There’s been an obvious amount of backlash against the S29 theme and how lackluster it is compared to previous themes. Some food for thought to put the season into perspective…
If everything goes to plan, it’ll be the last time we’ll be playing the game without an insane amount of powercreep available that’ll allow us to do GR150 with, say, 1500 or even 2000 paragons and the leaderboards eventually becoming GR150 time attacks.
it’s the last season where there’s truly a feature or modified feature that we haven’t experienced. At best, going forward, we’ll experience combination of themes but we’ll have seen each individual one before. Yes, there will be a paragon cap but they have anticipated that our power creep will come from good gear and it looks like fissures will facilitate reforging more easily. The progression seems quite logical and sensible so why not give it a try first before writing it off?
With how many D4 players are getting bored with the state of their game currently, and what looks like a good likelihood of players returning to D3’s next season, S29 may be the last season where we’ll have a sizeable chunk of the community back to blast that first week/fortnight.
I won’t try to make the lack of auto salvage and scaled back auto pick up a positive. It sucks but it’s not the end of the world. We did have vanilla, early RoS and 27 seasons without it so one more season won’t kill us.
So if you do love and enjoy the game still, why not just enjoy what you can of S29 in what ever state it ends up in?
You’re at a state, people want instant gratification. We need to move on from the Diablo 2 days, because those days are gone. Few are going to ever devote any more time into any one particular game, and this includes Diablo 3. Sadly, this also means Diablo 3 is going to be the least played season, even if Blizzard did a complete overhaul to the game.
The thing is, you can’t compare not having auto pickup/salvage before S28 with not having it now after S28. It slugs down the game heavily. I beg the devs to keep it in the game. No season felt smoother than S28 just because of this one QoL.
I’m a bit more casual so probably two weeks for me
In all honesty, after being spoon fed a GR150 solo, maxing my shards cap for NS and pretty much leveling up a max set of gems, I see fissures as a positive to get me back out into the open world and farming rainbow gobs and wirt’s original leg. These are the only two farmable cosmetics I’ve yet to get.
As much as I enjoy the power creep that came with ethereals, soul shards, sanctified items and the altar, I don’t mind a quieter season from time to time.
I don’t do much reforging coz I hate farming bounty mats so this will give me a chance to do just that and also do a bit of cosmetic farming too.
I’ll wait for S30/the permanent altar to get back to the power creep and level up my red soul shard gem… last gem I don’t have maxed.
D3 is dead until the altar comes back in S30, and then only if it’s mostly a complete return with significant player power included.
Until that time I suggest going to play another ARPG. POE is an ok choice if you don’t want to pay money, but my strong advice there is to avoid melee builds since the game is designed top to bottom with the “you need to avoid X to survive” mantra.
Reminds me of longwinded discussions on the eu forum a couple of years ago, where a guy insisted on the benefit of having some crit rolls (on gloves) on his invoker crusader. Because any and every source of damage would help. I’m sure Meteorblade remembers this.
Reminds me of the 2008 days when the original (not “classic” now) version of wrath of the lich king expansion came out for WoW. Everyone and their dog was rolling a new death knight (DK) character and had no idea how to play them. This class regenerated different runes as a resource and I saw lots of DKs rocking +spirit gear because “it will make me regen runes faster and do more damage bro” and +spell damage gear because “it will make my spells hit harder bro”.
The DK class had lots of spells (and also melee strikes) but was (and still is) officially a strength-based class and gains no benefit from traditional caster gear.
Unless they bring back the soul shard from S25 that benefited thorns builds by making them also scale with crit chance and crit damage. Just let me be an S++ tier godmode LOD bomb crusader please walking around killing everything passively.
Before I was 16, I rode a bike everywhere I wanted to go. The last 34 years since I have been driving a car, I have yet to ride a bike.
I do love hitting the Achievement LB’s, but then I am out. No altar QOL’s and too low a paragon cap means I will be playing other games the next several months.
