For me too, the game has lost some of its appeal due to a poor proposal for this AoZ, which remains an exciting and very interesting idea, but should be revisited a bit. Despite boasting a great sorcerer, fully uber, with several valid builds for pushing or farming the glyph (I can easily complete T15), I’ve only reached lvl 22 of it due to a lack of motivation. This is caused by the fact that from here to lvl 50, there are no intermediate rewards, neither in terms of titles nor cosmetics, and the distance to achieve it is enormous. It requires hours and hours of uninterrupted farming without any gratification in between. So, farming T14, up to 50 and then probably farming T19 up to 100 and so on. Mortally boring and fruitless, in my humble opinion.
However, the most disastrous thing about this AoZ is certainly the impossibility to diversify the gaming experience. Two more negative aspects than others:
First: in fact, you cannot play in a group, because the single life without the possibility of resurrection is too penalizing. So, the nice games in company that we used to play in D3 no longer exist. If anything, it’s better to play in separate matches and take turns inviting others into your own game to get some extra XP. This choice I imagine was made to avoid boosting, but this could have been resolved differently, as was already done in D3, for example, you cannot participate in a T16 group if you have not at least completed a T15 solo, for instance.
Second: in fact, you cannot play the end-game with more than one character, because the glyph needs to be leveled separately for each one, as is the case for other glyphs. Given that for the normal glyphs having to reroll them from scratch with characters of the same class is something inconsiderate, but for this special one, they could have managed it in a special way and thus allowed its sharing. And I could have played my beautiful barbarian also fully uber: which translates into hours thrown between tides to farm shards to farm Duriel to farm the uber themselves.
In short, there is something to review, and honestly, it seems quite simple to do better than this.
Easy suggestions:
- Allow displaying the character level and AoZ level (as was the case with paragons in D3), so as to allow players to ‘boast’ to friends about what they have achieved.
- Allow displaying the AoZ level during the AoZ match, so at least a streamer is not forced to say it aloud.
- Reward intermediate milestones with small variations on cosmetics (e.g., a sword illuminated in yellow, then becoming green and then red depending on the level reached).
- Reward intermediate milestones with titles (e.g., lvl 1 Zir’s, lvl 5 adept, lvl 10 cool, lvl 15 badass, etc.), and not just the last, for many unreachable, supreme title Zenith.
But I could stay until tomorrow writing more, I’ve already bored you enough.