Diablo IV Quarterly Update - Q4 December 2020

Your concern about skills being worse without legendary affixes is similar to my concern with skill points and break points. Especially with having them on passives. Stuff like that makes you build very much the the same. Are you telling me not one WW barb is going to build for crit to get that 30% crit buff when using WW. Basically means I need to dump a crap ton into dex which I wouldn’t want to normally,

I guess if the multipliers work in favor of main stat, all Str might out power the balance needed with Str and DeX to get that bonus crit. Breakpoints are bad. IMO.

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Significant to what player type. Let’s take D3s resources. Say respecs while leveling only cost gold. But at level cap they required 50DBs, 200BSs, and 500 of each salvaging material.

For people who play very regularly that may hurt a bit but regained in shirt time. For the normal player that is quite significant. For the casual player, better hope they give free respecs with each patch.

Significant to all player types.
Which to be fair, is once again a reason a cooldown is the better tool for the job. The great equalizer that you can’t circumvent by playing more :smiley:

A gold cost would be pointless. Sooner or later the gold “economy” will crash.
Other than a cooldown, if there is a material cost, make it something with a low cap, so you can only respec 1-2 times before having to fill up the resource again. That way, you never get a ton of them, merely by playing a lot.

Maybe something like;
Each week you get 1 respec token for free. You can also find 1 respec token each week (random drop). You can hold up to 10 respec tokens.
First respec costs 1 token. If you respec again within a week, the next respec cost 3 tokens. And the next after that costs 6 tokens. If you dont respec for a week, the cost resets back to 1 token.
That way, you get 1 free frespec each week. But even if you save up, and find tokens on your own, you cant respec more than 3 times in a week.

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The effects of the main stats feel very arbitrary to me. Diablo 2 did the main stat stuff the best - though still imperfectly ofc. Strength gives you flat physical damage and makes you able to carry heavier gear. Makes sense. Dexterity governed accuracy and evasion (aka defence in D2). Makes sense. Vitality = flat HP. Makes sense. Int = flat mana. Willpower is a better word here, but makes sense. The main attribute stats are core to your character, so they should elevate base numbers at a fixed rate, rather than augment the base numbers by a percentage. Leave multipliers to gear and skills where we have more freedom.

We still like the idea of Mythic items, but we don’t want to create an item quality that invalidates all others, so they’re out for now.

Quicky suggestion: Make endgame Mythic items that are “Bodybound” (can never unequip) and limited to one per character. It could give everyone an individualized item to chase instead of everyone just looking for a fancy leather belt like in PoE. Maybe a garbage idea but it sounds neat to me.

The game sounds like it’s coming together very well :smiley: I hope to hear more about crafting, currency/trade mechanics, sockets, and runewords next time. Keep up the good work and please don’t crunch your staff!

Unless you scale it to time played, it never going to be significant to thise that play alot. Or even tied to content. Some could just farm mats in prep while thise that take things slow get screwed.

You cant farm in preparation when there is a cap. Like bloodshards etc.
Nor can you farm your way out of a cooldown.

If you still want a drop to be involved, there could also just be a cooldown on how often you can get the drop, as mentioned above. Like one droppable respec token per week. So even if you only played a little, or a lot, you likely would be able to get that single token.

It is not hard to make a significant, casual-friendly, respec cost. It is only a matter of whether Blizzard got the will to do it.

I think in general, the affix pool still feels a bit wonky. I agree with LLama’s recent video about this December blog update at the end of his video when he’s talking about what he feels is still wrong with the affix pool. There are just too many of these specific affixes that do specific things instead of contributing to the characters overall power in a general sense. Its like ok cool I could make a stun build or make a build focused on elites but why have those take up affix slots instead of just delegating them to legendary powers since they’re more build specific. I think he sums it up well in the last 20 minutes of his hour+ video on the December update so I’d rather not type several paragraphs about it.

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Specific affixes seems like a really good thing? Allows builds to specialize more.
Generalized affixes are bad and boring tbh. +All skills is the worst affix in Diablo 2. By far.

Because everything shouldnt be about legendary powers imo. You are also going to have a ton more normal affixes than legendary powers.

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Well if gold is the cost to respec, then they could have it percentage based.
So:

  • Respecing at level 5-10 would cost 5% of the player total gold
  • Respecing at level 11-15 would cost 10% of the player total gold
  • Respecing at level 16-20 would cost 15% of the player total gold
  • Respecing at level 21-25 would cost 20% of the player total gold
  • Respecing at level 26-30 would cost 25% of the player total gold
  • Respecing at level 31-35 would cost 30% of the player total gold
  • Respecing at level 36-40 would cost 35% of the player total gold

Now respecing multiple times in a short time frame would add a 50% bonus to the cost each time. This bonus would reset once every week.

