I have been enjoying Diablo 4 season 2 quite a bit. My Druid is already the second highest-leveled character I’ve made since launch, way past my Necromancer from last season, both due to XP boosts and the fact that…I’m having more fun playing.
Leveling, loot and activity changes in Diablo 4 have made things more fun, and yet there are some clear gaps in the game that still need to be filled, even with these positive changes.
Helltides Are Lame And Bugged – We can now see just how mundane Helltides are with the new Blood Harvest zones which are way more fun and full of objectives to complete. Helltides are devoid of meaningful activities almost entirely, it costs way too much to farm up for the best chests, and hunting down absent locations for them is deeply annoying, as is losing currency on death or when they reset. Additionally, they are on a rotation with long gaps in between them, so you simply cannot farm things like Living Steel currency or Forgotten Souls whenever you want.
They’re also bugged sometimes. There are instances where the cinder drop rate is beyond low, or things like Living Steel chests are not appearing, and you have to actually leave your instance and return. That needs to be fixed ASAP. But overall, Helltides really have a lot to learn from Blood Harvests.
Re-Rolling Costs – Yes, Diablo 4 now buries you in money from Whisper caches. I have 100 million gold barely even trying to farm them on purpose, likely more than I’ll ever spend. But now they have included Forgotten Souls in re-rolling costs, the hard limiting factor, which can only be farmed from limited offering Helltides and no longer appear when dismantling items really at all, from what I’ve seen. This somehow made the system worse despite the game giving us so much more money.
Loadouts – While Diablo 4 is about to flip a switch and let us refund all paragon points at once, it remains really, really annoying to switch builds only the fly, as it’s an entire respec process for both skills and the paragon board, and a total gear swapover. We have loadouts for cosmetics but none for actual builds. I know this was a conscious decision as Blizzard wanted you to “commit” more to a build, but in practice, it doesn’t feel very good and loadouts would mean more diverse and more fun play, and create more drive to farm up for alternate builds that are easy to switch to.
Cosmetics – They are exactly as bad as last season. The store is jam packed full of amazing, enormously expensive cosmetics. The free battle pass set is garbage. There is only a single non-horse cosmetic to farm from the new bosses, a single generic crown. The game has thrown cosmetics earned in-game, at least for armor and weapons, completely out the window in favor of 10x more microtransactions. It’s treating the game like League of Legends or Overwatch when unlike those games, it’s a looter, and getting cool looking armor and weapons should be a part of that.
There’s more, but that’s a good start. I hope many of these are addressed in the future, even if serious gains were indeed made this season.
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