Great Progress, But

PC General Discussion
1

I want to start by saying that I’m genuinely happy with the direction the game is taking. The recent changes and what has been announced for the upcoming expansion show clear effort from the development team to improve the overall experience. There is visible progress, and that deserves recognition.

However, I believe that expanding content alone is not enough to sustain long-term engagement. Alongside new systems, there are still core design issues that need to be addressed.

1. Skill Tree Expansion and Build Diversity

The expansion of the skill tree is a very positive step. It increases build possibilities, encourages creativity, and should naturally improve diversity. However, this only works if players feel safe exploring those possibilities. Right now, balance changes—especially nerfs—often discourage experimentation instead of supporting it.

2. The Current Nerf Philosophy

There is a critical difference between adjusting a build’s power and destroying its identity. Many nerfs go beyond numbers and directly impact how builds function, such as reducing summons, lowering projectile count, or increasing cooldowns in builds designed around speed and flow.

These changes don’t just weaken builds—they make them less fun. Players can accept lower power, but not losing what made a build enjoyable.

3. Itemization as a Balance Tool

The game already has a strong system for balancing power through items. Instead of heavily nerfing skills, balance could rely more on adjusting items, reworking synergies, and introducing new gear.

This approach preserves build identity while still allowing the meta to evolve, and it supports players who enjoy experimenting with off-meta builds.

4. High-Tier Item Balance

High-tier items, such as Mythics and similar categories, currently have no meaningful limitation on how many can be equipped. This leads to stacking the strongest items and reduces diversity.

A potential solution would be to limit the number of these items per build (for example, one per character). This would allow them to be stronger individually while creating meaningful choices and opening space for more item variety.

5. Endgame Over-Reliance on The Pit

The biggest issue lies in the endgame. The Pit is not the problem by itself, but it has become the dominant activity. It concentrates difficulty, progression, and rewards in a single system.

6. Forced Gameplay Instead of Player Choice

Players are not engaging with The Pit because it is the most enjoyable activity, but because it is the most rewarding and necessary. Glyph progression being tied to it reinforces this.

This creates a repetitive and forced gameplay loop.

7. Pit-Centric Meta

As a result, the entire meta revolves around The Pit. Builds are judged almost exclusively based on how far they can progress in it. This reduces diversity and funnels players into a small number of optimized builds.

8. Builds That Disappear (or Never Exist)

This is one of the most important issues. When everything is balanced around a single activity, builds that perform well in that activity are often heavily nerfed.

Over time, this leads to:

The loss of builds players once enjoyed

Fewer new builds emerging

Reduced overall diversity

The game doesn’t just lose balance—it loses possibilities.

9. Lack of Real Endgame Choice

Players are encouraged to explore builds, but there is only one meaningful place to test them. This makes exploration feel limited and reduces the sense of freedom.

10. What Should Be Done

The solution is not to remove The Pit, but to rebalance the endgame:

Multiple viable endgame activities

Comparable difficulty across systems

Equalized rewards

Progression systems (like glyphs) available in more than one activity

Players should feel free to choose how they play, without being penalized.

11. A Positive Example Already Exists

The game already improved in one area by expanding how Mythic items are obtained. This reduced forced gameplay and improved player experience.

The same philosophy should be applied to endgame systems.

12. Final Thought: A Needed Shift in Philosophy

What is the point of expanding skills, items, and systems if players are still funneled into the same builds and the same activity?

The issue is not a lack of content—it is how the game directs players into that content.

Conclusion

The game does not just need more content. It needs a shift in philosophy:

From forced efficiency → to player choice

From one optimal path → to multiple viable paths

From reactive nerfs → to sustainable balance

I truly hope that the upcoming expansion, along with the new endgame systems such as the Plans of War, can address many of these issues. There is a strong opportunity here to improve the game in a meaningful way.

1 Like
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They should nerf and buff so you’re not one shotting everything but you’re also not having to spend endless amounts of time on health pools.

