DSP is, at a given point, a zen experience. Up until Dark Fog was introduced, there were very large stretches of simply waiting and enjoying the world around you. Especially when it came to the construction of the eponymous Dyson Sphere.

Dark Fog is an attempt at the PvE element found in Factorio. It adds a persistent threat that is relatively easy to defend on a planet’s surface and only supports brute force in space. There’s a passive research reward for participating, so you kind of want to set up a farm for it, which is surprisingly difficult to do. It also adds about 30% more ‘stuff’ with poor logistical intersections. I played it a few times, loved the early parts of it, and really didn’t enjoy the mid- to late- portions. There’s still no ETA on when the space portion will be complete, which would effectively make it 1.0 launch. Until then, Dark Fog is disabled in all my playthroughs.

Which is a weird thing, as it actually reverts the gameplay back a significant amount. From late blue science to early yellow, you’re just sitting and waiting as the research itself takes a while to complete. You can certainly add more research buildings, and fill your planet with wind turbines to offset the power requirements. There’s no real elegant option for power until after yellow. Thankfully this period isn’t complex.

I will note that there are some fascinating design decisions here that differ from Factorio, while trying to adhere to the spirit of it all.

• You pre-fab buildings. If you ignore the combat buildings, generally the types of buildings correspond to the work they do. Very similar to Factorio here. Wildly different than Satisfactory. I much perfer this model.
• Belts are everywhere. You need inserters. You can stack on belts (eventually). You can’t reliably add two items to a belt, but you can ‘pull/push’ from 3 belts away. Has some minor design implications later.
• The game is 3D and belts can go up and down. This works really well in theory and in practice. Gone are the Satisfactory clipping issues.
• A main bus is still the simplest way to build pretty much anything up until mid-game, and even then it’s worth keeping. The bus takes a decent chunk of space given the intermediary items you need to pass through. Some items are used once, but in high volumes. More on mega bases in a bit. This is the model I use for all logistics games, and it works relatively well here.
• The world itself is grid based, each on a sphere. You can only place items on the grid, and depending on which part of the sphere you’re on, things may or may not fit. This is a cool math problem, but it also means that blueprints are a pain as they only fit in specific locations. A Factorio or Satisfactory ‘grid’ blueprint doesn’t apply here. This is actually a great distinguishing feature for DSP.
• There are no pipes or fluid mechanics of note. No pressure. No head lift. Glorious!
• Research has an intermediary step, associated to colors and technology levels. The net benefit here is that you can easily see where research bottlenecks are present, can dedicate areas to their construction, and focus productivity benefits. I personally prefer Factorio’s modular builds for research, though this is certainly an option for late game SPM.

Automated Logistics

This deserves its own section, as there are some nuances here that are really not obvious. It’s a weird system.

There are 4 types of automated logistics

• Local: These operate as a sort of bot system from Factorio, where you apply a piece on a storage unit, then put in some bots, and connect it to a local network. The throughput is ‘ok’, and primarily meant to keep your inventory up to date, as well as move infrequently-used items around a planet in small volumes. These are exceptionally useful, though also quite simplistic. Also, you need to research 5 levels of distance to cover the entire planet.
• Planetary: This has shuttles that transport stuff across your planet. 50 drones, 4 types of things. Can connect to other Planetary stations. Has space limitations so that they don’t overlap. I cannot for the life of me find any use for this. This would only be useful if it could contain more types of things.
• Interstellar. This has shuttles that transport stuff across all planets. 10 shuttles, 100 drones, 5 types of things. Connects to all other stations. Has space limitations so that they don’t overlap. Can set groups, priorities, queues, volumes. These are the lifeblood of any mid/late factory.
• Gas. These harvest gas from, well, gas giants. Connects to Interplanetary stations, can put 20 per gas giant. You want these.

So the Local portion is primarily used on a main bus, so that you can get all the pre-fab buildings going. No real use outside of that as they can’t manage volume.

Interstellar… eventually you get rate limited, as the storage limits are too low. You are presented with 2 options here. Create sub factories on other planets and only ship end products (core of mega basing), or you create a hub/spoke model where you have 3 or 4 stations collecting across the galaxy that are pulled down for local distribution (the step before mega bases). Creating groups of stations allows for targeted distribution models, so you can (and should) have a dozen stations holding Titanium bars in order to support a massive factory.

