I completed Diablo 2 a couple of years ago on PC, and I even gave Diablo 2 Resurrected a go when it just came out. But turns out all that time I played it wrong.
For a normal person, it’s obvious that unique items are better than rare, and rare is better than magic, and magic is better than common. This is how that system works in every ARPG for ages now. Not in Diablo 2, though. The most coveted items are commons with sockets. In original game, you would put some gems in those slots, fun customisation. But in Lord of Destruction they introduced runes, which, if socketed in a correct combination, would create a unique item, but without the RNG involved, and often more powerful.
I also didn’t understand the attack speed at all. For example, if item has “+5% attack speed”, it doesn’t mean your character will attack 5% faster, no. There’s a concept of “breakpoints”: at a certain percentage, a single attack animation frame is reduced. So you need at least “+9% attack speed” in total to see any benefits, then +18%, then 30%.
I already knew the theory behind “player count”: you can multiply enemies power up to 8 times, in order to get higher drop rate and experience. But how a single character can survive a challenge set for 8 players? One of the videos explained it well: if basic enemy has 10HP, it doesn’t matter that at highest difficulty it has 80HP, as long as you can still kill it in a single hit. And the builds revolve around stacking so much damage through skills and runewords that is stop mattering.
Tag: Diablo
Am I playing Diablo 3 again? Yes, yes I do.
Never seen than joke before, though:
I understood that I don’t understand Diablo 3 Necromancer at all. I mean, you immediately get 7 skeletons, that are almost invulnerable and don’t require corpses. Why exactly 7? I don’t know. And your skeleton mages aren’t really skeletons at all, as they act more like turrets and persist only for a few seconds.
The legendary drop is still ridiculous but fun. I got two legendary swords even before I reached Leoric.
Completed Diablo 4.
Legendary items aren’t the rarest type of item, that’s why their names are so generic. That’s the bit I didn’t understand, or maybe forgot. Finally got my first Unique item. From a Treasure Goblin again, I think.
I know I complained that story bosses are useless. Well, Duriel dropped two unique items. Yes, there’s Duriel again.
The battle cinematic reminded me of those times when we were playing a game just to see the next cutscene. It’s that good.
It’s strange writing that both Donan’s (the fat guy) death and Neryelle loosing her hand are so… Offhand. Neryelle gets bitten by a random zombie, and Lorath has to chop her arm off, and Donan gets poked by a zombie column. Remembering how they offed Decard Cain in Diablo 3 like he wasn’t the cult character in the first two games, that’s nothing.
What I do have trouble with is… consistency. I know this is a story about angels and demons (and divorced parenthood). But why Mephisto is in some kind of a bubble?
Is Diablo and Baal also in bubbles somewhere? Lilith says that this is an eternal battle, because things like hatred won’t just disappear. But then her dying is suddenly a big thing? I mean, can’t she just reappear in a bubble like Mephisto?
After all, we killed Andariel and Duriel at least twice already.
Getting a triple boss in a dungeon for the first time is fun. Getting the same triplets for the third time… not so much.
Speaking of fun, the story bosses drop junk, but the Treasure Goblin dropped an actually useful bow that randomly creates a pool of poison, and while you’re standing in that pool, your poison attacks are free. Finally a mechanic that is not just about shooting monsters in their faces.
Elias is supposed to be some kind of a villain, and he certainly gets a lot of people killed, but for a good reason, it seems? He’s cullying humanity, because invasion is inevitable. So only the strong will survive to fight the demons. Makes sense to me.
Changed my build to be more poison and traps oriented. That gives me a bit more satisfaction and smugness, as you can win before enemy even knows it: neat feature shows you if the enemy will eventually die from your poison or not.
After reaching level 35, “orange” drop rate improves a lot. Funny though that those legendaries still get quickly outpaces with the yellow-rare drops. The main difference between “rare” and “legendary” being either effect when player is hit or some bonus to cooldowns. Strange that rares have some unique names, but “oranges” are often just generic “bumpy helm of greater might”.
Strangely, they managed to screw up the fight with Andariel. Andariel, the treat of Diablo 2, the sight of her monstrous body! Now, you barely see her. Seriously, it’s a shotout fight. She shots at you from across the screen, then dies. I’m not even sure what she looks like.
