Introduction
On a systems level, I think D4 is in a decent spot. Progression is fantastic, item stats are 75% of the way there and the upcoming tweaks will help a lot with drops, and paragon represents a good chase goal at endgame. There are a bunch of other systems in good shape as well. To that end, a developer mentioned in one of the recent campfire chats that they think the game is finally in a spot where they can begin tweaking systems instead of reinventing them, and I agree with that for the most part. However, I think there are still a few foundational, systems-level problems holding D4 back, and the fixes require more than just tweaks. I have a few ideas on how to fix them, so I’ve listed it all (problems and potential solutions) below. Of course, I’m just a dude, but I’ve posted popular, community-supported system change suggestions for previous Diablo games (see Dbrunski’s video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukcVVQMFMRY, though unfortunately they weren’t acted on), so hopefully Blizz will listen here. Also, since I’m just a dude, I don’t know everything and may have missed a glaring problem or idea; if you have any feedback/ideas as well, I’d be happy to add them to the OP as time goes on.
With all of that out of the way, let’s get to it!
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Problem #1: Nearly all of a skill’s power and customization comes from items. Almost none comes from the skill tree itself. A developer in pre-release interviews mentioned one of the weaknesses in D3 character creation was that a character’s build was almost entirely defined by their gear, and the developer wanted to get away from this because it didn’t make the character itself feel inherently special or powerful. They were right. Somehow, though, we’ve ended up right back at the D3 model, but even worse. In current D4, not only is skill power almost entirely dependent on items instead of the skill tree (same as D3), but so is skill customization (which was handled in D3 by runes). Instead of getting away from the weaknesses inherent to D3’s character building system, D4 has doubled down on them. For example, outside of uniques, nearly everything that makes a skill special in D4 comes from legendary affixes and tempering, not the skill tree. Not only does this make character investment less special because the inherent character build systems have less influence on skills than transient items, but it also reduces build and itemization variety because the limited number of item slots and affix/tempering combinations make multiple slots an absolute lock for each class with no flexibility allowed. All of it is really bringing down the game’s potential.
Solution #1: The skill tree needs to do at least two things: affect skill power more and provide avenues for deeper skill customization. I’ll admit that I don’t know the best way to do this. Perhaps it comes in the form of what you’re currently doing to ultimate skills: adding skill boosts/modifications with more point investment. Maybe the downstream passives for each skill could be expanded to provide 5 options instead of the current 2, with each drastically changing the function of the skill (e.g., ice hydras, single-target bone spirit with more damage, etc.), like D3. The points cap for each skill could be higher, like D2, or you could add synergies that provide inter-skill power boosts and customization, also like D2. Maybe the downstream passives for each skill aren’t unlocked until 5 points are invested in the skill. There’s a ton of options, many of which are evolutions of previous Diablo games, but that’s a good thing since this is supposed to be a Diablo game too. Whatever happens, though, there needs to be a proportional shift to the skill tree for skill power/customization. Right now it’s 90/10 items/skill tree, and it needs to be more like 50/50 (or more).
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Problem #2: The crafting system is miserable to engage with. Even if tempering rerolls and ancestral affix acquisition are addressed, the crafting system still amounts to sitting behind a menu for 20-30 minutes per item instead of playing the game or building a character. The crafting system in D4 is a literal slot machine. Whether it’s enchanting, tempering, or masterworking, we just sit behind the same boring menu for hours total per season, dumping money into it and praying for something good to come out. Even if we make tempering unlimited like enchanting and masterworking, the whole experience for all three of is the exact opposite of fun. No one buys or logs into Diablo games and thinks, “Boy, I can’t wait to spend 30 minutes of my night staring at the same menu, pressing the same buttons until my monitor has permanent graphical burn in!” I get it, RNG is part of ARPGs, but the RNG should be in the gameplay and item drops, not the item crafting. Having no determinism in the crafting system and just clicking menu buttons forever is a soul-sucking slog. It’s so bad that I dread getting new drops because of the tiring, mind-numbing, non-gameplay time investment I know I have coming up just to get the item to where it needs to be.
