Yesterday, Season 21 started in Diablo 3 with a new seasonal theme. While this is a lot of fun for our editor, it is also quite annoying. Why?
What is the theme about? In Season 21 of Diablo 3, the seasonal buff is running for the Trial of the Storms. For players, this means that every 90 seconds a power is unleashed that helps in defeating enemies.
When I started leveling my Demon Hunter yesterday at the start of the season, I initially found the buff quite positive. Enemies exploded quickly, and my Nephalem Rifts were much more relaxed than without this help.
But after half an hour, the buff started to annoy me a lot. The reason for that is its effects. I have been playing Diablo 3 for many years and have spent hundreds of hours in seasons and off-seasons. I must say: Blizzard has had better solutions for such buffs before.
Pros and Cons of the Seasonal Buff
This is good: It was immediately noticeable to me and my buddies, with whom I leveled from 1 to 70, that leveling was made easier. The buff sends meteors, snowballs, lightning bolts, or fire walls onto the battlefield every 90 seconds, supporting us and flattening enemies.
This is cool and makes the tedious leveling process quite fun. Even in Season 19, Blizzard managed to make boring leveling cool again with a seasonal buff.
Although this help with leveling is really welcome, it quickly becomes annoying. And for me, there are two reasons for that.
This is annoying: Every 90 seconds, when such a power is unleashed, the game announces it with a loud “tröööööööööööt”. It sounds like a huge cruise ship that blows its horn to let everyone know that it is about to dock at the harbor. Look for “Nebelhorn” on YouTube.
Make sure to activate the sound in the video so you know which horn I’m talking about.
This horn got so annoying to me after the first half hour that I had to mute the game’s sound. When I asked my buddies in Teamspeak, “Hey, what about this horn from the Season Buff?” I was immediately interrupted by an “Oh yes, so annoying!” It’s so loud that I had to turn down my ingame sound significantly as a long-term solution, just to be able to talk to my friends in Teamspeak while still hearing something from the game.
In addition, the visual effects are annoying in two ways.
It’s not enough that this powerful horn has to indicate that a huge snowball is rolling across the map. No, the game also has to visually adapt to the effect. So what do they do? They make it snow all over the visible map. Likely developed with people in mind who don’t want to hear the horn after a few minutes.
And if it’s not a snowball? Then they darken the map or bathe everything in effects. So that no one misses that an effect is being unleashed. What sounds helpful at first, is really tiring for the eyes in the long run.
Furthermore, the effects are initially very confusing. Those green circles on the ground remind 1:1 of attacks used by enemies. So I run out of there in a panic. Until I realize: Oh right, meteors are about to rain down, and that’s the visual announcement on the ground.
Conclusion: I like the idea behind the buff. Also, that Blizzard listened to the negative feedback from testers of the PTR servers and adjusted the buff again. However, this feature annoys me quite a bit in its current form. I would wish for a toggle switch for the sounds and the visual effects – instead, a countdown in the buff bar would be more than enough to prepare for the upcoming event.
What might comfort you over the annoying effects of the seasonal theme are strong builds of your classes. With those, you can race through the Greater Rifts and focus more on your gameplay than on sounds. In our Tier List for Season 21 in Diablo 3, we show you the best classes and builds.
