I waited a few days after the talk/patch notes for the upcoming Season 11. I was both angry and resigned as a reaction to what I read. Blizzard had been talking about major changes to Tempering, Masterworking, combat, etc. but at least from what I saw it felt like a major step backwards in almost everything presented, which is why I took a few days to jot down my thoughts.
This blog post isn’t going to deconstruct every line item from the patch notes but mostly talk about what I thought was a nonsensical approach to how they are handling their systems. First, the Tempering part seems slightly better in that you get to select the tempering value but you can only choose one. Unless they’re providing two groups of values, I don’t see how this is any good. It simply makes their so-called crafting system even less interesting. I already wrote my thoughts on how Aspects should be the model for all their crafting systems so anything that isn’t more exciting than that just sounds bad on paper.
Masterworking feels almost as though it reverted in a way to the original system. It’s basically adding quality to a piece of gear. But again I don’t see a point here. Even though the current system isn’t great, it’s a lot more interesting than adding boring quality (e.g. damage or armor) to a piece of gear.
The reworks to armor and defenses with diminishing returns make less sense. There’s a lot of nerfs going into these new systems that pretty much sound as though the devs just are aiming to make the game more frustrating and the players more vulnerable. But really the core problem all along has been adding stupid multipliers which makes calculations impossible on various fronts. If they just addressed removing multipliers and concentrated on making more meaningful bonuses then they wouldn’t need these complex-for-no-good-reason type of systems in place.
The monster AI was something no one really asked for. I’m guessing that it’s mostly to force players to manually dodge more which to me isn’t a great mechanic because it’s just a waste of time. I think if they wanted this feature, they should’ve added it at the beginning to train players rather than add it this late into the game. I doubt it’s going to make the game more interesting.
The loot nerf while leveling as well as the removal of starting skill points will suck. I mean, it’s clear that the devs just want to waste more valuable player time to show “engagement” for their KPI run organization. I think if they had made this baseline from the beginning I wouldn’t feel as angry. But it’s silly to constantly fuck around with this process because you’re effectively jacking around with how the game plays rather than working on more end game systems and new content that would excite players.
The only thing that I thought wasn’t bad was the various new monster affixes. This is something that was badly needed to make the monsters more interesting in general. But they honestly should have just done that and not messed with the rest of the systems. I don’t know why they decided to choose this one spot to just toss out everything because it’s better when they could just roll out a single system to see how players would respond.
In general, I’m obviously very disappointed but I’m at the point where my expectations for anything Blizzard related has sunk so low that I view any success by them as serendipitous rather than a true stroke of genius. The game feels like it’s being run by a very bipolar team with no real vision leading them. The real thing people have wanted is more activities rather than running the same zones over and over. This last season felt reasonably especially with the chaos armor and rifts. They should be focusing on more options like that rather than giving tiny amounts of content each season. And every time I see one of these patches where things get thrown around juggled around again, I can’t help but wonder if there’s some person in that company who’s in bad need of being tossed into a rubber room.
Either way, I’m not going to play the PTR for sure just because I’ve got more important things to do. But from what I’ve seen, I don’t want to waste any time on this. It just looks really bad.
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