Diablo IV Quarterly Update - Q2 June 2020

The images posted are beautiful, the thoughtfulness your all sharing is appreciated as well. I can’t wait to see what’s next.

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First of all, thank you for this very open and sharing approach.

Personally, I like it very much.
Also the insight in game developing.
(I’m a gis developer myself).

What I always liked about diablo is the godforsaken, dark, loneliness in a doomed world. Full of blood and gore caused by demons. And only you can help.
I loved that bit.

Although not dark enough and missing the blood and gore, in my opinion, D3 did have a great story (except for cain’s demise, I hope he makes a full recovery in d4).

So, I love a good story. I know Blizzard can. :slight_smile:

I’m not sure the open world thing is going to be a plus. I certainly would not like mandatory large group play to slay a boss.
Raids have no place in diablo, in my opinion.

Items.
I don’t know their contexts nor can I estimate their increase in power to the character. So I can’t really comment on that.
However, I always liked having a top tier of items, like uniques (D2) or legendaries (D3).
(Not ancients and primals).
A way to perfect your items would be awesome. Especially obtaining optimal rolls and stats you want.
Would be great to upgrade a legendary to primal in D3 with the stats you want.

Having a tier of which only one can be equipped feels like a mistake to me.

Hopefully that changes in the coming time.

Please ensure we have lots and lots of stash space and character slots in D4.

Testing.
Awesome you took advantage of this nasty bug to test client server tech and even rolling out updates.

Obviously, I can’t wait for it to be finished. You too, I guess.
But please do the famous Blizzard thing where you only release when you feel it is ready. Blizzard games used to be so robust, steady and mostly bug free. Reinstate that please. It will be much appreciated.
Yes used to be. W3 remaster was a disaster.

While fully understandable it’ll take few more years before release, can you please make some more interesting updates for D3, please.
Perhaps finish the story and areas of the abadoned 2nd expansion. It seems nice given the few bits and pieces in D3 now.
And yes, I’d pay for that.
More character slots would be nice too, btw.

I am looking forward to the next update.
Keep up the good work!

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I’ll be honest: I perused those items and have absolutely no idea what they do, or whether these are good or bad. :woman_shrugging:

“Easy to learn”? I hope so.

Kinda sad there wasn’t more screenshots of the world. I know it is a work-in-progress, but the sporadic release of screenshots and concept art is all I have to slake my appetite for Diablo 4, until a playable demo becomes available. Feed me, dammit! :plate_with_cutlery:

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I think my main hope here is that when they use Angelic/Demonic/Ancestral stats as a prereq for other affixes they let it be random. For example, I don’t want Crushing Blow affixes to always be tied to a high Ancestral score, because then you can’t experiment with Demonic Crushing Blow builds, etc. So if an item can roll a Crushing Blow affix with any of the three as a prereq, that could potentially be fine (albeit annoying) because then you just need to grind to find a version of that item with the affix that fits your build.

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My main concern about this game revolves around the Druid. Ever since LoD Druid has been my favorite class being able to choose between a summoner/elemental/werewolf/werebear. I like the direction the game is goin, however I always liked playing as a werewolf with an EbotdZ and just tearing through things. I would like to know if there are any plans to make the Druid stay in werewolf form besides using the skills that change between forms. While it looks cool, I’m not too sure I’m going to like it. That may change when I get my hands on it, but after watching(and rewatching ) the blizzcon demo multiple times, I began to feel discouraged about the Druid and how this change will make my favorite class in the Diablo franchise become my least favorite.

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I can see two main solutions here.

  1. Random. Sometimes Crushing blow requires Ancestral power, sometimes Demonic. On the other hand, why bother with the system at all then? It only adds RNG.

  2. Tiered affixes.
    (a) Like 1-5% crit chance do not require any ADA power. But 6% crit chance affix requires Angelic Power or whatever. That way, if you want that last step on the affix tier, it comes with a cost/tradeoff, but you can do perfectly fine with just the second highest affix tier too.
    (b) An alternative to this version would be scaling affixes, if you have 0 Angelic power, the affix gives 3% crit, if you have 30 Angelic power it might give 4.5 crit, if you have 60+ angelic power it might give 6% crit. That way, you have soft scaling instead of hard breakpoints. Both systems can work imo, just a matter of preference.

In any case, yes, it would be really bad if each affix is tied to a specific ADA power. That would be D3 sets all over again. By locking players into a few pre-defined paths of where they can go with their builds.

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The new update didn’t feel like it had a ton of information. A lot of it was “we are playing the game, come see how we develop games and the iteration process”.

With that said I am VERY concerned about skills in Diablo 4. You mentioned the talent tree being a hot topic but I think if players can only choose 6 skills the game is doomed to suck. Please talk about the skill bar some more.

There weren’t any new photos of heros in the real world so I’m just presuming you all are still running 6 skills. It’s not enough. My barbarian in D2 this season uses 11-12 skills PLUS the run toggle key. We need combat complexity. Also a weapon switch please for magic finding/buffs/dual playstyles/spell charges, etc.

Also, I’d like to hear more on resource and life regeneration. I hope that spamming abilities without having to use “resource junk moves” is a thing.

I do like that you all added crushing blow and +to skills again, it seems so obvious that it’s frankly annoying it wasn’t in vanilla Diablo 3. A nice addition to items.

The legendaries look like a lot of the affixes may be random, I hope many of these items are more static with their mods. I like that in D2 you can say unique item x and people know roughly what it is. Also, can we please call these uniques again? Why did we have to adopt WoW terminology, D2 named these and it was absolutely fine. We don’t want Diablo to blend anymore with WoW, they need to be very separate games.

