Despite my earlier misgivings, the facts remain that I both love collecting loot and don’t much mind mindlessly clicking things. So I went and bought the game+expansion (not the Necromancer though… not yet).
Seeing a new season had started and that there were item rewards for participating in it, I went and made a Crusader and started playing through the campaign. Only at the end of Act 1 did it become apparent that the Season Acts do not match up with the Campaign Acts; you’re supposed to play seasonal characters in Adventure Mode (which was helpfully auto-unlocked). So that’s what I did.
Despite wanting to make a Hammerdin, the loot table was having other ideas (Ancient Gyrfalcon flail) and I first ended up with a fire-based Blessed Shield build which was used to clear the first few seasonal hurdles and get the free loot. Seeing more ranks awaited and wanting to get to Greater Rift level 70 to unlock ancient primals I decided to keep going.
Eventually the Hammerdin drops appeared, which let me switch to that and quickly hit GR70 at about Paragon level 512 with only 3 pieces of ancient equipment. There progress stalled a bit as further ranks required completing conquests, with all except the GR75 seeming out of reach. But then I realized there was a trick to completing the 50 million gold one: Just open 46 Horadric Chests at once, since each contains 1.1 million on Torment 13 difficulty. Since they were needed anyway in order to extract more legendary powers (awesome feature) and upgrade my gear enough to reach GR75 it wasn’t even a hassle.
So here I am now with the season’s Conqueror rank completed at Paragon 643. The last rank requires completing three conquests and clearing a T13 Rift in under 4 minutes, so I’m pretty sure this is the end of the journey (while I do have the equipment for a speedy Bomber build, for some reason it only seems to be able to handle T10 easily). The last reward is only a portrait frame anyway, so it’s not like I’m missing anything. Now it’s time to go play the campaign and find out the answers to all these questions that have been raised by jumping around from area to area out of order.