A solution to current D4 problems

The biggest issue in-game right now boils down to three simple issues that is either making the experience boring, unnecessarily difficult for some classes and further insult to injury is restricting the ability to make viable builds.

  1. Resource Generation

Far, far too much emphasis has been placed now on auto-attack spam not because of damage but simply because of resource generation and this slows up the flow of the game dramatically from all previous diablo games, heck even Immortal wasn’t this bad.

The flow of the game is basically identical for every class, spam auto-attacks > cast/use two skills which fully drains all resources > spam auto-attacks > rinse and repeat.

The entire flow of combat is this, and nothing else which imho severely limits the games potential.

  1. Resource Management

To further complicate the issues, managing your resources is equally a pain with far too insignificant skills or stat boosts that actually matter. Take one of sorcs skills that increases your mana by 3 for each skill point, that is basically a entire waste of a valuable skill point for just a measly 3 mana points, make it 30 and then it might be worthwhile and this issue is prevalent on all classes.

Better resource generation and management is needed on every character.

  1. Cooldowns of spells/abilities are too long

To further exacerbate the situation with Diablo 4 is unacceptable long cooldowns on some spells/abilities, like leap for Barbs which has a 17 second cooldown. Or for instance, fire shield on sorc which lasts all of 2 seconds then its done making it so highly situational - why not make it constantly active? The point being, a large list of spells/abilities are effectively ruined by large cooldowns which further complicates making viable builds.

  1. Damage of many skills/abilities*

Far too many skills and spells have exceptionally weak damage or lacking synergies which could make all the difference, this 100% needs looking at closely. Even with some potential aspect buffs at launch, some abilities are just overall too weak compared to other options available and thus, makes a significant amount of abilities useless or too underwhelming for players to pick. This is less of an issue than the first 3 issues, but still I added this because its something to talk about.

3 Likes

I agree with some aspects of all of this for some skills on most characters. There are builds on classes that don’t struggle in combat pacing but it needs to be reviewed to open up far more build options.

The thing is, it wouldn’t take a much to make the flow of the game just better in general, a better flowing game means more fun and enjoyable experience for the majority of players, and that means more sales and less complaining.

Its not like Blizz even has to go nuts and dramatically increase everything either, a lot of things need some fine tuning, but if they start overtuning then it could become a problem down the line and we all know that leads to nerfs.

We only played to lvl 25. Every class has passives to invest in to fix this.

We only played to 25. Every class, to some degree has ways to fix this.

CDR was a pretty controversial stat. It trivializes the risk/reward of playing long cd skills. But it looks like at least in some capacity cdr hs returned as a stat. So again, we only played to 25. This may not be an issue late game.

I think this is much MORE of an issue than the first 3. But I don’t think until we hit endgame we know exactly what needs tweaked and what doesn’t. Certainly werewolf should hit harder than werebear right? But it feels wayyyyy weaker. There’s certainly some attention needed here for balance I agree.

2 Likes

i had none of these problems on my rogue except maybe the cooldown length one but even then it was like 10 seconds so it wasnt aweful. barb had fury issues, but it was manageable. Necro i didnt notice at all.

I didn’t check out all the passives for all classes, but the sorcs passives that give bonus mana are exceptionally underwhelming for skill point investment, Devastation passive increases maximum mana by 3, its basically useless for a valuable skill point and I’ll assume that other classes have equally useless ones too.

3 mana points isn’t going to do squat really, at bare minimum it should be enough to cast one core spell. Even if increased to say 15 mana per skill point investment to a maximum of 45 mana isn’t gamebreaking and would definitely make people consider investing, I don’t know about other classes resource passives because I never actually looked.

Necro pet build? They have no issues at all, except limited skill bar slots.

I agree w/ 1 & 2. I’m uncertain about 3 & 4 since those are based on lvl 25 toons with lvl 25ish gear. I’d love to know what 3 & 4 look like in endgame with endgame lvl gear.

1 Like

I think thats the biggest question everyone is thinking about now, what endgame is going to look like and what class to pick for their first choice based on the beta experience, what was the most fun to play, whilst had the least amount of issues.

For a short time in leveling perhaps, but many of my builds grew beyond this with legendary affixes or more skill points. The build i played the most didn’t need a generator at all.

I found a lot of cooldown reduction utility on some classes. Some had a chance to be instant reset on Lucky Hit.