Mega Basing

The definition here varies, but generally you’re looking at over 500 SPM to be considered in this space. Just getting here requires a decent throughput of Artifical Stars in order to power the whole thing. You reach a point where a single planet can no longer fully support the construction requirements to build research items. Instead, you’ll have factory planets that focus on a single type of research, with dedicated construction channels on a single output. That’s likely 5 planets, and a final one where you have your Dyson Sphere (as you need material generated from it).

Interestingly, nearly all the updates over the past 2 years have focused on mega base optimization. Multi-threading, CPU and GPU optimization, pilers, throughput monitoring, and a slew of other bits. Prior to these items, getting 1000 SPM meant frame rates under 10. Now, you can build multiple Dyson Spheres and ridiculously large factories across multiple solar systems.

Moving Forward

There are still no dates for the next content update, which will include vehicles and space combat. Game optimization is pretty much at the max right now, at least in ways appreciated by the wide majority of players. It is without question a better game today than it was a year or two ago. Factorio remains the gold standard, but DSP is the next in line under the concept of ‘the factory must grow’. Fingers crossed we can get a date for the next big thing…

While I’m not done with it, I do think the rest of the summer has other bits that need to be handled. 2.1 will be in experimental for a bit, likely waiting til the fall to get out. There are still a few quirks to work out, in particular around quite a few QoL changes that obviously are much more complicated that you would think. Still, general thoughts are that 2.1 is really amazing and addresses a lot of my concerns in 2.0, with one exception – Quality. More on that.

• Research – that you can queue research based on available packs is extremely helpful in the midgame. Gleba packs expire, so you want to take full advantage of them. It works on infinite research too, which is awesome. I have a weird display bug, but the functional parts are fine. This isn’t all that useful at late game, where you’ve generally figured out logistics, but for about 80% of your time getting there, it’s awesome!
• Visuals – planets in space are cool. Assemblers and rocket silos have a glow up. It generally looks better, which avoids needing more mods.
• Fluids – Measuring pipe volumes avoids the need for storage on most planetary builds, better logistics too. Being able to pivot fluid connection points allows for much tighter designs too, so that’s nice.
• Space Rocket Logistics – Hell yeah! The game is smart enough to ship less things to you, or break them up into better packages drastically reducing the need for rockets. When you haven’t gotten logistics fully sorted out, this is a really big deal!
• Military Science – What? This isn’t in 2.1! You’re right, and I have a gripe with that. Of all the sciences you can craft, all of them have have been optimized in some fashion in Space Age – except Military Science. Grenades and Walls still have shitty ratios on shitty crafting paths. I was hoping for something better here… at least in QoL. Oh well.
• Shipping between platforms – I leave a space platform above Aquilo that makes too much ammo and rockets, which then feeds my transport ships, without the need for rockets. The less time any ship spends around Aquilo is a good thing! While there are bugs to work out here, it has saved me from losing ships.
• Space Casino death – I still don’t quite follow why this took place, as I was rather easily able to build equivalent chains on Vulcanus. Granted, you need more ground space and therefore more foundations + power, but it’s certainly doable. Blue Chip + LDS shuffle remain absolutely viable, so if anything, it adds a small hurdle in late mid-game. Your bottlenecks will remain legandary quality + productivity materials anyways.

Quality deserves a special mention here, as most people will see 2.1 as a sort of reversion on the concept, or at least making it more difficult to acquire. I don’t necessarily have an issue with legendary material, but I do on everything between it and normal. Aside from space platform material (normal collectors are kinda bad) there are no real reasons to use anything but normal or legendary due to the logistic impacts of sorting through all the junk. You may end up using some buildings as a temporary measure (like Biolabs), but your goal is 100% to get to legendary as the benefits are ridiculous. Noting you can absolutely beat the game without any legendary mats, just that your final ship is going to be bigger and slower as a result. And for a variety of reasons, it’s not really practical to mega-base without legendary. This is one reason I prefer mods that simply give legendary outputs based on the volume of inputs, like say 100x the inputs to get 1 output. You’re skipping the lottery part and frankly, the view of destroying 98% of all your outputs.

What I think I find the most interesting actually is that the genre as a whole has emulated/replicated every single aspect of Factorio by now. Maybe not all in one game, but the pieces are everywhere. And yet none, not a single one that I have seen across dozens of variants, has opted to implement a concept of quality. I think that alone is argument enough.

Factorio still rocks, and if this is where the swan song is, then holy crud have we been blessed.

In the previous 2.1 post, I ran some tests regarding Space Casino alternatives, notably those specific to maintaining a space platform. The sum of it is that the removal of Quality Mods from crushers effectively made anything space related obsolete, with some caveats.

