Previously, I provided my early feelings on Season 6 roughly 2 weeks after launch, you can find that here: Season 6: My thoughts so far
Since then, I decided to give it one last go, and provide my feedback after extensive gameplay. My updated opinion and feedback is as follows:
TO THE DEV TEAM:
The reversal of so many quality of life changes in this expansion is greatly dissapointing, and it would be nice to get some sort of commitment from the team that things like this won’t happen going forward. The community has paid top dollar for Diablo 4, the expansion, and cosmetics, so seeing highly questionable setbacks to QoL is something that just shouldn’t happen. And if it does happen unexpectedly, or by mistake, the team should be making a hotfix to the prior state their #1 priority, and not waiting till the following season. cough VEILED CRYSTALS cough
Tempering & Bricking: In the June, 2024 Campfire Chat @ 1:16, you justified “bricking” with the Tempering system by saying you felt it was needed so that “items have an endpoint” and to “prevent players from hoarding”. The “bricking” RNG does exactly the opposite! If I take 4 pair of gloves to the Blacksmith and 3 in a row brick, do you think I am going to hoard more or less going forward? BRICKING ENCOURAGES HOARDING! Now I am going to keep EVERY item that has the right affixes to make sure at least one of them get’s the right tempers.
Unreliable Tempering RNG: In the August, 2024 Campfire Chat @ You also mentioned aiming to restrict Tempers to 3 affixes. Yet, there are still a ton of tempers with 4 affixes, including the new Spiritborn class, that has 14 tempers with 4 affixes each.
I’m just spitballing here, but what if you just remove tempering limits and this all becomes a non-issue and the players enjoy the game more?
Points of importance:
- I am paragon 272, with 4 geared level 60’s. I am not a casual “who just wants everything handed to them”. I play hundreds of hours per season.
- I DO NOT like to play just one class/build. I enjoy playing different classes and trying different builds, so bottlenecks ruin the enjoyment here.
- I want to have fun when I play, I know that’s asking a lot, but I don’t want to come home from work and feel like I’m working again when playing D4.
With that said, let’s get on with my final review of Season 6 and “The Vessel of Hatred” expansion.
Welcome to Diablo 4 Season 6: Season of Hatred Rising.
What an appropriate name, with the rampant return of bottlenecks, and reversal of a lot of good changes that have been made since launch, I can really feel my hatred rising. For me, the game was by far at it’s most enjoyable point in Season 5, and the devs just threw out so many of those good changes for what? Instead of getting to just enjoy playing the expansion and the new class and have a good time, I am instead reminded daily that I should have trusted my instincts on the Ancestral Loot changes and not have purchased the expansion.
The November, 2024 campfire chat also had my hatred rising, when they acknowledged there are materials issues in season 6, which has TWO MONTHS LEFT IN THE SEASON, but there are no planned adjustments until season 7. HUH??? Hot fix it so people can have more fun now, in the remaining TWO MONTHS of season 6! Veiled Crystals need a major buff.
While cleaning out my Season 5 stash the other day, I was reminded of all of the awesome gear I had acquired, and how as long as I farmed master working mats, rerolling at the blacksmith was no issue.
Sadly, those days are gone. I now find myself starved for Veiled Crystals on a regular basis, unable to masterwork, unable to enchant, and Veiled Crystals are NOT easy to farm anymore. The only double/triple crits I have are from when I got super lucky and got them on the first try. I rarely re-roll masterworking now.
Other suitable titles for Season 6 could be:
- “Season of Good Things Undone”
- “Season of Bottlenecks Returned, with a Vengeance”
- “Season of You Were Enjoying the Game Too Much in Season 5, So We Fixed It”
- “Season of Grinding Not Optional”
What is good in Season 6:
- Spiritborn - OP issues aside, I like the class and have had quite a bit of fun playing different builds.
- Nahantu Zones - I really like the aesthetics of the new zones in Nahantu.
- Kudos to the design teams.
- Sadly, due to everything that follows, I’ve had a hard time finding much more to add to this list.
What I wasn’t a fan of in Season 6:
SPIRITBORN POWER
The difference in power between Spiritborn and every other class is not even remotely close. We are talking orders of magnitude more powerful. In fact, it’s so OP that for the first time since the launch of D4, MaxRoll made a separate S+ tier for Spiritborn builds.
- This has made playing other classes less exciting, and even frustrating.
- Rod of Kepeleke is a busted item that should have been nerfed into the ground in the first week of the expansion. This takes an already overpowered class, and ascends it to God tier. With the right build, it is a 750+% multiplicative damage buff on every attack for EVERY core skill in the tree. Paired with Ring of the Midnight Sun and Banished Lords Talisman, you can guarantee that EVERY attack is a critical overpower. Some other classes can do this, but require a lot more gear optimization and they don’t get the 750% multiplicative damage buff.
ANCESTRAL LOOT TIER
Tying the Ancestral tier of loot to Greater Affixes was a bad idea, I hope the dev team realizes this and has plans to revert this change in Season 7.
- With the current affix pool, it was already hard enough to get the right affixes when every item that dropped was Ancestral.
