Yea, the co-op was a mess at launch too. I had tons of crashes playing with my friends

Ngl, pretty disappointed by this Diablo 4 server slam weekend. Blizzard decided to be absolutely brutal to us. Not only did they nerf most of the classes, pretty heavily in some cases, since the initial open beta, but then they also drastically dropped the legendary spawn rate, making it near impossible to get more than a handful of legendaries before going up against Ashava. If that wasn't bad enough, they also reduced the maximum number of players allowed to fight Ashava at once from 12 to 10 I believe. They reduced the level cap for this beta from 25 to 20, meaning less skill points.Then they made this weekend shorter than the other 2, with Ashava spawns not beginning until day 2, today. Then they set the the Ashava respawn timer at a ridiculously long 3 hours, meaning that Ashava only spawns 9 times during the whole weekend, just 9 chances to beat Ashava and get your Ashava trophy in the main game on release, and 2 of those 9 chances are at hours when people are typically sleeping, so it's really more like just 7 chances. The cherry on top, they allow players lower than level 20 into the Ashava zone, I have had players as low as level 6 show up on my 4 Ashava attempts so far.

My first run was the closest, we had him down to less than 10% health when the 15 minute timer expired. Since then each run has gotten worse, 2nd we had about 30% health left, 3rd about 40%, and on this 4th run I just did on the 9pm spawn, we didn't even manage to remove half of his health. And I had such hope for this last run as well, no minion build Necros showed up (minion build necro was nerfed into the ground) and everyone was level 20, and yet we still couldn't even take out half of his health. I've got a bad feeling that I'm not getting this Ashava trophy this weekend.

They also still haven't fixed the loot level scaling issue from the open beta, I'm level 20 and getting drops as low as level 11, frustrating as hell. Oh, and they're letting level 21 loot drop with the level cap at level 20, got a level 21 legendary that I can't equip, so that's fun. 

Edit: Even Rod is struggling

I'm going to try switching to world tier 1 on my midnight run, supposedly it shrinks Ashava's health pool considerably.

I've gotten level 25 legendaries lol

Still, I've found pretty much everything you said to be a positive. First of all, the game is much more stable now, which is great. And yea, I love that the world boss is actually more of a challenge this time, tho I still downed him pretty easily with my rogue. I also like that legendaries aren't dropping left, right and center now. That kind of loot shouldn't be raining down so early in the leveling process. 

I tried running the fortress farm from the youtube video that is supposed to give 25 legendaries per hour, but I got only a single legendary from half an hour running it, and it was level 21 so I couldn't equip it. Guessing they fixed the fortress exploit with a server side update at some point since the video was posted on youtube earlier today. Ran multiple dungeons including the ones with the highest drop rates in the open beta, but got no legendaries from any of them. Only have 2 legendaries actually equipped, both rings from trading in the gambling currency with the vendor in Kyovashad.

I agree, those things are all fine for the main game. I just hate that they implemented these changes early when there is a limited time only trophy on the line, and all of these changes to make the game more difficult are preventing me and others from earning said trophy. I mean I guess they implemented them early because they wanted feedback on the changes, but if that is the goal, that feedback has been mostly negative. I saw Diablo 4's reddit was aflame yesterday and earlier today, lots of people complaining about the class balance (both the nerfs to the best builds from the open beta and the lack of buffs for several weaker skills people complained about in the open beta), the Ashava difficulty, them letting lower level players into the Ashava zone and griefing those trying to get the trophy, the poor loot level scaling allowing higher than level cap and way underleveled loot to drop, and the treasure goblins having poor drops now. Tonight though I'm seeing people are happy with the legendary drop rate being lower (mainly the diablo 2 fans, diablo 3 fans are unhappy with the drop rate), though many are still unhappy with the poor level scaling on the loot drops. People are also happy with the dungeon improvements they made since the open beta, so kudos to the devs for fixing the dungeons. I'm also seeing praise for the stability, considering the goal of the server slam was to stress test the servers, I have had no queue times or server crashes unlike the open beta, so I'm hopeful that the full launch in June will be stable now.