• The rate of asteroid collection cannot be improved in any meaningful sense. Once you are moving between planets, the rate at which you encounter asteroids is relatively fixed.
• The rate of crushers vs. recyclers is substantial. Crushers return 80% of the material, Recyclers only 25%. Seen another way, it takes 1250 items crushed to get 1000 out. It takes 4000 items to get 1000 recycled.
• It takes about 4 steps to go from normal to legendary, each one a gamble. To get 1 legendary asteroid, it takes about 30,000 from recycling.
• In pure math, it takes about 7x more material to get the same results, and you cannot practically increase the amount you put in the machine. Well you can, you just need to build multiple platforms.

Right, so you’re stuck with less elegant options. The good news is that you only need coal, iron, and calcite. The even better news is that you need very little calcite as it’s used for stone, which is in turn only used for buildings, not actual products.

One important bit of context in this post. It assumes that you are only using normal quality science products. If you want to do legendary science, odds are you’re well outside the intended audience here.

Raw Upcycling

This is the act of taking any material, applying quality to the first step, and where you don’t get legendary, you recycle it until you do. As pointed prior, this gets you on average 1 item per 30,000. It is stupidly inefficient, if only because the throughput is so high. On top of that, every time you process something in a production building, you increase the odds as you at least get 100% of the output back, and with productivity, potentially more.

For example, if you were to process something with a max 300% productivity boost, you would only need about 7,500 raw items to get 1 legendary. Research improvements are very helpful here. There’s different math when it comes to adding quality mods, and where.

Intermediate Upcycling

The idea here is pretty simple. You want an intermediate product that you plan to recycle in order to get legendary material. The practical application is quite hard, as you need a decent supply of those materials first, in order to make that product. The general idea is:

Input base products -> Create intermediary with quality mods -> recycle anything that isn’t legendary –> use recycled material to make more things.

The main issue here is that you will end up with items of varying quality throughout and need to make different quality products from them, with some interesting filtering on belts. It’s about 10 regular production stations to 2 uncommon, and 1 of each rare, epic and legendary. If you do it once, it’s pretty easy to understand the flow for any additional time. The more of that item you need, the more space you need to orchestrate it all.

Quality Mods

There are three paths, one of which doesn’t actually count.

• Path 1: Tier 3 normal quality. This takes Superconductor rods, and gives 2.5% bonus. Only make these to start Path 2.
• Path 2: Tier 2 legendary quality. This requires green, red, and blue circuits, an upcycle, and provides 5% bonus. Insert Tier 3 normal mods until you produce your first rare or better, then replace away.
• Path 3: Tier 3 legendary quality. This requires legendary Superconductors, which is it’s own thing, and gives a 6.2% bonus. They are a pain to make, and should only be used once you have fusion power everywhere.

Iron

Raw ore is not really an option as only Nauvis has any in decent quantities, and you’re likely using that for something else. Vulcanus can give you infinite iron plates relatively easily, for very little calcite cost. Foundries also have a native 50% productivity, with 4 mod slots, making it a small footprint to output a full belt of iron plates.

Recycling them is one option, but if you were to turn them into iron chests with a 4 mod slot assembler, you’d be even more efficient as those are super fast to create and give/take 8 iron plates.

Calcite

Right, this one is either super complicated or super easy. Calcite is used in only 3 things – fuel, artillery shells, or cliff explosives. Those last 2 have multiple sub-products and are difficult to produce at scale. In this case, it’s better to just do a raw upcycle as you have so much available on Vulcanus.

Now, since calcite is only used for stone, you’re likely better just making stone instead. This can actually be quite simple… copper foundry directly into a recycler. You’d need to get rid of the copper fluid mind you – which is achievable through an extremely simple decider configuration.

Coal

This one is a big ‘it depends’. Coal is primarily used in the construction of plastic, which can be a bottleneck as it’s used for a ton of things. Plastic Productivity helps a lot here, as Chemical Plants can only take 3 mods. You’re gonna need a lot of coal!

If you’re on Vulcanus, you’re likely sitting on Coal deposits that are in the millions. There are two options present – raw & grenades. Grenades will give a 20% boost and some iron plates as an output, but they take 8s to craft each using 10 coal. 10 coal can be recycled in less than 2 seconds. Given near infinite supply and throughput options, raw seems the best option.

Closing Thoughts

I think it rather obvious that getting legendary anything through infinite inputs is not hard. Space Casinos essentially put it out of mind and let you concentrate on the more complex builds, while giving new ideas to creating items in space. By making this be planet bound, it actually increases the scalability as it’s way easier to create a new production line there than build a new space platform.

