I’m continuing to play the current season. So far I’ve tried the Sorcerer with Hydra, a Paladin starting with hammers and moving into Auras, a Golem Necromancer, another Evade Spiritborn and currently a Whirlwind/Earthquake Barbarian. I’m somewhat tempted to try a Pulverize Druid and maybe even a Rogue. But having done a few builds, I think I’m in a much better position to formulate an opinion of this season.
First, the Sorcerer with Hydra just felt really weak for me compared to last season. I attempted to do Belial on T3 but messed up in one of the phases and got demolished. That pretty much crushed my desire to continue with the character. For certain, the Chaos Armor and Chaos Perks with Mana Shield came in clutch for that season in turning the Sorcerer invulnerable. But the nerf to Primordial Binding probably has hurt this class/build the most. I have read that the Crackling Energy build is much better so I might eventually return and swap. But at least for now, I’ve got other projects on my list.
Naturally, the Paladin feels really “busted” at the moment and I’m guessing that the class might stay overtuned up until the first season of the expansion release. Since we won’t be getting the new class until the expansion release (which is in late April at least), it would be fatal for Blizzard to immediately nerf this class since it’s the main reason to preorder at this moment. There might be a thing or two that might get adjusted for next season but the feedback at this time has been very positive.
I ended up starting with Blessed Hammer then slowly transitioning into an Auradin build. There’s only one mandatory unique for this build called Dawnfire. What changed the build completely though was using Bac + Ceh to boost the damage from Holy Light Aura. I did manage to craft a Shroud of False Death and gambled a Heir of Perdition. However, without these mythic uniques, the build remains fairly powerful. I believe Holy Light Aura and Arbirter are what really turn this build into a powerhouse. At least for now though, I’m very content with this character and will probably come back to it a bit later.
The other thing I was eager to try was the new Golem Necromancer build which centered around the new Gravebloom mace unique. Effectively, it’s similar to the Short Man’s Finger from D3 for the Witch Doctor in splitting your Golems up into three separate minions. However, when you activate the Golem, they pounce on a target and explode for a lot of damage. For this build to work, you need a ton of cooldown for resetting your Golem. However, there is a delay when you trigger the Golem as you’ll see an animation of the Golem leaping onto an opponent. This delay can be extremely frustrating especially in tight, mob dense dungeons. In a way, this build reminds me slightly of the previous Season 10’s Raven build. However, that build was spammable since your companion skills would be treated as core skills with a resource cost, which made it easy to cast Raven. Also, the animation was much quicker and would leave a circle on the ground. So this build is quite weak to me and something that I want to abandon.
From there I wanted to create a Spiritborn. Originally, I thought about doing a Crushing Hand build but stuck with the Evade build from familiarity. For some reason, this build feels drastically weaker this time around. Beyond that I had an incredibly difficult time trying to locate a better Wusha Na Pak just for the damage. I don’t know what the issue is but the loot feels much worse on bosses. I’m still unsure if I’d want to keep her as an Evade build but the main point was to finish up the season campaign to obtain another spark.
Once I finished up on the Spiritborn, I eventually created a new Barbarian. Originally, the goal was to make a HotA Barbarian. However, it simply never felt smooth and I switched over to Whirlwind + Earthquake. My main comment is that it really feels like I need the Ring of the Starless Skies just because keeping up Whirlwind is a pain with the drain on Fury. But probably the real issue is that I’m running Call of the Ancients rather than Wrath of the Berserker. While Call of the Ancients is a fun ability used in conjunction with Arreat’s Bearing, because it’s a minion/summon type of skill, it can be unreliable. I might mess with the build a little more later but it does feel it can use a great deal of work, even if I have the basic gear to get it running.
At this time, I would like to obtain at least one more Mythic. The one I should really aim for is the Ring of Starless Skies but the Grandfather might be an interesting one just for the Barbarian. I might try to gamble for the Ring of Starless Skies because I’ve had fairly good luck in that realm this season. I think you can still just randomly obtain a Mythic from general gambling but at least for me I was able to target farm the proper slot for the two I managed to find.
Some other things I want to mention. The second character is much easier to level because of all the points locked behind the Season Journey you obtain. I’m not sure how to feel about this situation because progress does happen faster but the leveling experience at some point becomes a tedious chore. I think if everyone received a fresh Season Journey experience but started from scratch each time, the situation might feel better because each level and paragon point would mean much more. On the other hand, it probably would end up feeling tedious still so I don’t know if wiping a new character down to zero would be that better.
Finding optimal gear in the latest iteration of “Blizzard has no idea how to handle gear” is horrendous. The additional affix on legendary gear simply confounds things because it’s easier to get stumped by the additional permutation. I know part of this will eventually play into the loot filter but I think that as long as RNG is the primary determination for finding the right affixes, the gearing aspect and hunt will continue to feel awful.