This is called balance. Is it hard? Oh no! Hold me guys I work for a multi billion dollar company and I have to do hard work! I’m scared hold me!

Pathetic.

3

People keep saying this. I’ll believe it when I see it. In my experience not just Blizzard, but game companies in general, have a very hard time creating talent trees with meaningful choice that don’t devolve entirely into a small handful of metas.

And there will always be metas. The key I think is if there is meaningful choice within those metas, and that’s a hard one to tackle because it requires different choices to be equally valuable without them just being two different colors of the same thing.

Personally, I think that the key is having some choices cater to play style rather than to numbers-go-up, but then the game would also have to slow down a bit and move away from screen clearing attacks to give them meaning.

I sincerely doubt any of this is within the capabilities of the Diablo 4 team. I’d love to be proven wrong, though.

2 Likes
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The imbalance is largely due to the high number of pits. When you have a 30 pit difference between builds, it means one build deals trillions of damage and another billions.

Do you know how they solved this problem in d3? By adding even higher multipliers for the ability to work. Let’s create a Razor Wing build. For this, the unique item must deal 15000% damage for each active Razor Wing.

-Having 3 choices doesn’t solve the problems. Visually, it will be cool to have Ice Hydra. But if it’s weak, nobody will play with it. We need smaller numbers. So that at the end of the game, each small improvement makes a difference. I just found the same ring but with a Strength boost, so I didn’t increase my pit level by 1. I gained 70 Strength which did nothing.

We can only have realistic choices if the combinations receive the same attention. When a skill has pants that give x300% and another that gives 50%, it will never work. The meta doesn’t need to be forced. It will emerge naturally.

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nice blatant ai post marketing team

ctrl+F —
throw it into the trash

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There’s always been effort and they’ve always listened to feedback. Very, very few games have seen as many repeated changes to key systems in its first two years as this one has.

I’d wait until you experience it before calling it a success or failure. It’s less an expansion of the tree and more of a streamlining. It promises diversity, but so did having 2 terminal nodes on the existing tree. At the end of the day, that diversity is a function of how well situationally balanced the choices are. You can look at the Warlock, and without knowing the full picture, already point to nodes that appear clearly superior, clearly inferior, or just plain bad.

This is a very skill tree focused opinion. Your character is a result of all of the systems at play, not just the skill tree. Specific uniques, even in the new system, will be absolute build defining. A good example is D3 after it went to those 6pc sets. That was done primarily to make it easier to balance, which is one reason these skill tree changes are being made as well. Despite the fact the skills themselves were almost never touched after those sets were introducted, it didn’t change how players perceived changes. A nerf was seen as a nerf and a buff was a buff and if you completely altered a set like Rathma then you literally killed a build…despite never touching the skills themselves.

BIS is BIS regardless of what color it is. Even in some cases where there isn’t a very clear BIS, players will decide there is one and it will be the only one seen as worth using and therefore there is no build diversity.

No reason to respond to all of these Pit entries. The game is going to Torment 12 precisely so all activities scale to the Pit levels. No word on changes to glyph leveling.

Unless we get new active skills, it will have the same possibilities as it has now. Much of what is ‘new’ in the skill tree is just adapted Unique items (whether that effect actually existed or theoretically could have). We don’t play anywhere near the maximum number of potential builds now, by and large, and that’s almost solely due to balance. That won’t change after the first season or two. Specific metas will form, tierlists will result, and every streamer will once again have every chatter constantly asking for the ‘best’.

To be honest, most of your post is just you not knowing what’s coming in the expansion. The core of your post has already been addressed.

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I definitely agree with anti-nerf sentiments. My husband and I both stopped playing for awhile after the first sorc nerf, but later returned.

We met in D1 and we both played a rogue, which in D1 was an archer only, although we could use melee weapons, it made no sense.

Our role as rogues in D1 was to basically to ping the room, because we could hit things that were outside of rendering range. If a melee or sorc tried it, it could mean a group wipe. So the rogue’s roll was to basically ping areas we couldn’t see.

