Originally, my expectations for the expansion were quite low based on a few things that I had tried in the PTR as well as the supposedly lauded “raid” or “coop dungeon” (as Blizzard prefers to term it). The story itself wasn’t something I felt would be exciting and I had no idea what the Spiritborn class would entail. I thought that Season 5 was the peak of where the game needed to be in comparison to what I saw on the PTR. So now that the game has been released and I’ve managed to play it every day, how do I feel afterwards?
The launch was a disaster. It got delayed by 4 hours and everyone on Twitch were quite annoyed. Some non-US based streamers simply ended up going to be but I think the simultaneous launch idea was a poor marketing one that should never be attempted again. I think Blizzard does better doing regional releases because then you’re not keeping up people around the world, which is just flat out disrespectful. I imagine that some idiot inside the company didn’t want to get the story spoiled. But we’ll get to the story afterwards. Nonetheless, because of the delay, I anticipated that their download servers would get flooded and eventually their licensing and authentication servers once the game got cleared.
So you had to download a rather large patch (it said 42gb or something around that amount) and the speeds were variable via Battle.net. In my case, I was fortunate enough to have upgrade my internet a few weeks back and knew that all the speed issues were completely on Blizzard’s side (I’m in a reasonable distance from their office so the hops shouldn’t be that bad) As it was getting late, my patience wore thin.
Thankfully, once the patch was downloaded and the game was enabled for play, I really didn’t have any major issues for the rest of the night. Maybe there was some initial slowness for downloading new data and get everything initialized, but I had fairly stable game play. There have been a few post launch patches and the stability has been very iffy. Like I had two major crashes or lock ups that happened out of nowhere. So I don’t know what’s going on there but I read other people experiencing something similar. I think there’s just some bug that got reintroduced. Also, zone loading like Strongholds early on were pretty laggy. Now, I don’t seem to notice it so I’m not sure if it’s because the data has been cached on my side.
I would say that was the bulk of the technical issues I encountered. So let’s dive into how the game starts you off. The biggest question I had was how the game would re-introduce you to the old campaign and connect it to the new one. For instance, would I need to use an old character? Would I need to level a new character? How would seasons affect the new campaign?
So here’s where they actually nailed the experience. The best option for a veteran player is to create a new seasonal character. You still are required to play the new campaign to unlock all the features like Runes, Mercenaries and the new areas. But you can still do the new season 6 content. What’s great about this approach is that you can mix and match your activities. I wasn’t too keen on leveling exclusively through the new campaign. Given that you have all the new systems in place, you really should give yourself some advantage. There’s no real need to just push through the new campaign as-is, although you will want to unlock the mercenaries and runes as soon as possible because you want as many power ups as you can get.
In this manner, I simply rotated what I wanted to do, going from Helltides, to unlocking key Aspects for my build, to a few of the new Seething Realm events, etc. And you’re not really forced into pushing the most difficult content from the get go. So I could just do normal to handle the leveling process in a smooth fashion until I got enough key Aspects for the build I wanted to do in place and knew I would be able to handle a higher difficulty. In playing the PTR, I came to realize that the “hard” difficulty was actually pretty tough especially on a crappy starting Companion Druid. Without the key Aspects and leveling Mythics (which don’t seem to be a thing anymore), you would struggle to find any items. That changed a bit but the increased difficulty sub level 15-20 makes doing anything but normal annoying.
With that in mind, let’s talk about the story. Apparently, there was one except I barely paid attention to it. As with the original campaign game, I just felt the dialogs meandered, the cut scenes took too long and I just wanted to get through it all because I simply don’t care for Blizzard’s stale writing. At one point, I gave up trying to watch the cut scenes and skipped as much as I could tolerate towards the end of the campaign. Quite honestly, I have no idea what happened nor do I care at this stage. I think I might’ve been really annoyed by the delay and simply wanted to start the end game.
