D4 S3 Feedback - 30th Jan 2024
Please take this feedback from a point of positivity, I wouldn’t be here writing all of this unless I cared about the game getting better.
Context
- I consider myself a hardcore casual gamer. I have 3x level 100 characters in S2 and have had multiple 100’s in every season (including preseason). This season might be the only one where I get to 100 and just call it.
- Necro is my main but I also like Druid. I actually feel like Druid is the most well thought out class. Because the uniques really augment the gameplay in a cool / fun way.
- This season I’ve gone with Necro again, which is nearly level 100. I’m playing with shadow dot or Infinimist, as I found two perfect aspects really early in WT2 and WT4, and found it easier to push my level 80 something into NMD90 and NMD100 to unlock 925’s. Since then thats where I’ve been living.
- I’ve also heard bone spear / bone spirit is really good but havent had the gear drop (aspects) to try it.
- Before I quit the season I want to try Blood Lance with the new Mutilator Unique chest. I’ve found it, but I need to farm the other aspects / gear first.
- Blood lance is my favourite build, but I was sad to see the nerfs to overpower. I don’t know how it will play. But with the %life changes, maybe it will be better.
Generally
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Necromancer
- Not sure if the devs saw the rankings for AOZ but Necromancer was the only class NOT to be able to clear AOZ 25 in solo rankings. I think the highest was 22 or 23 on an infinimist build.
- Therefore it made me sad that Infinimist’s main ability ‘Blighted Corpse Explosion’ took a nerf to its LHC (lucky hit chance).
- Blizz if you’re going to nerf the engine of corpse generation for a corpse build, then please atleast increase the corpse limit on screen. Going to explode or tendril a corpse and see it vanish from under your cursor is the worst feeling - especially at high dungeons where this could mean your life. Or atleast compensate by making some LHC passives on the skill tree!
- Therefore it made me sad that Infinimist’s main ability ‘Blighted Corpse Explosion’ took a nerf to its LHC (lucky hit chance).
- Big Win / Small Effort Skill Tree Passives
- I’ve said this before, but the first skill wheel (basic attacks) needs a 3/3 passive node that increases core / other skill damage - for those that want to play a ‘basic skill-less’ build
- And the second skill wheel (core skills) needs a 3/3 passive node that increases the basic skill / other skill damage for those niche builds that dont use a basic skill or a core skill (ball lightning, firewall, meteor, blizzard, corpse explosion, bone spirit etc etc)
- QOL lost from previous seasons
- Necro in S1 was really fun. Playing with auto curse and auto corpse explode / tendrils made you feel like a god. Even auto summon skeleton for those niche minion builds was awesome. Its sad to see that go. Having the unique rings bring back auto corpse skills is fine, but I’d like to see the other powers come back as well. Some suggestions below.
- Necro in S2 was also really fun with Metamorph. The smoothness of having unstoppable at your fingertips is something necro’s dont have much of, unless you’re playing infinimist with high CDR and in bloodmist most of the time.
- I feel like metamorph was really close in animation to having a Blood Rush (from D3). Does this mean that necromancer is finally getting a movement skill? At a minimum I would like to see a bone armour skill that gives you another source of unstoppable, similar to druids earthern bulwark. And then a movement skill like bloodrush.
- I can understand the mentality of wanting to keep the neromancer as this slow, undead summoning master, but the truth is that summons are bad and have been since beta - aside from a few niche minion builds, which people been able to make work due to bugged interactions.
- In the world of zoomers, people just want to be faster. So please give us blood rush or metamorph back full time.
- Necro in S3 has 0 QOL that is tied to a season. The changes to bone prison / bone spirit regen are nice. And to be fair, the full power of the pet is yet to be seen, as I don’t know anyone with 10/10 governing and tuning stones and all the unique stones. (Dont even know if you need to level up the unique stones?!).
- Generally I think from season to season, there should be power creep instead of resetting all the time and trying to fill that niche every season with a different mechanic.
- Necro would be 100% more fun if we had those QOL changes baseline. And I’m sure other classes would agree if they could keep their QOL as well (not even the power creep).
- At a worst case the monsters could be buffed to suit any power creep.
- Not sure if the devs saw the rankings for AOZ but Necromancer was the only class NOT to be able to clear AOZ 25 in solo rankings. I think the highest was 22 or 23 on an infinimist build.
