Diablo 2 had other types of grind and bottlenecks for power.
D1 stands alone as an actual adventure/dungeon crawling game and the franchise unfortunately left it behind, starting with D2.
While you’re right that it doesn’t need to have grind, it would still benefit from improving the itemization before focusing on streamlining content.
And what were we talking about in this thread, again? Removing mats, right?
I didn’t say remove grind altogether. I said remove grinding for mats. When the game slows down to being about grinding for mats and managing the trash in your extremely tiny stash, there’s an issue. “Better itemization” might fix the issue a little, but I don’t even know what “better itemization” means.
Explain yourself further.
The game wasn’t even hard from the start, it’s just tiring and doesn’t feels like a game.
What I mean by “bottleneck” is that, farming Living Steel is not proportional to farming Mucus-Slick Eggs with the latter being easier.
It’s like having a top of the line PC but you only put a single 8GB stick of RAM in there. That RAM is bottlenecking your gaming performance.
There is nothing fun about grinding living steel in a time gated event with hidden chests that rotate on the hour. It is an awful mechanic. Please get rid of summoning mats after level 100 and let people have fun grinding the endgame boss for shiny things.
It did for ubers, you need the keys from countess, summoner, and nihlathak,
imagine if these only spawned once every hour and a half though.
My recommendations:
Add Group finder for Ubers - you will be allowed to join, if you have material in your bag. It is really annoying to be spamming /trade as ppl not reading or have it available. Also group inviting is not working as it should, sometimes I’m not able to invite directly and must add person to friendlist.
And the worst of all is that only bosses drop materials to people who have summoned this boss, something totally meaningless, who was “lucky that he decided that”
Yep proposed this a week or so ago as you have to wait for a Helltide to occur, then you have to collect 300 cinders, and then ride out to a chest and fight the miniboss. By the time you notice the Helltide if you have a life or were doing something else you might barely have enough time to open just 1. And we’re back to 1 1/2 hours or so until another happens.
I’d also propose world bosses and/or seasonal enemies have a small chance to drop an item like the malignant tumor (Lightning tome?) which can be exchanged for X Living Steel. Or to make it even simpler just let something potentially drop living steel.
Is it just me or has the Helltide also been nerfed? Just did a Dry Steppes and it took 3x longer to get 300 Cinders than before the patch… making this even more mind numbing. Makes me want to abandon farming completely.
This wouldn’t be as large a concern if Helltides was CONSTANTLY ACTIVE like the new vampire zone thing. But that’s just silly! Imagine the game allowing me to play the way I want when I want instead of being forced into doing what the developers want instead… silly! 
You realize what you did there right?
living steel shall drop from NM boss, higher the NM level higher the drop rate.
O god, please, NO !!!
After doing hundreds of NMD for leveling and glyph leveling I’m so fed up with these stupid NMD. Despite the patch notes NOTHING has really changed in the layout. Still so often stupid backtracking. I absolutely hate NMD.
Make Helltide always available like Blood Harvest and increase the number of Living Steel to 10 per chest. And please do something here for the solo players. Groups are sort of mandatory to farm the Bosses efficiently. That’s not fair.
It would be nice to have other activities that would drop living steel. But ofc it shouldn’t be something that makes the helltide ones obsolete.
Though you still have to do some helltides for living souls ones in a while, so that will bring you back regardless.
Maybe if The Beast In the Ice and Zir would drop an certain amount could help. Don’t really bother with those atm. So doing NM dungeons or boss/champ events are also a way to get some
I swear the different areas where HT spawns have different cinder drop rates
d2 is grinding and im fine with that, doing hundreds runs to get a chance of hi rune, but this living steel just waste of time and inefficient, kill random enemy that will not drop upgrade just to take the cinder. just awfull running like crazy in open world jeez
Yea, living steel drops need to be tripled in my opinion. Duriel ALREADY rarely drops the stuff we want. It’s not necessary to add so many layers of RNG on top of each other.
I warned ya’ll - this is a bad mechanic, full stop. Put a dungeon in front of him, make it challenging if you want to, whatever. But making players play content they don’t want to, for hours, to play a few minutes of content they actually want to (because there is a functional chance of the item drop they want, though still “very rare”) is a BAD MECHANIC. It’s stupid, it’s alienating for players, it’s an uncreative / weak way to try and get player stats looking better - and in the end it does the opposite.
They should tie it to NMT100 so there’s a reason to do them more than once. Or make it come from every chest, the # aligning with the cost of the chest. 75=1-2 125= 3-4 and so on. Make mysterious = 5-6.