Satisfactory 1.2

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It’s been nearly a year since patch 1.1, which was mostly QoL stuff as a result of the massive 1.0 launch. Well, 1.2 is here and there are a few notable changes.

  • Rain is back, which was removed to do occlusion issues (it rained indoors).
  • Additional game mode where you can set the resource costs and node richness values. This is a sort of middle ground to ‘build for free’ mode. Tweaking power consumption is a nice option.
    • Related, Space Elevator costs can be tweaked if you want to turn on ‘hard mode’
  • Vehicle pathing and reworks. This is more like trains now. I’ve always thought the concept of vehicles was good, but the execution was really quite random. Trains are almost always a better option, and at the end game, drones run the show.
  • Trucks can now transport fluids. This is good for mid-game options, where for some reason you don’t want trains.
  • Daisy Chaining for power connections between buildings. Never really had an issue with this outside of the start of the game, but certainly a ‘cleaner’ view of power poles.
  • Pipeline T-Junctions. This one is weird. Fluid dynamics in Satisfactory are physics-based, which really shows up when you make aluminum. Should make for cleaner pipes… should.
  • The recipe list also now shows alternative recipes prior to you unlocking them. I really like alternative recipes, as much for efficiency as flexibility. This QoL thing effectively removes the need to alt-tab to a wiki.

In total, the majority of this is also in the QoL space, though vehicles are the bigger piece. Which brings to topic the choice of when to use which vehicle. First, the list:

  • Belts & Pipes
    • Belts go from 60 to 1200 items per minute and can span the entire map. These generally make for ugly maps if you rips belts everywhere, but for short distances they absolutely rock.
    • Pipes are 300 or 700 per minute. Liquid piping usually isn’t too bad and due to transport issues, often better than all other options. Gas piping… this actually impacts your factory locations. Very rare to ship liquid in mass quantities for long distances.
  • Terrain Vehicle
    • Truck – Unlocked at tier 3. Uses for medium deliveries (25). Uses fuel. Needs a dedicated path.
    • Tractor – Unlocked at tier 5. Used for larger deliveries (48). Uses fuel. Needs a dedicated path.
  • Rails
    • Trains. Unlocked at tier 6. Used for long distances and very large deliveries (32 per car). Uses electricity. Needs a rail.
  • Air
    • Drones. Unlocked at tier 7. Uses for very large distances and smaller deliveries (9). Can only deliver material, not liquid. Uses fuel. Auto-maps.

The tiers do matter. Tier 3 is Phase 1 of the elevator. Tier 5+6 are Phase 2. Tier 7 is Phase 3. This generally means that Tractors are somewhat irrelevant as Trains are way more effective and unlocked at the same time.

Picking the appropriate delivery model is primarily a math exercise… how many items do you need per minute? You would be surprised at how few items you actually do need near the end game and how many items you need for raw materials. Time to delivery is total (volume per trip * # of trips per minute). The distance and pathing matters. Small trips with Trucks are going to be faster than trains, and way faster than drones. Medium trips for trains work well enough. Long trips, trains and drones are king. Something like 200 items or less per minute across medium/long distances, drones are amazing.

I tend to apply a rule of thumb here. If I can see it, I will belt/pipe it. If I can’t see it, and I only need a few, then I will drop a drone. If I can’t see it and I need a lot, then I’ll add some cars to a rail. Trucks are used for a very niche set of work on micro-factories, which are primarily Sulfur or Carbon related as those recipes aren’t used all that much and the nodes are in weird spaces.

Which gets back to 1.2 and vehicle changes. These are good changes, yet apply to a niche deployment. They don’t move fast enough or transport enough to make them viable alternatives to trains. This patch has a lot of work in it, no question there, but the net effect for a playthrough isn’t actually impactful.

PoE2 – Scaling & Mods

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Scaling is an interesting thing, I’ve written a lot about the concepts in gaming. Most ARPGs tend to have a weird mix of them, where monsters appear linear but are actually exponential, and players appear linear but are actually logarithmic bumps. The math behind it generally results in you either feeling good or bad about your power level. You feel strong being a level 50 taking on level 1 mice, but feel week taking on a level 60 boss, right?

Ok, real hard tangent for a minute. Taxes are math. When you’re young, taxes are pretty simple. When you get older, taxes can get hard, man. There’s an actual profession for it! The goal of taxes remains simple enough, people pay their fair share for common services. Now, everyone has their own definition of fair, and that’s why the complex math exists. Your emotional reaction to fair has a major impact.

ARPGs use this model, where some content feels fair and others do not. Some encounters feel good, and others on the exact same map, feel punishing. Why? There are a couple reasons here, and they boil down to mechanics and math.

