AtheistPreacher

@efesell: Yeah, you know, I'm generally a console guy and will buy games on my PS5 over PC when I can, and when I do buy on PC, I still usually prefer a gamepad. Just... not for Diablo or other isometric RPGs like it. Mouse and keyboard all the way. The rare exception for me.

I've said this before and so won't repeat it at length, but I always thought the D3 art controversy was dumb and that it looked fine. Someone here pointed out that it looked very WoW in style, which is maybe why more people were wanting something darker and just different from WoW, but speaking only for myself, I've never played a second of WoW, so it just didn't bother me. It did have more personality, both in the art style and the dialogue etc.

In comparison D4 does indeed seem a little grimdark and dull, and worse, less readable (another thing I'd complained about previously). But this reminds me of another change I forgot to mention that I really appreciate. Upon firing up the game for the first time since I'd finished season 2, I was greeted with this screen:

Wait, you mean I can actually see enemies again, they don't just blend into the background? Sign me the fuck up!

That probably is what seasons are for, I just hadn't ever personally played that way myself. I never touched the D3 seasons and just wanted to max all classes so I could play around with endgame builds with all of them. I was always wanting to get to the point where I could start actually keeping the gear I picked up, rather than knowing I'd be discarding it for something higher-level later (I don't think that particular aspect is all that unusual, actually). Having 925-power items drop earlier would indeed help with that, it would make the leveling grind itself less urgent, which could then be lengthened a bit again. But IDK, I think it's balanced pretty decently right now. Can't please everyone.

@bigsocrates said:

I get the frustration, but on the other hand I don't there was any malicious intent on the part of the devs. If they could have released a better game from the start they gladly would have, and I don't think simply delaying it another year until now would have led them to all the improvements that a year of player feedback suggested to them. And in the past, before the era of live service games, we likely would have simply been stuck with a worse game for longer. In that sense I don't get too worked up about it.

It does strike me with Hades 2 entering early access recently that Supergiant is literally making its early adopters "beta testers who pay for the privilege," but being very upfront about it, which I don't think anyone minds. I suppose Blizzard could have done the same thing for Diablo 4, but it's just not something that AAA companies do, they seem to consider if beneath their dignity or something. But we also all knew that D4 was going to improve, that's just how these games work. Theoretically I could have waited a year until the game was better to start, but I didn't really want to!

Yeah, I think the issue is that making the skill trees themselves that much more impactful leads to them multiplying off of the legendary affixes in multiplicative ways that become nigh impossible to balance. In a sense you have to pick one or the other or try to balance the scales between skills and gear. Last Epoch went the other direction and made their skill trees really involved and impactful, but the loot itself was exceeding uninteresting and unimportant (at least when last I tried it). And D4 does at least have the paragon boards, which do have some game-changing powers on them, and which I think are kind of neat generally. I do wish that the basic 1-50 skill tree was a little more straightforward, I don't like the weird meandering path design of it that makes it hard to see at a glance.

Overall, though, I do tend to agree that too much worry about balance just cuts into the fun, which is reminding of the thread I started a couple if years ago about how much I enjoy "breaking" games.

I have seen three stars... four times. For funsies, here they are:

The two one-handed weapons are sadly worthless to me ATM because the build I'm using requires a two-handed weapon. That Hammer is good, not quite the right weapon type, but still very usable, though I'd roll off the lucky hit effect for straight resource cost reduction. The amulet is OK, but max resource is kinda unexciting and total armor % is wasted for my current build.

Which actually brings me to another recent change regarding armor, for those deep into the game who care about such things (took me a while to realize this, maybe it will also be news to someone else). There is now a hard cap on armor at 9,230 for the full 85% damage reduction against level 100 enemies, and you now get that full 85% damage reduction against all higher-level enemies (whereas before, you'd need yet more armor for every level of an enemy above your own, e.g. for the ones that show up in nightmare dungeons at level 150 etc... meaning there is now a more reasonable limit on your squishiness against the highest-tier content). Worth noting in this connection is that there is an all-classes aspect called "Juggernaut" that has the negative effect of increasing your evade cooldown by 100%, but in return gives you up to 10,000 armor... enough to hit the armor cap all by itself (I'm using this on my current Druid build). I expect that this will probably get nerfed at some point, but suffice it to say that there seem to be ways to hit the armor cap even with the ranged builds without too much difficulty. But I hadn't understood this about the new armor cap before doing some research, I'd just assumed that it was working like previously.

