and playing some Last Epoch. When I was having a blast in the Path of Exile Crucible league, my friend Ace was having a similar blast playing a Druid Spriggan build in Last Epoch. So this morning I am going to talk a bit through the build and share some gameplay footage that I recorded yesterday. First, however… I want you all to bask in the glory that is my Wild Man Pool Cleaner… because I can’t NOT see a pool skimmer with the way he is holding that staff.
Thankfully however you spend all of your time in this build as a Swole Treant. This build revolves around spending all of your time in Spriggan Form and then buffing the abilities that you have access to in that form. Spriggan form like the other transformed forms relies on rage, so you will be needing to do things to make sure that you can make it all the way through a map without getting knocked back into your weaksauce human form again. We are also going to be shifting as much damage as we can to cold… which adds a bunch of benefits including a whole other defensive layer that comes from slowing and eventually freezing enemies.
Yesterday over lunch I recorded a video showing off some gameplay. This is me doing a level 75 monolith as I slowly work towards getting this character into empowered monoliths. Essentially the gameplay involves having 1 Spriggan, 1 Wolf, and 1 Storm Crow pet that provide buffs, conditions, and some meager additional damage and then running amok through the map dropping 9 Healing Totems and 12 Vines. The Healing Totems are converted to spiked totems through the Spriggan Form skill tree and the Vines are converted into frozen thorn turrets. So what ends up happening in practice is that the Healing Totems keep you alive through almost any damage, and there are just so many things firing spikes in all directions that it shreds most smaller mobs. It isn’t amazing at bossing… because it takes quite a bit of time for them to actually deal damage to the stronger enemies but the excessive healing you are receiving allows you to survive basically anything that does not one-shot you.
Currently, I am at level 73 and working my way through the level 85 Monolith without much issue. After conquering that I will have the three level 90 Monoliths to complete and then can properly begin Empowered level 100 Monoliths. Honestly, the mapping portion of running the various Echoes is smooth as butter. The only challenges thus far have come from the bosses, where there are a lot of one-shot mechanics that I have to dodge. I steamrolled the first Monolith boss and took two attempts at Rahyeh, and two attempts at Lagon. While it took quite a while for my army of turrets to burn down the bosses, the healing allowed me to deal with a lot of the smaller mechanics that just sort of whittles you down over time. So on Lagon for example I needed to dodge any of his beam attacks… but could just stand in and soak the waves.
As far as the build goes, Aaron from Action RPG has a guide video above and you can find the Last Epoch Tools template here. One thing that I find I miss greatly when playing games that are not Path of Exile… is POE.Ninja. That website scrapes the build information from the top progressed players so if you are curious how others have solved specific problems in a build, you can sift through information til your heart is content. I legitimately wish EVERY ARPG had something like this, so you could see how players that are focused on a specific type of play are gearing out and solving the inherent issues with the build. Mostly what I would love to see from build creators is some stat information… like you should have X amount of Y stats, rather than suggesting some idealized pieces of gear that will probably be almost impossible to replicate.
For my build currently, I have some pretty scuffed gear and am utilizing two uniques. The first is Tears of the Forest, which is very likely to be required to make this build work. Essentially it solves your rage problems and generates 2 Rage per second for each Vine you currently have summoned. Since you are going to be trying to keep up all twelve Vines at any given time, this means you are generating 24 Rage per second which is pretty much faster than you can reasonably spend it. I’m also using Valeroot, which is not super amazing… but does give me +1 to the level of Spriggan Form. My goal is at some point to replace that with a purple chest that has more than one level of Spriggan Form on it. While I have legendary potential on Valeroot… I am just not sure if it is worth trying to turn into a Legendary.
All I know for certain is that this has revitalized my joy in Last Epoch for the time being. I have two builds that need specific items to drop for them to really be able to transition into the next level, and Spriggan seems to be extremely solid with little to no specific items. My hope is if nothing else I can use this build to farm items in higher tiers of corruption in order to finish out both my Bone Golem Necro build and my Squirrelmaster build. I have been contemplating turning my necro from being Fire Based to Necrotic/Self-healing based but it just felt like too much fiddling to really make happen. Not that it would actually be that difficult given that I shifted gears to Spriggan extremely abruptly on my baby druid, but it is sort of the “full bags” problem I have with MMORPGs.
