I think I’m done for Season 11 as my last character, a Pulverize Druid, simply got to the point where I became bored. Beyond leveling glyphs and finding better gear, the build cannot compete with my Auradin. In fact, no build this season comes close to what a Paladin can do at the moment. I’m sure this will change in a season or two (at least after the launch of the expansion) but it’s clear that for the non-flavor of the month, the various changes to the game will most likely cause additional reworks/nerfs to some of the new mob mechanics or buffs to existing classes.
While I’ve played Pulverize a number of times in the past, I did not get a chance to play it with the Rotting Lightbringer. Originally, when I started this Druid, I went with a hybrid Companion build using a mixture of Wolves, Ravens and Creepers. However, it became quickly apparent that without the Kilt of Blackwing unique, this build would suffer immensely. Not to mention without the Core tag assigned from the Chaos Perk of Season 10, Ravens becomes heavily cooldown dependent and simply does not feel fun to run by itself. In contrast, it’s much easier to get Pulverize online with no uniques and it only took one Varshan fight in T1 for me to acquire a basic Rotting Lightbringer.
The main issue I had with Pulverize is that it feels quite weak still. The AoE clear is generally really good but the biggest complaint Druid players have at the moment is the massive nerf to Grizzly Rage. What happens is that Grizzly Rage’s cooldown doesn’t start until Grizzly Rage finishes. This is a stupid nerf because Grizzly Rage already has a long cooldown which makes increasing Grizzly Rage’s duration the better choice at this stage. Generally speaking though, I find that Grizzly Rage would fall off quickly so a lot of times, I might be hitting air or at least that’s how it’d feel in higher Torments. Also, I frequently would take heavy damage compared to other builds. In general, I thought this build was best just for farming Helltides and ranking up the seasonal quest for the spark.
However, I ended up burning out and swapping back to my Paladin temporarily. Even then I got bored very quickly because of the general lack of end game activities and variety. From there I realized that the season in all likelihood was over for me. While I would like to do more of the Goblin event itself, the will to just hang around in Helltides with the slow season progression on my Druid wasn’t enticing. Not to mention I need to do chores today before New Years Eve (Japanese family tradition).
Given my experience with this season, I have more thoughts to offer en route to the expansion. First, let’s address Tempering. We saw that Tempers are now limited to just one regardless of whether a legendary is Ancestral or not. Given that we’ll probably see about 10 additional skill levels for the expansion, I’m assuming there will be more power creep coming our way. Perhaps, limiting us to a single Temper at the moment is to prevent immediate power creep while they attempt to balance out the new end game. At least, that’s what I hope they are doing as the Temper pool at the moment feels wasteful and far too large to be meaningful.
Enchanting needs a revamp too. I hate that they carried over the same deal from Diablo 3. In Diablo 3, the Enchantress somewhat made sense because the affix pool on gear wasn’t as terrible and generally you could get what you needed. So having the single reroll made more sense back then. Now, that there’s four affixes (or five if you get a Sanctify) on legendaries, it makes finding the right pieces very difficult. Most legendaries that drop are absolute trash and it feels like a waste picking them up after a certain point. I get that they are implementing a loot filter but that won’t solve the fact that the bulk of the drops are terrible. With only a single nondeterministic reroll, enchanting feels more like a way to waste time and materials for no good reason.
I think for Enchanting to feel better they either need to implement a system like Tempering for deterministic affix swapping or introduce a currency to allow additional affixes for being rerolled. I’m more in favor of the later if they need to choose between both but even without any content changes besides the currency itself, it would give a new chase for the end game. Like my other suggestion for the Sanctification 2.0, I think you could have levels of currencies where white/common are for a single affix reroll, magic/blue two, yellow/rare three, orange/legendary for four. Potentially, such a currency could be used to unlock the slot and/or provide an additional cost for the reroll of that slot. With a system like that, I think making enchanting more deterministic would feel better overall.