Solution #2: Crafting needs to be a real, deterministic crafting system that takes far less time to engage with so we can get back to actually playing the game. We need to be able to input materials and output things we want. Crafting in ARPGs should be a way to balance out the unlucky side of RNG over the course of a season. On the latter point (time), crafting shouldn’t be a way to get the best items right away, but a way to create them to fill endgame gearing gaps after a lot of fun, hard, fulfilling gameplay. Maybe make the costs extremely expensive in return. Maybe make the stats guaranteeable but not the actual rolls. Maybe give players the option to pick the current RNG slot machine system for cheap or a more-expensive option that gives guarantees. As inspiration, look at what is already in the game for Mythic crafting, which I think is perfect: it has a “cheap” RNG option, and an “expensive” deterministic option. Whatever the solution is, though, it needs to give players significantly more control and take significantly less time playing “click the menu buttons” to engage with. In a recent campfire chat, one of the devs mentioned that they don’t want to nerf classes mid-season because they want to be respectful of player time; please apply that philosophy to item crafting too!
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Problem #3: Multiplicative damage is so much better than other damage sources that, even with the stat squish and Paragon changes, the entire game becomes centered around finding stats/modifiers that end with “[x]”. Additionally, it makes class balance unnecessarily difficult because damage scaling becomes exponential with every multiplicative addition. On the first point, having an entire game system so reliant on multiplicative damage gives players virtually no agency in character building or customization. With all the varying systems (affixes, tempering, masterworking, skill tree, paragon, etc.), it looks like we have a ton of choice in character creation, but it’s actually the illusion of choice because all we do is chase the next source of multiplicative damage. It’s such an overly-important, biased damage system that missing a single node or affix can drop you dozens of Pit levels alone. It just kills build diversity and player choice. Also, because multiplicative damage operates on a broken, exponential scale, we end up with a game that is incredibly hard to balance as the devs play whackamole with constantly chasing down unintended interactions, squishing stats/adding difficulty levels to compensate for runaway damage (another D3 problem), and implementing artificial stat/skill/paragon node caps to tamp down this nearly-infinite damage system. It’s simply untenable from a game health and game management perspective. As evidence of this problem, look at how the most recent stat squish did almost nothing (we all still do billions of damage) and how every season without fail has S/S+ classes that break the entire season due to unanticipated multiplier interactions (e.g., Ball Lightning Sorc, HotA Barb, Heartseeker/Victimize Rogue, etc.). For both players and devs, multiplicative damage is an all-around failure.
Solution #3: Get rid of multiplicative damage entirely. Convert everything to additive damage. This solves both the entire game revolving around multiplicative damage for players and the game being nearly impossible to balance for devs. Regarding build diversity, it makes everything a 1:1 system where the big “+XYZ” numbers seen throughout the game interact exactly as they would appear. While we will still want to pursue those areas with bigger numbers, the transparency makes build diversity much easier to chase. It will also put all damage sources (affixes, skill tree, paragon, etc.) on the same playing field so the game is no longer about finding specific builds that eek out one or two more multipliers than any other class/build, and even if some classes/builds do find an extra additive source or two compared to others, it only creates a small jump in power rather than the current exponential leap we see with additional multiplicative damage sources. As an added bonus, making everything additive adds transparency to the game mechanics so that even casual/new players can reliably build characters; big stat numbers actually mean big damage numbers. Regarding balance, converting everything to additive turns the damage system into a linear scale with predictable jumps, meaning it’s much easier for devs to tweak, anticipate, and balance classes so we stop this crazy cycle of broken classes ruining each season. If the goal of multiplicative damage is to provide players with a way to execute a power fantasy, just make some of the additive bonuses a bit bigger than the others so the power jumps are still there (e.g., legendary paragon nodes), but the overall damage scale is still linear and more predictable for both the players and devs. Simply put, converting everything to additive damage will solve a ton of build and balance issues in one fell swoop.