Mechanics

Enemies have their own methods of attacking you. Some burrow, some fly, some are melee, some are ranged. PoE has some rather insane enemy variety to parse, and they are generally visually distinct which helps. Mods though, mods will do you in. A monster with a hp/mana drain effect and can only be hit while being next to them is, for most players, an immortal enemy. Again, all the deadly ones have a very obvious visual clue.

Some events are more fun than others, mostly due to their mechanics. Having a ton of spawning enemies is generally manageable. Having multiple rares spawn at the same time – that is extra spicy. Breach, Expedition, and Rune events can cause this, with minimal warning. The net effect is that while you’re pushing maps there are certain events you will absolutely want to avoid, simply because the mechanics themselves are too volatile. Delirium certainly feels like hard mode if you get all the way to the boss and get a double spawn, as the difficulty in the map actually gets harder as you go!

Map bosses have their own amount of fun with generally a fair share of AE mechanic to avoid. With only a couple exceptions, there are few 1-hit-kill attacks so you are generally provided ample time to avoid a big hit. The effects of a given map will impact a battle, but this isn’t specific to the boss but all content in a map. Arguably, the harder a map, the easier the boss as you will have memorized the mechanics by that point. Except maybe the psycho gorilla. Screw that guy.

Major bosses are a different matter – these are either end-of-act repeats of bosses or new pinnacle bosses with absolutely punishing mechanics that will kill you. And then kill you again. But then you’ll get it! And then die again. (Noting that every death has you lose 10% xp, but not a level. Ideally only try these bosses when you just leveled up.)

Math

This is where PoE2 frankly does most people in. Your damage output and taken is under a complicated formula. Conceptually it is simple, but the practicality is much, much different. A minor thing, like +5 damage on a glove could have a few hundred damage impact in the end game. Uncapped resists are just, well, wild when you look at the actual impacts on numbers. And there are so many intertwining systems, it honestly feels like a math degree to work it all out.

In this space, hats off to frankly every other ARPG out there for having generally solved this issue. You can get to max difficulty in pretty much all of them without any help. PoE has a Solo-Self-Found (SSF) mode where you can’t trade. That should give you an idea of how much trading is core to the process of gearing. PoE2 has this mode as well, but has some controls to try and help here… back to a prior post on item drops.

The net effect is that by changing 1 piece of gear you will immediately feel the in-game effects. Making the correct choice as to which piece of gear to prioritize (99% of the time it’s your weapon) and what stats you want on it, well, that’s the true battle.

Finally a bit on the actual Waystone tiers. Maps start at 65 for tier 1 and go to 80 for tier 16. One level may not seem like much, but enemy stats scale with levels. There’s no damage penalty for a level difference, but the game expects you to be at a certain threshold – and item / mod drops are level based – so you will for sure feel a difference between tiers.

The net result is that difficulty in PoE2 is a combination of the Waystone tier, the mods on that Waystone/Tablet, the actual event within that map, and finally the RNG of enemy mods on any given enemy. That means the concept of fair at any given time fluctuates wildly. What an interesting model.

Path of Exiles 2 – Maps and More Maps

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This lake has no bottoms.

A long-standing challenge with Path of Exile is that seasons build upon themselves. Most mechanics in a given season become baseline, so you have an ever growing list of balls to juggle the more seasons take place. Most games tend to put this in the DLC space, Grim Dawn certainly fits this bills. Others repackage content, like Diablo.

PoE2 released 0.5 recently and brought the Runes mechanic to the game. It’s a sort of RNG system where you get a choice of outcomes, fight some baddies, and get rewards. It also includes a Runic mechanic that gives access to a subset of different skills. Cool. It also keeps the Abyss, Vaal Temple, 2x Trials, Rogue Exiles, Breach, Expeditions, Rituals, Delirium, Shrines, Lockboxes, Pinnacle Bosses, and then of course the Atlas Map proper.

The Atlas is a gateway to all this content, an infinite set of procedurally generated map for you to clear. Each map can have one or more of the pieces of content present. You ‘juice’ these maps with a set of currency (Tributes & Tokens) to make them harder and more rewarding, and to potentially focus on a specific set of activities. You like running Abyss? You can narrow down that activity if you want.

As with everything PoE2, there’s a ton to unpack here and it will take a while. Credit though, GGG has figured out a way to more naturally direct you towards progress with clearer map markers and passive boosts. Make a choice as to what content you want to take on has no real bad answer, as all of them have their own rewards. This is so drastically different than say Diablo 4, where there’s zero reason to run the Pit once you have gems sorted out, or the wildly unbalanced Inferno runs. The further you get in D4, the less actual content there is to run and the harder it becomes to unlock said content. That is less the case with PoE2 as each activity drives the larger meta content forward.

