Diablo 4: Season 11 Current Thoughts

So I decided to get myself an early Christmas present this year as I did not anticipate the dropping of the pre-order for the Diablo 4 expansion set to release next year around late April. This time around, I only bought the standard edition because I already felt like I was being a sucker but what the hell. Despite my initial misgivings, I figured I was bored and needed a distraction. Even if I didn’t need the expansion to play the current season, the extra stash tab and character slots would be things I wanted on top of the paladin class (despite starting with a Sorcerer). Regardless, I figured it was a good time to write down my current experience with this season and maybe some thoughts on the upcoming expansion based on the highlights from the official website.

First, my initial dismay was towards some of the revamps with the old system namely the alteration of Temperings and Masterworking along with some changes for monsters and progression. Both Tempering and Masterworking required a rework regardless but the way they were implemented on this iteration weren’t what I had hoped. I do like that Tempering is more static with only the values being the random part. I read that you can Temper indefinitely and can eventually hit a special Tempering to get some greater affix. I just dislike that it’s uninteresting because of how you can only choose a single Temper while there’s a massive list of options that did not get filtered down. It feels like more clean up needs to occur here as the sheer volume of potentially unused Tempering recipes are most likely going to go to waste.

Masterworking itself is all about quality with the final act giving some sort of a bonus. But the cost is extremely high. With the seasonal Sanctification power, you’re more motivated to Masterwork a lot earlier even on lower tiered items (750 item power) to get that final bonus. They give you 25 levels along with a final level before the Sanctification can be used but oddly you don’t need to hit the Masterworking 25+ times so I have no idea why the number 25 was introduced. Once the season is done and Sanctification is no longer an option, Masterworking won’t feel as impactful I think so your motivation for doing this won’t be as high since Sanctification is something that can make this option interesting.

With the monster affix and type rework, I do agree that something needed to change here. I do think it was good introducing more abilities to monsters to make them more interesting overall. But I feel that the increased aggressiveness wasn’t the way to go. I can’t really appreciate the individual abilities because there’s too much visual clutter. There’s a few abilities that I do look out for especially that stupid sword that follows you around. Most of these things feel more annoying than anything else and that they’re just around to make you dodge more stuff. And people are describing this as becoming more like Diablo 3 because of the general increase for the pacing of the game. While that might be the case, I feel that something is off. Diablo 3’s later iterations especially the Visions is where I think Diablo 4 is heading; the problem with the Visions is that it felt like a mess. It was the only way to really challenge high end players but it just felt like a mess stitched together for what they had available. But I think Diablo 4 should really attempt to avoid the clusterfuck gaming style that ARPGs seem to cater towards lately.

From there though, the other issues are stuff like Toughness. Once more Diablo 4 has been called out to using more of the Diablo 3 system. But Toughness is such a generic and nonsensical idea. Like why even bother having resistances and armor at this point as values? I don’t even know how they contribute because they supposedly have diminishing returns. So what can I even aim for here? The problem when you have a nonsensical system like this is that you have no clue what the ceiling ought to be. If the goal was clarity, I think that the change did the complete opposite. Now, I have even less idea of what I should be doing here beyond “a bigger number is always better.” But having stats like all resistance or specific resistances now seem silly because I can’t easily track what those ought to be. Same with armor.

If I sound like I’m complaining or being straight stupid here, let me explain by comparing this to a system that works: classic AD&D. AD&D had a very straight forward armor class system. Heavier armors gave better AC ratings. Magic improved upon that base AC as well as support items and modifiers that came from certain stats like Dexterity. Your range was from 10 (the worst) to -10 (the best). Someone would roll a d20 to determine using a hit chart whether or not they scored a hit. Modifiers would be applied from bonuses like specialization, attributes and magic as well as any other ones at the DM’s discretion. But it was very clear how this system worked and it made having the goal of trying to obtain a low AC.

With the way D4 (and other ARPGs work for that matter), the real issue is that when you die, it’s often because something very un-obvious/non-intuitive happens complimented by nonsensical systems and multipliers that seem unfair. Stuff like The Pit at one point or the revamped bosses where they would apply some stacking debuff were just awful because effectively they were used as a kind of nine lives counter during a fight. Some of those things were obvious but a lot of the problem for those fights the ground effects were difficult to impossible to see. As the number of effects continue to bolster up, it makes the situation more non-intuitive. But one shots are the worst where you go from having full life to nothing. Those aren’t fun because it shows that no matter how many defenses you have stacked up, there’s nothing you can do in that situation outside of purely avoiding that spot. It’s not really fun nor creative to me. I think the better way of handling things is to slowly drain health and induce panic because it forces a player to use their potions and abilities more judiciously. Now, there is one instance of a situation where I can say that notion was used but let me continue to talk about the season and experience.

