Is D4 trivializing the core Diablo elements as D3 did?

General Discussion
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Of course, D4 is still under early development, so I believe that now it’s the point to give the feedback, before it’s all set in stone. I’m aware that things are subject to change, but they have expressed their intentions and the master lines of the game’s development, and I believe that there’re many misunderstoods.

To me, apart from the mood/atmosphere, where they’re nailing it, I feel like D4 is falling again in the same issues that caused D3 to fail:

Trivialized leveling: a max level easily reachable (60 at vanilla, 70 at RoS) where the game starts. It used to be a big level pretty much unreachable that took a lot of time to get there, so you decide to stop at a certain point high enough. D3 also had the issue that leveling was an empty experience where what you do while leveling is completely pointless, causing devs to shorten it and making you able to do in 1h with your first char, so a warning about that. In previous entries you could get endgame-capable gear while leveling, side quests that gave you extra skills, stats, permanently raised your resistances, … According to last infos, D4 will follow D3 way, having a trivial max level 40, so I’d expect that leveling to also be an empty experience.

Trivialized customization: if there’s just a skill tree in the shape of a trunk, and it’s everything max-able, everyone will have the same filled skill tree. Paragon without being able to choose between stamina and mainstat, so even worse.

Trivialized gearing: in D3 you can gear yourself in 1 week. It needs to be that way in order to grant everyone being able to push GRifts. Drops too high, guaranteed endgame set… You get your desired items too early and after that you’re just looking for minor numeric upgrades. Given that the intention with D4 is having a limited trading, drop rates can’t be low enough to make items feel exciting, so devs need to find a way to make obtaining items exciting. You don’t want trading because of 3rd parties etc? OK, give an alternative, because the only I can imagine is weekly cooldowns on some monsters/dungeons, and that’s WoW, not Diablo.

Trivialized gear: gear has completely gone out of the focus. a) It’s obvious that inventory Tetris is very annoying to manage, but gave protagonism to the items, allowing to show big and in detail. The change to same-sized items clearly solved one problem but was a step backguards regarding putting the items at the center of the game, and this is also the intention with D4. b) “Loot 2.0’s 4/2”, “legendaries instead of uniques”, “huge bonuses to specific skills”: 4/2 means a quadfecta where all other attribute but the optimum ones is a bad attribute, while previously your BiS was an item with many stats, so some were optimal for you, but could come with others that could be useful (or not) for you, without being optimal. Legendaries are basically a bit bigger yellow item with a legendary power while uniques were items with mostly fixed attributes and very different from yellows, so they had their own personality without being so obvious about how you should use them and allowing you to experiment and theorycraft. Many QoL features that came with the objective of removing different annoying things are just a proof of that: we all felt that having to ID the million of blues and yellows was a pain, so they now all drop identified. Why? Because blues and yellows were trivialized. Not enough with that, now we can mass salvage them, and there’re people even asking for salvagin all non-ancients. D4’s itemization seems to be following the same way, with simplistic stats making the items boring. Waiting for the new dev blog, which is supposed to drop soon, but I can’t figure any way to solve this with their current master lines.

I mean, I get why you’re opposed to trading or Tetris and been said a million times the reasons. What I’m looking for is a solution to the issues caused by the removal of trading or Tetris and warning about potential movements that were done with D3.

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I agree with you.
I hope they give legendary items a feeling of actually being unique, just like in D2. Especially the skill tree bothers me. Them saying that we can grind skill points to make every build we could want sounds pretty dull to me. I would prefer if we would have to set our skills carefully and if we dont like a build anymore we have to complete a crazy challenge (like defeating every big overworld boss in a cartaint time or something like that) in order to recieve a skill reset.

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Exactly. So 1 Barbarian stops being the same as all barbarians. Anyway, I believe that the D2 token thing they added lately it’s a bit too easy. I’d ask for a middle ground between that and PoE’s Orbs of Regret, which I believe that’s a bit extreme.

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I would add one more point:

Trivialized monsters: While they keep talking about “families” and the stuff, in the demo we saw exactly D3ROS-like combat, where monsters mean nothing. Just build up enough “toughness” (c) and simply ignore what kind of source of incoming damage there is. In the end this leads to combat with enemy HP bars rather than with monsters.

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I’ll type down how will the design go. From the very start they deemed that they won’t replicate D2 or D3 with Diablo 4 but as a few years pass they will apply the same formulas used in those games eventually.
How do I know? One, ARPG design is pretty limited and you’re bound to repeat what has been done before. No matter how fast you run away as a designer, you’re keen on repeating others or your past.
Two; look at the Diablo 3, They plugged ears, they mocked the fans who wanted game to be more like Diablo 2 and you can simply see the same design notions that D2 followed with patches after expansion.

