Some context for the people who are still in their honeymoon phase with the game or having fun in the early game and want to instantly pull out the “cry baby bye” comment:
I have played a lot of Diablo.
Diablo 2: thousands of youth hours, as most people here.
Diablo 3: which I hopped on from the start, was a mixed bag. I still remember grinding gold in lower tiers to keep up with death costs. I stayed with the game and played all seasons (missed seasons 18–20, but maxed out season journey on all others) and thousands of paragons per season after the power creep.
Diablo 2 Resurrected: (lvl 90+ on release) + all seasons. Made multiple endgame builds for all characters.
Diablo 4:
Closed endgame alpha - (reached lvl 80).
All the betas - reached max level with all characters.
Server slam - (Ashava killed the first time it spawned).
Release - started with early access and reached level 100 a few days ago. I completed the story, got all the renown, and beat all the capstone dungeons myself. Leveled to 100 in nightmare dungeons (did not farm the “ultra efficient” regular dungeons 1 million times). That kind of gameplay is just meh to me.
Early game (first char start until lvl 70). The “Honeymoon phase with the game”:
Everything is fun, and the story is enticing enough to keep interest.
Leveling and gearing feels fresh; new items and powers are impactful.
Usually, your power level keeps up with the scaling of monsters. Enough of a challenge, but nothing crazy.
The world is gorgeous. Sound design, animations, and interactibility with the environment are on point.
Levels 70-100. The “endgame is unfun” part:
Ok, you have full sacred gear at level 60. Torment difficulty is a noticeable ramp-up. You invest in some paragon points, get an ancestral weapon, and build is coming online. The game is still kind of fun until 2 hours later, when you have full ancestral gear with most of the needed legendary aspects that complement your build. You’re doing just fine against the difficulty of +3 levels (above your character level) of monsters, but your power level stays just like that. Just fine. Sure, you get some cool drops of dopamine from perfectly rolled items. By the time you reach lvl 100, you have mostly min-maxed everything — skills, gear, and paragon.
Endgame activities just stop at some point. There is nothing new or exciting to look forward to past level 80. Let’s look at all the stuff you have available:
World bosses: the difficulty and rewards from participating are a joke. Even the timed reward cache drops nothing. Oh wow, one sacred legendary with an aspect you don’t care about. The vendor is sure going to be happy.
As the boss spawns at fixed times, the time investment involved in participating at the moment is not worth it. You have to track when the boss spawns, get there 1 minute before, wait, kill (usually in 1 minute), get nothing, and continue doing whatever you were doing. Blizzard really needs to increase the loot from the caches. Make it the same as it was during betas: multiple legendarys with a bunch of yellows thrown in. Maybe even add some forgotten souls to the caches. The socket adding materials and 1-2 legendarys, is not enough. Difficulty-wise, scale the boss according to the player power levels in the instance. It needs to be more dynamic and punishing when you have multiple powerful people in the instance. Currently, it is a time-gated champion mob with ignoreable mechanics. 9/10 times, it’s not worth doing.
Helltides: The concept is cool; hell pours into the overworld. I think it only feels awesome because, in this Diablo game, there is no hell we can regularly visit or kill monsters at. The “hell dungeon” you visit during the story was clearly not enough. In reality, the helltide rewards are mediocre. All other chests except 175 need a massive buff. Make them drop high item power gear. The area needs more threats — more unique monsters that spawn randomly with enough incentive to actually kill them. Regular open-world events feel out of place there. They should all be replaced by helltide specific new ones that tie into the helltide motive. Currently, if you have enough mats for rerolls, it is not worth doing.
Regular dungeons are, due to the monster scaling design choices, currently hotspots for EXP farming. Instead of trying to nerf every new EXP spot players find, Blizzard should tone down the scaling. Make all mobs -3 levels to players. I know I will get a lot of hate for it, but farming the same area 1 million times for level 100 is not fun. This should not be the most efficient way to level. Until it is, people will find a way around the density changes.
Legion events are so bad, I’m not even going to stop on them. Needs total rework. There is no incentive to do it unless you really want the low chance of getting the cosmetics there.
