I don’t want to be just a negative complainer, I’ve gotten a lot of enjoyment out of D4. But I thought the game was in a great state as far as the endgame progression goes in Seasons 4 and especially 5. Early leveling in Helltide was a blast, and I had a formula for every new character: level to 35, do some tempering and do capstone 1. Enter WT3, farm sacred gear, retemper, level to 55 and do capstone 2. Enter WT4, farm ancestral gear, blast to 100 and then work on my endgame build progression, getting legendaries, killing bosses for uniques, and minmaxing. This whole thing was extremely fun and I happily played multiple characters these seasons.
Now leveling from 1-60 feels like more of a slog than 1-50 did before, and good god don’t get me started on the grind to 300 paragon. To me this is the worst of all worlds - it’s an unbelievably long grind especially if you aren’t doing group farming of Pit 101 with Spiritborns, but it’s also finite meaning you know there is a top of the mountain, so you want to reach it to feel “finished.” I liked the process of making an alt and doing the entire 1-100 progression, I don’t want to have 200+ paragon on a new toon once I hit 60. And the mythic crafting and ancestral aspects put SSF players at even more of a disadvantage than ever. Why did you get rid of the deterministic reputation grind for resplendent sparks so we could just craft the mythics we want, instead we have to find or buy super rare runes.
It just feels like the game was finally in a really great state and now it’s all gone.
Don’t worry, the game will get better once they announce the next expansion. They’ll need to start from the bottom again, like season 1, just so they can proudly claim they’ve improved the game.
But it’s been a part of Diablo 4 for 5 seasons. It’s not PoE and no one should be wanting this game to be PoE. Seasons 4 & 5 were by far the best for progression. This season does feel like 10 steps back.
I’m exactly with you. This new progression is not it. Watching people doing 4-man groups, that are playing 16 hours a day, 7 days a week and still not max paragon after 2 weeks makes me not want to play. It feels like 300 paragon is not obtainable by most. And again this is not PoE, this is a game that for a year and a half every season has been a obtainable max level in a reasonable time frame for anyone remotely invested in the game.
Season 4 was the pinnacle for me where leveling felt so good that I made my first hardcore characters and got them to 100 after I got 6 characters to 100 on SC. I had 7 SC 100’s last season because of resplendant sparks.
This will be the first season I will not be playing more than one character. I really regret my VoH purchase because of these changes.
D4 was bad on release… it was only recently starting to get decently good in the seasons before VoH launched, and now the game is even worse than it was during D4’s initial launch.
I’ve paid for a base game, and an expansion… over a 1.5 year period I’ve had what 5 months of a decent game? That’s ~5 months out of almost 19 that have been good. The product has to be better, and the company behind the product doesn’t get to skate by on their past reputation and “IOUs” any longer.
The paragon 300 is to make you feel every trash mobs you killed feel meaningful. Reduce the XP requirement defeat the purpose.
You don’t need to reach paragon 300 to clear hard content, but there is an achievement to unlock at 300. Many other game also has some trophy achievement which is extremely grindy, for those chasing trophies.
BG3 has a freaking achievement which you only can unlock by kill 10 certain enemies while drunk.
D4 was superB on release and had most players for several months - regarding to active io… they were loosing players every season. Only S1 was comparable to S0.
You delusional if you think S4 brought all of those players back.
What we have now is abomination. Campaign is broken and D4 now is made only for D3 GR players…fast paced slaugher i would call it.
Damn