Before going into Diablo 4 itself, I want to talk about myself as a gamer who enjoys the general RPG genre. I fell in love with RPGs partly with games like The Bard’s Tale (especially 2 & 3), followed up by Ultima 3-6, Wizardry, Might and Magic and the gold box series for the classic SSI Advanced Dungeons and Dragons. I had spent grueling days, weekends and years grinding out XP to get my characters into an ultra powerful state where the game felt mostly easy to me. The most satisfying aspects was seeing my characters going from zero to hero with a meaningful progression system that rewarded you with time well spent.

Many of those old games I mentioned had their set of issues too usually caused by bad luck (RNG) or possibly very poor design. For instance, Ultima 3 had a very interesting character creation system where you could have hybrid classes that would split their core abilities in half if the class shared an ability with another class. But you get feel gimped out such as a Druid who could only reach 49 spell points, thus disallowing them higher levels of power and making them feel pointless to bring along. Or Might and Magic 2 suffered from very poor early game balance where even at the lowest difficulties a single encounter could wipe out your party because the game would allow for too many enemies while your party possessed little to no gold, gear and being of too low level/bad attributes. Then you would have a game like Wizardry 6 where the character creation process was nonsensically ass backwards in forcing you to spend hours just to roll up a single character because of how poorly conceived the workflow was.

Usually though, once you got over a certain hump, these games mostly were enjoyable. At the same time, even with their flaws, those games generally had no way of a system level update so you were stuck with any bugs that weren’t caught in QA and got shipped. Maybe later on the community might add patches in a few cases but generally those games remain nearly the same as they were originally conceived.

In a contemporary live service game like Diablo 4, you can expect that the game will see changes both good and bad, depending on how much the company wants to invest in the product. With Diablo 4 though, I have found that because it is a recent game with a ton of funding and eyes internally hoping for its continued success that the game itself is highly unstable. This situation can be good and very frustrating at the same time. Before talking about the frequent annoying changes, I want to walk through the burn out pattern I’ve encountered with Diablo 4.

A fresh season in Diablo 4 is fun for roughly the first week. Having a completely new character with the season journey incomplete and plenty of discovery/new things to conquer. Sometimes such as in Season 13, the top builds aren’t as fleshed out so there’s some freedom if you start the season early. If you haven’t played the game in some time (like a season or two), most likely there should be more changes that go into core especially as the player base have been calling for more permanent additions, which we’ve seen such as the new Nightmare Dungeons and bosses.

With everything reset like Mercenaries, your Paragon Board, stash space, etc. there’s more motivation to push forward as there’s plenty of clear goals in sight. During the early part of the season (the first few days), it might be frustrating as one starts to assemble a build. If by any chance any build guides exist by this point, then trying to structure ones build close can get you near the higher difficulties but not necessarily at the end game where you’re farming the highest tiers (unless you have help or know of a broken situation). Sometimes you can get supremely unlucky choosing the wrong class/build and need to start almost from scratch either by abandoning your current gear setup and/or ditch your character entirely for something else. At this early stage, that scenario isn’t horrible because there is generally a path forward as more builds come online and the meta starts to solidify (especially meta builds that rely on low hanging fruit type of solutions).

Where the game starts to taper off is when the progression slows to a near stop and you’re optimizing low percentiles for minor gains. Trying to get perfect Enchanting rolls, upgrading Aspects for the final levels, getting the highest value from Unique powers, etc. does not excite me much compared to the larger gains in the earlier stages of the game. Part of it is that the rarity in getting an upgrade like this relative to the power gain is to tiny that there’s not much to really excite. It’s a different feeling when, for instance, you find a 5th charm that unlocks the high end of your build. There’s a similar feeling with the whole +5 main stat meme/joke from Diablo 3; you can continue grinding indefinitely but it’s not exciting anymore.

Usually by this point, I might start up another character (if I haven’t already). Part of my alt-a-holicism is that I tend to reach a stage where the progression slows to a halt. Maybe the character I have feels stale. Generally, when this occurs, I think it’s because the routine no longer is fun or I want to see how other styles affect the environment for the character. This doesn’t exist only in Diablo 4 nor ARPGs but across RPGs and other games like this where the game to me is how I can alter the environment. When I say environment, I don’t mean having a mage that cast fireballs at flammable objects and watching things burn asunder. I mean the state of the game such as how one style can be altered because of the switch to a different character. An example of this is how I started with a Static Charge Blizzard Sorcerer that moved really slow but could demolish zones then swapped to a Companion Druid build for this current season, which moved fairly quickly and only required me to hit my cooldowns.

While gearing up those two characters, there was a certain level of excitement as I familiarized myself with the new systems from the expansion. Everyone was learning and the game was still changing (such as bugs that affected certain builds). From there, I would go on to create a Whirlwind Barbarian, which turned out to be my best character of the season, a Dance of Knives Rogue, an Apocalypse Warlock and eventually a Zeal Paladin. Leveling each character was fun mostly because they had their own play styles, although I was quite familiar with a few. But part of the motivation was seeing how certain builds changed like the Dance of Knives Rogue which no longer relied on traps compared to previous seasons or the Whirlwind Barbarian which now could use Dust Devils without the Aspect.

There was a major problem though in each of these cases. The issue was dealing with gearing especially in later stages and the funnel that became repetitive really quickly. While the new Horadric Cube does offer a massive improvement compared to previous types of crafting with more focus on being able to get the affixes you want, you end up dealing with heavy RNG to the point where a lot of times you feel like you go backwards. Transfiguration probably is the most endemic of this issue where a situation similar to Sanctification could occur. Unlike Sanctification though, the risk:reward structure in Transfiguration feels awful. Sanctification had bad outcomes too but it was partly mitigated by Ancestral Uniques and Mythics which could avoid the really bad outcomes. And the super rare multi Transfiguration outcome is simply that, too rare. In the case of Sanctification, the reward aspect was much higher because you could get Mythic aspects on gear, which could double the effect of certain ones (like double Ring of the Starless Sky). That made Sanctification exciting even though the other aspects of that season were in truth quite bland.

Then with War Plans, the start of doing these feels fresh because it’s new. But once you realize that you have almost no control over the layouts of the plans themselves and that you’re limited to rerolls, then the situation really stinks. You only have a very select few number of activities at your disposal and a very small number of modifications that you can obtain only after spending a very long time grinding on a single character. And when you want to switch things up, the cost is quite high so you just end up grinding even more.

But these are not progressive systems in my book. These are gambling systems where the game has quadrupled down at almost all levels in its over-reliance on RNG. The problem is that RNG becomes a substitute for original content by forcing the player to go through a system of regurgitation. You may hear me frequently belittle this situation things like fake carrot on a stick, the hamster wheel trap, bozosort, etc. But it really boils down to not respecting the players’ time for as little effort as possible.

The thing to me is becoming self-aware once this condition gets problematic. Usually, I end up feeling physically ill whether it’s from carpal tunnel, mental reluctance/lack of enthusiasm and sometimes straight out anger with a vile green sensation erupting from my belly. That’s the point where I know I’m becoming burnt out because the system is no longer fun and I’m simply in this horrible loop where I can no longer move forward. Worse yet I can move backwards with poorly conceived systems like Transfiguration.

There are going to be pundits who try to defend this system. My belief is that those people aren’t real experts on this type of thing but actually have an undiagnosed gambling addiction. I’ve seen people on stream who really believe in the RNG system where they tie the long grind to this unattainable thing. They get high once they reach this pinnacle and continue seeking this euphoric state much like a drug user seeking out a new high. They can’t admit that they have a major issue and use any excuse to defend their state of mind.

For myself, I don’t get the endorphin rush in the same manner. I am not addicted to that type of thing since the addiction for me is the satisfaction of actual growth as a result of the effort I put in. What hampers that sensation is the opposite for me where failure simply puts me into that opposite state where I feel sick as I mentioned. Once that happens, the only way I can heal myself is by stepping back for a long period.

With regards to Blizzard’s game, I already knew of this social engineering type of design because it’s the same problem I had with World of Warcraft. I recognized that issue with the way gear was provided as a kind of gateway drug to staying in the game. When you could obtain the gear, there was an immediate rush of satisfaction. However, the way they introduced gearing for the end game is where the poison lie in connecting it to some RNG mechanism where week-in and week-out you were forced into the proverbial hamster wheel. If you were lucky, you could get out. And if you were really lucky, you managed to get everything you needed. But once that happened, there really wasn’t as much incentive to do those operations (at least for me). It’s basically an ass backwards system.

So with the way the game is moving, it feels like various design philosophies have gone into Diablo 4 where at some point, the game loses the novelty. In this latest iteration, the RNG crafting is basically salt over the wounds. I think if there was some QoL attached where the workflow wasn’t bad, then I wouldn’t mind as much. I have to refer to Torchlight: Infinite where their crafting system is more modern. You might be forced to grind more if you can’t get the thing you need at the moment, but at least you’re not enslaved to a bad UI/UX workflow.

