As expected, my progression with both leveling AND finding meaningful upgrades on my sorc has slowed to a crawl since I hit level 80 last week. I’m currently just a little over past the mid-point of level 83; but I am much less focused on getting levels versus trying to level up the glyphs I am using (so far, I have only two of my glyphs at level 15). Even with the XP boost and somewhat minor rewards increase for Nightmare dungeons (running normal mode dungeons still yields way more loot and thus gold per run though), they in general are incredibly uninspiring and unfun (I end up salvaging a whole bunch of sigils once I see certain dungeons AND certain modifiers). That pretty much leaves Helltide’s as my main content (and often times I just miss them, and decide not to stick around for over an hour for the next one). So my play time in the past week has plummeted where I’ve only taken part in 3 Hellfire events over the past week.
Initially, I didn’t really care for Helltide’s; that was directly related to RNG affecting the effectiveness of my farming build. But once I got my aspects, that made clearing through mobs a lot quicker (and thus made things less tedious). So as of current, it’s about the only content I find remotely enjoyable (and where I also get decent XP and loot in terms of the 175 cinder mystery chests). In many regards, this huge drop off in the grind (that I was knowingly taking part in) works for me since as I’ve mentioned numerous times, that kind of grind is no longer appealing to me (and that is more so true with how the grind is in D4 with its current endgame).
The way the game is currently structured, I also find there is little incentive to play a different class; that makes sense to do for the first season but for myself, I don’t really enjoy seasonal restarts either (D3, I played only the first few seasons, and stopped once they gated stash tabs behind seasons). Note: the issue that I had with this gating in D3, was because the devs were initially trying to sell the notion of seasons as being based on the merits that a seasonal ladder offered which was the whole fresh start aspect (versus a lot of exclusive rewards which was initially cosmetics). A lot of players were complaining about the lack of stash tabs at the time, and the solution provided was to gate them behind completing seasonal objectives (so they ended up using far too much of a carrot on a stick to get more folks playing seasons in D3 versus sticking to their original pitch).
This is why I expect additional stash tabs to also be a seasonal unlock in D4 (versus a lot conjecture that Blizzard will attempt to monetize them directly in the cash shop). A lot of decisions center around driving players to seasonal play in order to unlock a QoL feature like stash tab (limited stash space, materials that have extremely low stack counts, etc) though IMHO, it’s just poor decision making to purposely induce QoL this way in order to dangle this carrot on a stick to promote a different game mode.
I did try to give the game a good go during this first month. And while I have mentioned D4 is in a way better place than where D3 was at this same point during its launch window, that also isn’t saying much (because it wasn’t that high of a bar to beat). I’m still hard pressed to recommend this game given the cost (I do appreciate that it was gifted to me, but the current state of the game did little to reignite my interest in the Diablo franchise, let alone the ARPG genre). I’m also not sold on the game getting significantly better just because they are pushing the live service angle; actions will speak louder than words so time will tell.
