D3 combat is better than D4's

General Discussion
1

All that is really expected to change between now and release is maybe some UI elements, number-crunching in terms of skill damage etc but nothing too substantial. And I almost hate to say it, but D3’s combat feels better than D4’s. And I don’t expect that to change a bit between now and June.

When you whack a group of tightly-packed skeletons with Arcane Orb, you feel the impact, you see them wince and stagger and you hear them groan. You feel it. When you smash the ground to cast Seismic Slam, you feel that ish.

In D4 it just doesn’t feel quite like that. It feels floatier, more akin to Last Epoch than Diablo. Although, you spend much of your time in the open world and you mostly encounter those annoying-af Wraiths/Ghosts, with the occasional bandit & Goatman pack.

Still, even when you’re going down the Cathedral with a Witch Doctor and you’re thwacking Grotesques and Ghouls from a distance with Poison Dart, you still feel the impact.

D4 doesn’t feel quite like that. I still had just under 24 hours of playtime left in EA Beta but I just didn’t feel the urge to keep going. I had hit lvl25 with my first Sorc toon, I could’ve started another one. But I just don’t feel it. Open Beta is ~12 hours away, I thought maybe I could try a Druid or Rogue this time…still not feeling an overwhelming urge. And it’s gonna be the exact same beta, right? Not an updated version.

This is made even worse by the fact that 99% of the Sorcerer’s skills are copy/paste from D2 (BOOOOOOOOOOORING) and nothing good from D3 was brought back, so I didn’t feel like I was playing anything new class-wise.

Also seeing a bunch of uninspired item affixes to the point where you barely care about what you’ve got equipped on. You see higher armor/damage and just put it on, that’s it. There’s no thought process behind it, no real planning.

Disappointed. I thought they would’ve learned more from D3/DI.

From the 1000 things that DI does wrong, there are a few things it does right. The chat system, for one. DI chat system is fantastic. You want to do something specific, you post it up in Party Finder and you’re ready to go. Wanna chat to clanmates, you hit the Clan tab and off you go.

Almost feeling like it would be a good idea to avoid playing D4 this year and wait for next year after a few patches.

https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/d3/t/d4-d2-with-new-areas-refunded/59336

10 Likes
2

I’ll leave my commentary about how D4 mechanics feel compared to D3 until I play the beta this weekend.

The chat mechanics in D3 are decent. If you need to access clan chat, /c and there you are!

My favorite chat system I’ve experienced in a game was in Guild Wars (of course created by former Blizzard North employees, lol). You’d press Shift+2(@) or whatever and access that channel immediately. That game was released in 2005.

3

Hot take: D4 is a broken stripped down version of D3 and you’re paying 70 USD (or 90+ CAD as a canadian) for it

Assuming you haven’t preordered yet, congratulations, you are one of the few smart ones. Stay far away from this microtransaction platform (I won’t call it a game) for at least 6 months after release. There are numerous other well developed games to play in the meantime, or many worthwhile things in life of course.

A bunch of streamers said it well: remove the blizzard and diablo name and then demand a 70 USD price tag? No, it would be a quickly forgotten 10-20 USD game on the steam store.

6 Likes
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I didn’t pre-order it either. They lost me at open world. I might give it a try at a 50% sale in the future.

5 Likes
5

I didn’t prorder either. I’m still stung from Diablo immortal…I think it gave me trust issues with blizzard lol

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6

Thanks for the feedback mate!

Glad I didn’t pre-ordered it or plan to buy anytime soon. Maybe… a big maybe on a discount down the road.

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7

Even if I thought the game was the best thing ever, it would be hard for me to buy it currently. Crashes, crashes everywhere. Can’t recall playing as unstable a game before. Cyberpunk 2077 ran well for me compared to this.
And yes, it is a beta. I expect these issues to be gone by release. But what if they are not and Blizzard refused a refund :grimacing:

8

Well…I did say I’ve already played it and open beta was ~12 hours away.

Oh I forgot about the other beta before…um, yes I preordered.

But it seems they’ve taken several steps backwards. Open beta is already underway and I’m not feeling the urge to try any other classes. Reading up on their individual arsenals, they all sound boring-af.

Sorceress is boring - direct copy/paste of D2.
Rogue sounds boring as hell.
Necro sounds boring as hell.
Barb is pretty much copy/paste from D3, which was pretty much copy/paste from D2.
Druid is pretty much a direct copy/paste from D2, not seeing anything new.

Ironically it didn’t crash once for me, just a whole bunch of disconnects during the first 24 hours. Once they did something about it, it was smooth sailing aside from a few more disconnects, but I was able to jump right back in with no waiting in the queue.

Except for how bored I was.

I should’ve listened to my own stings as well.

I’m all for trying something different but the open world is pretty much a ghost town. You only see a few clusters of monsters here and there but the rest of it is barren.

