Played to level 20 on druid during the open beta weekend on the harder difficulty option. Background: avid WoW player, but only really played d3 through it’s third hardest difficulty and then stopped. Never really did the “end game” or anything like that, and never played the expansion. Did play Hades a ton though, so I have some familiarity with a game with similar controls. My feedback, for those who would like it:
- Coming from Hades and WoW, not being able to use wasd to move was tough. I experimented with several options of rebinding force move and seperating off my main ability, but it felt awful. Clicking somewhere to attack and having your character move by mistake sucks. Trying to move one direction and then whipping the mouse over to attack another feels bad.
- I encountered frequent graphical stuttering (Nvidia 2080 Super)
- I really dug the vibe and atmosphere.
- The boss fights felt like they took PAINFULLY long, to the point of not being fun. Running dungeons and fighting the affix champion monsters was more enjoyable
- Initially, I felt like the skill trees were kind of on rails. Pick every bear talent, or pick every werewolf talent, etc. But this did get better as items started to drop that led me to try different things to match the gear I was getting.
- It felt like I needed to run away and let my pets do the work on hard fights until I had a charge of dash. Poison pools, massive strikes, freezes, fears… I didn’t feel like I had tools to stay in the melee fight. That didn’t feel great.
- Overall the combat responsiveness felt satisfying and I feel like there is a lot of potential variety here. But it does feel like dash movement or staying at ranged is required and Druid felt a little frustrating as a result.
- The story is pretty intriguing so far.
- I’m not sure if I should be paying attention to the power level of items, because it seems like it might be misleading. I’m still a little unclear on how to effectively compare items.
Overall, I think I’ll buy the game based on what I saw but I would like them to work on fostering a dynamic combat experience that doesn’t rely on either sitting at ranged or running away until you have the dash or defensive cooldowns necessary to risk going in, especially on boss fights. Perhaps this was a problem unique to druid (I wouldn’t know), but I would definitely fix that along with the damage sponge bosses.