Unlike previous seasons, this one strips you of everything down to zero. So you have no skill points, no paragons from the old Altars and the initial progress feels slower. But that first few levels of struggling doesn’t last too long because you can just wait for a Helltide to spawn where you find some other players doing the mini boss and leech some levels and gear. At least for me, I easily gained my first 10 levels just hovering around the boss area in the Helltide because several paladins were respawning the boss and blasting it down quickly. I suppose without the help from said paladins maybe the journey would’ve been more painful at that stage but I don’t see what’s different beyond creating an artificial barrier to prolong the leveling experience.

Gearing felt worse but it’s more about the levels you’re at in terms of obtaining better gear. That part hasn’t really changed too much besides at some point, you still just find worthless items. What sucks is that the materials you need to do stuff like imprinting early on seem more limited. On the other hand, gold is plentiful again which means that the developers still haven’t figured out the correct balance between crafting materials, gold and progression despite having 11 seasons. But that’s a whole different topic.

A lot of people complained about Strongholds but I don’t mind them too much. I think they’re one spot that provides a reliable level or so along with items and tempering recipes. I generally start approaching Strongholds around level 15 and there isn’t anything challenging. With the current season, they have unlocked all portals which is great because they revamped Renown too. The only remaining unlocked portals are those gated behind Strongholds.

And I did just mention Renown being reworked. Instead of using the old Renown system, they baked the new one into the progress of the season journey. So your additional skill and paragon points are tied that way to your progress. Since I haven’t created a second character, I don’t know if you can have multiple season journeys but I suspect that you can’t. That said, I’ve generally thought the season journey was bogus because of how a single task could prevent you from unlocking the whole thing such as an annoying PVP one, grouping, etc. Seeing more things being tied to the season journey just stinks to me.

In addition, part of that journey now is connected to the revamped Capstone dungeons. I really hated these from the beginning just because they felt so arbitrary and pointless. And this time around nothing has changed except that they incorporated some of the worst ideas to annoy people and force people to another funnel. To confound things even worse, there’s more than two stages you need to get through. I haven’t completed them all but the first one was by far the most annoying because of how they reused the traps from season 3 along with the old health depletion thing. Health depletion mechanics just stink especially in a random mess of a zone like that. After that first one, I didn’t encounter anymore like that but there was a darkness type of zone reminiscent of that one stronghold. Oddly, the end boss for these generally were easier than the bulk of the dungeon. So this whole trial thing never made any sense to me. But it does disturb me that in all likelihood I’ll have to continue doing them each season onward (until enough people complain on the forums of how stupid of an idea this is)

There are the “perks” or what they’re calling the “Divine Gifts”. These make little sense to me in terms of how they’re supposed to be used because apparently one adds a “challenge” but can be cancelled by putting the corresponding gift in. I figure by now all the perks/seasonal powers are just ways for the devs to experiment with future updates but what they should really concentrate on is a better UI/UX. At least at the moment, I only use the “inner” or beneficial gifts because I have no idea how the cancellation part works. I do know you acquire them from the season progress with that angel dude but I can’t tell if you need a corresponding level to “cancel” the negative aspect. I might just plug them all in to see what happens but I do think this will eventually tie into the expansion. At least for now, these gifts aren’t very interesting to me outside of the ones that supposedly are killing players during world boss fights.

I did a single Infernal Horde run just to see what changed after the previous season ended. They still have the Bartuc fight but I have no idea why. There is one task for the season journey to fight Bartuc but beyond that I don’t understand why it was necessary to keep him outside of having a second type of fight. You do receive quite a bit of reward from that fight but I can’t differentiate that from the main reward cache without the Chaos Armor attached. Also, apparently, they hard nerfed the Obdurite from the rewards here and most places except the Horadric rooms in dungeons which stinks because those areas are pretty bad. I suppose they needed a reason to do them but it makes most Dungeons almost worthless.

