Since I found myself in a rather huge lull in gaming (having completed the “Through the Veil” chapter of the Secrets of the Obscure expansion for Guild Wars 2 and not wanting to level up alts/chase achievements, or waiting for the ArcheAge service merge to happen next week), I decided to try out season 2 (Season of Blood) of Diablo IV. I previously wasn’t going to bother playing until more issues were addressed, but I’m also no stranger to changing my mind on occasion (this is one of those times). From Blizzard’s perspective, this sort of re-engagement would be viewed as a win (since they’ve long been obsessed with the MAU metric).
Like season 1, I decided to play Necromancer (even though I’ve been a Sorcerer main and could not avoid hearing about how good ball lightning was, I still felt burnt out from how so-so the class originally was post-launch). Instead of playing a bone build (bone spear focused in season 1), I went blood this time (blood surge). As many reviews made note of, the Blood Harvest event is how Helltides should be. Blood Harvest runs continuously (changing zones) and you don’t lose your Blood Lure currency. You can also often times, kill two birds with one stone since Tree of Whispers objectives are usually active in that zone when the Blood Harvest is running. With Helltides, if you login closer to when it is ending, there is usually no sense running it since you may not have enough time to get enough cinders (and you lose whatever cinders you have once it ends). Then you have to wait until the next Helltide (this downtime is not conducive for players who have limited time to play).
Tree of Whisper caches also had a huge bump up in the amount of gold awarded. In WT4, I usually got around 8 million gold during a turn-in (higher if there was a legendary cache and you redeemed for that one). Sure, you can still burn through this increased gold with re-rolling (even at the lower revised costs). The take away is that the changes to Tree of Whispers rewards, feels a lot more rewarding (the operative word being reward) where it is nice to complete them while doing the Blood Harvest zone.
Another thing with the Blood Harvest event is the high mob density (Helltides still have areas that have abysmally low density). Slaying hordes of mobs is what is expected in this genre. And then there is the loot explosion when you summon the main Blood Harvest ritual (the one where the three altars need to be filled with Blood Lure). Basically, Blood Harvests are done right (it actually feels fun/rewarding) while Helltides have been mostly lackluster.
As for the seasonal mechanic (Vampiric Powers), that is also much better executed compared to the Malignant Hearts in the first season. By just playing (Blood Harvests), you eventually unlock all the powers, and level them up (it’s random which three powers you are shown to level, but that narrows as you level them up to the max; level 3). IMHO, how you level them, is how paragon glyphs should also be leveled (just being able to run open world content like this versus the existing nightmare dungeon setup). Even with the changes made to nightmare dungeons, I’m still not a fan of running them.
Leveling up was non-eventful (mainly running Blood Harvest events); I ran the first capstone dungeon at around level 48 (with some vampiric powers, it was a simple tank and spank process). For the second capstone, I ran it at level 68. Yes, most folks tend to run it closer to level 60, but since you don’t even get Ancestral gear until 70, I found there was no need to rush (or be 10+ levels under the mobs in WT4). Yes, the Elias fight was trivial at this point with the vampiric powers (I quit season 1 before I hit world tier 4 so I never did do the fight on my necromancer to compare the seasonal powers). The only time I grouped up was when I got a random party invite during a Blood Harvest (and after entering WT3 and 4, whenever I got a party invite during a Helltide or Legion Gathering event). Yes, the XP gain over solo is that much better.
I saved most of my keys from Blood Harvests pre-WT3, so that I could open up those chests in WT3 and then WT4 for my starter Sacred/Ancestral gear in those respective tiers once I was in them. I still stand by my previous opinion that they shouldn’t even have this capstone dungeon step in progressing the base difficulties because the design is a boring/basic gear check. While Diablo III (post patch 2.0 where the original Normal-Inferno system was revamped) went overboard with the amount of difficulty levels you could set your game to especially at end game Torment difficulty (a necessity due to the power creep from infinite Paragon and legendary gems), the nice part of about that is you had that option of granularity when it came to the level scaling aspect pre-level 60, and then post-level 60 when you could also try playing at Torment difficulties.
For this season, I played casual potato style, sometimes for only 30 minutes a day. One of the things they noted in their pre-BlizzCon chat, was that leveling to 100 takes 40% less (time). Play testing at a far less casual pace from launch through the first month, took me to level 83-85 on my eternal realm sorceress (I then played more casually, and hit 89 over the course of the next two weeks before I stopped playing the character). Season 1, it took me around 5 days to hit level 54 playing at a semi-casual pace (basically more than the casual potato pace this season that took me to level 80 in much less time). And besides those occasional random party invites, most of this was solo (continuous party play would’ve probably gotten me to 100). Nonetheless, I stopped playing after hitting level 86 (getting just one paragon glyph to 15) as this end game loop was still this boring grind for the materials in order to do ubers including Duriel. I mean I understand as someone who used to be heavily into ARPG’s, that grinding for better gear was part of the goal. There’s just a point in Diablo IV though, where there is no dopamine fix in that grind (again, the biggest dopamine hit I’ve gotten in this game was the loot explosion doing those Blood Harvest summoning rituals; but that doesn’t yield the highest item power [925] gear).
As for inventory, the stash search addition was welcome and making gem drops as craftable material, also freed up a lot of space. However, that extra space was consumed by new consumables introduced with this season (pacts that take up space in equipment tab and summoning materials that take up space in the consumables tab); basically two steps forward, and a step backwards.
I will acknowledge they are making progress with improving the game (in terms of the missing QoL and the seasonal mechanic). The game loses its steam for me though once you’ve at least filled out your gear in WT4 for the non-aspirational content. The “chase” items (the uber uniques) aren’t worth the chase to me; I know a lot of that feeling is driven by the sheer meh-itemization. I know (after latently watching the BlizzCon videos), that itemization is something they are looking at addressing. But I think it is going to be like loot 2.0 in Reapers of Soul; a GIGO bandaid fix that works around the existing design.
I guess they have time to at least make it more interesting within that existing framework though since we know the first expansion “Vessel of Hatred” is aways off (more details to come during the summer of 2024 with a late-2024 release), which means the next 10 months should see significant updates to the existing game systems and missing QoL features not being gated behind that expansion.
Finally, speaking of MAU (which I noted up top), releasing on Steam (and requiring a new license for it) AND two free trials (up to level 20) now within a few weeks of each other (as of this writing), are “juice the numbers” tactics. Considering this was already Blizzard’s fastest selling game, most of the core demographic already bought into the Battle.net launcher version. The Steam version is just additional icing for the financial reports. I believe it would be healthier for them to grow the game more organically, but that clearly was never the case from the start given the marketing (especially the KFC promotionals in the west).
