Diablo 4 Season 10: Is Season 10 A Success?

I think an interesting topic to discuss is whether Season 10 can be considered a success. At least from various reddit posts, the fans of Diablo 4 seem to have a positive position thus far and those on Twitch have mostly expressed a positive impression that have given it a try as compared to the previous two seasons. For myself, as I had avoided Season 8 (which I thought was the worst of the bunch), I wanted to evaluate the current season and put my thoughts on the subject matter.

Right now, I have to admit that I’ve been more engaged with this season than the last season. I think the biggest impact to me has been the introduction of Chaos Armor and the Chaos Rifts in the revamped Inferno Hordes. Chaos Armor, as well as a few key perks, have allowed me to build my characters in a different fashion and provided enough of a chase that has made me want to pursue the various activities for those items. Also, in my discovery about being able to purchase reputation, I managed to uncover a method to continue to create characters and farm mythics in an alternate manner beyond leveling up a character, rep grinding the usual way and/or farming bosses. So there’s a few lessons that can be learned here for the Diablo 4 team.

Diablo 4 Season 10 Positive Marks

• Chaos Armor – If there’s one universal thing that everyone has agreed upon, it’s that Chaos Armor is a positive in a game. Many people are pleading on the forums and reddit to keep this in the game for the future as it really has opened up build diversity and part of the results have allowed the most build diversity seen in a long time (if not forever) to compliment all the other updates for the game. I think the fact that these pieces cannot be traded add to the idea of another worthy item hunt that keeps people engaged. Also, the fact that you can obtain Chaos Armor in a variety of manners (gambling, rare drops, legendary Chaos Rifts, bosses, Whisper Caches and the new Infernal Hordes boss) mean you can alternate the content for obtaining these.
• Chaos Rifts – Another major positive feedback item is the introduction of Chaos Rifts for dungeons, Helltides and as an option inside of Infernal Hordes. What makes this aspect fun is creating a new activity that makes running dungeons worth doing as you can farm for for Infernal Horde sigils, get a little bit of gear, do a quick activity and move on. For Helltides, these are nice activities that can help bolster your embers while in Infernal Hordes that provide a risk vs reward gamble. So if anything they add another flavor to the game to make the environment more dynamic which is sorely needing.
• Goblin Rifts – As part of the Chaos Rifts found in Infernal Hordes, I think everyone who does these believe that the goblin ones are a wonderful addition that give a spark of excitement that isn’t horribly overbalanced when it occurs. Since you can only get the equipment chest once per Infernal Hordes run, snagging a Goblin Rift means you can gain a good deal of crafting material or gold, neither of which really causes horrible problems in the game. So this is worth keeping around.
• Build Diversity – Usually, a Diablo 4 season ends up being one or two classes that outshine everything else. This season almost every class has at least one incredible build that really stands out from a combination of the season powers/perks and the chaos armor. Obviously, the perks for this season will go away that probably enable a few key builds (such as auto shout/Dust Devil Barbarian or Soul Rift Necromancer) but they need to see how the various updates, perks and chaos armor interplay to really enable as much solid builds moving forward.
• Whisper Quest Dungeon Mark – Small but huge quality of life update. I’m certain there’s other major QoL updates that are needed but those should get a dedicated post to address.
• Removing Immunity Phase – I think a lot of players thought this was a great move. The way the end game bosses had immunity phases never made any sense to me for a farming type of game that rely on farming the same bosses over and over to get specific pieces of gear. You still have to deal with the shield but with enough DPS you can bypass this part. I think they managed to finally get the right balance for handling these end game bosses for the current content.
• Reasonably Smooth Day 1 Launch – I missed out on the past two day one launches of the season but all things considered this had to be one of the smoother ones. I did encounter some lagginess and issues with crashes but not nearly as bad as the disastrous world release of Vessel of Hatred. Possibly because it was launched on a Tuesday early in the day, they were more prepared and there were less players. But the main thing is that all things considered, this had to be one of their better launches for anything in a while.

