Art is good in D3. I can’t comment on D4 as for some strange reason we haven’t seen official 4k gameplay on it yet. I love where it’s heading though however… dates on some things are worrying and the last update. It was good but… yea. I have a 4k computer for last year and i refuse to play another Diablo look alike (that’s just me). I have played some games but most i have 100%'d or completed or left it at the stage i did for a reason xD. (Some i played on 360)… oh yea. Much better on a pc btw.
I’m not anti-cooldowns (though I’d prefer them to be short) but there is a class with almost no CD in D3 and it’s one of the most dynamic in the game. Cooldowns become really a problem when the player meets real difficulty and that’s why the DH was by far my favorite class in D3 classic.
From what we can see D4 is going full CD again, even more actually. I don’t mind having some classes having many cooldown-based skills, but why make them the norm instead of more class-fitting alternatives ?
There’s also the Aether Walker wand that’s opening virtually infinite Teleport builds strong enough to farm T16.
Toggle would be good here actually. Since you could impose a resource drain per second and/or on skill usage.
Yeah. That was basically my point. Create new skills that took more than a few minutes of thought.
So you are against cooldowns why? They don’t actually seem to hinder you that much apparently. 
You do bring up a good point of Skill to Item dynamics
If my statement on mobility skills were true, then they wouldn’t allow you to spam it in a way that lets you cheese content. Which D4 does seem to be avoiding right now. We don’t know all the items, but they do have “No cooldown teleport, but it is random” If items are similar in this way, then it would create different item possibilities for skills. So we could end up with items for “Ultimate Skills” that cause them to have no cooldown but drain your resource until depleted. Or keep the cooldown but the skill will stay active as long as you have resource and will be depleted overtime.
In D3 you just got buffs with no downside. Zero/reduced cooldowns and Damage buffs. But with the examples of possible D4 items you’d have to choose giving up your choice of where you teleport in exchange for no cooldown.
This still doesn’t change my opinion on Ultimate Skills, as they still feel like a cheesy way to create more skills and they grant you too much immunity in the D4 examples.
Yeah, I wouldn’t have any of the story content/initial playthrough be masochistic like that. Except maybe the final boss! 
Struggle? Maybe. It’s a challenge but then no one said making an interesting game with varied mechanics would be easy.
A large pool that players regenerate slowly could work too. And you finally unleash it all in a grand display of fury. Not dissimilar to big cooldowns on Big Bad Ultimates but the player gets to decide if they want to use the skill in this way…also they are actively engaged in preparing it for such a purpose. Or how about an Overkill mechanic that makes monsters drop “Mana Globes” or whatever if you deal excessive damage. So that players might drop their costly Big Bad Strike for a net gain in the end. Might be cool.
EDIT: But failing any innovation I see no issue with D2’s mana pool system (sans the potion spam that allows infinite casts inasmuch as your inventory and gold permits). It serves as a sort of “soft cooldown” across your entire kit to distribute as you will. Call it a personal preference.
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This just moves the penalty from one place to another. One has to either In-geom + CDR stack up, full FB-6, Vyr-6 Archon with full CDR stack-up, or Aether Walker + RCR stack. This sets up a scenario of forfeit the farm for a barrel of apples or a barrel oranges or a barrel of tomatoes. Take your pick. The other classes do not have to make such grand sacrifices in damage and build diversity just to gain better mobility.
There is plenty of existing footage to view, critique and comment on. There is an old thread in this forum discussing the D4 art style. I have a critical take on it. The D4 art style is drab, the colors used on gear make it look absolutely hobo/ghetto, the character models look like plastic playdoh, and the stained glass skill icons really should be changed. I’ll leave it to you to go back and check out the quarterly update posts to see for yourself. This is the big thread I was making reference to:
I hope Blizz can get their heads in the right place and learn from their massive art screw up with the D2R character models. As of right now the D4 character models are going down the same bad path as the D2R character models. The D3 icons and icon art are quite good. The stained glass art for the skill icons in D4 is a bit too much of Christianity and Catholicism injected into thematic fabric of the game.
I’m kool on my 24 inch 1080p @ 144hz display. I’m waiting for the rest of the world to catch up and make the 36 inch curved 200+ hz 4k display-port displays super cheap so I can grab one.
What does Christianity have to do with it? As of the art for D4 i never said it was bad. Infact it’s really good. However no official 4k footage has been shown so we can’t see for sure how much better than D3 we will see.
