4 weeks after the early access launch, I finally hit level 80 on my sorceress (which is the only class I’ve played on live) and managed to get her completely geared in decent Ancestral. Also since hitting WT4 a little over a week ago, I’ve pulled back on the grinding play style where the more casual pacing/play time revealed the negative aspects of Helltide’s not continually running (so a couple of days, I didn’t take part). That event has been a core part of my actual gear progression since my Ancestral weapon, offhand, and most of my armor slots came from Helltide (and they were mostly all rares that I imprinted).
I finally replaced my last piece of Sacred gear today when I got a boot drop during a Helltide that (finally) had three of my +skills (and I managed to get mana cost reduction on the 2nd affix reroll). Most of my 800 item power Ancestral items (outside of jewelry) weren’t originally legendary (but I had 4 stash tabs full of them for aspect extracting). As far as uniques go, while most of them have been underwhelming (for this class), I finally got the frost pants (but am not using them until I can roll +Blizzard on another piece of gear).
Most of my game play since level 70 has been Helltide’s (if it is running when I am on) and Nightmare dungeons; I leveled my first glyph to 15 today as well which is a huge tell of how little I’ve been running them given how unrewarding they felt). With the small Nightmare dungeon changes made as of patch 1.0.3 (build #42677), the increased XP and gold rewards finally makes it feel worth running them more often.
I definitely would not be level 80 or even geared as I am had I played this really casually from the start (and I am pretty sure I’d be struggling through WT3 if I had played just 1-2 hours per day given how RNG can dictate the effectiveness of your build). Even now, I still need to hang on to my basic skill (Frost Bolt) since I need more mana cost reduction/resource generation (and I know how much of a gold sink rerolling properties are). I know for sure that I do not want to play another class this way, nor do I want to sink in that sort of time into seasons (especially re-grinding the last two renown tabs).