Now, this doesn’t diminish at all the core challenges with PoE2. You still need a stupidly strong beating stick (with a specific set of stats) to be relevant, movement speed on boots is king, and it’s relatively easy to get lost in the skills + skill tree. On your own, building a viable character build, that’s gonna be quite tricky. The difference between viable and not is a friggin’ steep curve, if not a wall.

My major gripe with D4 is around War Plans, which is a sort of simplified Atlas passive tree. It takes quite a few hours to progress in War Plans, which is restricted per character and cannot be shared across groups. I still think this is such a weird decision. I do enjoy D4’s general lack of friction, a sort of fast-food of ARPGs. War Plans break that. PoE2, as with the original, doesn’t follow that mindset and your Atlas is shared across all characters. Kinda makes a big overall actually, as the leveling phase in this game is much longer than in D4.

0.5 Changes

I won’t go full hyperbole and say that everything has changed, but I will say enough has changed that the end game has general purpose and direction. The map has an interesting flow to it, where cardinal directions push you into specific types of content. There are quest markers that push you along those directions so that you get a general feel for what you enjoy. While the content is available pretty much anywhere, the randomness favors certain directions. And those directions provide more intrinsic rewards, primarily through points you can invest in the Atlas tree.

Now, PoE doing PoE things, very few systems are actually described with enough detail to make sense of it. While the direction and visual incentives make it sort of easier to navigate, the actual mechanics haven’t really been tweaked and remain somewhat obtuse. Breach for example, it seems straightforward to just kill as much as you can, but the reality is that passive points and targeting hands is the actual goal. Waystone ‘juicing’ has no real instructions, you just hope for the best while crafting. 0.5 is certainly better than before as it isn’t a blind buffet of options. It can still use some tweaks though, as it truly feels like its bursting at the seams with content in a small framework. Best example is that every 20 maps or so seems to have all possible content spawn within, which is a half dozen trips back to base to manage the drops.

The final point I do want to make for 0.5 is that there is substantially too many items that drop and no simple way to manage it. I have 2 tabs that are just for crafting things, and both are full. This is a QoL thing for sure, and frankly a massive barrier for new players to digest. There really isn’t a solution here as many of these items are specifically related to rolling a given modifier on a specific item (e.g. +cold dmg on gloves). On the one hand, great that you can sort of customize gear, but less great when you come to realize the amount of possible permutations on gear + mods and therefore the amount of crafting materials to cover the broader pieces.

The end game in PoE2 is the best it’s ever been, and the changes so far have filled in a lot of the confusing holes that were present before. It’s quite obvious people can spend a lot of time here trying to put all the pieces together and no two sessions ever feel the same. There’s still ample room for improvement here without necessarily simplifying any particular component, as the depth is the real selling feature. And aside from the final 2 story acts, this feels mechanically ‘complete’ as compared to other games in the genre. Still a good 6+ months before it truly launches, and if you haven’t already dived in, I would personally wait until the F2P launch actually occurs. And I say that solely because if you are not already playing, that learning all these systems likely would benefit from a couple QoL reviews.

God of War – Laufey

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This is certainly different.

There’s an inherent challenge in any long-running series (21 years now since the first God of War) that has wholly been defined by a single character. A character that has been generally consistently portrayed too! Think about it – what other gaming series is so defined by one person? Halo maybe? None of the Nintendo games fit the bill, the characters have all gone through a ton of iterations.

I like the God of War series, but I also know what I’m getting. I am getting a fish our of water experience, with a brute as a protagonist, and some absolutely jaw dropping battles along the way. Kratos is God of War and God of War is Kratos.

That said, I am interested in Laufey as a character. Anyone who can ‘tame the beast’ and act as a peer is certainly full of mystery and potential. The question of how has some value here, but the real story question is why. The beauty of art is that the why is often the one question that isn’t fully answered, and requires the audience to fill in the blank. You embody the art and come up with your own reasons, making the experience unique to yourself as it would be to others.

Which makes the announcement of God of War Laufey all the more confusing. I like the mystery of Laufey. I think that character is best developed in drips rather than gulps, at least in the context of God of War. If this was an act within a larger storyline, like a flashback, then I can see how this would integrate well. Enough little additions to the context without fully pulling back the curtain.

This same argument applies to Atreus, Mimir, and Odin by the way. They are context to the larger storyline, they are not distinct storylines in and of themselves.