I once said that Diablo 4 would improve if they removed RNG from crafting and now War Plans as the mechanism that controls how you play. I don’t mind the target farming for materials; my belief is that once you find the materials, you should be rewarded for that instead of adding on another level of silliness. Again, the crafting aspect itself wouldn’t be bad if the workflow management wasn’t so god awful and very “engineer-y” (to paraphrase how the VC woman from Silicon Valley described an app that the Pied Piper gang made in a later season).

Then there’s the other problem when it comes to live service games: instability. No piece of software is completely bug free. However, Diablo 4’s constant systems changes with the nerfs/buffs are insufferable. Because of the multiplier issue, there’s zero chance this game will ever be balanced because the mathematics are too complex and out of control to be properly tested.  At the same time, when you see the patch notes for Season 14 come in and it’s basically a decimation of all these builds, you have to wonder what’s the point? Eventually, the developers are going to update things all over again. But this cycle never ends. You think that they take one step forward but move 50 steps backward. I really don’t get it at this point. I personally think some people in the company figured out how to create job stability for themselves in doing the absolute lowest effort possible and this is the “content” the players receive. Then you compare this to other companies that can dish out a ton of content with smaller teams and less money and you have to wonder what’s going on.

At either rate, the main purpose behind this blog was trying to get a better understanding for myself on what’s going on and why I feel unmotivated to play as well as this negative cloud hanging over my head anytime I look over at this game. I just feel so disappointed all the time and it’s impossible to feel any enthusiasm because the game just keeps going around in this endless circle and doesn’t really improve by much. I’m honestly surprised that they managed to get something like War Plans and the Horadric Cube out. Neither looked special from a development point of view but I’m guessing that the itemization on the backend with all the tools that have been created for their game designers must have some truly terrible code behind them because it feels like a ton of stuff got refactored. The problem is that even if it makes the people’s lives in the company easier, it does little for the player base at large.

The post Diablo 4 Lord of Hatred: Self-Analysis/Reflection on Game Burnout appeared first on Kontroversial Keith.

First, why do Zeal? It’s a decent leveling build (which you can find here) where you can transition from a starter to end game. Most of the basic skills are the same which means there’s not much else to learn once you hit level 70. If you’ve played Diablo 3, the build will remind you of the Roland’s Sweep build where you quickly blast everything around you. Like the Roland’s set build, this build also increases your attack (cast) speed when you employ the new Cathan’s Dauntless Faith Charm set where the two set bonus causes your Zealot (Zeal) skills to give you a Do or Die effect. This effect stacks and boost your Critical Strike Damage and Attack Speed up to 25 times.

Along with the Do or Die effect, the 3 set bonus triggers your Rally skill at maximum stacks once every 6 seconds. Because of this autocast effect, you don’t need to put Rally on your action bar but will want to place points into it because it helps with your movement speed, gives you Unhindered and triggers other Justice skills, which we will talk about in a moment. Then the 5 piece bonus increases your Zealot damage as well as stores an Afterimage effect for every 5 stacks of Do or Die that gets spawned when you move. So it’s a like a Shadow Clone that you leave behind after attacking.

The other major component to the Zeal build is a unique 2-handed sword called Red Sermon. Besides increasing your Zeal damage (which is the main reason to get this item), you also gain the Death or Glory variant for free, which means you’ll have two variants for Zeal. Death or Glory causes Zeal to do a full circle attack, uses 10% of your Maximum Life instead of Faith as a cost in exchange for increasing your Critical Hit Chance and Zeal’s damage. Besides Death of Glory, the build uses Zealot’s Legacy which attacks randomly and striking 4 additional times. Also, you pick up Additional Strikes, which gives you 2 more attacks and Weaken, which makes Zeal a fast attack.

To mitigate some of the life sacrifice from Death or Glory, you take Endurant Faith to spread the damage out, Defiance Aura to get passive healing and stand in Consecration for a little more active healing. In general, I’ve found that as long as you’re not just spam casting Zeal endlessly, the amount of life removed is negligible and can be topped off quickly. The build guide I use doesn’t do anything extra like add Life on Hit or Life on Kill but I imagine that you can effectively become quite a powerhouse in splitting some defense by using either type of mitigation.

Most of the defense here comes from Resolve stacking. The guide has you take Resolve on the amulet, helmet, chest and leg pieces and applying the Glynn’s Anvil aspect on one of the three armor pieces. Then you start building Resolve stacks early on by using Fortress. Since you can masterwork Resolve and get GA’s on it, you try to go for +12 on those pieces to get 48 points in Resolve on gear. I will have comments later on regarding Resolve stacking but it pretty much is the primary way to build defenses here.

Now, one of the cool things that happens with the way Rally works along with the 3 piece bonus from Cathan’s Dauntless Faith Charm is that it gets periodically autocast. When that happens and you choose the Words of Inspiration variant, Rally expends all available charges (which is up to 3) that causes your Justice skill cooldowns to be reduced by 3 seconds per Charge. Since we don’t have Rally on the action bar, you’re effectively able to lay down Consecration once every 2-3 seconds or so.

For mobility, you use Falling Star and employ the Igni + Ceh Runeword for using Spirit Wolves to apply Vulnerability to reduce the cooldown. The rest of your mobility comes from raw movement speed placed on your boots. But with Rally being up most of the time, you shouldn’t have many issues getting around. Also, while the guide suggest Cir + Vex for your other Runeword choice, I think it’s a bit of an overkill. Instead, I prefer Bac + Que for keeping up a Barrier for the extra defense. Movement really isn’t an issue on this build and you can get more skill points from your Charms. But having another layer of defense in sketchy moments I think is worth it for melee builds.

The biggest issue I’ve found in terms of the play style was the tiny pause when you cast Zeal. Because this ability is in melee range, certain mob on death effects like Executioner make the scenario dubious. I generally keep an Evade charge handy just to dodge quickly. Falling Star helps out with this too. That’s also why I prefer Bac + Que because I don’t want to rely on Resolve stacking or Fortress.

Another issue I had with this build (guide) was the emphasis on Critical Strike Damage, Vulnerability, Attack Speed and Physical Damage affixes/multipliers. I think because you get your Critical Hit chance from Helm of Perdition, Fanaticism Aura and Death or Glory via Red Sermon, you avoid having Critical Hit chance on your gear (except as a Temper on your weapon). But it does make these ideal stats very hard to obtain, which is really annoying and has me question the end game crafting and gearing system.

Before I dive into some overarching concerns I have with the end game systems, let me finalize a few thoughts on the Zeal Paladin build. First, it’s a decent build that does pretty good boss damage, which generally is my concern as I take a character into the end game. AoE-wise, it’s not great because of the range factor. The Afterimage effect seems cool in concept but most of the time you’re leaping/moving to the next pack of mobs so if the intent was to leave behind a clone to attack, it doesn’t feel effective. Maybe this style of play works better at higher difficulties but it doesn’t solve the problem of how you’re forced to move forward most of the time.

I did like the ideas of the combining synergies between the charm bonus, Rally, Consecration, Red Sermon and healing. The general concept is pretty cool. The Afterimage clone effect would be cool if they follow you around for a few seconds rather than be left behind. Like in the case of Whirlwind Barbarian with Tornadoes, the Tornadoes shoot outward, so stragglers can be damaged. I might have to play around with the Zeal build at higher torments to get a better feeling. Right now, my character is only at Torment 6.

That does beg the question: why am I only at Torment 6 on this character? So part of the reason I’m writing this post is to talk partly on the journey of this character not just writing on how to create a build (because someone has already done that for me). Because I have played numerous other characters in Season 13, I managed to accumulate plenty of spare gear, materials and set charms. Usually at a certain point in a season, if I’m enjoying myself, I tend to play alts especially if there’s new builds I want to try. Naturally, in Season 13, because let’s face facts and call the Lord of Hatred launch nothing more than a public PTR, the number of choices has been wide open. With the Paladin being the other newest class, I wanted to check out other builds as I only used an Auradin back in Season 11 (and leveled with a Hammerdin). Zeal was one of the top builds around and I got to see it in action which piqued my interest.

One of the advantages of having all those preexisting characters and spare gear is that it’s easy to get rolling fast. For instance, I grabbed Bac + Que and Igni + Ceh up immediately and crafted sockets on my starting gear. The difficulty mostly was in getting new Aspects to align with the build guides. Since I was pretty impatient, I used the upgrade mechanic in the cube to convert blues to rares to legendaries as well as Bartering with the Mercenaries (although I frequently run out of currency). Even with these methods, you still may not find all the key Aspects to really get the build online. So my leveling experience was more of a hybrid situation.

Also, attempting to match up the affixes on gear to the main build was a very frustrating experience (still is). Because the build guide emphasizes on almost all offensive stats, you need to get supremely lucky. Even crafting these stats in the cube isn’t a guarantee. At a certain point after burning tons of materials up, I would simply give up and find any 2-3 combos “just” enough because it was getting too expensive and painful to try and perfect the build. Even the midpoint guide used here mostly emphasized the “all damage multiplier” types, which I think is a red herring in a way. Because of having to deal with crafting, managing another Paragon board, etc., I effectively quit because I started to feel burnt out.

