Admittedly, I gave Season 9 a try just because I was interested in checking out the Sorcerer Hydra build. Then I read that the Companion Druid build was good and that there was a new Necromancer Summoner build playstyle. With these available, I figured it was worth giving the season a shot.
My main reaction to the season 9 with the updated Nightmare dungeons is that everything feels the same. There is the new Belial boss that I hadn’t done since I skipped Season 8 but I hated the pulled out camera view because it’s hard to see your character. On the other hand, Belial died so fast I couldn’t tell what killed him. The other major bosses like Duriel I heard had gained a god awful immunity phase. I read that in PTR they’re getting rid of it but it just felt so unnecessary. Most of the time, the loot is not what you need so why bother putting up an artificial barrier for no good reason outside of satiating a tiny niche audience who thinks they want a challenge? I’ve always said that farmable bosses shouldn’t have ridiculous mechanics since you’re probably going to be doing them over again to search for that one item.
Of course, the big thing supposedly was the Elevated Nightmare Dungeon with multiple levels and affixes. This mostly just felt like the older dungeons where they added back the prefixes. Once in a while the rewards were okay-ish, but on average the only thing really worth doing is the boss at the end (not the dungeon boss but the big guy) for the loot. I didn’t think the new system was anything special because you only are aware of the affixes when you tab into the map or when you first try to read the fine print. In either case, it’s really hard to tell what’s going on because you probably will forget. But the real pain is that there’s no agency to the system. It’s just random per level. So you can’t control the bonuses and penalties at all which stinks. Honestly, most of it isn’t bad; more annoying than anything like when you get the dreaded shadow monolith chase thing.
But the game just feels so dull. I really wish they’d kept all the previous seasons’ activities just because I want other progression systems besides the designated seasonal one. And I want those other seasonal activities to have their own rewards to motivate people into doing them. Otherwise, they’re just glorified Helltides.
Going back to the three builds I tried, I will say that Hydra Wizard was a ton of fun. Companion Druid also was fun and in the best state I’ve seen. Minion Necromancer with the Archmages only became a thing by the end for me because the two uniques were tough to find. But by that point, I think I just felt too burnt out on the game. I honestly wanted to try another Spiritborn but I can’t bring myself to start another character. It just doesn’t feel worth it because I’m not doing anything much different. I don’t even want to grind up my glyphs anymore and have zero motivation to chase after Mythics.
Then the season journey just died for me. It’s too dull and nothing really worth doing at this stage.
I am looking forward slightly to next season just because of the Chaos Armor uniques. That might change things up somewhat. But I haven’t really heard of any single crazy build coming out. And the season mechanic itself looks dull. If the Chaos Armor feature went to core, I might skip the entire season because the mechanics seem dull. But I’m hoping people can convince Blizzard to keep the new Chaos Armor. There really needs to be more permanent features in the game like this and different ways to obtain these things. Either way, I’m not all that happy about the current and future state of Diablo.
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