Masterworking is boring endgame system?

PC General Discussion
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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.

18 Likes
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You shouldnt be getting 1 shot in tier 60-70 unless you dont pass the gear check or dont know how to not stand in fire.

Pits are greater rifts. I find them boaring af but apparently people wanted the super linear zoom zoom. I got my gear to 12/12 went to pit 100 and im done with the pit. Everything (nm, ht, guantlet) is more fun then the pit.

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Sorc when shields are on cooldown results in 1-shot. I don’t think this is true for some other classes, but I don’t play the other 4 classes so I can’t say for sure. Either way, I know it’s not a player error because I have armor capped, full resists, and grabbed life where possible. It’s not like I have 40% resists and 6k armor.

As for the shields, you shouldn’t need to have them on 100% of the time. Forcing sorc to perma-shield is silly because it basically means your loot doesn’t matter, and that’s very bad for a loot game. You may as play the game naked then. Loot has to matter. When the player chooses to max out resists and armor, it should be notable.

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I did not read all of your novel but I agree.

Just count up how many pits you need to run to increase your MW to 12 and you will not want to do this chore…ever…not even a little bit at a time, it will take forever.

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Doing it once is a long time, but it’s very likely you’d want to restart the masterworking from square one because the game did not give you a good roll, and that’s where the system becomes incredibly grindy.

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I play a sorc i never have a problem. Yes you need to learn a rotation but I have not be 1shot in 60-70 for about 3 weeks since Ive been geared for it. Yes I now can get 1 shot 80-100 if I stand in fire or screw up my rotation. The rotation is a skill part.

There is also a dps check that makes it easier when you are geard.

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yes PIT aka GR is one of the crappiest systems in ARPG.

Although the developers personally promised that this would not happen in d4, this, like many other things, turned out to be another lie. Why couldn’t they come up with anything better? I don’t know if they had time for this, but masterworking is just an echo of d3 gems.

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Because the D3 crowd :sob: about not having GRs. Now that they pulled everything from D3 im looking forward to the better system that could be implemented.

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My feeling is that in future seasons there will be borrowed powers to help shore up sorc defensive issues. And come the expansion we will have mercenaries which will also alleviate some of the pressure. By the end of October we will be clearing pit 150 with our eyes closed.

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well, but high end sorcs build have no defensive issues, they are just clearly lacking in terms of damage comparing to other classes.

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Got nothing to do with the D3 crowd.
The devs lack creativity or are unsure of design-direction. D4 is an experiment.

Masterworking = WoW
Pit = Greater Rifts
Tempering = other ARPGs
NMD’s…oh boy…

There are not a single mechanic I’ve seen in this game that didn’t already exist and was implemented better in another arpg.

1 Like
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I’m guessing a large portion of the player base is just skipping it. Especially the last tier which is really grindy. Which is why they nerfed the pit in tomorrows patch. I’m not sure it’s going to change that much with the neithiron costs. Unless they nerf it so much people can do 30 levels higher or something.

They need to drop the material requirements (or increase the drop rates). Plus give you enough gold for doing a pit to pay for the masterworking.

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:100: but the D3 crowd has highly influenced the watering down of everything.

Im just saying now that all of D3 is in the game maybe they will actually give us something interesting.

Personally I would love to see a massive RNG maze like dungeon crawler mode with dead ends, hidden treasures with motivation exploration, with increased difficulty as you progress. Get rid of the zoom zoom timer linear go A to B gameplay.

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yeah man it would be cool.

But unfortunatelly we all know what they will give us. (this could be a joke but i would get banned for it, so nothing but old D3 ideas with different names :slight_smile: ).

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Or what would happen. Meh… i had to backtrack for 5 seconds blizzard doesnt “respect my time”. Blizzard would turn an endless maze to a straight hallway.

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Actually, I don’t think you should underestimate them. For example, you can take an altar from d3 last seasons, shove it into passives, name it something else and sell it as a new expansion feature.
Mark my words, we will see it LMAO

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I agree for the most part. Leveled 3 100’s and did multiple levels of MW on each and I just don’t see the point. After the glyphs are level 21 I am not really sure of the point for any additional “progress” at that point.

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I would argue that it’s worse than GRs. GRs are definitely more interesting. At least the challenges you faced varied from one rift to another. The pits are extremely same-y, outside of which shadows/boss you see. Even the enemies just seem to be snakes, over and over, like it’s the only enemy type they want to throw at you. Or at least it seems that way to me.

But yes, they already had the nightmare dungeon system (which is actually more fun to play imo because it actually has more variation than the pits). I don’t really understand why D4 needed 2 systems that were this similar.

I think Path of Exile had a lot more varied content. I know they had more expansions to rely on for sure, but I think that’s the direction for content D4 needs to go in. The content in Path of Exile is very, very diverse.

They really need to drop the 5 million gold cost to restart the process. That is absurd for something you have 0 agency over.

Personally, I really would prefer they just delete masterworking from the game and think up something else. Probably not going to happen though because that would require making even more items “legacy”. Really messes up the eternal realm.

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I only have 1 masterworked to lvl 12 item (harlequin crest which i got from level 3 chars to 100 for the res spark and not farming varshan/grigoire which is tedious)

– as a bash barb I already can clear pit 101.that’s nothing more after that. the game is over. why am i wasting time trying to master work the rest of my gear. it doesn’t give anymore rewards. game is already “won”

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My motivation in these games has always been making my character do new and cool things, or expanding on what I already have. Adding more stats to the build I already have does not interest me - reminds me of how getting primal items in D3 did not interest me. All the upgrades that just let you do harder content but don’t change the game at all don’t interest me.

If masterworking changed my build further - like adding even more frozen orbs, or creating multi-element orbs, or some more crazy stuff, I might have been hooked - especially if I had more agency to change the direction of the character. But I don’t. It’s all just a casino simulator, and you need to spend 5 million gold minimum for each attempt and you have zero control over it. I really dislike it.

1 Like