I’ve been giving hundreds of hours of feedback every PTR.
This time, gonna switch it up a bit and do it now. Hopefully the CM team will read this. 
S4: S4 Write-Up Feedback (32 lvl 100 Chars, 1100h of play, 6 pax)
S5: Final PTR feedback v2.0 - Top 16 needed changes to guarantee S4 is a success
S6: PTR review & Key feedback for S6 [240h, 5 players] - Longform Write Up
Today, I read this thread on forums and felt sad.
I related to it a lot, after spending 140+h in the Xpac+Season and just feeling D4 isn’t rewarding or enjoyable throughout the spent hours. There were so many great new things in the Xpac, so many things to love about the genre and the title, however, things still feel broken, unbalanced, monotone & weird. Diablo’s goal loop is broken, it feels… bad. Boring. The new class had amazing design, we had new dungeons, some things were improved by A LOT, however the loop of the game needs help. Now. And it has a list of small (and some large) fixes which, together, would solve it immediately.
In that sense, today, I wrote the patch notes I wish we had gotten for Season 6. The patch notes I hope we one day get for an upcoming Season.
I wrote them, all the while thinking how much I’d like every player to experience what D2 was and what D4 could be. D4 as a game has the potential to be an all time great and I know the Diablo team want it to be.
Below are the list of changes that, when done to the game, will make any season a success immediately. The key to player’s hearts and a LONG season is allowing build diversity, cross-class-alt creation & build/character customization:
KEY UPDATES POST-S6
GAME UPDATES
Tree of Whispers:
- A ‘Teleport to the Tree’ option has been added to the action wheel, similar to ‘leave dungeon’.
- Whispers are now capped at 50 instead of 10 in order to not force the player to interrupt their play flow just to be able to do more whispers.
Tempering & Masterworking:
- The material cost needed to Masterwork has been fixed to a set cost ratio. Across all activities, if salvaging Legendary+ equipment grants +10 RH, +5CW +5VC, all drops will grant materials in that ratio & all masterwork/reroll/other costs will also be charged in that ratio in order to avoid bottlenecks of any specific material.
- You can now choose to keep your previous temper roll when re-tempering an item, similar to enchanting.
- A button has been added to re-temper using the last recipe used, instead of making the player re-select the recipe every time they want to re-temper an item.
- Rerolling Masterwork on item prices now scale with Masterwork level: 2-4 1.5mill, 4-8, 3mill, 8-12, 5mill.
- Rerolling masterwork now takes the item level down 4 levels instead of fully resetting it so players aren’t at the mercy of 1/125 RNG causing the perception that the Blacksmith is the actual endgame boss of D4.
- You can now use one scroll of re-temper for each GA an item has. 1 scroll for 1 GA, 2 scrolls for 2 GA, 3 scrolls for 3 GA for added chances at crafting that perfect item.
- We have reinstated the tempers of ‘chance to cast twice’ we had removed. We realize players prefer it to ‘chance to do double damage’.
- Masterworking scrolls can now drop from the hardest activities and highest pit tiers allowing you to roll a specific affix when masterworking.
Enchanting & Affixes:
- Increased the possible offered affix changes from 2 to 3 possibilities to choose from.
- You can no longer get the same affix you already have chosen on an item as a possibility to enchant from the choice menu.
- Removed the ‘life per x seconds’ & ‘healing received’ affixes from the game.
- Resistances no longer roll on Amulets.
- ‘No change’ has been added as the default choice when enchanting to make the process leaner.
- Ancestral equipment aspects now start at the highest point of Legendary equipment. If Legendary equipment goes to 16/21, Ancestral will start at 17/21.
- Players can now spend a resplendent spark to imbue an item with 1 greater affix on the item’s current affixes. Can only be done once per item. We have noticed RMT going rampant and want to give players a grind possibility that will enable their builds and avoid the current market constraints.
Item & Loot updates:
- Vendors now sell Legendary equipment with a chance of Ancestral equipment. The chance of selling Ancestral equipment scales with the Torment level player is in.
- Magic & Rare items no longer drop ANYWHERE (FOR REAL) in any Torment tiers. Not even Pits, NMD’s, Vendors or Purveyors.
- Purveyor of curiosities loot has an increased chance to be better both in GA offered & unique/mythic equipment the higher Torment tier the player is in.
- You can now craft any mythic item using 4 sparks once again. It didn’t make sense to remove this option so we reinstated it, keeping the existing rune variation as well.
- We have re-created Selig, Shattered Vow, Nesekem of Herald items as their mythic affixes weren’t useful, into something more attractive for players to chase.
- We have reverted the Andariel’s Visage nerfs as it was a way for immense build variety.
- We have reverted the behind-the-scenes nerfs to Lucky Hit Chance.
