Yes exactly.
Lol. Ya right dude, D2 has more current players on pc than D3. You’re a minority, nobody wants to play Diablo 3 again as Diablo 4. Obviously D4 shouldn’t be an exact copy of D2 but it should be like D2. Inspired by D2. Not make a new arpg and pretend that D2 didn’t exist besides the npcs.
I am very doubtful of your statistic. Where did you find it?
Google “player counter diablo 3”, it won’t let me include links.
Until a few months ago Diablo 2 would tell you how many players were online and D2 has more players on pc than D3 according to the best available info.
I know it’s not perfect and you’re going to refute it cause you love Diablo 3 apparently.
PLEASE give the option to remove, dim, or alter the glow effect when you strike a mob. The pulsing bright red/white outline is obnoxious. A settings option for that please?
My point is, when I join a game. And I see 3 bararians. I don’t want them all to be WW. Because it’s the top build. I want to see different abilities. I loved the fact I could join a game in d2. And see a melee enchantress warewolf sorc. Which gives new ideas to what else you can do. D3 and what it seems like d4 is doing as well is u get 6 abilities and if I don’t use these exact 6 abilities, u won’t have the dmg or the tankiness to compete. Vs Diablo 2 I could put a point into every single ability from every tree, and use them all and make runewords that could further customize my builds and change my play style. Diablo 3 has completely lost that for me
Hey, thanks for the blog post.
So here is some feedback
In general, itemizationin D4 does look better than in D3, however, imo D4’s itemization is still (at least slightly) worse than D2’s Itemization. In many ways, I think it is mediocre, while is some other things it is either slightly above average or slightly below average. Nevertheless, it not as good as it could be, at least from what you have shown so far.
What is good about it is that the special affixes on legendaries are no longer so insanely powerful as they are in D3 and I also like a some of the new normal affixes like “Increased Gem Strength” or “Increased Damage while Healthy”/“Increased Damage against Healthy Enemies”. And seeing Crushing Blow making a return is also a nice thing.
Sadly, this is kinda where the positive stops.
ADA Power is not really a good replacement for an Attribute System.
You need to stack up ADA Power on your gear, in order to gain access to other affixes on your gear.
ADA Power also has a resemblance to Mainstat from D3, which was one of D3’s most disliked features.
If you want ADA Power to replace an Attribute System, then turn ADA Power into an Attribute System in which you can spend points into, but don’t let it roll on items as an affix. At least make it so that a large portion of your ADA Power comes from an Attribute System.
Now, having said that, even if ADA Power would be an Attribute System, it still would imo not be a good one.
A very simple and imo better Attribute System is to have 4 distinct Attributes that focus on distinctively different aspects:
Being able to spend points into something like that is much more exciting than ADA Power that randomly rolls on items.
I am really worried about this. Please be very careful with these affixes.
In Diablo 3, the existence of Critical Hit Damage in combination with Critical Hit Chance lead to these two affixes becoming mandatory, because the synergistic effect was so strong.
Maybe Critical Hit Chance can be good on its own, without needing Crit Damage, so that Crit Damage does not even need to exist in the game, except maybe on a few legendary items and only in small amounts, so that Crit Damage is not mandatory to use in combination with Crit Chance.
Something similar applies to Crushing Blow Chance and Crushing Blow Damage. Maybe Crushing Blow Chance can be good on its own without needing to have Crushing Blow Damage as well.
Imo Crushing Blow Damage and Critical Hit Damage are not needed, because if Crit Chance and CB Chance are not viable on their own, then you always need to focus on both X Chance and X Damage, which reduces customization options, and if they are already useful on their own, then X Damage just makes them too synergistic and too powerful.
So maybe roll back on Crit Damage and CB Damage and/or only let them spawn on a few legendaries.
imo Skill-changing Effects (like “Cast Nova at your Teleport location”, or “Fireball launches 3 Projectiles” or “Upheaval ignites the ground”) do not belong on legendary items, but on the Skill System.