Counterpoint here is that the systems the Norse-series God of War have brought certainly have the flexibility to tell another storyline. The game engine and narrative structures can certainly be transposed to something else. That system is portable. The bridge to the next story has a generally logical one, and that is Laufey. In that I mean, if you were to pick any NPC, across the last 20 years, the one most worth exploring is her.

Sum, this is an odd gamble. The floor to entry is relatively low given the systems already exist. It also existed with Ragnarok, but that ended up costing twice as much as the first one. Not sure the market is going to give a return that justifies that type of investment. It’s an interesting pitch, and all interesting pitches come with a ton of attention and opinions. This certainly is one. The net effect is that people are talking about it though, which is generally a good thing.

The only true downside I see here, given current decisions, is that I’ll never have a chance to play it as I have no intention of buying a PlayStation console and Sony has stopped all efforts to port to PC. Likely won’t stop the dev and this will likely still sell like fire. I sure hope so, first-party games here have generally been amazing.

PlayStation – Weird Choices, Man

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In an age where dollars seem to be the driving force behind large companies, Sony just, I dunno, is Sony I guess.

Is the PS5 a cool machine? Yessiree. Is it a gated community? Yup. Does it charge you for things you get for free on PC? Yes (though so does XBOX and Nintendo). It it more expensive than a Steam Deck? Yes. Is it worth buying? 85 million people think so.

For about a decent chunk of time, back in the PS4 days, if you waited a year or two, you’d see a first party game also launch on PC. Now, in almost every single case that port would be a bug ridden heap that needed months of patching, but it was there. (I will say that these crappy ports absolutely cost Sony money and bad press.) I know I picked up more than a few. With the PS5 currently near $900 (which, you know, holy cow), and the shakeup at XBOX, it seems that PlayStation is taking a hard turn on that model.

Sony Pulls Back From PlayStation Games on PC – Bloomberg

This only applies to single player ‘exclusives’, so Ghost of Yotei, Saros, and the upcoming Wolverine are unlikely to see the light of day on PC. As a consumer, this sucks as there’s less choice. I’ve purposefully avoided Nintendo games for a long time due to the frankly ridonculous price points, but it hasn’t been all that painful as I’ve functionally only missed … one Zelda and one Donkey Kong game. XBOX has lived on PC for some time now, and I can’t see them throwing the baby with the bathwater here…

PlayStation going ‘all in’ on hardware gating is a very weird thing to do, and at this point seems somewhat sunk given the PS5 footprint. We know the PS6 is around the corner, but with all the crap going around right now causing IT equipment shortages… this thing looks like it will come with a $1k+ price tag and only the scalpers making any sense of it.

Obviously in order to sell hardware, you need a damn strong selling point with software. (Hello XBOX!) Diluting that with PC sales, sales of which are on devices that cost less than the price of a console, is a tough pitch to make. Sony for sure has spent a few billion dollars investing here on the next big thing, and the last thing it needs is a relief valve on expectations. As a short/medium term decision to focus all it’s energy into the PS6, this makes business sense. As a consumer, I know where my habits stand, and there’s no real chance I’m getting a console that offers much, much less than what I already have. It’s a walled garden, and a pretty one at that. But my backlog of games actively prevents me from any FOMO. And dollars to donuts, it’s more than likely that Sony will revert in a few years anyways. Until then, I have a list to get through…

Call of the Elder Gods

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I played Call of the Sea as a free EGS game a while back, and this acts as a direct sequel. Buzz was positive and decided to give it a go. Impressed overall.

I enjoy puzzle games, there’s a zen in each of them when trying to put the clues together in order to get the final result. I really enjoy intuitive puzzlers, but those require a substantial amount of logic present to work. Return of the Obra Din is the highlight for sure, though there are a half dozen games that come close. Then you have mechanical puzzlers, and this is more like Myst where things need to go in a certain order within a machine to get you the final results. There’s a spot between both genres where you need logic and mechanics to move forward. Call of the Elder Gods is in that spot.

There are 7 chapters here, including a prologue. Each of them has 1 major puzzle to solve, along with a handful of smaller ones too. The wide majority of these puzzles are mechanical in nature, you need to simply find the instructions and sort of fill in the blanks. There are 2 exceptions here, a totem puzzle that is more like Obra Din on steroids, and then an Enigma box logic jump. Thankfully the game includes a very robust hint system that can nudge you in the right direction.

The story itself, well, it’s in the title right? It’s not a direct line to Cthulhu, but thematically it’s similar. The first game had much more horror baked in, while this one is much closer to an Indiana Jones vibe of discovery. The art style works wonderfully here, the voice overs are all solid, and the sounds eerie enough to keep you grounded. I will say that the story itself felt a bit short, like there are a couple chapters missing here to truly make sense of some of the later turns. Feels a bit like deus ex machina to close it all out.

