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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • A bit to explain what’s the point of seasons in arpgs: basically a season gets a few new changes/mechanics that are supposed to change the experience. Everyone starts fresh, and the seasons theme is what makes it different. It also affects the balance of the game, because it means all the new mechanics affect you from early game - instead of balancing mechanics around uber late game grinders.
    With living games, you either do vertical progression, or horizontal progression, or you do seasons and wipe the board clean.

    As a casual-ish player I like seasons because everyone is expected to run around sub-optimal setups and the game is balanced around that. Getting stronger is kinda the point. Then once I reach a certain point where my setup is “good enough” I can call it for the season. I’ve “completed” the season, and people who want to push further can keep going and keep perfecting their builds until the season is over.

    I’m d3 I’ve played every 2/3 seasons, each time a DH build, and it was a fresh experience each time.



  • I’ve played around with rogue and sorc so far. The two do feel different to one another, but within them - feels like you have “defensive melee sorc” and “squishy sorc” and both play almost identically. Rogue is either melee zip zap or mid range zip zap. Both play heavily around maintaining cc.

    It feels like there’s a whole skill slot missing. Or some skills/passives need a bigger buff to allow for more utility options. Basic skills being kinda meaningless, you can either have one to press to feel like you are doing something or you run around for 2 seconds not pressing anything if you take an actual skill instead.
    Like sure, you can take combo points and auto attack three times… Which feels bad because the skill itself does basically nothing.


  • Anecdotally, every interaction I or many friends had with IBM left a “is this the 90s” taste.
    It feels super disorganized but it’s still a big corp, “simple” dev position hard require a degree (like, their system just wouldn’t let a friend submit their application because they didn’t press the checkmark lol) - usually it’s not a hard requirement in our local market. I’m still waiting 5 years later for the VP of the BU I was interviewing at to return from his vacation to “approve my hire” LOL (for all concerned I found work at a different company… But still amusing to think about that guy spending 5 years in vacation…).

    Just examples, but feels like there’s some internal process/management failures higher up the food chain. Their devs create pretty innovative things, then nothing is actually done with that lol.



  • A thing to consider with d4 is the maturity of the endgame. A lot of live service games take a while to iron out the endgame experience. D3 only stabilized around RoS a few years in.
    Currently d4 has a good campaign and a decent mid game. Late/end game right now is a drag. It doesn’t mean it’s a bad game, just that blizzblizz need to analyze their telemetry and work on the game systems to give a better feeling for the 70-100 grind.

    Edit: forgot to say that I do think currently the game is worth it, I had a blast playing it before I hit the endgame drag. But obviously everyone’s preferences and priorities are different. At it’s current state I think it’s a 70 hour game, not a 1000 hour game. We’ll see how blizzard does with each season!


  • Your armour doesn’t matter while leveling.
    Your power spikes in d3 are in order:

    • 2/4/6 set bonus (maaasive spike, a 6 set with completely random stats still pushes you into t10)
    • farming for appropriate leggies (will push you up to t13, or even t16 depending on the build and leggy)
    • getting non-random attribute combos on your gear and getting level 25 on your gems. (This will get you to at least gr80 if not higher).
    • finally: infinite grind of getting better rolls and higher attunements. (Here is where you lose your sanity)