A casual player's view on the game

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21

I’m with the OP and consider myself a casual player. I have plenty of time to play but I’m not going to chase the meme builds that everyone is spamming to grind out pit, nmd and tormented bosses.
I want to play what I think is fun but then I can’t get past pit 31 so I’m basically locked out of maxing my masterwork which puts pit 61 and/or echo of lilith that much farther away. (And yes, I do play a barb. Melee characters have always been my favorites. It’s a hack-n-slash, I want to hack n slash.)
They’ve made certain skills and modifiers mandatory because they’ve balanced the game to the damage boost those give.

For me a real problem is the lack of fun content to do with fun builds. Why do I keep playing? Once I’m lvl 100, once I have my paragon glyphs to lvl 21, once I have climbed to my best on pit and masterworked accordingly, then what is there to do? I spent two days in the pvp area to earn enough red dust to buy the cosmetics from the vendors there. And I completed my map (all the altars, all the side quests, all the dungeons).
I’d really like a good hack-n-slash dungeon grinder but nmd just aren’t fun after doing 100 of them. Where is the fun replay content? For all of its other flaws, Diablo Immortal at least had some fun replay content (especially group content like Castle Defense which is what I honestly had hoped Infernal Hordes would be like).

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22

But this basically exists with glyph levels and then masterworking doesn’t it? Getting all glyphs to 21 gives some incremental progress. Getting all MW to the next tier does too. Then getting the MW crits on the right stuff and optimizing your gear affixes around the breakpoints for armor and resists and crit chance and various legendary nodes.

I feel like S4 added a lot of that extra layer of “grind till I can beat it” that was missing before that.

23

Make a new character and try out some fun build. Don’t worry so much about pushing pit, just see how far you can take something you enjoy.

24

That’s weird. I did beat them on hardcore with bone spear. it can barely do 3 mil damage. I guess you need to better control your char and try again. How about trying in a group? GL HF

25

I often read “casual reviews” just to have fun. It is amusing to see how casuals complain game is to hard when in reality is 99% game for casuals.

And they pretty often mention that 1% (which is Lilith fight) is not for them.
Yeah it is not, deal with it. 99% is enough.

But you had one fair point. I also think this type of boss doesn´t belong in seasson journey. On the other hand you can finish journey just with uber boss and it is doable ez.

Anyway what exactly you would think it would help to casual? You mentioned you don´t want to follow buildguides, I respect that. But you also mentioned to you have to well understand game like know your skills, aspect, paragon… Sweet lord :roll_eyes: Is that suprising? How it should work? that you will randomly clicked in paragon to made some smiling face and than bruising in content? For real?

26

I feel your pain. I run Blizzard Sorc and the ive taken down T Zir, but thats it. Ive even run them with a friend who runs Barb, who has better gear than me and again the majority of the time they are unbeatable. So like you, i am stuck with not being able to achieve beating that last Seasonal tier. Sucks

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27

This is the hard truth that drives almost everyone from the game. Those that remain here for any length of time are typically meta build only players, or people like me who don’t care if I “finish” the game or not. I’m here to experiment and find new and interesting way to slaughter hordes of monsters. Unfortunately, your average person does not want to go look up someone elses build to copy. And those that do don’t want to be pigeon holed into only being able to choose from a couple of options to be able to finish the game.

1 Like
28

Thanks for your reply. I see and mostly agree with your criticism about me mentioning the D3 paragon grind.
I’m not saying that it was a good system (and I could and should have stressed that, but the post felt unpleasantly long as it is). What I meant was that it gave me the feeling that if I wanted to spend the time investment, I could overcome a lacking in skill.
In the current game I feel sort of “done” when I have gear with stats and tempers that I like and leveled up the glyphs. Playing with a friend is all that keeps me going right now.

There has to be a better solution, but I’m no game designer, so I tried to shine a light on the problem instead.

3 Likes
29

Let me add my voice. I consider myself casual as well. I have the time, but not the desire to play pro and not the math-mind either :slight_smile:

I am glad to see a thread like this, I just fear that it will die now that Public Test Realm is over, because of its placement on the forum. I hope that is not the case. A thread like this should be alive for Blizzard’s insight :slight_smile:

I am sorry if my post is longer than the rest of you guy’s, but I thought it would be silly and indecent to create several posts after each other simply to make it feel shorter.
And y’all are touching on some really great points, which I want to applaud and share my own thoughts on in the hope that Blizzard listens just a tad more =)

Without further wasting of time and text:

I absolutely agree that whatever is in the seasonal journey should be doable by any player and any build.
The tormented versions are an interesting challenge but I am sad to hear them being part of a requirement. I know you can skip like 2 or 3 of the requirements to get to the next level, but I guess that is poor comfort if you want to feel the completeness of it.

