I’ll start by saying in general, I enjoyed playing the beta. The early game experience is quite fun, and act I has enough content there that makes me excited to see what’s in store for the full game. The combat is extremely satisfying, audio/visuals on point, and the overall world feels pretty massive.
However, the itemization and skill tree felt quite lacking and in general boring. I’m sure there’s enough videos and posts going in depth about this, but in short; legendary items provide too much damage multipliers, and skills/skill trees don’t have enough gameplay changing mechanics. Unfortunately, I don’t have a solution, and there’s obviously a lot we still have yet to see, but if we extrapolate what we did experience in the beta, it feels like this won’t change very much in the end game.
An Example I can give of lack of gameplay changing mechanic is the Necromancer book of the dead. Skeleton mages had some neat effects depending on which element you selected, but if you chose to sacrifice them? You gain 5% crit. scratching head meme A massive sacrifice to not have them dealing a lot of automated damage, and it gives you no gameplay change, nothing interesting or engaging. Just a small amount of crit.
IMO remove all the damage multipliers from legendries, make all aspects general use and not just class specific, and put gameplay changing mechanics/augments into the skill tree/class masteries.
Now a short Wishlist that I’m sure could be much larger if I had more time to play but this is just based on my experience and opinion:
-Make Inventory and UX not mobile/diablo immortal like
- Different items should take different space in bag ie; 2hand mace takes 2 spots. polearm takes 3 etc
- Raise significantly or straight up remove cap on Obols
-More skills/augments
-Change the way skills look after selecting final augment
-unique dodge animations for each class
-unique dodge cd’s (a rogue should have slightly shorter, a necro/sorc should have slightly higher)
-Increase density in dungeons/open world
-Ore/Herb/skinning animations (why this isn’t a thing in an MMO aiming to be immersive is beyond me)
-Customize map size/opacity/location
-Customize UI in general (more action bars, above player health/resource, number of life/resource shown without hovering over the globes, etc)
-Option to have interact/force move together, without the basic attack
-Change augments without having to refund everything linking to its major skill
-after refunding all skills, you shouldn’t have to refund with more gold until you click a “save” - remove level sync. it doesn’t belong in an ARPG
- less backtracking dungeon mechs (unless they implement some sort of events popping up to increase random mob spawns)
- better search capability/sorting (stash tabs especially).
- Necro book of dead re-work
Again, If I played more, I’m sure I could go on, but my hope is that blizzard can/will rework or implement some of these topics before launch and continue working on the game after it releases.
Being an MMO (lite) and Blizzard game, I think most of us have high expectations, but from my experience a large game usually doesn’t blossom until sometime (or a lot of time) has passed. We can only hope they are actively listening/reading our feedback. Just be sure to keep it civilized.
Thanks for reading, cheers.