Yeah, but gimp all nodes D4 style. Like “double DB drops” to “increase drops of whatever by 2%”.
What - get it right when it enters maintenance mode?
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At the rate yhings are going, that could be the best we can hope for.
That and that they listen to their player base properly.
You forget to mention the small number of Stash tabs.
I think he didn’t mention it because I specifically did.
Bottom line is, D4’s track record from S0 through S3, is 1-for-4 in my book. I liked Season 2. That’s about it. And I’m not really sure how many more chances, if any, I’m willing to give it. Which sucks, I mean, I paid a nontrivial amount of money for it and also spent a nontrivial amount of hours trying to see if I’d like it “long term.”
But, sunk cost fallacy and all that.
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Diablo 4 seems like it’s trying to be everything to everyone while forgetting its roots: Rogelike RPG’s with expansive loot in place of random powers. Torghast had the right idea in a lot of ways in WoW during SL but the dungeons weren’t random.
This is why D4 is terrible. It has no randomization and the loot is god awful as well as the skill tree and paragon board system way too limiting. It’s designed as way too overly predictable with not a great endgame either.
PoE has the right idea but cranks it into insane mode with a heaping ton of systems and complexity making it clunky as heck.
The reason Diablo 2 is fun is because you get powers randomly by playing the game instead of restarting and the gear you get them from matters. But you start off sucking.
Diablo 3 changed it up by turning the endgame into a leaderboard chasing simulator. Everyone just pushes a leaderboard and climbs greater rifts with a timer and grinding paragon. It also missed the point of Diablo but created a niche format.
That and I didn’t unlock all stash tabs during the open beta so didn’t feel i was qualified to comment on stash tab adequacy. I mainly hit the level requirement for the wolf pack cosmetic and did a few world boss events.
But lack of tabs is a common complaint amongst many D4 players i have conversed with especially with the number of rare items you need to keep to imprint with legendary powers.
The number of tabs is significantly less than D3 so i can imagine how big a step backwards it must feel.
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Oh man, you have no idea.
Like, take a standard 6-piece set from D3, right? Like I main necro, so I’ll use them as an example. Imagine taking a standard Rathma AotD setup. You have 6-piece Rathma, 2-piece Jesseth, the AotD-specific bracers + helm, and if you utilize the cube + Ring of Royal Grandeur, you can compliment that with a 3-piece like Captain Crimson. Pretty standard setup, right?
Well, imagine if the set bonuses were tied to individual pieces. Like, the chest piece itself was where you got the stacking DR. The legs themselves were where you got the increased damage to AoTD. Etc. Sounds cool, right? Because it gives you like 12 potential slots for bonuses instead of the 4 or 5 that sets give you.
But here’s where it gets fudgey.
Every single slot has variable ranges. So that ONE chest piece you were wearing only stacked to 40 stacks DR, but then you just found one that stacks to 45. However, that one that stacks to 45, rolled tons of modifiers that are irrelevant to you - stuff like “increased damage to bone spear” or “increased damage when an enemy is on fire” (you’re not dealing any fire damage as Rathma AotD).
So you have to go through a “crafting” process where you melt the new piece down to extract its “45 stack” set power, and then imbue that over your current piece to replace it with a marginal upgrade.
But THEN, you find a chest piece that has 42 stacks, BUT it has MUCH better and MORE relevant modifiers. And THEN you find one that’s Ancient. And THEN you find one that’s got a DIFFERENT set power, which would let you try to upgrade your PANTS instead etc. ad nauseum.
EDIT: I forgot to mention, you can only extract ONCE. So if you find a better chest with lower stacks? Sucks to be you, looks like you’re rocking 42 stacks for a while.
That’s the Aspect system from D4, and when you couple that with 5 stash tabs, the reality is that you fill up entire tabs just for POTENTIAL “what if” upgrades for ONE spec from ONE class. (Because remember, you can’t easily swap specs like in D3 - you need to invest a lot of time and nontrivial resources, or you need to complete the latter portions of the season journey and use limited-quantity consumables to respec)
It all sounds awesome on paper but is horrendous in practice.
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The probably need to take the bulk of the weight of those modifiers from gear and just toss them in the paragon boards and passives on the talent tree instead.
That’s the part that used to get me truly infuriated. Like, legitimately raising my blood pressure. The fixes are easy. They’re easy! You’re literally just deleting things.
