Overall, I'm positive on the changes. I spent a LOT of time with Diablo 3 over the years, and one thing I was hoping for for the sequel was that they would slow things down, make leveling and gearing up more of a process, and make legendaries more rare and special. Well, that seemed to be their initial philosophy, but they messed up so bad that they had to hard pivot back to D3's constant candy explosions. This season pushes you to Helltide from the start, and the new Helltide boss can be summoned using 3 hearts which drop pretty frequently, so a lot of my opening moments were spent around the boss area with a handful of other players, each with 10+ hearts, constantly summoning and killing the boss who drops like 5-10 legendaries each time. By level 30, I was fully decked out with legendaries, including two uniques. Absolutely absurd. It makes sense with the way the new codex works, but part of me can't help feeling a little bummed about the new direction. That said, I can't deny it's better than it was before.
Also, the days of picking up a cool item and equipping it are gone. Now it's about taking it to town to rework it. In the late game where upgrades are few and far between, these additions are great, but early on, I found myself scrapping potential upgrades because it was too much of a hassle to go through that whole process.
So I'm fairly torn on the early game, but late game! Oh, late game. Now you have my two favorite additions: greater affixes and masterworking. While standard legendaries are now a complete non-event, greater affixes bring back that level of rarity and excitement when something drops. A legendary with a star at the end? Fairly uncommon. Two stars? Pretty rare. Three? Haven't seen one yet, but knowing they're out there gives me that itch to keep looting. I guess uniques can even drop with four, but I'll never see one of those.
Masterworking also provides some sense of progression you lose once you hit max level, which... hey. Did we have to make it this easy to reach the level cap? I think being level 100 kinda sucks. When I've been playing for hours and my drops have sucked, I want at least something to show for that time. I know the infinite leveling of D3 was divisive (I loved it), but I dunno, I want that XP to go somewhere. Masterworking gives you a great reason to keep playing, but it unlocks so late in the leveling process that you then very quickly hit a great reason to stop. Even still, I want to keep playing, so hey, they've done something right.
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