This is of course assuming that gold is account bound, shared across the account, and also doesn’t rain from the sky.

On the other hand if respecing costs a farmable material or item, then maybe something like:

Either way, respec imo should be something that a person wouldn’t want to do constantly, at least not without paying a price that is.

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Meh just watch the last 20 minutes or so of his video if you want it explained.

Cant be purely % based, otherwise you could respec endlessly, as long as you dont mind being at zero gold (or 0.000000000000000000…1 gold anyway).

Also, imo respec costs should definitely be per character. No transferring of respec cost between characters.
An account-wide cost also discourages having multiple characters, when the opposite should be the goal.

This one I agree with. Though as above, maybe 1 token per character instead of 3 per account, to not discourage having many characters.

This is a little harsh, if anything this update looks more like D2 than D3. Im hopeful, I still think its moving in the right direction, there is way too much we don’t know yet about the game.

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I really disagree with respeccing having a cost. The only function a cost has is to waste the players time.

It’s not just during leveling that people want to experiment, people want to be able to experiment at level cap too when they want to try a different build that suits that great item that just dropped.

And if D4 will have limited character slots (and it almost certainly will) the lack of freedom to respec is even worse.

I hope there won’t be respeccing items on sale in the cash shop, because that would mean that the developers actually have no problem with the player being able to respec at any time, just as long as they’re forking money in the cash shop.

I mean, this already works for gems.
Runes in D2 were more interesting because when you upgraded them, you would get the next new tier of Ilvl rune with new effects.

Id rather have different type of crafting materials which drop from mobs/barrels,corpses/whatever you loot, that with certain recipes, they create a new crafting and potentially powerful socketable item for example (or even a completely new piece of gear even).
Mostly, tweaking items is what makes itemization generally more interesting.
The merrier, the better.

It will of course have some limit. It should just be a pretty high one.
50 character limit like in WoW, would be a decent start. Add more over time when new classes are added.

Yeah, that would be horrible. Game-destroying even.

A respec cost still allows people to change build to adjust to a new item. Just not all the time. But hopefully, amazing new items do not drop all the time either.

First of all, you are making assumptions on a couple accounts, especially the cash shop having respec consumables

Second of all, having the freedom to respec whenever you want makes choices and planning less meaningful. On the surface it seems like what you are saying makes total sense, however in practice it dilutes the process and connection you have to the character and what you have built.

It is not the best comparison, but it is kind of like Forza Horizon 4. They just hand you everything and it is not hard at all to buy tons of the best cars and upgrade them very quickly. Then you have it all and can play around, but at that point, I don’t even care. I feel like I didn’t earn anything I have and it all lost it’s value and feeling of connection.

There can be beauty in restriction and limitations. More is not always better.

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Only the first respec would be purely %based. Follow up respecs would have an added 50% bonus tack onto it.

For example, if I had 100,000 gold and chose to respec my level 40 druid. I would have to pay 35,000 gold in order to respec. If I decide to respec again after that with 65,000 gold, then I would need to pay the 35% (+50% bonus), so instead of paying simply 22,750 gold, I would need to pay an additional 50% bonus, so it would be about 34,125. Another respec would add another 50% on top of the previous one. So if I try to respec again at 30,875 gold, I would need to pay the 35% cost (+100% bonus), which should be about 21,613 gold. The bonus cost would continue adding 50% to the initial cost, each time you respec until the reset (which would be about once a day).

So assuming that gold would have other important factors and can’t be easily gained, this should still prevent folks from respecing willy nilly (assuming that my math isn’t wrong), as they would run out of gold eventually.

Well the material idea would give players two sets of respecs. The first one would be account wide and could be used 3 times without restrictions on any character, it replenishes about 1 respec every week or so.

The second one would be character specific, as in every character would have their own materials/tokens they could use to respec. Characters can only hold 2 tokens maximum and using one places respec cooldown on the character for about 6 hours. Replenishing these would require in-game activity.

Please speak for yourself… There are plenty of games for you to get your loot and free specs. You clearly are not a fan of early Diablo games and do not speak for most of the Diablo community. Diablo 3 was the outlier in this franchise and it’s time to get back to real Diablo.

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Thoughts and Feedback (in no particular order)

Let me start first, overall positive. Id grade the update at 85%, solid B. Extra Credit for returning to Unique Items instead of Mythic so I’ll boost you to 88%.

*Core stats are welcome return, but they’re only balanced by the addition of items have stat requirements to unlock additional skills. Assuming this all works, it’ll eliminate “Main Stat” issues and the false choice of stat point allocation. I’d like to see more evidence of this theory being correct though. “Main Stat” a la D3 would equate failure for this game.

