Diablo IV Quarterly Update - Q4 December 2021

General Discussion
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Hi all,

The fourth quarterly update for 2021 is now live!. This is intended to be a dedicated thread for the purpose of discussion and feedback, and our developers will be prioritizing reviewing feedback or discussion here.

Please note that this is a dedicated thread intended for player discussion and we may not respond to or immediately answer questions in this thread at this time. We may consider questions or feedback here for future inclusion in Quarterly Updates, and look forward to reading your thoughts!

If you’d like to recap or revisit previous posts on the announcement or ongoing insights on Diablo IV development, you can see everything here:

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nothing bad to say about visual design

but i saw something alerting regarding itemization
you wrote

That Essence can then be implanted into another Legendary item, overriding the power that was present in the item at that time.

but then you showed a rare item (with only 4 affixes!) that just straight up gets upgraded into a legendary item
i hope that was just a mistake because it would again render rare items completely obsolete and only make them a vessel for becoming legendary items

damage numbers are still way too bloated

i don’t really know what to think about the paragon system
it’s quite a weird aesthetic looking like a go game and it feels like it’s simply a PoE skilltree while we as far as we know already have a passive skill tree and attribute allocations
did that change?

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Just reposting my first response from the other thread, to have it in the appropriate place.

In Diablo IV, the +Skill Rank affix returns. As players invest points in skills, they grow in potency, and finding items with +Skill Rank can speed that along.

GOOD! No seriously, really good. Can’t even begin to describe how positive this change (back to what it was at announcement…) is.

Getting a lucky drop that nets you a skill you’d like for your build ten levels before you would otherwise have access to it is a huge boost!

Not good. Dont lock skills behind lvls at all. That makes lvling more repetitive, if we have to go along the very same path every single time. All skills should be available to put points in at lvl 1 (or within the first few levels).
If you want to introduce the game to players slowly, then fair enough, have lvl requirements on skills on the first character we make of each class. But after that, remove those lvl requirements.

Now, if you’re searching for a legendary power, like Martial Arts—which enhances the Barbarian’s kick ability— you may find it on rings, chestplates, or helmets; there’s no need to hunt for a specific item type any longer.

Sweet jebus. This is exactly what I have argued legendaries should be adjusted to (rather than all legendary affixes being available in all item slots).
Really, really positive change (might always have been the plan, and the first blog post was just imprecise)

HOWEVER, now that Rares can be “buffed” with a legendary affix, you need to let us buff Rares as Rares. As in, make a rare able to compete with a Rare+Legendary affix, while keeping the characteristics of a Rare item = all random affixes, and no legendary affix.
Otherwise, you just made Rares something we will never ever equip (and only use as a crafting material at the Occultist).

The Occultist can extract a legendary power from a Legendary item, crystallizing it into Essence while destroying the item in the process. That Essence can then be implanted into another Legendary item, overriding the power that was present in the item at that time. Essence material can also be stored and used at a later time.

As long as the essences can ONLY be added to item slots that could already drop with that legendary affix; so it only works as bad luck protection, then this is totally fine. Otherwise, bad, and invalidates the change mentioned above.
Seems like it is essentially the Legendary consumable you talked about 2 years ago.

Each of these monsters seem to enjoy collecting certain types of items and will be somewhat more likely to drop those items than others. While bandits are fond of Maces, Crossbows, and Boots, if you’re hunting for a new pair of Pants, you’d do well to kill some of the Drowned instead.

Good!

level 50

Hah, I was right after all :slight_smile:

Paragon

I am surprised, this sounds like it has some potential. Although I am missing some details.
Is the paragon lvls per character, per class or per account? Please say per character…
Also, it is essentially endless or not? Please god no.
Don’t make it D3 paragon all over again (account-based and endless). Then it wouldnt matter how nice the system itself is.
Other than that, the system seems fine, and reminds me of PoE skill web (especially with the socketables).

Overall, nice update, although a bit light on information outside the paragon piece :stuck_out_tongue: Like, how does all this affect the skill tree? Is it unchanged?

Got no comments on the art update, for the reason you mention yourself:

At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter what the art looks like if the gameplay isn’t fun.

But it is of course very positive that the art is designed around the goal of having very adjustable skill modifications!
Stuff like blood on the character models and what not? Could not care less :slight_smile:

Edit:
Ugh, bad… someone noticed Blizzard forgot to hide the damage numbers in the Death FX video at the end.
Rogue hitting for 330,000 dmg. Seriously Blizzard… What the heck are you doing. Remove a zero or two from that number already.
No, the numbers themselves do not matter. But how fast the numbers are scaling does. If you deal double damage 2 hours from now, everything that came before is being invalidated and feel meaningless.

Another thing I missed.
One of the normal affixes on the legendary item is 16% strength… seriously.
So much for attributes coming from the character.

On the positive side, dmg ranges on weapons are back.
And, attack/defense seems to be gone from amulets? Hooray.

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Sup Lolli42! - To confirm, Rare items can be modified by Essences. Glad this came up early in the thread to help confirm.

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At minimum we need a similar recipe for upgrading rares (add 2 extra affixes, of increase the power of the ones it already has) so they can compete with these enhanced ‘Rare Legendaries’.
Alternatively, when converting a Rare to a Legendary, it randomly loses 2 of its affixes (or whatever the difference is between legendary and rare affix amount).

If Rares are just straight up worse than Legendaries, what is the point in having Rares?