More people are cheering for Sanctification as becoming a permanent feature of the game. While the core idea is good, I still think that keeping it as-is remains frustrating since you’re already dealing with the RNG aspect of simply finding the right pieces. I think if they want to keep the RNG aspect, then it should be applied only to finding Heavenly Sigils. If you want to increase the difficulty for crafting the right power, you could increase the cost of the number of Heavenly Sigils required. But I detest the idea of “bricking” an item especially things like Mythics.
I mentioned that the loot from Lair Bosses feel worse. The biggest two issues I’ve noticed are rarer greater affix items and bigger pools of loot. I can’t tell if the loot tables have changed but I did notice finding items outside of the online guides. I think the main items are still there but if these pools have increased in size, it defeats the purpose of having certain Lair Bosses. If that did happen, I really wish it was communicated better.
Along those lines, I noticed more builds requiring unique weapons. This becomes very frustrating because the game’s gearing methodology seems to be moving towards set-like configurations while removing Aspects from builds. At least for this season, this approach kinda works mostly due to Sanctification. However, because Sanctification is RNG based, you can’t control the Aspect that you might need. In turn, this situation makes me believe that if they want to keep Sanctification in the game, they need to have multiple levels of currency:
- Common – Upgrades the quality of an item
- Blue/Magic – Should just allow a person to choose to add basic properties and damage with a small chance for rerolling an affix on legendaries
- Yellow/Rare – Upgrades an affix to a greater affix or adds a new affix to the item
- Orange/Legendary – Allows you to add an Aspect onto an item; does not stack if the Aspect already is in use
- Unique – Allows you to add a Unique property onto an item; does not stack if a unique with this ability already is equipped
- Mythic – Extremely rare, untradeable currency that allows you to add a Mythic property onto an item; does stack once if the same mythic is equipped
Perhaps, in addition to this currency, you may need additional currency for a recipe. If we use a similar formula in the way you can target craft Mythics, maybe Runes can be used again here to target farm Unique and Mythic properties. If you choose to YOLO the craft, you won’t need the additional materials but the RNG can be used for the random craft. Now, that would make crafting VERY interesting and solve for the immediate need for increasing the number of gear slots. If they need to further balance this out (because by itself this would potentially allow one to have nothing but Mythics/Uniques, etc), then I think they could limit the number of crafts depending on the category. Like maybe 1-2 Mythics/Uniques, 3-4 Legendary Powers and the remaining open to the other categories.
Beyond the Sanctification chase, I have to be honest, the core game still is really dry. I’m glad they added more bosses and revamped various monsters. However, the number of activities is still very small overall in the end game. I think if there were more progression systems like older seasonal powers, the game would be far more interesting. But the main Perk or Divine Gifts portion is horrible. The worst is the Azmodan grind especially feels terribly implemented and I don’t think I’m going to finish it up before the end of the season. Too much focus still revolves around Helltides and they’re simply not very exciting.
I know the main feature that many people are looking forward to is the Tower/leaderboards. But for me I don’t see the point. It seems like another version of the Abattoir of Zir or the Gauntlet and that doesn’t excite me at all. I did read that they might change the Pit in the future but for me to get excited they’d need to ditch the timer and the general claustrophobic layouts. Also, I still don’t see a point in having the Pit if they want to introduce the Tower as the source for leaderboards.
Some other things I discovered though along the way was the Jeweler Crafted Cache. This was surprisingly a neat thing that I was unaware of but part of the season journey. I knew about the Blacksmith cache you can craft. So having two types of caches really help once you hit level 60. Normally, once I’m around level 30, I return to the Den of Mercenaries to craft some starter gear or get some entry level aspects. But these two caches are great if you have the resources for getting missing aspects as well as possibly uniques early on. For additional characters, you can then save your Obols to target farm your early uniques. However, I did notice that pre-Torment levels, the gambling usually ends up shafting me with more common gear. So you might want to save your Obols until you’re in Torment.
One thing I was elated about was not having to repeat the Capstone Dungeon. I know eventually I’ll be forced to do them again but only for the first character of each new season (at least until they decide to get rid of this rubbish again). Also, I was able to do the Pit 75 for the last part of the Season Journey to get my Mythic cache. I was disappointed to find that the cache only contained spark rather than a whole Mythic. Most of the other items in the cache were worthless too.
On the bright side, the goblin event is still going. This is the one thing worth doing. But I haven’t found any mythic sigils nor goblins. I think if I could hit one mythic goblin/sigil, I would be quite happy just to finish up getting the remaining Mythics I need. But I’m pretty burnt out and the lack of end game activities really hurt.
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