I cringed in depression upon seeing how quickly the Gauntlet feature went up and immediately got panned by top Diablo 4 streamers and their communities alike. Virtually, all the major content creators went back to Last Epoch unsurprisingly (which is where I should be but that’s a different conversation) or didn’t bother giving the Gauntlet a try at all, probably knowing what a failure it was going to be after watching the super cringe demo stream. Le sigh.

I don’t know what to tell Blizzard at this point. I’m hoping that the takeaway from the Gauntlet is that esports is a very niche idea and the implementation that they did was one of the worst takes for handling an esports element in a game that really didn’t need any leaderboards. Honestly, I have no idea what group of people “demanded” this feature. Everything about it is lame. You’re a hamster running around in a hamster box for one week before someone comes over and swaps the boxes. There’s nothing here that’ll set the world on fire for gamers. Also, the rewards are dumb. In short, there’s absolutely zero incentive to do this piece of garbage and I hope that Blizzard removes it from the game and apologizes for wasting everyone’s time.

That said, again I have to ask just whom the intended target audience this was aimed at and what group demanded this. It had to be a very small chorus of voices because everyone on reddit panned the feature immediately. All I can think of is that internally Blizzard has been trying to turn each of their properties into some esports model just because of the old Starcraft tournaments. But the old Starcraft game was heavily PVP based and fairly well balanced. Diablo 4 is an ARPG and the motivations for doing PVP and/or esports are low for most people who want to enjoy this genre of gaming. But like the forced season journey PVP, this Gauntlet thing should just be another lesson to Blizzard to focus on real end game content, which I will talk about afterwards.

So what do I mean by “real end game content?” This is a topic that people nebulously berate Blizzard/Diablo 4/their devs endlessly on forums. But no one truly defines what this means. Some people think that item hunts are “end game content.” While we have Uber Uniques in Diablo 4, the vast majority of the people hate it. Similarly, with Season 3, there are two unique support stones that have exceptionally low drop rates on top of a shitty boss that one has to farm in order to obtain and people abhor that. The biggest counterargument for this type of item hunt is that a Diablo 4 season ends up lasting only 3 months. For most players, the content itself provides enough enjoyment for about a week before it gets repetitive. So if a casual person is expected to get an item that comes up almost as a requirement in one of these high end build guides, more than likely they’re going to either quit or complain about the drop rate and the fact that the boss sucks. So while the concept of an item hunt is great, there are key nuances where it does not make for a great end game system.

What real end game content in an ARPG setting represents to me is the continuing progression of ones character. Most times this involves leveling. With Diablo 4, you have a few levels of end game progression:

• Leveling
• Paragon board
• Glyphs
• BiS gear
• Uber Uniques
• Statistics on gear

I find that most people probably just aim for the first three. You can get the right affixes/Aspects and key uniques for your build, but the super high end stuff such as perfect 925 gear with all the upper stats and Uber Uniques end up becoming a tedious grind that does not feel impactful because of how Blizzard favors RNG as their tool/drug of choice to make up for their laziness in actual creative content creation. And with regards to Uber Uniques, once you get the ones you care for, you probably won’t be extending your play much longer because you’ve found the items you needed, which makes the actual hunt for the items moot.

However, in each step of the process, the key psychological factor in engagement is the notion of power progression. In the first three cases, the power progression is somewhat noticeable. An Uber Unique would be a massive power progression but it’s too rare to be taken seriously for most players. The last one is so tiny that only the most dedicated aim for it. There is a 7th type but it’s too whimsical at the moment, but i will address it here: season powers.

So season powers are great because they do augment your character in some manner. However, they are limited by the season. And the developers’ method of re-incorporating them back into the game post-season is through items at the moment. So this type of power progression nullifies itself because you get some weird situation where you’re sacrificing power to gain power. And not every build can take advantage of this situation since they are completely item dependent.

I’ve argued that the way seasons are being handled is a disaster and not good because of how they’re more developer rather than player focused. These seasons are used to allow the developers to experiment and go ham with powers. If the system in place fails though, it’s the player that gets penalized (well, we don’t know if a massive failure goes into the D4 team’s annual review but….). The problem is that if a season succeeds there’s no benefit because the developers just indolently reincorporate the positive powers into the system based on some KPIs/data they mine.

This makes no sense to me. What Blizzard should look for is a success of the system and figuring out how to incorporate that system into the core of the game. Path of Exile currently handles Leagues in a reasonable fashion. Everyone at this stage realizes that Path of Exile Leagues are beta content being wide tested. Hence, the social engineering aspect with the league mechanic where it appears in every zone to almost force players to interact with it.

For Diablo 4, I think that seasons from here on out need to incorporated as part of the core of the game. No more here’s more aspects or unique items. That system makes no sense as is because there’s no way to add more affixes to gear. So if they continue to use this methodology, the season powers will just become irrelevant since there’s no space. They would have to redo Aspects entirely from the ground up, which is why I suggest just ditching the idea of incorporating season powers as anything directly item related (meaning as uniques and Aspects). i liked the mechanics of augmenting gear like the blood things for vampiric powers or the stones for the construct then just having a tab to allow for users to cycle through their season powers. Then the only adjustments would be if a power is bugged.

And the reason why I want it separate is to help struggling builds which leads me to my next topic on the Minion/Summoner Necromancer build. For reference, I’m using the one on Maxroll, even though it doesn’t appear to be updated. Even with the update in buffing some base Necromancer speed (since they lack a true movement skill like other classes) and the damage/life of minions, this build still isn’t anything to write home about. I found that you eventually hit a wall with just the basic Aspects and even that Ring of the Sacrilegious before the game play becomes very tedious. Let me talk about the basics.

