So I played some Diablo Immortal...

I'm an old Diablo fan.  The original game, I played all the allowable classes up to 38 or so. Diablo2... I gave up when I couldn't get my Barbarian past the three honor guards on Nightmare, and I wasn't willing to grind the hours and hours needed for the right gear.

Diablo3 I've got 1200 levels in, and it's an easy way to blow off some mindless hours of clicking. Even with a few hours, you can level a few times, make progress, and improve a character, clearly able to plot out what you need to work on. I like the newest DH set, too, but it's a lot of work upgrading it to rival my main set... and unsurprisingly, DH's are considered the gimpiest class at the highest levels of play.

Diablo Immortals is a former handheld game they modified to accept PC commands. I had some nice expectations for it, and it was cool as long as I could play it through solo. Alas, at some point it dumped me into group mode, and while I could still complete the main storyline solo, it was an MMO.

The game is okay for a solo player who just wants to run around doing daily missions and stuff, but doing any of the higher-level dungeons on raised difficulty requires a group. They make it easy to form the groups, but still, random group quality is something... and my character was low level because I got in a week late, and wow, if I got sucked into a Hell2 group, I was literally a 5th wheel, as the amount of damage i could do was like a quarter normal.

I hit level 30 today, was recommended to go to Hell2 difficulty, and did so. Immediately, it was back to being LESS than level one, as stuff I could fight reasonably quickly now took full combinations because I was doing less damage than before.

In other words, it officially became a grind. I'd either have to grit my teeth and work at the higher difficulty, while my leveling slowed because of gameplay, or play on lower dif, and the leveling would slow because the stuff was too easy to kill and didn't award enough xp.

Then Akten posted on Discord about just how bad a pay-to-win game it is, and I had enough. Into the trashcan it went, and I'll find something else to do with my evenings.