to clarify, I mean games like Diablo 4, Path of Exile, and Grim Dawn!
I really love the genre (right next to roguelikes and looter shooters for me, I guess I just like shiny loot a lot hahaha) but I’ve been feeling kind of lost in it since I quit playing Path of Exile (with over a thousand hours in it) due to not finding the shifting meta builds fun anymore. my favorite build ever in that game (that I had even made myself!) was a tectonic slam juggernaut, and while it was never the best skill, it was an enjoyable one for me. later, things seemed to get more difficult for me to parse in PoE so I never went back. I also never really enjoyed trading, but found playing by myself hard and not as enjoyable since I played with other people at the time.
I’ve dabbled in Grim Dawn and Last Epoch, but couldn’t quite get into them. I keep feeling like I should give them both another go, because I like the genre, but I’ve bounced off of them multiple times. I also played Diablo 3 briefly but it was at the height of my Path of Exile phase so I didn’t really stick with it.
I’ve been curious about Diablo 4, especially with the summer steam sale potentially coming up soon. most reviews and such I can’t find something recent, but I know they had a big update not too long ago. I know a lot of reviews a saw before didn’t like it from the start, but I was wondering if anyone who played it could tell me about how it currently is right now.
what arpgs are your favorites, or maybe ones you dislike? what aspects do you like about them? is there something new you’d like to see in the genre, or maybe something that you want to become standardized?
deleted by creator
You should try Vrising. It’s more modern ARPG.
You are not bound to a playstyle for hundred of hours. Loot is based on challenges solved. It’s using your brain skills…
I’ve really enjoyed the ARPGs that I’ve played (D3, a bit of Grim Dawn, Last Epoch, and hell as of the recent update even D4) but I find that I am terrible at build crafting - and the really bad brain fog that I’ve had for over a year now doesn’t help that at all.
I find that I just constantly hit a wall that I can’t push past, and then run into the “Now what?” - every now and then I’ll play with some build guides online and tinker with them, but for me that isn’t as fun as coming up with something completely on my own.
That all being said, LE has been my favorite as of recently - it’s definitely still a light on content (1.0 just released this year), but over time I think it’ll be very high up there on everyone’s list.
I feel like I had a much easier time understanding the systems in LE than the other games (except for maybe D4 which was a bit too simple, though they’re starting to change it up a bit with the recent patches) but LE’s item and skill systems also clearly have a very high ceiling of what you can do with them.
I guess for me, what I really liked about it is that even with all the brain fog I could still get into the systems and pick it up quickly, yet also still see where it can certainly get more and more complex as you push your builds higher and higher, even if I’m not completely at that point yet.
I hope some of my ramblings made at least a little bit of sense 😅
thank you for this!
I too have brain fog and memory issues in general. I’m glad to hear that systems seem simple to understand but have the high ceiling, I love that kind of thing. I just need to push on I think and try LE again, when I get my desktop back.
what is your class of choice in LE?
No problem! I’ve really enjoyed Runemaster so far since I’ve always been someone who favored magic based classes. With Runic Invocation there are so many different spell combinations that you can pull off (I can’t possibly memorize them all, I think there’s around 50 of them?) which is really fun!
I need to try out Spellblade at some point, that’ll probably be my next class that I try out. Their new season (“Cycles”) launches at the beginning of next month (July 9th IIRC), so I haven’t decided if I’ll try to wait till then or if I’ll try to give it a go before then.
Some thoughts on Diablo 4 (D4) as per your question. In terms of ARPGs, I came from Diablo 3 and, way back in the day, Dungeon Runners.
From my feelings as a player, as well as reading from the community, the primary criticisms from D4’s launch have been the way it handles items and endgame content. At original release, I know a lot of people who tapped out around level 75-80, with level 100 being max.
I am personally quite pleased with how the latest season addressed these issues. With the elimination of yellow (rare) gear as candidates, good drops feel a bit rarer (more time spent playing; less time scanning items). Reviewing loot can still feel a bit tedious at certain points in the game, but you eventually reach a point where a legendary item needs to drop with an asterisk before you look at it, again allowing you to focus on playing over sorting.
You said in a comment that you are in it for the progression. I find character development rewarding but skewed; the early game is fast paced and incentivizes rushing to get to the final difficulty level, when progression peters off and becomes rather marginal. In Diablo 3, you wanted to play higher difficulty levels to have better drop rates. In Diablo 4, it’s not so much the drop rates as the quality. Items from the highest tier completely outclass items from even the second-highest tier, meaning you have to keep starting over from scratch as you move up. I’d rather it be balanced in terms of drop rates, thus still having a small probability of carrying a midgame item all the way to endgame.
Some endgame activities are more enjoyable than others, but they have different rewards that encourage you to have some gameplay variety. Boss farming is probably the most tedious endgame activity. It is done to get the most valuable and rarest pieces, the uber uniques, but requires you to also grind bosses that realistically won’t help your character other than to get materials to summon the higher chance bosses.
My friend who plays PoE and has tried D4 is well described by @Neuromancer49’s post; the lack of complexity turns him off. If you’re okay with trying something simpler and are at all interested in the campaign/story, I think it’s worth getting. I know there’s a vocal group that prefers Grim Dawn and the Diablo 2 die-hards seem to dislike D4, for what it’s worth.
Lastly, the art and sound design team did a spectacular job if you like Diablo’s aesthetic.
story is usually an important part for me! it’s one part of PoE that never impressed me. I might still check out Diablo 4, and I’m glad you laid out a lot of things for me. most of the stuff I could find online was still harping on previous issues that I now know some have been addressed.
funnily enough, I used to love running “lab” (I believe it’s short for “labyrinth” but my memory is shot and it’s been a long time) in Path of Exile, which was running through traps to rush to a boss. they nerfed that route shortly before I quit, too. but you got a lot of rewards at the end that had the potential to be good, and a blessing on existing equipment that you picked. a shame that boss farming in Diablo 4 isn’t as fun, but it’s something I’ll keep in mind when a sale rolls around.
sorting was probably one of the things I disliked the most in PoE, I could never grasp what was worth using or selling that well. goes hand-in-hand with my inability to roll with theorycrafting builds, so to hear Diablo 4 eases that some is nice.
Glad you found it helpful!
Ah, the labs sound similar to a type of dungeons that were part of last season’s theme. I liked them too. There’s a new pit mode that is similar to greater rifts in Diablo 3 if you remember them. Not quite running through traps, but running through procedurally generated dungeons to reach and defeat a boss as quickly as possible. Those bosses started out with some cheap one-shot kills (now nerfed), but I find them pretty fun and prefer this mode of dungeon + boss to the regular boss rushing.
As Grim Dawn has been on my list, do you mind sharing why you couldn’t get into it? Anything I should know going in?