Speaking of Dungeons, the big thing I’ve yet to encounter are mythic goblin dungeons. I read that’s where most people are getting a good chunk of their mythics along with boss fights. Some people wonder why there’s more mythics this season but to me it’s obviously tied into the Sanctification deal. Even though they got rid of the “bricking” effect, you still will need to farm up a mythic to get the ideal Sanctification effect. So it made sense to increase the overall droprate for mythics in this season.

Next, I will say that I did use a few Dungeons early on once I started to obtain rares to get entry level Aspects. So there’s a few rare instances for lower levels where Dungeons do have a role especially early in a season. But in general, most of those Aspects aren’t great so the idea of tying a dungeon to certain Aspects feel quite antiquated. So I hope that eventually this part gets changed. I think one way to update this would be to assign groups of Aspects to these dungeons rather than a single one. Then at the end of the dungeon, the player can choose which aspect they want to unlock. Maybe it’ll be class bound or generic. But increasing the early Aspect pool would at least give more motivation to doing Dungeons early on. Or perhaps if they want to have a certain level of an Aspect, they could have a mechanism that allows an increase in difficulty for better rewards, which includes a higher level Aspect that gets unlocked.

Now, let’s talk a bit about Sanctification as this probably is the one part people are raving about the most. In a previous blog, I addressed the issue of the Aspect bloat. Sanctification addresses part of the issue in allowing people to imprint legendary effects (including other mythics!) onto any item. In typical Blizzard fashion, they decided to make the Sanctification process random and in the case of legendaries, the item could become brickable. Some people have described Sanctification as the Path of Exile equivalent of using a Vaal orb where an item no longer can receive further modifications. People over on reddit have stated that by accident they Sanctified their item before adding sockets. So there’s a bunch of UX problems that probably need addressing.

I think for a single season, the idea of Sanctification is fine. I heavily dislike how it still leans into RNG though and the idea that it can brick an item (or at least make it unmodifiable). But it’s worse than Tempering and Masterworking because you can potentially lose an item. In my case, I’m at a point where I have a wand that I Sanctified with the hydra aspect and have been using this thing because I haven’t been able to find anything better. I did find the new Orsivane mace but only at item power 750. And I’m missing a lot of Obdurite to complete the Masterworking process. It seems that this problem isn’t bad in that it prolongs my journey in the game and that I have a clear goal to hit. But it is very annoying especially when you’re stuck with a shitty aspect like the hydra one which drains all your mana.

Nonetheless, the essence of Sanctification is what I had described in my blog post where you would want a special currency (like Heavenly Seals) to perform this action. However, I think that you should be able to choose the Tempering or Aspect you apply rather than leave something like that to chance. I think if they want to keep Sanctification it shouldn’t have this level of RNG where you probably would want a BiS type of legendary power especially if it’s a difference maker given that our gear slots have become overly crowded. The power of the Sanctification really should be separate powers that make them unique for the season if they want to reuse the idea of Sanctification. It’s similar to the D3 version where just one slot could receive a build defining ability (e.g. the Witch Doctor one that auto summoned Gargantuans and Zombie Dogs).

So I still think that they should introduce two currencies for the ex-pac to get a similar but more deterministic effect for adding a new Aspect and another for the missing Tempering. It would make more sense to do this in the ex-pac since we will be seeing more levels for the characters as well as an increase in difficulty as per the hints on the website.

Now, that I’m starting to talk about the ex-pac itself, I think it’s a good time to highlight the new features:

• Two new classes (one which will be announced)
• Major skill tree rework
• New skill “variants” for every class
• Increase in level cap
• Loot filter
• Bonus skill “variants” across each class
• A “fresh take” on crafting systems like the iconic Horadric Cube
• Set bonuses with new Talisman
• New Skovos region “now ruled by the Oracle and Amazon Queen”
• New endgame which includes:
  • New activities
  • Major system updates
  • Designed around “choice, mastery and high-stakes rewards”
• Craft War Plans for endgame progression
  • Advance through selections of your favorite activities
  • Apply a range of modifiers to earn covetous rewards
• Echoing Hatred (unending mobs)
• Fishing

Let’s break each of these down.

