I want to start off by saying I thoroughly enjoyed leveling my first 2 characters (one on Eternal and one on Seasonal) to level 100. I’ve watched the development team make dozens of positive changes and future announcements to the game in response to feedback from the community. It’s been a great game to me personally for 200 hours of play time.
Having said that, the game is beginning to run stale and I can’t see myself repeating the same tedious grind to 100 over an over an over without major quality of life changes and additional content beyond 80-100.
I comprised a list of things I would love to see in Diablo 4. I feel the vast majority of the player base would agree on most of these.
Codex Powers
Right now the vast majority of our stash is filled with high roll aspects we store for the future or just for a “what if build” that we will probably never actually use. The Codex Powers are a great design and serve as place holders for many builds while leveling/waiting to farm a better roll. I would love to eliminate the stash problem by having EVERY single Aspect in the game be available as a Codex Power with the ability to upgrade the Codex Power. This upgrade method could go two different routes. You could either find a perfect roll and upgrade it with the perfect roll to match whatever roll upgrade you provide. Or you could have a system where you have to feed the Aspect with 5-10 copies of the Aspect at any quality/roll to slowly upgrade it to a perfect roll.
Enchanting/Rerolling Item Affixes
Currently the RNG to Cost Ratio is one of the most tilting features the game has to offer. We need a more straight forward method of enchanting/rerolling our items. If the RNG aspect of it is a desired featured, there needs to be a gold cost cap of like 1M per roll max. It’s incredibly easy to waste 50-100M gold and not get what you want. If the RNG aspect of it can be removed, it would be nice if it were just a flat rate to remove one affix and replace it immediately with a max roll of your desired affix for a cost of 50M gold. With this method (yes it’s costly) but you know exactly what you’re getting for the cost. Having to farm the game/gold actually ends with a guaranteed reward and doesn’t leave you with the feeling of getting burned.
World Tier 5/New Item Power Range
Upon reaching level 100 it feels like there is no reason to continue playing the character. You have either full best in slot gear already, or close enough to where you don’t want to put 100 hours into farming one piece. Currently the final item power breakpoint is 725-825. At level 100 they should either add a new breakpoint from 825-900 within WT4 for 100+, or they should add a World Tier 5 that you cannot enter at all until 100 and have the new breakpoint be exclusive to WT5. No matter which route they take, you should never see a single drop below the new breakpoint once you’re level 100+. At that point you are “Endgame” and should be able to more efficiently farm gear for your character.
Paragon and Skill Tree
Currently the game has the least build experiment friendly game ever created. The Paragon Boards in particular take 10 minutes to clear by one individual node at a time and start fresh. Not only does it take forever but it comes with a hefty gold cost as well. It blows my mind that we don’t have a reset board feature already. It also makes no sense to attach a gold cost to it. Why must we pay gold to experiment with different builds and find out what we like/enjoy to play? The game should incentivize testing and variety and not funnel you into a build where you feel stuck because you don’t feel like spending 45 min to an hour, and 5M gold clearing your Paragon Board and then redoing it multiple times.
End Game Content
I know there are multiple pinnacle bosses in the works for Season 2, but I personally don’t think that will be the answer to the Endgame boredom. Once we kill each boss, we will still be left with just farming NM dungeons until our eyes bleed. Unfortunately I don’t have an suggestions for this one, but farming NM dungeons until our eyes bleed is not good Endgame content imo. Especially when we are farming those same NM dungeons from 50-100. I know people give D3 some crap for just adding Greater Rifts on Top of Rifts but maybe level 100 needs Uber Nightmare Dungeons to spice up the Endgame. Make Uber NM1 = NM100 and start another grind for Endgame players for UNM1-100. Up the drop rate of Uber Uniques by like .01% per UNM level up to 1% drop rate at UNM100. Just a rough idea and I’m not glued to the idea, I just want to see more options/content beyond level 100.
Well, a bunch of these ideas are great and all but wouldn’t it be easier just to have a button that says “kill Lilith and give me all the uber uniques as max rolls” /s
As someone who is generally enjoying the game, I fully support implementing a version of 3 above (higher tier gear). I will keep pushing my Hardcore level 80 rogue to 100 or die trying. But, it is annoying to know that the chance of improving my current gear is quite small.