My journey in the Gears series began May 1st 2023. I have now finished every single numbered game in the series.

All have merits and issues. 3 remains the best to me.

4 is a weak entry even tho that final act was awesome with the mechs.

5 is fine but the skiff parts destroy the pacing of the game and have the worst open world of any game. Worse than Rage 2 and No More Heroes. At least the stuff outside those is solid.

I can't help but think they lightened up on the gore and I love gore.  4-5 feel like weaker entries to me. 4 is technically worse than 5 but if I want to replay Gears again at least 4 is more or less a more traditional Gears game. More or less. I let Del die in 5 because I thought in stories like this the character you like most has to die in these situations. 4-5 looked nice on PC but 5 is not optimized that well. A lot of hitches and a couple of crashes. I have a 3070, 32GB of Ram, and a 10 Core i7 CPU in this so should be fine.

@derpysquirtle64 Would be spectacular if your bingocard represents the actual showcase

Against my own strict no new games till Starfield rule I set for myself … decided to get Divinity Original Sin Enhanced Edition because …. *checks notes* … “I wanted to to do an Honour Mode (1 save permadeath) playthrough” because I’ve never played more than the tutorial for this … that’s a weird thought to have on a Sunday afternoon. Can safely say tho it was much harder than my DoS II Honour Mode run but I just completed it. Will do another slower play through of this now to get the 90% of the cheevs I missed.

I'm left utterly shocked by this part.  I loved how it managed a nice yin/yang between fights, exploration, and characterization.  I'm also a big fan of skiffing around too.

You're right about them lessening the gore.  I remember a popular video pointing that out too.  There isn't that same kind of fleshy, 'smacky' sensation to melee and certain weapons.  Hopefully TC amps that up with Gears 6, especially with new visual & audio tech.  

For me it was quite the opposite, I played hardcore only this time and got the Ashava on the second attempt (first attempt, we got like 5 people one-shot in the first swipe lol (in HC.. Was actually fun to watch)). And yes :) I died once while levelling to a fucking Butcher, I was not geared well enough and this fucker destroyed me before I could make it outside of the dungeon haha

For the record, played rogue/barbarian mainly; they are by far my favorite characters. After you really spend time upgrading/crafting/enchanting/imprinting stuff at level 20, you can pretty much kill anything. Even the level 30 areas were easy to farm, got probably like 20+ legendaries per hours (did that for 2 or 3 hours, with few level 20 tho, rest was too high :D)).
I managed to have a power level of 560 on my rogue with several item levels 370+ (still equipable at 20); got some lucky drop. This was on my rogue mainly and did not even get the Twisted Blade legendary (and I farmed like hell for it haha). I'm pretty sure I could have soloed the boss (it scales with the number of participant) no problem but I never managed to be alone anyway.

I love the state of where the game is right now; yes it requires a lot of time to optimize your character and Ashava was a good example of that but this is how I want it to be. And I mean this is really just up to 20 too.

I totally understand the frustration for some tho; I'm a hardcore Diablo player and I optimize like hell and play non-stop for the beta. But even for people who spend let's say 6 hours per day in the slam, they could end up be unlucky and don't get the Ashava kill simply because of bad luck. I kinda hope Blizzard will say something this week that anyone who got to 20 and at least tried the boss will get the reward; it would be very nice. For a Beta, I think it make sense cause it is not like you could take all the time you need to level up, etc and then you need to be lucky enough to do not be grouped with bad players.

My GF was playing next to me (softcore) and I could see the fight on Ashava where more than half of her raid would die on EVERY swipe... I mean, nothing she can do and she died maybe only once. She did very well... But did not manage to get the kill before the very last attempt.

Because it adds nothing but artificially pad out time. It's empty. It was clearly done because everyone else was doing it. It would have worked better to just use a map and location select if it wants to let the player do it in any order. I don't hate the game by any means but MS and its shooting IPs need to stay away from open worlds as they have not figured it out and not sure they ever will. At least when it comes to Halo and Gears as those IP's don't really lend themselves to that.