I agree that it is misleading do have Echo of Lilith be a priority quest.
It gives the casual player the idea that this should be doable, but after patch 1.4, with the boss health buffs… Well… I lost all hope. My rogue (and only my rogue) would get her to 50% of healthy but having looked at maxroll.gg immediately after I could no longer even kill a pustule with the same build, I realised that I was never ever going to defeat her. And apparently, I am not the player that is supposed to.

But then why have a priority quest leading to it? Any meta-player (or pro) would know where it was, so that cannot be the reason :thinking:

While infeasible for an online game, I wish there were two lanes of the game but with the same content (season/non-season has big content-differences)

One lane for the meta-people and one for the casual people.
The meta-lane would continue to develop like it is now.
The casual-lane would slow down to longer seasons between 4 and 6 months in length, but with the same Quality of Life update cadence as the meta-lane.

To be clear, casual lane would get the same seasonal content, but slower and it would be a more polished version of what the meta-lane would get, because the team would have more time to work on it.

Hopefully the casual-lane would have different balance focus, because of the vast difference in play-play.

In short it would be a casual version of Diablo IV.

Alas… That is completely unrealistic. But it could have the potential to remove all the stress and fear of missing out (FOMO) from the game, which would also make it healthier to play =)

On Diablo III’s Paragon System

The system stopped being good when choices stopped to matter, which they did because you could eventually max everything out and only focus on main stat and vitality. But until then, it was a system I really enjoyed.
I think the upgrading of glyphs would be the equivalent of that for Diablo IV? Especially if we include tempering and masterworking? I am posing this as a question, because I feel like it is, but I am not sure =)
I have yet to really get into masterworking, mind you, so my experience with it could be lacking.

I agree with all the casuals on the problems meta-builds pose to everyone who does not want to use them.
In Diablo III I ended using them, because the game basically threw them at you with set items. I am glad they fixed that design flaw with the legendary / unique combination for Diablo IV =)

The pace of the game feels faster than from launch, but not yet as crazy as Diablo III
I am sad to see Diablo IV pick up the combat pace to the point where it starts to feel like Diablo III. Especially because the devs were very aware of that issue along with the issue of power-creep originally.
If you go back in time on Rhykkers website for D4 to listen to his analyses or, if you prefer, just read the the Quaterly Updates before release, you will see that. You will also see many other fun tid bids :slight_smile:

In short David Kim, the (original?) lead systems designer said that Diablo III had power-creep because they refused to nerf, but Diablo IV would do nerfs - but in a non-destructive way. It is from a 2019 interview with Rhykker, but I think what he talks about back then is what we are seeing today, but just not enough nerfs because the team was afraid to take power away from players five years later - ?

But now… Now it feels like they would rather balance towards the meta-players, as I guess more players want that?

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30

The game is easy if you copy a build. You don’t have to figure out how aspects work alone or with other aspects. You don’t have to plan your way through paragon glyphs, nodes and boards. You don’t have to know the different damage buckets and which items are multiplicative and which are additive. Which aspects are bugged, or what causes the damage interaction between Axial with Starless and Lucion. They don’t have the time to go to test dummy and make a boatload of changes to keep testing for max dmg.

In that respect, if you played solely that way, pushing 4 buttons/2 mouse buttons makes the game easy. They still can’t do the same level of content as the build creator, but they can progress through most areas of the game with little thought or effort. On PTR, I had my CL build, and I tested Mekuna build that he was doing 150-200. I couldn’t do 115 with his build but I could do 120 with my build.

However, on the other hand, to understand all of the aforementioned and create your own builds and KNOW what is happening, when it should happen and how to trigger what you want to happen, that is very hard for the average player. Look at the Sorc paragon board set up for any build you choose, and then tell me how intuitive that is for a player. To do more cold damage, I need to apply burn? Wait what?

It is easy for me to plan and execute multi-million dollar construction projects, but likely it would not be easy for you, even if I gave you the Gantt chart to follow. Just because it is easy for me, doesn’t mean it would be easy for you. Time available, time spent is important to proficiency and ability. The same applies to this game.