Please have a look at Last Epoch’s and Wolcen’s Skill Systems. They put these Skill-changing Effects on the skill system while also giving options to customize the Skill (via Skill Points) with more generic options like “increased damage”, “increased AoE” or “reduced resource costs”, which gives you a choice on how to improve the skill.
Having these Skill-changing Effects on legendaries makes the legendary feel mandatory or at least it makes you feel as if you are missing out on something if you don’t use that particular item.
However, the more Generic Effects like “Using Storm Skills increases the Damage of Earth Skills for x seconds”, or “Your Physical Attacks Chill Enemies” or “Chance to spawn a Lightning Trap” are fine, since they have a broader application for more builds, skills and/or classes.
In D2, rare items could have up to 6 affixes. Getting a rare with 6 affixes happened more rarely than getting a rare with 4 or 5 affixes, but you still did get them from time to time.
It made rare items feel a lot more beefy. Basically, what legendaries are in D4, that have been rare items in D2 – at least in regards to the amount of affixes, not the special affix – so rare items in D3 and now in D4 feel like a downgrade compared to D2, which is kind of a letdown.
Letting rare items to have a chance to have 5 or 6 affixes would make them much more interesting imo.
On a sidenote: some legendaries also could have a lot more than just 6 affixes. Look at some of D2’s uniques and runewords. They felt beefy and awesome, but I currently do not get that feeling from D4’s legendaries that much, which is sad.
This one here is more of a thing that I personally dislike, rather than a broader part of the community, but why do sockets need to be in the same affix pool as other affixes? Why can’t they be a separate thing on their own?
If every item that can roll with sockets either always rolls with the maximum amount of sockets it can have, or if the maximum amount of sockets can be added by e.g. a blacksmith, it would allow for a lot more customization, because the sockets would not take away a spot from the other affixes.
So my feedback on this would be to let there be a way for items to always have the maximum amount of sockets and have sockets separate from the other affixes, to have more customization options.
This was not a part of this blogpost but in one of the last ones iirc, but I still wanna mention it briefly:
A special consumable that adds a legendary affix to a rare item (iirc it was David Kim who suggested it some time in the past) will blur the lines between rare and legendary items and thereby giving them less of a distinct identity.
So instead of that, maybe this consumable can work like an Exalted Orb from Path of Exile, which adds one random NORMAL Affix to a rare item (and rare items only!) and you can put up to 2 or 3 of these orbs for up to +2 or +3 normal affixes on a rare.
This is an idea worth stealing and it also allows rare items and legendaries to keep a distinct identity.
Yes, this is indeed one of the things that I and many in the community are very interested in.
I personally am not too satisfied with D4’s current Active Skill System and also not with the Passive Skill System.
A month ago or so I posted a thread about how D4’s Active Skill System seems to be a worse version of D3’s Skill System and a lot of people agreed with that assessment.
Yes, there is the sense of progression (via Skill Points) in D4’s Skill System, which is good, but there are other skill systems in other ARPG’s already that are much better than what D4 has to offer at the moment and I was seriously surprised why you did not copy and iterate on these ideas.
As in regards to the Talent Tree (Passive Skill System), I think there are also better ways to do it.
My issue with the Passive Talent Tree is that you have to spend points into pre-required Talents that you maybe do not even want to use, just to get to the Talents you wanna have. I think the Talent Tree should rather be like the current Active Skill System - which is rather a Skill List than a Skill Tree - where you can spend points into anything you want without being required to put points into pre-required Talents.
Also the Major Gameplay and Mechanic Changing Talents at the end of the Tree could be separate and require you to spend several points at once to unlock them (aka Spend 5 points into the Endless Winter Talent to unlock it), instead of requiring you to go through the tree with its pre-required talents to unlock them.
You asked what we are interested to hear about in the next blog post and this is my personal list of things that interest me to hear about:
Very interested in hearing about
Medium interested / medium priority to hear about
Thank you!!
