There is a polarizing debate going on with regards to what looks like an expanding pool of loot (whether it be a re-worked legendary, or completely new one) being introduced into the season only loot table first (they’ll be added to non-seasonal loot table after Season 3 has ended).
Myself, I personally don’t care either way since I no longer really care about what the dev team does with this game. But I do have to say this; Seasons is a game mode. IMHO, game modes should be completely optional. Hardcore is a separate game mode and the only hardcore exclusive item is an amulet (Ancestor’s Grace) which restores 100% of your health and resource when taking fatal damage (the item itself is destroyed in the process). It’s an item that makes sense in that game mode considering the permanent death angle, but it has little desirability outside of hardcore (since you have endless lives in softcore).
IMHO, the amount of season exclusive loot should be kept to a minimum. It doesn’t matter that these items roll into the non-seasonal loot table after that season is over. My point is that game modes should be considered optional, and that any seasonal exclusive items which drop in that mode, should be small. I have no problems with cosmetics, transmogs, banners that are awarded for seasonal play. Likewise, I have no problems with the small amount of new legendary gems and newly created items that were available in the first two seasons.
I don’t think it is a good idea to start introducing re-worked versions of existing legendary items, into the season only pool first. Again, I view game modes as something that should be completely optional. Taking existing items, changing them (where they are better than what they replaced), and then time gating them into that mode, sets a bad precedent (to repeat – I don’t have a problem with them doing this with newly created legendary items and new non-class specific sets so long as they are a tiny focus of that seasonal loot).
A different way to look at this is what if they made really great changes to existing class specific sets, and made those available first only in the following two specific game modes; hardcore seasonal? I know it isn’t the best example, but all I’m highlighting is that optional game modes, should not require an abundance of loot based incentives to get players to play them. The merits of those specific game modes, should have more than enough incentives to stand on their own without using non-cosmetic loot as a carrot.
And just to make it clear again, I’ve been fairly ambivalent with the concept of seasonal ladders. What I do take issues with is the overall design and implementation of Seasons. That includes not addressing the technical issues with stash space and character slots. The latter is even more applicable because this exact same team, wanted the players characters to mean something (I know, this team has flip flopped and contradicted themselves so many times that I have zero trust in whatever they say).
I seriously didn’t think these folks would be so short sighted (which is why in prior postings before the details with seasons came out, I hypothesized they’d have a system in place to deal with it). How wrong I was in giving this dev team the benefit of the doubt. Well once players run out of slots (what will be a given after several seasons) if they haven’t already, they’ll need to start deleting characters. BRILLIANT!
I don’t really have an issue with re-leveling (though it’s kind of meaningless in D3 since everything only starts at level cap and there is no build permanence). The only reason I have multiple characters of the same class is for muling purposes. I don’t care about the leaderboards. And generally speaking regardless of game mode, I despise the implementation of Greater Rifts (which is the key leaderboard used by those competing). The only time I do them is to get all the gems and periodically level them up whenever I feel like.
This development team tends to get into this very funnel vision type of mode when they head down certain paths with the game. Campaign versus Adventure Mode is a perfect example (as well as how much lost potential exists within Adventure Mode). Look at the rest of the game outside of bounties, rifts, trials, and greater rifts. Generally, the best experience and loot occur within this narrow portion of the game. They’ve nerfed and ultimately, disregarded the rest of the game world including the campaign, all for the sake of driving players to play the new/fancy thing they created with adventure mode.
Their actions are going down this same route with Seasons by this decision to introduce re-worked legendaries into seasonal ladder first. D3 design team: lets try and get a larger percentage of the playerbase to play Seasons because we worked so hard on this. My question is this: what bozo decided this was even a good idea? Once they start down this path, it is going to be never ending.
My initial view with S1 was to play to 70 to get the transmog. Given my bad luck on non-seasonal with drops, I decided it wouldn’t be worth my time having to go through that again. But as I noted in previous posts with how my gearing went in S2, I’m now curious whether or not drop rates are actually better on the seasonal servers due to the compressed time frame (and not wanting players to have a poor playing experience due to really bad RNG). I’m going to be putting that to the test in S3.
But regardless of whether I play S3 or not, I don’t like the precedent this dev team is setting.
