Diablo 4: What Happened to Season 7 For Me

Obviously, I’ve been playing Wizardry 6 this entire time with all my recent blog posts. But I did mention that at some point I was going to try the Diablo 4 Season 7. Well, I did pause for a day to check out the new Season 7. And while it was fun during the time I played, I honestly was bored before hitting level 60. There’s no easy way to put it. I wasn’t excited at all. Some of it might be due to the PTR where I already had my fun there. Also, there were some bugs that affected my decision to try other things like the new Earthquake Barbarian setup. But there’s an even more important reason why I decided to stop: no one is playing.

After a single day, I saw many streamers practically quit. They seemed bored after a few hours and went back to their core games. It’s pretty telling that the sentiment was that this season wasn’t necessarily a bust but it didn’t feel special. I think people did like the new Witch Powers but there was no real end game added to make use of the power boost. Instead, it was Pit grinding all over again and I’m sure most people get sick quickly of that. I did post beforehand that Pit grinding sucks. It just is soul sucking because it’s the same crap over and over. There’s not much variety in how you approach the Pit either. All that happens is monsters increasing in damage and health with as you increase the “difficulty” as well as improving your Glyph levels.

While the intent of the Pit was to emulate Diablo 3’s Greater Rifts, there are some key fundamental differences where Greater Rifts feel less soul sucking. First, the loot in Greater Rifts is much better. So as you continue to push your Legendary Gems, you also get pretty good loot. In fact, some of the best loot comes through higher level Greater Rifts. Also, the map variety is much better and the Bosses aren’t just damage sponges locked up in a crappy arena.

More importantly, you don’t have to level 5 different Legendary Gems to a ridiculous level where the secondary powers are unlocked at later stages. And you don’t have to worry about whether or not a build can handle a Greater Rift because most of the builds can do enough. Only if you’re interested in hitting the really high level Greater Rifts do you need to switch to some meta build. But by then that’s just self imposed torture since there’s no real good reason to go past a certain point except for self satisfaction.

I knew when they decided to balance the end game around the Pit that Diablo 4 was going to suffer. It was an awful idea that didn’t have much creativity behind it. Just toss up another crap dungeon and add a lame timer with some feckless boss that you either one shot or it one shots you. Even if you can pump up the difficulty, the content itself is the same. And even if you complete your Pit, the amount of power gained in a Glyph feels insignificant most of the time.

But given that issue, the other problem in general for me is that none of my friends are playing. It just feels bad logging in to an empty guild. I think the expansion turned off a lot of people due to the price point and justifiably so once people got a glimpse of what came out. There were a few things that looked exciting namely the Runes and Mercenaries. But truth be told, both are duller than watching bowling on TV. There was almost no creativity in the Runeword idea because people would know the Runeword combinations since they were so simple. Then Mercenaries were worse than the ones from Diablo 3. After Diablo 3 added the Emanate feature to gear and updated the Followers’ core abilities, Followers ended up feeling great.

Just to add to the lack of enthusiasm, I read a post saying that the Lead Class designer for Diablo 4 quit Blizzard. All the videos of him made him look haggard and drained. I can’t blame him if he decided that Blizzard sucks and that management there are a bunch of idiots. The last livestream with the Diablo 4 crew was one of the worst things I’ve watched from them. It was a lame circle jerk that tried to pump up the mediocre changes after the PTR’s update.

The thing is that I want to like this game but they’re making it impossible. It’s a sad state of affairs when I’m more willing to play a 35 year old game night and day rather than something with updated graphics because the grind feels better. But that’s where we are and unless Blizzard makes another drastic round of changes, I’m pretty much thinking that’s it. They’re done for me as a game company. I’ll just continue playing older games because I enjoy them more and don’t feel ripped off when I re-purchase them.

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