This season is fried. I’m currently speedfarming Tier 90-100 Nightmare Vaults and posts on this forum haven’t even begun to cover how deep-fried this season truly is. Probably because 99% of people are still on WT3 - early WT4 and haven’t realized how deep the issues with this season run. I’m going to cover only some of the most egregious of issues in the hopes that Blizzard will do something.
===The Seneschal Robot===
- It’s weak as hell. Even with Tier 7 Governing and Tuning Stones, it’s barely managing to do 10% of my overall damage. Its only good for cheesing final trap rooms in Nightmare Vaults with taunt and grip. But other than that, it’s essentially like playing on the Eternal realm in terms of player power.
- Because of the loss of player power, many builds have become non-viable. If you aren’t running meta, you will have a bad, bad time in endgame content.
- The Seneschal Robot has very little in the way of interactions with class abilities and aspects. Moreover, it’s inconsistent in terms of whether it counts the damage done by it as player damage or its own damage. For example, aspects that require you to do damage from different elemental categories don’t work with the Seneschal.
===Nightmare Dungeons===
- Defunct. Nightmare Vaults have better density, less annoying mob types and reward more loot.
===Nightmare Vaults===
- Not as bad as people say once you memorize all trap locations.
- On the other hand, you are running the same 4 dungeons over and over again with zero variety.
- If you play it safe and run 18 stacks of Zoltun’s Warding, you spend only 2 Pearls per run due to getting 3 Pearls back from the chests. So you can chain run Nightmare Vaults nonstop as long as you grind a couple of Pearls every now and then.
- Nevertheless, the final trap troops heavily favor ranged builds that can stay in safe spots. Only the Vault of Stone has a safe spot that melee can use.
- Moreover, trap design disproportionately favors builds with immunities and teleports for skipping.
===Governing and Tuning Stones==
- In a word, complete disaster.
- Leveling Tunining Stones to max requires hundreds of Nightmare Vault runs, translating to dozens of hours of real time.
- Leveling Governing Stones with any semblance of efficiency requires you to AFK in a “Tech Farm” group that you can only join through Discord. Still translates into dozens of hours of real time. I don’t know WHAT you were thinking but surely 10 people AFKing around a mob spawn can’t be your idea of an engaging “seasonal mechanic”.
- Altogether, you are looking at spending close to a 100 hours to max out both Governing and Tuning Stones. Given how weak the Senechal Robot is, this is completely unacceptable. Given that you could max out all Vampiric powers in S2 in just a couple of hours at worst, this is completely unacceptable. Given that maxing out Tuning Stones is a requirement to 100% the seasonal journey for the title, this is completely unacceptable.
===Uber Duriel===
- The concept is dead.
- Due to the loss of player power, many builds now struggle with Uber Duriel, making finding rota groups that much harder.
- All the mats have already been duped into oblivion.
- Due to the combination of these two factors, people who play meta builds (like HotA barbs) are simply boosting RMT champions through Uber Duriel 24/7. There are almost no legit rota groups to be found. Even in a “legit” group you are likely to have some tool with 1000 sets of summoning mats trying to get everyone banned.
- Solo farming Uber Duriel is still beyond inefficient.
===Itemization===
- Good news: you can get 2 full bags of 925 items in 5 minutes from a single Tier 90+ Nightmare Vault.
- Bad news: the chances of getting something usable are still close to 0%.
- LOOT FILTER SHOULD BE YOUR #1 PRIORITY. I don’t care what you have to do to get it done. Stop S4 development. Stop Vessel of Hatred development. Get a working loot filter into the game. Manually sorting through hundreds of items every hour of grinding is simply not feasible. It’s doubly not feasible in S3 when you get all 925 items and everything is a potential upgrade. I don’t understand why this still needs to be said almost a year after the game’s release.
- In addition to affix bloat, we now have useless aspect bloat.
===The Ladder===
- Cancel it.
- If still in doubt, refer to the above.
- Dupers, exploiter, bots and RMT champs are already decked out in uber uniques and max rolled 925 items.
- Some builds are so dominant that others simply won’t be able to compete with them.
===Summary===
- This season is a dud. Boost Governing and Tuning Stone acquisition so that people can 100% their seasonal journeys and move on to working on core features.
- Like I have already said. CANCEL. THE. LADDERS. If you release the ladders in the game’s current state with exclusive cosmetic rewards attached to them, D4 will take a reputational hit that it simply won’t recover from.
- When you figure out how to stop the duping, exploiting, botting and RMT AND do a complete itemization rework with a loot filter AND achieve a semblance of build diversity, then you can do ladders.
- Until then, drop development on this season and work on more important features.
