I know, it’s not June, but I had to get this out of me.
The first thing that I am actually very upset about with this expansion was the lack of patch notes which did detail out every change made. On April 24th I logged in and played a Barbarian for a few hours that could generate dust devils very often. On April 28th I logged in and this build no longer is possible. It is gone. The components for it completely disappeared.
This is the most unprofessional thing I have ever experienced in a game. Yes, changes made in the shadows, updates, nerfings, etc. all exist but the fact that it was known that a large number of prior builds, existent for 1-2+ years, would just cease to exist in the flash of an eye and no official record was made of this to the players with time to at least digest it is unimaginable. I did not anticipate logging on, going to the codex to plan my route, and then spending 5 minutes going, “I know this existed!” only to find that it doesn’t anymore in any capacity.
This is not about whether the changes were good or bad. This is specifically about how so many ideas went immediately to die without any understanding of the fact that this was going to happen. You gently glanced over the tempering changes in the game without fleshing out that most of the class specific tempering was completely removed. The utility section was gutted.
The largest problem with this all for me is that this is not a new game. There is no “reset button!” again. You got that 2.0. There should not have been a “My bad, 3.0 though!” mentality to this. You can’t keep reinventing the game over time hoping to throw something that sticks; yes, the blatantly stolen systems that make this more of a “Path Of Exile-like”, rather than there ever being a “Diablo-like” to be humored again, are fine or whatever but the constant rewrite of the whole program is just not working for me anymore.
My suggestion is that you spend the next seasons fixing classes 2 at a time. You did well with the Druid and the Necromancer and they do feel more fluid and modern to me, albeit copied on the Necromancer side for warriors from PoE2, but the sorcerer is destroyed and the barbarian in my opinion is boring. Focusing on the sorcerer so much of the sorcerer worked through that passive tree that it’s removal needed a delicate touch that is obvious wasn’t made. A lot of the other classes have “artifacts” and aspects that don’t work anymore, not talking bugs but just general mechanical fit, and the ones that have it the worst are also the ones that are the worst in gameplay.
In my opinion without that careful care you gave to the Druid / Necromancer you were better off just leaving all the aspects in and slowly, gently cutting them out as you reframed the entire class to fit the new narrative. Instead it’s sloppy and obviously you can tell who got love and who didn’t because regardless of where in the game the builds land, pit 120 or whatever, the viability and fun factor of these classes were just removed in some cases almost totally.
Overall the lack of communication is just what got me. I don’t think I would have changed my choice to purchase but I definitely would have not gone in and be utterly disappointed with the experience immediately. The story is fine, it wasn’t painful or anything to get through, but the tone was set immediately when I started up a sorcerer and realized that shock couldn’t hit multiple targets anymore. I knew something was up right then and there but I wish I had listened to my intuition and stopped because a lot of the skills that got changed, in all trees, stopped making sense to use and actually narrowed, rather than broadened, build diversity.
Small note: Moving the ability for shock to hit multiple enemies into the frost skill tree, then making the ice shard shock elemental and making it level locked was the stupidest thing I’ve seen in a game in my life. There was some clear running out of ideas there in that tree specifically. It is the worst tree by far.