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Problem #4: the skill tree isn’t a tree. It’s a twig. This relates to problem 1, but I think it deserves its own mention because it has its own set of solutions. The current skill tree is really shallow and devoid of real, impactful choice. By having access to nearly everything at all points, the little bit of character power that does come from the skill tree simply means picking the most powerful skills/interactions at every branch. There are no sacrifices or rewards; it’s all just a bland, amorphous, repeatable blob. We all pick roughly the same passives, we all only put a single point into mobility and defensive skills, we all seek out Shroud of False Death for the +1 to passives, and we all only put 2 points in basic skills unless we are using a 100%-basic-skill build or using a basic skill as a one-point-multiplier-wonder (e.g., Bash being an overpower creator for core skills and not an actual useful skill in and of itself). By removing skill tree depth, hard choices with sacrificies/payoffs, and specialization (like was initially seen in alpha and beta skill tree previews), there is no room for actual build creativity or player choice. It just means picking the biggest ugga dugga available at each branch. As an example of how the Diablo franchise has previously faltered in this regard, look at D3, where there aren’t even skill trees in the first place. Having everything open at all times just makes for a shallow skill system with zero character investment or true choices. It’s just a hollow menu where you click the biggest things, not an important, interesting game system that results in real, consequential outcomes.
Solution #4: Make an actual skill tree with real branches and real choices that involve early sacrifices and later payoffs. Doing so makes choices fulfilling and impactful because it feels like you actually solved a build problem rather than just selecting the obvious thing at every turn. It opens up build diversity because we’re all not chasing the same two or three skill tree patterns regardless of class or main skill choice. It opens up itemization because we’re no longer looking for the same exact items that affect everything for every class equally. Having a real skill tree just makes the game more fun. If the worry is that overly-silo’ed skill trees would actually ruin build diversity, which I assume is one of the reasons we ended up with the current skill twigs rather than the true skill trees from alpha/beta, then provide a few crossover branches at key points that still allow for jumping around at key junctures. Provide a few synergies that encourage hybridization or even deeper specialization. Make some skills only open up if seemingly-opposite skills are both selected, and/or allow some skills to only open up if only skills of the same theme (e.g., darkness skills for Necro) are selected. There are a ton of different ways to both make real skill trees without killing build diversity, and a good example already exists in past Diablo franchises: Paladin skill trees in D2. Each tree has crossovers (e.g., Might>Holy Fire or Might>Blessed Aim), shared pre-requisites (e.g., Holy Shield), and deep specializations (e.g., Fanaticism). While D2’s skill tree system has its own flaws (for example, synergies are too powerful and kill build diversity), it provides a great foundation for Diablo 4 to perfect if it were to implement its own, true skill trees. In other words, don’t reinvent the wheel. Take advantage of the lessons learned from the Diablo franchise that D4 represents. Evolve what we had 20 years ago and make awesome, interesting, impactful trees.
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Problem #5: Game formulas and interactions are opaque, seemingly arbitrary, and nearly impossible to solve or understand. D4 implementing a skill twig instead of a skill tree makes it appear that the game was meant to be casual friendly and easier to approach than competitors. However, other parts of D4 have done the exact opposite, like the game’s baseline calculations and formulas. None of the math is intuitive or interacts in the ways it would seemingly appear. Even worse, almost none of the math is actually available to us so we can make educated decisions on how to build our characters. For example, multiplicative vs. additive is explained almost nowhere in the game, and we’re somehow supposed to just know on our own how small multiplicative numbers and big additive numbers work. The attack power stat in our character sheet is nearly worthless. Attack speed has a bizarre two-bucket system with separate caps and no consistent rhyme or reason defining what falls into which bucket. Attack speed also doesn’t actually increase attack speed unless you hit undefined, complex breakpoints that require out-of-game calculators to determine. To date, no one is completely, 100% sure exactly what stats minions inherit and how much despite a vague in-game tooltip that says something like, “Minions inherit most of your stats.”, and even in-game stats operate in contradictory ways on this topic (e.g., some affixes that don’t mention minions actually add to minion power, while others worded in the same exact way don’t). The Pit/Tormented boss debuff doesn’t explain how the debuff actually scales. I could go on and on, but just these examples make clear how unintuitive, overly-complex, and unnecessarily-hidden the game’s mechanics truly are, and it provides a huge, anti-player roadblock to building our characters and understanding the game. To solidify the point, look at the foundation of all ARPGs, D&D, and how it treats its mathematical systems: they are all laid out in a rulebook that everyone learns and understands. We don’t get the same treatment here, and it’s a detriment to D4.
