I finally managed to locate the “currency” item that starts the quest for unlocking the Echoing Hatred feature. I believe I picked one up during an Undercity run, which turns the flag for the quest on for you to talk to the Oracle in Temis in the north western corner. You get a brie conversation and can click on the statue that takes you to the Echoing Hatred location. The room is a large arena with four Shrines posted in each corner and there’s a ritual type of item in the center that you click again to start the event.
Once the event starts, you encounter waves of foes that assault you from all areas of the arena. As you go through waves, you progress from Normal to higher Torments that eventually become similar to Pit tiers. The general premise is that the feature is similar to Echoing Nightmares in Diablo 3. Unlike Echoing Nightmares, the environment isn’t as chaotic and the arena is far larger to move around. You can get various foes from the game as well as mini bosses, including one that I’ve never seen thus far. Sometimes you can encounter goblins while portals spawn in. I’m not sure what the consequence is for leaving portals alone but they flash on the mini map.
In my run, I took my Barbarian, who has been handling Torment 11 just fine. My Barbarian isn’t optimally geared and I use an Endurant Faith unique charm to bolster her survivability. In a few cases, her health did go down to some sort of poison or damage-over-time effect. I did fine up until around Pit tier 110. That’s when it became much harder to take down mobs. My hand started to hurt and I was getting bored quickly of the repetitive game play. So I simply opted to die (or as they describe it “getting overwhelmed). Once that happens, the event stops and you can resurrect then collect your loot. The loot is located in one corner with a special box. Once you open that, various additional goblin type of portals spawn, leaving goblin bags.
So let me start by addressing a comment I read on the reddit forum where the beginning difficulty should be selectable. For the most part, the developers almost verbatim copied the feature from Diablo 3 over except for the various environment effects (like constant explosions and meteors dropping from the sky). Part of that copy involved having players start at a lower tier to work their way upward. I feel like the event simply lasted forever and it took a while for new spawns to come in. Lower levels are pointless to me but probably should start at whatever Pit level you’ve conquered. The real issue is that the event takes a fair amount of time before you can arrive near the difficulty you should be playing at.
Honestly, this felt not that much different than Infernal Hordes once the event starts except you can pause momentarily in Inferno Hordes after a period. In general, the game play is nothing more than a typical gauntlet that tries your patience and endurance rather than your skill. I think once you past Pit 100 or so, the loot really doesn’t get much better. That might be a guess but you receive so many of these goblin bags that the bulk of the loot feels like garbage. The only item of note that I found was my first Mythic Seal. Luckily, it was the one that reduces set bonuses by one and had some decent affixes for my build related to berserking. The rest of the loot appeared more in quantity than quality.
But I have to ask why was this event added as an end game activity? It really doesn’t stand out in the scheme of things. The numerous goblin bags you receive at the end of the event mostly drop currency, runes and charms/seals. But you can get most of this stuff elsewhere. I think the Mythic Seal was more serendipitous than a reflection of the event itself. But the real issue is that this game mode really doesn’t mean anything compared to Echoing Nightmares. With Echoing Nightmares, you could get gems that you’d use to augment your gear so it had an actual side purpose worth doing. I probably wouldn’t have an issue of this event if it were faster or distinct from similar gauntlet style systems in the game.
Beyond that I would like to talk briefly about the Mythic Seal I found. First, I was in Torment 11 when I discovered my first Mythic Seal but I think the relevant part is conquering a Pit Tier 112 equivalent of the Echoing Hatred event. Possibly, because I hadn’t located one, the game took pity upon me. However, the Mythic Seal itself was inside one of the Goblin Loot bags where probably 20 or so had dropped at that tier of difficulty. So I think it’s a combination of things that gave me a higher chance of finding one rather than a single definitive thing.
Second, the Mythic Seal had the Ring of Royal Grandeur type of effect in reducing the requirements for Talisman sets to become active. This is probably the thing I sought the most because the effect is quite intriguing when paired up with various seals. For my Whirlwind Barbarian, I typically use the Sescheron’s Fury set along with an Endurant Faith for tankiness. The original legendary seal I used had Dark Pact, which wasn’t really relevant to my build (because I snagged it from a random pile in my stash). So I ditched the Endurant Faith and old seal for the Mythic one. The Mythic one had two berserking type of affixes, which were far more relevant, even though people say that the Mythic seal itself really isn’t effective for a Whirlwind Barbarian (most people use a Crown of Lucion unique charm here, which I do have). However, I had a few Berserker’s Crucible charms lying around in my inventory, which is considered useful for a starting Whirlwind Barbarian, so I swapped over to using two of those which gives me 50% more damage, 20% cast speed and 30% damage reduction while berserking. In comparison, Crown of Lucion is supposed to give up to 90% damage increase by casting a resource using ability as well as increasing its cost. So I think most people opt for the higher damage. In my case, I went for a hybrid that seemed like an in between compromise for Endurant Faith and Crown of Lucion along with the higher attack speed. I really don’t know why people aren’t choosing this option. I will say that without Endurant Faith, periodically I can get chunked particularly from DoT type of effects. But I think it’s kinda cool and I want to continue using it for now.
The other thing I wanted to point out about this Mythic Seal is how the affixes were Barbarian specific. I’m sure it’s fine in general but I like the idea of twinking out alts who might require a combo set. On the other hand, given that I have one of these now, I might look into the so-called Immortal Barbarian build. I personally don’t like the build idea because it sounds very gimmicky. Also, I would have to farm up new gear to get rid of the various maximum life I’ve taken as well as redo my Paragon Board (which I hate). But it might be fun just to try out since my Barbarian is already fairly well geared. I think if I did that, it would give new life to my Barbarian because I think it’s a little stale for me. Lastly, I had been considering playing a Paladin just because I’m bored and want to try something different. Some people have classified the Paladin as the worst performing class with some builds at the B tier. On the other hand, I would mostly be doing a Wing Strike type of build or maybe Zeal just to see something different from my S11 Auradin. I’m not expecting much nor do I really want to push the build far.
At any rate, going back to the Echoing Hatred activity, this is one that needs a lot of work. Right now, as it stands, Echoing Hatred resembles more of a live beta test for its performance rather than an activity that’s truly ready to be turned into part of the core end game grind. I think with regards to the Mythic Seal I found, that was sheer luck and I wouldn’t want this type of activity to be the defining thing to obtain that type of item. Besides the sameness to other timed gauntlet events, my primary complaint about this event is how long it last. Inferno Hordes already can take between 20-30 minutes but you can get small pee breaks between waves. I couldn’t even tell how long Echoing Hatred lasted but it felt like it went on forever. My hand ended up hurting, I was clearly bored and unmotivated to push further and thought that this was an exercise in futility by the end. So to me, they need to cap the event’s time limit or figure out how to speed up the difficulty progression. All of these elements just make it feel that they snagged the old Greater Rift gauntlet code from Diablo 3 that would provide a “test” to see what level of a Greater Rift you could/should handle. Finally, the idea of having a single arena serve as this bland unending wave gauntlet challenge is mind numbing. Personally, I think you should only have to do this event once each season at most because it’s not good, not rewarding well enough and painful to do.
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