- Uniques now roll their unique effect according to the number of GA’s they drop with: 1-2 GA’s, 50th percentile of the unique effect range or above, 3 ga’s 75th percentile or above and 4 ga’s 99th percentile.
Infernal Hordes:
- We have fixed the co-op bug on console, causing many game-breaking problems to players.
- We have reduced the amount of spires and masses that spawn when you choose hellborne and vice versa. Also, we have adjusted the aether rewards so the same spire mods aren’t always chosen and hordes become more strategic.
- We have boosted the amount of gold received from offering Aether.
- We have increased the ratio of Obducite received so it isn’t more efficient for players to farm multiple T6 hordes vs farming T10 ones. We want to reward difficulty.
- We have fixed instances where monsters would stop spawning for several seconds when being cleared too fast, causing density to be non-existent.
- We introduced a scaling system to hordes, up to 12 waves, where difficulty goes above Torment4 to provide a challenge to players. With adequate rewards, of course.
Cellars & NMD’s:
- After the positive reception of Nahantu Dungeons, we will be adapting existing NMD’s to Nahantu’s dungeons current layout.
- Cellars now have actual bosses, a larger arena & a mini dungeon.
- Chance of finding Goblins in Cellars has increased drastically. All Goblins found in Cellars are of Red shiny colour and wealthier. Instead of dropping legendary items, they drop ancestral equipment at a larger rate than normal goblins.
- Cellars reward Tributes for UC as a bonus drop at the end of the dungeon as well having a much higher drop rate for recipes.
- All NMD keys that are whispers will now have an indicator in the player’s inventory.
- We reinstated Glyph XP at the end of NMD’s so players can have multiple sources of Glyph XP rather than being forced to grind the Pit on loop, hundreds of times.
The Pit:
- Enemies have stopped scaling to quintillions of health, making Pit a grindy, unfun event at higher tiers. Instead, health has been capped at current pit 135 (x) levels and monster attack rate & density has increased progressively throughout Pit tiers…
- The Pit Bosses pool has changed. Instead of the same bosses as NMD’s, past memory bosses from Campaign like Azeroth as well as ancestral versions of overworld bosses have been introduced. Ancestral Echoes of Duriel, Andariel, Beast in Ice, Varshan & Grigoire can now spawn as a Pit boss, with an added chance at a mythic drop.
- You can now find larger arenas at the end of a Pit.
- World bosses can now spawn as a Pit Boss as well.
- An army of Goblins can rarely (4%) come to a Pit Boss room when the Boss is below 25% hp, trying to steal spoils of battle. The Goblins despawn with the boss and the player must kill them while the boss is active if they want the loot.
- Completing pit 100 & 150 now rewards a mount & armor cosmetic for those valiant enough to take on the challenge…
Paragon & Glyph updates:
- Removed ‘healing received’ & ‘potion healing’ from all boards.
- Paragon level xp requirement now stops scaling at Paragon 275. Each level after 275 and up to 300 now requires the same xp as current 275-276 does in order to make Paragon300 a tough yet realistic challenge.
- Glyph progression is now realm wide so players don’t have to level them twice when having multiple characters of the same class.
Wardrobe & Shop:
- Added a black dye option for players to color their gear. This is an absolutely basic thing to do, and we should’ve done it on release. Sorry about that.
- All locked content in the wardrobe is currently grayed out. Starting now, locked content will have the normal image of the item with a translucid lock on top of it as well as a tooltip of where the transmog is from so the player knows what transmogs are out there in case they’re interested in getting it.
- Shop no longer rotates and players can view all available items for sale.
Strongholds & Legions:
- Strongholds now always drop 2 recipes at completion.
- If a player completes ALL strongholds in Sanctuary, they are granted 50 whispers as a reward as well as a chest with an ancestral item and several legendaries.
- Legion chests always guarantee at least 1 Ancestral.
Seasonal event:
- Players can now opt to skip the seasonal event if they have completed it in another character in the same season.
- Realmwalkers and Opals are now a permanent addition to the game.
- Resplendent spark as a reward for the season cache has been reintroduced as it was a driver of alt creation and different class testing for many players, causing a positive player experience and driving engagement with the seasons and the game.
Runewords:
- Runewords have received a buff to their effects, we’ve reverted the post-PTR nerfs.
- They are now target farmable and split across activities, similar to Mythic items.
- They now have a unique color and beam when dropping, giving it that WOW! factor.
- Runes now must be target farmed from boss level enemies in Helltides, NMD’s, Pits, World bosses, etc.
- We made the runes tab able to fit every rune in a single inventory without taking space from the players’ already limited stash…
Endgame:
- Overworld bosses who used to drop the unique yellow items like Broodmother Stinger have been removed from the overworld.
