u/CreationsAU

The expansion is definitely a step in the right direction in regards to increasing a decent end game progression path and direction. I've not really touched the game since about season 2 of the last expansion. Back then, to me the idea of blasting for a day or 2 of season launch was fine but after that just just chasing GA items with bigger numbers to push The Pit just did not scratch any kind of long term playing itch.

War Plans now has the potential to change the gameplay enough that simply playing the game without the sole purpose of item progression could be greatly improved.

The not so good;

The time to grind out levels in the war plan trees feels quite slow. This would not be such an issue IF they were account wide like paragon points, instead of being character specific. This kills any desire to really play more than 1 or maybe 2 characters per season.

War Plan points being bound to specific trees only. This reduces player choice but limiting them to only being able to choose 1 path to go down in each tree. I know you can respec the tree points, but its expensive and this means I don't want choose between taking a gold whispers cache to cover all the gold sinks or an item cache to potentially upgrade an item. It also means I'm locked into only 1 playstyle per tree and i'm less inclined to try other tree paths. Choice is good in ARPG's but high levels of "friction" of choice are not fun in every aspect of the game. Keep that friction for character itemization or skill choice not in progression systems.

War Plan trees are too small. you Essentially choose 1 of 3 pathways and each path only follows 1 specific style of play.

Suggestions;

Making skill points generic to the entire War Plan Tree. So over the course of completing the system progression just award 1 or 2 skill tree points per level. These can be spent on any tree at any time. This means if I really loved just helltides. I can invest more points straight into the helltide tree and get more of the reactive gameplay that the tree nods offer. I can CHOOSE to invest more into helltides instead of the other stuff I might not like.

Make tree points account wide. You could still lock the tree behind level 70 or torment levels if you were worried about system difficulty or reward for each tree for lower level characters. You can still make the time to acquire the points just as long, but being able to set up your trees on new characters feels more natural for seasonal content. I mean paragon is account wide and a fresh 70 alt gets a huge power boost immediately from this anyway. Just include the tree system with this to match the power boost.

Make the trees bigger with more options and alterations to the gameplay. What is there now is a good start. More is almost always better. Go crazy just add wild nodes that can make things harder, easier, cross system (eg. Lair boss spawn chance during NM dungeons to replace the dungeon boss, mini infernal horde events can spawn in helltide etc etc.)

Just these changes alone could have other improvements to the game. For example you can have a "boss farm" character and they use alot of the lair boss tree or an aoe focused build and they heavily use a hell tide tree. It could give you solid character playstyle focus and build ideas without drastically needing to change your existing character talent trees.

The game is definitely in a better place and I think really fleshing out the war plans system has huge potential to really being this game into a Must Play each season type of ARPG.