- NOT REWARDING: It does not feel good to farm the highest level content in the game and continuously see almost nothing but non-Ancestral gear drop. 3 weeks into the season, I was farming Tier 100 Pits and still wearing non-ancestral gloves. I made an alt, and was in a group farming Tier 75 Pits (10 levels above T4 difficulty), after 15 Pits, I had gotten ONE ancestral drop. This is not rewarding.
- TRADING: Spiritborn damage isn’t the only place you will learn what 1 quadrillion means, head on over to the trading websites for Ancestral Legendary and be ready for your eyes to pop out of your head when you see the prices. I’m joking about quadrillion, but items that would have sold for 500mil in season 5, will be listed for 5+ billion in season 6.
BOTTLENECKS ARE BACK WITH A VENGANCE
- RAWHIDE & IRON CHUNKS - used for EVERY aspect of the gearing system, huge bottleneck. Recent hotfixes have improved this, but now there is:
- VEILED CRYSTALS - This was incredibly dissapointing. For the first time since Season 1, Veiled Crystal bottlenecks are back, and not in a small way. Unless you go stand at a tormented boss all day long, you will be constantly starved for Veiled Crystals.
- MATERIAL FARMING - Want to farm materials without wasting your time? You’ll need to spend all your time killing tormented bosses, as this ultra-boring 2-second game mode yields 4x the materials or more. Forget farming in:
- Helltides
- Infernal Hordes
- The Pit
- Nightmare Dungeons
- How bad is it you ask?
- Running a materials Opal on an Evade Spiritborn build, I did a full 55-minutes of the 3-zone Kekistan Helltides, opened every mystery chest, summoned 8-10 Hellborne, 2 Tree of Whispers Caches, and at the end I had earned around 2,600 Veiled Crystals.
- Next, I ran the materials Opal and killed Tormented Lord Zir for 15 minutes, and earned 2,800 Veiled Crystals.
- So while I had way more fun running helltides, I earned roughly 8% more Veiled Crystals in 1/4 the time killing tormented bosses.
- Why is this problematic?
- You can easily burn through 2,600 veiled crystals in 5 minutes trying to prep a few new pieces of gear. Between Tempering, Imprinting, Enchanting, Socketing, and 4/12 masterworking, POOF, your 2,600 veiled crystals are gone. You might not even get to the masterworking before running out.
- This disincentivizes playing other game modes when you are starved for Veiled Crystals.
- Tormented Boss farming is by far the least fun activity to run in Diablo 4.
ENCHANTING
Re-introduction of Enchanting resource bottlenecks. I was so excited to see enchanting bottlenecks removed in S4/5, but here we are, right back at square 1, constantly starved for Veiled Crystals. Extremely dissapointing.
- Nov Campfire Chat - Mid-season patch: They are making “No Change” the default option now, I would be way more excited about this if I had enough Veiled Crystals to click the enchant button.
ARTIFICIAL ENDGAME
All of the content below was previously available before max level. This meant you could level where you wanted, target farm uniques while leveling, it was up to THE PLAYER to decide what they wanted to do. Now, your choice has been removed, and you will have to wait till level 60 to do ANY of the content below:
- INFERNAL HORDES(IH) - If you enjoyed leveling in IH in Season 5, you are going to be disappointed with “Season 6: Season of no Leveling in Infernal Hordes”. Restricting IH to level 60 makes zero sense, and limits leveling options for players.
- The Pit
- Tormented Bosses
CLASSES OTHER THAN SPIRITBORNE
- If you play Spiritborn first, as many did at VoH launch, you will quickly realize that you are going to be struggling to clear content in BIS gear, that you would have breezed through in mediocre gear as a Spiritborn.
- What’s worse, without having a Spiritborn to carry, Glyph progression feels horrible around 85+, as clear speed at Pit 90+ slows to a crawl and your glyphs reach 0% success rate.
- Just go watch Darth Microtransactions “Diablo 4 Situation Somehow Got MORE Insane…” video. https://youtu.be/eR6cDO3UjwA?si=RrYx1Zp12H5GUHdZ
TEMPERING
- LIMITS - For the love of God, will you quit pretending like this is necessary? Just remove the limits and let us enjoy the game!
- RNG - Really bad, even feels rigged at times. With only 3 affixes on a temper, how is it possible to roll the same two affixes, SEVENTEEN TIMES IN A ROW before getting the 3rd affix? I don’t know, but 1 in 18 doesn’t seem to math very well with 33% chance odds, EXCEPT when your build is posted on multiple websites and the affix you need is the one that just so happens to not be rolling.
In conclusion, I’m done with D4 for now, and I’m not sure when I will be returning. I paid top dollar for the expansion, only to realize that the dev team had gutted a lot of QoL from the game. I just want to have fun playing Diablo 4, but a lot of the changes the Dev team made in Season 6 have stripped away most of what I found fun about the game in the past few seasons.
Playing this season has caused unnecessary stress and frustration. Season 6 is a dumpster fire, and felt like a total rug pull. Coming from Season 5, I would not have purchased the expansion had I realized the extent of the changes. I only purchased the expansion because I had so much fun in Season 5. I knew about the Ancestral Loot changes from playing PTR, but thanks to the Season 5 snapshot in PTR, the glaring issues around materials bottlenecks and acquiring legendary aspects were completely masked.
I know it was long, but I hope this post helps other players who are on the fence about purchasing the expansion.