To start, I am extremely critical of the base game design and endgame loop but I won’t go into detail and I’m going to only stick with the content that Season 3 offers. I currently have a level 100 Lightning Storm Druid and a level 90 HotA barb, I played ball lightning exclusively last season. Cleared all content. I don’t split-farm or exploit abuse and play solo most of the time.
Season 3’s gameplay loop is an improvement to Season 2, with the intended overworld farm involving summoning Malphas at the braziers and roaming to collect additional cores. The Helltides feel significantly less impactful to your rotations, only utilizing them when you want to farm Forgotten Souls or Living Steel. I still think the Helltide should interact with the seasonal mechanic once in awhile, even if they were weekend events - having the Blood Harvest in a Helltide area would have been cool to see, along with the Arcane Tremors. You passively complete whisper objectives at a higher rate and the flow of combat with mob density in WT4 feels good in the outdoor seasonal areas. If you bounce around between each arcane tremor it feels extremely efficient for your time investment.
The Seneschal Construct could use a little more juice, while the 1:1 player stat scaling can make some builds feel a little stronger with the construct damage itself (mainly Lightning, Fire, Poison, and Bleed builds) - most are going to benefit with the Adrenaline and Tempest stones using the tuning stone self-buffs, exchanging Adrenaline for Autodefense if you find yourself dying too much - the random excessive projectiles are likely a big contributing factor, unless you’re face tanking the choreographed heavy melee slams.
Some Improvements to the Seneschal Construct outside of player power could be passively gathering ground-materials, starting with Shattered Stone then move towards Cores, Pearls, Gold, consumable items. More than one skin, maybe upgraded armor? different styles, or each class had a unique one that fits the lore of their game play.
Spamming Nightmare Vaults compared to Nightmare Dungeons feels much better, you aren’t consistently hindered by dungeon objectives and can just blast - the traps are negligible with pearls but are still somewhat punishing enough if you aren’t playing your build well. My initial reaction with the Nightmare Vaults was that the pearls were too scarce of a resource and extremely punishing to your gameplay, with the Vault of the Loom being extremely under tuned. Those were both resolved with the Friday patch - and I agree with the approach.
If the Gauntlet were to have been live currently I may even slot Season 3 as an overall improvement from Season 2, but right now the Blood Harvest and AOZ are still overtaking anything that was introduced in Season 3. I don’t agree with their decision delaying it - especially if the leaderboard resets week to week. It would showcase the early start grinders, and show where each build is standing. However, if their intentions are implementing Mid-Season events and content injections I am okay with that as long as the base Seasonal mechanics are engaging and fluid.
Overall my complaints continue to be with the base game and not the seasonal implementations. The itemization is extremely stagnant and it takes away from the potential of any new additions in the game. There needs to be a deeper way to craft items to compliment your build, even if it was only a single piece. The legendary aspect system still seems elementary and the amount of modifier layers feels really bad to self-filter all your loot.