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Dungeons
- NMD90 dropping 925’s feels good / fun. Gives you something to strive for at mid/late game. At the moment for me personally this small change is literally carrying the mid/late game progression.
- However some chests in the NMD still drop low level items
- It is my strong feeling that this should be a meta progression to make overworld content also drop 925s (helltides / whispers etc etc). Account / zone wide progression. Similar to the GR70 unlock of primals in D3.
- There should be more NMD META PROGRESSION like this, examples below:
- NMD50 - Normal and Sacred base items stop dropping (100% ancestrals) and are Autosalvaged. And like the change in S2, these are auto salvaged.
- NMD60 - Elixirs last 50%-100% longer (I know these are sometimes covered by blessings, but I feel the blessings should be seasonal themed)
- NMD70 - Incense last 50%-100% longer (I know these are sometimes covered by blessings, but I feel the blessings should be seasonal themed)
- NMD80 - Horse and boost is useable in all towns & boost CD is reduced (I know these are sometimes covered by blessings, but I feel the blessings should be seasonal themed)
- NMD90 - All MAGIC and RARE items now drop as 925 (in the overworld and from ALL other sources)
- NMD100 - All UNIQUES now drop as 925 (see below) or Droprate of ALL boss materials is doubled
- Completing a higher NMD (skipping any tiers) rewards all of the previous tiers’ meta progression rewards
- I’m sure the community could come up with better ideas, if you have any bangers please leave them in a comment below
- NMD90 dropping 925’s feels good / fun. Gives you something to strive for at mid/late game. At the moment for me personally this small change is literally carrying the mid/late game progression.
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Boss Ladder
- All normal bosses such as Lord Zir, Grigoire, Varshan and Beast in Ice should have an UBER version at level 90-100 that drops 925’s. (or as per my previous note, make the world progress via meta progression after NMD90 completion with 925 as the new baseline)
- In the current state you need 925 uniques, and unless your unique is build defining, then its better to use 925 rares. However in mostly all situations where a unique is good or required, its better to have a 925 version.
- Sorry this sounds like a silly common sense statement, but farming perfect 925 versions of uniques is actually a problem in the current state of the game. Unless its a uber unique which drops with max rolls and 925 as static.
- Maybe the NMD100 meta progression could be that all uniques drop with max roll and 925 as static.
- These bosses quickly become redundant once you get your build defining unique
- The only other reason to do them is to farm uber mats for Uber Duriel and Uber Uniques
- Each Uber Boss should have a reasonable chance to drop uber uniques (not just Duriel)
- Funneling players into doing Duriel is making the other bosses almost worthless. And is making Uber Duriel boring / repetitive.
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Content Drought
- D4 actually has seen quite a lot of content over its 3 seasons. The issue is that it keeps getting removed every season.
- If the game brought back every seasons content in some way but as a permanent feature, it would be way better. Examples below:
- S1 Malignant
- Bring back Malignant hearts in a nerfed form. They should still be better than baseline gems in terms of power, but offer alot of the QOL that was realised and then removed.
- Use any maligant material to open up a malignant tunnel. These would transform any random dungeon into a tunnel. Tunnels have a higher drop rate of Unique Malignant Rings / Hearts
- Let us change the colour of a malignant socket with a craft
- All materials go to the ‘Materials’ tab. Even boss summoning materials - heres looking at you Varshan mats! (And all of the others). Why is there even 4 mats for Varshan lol? Hes not even that good!
- S2 Blood
- Bring back the much loved ‘Blood Harvest’. For those who said blood harvest was awesome (and I tend to agree) - have it in the overworld in a zone that has no activity present. Either cycling or static, it doesnt matter.
- Bring back Blood powers in a nerfed form. As mentioned my necro feels terrible in S3 without Metamorph, and is making me cringe to swap builds away from infinimist.
- Make all Blood power progression account wide (apply to all characters). Remove the need to keep metamorph at level 1 shenanigans to have it the most OP.
- Bring back AOZ but integrate it with the upcoming S3 leaderboards. This to me just felt like a missed opportunity. Ditch the TOB glyph or have it pre-leveled as an AOZ meta progression but heavily nerfed.
