Here’s a follow up to the original post after reflecting a bit, reading forums, seeing community response on some topics & top player’s feedback.
Original posts:
Highlights:
- There are actual systems in the endgame now and less bottlenecks.
- Helltides look GREAT & finally we have a fun overworld system to blast with others.
- No more gatekeeping for certain mats like forgotten souls / fiend roses.
- Boss materials are more common and dropped from multiple sources instead of being locked behind grindy boring mechanics.
- More capacity to edit builds & try different things according to playstyle intent.
- More bosses, stronger bosses, with fights that last longer than 10 seconds and are actually engaging with cool mechanics vs Duriel who did nothing.
Just to reinforce that, as is, S4 looks amazing. The below is what would make it even better. S4 is fixing a LOT of issues the game has and has the potential to deliver a home run.
Improvement opportunities:
1. Veiled Crystals cost needs to be reduced drastically. People want to try different builds & different classes.The cost to imprint is 150 crystals and you get 1 per salvaged rare. Grind is good, mindless grind which cuts playability isn’t.
2. Greater affix items + uniques + ubers NEED TO HAVE A DIFFERENT BEAM COLOR WHEN DROPPING, PLEASE! Make gamers have a WOW! factor getting a rare drop. A red beam like we had for primals. Make the inventory icon noticeably different. Change the sound for these drops instead of all having the same legendary sound.
3. The Pit needs to have more levels to progress, it’s too easy. Either change mob scaling or increase ladder to level 300 where 1-100 is nightmare, 100-200 is torment and 200-300 is Hell (maybe add a more hellish kind of look to the dungeons). Right now, pit 80 feels the same as pit 200. Make it extremely hard in the hell ranks.
Also, higher pit level = higher chance of drops that have multiple greater affixes. We need a progression system somewhere. Keep the rest of the world the same as it is now.
Note: Leaderboards in Pit > Gauntlet.
4. NMDs need an urgent overhaul now that vaults are gone. Compared to pit, NMD’s are slow, boring & missing a proper reward apart from glyph xp. Remove one of the challenges (normally there’s 2 in a NMD) and make the existing ones simpler. Don’t make us run to 6 constructs to kill them. Add something interesting at the end, like the bosses we have in pits.
5. Rares + most Uniques feel beyond useless. One of two things needs to happen, either if you get a rare with 2 greater affixes you get a different drop color and with an aspect it gains an extra affix or if not, they have to be removed from WT4/auto-salvaged. Remove ALL blue and white items from wt3-4. Even from the obol trader.
6. Change some builds visibility (Frozen Orb, Mending stone, Dust devils) so they don’t take up the whole screen. Scale their transparency down so only the casting player has full visibility. Apart from that, Dust devils & Frozen orb are THE MOST FUN I’ve had playing D4. Keep these builds coming, they’re amazing.
7. Recipes need tuning as they take AGES to get, add a way to target farm them that is NOT current NMD’s. Number of affixes on recipes is very different among them. Remove elemental surge from the game (it’s ridiculous) and add the All stats affix so we can hit paragon nodes.
8. Masterworking & tempering need a change in terms of success chance and rolls. Remove the skip button, speed up the animation and most of all let us keep the previous roll when rerolling. Would be great to influence which affix is increased in some way, at least 1 of the 3. Perhaps utilizing extra mats? Perhaps being able to reset the full item via use of a resplendent spark?
Note: Masterwork cache conversion costs are too expensive and need to be bulk opened.
9. Poison & shadow damage from mobs + overall 1 shot mechanics need to be fixed. 60k health, max resistances and elixirs, one explosion/dot insta one shots you. We want to be able to actually fight even if much longer, but at least without bugs.
10. Single play vs team play discrepancy is very severe. Amount of mats needed + rewarded from a solo/group pit/boss run is too different. There is absolutely no point in running team pits and rewards are worse if group bossing. Make them equal, not worse, or the social aspect of D4 will be gone. No one wants to be forced to play solo or be forced to play rotas.
11. Review some ‘damage on Tuesdays’ or pointless affixes like lucky hit do x when x (a-b dmg) or damage while wrath of berserker is active vs damage while berserking, healing received, etc.
12. Gems are still a bit bland, they should have more interesting affixes to contribute to builds. Right now only rubies and emeralds are mostly used. There’s an easy way to solve this by making them have x effects per class and varying them with stats like the rare paragon effects.
13. Change World bosses toughness, drops & add mechanics as they’re one shot or die in under 4 seconds. Increase their level to 200-300, have them have actual tough mechanics so we might actually fail if not doing damage as a team. They’re a great part of the game which falls very short. Make them similar to high Pit level bosses.
Note: Remove shrine effects when going into any boss room/fight.
14. Normal Ladder bosses & their Tormented version need to be tougher and give proper rewards. We should be getting better drops if we do ubers vs normal bosses whether as solo or group. In addition, make it so each uber boss gives 1 spark as an incentive to kill them all each season. The mat requirement being very high means we’ll spend less time doing them but the rewards and the challenge should be adequate.
15. Improve strongholds, they’re void of meaning, difficulty and rewards. Maybe you could allocate some recipe rewards to strongholds the same way that some dungeons give aspects.
16. QOL (Quality of life) changes:
- Add a protective dome at the end of the pit similar to NMD’s;
- Increase boss mats drop rate from all sources (x1.5 - x2);
- Reduce gold costs when tempering/masterworking. Reroll is fine with cap at 7m;
- Make it so that when tempering we keep the affix when rerolling;
- Increase the amount of whispers we can go to the tree with so it doesn’t stop us after every 10 mins. Increase it to 50 so we can claim at least 5 caches at once;
- Add a favorite teleport option to the wheel so we can always teleport to our favorite location to bank;
- Allow us to auto-pickup boss summoning materials;
- Let us open multiple transmute caches at once (I.E. Ingolith caches);
- Add an option to the pit where it remembers the last level we did;
- Add legendary items to the vendor shops or they will be useless;
- Increase the gold cap from 10b to 100b;
- Add a different visual when an item is fully masterworked;
- Remove blue paragon glyphs, no one uses them;
- We need a separate inventory tab for sigils, elixirs and boss mats;
- Give us more options to get glyph xp aside from NMD’s;
- Remove the need for us to keep resetting dungeons by going out & back in;
- Add wardrobe loadouts to save builds like we had in D3.
Thanks to Wudi, Rob, Raxx, Nikowrex, M1py & the LOE clan for building on some of these points!
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