Two New Classes (with Paladin being one)

With the recent game awards, the pre-order/expac was announced and the Paladin dropped that night. However, a second class has been left off the table and I think the new region of Skovos as per the description provides an ample hint at what that class will be: Amazon. I’m guessing that Blizzard is going to lean heavily into nostalgia by not only reviving the Paladin but the Amazon class as well. My theory is that the Amazon will either be a Dexterity class or a Willpower class (since Spiritborn ended up becoming the second Dexterity class in the game). But it would seem strange since I still associate the old Diablo 2 Amazon with the thrown javelin as being a Dexterity heavy class. I could be wrong here but I imagine that they still have room for other classic classes like the Assassin (although that probably was rolled into the Rogue), Monk (which people think is what the Spiritborn are) or even Witch Doctor (which we partly received a potential preview of through Season 7’s powers)

Major Skill Tree Rework and Variants

Many people have ridiculed the Diablo 4 skill tree as a “twig” which leaves little choice and mostly meaningless ones at best. There was a small preview on the site that hints at what this new “tree” will look like. Mostly, it looks like small support nodes with a few key nodes. What I really hope for in this revision though is something that goes beyond +10% damage or whatever. The skill portion should act as a flavor for how a build operates such as how projectiles might fly out vs a wide projectile that penetrates. Or perhaps you want your Amazon that uses Javelins to hurl out electrified and poisonous bolts that arc around in a circle. That to me is what a skill tree should look like in crafting the way your build operates. That way, when I choose an elemental Tempering effect for instance on my weapon, that effect bolsters up the flavor I chose. Then you have an actual build because it’s unique to how you want to design the character.

But that still leaves the paragon board on the table. I’ve argued that the paragon board has never made sense visually nor purpose-wise. It’s just bonus points that do nothing except for a few key nodes. I really detested when they cut down the total number of boards to five and put most of the emphasis on using The Pit to improve glyphs to a bland number. That whole system to me is trash because it feels like meaningless busy work. At this stage, I doubt they’ll revise the paragon board but it needs severe work to really stand out. I’ve argued that the skill tree should be the flavor of the build and that the paragon board should be where the numbers go in fine tuning how the numbers on the tree operate. But that would almost conflict with Tempering and to a lesser degree Masterworking.

Increase in Level Cap

I think this was expected given that we are going to see a power creep no matter what. But I think with the preview of the revamped skill tree, the increase in the level cap would correspondingly give us additional skill points. This will force most people to buy the expansion since otherwise you will be hampered without all the benefits of the end game much like not having Vessel of Hatred.

Loot Filter

With the current season adding a new stat to legendaries, I imagine that finding the “perfect” item is going to become more difficult. But given the current loot structure, I still don’t see a good reason that a Loot Filter is really needed. I think they just need a better search mechanism in the inventory so you can filter by stat. But the bulk of the items one finds end up just getting trashed since the only things that matter in the end game are those with higher GAs. So I have no idea why this was necessary beyond the filtering aspect inside of ones inventory. If it’s a ground filter, I think it’s pointless just because people are going to be picking up almost everything.

Bonus Skill “Variants” Across Each Class

I’m addressing this bullet point separately from the previous one because of the word “bonus”. Again, judging from the preview image, my only interpretation here is that the skill tree is increasing in size and that the little flavors that currently exist will be expanded upon. For instance, there’s Wizard’s Ball Lightning and Mage’s Ball Lightning. So I’m guessing we’ll see a few more of these types. Now, it would be cool if you could choose more than one type but I’m not hopeful in seeing this.

A “fresh take” on Crafting Systems Like the Iconic Horadric Cube

So I’m very curious how this part plays out. The revamp to Tempering and Masterworking to me were less than thrilling. They did one right thing in making Tempering selectable as opposed to RNG based. However, the rest of the crafting is still extremely bland. Now, the choice of wording here is interesting because you need to focus on a few things. First, what does “fresh take” mean? Does this mean we’ll see something completely out of the blue, innovative that doesn’t exist in the world of ARPGs? Because you can’t just create nothing out of nothing.

Second, it’s obvious that they’re re-introducing the Horadric Cube (as opposed to Kanai’s Cube from D3). But are they going to make crafting mysterious like the Horadric Cube or will they provide a clear recipe list like Kanai’s Cube? Also, what exactly can be craftable? Most people I think used the Horadric Cube (besides the quest) for things like gems and runewords. But gems and runes can already be crafted via the Jeweler. Kanai’s Cube did more like upgrading a rare to a legendary. So will we see a portable Horadric Cube? Will it be the thing that solves the annoying back and forth trek to a town to handle our inventory? Will the Horadric Cube do more than just crafting?