FWIW my two best pieces of equipment are probably these double-star ones:

Not bad at all! And that the fire resistance on the pants is non-starred doesn't even really matter since the 5% increases per masterworking level will put me at the resistance cap by level 12 anyway, so it's as close to perfect a roll as I'm likely to get. The ring doesn't have starred attack speed, and the resource cost temper roll is a minimum one, but still quite a good item.

Agree to disagree on the leveling. As I mentioned in the blog, I'd intended going in to level all classes to 100 before I found out just how many hours it was going to take, and promptly lost interest. I'd rather get to the endgame faster, it makes me way more likely to actually explore other classes rather than just stick with one.

Hey, fair enough, I get it. I've certainly been known to like games with lots of friction. The recent Dragon's Dogma 2 was all about that, I really enjoyed it and wrote my last blog about it (incidentally, a Double Fine dev did their own blog about DD2 that is a great read, more interesting than mine IMO). But I suppose it simply comes down to what you're looking to get out of a game. To me Diablo is the epitome of a casual "forever" podcast game and is best with little to no friction. I'm a simple man, I just want them loot explosions and increasing numbers until I decide to play something else. To each their own!

@bigsocrates: Yeah I did buy Reaper of Souls, I actually was just editing my response to reflect that. I just didn't buy the Necro, as that was a later thing.

Most loot games these days do generally tend to have fairly regular "loot resets" where you have to go out and find all new stuff. More engagement, says some executive. Often it's just increasing a level cap so you have to go and find the higher level gear. But this is a bit of a weird one as a more total revamp rather than a simple level increase. At least it doesn't matter at all in the context of seasons, which is where Blizzard tends to focus, but it does kind of suck for Eternal Realm characters.

Agreed that launch D3 was a very low bar to clear and they should have learned more lessons from it. Those who refuse to learn from history, etc.

It's actually even a bit worse than that. Since old gear had four affixes instead of the new three, all that old equipment is marked as "legacy" and can't be tempered or masterworked at all, hence its potential is just that much lower than the new stuff. I imagine that it would probably still work fine while you hunted for updated gear, but I was playing seasonal so I started from scratch anyway.

I wasn't as down on it as you were, and it was certainly better than D3 was at launch, where uniques not only had abysmally low drop rates, but were often bad items even when they did drop (I remember using well-rolled rares almost exclusively for a long time). But there's no doubt that "Loot Reborn", as they're calling it, is a massive improvement. It took them about a year to sort their loot out (amongst other things), but IIRC that's about how long it took for D3's "Loot 2.0", which I believe coincided with the Reaper of Souls release.

TBH I had completely forgotten that they announced an expansion. I'll be interested to see what exactly is in it and whether it's actually worth buying. E.g., I played D3 for a long time and did buy Reaper of Souls but not the later Necro, I didn't care enough.

@thepanzini: But you're talking about people upgrading from XB1 to Series X/S, when my point was simply that backwards compatibility made it all the more unlikely for anyone to switch from MS to Sony or vice-versa. MS handily lost gen 8, and in going to gen 9 the backwards compatibility makes it that much more desirable not to change ecosystems. You just said yourself that Xbox has half Playstation's MAU, that's the point, with backwards compatibility now being a thing it's all the more likely to stay that way. No one with years of free PS+ games and other purchases on Sony's side is going to be all that interested in buying an Xbox, whereas in previous generations it mattered less because there was a clean break, the new system didn't play the previous gen's games. If MS had shit the bed a generation earlier then theoretically they would have had a better chance to recover. Now they're stuck with half Sony's MAU with no clear path to closing the gap. IMO I'm just stating the obvious here.

