Going into the patch, I was super excited about the game. The patch added a lot of cool new things or addressed certain pain points. I think most of these are good additions to the game. I got super into build theorycrafting before the patch and my first character of the season was one I made myself and it turned out surprisingly good. (It turned out to basically just be a worse version of judgement paladin, but I swear I didn’t know that before I started lol.)
However, despite there being more potential content at endgame, including shooting for Uber Abberoth as an end goal, once I beat regular Abberoth I was more interested in swapping to another build idea than continuing to grind out the same character to it’s limits. But as I tried to play around with other builds, I found myself just getting burned out in the same ways that I’ve gotten burned out every time I play. So while I thought I’d end up playing this patch way longer than previous ones, I’m already starting to wind down. This doesn’t mean I won’t be back at some point, just that I’m surprised that this didn’t keep me occupied as long as I thought it would. So why is this? Some reasons:
This got long, so TL;DR: It takes way too much time and tedious effort to try new builds for how often I get disappointed by them and the new stuff doesn’t do much to address that.
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There’s still just a ton of friction and tedium involved in starting a new character, especially if you’re not following a guide. Planning a build is just such a slow process. There are so many pieces you have to deal with and most of them aren’t interesting. I like finding some cool interaction. I do not like the process of having to decide exactly the right balance of tiny stat increases needed to make everything work. You do this in so many places. Passive tree, skill trees, gear affixes, idol slots, blessings. And you need to do it for so many stats. You need to balance out your resists, crit avoid, crit chance if you’re a hit build, and then enough health and damage. Planning all this out either in game or on one of the planner sites just isn’t a smooth experience. It’s not always easy to find all the relevant things for your build, relevant total crit chance for an ability isn’t calculated anywhere, DPS tooltips aren’t reliable for some abilities/builds and because of the lack of a DPS meter, the only way to really know if what you did improved your build is to just do the math unless it was such a substantial upgrade that it’s obvious through the noise of gameplay. And that’s not all, you have to set up a loot filter for your build. If you want it to be a useful loot filter that doesn’t end up showing you a lot of crap or misses stuff, you need to put in a lot of effort to create it and the UI is just kind of slow for just how much you need to do with it. And all of this is before you have to either level the new character or put in all the work into respecing your current character. This has been shortened considerably, but it’s still enough time and effort to contribute to the friction that stops me from wanting to go again.
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As I feared, the hoarding problem is as bad or worse than it was before. All the new systems further encourage me to hold onto copies of items I otherwise wouldn’t because they all have potential value with the new crafting options. This is on top of the usual CoF hoarding I need to do to try to have key pieces for builds that I might end up wanting to play. If I were to start from scratch every time, I wouldn’t have to deal with the clutter, but I would need to play a generic starter build for a lot longer than I otherwise would like and in the mean time, if the build needs significantly different gear than the starter build, I still need to adjust the loot filter and hoard as I go to make the transition smoother. Despite all this hoarding though, you’d be shocked at how often I still end up lacking useful exalted items for the new build. So I feel pretty justified holding onto all the items I do keep since it’s apparently that hard to find specific things you need when you need them. Stash management still sucks even with tab affinities.
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I think for all the new things, the basic structure of the endgame holds back the early experience. Needing to complete all the monos to get your blessings and beat the harbingers means you don’t actually get to spend a lot of time in any given monolith, which makes me not want to invest in using my woven echoes unless I need a very specific thing because I know I’ll just have to leave the mono after a bit anyway. Also when you push corruption, you want to go as straight as possible to hit the shade quickly and since your woven echoes will disappear when you reset the timeline, it doesn’t make that much sense to place a lot of them. I don’t know how other people play with these, but I get the sense that outside of the initial completion and specific crafting needs, it seems like you only really dig into these once you’ve gotten all the early stuff out of the way and have reached your desired corruption farming level, which I don’t really do if I swap to a new character after a certain point. It also doesn’t help that you need to go to the cemeteries to place them. I think I’d do them a lot more if I could just decide at any time that I really want to do this kind of echo next instead of either finding a cemetery every time I want to run something or having to think 10 steps ahead when I do find a cemetery to place as much as possible.
