Season 7 is all about whispers, and season 8 will be about bosses. We can call this “Single mechanic” Seasons, where the season focuses on making one mechanic bigger than normal.
Now, this could turn out to be a very good idea on the part of the developers, as hopefully after Season 7, and thanks to all the experimentation and tweaking, whispers will end up being a great base mechanic for the entire game.
This could also happen in Season 8. If after this season the game ends up having really good boss fights, it would be objectively: very good.
And if this trend continues, we will most likely have in the future: a Tempering Season, Masterworking Season, Obol Season, Pit Season, Paragon Season, ETC, each one probably significantly improving each of these aspects of the game.
After this, it is expected that every X seasons and/or each Expansion new mechanics will be revealed, which will subsequently have their own season.
Personally, I don’t like the seasons being like this, but I do think it’s extremely positive that the game gets better with each season.
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I wouldn’t mind this so much if a piece of the previous season stayed, and continually built on the game season after season. But so far, nothing from S7 is sticking around.
Let’s get some head gems to put in jewelry! Let’s add heads to bosses or to Blood Maiden. How about Roothold effects to NMD?
But yeah. Nada. Unless we get a post-PTR surprise.
Devs don’t know what to keep, so they can’t say what will be kept.
The most important thing is that by focusing on whispers, they will learn a lot about how to do them well.
It’s the season of “how to get players to do more whispers”.
Thematically, it is, but not so much as an activity. They made rather substantial changes to whisper caches in S7, but to my knowledge we’re still farming for the same stuff, albeit in slightly less quantity, from bosses.
I’m hoping there is something we just don’t know about this season, because for vets who have sunk hundreds of hours into this game, there’s not a whole lot fresh to come back. The new boss mechanics will be fun for a bit and then you’ll realize the changes to the loot tables make it far harder to target farm and you just give up and play something else.
And that’s kind of the idea. To make you farm them more. They are learning how to get you to play more.
As I say, I don’t like it, but it’s not a bad idea.
I would like the seasons to be more about “breaking the rules”. Giving us something that they normally don’t want to give us because it breaks everything.
Feeling like you’re cheating is more satisfying. It makes for a better season, but it limits what you can learn from it.