Edits: typos, spelling & structure
Thank you for sharing an update with us! I noticed that the legendary items feel a little… bland, to be put mildly. One of the features which D3 got right, was a nice little text explaining the history of said weapon or item. Are there plans to reintroduce this into D4 Legendary and Mythic items?
I, and I hope am not alone in this, have a bit of a “lore-tooth” and personally love to read about the origins of legendary items.
Thank you!
I strongly encourage the Dev team to reconsider the “mounts” in the game, the fear I believe the diablo community has is the idea of not enough monsters to kill in-between areas. mounts encourage too much travel time so “here’s a mount to get you to the action faster” .
Diablo 4 needs to have the same feeling as all of its previous games of slaying all the demons of hell and not this feeling of let me mount up so I can get the demon slaying because there isn’t enough here.
again the mounts could be fine if there isn’t really a “NEED” for them.
The item graphics look terrible. The items are tiny and the font doesn’t feel like a medieval game but from a corporate email. Larger more detailed item graphics would be better
That why i said that the developers should tell us their goal/vision or plan about D4 partying in this blog instead of “player hub”.
And I assume that you guys also have problem with D2 party system then since it did the same thing incentive (more exp) as D3 party system.
You have got to make an entirely open item economy part of this game. I’ve watched with horror as Bliz has drawn all the wrong conclusions about the success of D2 and the hints we’re getting is that this will be just another glorified D3.
The real money AH in D3 had the potential to revolutionize the entire gaming industry and you let it fizzle and die on the vine. The first company to get it right will make billions and you blew it by absolutely astoundingly high transaction fees and a $1 minimum.
I hope this gets rescued in time. I really do and I’ve been playing since 1999.
“One of my favorite things about mounts was customizing it by attaching a trophy to the saddle…”
Geralt of Rivia says hi 
If all of the items end up being the same size for slots it will be terrible. Items should have their own sizes to fill in certain slots and to better see and find the image of what you are looking for.
Glad the team seems to be having fun playtesting, I can only imagine what that is like! The map with the peak number of player traffic was super interesting to see, as well as the Blockout explanation and images, it is fascinating to me anyways.
Excited to see the zooming in for some storytelling elements, I feel Diablo 3 missed some of those marks quite a bit and while some might think its a minor thing to talk about right now, I think its something to know ahead of time. The cinematic stills are amazing too, very non spoilery !
The open world and multiplayer looks like it will be extremely fun to engage in, I know some people are worried and seem confused though that its too mmo-lite but I think what we’re seeing here is exactly as it needs to be. It isn’t an mmo and the story is pretty blunt: Most heroes and nephalem are gone, heavens shut their doors so… to me it all works out if not too many people show up or I don’t see the same face again. Also LOVED the section on the Camps, I hope we get more of that soon.
Can’t say much on the itemization right now, that topic and project is on going obviously, I will say it is a bit confusing between the angelic, and demonic powers and I believe the third one was ancestral or nephalem? It seems weird probably need to explain it a bit more in the future which I know was stated.
Thank you Diablo IV team for giving us so much information, I know more about your game than Overwatch 2 which is a bit saddening in some ways. I fully agree that a year with no BlizzCon means we do need more information, now more than ever being communicative and honest is crucial. Thank you again for the update!
I really don’t like the aspect of this being an MMO, Semi or otherwise. this is not going to be something like WoW classic . at least from the dev block it looks less interactive than destiny and d3 . This is aboslutely the wrong path in my opinion. When i play Diablo, I don’t play it for random people . I play solo or with friends . If this is forced to be an online game with just who ever is there . I won’t buy the game . Yes there are those hardcore fans who just see the title and say they can do nothing wrong. If they want to do a Diablo MMO then they need to do an MMO. If they want to do a Diablo game then they need to drop the MMO part. I really don’t want D4 to fail. after the … lack luster attempt at D3 and its failures . the Diablo franchise needs a win, not a gamble. Now Do i like the idea of special Events/ zones /and dungeons having the option to have people join in because you must have a party. but at the same time it should not be tied to progression or forced in anyway. it needs to be 100% optional content. With the current design or at least how i take it … it will just be like D3 high end torment runs with random people in the world. that will lose player interest really quickly
still, there should be an option to see NO other player at all, if you dont want to
items are…ok? i guess? ADA will turn farming into a giant RNGesus pray fest^^
also i didnt see a single item with more than 1 socket
are runes still a thing? will more sockets only appear on lower tier items?
or was that just random?
