Some people had posted that the latest Season 2 changes have made the game quite fun. In turn, I decided to check it out because I’m pretty much done with Diablo 3 Season 29 and have been looking for a new activity. With more of an open mind, I wanted to discuss what I’ve experienced so far with this latest season.
The biggest boon I’ve seen thus far has been the ease at which one can obtain gear by doing these vampire hunts. It’s fairly easy to obtain gear with tons of legendaries dropping early on. While you’ll still need to grind out other activities for the season pass stuff, for the most part, I’m almost convinced this is the best way to level because they also provide a method to do Tree of Whispers, which likewise provides better loot and experience.
The vampire hunts themselves early on are fairly easy. I managed to get into World Tier III last night and experienced one death (not hardcore). But that was a normal story where my character was a fresh 50 with no sacred pieces. I had to make a few trips back and forth to town to upgrade some rares and ensure that my gear was decent once they started dropping. But the important thing here was having spare keys to open the chests as quickly as possible to start obtaining fast sacred gear.
At this moment, most of my gear should be sacred. But it’s not optimized and I’m still at level 51 (close to 52). Since I missed that one day where you could transfer all your Renown, etc., I have to re-grind all that out (le sigh). Quite honestly, I don’t mind that much because I haven’t played for a few months so such an activity (Altars of Lilith notwithstanding) keeps me motivated into playing.
With regards to the build I’m playing, I ended up going with a Necromancer Blood Surge build. Originally, I started with minions but after hitting World Tier III, I stripped out the skeletons and mages fro Bone Armor. For AoE, the build is great but the single target stinks. I might have to optimize even further because I’m not using the BiS vampire abilities, especially the major ones.
The vampire abilities I’ve heard are pretty powerful but they’re simply generic modifiers so I’m not exactly excited. The Capstone Dungeon did feel reasonable, although my character was squishy and slow. I think if I had done this on the Eternal Realm, I would have gotten pissed off just because it was a bit of a struggle and I probably wasn’t optimized for it.
Along the line of Dungeons, so far feels like the same old same old. Maybe the biggest difference is the events. I managed to conquer a few of the “XYZ must survive” ones. I still skip them for the most part unless I accidentally get into a fight. But I still see little to no reason to do them unless they’re involved as part of the Season Journey.
The Season Journey is weird to me. It feels more like a guideline of activities that tries to “encourage” you to do certain things. In my current situation, I see that there’s a PVP activity. You can always count on Blizzard for doing their coerced social engineering. Perhaps, this will become my version of the Set Dungeon Mastery challenge from Seasons because they’re annoying and I never want to do them. Luckily, the rewards from the Season Journey mostly are cosmetic and require the Season Pass to unlock. In short, if push comes to shove, I’ll just leave them unlocked.
But let’s talk briefly about the Season Pass. You have to love the fact that the website itself advertises the most expensive as “the best deal”. It’s an absolutely garbage deal with no upside because it’s not directly tied to any forcing function. This is one instance where Blizzard kinda got it right in making the Season Pass just cosmetic, despite the fact that the website’s verbiage is trash.
I’m going to skip out on other activities since I’ve been purely focused on leveling. Instead, I want to address many of the core addresses that continue to plague this game and prevent me from retracting my “worst game of all time possibly” stance.
The biggest issue for me is just bugs. Nonsensical, blockers where the game randomly (or not so randomly) locks up. Quite a few of the crashes for me occurred just by trying to enter a dungeon. I have no idea why such a fundamentally inherent thing can completely fail. My game just becomes unresponsive and I have to restart my client. One the bright side when this particular issue happens, I’m left outside the dungeon in question and don’t have to slog through. So it seems that the game does provide a save point for your last known location, which is great.
The lag issue continues to persist. I’m guessing part of that is due to the large number of players on this past weekend from the “free play” experience. Part of that last situation also had caused login issues where I just would get queued up. You would think by this point Blizzard should have figured out some autoscaling mechanism for their servers. If they’re still dumping you on some 1U server, then their entire IT department and especially their CIO should be booted.
Another major annoyance is the dialog which at times can’t be skipped and just drags on. However, the most irritating aspect is that just hitting escape when dialog can be skipped may not always work. My workaround has been to alt-tab a few times to make the escape key work. But why is this still a thing? Why not make dialog skippable as a setting?
One thing that improved that I will give Blizzard props for is un-retarding the mount. It’s still a poorly designed thing but whatever they did between the last time I played and now is a billion times better. Maybe they fired the retarded dev who came up with the stupid notion of mouse distance equating to the mount speed. If that dev fought to keep that feature, maybe they should send him to Gaza. Sometimes there can be humane beheadings.
While I’m trying to complete my Renown, my biggest fear is dealing with persistent bugs. I’m hoping those that required workarounds have been fixed so that I’m no longer blocked in finishing up my Renown. Otherwise, I’m still insistent on saying that this game, for the amount of investment, time and resources put into it, is still one of the worst I’ve ever played. I am having fun for the moment but I just think it’s because I have too much free time on the weekends for the moment and needed a distraction. But if there were better games, I’m sure they would embarrass this game by a landslide.