They get the feedback through weekly reports from CMs and sometimes they skim through here. Classic games producer posted here and I’m willing to bet that D4 designers are getting feedback or read here the same way.
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Well, I definitely agree on this. DIV itemization looks a lot like like DIII.
And this scares me a lot. It’s for me important to see what they screwed up in DIII itemization evolution.
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Ancients/Primordials:
The idea was to solve the problem about "Legendaries are raining and became completely worthless. So they imput drastic augmentation in stats and make them a more rare version.
But it was meh, and more frustrating mechanic. Pimals were a really bad idea, since they are rarely useful. And more, it was pure luck, nothing else. You could pass tons of hours IG trying to get your dreamed primal, when you could drop it in one hour at season start.
Legendaries should stay legendaries, not raining for everywhere. And putting ancient/mythic version won’t help.
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Legendaries/Set were broken multipliers
And the consequence was pretty simple. Some builds weren’t usable in high difficulties, since this made an insane powercreep. This killed build diversity.
Legendaries were too strong, since you gained a lot of DPS, without sacrifices. For example, Nilfur’s can make you jump from a difficulty to another, without losing any stats.
Legendaries can/must affect skills or modify gameplay, but with a price.
–> This way, I should consider and theorycraft before adding one leg to my build, and they make rare with good rolls far more competitive.
Sets are too mandatory
One more time, because of multipliers. Sure, we got LoN actually, but sets forces players to adopt a certain gameplay. And I clearly don’t understand this decision, since building and testing is one of the essence of an ARPG for me. Finding good combinations to make my fav gameplay viable.
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We will see that if they really listen us this time d4 won’t have any bad ideas(such as simplified loot system,no shoulder slot etc.)
D2 doesn’t have a shoulder slot. It’s a non-issue, but in the same breath, their barb is really weird. I understand having a weapon and shield or 2 weapons on quick swap (W key in D2 / Median XL), but Barb in D4 has two 2 Hand Weapons equipped as well as two 1 Hand Weapons equipped that he swaps between based on the skill you use or some crazy incoherent BS. It literally makes zero Fing sense to me.
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I think legendaries with interesting affixes is what they are shooting for… I never want to see a rare that has better stats than a legendary. I get wanting to recreate D2, but until there is a publically playable version of the game, i’ll reserve judgement… if what we can read between the lines is correct, this game is still years (2? 3? maybe 4?) away from release. Still time to address any issues. And the lead designer who came over from the Star Craft team is loved by their community because he listens to fan player feedback. Too early to start to panic…
Yeah, that was my thoughts. this isn’t 4, its 3.5. Its basically a reduxed D3 in gameplay, with the new talent system just being the passive skill system stretched out a bit.
DON’T YOU ALL HAVE PHONES?!
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All they need is to look at d2 or classic wow and understand that good items should be usable for a long time.
They just create this beyond stupid system where an item 1 level below max level is unusable garbage. Also a low level item having 10 times (probably a 100 times less stats for some) less stats than a high level one is simply stupid.
How hard is it to just make a game without broken power scaling?
Just look at DnD if you really need help figuring proper character progression.
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I will at least give them credit for bringing back +skill level as a stat, in the HOPES that they’ll make it so some classes/builds care about weapon damage and others are more about +skill level
Simplified loot is fine and I believe we’ll do just fine without bracer, shoulder and belt slots as well. The problem is we have simplified loot with superficial character customization, that will cause all the power load to be on our gear again. They’re repeating the same mistake, the same loophole.
May be it will be fine and I’m exaggerating but it doesn’t feel that way either. I don’t see how a talent tree filled with “+% damage” passives would cause any sort of customization.
We only have direct upgrades to melee and ranged damage, just like strength and dexterity of old D2 times. So they sorta nailed it in that aspect. However, main stats didn’t have linearly separated benefits for a character. Even some stats have given different values to modify resources on different classes back in D2, and that’s what made classes different than each other yet had to keep the control.
To distinguish different sub specs, they also have to create a meticulous bestiary for directing players down to different paths instead of “clear experience” or “linear progress” by developer’s hand holding. Considering they’re true to their words, this linear setup must be improved or embed into other systems.
“There seems to be a shockingly large number of people enamored with the “illusion of choice” rather than meaningful choice.”
“My question is, what is the actual benefit of having some low tier items be equal to or better than higher tier items? Why do people think thats “better design”? All that does is remove any value of a tier system in the first place.”
This, just this, remember this folks, he is right.
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I think a lot of folks think the systems in D2 are far superior to what was in D3 (and in some cases, they’re right)… the skill tree thing was one of those things.
But itemization where a rare drop should be viable in end game is odd in my opinion… it was that way in D2 I assume because they didn’t have “legendary” items that would replace them? Not sure. But wanting to go back to that system just seems odd to me.
In my opinion best itemization should be based on D2 system, and not huge number items of D3…
What we should have is:
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Normal and Magic - common trash items to fill in drop table and be sold or salvaged mostlly. Magic should be limited to 2 sufixes
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Rares - Two categories here: sub max level rares having 3-4 suffixes and endgame rares having 5-6 suffixes. Endgame ones should have some limited pool of suffixes that canot appear on legendary or set items therefore making perfect rare a high value and best in slot item when legendary item isnt required for our build.