This just reminds me once again how deeply hilarious it is that Microsoft did the whole Xbox One debacle at exactly the wrong console generation. Current-gen consoles both toted almost total backwards compatibility with the previous generation as a major feature, and it was because, as you say, the new ones were basically a spec bump. But backwards compatibility just locks you in all the more to whatever console ecosystem you find yourself in, and Sony so squarely won gen 8 that Microsoft was always going to be completely screwed for a backwards-compatible gen 9. How do you convince people to abandon their entire digital catalog of games from the other ecosystem in order to switch to a new one that is nearly identical? Good luck with that.

I don't know if I really have a point here, but in reading this last paragraph of yours my mind went immediately to phones. Because to me it seems like everyone always wants whatever the hot new phone is despite my not understanding at all how they're actually different. I've only ever owned one smart phone, given to me by my brother and mother in late 2016. After 7.5 years, I just replaced the protective case because too many of the little rubber bits around the buttons and ports had fallen off. Phone still works fine, I can't think of a reason why I would want or need a new one.

Whereas to me the new gen consoles do still have value. You could say that I just like the "console experience" as you put it, since I'm definitely not fully utilizing it. My TV is still a 37-inch 1080 from 2009 (for that matter, my PC monitors are also fairly old and definitely not 4K). But the load times are way nicer, there are still some exclusives I do care about, putting together a good PC rig is still generally more expensive, and the console "walled garden" does help keep down the number of hackers/cheaters in multiplayer games (provided you've turned off crossplay). I recently got a promotion and a nice pay bump, and sometime in the next year or so I'll probably put together a higher-end PC gaming rig for the first time in my life (after using low- to mid-range ones for many years) simply because I have a bit more money to burn, but even then I suspect I will continue to default to the PS5, because I don't actually care that much if my PC has some extra oomph over the PS5. I kinda just like the consoles, it's what I'm used to.

IDK, I think the real question is how many people are still somewhat irrationally attached to the console environment and will buy the new one just because it's the new one, in the way that so many people seem irrationally drawn to getting new phones for (so far as I can tell) very little real benefit. I suspect that number is still pretty large; whether PC gaming has gotten easier won't necessarily affect it that much. It's the momentum of a lifetime of habit. And the people who grew up with consoles are at the point in their careers where they're starting to make a bit more money, and will probably be happy to continue to prop up that habit in the form they're used to experiencing it in.

I do think it's obvious that the longer length of the eighth generation is definitely the new normal. As you say, the decreasing growth in GPU power and of games flexing themselves graphically has made the differences between generations less noticeable. But I think plenty of people will still be buying PS6's in the late 2020s and I'll be one of them. I guess we'll see.

@gyratyne: Ouch, that sucks. I haven't experienced any crashes myself. All I've run into is minor bugs with boon interactions etc not working quite correctly.

BTW, I thought it was funny that I found that Staff of Momus + Poseidon Special build independently, and then in looking for recommendations for builds to beat Fear 32 (to get Skelly's last statue), I found a Steam thread in which everyone was pretty much agreeing that that was the easiest and safest build in the game. The icing on the cake is that the Momus Aspect can also heal you back to half using its Omega Specials after every encounter. God forbid you get Aphrodite's "Healthy Rebound" at 50%, then you can just heal to full after every encounter. It definitely feels brokenly strong right now, especially since it requires basically no mana. I think they're going to have to nerf it at some point. So I'm glad I've already exploited it to complete that pair of Fear 32 runs before that happens, and can go back to something more reasonable. Now that I'm done with that, there's no gameplay reason to go higher than Fear 20, so far as I know, which is a lot more doable.

Whereas, speaking to your earlier post, I feel like the biggest consensus balance-wise in the community is that the Torches really do need a buff, or need to be redesigned completely. I've seen almost no one saying they like the Torches right now.