What they did with the start of season 6

PC General Discussion
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When developers lacked ideas for new content, they simply prolong the grind and therefore increase the waste of time of players in this game dramatically.

This is exactly what happened with the start of season 6. A few details:

Shortage of materials
Blizzard has changed the materials droprate to the point that players need to spend much more time farming materials. The shortage of rawhide was only one example.

Severely lowered drop rates of mythic uniques
While in season 5 the drop chance of mythic uniques was about 7 % for all bosses, it is now 2% for Duriel and Andariel and 1% for other bosses.

Severely lowered drop rates of ancestral items with greater affixes
The drop rate of legendary ancestral items with greater affixes was severely lowered in season 6, compared to season 5. Especially those with 2 and 3 drop way less often now than in season 6.

Severely lowered drop rates of maxrolled legendary aspects
Since maxrolled legendary aspects can only be on ancestral legendary items and since ancestral items only make a fraction of legendary item drops and since (on top of that) the drop rate on ancestral legendary items was severely lowered, you can play like 200 hours and you will have less than 25% of aspects with maxroll in your codex of power. It will take probably thousands of hours to complete the codex of power.

Introduction of RNG to Glyph Leveling
Compared to season 5, it will now take much more time to max all your glyphs. The reason is that Blizzard introduced RNG to glyph leveling, thus the chance that a glyph leveling attempt fails. This adds to already a lot of RNG factors in the game, such as Tempering, Enchanting and Masterworking, that all can fail and/or not produce the desired result.

New leveling system
It now takes way, way more time to level your char to the max level, with the introduced new paragon level progression.

All these things together slow down progress of players artificially without adding exciting new content to the game. On the contrary, it rather adds frustration to players, especially when it comes to items and itemization.

At the same time heavily demanded quality of life upgrades in the game, such as loot filter and ingame auction house, that could accelerate progression, are still rejected by the developers. Therefore players still have to regularly portal back to town to manually salvage the 99% useless items into materials which interrupts the game flow. Doing this hundreds of times leads to hours wasted only for salvaging items in town.

There is nothing exciting about all these things that lead to artificially prolonged progression without actually adding new exciting content to the game.

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To be fair, from everything I’ve read*, leveling to paragon 200 isn’t that bad, and that’s equivalent to what we had pre-VOH. The fact that new paragon points via paragon level 201-300 takes much longer to achieve should be looked at, but isn’t a step back as it is wholly added content.

Also not really part of the same issue, but I’m sure if I get a comment at all it’s going to be something like “but the new paragon system is too restrictive” I’d like to say I love it. With the 5 board limit, higher node density, and higher point value, I can now make more important decisions about which boards to pick because instead of speeding through to unlock glyphs for their secondary feature, I can now invest to boost their primary feature and grab tons of node clusters as well. I’m incentivized to use the boards as they were probably intended, and it’s nice.

*Eternal, so I started at P201. I have no personal experience leveling to there since VOH.

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I think 230 is the good spot and that’s really not bad to get. My beef is with aspects and classes that struggle even in pit 90 so can’t level glyphs. Those two things should be reasonable to get by everyone. Not everything in game needs to be some masochist rare af chase and I’m tired of hearing “aspirational content” to try and explain all this artificial grind used to keep people on a boring af treadmill.

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Ive asked in game trade channel.
Anybody got max herculean and edgemaster aspect for sale?

No answer coz nobody got it

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I don’t think it’s entirely fair to say they are doing it purely to make you play longer. For one how long you play is entirely your choice nobody is forcing you.

The feedback they have been getting is there wasn’t enough progression, some even called for infinite paragon points so I think the changes have stemmed from that feedback.

Now there have definitely been some missteps. Mythics are back to season 3 levels of annoying to find, although in fairness boss mats are probably the best they’ve ever been.

Ancestral drop rates is definitely too low, although not impossible to find, I have many 2ga and 3ga items from solo play no trading.

Maxing out aspects is just stupid. I get where they are coming from when they say they want it to be rare but having aspects that aren’t maxed and never seem to be maxed just feels bad.

But the good news is all these things are easily adjusted. So in all I like the direction of the game and with a few tweaks it’ll get there.

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The bad news is they can’t make up their mind on what they want this game to be. Until we get better leadership we are likely to continue to see the rampant bugs, poor execution, and these inconsistent balancing decisions.

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There were also enough feed back to show if they lower drop rates and make item progression hard people don’t enjoy the game. However instead of implementing alternative ways to satisfy grinders, they slowed the progression to a halt.

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Amulets with passive ranks are like 1000x rarer than mythics. As well as max-rolled aspects and 3GA legendaries / 4GA uniques.

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What’s done is done, but there should have been a 2-week gap before starting Season 6, even if it meant shortening the season. This would give players time to play through the campaign and explore some endgame content, helping to identify and address bugs. Hopefully, they’ll take this into consideration for future expansion.

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That’s like saying that because you chose to not take Calculus, the math department wasn’t put there to teach Calculus.

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How is it like that?

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Yep which is one of the things I went on to mention could use some tweaks. Not sure if you read my whole reply or just stopped at that bit.

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Great post, and hard to refute anything you’ve said. The entire idea about things like patches and seasons, is to make the game better, not to make it a more boring slog… which they clearly have, and now we have no build diversity in classes.

They don’t play their own game… Who would agree with these changes if they actually played it?

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I did read your post. I just wanted to point out there was stronger evidence to ignore those posts. It wasn’t meant for counter argument.

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I agree, thus I am losing interest in this game and ready to move on.

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Oh yeh? Then don’t play it and hopefully if enough people stop playing then things will change.

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Now we can all see that Blizzard likes to waste players’ time.

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Their entire goal is to get people to play close to a full season. What they found is the hardcore sweats quit after a few weeks. Most others quit by mid season. Initially the cash shop was designed to rotate in new cosmetics like every week or two throughout the season. They quickly found out they can’t do that because nobody played long enough to look at the cash shop. Now they put some new skins up in the beginning and thats about it.

I’m sure they would like to go back to selling more skins over the course of the whole season. It’s what earns them money. They aren’t doing seasons to make no money. Their answer to this was… just make people grind longer and call everything “aspirational content.”

Even the mid season patch idea was to drum up hype and get people to play the second half of the season. Unfortunately they are mostly bare bones like the season content is and doesn’t do the job either.

So yes, they cranked the grind and rarities to get people to play longer… to have a chance to sell more skins. In saying that, I am ok with a company trying to make money. Thats why they exist. I still want a good fun game though and this doesn’t make anything fun for me. It does the opposite and I play less.

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Like a homeless guy sitting outside a building. His hand shakingly raising a cup that says “Max aspects” on it.

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Ya a long boring grind probably isn’t “it” but it’s all they’ve got. Make the grind less boring is the answer. Make all activities grant similar experience. So you can rotate through all 5 or 6 of them or however many there are. Like you did while early leveling.