We already know some sort of make shift Greater Rift challenge will be there very similar to Path of Exile. For years fans begged for Horadric cube, boss fights and small item chase in D3 for a real endgame. They plugged ears just to add them in the most unimaginable way in the name of being original; Kanai’s cube, Greater Rifts and legendary gems. I have no idea what “originality” they could muster in D4 just to not repeat previous installments.
Difficulty scale, player capabilities and drop rates are other issues; there’s a thinline between slot machine power trip and enticing the player with risk-reward balance.

I expect to read another blog with technical non-sense of screen size and neck comfort instead of gameplay.

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Thanks :sweat:, I even posted about that in the “How to easily tweak the game to annoy us” and forgot to post it here, as well about how mid-D3V resistances to a single element started to mean nothing (except specific cases like monk passive).

Anyway, I don’t have enough knowledge regarding that in D4.

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While I also believe it will be a trivial and boring experience, nothing of what has been told about lvling so far says that it will be. 40 is just a number.

Yep. Being able to max all skills is a complete travesty.
It should never be possible.

The alternative is also the best solution.
No trading, combined with reasonably low droprates.
Both trading and D3 droprates leads to the same problem of making it way too easy and boring to gear up.

The solution seems easy here. Add a tooltip that can show items in all their glorious size and detail.

While I dislike the 4/2 system, it doesn’t automatically lead to trifecta. Bad affix design leads to that.

Legendaries should have fixed stats though. And rares should not be 4/2, BUT it might need some affix rules, as for what can and cant spawn together.
I wonder if it could be useful to split attributes into 3 categories; Power/dmg, survival, utility.
On a rare with 7 affixes, maybe 3-4 could be dmg, 2-3 could be defense, and 1-2 are utility. So rares weren’t completely random, no way to get an item full up dmg affixes, or defensive affixes.

The way to avoid trifecta still is to design better affixes though.
Affixes should not be universally good for all builds.
Dont have class-based affixes.
Dont allow affixes to have crazy synergy (crit/crit dmg) with no downsides.

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To me it’s more about experience. D1 developers had the mix of talent and luck (a lot of luck) needed to make a good game. With that experience, they could do D2 relyng less on luck.

D3 was designed from the ground up by a guy (Jay) experienced about shooters, but not about ARPGs. He made his job studying the franchise, but it was proven to not be enough, years of experience designing, playing, and facing the issues are hard to match with just studying it. Apart from that, the few guys left from the previous team seemed to have not enough talent or power to understand why some things wouldn’t work.

Apart from that, the philosophy against issues, bugs or cheats was completely different. It’s not a secret that D2 was a game very limited technically, but they could revert those issues into good things thanks to talent (yes, they had talent, Hellgate London and so on that’s another story).

An example with dupes: people was massively duping back then, and one of the items with higher value per space taken was the SoJ. So people started to massively dupe SoJs to a point where the market was flooded by them. Sure, they messed up with trading window technical design which allowed things like this to happen. But then, after solving the bug, they had to face against how to drain that excess of SoJs: they designed the “Diablo walks the Earth” feature, which was a cool and exciting one.

Another reaction to a technical thing that I’ve found brilliant was the item tiers. In order to save design time, they made 3 slight variations of each item. As opposed as things like 4/2, it didn’t lead to the make the game poorer, instead it added a huge richness to it, making an interrelation among those 3 versions, letting you visually identify which type of item it is (for example, if you see an armor with a cloth-foam appearance, you know it’s light one that will demand low strength requirements, while a plated one will have more defense in return for higher requirements), opening the door to decide if you should upgrade that unique item you got or not.

D3 and, it also looks like D4 devs, wanted to make a new game and not just a D2 remaster with another story. That’s legit. So they started to change things without knowing which were the things they should or shouldn’t change, they didn’t know “why that weird thing was there”, and sometimes, “that weird thing” was there for a good reason, and axing it just meant to unleash a big issue.

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Agreed speak up now or you might regret it later.

Here is where we may not totally agree on. Because my memory of what I seen and have read might be different than what you know.

Here I agree as well, maybe except for the part where you feel that D4 is becoming like D3.

The number on max character level doesn’t mean that it will be a short time to level cap. If that were true then they would need to make the level cap 400. Where if 400 was the level cap then that guarantees you will take a long time to make it to level cap.

