Season 6: My thoughts so far

PC General Discussion
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TLDR: I haven’t had less fun playing Diablo 4 since Season 1. If you don’t enjoy bottlenecks and having your time wasted, you probably won’t have fun this season. The reduction in loot(making aspects harder to get and materials less plentiful), making Ancestrals extremely rare, and creating a new resource bottleneck with iron chunks and rawhide make the expansion feel like 1 step forward, 4 steps back. I should have trusted my instincts from playing the PTR.

My personal feelings on this season is it’s a return to the worst times in Diablo 4. I have honestly been trying to just play the expansion and enjoy it as much as possible. However, the further I get into the end game the less I feel like my time is being respected, and the more frustrated I have become. I usually play 200+ hours per season, but we aren’t even 2 weeks into season 6 and I’m just disappointed with the rug pull. Seasons 4 and 5 felt REALLY GOOD to me, with plenty of loot and master working materials being the only bottleneck, but I was fine with that since I found Infernal Hordes fun. Remember how good it felt to finally be able to re-roll at the enchanter with no resource bottlenecks? The game was in such a fun place.

I have ZERO desire to go back to bottlenecks at the enchanter and grinding all season to optimize one or two characters/builds. I can’t emphasize this enough, the rawhide and iron chunks being added to enchanting will be worse than any enchanting bottleneck in the past. Now, getting unlucky at the enchanter doesn’t simply mean you can’t enchant without farming, it means you can’t do ANYTHING with gear without farming. Running out of rawhide and iron chunks literally hamstrings the entire gearing system.

This was a purposeful setback and we shouldn’t be ok with it. The dev team has spent the last year making changes and improvements to the game based on player feedback, only to have them undo some of the best changes for no good reason and add new bottlenecks.

Realize this is what they do, introduce new problems so they can solve them for us. Here is tempering, we know it sucks, so next season we will give you +1 roll per GA. We know it still sucks, so next season we will give you scrolls to reset your rolls ONCE. We know it still sucks, so next season we will give you…

We already suffered through D4’s bad loot systems and time consuming resource bottlenecks and waited for the improvements. I’m not going to endure it again just because it’s an expansion release. I’m done with this season, and I probably won’t be back to Diablo 4 until they get it back to how things were in Season 5.

Gear, Aspects and Materials:

  • Legendary loot scarcity - the reduction in legendary drops this season is what I would call extreme. The old days of having reliable ways to farm aspects and materials from Helltides and Tormented Bosses are gone. You will now get 3-5 items from Helltides/Tormented bosses.
  • Ancestral Gear - As I was concerned about in my PTR feedback post, Ancestral drop rates feel absolutely horrible. The drops are few and far between, and even when you do get an ancestral, it’s mediocre at best, with the GA more times than not being a garbage affix.
  • Ancestral Uniques - Just as bad, grind for days to get boss mats, do 10-15 boss runs and you are lucky if you get an Ancestral drop of the unique you are farming and pray the stat you need a high roll on drops.
  • Legendary Aspects - This goes back to the first bullet point on loot scarcity. I have played season 6 at least 2 hours a night and probably 4-5 hours/day on the weekend. Since release, it took me over a week just to get the legendary aspects for my build. 6 days in, I was still missing 3 aspects. This is boring and doesn’t feel good.
  • Magic and Rare loot - remember 3-4 seasons ago when the devs said they were going to make materials drop instead of blue and yellow gear and everyone was like YES DUDE! What happened to that??? Instead, you go run Tier 60+ pits and your inventory is half full of blue and yellow drops. JUST DROP THE MATS LIKE YOU SAID.
  • Iron chunks and Rawhide
    – This feels like the Veiled Crystals of season 1 and Forgotten Souls of Season 2 ON STEROIDS.
    – Just watch your last weeks supply go up in flames as you start preparing your gear for a build.
    – They are used for almost everything now, so instead of an enchanting bottleneck, you have one resource to bottleneck the entire system.
    – Imprinting :white_check_mark:
    – Enchanting :white_check_mark:
    – ADDING SOCKETS TO GEAR??? :white_check_mark:
    – Tempering :white_check_mark:
    – Masterworking :white_check_mark:
    – Alchemy - shockingly, they didn’t make iron chunks a material for potions and incense. I know, I know, it doesn’t make sense, but neither does requiring 120 iron chunks to put a hole in ancestral jewelry. Or 120 rawhide for socketing armor, it’s like saying I need more denim so I can put holes in my jeans.