The hardest puzzle in the game also looks amazing

That said, there aren’t many games in this genre to start, and Call of the Elder Gods hits a lot of good notes along the way. Steam says I cleared it in about 8 hours, so give or take a couple more for the general public. The best credit I can give to any game is one where you find it hard to put down – and this certainly is in that category. Hopefully the gaming industry can see what was done here and continue to make awesome games. We can all use more of that.

Outer Worlds 2

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It’s been in my catalogue for a while now, finally got around to spending some time with it. The first Outer Worlds (Spacer’s Choice Edition) was quite impressive, and who doesn’t want a sci-fi RPG satire?

There are 4 important bits to understand about Outer Worlds 2.

  1. This game is a direct response to Outer Worlds 1 but not a direct sequel. Mechanically it improves on the first one, and the story uses the same setting with different characters.
  2. Obsidian somehow launched Outer Worlds 2, Avowed, and Grounded within 8 months of each other. This proved to be a marketing call, and certainly un-needed stress on the developer.
  3. Outer Worlds 2 was launched at a very high price point (beyond AAA), and Microsoft was forced to reduce it after significant blow-back.
  4. We won’t be getting Outer Worlds 3 as the game underperformed expectations, which is a consequence of items 2+3.

Setting

It’s hard to fully describe Outer Worlds as most of the game gets by on a set of vibes. Corporate satire vibes more specifically. And let’s be honest about that, satire is a difficult thing to do, where writing needs to be top notch and the audience needs to be in the right state of mind. The first game really did an awesome job of this, frankly dialing it up to 11. You’re essentially led by an insane (?) scientist who’s trying to revive an ark full of people. Clear goals, and the enemy is a bunch of corporate selfish a-holes. Clean.

The sequel, you’re chasing a rogue agent who opened rifts… that don’t seem to do anything other than simply kill you when you get too close. The characters you meet all seem to be ‘normal’ rather than the broken husks you’d expect. There’s lacking a complete set of ‘dumb’ decisions that are made for ideological reasons. NPCs are generally nice, except the obvious villains – there’s a distinct lack of pure corporate greed here, which is odd.

I was hoping for more from the companions. I realize not everyone can be a standout, but was certainly expecting more glaring character flaws to present themselves, certainly in the earlier moments of the game. When you finally get the lot of them going, there are some interesting threads to pull on. Except Niles. Maybe it’s a design choice to have 1 terrible companion in every game, which contrasts the better ones moreso. Mass Effect is a shining example of this.

Outer Worlds 1 felt like you were in a fun house, with a lot of pieces dialed up to 11. Here it plays more like a regular sci-fi game, which is tonally odd.

Mechanics

Skills are your standard fare. Perks are pretty much what you’d expect, with the largest benefits with 1 skill point invested – things like Pick Pocket. Flaws are wild that provide some modest benefit for game altering penalties. Kleptomania forces you to automatically steal everything your cursor touches, but you can sell it for 100% more. Stealing = the town will attack you, so this is likely a bad call. Taking every flaw wouldn’t make the game unplayable, simply hilariously complicated.

Melee feels ok, with attacks having some weight. They don’t do enough damage though, especially in a game with giant mechs and guns everywhere. Not sure why anyone would bring a hammer to a gun fight…

Ranged attacks feel much tighter than the first game, but there isn’t much variety here. It’s not space wizards, that’s for sure. Thankfully, you won’t spend the game reloading all the time, which is a huge improvement. In nearly all cases, this is a massive upgrade from the first game.

Sneak / stealth is better but still bad. It’s really quite simple, sneak attacks do not deal enough damage. You are funnelled through areas with multiple enemies, and if you don’t 1-hit kill, then all stealth breaks down and it’s 10vs1. The concepts are here, just not fully executed.

I like that the skill checks don’t include some mini-game, you either have the requirements or you don’t. This means that there’s a good chunk of content that won’t be available due to your skill selection. Absolutely none of it prevents story progress though, so that’s a smart thing. And as with many of these types of games, you will find many more of these ‘locked skill checks’ in the first few hours than the last. There are just enough points to feel like your character has well, character I guess, without being a master of everything. A rare game that strikes this level of balance.

There is something to be said about the Dumb flaw, and Speech skill. The absolute best writing is behind both of these options, and they are generally exclusive to each other. The downside to this is that Speech is too often relied upon as an ‘I WIN’ option, which makes it significantly overpowered compared to something like Engineering, or Medical. The net effect is a sort of ‘golden path’ that is very obviously the correct one, rather than the multiple options you’d expect.

