Yesterday was the launch of Diablo IV Season 3, and like a moth to the flame, I was drawn to create a new character and check it out. This time around it is the “Season of the Construct” with the unique seasonal mechanic involving building up a little robot friend called a Senechel and equipping it with abilities and modifiers you collect along the way. I’ve kept up the hope that Diablo IV will turn into an amazing game at some point, and while it has improved greatly since its launch, it isn’t quite there yet. I have to be honest… I did not play a ton of this last night because I was not exactly feeling the experience, so please go into this post knowing that I was a bit “meh” on the experience and it might have simply been my mindset.
I think the first challenge is that I decided to mix things up a bit and break out of my normal Barbarian gameplay pattern and try the druid. This led to a lot of respeccing and trying to find a way to play the character that felt good to me. I want to love this class but at least at low levels it never really is the thing I want it to be. I want to be a werebear and NEVER leave that form, and have big smashy melee abilities. Unfortunately, Pulverize which is essentially that gameplay methodology took some significant nerfs. As a result, I started out trying to play a Tornado Wolf and not really jiving with that… then leading to the reportedly best leveling style Lightning Druid… and feeling that even less. The problem with Druid is that it feels like I have to use caster abilities in order to power up the fun melee abilities… leading to this mangled awkward experience. What I really want I guess is Bear Druid from WoW, but I think you have to get pretty deep into the game before it can really feel like that. Tornado Wolf looks cool, but it seems like you sort of have to suffer through some crappy gameplay to get there.
Instead this morning I rerolled completely and went back to good ole Barbarian. There are a lot of changes to Upheaval and I wanted to play with them anyways. Already the gameplay feels so much better to me. I guess maybe I am just a Barb main and should stop trying to fight it. Sure I like the idea of trying other classes but this seems to be the core experience that I enjoy the most in Diablo IV. At some point I want to revisit Necromancer since I love pet classes, but I figure I will wait until I get deeper into the season before doing that. The biggest frustration I have with alting in Diablo IV is the fact that the seasonal mechanics are tied to each character so I had to start over from scratch with the Senechel. This felt awful with Vampire Abilities in Season 2, and it still feels awful with your pet mechanic. They should be account-based to make alting feel more enjoyable and that is a hill I am willing to die on.
Speaking of the Senechel, it is an interesting idea that feels a bit poorly implemented. Right now it is an entirely passive experience of having this pet follow you around and occasionally do things… but also does not feel like it directly improves your gameplay much. How the pet works is that you can equip two Governing Stones that give your pet some core ability. For example, right now I have Lightning Bolt equipped which fires a shock attack, and Protect which seems to give me a shield at random intervals. Were these something that I could control as the player it would feel a bit more impactful. If I could hit the shield button whenever I reach low life or something like that, it could in theory actually save me a death. As it is now… it is a poorly coded companion that sort of does whatever the heck it wants whenever it wants. Tuning Stones you collect along the way allow you to tweak how the abilities work, but again they don’t really feel like they are changing much. I gave the lightning bolt a taunt, but it doesn’t seem like it actually does much of anything to take monsters away from attacking me.
The new open-world mechanic for this season is something called an Arcane Tremor. Essentially these are the new “Blood Tide” but a sort of worse version of them. There is an area in each zone of the game that I have marked with circles on the above map image where seasonal-related mini-events can spawn. You go here to collect the materials that you need to level up your Senechel and collect new abilities for it. Why these are worse than the Blood Tide from Season 2, is that they don’t have the clear sense of purpose that those had. The mob density is so much lower and instead of having a fixed area of the map that draws the attention of ALL players for 30 minutes… you have five static spawns that don’t really have any quest support behind them. With the blood tide I would pop in, do three objectives… probably fight a series of mini-bosses, and then feel like I was okay to move on with my life until the next one spawned. This instead has a very “mill around and wait for shit to happen” vibe that I do not like anywhere near as much. I get that they caught shit for having 3 different Helltide-like mechanics in a row just with different colors… Helltide, Season 2 Seasonal Mechanic, and then the Christmas Event Mechanic… but they were all far better than this approach.
The other new seasonal feature is the Vault, which is essentially a Nightmare Dungeon with traps. There is a mechanic called Zoltun’s Warding which is a number that shows in your hud, and each time you get hit by a trap it takes one away from your current Warding level. If you manage to finish the vault with even 1 left on your warding, you get some extra rewards. The problem that I see however is that Vaults are exactly Nightmare Dungeons… in fact, there is a “Nightmare” version of the Vault that allows you to level up your Glyphs. I do not really like Nightmare Dungeons in the first place, and think the entire Dungeon system needs to be reworked from the ground up. I am not excited to do all of the same bullshit “find the MacGuffin and return it to the pillar” mechanics while avoiding traps. I feel like there would have to be very good rewards in order to get me to do this thing. It reminds me a bit of the Labyrinth in Path of Exile, which is quite possibly my least favorite system in that game.
I feel like I am being a bit harsh honestly… but at this very moment, Season 3 has been a bit of a letdown. Season 2 was a hell of a lot of fun and felt like a clear step forward for the game. Season 3 however… feels like a step backward and maybe all of the seasonal stuff greatly improves as you invest more time and effort into it but for the moment it is “less fun”. The “Bloodtide” gave me this clear call to action and a super fun mechanic that I should spend all of my time focused on. Vaults and Arcane Tremors just feel less enjoyable and more akin to the plague tunnels from Season 1… which were aggressively mid.
Quite possibly the best universally good feature of this season is the introduction of a new hub area called The Gatehall. This is going to be the only place most players hang out because it has everything that you could need in a tightly contained space. I am hoping this becomes a permanent feature of the game and something that they build upon rather than something that we only get for this one season. The Tree of Whispers was close, but it was missing several vendors… and this basically fixes that problem. Honestly, the main quest chain has been enjoyable as well but I don’t really play this sort of game for the story, or at least the story stops mattering once I have finished it the first time. ARPGs are for mechanical enjoyment, and as cool as the story has been it is going to be a bit of a pain in the ass to have to do this on every character. Again these features really need to exist at an account level.
So far at this moment after an evening of screwing around with it… I would say that Season 3 is a solid 4 or 5 out of 10 experience. It doesn’t really add anything to the game that is exceptionally enjoyable save for the new hub. The pet is a completely passive experience, and mostly just feels like you have a random NPC following you around on your questing. Vaults are just worse than Nightmare Dungeons and I already did not like Nightmare Dungeons. Helltides and World Bosses still take too long to spawn and both feel like mandatory content, and there is nothing really that is fresh and new and exciting to act as a focal point for your moment-to-moment gameplay. I am likely going to grind out all of the steps of the Battle pass and then call it good for the season. The Gauntlet and Ladder that are coming are not really content for me given that I am not exactly a competitive player.
I think the biggest challenge that Diablo IV has at the moment is the fact that Path of Exile just has more content and is going through what is quite literally the wildest league that it has ever had. Then near the end of next month, you have the launch of Last Epoch officially, and a ton of new systems going into that game. I think folks will probably play Season 3 for a few weeks and then fade back into either Path of Exile or prep for Last Epoch. Diablo IV needs to make some changes that feel like they are moving the needle forward and adding more permanent evergreen content to the game. I still say that the Helltide needs to be reworked to essentially be the Bloodtide and always be up. Dungeons still need to be nuked from orbit and rethought because the objects are still awful in spite of numerous rounds of changes. What the game really needs is something akin to a Greater Rift that can be run from a hub environment. There is too much required dicking around and not enough focused fruitful grinding. Then again… maybe Diablo IV will never be the game I hope it can be.