Outside the whole performance/queue thing, which I doubt will be fixed for launch, I did enjoy the game. The only big issue I found outside disconnects is when I went into my second dungeon I found what appeared to be a random spawn boss that hit me for ~30% of my HP a whack and it was a very high attack speed. For comparison the end boss of the dungeon was faceroll easy. I’d say which dungeon, but when I tried leaving, it disconnected me and I had to rejoin the 1.5h queue to get back in. The random boss looked like The Butcher, and was behind a locked door.
I’ve only played Sorc, and I will say that Frost/Fire skills seem…underwhelming. Please don’t nerf the chained lightning spell, but maybe buff the others. It’s just so easy to use the CL spell compared to the others. I can’t see myself using any other other comparable spells on that second node.
Worldbuilding seems spot on. It feels right, and while in the storm visibility was impacted and just felt right. The tone of the world is proper and more aligned with D2 than D3, which is a very good thing. It also doesn’t feel entirely empty like D3 felt. The first city gives this feeling of a bastion of order where people are huddling away from the storm. World just feels more populated, which is nice.
The game feels a bit closer to Immortal than I’d like, but I also haven’t been able to spend nearly enough time with it.
I guess, outside the queue issues, I think I don’t regret preordering. Hopefully if MS buys you guys, they can inject some accountability and we’ll have better launches without auth server issues that seem to plague them all at Actibliz. I really did expect more considering you knew how many players would be in today and you knew about the stability issues two days ago and didn’t delay.
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The Butcher seems to be a random spawn boss that can appear in dungeons. Like a wake up call when you think you are winning too much.
I played Barbarian and i will say I enjoyed the story so far. I think the lag and disconnects are ruining my play experience more than anything. I tried turning down graphics but that seemed to make things worse. I dont think they optimized the graphics scaling yet.
As far as gameplay, it was pretty much what i thought it was going to be. Diablo Immortal like world with D3 combat and D2 loot hunt and slower combat. Graphics are very dark and gloomy which fits the story. I like it. The core of the game is good. They just need to fix que times and performance issues and it will be great.
chain lightning made that first boss a joke, much tougher fight on the barbarian. Ateast ont he veteran difficulty
Yeah, so lvl 15 and all I really do is cast hydras, and spam CL. I fill when I don’t have mana, or…usually run in a large circle around the hydra until I can cast CL more. That’s…not great combat, but I don’t think you can judge combat or itemization until endgame anyway. I was expecting more from spell, a la a tree…I need to read more, maybe that’s the paragon window?
In order not to multiply topics on gameplay, I will write here my thoughts. In general, so far I like the gameplay, but some elements in my opinion could be improved.
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In all the time I played the sorceress I haven’t seen any game hints about her, only a lot about the barbarian and one about the necromancer.
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After completing a dungeon half of the screen is closed with a notification about it. If there are still monsters around, this forced blindness is very unpleasant.
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Again, after completing a dungeon it is very boring just to run endlessly long and empty corridors back to the entrance. Couldn’t you add some way to leave the dungeon instantly? Upd. Nvm, I just noticed you could click on the dungeon’s exit icon on the map. Perhaps, this functionality requires clearer explanation in game. Upd.2. Action Wheel also helps.
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Regarding sorceress spells, I have a concern that the variety of builds would be very limited, because spells of one element tend to be tied to the effects of that element and it’s inefficient to mix different elements together. Although I may not be too familiar with all the spells yet.
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I don’t understand what the Item Power characteristic does.
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The ‘Raising Spirit’ side-quest about emotions feels so… emotionless…
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It’s very strange to see so many people in my room at the tavern, rummaging through my wardrobe and my stash.
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Although the plot is interesting, the marathon between key points through vast and empty spaces gets boring very quickly. It seems to me that more waypoints are needed.
Sorry this is long…
I am very intrigued by the game so far. I absolutely loved D3 and was waiting anxiously to play D4 (really waiting to try out the necro; started as a sorc this weekend for early beta).
Things I noticed about the game:
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Good graphics
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Interesting story so far
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Love how we can personalize the characters we choose to play (reminded me of SIMS though and with the helpful tips between scenes as well)
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Nice that I don’t have to pay to get my outfit to look different in design (will miss hunting for colors to dye the outfits; but is nice that I don’t have to spend a fortune)
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Interesting that gathering herbs was implemented (gave me a reminder of resident evil but you don’t combine them nor do you really see what you have as it doesn’t take inventory space).
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It is extremely laggy to the point of dying because you get surrounded by large number of mobs and/or the game crashing due to the lag/time out. It crashed on me more than my hands can count and was a struggle to get to level 21 due to that. The cut scenes make it feel like the story is longer and takes a bit longer to load into the areas vs D3 where is was much much faster. (Might be due to the open world aspect)
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I was not familiar with how the open world aspect would work and found myself coming across various individuals. I wish there was an option to turn off open world so you can have it private if you wanted to, but I understand it is an interesting concept to try out.
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The difficulty of the mobs varies by region and the bosses vary greatly in difficulty.
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There are no mana potions like in some previous versions of Diablo.
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There are a lot less waypoints to places (I always enjoyed finding them and going back after beating the game to different areas to level vs running around at a distance)
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A couple of the maps it was hard to see the areas you can go vs not go
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Not all my portals into town stay for me to take it back to where I was at (gave up on using my portal to go back to where I was outside of town) (does doing a tp to town bring you to the closest town vs storyline checkpoint?)
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Does day/night mess with any of the quests?
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Interaction with new mobs usually came with a journal to listen to to tell you more about the creature or some random person’s journey (there wasn’t anything interactive to take the place of not having that, there was only maybe a couple I came across as part of a quest but that was all). Same with interacting with objects (like bookshelves); you can’t really destroy a lot of those kind of objects like you can with D3 (same with chandeliers to kill mobs (that was really cool in D3)).
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I do kinda miss the aspect of combining different items to make new ones (like with rings to make an amulet in a previous version)
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Miss the aspect of needing to get legendary items identified
I’m really hoping that this lag will get fixed, otherwise it is not worth playing even though it has a nice potential to be a really good game. I didn’t notice a spot to create your own armor and weapons yet (I hope that is still implemented in this edition as it was one of my favorite things to do). The open world aspect is a cool idea but it makes the storyline get a little pushed out of the way (it is like major quests and minor quests vs storyline and side quests). Wondering if there is going to be any special areas like with the cows and unicorns as well as the treasure goblins going to be implemented.
Sum of my review/feedback:
*Lag needs to be fixed
*Needs a few more waypoints
*It would be nice if the mobs/boss difficulties have some more of a smoother transition vs having an easy one and then a hard that that can kill you in less than 5 seconds
*Make the exit dungeon more easily to click to exit
*Needs more interactive objects like book shelves
In all seriousness, has blizzard thought about making an option where you can choose a default town to tp to when pressing “T”?