Now that there has been one completed season (Season 1) and with the second one currently in progress, the following are some general observations.
Unsurprisingly, the greater rift leaderboards for both seasons are tainted due to the clever use of game mechanics; some folks figured out the algorithm with how pylons spawned in greater rifts and used it to cheese their way to top of the leaderboards.
Similarly, some folks continue to uncover unintended interactions of class skills with certain items, and used those to gain an advantage. I guess you could argue that it is generally fair but when Blizzard decides to make a change to skills that weren’t intended to work that way and then leave the leaderboards as is, it’s no longer something that holds any merit.
With experience being multiplicative in greater rifts, Paragon levels are unsurprisingly trivialized and even more so meaningless as any sort of indicator. But since there are actually players in this community who like pounding their chests with bigger numbers as being meaningful of how good they are in D3, enjoy your high Paragon levels.
I will just add that the ridiculousness of this further puts the developers into a hole in the future (one which they keep digging themselves deeper into). Why? General inflation of primary stat and vitality from Paragon points. I already wrote awhile ago about how their greater rift design and the power creep associated with it would trivialize the standard difficulties in the game. Well guess what? It’s unsurprising there are folks posting in the forums asking for T7-T10.
Adding difficulties to the base game solves absolutely nothing because the continual power creep will result in players wanting higher levels of base difficulty. It’s a never ending cycle. Greater Rifts is their solution to higher levels of difficulty (albeit with a timer attached to it).
IMHO, it was absolutely asinine for the developers to create an end game mode that scaled infinitely and then creating the sort of power creep associated with legendary gems. That kind of scaling should be independent of the base game where your dungeon progress defines your power level only within that area of the game. What I’m saying is that your stats and items would scale dynamically within that game mode based on your performance. Your legendary gems would “power up” and dynamically scale only within a greater rift based on your previous highest ranking. Once outside of greater rifts, your power level returns to something more sane for the base game. This way, you do not trivialize the games core difficulty.
I made it clear before that I disliked greater rifts once they unveiled their design (the idea sounded great on paper but the implementation done very poorly). And once they introduced the notion of trials, my disdain for the entire mode flew out the window. The game already has enough on-rails design mentality with funneling players into this path (bounties -> rifts -> trials -> greater rifts) while leaving the rest of the game world to rot.
Eventually, they’ll run into the same issues of how to balance out all of this power creep and stat inflation in the future for the next expansion. I’m pretty sure they will raise the level cap to 80 and have to use even bigger numbers so that the power level of level 80 items, will trivialize the abilities from any high ranking level 70 legendary gem.
The final observation relates back to my previous post. Drops in seasons. I’m not the only one who has generally had bad luck on non-seasonal play, and experienced a complete 180 on the Seasons. I didn’t play past level 70 long enough on S1 to notice anything. There is also no way to prove whether or not the drop rate chance has been tuned to be more generous to account for the length of a season given how RNG can work either way. What I do know is that on live, it took me nearly 2 months since Reapers launched, to finally start getting better drops. That kind of RNG/bad luck, will never cut it in seasonal play since it will just lead to an overall poor playing experience.
This is why I’m going to play S3 the same way I did with S2. If it turns out the drops are indeed better in seasonal play, the question then becomes, why bother continuing playing your non-seasonal ones?
And this all leads me to season versus non-season. Generally speaking, looking at how there is little downtime between individual seasonal ladders in StarCraft 2 (generally since 2010, it’s been one week or two weeks once a season is locked, until the next season starts), there really isn’t going to be any meaningful downtime between ladder seasons in D3 either.
For some players (competitive leaderboards), this generally means they will never really play their non-seasonal characters again. For others, it’s going to be having to decide what they want to do. In the beginning, Seasons was promoted as primarily giving players a fresh start, and would also provide additional seasonal leaderboards as well as cosmetic type of rewards like transmog and banner unlocks.
The amount of actual seasonal exclusive items have been generally small in S1 and S2 (such items are added into the non-seasonal loot table after a season ends). Patch 2.2 and S3 is adding a number of re-worked legendaries as seasonal only loot. The old versions will still continue dropping in non-seasonal play. Several new set items as well as re-worked ones, will be added to the game in all game modes with the new patch.
I’m going to write about that in a separate posting.