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For all the new things you can do to craft items now, they’re all still competing for the same limited FP and you still have to deal with the problem of not getting the bases you want. Forget about the top end, this just makes it frustrating to put together the initial stuff you might need for the build, either dealing with the aforementioned defensive requirements, or the more specific affix needs for more interesting builds. For how excited I was about set crafting, it’s kind of hampered by this limitation. I straight up have not been able to craft a genuinely good set exalt for any of my builds yet. The need to find a good exalted base which has stats you like, but not too many so you have space to put the affix on is just really hard to meet. So you end up needing to gamble on using runes of removal or maybe a glyph of despair to open up a slot, then craft the affix on and either upgrade it 5 times or rune of havok it until you hit, all of which costs precious FP and might result in you not being able to fully craft the item.
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Last, but not least, the design and balance of uniques is a frustrating disappointment for me. The thing that most inspires me in the game is seeing cool uniques which have the potential to be built around and then coming up with a build to use them. Unfortunately a lot of the interesting ones are just pointlessly bad, to the point where I wonder if anyone tested them or why they’re in the game in the first place. Sometimes this is just a numbers issue and I wish they would just get buffed. But sometimes it’s just some random anti-fun design limitation. A CD you can’t reduce. A stack cap. A proc limit. A potentially cool interaction that’s forbidden. A skill that just isn’t good enough and doesn’t have adequate ways to make it good. A baffling lack of support for the things the inputs or outputs of the unique in the classes or other items. Sometimes there are other cool unique items that would have cool synergy… but they’re in the same slot so you can’t do that. This is all super lame and deflates the excitement I have to make builds and try to play them. The worst is when I actually go through all of the aforementioned effort to plan the build, make the filter, level the character, etc only to discover it just sucks and can’t work once I get to empowered monoliths. That possibility in the back of my head makes me hesitant to spend all the time and effort it takes doing repetitive stuff just to get to the point where I can find out I wasted my time. The worst part is they aren’t even consistent with these kinds of designs. There are some busted builds that can scale to infinity and beyond while needing barely any investment to get started. I don’t mind those existing. What I do mind is how arbitrary it is that they get to do whatever they want while I have to deal with “Sorry no matter how much effort you put into this, the best you can do is making this cool thing happen once every couple of seconds. And no it will not be worth the wait.”
A related point to the lame unique design and sort of the limitations with crafting is how often builds will use LP uniques not for ANY unique line of text on them, just because they have some good stats you can’t easily get on a regular base and are relatively easy to craft what you want onto, especially with the legendary crafting changes. How boring is that? How many times have you looked at a build guide, scratched your head at what they were using a unique for, then go “oh it’s just for the stats?”
Just a random assortment of lame stuff I’ve found recently: (and an invitation to anyone who could make some of these work.)
- Bee build is probably never going to bee a thing because there’s no more multipliers for them, so even if you do what the item asks you to, it still just sucks.
- Forged Weapons and Manifest Armor inherit literally no interesting unique effects. They only take the stats from the items. So any of my ideas that involved doing something cool with them are dead on arrival. What can you do with them? Just put stats on them from your gear and passives. They’re a closed circuit. There aren’t interesting points of interaction with them outside of what was directly built into them.
- Ruby Fangs just doesn’t seem to make sense anywhere. The best I could come up with was using Cinder Strike with the poison to ignite conversion (which is already kind of lame), but I just can’t get that to feel event remotely strong enough to even do 100 corruption monos.
- Phalanx has a line of text that scales Vengeance based on your block. I tried my damnedest to get as much block as I could and it just doesn’t do any damage. Also the retaliation build kind of just sucks in general. Mobs don’t hit you often enough and they don’t follow you far or fast enough to group them together. And even then, Sigeon’s auto shield throw still has a CD proc limit. Why?
- Summon Bear has a node that gives more melee damage per bleed. Oh cool, maybe this is how I use the bees, as bleed application for the bear. Expect it caps at 30… so what’s the point? Warlock gets to have infinite ward and damage from stacking necrotic res but the best I can do to take that bear node to extremes is 30? That’s nothing. You bearly have to build around that to achieve that.
- Conditional block chance isn’t actually added to the character sheet, so it can’t be used to scale anything dependent on block in a cool way.