Tempering and Masterworking:
/startRant - I will start by saying, I DO NOT like tempering in it’s current state. RNG is bad enough, but I don’t like gambling, and tempering with limits takes RNG to a new level and I feel like I’m being forced to gamble. Having roll limits on tempering is just another grind mechanic and adds nothing to the game, but introduces unnecessary frustration. I want to have fun when I play, and tempering sucks the fun right out of the game. /endRant

  • In one of the recent Campfire chats, the devs said they recognized the frustration around tempering RNG and were going to aim to limit tempers to 3 affixes. Yet here we are in the new expansion, with a new class that has something like FIFTEEN class specific tempers with 4 affixes.
  • Tempering RNG is still REALLY bad. Just tonight, I rolled “Worldly Finesse”, which has ONLY 3 affixes, 17 times to get two Overpower Damage rolls. This RNG is NOT uncommon, and sometimes even feels rigged. Not fun.
  • Master Working - hit or miss, but when it misses it’s REALLY bad. I’ve had items where the same 3 affixes proc over and over, and it takes 20+ re-rolls to get the 4th affix to proc.

I dunno, I’ve always found the end game bottleneck mechanics to be where the fun gets zapped out of the game, but season 6 is exceptionally bad in this regard.

Launch and Season 1 were the least fun I had in Diablo 4. The time required to level and acquire gear/aspects made it feel like you were locked into one class and build for the majority of the season.

At launch, I was level 86 before I got my first Shockwave aspect for Pulverize, that felt bad. In season 1, I didn’t get a level 2 or higher umbral aspect until I was level 96. By the time I got it, I had been so frustrated for so long that I wasn’t even excited when it dropped.

Season 2 was a breath of fresh air, introducing the blood fountain events with an explosion of loot. Finally, we were able to get aspects fairly quickly and start blasting faster. It also allowed us to try new builds and I had more fun in general.

Now for some reason, the dev team decided to send us back to the stone ages of Diablo 4. I could be wrong, but I’m pretty confident if a poll was taken, you would find there are probably more players than not who are unhappy with the loot system changes in Season 6.

I have no interest in going back to a version of Diablo where I’m back on the struggle bus to get geared for the end game. I like to play different classes and try new builds and test them in higher level content. But that’s not going to happen in Season 6 with the loot scarcity and materials bottleneck.

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Completely agree with everything you said. On top of that i was rocking a build where i was steamrolling torment 2(like legit 2 second torment boss runs) doing 10s of millions of dmg with barries for days and max resist etc but couldnt do torment 3 to save my life even with still being at max since i overshot on purpose knowing id take an armor/resist hit. There really should not be that huge of a spike in difficulty. So what was left? Ope go grind out 20 more hrs to switch builds to do some meta trillion damage immortal build? Spend another 20 hrs on t2 leveling up to over 200 so i can hit all the hp nodes? Dont have that kind of time so nah hard pass drop game. The balance in this game is freakin atrocious now. Im mad that i spent the money for the expansion should have bought a different game entirely. I like to play games to enjoy myself not bang my head against a metaphorical wall. So yah i dont see many casuals sticking around especially if they see what i saw.

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Agree, probably my last season, i just want finish the battlepass before i quit !

I have no fun atm, just playing because i do not want the money i spend go to the waste !

Just hope in 2-3 season they can make it fun again !

