14 DAY TRIAL // Diablo 3 is a great game that I enjoyed a lot and still do from time to time, but there are still things that puzzle me about it.
For starters, it's very hard to understand how you can make so much money, have so much experience, and make such stupid, stupid choices.
Sure, it's easy to say this in hindsight, but Diablo 3 came out in May 2012, Torchlight 2 in September 2012, and Path of Exile entered beta in January 2013. The latter two games were made by much smaller teams, with a sliver of a development budget, and they had an endgame: an endless stream of random maps.
Meanwhile, Diablo 3, coming from the company who made billions off World of Warcraft's endgame, had no such thing. Furthermore, it was introduced two years later, with a hefty price tag.
Because I hate greed and distrust corporations, it's easy for me to think that the only reasoning behind this was milking more money out of their audience. From the safety of my tin foil hat, I find it hard to gather arguments against that, but I'm not going to pursue the matter.
In any case, we now finally have the endgame that Diablo 3 should have shipped with, after having spent 10 years in development, but there are still some issues to take care of.
Imagine what the World of Warcraft raiding scene would have looked like if level 100 raids had a random chance to drop any kind of loot in the game, including level 19 rares and epics.
Pre 60/70 Legendaries are a slap in the face
This is what the Diablo 3 endgame looks like right now, especially since you can't trade items anymore. The removal of the real money auction house is a very good thing, since the core gameplay experience revolves around farming and getting better loot on your own, but now we're left in a position where getting interesting items is impossible.
I know that there are people who reached Paragon level 1000 on Hardcore, but nobody has that kind of spare time, especially when other video games exist in the world. It would be nice for Blizzard to create a system where you can grind for specific items.
It doesn't have to be cheap, but you need to be able to get specific items. The way things currently are, your best bet is to join a rifting community, find a few members of your class that already have the item you're looking for, and then farm and share the loot.
Doing rifts and bounties at the highest difficulty and aiming for 10-15 minute runs, then dumping blood shards on Kadala while praying to the random number generator gods is pretty much your only choice when it comes to getting better specific loot such as boots, helms, etc.
The thing is, many Legendaries now have specific effects that can severely alter the way you play the game, and many builds revolve around having one or two specific items that can't be replaced by anything else.
The way things are, most players will never get the items they want, and there are countless reports of playing hundreds of hours on a single character without getting the loot they sought. Most of them don't want getting specific items to be easy, as it would impact the satisfaction that comes with actually having them, they just want it to be possible.
Some Legendaries are very interesting, but I only know this from reading about them online
It doesn't matter if it takes running through the whole game again or doing a unique quest with a month-long cooldown or completing countless rifts or bounties, as long as there is a solid chance of nabbing the carrot that's dangling in front of you.
That carrot keeps things moving forward, but if your math (hours invested versus return) doesn't add up, you're going to forget all about the carrot and find something else to do.
Instead of still playing Diablo 3, which I liked a lot after Loot 2.0 and the expansion, I now play other games because Blizzard can't be bothered to give me an incentive to farm, which is essentially what the game is all about.
Maybe they just wanted me to buy the game, play for a while and then give up so I wouldn't load their servers, which pretty much brings me back to wearing my tin foil hat.
But that's fine with me, I very rarely made use of multiplayer while playing Diablo 2 or Diablo 3, so give me a single-player mode and a way to get the loot I want and I won't load your precious servers.
I'm not even going to bring up PvP, just because I'm nice like that.