Everything else at Open World is ignoreable as it is not worth doing at the endgame. Maybe food for thought for Blizzard.
Nightmare dungeons — the place that actually needs balancing.
Currently, I do not care about the affixes on the sigil. I only look at the level of the sigil and the name of the dungeon. There are multiple tiers of dungeons. Do not get the correct level and location of the dung - you will salvage the sigil. Balance this out. Make every or most dungeons worth doing.
In my opinion, all the sigils need an exp multiplier according to the level of the sigil (besides monster levels inside the dungeon). High completions should be rewarded. I.e., a level 50 NMd sigil should have a 1.2x exp affix, a level 60 1.3x exp affix, etc.
All the negative affixes need to be overhauled. Some arbitrary amount of +/- stats or monster buffs is not enough. There needs to be defining affixes, like all elites are in a pack (3-5 elites instead of 1), change all mobtypes to something good or bad, butcher roams the dungeon, etc. Currently, they are not creative, and all of them are ignoreable.
Post Level 100:
Ok, you are done with the grind. You have a build that works; maybe it is the “meta”, maybe not. You can delete most of the content. Now what?
a) Try new builds
Farm out new items and add legendary aspects to them. Reset the skills, reset the paragon…wait, where is the reset paragon button? WHERE is it? Honestly, having to click each node to remove it is the worst game design in the world. I don’t mind the cost; just give me an option to clear the board. You spec into a new build, go to try it out, and do no damage. What?
You have to search the forum for the latest hotfixes and the website for the latest client patches. Ah, nerfed again. Go through all the pain with the Paragon board again to spec into something that can farm the content again.
For the love of God, Blizzard, add a changelog inside the game. I do not want to search for the latest changes in two different places. Throw them in my face each time I start the game.
You can make changes in the game without booting people off, which is great! Show a scrolling text to all the players in the game saying that the new hotfix is live. Allow people to open the changelog in game. There’s nothing worse than your build randomly changing during a dungeon or uber-lilith try, etc.
When you disable an aspect of an item, show it on the item. Make it gray, make it say disabled next to it — there are so many design choices. Having nothing and people not knowing if it is disabled is super bad design.
b) push nightmare dungeons
No. There is no incentive. Few achievements and titles? I did NMd lvl 75 solo. Felt nothing.
c) Farm for chase items
No. The drop rate is riddiculous. Trade is limited to yellow items. If you get one, good for you. You can’t trade it.
Actively going for them is insanity.
d) Make an alt or a new class
You get to skip the story and get some renown bonuses. Cool. I cannot make myself go through the grind again; this time, with no honeymoon phase, it will be pain all the way from 1 to 100. Even if I go for it, what goal or challenge awaits me? There are no mechanics, no endgame content, and no change a new character brings to the endgame. I will be stuck with a new character with nothing to do.
e) PVP:
This is fun for a day or two. I got all the cosmetics from it the first day I started going after them. Gambling with PVP currency is actually a good way to get bases for your builds, but the whole PVP concept gets old pretty fast. Luckily, as I was at a high level early, I usually faced no challenge from other players. Once you spec a PVP-oriented build at level 100, it is lights out for everyone else. Still, it is fun for only a few days.
There is no content to keep you hooked once you are at the end. In D3, we had endless paragons. Sure, it was a bad design; D4 Paragon is leaps and bounds better, but having something attainable to chase and give you small doses of dopamine each time made me log on, farm some dungeons with friends, and have a nice chill evening. D4 offers nothing like that currently.
All the insane and fun power combos get disabled or “fixed”. I get the design choice that the game is not meant to be easy blasting like D3, and the journey to the endgame shouldn’t be “skippable”, but in the process of balancing the journey, Blizzard has removed the fun of ARPG endgames. There is no insane build or fun mechanic to work towards. Engame is just pale and unfun. It makes you want to press the “start game” button less and less.
Overall, the game has a lot of potential. It is definitely in a way better place than D3 was at the start. Seasons and some patches can fix a lot of the issues I’m currently facing in the game, and I’m hopeful that this will turn out to be a multi-thousand, not a multi-hundred-hour game for me. So far, I’ve definitely gotten my money’s worth.