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Agreed and well said. The abysmal chance to get max roll aspects this season is insane. Pair that with the leather/iron gates for masterworking and you’re destined to have a horrible experience. Tempering feels awful. You finally get that useful item and then vendor it over a temper… but wait! You can use a scroll once! Nope, used it and botched it all 12 times… vendor trash now. Well, when you finally get that right you can masterowrk it, right!? Nope, spent 50 rerolls trying to get a single affix to hit twice… botched it, out of gated mats now.

I think you nailed it… generate an unfun gameplay loop and break things that previously weren’t so they can have things to “fix” and “improve” in the future. Season 5 was absolutely amazing. By far the best state the game has been in. How do you go from Season 5 glory into this absolute joke without that being your actual intention? Makes ya wonder.

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The issue is that the game in general is boring, if that wasn’t the case you wouldn’t mind the time it took

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Thanks for you post, that is exactly describing my feelings as well.

For me, it is the Ancestral Drop rate that is driving me crazy, especially with regards to updating Aspects. Many Aspects came into the game (quite some of them useless) and the RNG involved with the increase in combination with low Ancestral drop rate are a mess, especially, if you can do nothing about it:

  • You would guess a 140 Pit run gives you better loot… no, just normal legendaries most of the time, and even some yellow ones???
  • Target farm with Undercity? Targeted farming is you a running gag the devs made up I guess.
  • Gambling with Obols: More Unique Item crap than Ancestrals
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An don’t forget about ruined mythic craft.
Target farming mythics is impossible now.

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Just want to add a point about tempering that with decent gear being so awfully hard to come by rolling the same trash affix 12+ times in a row on a single ancestral item alone is enough to make most people rage quit. I’ve done this five times this season and that was in the first couple of days. Everything else I agree with completely especially the part about mats and the general waste of time farming them is. I think we should all quit until they fix it. Maybe if their login numbers drop substantially they’ll listen. Maybe not🤷🏻‍♂️

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Sums how I feel up pretty nicely. There is a bit more I am unhappy with but good post.

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Players cannot accept that certain items can be rarer, they will cry the devs will make those items rain from the sky and the playerbase will play the game less and less.

All left will be mindless zombies being done with their gear in the first 10 hours of the game and grinding paragon points.
GGs and welcome back to diablo 3.

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One of the worst thing about this game now is how you can’t even play multiple characters due to the gear and resource bottleneck.

Not that any of them are really worth playing right now with SB being just absurdly bugged out, but it’s something I’ve always found strange about the design direction for D4.

No other iteration of Diablo has been so restrictive for seemingly no reason, outside of they want you to be spinning your wheels.

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I absolutely love Diablo IV Season 6. I play Spiritborn and do have the advantages of Runes and Tributes due to the Expansion. I don’t have any resource issues at the time, but that’s probably because I don’t re-masterwork a lot. The difficulty changes have worked out great. Ancestral drop rate is spot on.


Some tips for future improvements

  • The Dark Citadel is one of the few things added that “feel” completely different than any other challenge in the game, which I really like. I do think it takes a bit too much running and the levels could be just a little more compact.
  • Tributes should drop before you finish the Undercity questline.
  • Mercenaries are great. When joining a party it should automatically switch to Reinforcement unless you selected an option that you don’t want that.
  • Why not let Infernal Hordes Compasses of the same type stack?
  • The way the skills and the skill tree works for the Spiritborn in combination with the Spirit Hall is really interesting and might be something to introduce for other classes in some form.
  • Adding Ethereal Socketed White items in Torment I and up, where you can insert Runes to get more Diablo II like Runewords, granting for example Teleport as a skill, might be something to consider.
  • Consider adding Cursed Items that offer great boons, but also have a bane like for example you cannot equip an amulet, but the legendary effect bonus on your rings is doubled.
  • From a certain point onward you always salvage non-ancestral legendary items. This is probably true when you reach Torment 3 or 4. It might be worth considering to auto salvage those in the highest difficulties.
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By far worst season. Makes S1 barber heart fiasco look like a gnat. Literally 95% of server are unkillable SB able farm 150 pits in 5 min.

