I got my 8th Resplendent Spark today on my 2nd Necromancer of the season and crafted a 1 GA Tyrael’s Might. In a way, I had a feeling I was going to get a GA item just because I didn’t see any all season long. The GA turned out to be damage reduction too so I was quite happy with the result. Of course, the real question is what I intend to do with the item, especially now that I have three of the Uber (soon to by Mythic) Uniques for a bleed variant Whirlwind Barbarian. But we’ll get to that in a bit.
With my main project done, I’m now thinking of either rolling a new Barbarian or repurposing my Double Swing Barbarian into a Whirlwind Dust Devil version. I would only level a new Barbarian to get one more Resplendent Spark but I feel a bit burnt out already. The only thing I would want is either a Andariel’s helmet or a Doombringer at this stage. But I might just try to grind it from Duriel since I’ve been doing too much leveling this season rather than grinding Pits or gear. Also, my Double Swing Barbarian has decent gear and I probably just need to take a look at her Paragon board and level up the relevant glyphs while finding better gear for the Whirlwind side of things.
I did try doing some Pit stuff with my Thorns Barbarian. I did Tier 20 just as a test run to see how good this build was. Felt quite easy although my resistances are low. So I might spend some time finishing up her Glyphs (two now are level 21) while finding better gear. I was trying to farm Lord Zir for a better sword or Razorplate but no such luck on the GA side of things. Instead, I might end up going back to farming Gregoire since I need more summoning mats for Duriel. I did a few Duriel kills on my Thorns/Bash Barbarian and found the fight to be trivial. Either way, I’m probably going to work on pushing her a bit more along with my main Minion Necromancer.
On the other hand, my poor Bone Spear Necromancer got screwed over when I accidentally swapped out my weapon for a shit one and accidentally sold them both off. It made me realize just how bad this UI is because of how easy it was to do this. And it’s not exactly the first time this happened to me. The fact that there’s nothing that locks gear into place while selling is troubling. I know some people simply mark gear for sale but I think that’s dangerous too. The better option would be to just lock a piece of gear or have a kind of force confirmation once you mark it for that type of status. Either way, I’m more infuriated just how bad Diablo 4’s UX can be and really believe that they need a huge dedicated internal team of product QA people that have zero interaction with their game designers. Then the feedback would go to their accountants and they can run all their KPI crap through that.
Nonetheless, the bigger thing is the upcoming Season 5 PTR. Patch notes came out on Friday and it’s a mixed bag. Truthfully, most seem pretty positive despite the nerfs to class specific things but I’m assuming that the PTR will reveal what’s really weak and too powerful. Probably, the biggest thing is all the new upcoming uniques and legendaries. I feel that this aspect more than the new end game mode they’re introducing will be the significant part for me because I anticipate a large number of new builds (i.e. my Diablo 4 toys) opening up. And while the current or old metas will probably shift around, the key here is just seeing new things arise. I expect Chain Lightning to become a pretty interesting build for instance. Also, people have commented that Rogues are getting a hefty number of buffs so we might see a renewal for a Rogue meta that’s outside of the Heartseeker and Andrariel/Flurry one that arose this current season.
I haven’t really sat down to try and figure out what I want to play for the PTR outside of the Chain Lightning build. Druids didn’t get much and Sorcerers, outside of that one unique, got the shaft with more nerfs to defense via Fire Shield (to kill the immortal Sorcerer builds). But I do know that the bulk of the upcoming build metas will center around uniques as the developers on their stream talked about their build philosophy. With that said, I have no idea how they’re going to be able to fit the overflowing number of uniques. I already stated that they should revert the season 2 uniques that came from the season 1 powers and get rid of the Vampire Power aspects for just the Vampire Powers themselves. That by itself would clean up a lot of the mess caused by the Aspect and Unique inflation and allow for more room for growth. Also, the rings that were created in Season 2 fall into the more generic mentality that the developers wanted to avoid. So if they wish to retain those unique powers, they’re better off simply getting rid of them and adding back the older powers into the game.
While I’m sure some players would argue the power creep issue, the problem is that you have too many competing interest on slots and a high ceiling from level 200 content. Without knowing what Mercenaries will entail for the upcoming expansion (which comes out in late October) and whether or not new levels, paragon boards, etc. will be introduced to allow players to push for more power, that level 200 ceiling has not been cracked at least on the Pit. So I think just bringing back the Season 1 powers and Season 2 Vampire powers would provide some of the generic power creep gap closure like CDR or attack speed problems.
And though the developers did talk about bringing up Uniques to become competitive with the changes to legendary items via tempering, I still can’t see Uniques being that much better than legendaries unless the power difference is significant. Like if a weapon can get 50% critical hit damage bonus on a legendary with a GA, then a Unique should have anywhere between 100-200% bonus just to make it worth swapping to that item. Even so I doubt there’s going to be enough stat bonuses to really push a player’s Pit completion more than 10 levels based on what the developers have mentioned.
Now, I did talk about how the other two ways that aren’t coming anytime soon but should be considered by the developers in giving more configuration to a character’s power is through more gear slots (e.g. shoulders, belt, bracers, two earring slots) and/or the equivalent of Kanai’s Cube for either Unique powers and/or Aspect types. A Kanai’s Cube type of power source would probably be easier on the developers because players would simply select the power from their Codex that they want for a certain type. Then rather than trying to retrofit the Vampire powers, as an example, a player could just select any Aspect for a given type, giving them 5 choices. I threw in the Unique idea because of classes like Sorcerers and Druids where a Unique weapon might be useful but dual wielding is preferred because of how much power they’d miss out (like Conceit). I still think that Sorcerers, Druids and Necromancers should just have two more weapons to make their powers more in line with at minimal Rogues.
Anyway, going back a few steps, I’m probably going to mess around a little longer on Season 4 before giving the PTR a try. I don’t think I’m going to try that new Hell mode or whatever it is. I’m more interested in what builds are going to be available.
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