- E.g. Every 5 levels of AOZ you get a +40 to your TOB glyph. I’m sure someone can think of a better sytem.
- S3 Construct
- Bring back / leave Tremors and Vaults in the game. Take advantage of the fact the open world is so big and give each zone its own mechanic! That would be so cool / amazing.
- Delete the pet, its kinda meh
- Or bring it back with proper scaling (more below)
- Or make it purely QOL / utility and let it PICK UP ITEMS ONLY VISIBLE BY YOUR LOOT FILTER (hint hint)
- Gauntlet. No idea about this system because its not out yet. But it feels of more like a speed run leaderboard than a push leaderboard.
- If this is the case then use the previous idea and make AOZ the push leaderboard but with infinite scaling. And keep the Gauntlet like it is.
- It would be cool to see some form of the D3 Challenge Rift come back, where at the end of every week you could use the build / gear / paragons of the person at rank 1 and try to beat their time / points. This could literally be called Challenge Gauntlet and have its own leaderboard as well.
- This way people who are skilled but dont have the time to grind endlessly for the best gear have a chance to prove their skill with gear that others have farmed.
- It is also a very cool way to introduce players to new builds / playstyles that they might enjoy. Just dont make it super un-optimised silly builds like we saw in D3…
- As noted, the monsters at end-game NMD100/AOZ/Gauntlet could be scaled to suit any power creep etc.
- S1 Malignant
- All of this should scale with NMD Meta Progression
- And all of these seasons / sytems should have their own meta progression in some form that people can chose to grind to give them an edge in the proper end-game: AOZ / Gauntlet Leaderboards
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New Bosses / Duplicate Bosses
- There are also so many cool campaign bosses from the Acts that I’m sure people would love to see again.
- Can we get the duplicates like Tomb Lord or the Blood Bishop swapped out for bosses like ANDARIEL or even ASTAROTH?
- I’m sure myself and others would be happy not to have to fight blood bishop or tomb lord for the 100th / 1000th / 10000th time.
- And this would help to appreciate all the dev time put into creating and animating those bosses and bring them back in a meaningful way.
- Boss Materials - please make this stack to 999 or 9999. 50 feels like it is not enough. Or better yet, why not both and let it go into the materials tab as suggested.
- Low % secret bosses.
- Butcher is cool but gets out-geared quickly. Right now hes just a gear check.
- Goblins are fine but boring now.
- Son of Malphas was fine the first few times I vs’d him but like butcher he doesnt scale. Also some of his damaging abilities over overtuned. (Rip Raxx). I also remember him being very annoying and just constantly jumping into the sky. Can we get a small cooldown reduction on that ability please?
- There are also so many cool campaign bosses from the Acts that I’m sure people would love to see again.
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Loot Filter / Itemisation / Trade and SSF
- Its no secret that itemisation in D4 is terrible. Theres been enough damage on Tuesday memes now. I just cant believe we’re less than a year into a new game release and it already needs a full itemisation 2.0 rework, but it is what it is.
- Bring loot filters into the game. I know the Devs want to fix itemisation first and then see if a loot filter is required. The truth is, people would rather just filter what they want. Even if items stayed the same.
- I feel like this is the easiest big win move. Let us filter what we want and send everything else to salvage.
- Most if not all of the latest ARPGs have loot filters. Last Epoch has an amazing loot filter which could easily be expanded upon to include materials etc. POE has an amazing loot filter and even though its 3rd party, its still the best in class.
- Filtering of items also helps to encourage trade / SSF, because if you get that GG drop it might encourage you to trade it away to buy what you need, or keep it and reroll that class/build that best suits that item.
- For all of the Trade enjoyers, I feel like trade needs to be streamlined or more heavily supported. An Auction House (AH) or Bazaar might be a good idea given how painful it is to find and trade items (3rd party websites).
- BTW this isnt insinuating that Uber Uniques should now be tradable. I feel like that philosophy of the ‘best items in the game should be droppable and soulbound’ from Joe Shelly back in Blizzcon 2019 should still hold true.
