Diablo 4: Another Whirlwind Barbarian for Season 15

Whelp, I ended up making another #Diablo4 Whirlwind Barbarian this time for Season 15. Gearing wasn’t too bad this time around but I consumed a ton of charms trying to get her set bonus. Of course, I rebirthed another character and wanted to see how the various changes felt especially in comparison to Season 13. As usual, Whirlwind pretty much destroys everything in its path.

So far, I managed to get most of the basics for her gear except for crafting an Enigma and an Infinity. So there’s still quite a distance I need for getting optimizing this build especially because I haven’t found any Ber runes (yes, I know where you can farm for them as well as how one can craft them). But essentially, I need three Ber runes to complete the basic build, mythics notwithstanding.

Now, I have managed to find a decent helmet that rolled as a mythic without any greater affixes. But I wasn’t going to complain given that my previous one had crappy thorns on it. Also, I upgraded my gloves to be Mythic while a crappy version had dropped from el Greg boss. Beyond that, I’m also trying to farm the currency that helps with transfiguration for amulets as I can’t hit Anger Management. Either way, there’s more I need to do along the way.

Of course, I’m still thinking of trying other characters. The only one I really want to take a stab at is a Dance of Knives rogue. Originally, I considered the so-called GoD version in D4 but it looks like they had no idea of the nuances in terms of implementing the D3 version. So I might just end up taking a normal Dance of Knives rogue, although I read that Death Trap still is the ultimate top build for Rogues.

But let me pause here and go on a rant because of how itemization still stinks. I’ve done rants before on how I think Tempering, Enchanting and Masterworking have been poorly conceived. Tempering never really made any sense to me, not the idea of having a blacksmith improving your gear, but that the result would be random. While they did improve Tempering to a degree in removing the alternate category choices, the fact that they kept the RNG part in any form just felt downright rotten. In fact, all of these systems are downright rotten still and beyond frustrating.

My main complaint is that I hate sitting around waiting for something to hit just for an affix that eventually I’m going to get. Now, if the RNG part was replaced by an estimated cost the way Torchlight Infinite does something, I probably wouldn’t mind. But it’s the experience of improving your gear with these three methods that drive me nuts.

I’ve stated that the only RNG portion should be finding the materials not the act once you get what you want. A better system is in Baldur’s Gate 2 where you’d kill key enemies or find a treasure trove and use the Dwarven Smith or the Imp to craft/upgrade your gear. The key here is that you’ve won the crucial battle or solved the quest and have the items available so you should be able to get your hard earned items.

So Diablo 4 makes you feel like an absolute idiot for wasting your time because the affixes are so badly randomized that most items are worthless. Then when you finally get a reasonable item, you still have to go through this ridiculous process rather than receiving a satisfying outcome that make you believe you not only earned something but you’re progressing your character.

But what triggered this sudden rant? I saw the other day on reddit someone complaining of spending several billion gold trying to get a +2 skill on their amulet using enchanting. Recently, I started to focus on ensuring that I could get higher end affixes as opposed to using the first one I hit because I had 6 billion in gold. Even when dealing with small pools of ranges, you still won’t get what you’re looking for. Worse yet because you’re mindlessly rerolling as quickly as possible, there’s a small chance you’ll accidentally skip over the thing you need. Then you spend another couple billion trying to get the same affix. This is an utter waste of time.

I had stated in the past that the real fix to Tempering, Enchanting and even Masterworking was getting currency to progressively upgrade your items. Instead of having these awful ranges with RNG on top of RNG, just make the currency be RNG based and if you want, throw in a quality portion so that higher ranges need better currency. If you want a little more RNG, instead of having broad Tempering recipe manuals, just make each upgrade type an individual thing you find just like Aspects. I really don’t understand why there’s this level of RNG in the game. I want to be excited about finding a treasure, not relieved when I finally hit a craft by chance.

Since I’m on this podium, I just want to say that if/when Diablo 5 ever arrives, I truly hope that they look at this garbage system of itemization and just toss it. There’s some interesting concepts like Aspects but I think the whole system got out of control at some point. Then Uniques became the actual build enabler and conflicted with Aspects where Aspects felt useless. I mean most of the builds this season almost use all Uniques with only one or two Aspects included. I don’t get it.

Next, there’s all the stupid damage types like Vulnerability, Critical Damage vs Critical Damage Multiplier, etc. Why? I’ve been reading on reddit how you have these Apocalypse Warlocks hitting 100T worth of damage. That’s sheer nonsense. At some point, this just becomes an exercise in futility that got out of control. None of this is good game design at all.

And I’ve been reading about how the secret Uber fight for this season is impossible to solo unless you play Blazing Scream Warlock because of how it’s a broken build. I can’t express just how frustrating that sounds because of how damaged the core system must be. At this stage, I almost wish the Diablo 4 developers just stop making any attempts to balance the game and just put all their energy in fixing bugs.

Speaking of bugs, the game has just been horrible in terms of performance lately. I read that some people put the blame on Whirlwind Barbarians. While I am playing that build, it shouldn’t be this wretched. Nothing can be more frustrating than a game that has this level of instability.

Lastly, I’ve been reading a few threads on reddit where people believe that this is going to be the last season where we see something significant for the game. One person pointed out that the upcoming Amazon class will be a boost, there’s nothing guaranteed. Some people believe that the team got moved off to Diablo 5 and that a small contingent are keeping this game on life support. It sucks because the game seemed to finally have found its mark but mostly had been marred by lingering performance issues and a need to fix up old content. Given Blizzard’s history and the incompetence demonstrated by the current XBox head, it’s not surprising most people lack any confidence. As for me, I’ll continue playing out this season but I don’t have a lot of hope for what remains with this game. At least with Diablo 3, it went out okay by the end. I don’t know if Diablo 4 will be able to make three more years at this rate.