Thought on Heralds

Found

Latent Crack of the Heavens very early on, got very lucky there.

Nothing of note since. I will say that solo fighting t5 heralds in an 8 player online game is the most excitement I have playing the game, so that's something.

oOKIWIOo wrote: 8 hours ago

[..] In my experience, and judging by everything I’ve read so far, I’d have to take a week off from my job, lock myself away in the basement and neglect my family [..]

To be fair, if you also pull your boys out of school then half your family is locked in there with you so..only neglecting a fraction of them!

sbn wrote: 13 hours ago

Unhealthy is really a good way to describe this new content. My experience was to use shard on Act1, then Act 2, then I was so far in, why not Act 4, then Act 5. When I was done with it I had spent hours in the game, did find about 4-5 T5 Heralds.

And when I was done, it burned me out of the game. I could not continue. Best I could describe the experience was grinding & depressing. A mechanic designed to force players into a continuous game for hours. Don't leave, or you need start all over.

Whoever was behind the design of this, should never be allowed to work on game design ever again. This just reeked of D4 marketing mechanics B.S.

Yep, this reflects my experience to 100%.

Never before I felt exhausted and discouraged after playing Diablo 2. Since many players are complaining, maybe there is some hope for Blizzard patching this mechanic, but I wouldn't bet on it. They did this on purpose, they knew what they were doing. No one can tell me that they can't do math and this was just an "Oopsie!".

This whole new itemization is downright punishing. We are back to having a mere handful of builds capable of farming hell in ladder. People are band-aiding by playing two ladders at once now just to get hands on a sunder charm. What an absurd, colossal mess... the enforced timesink is real.

I will definetly have a long break when this ladder is over. Player numbers will probably drop by a noticeable amount then. Serves 'em well if you ask me.

Icing on the cake is the Silence we get from all those involved.

We discussed in another thread the topic of whether to blame streamers or Blizzard. HikariNoRevan wrote

the conspiracy here is not that this caters to streamers, but the new RotW system caters to shareholders and board members, as it inflates players’ engagement time, without actually increasing our fun or entertainment, quite the opposite.

I think it could be a combination of the two. This content was simply never tested, never put on a PTR. Who did get to "test" were the streamers, who it seems said nothing about bad design. If anything we have to assume they gave a thumbs up. And it probably was someone in marketing who asked for a system that would require players to spend more time in game to increase metrics. Someone is proud of themselves at Blizzard with a Powerpoint showing the increase in per players hours spent in game.

Whether we can blame solely the streamers is debatable. One thing is for certain, I am unaware of anyone critiquing this new content. If anyone is aware, please post link. I know a few of these Youtubers certainly had multiple videos critiquing D4. What this represents to me is the disconnect between the average players vs the streamers. They simply do not represent us, but it is all the more worse that these are the ones Blizzard communicates with. We do not have a forum, or a Reddit ask me anything or whatever or similar Q&A with Blizzard. This is the same behavior that they do with D4 (and maybe why D4 just turning into a bigger mess).

When you cater a game to 1% who in no way represent the player base, it is just FFS in my opinion.

It only makes sense to artificially increase the engagement time in a game that uses micro transactions.

"Never attribute to Malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

"Stupidity" is maybe a bit harsh here. I think this was just developed on a tight budget.

I have still only found 1 sunder charm (from a T4

Herald lmao) and have kind of given up on actively trying to get them unless I'm really in the mood. I think we all agree this needs a rework.