Talking about real-time cutscenes. May I suggest a small idea?
Alot of the times when you see these kinds of stuff, you tend to see your party members become completely irrelevant for the duration, making it quite boring and unimmersive at times.
But since we’re trying to push the envelope, why not have some real-time cut-scenes show interactions between the characters within you’re party?
We’ve been shown how well a few lines of interactions between characters can define their characteristics and make them see so much more alive. Why not bring this?
If you finished a certain side quest solo that involves a cutscene. You get the standard “You’re the only hero” cutscene.
But if you’re a party, we can have so much more depth by just adding a few remarks between character on the situation.
For example, Lets say you met the Ghost of Deckard Cain.
Solo quest
Cain: Come! Stay awhile and listen!
Barbarian Player 1: It is time for shedding our enemies blood. Not idle talk.
Cain: (sigh) No one ever listens these days.
Party Quest
Cain: Come! Stay awhile and listen!
Barbarian Player 1: It is time for shedding our enemies blood. Not idle…
Sorceress Player 2: You shan’t ignore the power of knowledge Barbarian. It is the mightiest power of all. How fascinating to meet you in person Cain. Did Leah…
Barbarian Player 1: NOT NOW.
Cain: (sigh) No one ever listens.
A few interactions like these would give another depth with just a few more lines.
As someone who connects from China, I really wish there was an offline option. I can no longer play D3 or WoW because even using Asian servers I get around 1000 latency, even though my local connection here is very fast. If it’s not possible to provide an offline mode, please do whatever Overwatch does with their servers, because it’s the only Blizzard game that gives me a decent latency (when using asian servers).
People complaining about mounts obviously haven’t seen any recent isometric games like Lost Ark.
Previous diablo games have a goal, kill diablo and the generals of hell. Those games have a beginning and an end. D4 isn’t like that because world bosses respawn and it’s confirmed there will be weekly/daily quests in a never-ending end-game.
The point of mounts is to skip the mobs you don’t have active “quests” for while you make your way to a specific area of the map, or even just to change maps. They’re trying hard to remove loading screens so zone changing is going to be done via mounts unless you are way-pointing into major quest hubs.
D4 is not a “diablo” type single player game, it is a modern isometric rpg in the diablo IP.
They aren’t making D4 diablo 2 because they can just remaster it and they aren’t going to make it like diablo 3 because despite selling well it was a train wreck.
Hi!
I’m still a bit worried about the path that’s being taken here, regarding loots. I think many of us are unsure if the loot system will be like the legendary fest that is Diablo 3 and other similar games, without any sense of exclusiveness and fulfillment. Are you guys planning to have that feeling of, for example, finding a Vex rune in Diablo 2? And the world of possibilities that follows it? Or is everyone going to be the same after a month playing the game?
Diablo 2 has such a simple and well defined loot system and I really believe it should be taken as reference. Sometimes simplicity can be better.
The last image also worries me about the art direction as a whole. The bright red light takes us back to what Diablo 3 failed to portrait, fear and that unsettling feeling of doubt. A river of bright blood and shiny fire with skeletons swimming on it, is less unsettling/scary than a dark dusty room hard to understand such as the Durance of Hate, in D2’s third act. I believe the contrast should be always toned down unless there is an specific reason for it to be like that.
I love all Blizzard’s artists and, being a game artist myself, I know how tight deadlines are and how stressful everything gets. You got this! I hope you’re all doing great, staying healthy and washing your hands every 2 minutes. xD
Keep up the good work!
Cheers!