The game itself though has been quite good for the most part. I started with a Dance of Knives Rogue and have not gone alt crazy just yet. Part of the issue is that the reputation grind from the previous two seasons giving you a Resplendent Spark no longer provides that reward. Instead, they tied the Resplendent Spark reward just to the season journey. So the motivation for doing more alts really isn’t comparable to S4 and S5.
Second, I feel that the power grind and item hunts are slightly better than before. The goal is to eventually make it to T4 (what Blizzard calls “aspirational content”) but made the game accessible from T1. Your main gate keeping is done through the Pit’s difficulty. However, to get to T1, T2, etc. you have to optimize your gear, level your glyphs, get the right Runewords in place, etc. With T1, it shouldn’t take much to arrive, mostly get enough of a paragon board or two setup, level a glyph or two, have 750 legendaries with the right Aspects, the key tempers and maybe four levels of Masterworking done.
But once you want to cross that threshold into T2, you need to start really farming for gear. Getting ancestrals will be huge because of the +50 item level power (which is critical especially for weapons). Having resistances and armor capped. You can then test your build by seeing how effective it performs against the bulk of the content. And this cycle happens at each level. The thing is that the gaps between each difficulty level get less forgiving so you need to get very specific items, Masterworking etc. so your build is running efficiently. This is the primary game loop.
In order to get what you need, there’s a variety of activities for you to participate in. Here’s where the PTR was severely lacking but where I’m fully engaged. With the new season and expansion, you now have the season mechanic, the Undercity (which only was announced fairly recently), the revised Nightmare Dungeons (and more as a result of the ones from the new zone), more Strongholds (one which has a sweet legion event), Helltides, Infernal Hordes, ladder bosses, Tree of Whisper events, etc. I’m not going to get into the Raid as something that mostly contributes to the main game loop except for the scroll that provides a reroll to your tempers. But there’s enough things to keep you fairly occupied as well as trying to target certain items. Also, the reputation grind for the season and mercenary quests (not a lot but they help) While it’s still not as much unique content and diverse compared to say Path of Exile, it’s not as dry compared to the PTR and you’re going to want to do a little of everything.
Since I mentioned Mercenaries, I want to discuss these as they weren’t part of the PTR. Mercenaries effectively are buffs. They are quite simple with small skill trees that you can only choose one route. But the buff they provide are significant. I can’t tell if Mercenaries die but at least when you hire one, they can provide a clear complimentary power to something that a build or class might be missing. Also, you can use Mercenaries through reinforcement which is where you tie an ability to a skill. When you activate that skill, they show up and perform that power. Lastly, Mercenaries give you a currency for bartering. Bartering is useful for buying some extra mats and Mercenaries, after reaching “max” level, provide that currency ad infinitum similar to reputation grind rewards. It’s a nice little bonus for things like crafting materials of buying a group of aspects you may not have. Or if you get lucky, you might find a key legendary with a good greater affix.
I will say that compared to Followers from Diablo 3, the Mercenaries feel a little lackluster. I think the main thing is that there’s almost no real customization for them. You can’t gear them so besides the little story each one provides, they just seem like they’re there once you acquire them. The developers did say that they have enough of a base system that they can expand upon later so I hope that means you can eventually gear them. Like it would be cool if you could use some of the new Aspects as the Aspect pool is getting unwieldy and there’s too many Aspects that probably just are going to sit around collecting dust.
Next, let’s revisit Runewords. I still think that for the supposed power these things provide, the grind for them is really annoying. I know they took out some of the more useless Runewords but I think the system isn’t great. I still believe that Runewords are there to allow the developers to be able to grant new powers to players without much modification to the UI. So they’re all based on triggers similar to Mercenaries reinforcement. But being able to find the right Rune you need is a real pain in the ass. Like my build requires War Cry or Petrify. I still haven’t found them because they’ve become classified as Legendary. I think a huge problem with Runes in the way they were designed was that they wanted a callback to the ones from Diablo 2 but they completely missed the mark in making the new system more complicated and less rewarding. Obviously, they’re still useful just not to the level people had probably wanted.