- Considering the success of Dark Citadel, we have created ‘The Temple of the Zhakarum’, a solo/co-op new multi-floor dungeon with mighty foes, with the above overworld bosses serving as final foes in a much stronger, larger & tormented version. These bosses drop one unique item each, with a drop rate of 1% as well as a guaranteed 2 ancestral items and 4 legendary items. The bosses are resilient and summon other mini-bosses in their aid throughout the fight, including Goblins. This dungeon has the same difficulty as a pit110. The expected duration of a single run of this dungeon is of about 10-15 minutes for well geared challengers.
Quality Of Life:
- We have added 3 extra stash tabs, unlockable by completing pit100, defeating Lilith and completing all battle pass challenges.
- Lilith now drops guaranteed 2 ancestral items and 4 legendary items, as well as 2 runes and a very low chance of dropping a mythic item.
- Lilith is now a whisper boss.
- We have fixed multiple issues causing memory leaks, lagg & overall latency in the game.
- We changed the color of the mercenaries progression to something other than purple so as to not confuse players into thinking they received a mythic drop when killing tormented bosses.
- Ancestral item drops color is now a much brighter red than legendaries.
- We now changed the stars in ancestral item names to fit below the name vs next to it.
- We removed doors in NMD’s as it was unnecessarily slowing down players.
- Mounts are now faster, to the rate of S4, which all players liked. You will no longer be faster out of mount than on mount.
- Damage to mount causing dismount has now been corrected and you shouldn’t be kicked out of your mount every other second.
- We have implemented an armory for players to be able to swap across builds without spending hours respeccing.
- Conduit shrine now does %hp damage, bringing it back to its former glory and becoming useful once again as it was a nuisance in the past couple of seasons.
Class Balance + A note from the team:
Class balance hasn’t been great. It hasn’t been good and we’re aware of it. We’re players too!
Builds are always either too weak or destroying every piece of content and it’s been a challenge for us to be able to balance them considering all the moving parts we’ve had re-doing the game after launch, where we noticed players wanted a different, more endgame oriented experience and we’ve been trying to accommodate that.
We acknowledge that, however, a lot more comes into play here than most players realize, so we want to find the best solution while leveraging our past experiences in other Diablo games, as well as our playerbase.
We want to be closer to our community and we recognize we have great assets with deep knowledge of each class as well as hundreds of hours of play. Consequently, we’ll be holding recurrent roundtables with people who have proven themselves deeply knowledgeable in order to brainstorm ideas to implement into class updates and make them as fun as possible for our players.
Despite not being able to promise we’ll implement X or Y, we want to create a streamlined way of receiving direct feedback to the main points of improvement that need to be looked at fast.
To this point, we’ll also be holding monthly surveys to the Diablo players to collect data on how implementations were received.
We are reaching out to following players to come together with our team and brainstorm - Just about builds and how to make them interesting! (No game logic discussions): Sanctum, Northwar, Aceofspades, Lurkin, Screamheart, M1py, Dalkora, Mekuna, Macrobioboi, Angren & Ruse_Cruize.
We will also make our Rogue & Spiritborn class designers have a more active participation in other classes’ design, to contribute & draw value from how successful these 2 classes have been.
- Buffed Druid, a lot (25%)
- Druids can now permanently stay in their true form, even in town.
- Druids can now change their fur color according to the color of the character’s hair.
- Buffed Rogue (20%)
- Buffed Barbarian (15%)
- Buffed Necro, slightly. (10%)
- All the buffs above are to skills rather than main stat. We wanted to bring skills to an even level where they don’t rely on modifiers, like Barbs’ Dust Devils, Rogues 10x Snapshots or Druids bugged interactions.
- Corrected unintended interactions in Spiritborn nodes (I.E. Viscous shield).
- Improved the visibility on certain skills when cast. (I.E. Dance of Knives Rogue’s knives were barely visible, they’ve been increased in quantity & quality).
- We recognize that players have a sentiment for iconic builds and we want to make them viable to play. Prime examples being WW & Hota Barb but also things like Dance of Knives Rogues. We know Spin2Win builds are fan favorites.
- Reviewed all core skills across classes and made their own damage viable without dependencies on secondary factors.
- Classes are now balanced around the max power level of pit 110-115. This will allow room for customization, gear maximization to attempt to reach pit 150. If we see that there are non-anticipated interactions, we will address them throughout the Season. We will make it a fair, stable experience for the players, or at least try. We hope you join us in this sentiment and join the Diablo team in attempting to make the game as great as possible for all players, all Season(s) long.
Can’t wait for the day Diablo4 gets the logical updates it needs in bulk. The day it gets the Reaper of Souls or Wrath of the Lich King moment.
With it’s current combat, setting, story, music and feel, it could be so, so good.
If you made it this far, GG 
