D4 has a good foundation but it has been made and turned into a glorified d3 clone and will continue to get worse if these changes are not made. Loot overhaul is coming season 4. But, I’m sure its going to be severely lacking what the game really needs. These devs are so far out of touch it is unreal.
Game could easily be saved. The level grind to 100, was cut entirely too short. But, they will NEVER revert that, due to fear of outrage from the small d3 crowd. They’ve already turned it into a D3 clone by allowing players to get max level within a few hours of ladder/season at a CASUAL pace. Literally 12 hours, in a single sitting as a solo player.
Revert the experience change to lengthen time in mid to late game.
Remove restrictions on open trading, including all legendaries, uniques, and super uniques.
Uniques and Super uniques need to remain chase items, and not entirely target farmable from one specific area/boss. Spread them out. Duriel is fine, however, cut the loot pool down, and keep super uniques chase items. If you are going to keep the super unique vendor, reduce the drop chance of super uniques and make the currency tradeable. Take a play out of the D2 playbook in regards to certain areas of the game, perhaps uber bosses, and NM dungeons, drop certain levels of loot, whether that be power level, unique, super unique. Example, T83, T85, etc in d2.
In the item overhaul, add Charms (small, medium, and large) the UI already supports a 2nd inventory for this purpose, use the seasonal inventory tab in lieu of.
Add runes and rune-words. Rune-words would be equivalent to uniques and super uniques in power and expectations, and also allow support to add aspects on them like every other item.
AVOID adding sets for the time being if not at all period. Until it can be done properly. We do not want a D3 clone more than we already have.
This small list alone is a very big step in the right direction to correcting D4. The charms, runes/rune-words, uniques/super uniques and super unique currency, would support a trade economy for open trading. Not only that, it gives players something to keep working towards paired with reduction in experience to lengthen the leveling process to fully complete their builds and lengthen the overall mid and end-game. AS WELL as it brings the community together and creates social interaction in an MMO-ARPG.
You may wish to hold off on these suggestions until the details come out for S4, just saying. With less then a month to go, I don’t see them adding or taking away anything that isn’t already in the works for S4. Even after the S4 details come out and people give their feedback in the PTR, I can see small tweaks coming, but nothing of the magnitude you’re talking about.
Diablo 4 carries similar technical issues from Diablo 3… to say it’s turning into Diablo 3 is peculiar, since it appears to already be a repurposed Diablo 3.
You’re not wrong. D3 reincarnated. Uniques, Super uniques, and legendaries raining from the sky. Poor loot itemization. Max level in under 12 hours of game time, literally in one sitting. Continued lack of Dev and CM interaction on the forums.
End game was lacking, but is slowly developing. It is getting much better, but still needs work. NM dungeons had huge potential but are now negligent.
I don’t know why they had to change that to such a big degree. They needed to improve the leveling experience not cut it short. People wanted to get to max level faster as if there was some mysterious other end game thing to do.
Blood harvest was good for leveling. Do more of that.
Add leveling uniques to the game prior to sacred tier that are fun to find.
Add crafting elements that let you use other uniques early in the leveling process for alts.
More special events like lunar that rotate in and out more often for leveling.
Side quests could be better utilized more take advantage of the open world nature. Could be another tier of side quests that are scenario based, tougher than open world combat, shorter than a dungeon, more xp
You have a funny view of casual. Probably takes me 3 weeks to hit the 12 hour mark.
It always cracks me up when the forums spout on about “casual”. It’s nearly always a derogatory term on one hand and then in the same breath it will be like, “any casual playing a mere 70 hours per week….”
No need to respond, you just made lol. To each their own….
Even if it turns into a D3 clone it’ll at least be alive just like D3 is.
So points here are invalid when all of it boils down.
Too many people are trying to treat D4 as an Anthem situation and trying to say the devs scammed everyone because they held content back for a quick buck. Alot of you need to wake up and see what D4 and even D3 is and who they are meant for.
PoE/LE are meant to be played 10+ hours a day for the typical unemployed guy.
D3/4 are meant to be played by normal 9-5 people after a day of work or a weekend binge.
D4 doesnt need to be an esport or have levels of grind that PoE has or even complexity.
Go ahead, call me a shill/defender of blizzard but at least I play and know what D3/4 are meant for. I’m done with the days of 8-10 hour gaming sessions on MMO’s and other types of games, specially LE/PoE levels of grinding.
A big part of what slowed us down in the beginning were things like grinding out renown and the sparse monster density. Also tree of whispers was a tiny fraction of its current exp level as were NMD’s. You had to also search for the Lilith statues and upon creating a new character your map was even still fogged.