What I mean by the “full bags” problem is that there is often a game for me that I might want to play… but there is just enough friction involved with playing it that I have trouble getting started. Traditionally this has been an MMORPG problem where I have no clue what any of the items in my bags do anymore, and it would require an hour or so of dedicated effort to sort things out… so instead I keep logging in and then logging right back out. I’ve had this most specifically with Everquest II, where I have some 300 bag slots full of probably useless crap, and I just don’t want to dedicate the mental bandwidth to trying to figure out what to do with any of it. Similarly, I have this wall with getting back into Genshin Impact, where I have too many quests pulling me in too many different directions… so instead I just don’t engage at all. So instead of taking the time to sort out my Necromancer in Last Epoch… I just shifted my focus to a different character for a while.
I am a “stuffer” and this drives my wife insane. She will occasionally bring me an object… that she wants me to deal with, but at the moment she hands me it… I can’t dedicate the mental bandwidth to figuring out what to do with it so I just find someplace to put it. Often that place is somewhere I will likely never find it again, but I just can’t deal with new stimuli when I am in the middle of doing something at times. In Path of Exile I have several “dump” tabs, where I just shove gear that might be useful at some point but I can’t deal with trying to decide if I sell them or vendor them at that very moment. The huge benefit of having seasons that reset in ARPGs… is it limits my ability to get into a state of having too much shit to process. For now, I am enjoying the heck out of the Spriggan, and my hope is that this will ground me enough in Last Epoch again to feel comfortable going and actually dealing with making the Necromancer work in a more comfortable manner.
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Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! This week we start off with a carryover topic from last week and talk a bit about Star Wars Shatterpoint. From there Ash tells us about the Furry Child Soldier game… better known as Fuga: Melodies of Steel 2. Bel talks a bit about the Overwatch 2 PVE content that is being sold for $15 after the original PVE expansion was canceled. He also talks a bit about the concerns brewing about a proper cash shop opening in World of Warcraft. Tam tells us about this delightful-sounding game called I Was a Teenage Exocolonist before Bel brings down the show with talk of the current Corporate Internet Apocalypse. We talk a bit about the Reddit Blackout and Streamers abandoning Twitch. Finally, Bel and Ash talk a bit about how nonsensically good the Spriggan that Grace told us about is in Last Epoch.
Friends… I am starting to get so overwhelmingly pumped about Path of Exile II. With Not-E3 going on right now, we’ve got two new teaser trailers kicking around after a few years of relative silence. I talked about the first one last week(Ngamakanui), and then we got another one during the PC gaming show (Aggorat). I’m expecting ExileCon on the 28th of July to be a massive deal and essentially outline not only the full feature set of this mega-expansion as well as a general release schedule. It would be truly wild if they just shadow-dropped the game at the show… but I sort of doubt that will be the case. We do know that the Crucible league that is wrapping up was a bit smaller than normal because we are expected to get a really massive league launching with ExileCon, and I wonder if it will be directly tied to Path of Exile II.
One of the things that have been a bit hard to wrap our heads around has been the fact that we keep referring to it as a new game… but in reality, it is just a continuance of the original game. The idea is that everything about Path of Exile 1 continues trucking along, and all of the expansion league content applies to both games going forward. This solves one of the problems that I had when Destiny 2 was released because it felt like we gave up too much of the good stuff that was in Year 3 of Destiny 1… to end up getting a crude shell of a game that wasn’t fully fleshed out and lacked a lot of the quality of life features we had gotten used to. So I will not only get a brand new campaign, and a whole slew of new abilities to play with… but also get to keep access to the leagues that I love like Delve and Heist.
One of the things that I find interesting is that in the two latest trailers that we have seen so far… I feel like we are seeing brand-new classes on display. For example in the Ngamakanui trailer, I just assumed I was seeing the Witch on display because it was a female caster… but Aggorat pictured above has made me reassess those assumptions. The “Monk” class that we see on display in that trailer does not really match the visual signature of any of the starter characters that we currently have in the game. This makes me think one of two things is happening. The first idea is that we are getting several new starter classes and both of these trailers have showcased a different one.
The other more intriguing idea is that maybe we are getting a detailed character creation system similar to the one that we just go with Diablo IV. I don’t want to get my hopes up too much, but it would be so freaking amazing to be able to craft my starter character to look however I want it to look. Not that I mind playing a feeble old man, a girl in rags, or a beefcake in a diaper… but the entire ARPG experience is so much richer if you get to pick your own appearance. This would also solve the problem of not being able to play the gender you would prefer to play. That doesn’t necessarily impact me directly given that I pretty regularly flip back and forth between gendered options just to mix things up when a game gives me that ability. However, I know this is a big deal to a lot of players and it would be amazing to see these character models trickle out into the rest of the game.
