The State of Diablo 4 in Season 3

hi everyone it's Rex last season I made a video called the state of Diablo 4 in season 2 a lot of people liked it and asked me to continue this series every single season so here we are again in season 3 I want to thank everybody that was there on my stream that helped me make a gigantic outline to go over a bunch of things that are happening within the game if you haven't been following the sentiment um at least online which is not everybody there's a lot of people that never go online but it is not it's not positive so I'm going to do my best to explain to you what's going on and well the state of the game so we're always going to start off with the positives so let's rattle some off here one thing that I found pretty fun about Diablo 4 season 3 was the quest line going through the different things the first time that I walked down the huge hallway with all the fire traps it almost killed me and I was playing in hardcore so that that got the the juices flowing and and the bosses were pretty cool and overall I enjoyed going through the quest line um another thing that they did nice with the season theme that really wasn't true for previous seasonal themes is the season theme doesn't really interfere with stash space yes you get the vaults that appear um in your consumable tab but they kind of work like nightmare dungeons so it makes sense for them to go here um I didn't feel super cluttered because they put a lot of the stuff in the currency tab so please do that in the future well the pets can't die and they can tank stuff for you sometimes I just walk right behind and they they'll soak a fireball for you so that's nice the season started on time the same cannot be said for season two so uh started with minimal problems this time the scroll of escapes that drop in hardcore are now legendary so you can see them very easily that was a huge change for hardcore players even though people are going to be upset that they nerfed ball lightning that they cut cut down the overpower da d da this and that they Nerf twisting blades I would say class balance in the game right now is in a better State maybe than it ever has been and kind of coinciding with that the number of like gamebreaking bugs there's some weird ones like bosses are going invisible and nobody knows how I died like I died to some weird shout Taco Bell lightning fart or something which one-shotted my sorcerer but despite all that the number of bugs in the game there's another bug down here where you can't click the prer but the number of bugs seems to be getting a little bit better um the new uniques and the legendaries that they introduce every season those are nice the extra stash tab the wasdi movement um the only build that they buffed a lot was charge and charge is pretty damn fun last season we saw everyone at every event was a ball lightning sorcerer well now everyone's a charge bar so when you buff stuff like this people gravitate toward it and they have fun so I'd like to see way more of this the permanent hell tide feels good um one thing that I actually had to calculate just to double check but when you get into the endgame and you start comparing the Vault rewards they're actually pretty good um the XP the huge loot explosions at the end if you open up all the chests if you can get past the traps the vaults were actually calculated pretty well where a lot of thing a lot of other things with the seasonal theme were not calculated so well so that's that's one positive the Respec mode is a win the new little town that we operate from this is much closer to a town that I would like to be in because look everything is right by the Waypoint this is exactly stuff that we need um I will give you credit for attempting something very new to Diablo 4 some people are really not liking the pets and some people are really not liking the traps and that's fine that's like a separate thing but for me if you're going to try like completely new mechanics to the game I'll give you credit for trying it um there's new timers on the map that tells you exactly when something is happening there's I guess nothing going on right now but the timers are very nice um this is kind of a positive only for this season the nightmare dungeons that you selected for this season are Godly like blind Burrows and guron canals and um older's cave but maybe that's also an indication that some of the other crappy nightmare dungeons just need to be buffed and then finally one other positive is the gifted Mount event brought a lot of people into the directory especially the titty streamers that weren't even playing Diablo 4 that were just there to collect the money but in general these uh little events like that do help the streamers so I I've got to thank you for that okay now we go on to the negatives so the first thing that is really not uh how blizzard normally conducts things is the announcements and the build up and the leadup for this season was absolutely not the same as the other Seasons I'm almost certain why it's because of the holidays right probably everybody was so overworked from getting Diablo 4 out in the previous year that pretty much a bunch of people took all of December off and then you come back into the office oh we got a season to release like right now everything felt very rushed and we got like all the information just within a few days of the Season that didn't uh that didn't do the launch any favors um I'll say this again this is a huge problem the fact that you don't have the main thing for the season at the start