Going further, let’s talk about +10 skill points and +100 Paragon levels/5 limit board. I still think that neither do much. There isn’t anything truly groundbreaking with these additions that can compete with the new Spiritborn class. I know the skill trees did receive a little bit of a revamp but none of what had been done was what I would hope for. I think that skills / passives should give a kind of flavor to a build and something else like Paragon points are the things that make that flavor scale better. There current systems in place don’t provide enough flavor nor scalability but become great only when a serious bug is introduced. Even with the stat squish, I don’t think it really accomplished anything useful just because uncontrolled multipliers exist in this game.
With the Paragon board revamp, I still think the system is horrid. It’s just brutal to look at and you’re forced to use someone else’s published build to make any sense of this thing. The glyphs themselves are boring beyond belief. The scaling piece mostly is just something like Magic Nodes. But those Magic Nodes are generally really generic so you don’t get a huge boost of power as you level glyphs up. The only big thing to obtain is the legendary portion because of the multiplier. But those are too generic with just some x5 damage boost etc. It makes Pit Pushing unnecessary except for high end players.
Also, I stand by what I said about the Pit as the key gateway for everything. I just think the Pit is boring as hell and you can get royally screwed over by having a bad layout. Since a lot of the dungeons have bad layouts, it makes the Pit want you to blow out your brains with a 12 gauge after doing enough of them. Fortunately, when I’m the mood for Pit running, I just keep chaining them as long as my buffs are up because that’s all I can take in a single session.
The new Undercity feature is like a revamped version of the Gauntlet with more objectives. But it’s really bad at the moment because the loot is bugged. I heard they will release a patch soon to fix some issues and I think the Undercity ought to be one of them. That said, I wasn’t happy when they announced yet another boring timed event. I was even unhappier that they made it seem that it was lucrative to do these runs with penalties that supposedly gave better rewards. I have yet to see how doing more than one at a time is fun.
The new Strongholds mostly are a pain in the ass to deal with. The one that’s underground in particular is unique in how you have a lantern and must use it to traverse areas. But it’s a real hassle getting into frequent combat only to drop the lantern, pick it back up, get into combat, ad nauseam. After doing it once, I had the epiphany that my alts would be forced to go through these if I wanted the relevant waypoint. In truth, unless they decide to cut down on the amount of things required to handle a few of these, I’ll probably skip them. I will say that the one Stronghold Legion event though is my favorite Legion event by far. I feel this should have been the way the new Raid needed to be handled. But I will address the Raid later.
There are new blue quests (non-campaign) for the new zone. I think I got most of them but there weren’t anything that was truly remarkable. As Mathil1 had stated, they felt like a typical World of Warcraft style quests. Nothing groundbreaking here nor did they really compel me to care about the characters nor story anymore than I had previously. So the only reason to do these are for completion.
Obol gambling is one thing that is awesome. I did manage to pick up a Mythic Unique (Andariels) on accident while gambling for gloves. Also, getting Uniques in this manner is quite good. They need to keep this because it’s great having an Obol dump and making gambling actually worth it. I think besides that super rare instance of finding a Mythic Unique, this system will help underpowered characters find a key item that might be gated behind a bad boss or fight.
Spiritborn….obviously, the one key feature for this expansion is this class. I have yet to try it and decided that I wanted to play other classes before giving this one a shot. The primary reason is that everyone decided to play it and knew it would be overpowered. I figured if I played it, I would feel spoiled (similar to how Lightning Spear Sorcerer was in the previous season) All I know is that the Evade build looks crazy and it’s something I may try before this season ends because it looks like fun.
