Old School RuneScape | One Small Favor
Diablo Immortal | An Age Old Issue
Diablo Immortal suffers from what all ARPGs in my opinion suffer from. Over the years I’ve gotten quite tired of the leveling process and getting a new character from level 1 to usually 60 or so. Once you get to max level you then get to do all the things you want in the game usually. It seems in Diablo Immortal's attempt to resolve that it has led me to already be bored of what was to come for many aspects of the game.
It was time to get my necromancer to level 60. I still had a few levels to go. Unlike a lot of other ARPGs where you can’t wait to get to level 60. You are grinding out a lot of those activities beforehand. Leaving them not feeling special once you get to 60 since it's just the same old same old.
In Diablo III once you run the main storyline once you can level up other alts using rifts. I got to say the mobile version of rifts is just not fun. So far they have been a single zone. You don’t need to come up with much of a plan. Instead, you end up clearing a lot of the zone and that is that.
I’m hoping at level 60 and beyond rifts get a bit more interesting. Early on I tackled them with the mindset I would in Diablo III. I would run through them looking for magic and rare creatures to hunt for the bigger progression gains. If you do that here you end up at a dead-end having to backtrack looking for normal creatures to kill.
My biggest hatred for rifting however is the massive pay-to-win elements of it. In Diablo III you had a massive reason to grind greater rifts as you got legendary gems at the end of it and were leveling up gems depending on the difficulty of the rift.
In Diablo Immortal if you want legendary gems you need to use Legendary crests for the most part. While you do get a couple of crests for “free” once in a blue moon. The biggest source of getting them is flat out paying real money for a bunch of them.
You then will be merging those gems into other gems to level them up. Apparently, whales can spend $550k as a bare minimum to fully max out all their gems and their gems for having gems. Before that people were thinking it was $110k to fully max out which now sounds almost like a bargain if you were insane.
The sheer insanity of it all makes me not want to do rifts at all. While sure I could use the runes that drop to craft lower star legendary gems or attempt to gamble for better. Before even getting to level 60 I was over Elder rifts and I did not care much for the normal ones either.
The next thing to finish off hitting 60 was hitting up my daily bounties. Thankfully if I missed a day or two they would stack leaving me with even more to run when I returned. Doing them though for a random piece of equipment a little bit of gold and experience seems rather lackluster.
While this might have been great while I was leveling up to 60. After 60 I just don’t care for them that much anymore. I don’t see some special drop that I want to be running them for making it worth my time.
I can’t help but feel I enjoyed them more in Diablo III. Where once you got enough of the special crating items you needed for the cube you were done with them for a while. Maybe a week or weeks later you had a reason to run more of them.
The biggest fun really for me in a brand new game is exploring all the zones. Since this is a mobile game and it’s quite early into its release cycle there was just not a lot to explore. Not to mention you could not just get to them ahead of time. You needed the storyline to unlock quite a few places.
There also appear to be a lot of areas I have not discovered yet. Blizzard has come out and stated that more “free” content was on its way. Which makes it feel like they were expecting players to not be happy with the amount of stuff to do in the game as it stands.
While a part of me as a PC gamer feels that is a sign of an unfished game released before its time. I do understand that is more how mobile gaming tends to work. Instead of doing giant updates, they tend to always be rolling something out every couple of weeks.
Whatever this new content is going to be I already need it and that was before even hitting level 60. You would think all those years blizzard has making video games they could make it fun. If it ends up being another pay-to-win wall and grinds fest. I feel that will more than be the final tale of the end direction this game will be heading.
One thing that at least remains always fun is finding and acquiring legendary items. I did end up getting a couple along the way. I was also thankful most of them were weapons. Gives me a nice boost in damage to clear quicker.
I have never been the biggest fan of in ARPGs as having to repeat the entire storyline at a higher difficulty. Once I got to level 60 I noticed I could switch the difficulty and did not have to go through it all again. Perhaps some former trends in this genre just need to go the way of dial-up internet. With it still being a thing on some rare occasions but most have moved beyond it.
From my point of feeling for the game, I would have expected by now to have leveled up a bunch of alts. Expect I’m still on my main. Alts could end up being a waste of time in this game. As Blizzard plans to add some feature at some point that allows you to switch classes with a cooldown.
Having an alt also lacks the main benefit you would get to enjoy from already having a main in an ARPG. There is no shared bank space. All the gear you have is stuck on your main and you can’t move any of it over.
That seems kind of lame in this day and age to not allow things to be account bound at the very least. I guess they want to make sure you have to spend all over again a bunch of money.
People usually love to make alts and gear them out with resources to breeze through the game. If you want to feel like a god in Diablo Immortal you will need to max out all your credit cards, sell everything you own, and live in a cardboard box.
Final Thoughts
While I do understand there are other things to do once you hit level 60 in Diablo Immortal. The fact that you have to grind the grind just to get to 60 in the first place got old real quick. At least now I can see what the rest of the game has to offer.
Now I just need to do a lot of grinding. Gear I’ve noticed has paragon requirements on it. I also need the paragon levels anyways to progress further along. Here is to more grinding of the grind. At some point to progress further, I need to do group and guild activities. Along with PvP which I’ve been avoiding like the plague I expect it to be in this game.
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Screenshots were taken and content was written by @Enjar about Diablo Immortal.
