Diablo III Season 5: Not your everyday season opener

Most of the time that Diablo III (pronounced die-aa-blow and not dee-ah-blo) has been out, it has been a mostly terrible game. Slowly but surely, Blizzard has managed to improve the gameplay by leaps and bounds.

For me, this mostly boils down to playing a few days after a new season starts, get a couple characters to level 70 and then moving on to other things. I thought this season would be more of the same, but it's starting to look like that assumption could be proven very wrong with the start of Season 5.

This season started out like the others, an initial flurry of power-leveling and grift-running while building a decent outfit of legendary and set items. Then, optimizing and re-optimizing to get through tougher and tougher grifts... in order to get more legendary and set items. Hopefully, during all this, one manages to nab those all-important season-specific legendaries.

Now, things are different. At first, it was a bit of a let-down. They're just giving away these set items? What's the point of that? As I ticked through season challenges, I eagerly awaited those Haedrig loot mails. Once I possessed all seven pieces of Firebird's Finery (pronounced Fire-bert) I had but one season challenge remaining: Finish your class set dungeon.

I rolled into Leoric's manor with my 6-set bonus, bringing down the denizens with my usual aplomb. I peeled open the Tome of Set Dungeons and grasped firmly the newly acquired Page 112. "Go to the one place and do a thing." Huh?

"Go look up the location on a wiki or something." Oh, right. Got it. Away I went. So, I sauntered up to the set dungeon entrance (after an appropriate time wandering lost through the Desolate Sands). Up popped my first set of objectives. Something something burn 20 things 6 times blah blah whatever.

Whatever. The point of this meandering diatribe is that the set dungeon is frigging hard. "Harden the eff up" levels of hard. "Git gud" levels of hard. I thought I would've been done and tired of this season in a few days here, but now I gotta go back to grifting and craft the perfect combination of artifacts and skills that will let me defeat this thing and get the highly sought after season awards of a rinky dink portrait decoration and maybe something else, a pet? I don't even know? doesn't matter anyway gotta go.