By level 43 or so I finally got a horse. A horse makes traveling easier, and feels a bit like Legend of Zelda with its “boost carrots”. Here you can also gallop it 3 times in a row. Anyway, since all monsters are basically the same, horse allows speeding up by them, which is great.
Just as I complained that I’m not getting any orange drops, I got my first proper orange drop. And a bow at that.
I feel that there’s a lot of backtracking for a modern game in Diablo 4. Maybe that’s intentional, or maybe I’m missing something, but I often couldn’t jump to the dungeon entrance, like with the “cerberus” dungeon, or back to the quest-giver, like with the “druid on a tree”. Sometimes you have to mow through the same mobs again. Sometimes you’re just walking the empty halls. Both doesn’t add anything to the game experience.
Around level 30, end of Act 2, the game becomes a slump. The monsters are getting more and more meaty, but your gear doesn’t scale with them. And that “orange” bow you picked a few levels ago is now doing same DPS as the “blue” drops.
Also, because it’s an open-world game, and the monsters simply level up with you, there’s this discrepancy that you just defeated The Guardian of Cathedral of Hatred, but then you fell victim to a porcupine.
Ironic that the one of the best written quests is also annoying to complete. The sad story about the Goose Sign, I mean.
I wasn’t much interested in Diablo 3 when it was announced, as I didn’t even play the Lord of Destruction at the time. So to me all the promises and changes are fascinating, especially as I know the final product well enough.
Even more interesting that some things that they promised in Diablo 3 were actually later implemented in Diablo 4.
Something I didn’t expect is that I’d have the most success with Rogue, out of the three classes I tried until now. Rogue has the same concept of two weapons slots the barbarian has, but in her case it’s for ranged and dual-wield set of weapons.
The class mechanics are what you’d expect: homing arrows, barrage of arrows, imbuing arrows with elements. But with her I didn’t die once yet. With barbarian: many times.
I’m at level 24, ending of Act I, and I’m seeing an “orange” item for the first time just now. How times have changed since Diablo 3…
Are we dealing with a dysfunctional family again? I think we’re dealing with dysfunctional family again. First we had Adria who sacrificed her daughter.
Now we have Lilith and that Angel who killed his son the goth-necromancer because anger management and prophecies, and now mommy is angry.
Seeing Vigo as Knight Penitent after playing Blasphemous is… strange. I’m not sure if the reference is intentional, but it is quite obvious.
While comparing Diablo 4 to Diablo 2 and Diablo 3, I noticed one detail that is very interesting. You start as a necromancer with no ability points. But you can still summon a skeleton to help you from the get go. That’s because you’re given a wand with +1 to Summon Skeleton skill. So you can be a necromancer from the get-go, basically.
What I like about console versions of Diablo 3 is that they work completely offline, both on Switch and PS4. No such luck with Diablo 4, unfortunately.
The game won’t even show menu without internet connection.
So, I had to download latest system firmware.
Then I had to set up PSN account.
Then download 12GB update.
I wasted an hour, and didn’t play Diablo 4 at all this evening.
I’m not much into speedrunning, but I found this video to be fascinating for a couple of reasons:
First, the author managed to bring together most of the speedrunners to get their opinion. Second, he explains pretty well what techniques they use to optimise their runs. And finally, unlike many other game speedruns, those don’t rely on glitches much, it seems.
Categories
Diablo Immortal
Guess who got 3 4 similar legendary helmets now…
On the flipside, Blizzard is surprisingly generous about some aspects of the game. For example, you need to get every legendary item only once in order to keep its effect. You can “extract essence” in Westmarch, and after that you can always imbue another legendary item with this trait.
I like comparing how character look evolves in Diablo. But after you reach maximum level and start accumulating Paragon points, it stops being interesting. Your character just stocks on all-legendary equipment, which defines most of their looks. You don’t look that way because it’s cool, but simply because you need a trait from that particular piece.
That also means that if you play Diablo Immortal enough, you’ll know which traits are equipped on each character simply by looking at them. I won’t mistake that bucket helm or that armor for any other now.
Categories
Diablo Immortal
I love to track the evolution of my character in Diablo-like games:
Categories
Diablo Immortal
Getting to level 60 allows you to change difficulty level. And finally die from regular monsters, or at lest from elites.
Surprisingly, I got two set items, and both are from the same set. One from leveling to level 60, and another from one of the dungeon bosses.
There seems to be no more storyline after that point, but you get some sidequests related to characters that you’ve met some 20 hours ago.