After giving myself a few days off, I came back and played around with this character again. One of the things you can do is that reaching Torment 1, you can convert your other set charms into your current class’ sets. Since I was aiming for Cathan’s Dauntless Faith Charm, I naturally crafted the one for the Wing Strike build and only crafted a single piece for the Zeal build. That only infuriated me into taking a few more days off to clear my head (not to mention I was upset at the upcoming Season 14/patch notes).

So finally, I decided the other day just to play normally and treat this character as an “advanced” fresh start character. Meaning, she would have some twink gear but I already had found the Red Sermon and had enough Aspects and basically gear to hit Torment 1. And to be frank, I enjoyed this part. If it weren’t for the fact that I have a kick ass Whirlwind Barbarian, I would probably enjoy playing other characters a lot more. But having a near fresh start character does give you a type of new way of progressing and it honestly doesn’t take long before you’re in at least Torment 3. The thing is that I didn’t want to push her too fast in the way some people might try going from zero to hero when you already have unlocked all the higher Pit tiers on a more powerful character. That way, I could still experience a small sense of progression on her. On top of that, getting the other set bonuses was not difficult at all.

But part of the journey was just using the existing War Plans to get through these lower torments. I could have just grinded in the Pits to push her Glyphs, etc. But you simply do not gain enough War Plan experience so you’re effectively wasting a lot of time doing any non-War Plan activity (which will be part of my upcoming criticisms to the War Plan mechanism). On a fresh character, you will want to only do War Plans so you can level them up. This does prevent you from focusing on a single activity like the Pit and you’re at the mercy of RNG for what it gives you. As a result, I would do the Pit anytime I had a chance but I still needed to do all the side activities which takes time, which left me at around Torment 6. I could easily do a higher Pit level but I like gradual progression especially because of how I didn’t obtain all the necessary glyphs.

That said, I really had wanted to play the Wing Strike build rather than Zeal. I think leveling with Zeal was a little painful and slow. At the moment, Wing Strike is considered a C grade build as per Maxroll. Also, I’ve read numerous other people describing Wing Strike being weak, awkward and not great at bosses. However, Wing Strike does offer one thing that other builds (except pure Auradin) do not: a walking simulator build.

Given this experience, the whole ordeal gave me the epiphany of how poorly structured Diablo 4 is at the moment. First, crafting is definitely in a better state if not the best state as far as any previous version of Diablo has been. But the cost and sheer RNG aspect make the situation truly a nightmare along with the horrible UI. While I do think the crafting materials are a massive step up from what they had before, the interaction with this whole system is nearly insufferable from the fact that you cannot easily pick up the materials off the ground, the tiny amounts provided, the very manual mechanisms to craft anything desirable and the depressing feeling of being letdown when you cannot get what you want. Some mentally disturbed individuals actually enjoy this system but I think those people are masochist and want carpal tunnel because that is what you will receive as your true “reward” from enduring this torturous experience.

But I think the frustrating wasn’t just this terrible flow for me. I think where the game just dies and leads to burn out is when I find myself doing this highly manual, one-by-one, type of workflow where I get nowhere. When you combine how build guides are made with the “idealistic” gear in mind and try to pair it with someone who does not want to spend their entire life inside a single game, it’s a really bad combination. I want to play the actual game and find some meaningful progression towards a goal. The RNG factor absolutely kills 90% of my desire to play this game any longer than a month when there’s a reasonable season at hand. I’m not talking about just grinding to find items, but grinding, finding the items/currency, then starting from scratch because the game has a shitty “The Price is Right” failure honk going off on you because there’s a built in gambling mechanism. It’s just not fun and more than frustrating.

Where the idealistic build guides portion start to damage the game for me is when the game allows for an insane level of multipliers and damage types on gear. For instance, in the Zeal Paladin’s case, you grab on Gloves, Rings and Amulets Critical Strike Damage, Vulnerable Damage, Physical Damage and Attack Speed. While it is good that you can obtain all these forms of damage modifiers, getting the quad-fecta version is close to impossible without spending hours maybe even days on a project. You’re effectively doing Focused Rerolls or Adding/Removing carefully, one by one. The workflow of the Cube itself is just so horrendous that you’re better off blowing your brains out with a bazooka than suffering this mind numbing, fecal waste of time. Hence, why I just started giving up once I hit 2-3 key modifiers. We’re not even talking about Greater Affixes either nor adding the perfect Temper and Masterworking, which still are all RNG based to a degree. THIS IS NOT FUN.

For me and I think a lot of ARPG players, the real fun is when you see meaningful progress and that you’re gradually getting improvements while the game opens up as well as seeing the updates which alter how you play the game. The way Diablo 4 is currently designed, you have so many impediments where the start of a new season is fine but once you get into the end game or when you start playing alts, this feeling of sameness of self-awareness of being on in a trapped hamster wheel creeps up quickly. This same feeling is the same reason I quit World of Warcraft a while back because I knew that game was horribly poisonous to my mental state. With RNG being the gatekeeper in Diablo 4, I feel like all the joy of the game gets quickly sucked out, which is why the game only last for most people a few days after the start of a season.

Another thing that I realized in playing the Zeal Paladin build is that the game is terrible for anything except walking simulators. At this point, the game requires every build to be fast, do area damage, have great single target, need high defense and a get out of jail card (outside of Evade). It’s absolutely ridiculous to have these types of requirements because it imposes a very strict type of style in place. The end result of these requirements is that the only builds worth doing are those that can either clear the entire screen at once or doing enough damage in a radius quickly while not stopping. All the builds that I’ve played that were enjoyable were speedy, did not pause for casting, had some sort of gimmicked defense and possessed a reasonable area clear. This is an absolutely stupid design.

There are two major problems in the current design of the game, which funnels players towards these types of builds. First, bosses have massive, unforgiving AoE zones and generally poor mechanics that become annoying once they phase. So you need to effectively kill the boss before they can phase. If damage reduction were actually meaningful in this game, the damage wouldn’t be so bad. You should be able to take multiple hits even at higher difficulties if you have enough Toughness. So Toughness is virtually a nonsensical, meaningless stat. The second major problem at this stage is the recent addition of on death effects. I would argue that on death effects would not be an issue IF YOU COULD SEE THEM. The game’s art design effectively make these on death effects almost unfair because they aren’t highlighted well, they conflict with the player’s abilities and the damage becomes so high that there’s almost nothing you can do. It’s one thing if the Executioner’s falling sword pushes you into a swirling poison pool that takes a portion of your health away. It’s another when you can’t even see either and just die out of nowhere.

The other massive problem is the speed in which the game has moved towards. People describe Diablo 4 as more of an arcade style game (they even have those anymore outside of Japan????). So the expectation is that everything just moves fast. When they talked about increasing the AI for monsters in higher torments a while back, we never really saw that aspect in play. I think most people were expecting better reactions from monsters, which only seem meaningful in lower level content where a player is undergeared. In higher difficulties, the only real visual thing is seeing monsters assault players must faster and shoot out a ton of damaging effects. None of these elements cause me to believe that the monsters’ AI has improved; instead, it’s just AI slop in a very literal sense. But the result of this is to force players to have increased speed in a variety of ways. It’s basically kill or be killed.

But the core overarching issue is the internal edict that the developers are here to kill the players. This was actually a highlight in a previous developer campfire. “You will die” they mentioned during Season 9, I believe when all the monsters received a massive revamp. Now, this situation would be fine IF there was compensation for the way the various systems have evolved. If Toughness was actually meaningful/useful as a clear stat to indicate how much damage you can mitigate at once, then the current systems would actually work. You wouldn’t have to use some sort of janky, gimmick like Resolve stacking or Immortal Barbarian with Selig’s to deal with a lot of the one shot stupidity.

Along with this internal edict as I’m labeling it, the various multipliers that players are allowed and almost expected to use are out of control in conjunction with the Torment and monster damage scaling problems. Many people have stated that multipliers are what is making the game ridiculous. The problem is that they aren’t really meaningful stats at the end of the day. You can’t deduce how much you ought to be doing because of the wishfully complex math involved. It would be different if say +1 skills simply meant +1 to damage or something on a reasonable level. I think part of the problem is that multipliers are the mentally ill fated mechanism that got World of Warcraft into a bad state to begin with in creating higher tier gear and making lower levels invalid when an expansion began. So this issue ended up somehow getting inherited to the Diablo franchise.

I don’t think the game as-is can easily change the multiplier situation without yet another round of monstrous refactorings from the ground up. But it is a major issue that I think has made these various builds problematic because of how it’s impossible to reliably calculate damage and defense. And to be clear, I think the only real multiplier should be on Critical Hit and nothing else and I would reserve that type of damage to a few select scenarios.

Given these situations and the upcoming Season 14, I’m not certain if I want to play at this point. I’m a bit disappointed in the state of things. I think the changes to Mythics coming up and the various balance changes don’t solve the core problems of the game. The actual builds themselves won’t change much, which leaves just the season mechanic as the only reason to play. But I might just be burnt out by the game at this stage. I think if the grind was more progressive than regressive from its RNG dependency, I would be more compelled to try more things out. But the game is still a far cry from what I would consider a true A tier level title.

