So, art creation ended after a month. It was fun while it lasted, but in all honesty, I felt it was a bit too pricey for what I got out of it. I did get a couple of nice arts that I get to keep though, so that’s something.
I’ve taken up Diablo 3 again, been playing just over a week now. I got through the entire Season 27 Journey, so now I have the double portrait borders, the new pet, a stash tab.. all around, pretty good! I think it’s a decent season to be honest, basically “Primal’ing” any item at will, with a bonus power added to it. Drawback is that they roll three random extra powers, so if you dont get the power you’d like, it’s basically like playing with a primal – oh, and you can only play with one such item equipped.
For now, I’ve managed to get a couple of builds together; Sentry Marauder, Strafe Impale, Strafe Multishot, a Speed Multishot and Wudijo’s Natalyas Rapidfire – those just on Demon Hunter. I also got the Tal Rasha Meteor, Firebird Explosive Blast, Vyr Archo- and DMO Frozen- Arcane Orb, Typhon Hydra, the LoD Meteor, and a weird creation of my own which uses Firebird Disintegrate/Magic Missile on Wizard. All I do on that build is stand still and channel Disintegrate, constantly teleporting around, CC immune thanks to Invigorating Gemstone and when I’ve ticked everything with ignite I just send out a massive wave of firebased Magic Missiles. It’s not terribly strong, but I did do a GR104 with it.
..in 13 minutes.. I’m trying to get a Fragement of Destiny sanctified with Magic Missile power, so that I can do the “actual” Firebird Magic Missile, with Explosive Blast, Black Hole and Frost Nova build, but so far, luck hasn’t been on my side when it comes to rolling wands or powers..
Besides those two classes, the Demon Hunter and Wizard, I’m also trying to get a Witch Doctor going. I’m missing a key component when it comes to the Zunimassa Poison Dart, which is the Dagger of Darts. I just cant seem to get my hands on one. Ofcourse, I’m not only trying to get that build going, but also a speed-build that BigDaddyDen showed a couple of days ago, but I need three pieces of Mundungos for that – still trying to get shoulders, chest and pants. Weirdly, I’m probably closer to get those three, than I am the Dagger of Darts..
Oh, and ofcourse, trying to gamble this with Kadala has actually gotten me closer to get a full Arachyr build than anything. I’m missing head, chest and a ring, I believe. Which isnt to say it’s bad – although ranked as an A tier build and not an S tier, it’s there along with the other two builds the Witch Doctor has. I’m just wondering if I, as an arachnophobiac, will be able to play the build… with that massive spider and jars of spiders you’re throwing…
And who can forget the Crusaider. LoD Bombardment is the one I’m going for, but I havent even levelled the Crusaider up to 70 yet.
Other than that… Well, this week I’ve been diving head first into Diablo 3. I havent done much else, to be honest. I’m recovering from an incessant cold, mostly. I rearranged my furnitures, alone, when the kids were at their moms, and that took a heavy toll on me. Couple that with the fact that, apparently, my youngest kid had contracted a cold from kindergarten and had come up to sleep next to me every night that week, and my rearrangement of furniture apparently broke me. It’s been two weeks since, and I’m still coughing. I’ve taken tests and, no, it’s not that. It’s an actual cold.
So, a bit of news on D4 though – It’s set to come out next year, which is awesome! It’s MMO-esque, and not an ARPG like D3, so I imagine it’s like “WoW in Sanctuary”, which is ok with me. There’s also a beta coming out soon, I imagine it’s for select people only, but that beta is apparently for the entire game, start to finish. Oh, to be one of the chosen ones! It’s also no pay-to-win involved at all, according to what I heard, so I consider D4 officially redeemed from the DI-fiasco.
In other ARPG-news, Path of Exile had a terrible new league. The league mechanic itself bugged out alot apparently, I heard lots of people making T16-mirrors that gave basically nothing, and they had tuned both quantity and quality of item drops throughout the game – as well as overtuned “item culling”, scaled up mob health and nerfed mob-juicing.
Perhaps this doesnt make much sense to most, but basically, when you play the endgame content of PoE, you open up a map; there’s 6 portals to the new destination, you enter and kill as many enemies as possible. Before, the loot-system worked in a different way, every enemy had a set chance to drop stuff, chosen from a loot table. Both quantity and quality – amount and how rare each item was – came from that chart, and most mobs could drop several items each. Alot of it was “currency” – which in PoE is items used for crafting purposes, there are no actual currency like gold – but plenty of it was just items. Most were “rare”, yellow quality, which meant that if you played your card right when crafting with that item as a base, you could get lucky and get an item-upgrade from what you had, making you more powerful.
