It’s not that I’m defending them, but what do you expect from a H&S (ARPG) game? Go play Titan Quest 2, Last Epoch, PoE or any other similar title. In all of these games, the core idea is item drops and increasing your character’s power. The problem with D4 is that the balance is just bland. You can drop mythical or legendary items with great affixes that increase your character’s power and let you progress to higher difficulties.
But in this game, it’s boring because there are few alternatives. Specific things drop from specific activities, so if you don’t like something, you’re still forced to do it. Plus, the core of the game is weak — even with a weak season, the game could still be satisfying if it had a strong foundation that made you want to spend hours playing. That’s missing here, because every season feels the same apart from the seasonal activity.
And that’s the issue — when the seasonal activity is bad (like now in Season 8, or during the itemization rework instead of a real seasonal activity), the game has nothing to fall back on because its foundation is very weak. In short, the game’s fundamentals are so poor that only a well-designed season can save it.
The only thing that could help is seasonal activities added into the core game. They could finally dedicate a season to enabling crafting, expanding crafting, and breaking weapon limits so we could build around any spell we want, and make spells synergize. Add the ability to apply affixes to legendary items that change builds like uniques do, using a runeword system to transmute items (like in D2).
They could do that, but they won’t. It’s not that seasons are truly dedicated to new content. We have seasonal themes — I wouldn’t even call them mechanics, since they tend to become permanent parts of the game’s base. Meanwhile, we have “expanded” battle passes and a shop, where 90% of the team’s attention goes.
I get that the game has to make money, has to be profitable. But if something is bad, it won’t be very profitable. If something lacks quality, it’ll rely on marketing. And if something has no soul, there’s no way it’ll sell well.
PS: In my opinion, you shouldn’t really complain about good items being rare drops — as a player, you should have some benchmarks to aim for. However, I do understand your frustration, because without certain items, some builds just don’t make sense. With each world tier, the chance of getting drops increases. And that’s where the problem lies: to move up to a higher tier, you need those items first.
This is a balance issue that someone responsible clearly struggles to finalize. That’s why you get the feeling that your character is weak, and everything drops poorly. In my view, the current best-in-slot gear that players aim for, which is also required to progress to higher world tiers, creates a vicious cycle.
Your character should be able to access content where better drop chances exist — with legendaries/uniques — without being gated behind mythic items, Greater Affix gear, or whatever future endgame itemization/crafting is introduced. Access to higher tiers shouldn’t depend solely on how absurdly high an item’s stats are. Those should be one of many goals to fine-tune and perfect your build, not the only way a character can handle endgame content.
For example, in LE or PoE, you can do endgame, get item drops, and enhance your build with uniques to create stronger items, push higher difficulty, and break through power ceilings — progressing as far as you can. Along the way, you have tons of options: trading, dungeons, arenas… and in the future, even more. On top of that, you have Harbingers, Pinnacle Bosses, etc. I could go on.
But the truth is, D4 was killed by a team that built it without any passion for the title.
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