The post Diablo 4 Lord of Hatred: Season 13 Zeal Paladin Build Review and Game Thoughts appeared first on Kontroversial Keith.

Season 14 Mechanics / Features

Pandemonium Ruptures

This is the main new season feature where an event can occur in the open world called a Pandemonium Rupture. There will be three classes of this:

• Normal – Small versions that can be found anywhere in the open world but happen more frequently in Helltides.
• Surging – Medium versions that can replace events in Helltides.
• Colossal – Larger ones that appear in the Fields of Desecration.

You basically kill the mobs around something called Death’s Head Idols (Jerry Garcia reference????) to open the ritual ring (which I’m guessing is similar to most of the summoning mechanisms you find in this game). Then like Hellspires and Ravenous Soulspires, you try to keep these ruptures open by killing mobs as well as closing something called Tears. Also, Rupture Goblins can appear to open more Ruptures. So it sounds similar to the other type of events like certain chest and shrine events found in dungeons.

Realmwalker 2.0

The return of the Realmwalker is here (something I have asked for just as adding content to the base game). I know the fight itself has changed where you no longer have to chase the Realmwalker around as that portion was heavily criticized by the community. Instead, this new Realmwalker will behave as a world boss fight once it’s summoned. The way a Realmwalker is summoned is through Pandemonium Ruptures:

• Normal – Cannot summon
• Surging – A chance to summon when you completed with a Mastery level within the timeframe of the event.
• Colossal – Guaranteed

Like in Season 6, defeating the Realmwalker will once again open a portal, this time to a smaller arena called the Deathtoll Chamber.

Deathtoll Chamber

This area will be a one-room mini-dungeon you can enter via defeating a Realmwalker or when you close enough Tears inside a Rupture within a Nightmare Dungeon. I’m guessing that this area is similar to the one from season 6 where you’d fight a gauntlet of enemies and some sort of mini boss for the rewards. But the key takeaway from the notes is that you can get Greatere Lai Boss Keys here, at least as the best source. I’m not sure if that implies other places like normal bosses, etc. will still give them out but I’m guessing that you will be able to better target farm them here.

New Monster Family: The Risen

Gravehounds are a part of the new Risen monster family and will appear from Ruptures and the Deathtoll Chamber. When you kill these Gravehounds, they will drop orbs that enhance an Exarch monster, which is another form of the Risen, that aims towards it. If you get the orb before it reaches the Exarch, you get the power yourself. So this thing sounds a little similar to a Headhunter except you probably get some sort of temporary power like the thing you’d find from Chaos Portals. Instead of having an actual permanent season power, you’re just granted a transient one here.

Seasonal Lair Boss

This is a familiar boss (a Reaper type) that we’ve seen from Diablo 3. But this new boss will have a lair similar to other lair bosses that is accessible from Zarbinzet. The boss opens up like other bosses from Torment I and will require a Greater Lair Boss key to get its rewards cache. The main purpose behind this boss for the end game activity is to farm Mythics and the Mythic Unique Upgrade currency as the chances will be higher than other bosses for the season.

One comment I have here is if this boss is going to suck. It’s obviously meant to be a farmable mob but lately, the end game bosses have been worsening. On the bright side, you’re not forced to farm this thing at T12 but I have to wonder with all the changes to Mythics how frequent the drops will be depending on the difficulty especially with the incoming class nerfs.

Mythic Uniques 3.0

So the main story here is that Mythic items are going to undergo yet another change but in a huge way. The old Mythics items are losing their status and becoming regular uniques where they only have a single static affix. Instead, Mythics are going to be a quality property (as opposed to rarity) where your affix stats are boosted as well as the core Aspect power by about 30%. So in a way, they’re receiving the Chaos Power treatment in terms of the power gain. From what I can tell, this is going into core as finding the new Mythics in eternal will be a thing. Also, you can craft onto a Unique this Mythic attribute with a special currency. They’re saying it’s a season only currency found from bosses but I heard on the live chat that this will also be going into core. Lastly, only one craftable Mythic unique can be equipped, which implies that Mythics are effectively becoming the equivalent of Primordial Ancients from Diablo 3.

With regards to Uniques though, the main upside is that they’re using the Horadric Cube to be able to reroll affixes using the Chaotic and Focused Reroll abilities. That should help the overall unique scenario a lot but I’m still unhappy that Uniques in general are becoming more generic by the day. Also, I’m very unhappy that the Diablo 3 systems are continuing to make its way into the game but not really having a meaningful impact but turning the game into something more generic when it comes to skills and modifiers as multipliers.

Tower & Leaderboards Beta Rewards

I’m not going to describe what’s going on here. Instead, I’m going to use this space to continually make my disgust for Leaderboards well known as the thing that’s going to rot this game further. There is going to be a moment of respite though that I hope counterbalances the emphasis on esports that I will discuss since it may affect how I play.

War Plans Updates

Most of the feature updates here affect group play. I still think that making War Plans this randomly constructed thing is terrible. Again, instead of going into the mechanics here, I am going to utilize this space to emphasize how the notion of a play list needs to actually resemble a goal oriented mechanism and to remove the nonsensical random generation of an already small set of options.

The other major piece is that the rewards are being increased for longer activities like Helltides and Inferno Hordes due to their time commitment. So rather than having 1 or 2 open chest in pre-Torment difficulties, you’ll be forced to achieve 300 Cinder. That partly makes sense in that people are swapping between activities quickly and probably shifting once their Helltides quest is done but forgoing the normal Whisper activities. I honestly wish that you’d just get random quests for Helltides instead to vary up the activities and make it more goal oriented.

Solo Self Found Mode

This is probably the second biggest update to me. They did mention since the launch of the Paladin class that they were working on an Solo Self Found (SSF) mode. Well, it’s here. I am very much in favor of this because I think it’s mostly going to cater towards streamers and the crybabies in this game who bitch all the time about gear and unfairness. In having the HCSSF mode in particular, I think you’ll see a new group of crybabies that will suck each other off and become elitist in swimming in their own toxic pools.

That said, I think once the basic SSF mode goes out it might help clear up certain areas because these modes will have their own instances. You’ll still see people in the game but cannot trade nor group. You can fight world bosses and legions but cannot partake in a group that do those events. Also, that shitty raid won’t be a thing for these people, which is fine because I’m hoping that this mode will further kill off this activity.

For myself, I might actually try it. Not because I’m elitist but because I’m hoping that having a separate instance will shrink the general population in town and prevent lag. Someone did complain this is not a true SSF mode because of the world participation aspect. I argued that the only way you’d get a true SSF situation is if the game received an offline mode. Otherwise, you’d need a dedicated instance per player. Neither are viable for one reason or another (all financial reasons). So this is the compromise. The main reason to do this in the first place though is getting to a purer state where people can earn bragging rights. Then the main issues will be on Blizzard when it comes to problems like dupes and that odd Transfiguration issue. The dupes might actually get fixed in SSF and I’m sure they’ll patch up the Transfiguration problem by the time PTR or S14 launches. But I do think this is going to be a huge win overall in any case as well as addressing that question I had about world bosses and other group related content (except for the Raid since we hate the raid).

Other Aspects

The rest are more QoL things, fixes, nerfs, etc. But I want to talk about the main problem: more numeric changes. I get that S13/Launch was meant to be the actual PTR for the game. I think the devs went in and figured they could get away with this situation just one time and you can see the numerous bugs in place. However, there’s a constant factor that bugs me in that we still are seeing balance changes.

What I really want is a stable game. No more bipolar disorder because of the constant leadership and priority changes. Can we finally have a game that starts to move forward much quicker? I do appreciate the updates to uniques, the new season mechanic, a new boss, mobs and the SSF mode. But where’s the new items? How about increasing the number of activities for War Plans? The upcoming S14 is okay but it’s like S6 except worse because you didn’t get the expansion content underneath. Instead, we’re just seeing balance changes mostly while the main season content will end up getting stashed away, iterated upon as feedback entered rather than becoming another core piece of the game whether it was good or bad.

But I keep emphasizing that the main game needs more to do. Blizzard’s feedback loop is just too slow and it’s frustrating to see that they keep tackling the same problems over and over with only a tiny amount of momentum forward. With all the nerfs coming up there’s no real compensation. I don’t think this new version of Mythics is going to make the game play anymore interesting because it’s just numeric and another hamster wheel being tacked on. If they suddenly announced that Legion events, World Bosses and Strongholds would become parts of War Plans with their own trees along with past successful seasons, then I’d be really excited because my game play would change with the new activities that would change. But I want the game to change and move forward somehow. I feel stuck in a shitty timeloop where the world is familiar but the names change and nothing else meaningful. Give us something to really chew on to feel excited about rather than incremental updates that focus on constantly trying to repair outdated systems or things that are considered unbalanced.

The post Diablo 4 Lord of Hatred PTR for Patch 3.1 Review appeared first on Kontroversial Keith.