<img data-attachment-id="24191" data-permalink="https://aggronaut.com/2023/06/16/path-of-exile-ii-hype-intensifies/path-of-exile-2-aggorat-teaser-pc-gaming-show-youtube-0-59/#main" data-orig-file="https://i0.wp.com/aggronaut.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Path-of-Exile-2-Aggorat-Teaser-PC-Gaming-Show-YouTube-0-59.jpg?fit=1280%2C720&ssl=1" data-orig-size="1280,720" data-comments-opened="1" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"0"}" data-image-title="Path of Exile 2 Aggorat Teaser [PC Gaming Show] – YouTube – 0-59" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="" data-medium-file="https://i0.wp.com/aggronaut.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Path-of-Exile-2-Aggorat-Teaser-PC-Gaming-Show-YouTube-0-59.jpg?fit=1280%2C720&ssl=1" data-large-file="https://i0.wp.com/aggronaut.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Path-of-Exile-2-Aggorat-Teaser-PC-Gaming-Show-YouTube-0-59.jpg?fit=880%2C495&ssl=1" decoding="async" loading="lazy" width="880" height="495" src="https://i0.wp.com/aggronaut.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Path-of-Exile-2-Aggorat-Teaser-PC-Gaming-Show-YouTube-0-59.jpg?resize=880%2C495&ssl=1" alt="Screenshot from recent Path of Exile II Teaser trailers showing the text
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July 28
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Suffice it to say I am pumped for July 28th… but am trying really hard to reign in my expectations. I have considered taking the day off from work just so I can watch the presentation uninterrupted. A lot of the reason why I have been so engaged with Diablo IV right now… is that I am in somewhat of a holding pattern until the next Path of Exile league. The only negative I can see about the “two campaigns one game” thing, is that for players who were maybe hoping POE2 would be a fresh start and wildly different. I expect a lot of new toys to play with, and a lot of changes to the game engine to make it feel a bit more responsive and have much better visuals, but I also sort of expect POE2 will feel a lot like the original release in the way that the end-game works. It took me over a thousand hours in this game to really come to a place of loving it wholeheartedly, but that is sort of a big ask for most players.
I do think the relatively shallow nature of Diablo IV, is ultimately going to make a lot of players feed into Path of Exile. There were a lot of folks holding out hope that D4 would be the next best ARPG and I am not sure that is the case. It has a lot of great moments, and yesterday I released a video talking about some of my favorite things. However even in a video where I tried my best to stay positive… a number of complaints still made it into the recording. I am almost vibrating with hype for what I am seeing for Path of Exile II though, so the future still seems exceptionally bright. I’m also extremely pumped about the release of Last Epoch 1.0 later this year. We are truly living in the golden age of the ARPG, and the loot will flow!
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Friends… I find myself in an awkward place right now. I keep poking at Diablo IV even though I am admittedly not really enjoying myself. I end up in these patterns sometimes with games where I feel like I should be enjoying them, but for whatever reason don’t. I probably spent 200 hours poking at Guild Wars 2 over the years trying to figure out what I was missing that others really enjoyed about that game. Eventually, I reached a place of happiness with that experience, but often times I never really do. I do not enjoy Warframe for example, even though on paper everything about that game should be something I am heavily into. I’ve never quite been able to put my finger on what was wrong with the experience, but something is… and something is also wrong with Diablo IV. I feel like I am poking the dead corpse of Diablo IV with a stick, trying to figure out why I don’t love it after waiting over a decade for it to arrive.
Most recently I have poured all of my efforts into catching up with the story quests that I missed along the way, and more importantly, grinding out my renown levels. At this point, I have completed everything but Kehjistan, and I have to say… this is a miserable process. Nothing about this is enjoyable in the least but it also feels like they have hung just enough carrot… in the form of 4 bonus Paragon Points at the end of this stick that I cannot avoid it. I also found the hunt for 160 Altars of Lilth was complete misery as well… but again all of the permanent stat boosts were too beneficial to ignore them. Both of these are examples of thoroughly uninteresting gameplay, but also something that feels like you can’t really skip it because they attached something to it that you can’t really get otherwise. I certainly hope that these are a one-time thing and do not reset each season, because I cannot ever fathom doing this again.
