I wanted to wait a while after the PTR to let the hatred subside… because I hated almost every 2.0 change at first. The exception being the elimination of the two higher tiers of masterwork materials.
There are just so many changes that evoke a “Why?” response… like if your stated goals are your stated goals, why did you do this?
If you want to make the experience more fun and give the players more choice… why add so many hard-stop gates to the higher difficulties? One of the biggest complaints about this game from the wider gaming audience was the lack of difficulty from day one. Why?
If mythics have no level requirement, why require lvl 60 to craft them? If we have to be level 60 to craft them, why not allow us to craft ANY of them? The idea seems to be to allow us to have fun with them at the earliest levels on twinks… but there’s a gate that doesn’t make any sense if that is the goal.
Why remove the mindcage instead of expand it to the greater game… I misunderstood what was said at gamescom and assumed that’s what was happening. Keep the 8 new difficulties and give us the ability to juice them with a mindcage… allow us to dial-in the difficulty for more fun, progression, and rewards.
I’ve lodged my complaints about moving from reward to chance based glyph XP previously, but I’ll expand on it here… You’re layering RNG on RNG on RNG in this game and it sucks. I made this arguement in trade chat during the PTR and someone countered that’s how D2 was. They said you had to run Meph 1000 times to get a Shako… yes, but you didn’t have to farm for hours to get the mats to farm him only to have him drop one that isn’t ancestral so it can’t be tempered more than once and even if it was it bricks anyway… and then you get to use one scroll to have another shot at it not bricking, never mind getting good rolls. In D2 a good shako is stupidly cheap a few weeks into the season, In d4 good rolls on uniques are still billions and billions of gold 80% through a season… and this is BEFORE the drop rate nerf.
Why restrict two tempers to ancestrals AND make them super rare? Why take away tormented rewards AND make all echos always tormented? Why increase the cost of fighting most echos, but reduce the cost of others? Zir goes up by 30% and varshan goes down by 20%? Why?!
Why talk about getting people to endgame quicker if what you’re going to do is make midgame systems like upgrading and paragon into end game systems… all you did was redefine endgame and draw out the midgame.
Ultimately I’m left to question the leadership that seems more interested in making this game a time suck than making it actually fun. I’ve got my preoder for VoH and honestly I’ll probably get a second for another account… but I’ve got so much whiplash from the back and forth on changes I’m probably going to sit out this game until Blizzard finally gets rid of Rod Fergusson. It worked for D3 right? And if it worked for D3… :trollface:
This is the only live service game i’ve ever seen that doesn’t have a multi season roadmap… and I think that’s because the leadership is clueless and wants the freedom to pivot at anytime without having to appear as clueless as they are. Problem is that doesn’t work and you just end up looking stupid while we mock you with memes like damage on Tuesday. I feel bad that the creative people with vision, that this team so obviously has, have to work under this kind of leadership.
Lose Rod, connect, really connect, with the community… not this faux campfire stuff… and give us faith this game isn’t just the reanimated corpse of the Diablo franchise.
Whatever… off to record my final capstone run.
See ya in Nahantu.