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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1. Warlock Visuals – I don’t think this is going to be an easy fix that will get out in time for Season 14 but the Warlock is simply too noisy and visually busy for no good reason. Even something as simple as an opacity slider for player effects could make a huge difference because of how badly the various effects interfere with the environment. The biggest issue is the conflicting ground effects that can determine the life and death for a situation.
2. Not Quite on Death Effects – It was clear that the game needed a change to increase the danger players can encounter. However, on death effects are a thing more ARPG players loathe because they’re generally considered unfair when they occur. While having danger is still required, it should not be an all-or-nothing scenario especially when defenses generally have little impact on blunting these effects. The fix would be to figure out a good spot where Toughness translates into mitigating a percentage of the overall damage. So instead of seeing your entire health bar taken off, you see percentages at a time. In boss fights, this change makes a much bigger difference especially in cases where bosses are phased and have poorly telegraphed mechanics. I think that might be easier to change compared to another revamp where the developers inspect each mechanic to add better telegraphing. The long term solution is to improve the visuals and telegraphing of mechanics but I think that’s a monstrous feature that would take a very long time to get right.
3. War Plans Shared Experience on An Account – This is something I think most people want. As someone who has done five characters already, it would be nice to have my experience be spread across the account since I’m still the individual playing but simply changed context with the alt. I don’t mind the grind itself but to get to the lower levels of the trees is pretty bad. I do hope to see more upgrades and more activities for War Plans but I have stated that if that is to occur, they need the shared experience part to balance out having more nodes added as well as deeper trees. For leveling to 70, I think they can have limited trees to prevent players from overextending themselves. But the overall experience should be shared. That way you can customize your activity on what you need such as getting gear or glyphs upon hitting level 70.
4. Better Unique Affix Management – I think the way Uniques were handled was basically laziness by the developers. At this point, the only real “Uniques” are Mythics. Uniques would be better off if their powers were turned into Greater Aspects or some other recipe and allow players to imprint them. The old Unique affixes were better done and made them worth farming. This was a major mismanagement on their part since they cut out passives and were in all likelihood rushed to get this part of their system out rather than sitting down and really examining each unique’s affixes and figuring out what deserved to stay. The long term fix is to make the Unique Aspect a property that goes into its own Aspect box once you salvage the item. That way, you can still use a unique that drops but are required to farm it. And it can still be build enabling since they would be rare. But at least allow players to optimize the affixes on them by letting up imprint the Aspect onto a rare.
5. Remove Indestructible Transfiguration Property – No one liked the bricking effect during Santification so the developers relented in only having legendaries and not Greater Affix uniques be affected by a “brick”. Given how difficult is already is in finding a decent item, the idea of indestructible is merely adding insult to injury. Something like this is good for streamers to be embarrassed by their viewers but it’s terrible for the average player as an experience where you feel like you’ve wasted your time. If they intend to keep this, then bring back adding prized legendary aspects and mythic properties to Transfiguration similar to Sanctuary. That makes it worth the effort of Transfiguration’s gamble.
6. Temis Obol Vendor – It’s become a recent issue someone discovered where they realized that the Obol vendor in Temis does not provide Uniques. It blows my mind how the Obol vendors don’t share the same loot table but I did confirm last night that I could gamble a unique elsewhere. This sounds like a low hanging fruit situation to fix maybe in a patch for this season. But it is frustrating knowing that I missed numerous unique opportunities because a single vendor was either bugged or intentionally designed in this manner.
7. Echoing Hatred Rarity – I think a major complaint from most people is that the one new end game activity simply is too rare. I think it was an experimental mode and that the developers didn’t know how well it could scale or destroy their servers. So they made it into a rare event because it’s probably built really badly behind the scenes. They didn’t have a PTR to really help them determine how to scale this thing either, which is why I think they limited the access. Not to mention they wanted a broader group to test this feature out rather than just hardcore types or streamers.
8. The Latest Gem Implementation – Personally, I didn’t really care enough because I wasn’t interested in min/maxing my characters out this season. But I will say that the farming portion for getting top Gems is ridiculous. One might say it’s balanced against the power that the Gem Strength affix provides via Transfiguration (which can be further Masterworked). But the way you get these Gems is mostly through a single dungeon or by trading. I know some people are calling for the nerf to Gem Strength but that would only work if the power of the gems are reduced correspondingly with the effort to farm them. Oddly, a lot of those people who are in some of those camps are the types that want a hardcore grind. So I don’t get it. Either way, I’m probably in favor of reducing gem power, decreasing the amount of materials required for higher level gems and keeping the Gem Strength affix as-is since it’s already a rare enough Transfiguration that it’s like hitting the lottery when you get one.
9. Making War Plans Selection a REAL Play List that can be Customized – I think it was false advertising by Blizzard when they said that War Plans would be customizable for your play style. No, it isn’t. War Plans forces you into a nonsensical RNG grouping that has limited number of changes. WTF is this. I think this game mode had zero need for an RNG layer that made no sense. If you wanted an RNG layer, you’d have to compensate the player by adding something like triple rewards because the RNG layer defeats the purpose. Instead, War Plans should be a game mode that theorycrafters can help other players plan out their activities based on the need. I’ve argued in the past that you should have a path to help players obtain their goals. If you’re focused on paragon leveling, then provide a tree that optimizes your boards. If you need gear, especially build enabling uniques as you’re trying to get your build online, give me that type of tree. Honestly, if they want to fix the War Plans piece, get rid of the experience points part, have the activities get unveiled as a character levels up with certain breakpoints that permits that character to gain access to an activity (e.g. lair bosses only start appearing in Torment) and make the selections completely available and deeper. Or perhaps, the experience gained from activities goes into a general pool that function as activity upgrade points that can be placed into the available nodes. That would solve the bulk of the issues with this system. The current system is half baked and only was popular due to the novelty from its freshness. But it was far from what was promised in my book.
10. Loot Filter Upgrade – Besides improving on tooltips (because certain parts make no sense when you look at them), I think the Loot Filter should simply be changed into a Loot Vacuum with a checkbox that makes auto pickup turned on by default. But you should be able to uncheck it if you prefer the carpal tunnel inducing experiencing of clicking on microscopic items that have a tiny pickup radius and are placed haphazardly on the ground in a manner that makes clicking impossible.
    10b. Auto pickup for Currency, Charms/Seals and Runes – Instead of the Loot Vacuum, then at least let the Pet pick up these microscopic items. There’s really zero reason why anyone in 2026 should have to sift through the ground for these imperceptible items. We know the technology exist because the Pet can pick up gold and other materials. So why not the rest?

Final Thoughts

Why didn’t I add Mephisto and the cut scene to this list? I think Mephisto is such a poorly done boss that it should be outright scrapped. Whoever the lead encounter(s) person/people are need a mandatory probationary period at Blizzard. I’m not sorry nor will I apologize for making that comment. There’s something clearly wrong with this person in believing that they can add a raid style phased boss to a farming, casual game and then force some sort of social engineering to cockblock seasonal progress because of how bad the system is designed. I feel like the Diablo 4 team invited the raid boss encounter people from WoW to the Diablo 4 side without realizing that they are two differently designed games. Many encounters that have the horrible pulled out view should be removed from the game and revamped from the ground up because they defy any common sense for UI/UX and game play in this genre. Even high end streamers who can farm these bosses do so through gritting their teeth because of how bad these mechanics are. The difficulty for these bosses is purely artificial. If you want a raid style boss, go play Dark Souls or find a mythic guild in WoW. I don’t want Diablo 4 to be a game for everyone. There’s some limits where you need to put your foot down and say enough is enough. Same thing for the Tower and high level Pit situations. The so-called broken builds that people complain about wouldn’t be a thing if leaderboards and this misguided notion of esports were removed as a core value from Blizzard in all of their games. It’s something that makes a game like this toxic since the competitive assholes, who are a very tiny vocal minority, are the ones ruining the fun by calling for nerfs and not really understanding how a game like this ought to be made.

The post Diablo 4 Lord of Hatred: My Top 10 Fixes that Need to Happen for Season 14 appeared first on Kontroversial Keith.