Take even FIVE useless item mods out. Just FIVE. Don’t even try to prioritize the five worst ones. Take your pick, there’s dozens at least. Just pick 5 at random and delete them straight out of the game. Don’t even affect existing items. Just make them literally not spawn anymore. Comment out the code. Get it gone. Takes like 5 seconds. You hit one single ’ character in front of the code and it’s GONE. Maybe you write a quick exception so the game doesn’t crash when referencing a commented line. That’s it.
That one single step that takes 2 minutes tops, would make the itemization SO much more bearable.
Little things like that, are killing D4 by a thousand cuts. But they can’t even bandaid those scrapes and bumps because there’s gaping chest wounds from exploits and dupes.
Call me a middle aged white woman because “I can’t even.”
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Not to mention most of the loot is horrible. Even uniques aren’t that exciting to get.
And it overly relies on randomized stats in a range on top of randomized affixes. They basically did the same exact thing they did with Diablo 3 vanilla with loot and didn’t even notice.
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Yeah, I wasn’t impressed by the item stats when I played the open beta. D3 introduced loot 2.0 for a reason and this seems to be going backwards. Lots of irrelevant stats that adds to the loot hunt frustration.
And yeah, I can see how you can devote all of your stash to the one build.
When I play an ARPG single player campaign, I will play all 5 classes simultaneously so that if I find something good for another class, I’m usually within a similar level so can use that item on the other class either immediately or soon. But not sure I can do this with D4’s itemisation.
I’m thinking when I eventually get D4, I’ll likely play the campaign with one class… explore everything, unlock all renown etc. And if I still want to experience other classes, I’ll do one per season so I have a fresh stash. Though, stash tetris will be interesting with each subsequent season.
I was going to stay silent on this because I am no longer hating on D4… after playing for free for 21 hours.
I do not have any insider information but my years of experience makes me believe that there is a roadmap for the next 5-6 years for power creep for D4. It is supposed to be long and boring NOW so players will have a greater appreciation for the crumbs of power that I believe that they plan to dole out slowly over time.
Trouble is D3 tanked and D4 did not start out with all the good will that D3 received.
I do not envy the painful choice of sticking to the roadmap or accelerating the timeline.
My humble opinion
Do yourself a favor and just forget Eternal (D4’s non-season) even exists.
See, you know how in D3, we had that one final “balancing patch” that nerfed a bunch of stuff? And then people were expecting the Altar to make up for it?
Well, in season 30, where we HAVE the Altar, it kind of sort of does. Like, Meteor Sorc went from “screens deleted instantly” to “screens deleted in ~10 seconds.” Just about long enough to where you actually have to SOMETIMES pay attention to things. If you’re pushing high GR’s, especially higher than you’re comfortable at the time of pushing, you actually have challenge again.
But in NON-SEASON? Where we don’t HAVE the Altar? Well… I think the “bring the Altar back to non-season blizz, FFS” threads all speak for themselves.
Now, imagine a situation where you NEVER even had a CHANCE at getting the Altar. That, is D4’s Eternal realm.
All the nerfs, none of the seasonal compensation. (But on the bright side, if you cheat or exploit or RMT, you can get tons of uber uniques in order to make PVP quite lopsided… if you manage to find a single other person who actually wants to PVP)
Might could be you’re right in your first sentence. I’m a bit more cynical but perhaps the game WILL be better in several years.
Problem is, that’s still a gamble, and also, your second sentence is 100% on the money. Even if it follows D3’s trajectory towards something fun in several years, I’m personally not willing to wait that long. I waited 7 months, that’s about all I’m giving it.
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is there a single good thing about d4?
- bombed on release.
- Season 3: “Can We Fix It this time?” failed to fix it.
- 1900 people laid off.
- run by MicrotransactionSoft.
- still holding half the stash tabs hostage incase decide to sell them.
- no paladin lol.
- no pvp.
- loot system is trash.
- no build freedom, forced build design paths.
- abilities have no sustenance, no impact, gameplay feels empty.
- boring.
- nothing iconic at all.
they lied so hard before release, and in the end, it didnt even matter.
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Yeah I hate how they clearly designed it to shoehorn you down a certain path due to how limiting the Paragon boards are. They seem to only want to support certain types of play while not giving you enough tools to make other potential ways relevant.
Seems very much up Blizzards controlling design alley. If they’re trying to emulate PoE they failed very hard.
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With that big long list of things that are wrong with it, it’s a good job some folks, who said they’d never buy another Blizzard product in their entire life, didn’t go ahead and buy it. That certainly would be ironic.
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You don’t need to worry about me. LOL. 
THINGS… CAN ONLY GET BETTER!!! literally.
I do see comments on the D4 forum that read exactly like something you-know-who would say. 