The original intent was for the players to have to redo all of this each season, but right from S1 they gave us our Lilith statues, map progress and enough renown to get 10 skill points. Players still complained about needing to grind the rest for the remaining rewards and from S2 all of the bonuses associated with renown grind were given at character creation.
Preseason you also had to deal with the main quest as well as level gated areas. Parts of Hawrzar had level 45+ monsters and you could t wander down there at level 10 with your basic white gear or lack of skill points else you would have a bad time and likely get one shot by the most basic enemies. You also had to grind until
Chapter 4 to get your horse which meant traversal on foot for quite some time.
Most players don’t want to have to grind through all of that again, let alone each and every season. What blizzard has done. Owns shift the grind to the end. You get front loaded with power now and the grind is only there for optimization and chase items which seems to be your typical ARPG seasonal formula. If this game had to rely on its non seasonal design that it had at launch it would suffer even worse player retention because the replayability factor just isn’t there.
They are trying to walk a thin line here, but the ARPG player base is fickle as ever. Every game that comes out is the next Diablo killer, people play it, some like it while others don’t. Players stick around for a while until the new hotness comes out, maybe they bounce back and forth between a couple games or discover other games that have been around for a while to scratch their ARPG itch.
When that other game launches this summer let’s go look at the messages on other boards blaming that game for killing their favourite game.
d3 is much better then d4, if only these devs woiuld have build upon the foundation of d3. Then at least we would have had group and social settings, armoury and much more.
D3 was terrible. It was a monster killing simulator with poor itemization - you get your 6 pc set or 2 sets with grandeur and done. Other items have no value, rares have no value, ridiculous power creep, and little to no social impact or community bonding. No trading, no economy. Terrible game.
And you want to turn it into D2 instead. D2 and D3 were great during their time. I dont want to play them again. D4 should become D4… not D2 and not D3.
I was here since Season 0. Leveling to 100 then takes too long like it’s forever. Now, when Blizz shortened it, you’re complaining again and you want to revert it back? Hope you wont regret it when Blizz put it back.
Really? Have you done it? It must be very boring. Becoz mine, as Casual, it took me more than 2 weeks but i accomplished a lot of stuffs… All Uber Bosses got killed at least 5 times all on Solo; Accomplished most Season Journey except Destroyer; reached at least NM90.
What have you accomplished in 12 hours at level 100? Are you just starting to kill Uber Bosses. You will try level 75 Varshan at level 100? Thats faceroll boring. You will try level 85 Lord Zir at level 100? Duriel is suppose to be solod at level 90 and you do it at level 100?
It’s like WoW players… they level up to max level before they do Scarlet Monastery. That’s so boring.
You should be killing Bosses at their appropriate levels.
NM21 at level 100? Are you a joke? Starting NM dungeons at level 100?
12 hours as level 100 is boring.
You start leveling you first glyph at level 100? You should have at least 5x Level 15 glyphs by level 100.
Btw, it’s not doable doing level 100 in 12 hours. If it’s doable, it’s extremely boring. Doing boring stuffs, i may not even reach level 50. I would be gone by level 50 due to extreme boredom.
Thoughts in bold. Overall I am a thumbs down on this post.
Trading items is not going to save the game or become part of saving the social of the game. That seems like a majority of your post. All trading does is short circuit players gearing process. Trading is always the best way to gear. It also lets RMT gain more of a foothold. Trading should mirror D3. It was the best way for most ppl. A compromise where there is no AH and trades are limited to players that earned them in parties.
The entire mathematical system of attributes, stats, multipliers, affixes and how everything is calculated needs to be rebuilt from the ground up. The whole power scale needs to be reduced orders of magnitude to allow for proper balancing.
Itemization needs to be completely rebuilt from the ground up with base items as its foundation as is the case in D2. This way all items and rarities will have flavor and necessity. There needs to be a much greater variety and necessity for all item types.
Item affixes and stats and attributes need to be easily understandable and the calculations should be such that power increases and decreases are easily read at a glance when comparing gear. ILvl needs to be scrapped as a concept and items should come in their base form with a chance to be low, normal, high quality and that this modifier can affect all items.
The rate at which loot drops should be greatly reduced and changed in other ways to be more meaningful to compensate and eliminate the item sifting hell we have now. Items should be easily identifiable at a glance upon drop as is the case in D2.
And rebuild crafting, give gems a purpose, etc… etc… I could go on and on.
This game is borderline irredeemable…
Basically if you just built the game with an open world but with D2 systems and itemization you would have won.
But you thought you knew better and here we are, getting humbled…
