As I expected, the concept of “avoid being hit by traps” to carry an entire season is not working out so well for Diablo 4 players.
Social media and subreddits are awash in negativity, but Blizzard has said they are receiving feedback and as they tend to do, fix things quickly.
There’s an exchange between a player and the game’s Community Development Director Adam Fletcher that I think sums things up pretty well:
PLAYER: “I don’t want to do puzzles, traps etc in Diablo. I want good combat, great skills, interesting boss fights and a fun grind to power. S2 improved this in many ways. S3 feels like you tried to become not an ARPG and took the worst part of other games and made it featured content”
There are many conversations like this with different members of the Blizzard team acknowledging the mass, instant feedback that this was a huge step back from last season, and probably, easily Diablo 4’s worst season of the three so far. The way these are staggered, this seems to have been developed by the season 1 team, but even that one was better than this.
The problem is…how do you “fix” a seasonal activity based entirely on traps if players…hate the traps? Right now, the most annoying bit of this is a mechanic that means you cannot get hit by traps too many times, lest you lose rewards at the end of a run.
This results in battle rooms where you are quite literally hiding in a corner because in Diablo 4’s frenetic combat, trying to actually move and use your skills mean you will absolutely get hit in the chaos no matter what.
However, you could erase that entire “no hit” mechanic and just give people the loot, but even then, you still have vaults that are designed entirely around multiple trap rooms which are still not fun at all to deal with.
So you don’t have to fully dodge them, but then you still have boring, empty rooms full of nothing but traps, or an irritating final (no-boss) combat room also full of traps that you cannot kill, unlike the enemies, so you’ll just be getting hit by them non-stop. Still not fun!
The Seneschal buddy has also been the target of complaints, but more that it’s just too weak to be noticed in combat, and leveling up its stones is going to take way too long.
That at least seems like an easier fix as you can just buff it until it’s noticeable, albeit no, I don’t think this is a very good “player boost” seasonal mechanic either compared to the last two seasons which felt like you really were reshaping your build entirely. This is just…a thing that’s there and sometimes does stuff.
The Traps thing is going to be hard to fix. The entire season is built around the mechanic and you can’t just…patch the traps out. I am very curious to see how Blizzard attempts to change things here, but they have to do something fast or everyone is going to bail out of this season in short order.
