Dear Blizzard Team,
I rarely post on public forums, but I felt compelled to share my feedback after my recent experiences. I hope you can take my points into consideration because the PTR was extremely disappointing.
I entered this Public Test Realm with my Bone Spirit build, a DoT version like most of my builds used to be. Perfect gear. MW/4 in all the right crits. Doing pretty decent, but I was having too much fun with Shadow Minions and pushing pits around 120 with an 8-glyph/5 legendary paragon system, shako and a shield. It was my Wither take on a Golem hybrid and I was blasting. I felt original. As a result, I didn’t min/max my Bone Spirit build. It became my meme build.
Therefore, I took this toon, with lots of promise that hasn’t been played in a while to the PTR and just made another one to get the goodies and luckily, I’ve got the new boots. Unfortunately, I am not impressed. It is the lack of flexibility these new unique items provide. I don’t want to do what everyone else is doing. There are many players like me that don’t like to be carried and enjoy gaming and being creative in peace and anonymity. And I couldn’t do further testing because I didn’t get any materials to do so, no one in my clan did, and I wanted to get the experience alone anyways as I would normally do at the start of the season. I only group on alts or after solo completion.
Plunging Darkness Aspect triggering a pool of Blight with these unique Path of Trag’Oul boots that buffs Bone Prison, looks like a tiny piece of excrement now in comparison. However, it doesn’t matter because no one will be running it anyways since no one will play Blight ever again. In combo with Void aspect the size buff would have been hilarious, but your development team has either no imagination or they are poorly managed.
DoT is dead.
Necro class had a slight taste of a comeback, but you couldn’t even give us a full season like you did to HotAs. Mid-season patch sac buffs were trash and just not good enough to justify the massacre you did to us hooked in the history, aesthetic and drive of this class. I feel offended and I’m over it.
I am so bored of bone builds and bone spirit builds and here we go again with crit damage. There is nothing interesting in crit. And overpower ketchup is not making me change my mind when I have no other choices. I am considering to not even play Necro ever and I’ve been trying other classes and builds since, feeling lost in my identity as a player, it feels like doing drugs for the first time when I’m on freaking Rogue. I feel too matronly as a Sorc. My only hope is now Spiritborn dependant. I feel lost in this freaking game too, but I am attached to it. So, I’m tired of conforming with third place. I want to feel godly and powerful. I’m tired of winning bronze. Please Blizzard:
Make minions great again!
Also, the best Bone Spirit builds ever recorded did pit 140. It’s King Pig OP variant. As many of us know, every Necro build could have been a DoT variant since Blight/Shadowblight were so good but that is all a nice memory now. The point is that he innovated, and you aren’t giving us anything new. Despite this achievement, it’s still not good enough in comparison to Barbarian class. It still takes a significant amount of time to kill a boss with this hyper optimised build. I am a decent Diablo player, and I cook builds of my own. Most importantly, as a fluid woman gamer, I feel this environment provides me a platform where there are no other differences between me and other genders beyond our skills and intellect, and I wished more women and gender variants realised how great it feels to stand equal in this realm and beat the game. The point is, there aren’t any biological or physical differences in videogames, but the classes are still so unbalanced, that I can’t really fulfil my fantasy unless I play a Barb and I refuse.
On top of that, our silly Core and Corpse skills as many professional and avid players have tested over and over, won’t scale properly and all you did Blizzard, is to give us uncalled mobility buffs. It is a buff and a nerf that takes an aspect slot, it feels wrong, like eating bread in front of the hungry. Mobility was not a problem anymore. And what on earth am I supposed to do with 200.9% Shadow Resistance on a sac Necro build? It’s plain stupid with the current cap. Can we please just get some DPS instead? We are hungry for some DPS. No one had mobility problems this season with GA affixes and tempers.
Honestly, it is sad and pathetic what you Blizzard did to us Necros.
It felt so good to use Army of the Dead for once, it felt so good seeing other Necros using Blood Wave on HT having fun. Bone Storm is the most boring, most bland, most overused Ultimate ever made; this needs to stop. It’s even ugly. Bone Storm with shadow variant is like a tornado of farts. In fact, all Necromancer skills look pretty bad. While Sorcs get to have amazing VFX we were granted with period Blood Mist and Blight vomit visual effects. As someone that uses Unity for work, I am telling you it could look so much better with a simpler game engine. With that being said, I would have been okay with period blood, farts and vomit, if at least they would do something, inflict pain in monsters, particularly bosses. Bone Storm is so good at offence, but it falls flat in everything else. And you don’t even need it anymore to cap your Crit Chance. GAs and Grasping Veins were good enough. Grasping Veins is another very sad topic. The new crit amulet Locran’s Talisman is trash, additive damage. I put it on me in PTR. Gained around 20% more Crit Damage. Lost 20% of Crit Chance.
