Campaign
Overall the new look for the campaign is awesome. Areas were distinct and all the graphical touches really showed. The music also continues to impress. As far as pacing, I found the difficulty to be adequate. That being said, I’ve been gearing through the same campaign for so long that I don’t think I could be a good gauge on difficulty spikes.
I found it fairly easy to be resistance capped from around level 40 onward, and with tier 18 and tier 19 two-handers I fashioned from some careful shard conservation. The mastery I chose was Forge Guard and it pretty much trampled content all the way up to empowered monos. Multistrike + Forge Strike is still a very serviceable build path that can be taken to end game. I look forward to continuing the story in the Cycles to come.
Monoliths
Monoliths were also pretty smooth. The blessing system along with the target farmable boss uniques gives plenty of stop-gap options to push you through the tiers until you hit empowered. While I did die a few times at this point I never truly hit a wall. In fact, something happened that never happened before thanks to the new affixes and base types that were introduced. I didn’t have to farm for Woven Flesh. With reduced crit damage being more prevalent I was able to limp by with moderate critical damage reduction all the way into empowered monos, and start on my empowered blessings.
Usually woven flesh was a must-have that had to be farmed to progress due to 100% crit avoidance. Now there are more options to speed up the monolith transition. While I’ll save itemization for a separate thread I will say the new defenses afforded to my Sentinel have been a real game-changer. The Echo changes are also much appreciated. They feel much more balanced and less annoying to stack.
End Game
Empowered Monoliths were harder than previous iterations. I don’t find this to be a bad thing. The increase in difficulty not only forced me to engage more with the content than I had previously, but also gave me an earlier sense of build progression that had been lacking at the start of end game. Level 60-80, when I clear regular monoliths, still feels like a bit of a zombie walk, but the game picks back up fast enough to not matter.
Dungeons are fun but could still be improved, and the farming loop brought on by playing as Circle of Fortune is serviceable. As of now My level 98 Forge guard pushes 200+ corruption and has killed every boss in T4 content. While I don’t feel everything about end game balancing is perfect it never felt impossible. There is a good system in place for getting that gear you want and that gear is indeed strong enough to get you over the finish line eventually.
Conclusion
That’s it so far. The campaign remains solid, monoliths feel good (especially the echo changes), and the end game gear hunt is fun.