D2 had a spear chucking Amazon which lacked the range of D1’s archer only rogue. While we both recognize that D2 had some of the best cutscenes of all of the Diablo games (and ranking up there with The Secret World release about a decade later, which in my book, have never been surpassed.) we both were still called by Evercrack and other MMO’s instead.

D3’s demon hunter was eventually all over the place, which made it fun. Despite the fact that demon hunters were near the bottom of the leader boards, we still played it BECAUSE it was fun.

D4’s original rogue was pretty much D&D’s rogue (often misspelled as “rouge”, to the point the misspelling was mocked in TSW.) Nevertheless, I tried to make a viable archer rogue without much success relative to what I could have achieved by using a melee rogue.

Then a viable ranged rogue occurred, but in mid-season it was nerfed. My husband wasn’t playing a rogue, but he was helping me to obtain the gear necessary to make it work. Which was working great.

Then it was nerfed. My husband hasn’t played D4 since.

Edited Note: Moral to this story: Devs should never nerf anything. Raise all the other classes accordingly and the base difficulty slightly over time. Odds are we’d never notice, like the frog story in boiling water. Nerf gear that we’re currently using, we notice in a heartbeat.

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When people need AI to think for them it immediately tells me they lack the capacity to make an informed opinion.

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2 completely ignores why nerfs happen. Often, skills, items, builds overperform or have over performing synergies that far exceed expectations. The game is better to nerf those to bring them more in line with the rest as opposed to making everything overperfrom. Then you get the D3 situation with 10,000% damage increases because it’s fun.

Nerfing makes it easier to bring more skills/builds in line with each other. But with those nerfs, you ignore all the buffs that happen as well. Druid was significantly buffed throughout the seasons, Necromancer just saw a huge buff with that golem build. Rogue had some amazing buffs to heartseaker and death trap just off the top of my mind.

Its a give and take and reminds me of warlock players in WoW. They spent like 10 years as being OP and always at the top of tier lists, they got a minor nerd and all of a sudden they were near the top in line with many other classes, and they cried like Blizzard just killed the class.

2 Likes
10

Nerfs are extremely necessary. Aside from the Poison Lucky Strike build, I don’t recall any major nerfs. Rapid Fire and Piercing Shot builds have performed well in some seasons. Some things are bugs and need fixing for a healthy game.

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The game needs surprises in both encounters and loot drops and it has none. Everything is so predictable and so directed that I almost know how something is going to play out before it does. And yes a lot of good, fun builds got nerfed out of existence for no real reason. Even Rogue players hate Rogue now.

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I don’t play seasonal precisely because of the Pit…no interest in running that thing endlessly for glyphs.

I just keep a top aspect of every unique so that if/when my build gets the axe I can switch to something different and just hunt GA’s. We need more stash tabs!

13

Not reading your AI novel.

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But yet my Auradin Paladin can kill things just by walking around which makes the previous nerfs seem absurd.

Yes, of course, I do expect that it will be nerfed eventually.

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How is that a novel? You must have meant to quote someone else.

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They should bring other things up to par while re-balancing the difficulty through the 12 total torment tiers. No one likes to see “nerfed by x%” in patch notes for a build they enjoy playing. The reasoning being if something isn’t strong it’s complete and utter butt that makes you spend endless amounts of time on health pools. Blizzard’s balancing is that bad.

Monkeys could run a grocery store better than Blizzard balances the game.

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This is a post (OP) written with AI right?

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Well, considering that from some of the white collar worker experts here, using em dashes is a sigh of professional writing, only jobless and blue collar peasants don’t have the understanding of the greatness of using em dashes over commas and such.

Basically if you not a white collar worker you education failed you( yes that includes college education).

Did my post sound stupid in your head when you read it? :grin:

19

Some devs have taken that approach because of all of the negative feedback to the nerfing. Except, they really didn’t because they’re intentionally under-tuning things so they can say they only ever buff things.

You’re still being nerfed, you’re just being pre-nerfed.