After completing all the D4 content available to players as a Barbarian and reaching level 25 with pseudo legendary optimization, I have some thoughts and feedback that could improve the experience.
UI: The UI feels good except for the Social menu. I believe there should be 2 buttons on the UI. One for character/inventory and one for the Social menu to access friends and clans easier. Having the social menu pinned as a sub menu to the map felt weird and forgotten about often. Other than that, the UI felt intuitive.
World Bosses: Ashava was a fun experience and I enjoyed it thoroughly. As far as spawn timer, the timer for it was once every 3 hours during the beta during the evening. I don’t know how the official timer for it will be at launch but I would say that I hope the spawn timer is always once every 3 hours and not set to a specific time frame.
Public Events: Some of the Public event spawn areas were completely chaotic. Some areas were more efficient to farm than others as the spawn rate seemed to be a lot higher. I don’t know if that is intended but from my experience, the spawn point west of Kor Dragan was spawning every 2-5 mins and I was capping out my gambling currency in less than an hour. On the flip side, some of the more remote out of the way areas were spawning every great once in a while.
Dungeons: Dungeon lay outs were randomized but the layout variety was very low. Certain dungeon bosses like the Blood Bishop were used too often. In the case of the vampire themed dungeon, why not just have a named Vampire as the boss instead of the Blood Bishop which was better themed for the dungeon focused on the Blood Chalice. I can’t remember if they were the same dungeon, but the point is that it was disappointing to see some bosses reused so often. The Spider boss and the first dungeon demon boss were more interesting bosses, visually and mechanically, but they were only used for 1 dungeon each. The mechanic of finding the key items to open the next door of the dungeon was fine. Having an objective is good but not every dungeon has to have that as a mechanic. Having 1-2 dungeons in Fractured Peaks that was just a straight shot would be nice. Doing straight shots can be fun too if you add hazards like traps or hazardous ground/fog to move through. You have verticality in the game so you could have a dungeon that was safer to traverse on the higher ground but on the lower ground it had a poisonous fog or water you had to move through. Stuff that makes you think about where you are positioned, while being a maze without keys, would be a nice change of pace.
Gear Drop Rates: I think the drop rates for Rare and Legendaries was too high. Their drop rates need to be cut in half to feel better. Once I started getting Legendaries, all I cared about was keeping that legendary or hoping for a really good Rare item to put the legendary power on. The drop rates felt like D3 honestly which is way too high.
Legendary Aspects: I like that aspects give a power increase to certain items. That felt like I was making a choice on where I wanted to place certain extracted powers. The part of the system that felt clunky and not very intuitive was the Aspected item restrictions. Some were meant only for armor and amulet slots while some were weapons, amulet, rings, and gloves. It was a little weird and I found myself with a power that I really wanted to place on my gear but I couldn’t as I didn’t plan out ahead of time which slots all the powers would go. In order to fix it, I would have to re acquire 4 pieces of gear to rearrange the powers in such a way as to make it work. In the meantime, I just had to work with what I had. Instead of having 3 different gear slotting outcomes for Aspects, just have 2 of them, one for weapons and jewelry and one for armor and jewelry. That is more intuitive. Either that or have all utility/resource generating based powers on jewelry and defensive/offensive powers on armor and weapons. Having weird slot requirement combos on aspects frustrated me and was a bad experience.
Gems and Sockets: I liked this part and reminded me a lot of D2 gems. Every gem seemed to be equally good situationally which they should be. Please don’t add legendary gems into the game as that would be overkill with the Aspect system.
Stats: The stats on the gear seemed varied and ok. I didn’t really like that a piece of gear could roll 3 different skill rank ups. It could be amazing if all the skills rolled were for what you need but I had 1 useful skill up and the other 2 were useless for my build. Also I never knew how Fortify worked even after hours of min/maxing my gear at level 25. I knew that it was an addition brighter red color over my existing health globe but I didn’t know from the description how it benefitted me. It sounds like a defensive effect you can gain but it didn’t mitigate any damage as far as I could tell and was a pretty junk status. If Fortify could be explained better in the tool tip, that would be nice.
Monster Density: I felt that monster density in the open world was higher than in the dungeons. The dungeons should have a higher monster density honestly. The open world monster density could be lower in some areas than others. Especially around towns unless the town is under siege by monsters.
Strongholds: I really liked the system and the 3 strongholds we got to unlock in the beta. Each one was unique to clear out and 2 provided hubs. I will say that the hubs that were unlocked should always have a portal pad, blacksmith, armor/weapon seller, and healer. One didn’t have a portal pad and was a bit of a letdown. If a stronghold unlocks town hub, at least give it everything a town should have. That or have a side quest after the town is unlocked to gather ore, blood of fallen demons, and special spell scroll from a horadrim in order to add a teleport pad.
Story: Act 1 was alright, but it felt somewhat shorter than I was expecting. Using character models in cutscenes and having them speak was awesome. I only wish we could have had voice options in the character creation menu. Even if it was just 3 different voice options, that would have been nice for cutscenes and side quests.
Side Quests: I think I had more fun story wise with the side quests than the main story quest. They really made the world feel richer and more alive when you had the small story side quests. It was a nice touch and I wish there were more. It was something fun to do that was broadly focused on not just dungeons but also on the open world. I liked the side quests that unlocked dungeons and the side quest items that drop off of a body or clickable object and have you search or hunt in a certain area to complete the objective.
Lag/Disconnection Issues: The main city for Fractured Peaks was horrible for lag. More noticeably around the teleport pad area. I don’t know if it is the particle effect of the portal, player density around the portal pad, or both. If it has to do with other players, you could fix this by just loading essentials such as gear art, character art, and name/title plate. There is no need to load in every aspect of the character unless the player inspects someone. With the city being the main hub where characters will see other characters, there should be a lighter character load to improve performance. As far as disconnection issues, I felt they were initially really frequent in the first day and the rest of the time they became less of an issue. Que times to get into the game were also improved as the beta went on and I thank the blizzard team for working on those issues.
Barbarian: The abilities felt good and meaty while in combat. Fury generation was a huge problem and I found myself trying to grab as many ways to generate Fury as I could. That said, I was still having issues after gearing for legendary powers, putting skill points into skill upgrades, and putting points into passives. I think that that out of combat Fury degeneration is too fast and that there needs to be more ways (whether baked into skill upgrades or skill tree passives) to generate Fury. I played a Whirlwind Bleed barb and half the time in combat I was out of Fury. I think the problem could be fixed with the Enhanced Whirlwind trait that generates fury being increased slightly. I did find an Aspect that generates a small amount of Fury by dodging but that wasn’t found until the last few hours of the early access beta. Other than the Fury generation with the Whirlwind build, I had fun with the class. The legendary powers focused on Whirlwind felt good and transformative to the build. The biggest issue I had with the Barbarian was that I was forced into taking a 2H Mace. There were no options for that weapon slot in the Arsenal system but to take a 2H Mace. I would have loved to take a 2H Sword and 2H Axe but that wasnt an option. Also the 1H Swords roll noticeably lower damage compared to the 1H Mace and 1H Axe. More often than not, I found myself wanting to equip the 1H Maces and Axes more than the Swords. I would say either increase the damage of the 1H and 2H swords to match the axes and maces or make them always roll Attack Speed as one of the stats. If those issues can be fixed, I think I could have had more fun with the weapon options.