Unfortunate that the ticket keybind or menu doesn’t exist in open beta. I’d rather not post thoughts in this overwhelmingly negative space but this is the only way I see.
I leveled all 5 available classes to 25. I had a lot of fun playing and am excited for what the full game will bring. But this is a beta and there were some issues that should be addressed and now is the time to talk about that.
The 2 biggest issues I saw have likely been talked about endlessly. The first few hours of open beta crushing the servers was the worst part of the experience. That can’t happen, but you hardly need feedback for that. The other one would be the very early game (up to lvl 10) on Barbarian and Druid. It may mess up later game to make those early abilities powerful but they both need help. Maybe a special character-only weapon or temporary pet, something.
Once I got to around lvl 15-20 I started to feel strong with both characters. With some more time dedicated to gearing, they’re both much better now.
There are several aspects of the UI that need fine tuning. The NPC menu’s for the Occultist and Jewelcrafter are very much afterthoughts. The Occultist in particular is very important and we’ll be spending a lot of time with him and spending our hard earned resources. The Enchanting UI is just terrible. You can’t see what all the options for stats that can be replaced. You can’t open any other windows while the enchant is active or it closes and you lose it (say you want to look at +1 weapon mastery what all skills that would be). Then, the fact that we will need an herb to replace a legendary stat and the gold cost gets very quickly massively out of hand are separate but important issues. You have a great blueprint for that UI in Diablo3, take advantage.
For the Jewelcrafter UI, showing a grayed out “next upgrade tier” is important because you can’t tell at all what the maximum level you can upgrade your gems to. Balance-wise, I would really like to see a different material used for low level socket additions because it looks like you can only use the very rare “Scattered Prism” and you’d be making a large mistake spending one of those on sub max level gear.
Gems waste a large portion of our inventory space, because everything only takes 1 slot, the 33 slot bag loses a lot while carrying gems around.
The item upgrade UI is ok but the costs are absolutely extreme for low level characters. It looks like it will keep scaling to very high costs for higher level characters too. Because of the nature of diablo, you should be just killing higher level / torment level monsters before you even do any upgrading so it makes no sense for the player to be doing upgrades anyway. Having it be plentiful and cheap works in your favor too when the costs inevitably skyrocket at max level, if you started selling gold for $$$ that is… Anyway, gameplay wise, item manipulation costs are simply too high across the board, at very least for lvl 25 and below.
Other UI things: Character screen - “materials and stats” should default to stats and not materials.
Map - An option (at least) to have the map go back to where you were last zoomed in at instead of defaulting to your character. Reasoning (Map)- You often get interrupted one way or another and it’s annoying to navigate back, especially in a dungeon. You could have a stronger character highlight on the map as well. Both for you and your party members.
Combat - The sounds and animations are top notch, thanks for that. The biggest frustration for me is how hard it is to avoid damage if your evade is down. Summoned ‘totems’ in particular are so accurate and have a huge hitbox, very punishing to melee. Manageable but it sucks to get slowed down so much by various slowing effects while chasing down casters/archers.
Pathing issues, for combat purposes, come up often for melee. Where your character gets stuck not attacking near a wall or especially those blocks of ice that come up in Malnok’s stronghold.
All that said negatively for melee, I still enjoyed that part quite a bit and chose melee variants when possible for Druid / Rogue.
Hopefully this was worth your time to read. Here’s to making a great game even better.
EDIT added more
Further UI thoughts:
Bag sorting - Locking a particular piece in place would help. Click once for junk and twice for locking (with a clear UI indication of that). This is so you can lock in your upgrades or bank material and keep it separate from everything else, while still able to use the ‘sort’ button.
Searching the stash - This is likely planned in the future but a bank search would really help. Would like it to be much more robust than D3’s. Searching by much more than just name. Notably: by item class, character class, ‘weapon’, level required, and a host of other useful things that require searching the tooltip.
Item extraction - when you select “only my class” it should also include anything usable for your class, not so strictly show “Barbarian” only. Should include things usable by all classes. Or better yet, only show other class powers if you choose to see it.
Item extraction balance concerns - Since you can only extract a power once, and it looks like it will work from lvl 1 to 100, this will lead to your bank getting jam packed with legendaries sitting and waiting to be used at max level. Our limited bank space and materials will make this very frustrating as time goes on.
Item extraction should be much more lenient in the leveling process. Allowing multiple or even infinite uses of extracted powers when in non-torment difficulty. This would allow you to use your sweet legendary for a long time while leveling, instead of needing to replace it in just a few minutes or couple hours.
Extracted powers UI future concerns - It’s good to have the icons on there but we will have hundreds of those things and finding the one you want will be quite a chore in the current system. Custom sorting, locking and searching would all help. It will likely need a whole window or bank stash UI dedicated to it though.