I will take that into consideration!
That’s extremely good advice. There are a lot of opportunities to improve your speed in this game; movement speed is one but also items that give you extra dodge charges and/or a shorter CD on dodge.
Anyone playing season 5 or is everyone on standby until the expansion?
Expansion/Season 6 starts in about an hour.
I guess it had a last minute delay and is pushing until at least midnight EST.
I’m looking forward to playing it but I’m not jazzed about starting another season. It’s not D4 specifically but I feel like I have been in continuous ARPG seasonal start-up mode for the last 2 years because of the staggered D2R, D3 and D4 seasons. It used to be I would hard charge one game for a month or two then walk away but these last couple of years I just go from one straight to another which is annoying for my wife.
I just thought of the most insidious in-game purchase possible, and I’m amazed if it hasn’t been done before.
Allowing Hardcore players to buy another life.
As an occasional hardcore player this would not fly at all. We play for the danger, if you die you die. Buying extra lives is just paying extra for the privilege of playing the normal game already available to us.
This is why I fully expect Blizzard to do it. 
Spiritborn are so brokenly OP i just gave up on my regular character and went to play HC mode. Got to lvl60/125 or so paragon/Torment III before i randomly lagged out and died. Game is absolutely broken ATM, the new class is something like 100 times stronger than the second best class.
Ah, Blizz. That sounds so… normal. I remember when the first started releasing prestige classes in WoW - starting with the Death Knight. You could only have ONE, but they were so OP that for a while, that’s all I saw. A 5 person party with a DK tank, 3 DK dps, and one “whatever” healer.
And they were slow to nerf it, because it was a huge draw in new subs/the expansion (though WotLK was awesome IMHO). It wasn’t until the next expansion or so that I felt they were reasonably balanced. Ditto for the Demon Hunter several expansions later.
It didn’t help that a DK could go DPS or tank and also could heal itself pretty well, so you pretty much didn’t need anything else.
The worst I ever saw was in Lord of the Rings Online when the Mines of Moria expansion came out. Between the buffs to that game’s hunter class, and the way dungeons were constructed at first, you had all-hunter parties. A hunter could only do DPS, but 5 hunters killed so fast that everything died before it could be a threat, except bosses who could either be kited or exploited in some way (like everyone stand on this ledge and shoot it and its attacks can’t reach us).
Not only was it just one class, it was just one role. They rebalanced things and fixed it but it sucked as a tank to suddenly find that nobody wanted me anymore.
I think this is the worst I’ve seen. I could drop uber lillith in less than a second in torment 4 without having top gear, no where close to max paragons and not even maxed aspects as those are extremely hard to get now. The “hundreds of times stronger than the nearest class” is not hyperbole, there was a stat crunch before this season and Spiritborn are doing TRILLIONS of damage.
Welp, dead again. This time around 230 Paragon. Account wide paragons make HC characters more viable. The Halloween event buff helped quite a bit, but i am nowhere close to done as apparently the halfway point for xp required to get to paragon 300 is not until 284.
Bumping, since I mentioned this in “games you’ve played recently” but the Blizz launcher can’t stop begging me to pre-purchase the “Lord of Hatred expansion” with another nugget of story and finally the Paladin class [going live 28APR2026]. But once again, the predatory pricing ($40-90 US) earns this a huge “Nope” from me. Is anyone who participated in the thread still playing or planning to come back for this?
I loved this game once (that’s why I started the thread after all), but it lost its appeal in the end-game.
I was tempted to come back a couple of times, especially since they made it so that I could install the game on the Xbox and I would have access to all of my characters and content from the PC game. They did a great job with cross-platform. But it still couldn’t keep my interest after the main story was over. Just doing dungeon after dungeon trying to farm crap to advance was so boring.
I bought the expansion and played the paladin for a few hours. It was… fine? There are some loot changes too that’s supposed to make the end game better.
But I got to level 40 or so and kinda lost interest again. The gameplay is just too basic, compared to basically any other game in the genre.
And the MMO nature of D4 in particular means that the most efficient way to level up is to not play the game, but just join random groups with high levels and leech xp from them. It’s like 10x faster than playing the game yourself, but very boring.