Tbh I am sure that if I knew how to design a game I could make a level cap of 400 take as long as reaching level 70 in this game. Along with taking a level cap of 40 and making it where it would take 80+ hours to reach.

IIRC at Blizzcon it was mentioned that they will not be letting us reach level cap at the speed of light.

Something else about leveling and endgame we don’t know, at least I don’t remember if they stated that we will have to wait till level cap to start endgame or we will be able to do it before level cap like PoE.

Right now I believe that the level cap is just as static as the rest of the game. Also I agree with Blizz and other developers that the level cap in a game has to fit the game.

Let’s say that the level cap in D2 was change along with the skill and attribute points to keep them the same as it already is. Let’s say it was changed to 50. Now this means that you will reach level cap all of the time and still you might not have beaten the game on hell difficulty. Put it at 199 and now such a grind is so long that players won’t go through such a grinding experience. See what I am talking about, the level cap has to fit the game. Right now it is 40 for D4 but that could change before the game launches.

There is so much about the skill system we still don’t know that would make a world of difference and I will explain below.

  1. How many skills points from leveling will we be getting?
  2. How many talent points will we be getting leveling?
  3. Are the skill tomes generic?
  4. Are the skill tomes class specific?
  5. Are the skill tomes skill specific?
  6. How rare of a drop are skill tomes?

The answers to questions 3-6 are the most important because they will be setting the stage that will decide whether or not the majority of characters will be identical or not. Even though I know that myself and others here on the forums can decide to not use the skill tomes as they drop.

Also you have to consider that each ones path to completion would be different if the majority does get all skills unlocked and maxed.

At Blizzcon it was stated that it will not rain legendaries. There is nothing wrong with getting some cool and awesome loot during the leveling process.

I am sure you know what in D3 the game is designed that way. Due to the fact that the majority of the power comes from the gear the devs are almost forced to hand it to us. Without any alternatives to BiS gear we have it where they almost have to hand us the gear.

Trading for items that is common as dirt or nearly common as dirt (at least the way that I understand it) won’t mean that gearing will be trivialized. It just means that if you are hunting for a certain piece that will complete the set you are collecting is gotten from trade you won’t have to go through more frustration waiting for it to drop and not getting it. Kind of like an rng protection to bad luck.

Instead of inventory tetris where you see the item both in the inventory and on the character. You just see it on the character page. So the focus is still there. Just because D4 names one of it’s tier’s as legendaries means that we will have smart loot. No, it doesn’t mean that at all nor does it mean it will be raining legendaries either.

Nor does it necessarily mean big bonuses to skills that will be anywhere near what we have on our gear right now.

Without knowing about the affixes on the gear in D4 there is no way of knowing how the affixes will be used in D4. We might see more builds that would be able to go down a route of faster attacks instead of crit and still be able to clear the hardest content in D4.

I see no reason to have us identify everything that we pick up.

So here is the real kicker, this thread isn’t really about the rest of the above it is all about wanting free trade so third party sites can make a ton of money and having inventory tetris.

Both will not be returning to D4. D4 will not have inventory tetris nor does it need it. And it doesn’t need free trading of all items either.

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Leveling up is a carrot. Less than 39 carrots are too little carrots. Hard to imagine stopping at level 32. Of course I can’t recall them saying they won’t make 40 a pretty much unreachable level in the practice, but given the general direction of the game pointing to D3, I believe that’s good to warn about it before they mess it.

With D3, they tried to have low drop rates (hardly remember some comment from Jay about something like needing decades to gear) but it didn’t work. In order to criticise the high drop rates, you must understand why those drop rates. In order to be exciting enough, the items need to seem unreachable. During the season, you’ll be able to get some of those “unreachable” items, along with other unreachable items that are not for your build, and trading them, you can fully gear yourself while keeping that ultra rare status. If you keep those drop rates without trading, everyone will complain about not being able to gear themselves despite 24/7 playing during the season. On the other hand, if you lower the drop rates to make possible for everyone to find the drops themselves, you’re severely watering down the excitement.

Trading only trivializes gearing for the ones going to 3rd parties or the ones looking for presents, while keeping the excitement for the ones playing the game how it was designed. No trading trivializes it for everyone.

Or add auto-sort, which has been present in many games since years ago, while retaining the item protagonism.

Here I agree with you.

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Wouldn’t mind the option being there but auto sort tend to suck imo. Cant place items where I want them.
At least add a feature where you can mark items that should not be moved on sorting then.