• Passive play style where your minions do the bulk of the damage
• You waste 3 skill points on a basic ability just to progress your tree
• Most of the game play is you cursing something and occasionally having your priest heal your minions
• You have one button to assault either a group or a boss
• Corpse Tendrils doesn’t really enough on its own and truthfully can be frustrating since you’re not doing a lot of concentrated AoE damage
• Bloost Mist doesn’t do a lot on its own beyond a GTFO move
• Bone Storm is cool but it’s not up enough.
• Lidless Wall, for whatever reason, isn’t factored into the build except for “speed 100s” which seems to defy this build since you can’t kill things fast enough
• The AI sucks and there’s no manner to help you focus your target
• Against certain situations/bosses, you just have no DPS because your skeleton minions are fragile
• There’s too many aspects that are required to do the bare minimal to get some damage out of your minions and not enough space on your build to fit everything in
• You can’t use the new Vampire aspects anywhere
• It’s just a subpar build for all but the laziest of people
• The Maxroll guide doesn’t even factor in the Malignant Ring even though at least two of the key abilities are on your action bar.
• The fact that you need a different unique ring at a certain point to make this build take off sucks.
• You only have one AoE option and that’s for your golem to do use their ability. This blows donkeys.
• You KNOW that Blizzard is hesitant to empowering minions in a passive manner.
• It’s unfun for non-Minion builds to feel “so lonely.” I hate the Sacrifice aspect to Necromancers.

This is a daunting list and in my case, I managed to find all the Blood Surge gear. So why even bother with a minion build?

Well, to be frank, I wanted to try it out and see how far I could get. It’s getting to the point where I don’t know what I can do to make this build feel better except that Mendeln ring and I doubt it’ll fix all the core issues. But here’s what I think can be done in the future to correct these issues:

• Get rid of the Book the way it is and make it augment your minions.
• Move the skeleton ability into a core or basic ability that you can at least target an enemy. That way you’re not wasting those precious skill points. Either that or have some generic “minion attack” ability that’s either a core or basic one. The two minion actions on the action bar should just go away.
• Another way to handle targeting is to have Decrepify or Corpse Explosion be the things that cause your minions to target an enemy. I vote for Decrepify because that Sacrilegious ring would mess things up with the auto Corpse Explosion
• The priest healing should become a passive that you can spec into where the priest heals your minions periodically based on an interval that shortens with the more points you put into that passive.
• Merge Blood Getter’s and Occult Dominion into a single aspect. I don’t get why these should be separate. You’re already struggling as a Necromancer for room for Aspects. I would add that Frenzied Dead and/or Hardened Bones should get merged with that new aspect or a separate aspect. Honestly, I think getting rid of the +2 skeletons and just making 6/5 the standard for skeletons should be the move here. The only way the Aspects would be useful is if we saw something like +6-11 skeletons rather than a mediocre +2. And you need a big range to compensate for the lack of AoE.
• Doing the above would free up 2 spots on your gear. Then you can move Grasping Veins to your gloves and run the Mendeln Ring in parallel with the Sacrilegious ring. Also, you could use the Golem Aspect.
• Get rid of Reanimation aspect and use that on Kalan’s Edict because Kalan’s Edict is useless. Also, buff the damage/attack speed in that passive.
• That frees up a third aspect for the Skeleton Mage’s cold blizzard aspect (which actually is cool)
• You now should have one more free aspect for at least one Vampire Aspect or a movement/boot aspect or the Lidless Wall unique.
• Unfortunately, you still can’t really use any Uber Uniques. So I think just getting rid of the +2 skeletons aspects would probably be the best thing and make those permanent additions. Then you can put a few more defensive Aspects since there’s not a lot besides Disobedience and the Bone Storm one. Or you could have more room for Uber Uniques or even the Blood Moon Breeches which you can’t even use because your Aspects are all filled up.
• Your minions need a kind of cleave ability similar to how a Witch Doctor’s Gargantuan had one (except that build also had three smaller Gargantuans that were super powerful). Honestly, Blizzard needs to look at the Helltooth Gargantuan build and Zunimassa’s Poison Dart fetish build to see how they handled minions for both passive and active damage. They already have a precedent that was done reasonably well but in their ancient age, dementia has caught up with the company.
• I think passive minions are great for when you’re studying a map or teleporting back to a town. So Blizzard shouldn’t fear a passive minion build being reasonable. But they shouldn’t fear an active minion build either.
• I would love to be able to use Corpse Explosion in this. Or at least allow for clicking on the skeletons button to force them to attack a target. I’ve noticed in Helltides there are some containers that require an attack and the only ability I can use is my Bone Storm. That’s stupid and beyond frustrating. So getting rid of the two active abilities for skeletons and minions in favor of more room on the action bar would be another option. Or at least make one of these things more useful and avoid the problem of wasted skill points.
• I can’t emphasize enough how stupid it is where you’re forced to take a basic skill and just waste points. I’m sure there are other instances of this but that just shows the stupidity of the layout of the current skill twig.

I think minion summoner Necromancers need a lot of work. At minimal, a good chunk of the work is cleaning up the badly done passive. The second thing is rethinking the priest and getting minions to attack better. And if the plan is to not give minions any more AoE, that’s fine but the compensation should be some sort of active skill in combination with a larger number of skeletons. Someone also mentioned +1 golem.  I would think that either could be handled through some paragon passive or a unique similar to the Short Man’s Finger. Nonetheless, you still won’t resolve your core issues. But my suggestions I think are a good start (without seeing the revamped itemization)

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