Not sure if this is the right place to post feedback for the dev team, but here is mine. I had a great time this season. I really enjoyed unlocking new powers, leveling up glyphs in nightmare dungeons with friends, and farming materials for Uber drops. I got a few of them: the staff, the amulet, and both helmets. I played a ball lightning sorc and loved the fast paced action of teleporting into a whole bunch of monsters to obliterate them.
Then AoZ dropped and my excitement went super high. I pushed early into tiers five and six, hit a dps wall around tier seven. No problem, I’ll grind out some glyph exp, I thought. I looked up the best farming method, and found the exp per hour was best at lower tier glyphs. Okay, not that fun but if it efficently lets me push into higher tiers I don’t mind. The next day, glyph power was lowered from 1/10th to 1/8th percent increase per node updated. Not a big deal, a 20% drop in power I guess was necessary after some adjustments.
The update on Friday to adjust the exp reawrds on the higher tiers was great, and I started grinding higher levels again. More fun, more challange, and more rewards. All good things! But my friends playing necromancer and druid couldn’t compete, and my barbarian friends would totally obliterate any elites before I could make meaningful damage. Ultimately I found that between the huge disparity in performance and the extremely punitive nature of death forfeiting any dungeon rewads, compounded with the huge increase in mob hp, this event just wasn’t fun for playing with friends. A shame, really. I think in hindsight increasing the number of enemies to elimite rather than monster hp, it would’ve been better.
By the start of the weekend and the AoZ builds started coming out, and I was excited to see what the community would create. I watched some amazing gameplay of barbs pushing past tier 11, then 14, then 19, then 24. Amazing! But… what else was there? A sorc had done tier 19 with what looked like the most boring, tedious playstyle possible. They would do a low-life build with constant barriers and kill enemies though slow attrition. This looked… completely unappealing to me. Where were the sorcs blasting through content with the same amazing proficency of our barbarian friends? I guess they don’t exist. But I wanted to push, so I tried this weird low life playstyle. And it was effective, but completely ruined the enjoyment of the gameplay for me.
I was at a crossroads. Should I revamp my entire playstyle just to progress in AoZ? Should I create a new barb so I can actually grind out some higher tiers? I decided that neither option was acceptable for me. I wanted to keep playing with the same playstyle that worked for me all the way up until the launch of AoZ, and I didn’t want to sink the time into leveling a barbarian for what would end up being a few weeks left of the event. So I did the last thing I could think that would work: I started grinding experience for my glyph in hopes my class dps defencies could be compenstate for with a higher glyph level.
In one of the dev campfire chats, the team said they wanted to see how far the community would go. Here it is for me, glyph level 32. After upgrading it over 8 times by grinding tier 9, my attack power hasn’t risen enough to comfortably and consistently complete the next higher tier, tier 10. My damage increase from 31 to 32 was only a total 1.6%. According to some of the streamers, the increase in mob hp from tier 9 to tier 10 is roughtly 100%, and getting enough dps to match that isn’t feasible for me with the current rate of progresion. Going up anough glyph level would take me at least two hours, and I can’t say it would be fun. I think I would need at least another 10 levels, and with each taking longer than the last I can’t stomach that grind.
What was the thought process is on the progression on the glpyh? Assuming the progression was linear and scaled with the tiers on AoZ, I would think 4 levels on the glpyh would scale damage enough to comfortably do the next tier. So… at 32 I guess I would be around tier 8. And I can do it, but the glyph exp rewarded for a tier 8, and a tier 9, is too low to make meaningful progression on the stone as it requires over 16 completions at tier 9 to level the stone at this point. Running over 100 runs on tier 9 to then start on tier 10 seems crazy.
But the more I thought on this the more I realized there isn’t any reason to do this content anyway. The amount of damage I do with the glpyh at 32 makes any content outside higher tier AoZ dungeons trivial. And I can’t say I enjoy the grind anymore since the progression is so slow and bad. So yeah, I give up. Congrats to the HOTA barbs who are doing tier 14 with a level 10 glyph. I would be lying if I said I wasn’t envious that you get to experience this event to the fullest, but I refuse to be upset at the success of another. Maybe some balance changes to progression or class damage can be made to make the new endgame enjoyable for more classes and builds? If not, I guess it was a good first half of the season. And hey, at least I’m not a druid or necromancer.
If you read this far, thanks for sticking it out. See you all season 3.
- PC General Discussion - Diablo IV Forums (blizzard.com)