- Also when is SSF support coming to the game? It took 11 long years to bring it into D3. Please don’t make us have to wait that long. You can still make town hubs and sanctuaries sharable between SSF / non-SSF players so people can admire xmogs and go visit the store etc. I’m not trying to rob Blizz of cash shop opportunities. Speaking of the cash shop though, please don’t sell the expansion for $100(US) baseline. I know this has been addressed but I feel like the community is hurting and needs an olive branch and the new xpac is the perfect opportunity to do just that. And people want paladin, so after this new class, the next class should really be paladin if you want to please the masses. (I’m not fussed either way, but would be excited for everyone else if we got a paladin).
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Loot Filter - Min Reqs
- I think as a minimum the loot filter needs:
- Filter by item level (with ‘greater than, less than and equal to’ options)
- Filter by item affix (Crit, vuln, crit damge, dmg vs, dmg on tuesdays etc)
- Filter by aspect and perfection (Show me Umbrals with 100% perfection = 4/4 roll etc)
- Filter by item type (1h sword, 2h sword, shield, druid offhand, helm, chest, pants, boots, gloves, amulet and rings etc etc)
- Filter by rarity (common, magic, rare, legendary, unique, uber unique)
- Filter by item tier (normal, sacred, ancestral. While this would only be good for levelling, well rolled base and sacred aspects could still be useful at endgame)
- Show / Hide any of the above
- A priority system with filters at the top of the list taking priority over those at the bottom (see Last Epoch)
- Setting the threshold for auto salvage like you gave us in season 2 would be awesome as well. I.e. Salvage all items below 925 ilvl that are common, magic or rare.
- Options for materials like herbs, ores, elixirs, veiled crystals, raw hide etc. Which would let players hide these once they hit the cap or don’t care about them anymore
- I think as a minimum the loot filter needs:
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Crafting
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The level of crafting in this game is so minimal but that also means it can be easily expanded upon without having the need for overcomplexity!
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I would like to see the game “lean” more into the Vendors (Alchemist, Jewel Crafter, Blacksmith and Occultist)
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Alchemist
- Lets take a look at the potion system / elixirs / incense system
- Issue: Right now its easy to become overrun with elixirs from farming helltide. Some are kinda meh, some are good but for other builds and a few are perfect for your build but just low power level
- Issue: After you upgrade your HP Pot to 90, herbs become pointless? So, what to do with excess herbs?
- Issue: The best elixirs drop from helltide and can’t be crafted. E.g. The 20% max hp elixir is good for end-game pushing.
- Suggestion: What if we could “salvage” the elixirs / incense into its base materials (herbs). That way we can free up space and can just craft the elixirs that we need, when we need them.
- Suggestion: Instead of dropping pure elixirs, the helltide could also drop plans for the rare and special helltide only elixirs. Allowing us to learn and craft them at the Alchemist.
- Suggestion: Potions could be suped up to have extra effects. Lets give the Alchemist excess herbs as a form of meta progression to grant extra power to the potion or increase the efficiency of salvaging (maybe at max rank you get 100% efficiency of salvaging). D3 had wicked ideas for the potion from the Altar season. Someone call an interdepartmental meeting!
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Occultist
- A similar system to the above is already in-game with the NMD / Vault sigils and Sigil Dust which is cool, but this could easily be extended to other systems.
- What about leaning into the codex more with some meta progression?
- Issue: Bags / Stash are constantly full of aspects. Early / mid game players hoard any aspect that they think could be useful. And late game its only perfect aspects.
- Suggestion: Others have already suggested this, but let us upgrade and store all aspects within the codex! Everytime we salvage an aspect it goes into the codex and depending on its perfection it upgrades the codex permanently to that level.
- This will alleviate space issues, and actually let you use the stash as its intended for crafting projects or potential upgrades. This also saves on sorting time and running between the stashes. (Thanks for adding more stashes and stash space btw).
- Also this should go without saying, but this and any progression should be account wide progression for all systems, where possible.
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Blacksmith / Jewel Crafter and Vendors.
- Issue: The issue is that when you compare a normal (un-upgraded item) to an upgraded one, you cant tell whats better.
- Suggestion: The un-upgraded item should be pseudo-upgraded for the purposes of the comparison tool (shift), because if you’re going to use it, the reality is that you WILL upgrade it (given the gold / mats / time).
- Also please let us use the mark as junk feature to salvage ANYTHING, ANYWHERE. Who cares if its immersion breaking? I’ll tell you whats more immersion breaking is burning your feet in the town lava because you’re not out there fighting back the forces of hell!