Then there are my frustrations with the Paragon Board system. Namely the force mechanic around unlocking the bonus for each Glyph. None of these are really worth the effort unless you unlock the bonus, but in order to do it… it causes you to make some deeply uninteresting choices with your points. My frustration right now is that I need to acquire 40 strength from nodes on the board, but there is only 35 strength worth of nodes in the radius of this glyph. That means I need to level this glyph to level fifteen in order to expand the radius. The system of leveling glyphs is in theory supposed to replace the process of leveling Legendary Gems from Diablo III. Same mechanic but implemented in a maddening slow manner. When you leveled a Legendary Gem you got 3 level raises each time you ran a Greater Rift, with Glyphs… you get part of a level each time you run a Nightmare Dungeon.
Most of the glyphs that I have access to are Tier 1, and those gave me half a glyph level at 1, and a quarter of a glyph level at 2. Meaning that in order to level these up you just have to chain-run Nightmare Dungeons. These are not fun. They are just normal dungeons with some added nonsense that you have to watch out for but are as mind-numbing as the normal dungeons. Greater Rifts in Diablo III were also admittedly repetitive but there was a lot of randomization in each run and you could rip through them quickly as they did not require you to do any backtracking. Dungeons in Diablo IV however require you to complete a series of boring mechanics which often require you to backtrack in the dungeon and are effectively the same experience every time you run them. I ran six of these back to back last night before ultimately deciding I had my fill and moved on to other things.
What is genuinely enjoyable are the World Boss fights. I grouped up with my friend Cyl and took down The Wandering Death, which is an encounter I had not seen before. Sure the mechanics were relatively easy, but it was still a fun five minutes of gameplay that felt extremely rewarding for the time spent. The problem here however is that these world boss events… are so few and far between that I’ve literally played likely over a hundred hours at this point and this was the first one that I happened to be on at the right time to catch. Instead of taking a page from the very excellent Guild Wars 2 event spawning book, Blizzard seems to have these vague three-hour windows when a boss MIGHT spawn… and when this happens you are not exactly given a clear indication unless you happen to be looking at the map. Personally, I feel like World Bosses should ALWAYS be spawning and you should never be more than 20 minutes away from the next one. The same is true with Helltides and I feel like there should never be a moment when you log in and there is not one available.
Then let’s talk about one of my key complaints… how generally fucked the stash tab situation is. Not only is the UI for your Stash completely useless and without any sort of search functionality… you are painfully limited in what you can store. This image that I have cobbled together from screenshots represents all of the storage space that you have. 200 slots of storage space are allocated for all of the characters on your account, and right now it is largely filled with crap for my barbarian. Then you have the 88 slots of storage space that you are carrying on your character which is divided up into 33 inventory slots for drops, 33 slots that are for consumables but this is shared between Potions and Nightmare Dungeon Sigils, and finally, 22 slots that you can use to store aspects that you have extracted. Most of my actual stash tab storage is consumed by legendary items that I am holding on to in order to extract legendary aspects from later because the aspect storage is so painfully limited.
Let’s contrast this with three other games in the genre. Path of Exile has a virtually unlimited amount of storage space so long as you are willing to buy more stash tabs with real-world money. Last Epoch also seems to have a virtually unlimited amount of storage space available pending if you are willing to keep farming in-game gold to purchase them. Even Diablo III, which I considered fairly limited… gives you 910 stash tab slots… though some of those I earned through seasonal play and others I got from the Reaper of Souls expansion and the Necromancer pack. However, even if you only have the base game… you still have 350 stash slots. I think part of what makes the D4 situation feel so bad is all the damned gems… and admittedly they ate up a ton of space in my bank in D3 as well. However, there is no real reason why they don’t just live in your ingredients tab.
I find myself in this rough spot with Diablo IV, and the longer I play it the more frustrated with the current state of the game I get. I should just stop playing it and do something else, but I am not sure exactly what else I want to dive into at the moment. I should go back and finish out the league in Path of Exile and get the last achievement I want to get. I should work on progressing through the monolith further in Last Epoch. However, my brain seems to be caught up in this pattern of logging into Diablo IV and then getting frustrated. I keep thinking if I push through this…. the game will get better. However, the further I push… the shallower the game seems to get. I still stand by my original assessment of this game. It is a pretty great game for playing through the story and then moving on to another game. I question how good of a game it is for playing like most ARPG players play those games. I feel like as soon as the new Path of Exile league lands with ExileCon in July, Diablo IV is going to be a ghost town.
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