What’s wrong with Ethereals in Diablo 3 – Season 24?

  • Post published:July 3, 2021
  • Post last modified:December 19, 2023
  • Post category:Diablo
  • Reading time:6 mins read

Welcome to my texted video opinion about the recently added feature of Season 24, for patch 2.7.1 – Ethereal weapons.

The information is based on my personal opinion and experience. Your personal views and opinions may differ.

Introduction

Ethereal weapons aren’t a big kind of deal I must say. These are just items like primals that drop with an extremely low drop chance at about 1% and they proc with random passive class skill and legendary bonus. Sounds cool in theory, but in practice, all ethereals are so rare to find.
You must be super lucky to find at least one in an entire group of four, while leveling your characters. But this drop chance while leveling your character from a scratch is not always the case.

This recent season 24 is not very player-friendly like the previous seasons. Many players have to rely on the pool table, abusing difficulty and leveling to increase their chances to find a desired ethereal for their collection. Many will just play as usual but it will take much more time without an unintended farming method.

It is true that ethereals are greatly increasing your total power allowing you to burst into high level greater rifts as a solo player or in a full meta group. But there is a problem that significantly ruins this season – RNG.
As I mentioned earlier, ethereals may proc with random passive and legendary bonus, you never know what will proc for your character, except for the fixed stats each weapons have, like crit damage, 100% damage to all skills, or for example extra damage to undead.


If you have plans to create the best possible build for all your needs (Greater rift leaderboards, speed rifts or bounties), then you are going to face one little problem here.

RNG Phenomen

1% drop chance is so low, that the chance to find the desired weapon to boost your build even further becomes even lower. IF you find an ethereal with the wrong passive skill or legendary skill which doesn’t synergize with your build, then this item is pretty much useless. But those, who don’t bother making ultra-strong rank-1 leaderboard build can just enjoy the game and ignore this message.
Thank god, Blizzard cares about casual players and they decided to add a special salvage loot pool adding a chance to receive either 8 to 10 forgotten souls, around 50 death breaths or even some nephalem keys but obviously don’t salvage your ethereal if you don’t have another one in your pocket.

Hunting for the best weapons and, praying for this RNG is like mission impossible, and moreover, Blizzard couldn’t think of anything better than to force players to play on each 7 classes to find all 21 ethereals in total in order to transfer all these half lazy-designed transmogs into your non seasonal mode.
it shouldn’t be super hard though if you really want all these ethereal transmogs in your collection and have a clear plan. If you know in advance what items other classes need, how to level up fast, how to raise your paragon levels
asap, and keep farming Greater Rifts and Rifts to increase your chances, then you’ll be ok.
The others, who don’t play much, like once a week may really struggle to find this stuff. Whether this player is a diehard Diablo fan or not.

In conclusion

No doubt, these Ethereals are game-changers for all of the classes, but it feels like I’m being fooled with this seasonal theme. No matter how many ethereals will drop, if you miss at least one you get nothing in the end. It can take many hours and days to manage all of your classes and find all of them, or it can be a walk in the park. you never know what happens next.

Thank you for reading this article. Let me know what you think about this in the comments. If you have any questions, ask me anything on my social network profiles or in the contacts page.

Video Version