Soul-crushing, and not in a good desolate making-you-feel-alone way. But in a I’m-bored-wanna-close-the-game way.

2 Likes
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But remember, MILLIONS of players are playing Diablo! :face_with_raised_eyebrow:

I see like 2-3 people, scarcely, wandering around.

But also, same company that has some people fooled with “65 million players on D3”. Yeah… more like… 65,000 at best.

I tried to give the game an unbiased chance. The boredom spoke for itself.

10

“We’re making a brand new game so we’re gonna copy/paste the classes from a 23 year old game and call it a day”.

That’s all they did. Say what you want about Jay Wilson & co, but at least he tried to do something different. Fundamentally: Wizard, Crusader, Demon Hunter and Witch Doctor are far more interesting to play than Sorceress, Amazon, Paladin & Druid.

The former simply got ruined by all the stupid sets.

11

D3 is a pretty solid game engine. The only qualms I have with it are:

  1. lack of end game content beyond repeating GRs. It needs an endless dungeon that progressively gets harder.
  2. lack of QoL features to catch it up with… 20 years ago.
  3. very uninspired soundtrack (remember how cool D2 LoD’s opening theme was?), I can still hear it in my head and I haven’t touched the game in 15 years.
2 Likes
12

#3 hasn’t changed in D4 either. I haven’t heard a single memorable piece of music. I just turned it off by the time I got to lv15 or something.

13

LOL.

If I show you a D3 Open Beta gameplay ( you can actually look up for yourself ), you will come back and say how shtty the combat was vs today.

D4 has more depth into combat than “mass aoe and stuff”. The animations are amazing. You compare them with Last Epoch?! Geez.

How was your sandwich btw?

Edit : Here …

14

Lol where? All those boring “lucky hit” bonuses or the “cast XXXXX a bunch of times to boost YYYYY”?

Even Immortal did better than this. See “casting Arcane Wind over burning ground to shoot embers & ignite enemies”.

And in any event, I couldn’t care less anymore. I just processed my D4 refund. I’m not about to play an overpriced D2 take 3. If I wanna play the same :poop:ty ancient classes I’ll reinstall D2R…and that’s something I will NEVER do.

Already made one mistake of buying D2R because I thought Laz was gonna finish his new mod, but that clearly ain’t happening. Ain’t wasting my money on Blizzard any further.

Refund Complete!

You’ve completed the process. The product and amount listed below will be refunded to your select payment method. Refunds can take up to 72 hours to process. You will receive an email confirmation with this order number.

Game: Diablo® IV: Digital Deluxe Edition
Order: #XXXXXXXXXXX
Refund Amount: $139.95

1 Like
15

Glad you did this.

Bye!

16

Still here, luv. I ain’t done.

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So before today, I hadn’t played since last Fall. I could only stomach a couple of hours a day then and it turns out it’s the same now. The combat has been boring on the classes I’ve tested: Barb, Necro and Rogue.

Now it’s quite possible i get bored because the characters are going to be wiped. But I don’t think I’d still be so bored with the world and quests. I was hoping the campaign quests would help but they are so few and far between that it didn’t help enough.

What really killed my interest last fall was the rotating quests you had to get to soon enough. That and the middling itemization and skill tree.

Anyway I uninstalled and don’t feel like I’ll be missing much by not playing at launch. If they were able to massively improve D3 over the years, they certainly can with D4. But they are so gung ho to get it released that it’s going to take a while.

3 Likes
18

Why did you bother posting these videos? TBH D3 looks better than D4, lol. If you show someone who doesn’t know these games those videos of D3 and ask them to compare to D4 (without naming the games or year produced), I’m thinking they’d say D3 looks better.

Why are you bootlicking Blizzard on D4? They had 10 years of D3 experience to BUILD on, not reinvent the wheel. D4 literally put me to sleep.

19

Every game has a couple of unpaid shills on their forums always excusing the inexcusable. You should see the ones on the Steam forums, they’re hilariously rabid.

Reinventing the wheel would’ve been an improvement over what we got, which is a D2 copy/paste of some of the worst things D2 has to offer to a game in 2023: classes & itemization.

1 Like
20

Depends on the build, but I reckon D3 has more than “mass AoE and stuff”. However this developed over the course of years by them listening to fan feedback. We have no idea how D4 endgame combat gonna shape up. Apparently developers gonna speak after current beta weekend ended and it will be about endgame and difficulty tiers.

They’re at different scales in terms of readability and contrast. Matter of taste. Trying to read an endgame combat in D3 is torture for an untrained eye. I don’t think D4 will be any different though.

They had to capture the previous generation of Diablo players whether you like it or not. If they wanted only Diablo 3 players to play their game only, they wouldn’t invest millions over a new installment and release another expansion pack instead.