the gauntlet is a huge miss someone tried someone left a comment on one of my videos and they said Rax I don't think you understand how Gamers work the average gamer is not going to get to 100 in the first day to be participating in The Gauntlet and The Gauntlet should be released when everyone is level 100 might be the the dumbest the dumbest combination of things I've ever heard first of all all I have done for the last five years is make guides for the average gamer and I go to bat for you guys literally all the time for everything so the the sentiment that I don't ever think about what the average gamer goes through I don't understand what they go through is hilarious to me and the second thing is is Blizzard does does these things all the time where they like kill the hype before it even begins they have been touting that this is the main thing The Gauntlet and the leaderboards and although everybody is not racing to 100 there would have been plenty of people that were level 100 that wanted to try the gauntlet before everyone had perfect gear and all the Uber uniques it would have been way more fun to see the leaderboards in the first few weeks than four weeks later when everyone has everything so I there's no way that delaying The Gauntlet was a win at all and I I really really do not understand why they did it it's a huge huge mistake um similar to that I think blizzard correct me if I'm wrong if my history is wrong they literally invented the ladder they literally invented racing to level 100 and not everyone participates but even a lot of people that don't participate they like to watch there's no ladder there's no race there's no leaderboard so even all the racers we we were talking to each other and we're like no there's no race so I mean we could just try to get to 100 fast but at the same time who really cares I can't believe that they don't have this in the game yet um another problem for a lot of people not everyone but for most people is the fact that they release the season on a Tuesday I know that that's good for blizzards so if something goes wrong they don't have to work into the weekend but that's got to be so bad for so many people that actually want to blast your game and the season start start is the most fun time these Tuesday starts absolutely suck and I hope that they move it to like a Thursday or a Friday uh for other people's sake it doesn't matter to me when it starts every day is the same for a streamer but I really wish they would move the day all right now let's get into the seasonal things okay let's talk about the pets and the traps and let's talk about in general the general sentiment is people don't like it and let's try to talk about why all right so we have the pet here here it is the the basic problem with the pet is it's just not impactful so for example if you're playing and you're going at a pretty you know let's just say an average pace you're killing monsters and you're moving and you're moving and you're moving guess who you're never going to see your pet you want to know why it's lacking behind a room or two maybe they're killing something maybe they're doing something we'll never know but when I was leveling up no matter what method that I used I never saw my pet because I'm going forward killing killing next thing next thing next thing yes the players that go very slow your pet will probably be with you all the time but for a lot of people you never even see your pet they do pretty insignificant damage I have tried tons of different combinations here actually it might not look like it but I've actually invested a lot of time into my pet remember this is my second character I died to a a one shot bug or something we we don't even know this is my second character but um I've tried different combinations of things and the pets I just cannot get them to deal meaningful damage can they deal meaningful damage with Rank 10 of everything maybe but that doesn't matter because people are not going to put forth the effort to get everything to rank 10 people were so disengaged right away that it didn't matter um the Buffs that they give you for for example I tried the buff that gives you a barrier because I had a power where I would get more damage if I had a barrier the amount of times the the uptime that I actually had on this barrier was super low and it you again another disengaging thing I'm trying to use the seasonal mechanic in an interesting way to buff my character and it it just doesn't work another problem with the pets I saw this instantly I saw this when they had the the initial trailer I was watching it on my stream and I paused it it's the exact same problem with the malignant Hearts it's the same type of problem the malignant Hearts was not a popular season it's because you kill the monster and then the the heart slowly Rises and you click it and then it slowly goes down and then the new thing comes up and then you kill it and then you get your Loop the whole process is just too slow it's the same problem with the pet the pet just attacks too slowly he throws an attack he looks over here he checks his watch he throws an attack over there he shuffles around a little bit he thinks he attacks over there I want it to look like the Army from the night King in Game of Thrones if you based your entire season off of this pet and how powerful the pet is and how he's going to buff you I'm going to expect this pet to be like a coldblooded killer but no he's a lot of times is's very passive again he's not even really with me and it's just not working um so this