Keeping this one short. Finally hit level 70 (that was like only the 4th adventure mode play session I’ve done with the class since I only made the decision well into the closed beta to actually give it a try) thanks to the 100% bonus experience/rewards which they have kept in place. The double blood shard drops also made it easy for me to have enough to get all 4 armor sets plus the weapon/shield before hitting 70.
As mentioned before, I’m doing this entirely blind and just used each set (swapping in the skill for it) as is. There’s a lot of non-optimization since I don’t have a lot of support items (nothing for the cube, only a few legendary gems, etc) or crafting materials. I don’t even have the recipes for crafting gems beyond flawless imperial. A lot of this is jarring my memory on things that I have forgotten (having not fully played since November 2015) like having to run bounties for cube materials as well as recipes. Much of that reminded me why I stopped playing (not going to get into that again though)…
To cut to the chase, the set which I personally found engaging to play was Grace of Inarius (Bone Armor). As of this post, I have no idea which set is actually the strongest in terms of pushing Greater Rifts (I have not changed my mind about my dislike of the Greater Rift system either) since I haven’t looked up any builds, watched any videos, or looked at the leaderboards. I just want to play something that isn’t full of tedium.
My opinion on the class feeling fun to play (at the non-high level that I am playing it at) hasn’t changed. It is way more fun at 70 though (my opinion on it is far more favorable compared to the crusader which ended up being my least played class). The new graphics for bone armor (which is now in the style of the way that it was in D2) is much better. I obviously have no informed opinion of the higher level Greater Rift play for the class though and have no intention at this late point in time in the beta of grinding bounties so that I have the materials for cubing some legendary powers from items via the PTR vendor.
Again, none of this has been enough to compel me to log in on my main account and play. The necromancer would probably give me around 40 hours of fun play before it devolves into continually pushing Greater Rifts for eventually marginal increases to stats (something that has never been my idea of fun when it has been the only end game thing to do). I did give the new Challenge Rift mode a try but have no gameplay opinion at this time until I play it several more times (there are some opinions I have on the design which I really do not want to get too deep into since it surrounds some of the contradictory design decisions that have been core to Team 3 since the beginning). So I will end this entry here.
