the boss changes are overall nice, especially in theory (the goal of spending less time and feeling like a good dopamine hit is the correct vision), however the mark was missed on 2 important fronts from my experience.
- the time investment still feels pretty much exactly the same. you fight them less but the duration of the fights are significantly increased. trying to find anyone on t4 is a nightmare because you just get 3 paragon 100 leeches auto joining every party you make.
and more importantly:
- the lowest tier bosses drops feel appropriate, i don’t expect to get much on them, but on the higher tier bosses there should be something. andariel, duriel, harbinger, and belial don’t give anything or feel any better than the low tier bosses for the most part (until you get that 1 mythic drop after 100 boss kills). just bad mythic drop rates in general, pretty low GA drop rates, and what i think is the worst issue, because it serves as a great “bad luck protection” since you can sell them on diablo.trade quite easily for a lot of gold which can help you buy runes to craft the mythics you want, is that there are almost non-existent legendary rune drop rates (maybe like 1 every 30 kills on average?) and you also get 0 gem fragments. most legendary runes are 800m+ and grand gems are 400m a piece so it would just be nice to get literally anything after hours of carrying 3x leech on t4 bosses just for that extra +1 loot drop for hours on end.
the game is incrementally improving and blizzard is demonstrating they have a good vision but honestly its like baby steps. i think itll continue to feel like a weekend game until 2026 when kanais cube, leaderboards, etc are available and even more balancing takes place. it’ll happen, it’s just taking FOREVER. i wish we’d get a poe 2-level hotfix patch 1-2 weeks into the season but that never happens. oh well…
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Yea, it seems like they listened to the vainglorious “it’s too easy” crowd, but forgot that although lots of people do like a challenge, that tends to be in games’ storyline bosses (the climax for each chapter). D4 bosses are a repetitive grind for special items that can make builds work. So by reducing the drop chances AND increasing the length of boss fights, which are supposed to be repetitive, it gets old fast (and now super fast).
Analogy: work longer hours and get lower pay - sounds like fun?
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I just got into Torment 1 and everything feels like a slog. Glyph leveling a slog, gearing up a slog, tempering a slog. Hell I haven’t even gotten to trying to do lair bosses yet and I’m burnt out. Feels like I’m the horse who never gets the carrot.
I wish they would just make another server type for folks who find this fun and revert everything else back for those of us who like it the way it was.
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Ugh try being a casual player on Eternal. All of the nerfs with no added powers. I feel like I’m throwing cheeseballs at them instead of fireballs. I didn’t breeze through them before, but now it really is an unrewarding tedious experience. That’s assuming I can kill them at all. I guess dropping back from T4 is an option, but the whole point to them is try for better gear which dropping down negatively impacts.
I know most don’t care about eternal, but it’s still part of the game and I really wish they would consider something for those of us playing it.
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I have three characters that had a bit of room for growth, each one a different class.
Now they are literally at their wall - no more glyph growth possible, P277 so not much to do there (plus I can’t get XP as fast as before even if I wanted to) and the item hunt already ended about 2 hours* after I got them into torment content anyway.
So there’s no progression left for them - and no reason to start another character because I’ll hit 60, dump in my paragons, spend two hours* gearing and then what? farm a few glyph levels to do nothing with?
I’m not interested in seasonal because I do not play these games for throwaway characters. I know that seems like an answer I should follow, but it isn’t.
This patch literally took away my reasons for playing without giving anything in return.
*I want to make it very clear I am not complaining about how fast I can get a set of ancestrals - I’m complaining that after that first set, there’s no more upgrading. We have gear that should provide a long sense of progression, but it just doesn’t drop.
The big issue to me is that invincibility phases essentially kill the “power fantasy” aspect. It doesn’t matter how powerful your character gets, it still takes basically the same amount of time to kill bosses because most of the time is spent in invincibility phases. So you could be some godlike P300 with mythics, multiple GAs in every slot, tempered perfectly… and it just doesn’t matter, you simply can’t kill bosses any faster. This results in your characters never really feeling particularly powerful.
Also seems like the only times I ever die is when I get oneshot. I’m very tanky overall, I have 100% barrier basically at all times, and I’m never really in any danger, my life never even moves (this is on T3, btw), but every now and then, some attack will just make me fall over. Attacks are basically binary, they either do nothing to me or kill me instantly. This does not feel good, and definitely seems like something is off with the balance.
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I wrote a post on this a few days ago: D1’s & D2’s primary damage mitigation was an all-or-nothing avoidance system that also allowed potion spam; D3 was a damage reduction system with potions on cooldown but ways to regenerate health quickly; and D4 has a damage reduction system with potion spam.
Blizzard has never created a Diablo game where avoiding sequential, sustained hits over time was necessary to prevent death; it’s always been one where only massive hits provide any danger at all.
It’s very unsatisfactory in retrospect.
I care about Eternal and i’m glad i pumped my barb as high as possible with gear and glyphs, now i can do T4 but it sucks because my sorc and rogue were doing T4 (not as fast) in S7 but now they don’t kill anything in T4.
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