*Attack speed is a welcome return. It might mean more work, but I like weapon choice having a role in driving your build. Terrible in D3 to equip a Daibo only to have it “disappear” for every attack on a Monk. Bottom line, we need unique animations for every class of weapons. Swords. Maces. Bows. Polearms. Some skills also shouldn’t work or function if you’re not equipping the right weapon. I recall an excuse in D3 being that animating every character with every weapon type would be too laborious. I don’t buy it. Not for a company as big and well resourced as Blizzard. Make it happen.

*+Dex helps regenerate mana? Really? Overall not a deal breaker, but I think that’s sloppy RPG work. I don’t think conventional RPG dynamics has ever inferred that having exceptional Dexterity helps recoup mental/mana energy.

I’m showing my age here, but I value the greater gravitas inherent of what we’ve seen in D4. Ever since WoW came on scene, Blizzard has looked more like a Super Bowl Doritos commercial. Everything is telegraphed as EPIC. NEED MOAR POWA The ridiculous damage numbers in D3 are evidence of this as well. The shoulder pauldrons alone in the WoW artstyle (and D3) look heavy enough to drop your character to the ground. It worked for awhile, just not for me. I’m hoping we turn the page on that art style.

I saw too much debate on Respec’ing your character. I’m sort of impartial, however, I think it extends game life to make respec’ing cost prohibitive after a certain point. If you want a new character, you have to start over. I think the goal for me would be to have a collection of high level characters that I could swap my loot between, each with a different purpose.

There’s still just too much we don’t know about this game, crafting, economics, social game play, I struggle to see how anyone can definitively judge this game yet.

Lots of math to do here. The number of permutations just needs to be plentiful enough to offer of healthy bounty of discovery for a player. Too many permutations and you create an obnoxious PoE. Too few and you have all the depth of D3…

:+1:t2: This update is a thumbs up. These systems will be excellent if they assign reasonable numbers and criteria throughout.

SKILL TREE
Clustering is fine so long as it results in many build outcomes. The quantity of competitive and playable builds is the only thing that matters. I do hope that running top-tier builds with more than one DPS skill will be possible. I did like the idea of planning point investment up different tree branches, but it sounds like the stat system will absorb some of that customization.

Your explanation of respec is great. Please make sure the cost to re-spec involves no more than ~8 hours of resources acquisition time. If it takes me 30 days to form my character, I don’t want to farm resources for another 30 days to start the respec process.

If those respec reagents are already acquired along-the-way of grinding and farming, then it can take longer than 8 hours to farm a full batch of respec materials from scratch. Either way, if I play for 3 months and decide it’s time to try another build, I should already have the means to respec a few times over – unless those resources were invested into building power elsewhere.

That said – just be sure the fee to respec is reasonable for casual players, who are already fully leveled and invested into their one build.

PRIMARY STATS
Good idea to steer away from the Angelic / Demonic language. The class identity should be a constant, otherwise why show all of those fancy introductions during character creation?

I love how the point assignment was done. The stat requirement unlocks for certain skill effects is brilliant. It will add to build depth if they are plentiful. Work extra hard to balance those unlocks, we don’t want build guides saying, “Spend all points into strength because you only need to unlock strength effects, and they become most powerful with 100% of your points in strength. All other stat unlock sucks, there are not enough legendary items to support them, so just ignore them.”

Good luck with the balance here, I’m rooting for you.

WEAPON TYPES
Great. Just beware of the pitfall of slow weapons with higher attack power being superior for dps skills on cooldown. How do you plan to get around this? Extend certain cooldowns for slower weapons?

ITEM QUALITIES
Will those Magic items be compelling with fewer, but stronger affixes? Nope. In your example, the total power from having multiple affixes beats the magic item. Specifically in the Staff comparison example 5% resource regeneration multiplied by all of those other affixes on the legendary item will far exceed 7% resource regeneration.

Please consider doubling the value ranges on the magic weapon: 10% resource regeneration and 22% immobilize chance. Why? because this really equates to a rare item with 4 affixes doubled up:

  • 5% Resource Regeneration
  • 5% Resource Regeneration
  • 11% Immobilize Chance
  • 11% Immobilize Chance

Of course you’ll come up with the right numbers, I can’t speak to the numbers in the example. Rares should probably encompass 2 affix Magic Items in the 90th percentile. Meaning, a really good 2 affix Magic item might as well be presented as a Rare item.

That staff with 7% Resource Regeneration + 16% Immobilize Chance would be a Blue Magic item, but if the both stats were well rolled: 9-10% Resource Regeneration + 21-22% Immobilize Chance it should show up as a Yellow Rare.

This way I can chuck out all blues – you know I dislike picking up pennies?

LEGENDARY AND UNIQUE ITEMS
This seems great. Legendary items will mostly likely always beat out a Rare, provided there are enough legendary effects that can boost damage.

Keep it up.