I played through grim dawn. it doesn't have the budget available to it that diablo does so it lacks a bit on the graphical/feel of the gameplay side but it works on a good dual classing system where you can pick two classes that you combine the skills of, giving you a lot of options on how to build your character.
Grim Dawn is one I still need to check out, along with the van helsing game.
Last Epoch
is early access, I think 0.8.2, but seems quite promising. They already have a pretty good combat feel, and the class system is interesting; 5 base classes with 3 subclasses each. You can invest your passive points in your base class, all tiers for your chosen subclass, and the lower tiers of your unchosen subclasses. Likewise, you get some baseline active skills for your class, then additional active skills from each of the subclasses based on how many passive points you spend. You can slot 5 skills on your bar, and gradually unlock 5 specialization slots for each of them. Specializing your skills brings up a separate tree for each individual skill, which is a good mix of increasing power and changing flavor.
One of the standout features of LE is its crafting forge. You find affix shards throughout the game, or as “salvaged” materials, that start off simple like “Health shard” or “Poison resistance shard” and can get way more specific like “Damage while channeling..”. Once you have shards, you can add prefixes and suffixes to items that match that shard, or elevate the tier of an already existing affix, up to 5 I believe. My understanding is the best tiers of stats are 6 and 7 and appear only on drops, then you can craft on the other affixes you want. The cost of this being way less random than D3/PoE is that crafting add instability which can lock, weaken, or destroy an item if you push it too far.
Endgame... I’ll be able to talk about soon.
PoE is huge and massive and overwhelming to start on, but there’s a looooot of layers to uncover if you let it gradually pull you in. I didn’t like it at first, but I really do now. I’m not see what to really say about it other than maybe give it a try if you haven’t. There’s SO much there, so just taking it at your own pace is the way to go.
Now, if this answer can briefly include things that are Diablo-ish, Hades is extremely good for roguelite action, customization, and story. Children of Morta kinda has the feel too, and is full of style, and I need to play it more! Only barely started that one, woops.
Another I kinda have my eyes on is Curse of the Dead Gods, which I don’t know too much about yet but looked cool at a glance!
Supposedly there’s some decent warhammer arpg’s, and I think there was a darksiders one. I seem to recall someone here at least mentioning those.
I recorded a clip of one "echo" I ran this morning. They work perhaps a little closer to bounties with varying objectives and rewards that you select from an expanding web of options, but are kinda rift-like too. This is my Lich, so here's some context for what's going on.
I switch into Reaper Form that improves my damage over time. Reaper is temporary by draining a secondary hp pool, and sustained by leech and regen. I get a lot of hp back from the "reap" skill on W that replaces it. I have small poison cloud on E that stacks poison on myself and everything near by, but it's specialized to reduce the poison damage that I take and also regenerate a percentage of my missing health. Those all combo to keep the Reaper form going as long as possible. The ghosts on Q are summoned in an area and wander around damaging enemies, the spirit on R DoTs & poisons enemies in a small area and can spread, and the spirits on right click shoot out in a fan, kinda homing in usually, and throwing on yet another DoT.
At the end you port out to "home", get a treasure chest of rewards, and continue on. So far I've seen this cycle unlock one "quest" and I think eventually there's a new Boss encounter that you work toward.
I decided to give LE another shot while the baby was napping today. Just got to chapter 3 and having a good time. I haven't crafted anything yet but gear seems to be dropping frequently enough that I haven't really explored that aspect. Doing a mage with lightning skills for UNLIMITED POWAAAAAH and it's been pretty successful. I wonder if it's worthwhile to make a separate thread instead of mucking up the Diablo one :P
I should probably get the season done on the Switch either way, so it's not bugging me in the back of my mind every time I forget to do the weekly challenge.
The challenge rift this week is piss easy, but mind numbingly boring.
LoN Disintegrate wizard with no teleport. :rotate:
The first pylons don't show up until you're at about 60% and it's a conduit and shield, neither of which are remotely helpful because you're already damn near invincible and instakill everything anyway. Then they give you a speed pylon when you're ~98% done.
