I think D4 is good enough, I wouldn’t be here otherwise. It could have been, and could be, so much more though.
I think that the game is severely lacking in skill/build choice (which affects class balance). You’re funneled or shoehorned into a particular set of skills, aspects/gear, passives and paragon with a relative illusion of choice. Some classes require a particular skill or passive to perform well. If a passive is mandatory, it should be “built-in” within the class, or Blizzard should give some other meaningful options. I would even argue that some passives should be incompatible with one another and we should have to choose. Also, due to multiplicative damage stacking to astronomic levels in some case, you’re forced to make sure that all your offensive and utility aspects work with your main damage skill/source. We become overspecialized killing machines usually using one damage skill, and a couple of supporting/effects ones (that usually have for result to increase our damage through mob stacking, or CC, applying vulnerable, or all of them).
Skill tree choices (or lack thereof) : Maybe in a future expansion, I would like to see some skill changing passives that aren’t tied to an item, like runes were in D3. Each skill should have a slightly expended tree beyond it with some options to change its element, effect, change from a Core skill to a basic one, change to a channeled one, etc., even if one ends up being better than the other. The current two options are limitative and usually poorly balanced too (thanks Blizzard for being bad at balancing).
That would require some aspect tweaking, new vfx, and changes to some paragon legendary nodes to be more inclusive when it comes to damage type. However, they would need to really tune down the overall multiplicative bonuses we get from any source to balance the whole thing as damage currently get out of hand, and that’s with a relative illusion of choice. What would happen if we had even more choice? They really messed up with the whole multiplier stacking paradigm.
Endgame : The endgame is bland. It’s even worse since they tied almost everything to Pits run and glyph levels. We need other activities to give Glyph level/exp, and we need something challenging that isn’t running a map full high damage high HP sponges in less than 15 minutes.
As for PvP : I don’t PvP unless it’s a fair system, with standardized stats. Maybe throw in some team mini games / objectives, or its of little to no appeal to me. However, it never was a Diablo thing for PvP to be balanced, so it probably won’t happen in D4. If they wanted to balance it a little bit, every skill or effect would have its PvE damage, and its PvP damage, and not a simple reduction all across the board.
Anyway, Blizzard is probably thinking all of this is unecessary as all they have to do is give us a minimal effort patch and expansion every now and then.
With more choice is the skill tree, we would obviously still have FOTM builds and skills. There’s no way around it: It’s an ARPG, and to keep people coming back every season, they need to add new items and tweak stuff. By doing so, it usually introduce a new multiplicative bonus that takes a skill to another level. If they kept the multiplicative bonuses at a much lower level, it definitely wouldn’t be that crazy (i.e. we would have builds that hit for 4-5 times more, obviously, but no builds that hit for 100-1000x more.).