I tried again last night to get the pally to the end game, but got bored again after 15 minutes. I fell asleep. The builds in D4 are so basic that I’ve literally played idle battlers with more depth. I keep buying expansions in the hopes that it gets better, but it really doesn’t. I loved D1, D2, D3, and basically every other ARPG. D4 is just uniquely bland. It just can’t help but emanate an atmosphere of corporate soullessness. The open world was a mistake.
I think it would be a better game if I could play through the campaign with some friends and avoid the open world.
As it is, I make a new char every season, play for a couple hours, fall asleep at the keyboard and then don’t touch it again for several months.
Honestly, Last Epoch is just a better game all around with much more interesting builds. You get much much more gameplay for the buck. Too bad about Krafton though.
PS POE2 just added a druid, and it’s a basically a ripoff of the Diablo one. If you like soulslikes, that’s another option. Very slow, tedious, methodical gameplay there though, totally different from the mindless button mashing of D4.
I played POE quite a bit, and I assume POE2 Isn’t dramatically different in gameplay. POE is very much like the Diablo series except you can build your character in so many unique ways, and it can feel like a totally different game in the way you make your character.
On the other hand, it can be so complicated for building a character, I feel like I either need to follow a guide to the letter, or get a PhD in order to figure out how all the different abilities and bonuses work. It’s like it has the opposite problem from Diablo. Great game though that I had a lot of fun with.
They’re actually very different — and part of the reason PoE2 launched to mixed reviews in the beginning.
PoE2 was a deliberate attempt on the part of the game designers to make a less “zoomy” game, making it more like a top-down soulslike than a typical ARPG.
PoE1 was basically all about your builds, loot, and crafting. Once you got that down, the game pretty much plays itself and you can explode entire screens in a single click (or sometimes not even having to click, if you have one of those “autobomber” builds). So the bulk of the gameplay is really just running the spreadsheets and build simulators and creating an automatic death machine… the actual running-around and clicking-on-enemies was largely secondary to the planning.
PoE2 took a very different approach: It is much more “tactical” and hands-on, requiring constant manual evasion (you have unlimited dodge rolls) to avoid the frequent telegraphed attacks, and using certain skill combos in a specific order, on a long timer, to break through enemy defenses. It is a bit like the Dark Souls games, or Monster Hunter or the Batman Arkham games in that regard… not quite to that extreme, but it’s very, very different from D4, Last Epoch, Grim Dawn, Torchlight, Titan Quest, etc. (At least until the mid-to-late endgame, where certain builds make it “zoomy” again. But in the campaign, there is very minimal loot/crafting/planning and you’re just dodge-rolling through enemies and very slowly whittling them down with your basic skills.) This hugely shifts the gameplay emphasis from “cerebral planning” to “dexterous controller work” (and they also added WSAD keyboard gameplay, because you need it to survive in that game).
It was (and I think still is) quite the polarizing ARPG game because of this, though they’ve also tuned the difficulty and hardcore-ness down a bit since the initial launch (to the chagrin of the soulslike fans).
My friends who’ve tried it hated it… usually ARPGs are pretty accessible to newcomers since it’s just point-and-click in the beginning, but oh no, not PoE2. Even the very first few enemies are lethal, and the first mini-boss is all but impossible if you’re not used to action games that need a lot of manual dodging. They gave up after a few minutes, thinking it was a gameplay bug that it was so hard to play. It’s not, it’s the designers’ stubborn design decision… the people who made PoE1 sold the company to Tencent and left before PoE2 launched, and the new designers have a very different vision.
Yeah, exactly.
PoE2 is a double-edged sword in that regard: More action-oriented in the campaign (and thus less planning needed), but also a different type of game. You won’t be able to play the game even with the best builds, unless you get good at dodging constantly.
Last Epoch has a much better balance overall, IMO, between action/complexity/planning/fun. It started out as an indie passionate project made to find that optimal sweet spot, and it succeeded for the most part, but never saw enough financial success. Then they had to sell out to survive, so the enshittification is just around the corner, sadly.