Please talk about runes some more and socketed items, please elaborate on this system. Will there be runewords? Socketed gray items role if any? What is the max amount of sockets on an item? etc. The runes seem really underwhelming right now, I hope this isn’t a case of being too proud to bring back runewords. We get it, Diablo 3 suck and Diablo 4 is a new game; not Diablo 2 again. That doesn’t mean scrap runes and make a bad game again like Diablo 3 just to be different.

Crafting and charms would be great additions to talk about as well. Will we be forced to carry trash items again to the blacksmith? Can we have something much better please? Charms easily beats hauling trash around.

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Pretty good update, seems like the team has the idea not to make the game an MMO.

Like the inclusion of camps, right out of “The Witcher 3” (which is fine BTW). More immersive stuff like that gets my vote.

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I’m loving what i see! Great job! Talents and skills are really what we what to know more about. As someone said above items’ descriptions are not clear at all.

An idea: you can upgrade roll of a chosen affix though some kind of blood magic (idk) so you have progress bar on weapon and you need to kill monsters to fill it and slightly increase chosen affix’s numbers

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Hello,

A very Interesting Update, but I want to hear more about items, talents, crafting, and Endgame. Item affixes need more love and I would like to see a range on the attack, so for let’s say 40 - 90 attack.

But also you can find items with affixes that boost your attack on that item with an affix that is something like this:

“*Adds (3-4) to (5-8) [Fire Damage].”
“*Adds (3-4) to (5-8) [Cold Damage].”
“*Adds (3-4) to (5-8) [Lightning Damage].”
“*Adds (3-4) to (5-8) [Physical Damage].”
“*Adds (3-4) to (5-8) [Poison Damage].”
“*Adds (3-4) to (5-8) [Storm Damage].”
“*Adds (3-4) to (5-8) [Earth Damage].”

So an item could have a physical attack, Fire attack, lightning attack, cold attack, poison attack, Storm attack, Earth attack. This gives the itemization more of a loot hunt, which is a core part of any ARPG. So you could use a physical attack weapon but it is not optimal for a cold spell. So I would like to see more flat affixes rather than percentages so a variety of affixes is always good in an APRG.

Also, spell Damage is also a way to convey power, so, for example, a Wand could get 100 spell attack or (spell damage). So let’s say that you are using a cold skill and you find a wand that has 100 spell attack and Adds (3-4) to (5-8) [Cold Damage]. this could also boost your cold spells. so you have 100 spell attack, and 10 cold attack.

Also, I would like to see different armor and weapon types, so an axe could be separated into different sub axes, so let’s say a tomahawk, battle axe, hatchet, etc. And for armor give them different bases, so let’s say that a chest armor could have dodge defense or armor defense or energy defense, and maybe 2 of these defenses. And also these defenses give you some specific power. Where these sub-weapon types have fixed extra affixes such as a tomahawk could have a more bleed chance.

Also, give legendaries some fixed affixes that can only roll on that legendary apart from the legendary power, because that gives you that decision, do I want to use this legendary because of the legendary power and the specific legendary affix or do I want to convert this legendary power on my rare item with the consumable that you talked about in the system and design part 2.

I like that you are going to touch on talent trees later on because I feel that they are underwhelming at the moment. give them more branching so you have a lot more choices to choose from.

Also, you can also introduce ascendencies that you can unlock later on in the game where you can specify your character into some specific spec, which also has an ascendency tree where you make important choices.

I was thinking of an attribute system where you can spend points in when you level, just like in D2, but in this attribute system, you can choose angelic, demonic, and ancestral power. So you don’t need to get this power just from gear, because that becomes just like sets in away.

let’s just end by saying I am looking forward to the next D4 Quarterly Update.

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Ooh, this is an intriguing idea that could be an option for endgame progression. I could see it working where as you have an item equipped and you’re clearing content the item gains an xp of sorts, and when it “levels up” you get a point you can use to re-roll an affix. That would be more satisfying than grinding mats for rerolls.

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What about party size? I have more than 3 friends I would like to play with. 6-8 would be much more ideal for most groups of friends.

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Still, the direction is promising.
I can see why it gives them the feeling of the game still in their thoughts after play.

Looking forward to how this progresses!

I agree with this. Too many percentages, item art is bland, items should have different sizes.

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My feedback is that I love you are asking for feedback. A big take away I see from this is there seems to be a good class identity in your play test. I love that. Very interested to see new classes and how they fit in with the world.

Info about Itemization direction should be clearer. End game will it be like D3: everyone running around in full legendarys? Will rare or other type items have a place in builds like in D2 and PoE? Crafted items have a significant role?

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How did you determine that? From this update? I don’t know, if all the heroes have some big AoE that kills the monsters in roughly the same way with different graphics then there isn’t really any difference between heroes. I like how D2 had things like Oak Sage, Teleport, Battle Orders, Auras, find item, and curses that clearly differentiated classes in a powerful manner.

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Yep, free us of the skill bar! Let Batman hotkey werewolf ability to whichever key and stop removing the option cause he only has 6 skills.

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I agree with the comments about the legendary powers feeling bland from a thematic standpoint, but I really like that the effects they give can be used in creative ways.

A legendary that directly modifies a specific skill can feel really flavorful, but the examples they’ve shown here have WAY more potential for build flexibility and that’s what I want to see. I’m already salivating thinking of ways to combine legendary abilities like this to create unique combo moves!

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Yeah the item art could use a little work to make it look impactful. It seems to look too generic. Maybe the art is not finalized and is just a placeholder.

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I’ve seen ‘Find Item’ referenced as a skill that contributes to the class identity for a barbarian multiple times in the last couple of days. I don’t understand why people think ‘Find Item’ defines the barbarian, at all.

Can you explain that?

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