My rough math says that for each Casino I had, I’ll need roughly four times the space to collect a similar amount through alternative means. The main issue is the sheer amount of Quality Modules needed to get this running well. Vulcanus can easily build an upcycler for Q2 modules at 5%. Legendary Q3 require fusion + trains + upcycling of capacitors on Fulgora… that’s a long term thing.

It also means that collecting materials from space to do anything non-space related (e.g. fuel or ammo) is pretty much gone. The domination of Vulcanus for nearly every late game production is even more cemented. The only hiccup I now see is that you’ll need multiple fusion power plants and a decent amount of foundations to expand sufficiently.

I’ve been away on a break for a few weeks, hence the quiet blog. Where generally folks use New Year’s to ponder their annual goals, I do that during the summer break as a mental reset. And this year was an interesting one. Within about a week two meaningful events occurred.

First, a great friend’s father passed, a man I knew for over 30 years and treated everyone as his best friend. It was relatively quick, and he went out with a giant grin. He was a man with infinite energy and boundless optimism. Truly a fascinating character and no matter how bad a day you may have had, he was enthused to make it a good one. He embodied the adage that ‘a stranger is just a friend you haven’t met’.

Second, Belghast passed away. A year to the day that he lost his wife, and nearly 6 months from when he shared he had cancer. ‘Pillar’ is a term that is thrown about, and in this case it’s certainly apt. Blogging is everywhere and in today’s age, one of the most archaic forms of sharing if you’re not using some sort of AI tool and recipe hunting. Bel found a way to bring more people under the tent (Blaugust) and somehow found time to share his passion for gaming on a near daily basis. His was one of the few blogs I checked on a near daily basis… and as a habit I still do, until it hits that we won’t see anything more. He’s frankly the reason I played FF14 and enjoyed the time spent in there with him and the guild.

It’s an interesting thing this concept of life, as ephemeral as it is. I’m at that age where there are way more funerals than weddings, way more divorces than baby showers. The absolute certitude of youth is replaced with a sort of melancholic acceptance of loss of control.

It reminds me of a sci-fi trope that immortality is a curse, where true appreciation is bound by the loss of something. The act of procrastination or deference to a future date is pushing out the ability to enjoy what you have today. There are so many things that can happen tomorrow that you can’t control, and if you can do something today, you generally should.

My friend’s dad lived every day like it was going to be his last. Nearly his entire life that way. Bel shared what he had with what tools he had on a near daily basis, spreading the good word of community and gaming as a way to bring people together. Neither made excuses, they just appreciated and moved forward.

If there’s a resolution or attempt I want to spend my energy on, it’s exactly that. Appreciate the day. Appreciate the gift of the people around me. Cause tomorrow is another day that may not bring that gift.

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.

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.

There’s a sort of familiarity within genres that we get used to. A point where devs kinda look at the mechanics and go, ‘yeah, we can’t really do better than this’. Survival games have you punching trees. You’ve always punched trees, you will always punch trees. Tree punching is where it’s at.

These foundational elements are important, as they mean you need less time designing a tutorial and balancing the basic elements. The comparison to a song is apt. Imagine making a new song with brand new instruments. Or making one that’s only drums. Sure, technically it’s a song, but I mean, is it really? These foundational bits allow for a stable base from which you can build new ideas.

Windrose generally keeps the foundations in place, though tweaks some bits. Harvesting material, mining, smelting, construction is all pretty much like you’d expect. You need a spawn location, you need a roof to place buildings, you need coal to make copper, you place extra buildings to unlock higher tiered crafting abilities.

Where it tweaks the model a tad is in the combat space, and I’d be hard pressed to argue this model works as I would have expected. Before I get to this, I want to remind people that there are difficulty sliders you can set when you are at the login screen. There are really no death penalties here except time to reach your corpse – your call how many corpse runs are too much.