Felt like a troll rift. Not hard, just a dick move.
Some PTR details are up but not overly specific. The season theme is item-focused to honor D2.
New Season Theme: Season 24 introduces Ethereals, a new weapon-type that players will be able to acquire and hunt for in their upcoming seasonal journey. Ethereals will roll a powerful set of affixes, a random Class Weapon Legendary Power and a random Class Passive Power. Ethereals will have unique icons, names, item types, and sounds originally found in Diablo II. For additional details on Ethereals, check out the list below:
Ethereals are account bound and can only be dropped by monsters, chests, and destructibles, but do not require your character to be level 70 to drop. Ethereals cannot be acquired through Kanai's Cube or from Kadala.
Ethereal rarity drop rate is set between Ancient and Primal items.
There are 3 unique Ethereals per class. Each Ethereal has fixed affixes and rolls one random Legendary Weapon power and one random Class Passive Skill.
Only one Ethereal can be equipped at a time.
Ethereals ignore item durability loss.
Legendary Powers and Class Passive Skills rolled on Ethereals do not stack with the same power equipped through Kanai's Cube, Items or Skills.
Ethereals cannot be Enchanted, Transmogrified, Dyed, Reforged, or traded.
Ethereals can be augmented.
Collecting all 21 Ethereals during Season 24 will reward players with the Feat of Strength, Ethereal Recollection. Players who accomplish this will have all Ethereal transmogrify options available for future seasonal and non-seasonal play.
Ethereals only drop in Seasonal play, and will not transfer to your non-seasonal character when the season ends.
Inna’s being reworked to go all in on mystic allies, Wiz mirror image getting a counter, and nerfs to Aegis 2pc and Masquerade 6pc.
If I read right, it’s like a 40% dmg nerf to Heavens Fury and Bone Spear.
The transmogrify reward seems really cool, but you have to get all 21 of them to unlock it? That's a lot of RNG; and it sounds like there's 3 per class, so you may need to level up one of every class this season to get it?
I don't see anything in there about dupe protection. Congrats in advance to the poor bastard with 10 Wizard ethereals who still hasn't gotten all 3 (5%).
Well, it'll be interesting to see how Inna's plays out. The managed to take Rathma and somehow make a pet set that made your pets actually useless for anything but a CDR. I honestly can't say I have a ton of hope they won't dick up Inna's. Reading the notes, it definitely sounds like "have all the allies! But, fire is really the only source of damage."
And utterly needless nerfs to aegis and masq. Yeah HF is pretty consistently top tier, but who cares? Crusaders still had other quality options regardless. And now Necros will have a grand total of 0 high tier builds, and only a couple that are mid tier that aren't complete ass jank to play. :rotate:
I don't care about ethereals poofing at the season end, all seasonal bonuses do. I'm concerned about how frustrating they'll be to collect. Will they only drop on the class they're for? Can they be rerolled? The odds of getting the attributes that align with your chosen build and are better than the traditional weapons in the build are likely to be astronomical.
I dunno, it just feels bad to have there be basically nerfs in the notes aside a single set tinkering, and no tweaks to anything else. Maybe they don't care, and hope/expect everyone to move on to D2 or Immortal, but this sure doesn't feel like a good way to get players who are still around excited!
Will they only drop on the class they're for? Can they be rerolled?
These are just my guesses, but I imagine they will work like most loot now, where there is a possibility for another class' ethereal to drop for the one you're playing, but it will happen significantly less often than drops for your own class.
And given the big list of "cannots" for Ethereals, I think it's very unlikely they'll be able to be rerolled.
Would be nice to see official confirmation on these things though.
We got some glimpses of the new cinematics in D2R, which are supposed to be "in-engine" shot-for-shot remakes of the original. I was wary about why they were even bothering messing with the original videos beyond some upscaling, but I must say what they showed so far looks pretty good.
and yeah I heard under the hood its the same. I would just think any mods that added something graphically might have issues? I don't really know how that works considering you can go back to the old graphics at any point.