Now, both quantity and quality were tuned down – meaning, less items dropped, and each item were of a more common rarity, basically meaning it was worth less, and these “currency-items” were no different, they were fewer. So less good items to craft with, and less currency to use while crafting. That’s a recipe for disaster.
Earlier, each enemy had a set chance, as I said, to drop these items. These chances were in turn boosted by adding crafts to the map itself, before opening it. That made an enemy who were likely to drop some items, drop even more items. And when you kill lots of these enemies, lots of items are going to drop – making “juicing” a great investment. That means, that you put in more of your currencies to craft the map to have the most amount of enemies as possible. If a non-crafted, blank map had, say, 50 enemies, a fully “juiced” map could end up with well over 4-500 enemies, all with boosted drop chances. One correctly boosted map could very well be worth 100 times a “blank map”. But they changed this too – instead of letting this “drop-chance boost” and “juice-map” go on, they removed the drop chance boost, returning every enemy drop table to the original one, and changed it so that the most amount of loot doesnt drop from killing the monsters, but rather completing a mission, such as “killing that mob”, or “killing that boss”, or “finishing this league mechanic”.
Couple that with the fact that they had boosted enemy health so that instead of rushing and killing 50 enemies in 10s – which definitely wasnt unthinkable before – now you have to stand and fight with a single enemy for.. I mean, I had a fight with a group of enemies spawn during a league mechanic, and that fight took me 5 minutes. At that point I just quit.
Oh, and dont forget “item culling”. Before, the amount of loot that dropped was almost bordering on insane – there were more loot that dropped than you could feasibly carry through all the portals – but that just made the devs come up with the idea that “ok, so most people dont pick up items that have these stats and these ranges on other stats, or these combinations of stats, or these base items, so whenever a mob actually does drop one of them, we just remove those from the game completely, so they dont even drop!”. Sounds like a great idea, except for the fact that… most currency early game comes from picking such items up and vendoring them. There are “vendor recipes” that, when you turn in a certain amount of a type of item, or a combination of certain items, those can give you a pretty significant return of currencies. And not only that, even if that item aren’t necessary a good upgrade for you, you might still pick it up to sell to someone else, in turn generating currencies for you that way. And tune that “item culling” the wrong way, you end up culling items that people actually want. Or need.
If you mix all these things together with the fact that the new league mechanic seemed bugged and didn’t even work most of the time, people ended up getting frustrated because they felt like they couldn’t progress the game like they used to, and on top of that they got stonewalled by enemies who were too tough to beat with the items they had, because of all these system changes were making it nigh on impossible to get better gear. A lot of people quit the game, from 152’000 people playing at launch, there’s actually less than 40’000 less than 4 weeks later. That’s almost 75% of the entire player base that just up and left.
I mean, I get it. Grinding Gear Games wanted a slower paced game, where instead of everyone just trying to get everything min-maxed when it came to loots, actually slowed down and interacted with the game and it’s mechanics in a slower fashion. But…what I dont get is, they’re currently working on PoE 2 right now, where they will have all of this already. Why not let PoE 1 run haywire like it has been before, and let PoE 2 be the new game that actually have their original vision in it? No, instead they pissed off most of their player base and people left.
Now, to be fair, over the course of a league, many people do end up leaving the game when they feel like they’ve done everything they can. GGG wanted these people to “stay for longer”, that’s why they slowed down the pace of the game. People just left because they felt they couldnt progress instead. But the player base drop hasn’t been this hard or fast before, and not this angry.
Those two games, and League, as usual, are the only three games I’ve actually come around to play these last few months. I’ve booted up New World and played with the new instrument-mechanic, sure, and I bought the second expansion of Back 4 Blood – although, I never came around to play it – and a few smaller sessions on the PS5, one where I played Spiderman for 5 hours one evening, or tried Trials of Mana for a few hours.. but actually played? These three games are the things I’ve “focused” on. And honestly, D3 has only been the last week, so it hasn’t even been that much gaming.
Now, what I have done most.. is coughing. And TV-shows through Netflix and Prime. I can’t wait to get back on my feet properly and do something.