Ground Combat

• First, and importantly, you need food. That boosts your HP to manageable levels. If you don’t have food, a level 1 boar will kill you in 2 hits. Get food. And know that dying has you lose the food effect.
• Related, have bandages for a HoT, and try to keep a pack of healing potions for tough spots. I use bandages all the time.
• I do enjoy i-frame combat (dodging), where timing is key. I enjoy when there’s a difficulty to remember a pattern. That’s present here.
• I also enjoy parry combat, where you can retaliate. That is also present here.
• Dodging ‘red attacks’ is timing based, more like a parry in terms of timing. Charging boars from the jungle are likely to 1-shot you with no/poor food from this attack.
  • Some enemies (alpha wolves in particular) have moves that are insanely hard to dodge, with very odd hitboxes. Expect to die until you learn all the patterns.
• Both of those systems require a particular level of fine tuning, and neither of them are designed for 1 vs many combat situations. The net effect is what I call mosquito fights, where you attack, then run like hell waiting for an opening, and repeat. The first boss is a major skill check on your ability to dodge, at least in solo play.
• Ranged attacks are not very powerful, require gunpowder (which can’t be crafted in the first zone), and the combat materials stack extremely poorly. Think of it as an extra attack rather than a primary attack, and you’ll be ok.
• All told, this gives one particular weapon a ridiculous advantage, the Rapier of a Thousand Cuts – which is in a buried chest right next to when you start the game. This thing applies a stacking DoT, which melts most enemies.

Ship Combat

• In nearly all cases, your ship will be faster than any enemy. They’ll still get some potshots at you, but you can outrun them.
• Repair Kits. These heal your ship, but reduce their value if you get damaged. You can also repair you ship for much less at your home warf.
• Cannons. Upgrade them for more damage. When aiming, know there’s movement at play so at distance aim ahead of a ship and as close to the waterline as possible. With 3 canons, you want to run at 3/4 sail speed and try to get all 3 shots on cooldown. This is very similar to other games, nothing fancy.
• Keel. Upgrade for slightly more armor. Eventually you’ll get enough faction for a rare version that allows you to heal while taking damage, and that one is worth maxing.
• Naval Tactics (the book slot). Don’t worry about this for a while, til at least after the first boss.
• Boarding Gear. Upgrade this to max. More in a sec.
• Picking targets. Always take out the lowest level enemy possible first. And try to avoid going in circles. For 1vs5 fights, you need to strafe the entire group and learn to pick targets effectively.
• Boarding. Unless there’s a chest icon above the enemy ship, don’t ever board. There’s no reward and the melee combat is likely to kill you. If there is a chest icon, YMMV. If your boarding gear is higher than the enemy level, the NPCs will do the job for you. If not, you’ll need a gun. If you think you’ll lose, summon your tiny raft, jump to it, then back to the ship and the boarding will reset and you can sink the enemy ship.
• Eventually you get to craft a Brig, then a Frigate. They cost an absolute fortune.
• Ship combat itself is fun in most times, and presents the best way to acquire money + faction rep items.

Exploration

Your starter island has pretty much everything you need to get to the first boss. The need to leave is based almost exclusively on exploration & quests. For that, you need a ship. And while on the ship, you want to press F to change the view. Look at the horizon for new islands. Quest markers will point you around the map, and it’s good to keep an eye on all islands along the path. Your ship opens up more of the map and can detect points of interest from a decent distance. The world map is substantially large. When you land, there are really two main options:

• Exploration. Land on an island. Immediately craft a tent for a spawn point. Make sure you’re fed and have empty-ish bags. Explore the island and place tents near ? points. When the island is done, head to shore, board the ship and return home to port and empty your bags. If you die while exploring, it’s a judgment call if you want to feed yourself again. Taking on a half dozen pirates with a pair of musketeers… you are going to die again, no question about it.
• Farming. If the island has points of interest that continually spawn items (hover over the point to see what spawns), you will place a Bell on the beach so you can easily return. Items (not chests) normally respawn after 3 in-game days. The only teleport restriction is having only 10 Bells placed, easy to manage.

Note that major points of interest have their own teleport locations. This includes all faction hubs, Tortuga, and boss locations.

If it isn’t terribly clear yet, this game has a very odd difficulty curve. It’s not ‘deathsquito’ level painful here, not even remotely close. But do get used to dying, a LOT, and having player skill much more than stats determine your level of progress. A trule palate cleanser after a binge of ARPGs.

Brought to you by – one-hit kill mechanics!

Nearly all RPGs have statistics, used to math out the results of an event. Your perception to detect a trap, your agility to avoid a blow, your strength to deal damage. Simple in concept, and as D&D has proven, extremely complicated in execution. Dice wars are a thing folks.

