I found out an easy way to level an alt by using a higher difficulty’s Tree of Whisper’s Cache. Not only do you gain XP but gear at a higher level. For an alt, this is just another way to help gear up quickly. For instance, I managed to receive a few Ancestral items to help start my Barbarian off once she hit level 60. That made progression really expedient but posed a different almost existential problem for me: I’m bored. So the question is whether I continue with this Barbarian or start a Necromancer?
Let me start by saying that getting to Torment I was very easy. I did some basic content before hitting the Pit that unlocks Torment I in the hopes of securing a few more Glyphs. Everything practically melted like butter for my Barbarian, including ladder bosses. Unfortunately, I am missing one of the key Aspects (Bold Chieftains) for helping to decrease the cooldown on my Shouts, but I am able to handle Torment I content quite easily for the most part. The only thing I really want at this stage is The Third Blade so I can switch over to Mighty Throw. However, I did end up farming up gear for most of the other builds and am considering switching to either Leapquake or Whirlwind + Twister. Leapquake looks pretty fun but you require a great deal of cooldown to make that build work. I know WW/Twister got nerfed heavily but for certain content, I think it’s still reasonably viable right up until T3/4.
That said, I was debating heavily whether to swap to Leapquake or just skipping it and doing a Necromancer. I saw a Spirit Wave Necromancer and it looked pretty fun. Besides the Ring of Starless Skies, there’s not a lot of outstanding pieces that make this build seem difficult to piece together. And for leveling, I can always just begin with Minions to farm up the main unique for the build off of Duriel.
However, I’m slowing down in the game and starting to feel burnt out. While the journey has been fun, I knew after playing a Spiritborn, my enthusiasm would dip just because there’s not as much motivation to try out different builds since they got rid of the Resplendent Spark reputation grind and crafting system. Outside of the new Dark Citadel “raid,” there really isn’t much I haven’t experienced yet and my main character can handle virtually all of the content thus far (except Lilith but that’s a separate matter).
What I’m really waiting for is a game changing patch. They’ve been doing minor bug fixes here and there but there’s not much major content adjustments outside of last week’s patch. If Sorcerers and Druids were given major buffs, I might feel more inclined to roll more characters but I’m hitting my limit again. Also, since most of my friends don’t play, it’s been a major bummer doing this expansion and having virtually almost no one to converse with about it.
Also, like what I said before about progression, I wasn’t happy that the developers ended up making The Pit the primary source of end game progression. It’s just not enjoyable for me and it gets monotonous fast. While I do know that leveling ones Glyphs does help out, it’s a very tedious process and a little after level 46, I just stopped in running out of motivation. Similarly, I really hate the Paragon boards and their limitations. Reducing them to just 5 and increasing the number of Glyph levels to 100 along with using The Pit as the primary mechanism really made me unhappy. I know people have compared these systems to Diablo 3 but the main difference was that you could get pretty good gear in Diablo 3’s Greater Rift system that was on par with running other forms of content. The Pit itself just has boring drops and it takes far too many runs to max out your Glyphs. At least with D3, you would get 5 levels at a time mostly and only had to deal with 3 Legendary Gems.
I think what’s killing me about the game is that once I hit 60 and get my basic gear, there’s not a lot to look forward to outside of the gear grind and a few other things. But getting good gear in this game is painful and Tempering along with Masterworking are awful systems that are frustrating to use. And with my Spiritborn being quite good at the moment, everything else just feels bland. Normally, I would enjoy playing alts but the difference in power level is too dramatic even though it was intentional. Hence, there’s not a lot of good reasons to stick around until a major patch drops with various non-Spiritborn class buffs.
Ultimately, I might just take a break for a bit. My mood has not been on D4 as much lately nor gaming. I need to get my head back into the normal day to day game. But I have enjoyed my 2 weeks that I was invested in the game.
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