1. Inferno Hordes / Impending Doom – I imagine this upgrade is really meant for group play because it’s just awful for a single player the way things are setup. Effectively, you’re waiting or events to spawn in the last 10 seconds of a round but you’ll get things like spires or Aether Fiend spawns which take too long. It won’t matter what build you use as a solo player but this one probably should go away unless they replace the events with other modifiers like Aether Goblins, the Inferno Butcher, etc. and avoid the four point area system. Only take this one if you have a group.
2. Inferno Hordes / Total Chaos – This might seem appealing because of the chance to get the goblin event. However, the downside is that you only have two picks per round. The problem here is that most choices end up sucking in general and if you get a bad set of choices like spires and the rain options, you can’t do anything that can prepare you for an event like the Aether Fiends spawn. You’re better off just having more choices and optimizing around that and your build.
3. Tree of Whispers / Fortune of Famine – This to me really is a n00b trap. I’ve had situations where the only choices were junk. It feels awful when you’ve wasted your time only to see junk appear. I think an option like this is better for streamers who enjoy getting ridiculed for donations, subscription messages, etc. Otherwise, for a normal player, this is a terrible option.
4. Helltides / Wretched Vermin – This is truly an uninspired choice. Although I’ve never chosen this upgrade, I’ve seen others who tried it and basically you see these rats falling from the sky around you. There’s no reward that I see associated to this event and think that if there was a benefit, then it might be novel. Otherwise, it’s just a bad meme.
5. Helltides / Hell’s Prize – I haven’t seen anyone report that this choice is any good. I think it’s just another n00b trap. You’re really better off going for a wide spread and opening as many Tortured Gifts as possible since the average reward these days is pretty bad.
6. Helltides / Undying Embers – This is another n00b trap. I think it’s incredibly hard to die in Helltides these days. This definitely is a wasted upgrade for Hardcore players.
7. Undercity / Jade Epiphany – The right hand side of the Undercity I heard is really bad. For some builds, increasing the monster power level might cause a complete failure of a run because people can’t kill things fast enough. The thing with the Undercity is that you need speed and fast kills for a build to be successful. Once you hit Mythic Tribunes, the rewards themselves are pretty high so anything beyond modifiers that increase your attunement pretty much hurt your chances for a successful run.
8. Lair Bosses / Infernal Deception – I think the Belial mini boss encounter is annoying as hell when it happens. Imagine how I’d feel if you had to deal with yet another encounter once your Inferno Horde run is done especially once you’ve spent 20-30 minutes trying to get through all those waves of nonsense.
9. The Pit / Damned Thieves – I won’t even go near this thing. Traps in Diablo 4 suck and the goal for any Pit run is to finish as quickly as possible. Add to the fact that you have to deal with the stupid Orb mechanic and this is clearly a n00b trap.
10. The Pit / Heart of Stone – Even though I choose this option when I get a chance, I still dislike the way it’s implemented. I hate having to pick this thing up at the start of the run or even pick it up if I drop it. But the worst part is the backtracking for grabbing slow dropping Orbs that require you to run over them and not have a Pickup Radius attribute/affix to make this issue not as frustrating/painful. If the Pet moved faster, had a big pickup radius, etc. then maybe this option wouldn’t be as bad. This is more of a situation where it’s a forced necessity but I feel there should be better options available for a stupid mechanic.

The post Diablo 4 Lord of Hatred: My Bottom 10 War Plan Upgrades appeared first on Kontroversial Keith.

1. Helltides / Hellmouth – In general, I’m a huge fan of Chaos Portals in Helltides and this is where things start to take off in terms of adding a dynamic layer to the game. In particular, Chaos Portals are what I consider a good form of gambling in the Forrest Gump type of manner with the “Life’s a box of chocolates, Forrest. You never know what you’re gonna get” type of philosophy backing it. One of the best outcomes I’ve ran into was receiving a large number of uniques where one was a build enabling type that I had a hard time farming on a certain character. So this maybe confirmation bias but I still feel excited whenever one of these portals spawns at any difficulty in a Helltide.
2. Lair Bosses / Grigoire’s Gambit – This is a perfect example of how moving the claustrophobic setting of the lair boss encounter into the open world is fantastic especially for characters that need to farm a boss. It’s an instance of efficiency where you have a good chance of the boss showing up merely by opening a Tortured Gift in a Helltide. Although this spawn isn’t the exact same, you can still receive loot from Grigoire’s table as well as potentially having random help appear because of the open world nature of this encounter. The only annoying bit are the electrified spawns that appear after you kill him. I think you can get up to two which means increased potential for loot.
3. The Pit / Pit Butcher – This is a great modifier because if you encounter the Butcher early enough in a Pit run, you don’t have to waste additional time. Last night, I had killed the Butcher spawn without realizing it and only knew something happened when the protection bubble appeared over me.
4. The Pit / Choron’s Haste – This upgrade (and more of Choron’s related upgrades) offers increased chances to upgrade your Glyphs. These upgrades make The Pit far less painful than the previous versions. I think I’ve managed to get up to 9 upgrades in a single setting. If you have a significantly high Pit tier, you might be able to get a huge chunk of your Glyph upgraded.
5. Tree of Whispers / Corrupted Roots – I like that they re-added the idea of Corrupted Roots and Headrotten. I dislike that they made the mechanism an item you plant from your inventory though. I think these should be auto-spawned randomly in your journey in the world. That would make the general world encounters more dynamic. Like if these appeared during a World Boss encounter, it would add a new dimension for that fight. Also, while traveling from place to place, if these spawned or if a region suddenly became a Headrotten/Corrupted Root type of zone, then it makes exploring non-Helltide regions much more interesting. So the idea is right but the implementation needs more work. Also, it would be cool if they added the Witch Powers and/or Occult gems back in this manner. That way, there’s a clear benefit for farming this type of upgrade. But this is the type of thing I want to see for re-integrating old season mechanics. They just need to bring back old season rewards to compliment this type of mechanism.
6. Nightmare Dungeons – Altar of Avarice – I like the addition of these Altars in dungeons. The only issue I have is their visibility. I would have added the Greed is Good upgrade except that the portal is too rare of a spawn and/or is bugged.
7. Lair Bosses / Two by Two – The general idea of the Nemesis lair is pretty cool since you can get additional rewards. I would have ranked the other ones higher if the chances were better and the 30 second timer hadn’t been added. Again, I mostly am emphasizing the idea not the implementation here. I do think that these arenas should be bigger though to invite more chaos with other elements like mobs that get randomly spawned inside or having other events.
8. Tree of Whispers / Material Wealth – I feel like I’m constantly material starved. So having a place dedicated to obtaining material rewards is really great. This is a great option once you’re starting to focus on crafting gear after deciding on a build and getting reasonable bases.
9. Undercity / Gutter Filth – To be frank, I’m not a huge fan of Undercity but this is one of the few choices that isn’t bad to improve your ranking quicker.
10. The Pit / Choron’s Blessing – The other Choron’s upgrade that I think is a must have, at least early on when you’re pushing your Glyphs. It’s not fancy but anything to get out of the Pit is a good choice.

As you can see, most of the stuff I prefer are things that bring more life to the same areas I’m constantly in or adding a QoL layer such as the Pit upgrades. The other nodes are things I’m still working towards like the one for Helltides that add Profane Mindcages. I think if there were more nodes that cater towards a specific type of play list that can be curated, saved and/or adjusted then this system would be a little less clunky than what it is. But the overall implementation is a decent enough start.

The post Diablo 4: My Top 10 War Plan Tree Upgrades appeared first on Kontroversial Keith.

First, let me state that I generally don’t like using the Whisper Cache method for boosting an alt. When I play an alt, I want to see the progression and the Whisper Cache method bypasses the actual play experience. The importance of hand leveling an alt is that it provides the opportunity to feel skills before the end game build comes together. Quite frankly, I think if they got rid of the rushed arcade style the game would behave a lot better overall. But that’s just my opinion here.

When it comes to a fresh season, I think leveling on normal difficulty is the way to go up until around levels 40-50. Anything beyond hard at the start of a fresh season can be rough because of how loot has frequently changed. And most people probably end up heading straight into the Helltide, which can be strong depending on your class. Without Runes, Aspects, progress with the Season Journey (especially the extra skill points), Helltides might seem more challenging at this stage. If I start a character later in a season, Helltides can get rough because there won’t be many players in the wild that can help you out. If no Helltides are up, I might try a different zone to avoid wasting time and get either gear or Whispers. Also, I won’t tackle the Blood Maiden in the Helltide by myself until I have some gear and help (well it would be pretty hard at level one just because not only will you probably not have enough damage but you won’t have the summoning mats)

Fortunately, with Helltides you end up, leveling quite quickly. I tend to stick to Helltides until roughly level 15 to get my first class specialty ability. For instance, Sorcerers being able to attach a Fireball to their spells tremendously helps clear speed. Also, this is when the game starts to pick up more speed. I usually start clearing Strongholds in the north eastern regions and those with portals. There’s a few where the portals make a huge difference in providing quick access to World Bosses, Helltides, etc. Also, clearing Strongholds opens up Dungeons, which have become quite important because of the new War Plans mechanic as well as Escalating Nightmare Dungeons (since they may kick you out; although that issue might’ve been fixed in a recent patch). Early on Strongholds provide a fairly easy way to get quick loot and a level or two. In the past, they would provide Tempering recipes so that was an added incentive for starting characters.

I try to do all of the older Strongholds and one of the Kurast region ones (the one without a portal). The other two in Kurast can be a hassle so I might avoid those especially the darkness one. But part of the problem in the past is that the heavily scripted Strongholds would bug out especially if you kill a boss or manage to avoid a trigger from the script. Then you would have to reset the instance and redo the Stronghold which feels like a waste of time. That’s why I do these at lower levels because there’s less of a chance of causing an issue compared to later on when you’re doing ridiculous damage. This technique might change in the future if they ever get around to updating these areas. In the past, some Legion events would be worth doing but lately that’s not the case since the content is outdated and not very rewarding beyond some early season achievement progress. Note: if there are Legion events tied to the season journey, you’re best off trying to accomplish these early on because no one is around to help most of the time later on. I might try doing 4-5 in a row to get things done and break up that activity by throwing in some Helltides or a Dungeon. With all the Strongholds available, I can get to roughly level 50 or so, depending on how much time I spend on alternate activities.

