I had to post this…. My S2 HC DH is “hilarious”.
The level of RNG based luck is off the chart in this game. I’ve already noted before about how my main non-seasonal character has had terrible luck with drops so it’s not like I’m surprised. In this case though, my luck with RNG has been well above average. This includes luck with re-rolling items (like getting an ancient Reapers Wrap, rolling 6% crit chance on the first try, getting 6% crit chance on my ancient helm in just 2 tries, etc). Just that kind of luck was not the norm playing my non-seasonal main.
I’ve been casually playing this hardcore character and have barely done any regular rifts. As of this post, I’ve done only 374 bounties and 99 rifts (that isn’t all exclusively hardcore nor max level ones since I did initially roll a softcore wizard). And some of these bounties and rifts were from leveling these two characters to 70. Total blood shards is just 9062.
My character (as of P223) looks like the following:
At level 70, most of those rifts were done at T4 and T5. Most of my ancient Marauders pieces came from drops when I played through the campaign at T1. My Witching Hour dropped today from a corpse during a run through a T6 bounty looking for the Tollifer’s Last Stand event (no dice there).
My ancient Kridershot also dropped today during a T5 rift that had a huge pack of goblins (I actually had enough damage to nuke all of them).
My main wizard has close to 1000 hours on it and is crap compared to this under 150 hour character. And some players have had much sicker luck with getting this kind of gear in under 30 hours of play in seasons.
But why did I play through the campaign on seasons? So that I could work on getting some of the Act V achievements (I’m not a total 100% achievement hunter but I was missing over 80% of the basic Act V ones). Leaderboards or greater rifts don’t interest me at all. Neither does Paragon levels or playing the game like a human automaton. I’ve posted my reasons why before.
I wasn’t even planning on putting this much time into seasonal play either. I wasn’t even planning on playing a demon hunter, let alone on hardcore. So what changed? I was so sick of playing my non-seasonal wizard and not getting anywhere (especially in terms of getting away from relying on double-Unity). I was also getting disgusted with the Firebird’s playstyle (sans a Serpent’s Sparker which has never dropped for me except on PTR). Basically, the class just feels terrible to play at this juncture so I decided to begin putting more time into playing a demon hunter.
Best place to do that was start one on seasons. And I decided to do it on hardcore since none of my non-seasonal hardcore characters are Torment capable (they were only played through on RoS initially to get them to level 70). So my main goal was to keep this character alive to at least level 70 and if I accomplished that, to be able to at least do some level of Torment difficulty.
Digressing, a large bulk of my initial level 70 playtime ended up being preoccupied with picking up all the missing conversations for the mystic, all of the ones in Act V, and ticking off the missing achievements. I didn’t except anything decent to drop while playing through the campaign. The RNG joke was on me with better than expected luck though.
Before I knew it, this character was at least T3 ready since I had 4 pieces of the Marauders set by the time I hit Malthael. I spent at least 25-30 more game play hours ticking off achievements by flipping games on the campaign (plus getting a lot of the missing hardcore ones since this character was Torment capable).
Before I knew it, this character felt more than T4 ready. Furthermore, this character just felt fun to play. I always felt the class required the most dynamic engagement during game play due to its design but for some reason, I didn’t consistently put anytime into playing the class at max level. The last time I had really played the class was back in 1.0.8 – the only time I loaded it up recently was to gear it with items I found playing my wizard, and to gamble farmed blood shards with).
Anyway, this is when I switched back over to adventure mode and began doing bounties to get some rift keys. On non-season, I never got a goblin portal. My first one came during season 1 on my barely T1 capable wizard. This season, I got 3 portals on this character. Stating the obvious here, but it is fun when you get to experience all of the games content within a reasonable amount of play time.
Basically, this character was easily farming T5 (which around 8 hours in, the above happened with the goblin packs). And this character is now T6 ready sans double-Unity (since I don’t have them and don’t have any of the legendary follower items that prevents them from dying).
This character is also far from optimal (not enough elemental damage, no SoJ, and I gave up my only source of elite damage when switching to the Kridershot).
The above illustrates my past rant about how ones gaming experience can be so different depending on your luck with RNG. I can guarantee there is some 1000+ hour demon hunter (since launch) that hasn’t seen a Kridershot or Calamity (let alone hoping to get ancient ones). I know the feeling where some items will just not drop since I have experienced this on my since launch wizard.
This led me to think about seasonal play along with the ongoing developer meta (which now includes constantly tinkering with set bonuses). I know, I wasn’t planning on posting a lot about this sort of stuff anymore. But I think this provides a perfect illustration to what I had been posting ad-nauseum about before. Will write those thoughts in another posting.