Also, it’s important to talk about the vague word “like” here. In this instance, the Horadric Cube is tossed as a name drop to demonstrate that this will be one major change/update to crafting. But we already have received the updated Tempering and Masterworking (neither of which to me are “a fresh take”). So will we see additional changes? Because I think we need a plethora of crafting options that go beyond Aspects imprints, Tempering, Masterworking and Enchanting. Sanctifying is a step in the right direction but it does need more work.

Set Bonuses with New Talisman

This has the potential to be both exciting and disturbing at the same time. People criticized Diablo 3’s sets to be far too restraining and unimaginative. I have to agree because you’re given strict builds with very little wiggle room for customization. On top of that, sets enforced a certain playstyle where a good chunk of builds were relegated to a few skills and leaving no other choices. To a degree, we have a similar situation in Diablo 4’s current state where your ability to mix and match is still limited to the Aspects and Uniques that define builds. But the positive is that you still have wiggle room. When Chaos Armor came about in Season 10, I think it demonstrated that having variable slots for Uniques made builds more exciting just because at the very least you increased the item hunt and could move things around more beyond the basic power creep.

What I hope these “set” bonuses avoid are restricted play styles and gear slot positions. Because the item mentioned here is a new Talisman (which might be a new gear slot), I don’t think we’ll see the same issue. I mean having actual set pieces of gear would pretty much invalidate the entire equipment system. But I can see at the very least Blizzard trying to enforce a play style with specific sets of skills grouped together. That part worries me more, even though we already face that issue now mostly. I just hope that the bonuses don’t go into either extreme (e.g. +500 dex for these items or must use these skills to receive generic multipliers to defense/offense)

New Skovos Region

I forget if we’ve encountered this area before. However, it does sound like we’ll be in the jungle with the “Amazon Queen” being the ruler in this region. But I feel like the Kurast region already had that jungle flavor so I’m not sure what they’ll accomplish in this new region. That said something did hit me just now where I may change my speculation about the new class from the Amazon to a Witch Doctor. My main reasoning here is that season 7 showed us the Witch Doctor powers. Also, I did not address the mysterious “Oracle” fellow, who probably is some shamanic spellcaster. And with the Spiritborn class, I feel that overlaps very closely to the original Amazon (except for the missing Javelin). So I’m wondering if we’ll see a hybrid spellcaster/melee type instead.

New Endgame

Obviously, this is something sorely lacking at the moment. If you think about the expansion and what it provided as new end game activities, the main things were the Kurast Undercity and The Dark Citadel. I’m not including the seasons up until now because most of the things were just variants on seasonal powers and updates to existing systems. Also, I’m not taking into consideration the item hunt. I’m only thinking of what was delivered on day one as end game artifacts for Vessel of Hatred. Kurast Undercity was the keeper between the two because it was quietly released rather than something hyped in a campfire session. However, the Dark Citadel pretty much was DoA as my blogged discussed and along with the PVP zones are practically are unused.

I don’t know if we’ll see a new PVP system or a revamped Dark Citadel but neither were hinted at as part of this new end game system. I personally think both were so abysmally received that they should simply be discarded and used for something else. But it has been mentioned that we should be seeing “new endgame activities”. Here’s a small list of things I hope we won’t see:

• PVP
• More Forced Group/Coordinated Content (or them attempting to salvage the Dark Citadel in any form)
• Stupid puzzle rooms (the ones that you occasionally see and skip each time in the Cellars)
• More stupid timed content (we have more than enough to last a life time)
• More stupid escort missions

I feel these things just kill a game. Blizzard is notoriously bad at making these things work but inflicting unending pain and annoyance to players when they’re introduced. What I do hope to see is something like Season 7 where we had a wide array of activities to complete. Even if Season 7 was the pinnacle of the ridiculous power/item creep that had a short shelf life, I thought it was fun while it lasted.

That said, by now Diablo has a fair number of seasons in terms of potentially reusable content. Some might not work out so well like the old Vampire season which ended up getting rolled into Aspects. But I wouldn’t mind seeing some of these things reappear in some other shape just to have more to do. I mean with the addition of Chaos Armor and Sanctification, maybe the choice is to remove the vampire aspects and just keep them as toned down powers that need to be farmed up on a season themed rotational base that occurs once every few hours. Or the little Construct with the trapped dungeons. They may have reused the assets for the Capstone Dungeon revamp but it doesn’t prevent them from pushing out a revised version of that season.

