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?
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.