One Thing About ‘Diablo 4’ Season 3 Seems A Bit Off For The Series

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 am excited about the little robot spider buddy (the “Seneschal”) you can power up to help you in combat. But Vaults, the main activity to run during the season, have me a bit confused based on what they’re asking of players in terms of maxing out rewards.

The idea behind Vaults is that they’re going to be full of more deadly traps than usual for players to get past, as opposed to the occasional flame floor or spike trap in other dungeons. That’s all well and good, but there’s an additional component here, where you farm up a currency to spend in Vaults that will give you more rewards when you are not even hit by traps over the course of a dungeon run.

This confused me as I was hearing it, so I asked Blizzard whether or not there would be some sort of mechanic to make you immune for certain elements of traps in certain builds for the season, or some other way to counter them rather than just…walking around them.

That isn’t the case. You have to manually avoid traps the way you do now, only there are a lot more of them. Or you have to use some sort of class-specific skill like Necromancer blood pooling to get past them. Or your spider buddy has an option for a shield ability that might help, though you’d have to build into that.

To me, this just strikes me as pretty counter to how Diablo, in all the games, normally works. In most dungeons, you are trying to crush through enemies as fast as possible to reach then end. Or in harder dungeons, you may be moving more slowly but you are tanking damage, not needing to completely avoid getting hit altogether (the exception being say, 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?

This all strikes me as kind of a weird concept for Diablo, though admittedly I will need to see how it feels in practice before rendering a final verdict. While most stuff about Season of the Construct seems cool, I am less sure about what is apparently the central activity of the whole thing based on how it sounds. But yeah, we’ll see next week I guess.

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