Only an incompetent designer could come up with these settings. Any designer with a bit of intelligence wouldn’t design something that harms player experience. Game data should not be improved by damaging player experience. Improving player experience creates a positive cycle, which is essential for the healthy development of the game.
Feel free to add more points.
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The Tree of Whispers quest requires grinding ordinary dungeons for faster completion. The materials from Varshan are essentially mandatory, offering no challenge and just wasting time.
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After defeating the endgame boss, you need to leave the instance, reset, and run the map again, which is another pure waste of time. The shared loot in endgame boss groups and the tradable keys have created an entire ticket industry.
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Helltide events lack difficulty and challenge but are the best place for gear drops. The concept is good, with increased difficulty corresponding to better drops, but not being able to stack multiple Helltides makes it pointless.
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There’s Nightmare Dungeons after Depth of Despair, dropping crafting materials and Paragon XP, which again is just a waste of time.
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Tempering cannot be reset; once it goes wrong, it’s wasted, leading to high frustration. It’s just a way to annoy players.
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Legendary items cannot be tempered. Except for a few core items, most legendaries are a joke. Even rare legendaries are almost all jokes.
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The drop rate of Hellfire Shards is ridiculously low. If you want players to avoid frustration from bad drops, these shards should drop more frequently at higher difficulty levels.
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The game difficulty and rewards are mismatched. High-level Nightmare Dungeons and Depth of Despair drop items of no better quality than those from Helltide. What game is designed like this?
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Gold drops have no relation to game difficulty. The most gold comes from the Tree of Whispers quests?
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The inventory space is so limited that players are forced to constantly return to town to sell junk. Not selling isn’t an option because gold acquisition is insufficient.
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The drop rate of Greater Affixes is absurdly low. This completely diminishes the joy of upgrading gear, with most of the time being spent on frustrating Helltide farming.
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High-difficulty Depth of Despair dungeons can instantly kill you regardless of your resistances, even more absurd than Souls-like games. A random small projectile can kill you instantly, disregarding normal gameplay mechanics of eating small hits, activating damage reduction, or using invincibility skills. This game does not test positioning, skill timing, or countering moves but just kills you outright.
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In Season 4, most classes abandon core skills and ultimate skills, making the skill system a joke. The designer is to blame for this.
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The game heavily encourages trading, removing almost all trading restrictions. The fun of grinding games lies in improving gear through your own efforts and challenging higher difficulties for better gear. The trading system destroys this fun, turning it into AFK farming in Helltide and buying/selling gear. It even allows direct RMT, which is ridiculous!
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Despite encouraging trading, there’s no fun in team play. If it weren’t for AA ticket grabbing (including endgame bosses and Helltide hearts), is there any fun in teaming up? Most multiplayer games have team play to combine each class’s strengths and weaknesses to defeat bosses, but Diablo IV lacks this design.
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PvP has no presence.
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The mechanics of multiplicative and additive bonuses are still unclear. Most gear attributes are just for show (especially primary attributes). Most classes desperately need skill level affixes because of multiplicative bonuses. For example, the Rogue’s Heartseeker relies heavily on a single passive, resulting from unbalanced multiplicative and additive bonuses. The vulnerability and overpower mechanics in Diablo IV have been adjusted for so long that they have become useless, which is laughable.
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World Bosses die in seconds, with no special drops like guaranteed Primals. They are pointless except for the socket items.
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Legion events are tedious and long with no challenge, only worthwhile for the socket items.
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Resistance settings are uniformly capped at 9230, 70%. If you’re going to do that, why even design them? Any rational mind would balance resistance and attack, with diminishing returns as you stack more. What were the designers thinking?
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The old issue of quickly switching builds. Players are forced to stick to one build until they’re tired of it, and the thought of reallocating 200+ Paragon points discourages them from trying new builds.
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Some classes can stack infinite invincibility skills, indicating a failure in numerical design. CDR and effects that reduce skill cooldowns through attacks are too easily obtainable.
I just wanted to find another good game to play, but it appears Diablo IV isn’t good enough now