So. These changes were meant to help with the fact that the rares were “not meant to be the primary activity in ZC”. OK. Fine. I can go along with that (although it is strange that there are so many of them then ). Putting aside for the moment that Blizz hasn’t stated what the “primary activity in ZC” is actually meant to be, lets look at the practical result of these new changes shall we?
Before the change:
ZC was mostly a dead zone with terrible sharding. Most people would be sharded into zones with all rares dead or a shard with many rares up but with no way to kill them due to how few people actually play the zone and there weren’t many people listing groups for it where rares would actually be up. But at least you would occasionally get lucky with a custom group listing after reset. Then the zone was actually playable as you could start farming the rares. Typically this would mean the raid lead would direct which rare to go to next or if not that, the herd of players would group-think their way from one rare to the next, sticking together the whole time.
OK. Not a great system but at least it worked, even if sporadically due to how dead the zone was.
After the change:
So now the rares are tied to WQ spawns with certain batches of non-loot lockout rares spawning on some days and the rest spawning on the new 4/5day CD. However this is somewhat compensated by the fact that the daily loot lockout for those specific WQ batch rares was removed. So they can be farmed infinitely. However there’s a couple big issues with that:
You still have the dead zone problem, so even if you can get loot repeatedly from the rares, that doesn’t do you much good when you can’t find any rares to kill to begin with or can find them but have no way to actually kill them.
(this is the big one) Because you now have 2 different lockouts affecting different rares in the one zone, those raid groups I mentioned that actually made the zone playable are now having big problems. This is because you now have people who will see some rares up and others not due to the differing loot lockouts depending on when a player last took that toon through ZC. The net result of all of this is that these groups are now splintering. Now these groups are filled with people who do not see your rares and therefore will not follow the leader. Instead they form smaller groups that will go around killing the rares they can see/are eligible to receive loot from.
This is becoming a serious issue since it also denies those rares to the raid lead/other players in the raid. Some raid leads have resorted to instantly kicking anyone who does not join their locale. Whilst this may be their prerogative. It doesn’t change the fact that it causes much consternation to those people kicked and even the raid lead themselves due to the constant vigilance they now have to maintain to ensure people don’t steal rares from the rest of the group.
Granted this was happening before the new loot lockout changes. But no where near on this scale due to the fact that the daily CD across all rares was minimising the impact on different players locked to different rares since the frequency loot lockout resets were much higher. But now you’ve got large amounts of rares stuck in a 4/5 day lockout. This massively increases the number of people getting loot-locked.
Conclusion:
To my knowledge, no other zone in the entire game has 2 competing loot-lockouts for rares. This is creating much confusion and frustration in the community. Either change the loot-lockout to be something else or revert the changes completely.
Yeah except Timeless Isle had A LOT of stuff on it to collect and do. ZC is pretty boring especially after the change. I remember the zone chat would call out Huolon like “5 minutes!”.
And there were many secret toys and pets and things… I don’t love the new zone.
I am on a low pop server, and yesterday at 5pm (so a weekend, during prime time) there were SIX people in the zone. I’ve never seen a current-content zone be that dead.
I like the content islands. Timeless Isle was great, and I really enjoyed Zereth Mortis.
But the iterations they’ve done with Forbidden Reach and Zaralek have been largely awful.
i dont understand why they went from rares that most (if not all) classes could solo fairly easily, to actual world bosses you need multiple people for. nobody is doing these rares anymore so i, as someone who just came back for this patch two days ago, have nobody to help me kill rares and therefore probably no chance of killing them at all
my only answer is DIABLO 4 they are doing it for diablo 4 only purpose because diablo 4 has battle pass, ingame not pay 2 win (it is indeed p2w) only to milk the last remain of fidelity.
I think this will undoubtedly affect lower pop servers from the get go, full pop is still seeing action per se on the rares.
I’m on a few servers ranging from full [or so it says] to med, to low…
The drop off is pretty quick I’d say.
I’ve read people write about how they are tired of the same formula again, farming rares… and frankly FOR ME, the place was a dud even before the change.
They banked on Zereth Mortis being their go to moving forward but they underestimated how many people will like their constantly same-y design in a dark and dingy zone with ugly mole people.
It’s just a lot of directionless development by a team that is saying yes to every idea devs have. So I am not holding out hope that they improve this in their next zone of DF.
Wasn’t meant to be a “Timeless Isle”, it was meant to finish up the story arc, dripfeed some minor content instead of having a complete draught, and complement it all by giving us interesting gear such as the ring
It had more in common with the old legendary quest chains than Timeless Isle
And Zaralek was supposed to be just a Broken Shores zone, except without the mage tower
Instead it had other stuff that wasn’t as engaging as the mage tower which is hardly surprising but the zone again wasn’t meant to be this grandiose “You’ll never leave this place”
The current content is across all of the Dragon Isles instead of just concentrated into one single zone and besides, 6 people (heck even just 3 and depending on folks’ gear 2 can be enough to take out rares), and the ‘Looking for group’ function still exists for folks to use, and so on and so on
From what I’ve been able to tell, the small batch of rares that rotate up in the vicinity of WQ spawns get removed from the daily loot-lockout system (like how all the FR rares are). However all other rares in the zone then get put in a 4/5 day loot-lockout instead. This is how you’re getting huge problems with conflicting loot-lockouts and the consequential problems affecting groups in the zone.
So now you’ve got even less of a reason to be in the zone. Basically it boils down to the fact that these changes have made it so that it makes little sense to remain in ZC more than once per week. So they’ve made a dead zone even deader…
Those who already killed the rare wont see the rare icon on their map. They could still see the rare when they follow the group towards it. But of course, they wont get rewarded becoz they killed the rare already.
There is more to do in ZC than rares fyi. (Snail dailies, the horn events, treasures (which has been a focal part of this xpac since day one.) The three? Digs with that annoying mole-miner. Bartering, thoufh thats done ina few moments. Definitely (expected/encouraged) to farm bags/treasures for tablets until renown 12 when ponzo scheme has you collecting boulders instead. (At renown 20 we can buy boulders for supplies… So the scheme ends eventually. (Wait until you get 12 lmao. He legit ponzo schemes us for tbaleta to boulders.)
O.o Plus theres a whole DF isles outside.
Legit: Were people.expecting ZC to be the size and have the udnertaking the xpac does? (Shake your entitled heads )
). Putting aside for the moment that Blizz hasn’t stated what the “primary activity in ZC” is actually meant to be, lets look at the practical result of these new changes shall we?
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