Lastly, let’s talk about the key line: Designed around “choice, mastery and high-stakes rewards.” I think the next section will go into more detail but the high level point here is the thought process. Since Season 4 with the introduction of the Profane Mindcage, people enjoyed the idea of having something to increase difficulty. We’ve seen more flavors of this increased difficulty through features like the Seething Opal from Season 6, the Rootholds from Season 7 and to a lesser extent the revamping of dungeon sigils. So it’s clear they have the technology to allow players to customize their overall experience but at this stage it’s been mostly through seasonal mechanics that have evolved over time. In turn, the idea of choice/agency is what I think a lot of veteran ARPG fans have been really hungering as part of the end game experience with Diablo 4.

Now, the idea of “mastery” is a common theme in Blizzard games. There’s an internal adage, “Easy to play, hard to master.” It’s clear at this stage that both the new Tower feature and the Pit are meant to be at the core of the mastery aspect. Combining that with leaderboards and the previously mentioned choice pieces, we’ll probably see the game evolve where we’ll see more options for how the overall end game will play out, judging by the various features we’ve seen evolve season by season.

Craft War Plans for Endgame Progression

This feature sounds like the concrete implementation of the previous point’s thesis. The main two sub points were the idea of “advancing through selections of your favorite activities” and “applying a range of modifiers to earn covetous rewards.” So I think what we’ll see is that the War Plans themselves as going to be part of a craftable system like Path of Exile maps that apply an array of modifiers that increase the danger and reward for an activity type. The abstract notion sounds like a lot of potential and we’ve probably seen small glimpses as the devs were experimenting in each season. Now, at least for Dungeons, I did remark in that same blog post how we needed a currency similar to the Mindcages to handle this. So I think War Plans are meant to be applied to most things. So the question is what exactly will go on?

Part of my skepticism is that the “elevated” dungeons that came from the revision from season 9 were a dud to me. There was no agency whatsoever but just more modifiers that got added but didn’t necessarily make the dungeon more interesting nor challenging. I found most of it to be irritating because you would just have to deal with a situation like the Stormbane thing when you encountered one. I like the idea of a progressive dungeon that increases in difficulty with a corresponding reward system. But I do think there should be some choice involved.

I’m guessing that we’ll see a combination of a feature like a Profane Mindcage and/or Seething Opals where these plans are used as a temporary buff that gets applied to all activities. I don’t know how generic they’re going to make them because your outdoor vs dungeon settings are going to differ greatly. Also, beyond just dungeons and general outdoor content, will we see these War Plans affect things like World Bosses, Uber Bosses, The Pit, The Tower and Infernal Hordes? Because at least with Infernal Hordes, it already provides its own mechanism that has these ideas applied. Having the War Plans being used here is almost like having a hat on a hat. And The Pit would be a terrible place to apply this idea because you don’t see rewards until the end. That makes these War Plans very context dependent.

Echoing Hatred

So there’s very little detail on this activity. It clearly sounds like a new end game activity. Based on the wording, I’m guessing that it might be similar to Echoing Nightmares except there’s no context on what the reward would be. Since we’ll eventually get the Tower (for leaderboards), I’m not certain what the motivation for having the Echoing Hatred will be. Will it be a new variant on Glyph leveling activities? Will we get a new currency that allows us to boost our gear even further like Augments from Diablo 3?

You have to figure that the devs aren’t very imaginative. Or if they are, they won’t be allowed to show it. So I wouldn’t doubt seeing something similar to Echoing Nightmares being re-implemented here.

Fishing

The post only (flowery) describes this activity as “find respite from demon-flaying by Fishing through the perilous waterways of Sanctuary” In short, we’re getting fishing from World of Warcraft. I’m sure this is just going to be another mini game but the real question is what’s the point? There’s no food in Diablo and no cooking in relation. So is this just going to be for having a fancy fishing pole and having an alternate leaderboard? Will there be contests or rewards for finding fish? This is such an out of place feature that I have no idea what to make of it outside of how some internal fanboys/girls are just re-implementing something from WoW because they could.

Clearly Missing Things

Despite all these “new” things coming up, there’s a lot of key missing components still. First, the most obvious one to me is the lack of improvement for Clans/Guilds. I still have no idea why there’s Clans in the game at this stage. They have no clear purpose outside of gathering friends for a group. But I’d prefer just to use a simple Battle.net feature instead of having another group feature in the game.