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True. I want to identify items again and have some blues be worth identifying. Even D2 has circlets, jewelry, druid helms, shields, claws and armors that can be worth identifying to this day. 3/20 gloves are sought after as well but typically just shopped from a vendor.

To add to your list, a few things that really bother me about where D4 appears to be going:
-Resource system - I want to manage it, not use a lame junk resource skill. Flasks from PoE are way better and even pots from D2. Stop giving everything away for free and trying to QoL the crap out of the game, there won’t be anything left to do if you keep doing this kind of stuff (compare item tool, all identified, all one slot, no decisions ever).
-6 skill max - If we select just 6 skills again D4 is going to be stupid.
-Monsters - How about making monster type matter.

D4 should try to emulate PoE (or D2, pick one) at this point honestly, D3 was a total failure imo. D4 probably doesn’t need to be particularly unique, they already have the name Diablo on their side. They just need to be a top arpg, not redefine the genre with an action smasher.

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I see it as the early carrots. And just 32 or so early carrots are too few carrots in my opinion.

Not letting us to level at the speed of the light doesn’t prevent that it won’t be like vanilla WoW or TBC, where it took its time, but it meant all or nothing.

Agree that I can’t recall them saying that they’re doing that, so put this in the warnings side to make they know before they do it.

I don’t get your point there. No matter the way you choose, your characters end with the same skill tree.

Yes, I remember that Q&A panel answering to if the legendaries would rain from the sky. But Jay say the same and we all know how it ended. What I mean is that both are about to get hit by the same trading truck, just facing opposing sides. The old D3 Team knew the correlation between trading and drop rates, even Bashiok made a clear post about that, but I suspect that this new team doesn’t know about that. They’re mixing ideas that collide.

We’ve all seen the simplistic current ideas (att/def) about itemization in the previews. I was bringing an example from D3 with the same lazy philosophy.

Same reason to have us not identify anything.

And this is where I report you for free baseless accusations.

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Tetris and trade are better than the alternative. PoE has these and it’s the most popular arpg, D2 has these and it’s the 2nd most popular arpg. This accusation is wild, you think OP has plans to run a bot farm and sell gear on a website he will build? haha.

After he buys several cd keys, builds a bot script (to advertise his site and farm gear), pays for search priority, builds a website, and then works the website I’m sure his rate of return and profits will be through the roof of people desperately paying loads of money for gear off of his 3rd party site. This sounds like a ton of work, I think OP would do better if he just got a job doing something he likes. I hear Overwatch pro Dafran traded in his mouse for a farm, maybe OP would have better luck making his own real life Stardew farm. Put a few buckets of flowers, some jumino huts, iridium sprinklers, and kegs out there and then OP will really be making the cash. Maybe sick of the city and wants to look at all the pretty cattle.

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It all depends upon the rate of xp and leveling. If the world is as massive as it looks, and as sparsely populated as the gameplay vids from blizzcon then it may take a bit to max out. Maybe they don’t give out XP by the gazillions like in D3. Maybe it’s a slower progression, such as with JRPGs or D&D. (D&D takes FOREVER to hit lvl 20) I agree that max level of 40 is concerning, but not for the reasons you think. I’m not worried about hitting it too soon. After all, it took me forever and a day to hit level 50 in ESO or max level in Neverwinter. Admittedly, I didn’t play those games like I played d3 in the beginning. My concern with max level being 40 is that we’ll be nickel and dimed to death by “expansions.” Every 3-6 months or a year they’ll nick me for another 40 bucks for a craptastic little island with literally 2 dungeons and maybe a new class if I’m good and lucky. But they’ll justify that by raising the level cap by 10. Soon enough I’ve spent 500 bucks and have a level 200 character. THAT’S what I’m afraid of.

If they make those skill tomes unable to be traded (which they should) and as rare as D2 high runes, you’ll be here quite a while before you max everything out. Beyond them being ultra rare to get, shame on them for allowing all characters to be exactly the same again. If you’re worried about people whining about not being able to “freely swap their skills” then just make skill respec points a thing. Make it so when you find a skill tome, you can either add one point to OR take one point out of that skill, which would give you a point to put in elsewhere.

Current D3 drop rates are obnoxious. So were vanilla D3 drop rates, but in the other direction. This conversation actually happened between myself and a buddy on day 5 of D3 dropping:
Me: Hey Andy, I made it through D3 on normal and nightmare, but I can’t even make it to the ruins of old tristram on inferno, what gives?
Andy: yeah dude, Legendary drop rates are super low. Also, the gear you need to be able to effectively play inferno only drops on inferno.
Me: well what the #$@% sense does that make?