- Please also add ‘sell junk’ and ‘sell all’ buttons to the vendors.
- The mark as favourite addition from last season was really nice too - thanks!
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Blacksmith and Jeweler
- Upgrading is good in terms of power but bland. An extra 25 ilvls in terms of power is nothing to scoff at, especially on a weapon.
- The upgrade system is fine for a mobile game but we need something better for D4.
- A random spit-ball idea is, how about when you upgrade an item there is a 25% chance per upgrade for it to also gain an extra 5th affix? Now 4/4 perfect items just became ALOT more desirable.
- Maybe make some meta progression on the BS / JC so that weapons of higher ilevel have a higher chance to gain that 5th affix.
- Another idea I was playing around with, was with regard to fixing the jankyness of the gearing process from normal to sacred to ancestral quality tiers between WT2, WT3 and finally WT4.
- Right now you make a build, most people either farm a dungeon for their key aspect if they have a build in mind, or others just RNG it and play to what drops (play the hand that you’re dealt).
- Issue: I’m sure we’ve all had this happen but its frustrating to find a perfect item that is normal legendary or sacred legendary, because you know that you will just grow out of it and eventually it will just become redundant once you move into WT4 and ancestrals.
- Suggestion: What if we could salvage 10 ‘sacred’ or ‘ancestral’ items and get ‘sacred dust’ or ‘ancestral dust’ and use that dust to upgrade one piece from normal to sacred, or sacred to ancestral.
- Mechanically the % perfection of the rolls will be locked and it will just upgrade the quality or tier of the item, including any crafted or re-rolled affixes.
- E.g. if you find a perfect (100%) pair of 4/4 quadfecta gloves but they’re normal. You slam a perfect aspect because you know you can upgrade them. Once you find 10 sacreds you salvage that for dust and upgrade to Sacred. Doing the same for ancestral until you have a perfect (100%) pair of 4/4 quadfecta END-GAME ANCESTRAL gloves. Your aspect also gets preserved.
- This would alleviate the annoying process of gearing in WT2, then regearing in WT3 and then having to regear again in WT4. And could help smooth the transition between world-tiers as I’m guessing there will also be a WT5 at some stage. Which could also introduce its own new item quality tier. Having to farm the same gear / aspects one more time will just drive people crazy (and likely away from the game).
- Honestly this isnt even a new concept, its the same thing that was in D3 for primals. So even if you let us do that, but only for one item - I’m sure it would be better than nothing.
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(On a side note, the most rare items in the game [aside from Uber uniques] I feel are white base items. Can we do something cool with them for crafting? Let us add affixes somehow? Chaos orb? Affix shards? I feel sad everytime I walk passed one, as it feels like wasted potential. I mean even in D3 they were useful for salvage!)
Seasonal Mechanic
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Generally:
- This should always be the best and most rewarding way to play the game. Prior to the hotfix / buff, this wasnt the case, so I’m glad they buffed it. Early indications are good, but it still remains to be seen whether its the best for xp / gear.
- Also the knockback removal was perfect. I don’t know what devilish mind came up with that, but it was straight out of the 7th layer of hell I’m sure (and not in a good way).
- The new boss also looks cool and when learning, its a toss up whether to kill him or the towers. Its cool how the towers align with elements that change the room and layout of the fight.
- Vaults feel bland / boring.
- Pet seems lackluster.
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New Town - The Gatehall
- Layout is better than most towns which is good.
- Would be nice to be able to mount whilst in there though. This should be baseline for all new towns.
- When opening a NMD sigil, cant easily zoom out to find your NMD. For some reason the zoom out keybinds are removed on this new town / map.
- For some reason every other zone has 1 and 2 keybinds to zoom in out of the map / town / dungeon, however this area does not. Not sure if console is also having this issue.
- Vaults obviously open inside the gatehall, it would be nice for the NMDs to open here as well. Or just fix the bug above.
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Questline
- Thematically the pet is cool and the questline is good (aside from that bugged quest for the journals lol)
- Droprate on the ‘Resource’ tuning stone is very low (got to level 92 before I found it)
- As others have suggested, it should have been a reward from the season journey or an early quest.
- I didnt do many NMVs (nightmare vaults) in WT2 / WT3. Maybe 1-2 each.
