CCC - Constructive Conversation Continued

PC General Discussion
1

Was having a nice conversation with BorgerCrunch before we got abruptly interrupted. So I am continuing that conversation here instead.

I apologize I wasn’t able to save all of what you typed out.

I agree with this to an extent, I just think the aspects add onto this is all. Even if you had, let’s say a sorc skill passive that turned their ice storm into a fire storm, the same could be done with an aspect. This I believe is their philosophy behind it.

D3 by comparison was all about changing your skills on the fly, pretty much whenever you wanted. D4 wanted to make it a more permanent choice, as is seen in the early days of the game. They’ve never left that mindset though when it comes to the skill tree.

Mostly in part because Aspects fill the gap instead. I also agree it gets to the point of almost being overwhelming. With so many aspects to choose from, a newer player making their own build may not understand what works best without a lot of experimentation. Which I don’t necessarily see as a bad thing, just different.

Think about how we have it now. It’s been over a year with the current amount of skills we have. New expansion actually didn’t add any new skills, Patch 2.0 did. 1 new skill for everyone that isn’t tied to the expansion.

Now if you’re already bored of the current skills, how long would it take you to get bored of any new skills they would come out with? See where I’m going with this? Again I’m taking an opinionated approach of what I think Blizzard’s philosophy is.

I think they are more willing to make more aspects and tweak current ones than they are to make more skills to add to the skill tree.

I’m not saying Aspects are better or worse, I’m just going from the perspective that I think Blizzard is taking. Playing devils advocate is all. The conversation you and I having right now, is one I could imagine being held at the table over at Blizzard.

1 Like
2

Blizzard doesn’t care about constructive feedback.

1 Like
3

Was irrelevant to the discussion, but thank you I guess?

3 Likes
4

I think there are too many aspects already given how hard they are to upgrade and the current ptr feedback is that the ancestral drop rate isn’t any better (or minimal).
Add 1, remove 2 would be nice as long as the 2 removed are almost never used.

1 Like
5

I think there should be far more skills on the skill tree, far more avenues for upgrading those skills to be more powerful, synergies that you can choose that work between certain skills (so you can customize your skill loadout), and there should be more skill points given to you for the entire character leveling process. (This would be assuming characters were to have a max level of 100)

Aspects should be universally designed so that they can affect any number of skills, rather than tied to specific ones, allowing aspects to be more desired among all classes and builds. They should enhance your playstyle, not be your playstyle. Upgrading aspects to become more powerful should remain, however I think that system should be deeper as well, so you can further specialize within your chosen aspects, and continue the hunt for specific ones.

The paragon system is fine starting at 50, although I think you can eliminate all of the “bonus” points, and design it for a 50-100 experience,1 per level. Eliminate most of the nodes, and make them more impactful, so they matter every time you choose one. This is also where your “damage on tuesdays” type of effects go, so you can further customize your playstyle based on your chosen skills and the aspects you are gunning for.

The entire glyph system should be overhauled, having less levels per glyph, while each level is an impactful growth. This makes it so that when you level your glyphs, it actually feels like it matters to your character. The glyphs should all be “socketable” themselves, so you can stick gems or somesuch within them, allowing you to customize their effects to a degree, allowing people to have more differences between each other, even with similar builds.

Items should be opened up more to allow for all classes to use nearly every item, as well as having skills and benefits that support those various weapon types, allowing for more unique builds for people to play with.

Open up the resource system to allow for any class to access and use any of the resources to gain benefits from them. You can reduce the number of resources that are “necessary” for characters down to Health and Mana, while allowing for the use of Fury/Spirit/etc. to be used by any character class for various things, as well as opening up the possibility to have cross-class skills. A Warrior with Wolves? Why not? A Sorceress with anger management issues? Sure. This kind of thing makes the game more replayable by far, which is the most important thing needed for Diablo IV, as replayability is by far its weakest issue, and has been since launch.

This would be the start of fixing the game to be better.

1 Like
6

i think they should just get rid of the aspect system. Instead give us some from of “charm” ith i dunno maybe 3 slots and you can just place 3 aspekts. Kinda like the passiv slots in D3.

Its kinda unenessary tedious work to redo aspects everytime you get a new item.

I see no point in this unecessary swapping all the time.

1 Like
7

I think I get what you’re going for, multi-classing can enrich and deepen the tactical options of a well-designed RPG system.

However the way you wrote this feels like a laissez-faire approach, and I would caution against being too open for the following reasons:

  • If any character can do anything, you lose class identity and can counterintuitively reduce replayability by making all classes functionally the same.
  • The game either becomes far easier to balance because the evolving meta(s) become even more railroaded than they are now (which is probably undesirable to many) or an absolute nightmare, worse than currently, because there are too many options.

Personally, I think a party RPG with varying obstacles and enemies over time lends itself very well to either narrowly defined classes, broadly designed classes, or smart cross-class design, but a solo, dps-oriented RPG benefits from more narrow choices (whether that be via the classes themselves, or a sub-class/build system.)

It would be interesting to be proved wrong, though.

1 Like
8

Class reworks will probably be a major feature in expansion 2. Or in season 8.

9

It is mainly because I think their current resource system is nonsensical, and not needed, honestly, both the generator/spender/cooldown system as well as the class specific resources.

1 Like
10

I don’t have a problem with the flavor of giving different classes different names for their resources, but I do think the affixes should be generic (“+2 Resource Per Second” instead of mana, for example,) because then it could potentially be one less affix in the way of sharing drops between alts.