So I farmed the opening area of act one on inferno for DAYS to get the gear to be able to not get one shot in the latter stages of act one. I had played literally hundreds of hours before I found my first legendary. It was a Bul Kathos sword…with int on it and no socket. I took a nice long break from diablo at that point and played something else until the ROS/smart loot announcement came in. I don’t mind grinding for my gear, but make the gear worth while. I would have never made it to inferno at all without the auction house. (I only used the gold portion of it)

I actually agree with Shadout in that the 4/2 system isn’t inherently evil or bad. If they rearranged the affixes a bit, it could work out. And maybe come up with some neat new affixes that let you add flexibility into your build. And, NO, Jay Wilson, I do not mean just “Double” the numbers or affixes that effectively let me do that.

I also think that it would be ok to completely randomize the blues and yallers as long as the itemization was interesting, varied, balanced and unique enough to warrant looking at them. Also, blues and yallers drop often enough that even if it were a completely random dog and pony circus of a crap show…I’d be ok with that.

As far as "inventory tetris goes, there are many ways to work around that. One way is the D3/D4 sytem where everything is either 1x2 or 1x1 and that’s it. Another way is an auto-sort button that would automatically sort your crap for you. Yet another solution would be 1 item=1 inventory slot, you are capped at a number. Solution number four is that you assign all items a weight value and you can carry items until you hit it. (I hate this system, btw as it almost forces you to choose “carry more stuff” as a mod on almost all your items otherwise you’re constantly running back to town to mulch/sell your items.) D4 could borrow a system from Dragon FangZ and have a new category of item drops called “chests.” They drop unidentified and do a variety of things. Some chests will convert any items put into them into gold. Some could scrap items into crafting mats. In Dragon FangZ one of them would transmute the items into different random items. And finally, one of them would send the items you put into it directly into your stash back at your base. The catch? each chest only dropped with 1-5 uses. IE: you could only put 1-5 items into each one before the chest was useless.

You forgot Javelins (could get +3 BO) and wands. Getting lower resists on a wand was pretty wicked for a lightning sorc. Switch to wand, curse enemies, switch back to main hand and nuke the pack.

Finally, I want the following things for D4:

Loot filters!! Why in the wide world of sports isn’t this already a thing for Diablo?
No subscriptions! I refuse to play a game i’m forced to pay rent on. And Diablo is my favorite franchise of all time. I would hate to miss out on D4 due to a technicality. If you want to monetize D4 with a “premium” account feature with extra stash space, auto loot pickup, etc for a baseline monthly fee, that’s one thing. But please don’t force us to pay by the month.
I want to have that moment where I set down my keyboard/mouse/controller, pick up my beer and take a long sip as I contemplate whether to give up insert legendary power here for a really well rolled rare item. I want that moment of quiet reflection and choice. That doesn’t exist in D3.

The ability to mute all chatter while in hubs. I don’t want to hear Tommy Twiddle fingers’ kids screaming in the background. I don’t care to hear whatever kind of music Sally is listening to. I really don’t want to hear Ole Boy’s dogs barking. I don’t want to be forced to have a constant din of noise every time I wander into a town. Loud noises give me panic attacks and I’d rather just opt out.

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I see tons of golden thoughts in recent posts in different topics and also see a lot of agreement (some radicals like me shouldn’t talk too much i know but I belive that sharp speech can sometimes revive discussion) I hope diablo 4 developers read it all with curiosity. Blizzard could sometimes type something blue like „Hello we are watching” under good discussion.

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Ignoring that it’s free and gamers are cheap. If PoE had a box cost associated with it the numbers would be much smaller. GD is a mucher better game and wasn’t even full priced. If it were free you might see similar number of peak players.

Don’t take this the wrong way, PoE is a fine game, but open trade has little to do with its success.

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Yea and if D3 was named Riftrunner and made by a different company it would have 5% of its current sales. There are many hypothetical scenarios that could’ve happened. The reality is that PoE has a firm grip on the ARPG market as of now and claiming that GD is a much better game is laughable. I’m surprised someone so concerned about the combat would even look at a game like GD as it lags behind its competitors quite heavily in this regard.

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I’m just countering the argument that PoE rules the market due to open trade. I found my playing experience with GD more enjoyable than PoE.

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Not only, but it does play its part. People like to trade and they can’t get it from its competition.