is uh something that I want to show you later about calculating um different times but I'm just going to overwrite it I'm going to show you something here let me draw a comparison we're going to do season 2 in yellow and we're going to do season 3 in Orange okay so here you are you're a Diablo player ler this is you and the the thing about the season the season themes is they need to be impactful right okay so let's say this is your Baseline power with no seasonal theme now we go to season two with the vampire powers now almost immediately you could unlock level one hemo how much stronger did hemo make you in the leveling process that's what everyone's doing in the beginning you're leveling up how much stronger did heo make your character regardless of the class regardless of the spec um it made you way stronger so your power level goes up like this right away it makes a huge difference it like Penta kills the entire room for you and you just feel like a god it also even enabled some mediocre builds that really had no business leveling up it made them competitive with some of the best builds in the game then think about all the vampire powers you had to unlock the ones that you needed and then you had to level them to level three and the question is is how do you feel your progression over the seasonal theme or over the seasonal journey goes as you upgrade these powers and you get the right ones well it's like a steady increase the moment that you hit a couple of the right Powers the moment that you get hemo to level two even or level three then you're pumping even hard harder so you have this initial Boost from the season theme it's making you feel good about the vampire powers and then you have the entire scaling of it throughout the season and it's always just feeling good to be interacting with the vampire powers not to mention that doing the vampire events was very fun just to run around just slay vampires everywhere it felt like literally the entire world was taken over by vampires and we were trying to cleanse them um and now we compare this to the next season okay you get your initial pet how much does your power increase by getting the pet initially maybe that much okay and now I I spent a good amount of time today like a a pretty good amount of time way more 10 times more than the average person would I don't even have all of the stones unlocked and I only have three of them that are even ranked two out of 10 one 2 three okay and how have I felt that my power level has increased today well it used to be a slope like this but now the slope is almost flat I'm getting marginally stronger as I work toward this but barely this is the problem the initial hype of the season was lost and the scaling of the power of how you feel about investing time into here is also lost so this is the best way that I can think of to illustrate what exactly are uh the problems here now back to that other sheet which I wish I wouldn't have closed but it's gone another part of the problem to go back here is whether you it's kind of confusing how you want to describe it you I want the reward birs to be front loaded and I want the difficulty to be back loaded so levels 2 3 and four cost the same it cost you three Runes of a single stone or three stones to level it up to the next uh level and then it gets a little bit harder at five six and seven and then it gets a little bit harder at 8 n and 10 the way that this is set up it makes it so difficult to even get started to level the leveling these up it's a huge part of the reason why the slope of this line isn't like this getting to level two should not be hard getting to level three should not be hard four should not be hard five should be a little harder six is even harder than that and 10 is 9 to 10 is an arduous task right that's not how it is even going from 1 to two I can only get three of my runes there buying the entire day so you need to however you want to call it frontload the Rewards or backload um the costs and I think that would make things a lot better another massive problem I talked about this last time I don't think there's anyone out there that doesn't think that this is a problem my sorcerer died I got one-shotted by who knows what I still don't know what whatever I make a barb guess what I started with nothing I don't understand this it's already difficult enough to level up everything to to get it really powerful and feel good about it but what the the fact that I don't get to start with the same level of runes if I would make a new or uh Stone sorry I keep calling them runes if I the fact that I don't get to start with these if I make an ALT it means that I won't make an alt and some people love doing that especially in a game currently that doesn't have a vast endgame some people stay very entertained by making alts I have I have 151 100s myself the way that these seasonal themes are set up I I will never make an ALT or I will make an alt and just I will never put time into leveling up the pet because I'm not going to put forth the effort to try to get it all to level 10 again when I've already done it I really really think this needs to be Revisited for future Seasons it was a problem in previous Seasons it's a recurring thing another problem with the pet this doesn't matter so much to me but I know this matters to a lot of people there's no way to customize this pet at all I can't name my pet I can't get anything other than a scorpion I can't change the color you can think of a million other ways that you could customize your pet you can't do any