For this particular post I wanted to explore the concept of skill vs stats. The typical JRPG has had a ‘Level 1’ challenge where a player tries to complete the game at the absolute lowest level possible, with the worst stats, and simply ‘gimmicks’ the game to completion. FFX has a notorious NSG (no sphere grid) challenge I’ve attempted that boils that down to the essence of cheese. On the one hand, games are math and math has a logical output, if you understand the formula. Rarely is random ever truly random with computers, and as such, players have found ways to tweak the math in their favor. Shaving the dice as it were. Conversely, there are games where you can simply stack the stats to a sufficient level that all math is irrelevant due to scaling, which is an end result of a power scale with no meaningful end. Again, JRPGs have exceled here, where the end game is some sort of uber challenge that makes the final boss look like a tissue in a rainstorm.

ARPGs are in this vein but have their own sauce. The mechanical pieces of the game usually have no upper limit in math, which allows for ‘god rolls’ and players pushing the hardest difficulty possible, with some measure of skill included. For the most part though, the events in the games are dictated by your ability to reach statistical thresholds to survive/defeat a particular event. If a boss is able to 1-shot you, then you need improved defense stats. If the battle takes forever, you need more attack stats. Mitigation and mechanics are sometimes present, such as ‘don’t stand in the fire’, but there comes a point where you can simply stat your way out of it, and face-tank the event.

Well, that’s mostly true. Some ARPGs do have situational mechanics that defy all stats and require you to pay attention. Some battles have timers that require you to perform specific steps before a game over. Some have 1 shot mechanics that require memorization + mobility to avoid. Some are just artificially challenging as it’s not content you’re actually meant to experience until other events take place (e.g. invulnerability phases). This effectively maintains the challenge of a given event regardless of the stats you have, which I will readily admit I am not a fan.

This is more due to design concepts than mechanics, or perhaps more accurately the player conditioning applied and reversals. ARPGs are meant to be near-infinite stat ladders, where a few more digits can move you to the next tier of the hamster wheel. There is no stat stick that prevents a 1-shot mechanic, and as such, this mechanic stops the momentum of the wheel in its entirety. There’s no flow, dude. This friction may be seen as interesting by some, but more of a nuisance by others.

Diablo 4 certainly has it’s fair share here, which is more of a frustration due to the visual cues not being clear when the screen is simply filled with FX. If your character has an aura for example, or a hydra on the ground, it’s entirely possible to not see any cue and just go poof. Which, fine, you won’t see at all if you can conversely 1-shot the boss and simply skip those mechanics. This adds some interesting decision points for players, as not all content at a given level is the same. Duriel, Andariel, and the Aspect all have the same loot pool. Duriel is dramatically easier than both the peers, so players will only really ever do that run. Heck, a nightmare (+15) version of Duriel is easier than a base level Lilith.

It’s funny in a way, this was a similar issue with WoW for years where raid markers were near impossible to detect and frankly was the core reason DBM was created, or why players simply turned off VFX in progressive raids. I don’t need to see my sword on fire, I need to see me not on fire.

I’m kind of curious as to how the next Diablo 4 DLC decides to tackle the difficulty curve of stats vs skills. I know there’s more splits in the difficulty levels planned, but the overall balance should be interesting. If it’s anything like the Diablo3 RoS expansion, then this should be quite eye opening. PoE2 still has no details on Patch 0.5… so will be interesting to see what comes from that.

Following on the ARPG itemization post, D4 has a ‘refined’ journey here after a few years of tweaking and 1 DLC in prod (another coming end of month). It would be fair to say that D4 has stumbled at multiple points as the seasonal changes are often significant tweaks to the model, rather than simply tweaks (as in D3). Most of this relates to how rewards are allocated for given activities, sometimes helltides are better, sometimes bosses, sometimes undercity runs. The community generally adapts quickly. This post therefore reflects Season 12. I’ll update this for later seasons.

Assuming you are a fresh level 60, there’s only one real measure of progress and that’s a sustainable clear rate in Torment 4 – the highest difficulty currently available. In order to reach this, you need better stats. To get better stats, you need to play the hamster wheel of content.

Paragon

These are meta levels that are shared on all characters in a realm, in a system that’s more akin to PoE in complexity. This means there are optimal builds, and you can reset it pretty easy. You’ll likely be 200 levels into this by T4 difficulty. Gaining levels is passive as you complete content. Meaning – don’t worry about it, worry about gear.

Equipment

There are 2 types of items to worry about – Legendary and Unique. Legendary items can roll a multitude of stats and can be significantly tweaked (more on that). Uniques have fixed stats and fixes bonuses that cannot be used on other equipment. About half of the gear for any given build will be uniques.

These items can also roll as Ancient (50 power stronger) and/or Bloodied (extra stat boosts if you kill many enemies in a sequences). T1 content generally requires a decent set of Legendary items. T2 the mix of Legendary and Unique. T3 needs more of it upgraded to Ancient versions. T4 has optimal stat rolls.

