After playing Masterworking/The Pits for several days, I’ve concluded that I really don’t like the Masterworking stuff in Diablo 4 Season 4. It’s so boring. I find myself running the Pit repeatedly, and besides more one-shots and slightly longer times to kill, nothing changes with the gameplay. It’s the same thing, over and over. By Diablo standards, it actually feels more repetitive than usual.
The Masterworking outcomes couldn’t be more boring. It’s just getting slightly higher numbers on our gear, and it’s just a gambling simulator that you can run over and over until you get the desired result. I find no satisfaction or agency in it at all—a pure, mathematical, and inevitable grind with zero thought to it. It’s just a test of raw patience because you need to perform Whispers repeatedly for more gold, which is a 100% boring and unrewarding activity at this point in the game for me.
Why does it cost so much to reroll Masterworking? I already have to repay the materials and gold to level it up again, so why does it cost yet another 5 million gold just to restart because the game decided to constantly upgrade Intelligence instead of Cooldown Reduction or +X Mana? Why are you forcing me to do Whispers repeatedly? I don’t care about anything it offers except the gold, and that’s only because you made it cost 5 million. The amount is completely arbitrary.
And we should do all of this grind for what? Masterworking isn’t that exciting. My build doesn’t change. All the interesting Paragon and Glyph choices are done. All my main affixes on my gear have been decided. My skill tree is set. My build, mechanically, is done. So all I see in my future is how many dozens of hours I need to farm gold and run the Pit/Masterworking slot machine on the gear I already have? That’s the D4 endgame?
No thanks. This is actually really boring, and I don’t even think it’s worth dealing with the one-shots. It’s not rewarding enough. Masterworking has to do something cooler than raise my stats by 20% or raise an Intelligence stat from X to Y to get me to care.
I also have problems with Tempering too, but at least that system offers build-altering mechanics and visible changes to your character that you can perceive. I still don’t like bricking aspects, though. For one, +3 Skill gloves with 2 other good affixes are very rare, even without a greater affix. Bricking this is very annoying. But two, even if you want to shuffle around +Total Armor with Max Life to work around the 9200 armor cap, it’s not easily changeable due to the low number of durability on your items. So many things wrong with this Tempering system.
I appreciate what the devs were trying to do with these systems, but they are not done yet. They need tweaking for sure.
Between the one-shots at tier 60-70, and just how boring I’m finding end-game activities, I’m just not finding the end-game very fun. My journey to level 100 was certainly better, but post 100 needs a lot of work still.