As I mentioned, I wanted to try other classes first. So far, I only have done the Rogue Dance of Knives build. It was something that I heard good things about during the PTR and it was one class that the developers didn’t nerf from the PTR. So I went with it as the common thread in comments was “it’s like GoD DH from D3.” Actually, I would say it’s more like a GoD DH with the Soul Shard that does a poisonous explosion (except here, you’re usually doing Shadow explosions). But what a fun build. It is spin-2-win and some people accuse it of being braindead. I will say that the charge mechanic for Dance of Knives is weird and something I don’t quite understand. The biggest issue is the snapshotting. What people do is use the potion rune that spends your resources after activating an ability, that in turn causes you to boost your damage and lower your cooldown on your Ultimate skill. But you use it with Shadow Imbue, Concealment and Dance of Knives to snapshot your buffs then keep Dance of Knives up for as long as you can (it depends on your movement). With enough movement, you practically can keep Dance of Knives up indefinitely.
I messed up because I’m missing boots that have the implicit of “killing an elite grants +125% movement speed” which is the key to get to a +195% or so breakpoint that I heard makes this build ridiculous. That said even without any of this, you’re just flinging around like a mad person and it’s a ton of fun….except for when the buff drops and you have to start from scratch.
Now, I must admit that because my gear isn’t the best, I’m still working on the build. So I’m very engaged at the moment even though there’s a slight temptation to try something else. But this definitely has made the game a lot more fun than I expected.
That said, I want to talk about the Raid. While a new party finder has been added, I simply have zero desire to do this feature. It doesn’t look fun. It looks more like a troll design that’s experimental. I originally stated that this feature was dead on arrival. I have seen streamers do this and even they struggle because groups aren’t well coordinated. But I hope they drop this thing from the game because it has no place. It’s going to end up like PVP did or the Gauntlet. I mean they can keep it but if they insist on pushing it down our throats the way PVP had been then this game is going to really lose people. At least, they made it so the bulk of the rewards are cosmetic. The only useful reward I’ve seen was the one that resets your tempers.
My guess is that people are going to try this feature out and after a week, they’ll just either give up on it or get bored quickly because of the lack of rewards. I still insist the best group content is done in a non-instance like Legions (even though they probably are instanced but not to this degree). I think group content should be ad hoc where people join when they want to. The party feature itself is fine for people who enjoy that sort of thing but I just don’t think a lot of people want random people to yell at them. Raids and dungeons i WoW were the worst things I’ve ever experienced in a game that give me PTSD because of the frustrations in being forced to group up and deal with people who could be assholes.
I suppose they wanted to test the waters in trying to use what they think is their expertise in group content. But there is a difference in the mindset of a WoW player vs a D4/ARPG player. When I saw the raids themselves, I wasn’t impressed at all. Everything about them looked overengineered like someone purposefully did everything possible to think, “What mechanic can we add that forces this escape room type of play?” Because that’s essentially what these raids are: escape rooms. It really has no place in this game outside of a one time novelty. And again, if they really want to do more group content, they should focus on stuff like the new Stronghold. That was actually very well done.
Overall, I would say that the expansion is an overpriced Season at best. I’m glad they added a few new features and power ups. I’m not happy about the sudden switch to a more Diablo 3-like mode with some WoW tossed in. None of these things really make the game feel more like a traditional ARPG. I’d prefer if the game cut down on the timed event stuff. There’s just too much of that. I want to see more power ups and interesting content like the Stronghold. Also, no shitty puzzles. I encountered a few stupid puzzles in the campaign mode and one of those mini dungeons that I pretty much left to avoid. The campaign mode one I looked up because I was forced to do it. But I’m not looking to think in an ARPG. There’s a difference in conflating interesting content vs puzzle solving/thinking in an ARPG.
I am still engaged because I do enjoy the core game itself. It’s far from perfect but at least the state it’s in now keeps me reasonably engaged for a season. I would like to try other builds and classes but I get the feeling most are going to be disappointments besides the Spiritborn one because they’ve been nerfed into the ground or poorly designed from the start.
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