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Thanks for the update. I like the Occulist and the fact that we can farm certain enemies to have a better chance of getting certain item types (like farming bandits for crossbows and such). Perhaps consider also allowing us to farm certain enemies to have a better chance of getting certain affixes on items (for example, killing fire enemies have a better chance of dropping gear with fire resistance or damage increase)?

Paragon Board looks interesting, but it also raises some questions. For example, is it limited? How much power does it grant characters? Is it account-wide or character specific (I’m assuming character specific based on the update)? Are all paragon boards active at a time, or can players on have one active at a time, and must switch between them?

Also, I’m not keen about the upgradable glyphs, since they seemingly can only be upgraded in certain dungeons, I’d rather not a see a repeat of Diablo 3 greater rifts/legendary gems. Instead I’d just suggest to have where you can find these glyphs anywhere in the world, and salvage them; and the salvaged materials can be used to upgrade other glyphs. The higher the glyph level, the more glyph materials you’d need.

All in all, this was a good read imo, especially regarding the visual portion. A tad shame that we didn’t get to see an updated skill tree, depicting skills, passives, and upgrade nodes, runeswords, or the Druid’s unique class system.

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then this is a bad sign and blizzard really didnt read or understand the countless discussions regarding itemization on this forum

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Huh guys ? What is this “Damage per second” bomb on weapons instead of “Attack” ? It can’t mean that our damage will once again depend entirely on weapon damage can it ?

Until then, skills in D4 were the source of damage and weapons increased their effects. Exactly the opposite of D3.

If you downgraded the design to this old D3 system, the source of so many issues with the game, it’s a HUUUUGE step back !!!

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I’d only say that this is a bad sign if sockets and by extension gems (if they’re in Diablo 4), and runewords can’t be used mostly by magic and rare tier items. After all, legendary items are essentially rare items except their 5th affix is a legendary affix.

That said, I did noticed that the rare item they showed, only had 4 affixes rather than 5 like they were stated to have in last year’s quarterly update.

So I’m not sure if that’s unintentional, or if there was some more changes to the itemization that wasn’t mentioned.

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Didn’t think of that… Hopefully not :smiley: In the end, it shouldnt matter if it is called weapon DPS or Attack. The design that makes it so skills scale differently with weapon attack can also scale differently with weapon DPS. It is just a name.

But yeah, who knows :confused: Blizzard definitely should clarify.

These items seem even more mock-up like than usual. Some affix names are spelled wrong. The fonts seem off. So maybe we cant really trust anything we see in those items.

Would be really bad if Rares have the same amount of normal affixes as Legendaries at least.

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well the last time they talked about items they wanted to make all qualities viable and now they are back to upgrading

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Indeed, because there’d be no point in using rare items. It’d be understandable that if you use the legendary essence on a rare item with 5 affixes, you’d have to choose which affix to replace it. But again that depends on how sockets are handled and whether or not rare and magic items gain the most benefits from them.

Yep, which is why I said it depends on how sockets are handled. If sockets are equally effective for all item rarities, then yeah, magic and rare tier items offer very little in comparison to unique and legendary items. On the other hand, if sockets are mostly beneficial to magic and rare items, then it wouldn’t be as problematic imo.

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Btw, the legendary affix examples are back to being class specific, and even worse, skill specific. Stoooooop :frowning:
Make most of them work across classes, and across skills/builds.

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that honestly sounds like a weird band aid fix
i mean obviously magic items should have stronger socket effects as every affix on them should have a higher value
but that still doesn’t solve the problem with rares simply having the same number of affixes as legendaries as they also have a chance to roll without sockets

legendaries need less affixes and rares should not be able to get augmented

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That’s kind of the point I’m making:

So assuming that rare items still have 5 affixes, then so long as sockets are more beneficial for rare and magic tier items, then it’s not as problematic.

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I was reading the Reddit thread about this update and someone made a suggestion regarding allowing players to choose how in-game numbers are displayed. Basically, allow damage numbers to be displayed not only as their raw value, but any factor of 10, such that a number like 34,137,532 can be displayed as “34.1” or if you prefer, “341.3,” etc. It would be the single biggest accessibility feature to be added to the genre, possibly ever (well, after getting rid of Stamina from D2).

Everything about the footage made me really start to get a bit excited. It looks fantastic!

I have no strong thoughts about itemization, though. If it’s fun to you guys, then I don’t care how it’s implemented - it’ll be good.

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it is because then we are simply back to where we were last itemization blog when you were basically running around turning rare items into legendary items → effectively no single build will feature a rare item since
rare affix < legendary affix
to compensate for that legendary items would need to have only 2/3+1 affixes and not 4+1

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here’s an idea
i’d take these essences and only make it possible to augment white items, giving them the absorbed legendary affix + 2 random normal affixes, turning them into a new surprise legendary item

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That’s where sockets come in honestly, and why they need to be more beneficial for rare and magic items. Because even if we look at last year’s itemization update. Legendary and Unique items still held more benefits than rare and magic items with some exceptions. After all, a legendary affix for the most part is more appealing than an additional non-legendary affix and/or affixes with higher rolls (depending on builds ofc). However, sockets could be a way to bridge the gap between magic, rare tier items and legendary and unique items.

For example, if you found a good rare item with sockets, then you wouldn’t turn it into a legendary item so readily as it would mean:

  • Losing one affix
  • Losing some benefits to sockets
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