of them everyone has the same score with no name and that's what it is it could have been way more fun if we had a even if we could have gotten some different pets oh you got really lucky in a nightmare dungeon you got a legendary dragon pet and the dragon pet has this other ability that the the spider doesn't have or the Scorpion that would have been so cool man a lot of missed opportunities speaking of missed opportunities this is just a a few ideas but there are so many things that you could have done with this pet to make to have made it a real seasonal theme to make it feel like you have an attachment to this pet the pet itself not not its skills the pet right here could have a level and maybe you could level him from whatever 1 to 10 1 to 50 whatever the number is and as you hit certain Milestones you could have given the pet certain powers or quality of life features for this one season that people would have loved I sat there with chat for not long two minutes and we came up with some something like this the pet could have additional space that could have held more items for you doe just did this it could have given you an increased pickup radius or anything that it ran over it would Auto pick up you Auto pick up gold on your own but maybe it gives you a bigger pickup radius or anything that it it walks over it would also pick up or it picks up at range maybe on a 60-second cool down it'll give you a potion for you automatically uh maybe you can give your pet an Elixir and it counts as an extra Elixir for you a way to get an extra Elixir maybe at a certain point you could ride your pet as a mount maybe your pet could serve as a blacksmith so you never have to go back to town you finish a nightmare dungeon you talk to your level 10 pet you just unlock the perk you can salvage your and go to the next place um maybe your pet your mailbox can hold 10 legendaries for you that are mail to you if your inventory is full maybe your pet has another Mail system and can hold 10 legendaries for you this is just something that we came up with in 5 seconds almost no time of people thinking you could have had the pet level up that gave us a bunch of features and that would have meant spending time leveling up the pet not just from the power level that it gave you that time invested into the pet would have felt better I feel like it's a big missed opportunity now we go to the vaults and The Traps here's what people kept telling me that like I I I don't want to talk about it I don't think this is a fair thing to say they keep saying Rex I don't like the traps because they they slow me down they slow down the gaml they they're like annoying me that's that's the entire Point that's what a trap is supposed to be so what I think people are saying is they just don't like traps it's different to say I don't like traps but you can't say you made a trap that slows me down but I mean that's what traps do right but one problem with the traps is they're just mostly just stationary with you no way to interact with it other than Dodge it for example if I go into a room all the traps just turn on right but usually a trap is triggered by something well yeah Rex it's triggered by you walking in the room but what I'm saying is it would have been more interesting Dynamic play if let's say I knew the layout of a certain uh Vault that we were doing and I knew that there were a bunch of deadly traps that I'm going to trigger somehow would have been so nice like throw a ranged attack to flip a a lever across the room that disables the Trap or some other way to disable it so it's not just about player dexterity dodging the traps it's also resource fulness it's also tribal knowledge it's also your intelligence and your wits that can help you overcome the traps but no it's just how can you just run through it that's the only thing that you can do and you know similar to that there's no ways to disable redirect nullify a trap at all other than just beating the event um which is not that fun here's another missed opportunity that I think that they could have done they could have given you a vault key from what I've seen these Vault keys are just literally copies of different things that you did in the campaign doing it once in the campaign was fun redoing it over and over and over as a nightmare dungeon not exactly the most fun thing one thing that I would have liked to have seen if you're going to make a trap season is make a nightmare dungeon that is just a gigantic trap it's just tons of rooms a maze with traps everywhere let's say you disable all of your skills you don't get any skills there's no monsters and maybe there's a timer and you just got to get through it and maybe you can only get hit three times and if you get to the end you get massive rewards massive get XP get loot get pet stuff whatever get a rare chance to get something Godly whatever if you're making a trap season why isn't there why isn't there a dungeon that's just a gigantic trap one of the most fun parts of the campaign for for me was that little fire thing in the beginning where you were trying to walk through it and time it I was like oh this is what the season is going to be like nope it was never present ever again it was always just a bunch of monsters with some traps everywhere and then at the end one room with a million traps where you have to sit there for 30 seconds and survive I I really and if that is in the game if I just haven't seen this key I I haven't seen it but I thought that was a missed opportunity where it would have been a complet different