If Blizz spent time on making permanent unique items… instead of wasting it on throw away seasonal gimmicks… we would have a pretty amazing game right now.
Not a perfect game, but a way more interesting game than it currently is, or ever has been.
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They’ve changed itemization so many times that in the end, they’ve basically returned to what we had in the first 2 (or maybe 3) seasons. With each new season, they don’t expand the pool of uniques and mythic items enough. It’s a game where character power revolves around itemization, yet they barely add any new items (and in Season 8, both the builds and item variety are lacking).
On top of that, there’s a complete lack of balance among legendary items. Often, a legendary aspect is so core that even the theoretically best weapon in the game makes no sense in that slot, because equipping it would mean losing tons of DPS. Many uniques still need reworks or buffs, because each season instead of gaining more viable T4 builds, we actually lose them. And it’s not like you can just equip better gear and suddenly climb higher. No — even with the best gear, the scaling on some spells and their design is so poor that they deal 1/100,000 of the damage meta builds can output.
Right now, with Charged Bolts, I can barely do T2 content. Even though I have an aspect centered around the spell and it’s at level 18, other spells with level 1 and without dedicated aspects still deal more DPS than the one I’m focused on. I’m starting to think whoever is responsible for spell balance at Blizzard must’ve had really poor grades in math.
And yet, somehow they still find time to produce tons of cosmetic content for the shop (which, to be clear, I understand — they need to make money, and I don’t have a problem with that). What’s frustrating is that they seemingly don’t have time to implement new items or systems to upgrade existing gear (crafting or anything, really). It could’ve also allowed them to expand the game with more challenging mechanics and long-term depth. At the same time, it would help the core game absorb some seasonal activities — so that even during weak seasons, the game would remain engaging.
But hey, it’s Bli$$ard.
I think they need more uniques and legendary aspects as well, but our most recent dev stream and interviews have them talking about overhauls to the skill tree (it’s about time), and they mention legendary aspects as part of that. Aspects change functionality (the interview talks about twisting blades turning into a circle for example) and then add power to skills, and they seemed to imply they wanted to take some of those functions and add them into the skill tree. That leaves them in a spot where they have to be careful that they don’t make items underwhelming or JUST power with no interesting effects. I think if they can make the skills have some more flexibility out the gate with no items, that’s a great change, but I guarantee that first season that we have those changes, be it S9, 10, 11, whatever, there’s going to be a worse feeling itemization game because some items won’t have cool ENOUGH effects anymore. Then they’ll have to spend a season readjusting those too, and then we’ll get back to slowly adding more.
I think it’s going to be one of those ‘this is dumb that it took a season to do, but… yeah the game is better for it’ moments, like when we got new helltides for a season. I’m still annoyed that they can’t seem to manage to do those rework type updates / fixes while ALSO giving us new stuff, but whatever.
helltides is only getting better. too much pink though.
It take too much time for them to do it… And it’s good move, because they have a lot boring and bad mechanic, and they can change it and call it as “new season” without any new stuff… Smart move, but we are also smart.