Diablo 3 melee system, to me, was IMMENSELY repetitve. Skills like the barbarian’s Cleave literally has 2 animations that would repeat infinitely as you used the skill. If you used only one generator for the monk, you would basically see that same 3 hit combo string until you switched it out/used another one along with it. I feel like over time, seeing the same canned melee animations over and over and over again makes the game get old fast.
I think Diablo 4 should reintroduce just regular auto attacks like from Diablo 2 and Grim Dawn, just give each melee class around 10 different auto attack animations. This would be amazing, and would make playing melee classes far less repetitive IMO. Auto attacks would be your main source of damage or resource generation, and then have your secondary resource dumps (like hammer of the ancients and whirlwind) that were more powerful, but NOT infinitely usable. Better yet, have most melee abilities just be cooldown based, so they weren’t spammable (which results in massive repetition, D3’s biggest problem to me for melee classes) and abusable. Seeing a barbarian build that does nothing but summon a hammer out of thin air and hit enemies, or using whirlwind indefinitely with absolutely no variance are things that should be left out of Diablo 4. Really hope it doesn’t get cheesy builds like that.
Grim Dawn has an EXTREMELY cool mechanic for melee classes that are unlockable skills that have a chance of activating (12-20ish percent) when using your auto attack that replace your auto attack animation with a different animation and more powerful attack. Having a few of these unlocked and seeing them weaved into your auto attacks randomly from time to time makes playing melee in this game more fun to me than D3. This would be an awesome feature to have in D4, and would alleviate the overused and tiny amount of main melee attack animations in Diablo 3 that contribute to repetition of playing melee classes.
Hopefully, I have agreement on this topic. Would love to a see much higher variety of melee attack animations for the melee classes in Diablo 4, as opposed to the standard 2-3 per ability in Diablo 3. Diablo 4 is an action RPG, not an MMORPG in my estimation, so I think having animation variety is incredibly important 