Diablo III Seasonal Journey

One Hero’s Journey Is Another’s Grind

I tried going back to Diablo III, but in the end, it couldn't hold my interest, and that's a little weird, because on paper it should. It has a satisfying gameplay loop, plenty of progression, nearly infinite maps. It has probably the best solution to the problem of the end game that I've ever seen–The Seasonal Journey.

The Seasonal Journey is an end game mode that encourages you to start a fresh character, one that doesn’t share the stash of your regular characters, though apparently some things either are shared or carry over from previous seasons. The idea is to level up and then proceed through a series of challenges, acquiring unique loot Abdul getting ranked on a leaderboard. Basically, it's a pretty clever way to get players who have completed the game to keep coming back.

The next season starts on January 18th, and since I’m in this place where I’m between games, I thought I’d take another swing at it. But I wanted to practice, so last weekend, I started a new seasonal character, even though this season is basically over. I started in adventure mode on hard difficulty. The game started me in Act I, and I should have checked the map, but from what I read on Icy Veins the bounties in the starting act have an extra experience bonus to them. I started with the boss, and this is where things got interesting.

It's really hard to take on the boss fight level starting at level 1. You start out with nothing, but rapidly shoot up in level and every piece of gear you find is useful. It also immediately stress-tests your abilities and how to use them.

I don't usually start a game on the hardest difficulty, and I certainly don't usually start a game and head straight into a boss fight. I'm the kind of person who likes to ease into a cold pool of water instead of plunging in, and when I play a game like Diablo, I like to start out easy, at least feeling at parity with the enemies that I'm facing instead of out-classed. But this forced me to think more about strategy. I was dodging–I've never dodged in Diablo before. I was using health potions, which I never had to use before.

And I was dying, which used to drive me crazy, and make me quit a game, because I felt that it meant that I wasn't good enough to play it. That was a big mental hurdle that I've gotten over in the past year.

But I made it through the first boss, and then finished the bounties in the opening area. Then the Icy Veins guide recommended grinding through Rifts. Rifts are basically random levels that you go through, killing everything until the Rift Guardian shows up. Killing the Rift Guardian drops a lot of loot, and then you go back to town and talk to the “Rift Dude” (that’s not his real name), who gives you a bunch of experience. Then you sell stuff and repair, and plunge in again.

And it was a lot of fun, feeling the power of the character gradually ramp up. Things got a lot easier when I remembered that you can have a support companion. I picked the Enchantress for no real reason, and then we were just wiping up the Rifts. This is the strategy behind the Icy Veins guide—power through the Rifts until you hit the level cap at 70, and then take a break to do the first chapters of the Seasonal Journey.

And it worked pretty well. After about six hours of grinding, I am at level 50 something. I’ve got a lot of cool gear, and I wade into these battles like I’m some sort of god, wiping out crowds of baddies. And then I got bored.

Part of the reason I stopped playing Diablo before was because it just get too much like a button-masher, which is fine, I like a good button masher, but after a while, it just starts to feel a little mindless. This time around, I’m more conscious of what I’m doing, so it’s not that it’s mindless tapping of buttons to get loot that’s boring me, it’s the cycling through these rifts, over and over. Basically, I feel like I’m going through the same fight for six hours, pausing every now and then to sell everything.

And there’s no reason to be doing it this way, I guess, other than the guide told me to. The theory behind the guide is that you want to get to 70 as rapidly as possible, I guess for the leaderboard part, though I’m not clear about what that entails. But it kind of burned me out on the game.

I guess I need something tangible to work towards, and maybe in Diablo, I’d be better served by following the campaign first, and then running through adventure mode. Honestly, I had more fun doing the bounties than the rifts. And I think this guide is little out of date, anyway. It’s made a couple of references that don’t seem to be true any more. Maybe I should just play the game the way I want to play the game.

I’m not totally burned out on it, I guess, but I was grinding hard and heavy for a couple of days, and then didn’t want to do it anymore. Maybe in a week, I’ll feel like getting back into it. It is a wonderful game, just an absolutely stellar design, and it seems a shame to be not playing it. But I think if I do start the next season, I’m going to do it on my own terms.