Diablo 4 players have been airing their frustrations about the game since it launched in June on a variety of topics, but the latest target is the Occultist.
The NPC that helps players by extracting and imprinting Aspects on gear, enchanting items, and re-rolling gear for the best possible stats is in the crosshairs of several players, as evidenced by a recent Reddit thread on the subject.
“This is a dead horse being beaten but I need to air this out,” said a clearly-frustrated Diablo 4 player on Reddit. “I enjoy this game and have played it enough to have three level 100’s this season. I haven’t gotten an upgrade for my Necro in probably two weeks, with constant farming and playing and tonight I finally got an [Amulet] with [cooldown reduction], movement speed and essence cost reduction.”
“Perfect, a three out of four for my bone spear as long as I can roll Evulsion,” they said, but then things took a turn. “I spent 500 million gold and over 50 Forgotten Souls to not once roll Evulsion. The item is completely bricked as rerolls are upwards of 17 million each.”
That’s obviously some real bad luck, but it does seem to happen more often than players would like. You’re at the mercy of RNG when it comes to re-rolling items that drop with good rolls, which is yet another layer of RNG.
“I don’t understand how any dev could’ve looked at the occultist system and thought ‘yeah, that’s what players want,” said the poster of the Reddit thread above. “It’s absurd to think you can waste weeks of resources to not get one simple roll on an item, especially in a game where finding any meaningful item after level 80 is playing the lottery.”
And of course, other players had theories as to why the system works the way it does. It’s as tinfoil hat as ever, but it also kind of makes sense.
“I’m convinced that it’s by design,” said one reply. “They want you to brick your three-out-of-four items so that you have to spend 10s more hours farming shit to find another one and go through the same process again.”
This kind of process should only affect a very small number of players who are trying to min-max every piece of gear to the absolute best possible roll, but those are the players who continue to support the game and return each season, after all. So, it may be in the best interest of the game for Blizzard Entertainment to consider some changes.