Expectations

This is the crux of it, right? Outer Worlds 1 had a solid story, with mechanical flaws. Avowed had a simple but effective story and mechanically improved on quite a bit – you could clearly see the Outer Worlds framework in place. I really liked the idea of moves with cooldowns since it changed the pace of battle.

Outer Worlds 2 simply came out too soon after Avowed. The story needed to be stronger. The mechanics more varied. Had it waited another 6 months or more, it would have had time to fully apply the lessons from Avowed and potentially tweaked a few other internal systems. It’s still a good game, just not a AAA-ultra-priced game. It’s greatest flaw is that it doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and unfortunately was a poster for seemingly bad decisions by Microsoft gaming. Or, alternatively, had the game been priced at $40 instead of $80, this would have been an easier sell.

I didn’t expect to see an Outer Worlds 2, and so I’m not disappointed there won’t be a 3. Obsidian learned a lot of lessons here, and it’s still one of my favorite developers. There’s a ton of good here and getting it on sale is a very smart pickup. Now, if I can get more of Pillars of Eternity… then we’re talking!

Breadth vs Depth

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Non-game related…

Focus is a self-preservation mechanism – tackle what’s in front of you. Awareness is a growth mechanism – know you need to plant seeds in the spring to get food in the fall. Everyone has some ability to do both, and likely shifts between them given circumstances and experience. What you would do in a burning building vs what a firefighter would do are drastically different.

I opine about game design and for the most part, the topics relate to breadth (the big picture) more so than depth (the minute details). I find the best games find the balance between both, where systems manage to be co-dependent and balanced. Intrinsically, gamers can feel this balance and can rapidly sniff out systems that conflict with the bigger picture. Anthem was really bad at this, where the systems simply conflicted with each other, like someone making a meal with whatever ingredients they could find. Others are curated experiences, like Baldur’s Gate 3 or Clair Obscur.

I am finding more and more analogies in real life. At the start of my career, I often found it strange that some folks could not anticipate the logical next step of problem solving. You’d fix a blocked sink but not actually determine why the sink was blocked, so it would keep happening again.

Tangent #1 – I recall working a grocery store as a teen and our local handy man would pop by. He’d need to fix some lights, a set of shelves, or hinges. And he always took the time to break something when he left so that we’d be forced to call him yet again and maintain the cycle. He’d been doing that for 20 years with success. That was a marking point for me, as I decided right there I was never going to be that person.

So in my career I’ve tended to try and see more, to collect as much knowledge and experience that is transferable to other domains. Often when faced with a challenge, I’ll ask myself if I’ve ever see or done something similar in the past, and in 99% of the cases there’s some history there I can rely upon. Changing tires is about screwing bolts on, which is extremely similar to just putting a screw in a piece of wood, or connecting a pipe fitting. Mechanically I am making things tight.

Tangent #2 – Years ago I was taking the bus to work and often shared the ride with an old school friend. Mostly small talk. I vividly remember taking about small home projects and how we were each taking our own approach. One of the conversations was about him changing his washer and dryer and paying someone to do the installation. I was baffled as to why, given it was a replacement. The water pipes were there and the dryer exhaust as well. You needed to only disconnect and reconnect the same way, and didn’t need any tools other than a screwdriver. He said it was too confusing and was willing to pay someone else to do it. Still amazed at that entire conversation.

As work has progressed, I’ve taken on more and more complex initiatives. Things that cross international borders, complex security requirements, hundreds of thousands of clients, and many millions of dollars. I’ve continually strived to challenge myself on seeing wider, understanding deeper. Course, there there are challenges here… being an expert and being a manager require different skill set. You need to delegate things you know you can do better and faster, but it’s not sustainable to do it all yourself. You need to find semi-qualified people who want to learn, and guide them along that path. It certainly takes longer to get done, but it’s sustainable and you can do more overall as a result.

Tangent #3 – I can think of quite a few cases of leaders who are unable to delegate and want to keep more on their table. The result is always bad. Either they are overworked and never deliver or they do deliver and end up with serious health/mental issues that prevent them from doing more later. I was certainly one of those earlier in my career and it nearly cost me everything I held dear. We all tend to project our personal self-worth into our careers, and I’ve had to learn to let things go, or to hold staff to a higher standard so that the entire team can find success. I have a lot of patience for those who want to learn and demonstrate some progress. I struggle tremendously with folks who fail to meet lowered expectations.

