The Queue: Distractions

One thing that’s really hampering my ability to actually progress in Diablo Immortal is my inability to stop myself from rolling yet another Barbarian and testing out the different options for tweaking their faces and hair colors. I feel like if there were a few more baseline options to start with this could really be something great, especially considering it works across six classes and two gender options.

Yes, this is utterly trivial. I’ve got a lot on my mind, okay? It helps fight off the sad thoughts. Feeling down? Spend a half hour coming up with a face for a Barbarian, go into Wertham, kill stuff until you get bored and then start it all over again.

Favorite thing is the character creation. Just having appearance options in a Diablo game is pretty freaking amazing, even if 9 times out of 10 I can barely see them. Wish I could figure out a way to turn my helmet off so my face showed all the time.

Least favorite thing after the thing you said to set aside is probably the sheer amount of currencies to keep track of. There’s a lot of it, and I’d really like it to be streamlined. So many Crests and Hilts and Platinum to keep straight. Oh, and the idea of caps to keep you from grinding all day? That’s so anti-Diablo as I understand it and it needs to go.

I like the story and the presentation of it, but I do wish this had been the era they’d explored in a single player game. I’m basically playing DI as a solo player, aside from occasionally teaming up with my wife. For right now it’s working out fine for me, but I have yet to group up with anyone beside my wife and I wish I had the mental bandwidth to at least try it out more.

Believe it or not, that’s actually a different Barbarian that I rolled up, got to this point, then deleted instead of even playing them.

Okay, as someone who managed to get into the now three year old demo at BlizzCon 2019? If you’re really burned out on the best class in Diablo — I don’t know, to me it sounds like someone saying I’m done with pizza, give me nothing but broccoli spears but some people like broccoli and I’m not here to judge you — I will say that both the Sorceress and the Druid were fun as heck to play and I’ll bet anything that all five classes will have something to recommend them.

There are absolutely going to be Necromancer build options that will work very similar to Death Knights. A Bone or Blood build with a lot of Book of the Dead options to buff your abilities and give you just the one really strong undead minion would work well as a tanking DK concept, and the Army build is like a DK who can just cast Army of the Dead all the time. So if you like DK’s, I’d say tinker around with Necromancer.

But really, play a Barbarian, in every Diablo game, all the time. I’m sure it’s fine. It’s fine that I keep doing this.

I like blue hair, plus the red hair options just look sorta brown, which is sad. Sad for me.

The unity of the five primary Dragonflights, the trust of his four fellow Aspects, and the Blue Dragonflight, who he murdered with the Dragon Soul by turning it’s power against them, killing so many of them that for eons Malygos considered the flight extinct and went mad. Oh, yeah, and Malygos’ sanity.

Also he just casually tore down mountain ranges to deliberately allow the mortal races to come into contact more often just to manipulate them into murdering each other for fun, so there’s that too.

Retaliation. There was just something so intrinsic to the Warrior class about this ability. Charge into a group of mobs, trigger Retaliation, and make them kill themselves by hitting you. Once they dropped the stance requirement it was even a really nice ability for tanking, generated a solid bit of threat on multiple mobs.

Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy Die by the Sword, but Retaliation was just so much a part of my tool kit for so many years, I still miss it.

My quest for the ugliest, beardiest, grumpiest male Barb continues. This one isn’t quite there yet.

I’m not really a big PVPer, but if I were, I’d want as close a faction equivalency as I could get because what fun is it to utterly stomp the other faction all the time? Similarly, server races to first on a specific boss kill — something that was a big part of my original WoW playing time back up until late Cataclysm — is just better when you have an active competition, instead of one faction just owning all the materials, all the top raiding guilds, and basically all the spots at the top.

In general, especially in an expansion like Wrath Classic, if all you ever see are people from your own faction it makes the world feel dead. There’s a reason I haven’t ever really liked the faction conflict, because every server tips in one direction or the other, and then either you spend you time playing on a server with almost nobody for you to group with or even see from your faction, or you end up on a server dominated by your faction where the sight of a player from the other side is almost a rarity. Doesn’t feel great to me.

Not really sure what happened there. Just kinda went nuts on the pastels.

Anyway, this is the Queue for today. Thanks for allowing me to distract myself for a little while. See y’all next week.