Item Tweaks

You can enchant an item to re-roll one stat to something you prefer, at increasing costs. You can imprint legendaries with different passives, yet another stat that gives flexibility. You can temper items to add a passive boost (like more fire damage). You can add sockets and gems for stat boosts, or with 2 sockets, add runewords for skills that activate in certain conditions. And you can masterwork gear, improving it’s level by 25.

As a melee user, you likely want pants with Strength, Armor, Hit Points, and Critical Strike chance. You likely want a boost to whirlwind too. And slot runewords. That’s a lot of rolls that need to go your way. In D4, you only need 3 of those 4 initial stat rolls and can modify the item for all the others, and for dirt cheap as well!

Across 10 or so items, this makes a huge difference.

Acquiring Gear

This is the core of the game, right? All these activities have a difficulty level that is similar, though Boss Lairs can be a notch higher.

• Dungeons: Don’t do them, plain and simple.
• Nightmare Dungeons: You’ll randomly get a key to ‘upgrade’ a dungeon to a harder version. In season 12, I’d suggest you don’t run these.
• Slaughterhouse: Random key drops where you play as the Butcher. This is ‘fun mode’ and provide no meaningful rewards outside of the season journey.
• Infernal Runs: Increasing waves of difficulty (4, 6, 8, or 10) that give crafting rewards while leveling, and have a couple chests at the end. Outside of the seasonal journey goals, I would avoid this.
• Helltides: An area of the map has super spawn modes that drop cinders allowing you to open chests for random rewards. Useful all the way until Torment 1.
• Legion Events: Every 30 minutes or so, a multi-stage event with decent enough drops for the time invested.
• World Boss: Much longer spawns, only do it once a week. Not really worth the effort.
• Boss Lairs: You can access this any time but to open the chest you need Lair components. Bosses have much higher odds of dropping specific uniques. Mythical uniques (super rare) come from uber versions, and in season 12, Duriel is miles away from any other option here to farm. Bosses are generally harder than dungeons.
• Whispers: Completing a set of random activities gives you points, which you can redeem for loot chests. Don’t focus on it, but consider it when faced with multiple content options.
• The Pit: These are essentially D3 greater rifts, meant solely to upgrade glyphs used in the Paragon system. Get your 5 main glyphs to level 15 quickly. Level 46 is needed to get to get past T3. I would not recommend pushing past 46 until you can comfortably do T4 content.
• Undercity: Similar to the Pit in structure, but you can target rewards with Tributes. Useful to get more runes, Obducite, or legendaries. Generally, this is the activity that gives the most rewards per minute of activity.

Bloodied Dungeons, Infernal Runs, and Boss Lairs add +15 difficulty to the content you are in, which is a bit more than a single Torment level of difficulty. This means, if you use a key at T2, the content will be a bit more difficult than T3. If you want to use these keys, I suggest you drop the difficulty level down by 1. Bloodied Boss Lairs are extremely rewarding.

Gambling (Safety Net)

By doing the various bits of activity, you’ll also be rewarded with other currency you can use to get more gear in town.

• Pale Marks. You get these from using mercenaries, can’t really find the benefit here.
• Obols. There’s a cap on how many you can carry and you get this through a ton of activities, though mostly on the main map. One of the best ways to get your initial level 60 gear.
• Fresh Meat. Very similar to Obols, allows you to get Bloodied gear. Slaughterhouses give a lot, and bloodied lair bosses give the most by far.
• Butcher boxes. By chaining together multiple kills, you get points, which give you item boxes that drop a ton of loot and keys. You likely won’t even notice it as you need to manually collect it from the seasonal board, which is unfortunate given the rewards they hand out.

Dark Citadel

Adding this sort of footnote regarding the only mandatory grouping content in the game. Rewards are the same as other content, and the amount you get is determined by clear speed, which will be slower than all other options. There are cosmetics here, but they haven’t changed since the feature was released. The group finder is rudimentary, so your mileage may vary. This isn’t ‘brrrr-mode’, there are actual combat mechanics that need to be performed to avoid a wipe, so mindless play doesn’t work.

Personally, I think MMO-mechanics in an ARPG are not a terribly good use of resources without some sort of meta-incentive. Guilds in D4 are currently just group chats, so maybe there’s something that could be done here instead. For now, I’d avoid the content.