31

They want us to compete and not just play. If competition was PvP at least would feel like ok, but no, they want us to compete who first, who fastest, how much fastest, e.t.c. (and make sure not only the lane but the equipment for everyone is the same)

Basically all the things that kill a casualty of a game (and literally physically kill the game as well)

How do you “develop 2 lanes” when in both lanes some skills/passives/nodes end up stacking 20 times and deal 200x damage than a “normal” build would do ? :thinking:

It’s just outright impossible, whatever they create to be “interesting to fight” for the “meta” lane ends up totally impossible to even attempt in the “normal” one

And frankly I’m at this point probably even angered by the whole point of their approach:

  • Give everyone the same things all the time
  • Some smaller portion of them (or combination of some things along those) will be completely broken compared to everything else
  • Everyone else is a “chump”

IMO, the whole thing is opposite of what things should be (step 1 should be around variety and individuality of runs, and step 2 should be around combining to squeeze a 2x, 3x, 4x performance - if someone can)

Not a broken loop that ends up stacking itself, and most certainly not pigeonhole us all into “collecting” skills… I wanna play a game, not some broken collection-based Pokemon card game where some certain “comboes” end up doing 200x damage ffs

32

This is not something to test, it is something to prevent

If they knew that Lucky hits can end up being totally broken could’ve actually said it out loud - sorry, we won’t increase monster density cause lucky hits will get out of hand

That’s just one way/example b.t.w.

It is what it is… They allowed all the poisoned milk from D3 to spill over (instead of prevent it) and now there’s nowhere to go elsewhere

Stuck with the broken sh*t stacking mechanics that will make everything else obsolete and then “round robin” fotm every now and then

The fate of the game is decided already in that regard.

Either one-shot everything before anything even reaches to end the spawn animation or die trying… it’s THAT bad

They literally destroyed the whole game

33

Thanks for sharing. I had a look at it, though I’m not familiar enough with game design to truly comment on it. But I’ll try:
Your solution, to me, seems to address the insane disparity, while still allow some builds to shine over others.
I cannot predict how this will impact enemy health and/or fight mechanics that are, once again, to me, unreadable. Echo of Lillith might still not be for everyone, but as long as that is no part of the seasonal journey, I could live with that.

What your solution doesn’t address, is the underlying mechanics that might require a solution like this. if numbers can fluctuate as badly as you write, then it seems to follow that the core class design is flawed. They will change the classes with the expansion, but we’ll have to see if they address this issue.

34

Yep, exactly right. The solution in that thread is in direct response to the current insane disparity on skill damage. People already (1 year in) are hitting for trillions (streamers have succeeded at hitting for 4 quadrillion, although that was certainly a bug). Importantly, as you say, a formula like this is not just a straight cap on damage. It tapers the top end, but doesn’t prevent 10-20x builds or anything below the cap from working exactly like it does today (for better or worse).

So yep, you’re 100% right, the formula does not solve the underlying problem of the huge range of skill / ability damage. It just mitigates a glaring issue. Long term I have ideas for it (a few below), but I think they need an immediate band-aid for damage and I hope this, or a formula like it can help.

A formula like this could:

  • remove caps (resistances, the armor cap, crit, etc.)
  • scale players backwards (low and high level open world zones?) - see the 10k example in the other post
  • make monster resists and/or immunities a real thing
  • future proof against the worst bugs even if they normalize damage differently
  • drastically increase the power of specific items/consumables without as much worry
  • make nerfs less necessary
  • etc.

Nothing is perfect, and adding monster “resilience” could easily cause bugs too. I think it could be a lot better than what we have now is all.

Thanks for your input!

35

Well you are right, but I am not sure what was point of this text or how it is relevant to my text :smiley:

36

Gee your troll post that boils down to “get good” really helped nobody ever. I am happy that you are a “Gaming God” and all but casual players are the ones who spend money in the cash shop, not elitists. If you want this game to keep going, keep that in mind.

37

Said nothing like that. But dude admited he is casual (nothing bad about it) but complain that game is not for casual and use Lilith as argument. In reality all game is for casuals except Lilith.
Uber Lilith is one and only challenging content (didn´t kill her either).

So yeah if you want… you need to git gut if you want to kill her (or find currently bugged way ofc)

38

The biggest issue right now is the Skill Tree and how the Classes perform fundamentally.

Until this is fixed I don’t want to play.

I came back to play Season 04 and it was fun at first and once I reached 100 and started to get more into the community I realized how unbalanced so many things are still. So many things to work on still.

And now if they don’t make things in Season 05 fun for people that don’t stream and/or play this all day then it’s not going to be worth the time.

We need the game to be more fun.

1 Like
39

just came here to post my first opinion about the game and read your comment, and it’s exactly what I was going to write. I’ve played all Diablos since D2 and this one has worst itemization, way too complicated for the end game (for casuals). I hate using ‘must go to’ builds and want to beat the game my way and to do that all skills should be equally powerful…unfortunately beating this game is practically impossible for casual dad like me…the simplest thing to fix it would be if they remove cap on skills(currently 5) and add like aspects that specifically boost skill that you want or keep 'em in inventory like in D2, so if I want to have a barb with only stump on level 50 it would be doable…the things are right now, I’m frustrated with my barb and not even thinking trying other classes just because of sheer amount of time needed to up your character, grind the gear, and so goes my interest in the game

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