Dibalo IV's missing complexity, will be it's biggest problem

General Discussion
1

Hi all,
I’m a concerned Nephalem, that wants to share some of his experience and express my opinion on the currently revealed Diablo IV character itemisation.

On my background I’m 20 years old and I played Diablo 2, Path of Exile, Boderlands 1,2 and 3, Warframe, Destiny 1 and 2, The Divison 2 and about 3000hrs of Diablo 3.

What am I worried about?

The current itemisation with attack/defense aswell as demonic, angelic and ancestral power, looks way to simple, combined wth the similar lack of depth in the active and passive skill tree, it seems that the players will have everything figered out 3 days into the release. After that the copy and paste builds will show up, the top ten best legendaries will be known by everyone and the concurrent players will start to drop.

The biggest problem of all seems to be that the design team is aiming on endgame builds that are focused around legendary items. I think this is a realy bad design choice, that can kill games completly, and I have a perfect example Boderlands 3.

I was hyped for Borderlands 3, I even bought Boderlands 2 a third time, 2 months before release and replayed the story and some dlc’s.

And well they let me down. The itemisation in Borderlands 3 is terrible, and the balancing makes it even worse. I played through the campaign, with the fear that they will force me to play it 3 times. It was only two time but please blizzard don’t do this, it is an old game design technique to crank up your “content” and “playtime”, with little to none development effort.

At some point in the second run, you relalize that only legendaries are viable and even worse, that there are some legenadaries that greatly out perform others.

So I made my build put in the three best legendaries, and I was done.
I was at the end of character development after 60hrs. I could clear everything on the highest difficulty, and the endgame was obsolete because I could’t get anything better out of it. My friends and I said “well let’s just get our progress to 100%”, we made like two side quest, and during the next one we were like, “hm it’s kinda boring now, why do we even play anymore” and stoped. I closed the game and, never started playing again after that.

Last note on Borderladns, I have checked the current status again because, I thought you could fix the game with updates quite easily, but they made it even worse, they increased the difficulty and nerfed the three weapons I was playing. So before the patch all other weapons were under performing, and after the patch they were even worse because the game got more difficult, and well my three weapons were still the best option because of that.

From a top layer perspective I think, uniques(legendaries) should never be the only endgame option, because you start filtering your loot to a few items.
You run rift after rift after rift, with only 16 items in your mind and everything else gets ignored.

Attack/Defense
I understand the intend in itroducing attack/defense, it is beginner friendly, and overall just gives a smoother entrance in to the game. For example 8 atk, 10 atk, 15atk, oh legendary 30atk. I like the idea, but I think it scales very bad, because you can dumb down an item on one stat. For example lets say max lvl is 40, so the max item lvl is 40 and the best rare(yellow) item that drops has 3000 atk and
the best legendary that can drop has 3100atk + an affix. Well we don’t have much build varity then. You could invert it and say yellow 3500 and legendary 3000, but with diablo 3 affixes in mind, the popular choice still seems quite obvious.

I also don’t think that you can solve all problems with just complexity, for example, I played 230hrs of path of exile, still don’t get why people are exited about “Adds 7 to 69 Lightning Damage to Bow Attacks”. I think it is way to hard to find a way into the game, before I started playing Path of Exile I watched like 5 to 8hrs of tutorials.

A solution
Well I don’t want to only point at problems, so I also thought about a solution.
One thing is fairly clear I think, you need to add stats. there has to be multiple way to ehance your charcter, like Strength based damge, Strength based defense, Dexterity based damage, Intelligence based defense, with that foundation you can make barbarian stack healt stats, crusader armor stats, wizards shields and assassins evasion.
So that when you change the class the game acutaly feels different.
For example Star Wars Galaxy of Heroes is a mobile game where every character has 28 stats. From strength, agility and tactics to critical avoidance, potency and deflection chance.
There is definetly a problem when people start comparing your game to mobile.

How to add complexity without removing the simplicty at the start of the game.
Let’s say there are a 100 level. You start playing atk/def items drop, it is kinda easy there are green and red arrows showing what is good and what bad.
You get to level 50 the campaign is finshed, and then the blacksmith that you rescued during the story now has something new for your “Mastery Crafts”(or something like that idk).
From that point on there is a completly new Item pool. Items now have multiple pre- and suffixes, with min to max values.

But you can scale the system, that it is not overwhelming at the start of the endgame. For Exmaple lvl 50 1 prefix and 2 suffixes lvl 60 2 prefixes and 2 suffixes.

So from level 1 on a character has 50 stats in his caracter sheet but, the complexity is “hidden”(a show stats button pls) at first, an item scales multiple stats, so a sword with 300atk gives damage, attackspeed, crit dmg and chance aswell as fire on hit.