kind of dungeon there's no fighting there's no skills it's all about how well can you maneuver maneuver through it for really good rewards I personally thought that would have been fun to do at least a couple of times now another problem that I have and maybe not everyone's going to agree with me here but here's what they did they took the they took the dungeon that you did in the campaign and they turned it into a nightmare dungeon and so it's like four or five different levels that you just keep doing over and over and over with the same layouts and the same traps once you've done like I noticed it instantly the first sigil that I plugged I only did the campaign one time I instantly recognized that I have already done this it was just a repeat instead of that and instead of in the end having these 30- second timers where you have like 15,000 traps and one with Elite spawning and the AIC is hitting you and da da d da and just try not to get hit for the treasure chests I would have had a lot more fun if they would have taken the lineup of the 30 nightmare Dungeons and just sprinkled in some traps here and there and that's how you interact with the traps rather than repeating the campaign over and over and over and over and over and over and over because then it would have actually felt like the traps were ingratiated with the entire game and I think it would have been more fun than being locked in a room for 30 seconds Dodge all the traps like like the the concentration of traps in that room I get it they're trying to make it difficult but all it turns into is you stand in the corner and you throw all your abilities toward the middle of the room and the second like some meteor is going to hit you try to like step away from it it's not really very engaging but going through nightmare dungeons with just some traps here and there that you're just trying to dodge and if you get hit three times you lose a treasure chest at the end at least that would be fun I'm mostly playing Diablo in the same way that I normally do and I get to just try to avoid pay attention here and there to dodge these little things for a better reward to me that would have been a way better system than running the same four things over and over endlessly I don't know anyone who who liked that setup um so in conclusion the traps and the pets for a lot of these different reasons have really not gone over well I'm not making this video to farm hate hate clicks I'm not making this video just to endlessly at blizzard and just promote the hash Diablo forbad trying to help here as much as I can I'm trying to be objective I'm trying to explain my thought process of exactly what is not working here and maybe we can do better going forward there are some major looming problems with the game so I guess since this is the state of Diablo let's hit them really quickly there's a lack of an endgame just doesn't exist that's a continues to be a massive problem even if the pets were really strong what would you do if you had a really strong pet in a character I don't know itemization crafting loot filters is a major problem they're releasing their items 2.0 in season 4 we'll see how that goes they already we already have a date for that um legendary aspects don't level up in the Codex still massive problem still a massive problem it still takes up a I I had already two stash tabs completely full by the time my sorcerer was 61 we really really need that change I hope to God it's part of the itemization changes with season 4 The Uber grind now killing Uber duriel a lot of people were shocked when they came to the realization wait a minute Rex I got the one or two Uber uniques I wanted last season do I have to refarm duriel 10 million times and get it again yep maybe that can be part of the itemization change but that that durial farm is not fun anymore and almost no one is up for doing it again and then another major problem is a lack of a bunch of social features like trading and Clans and a group finder is another major issue there there are plenty of the other ones but that's some of the big ticket items anyway that's my delivery of the the state of Diablo 4 in season 3 through my eyes how do you guys feel about it do you agree with the sentiments that I shared do you think I'm just some dumb idiot I would love to hear your feedback in the comments um I'll share this video with blizzard I'll send the little outline that we made with chat thank you again chat I'll send it over to Blizzard um trying to help not trying to endlessly but um I I'll close by saying um I am I am a bit deflated I am a little bit demoralized here and I'll be honest with you I'm not super excited to play Diablo 4 right now I'm trying to find the motivation here but I don't know where it's going to come from anyway guys hope you're having a great day um I hope Dia oblo 4 continues to get better that's all I can say thank you

Channel: Raxxanterax

Views: 309,329

Keywords: Diablo, Diablo 4, Diablo IV, Barbasrian, Necromancer, Rogue, Sorcerer, Druid, Mephisto, Lilith, Uber Lilith, Helltide, Nightmare Dungeons, World Boss, Last Epoch, LE, POE, POE 2, Path of Exile, Path of Exile 2, Duriel, Maxroll, Youtube, Guide, Walkthrough, Build Guides, Tier List, ARPG, MMO, Tierlist, Gauntlet, Twitch, Raxx, Rax, Raxxanterax, Monolith, Sentinel, Mage, Primalist, Acolyte, Diablo 4 Guide, Diablo 4 Builds, Ashava, Avarice, Wandering Death, Echo of Varshan, Grigorie, Lord Zir, The Beast in Ice

Id: 1mQYwproTLI

Length: 29min 37sec (1777 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 25 2024