Since I’m around a week behind, one of the key things that was brought up during the livestream was that they will be revamping legendary items starting in 2.1 (the changes will not be retroactive; just that the reworked items that drop in patch 2.1 will be enhanced). Note that Travis Day mentioned they will be providing patches as items are upgraded. Thus it sounds like they will be reworking items slowly as opposed to trying to get all of them done for 2.1. This makes sense to me because they could only manage a handful in the 1.25+ years they spent working on loot 2.0.
First of all, an orange flavor text of some special proc effect, does not necessarily make the item better. I’ve smashed more than enough of those. What this could also mean is that some items, will actually indeed get better (minority though). To put it even more simpler, one should expect their current gear to be slowly obsoleted as a result of the changes they make which could result in builds that weren’t previously possible/becoming better; the grind for better gear is going to be never ending as these changes hang in the air.
Seasons buys them time especially as players level again (it detracts attention from the non-seasonal realm where players have been at level cap for awhile) and do the grind all over again. Note that with well spaced seasons, this will buy them enough time to revamp a large amount of items until the next expansion (while providing what is mostly recycled content, as updated seasonal ones). It’s a clever move because the player base will have their various attentions split in many different directions.
BTW, I can already see Seasons as being something that many players will not end up enjoying because many players have not actually played the game that way in a long while (without leveled artisans, without gold, without artisan plans, without twinked characters either from previous stashed gear and/or Paragon points). Remember, the expansion was balanced around those segment of players that brought in billions of gold with them; thus everything from gem crafting to enchanting costs, were balanced this way. Many players will not be crafting high level gems for awhile in Seasons. Also, I’m guessing that adventure mode will need to be unlocked again in seasonal play thus requiring at least one complete play through of the campaign (for players who dislike the campaign, this isn’t going to be fun). The initial first time playing this way provides the ILLUSION of fun for many. Do it enough times though, and it gets old fast UNLESS you truly enjoy leveling, finding items all over again, leveling artisans and restocking their recipes, etc.
I’ve also covered the competition angle where for myself, I consider the competitive aspect in a game like Diablo as being a farce (
this is a game which does not take a lot of player skill). While I do plan to play at least one seasonal character, it’s mainly to give myself metrics to gauge my own game play. I also personally find race type events fun (did it often in PoE but not competitively since you have to pretty much no-life to take part in many such events if you want to be in the top ranking). Playing D3 competitively is an oxymoron given how many details are out of your control including the layers of RNG where what drops for you is based on pure luck (and the key way to mitigate bad luck is to no-life the game).
Myself, I’ve stated numerous times that leveling is actually the best part of the game when it comes to seeing your characters progression (so I’m one of those who don’t mind the above aspects of a reset). The best way to actually level and get that feeling is when you start off with absolutely nothing (as with ladder/seasonal play). The game falls flat on its face at level cap though when it comes to your characters general progression/striving for goals. Doing subsequently higher Torment levels is NOT one of those goals as far as I’m concerned because dealing with higher difficulty in this game is about getting better gear to manage the larger numbers needed for dealing out damage and mitigating incoming damage. Monsters have NO added mechanics/AI changes (Normal 70 mechanics are exactly the same as T6 70 mechanics) that actually test out a players game play skill (it’s still mostly a mindless click fest) and as I also mentioned before, Seasons will not fix these kind of core issues (including damage scaling primarily off ones weapon + main stat inflation).
But isn’t that the same as general character progression (because that better gear allows my character to do higher Torment difficulties)? Again, there is no difference with monster mechanics and their AIonce one reaches level cap – that’s the angle that I’m looking at when it comes to the sort of challenges that I prefer to gauge general character progression by (which is the difference one sees during leveling where packs gain affixes at certain monster levels – which before patch 2.0, occurred when playing each difficulty of Normal through Inferno).
Also, I know many were planning to play hardcore mode with Seasons. That was of course on the assumption that seasonal ladders would follow the same format as D2 (mainly based on exp/level). Seasons is not going to work that way because it’s multiple events/conquests are going to be geared towards different playstyles. Thus players who were originally planning to play hardcore Seasons will need to decide if that time investment is going to be worth their while as all the benefits get rolled over to their non-seasonal hardcore realm account (basically, if one didn’t care for playing hardcore on the non-seasonal realm, nothing really changes with playing seasonal hardcore ladders except the chance to be immortalized on specific leaderboards – which is more of an e-peen thing because this game is not inherently a player skill based one).
What the developers have also NOT clarified is whether the actual seasonal character will roll over. I’ve already stated previously that I don’t think it will work that way given the shared Paragon system. With that system, we don’t have to worry about our current character slots; seasonal characters would just be lumped into this display as a user interface slight of hand (given they are transitory on a separate server). All the pertinent data (accrued seasonal XP, gold, and items) will get rolled over to the standard realms – and hopefully they deal with that roll over of items into a read-only style stash (like the way PoE does) that players need to pull those items out of by some expiry date (which is how I expect them to do it given the way they handled it with the AH completed tab).
Also by not rolling over the actual character, one does not have to worry about the amount of current free character slots they have (that is unless Blizzard plans on giving players more permanent slots- which I highly doubt). Furthermore, not rolling over the actual character means that it gives players incentives to level characters on the non-seasonal realm (else many players will just level only on the seasonal realms). And from Blizzard’s perspective, it’s a server-side space saving plus if seasonal characters are transitory. I look at it this way, it took them awhile to even give us one additional stash tab. Plus they gave us only two additional character slots for the base expansion (plus three more for those who bought the Digital Deluxe/Collectors Edition). These signs point to them not being generous with space.
The space being freed up from the removal of the auction house will likely be re-purposed for the seasonal realms. Out of that, they may decide to give us an additional stash tab (or use that as a means to give us a transitional read-only storage area for our seasonal items once a season comes to an end). Given the lack of details, it’s something they probably have not made a decision on yet.