I will pay $40 to be able to play diablo 2 in a resolution that is not 800x640. assuming there is map hack. Give me my 1920x1440 single player diablo with map hack and I will be happy
After the increasingly shitty business practices of Blizzard I think the only way I'll be getting D2R is if I still have tokens on one of my WoW characters to turn into blizzbux
and yeah I heard under the hood its the same. I would just think any mods that added something graphically might have issues? I don't really know how that works considering you can go back to the old graphics at any point.
I read that they have a new more controlled modding framework and they've moved a lot of game engine code into the scripting instead so it can modded. But that presumably means no compatibility with old mods.
After the increasingly shitty business practices of Blizzard I think the only way I'll be getting D2R is if I still have tokens on one of my WoW characters to turn into blizzbux
I mean, if you're concerned about the rewarding them for their business practices or not, paying via wow token actually means they get more money than if you just bought the thing
it was the smallest on the list but
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
Posts
Last Epoch
One of the standout features of LE is its crafting forge. You find affix shards throughout the game, or as “salvaged” materials, that start off simple like “Health shard” or “Poison resistance shard” and can get way more specific like “Damage while channeling..”. Once you have shards, you can add prefixes and suffixes to items that match that shard, or elevate the tier of an already existing affix, up to 5 I believe. My understanding is the best tiers of stats are 6 and 7 and appear only on drops, then you can craft on the other affixes you want. The cost of this being way less random than D3/PoE is that crafting add instability which can lock, weaken, or destroy an item if you push it too far.
Endgame... I’ll be able to talk about soon.
PoE is huge and massive and overwhelming to start on, but there’s a looooot of layers to uncover if you let it gradually pull you in. I didn’t like it at first, but I really do now. I’m not see what to really say about it other than maybe give it a try if you haven’t. There’s SO much there, so just taking it at your own pace is the way to go.
Now, if this answer can briefly include things that are Diablo-ish, Hades is extremely good for roguelite action, customization, and story. Children of Morta kinda has the feel too, and is full of style, and I need to play it more! Only barely started that one, woops.
Another I kinda have my eyes on is Curse of the Dead Gods, which I don’t know too much about yet but looked cool at a glance!
Supposedly there’s some decent warhammer arpg’s, and I think there was a darksiders one. I seem to recall someone here at least mentioning those.
The skill and mastery systems seem good.
I like the gear crafting system.
I switch into Reaper Form that improves my damage over time. Reaper is temporary by draining a secondary hp pool, and sustained by leech and regen. I get a lot of hp back from the "reap" skill on W that replaces it. I have small poison cloud on E that stacks poison on myself and everything near by, but it's specialized to reduce the poison damage that I take and also regenerate a percentage of my missing health. Those all combo to keep the Reaper form going as long as possible. The ghosts on Q are summoned in an area and wander around damaging enemies, the spirit on R DoTs & poisons enemies in a small area and can spread, and the spirits on right click shoot out in a fan, kinda homing in usually, and throwing on yet another DoT.
At the end you port out to "home", get a treasure chest of rewards, and continue on. So far I've seen this cycle unlock one "quest" and I think eventually there's a new Boss encounter that you work toward.
I'm enjoying it anyway!
IN DIABLO NEWS, I did see that the PTR announcement is in the works.
For D3? Or D2R or Immortal?
I should probably get the season done on the Switch either way, so it's not bugging me in the back of my mind every time I forget to do the weekly challenge.
Origin: Galedrid - Nintendo: Galedrid/3222-6858-1045
Blizzard: Galedrid#1367 - FFXIV: Galedrid Kingshand
LoN Disintegrate wizard with no teleport. :rotate:
The first pylons don't show up until you're at about 60% and it's a conduit and shield, neither of which are remotely helpful because you're already damn near invincible and instakill everything anyway. Then they give you a speed pylon when you're ~98% done.
Felt like a troll rift. Not hard, just a dick move.
