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A lot of us are "in the grind" now. We're focused on churning out as many Masterwork / Legendary rolls as possible to hunt those sweet inscription build rolls. We're playing the game in grind-mode and seeing it through the eyes of what it's like to play it repetitiously.
In all honesty, the grind in this game holds up okay. For now, at least. Freeplay Event grinding is really chill and laid back, Stronghold chest grinding is fine, Contract grinding probably my least favorite form of it but still viable. I'm not hating my time with it and I know it will get better as we go along.
Still, I'm shaking my head at a lot of the design choices for the gear grind itself. It reminds me of Day One Diablo, or Day One Destiny. Just a lot of missed opportunities, that we KNOW they'll change in the future, and it just stinks that they didn't catch it all for launch so we don't have to wait.
Here are a bunch of the current problems with the grind, and potential solutions to each. I'm going to be referencing Diablo 3 a lot because, like it or not, regardless of what you think about that game, you CANNOT argue that they have shown some of the best signs of progress over the years of adjusting the game appropriately to suit what the players want. That game today, vs that game at launch, are two completely different games... and for the better.
Problem: Low level gear becomes 100% obsolete too quickly. I hardly even pick up White/Greens/Blues any more, and while I do pick up the Purples, I hardly care. The only, only use they have right now is for consumables, which is very underwhelming and I almost always have more Embers than I need for it. Once you're in Masterwork/Legendary gear, going backwards to Epic is just not an option.
Solution: Add more uses for these low level Embers. One of the best things Diablo 3 did with it's QoL changes was introduce a ton of ways to utilize every resource in the game. Gold matters, gems matter, low level crafting mats matter. Every available farmable thing has purpose, relating to the end game gear grind. That should be prevalent here. We should have recipes that can convert materials upwards, something like 5 Whites -> 1 Blue, 5 Blues -> 1 Purple, 5 Purples -> 1 Yellow, so on and so forth. This means ALL of those materials remain relevant the entire time. Recipes for re-rolling stats and items can also utilize these low level Embers in their recpies; it works for Diablo 3, and makes every. single. item. drop. at least somewhat relevant. Some variant of that system here would go a long way.
Problem: Salvaging basically every item I loot that isn't Masterwork is kind of tedious. After a good Freeplay or Stronghold session, I usually have dozens of items to salvage. Considering these will always be salvaged 100% of the time, it adds layers of tedium to the game that will inevitably result in literal thousands of clicks that could have been avoided with some simple changes.
Solution: There are two for this one. Either A) add salvage-all options for tiers we could manually set, such as checking everything Common thru Epic, or B) add an option to literally automatically convert drops as items in to Embers. I realize A is the easier of the two, and more likely to happen some day; that being said, B would be flippin' awesome. If I could just check some settings boxes to have the game automatically have chests, enemies, rewards ETC drop EVERYTHING as Embers instead of items I'd inevitably just salvage, not only does it streamline my loot process and make life easier on me, but it means my bags won't be filling up either! It's wins all around.
Problem: Crafting Masterworks is lackluster if you're chasing Legendaries. Once you see the difference in perfect inscription rolls for Legendaries, it becomes obvious that they're what you really want. 25 Masterwork Embers for a single crafted item is a daunting grind (something the converting recipe would help with) and knowing you're only getting a MW item from it makes it hardly exciting.
Solution: Crafting a Masterwork should have a 5-10% chance to come out as Legendary. By doing this, we could make crafting Masterworks a base-line grind. If we had the converting Ember recipe, it means we know that our time invested generates X amount of MW over Y time almost guaranteed removing some of the disappointing RNG from the formula. Even if you get all Blues/Purples for 2 hours of play, at least knowing those transform in to some MW Embers, and those Embers transform in to a 10% shot at a Legendary, means you're ALWAYS making progress.
Problem: The number of inscription rolls gives too much variance to finding the actual rolls you want. So many useless inscription rolls, not enough items coming in. It can be depressing.
Solution: The re-roll system needs to come sooner than later. The Diablo 3 re-roll system has it right: you can either completely re-roll an exact copy of an item, or you can re-roll one stat on an item as many times as you'd like. Both of those options should exist. If my Ten Thousand Suns comes out 100% poopy, knowing materials can re-roll that are a game changer. I know the devs have said this is something they're "looking in to," but they should consider it sooner than later. This, for me as a player, is the #1 thing this game is missing right now loot-wise.
Problem: The rep grind sucks. 50K rep on all three to unlock a baseline starting point for Masterwork Components is asinine. This is something we'd all like to be crafting now to get us geared up and going, not something we want to wait literally hundreds of hours in to the game to be able to do. I think a lot of us would be totally fine with this rep grind, if grinding rep wasn't so bland. There are not nearly enough concrete ways of effectively tackling such a high threshold of reputation.
Solution: Allow difficulty to also scale Reputation gains. If I'm doing a Legendary Contract on GM2/3, I'd like to earn a hell of a lot more Rep than just spam farming quick Easy clears. Make it worth it. Give us a considerable amount more, to ease the annoyance of this grind a bit.
Problem: Events are uneven in their reward payout. Currently, some Freeplay Events require us to kill a few insect nests, while others require us to enter mini-dungeons and fight many many enemies. The problem? Both of these pay out a single reward chest, while taking very different amounts of time to complete.
Solution: Events should be in a tiered scale of difficulty/reward. There should be an understanding that some events are the "easy" ones, and some events are the "hard" ones, and the payouts should reflect this. Quickies should pop us one simple chest on the fly, the long time consuming ones would benefit from giving us 2, maybe even 3 for our effort. Remember, we're grinding these A LOT over the course of farming: we want that time to feel well spent.
Problem: No special Legendary/Masterwork Support Items Kind of self explanatory on this one.
Solution: Add them? Just curious, but why did you guys think this was the correct decision?
Some other problems that have been well documented here in the reddit that I'll just mention one more time:
- Can be difficult to know how our stats change without a stat sheet.
- Too much ambiguity about specific inscription effects.
- Having to exit out of one Expedition completely to start a new one is cumbersome.
- Communication and synchronization inside of Freeplay can be difficult; if there are only four of us on the map anyway, why are we not automatically put in to a Squad?
Lastly, and this one is very Storm-specific, but I'm going to throw it out there anyway...
Problem: Wind Wall does not scale with difficulty, AT ALL. It is pretty dumb that my current Wind Wall gets coughed on in GM2/3 and disappears before I'm even done the casting animation. This is not good.
Solution: Wind Wall should be changed to completely block X attacks, OR have a DRAMATIC up-tick in Health, OR scale in Health with the % bonus from the difficulty. Something, anything to make this Support Skill not totally worthless. Because right now, that's not hyperbole - it is actually worthless. And it doesn't need to be.
All in all, with some tweaking I think this game's end game loot grind is fine. I honestly feel most/all of the changes I've listed here will eventually find their way in to the game anyway, because they're all common sense QoL improvements. Anyone not taking the path Diablo 3 took in making their grind better and more player-friendly just isn't doing it right. I can only hope these guys see the light there and follow suit. It's just a shame to know that changes like these can take all too long to see implementation, when they're right there out in the open from the get go. Fingers crossed some of this finds it's way in ASAP.
EDIT: Wow, thanks guys! That blew up fast. Just wanted to say, if you're grinding gear as well and want to join a group of like-minded players, I'm recruiting some top talent for a guild. Made a post about it here.
EDIT 2: Hey, thanks for the Plat guys! That's awesome!
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