Stained glass windows were used extensively in churches, monasteries and cathedrals. In England, possibly as early as the 7th Century, but certainly from the 12th Century onwards.
https://stainedglassmuseum.com/histsg
Of course, and that’s only logical considering the defensive and mobility bonus it provides.
I just wanted to point that there are multiple alternatives to spamming Teleport than Firebird. Personnally I’m using Aether Walker + Shame of Delsere with Typhon.
Really ? I find many of them horrendous, some even misleading. D2’s were not great but simple and graphic. D4 is a huge step up in my opinion, the stained glass an excellent idea to enhance the medieval feel Diablo needs so much.
As for the models, I have no idea what your complaint is about. I can understand the criticism on the art, which has toned down colors from all previous games, but models of D4 and D2R are objectively the best in the franchise yet.
Those were some very tough times i’m sure. This is D4 and that guy was collecting ears in his monestary… now we aren’t even talking about art lol.
Itemization in D2 was better than D3, but still pretty bad. “BER” rune being necessary everywhere, CHAM, Zod being barely useful. 90% of uniques/sets being un-useable. Runewords eclipsing basically everything.
D2 had a very limited pool of good items.
I think a combo of the two games is best, but the mix is closer to 60-40 D3 than what you suggest. The item idea behind D2 was awesome, the outcome was not.
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Nope try again please.
You are thinking only of T-16. I’m talking all torments at level cap and the full gambit of GRs. The other classes don’t have to make huge sacrifices just to get better mobility and the mobility improvement isn’t as good as the other classes even with the improvement. For example, if you run FB-6 with Frag of Destiny and even a little IAS, your teleport at 50 stacks is still slower than teleport amp’d by 50 stacks and the CDR shrine in GRs. Even if you went pull max CDR, plus max the IAS on your gear, and get an in-geom proc your Tele is slower than all of that plus the CDR shrine in GRs. So we are making big sacrifices without even being on par with the rest of the classes. Right now the fastest and tightest teleport is Dash on a monk. All they need is a little CDR and an in-geom proc and they can basically traverse entire maps.
The devs added options but the options are weak and come with caveats that the other classes do not have to contend with. Even the Necro has better mobility than Wiz and that was the last class added to the game. The Wiz tele issue has been with us since D3 vanilla release and has never really improved as compared to the other classes.
True. I don’t mind they removed “potion spam” in D4.
I don’t kite (or wait for refresh) in the game that has skill cooldown so far.
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@Xaviour:
Consider the immersion and fantasy of the game. When you are piloting your character you are playing a Nephelem. This means one is playing for team Nephelem not team Catholicism or team Christianity. If I’m playing on Dallas Cowboys football team, I’m not going to get on the field with a New York Knicks jersey. Its out of place. As a Wizard generally I would be aligned with one of the mage clans. As a Barb I would be part of one of the Barb tribes. When playing the original Starcraft and Broodwar, the UI would change to a theme associated with the race you were playing as.
I did not like that class trailer employed the visuals of the church and its agents in a corrupt manner (killing and collecting ears). The trailer only makes sense because the devs and management are presenting religious pop-culture references and assume that most players have little to no lore knowledge. As far as I can remember, the trailer featured a Catholic priest. They could have done better.
Erm, you do know that Nephalem is a corruption of the word Nephilim…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nephilim
…which are giants in the Hebrew Bible. Also, the Nephalem in D3 are the offspring of angels (from Heaven) and demons (from Hell). And Diablo literally means “The Devil” in Spanish. In the first Diablo game the first few levels are to be found underneath a Cathedral. To claim there’s no Christian influence on the franchise’s lore is crazy. What about Paladins? They’re literally martial priests, doing holy damage.
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Yes, because Sorcerers don’t have much trouble reaching high GR levels. Mobility is just not that important in that mode.
It’s even a good thing imo, as it reinforces classes distinction.
Players were crawling down a church long before the word Nephalem was ever mentioned.
D1 was even more christian referenced than D4 as it featured an abundance of litteral christian crosses.
Also, the Rogue trailer presented a zakarum priest, which is well rooted into the lore.
I never claimed no Christian influence. I still don’t like action button icon art and the other stained glass iconography. Also, I was aware of the other religious connections/references. I never played D1, but I’ve seen videos of game play.
I disagree. D3 has been flavor of the month class balancing so the statement above won’t hold.
If you look at most seasons leaderboards, Sorcerer is always over average. But I agree that general class balance is unsatisfactory, to say the least.