TLDR: Massively underwhelming.
The Good:
Spiritborn has so many endgame viable builds, please make the rest of the classes like this. Yes, Rod… BREAK THEM. Nahantu NMDs are the way NMDs should have always been… Kill the boss to complete the dungeon with optional objectives and rewards. Bringing back pools of reflection is good… but could be better. Put them in every NMD for more incentive to run them and less incentive for ppl to offer 500m gold bounties for working ones. Nahantu is beautiful. Undercity concept is cool.
The Bad:
Nahantu: Not enough happens there. I want to spend time there… but the things we need to farm in the new “endgame” are everywhere else 80-90% of the time… even with NMD sigils, why are THOSE so rare?! I can only get socketable opals from Nahantu realmwalkers… but they spawn so infrequently compared ones that can’t give socketable opals.
Story: Relatively short without much real progress. Too much focus on Nayrelle… I know it’s in the title, but it was still a mistake. I didn’t like her in the base game, and I like her even less now. Not completely killing her off at the end of the xpac story was a HUGE missed opportunity to give her a sacrifice worthy of her incessant crying and make the story feel worth it to me. I am not looking forward to dealing with her again.
Content: Where are the dolls? THIS IS KURAST! :Spartan Kick: Why no new world boss? Why no boss ladder additions? Echo of Malphas and echo of Astaroth drop mats to fight an echo of Elias? That’s some seriously low effort expansion content and we didn’t even get that…
S6: The single worst seasonal mechanic so far. The Midwinter blight event last year was more thematic and fun than this. The entire reason to run the walker is opals, and all those really do is bring this game to where it should be without them. This has been a common theme with the ashes (increased horse speed, greater cache chance, etc…), and it’s not really “fun”. Fun is taking something enjoyable and making it better, not taking something that’s tedious and making it less tedious.
Meat or Treat: Saw burning butcher twice, and got maybe three goblin bags that dropped garbage… ZzZz… wait, there was an xp buff? didn’t even notice…
Dark Citadel: This is not the co-op I want. I want group meta co-op. CC, DPS, Heals, Tank… BUT if you want this to be fun, you need to either educate the playerbase about what to do, or make it more obvious. Very frustrating trying to explain what to do to ppl while avoiding mobs, hazards, and racing a death clock.
Nerfs: SOOOOO many nerfs to progress, rewards, and choice. Perfectly masterworking your gear is WAY more expensive now that you can’t farm neithiron and 3x it into ingolith or 9x it into obducite. It takes so long to farm the runes needed to target craft mythics compared to the system that was in place for the prior 9 months… we can’t target craft runes, or target farm them… 4 random magic runes for a tribute that I can only randomly transmute? RUFS? On top of that it completely screws over people who can’t afford, or don’t want, to drop more money than this expansion is worth on it. Mythic ladder boss drop rate is now basically what it was in S2 but the bosses are all tormented now, drop less everything, and mythics aren’t even perfect drops anymore.
The Ugly:
Eternal: Ruining all my eternal gear and leaving all my characters unable to even access paragon boards… I’m never going to forgive. No previous Diablo game has ruined existing gear. I still had a very OP and tradable Horadric Hamburger in non-season well after Loot 2.0 in d3… and plenty of 1.08 gear in d2 non-ladder. I was upset that we didn’t get to keep stuff like the malignant hearts we had in our gear… but ruining my gear out of spite is completely unforgivable. I absolutely hate the leadership that made this call. I would not hesitate to ruin your life given the legal opportunity. I only ever played seasons in any diablo game to take the loot and rewards back to the non-seasonal realm. You already made that less of a reason to play… and now, it’s pointless. I can’t trust that you won’t do the exact same garbage again…
I’m tired. I’m tired of fighting you to get you to make a change, only to have you undo it later in a roundabout way… I’m tired of dealing with this absolutely broken game… These expletive world boss messages have been broken for SEASONS, WTF. The stability since VoH launch has been the worst I’ve ever experienced with this game. On top of all the random disconnects and crashes… It has hard locked my entire PC 3 times, that hasn’t happened to me in over a decade across multiple PCs. The party joining errors that have been in this game since launch… fix your damn netcode so ppl at least gracefully reconnect when the rest of your netcode falls on its face… or IDK DEVELOP A DETECTION SYSTEM THAT WARNS PPL WHEN THEY HAVE A PARTY LISTED SO THEY DON’T CLOG THE PARTY LISTS, OR GIVE US A CANCEL BUTTON, OR JUST DON’T LIST THEM, ANYTHING FFS!
You’re just putting jewelry on this pig until you get this game stable and including standard modern game features… It’s absolutely disgraceful that it took over a year to add any matchmacking at all to a LIVE SERVICE multiplayer game that launched in 2023. It desperately needs a trading house, but that probably won’t materialize until the third expansion at this rate…
The storage situation is absurd in this game… You’ve admitted that the code behind the storage system is atrocious, but have absurdly low and varied stack counts for all the different stuff we need… If the variable is big enough to store 999 stacks, doing anything less is stupid when you’re facing the kind of constraints you apparently do. Why incense at 20, boss mats at 50, elixirs at 99, runes at 100, abyssal scrolls at 999… Why not make one stash tab personal like D2R? That alone would drastically alleviate much of the ‘storage tension’.
Mythics should at the least be treated like D3 gear… tradable for a limited time to ppl in your party at the time. It sucks so bad to be in a long dry spell looking for that one mythic you need and not finding it, while your buddy finds 3 mythics and two of them are the one you’re chasing. They’re not “find it and you’re done” items anymore and the mythic pool for any given class has nearly doubled… so loosen the restrictions.
I know I’m forgetting so many things… but I’ve already spent too long on this.
I pledged earlier to burn my battle pass token and then only return for expansions… but I’m not even doing that. I may not ever come back after this season, and that depends entirely on you. S7 better be on another level than anything this game has done before, an apology tour of sorts, or you’ll probably lose me entirely.
You don’t have a roadmap and frequently respond “nothing we’re ready to talk about”… well, you might want to get ready. Short term faith in this game is non-existent, and long term faith isn’t far behind given the leadership and lack of openness about goals and plans.
[Half Baked Scarface exit]
for the constructive criticism up until that point.