While I realise that this feedback cannot be addressed in the next patch, I feel like I need to share it anyway. Hopefully it can be of use on a bigger time frame.
Over the last few weeks and also through trying out the PTR, I came to realise I love the potential of the game more than the current status of it. It feels to me that the game is geared mostly to highly skilled players with a lot of time on their hands. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it leaves casual players like myself in the dust at times. Let me explain why I feel this way.
While it can be fun to play one of the meta builds from one of the many websites, part of the fun in playing the game is coming up with a build on your own. But all the layers of optimisation that are possible in the game, make it really hard to do this. You need to know all of the class skills (active and passive), all of the complex paragon boards, all of the legendary effects and all temper recipes, in order to figure out what works and what wont. This can become not only a time sink, but also a gold sink, given respeccing costs gold every time you want to change something. The current way tempering works also locks you into a single build, as you need new items if you want to try out new tempers, to see if those work better.
Even when you find something that sort of works, there often is a huge gap between this-fun-little-thing-I-tried and the current meta builds, making end game content even more challenging than it already is.
The late game content is now geared towards being challenging for the best builds (and for the most part I agree with that), however, this makes it sometimes only theoretically possible to complete certain fights, like the Echo of Lillith. Making fights like these part of the seasonal progression (like in season 4), implies that this content is reasonably doable for everyone. But I have still no idea how to best the echo of Lillith if my life depended on it. Most of the time I donāt even see the prompts to get out of the way (even after going through YT videoās explaining them to me, I donāt see it in the midst of the fight), because Iām too busy trying to kill her. And when I do miraculously see them, Iām too slow to respond.
This makes it feel like I hit a ceiling that is unbreakable. There is no amount of grinding just for gear that I can reasonably do to help me progress there. Which raises the question: is that fight intended to be beatable by everyone? If not, thatās okay, but season 4 seemed to suggest it should be, which is why it frustrates me all the more.
The idea of having Mythic Uniques drop from most content is a great improvement in my mind. It makes it feel like running helltides or collecting Grim Favours stays relevant, but it only solves the gearing part.
What I miss, I guess, is something like the D3 paragon points, where, if something proved too difficult, you could just grind out more levels to gain that extra edge. This could allow less skilled players to beat a difficulty that better players could complete early on. [edit: Iām not saying the old Paragon system was good, just that it kept the possibility/illusion of eventually being able to do something.]
Adding something like that probably requires a huge overhaul of the game, but I could see it having a place. There could even be game modes where this feature would be disabled, so that pure skill could be tested.
Of course I have no illusions that there will ever be a game that can truly be balanced for both casual players and the very best of players. No game can truly get there. But to me, it feels like the best of the best are what the new features, such as the infernal hordes, are geared towards, making me wonder how much longer the game will stay interesting to me.
The āMaybe with 10 more paragon levels I can do this thingā is what kept me playing in D3. And I really miss that incremental progression.
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that spreads out when it emerges from the ground. Or youāll be debuffed and nomore survive.