But after lvl 50 the same item would look like one handend sword:

  • adds physical damage min to max
    *X% attack speed
    *X% critical damge
    *X% critical chance
    *X% adds fire damage min to max
    *X% fire ailments chance

Same with defensive, it gives health, armor, evasion, health regen, health on hit, life steal…

I think I have to stop now, hopefully someone reads this, but even if nothing changes I will play the game, but not for 20 seasons if it is, that simple an repetitive.

Looking forward to Season 20 of Diablo 3, but I will not play it on the 13th that’s for sure(chuckles).

Bye

5 Likes
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I think the issue re attack and defense stats is that they tie into they endgame item hunt and likely serve as a baseline for blizzard whenever they start to balance the proposed tiered dungeon system. IE blizzard can assume that an average player will have x and y amount of attack and defense when they hit endgame and go from there. I dont know if it’s the most elegant solution, but I can understand it from a design perspective. (This also assumes Blizzard’s intention is to get people into endgame.)

I do hope we dont see trifecta-type stats or mass cdr as we’ve seen in D3. For other stats I’m willing to give whatever system they concoct a chance so long as the choices are interesting and somewhat orthogonal not just a binary up or down like eith mainstat.

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I get what you are coming from and i completly understand the point you are making, however we do not know the extent yet of the problem till we have a more complete view of the situation, but i agree it does not look good (to me).

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I totally agree with your post. Like you, I’m concerned about many aspect of a Legendary items define your build orientation. I’m concerned that those Legendary will become completely mandatory for even starting to play the build you want. And that I’m forced to use all the designed item for that specific build, like the Sorceress Teleport build in the Blizzcon Panel. You MUST equip all the designed item to play that build, that’s it. So it feels exactly like current Diablo 3 set’s design. You must play alternative build until you gather all the Legendary items. I think it might completely kill diversity and creative build. But for the moment, that’s theorical because we didn’t get any info on that since a while and maybe they changed some stuff. Like buffing that oversimplified Talent skill tree.

I talk about that in one of my post. (Middle of the post) and I also explain why I prefer a system based on the Skill itself

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Cutsman hm? :wink:
Had the same problem with the fibber in bl2

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You all need to ignore Atk and Def. The real itemization is the Angelic, Demonic, Ancestral powers and affixes. People overstate the complexity of D2 stats. You chose your main stat to a point then stacked endurance while adding a few points here and there to meet equip requirements.

Focus on affixes. That is your real customization.

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People will make cookie cutter builds no matter what.

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i would wait to see another itemization update before jumping to too many conclusions, I agree that the base att def stats seem boring and simplistic but as Beefhammer said the secondary parts (angelic, demonic, ancestral) may easily make up for this and create diversity in the builds.

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there are actually a bunch of different affixes
and that was known from the first day

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To me, at least main stats made sense. If you had high strength you were obviously really strong and could do things like wield Heavy weapons and withstand brutal attacks. Attack and defence to me are nondescript balance tools not so different from cooldowns.

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every arpg always had weapons with a damage value and armors with a defense value

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Diablo 4 needs depth, & complexity should only be a by product of depth when needed) but not the core value.

PoE has many unnecessary complexity that focus on gears and skill tree that doesn’t add much value to actual gameplay.

Mostly around complicated ways to calculate and scale Defence and damage. Like one way scaling of physical to elemental damage to chaos damage.

4 Likes
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More stats are not the equivalent of more depth and complexity.

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Missing a TL;DR is your post’s biggest problem.
:point_up: You see when a problem is big, you don’t need many words to explain it.

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The bad thing is that when we are having a more complete view of the situation, it will be too late, so it’s OK for me to have they warned enough.

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Correction you stacked str for gear, not main stat in D2.
I mean this politely, just correcting you since its known you haven’t played D2 much relative to the people who grew up on D2, in that time, for that decade.

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My bad, still wasn’t complex. Especially if I did it wrong and still managed to beat it with 2 buttons.

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Nice, glad to hear you respect brev schaefers n co.
sounds like you understand what they did, and took the time to heavily analyze the game, instead of playing 2 classes and trash talking the game like it’s garbo

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I understand stand what they did. There certainly some complexity behind what they did since it stems from old table top RPGs. You all make it sound like in order to play the game you need to fully understand that. I certainly didn’t at the time, yet was able to do just fine. If you wanted to delve into the richness there was a pleasant surprise of depth, which was missed, ignored, or not needed by the masses.

Again, I enjoyed most of D2, it’s not the be-all end-all of ARPGs IMO.

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Politely, you discount D2 as <<< D3, and not-good.
you’ve revealed your low play time, and tbh care for D2.

Just be open and honest, you aren’t 'in the middle with a deep understanding of D2 and why it was good"

You’re "on the D3 side, and bash people who’ve played a LOT more D2 than you, focused on tearing down it’s dev, not on ‘beating hell’ or ‘finding hdin gear’ or whatever meta-garbo is in that game.

D2 is the goat arpg, non-debatable.
Just be open and honest just say “yea I love D3 I cant stand D2” bc that’s how you come off, politely, and accurately.

1 Like