I’m exhausted. I don’t spend over 2 minutes on a Lilith fight why on earth would I spend more time killing a pit boss with debuff mechanics? The pits are just impossible on PTR. I liked them how they were at beginning of Senson 4. Seeing everyone struggling. Even professional players. I didn’t mind the mid-patch nerf too much either, it was party time, grind vibes with casual friends or whatever, but still interesting for solo play since there were many levels yet to conquer. I don’t want to be able to one-shot anything. No class should. That is plain boring and stupid, but a good 2-minute fight with a decent solo char or while in a party feels in good camaraderie. At last, Necro felt “Necromancer-y”. I was living my shieldmaiden fantasy. And you Blizzard, instead of just giving us a viable sac version mid-season to spice things up on top of what we already had, you just made us all mediocre and sad. And you have plans to keep it this way.
Please Blizzard, change this game or rename it to BARB 4.
Barbarian class design belongs to Assassin’s Creed not in a multiplayer game. It is terrible game design. What freaking class balancing are you ever going to achieve when you gave this toon so much stupid power, defences and weapon/aspect slots from the get-go? You need to nerf the hell out of this class or make it go away. Make it like the Paladin or the Crusader, take one 2H off them and give them a defensive option instead, maybe with a shield they can throw after to block damage with minimum damage return or thorn damage. You should stop giving them so much HP on top of everything and if you are going to nerf the poor Sorc defences, at least give them opportunity to gain life as well.
Blizzard, you have destroyed Sorc class identity, and I feel their pain.
For a game to be balanced, each class deserves an OP meta version of their own with potential to deliver excellency in all content stages of the game, and we also deserve a fun meme build for our alts and farming toons. Blizzard, you should hire mathematical players like Macro and Otter to playtest in-house. You need to calculate the damage scaling output of every game object and interaction amongst all player classes, I don’t know if the coders are using chatGPT but PoE skill tree looks like quantum mechanics, I don’t understand the difficulty in balancing this very simple game of Diablo.
Please Blizzard, stop making other classes Barbarian trophy wives or just make us their minions instead, so we can stop pretending we exist. I’m done.
Season 5: LOOT DESTROYED. Theorycrafting for Dummies. Ages to 5+
Moreover, I hate the new paragon caps, paragon should be a puzzle not a freaking memory game, the paint-by-nodes paragon system everyone is going to copy-paste because you removed the potential for cooking anything. I even find the armour cap stupid but not unforgivable. The fact is that you are making this game too easy to play for anyone with half human intelligence. ARPGs are supposed to be complex and empowering, and they are not for everyone. You literally just gave us so many incredible crafting abilities this season, for you to come and undo all the good work on the next one by forcing us to grind and use your stupid new unique items with no customisation potential. You promised us we will have more control over our builds, and then you nerfed it all away.
The game was finally good. Even after bricked items and everything. Life is hard. Why gaming should be any different? You need to keep introducing more challenges, layers and dimensions. Something to aim for, to get back to the grind. Life is not perfect and/or gives you everything you need so it is okay to fail sometimes. We go and try again. That is what gaming is all about. You lose. You try again. You eventually win.
The game is now this:
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Create a new toon.
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Go to the Baneful Heartless Helltide.
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Get to a 100 without the Blood Maiden.
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Stop playing the game to go to Diablo Trade website.
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Buy your new uniques with IG gold you don’t have. Good luck finding any new unique in game otherwise.
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Slot your new uniques. Go kill stuff.
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Call your Barb husband before you get to the boss.
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Enjoy having no rewards.
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Be punished for playing with your friends with half of the materials.
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Game freaking over.
Lastly, the new end game is just 2 things: Boring. Pointless.
The difficulty instances between all tiers of the Infernal Hordes are way off. The first tiers are a snooze, the rest are either unplayable or impossible to get to since not enough compasses dropped for me to test any further. This happened amongst the very popular 250-member Discord Clan server I belong to. I was also not motivated to grind more than I did for a week of my time. None of us were. And since you made me play the Seasonal Quest to even get there in the first place, I really hope there is something else to do at launch with a seasonal power. Otherwise, there is no point of playing this filler season.
In terms of game design, the VFX are pretty, but the level design is awful. I don’t understand how for example, the pits are nightmare dungeons and/or vaults combined with two different portal shaders. You have months between each season, can you please stop repurposing all your vector meshes everywhere? We can tell. Everything is just the same with a different render. And remove the timer. It doesn’t mean anything. It is literally imprisonment. Imagine doing this on a rota. What are we supposed to do in the meantime? Go to Diablo Trade to sell? Oh, wait a minute! There is no reward for doing this crap! Just gem frags I can get anywhere else and legos with no value. Stop wasting my time so I can game and maintain my job, if you want me to keep purchasing your expensive cosmetics as I normally do as your good Diablo IV customer.
I’ve said it all. If you came this far Blizzard, for the love of Lilith. Stop ruining our gaming lives.
Thank you.