Diablo 4 Season 10 Negative Marks

• Buggy Game – Despite having a smooth day 1 launch, the game still is riddled with bugs. As a developer, I understand that bugs are inevitable. What I don’t understand in particular is how something like Chaos Armor in using the same ability as the original unique will cause that ability to not work at all. That tells me there’s some really bad design decisions behind the code that either are hard coded or do something really weird behind the scenes.
• Season 9 Main Feature Moot – The revamped dungeons still mostly feel the same. Yes, they have the positive/negative attachments but the Escalating and Horadric Rooms feel pointless, which seemed to be the real selling point of last season. Initially, I ran a few of those Horadric Rooms and learned quickly that no matter how much DPS I possessed, I could never get the full reward compared to the previous season. And the rewards I did obtain were mediocre at best. So anytime I see one of these pop up, I completely ignore them. And the Escalating dungeons themselves are so rare and lack anything special to make them worth doing. So I think dungeons need another pass to determine how to improve them. I did a write up on my thoughts on what they should be. But if anything it’s more of a failed vision to carry over into subsequent seasons that should be the take away, not really a failure of what’s in season 10 itself.
• Mythic Farming is Painful – Yes, you can roll new characters to quickly rep grind the season reward with all your spare reputation but it feels lame given that the rune crafting option requires too many legendary runes that have poor drop rates. I realize that part of the intent with that is to encourage trading but without an in game market place, that method will never be a reasonable option for the average player. And bosses drop far too few to really be a great source. Yes, removing the immunity phase has improved being able to farm bosses, but if the mythic drop rate was adjusted then that’s a poor decision because it simply makes boss farming feel like a waste of time.
• Pit Pushing the Only Real End Game – This really isn’t what I desire in a game like this and the fact that glyphs only can be leveled up via Pits make this system rotten. They need to look hard at why Chaos Armor is a success because partly of how there’s a variety of ways to obtain it. Honestly, I only view using the Pit to get my Glyphs to 46 or so as the reason to do them at all because this activity gets monotonous VERY fast.
• World Bosses – No real reason to do them. Someone said that these are good for trying to get the mythic tribune but I find World Bosses boring and almost no one is around.
• Legion Events – These feel outright dead. I only did one near the start of the season to get the achievement done for the season journey. Otherwise, there’s no reason to do these.

Diablo 4 In Progress Things

From what Pez mentioned, the next season will supposedly address Tempering and Masterworking. I really hope they read my blog post on those systems. If not let me state how they should operate:

• Tempering – I think instead of having categories of tempering recipes, you should only have a single recipe that have grades of upgrades. That way, you find the recipe and upgrade the recipe as you find more of whatever thing you’re trying to boost is. The random factor should be on the recipe itself not on what you want to craft. You can make the actual crafting part a lot more expensive both in the form of gold and crafting materials when you want to boost an item, but what you want to craft should not be a frustrating process nor something you brick a well rolled item. Having this type of system in place would make crafting more deterministic but more satisfying because you have four meaningful item hunts in the base item, an upgradeable crafting recipe (beyond the first three levels), the actual materials used for tempering and raw gold. The reroll scrolls will become a moot thing too, which is good because that will help relegate the raid into a further useless state and hopefully motivate the devs to just remove it from the game or rethink how it operates if they ever want something like that in the game again.
• Masterworking – I don’t exactly hate the Masterworking aspect but the “start all over after spending a shit ton of currency and materials” part is beyond frustrating when you combine that with the randomness on numerous affixes. There are two ways to improve this system. The outright simplest is to introduce a way to only rollback the last major crit or the entire thing. Now, some people think that rolling back the entire thing is the only way to handle this to keep people engaged in the game. I think that part just frustrates people and causes people to drop off or not bother perfecting a masterwork because the mechanic itself isn’t engaging and just throws people into the same old, same old loop. It’s not really a challenge but a meaningless time sink. So having partial rollbacks would be the easiest thing.

  An alternate way of handling Masterworking is through some currency that like the scrolls to allow a partial rollback. The interface might open up if you have that currency where a second (or third) option shows up to lock in or go back to a level that you wanted. If you want a slightly more in depth version, introduce three levels of currency rollbacks, one per level. Heck, put these on Legion events and World Bosses just to give them some reason to farm.

  The other way is to allow a currency similar to the one I proposed for Tempering which would be exceptionally complex in effectively providing all the recipes for each type of attribute that can be Masterworked but are farmable and make Masterworking more deterministic. I think this would be the best option just because you want the reward to have the RNG behind it not the crafting part. You want to hunt for those rewards in a variety of activities. Once you find that reward, you should be able to use it immediately. That’s the real takeaway. Again, they have the correct system in place with Aspects and should use that as the model for crafting.

Key Take Aways

To summarize what I think are the main take aways for why this season is a success, I have some bullet points here:

• Item hunt in the form of Chaos Armor.
• End game really is in the hunt for Chaos Armor as a result of having a plethora of activities to obtain the item.
• More activities introduce in other parts of the content to create a more dynamic world.
• Immunity phases suck for farming. They only work in a situation where you have a one time challenge. That doesn’t really work in a farmable setting though because people are still locked behind the item farming.

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