is this a paid advert? It misses the actual mark by miles.  so completely misleading compared to the actual exp and end game grind nerfs.

Did you read the whole patch notes? Renown is slightly better, and some aspects of it are account wide. They planned the exact opposite but we bitched enough for them to change it. So that’s on the community, not them.

Besides that, every other type of progression, leveling and farming have been significantly…

The patch, overall, made the game a lot more grindy. Why is this article focussing on a minor change to the renown system?

Does anyone on staff play Diablo 4? Two days ago you had an article that said you could only put on ancestral gear at level 100, but they were lowering it to 80 (you can get it around level 60, even pre-patch). And now this? They made they grind MUCH more tedious. Like, embarrassingly so. People are boycotting Season…

In my years reading articles here I don’t think I have ever seen one that was more out of touch about a patch.  Thought the headline was a joke at first.  Yikes.

i understand that an article on this one aspect (pun) might be informative, but focusing on reknown when xp, characters, items and affixes all got nerfed, which will absolutely make the game go slower, is probably more relevant.

Is ActiBlizz writing these D4 articles for you?

Uh, this feels like a weird article. Renown might be much better, but they’ve also nerfed Vulnerable and Crit damage, reduced cooldown and damage reduction, and even reduced the amount of experience you get from killing monsters at higher levels than you, as well as the experience boost from partying up with people.…

This reduces the grind ever so slightly between finishing the campaign and starting the endgame. The endgame grind of nightmare dungeons is significantly increased with this patch.

This is the exact opposite take from what I’ve read every single player complaining about. It seems this patch is actually designed to DRASTICALLY slow down the game. If you slow down the game, then you are increasing the grind. 

Yeah, go look on reddit or the official forums and see all the people talking about how the patch ‘reduces grind’.....

The one thing that stands out as different with Diablo 4 is that in Diablo 3, at the end of the season your special seasonal character got all the experience gained rolled into your “main”. So if you had a paragon 100 character then made a seasonal character up to paragon 100, all that EXP got pooled together and now…

It’s worth noting that in Diablo 3, leveling was not the main content for seasons, but rather what you did when you hit the cap and could start farming for end game gear. It revolved heavily around sets that helped define your build and that they usually made fairly easy to obtain (at least your first set, min-maxing…

It’s been a thing in other ARPGs and the previous Diablo games, but there’s a big asterisk attached to those. Leveling has never been this slow before, ever. It’s taken me weeks at this point just to hit level 83 on one character, something I could previously do in a single weekend playing other games. Making players…

It’s exactly D3's seasonal rebirth that got me to start participating in seasons — it allowed me to keep the ‘playtime accomplishments’ while still starting the character over from level 1. Deleting an existing character to make a new one means that existing character loses everything you’ve done with them, whether…

You’re level 45. The problems really don’t kick in until level 70 or so.

Also you yourself are about to hit a hell of a wall. You should really get the campaign done since World Tier 2 caps out at level 50 and you need to complete the campaign to move to World Tier 3. 

I don’t think they are obfuscating it - the intent this time seems to be to emulate the kinds of ARPGs where you can essentially complete a character before hitting the level cap - PoE does this quite a bit, as did D2 back in the day, so it feels like more returning to that kind of design.

Yeah, exactly. I think they actively don’t want people rushing to 100. They’d rather they just play more slowly and return periodically for the seasons and stream of new content. Overall, I kind of like this because when I come back for season 1 I’ll still have progress to make, but it also has the downside of drawing…

Blizzard has been weirdly determined to stomping down almost ANY fun the player base comes up with. Efficient farming dungeons, efficient builds. Seriously a good build will be discovered one night, and then by the next will have been hit with a precision guided nerf missile.

It’s like they’re absolutely set on making…

This is one of those rare instances where I go from rolling my eyes at week 1 reddit complaints to agreeing with them. Its friggin’ wild how different the leveling experience is from 50 on. I have a limited time to play each night, and while breaking levels into 4 “paragon point” chunks help, its still taken me…