Origin: Galedrid - Nintendo: Galedrid/3222-6858-1045
Blizzard: Galedrid#1367 - FFXIV: Galedrid Kingshand
TLDR: They’re doing away with regions, and moving toward cross-platform play. Today??
It seems to say that all game spaces are merging, but only overwatch will be cross-play, Soon / for now.
edit: so if any of our EU folks still play, maybe they can join the clan?
Ethereals are account bound and can only be dropped by monsters, chests, and destructibles, but do not require your character to be level 70 to drop. Ethereals cannot be acquired through Kanai's Cube or from Kadala.
Ethereal rarity drop rate is set between Ancient and Primal items.
There are 3 unique Ethereals per class. Each Ethereal has fixed affixes and rolls one random Legendary Weapon power and one random Class Passive Skill.
Only one Ethereal can be equipped at a time.
Ethereals ignore item durability loss.
Legendary Powers and Class Passive Skills rolled on Ethereals do not stack with the same power equipped through Kanai's Cube, Items or Skills.
Ethereals cannot be Enchanted, Transmogrified, Dyed, Reforged, or traded.
Ethereals can be augmented.
Collecting all 21 Ethereals during Season 24 will reward players with the Feat of Strength, Ethereal Recollection. Players who accomplish this will have all Ethereal transmogrify options available for future seasonal and non-seasonal play.
Ethereals only drop in Seasonal play, and will not transfer to your non-seasonal character when the season ends.
Inna’s being reworked to go all in on mystic allies, Wiz mirror image getting a counter, and nerfs to Aegis 2pc and Masquerade 6pc.
If I read right, it’s like a 40% dmg nerf to Heavens Fury and Bone Spear.
e: spacing
Brutal.
D3: HexDex#1281, PSN: DireOtter, Live: DireOtter
Steam: betsuni7
It says they can drop before 70, so if you're just going for the without a care for stats, maybe not totally terrible?
Though a drop rate between ancients and primals is a fairly large gap.
Origin: Galedrid - Nintendo: Galedrid/3222-6858-1045
Blizzard: Galedrid#1367 - FFXIV: Galedrid Kingshand
I don't see anything in there about dupe protection. Congrats in advance to the poor bastard with 10 Wizard ethereals who still hasn't gotten all 3 (5%).
And utterly needless nerfs to aegis and masq. Yeah HF is pretty consistently top tier, but who cares? Crusaders still had other quality options regardless. And now Necros will have a grand total of 0 high tier builds, and only a couple that are mid tier that aren't complete ass jank to play. :rotate:
I don't care about ethereals poofing at the season end, all seasonal bonuses do. I'm concerned about how frustrating they'll be to collect. Will they only drop on the class they're for? Can they be rerolled? The odds of getting the attributes that align with your chosen build and are better than the traditional weapons in the build are likely to be astronomical.
I dunno, it just feels bad to have there be basically nerfs in the notes aside a single set tinkering, and no tweaks to anything else. Maybe they don't care, and hope/expect everyone to move on to D2 or Immortal, but this sure doesn't feel like a good way to get players who are still around excited!
Origin: Galedrid - Nintendo: Galedrid/3222-6858-1045
Blizzard: Galedrid#1367 - FFXIV: Galedrid Kingshand
And given the big list of "cannots" for Ethereals, I think it's very unlikely they'll be able to be rerolled.
Would be nice to see official confirmation on these things though.
but Blizzard pricing is Blizzard pricing. Unfortunately.
e: I'm surprised they don't roll out a classic Blizzard collector's edition box for it
I want to say they confirmed that
and yeah I heard under the hood its the same. I would just think any mods that added something graphically might have issues? I don't really know how that works considering you can go back to the old graphics at any point.
I read that they have a new more controlled modding framework and they've moved a lot of game engine code into the scripting instead so it can modded. But that presumably means no compatibility with old mods.
I mean, if you're concerned about the rewarding them for their business practices or not, paying via wow token actually means they get more money than if you just bought the thing
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget