This post is aimed at the devs as a thank you for how far this game has come since release and also some constructive feedback for the future! I hope that you guys can continue to improve on this game and make the expansion even better!
To give some context, I have played blizzard games since I was about 6, started with D1, then became truly obsessed once D2:LOD came out and spent years of my life on that game as well as SC/WC3/TFT/WoW/SC2/D3.
Safe to say I’ve been a lifelong fan of this company and have a lot of appreciation for the countless hours I have spent enjoying your games. Through all these years of playing I have seen what has worked well, what has potential, and what doesn’t work at all.
First off, I want to say thank you for making vast improvements to the game since release. I was so hyped when the game came out and it just felt absolutely awful. I blasted to 100, did everything possible, and felt like I was playing a pre beta. So to see how far this game has come since then is fantastic. The quality of life changes have been pretty great and the game certainly has a nice rhythm to it that it lacked in the beginning. Each season things have gotten progressively better, cleaner, faster, funnier. So we’re definitely trending upwards…but there’s still just something missing.
I skipped S4 together, so I was pretty hyped to play S5 with the new loot system and all the new changes to the gear.
I log in on Tuesday, create a new character and start cranking levels. FYI I like to play this game solo because it feels like a jokey arcade game in a group. Within the first 24 hours, I’m level 100. I’ve completed the season journey, I’m decently geared, I’m starved for gold and mats but that gives me something to farm for and a huge power level increase to go try to achieve.
Fast forward the next day, I am very well geared…somehow I’ve gotten a shako and a tyrael’s might already and I’m almost full bis fireball sorc. I’ve pretty much just played the game to the fullest in every part of it exploring all the new Uber bosses, cranking out my glyphs (love how quick you can level your glyphs at T100 btw, great change) pushing the pit as far as I can, got to like 113 or something. Eventually I figure out that the new infernal circle farm is the place to be for mats/gold so i push all the way to level 7 and pretty much get hard stuck there, no chance at doing level 8 as a fireball sorc.
I farm my tail off, get hundreds of millions of gold, tons of mats, and think to myself, ok if I can masterwork all my items then maybe I’ll have a chance at lvl 8. I’ve already beat all the Uber bosses, I can clear Nmd 100 with my eyes closed in less than 2 minutes…really the last challenge is to min/max my gear and do pit lvl 8.
After farming for most of the day…I go to the blacksmith, gamble away alllll my gold/mats trying to perfect just my staff and go like 0 for 30 on trying to get a 3x fireball roll. I can’t tell you how demotivating this game mechanic is as a player who values his time. It is truly horrible to grind your butt off all day long to simply get absolutely wrecked by simple rng.
After spending some time looking at other builds, I changed to lightning spear and became a god and one shot everything even faster now, i can carry my friends through T8, all the Ubers etc. I have masterworked all my gear to 12/12 and none of them have perfect rolls, nor do they need it because all the content is so easy and the frustration of rerolling a masterwork for 10 straight hours does not make me ever want to play this game again.
I guess what I’m getting at is that you guys have created a game that has fantastic combat, nice graphics, cool spells and abilities, but there’s absolutely nothing fun about the game once you’ve hit 100 and gotten all your gear. And now that we can do that in less than 3 days played, I’m not sure what the point of the game even is.
I went from 0-100, full bis, mythic uniques, and now if I want to do anything meaningful in the game, I’m just stuck in a room killing 10 waves of demons, doing the same boss fight where they run away from me (horrible boss fight design btw) and clicking on this chest 30 times to get my mats so I can pull the masterwork slot machine. And for what??? To try and do said loop 1% faster? Getting a good drop isn’t even exciting because it just feels like a massive chore to temper it, hope I get some half decent rolls and then really pray for RNGesus to bless me with at least 2/3 masterworks on the stat that I want.
In order to get a GG item it needs to have 2 GA’s on the correct stats (ultra rare) then you only get a limited amount of temper rolls for some super dumb reason. Followed by the 1/6 chance of rolling the right stat with MW. The real problem is that if you actually happen to hit the megalotto and get said item…there’s absolutely no change in gameplay and nothing to do with it.
In D2, it was super fun to get max geared and then make P8 games and carry everyone while still getting xp and hoping to get some sick gear/HR’s in public games. And once that got boring you could make whole different sets for dueling, and different sets vs different classes. It was also SUPER epic to find a sick item or a HR because once you found your item, you didn’t have to pray to God that you could be blessed to maybe roll a few good rolls.
TLDR, the game feels way more fun than it did at launch, but its short lived and the current item system makes the game feel like a MEGA grindfest that actually feels worse when you get a good item because of the frustration that will follow trying to max it out. This game should feel epic when you finally get that rare item to drop, not dreadful that you know you’ll never get the rolls you want. The end game is literally a slot machine of re rolling affixes at the blacksmith and just running a loop for mats and gold. Watching a streamer reroll 50 sparks to try to get a perfect mythic unique is not good game design. The rest of the game is so easy that there’s no need to do that so there’s basically no end game. With no pvp, no endgame, bad item system, I find it very hard to want to continue playing on this hamster wheel. I am hopeful that changes will continue to be made for the better, so that’s why I’m giving you my honest feedback! Thanks again for all your hard work and I am grateful that I even get the opportunity to play, I just want this to be better so I can look forward to logging in after getting geared up and have something to do.
Some food for thought…
1)make instanced PVP like a battleground or arenas
2)way less items, I don’t want to spend my time filtering through 20 bad items everytime I kill a boss. Just drop 4 items and they can all be bad i don’t care, but don’t make me look at 20 and have to go to town over and over, or drop a ton of items on the ground. Just no need for these massive loot piñata’s, they didn’t work in D3 and they don’t work here either. I don’t know a single person that enjoys making a trip to the blacksmith to hit salvage all over and over again.
3)make epic items way more rare, if all there is in this game is gearing up a character, make it harder so its more rewarding
4)rework tempering/masterworking so its not RNG. Make it cost way more and require way more mats, but let us choose what we want. There are SO many options and we can truly customize our character the way we want. This would make gearing up a character way more fun because at least all that time and energy is going towards something, no matter how small.
5)the gold cost is such a lazy time sink and truly makes me feel like I’ve become a Chinese gold farmer. Make crafting mats harder to get, remove gold sink, and make the crafting mats a more diverse targeted farm so I’m not just running the most optimal one stop mats shop loop over and over again. This would bring in diversity as well as create a need for different builds that are better for different things such as overworld farming, boss killing, speed running dungeons etc. as of right now it’s just how fast can you run the compass.
Thank you!