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Set items - they should be similar to end game rares in terms of suffixes but offer higher numbers for each suffix that is given when combining anything betwean 2 up to max 4 set parts. Each set item should be also limited to 2-3 suffixes for example to not make them overpovered.
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Unique (Legendary? i always hated this change) - 4 suffix rare with unique power that alters gameplay or group of skills in specific way.
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Mythic or relic items that are super hard to find. Should give great power and greatlly alter gameplay mechanics and also add interesting visuall effect and have theme and story tied into lore.
Now when it comes to runewords… I like idea of condition and effect but shouldnt be limited to 2 runes. Instead each condition rune should have also effect also so they can be combined and chained in difrent combination up to 6 rune words. Than if blizz want to add secret rune words in some limited way it would be just epic to find one by pure accident or just make a randomized complex side quest in order to find recipe and being able to compleate a runeword similar to D2 one.
By no means legendary/set drop rate should be crazy high or tied to dungon end boses or main quests. There should be fairlly low drop rate of those so those items are valuable also… not auto brims like in D3.
And please, forget about ancients and other additional gear tiers… if you make legendary ancients all legendary will be usless and low value tier in endgame at some point. Instead you need to make a proper loot table when legendaries and sets are like 0.002% drop chance or so.
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PoE is certainly better than D3 when it comes to drops but there is still the illusion of choice if you want the best items for a specific skill. It’s true you don’t need legendaries in every slot but a lot of the affixes on rares are still garbage while certain ones are completely overpowered-meaning people all want the same stats on them. Add that with the relative ease of rerolling rares, it means many people end up with the same general stats (even if a lower tier) and builds despite all the customization available. The best example of this is the passive tree, where basically everyone goes for the same life nodes (or energy shield) because the way the game is balanced- easy to do damage, hard to survive.
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No I don’t think that’s what they are saying. It isn’t about being overall “as good” or “better” than higher tiered items overall. But for certain specific builds for certain classes if lower tiered items have cool affixes and benefits that make it more valuable in certain situations than you can give items value even though they aren;t in general a more powerful item than the higher tiered item.
Its about creating diverse itemization throughout the tiers and classes and builds. It isn’t just about having a system where A item is better than B but C is better than B etc. It’s different depending what and how your playing.
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All items should have some sort of meaning to them and not this attack and defense on every single item in the game. Rings should spawn with completely different stats to gloves and so on… with a few exceptions like unique items from Diablo 2 or just some stats being totally random on every piece of gear. All types of rarity of gear should somehow be usuable. A great example is this blue rarity armor in diablo 2 that you can find with 4 sockets and 100 life called Jewelers (Armor Type) of the Whale, a blue ring that spawned with the highest magic find possible (40%) called Fortuitous Ring of Fortune. These items gave you options to have the most life (If you put 4 rubies into the sockets) or the most magic find possible with the drawback of not having other stats with them. It created lots of build diversity of what specific build you were trying to make for PvP or PvE. Variety is key .
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Rather unhappy to hear that the defenses seem to be very simplistic here; Just “defense” so far. Compare path of exile where you have armor, evasion and ES for different base defenses (Tanky guy that gets hit but ignores it, dodgy ninja, and Mage with a barrier-- though at least frost armor looks to work that way, but I’d prefer it to be on equipment), even BEFORE you get into things like resistances and uniques/ect.
Having different ways to tanking/avoiding damage is interesting, not just basically “all resist”.
On that note, since this looks to be D3’s system again, I’m guessing they’re going to be going for Infinitely scaling resistances, rather than D2/POE’s System where you get your Resistances to maximum as the most important goal, but then are capped fairly early on, so juggling different gear to maintain resistances without overflow mixes things up
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I watched Barbarian gameplay video from Blizzcon made by GameInformer,
And my biggest downfall was when I realize that barbarian can’t use ranged weapons again, like it was in D3, the same “mistake”. In D2 no matter which class you play, you can build Barbarian with ranged weapons, or Sorc with Melee weapons, you can even combine Druid polymorph and Sorc teleport with other classes, via unique runewords.
But D4 gameplay demo didn’t show any of these features, also quest that was shown didn’t add anything new to the gameplay of the new Diablo game.
Overall, I want to say that my expectations wasn’t fulfilled and the whole demo felt like a better graphics D3 to me, because of the item slots are all set for specific weapons of specific class, and it felt to me that skills used are based on the D3 system, when you only select which one you will use, and you can’t improve their damage effectiveness without specific items prefixes, like legendries or sets from D3, which is basically again leads to an unnecessary limitations set by D3.
Simply, I would like to see Barbarian using ranged weapons and skills from other classes, also levels for skills and stats, and, ideally, make level investments into stats really strong pls, for the character builds and brain development))
Or you know an item filter
Yes stats should be Item Slot based just like movement speed is only on boots, for casters Gloves improve them as most casters will have hand gestures, If they use belts the and I know its more DnD then Diablo Belt of Giant Strength, Bracer of Defense, things like this make more sense.