If u cant beat em join em!

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I am having some fun with the new class and Citadel. I completely agree on the bottlenecks. The ancestral gear drop rate is horrible. The torment killing your resists and armor is over the top. All this requires perfect rolls and masterwork with the bottlenecks means i will be living this season in torment 3. The paragon once you get past 150 is grindfest. Surely blizzard can find a happy medium somewhere between their hardcore and casual crowd. This season is not it.

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This is very true. While there are some issues with the current game, such as the rawhide costs/bottleneck, bugs etc. gear progression is absolutely not a fault and the amount of entitlement from these players who want the best of the best gear, ancestral legendaries with guaranteed GAs, that are massively buffed compared to previous seasons, within a week of a season starting is silly. If Blizzard buffed ancestral droprates, people would be decked out in ancestrals over the next week and these same complainers would be right back on the forums complaining they’re not getting upgrades and that there’s nothing to do.

At least now, the game has a good progression tail, where you level your character, get non-ancestral gear, get some uniques, then grind (you know that thing all arpgs are about), to replace those items with ancestral versions, giving you an incentive to log in every day and play.

I seriously don’t understand how players want that progression tail squished/shortened to the point you get all the ancestral gear you want super quickly and then literally nothing that drops is of any interest…

I always blast the crap out of a new season and I am swimming in ancestral gear. What I do in the first two weeks of a season, the casuals and slower-paced players can do in a month or two. I see no reason why, in a 3 month season, even the most casual player should be getting all of the best gear in a week. Droprates that high, like they were last season, just means the more dedicated players are geared up with no more gear progression within a few DAYS of the season starting. No thanks.

Apart from S1, S5 was probably my least played season simply because of how easy and short the character/gear progression was. In fact, I probably actually played S1 more because leveling to 100 still took a bit of time back then.

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Agree, Something that i have not seen mentioned anywhere is, With the change to paragons promoting multiple characters, and how easy it is to get alts to 60, They should of made glyphs account bound per class.
Making another spiritborn as there is no loadout / armoury feature, Having to get all the glyphs again and level them up becuase there is no 1 click solution on their end.

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No, no, no. Please don’t come in this thread calling people entitled. It’s not entitled to be unhappy with the fact that Blizzard married Ancestral gear to GA’s and nerfed the drop rates into the ground. Ancestrals have been easy to acquire since launch, and the game was just fine with GA’s being a rare occurrence on Ancestral gear. Please don’t defend this.

The changes to Ancestral loot in Vessel of Hatred is literally just adding RNG to RNG on RNG on RNG. It’s just another grind mechanic to keep you logging in, it is no different from bottlenecking the entire gearing system with raw hide and iron chunks.

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Agree to all. Drop rate of Mythical gear is non-existent. After hundreds of hrs between 2 toons and over a hundred boss runs not a 1. Waiting for next season and if no improvement I am done with D4.

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I agree, with the criticism. For me, though, the real issue is with absolutely non-existing pool of legendary items. The fun comes from the fact you empower your character with items you find, however, reaching T2 difficulty, you only farm for materials, not items. I really do not need to see one concrete legendary to drop a hundred times during a season. Itemization of D4 is simply the worst among D2, D3 and D4.

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I think your post reflects what others have been saying and feeling about the current state of the game. And it’s difficult to make sense of it all because of the lack of transparency. However i can sort of patch a couple things together. first massive nerf to drop rates, Then RMT is at it’s all time high, which leads to massive duping. Coincident? or planned? And keep in mind Blizzard is not a new kid on the block, They are fully aware of what will happen when they take actions such as these. Just something to consider. and of course this is not me making any accusations. But it does open the door for speculation and conjecture.

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