Solution #5: Simplify the game’s formulas. Make them more intuitive. Provide a simple, in-game resource that explains how many of the key mechanics work. During the production of D2:R, Vicarious Visions (now Blizzard Albany) mentioned that they wanted to remove some of the “tribal knowledge” required to play and maximize character efficiency in D2. This was to come in the form of cleaning up base systems to make them more intuitive and explain them in clearer ways so that players truly understood how the game worked. I don’t think this goal was every fully achieved, though it was definitely acted upon in some ways, but regardless, it was admirable and healthy for the Diablo community. Additionally, D2 has had The Arreat Summit for years – an incredibly-helpful, out-of-game resource that gives players exactly what we are lacking in D4: a “rulebook” of sorts that explains how the game works. Blizzard explicitly acknowledges that tribal knowledge and unintuitive mechanics are bad for ARPGs, and it also implicitly acknowledges how valuable having a transparent rulebook is to players by its continued support of The Arreat Summit, so please, help us and act on both of these by providing the same treatment to D4. It would dramatically improve the player experience and open up the D4 market to even more potential players.
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Problem #6: There are too many buffs/debuffs, and the UI is incredibly ill-equipped to convey them. Does anyone actually understand what is affecting them during a fight? I don’t. Between all of my static buffs (e.g., elixirs/incense, event buffs, runes, etc.) and debuffs (e.g., Pit/Tormented boss debuff, IH “withered” banes, etc.), and all of the temporary or conditional buffs/debuffs (of which there are approximately 6.3 million), the buff/debuff bar in the UI is nearly worthless. There is so much information happening at the same time, much of which is in an invisible overflow menu, that it may as well not even be there. Not only that, but some tremendously important buffs/debuffs share the same icons and go missing in the overflow that when important information is shown somewhere, we can’t actually access it in the first place.
Solution #6: Change the UI to better convey to players what is actually happening in more-visible, more-understandable ways, and reduce the huge number of temporary/conditional buffs and debuffs in the game. Regarding the UI, one of my favorite things from WoW was the ability to add mods to the game that allowed important buffs/debuffs to be be shown in different areas of the screen. For example, I would put important cooldowns and buffs in a semi-transparent icon right next to my character, and I would also put timers on the icons so I could clearly see the duration left on each. It made tracking these things super intuitive and easy while also not cluttering up the display. I’m not suggesting that D4 allow mods to be added like WoW, but allowing for some in-game customization of the UI would go a long way to solving this problem. Perhaps players could select priority buffs/debuffs from an options menu, and those priority items would appear near the character like the current above-character health and resource bars do; players could also adjust icon transparency and whether timers would show to give us customization of the system so it provides exactly the value we each individually need. The UI could also have different areas for buffs and debuffs to be displayed, which would allow us to quickly eliminate many of the icons we have to mentally sort through by focusing on the exact category we need in the moment. Regarding the huge number of temporary/conditional buffs and debuffs, this game still suffers from WAY too much “damage on a Tuesday”, so even if the UI were improved, it likely wouldn’t give us the information we need because there is simply too much of it. Granted, we’ve come a long way since the worst form of “damage on a Tuesday” (we’re now more like “damage on all weekdays for 15 seconds every time you critical strike a bologna sandwich”), but the fact remains that we have too much of this stuff to take in. As evidence, there are so many overlaps in buff/debuff icons that Blizzard is implicitly admitting there are too many buffs/debuffs to grapple with, even for them. We just need less. Please reduce the number of conditional/temporary buffs and debuffs available to us. It’s just overwhelming to the point that even the best UI improvements would fail to fix the problem.
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Alright, I think that’s it for now! Will keep this thread updated and respond to productive commentary where I can. Thanks for reading, everyone – especially you, PezRadar! 