- But in WT4 once I unlocked NMD90+, its been a 50-50 split between NMD and NMV level 90+. So not seeing the resource aspect til 92 was just weird. I don’t mind as I’ve been playing a CE build that doesnt use resource. Its just odd as I thought this would be one of the first stones to drop!
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Uber Malphas
- As mentioned its cool the first go around when its all new and shiny. The quest version is kind of a push over, so the uber version is nice to see all the mechanics.
- Feels very un-rewarding (pre-buff)
- Havent’ tried it since they patched it with Igneous Cores. I’m finding the cores a little hard to come by honestly.
- New unique stones seem are cool but I havent had any drop.
- Why was the initial drop-rate so low?
- They’re not stronger than uber uniques, so I dont understand why the droprate was lower than uber-uniques?
- Also, why doesnt this guy also drop uber uniques?
- Being the new big bad for the season, I suggest he should drop all uber uniques and at a higher rate than duriel:
a) 'cuz he’s new and shiny
b) 'cuz people are sick of duriel
c) 'cuz he’s new and shiny
- Being the new big bad for the season, I suggest he should drop all uber uniques and at a higher rate than duriel:
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Pet
- Thematically its cool to have a robo-dog-spider-scorpion thing following you around.
- Initially I thought the pet would be there to supplement your weaknesses and/or bolster your strengths. At this stage it feels like neither.
- Pet progression is slow and tedious. Needs to be 10x faster. Seems better since the buff patch but still slow imo.
- We were promised a pet that scales with our character. Right now our character leaves this thing in the dust. Its worse than having a single necro skeleton. (Offtopic: Bring back beta necro minions pre-nerf please).
- Pet scaling is terrible. Basically useless during leveling. Would be nice to know how it scales exactly, for players to take advantage of this.
- Does it scale from your Attack Power, ilvl or offensive stats? Does it scale with element? I.e. would fire sorcs scale the fire skills? Would shadow necros scale the shadow skills?
- Feels like a hinderance instead of a boon
- It fights and pulls monsters back one room instead of them being on you (its fine if you need a tank but annoying when you’re playing a melee build like me).
- It should have an attack mode / stance. Passive, Defensive or Aggressive.
- Pet gets bodyblocked by monsters. It should have passability and be freely able to move through enemies
- Admittedly I havent levelled all the skills to level 10 to see if its any good when fully powered up, but therein lies the problem. The grind for the pet shouldnt be longer than the grind for 1-100 (unless its godly with full level 10 stones)
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PTR and Other Feedback
- Others have voiced this opinion but can we get a PTR. Even if under NDA, there are streamers willing to freely give their time to test things for the good of all.
- The vaults and bosses could have used extra testing. They are better now, but doing emergency hot-fixes I’m sure is just a waste of everyones time.
- Please give players access to test it and provide proper feedback.
- Alot of players are just finding the seasonal mechanic boring:
- Annoying traps were the knock back ones. Its good that they’re removed.
- Visual clarity and signaling on traps could still use some work. Especially the ones close to doors, where the door animation blocks the trap or blocks you from being able to pass through
- Obelisks and cores are kind of annoying. Would rather them have mass spawn monsters than freezing me every 2 seconds.
- Mechanic should scale with the number of warding stacks. I know in WT4 the NMV have chests worth 15 warding, but what if you just wanted to dump all your pearls into one omega run? 50 or 100 stacks of warding should give something more.
- One suggestion would be for the 10, 4 and 1 ward chests to remain, but the centre chest to scale of the remaining warding you have left (with the intention that you open this chest last- maybe its locked until then?) and get a reward that scales accordingly.
- Straight way I feel like that would be a more rewarding system and push people back into the overworld to farm tremors / cores and pearls to juice up their runs even more again.
- Another crazy idea is that the vaults scale monster density with number of pearls used.
- There are very few instances where you actually feel scared to enter a room (unless you’re new to WT4 and seriously undergeared / under-leveled). This use to be the whole primace of Diablo back in the day. Lets juice the density to where you need your big boy/girl pants on to tackle whatever lies ahead.
Thanks for reading and hopefully that gives the devs something to think about, with some ways to potentially make D4 better.
If you have any feedback of your own, or big brain ideas etc please comment below.
Kind regards,
Tylicius
and just stick to some necro parts.