For example Valla, a demon hunter we meet in the second chapter, is now tormented by a demon that recreates the horrible moments of her past: her family being killed by demons and all that.
At the end of that questline she gets her iconic red scarf:
I don’t play many F2P games at all. So for me the fact that Diablo Immortal has around 16 different types of resources seems kind of crazy.
Categories
Diablo Immortal
Talismans are just dumb. 2% to a random skill. What?
Of course there’s a fight with the Butcher…
By 56th level we are reaching Scarn, the demon lord that was introduced as the main villain. Turns out he kidnaps angels and tortures them in order to create a demon army. Don’t ask me how that works. Along the way we beat huge worm and a dark angel. Those fights are pretty good!
For some reason we need to bomb some furnaces, and we use the angelic dagger as a kind of HIMARS to do that.
But that was all Scarn’s plan, you see, as he wanted to taint the dagger by soaking too much of the demon’s essence. So, he now can steal the dirty dagger. We pursue him and beat him to death. He isn’t very tough, unless you’re playing on your phone, I guess. Attack patterns are very similar to Diablo from Diablo 2 (I don’t really remember Diablo from Diablo 3). Especially the laser beam attack.
The dagger is still tainted, though. So it shatters alongside the last Worldstone fragment we also took away from Scarn. But now new weird stuff is happening: Diablo’s spirit returns.
I’m not entirely sure how a demon has a spirit, but whatever.
Categories
Diablo Immortal
By 49th level finally managed to join a raid for Lassal, and we even beat him. At least now I can stop thinking about it.
Had two legendary items drop from updating a monster entry in the in-game encyclopedia. I’ve beaten bosses for far less.
By 53th level I think there’s another such a slump. Takes a day or two of grind to get to level 56. Encyclopedia gives huge boosts, though.
Got a second legendary helmet, and it’s the same as my first one. That’s just my luck 🤷♂️
Categories
Diablo Immortal
Bounties are pretty boring, but they do allow to level up pretty quickly, I give them that.
There are no two-handed weapons in this game. But if you play as crusader, one of the rage-modes is a two-handed sword.
Around 35th level you get access to raids of 8 people. Gathering enough players is quite hard. The chat is full of calls for Lassal (which is the name of the raid boss). Reminds me why I hate MMOs.
Of course 3rd episode is Jungle. It’s not bad, though. Fetishes are one of my favorite enemies in terms of the design.
Guess who’ve got two legendary shields of the same type? 🤦♂️
Categories
Diablo Immortal
Hit my first roadblock at the end of the dessert episode, when the game told me literally that I need to be at level 35 to progress, while my character was only 32.
Also about that time got my first Legendary item. Those are the only items that actually need to be identified in town.
Besides the usual gem system that has been around since Diablo 2, there’s also a new “rank” system, that basically allows you to upgrade different equipment slots. That is, if you level up rank of your shield slot, any shield that you wield will become stronger. Level up everything!
The nice part is that when you equip a new item with sockets, the game will also propose you to transfer your gems to this new item. Very convenient.
Categories
Diablo Immortal
I already mentioned that the graphics aren’t far from a 10-year old game. Where it differs though slightly is in the models. The models look better. This includes both your character and enemies. At first I was sure they are mostly reusing old models from Diablo 3, but when you fight King Leoric (yes, you have to fight him AGAIN), you’ll see him riding a horse.
Manoruk, a giant lich popping out of a doorway is also a lot of fun.
There are now splashes of blood on the character, and the fabrics such as crusader’s tabard looks better too.
The fights are slightly more telegraphed, I would say, than Diablo 3. Bosses would highlight the zone they plan to attack, and your attack draw cones or lanes as well.
Story-wise, it was a very smart move from Blizzard to release this after Diablo 2 Resurrected, as the story takes place after Diablo 2 and before Diablo 3. So most of the iconic characters such as Deckard Cain or Charsi are still alive and well, and gamers now remember who they are.
And in general, it feels very much like a tribute to Diablo 2. You even visit first woodland, then a desert, just like in Diablo 2.
Categories
Diablo retcons
Diablo Immortal also made me aware that Diablo lore was quite heavily retconed.
Now the Dark Wanderer in Diablo 2 is not just your anonymous warrior character from Diablo 1, but Aiden, son of Leoric and elder brother of whatever the name of son of Leoric was.