...it's when they went from decent spots to crazy-ass spots that make no sense or are incredibly hard to get.
For example, of weird spots...how about looking in animal corpses? They eat magical cherrios for breakfast and shit a/b/s wands? Then the difficult just went stupid...with the changes of HLK made those spots an even bigger pain. Don't get me started on a sanctified, invoker stone-shattering mob underwater for an amber wand that very rarely can even be soloed at hero. Or you can get more than one spot where you just walk in and get it with NO challenge. I'm not kidding, I've had sets where it's impossible with even a full group at level 35 and sometimes even at 51 (yeah, I finally found one of the last ones and FUCK that spot)....other times I can have full a/b/s at 35 without a care in the world.
The fact that so much of the balance of the game revolves around complete randomness that you've no control over is retarded. It'd be like doing a game like HoN/WoW or whatever and at the final mark, you roll a dice....and one side gets to add 5. Yeah it's possible to still do it with non-limited but you have to fight the patience of the entire playerbase to get those. It's pretty sad when you're ranking with someone and their wand breaks and they say "sorry, I need to go get this again before anyone else does". And don't get me started on "but you don't need a/b/s!" when you can roll the dice just as much against deathblows.
So in essence, it's nothing to do with exploration at all once you know the spots. It's out of your control if you can actually even get them at a reasonable level without help....considering those are very few and most require hero level with good skills and certain classes to even get, it's a faulty system. If you're good and got easy spots, you steam roll. If you're good and have bad spots, your life sucks. If you're bad and have bad spots, you're absolutely fucked. It was tolerable originally, now it's just morphed into something horrible....especially wasting 100s of hours searching the 50+ spots to find out if you're screwed or not.
Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 10/09/2009 01:02PM by torak.