Many Welps

It’s always weird starting at the beginning of a season after playing a high-level character. Everything feels slower and it gives me that race to the end mentality because I know what the end game is like and I quite enjoy it. Plus the damage numbers are low and it takes so long to kill everything. But I love loot collecting in ARPGs. I rarely share loot between characters because it’s always a rush when you find that one item that puts you over the edge for the next area of difficulty.

I picked up the Shield Lancer and Plague Doctor classes just to support the developer and complete my collection of the classes. I started a solo playthrough with the Shield Lancer. Shield Lancer has a much different playstyle than most of the classes. Where most of the classes want to avoid damage at all costs, getting one-shotted in the higher levels is common, the Sheild Lancer wants to take damage to deal damage. It’s hard to switch from dodge everything mentality to sit in the AOE to charge up my counter-attack. I’m looking forward to how he performs in this games version of greater rifts, wormholes.

Shield Lancer doesn’t really come online until level 48. At level 36 you unlock Shield Wall which summons a ring of shields around you. At level 48 you unlock Spiked Shield which makes the orbiting shields actually do damage. So for the build, I’m running, the play is to run into a group of enemies, taunt them to lower their defense, pop shield wall and watch everything die. Anything still alive after shield wall runs out can be taken care of with a counter-attack which has been charging every time you got hit. I find this to be super satisfying.

In my co-op playthrough, I’m playing the Plague Doctor. I didn’t pick this up when it first came out because I was maining a different class for the season. The theme of this class is fantastic. It has an army of rats to spread the plague to enemies, it throws jars of leaches, and does a lot of damage over time. Just like the Lancer, the Plague Doctor really starts doing a lot of damage at level 48. The skill The Last Patient explodes all of the corpses around you spreading a poison gas. You get enough dead trash mobs around an elite and pop it, that 100K health elite is demolished.  My buddy, Jay, is playing the pyromancer that does a lot of burst AOE damage so we’ve been shredding through the Acts. We just got into Nightmare difficulty on Saturday and the increase in difficulty is actually surprising. Luckily, the quality of loot is improving as well. We made it to Act 3 out of 7 this weekend in Nightmare

I want to try a few more classes out before I decide on one to climb the wormholes with. Last season, I was rocking it on the Marauder and ended up on the top 10 softcore leaderboards for a while. But I also didn’t play anything else for a few months. I want to find another class that clicks for me. So far it’s looking like the Lancer but Jay and I are going to try a few more classes co-op.