These days, the type of work I do is quite broad in scope and needs a significant amount of expertise depth to see delivered. This also includes a substantial amount of change of culture where folks have to change their perception of authority and control. The closest analogy I can come up with is a transition from an independent restaurant and one that is part of a franchise. The desire is to move to the franchise model of operation as there is a pile of benefits exchanged for the loss of control. Making that transition is not a simple thing, there are tons of dependencies and pitfalls that truly are only acquired through experience. And the best folks in this space are those who are able to not only anticipate those items, but prepare their teams to address them so that they gain the ability to anticipate as well.

More acutely, I am finding it difficult to oversee these complex files due to the lack of overall experience. It’s not for lack of trying to delegate, inform, or train people. The desire is there, but the curve is simply too steep. You can’t learn to be a fighter pilot by taking an online course, and I am in dire need of a handful of fighter pilots. Or, I am in need of an expectation reset on timelines to goals so that the existing people have enough time to adapt to the curve. The truth is likely in the middle.

So for now, I’m trying to stay as optimistic as I can, applying practical solutions that will help in the medium term, but will absolutely generate short term pain. I know that not everyone will complete this ride, quite a few have opted out already. I lose no sleep on that matter. Time will tell how long I stay in this specific role, as any candle that burns bright, burns fast.

D4 – Torment Levels

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Likely the last post on this topic for a bit, the rest still needs sorting. Lord of Hatred restructured the end game, where we had 4 Torment levels and now have 12. This was meant to ‘ease the curve’ between the prior levels, and increase the overall difficulty level to map to the addition of set talismans. And in that regard, it certainly does. The difference between individual torment levels is much easier, where prior something like T3 you would be a walking blender and in T4 you would be the puree. So good on that.

What wasn’t clear however was the number of systems that are gated behind these levels. In general, you level in normal, and then get enough gear to hit Torment 1, which is all legendary gear without any passives, no glyphs, and no real investment in the paragon system. Not exactly a huge hurdle, but you’ll need to craft the legendaries to get there most likely.

You should spend a grand total of zero time on Hard, Expert, or Penitent unless you are trying to unlock a season goal.

Monster Power

Every rank of this is like +1 Torment. Some War Plans add this. Lair bosses naturally have +3. Greater Lair bosses are +6. You will see this marker next to their hit point bar. I would suggest lowering the difficulty before taking on Greater Lair bosses so that the Torment levels match – this won’t impact War Plans. Generally, if the battle takes less than 5 seconds, you’re good to move up one difficulty. At 10 seconds, you will hit boss mechanics and some are 1-hit-kills, for very little additional reward. Lilith, Belial, and Mephisto are on another level, you’ll figure that part out.

Gains Per Level

Every Torment level increases monster difficulty, gives more XP, more gold, and more items that drop. The % of an item being legendary stays the same, but the number of chances for items increases. Loot filters are all but required for your sanity. Note when I say ‘starts dropping’ there are chances you see it before, but those are so small they effectively don’t.

If you want a comparison, the (#) is the equivalent in the Pit, which remains the measuring stick for difficulty.

  • Torment 1 (10): Ancestral items (level 900) start dropping.
  • Torment 2 (15): Legendary Temper Manuals start dropping… to get more legendary passives. This is much lower than you’d think. Pretty much when you start farming Lair Bosses.
  • Torment 3 (20): You’ll notice a big boost on set charm drop rates, and you’ll get a penalty on armor/resistances.
  • Torment 4 (25): Neathiron starts dropping. You need this for end-game rerolls.
  • Torment 5 (30): Legendary Runes start dropping. Very few builds actually need these, but hey.
  • Torment 6 (40): Greater Lair Keys start dropping. Considering these bosses drop the best uniques, you want this.
  • Torment 7 (50): Primordial Dust starts dropping. Big deal for late game re-rolls.
  • Torment 8 (60): Unique Charms start dropping. There is 1 per build, and it does make a difference. You can now fight Echo of Lilith… I wouldn’t.
  • Torment 9 (70): Kullean Tuning Prisms start dropping. For cube recipes where you target specific outcomes, very useful.
  • Torment 10 (80): Mythic Seals start dropping. There are god-rolls here and then head scratchers. Odds are you’ll never see one. Echo of Mephisto here, and that is a hard fight!
  • Torment 11 (90): Resplendent Spark for Mythic Uniques starts dropping.
  • Torment 12 (100): Everything unlocked, 1400% xp, and you need near perfect rolls to survive.

If you’re wondering how this maps to the prior difficulty, the Pit tiers help. T4 in season 12 was tier 55 in the Pit, which is now between T7 and T8. It’s not a perfect mapping, but having twice as many steps certainly smooths out progression. And with 4 more tiers to come after that, that’s a significant boost for those looking for more challenge.