The contrast with WoW is huge, where there is a wholly complicated push for better gear once you hit the max level. Having more endgame content with better loot chances would make D4 a better game.
Disagree with #2. Rerolls should be expensive. I think their cost is pretty good. Can be very cheap if you get lucky, but very expensive on average. If any quick fix is needed here I would suggest allowing royal gems to be used as payment. e.g. Adding a royal gem to the payment reduces the gold cost by 25%. This would make gems actually worth something. But in general I want gold to be valuable and useful. Something you want. Currently without high reroll cost then gold would just accumulate.
I’ve burned over 300M two separate Amulets to not get what I needed. It’s outcomes like that, when a player gets a new piece of hard to find gear and then has all the enjoyment/satisfaction of equipping it just ripped away in a few minutes. It takes ages to build up the gold and then it all gets depleted in a few minutes and for a roll of the dice. That’s my only issue really is how frequently you get burned by the system
But why should going to an enchanter who knows how to enchant gear with an affix be a dice roll to begin with? If the man knows how to do magic and alter an affix why should it not be a guarantee? I just don’t think it should be possible to burn 1 month of gold savings in 3 min and not see the affix you wanted. That’s all
#4 is the biggest issue for me. I would really like to be able to save my current build and then run/attempt various other builds even if it cost a bit. The current setup seems to discourage experimentation.
yes, lower prices and price based on item power instead of sell value to not make it unenchantable after imprinting.
no, just make itemization better. At lvl 90+ there shouldnt even drop sacred items. Minumum item power should be determined by level. example at lvl 70 in wt4 item power could roll 680-820, and at lvl 99-100 it can roll 800-820.
yes
something needs to be done, but foremost i think a lot can change for the better with proper itemization first.
If you unlock an aspect in the codex. Find a legit better than default roll you get now, could overwite the base codex. Thus no aspects in your inventory
They seem particularly slow compared to GGG/Mobile games patch release cycles.
Maybe they can’t due to incompetence, but they also won’t do it this way.
Their idea of live service is 2-fold.
To align good quarterly fiscal reporting of addressable market with seasons tied with mtx/battlepass/tabs. It’s a conscious decision not to release well suggested QoL features all at once or whenever it’s ready. (e.g if you see it along the lines of subscription model and blizz has 20 QoL features ready to ship, they would rather release 1 feature per season and earn the 20 months subscription.) They definitely want the long term monetization.
This makes them lax and wiggle room to weasel out of accountability. Instead of having real content, they market the QoL features as content, as seen in season 2. You can also see they are tryhards in slowing content consumption and item acquisition.
That’s why even simple fixes like respec button for paragon, although it’s done they are gatekeeping it as incentive for participating in seasons currently.
And now they are trying to hype players to come back with +25% gold/xp? Heh.
I think having a method to upgrade the codex powers with found aspects would be ideal, this is especially good for alts as your ‘main’ might have already upgraded the codex powers you might need.
I do think the increments that the reroll increases is a bit extreme, it should be using a set randomize amount with a top end, something like it increases by 50-150k on each reroll to a max of increasing by 250k per roll or something. Currently it increases by a percentage of the previous value which means the reroll costs get much more extreme fast.
I think it does need a World Tier 5, where all the regular mobs are level 110 and elites are 113-115 with world bosses being 125. That would create an appropriate challenge while also providing new tier gear levels in say a 825-900 range, calling it something like ‘Sacred Ancestral’ and you should only see Ancestral/Sacred Ancestral items 95% of the time.
I thought there was scroll now that resets your paragon? I think at level 100 it would be great to continue to earn experience towards additional paragon points, however I think each additional point should take a lot of experience. Perhaps start with 250k for the first post 100 paragon point, doubling for each point after that with some max such as 64 billion per point or something. Having a paragon board just stop progressing doesn’t feel great.
Something additional does need to be done, I’m a fan of entering a ‘remembrance’ archive. Wherein you can replay the story, but at WT5. Or have demonic shadows form that are revisits to the storyline that you enter and have to defeat, but it’s the full story arc for that piece at your current world tier. Or a shadow of Innarius, in the cathedral, that fights you but is only available on WT5.