Diablo 4 has now released a good amount of information about season 3 of the game, Season of the Construct. I spoke to Blizzard about it, and there should be more chats with developers happening today, I believe, but one thing strikes me as odd about it, and I’m hoping it’s going to be better than it sounds.
I’m excited about the little spider robot friend (the “Senecal”) that you can force to help you in battle. But vaults, the main activity to run during the season, let me leave me a little bit about what they ask of players in terms of maximizing rewards.
The concept behind the vaults is that they will be filled with more fatal traps than before for players to navigate through, unlike the flaming floor or occasional spiked traps in other dungeons. That’s all well and good, but there is an additional component here. , in which you collect money to spend on vaults that will give you more rewards when you don’t even get hit by traps in a dungeon.
This is what he told me as I listened to it, so I asked Blizzard if there would be some kind of mechanic that would make you immune to certain cheat elements in certain versions of the season, or some other way to counter them instead of just. . . walk around them.
This is not the case. You have to avoid cheating manually like you do now, but there are many more. Or you want to use some kind of class-specific ability, like gathering the Necromancer’s blood, to triumph over them. Or your spider friend has an option for a shield skill that could help, even if she wants to integrate it.
To me, this is contrary to the way Diablo, in all games, usually works. In max dungeons, you try to weaken enemies as temporarily as possible to succeed in the end. Or in more complicated dungeons, you can move slower but deal damage, without needing to avoid being hit altogether (with the exception, for example, of Uber Lilith).
Here, I see two options. That either these are going to be empty rooms you either have to cautiously make your way through in order to avoid getting hit by traps for max rewards, really slowing down the pace of things. Or if there are normal mobs of enemies and elites in these rooms, you sort of throw the “don’t get hit” thing out the window, as it’s going to be incredibly chaotic to be spamming your build and also dodging a bunch of elaborate traps in the room. I’m sure you can tank the damage as per usual, but avoiding getting hit entirely? Really?
All of this turns out to be a foreign concept for Diablo, admittedly I’ll want to see how it turns out in practice before issuing a final verdict. While most of the stuff in Season of the Construct sounds good, I’m less sure what the core activity of all of this supposedly is based on how it sounds. But yes, we’ll see next week, I guess.
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