The Queue: Me and my skeleton army edition

It’s nice to have a skeleton army, a nice protective cordon of spirit and bone surrounding you and protecting you from the dangers of the world. That’s basically what necromancy is all about: raising the dead to be your friends and also sometimes guarding you from giant snakes.

Let’s do this, Queue.

AftQ1: Yes! …wait, when did I become a patron saint?

AftQ2: That really depends on how you define “tomorrow.”

Pretty poorly so far. I haven’t played a ton since unlocking it, but what I have played was discouraging. Every World Tier is a jump in difficulty — I personally think it’s too much of a jump in difficulty and that we need more difficulties in between the existing ones. Going from WT2 to WT3 was rough, and going from WT3 to WT4 is also rough, bad enough that I’ve already put it back down to WT3.

In WT4 I can do open world content and quests, but anything challenging — even normal dungeons — I can get overwhelmed quickly and can’t come back from it. Multiple elites or elites with particularly nasty affixes will wipe out my skeleton army and then come for me. This isn’t exactly a new problem. Every time you have a difficulty jump, this is an issue pet-based Necromancers have to deal with, and the Necromancer community seems to lean anti-pet because when you get to challenging content this is typically what happens. But I’ve seen SoulSoBreezy running a Necromancer pet build in WT4, doing Nightmare dungeons 12 levels above him solo, so it’s certainly possible. I need to find a couple of skill points to reallocate and change my spec, and I might try shifting my Paragon points around. It’s looking like it’ll have to be a pretty significant change.

But these big difficulty bumps are frustrating, because to overcome this I need much better gear. Matt mentioned WT4 started feeling better when he got mostly ilvl 800 gear, but my best WT3 gear is ilvl 700, and most is closer to 650. So I need better gear, but getting better gear either means getting really lucky with RNG or jumping to WT4. But I struggle in WT4 until I get better gear. See the problem?

This is why I think we need something like a .5 difficulty between each difficulty. I am already well past the point where WT3 is easy. I passed that a dozen levels ago. I can afk in the middle of a crowd of mobs in WT3 and the biggest danger is getting distracted and idling out. But WT4 wipes the floor with me. We need some in between difficulties where you can have content with more of a challenge, but not content that seems insurmountable. Right now Diablo 4 only has four difficulty levels, and the trip through them isn’t very smooth.

Yeah, maybe some dungeons.

I’m going to echo other Queuevians and say try a lower difficulty level. There have been places I’ve hit in the game where a certain encounter was too difficult, and after a few tries I dropped it down. When I first hit Brol in Act 3 on my Druid, I spent many wipes trying to kill him… before abandoning the whole thing to go back and max out my entire Spirit Boons system for more defense and change my spec. I was four or five levels higher when I went back and it was easy.

Meeting challenges that feel like a brick wall seem to mean you need to rethink something — usually something big. It could be as simple as needing a few more levels. Paragon points are very powerful, and in your early 50s you only have a handful of them. More points can unlock extra survivability and damage, so a couple of levels could make a big difference. (I recommend normal dungeons for leveling.) It could be that you need to rethink your build,  too. My Necromancer is probably going to swap ultimates, and that’s going to mean swapping a couple of pieces of gear and skill points to fit with that new ultimate. It will be a thinking shift, but in my experience at least a bit of a thinking shift is required to get past walls — anywhere from swapping a couple of talents to rethinking your build entirely.

I’d say go off and do something else for a while. There are tons of dungeons, tons of side quests you could do away from the main story quest. Beef yourself up a bit and then come try again. Because the world scales with you, it’s not about level, but it may be about how your character is set up or geared, and sometimes even making small tweaks to your setup can help.

But you can do this! I believe in you!

I got a unique two-handed scythe a while ago, and now all I get are weapon drops. Rare weapon drops, legendary weapon drops, maybe a shield or off-hand.. Weapons, why does everything have to be a weapon?

As someone who has been enjoying pure Paladin decks for a while, I think Hearthstone Twist’s initial plan to do a season where you can’t do neutral cards is (1) really great for me and (2) really lousy for everyone else who has to give up neutral cards without getting the benefits you get from that sacrifice.

Don’t get me wrong, I think this is a neat idea, kind of like Diablo 3 Seasons which always add some unique mechanic to make the game feel fresh and interesting again. But to start they’re taking an interesting mechanic that benefits one class and telling every class they have to use it. Paladins have access to some very nice benefits with cards that trigger only if your deck doesn’t have any neutrals in it. That’s why you’d play a pure Paladin in the first place.

I like the idea of Twist in general, though. And this first, no-neutrals season sounds like it will be a very short test to see how the game mode works out. Blizzard is good at iterating on designs, so I’m eager to see where this goes from here.

Without a doubt. While it isn’t difficult to find people to play with, it can be difficult to find people who share your exact game goals and want to play at the same level, in the same way, and at the same time as you do. And it’s even more difficult to find people you get along with, people you want to hang out with while you’re spending hours in raid.

Finding a new raid group might not be hard, but finding people I want to hang out with throughout endless raid wipes, with a tank who will save me when I accidentally hit Judgement with three seconds on the pull timer? (Not that I’ve ever done that.) That’s harder. Finding friends is harder still, and when you find them, you hang onto them.  If they decided they were moving, I wouldn’t hesitate.

At this point, that question is sort of difficult. Are we talking today-tomorrow or tomorrow-tomorrow? But either way, the answer is no, so maybe it doesn’t matter so much.

And that, my friends, is all for now. I hope you have a lovely afternoon and an even better weekend. Take care of yourselves, hug your loved ones, and maybe I’ll see you in Azeroth.