At level 30, the Mercenary vendor opens up and you can start buying items. For fresh seasonal characters, the Mercenary vendor won’t be very useful early on because you need to max out all your mercenaries to open up the vendor’s full potential. And I think it’s a bad idea to swap Mercenaries until they’re fully leveled. For alts, if you have enough of the currency, the Mercenary vendor becomes a great way to get some Aspects and gear while you’re leveling.

With the Horadric Cube available, another way to get Aspects, especially for fresh seasonal characters, is to use Pure Primordial Dust to upgrade a rare into a legendary. There’s other requirements but the Pure Primordial Dust is the main key. This becomes critical once rares start dropping and Aspects are harder to find early on. For alts, you can do something similar in cases where you have a difficult time finding a class specific Aspect (because usually by that point, you probably would have farmed up the ones you needed on other characters). You can combine this with buying rares at the vendors in town to slightly target farm a category of an Aspect.

Since they added War Plans, I think it’s important to get the activity tree leveling started. Early on, I believe only Helltides are available. Shortly thereafter, Nightmare Dungeons are added and later Undercity runs and the Pit. The Pit becomes viable a little later maybe in the 60s zone as a way to start get a few Glyphs leveled as well as unlocking Torment I. Undercity is okay if you use a fast build, otherwise it’s a slog. You can run them without the Tributes but I feel it’s a wasted activity. Doing Nightmare Dungeons through War Plans though is the way to go for a fresh seasonal character because you’ll probably have little to no sigil crafting materials and can get a free Nightmare Dungeon done in this manner. When Inferno Hordes open up, then War Plans also can be used if you don’t have a key. But don’t expect a lot of loot at this stage. Either way, the main goal here is to start gaining experience for your activities as some early nodes can be very rewarding. Probably, starting off with War Plans in future seasons will be the way to move forward as you can get some rewards just for opening chest in Helltides.

Now, from levels 50-70, you have a few options. With a fresh seasonal character, you pretty much need to grind your way to level 70. I think around level 40-50, if you want to challenge yourself, you can test increasing the difficulty especially if you continued to keep your gear upgraded. The most important in that situation is ensuring that your weapon gets upgraded periodically. I think every ten levels you should get new weapons since the DPS can fall off hard. Tempering can help but I would save my materials and gold for a season starter.

For alts, I think this is the point where you can decide if you’d prefer to finish the character using the Whisper cache mechanism or continuing to level. Lately, I’ve used the Whisper Cache just because the last parts end up being painful and the build pretty much is set by this stage. Also, having those Whisper Caches available means you will have some starting gear potentially at level 70. In that sense, you might want to try saving a few categories to give the alt a well rounded group of items to use and upgrade.

If there’s a seasonal quest, I will split my time doing portions of it. If there’s a boss involved (or bosses), I might try the quests on lower difficulties just because it’s less annoying. Also, in cases where there’s some sort of currency or power unlock, you want to get this portion done earlier. Until the next set of seasons are announced, I don’t know what those may look like so this part could be irrelevant.

Another key thing to note is keeping your set charms around. I believe these start dropping around level 40 or so. But they’re important not only to help boost your character early on but you can convert them with the 3:1 Horadric Cube recipe once you get into Torment difficulty. You do NOT want to convert any charms earlier though because they simply transform the charms into the lower powered set versions, not the class specific ones.

Along the way, you might want to consider which build you want for the end game. In the case of Season 13, the situation was special because everything changed, there was no patch notes and no PTR. So there were no build guides available, even leveling ones. Right now, because of the skill tree revamp, I think you don’t need to put as much emphasis on getting Aspects to synergize during the leveling phase. You can piecemeal a lot of items together. Only when you get to some of the earlier Torments will you want to start focusing on finding the rights pieces for a build. Since they did announce a PTR coming up (which is for the patch 3.1), I’m guessing that most builds will remain relevant unless they either alter the systems again (which I doubt) or add more items. I don’t see them adding more skills at this stage though. Either way, I think you can find an appropriate build guide moving forward to help continue getting you through the end game.

The post Diablo 4: My Preferred Method of Leveling appeared first on Kontroversial Keith.

Leveling was very smooth mostly because I had gone through a few characters already and had all the Runes I would need to start off quickly as well as max starting skill points. Again, for alt leveling, skills being capped based on your level feels crummy and almost pointless just because constant re-spec’ing already is a miserable experience. Here, I think if you have the skill points available and you have an alt character, you should be able to access any level on the tree. If the idea is to slow down leveling, then it makes no sense as many players will probably just use the Whisper Cache trick to power level up alts. In my case, I saved a few excess season caches once I hit around level 40. I found that for alts, one you do the majority of the strongholds and get to roughly level 40 or so, the last 20-30 levels feel more like busy work. So that’s when I use some spare caches just to finish off or get close to where I need.

For the early part of the leveling experience, I ended up doing a Minion type of build that uses the Command Fallen and Bombardment combination. Warlock minions drastically differ from other summoning builds as their minions mostly are temporary, thus forcing you to re-summon them. They function more like a demolition crew which makes the Warlock summoning style less passive than a Druid or Necromancer. On the other hand, the AI seems slightly better as these critters act more like a heat seeking missile. Also, there’s a Rampage greater demon that smashes enemies or rather a spot and continues to do so until you cast them onto a different spot. The most impressive summon though is the monstrous sword wielding Fiend of Abbadon, which reminded of Ragnarok from Thor.

Once I hit level 70, I altered the build slightly using a variety of boss trophies to get the build enabling uniques. I was missing an aspect or two so the build might’ve been a little off. Also, I never managed to acquire the Talisman set for this build and only found two pieces. Oddly, I managed to quickly scrape up the Apocalypse Talisman set instead (which was the build I was aiming for). The Minion build was fine and many people described it as tanky. However, I found that the lack of AoE and the funky swapping between forms was off. Some of it reminded me of the old Chicken build for the Diablo 3 Witch Doctor. I simply didn’t care for it here as I tend to dislike builds that swap context and UI. I think the experience is bad because of how you build a certain muscle memory which builds like this defy.

Right now, I’m running the Apocalypse build. What interested was the Umbral Chain skill in seeing these odd chains rotating around in the battlefield as well as the giant nuclear explosion that goes off periodically. I have the basic gear setup (included the Helm of Perdition). So far it’s a very impactful build that effectively one shots almost everything if you can get your Apocalypse spell off. It is a slower build compared to other ones I’ve played because you need to combo certain skills together to really max out your DPS. But it really isn’t that bad at this stage.

I think the real issue for the Apocalypse build comes once you begin pushing Pit levels or higher torments. The main comment I’ve read is its squishiness. You do emphasize getting a lot of life and have some defenses like employing the Endurant Faith as a charm. Where I think most people have issues is the double whammy effective of a brief pause during a cast then having too much indistinguishable screen clutter. Since on death effects now plague the game, the excess visual clutter prevents someone not paying attention to see things like the Executioner Sword effect. However, I think Blizzard is going to have a very difficult time fixing this issue for Warlocks because of how they made the class vastly messier than others.

I really think the solution is simple though where they need to remove the excess effects and go with a light opacity. Even if they were to remove the on death effects, you still have too much screen clutter interfering with other visuals like chests that lack clear outlines. But I think the positive in this is that hopefully it forces Blizzard to have a deeper examination into the visual design portion of the game because that part needs a lot of work.

I am glad that I gave this build a try though. I don’t think it’s something I will stick with for the rest of the season. Maybe I might try to push her glyphs to max and see how much gear I can improve upon. And while the big explosions does provide some satisfaction, the class itself with the two key flaws doesn’t provide a compelling enough reason to go further at this stage. I might either return to my Barbarian and attempt to aim for an immortal setup (which honestly seems boring and silly) or I might give my Druid a second shot. The three remaining classes of Spiritborn, Necromancer and even Paladin don’t really have any special builds that entice me at this point. I’d really prefer that Blizzard fixes up the main bugs from various classes then have a kick ass Season 14 with some new end game content that becomes permanent additions to the game and expand on the War Plans activities.

The post Diablo 4 Lord of Hatred: Warlock Class Review appeared first on Kontroversial Keith.

I’m going to re-post the items as they were with some formatting changes and side-by-side comments to better organize my thoughts.

​Progression & Account QoL

• ​Account-Wide War Plans: Progress is now shared across all characters. I think the general idea of at least having shared experience between characters on an account is something most people want. I think in practice this will happen at least in terms of a per season, per segment (seasonal, hardcore, eternal, etc.) If the progress isn’t shared, then the amount of XP ought to be reduced at least.
• ​Massive Cap Increases: The main comment here is gold and obol caps. The amount requested is absurd to me but I do think they need to choose a better number format for both. I think making gold and obol an unsigned longint would be the best solution.
• ​Auto-Loot: Specifically, the poster mentions Cube Materials. I think that the implementation ought to be a loot vacuum integrated into the Loot Filter that gets turned on by another checkbox next to the “Enable” buttons. There really is no reason for loot to be manually picked up in a modern game when other games handle inventory management much better. Any excess loot really should be allowed using a scrollbar attachment to each inventory tab type both on the character and in their Stash tabs.