Strongholds remain uninspiring with even less of a purpose given that they were used for the expac as a way to gain quick levels. With all the town portals unlocked except a handful, most Strongholds remain pointless except in cases where you might need a quick level or want tempering recipes. Maybe even a Legion event but there aren’t enough people who do Legion events anymore to make Strongholds worth doing for the average person. I still think that Strongholds should be coupled to their name (an actual fortress with a special event) and used in conjunction with a Clan to make both sides more meaningful. But I doubt we’ll see any revamps for either before the expansion launches.

PVP updates. Not that I want any but I still think they should just remove those two zones completely. I’m sure there’s some real niche use cases but the bulk of the player base won’t touch them. Blizzard has the data and it should inform them that these spots are a massive waste.

Dark Citadel updates. Again, I don’t really want anything from this in its current state. I think it should be removed or changed such that a solo player is able to fully use a party of mercenaries to do this content. But it was a bad idea with terrible execution.

Non-Helltide zone Whisper quests. Besides, Dungeons, World Bosses and whatever season task is required, are there any good reasons to do anything besides Helltide in the outdoor zones? I think the Whisper quests work well at the moment when they overlap with a Helltide. By themselves, they seem dead except possibly in the instances where there’s downtime for Helltides. Beyond that though, there’s almost zero incentive to do them, which is why I argue bringing back old season zone content would at least boost the non-Helltide Whisper quests usage. Like Season 7 did a good job of combining Whispers inside of the season zones. It gave you a lot of things to do. If you had something like the Vampire zone from Season 2 mixed inside of a zone with Whispers, then you would have a good deal of motivation to do both types of content.

Regular vendors. The normal vendors are worthless. Once you get enough mercenary points, you can start buying caches from the mercenary vendors which are actually fairly good. But the normal vendors never have anything worth buying EVER. Someone mentioned that you could buy a legendary but it’s such a rare thing that there’s no reason to check. Since Masterworking changed this season, I wish there were alternative ways to spend my gold and having vendors and an actual Auction House would be useful.

Mercenaries. There hasn’t been any mention whether we’ll see more mercenaries. Even if we do, the current implementation for mercenaries is horribly bland. There’s almost no customization. Your excess gear goes to waste and you can only use one and a half. So if they did expand the number of mercenaries available (and it has been hinted that the system does allow for more), the real problem is that you can’t get much out of them in the first place. To make mercenaries semi useful, you’d need to allow them to have their own gear, more customization and more slots to allow players to bring them along. Also, I don’t understand why mercenaries can’t be brought to parties because by themselves mercenaries are nothing more than a glorified buff. The little Construct from season 3 had more personality than a standard mercenary. So these guys need a ton of work and improvements.

Class Enchantments. I don’t know what to call this part but effectively it’s the small perk/side effect you get at levels 15 and 30. There’s a germ of an idea there but for the most part these are once again bland as fuck. There’s a few cases where this can get interesting like a Sorcerer who uses Fireball for their enchantment slot for leveling. But something like a Barbarian is very tepid. That said I like the idea I just wish there was more of this available. For instance, someone mentioned that the early version of the Sorcerer had a third slot for Enchantment. That would’ve been really cool because it’s another option to customize/flavor your character.

More Gear Slots. They mentioned Talisman but not what it will be. There’s a good chance that the Talisman won’t be an actual gear slot but something that gets applied in a new slot in the character interface. Regardless of what the Talisman will be, the real issue is that Aspect and Unique bloat are a thing and we either need that currency I mentioned earlier to deal with the bloat or new gear slots. I think that having more gear slots like shoulders, belt, bracers along with Mercenaries and their own set of Emanating gear would be fantastic and almost necessary additions to the game. I mean if you are going to gradually copy over all the existing ideas from Diablo 3, might as well not be shy and grab some of the better ones.

Final Thoughts

This post ended up taking way longer than I had hoped and went beyond season 11 into the expansion. I am somewhat excited to see what the expansion entails and that we will be getting at least one more season within the current Vessel of Hatred before the next expansion is released. I’m not 100% onboard with all the changes but it wasn’t as bad as I had originally feared. Lastly, I avoided any talk about the story because I expect that it’s going to be terrible based on Vessel of Hatred and that my main complaint of useless, unskippable dialog will be present. So once the expansion does come out, I probably will just push as fast as possible to the end.

 

Comments

comments