I decided to try a little more of the PTR with the so-called Runeword drops being enabled as my biggest interest (along with the cheat vendor which honestly was the best thing in the entire PTR experience for me). Right now, I don’t have a good impression of Diablo 4 based on what I have tried. I felt bored and didn’t really have the urge to grind the content that was present. It felt vapid and the Runewords thus far added little to my enjoyment.
First, I think it’s good to start off with Runewords. My understanding of the original Runeword system was to create your own item effectively, a unique super powered item that let you cross class lines in certain abilities. I think the prime example the people have made was giving non-Sorcerer based classes the ability to Teleport. And while that was cool, it wasn’t the exclusive power to a particular Runeword. Combinations of Runewords based on the number of sockets on an item could provide other bonuses which created specific builds or allowed early game gear that was good for leveling.
The Runeword system introduced in Patch 2.0 is effectively just giving you two additional powers or resource management that might help gimped out builds or on rare occasion make something a little more interesting. But there’s not a lot of what I would consider game changing builds based on the bulk of these runes. More than that the Offering system is just another hassle resource system that you have to deal with in order to trigger the power. Obviously, there’s a variety of methods to trigger the power but the main point is to not have the designers worry about adding two additional action bar skill slots (which seems silly but whatever)
While I have heard there are a few really good Runewords buried somewhere within that lot, some of the Runewords I had hoped would mean something ended up being super lame. For instance, I gave a Companion druid a try with the Runeword that allowed me to activate a spirit wolf summons based on my companion killing something or being killed. Naturally, for a Companion Druid build you would naturally be inclined to believe this could be a best-in-slot type of Runeword as your damage primarily scales based on the number of Companions you have. However, the AI for Wolf companions in particular is so bad and the AoE for this type of normal build is wretched that the Runeword is completely worthless.
Of course, it could be the way the activation of the Runeword occurs but having a secondary resource on top of the trigger itself feels awful. With the summoned wolves, outside of novelty or perhaps being something one might find early on as a boost, there’s no way I can see it being useful down the road. Same with the Meteorite rune. I gave that one a try on a Meteor sorcerer and it was embarrassing. At least with the Meteor sorcerer build, I was hoping one of the aspects could help boost the number of Meteors that fell. Instead, it was light a tiny penis squirt which is about as much as I can imagine the developers on D4 can manage.
There are more useful Runes that are at the higher level such as the one that helps your Ultimate Cooldown or the Barbarian War Cry one. I managed to partly salvage the Companion druid when I used a suggestion from someone else and rearranged my Companion druid to employ Cataclysm and try to keep it up at a higher rate. I did use Lightning Storm to help keep the reduce the cooldown a bit as well as the new companion passive to convert primarily make Poison Creeper just a passive since we don’t get any additional creepers by spending more points into the skill (and I acquire the base points through a Shako), it still just feels too weird since all the abilities are more jumbled together and there’s no real coherency between them. It works and you do get some flexibility but it’s just off to me. Like in theory the wolf rune should just have a way to proc constantly and give you an army of wolves that spread out to make up for build’s lack of a normal AoE. Why am I using Nature skills to do the damage? It feels as logical as prior to season 4 where the Shepherds Aspect forced you to take all companions because it was one of the best multipliers around. Have we just returned to that?
What I think is going to end up happening is there’s going to emerge only a few actually useful Runewords. The Barbarian War Cry seems like a given. Teleport might end up being good for a class like Necromancer. The cooldown reduction one to me is a god send for my Sorcerer. Also, Petrify seems like a really good one. The rest feel mediocre without some way to boost them. Like I saw people doing a Dust Devil Earthquake type of build but the problem with that is the competing Tempers between Dust Devil and Earthquake. Supposedly, the class should be able to scale the powers if they’re inherent but I didn’t see that with the Sorcerer at least and Meteorite. Like in that situation, I was hoping to have Meteors constantly raining down but there was just too much downtime between being able to cast the actual Meteor ability because of how long that stupid cooldown is. So in that case, I probably need to go back to the drawing board and just ditch the Meteor rune for something that doesn’t suck.
I was really hoping that these Runewords would provide a massive change to the base game. While they are nice power ups and will give another item hunt, they just feel overwhelming and something else you have to worry about. The only thing that impressed me so far was a John Cena Necromancer build auto curse/auto bomber / stealth thing. It looked good until the bugs hit that prevented the auto curse from applying and some of the boss scripted interactions. But that was one of the few things that impressed me whereas everything else felt mediocre.
Maybe the problem is that I’m just not a good theorycrafter. I don’t really try to min/max what I’m doing. However, I do try to take a look at the tools that are available to try and make sense of what’s there. Instead, what I’ve come to expect (and this isn’t just me talking) is that the only builds that matter are those with some game breaking bug. If it’s not game breaking, then it’s enough of a thing where the game doesn’t do a good job keeping the damage in check. And most times I don’t have a problem with that. I do have a problem when the issue causes everything else to suck. Or perhaps it’s just the only way to make the game not feel terrible.
I know there are people who enjoy these high walls to climb. I get it but I feel those walls tend to be kinda arbitrary. Either they’re too high or nonexistent. If they’re too high then you feel like you’re just wasting your time and only 1% of the populace might be able to jerk off to such a wall. For someone like me, I don’t want my time wasted. There’s positive time wasting where you feel like you’re progressing in a meaningful manner and just sheer stupidity. Most times, this game makes me feel like the latter.
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