Next, let me talk about an idea that has been brewing in my head regarding Aspects. Right now, Aspects feel like an awful mess with the unmanageable pool. A lot of Aspects just feel like they exist for additional damage or damage reduction. But most are flat out uninteresting and have some complex mechanic behind it to invoke the ability. Some Aspects feel like sheer accidents such as the one that reduces the cooldown for a Mercenary (I have that Sanctified somewhere). But more than that, these Aspects seem more like the flavor of the month that edge one another out as nerfs/buffs hit each one while other Aspects end up taking a backseat and being completely unused. I think when they moved Aspects into the Codex of Power with power increasing as one discovers upgrades, it was the step in the right direction. However, the sheer number of Aspects have caused bloat and I think that has gotten out of control.
More than that I think Aspects aren’t very interesting at this stage. I’m really hoping for a new system to make them interesting. What I would like to see is a custom crafting system for Aspects that one can apply to gear. Maybe what this system can entail is using the return of the Horadric Cube (or whatever is coming in the expansion) to combine Aspects to generate new Aspects much like Rune Crafting in Diablo 2. For instance, there’s Occult Dominion for Necromancers which had combined the increase in Skeleton Warriors and Mages together into a single Aspect. Quite often, you can find builds that use this Aspect on boots, which seems odd except that Occult Dominion is considered a Utility type of Aspect. So you end up losing a movement Aspect and have no options for escape beyond using boots that have +3 on Evade (if you’re lucky to find one). What I would like to see is being able to combine that Aspect with something else such as Metamorphosis. Or possibly being able to take something like a Barrier to create a trigger for another effect.
If you combine a rehauled, custom Aspect crafting system and use Tempering as the means to help scale the Aspect, then crafting becomes very interesting. I like the idea that your pursuit of the end game is perfecting the build through clear goals as opposed to RNG dependencies. The RNG aspects really should be relegated to finding the currencies, recipes and base items to craft upon. The action of the craft itself should be more deterministic though as well as having stages of progression where players balance between the progress of their skills, gear and other aspects (not Aspects) vs the content.
Beyond that, the gearing part this season really put a damper on the game play for me. Even though they’ve added a few more activities, generally speaking none of those activities truly feel progressive because the rewards you get from these activities do not necessarily correspond to the results in a necessarily positive direction. For instance, I know the Horadric Strongrooms were meant to be the key feature for players to obtain Obdurite. However, because of the Goblin event, there was almost no reason to do the Horadric Strongrooms thereafter. More importantly, the Horadric Strongrooms simply suck as content because it’s just another shitty timed loop event that’s frustrating and very build and RNG dependent. Maybe the only reason to do them after obtaining enough Obdurite is for the Escalation Sigils/Nightmares. But truthfully those aren’t that interesting either. The final boss fight gives mostly junk so there’s almost no reason to do them.
That said, I found getting gear to be as frustrating as ever with the added affix increasing the number of things I’d need to perfect in my hunt. It feels as though there’s an affinity for bad affixes like healing or something per kill. With Diablo 3, they moved a lot of those to secondary affixes which allowed people to find the better affixes much easier. And if you want Greater Affixes, your primary best bet were moved into the Hidden Armory sigils. However, uniques with Greater Affixes have become much rarer though. Also, the boss fights, while easier compared to Season 8-9, still are heavily build dependent. There’s real middle ground as right now you have a build like Auradin which can one shot almost anything in T4 vs say a Whirlwind EQ build that mostly hits like a wet noodle except when a small burst window opens. That makes farming for items with Greater Affixes much more tedious and unbalanced.
Something I have said before is that on top of needing more content, I wish that old seasonal content could return in some form just to give people alternate reasons to play throughout the season. One idea hit me that would make old seasons relevant: rotating weekly seasonal content. I think having daily seasonal rotations is too much but having alternate older seasons with seasonal powers could be interesting. These would be on top of whatever current seasonal event + perks are available. The difference is that the powers would only remain available for a single week so you’d need to farm up new powers each time the event rotates. Or possibly you can go into an interface where you select 1-2 seasons that augment existing one. Like maybe you prefer the Construct along with the Vampire powers. Or if you’re a Companion Druid doing the Raven build, Season 10’s Chaos Perks would be a thing. Or maybe being able to complete a season of content (like an abridged version of the seasonal quest line), you can unlock a subset of those powers (such as one or two Vampiric powers) These would all be character dependent rather than account shared to allow people to have new ways to play out a season.
Either way, I might give it another shot at another time. But at least in the current moment, I feel burnt out with nothing else to do.
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