I would not be against having all resources tick up by default though, and rebalancing recovery of them. I like the idea of low-level characters needing to be mindful of their usage and end-game ready characters being able to pretty much indiscriminately use skills; but I think it’s a bit too punishing early on and takes too much set up later on. It would be nice if it were more of a baked-in change that you could augment by choice.

Could also smush some concepts together and go a completely different way, give all classes three: one that regenerates (like mana) for middle skills, one that degenerates and needs to be earned for stronger skills (like fury) and one earned and storable in small quantities (say, three) that could, for instance, let you instantly use an ability that was on CD. Basic skills would be free.

Idk.

1 Like
11

Almost anything would be better than the current system of being convoluted for the sake of being convoluted, rather than actually adding depth to characters.

2 Likes
12

I t all boils down to the d3 style hamster wheel tied to a materials grind and minmaxer style loot pool of junk and rng to sort for days on end. at least for SSF which is how i play, if you trade good for you and you obvs buy the gear and rng is only tempers and MW.

It’s the same reason i didn’t play long in D3 seasons, and played the campaign with all classes and that was pretty much the peak of my D3.

Same here, minus the desire to play the campaign with all classes, since the game design poorly supports this, in its loot and in its account bound AP and such. Making it not play like games i enjoy more. That and years of other games, have raised the bar for what i want in a game.

Seasonal is fun, but in endgame the grind is about mats and raining loot like a literally poker machine game that never pays out and just creates tedious busy work, to the point you needed to auto salvage says alot, that is also dumb since it’s gold i can no longer get from selling, but it rains legs instead so it doesn’t matter, I am not a fan of it :man_shrugging: this alone will make me more casual check out the new season and bounce player, and eventually i might get bored of that, if the game continues like this, which is fine, as long as people are happy and the game has a audience it doesn’t have to fit my needs. :v:

13

I think we should have a hundred more aspect options, but upgrades drop more often. IDK, I find the current loot pretty boring. Would be nice to have more powers to play around if they won’t bother revamping the skill trees.

1 Like
14

Something I’ve suggested before on this topic that could help is a mapping of skills to aspects. Perhaps a tooltip on a skill that says something like “can be modified by these aspects and these tempers” so players are aware of what’s available.

I think one of the advantages of keeping skill modifiers in aspects is it’s so much easier to add new ones and adjust existing ones without having the change the skill tree every time. The skill tree mostly remains a constant as does paragon boards but available aspects either legendary or with uniques can change how builds work season to season.

Although the downside is the codex does get a bit crowded after a while. I hope they are keeping stats on unused aspects so they can do some house keeping on them soon.

3 Likes
15

I dont like how you cant really change skills like how runes did in D3. Aspects are usually just multipliers though some are cool like gravitational for ball lightning. I miss being able to change elements of skills easily and stuff like that. There just isnt anything going on with our skills themselves to change them without aspects and using many uniques takes this away.

I have made a new idea for skill gems D4 can do and beat POE at their own game. Check it out:

IDEA: The D4 Gem System! :gem: - PC General Discussion - Diablo IV Forums

2 Likes
16

I think using the current Gems as another form of upgrades for skills would be a good idea. Being able to “slot” them into Glyphs, or Skills or Nodes or Aspects, anything honestly, to allow you to customize the skill or your gameplay more, plus it makes Gems less boring, as they currently are.

17

Pls add set armor and balance it. I dont care how.

Also give me my sword & board holy paladin.

18

I didn’t read through the thread yet because I don’t have time right now. I will tomorrow. I did want to leave my opinion on skills though.

I think the variety of the skills is fine. What I think is the balance of skills is so bad that pretty much everyone plays the same meta build every season. Yes, I know there are those few people that say “I just play whatever I want an enjoy myself.” Im glad you do, but other people take the game more seriously and want to push it harder. I myself, included.

I also think, while they have a ton of different aspects to choose and a bunch of different uniques, it runs into the same problem. Everyone is looking for the same exact gear with the same exact aspects with the same exact uniques/mythics with the same exact affixes too. Why? Because everything else runs into the problem above… you can’t push the game hard because anything other than meta is dog poop. Sure, there might be some random build no one figured out but woooptie.

Lastly I think too much emphasis in this game is put on multipliers and not enough emphasis on making skills do different things.

The variety is there. Just nobody can use it because using anything but meta feels like trash.

Edit: I’ll leave an example. Barb core skills. They don’t do crap for damage. Add some tornados then all of a sudden they do 1000x the damage. So, everyone pick tornado. Basically the entire game is like this. I expect witch powers will be more of the same. Might be some fun stuff in them but something will be 1000x better than the other stuff.

1 Like
19

Id also like to add something about the aspect system. I kind of like it and I kind of don’t. My problem is they choose to add aspects all the time. Lets be honest. We only use a handful of them. I think there are like 135 or something useable on each class or something? Like thats so much unnecessary bloat that is just there to add to RNG of not getting the aspects you want.

Its already too bloated IMO and they just keep adding more. I feel this with uniques as well. Like I like when they add new stuff but everything is so out of balance that it just makes old stuff, even after reworks sometimes, useless. It now just contributes to having that junk loot feel everytime you fight a boss. There be like 10 uniques on a boss. 2 of them at best are good. The rest end up being trash.

They say they want less loot but loot to feel impactful. Well… it wont feel impactful if its still just bloated junk. Then in the future they are just going to have to keep updating this crap to stay relevant. What a colossal waste of dev time. It also just pisses off the eternal players.

1 Like
20

I’m still afraid by the brutal PC reboot-crashing bugs of this game honestly. I doubt I will reinstall soon since my rig is new.