I'll say it. Grinding gear sucks.

This probably sounds insane to you. How could I, a person who has played and paid GGG since the beginning can say grinding gear sucks. I will elaborate.

When the game was simpler and much of it emergent we had a blast playing and chatting. We were in discovery. Acts were being updated and league mechanics were welcome additions.

Today league mechanics are not adding anything. An additional way to grind loot when grinding loot is disinteresting is NOT helping the issue.

The game has lacked for core features. Improvement to Acts, build diversity, PvP, etc have been largely backburner content for chasing the perfect league mechanic.

All these years nothing has really changed positively. More skills, more overpowered endgame stuff, more bosses, etc. Yet the same underlying disease has presented itself on more and more older builds.

Now that monster is highly emergent as builds are slowed down and gear grinding is also slowed down. Now that people can't burn through maps they are getting shredded by poorly balanced PvE content and poorly thought out build diversity. Is this overwhelming? Probably. I'm not internal on the team so I don't know. But none of this is good.

Fun and difficult combat is certainly part of the gameplay loop. What we have though is melee who can't do anything but fight a monster that can one shot them at any point that takes multiple minutes to kill. That's a hard pass.

And even older are the many tier affixes that make getting something like a mappable weapon impossible. This is where Harvest came in to save the day. But that wasn't the answer.

What is the answer? Remove tiers. That's how you do it. If you expect a melee under these circumstances to work up to maps gear has to be more within reach and crafting has to be less abysmal with less currency involved.

There are ways to fix grinding gear but keep this in mind as well. Bots controlled the gear market in D2, not the players. Players might have done Baal runs or Pindle runs or Meph runs for a few days or a couple weeks. The rest of the time they were interacting with bots to prep for PvP.

Grinding gear is not enough.

^ this

.

It wouldnt suck too much.

Its not that grinding gear sucks but the gear that we can grind sucks.
Also, basicly cutting the whole crafting system out of the game removes end goals of many players who just dont want to beat uber uber uber uber bs bosses and rather have perfect gear on perfect characters. Thats one of the most important aspects on a RPG.
I realy dont get what GGG is trying to pull of here. Shit gear drops and busting the whole crafting aspect of the game simoultaniously is what i would call.... an unlucky descion. But it also can be that i just lack "The Vision"-

Chris doesn't want us to have power fantasies but instead wants us to have submissive fantasies it's as easy as that lmao