As per the prior post, I don’t tend to pick up ‘premium’ games at launch. In many cases I end up waiting for a promised DLC to launch, as that often comes with a major balance patch. Think about Diablo3 pre- and post-RoS. Completely different games. Rogue Trader fits this model.

It’s a CRPG, which more or less means it’s like Baldur’s Gate. You control a party of characters who go on a very long set of quests, see stats go up, and make character defining decisions, almost always in an isometric-type view. BG3 pretty much perfected this model and everyone has been trying to find a niche along that path.

Now, Warhammer40K comes with baggage. It’s a world of constant war, where everyone is a shade of evil. If you look at the D&D alignment model, there is no good, there is no neutral. The Imperium (where you reside) is lawful evil. Anyone who says otherwise doesn’t understand satire. You play the titular Rogue Trader, a sort of vanguard to the imperium, conquering newly discovered planets, and building a financial empire. If you see it, it’s yours. Thankfully, no spreadsheets to manage here. Along the way you’ll collect a slew of party NPCs that fit various classes and backgrounds. Deluded space wizards, gun toting priests, deranged blood worshipers, and so on. You start off inheriting a part of the galaxy and need to stabilize it. Along the way, ‘bad stuff happens’. You can be dogmatic (be lawful evil), heretical (chaotic evil with space madness), or an iconoclast (which is frankly more pragmatic than good). Now, CRPGs in general prefer an iconoclast approach and first time players are going to see more here. Heretical is hard mode. Dogmatic makes sense about 20% of the time (e.g. purging a planet that’s converted to madness), and dumb the rest of the time (e.g. an ally offers you their services for free and you shoot them instead). The writing is thematically aligned to 40K, very lengthy and full of complicated terms. It works.

Quickly, the companions here are well done and thematically resonant. They have very little interaction between them, but their individual perspectives and side quests are all quite interesting. Who you bring along on the journey is personal choice, unless you’re on the hardest difficulty.

Mechanically, the combat is a bit of XCOM (with action points + cover) and BG with various skills. It’s often your team of 6 against a dozen or more enemies. AE attacks and multiple single target attacks per turn are key. Generally, this works well. More in a bit, but there reaches a point where compounding levels and skills make you effectively run in god-mode with some crazy OP builds. It can get a bit much and overly complicated, but it works.

Inventory is weird. Still trying to make sense of any of it. Your bag will be filled with generic items that have a 2-5% stat difference… but they have a very big integration with skills. Heavy Bolters may deal less damage on paper, but with the proper build they are infinite bullet machines. Keeping track of all of this is complicated, not to mention actually finding items that fit a build. YMMV.

The stats and builds though, that is a friggin’ mess. Every level you’re given a set of options, often 30 or so, that you can select from in a list. A list! You can’t easily see dependencies or syngergies, and each one of them practically requires you to scroll to read the definitions. On the one hand, congratulations on having so many skill options! On the other, you can see how this is practically impossible to balance. I keep thinking of Path of Exile’s skill tree and build options, it’s just so much. Min-maxers will love this, but it is absolutely a challenge in terms of broader appeal.

Side note, you remember the D&D issue with quadratic growth for mages? In that a warrior hit very hard and was sturdy for a few levels while a mage was a wet tissue, and then they acquired a few tier 4 spells and turned on god mode. That model is here too. Melee is dramatically limited in damage and movement by the mid-point. Ranged AE attackers can clear an entire field with multiple tools and turns. I mean, I still love the bladedancer cause they can decimate 5+ weaker enemies in a single turn and it looks damn cool. I can also shoot an arc rifle at the same group and AE them all for triple the damage, then get another free shot for the next group on the other half of the map.

There are a multitude of other systems in here that work at various levels. Space combat is meh. Space exploration has overly complicated (but absolutely nails the thematic pieces). Merchants are amazing, where if you have reputation with them and a given ‘profit factor’ that measures overall wealth, you simply by the thing. I really like this model.

Is this game better than BG3? No, and it’s not trying to be which is actually refreshing. It can easily take you 100 hours to get through a single playthrough, and very few games ever offer that these days. Replay value is iffy, as it’s less about build diversity than story choices. Well, I guess that particular statement is a matter of perspective with so many skills to choose from. Still, the question boils down to…

Is it any good, and is there value? An absolutely emphatic yes to the first part, the game is quite good. It has quirks and leans heavily into the theme, and frankly may be the ‘truest’ 40K game out there as a result. Value is subjective, but consider this – it’s 100hrs of content, with voice acting and quality writing throughout, it has meaty DLC, and is on a banger sale. I think there’s a lot of value, and I am rather picky on these sort of things.