D4 is especially egregious because with the way the itemization is set up, you essentially need to pick up every single rare item that drops because every single item is possibly an upgrade and there’s no way to tell without picking it up and looking at it. And it’s way more practical to just pick up everything and tp…

Ubisoft strategy:

It’s a bizarre thing to aspire to, especially in a genre that attracts minmaxers like dog shit attracts flies lol

People make that joke all the time, but this is honestly the first time I think it might actually be true lol

He basically never spawned for me until I was in Tier IV, and now that I’m at around NM50 he spawns like every 4th dungeon on average. So it might be based in part on difficulty.

As a sorc doing the ice shards meme, it still blows my mind that other classes don’t have to apply like 5 different statuses in order to make their abilities do damage lol

Speak for yourself: I can’t wait to have ChatGPT on my Juicero

I mean if they can only drop at level 85+, it’s kinda hard to assess how rare they actually are going purely by drop rates, since I imagine the overwhelming majority of the player base isn’t at that level yet.

It’s not even the fact that leveling is slow: it’s that they’ve really made a point of going out of their way to nerf efficient XP grinds. And not even exploits: just nerfing mob density in dungeons that people were running over and over again simply because most dungeons are stingy with stuff for you to kill.

I’m curious as to what other purposes of gems will be the future because at least at Tier IV, I feel like having a stack of 50 royals for each in your stash is practically overkill because I don’t actually replace gear fast enough for it to matter lol

Maybe. Truthfully the only ARPG I’ve ever played to endgame where “hitting max level” wasn’t considered a real goal was D2, so I have no idea lol

It starts dragging alot in the low 70s, especially when you have to replace all your gear with the stupid ancestral items.

It seems like the fundamental problem is that they designed themselves into a corner with the paragon system redesign, because there is functionally no endgame once you’re done with it (aka, hit level 100).

I don’t think I can even conceptualize what the reward processing looks like in the heads of all these kids nowadays grinding out battlepasses... when I was a kid the metagame progress for online games was trying to get on the leaderboard for your favorite Counterstrike server and it’s such a comically quaint thing…

Same thing happened with a “boycott Modern Warfare 2" steam group lol

Yeah that’s the other thing: we can sit here thinking about the economics of how many people does it take to cancel out a whale, but then there’s nothing indicating we’re anything than a vocal minority anyway. Plenty of people have grown up with this as the new normal now.

Oh I’ve already uninstalled the game. I’m just saying that gamers have a bad habit of complaining about it, and then still going along with it anyway.

“MW2 can’t afford to not have dedicated servers” lol

I’ve been done with this game for several weeks as I haven’t played since the end of season 3, but I’ve been holding off on completely uninstalling the game. But this finally pushed me over the line.

Probably just the lingering aftereffects of the game not being what was promised at launch.