​Endgame Adjustments (Hordes, Pit, & Undercity)

• ​Infernal Hordes Buff: Wave count capped at 5 across all tiers, but Burning Aether rewards are tripled. The quality of items for chest and boss loot has been massively buffed. – I think this won’t happen mostly because of how each is meant to build off the previous choices. Instead, I think the pragmatic solution is to spawn the events faster and eliminate that particular choice so that Infernal Hordes no longer takes 20-30 minutes.
• ​Instant Progression: Orbs in the Pit and Undercity now drop instantly upon mob death—no more waiting around to collect progress. – I think they need to get rid of the Orb system entirely and mark mobs that would have Orbs normally with a special icon to indicate the bonus and have that applied. This includes experience globes. There’s no good reason to have this type of implementation.
• ​Echoing Hatred: The Altar now lets you select your starting Torment Tier Wave. Echoing Hatred goblin bags now have a small chance to contain a Mythic Charm. – I can see the torment tier choice being a thing. I think the bigger issue is changing the key from a flag to a currency item in ones inventory. Having Echoing Hatred appear as a nondescript brown icon is simply terrible UI. Either have it automatically picked up or make it an account wide flag. Similarly, they need to up the event chance for spawning since it’s virtually impossible to get at this time.

​Next-Level Itemization & Crafting

• ​Mythic Dust: A new ultra-rare drop that completely resets a Transfigured item to its original state, allowing it to be modified again. – I like the idea but I doubt that Blizzard will implement this just because the idiots in charge prefer the hamster wheel/carrot on a stick model. You’d have to shoot the people in charge of that model and change the internal philosophy for RNG and loot in the company so I don’t see this becoming a reality anytime soon.
• ​Buffed Mythic Seals: Mythic Seal affix ranges are now 1.5x stronger (e.g., 10% crit becomes 15%). – Sounds good on paper but this change isn’t a game changer in itself that raises the game to a 10/10 standard. This is just an opinion. The better change would be ensuring the the Mythic Seal aspects didn’t suck out the gate.
• ​Unique Enchanting: You can now re-roll/enchant one affix on Unique items at the Occultist. – I think they simply got lazy with Uniques and converted their affixes into the general item pool to justify not having to spend the necessary time to fix each one. They certainly lied about having any type of close examination with these things and probably said fuck it. That said, I already hate the Occultist so giving them additional life at the cost of my sanity is a flat no. Instead, I think they really need someone to do what they promised in combing through each Unique and fixing their core affixes. Either that or flat out get rid of uniques, make a superior but rarer Greater Aspect type that players can imprint onto an item and it’ll solve both problems. Then have only Mythics be the true source of Uniques in the game.
• ​Transfiguration: Gem Strength has been nerfed by 90%. – This sounds like one of Rob’s bad takes that one of his braindead mark followers blindly agrees with. This transfiguration property already is difficult to obtain and most times people get bricked items. So they should be rewarded with a strong Transfiguration when it lands properly.

​UI, Settings, & Integrity

• ​Dedicated Stash Tab: A separate, dedicated stash space specifically for Runes, Gems, Charms, Seals, and Keys. – There’s really no need for this. Instead, the proper UI/UX solution is to add a scrollbar to each tab and leave the existing tabs for individual characters/builds that the player wants to try or use as a label. You don’t need to mindlessly copy PoE especially when there’s no monetary motivation. Instead, the UI/UX experience needs to improve.
• ​Loot Filter Fix: Filtered items will no longer clog your minimap with star icons or get mailed to your stash. – I thought the Loot Filter already did this. Maybe not the mailed part but that’s a minor inconvenience. The 10/10 game changer is the Loot Vacuum idea. Add a simple auto pick up option so that the player and pet merely need to run over loot within a specified radius. You continue to allow players who love carpal tunnel the ability to pick things up manually but make the default a QoL option.
• ​Visual Clarity: Added a game setting to turn off other players’ spell effects (looking at you, Apocalypse Warlock and Ancients Barbarian). – This is just bad visual design conflicting with how the game was intended. That said, the game badly needs to either minimize ground visuals that aren’t being set by monsters or provide better colorization and telegraphing. The low hanging fruit option might be an opacity setting but I think clearly marked damaged types (e.g. purple for shadow, orange for fire) and extreme highlights better serve the issue along with enforcing a rule of having monster effects cancel others out or only allow for a single effect to occur in an area at one time.
• ​Skippable Mephisto: All Mephisto cutscenes are now skippable, and his Mythic Seal drop rate is buffed. – The cutscenes sound like a major oversight because the team has no internal product QA. I would augment this statement by having another checkbox to prevent any cutscenes and extraneous dialog from ever showing up. That would make this game more tolerable.
• ​Competitive Integrity: Leaderboards will now instantly reset following any major bug/exploit fix. All recent community-reported exploits have been hotfixed. – Too big of an ask for a tiny gain. I’d prefer that they get rid of the leaderboards and remove any notion of esports and timed events from the game.
• ​Class Balance: Substantial buffs deployed for all underperforming classes, including Warlock and Paladin. – This is not a hotfix ask. This is a major patch. Also, how do you identify an “underperforming class?” You can’t just go to Maxroll and assume anything not in the S-tier is “underperforming.”  I would argue that the problem is that the people at Maxroll ended up getting too much political clout online but don’t have the resources/staff to accurately provide every build imaginable, especially those that should be at a high level. I think the issue with Warlock mostly is visual clarity and then second from the frequent comments about how it operates in a clunky manner. Paladin suffered mostly because the Castle node got killed by the community. So the community should blame itself, not Blizzard, for the Paladin’s downfall. I personally never asked for any nerfs. I was perfectly content with my S11 Auradin. Either way, asking Blizzard to balance classes is like Trump and his team of criminals going to jail and the world returning to 1986 levels of normalcy.Instead, the ask here ought to be a larger demand to kill off the concept of uncontrollable math, which has been handled through a poorly conceived system of multipliers and conditionals that make it impossible for the developers to determine how a reasonable sounding ceiling for damage and monster health. The only problem is that if a project like that were given the okay, we would be forced to sit through yet another iteration on all systems. But I can’t really see Blizzard being able to dig themselves out of this deep grave they’ve buried themselves under.

Final Thoughts

I think the author has good intent albeit a flawed interpretation of what ought to convert Diablo 4 into a true 10/10 game. Diablo 4 at this stage is a game that has finally managed to reach a bare minimal level of acceptance compared to other games in its genre. Diablo 4’s main benefactors revolves around nostalgia, brand recognition and the theoretically deep pockets that backs the brand. However, for the latter part of the game, I think it’s more deep bureaucracy that has stunted the growth, decision making process and bad estimations that has led to this current state. Other games though are just massively far ahead in nearly every manner possible, which becomes the ironic and frustrating part.

I think at this stage, the game itself is reasonably fun and the new systems have given the game enough new life where others are coming out of the proverbial closet to admit that it’s fun and d4notsobad. But again there’s simply not enough meat on the bones where things really are needed. I think the team has spent way too much time reinventing the wheel constantly without moving forward. For instance, in the case of game balance, I think the current systems in place pretty much invalidate any hope of proper balancing mostly because the over engineered math handled through an insane number of multipliers and strange conditions make it impossible for these people to create anything coherent.

Instead what would convince me that this game has the potential to become 10/10 is if the developers put more effort finishing up any modifications on older content that need updating to work with this new core and/or create more end game content. I thought that the previous seasons that had extensive mechanics and powers were the best mostly because of the alternate content provided. Like Season 7 is still the peak in terms of sheer variety potential. Also, the new content needs to constantly be integrated back into the core such as a mechanism like War Plans. With the various modifiers that have made their way into War Plans from previous seasons like Chaos Portals, I have argued that the team is willing to bring back old content from other seasons that were popular. I think the issue that they face is a long, disjointed feedback loop that results in taking longer than necessary whether it’s attempting to re-engineer pieces or overthinking certain things. For instance, while Chaos Portals returned, we haven’t really seen the much lauded Chaos Armor that the developers mentioned would probably make a comeback in some form. Beyond the modified affixes on unique gear, why would it take 3+ seasons before they can make a decision on how to reintroduce this concept?

So I think the general slowness for a live service game in the hands of a powerful studio owned by one of the most profitable companies in the world make the game seem that its real potential is being held back for, um, reasons. It’s certainly a problem when this slowness interferes with the addition of long stemming bugs that are almost deal breakers especially in contrast to how other studios might be able to push out content much faster. Until they improve their pipeline, I think the game will probably be mid mostly and from the periphery it’s nearly blind luck they managed to stumble upon this current iteration based on their history with this game.

The post Diablo 4 Lord of Hatred: Responding to Reddit Post on 20 Hotfixes that Would Make It A 10/10 Game appeared first on Kontroversial Keith.