Thoughts on 0.40 patch Endgame

I have 2 level 90 characters, a Wolf Druid and a Poison Pathfinder. The endgame is worse than it was last patch. Not because of the new content or because of the new class... but because GGG keeps making it more frustrating.

example 1; Last patch we had guaranteed waystone drops from killing the final rare. Now we are back to the fun game of hoping waystones drop randomly. I don't understand the necessity to gatekeep the endgame experience behind random drops of a key and why doriani doesn't sell tier 15 maps once you've completed them like he does every other tier. If someone chose to go into t15 maps and die over and over that's a choice they're making. They may not have the maps fully juiced so they can try multiple times. Obviously if you just kill the boss in the map you get a waystone. The issue is the game has a billion instances of things that may end up killing you without you ever realizing it. Yes, all my resistances are maxed out. Yes, I have decent defenses. Doesn't mean I'm not going to die occasionally... also shouldn't mean I now HAVE to go back to a T14 and find a boss on the atlus map just so I can get back to a level 79 map. It's not a difficulty thing, it's just annoying.

example 2; Ritual, and possibly rewards across the board are worse. Almost every ritual I've opened will have about 10 variations of augmentation or transmutation orbs and an exalt. The omens rarely show up anymore. I assume GGG didn't like people having items to be able to have a chance at having a chance to craft gear. Abyss rewards are okay from time to time but the total amount of preserved bones you get is way lower, allowing you even less opportunity to maybe getting a good mod on your gear if you're lucky.

example 3; Delirium also seems to have changed out how rewards are dispersed. Delirium no longer drops based on how much you clear the fog but randomly from monsters much like catalysts but less frequent. Now the rare Delirium (white/black) is far rarer and more expensive, making it harder to anoint your amulet with a good passive.

example 4; Soul cores having specific equipment they can go on is dumb. I can't put a chaos resistance soul core into anything but body armor. I also can't put a 5% (FIVE) all ele res soul core into anything but body armor. So we are supposed to use sockets as the main source of deterministic crafting but we can't use socketables unless we have very specific gear to put it into and the free sockets on that specific gear. Meaning we have to get those mods on the gear itself, meaning gearing up is now harder and more expensive. Also meaning if we want to get loot we have less space for the Rarity mod...

side note; Load times are longer, and I get fairly frequent "pauses" that eventually lead to crashing. Overall performance seems improved when the game is running which is nice, but I lag out to disconnections now but never had performance issue before.

I had a great time in the last patch but so far, I'm not feeling like I'm getting rewarded and when I do, I'm hesitant to do anything with that reward because there might not be another one for a while.