Now, in my own personal opinion that I use this blog to share, I would consider your season journey done when you can clear your first Greater Boss, as everything past that point is just more numbers and not more content. This was not the case in season 12, as you’re going to spend a ton of time getting to T6 now. I’m not a fan of gating that content as those bosses are essential to get specific uniques which are absolutely build-defining, but hey, Diablo be Diablo.

Is it better than Season 12’s Torment model? Yes in that the scaling is much more appreciated. Meh in terms of the sheer amount of gating at each step.

D4 – Legendaries, Talismans and War Plans

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A bit more time here, a bit more thought on the sort of defining end-game features.

Legendaries

The game is currently quite anemic until you get into the higher torment levels on the number of legendary drops. The passives on these items are build defining, and a huge inhibitor to progress. To give you an idea, getting near perfect rolls on rare gear is enough to close to Torment 1, but not in it. You need at least 1 passive legendary boost to get over that hump.

The most effective way to get legendaries to get the passives? Either you farm helltides, barter in the Den, or use the horadric cube to craft them from rares. This is actually a disincentive to play the game normally.

Once you do hit Torment 1 and beyond, drop rates start to make some sense. But don’t expect to get all of them, even by T6. Better odds of being in full ancient legendaries before you get all passives. Weird way to intro the system, which requires some tweaking to get right.

Talismans

Similar to legendaries, talismans make little sense until Torment levels, and even then only in the space of set charms. I really can’t stress enough how utterly atrocious non-set charms are in this game. And the game allows no method to upgrade them to a better quality. Eventually you’ll find legendary charms, but that’s a long way to go.

Seals… you only want legendary and the only stat that matters is +1 slot.

Set talismans however, all seem to have a 5 item build requirement for some impressive boosts. It’ll take a bit to get enough, and if you have duplicates you can re-roll them within a set. Once you have the benefits however, you’ll wonder how you ever played without them. +500% damage is nothing to sneeze at.

The stats on all charms are mostly meaningless, except in the space of min/maxing. You can re-roll them and have a 1/5 chance of getting the set charm you want and then the normal 1/100 chance of getting stats you want. Enchanting should be an option here, not re-rolling forever. It’s a good idea here, some tweaking needed.

War Plans

These are solo-only (next season will be fixed) and character only (which I have to assume will change, as it’s super dumb). Fine – that aside, it takes a very long time to gain levels here. You are capped at 7 points per War Plan (49 total) and my rough guesstimate is about 30 hours to get there, depending on RNG.

The events themselves are the same, meaning the incentives remain. War Plans add some contextual benefits to these activities, and some of them are arguably better than others. In personal preference:

  1. Helltides. These have always been a good source of just about anything per hour, notably experience, materials, and items. The middle upgrade path gives you access to lair keys and materials for uniques, which are super important.
    • Always select this option
  2. Kurast. These are quick events that can target specific drops with the right tribute. Technically the highest drop rate per hour too. The left and middle paths are good, giving better runs overall.
    • Always select this option and use your tributes
  3. Lair Boss (only in Torment). If you can clear them, they are the fastest of all activities. All the path options are decent here, assuming you have the keys to unlock the boss chests.
    • Mostly select this option when you have keys
  4. Nightmare Dungeon. Use keys you have on hand, ideally the ones with Whisper rewards. Not all of them are equal though, you’ll learn which are worth it. The right tree is the best, the middle one gives you access to Astaroth (not a fan of that system).
    • Mostly select this option when you have keys
  5. Pits. It’s better than previous seasons, and great if you like leaderboards, otherwise it’s a very specific use case. Pick the tree upgrades that increase the number of glyph upgrades you can perform.
    • Only select if you need to upgrade glyphs
  6. Hordes. This mode takes too long, soulspires still aren’t balanced, and the boss drops are anemic. The left tree has the best options, but require Bartuc to be killed (666 to spawn, and 400 for the chest).
    • Avoid this option
  7. Tree of Whispers. You can’t select this, it just happens normally. Select the middle path for the Spark reward. This will take a very long while to complete.

I think the idea of War Plans is interesting. The tree isn’t exactly balanced at this point, as for most of them there’s a super clear ‘best choice’. Balance in these systems takes some time, and heat maps are going to be quite indicative of where player preference lies. There’s not a whole lot you can do to fix the problems with Horde mode by applying a coat of fancy paint. The trees need a bit more balance to either align with the larger game goals, or to offset the hurdles of the activities themselves (the Pit tree does this the best I think).