I think you didn’t min max a character enough to see the ways around these points that comes with more time spent on itemization through affixes, passives, and aspects. It looks like you talking about the leveling experience from 1-20, rather than the actual experience of a fully realized build, which was achievable in only a few hours after hitting 25 because of the increased drop rates in the Beta.

I maxed all available classes, and tried various builds too. Resource Generation/Management was a prevalent issue for quite a few builds with Necro and Druid for me, having the least problems in that department but Druids felt generally underwhelming.

Barbs definitely had resource problems along with cooldown issues, so did Sorc which needs a slight buff in that area, probably lower mana costs on some spells would go along way.

I’m more concerned that mid and end game aspects are basically going to be the main focus of entire builds, and getting those drops could literally make or break entire builds

I played electro sorc and the ultimate spams your skills for free. Druid has a capstone that resets your primary resource fairly often if you’re using earth skills. Idk man, I just think there will be lots of ways around that issue.

I think this is more an argument for point 4 than point 1. Like that passive sucks and needs a buff because it’s useless like whirlwind without an item.

CL build? Electro sorcs definitely seemed one of the more overpowered builds, along with Ice Blade builds. Fire basically just was heavily underwhelming with only hydra actually having any significant impact. Firewall and Meteor were both meh, I understand that given firewalls history of being OP.

I tested a fireball build and that wasn’t too bad at all early game and was able to smash up packs of mobs very effectively but once hitting level 20, quickly became defunct and hydra basically took over.

+1 fire sucked for me too. Others had better luck though from my play group so idk.

Agree with each point. For 4, I couldn’t get the Earth line working on the druid at all. I gave up on the barb. For #3, Spells/Abils even working for another 5-15 seconds would be better on a game we play 10+ hours a day. Combining 3 & 4, the ultis I was able to use were extremely underwhelming, should have done more dmg and or lasted longer.

Given the “universal” nature of these “problems” that you see and outlined…I think it might be your own metrics and expectations that need more adjustment. Or, in simplest terms, it may just not be the game for you. I can understand how disappointing that could be, but this is just one little fish in an ever-expanding ocean of gameplay.

I think the problem for fire is that the main damage comes from DOTs with the direct damage component being very weak, so naturally you are relying on mobs to actually stay in the fire…and well, that isn’t going to happen and the same goes with Blizzard not being as good as previous Diablo games.

In fact, I think a lot of issues for classes are DOT based outside of bleeds which you can easily stack, poison? No problem…fire…ice dots? Nope, not happening because the mobs have to stay in the effected area. So maybe firewall etc might need the direct damage component buffing and the burn DOT increasing to be really viable.

After all, its not like an enemy see’s a giant fire raging and thinks “Oh a fire, I’ll just go stand in that and burn myself to death” lol

I seem to remember playing one build to level 30, respeccing and then playing to lvl 70, respeccing again. D2 every single class. For better or worse. If you care to min/max it and be perfectly optimal. I think basically anything CAN be played(an improvement on d2/d3) but yeah there are for sure some that need buffed and some that need nerfed a bit for balance. We’ll see once we can level up higher if anything really falls face first in the dirt or shoots through the moon.

I guarantee they will NOT be balanced day one. There’s no way with how short the beta was, even with the closed endgame stuff, there’s no way.

This is a terrible take on some really constructive feedback. Every class had mandatory skills to deal with resource starve or under performing skill options. All the poster is advocating for is to balance these skills and consider how often you’re asking players to use basic attacks which felt underwhelming and not exciting.

2 Likes

Like others here, I’m a veteran of every single Diablo game since the original and fully well know that balance has been a critical issue in each game, heck even Diablo 1 has some balance issues but it wasn’t until Diablo 2 launched that balance went straight out the window and ran down the street.

That being said, the difference here is that each Diablo game thats been released to date, the core balance was never really an issue that prevented or scaled down the core flow of the game that effectively isolated builds, or general playability to seem artificially slow or even gasp boring at times, sure each diablo game level 1 - usually around 10 was the traditional slow period but until you started unlocking more skills, getting some loot that really opened things up and players never look back.

In fact, one could entirely argue that Blizzard/Activision has always had balance issues with every single release, WoW? unbalanced, Diablo series? Unbalanced…Overwatch? LOL the point really is the same though, what is balance? I bet if you ask 10 different players, you’ll get 10 different answers.