This community confuses me. I constantly see complaints about D4 here and it doesn’t align with my own experience. I’ve honestly found D4 to be one of my favorite ARPGs of all time (it is my most played by a good margin at this point). With that said, I’ve been trying to understand why so many others hate it and my theory is that it comes down to playtime. D4 layers lots of systems on top of each other. There is progression in difficulty (normal through torment 4), progression in gear (rarity at first, then aspects, then tempering, then masterworking, with runes/gems on top of it all), progression in skills, progression in seasonal mechanics (season journey, finding the seasonal powers, leveling the seasonal powers), progression in paragon (including finding and leveling all of the glyphs), and then ultimately the pit push. All of these relate to a character’s power level, but there are also progression systems built directly within the map (renown) and progression in the Codex that give account based progression. In addition to these progression systems, there are loads of different activities that give various currencies that are useful for different things. Infernal hordes, NMDs, lair bosses, helltides, dark citadel, undercity, the pit, etc are all useful for farming different things in different ways. Infernal hordes are waves of waves of enemies, with each wave escalating based on a modifier the player selects. NMDs give static dungeons (and escalating NMDs are awesome in my opinion). Lair bosses give a boss fight and forced mechanics (you may not like that but if you are a player that does, it can be nice). Helltides and dark citadel can be fun group content. Helltides give a passive “group” experience by simply being around others while Dark Citadel makes it more deliberate. Undercity gives a timed race that you can modify the outcome of beforehand. Finally, there is the tree of whispers giving you bonus loot/exp for completing certain activities at certain times.
There is a ton of variety in this game. There are a ton of viable builds in this game. Most builds, in my experience, can make it to T4 and do reasonably well. They won’t be pushing pit super high or 1shotting bosses, but all of the content is available. With all of this variety, I wonder what the problem is with everyone? For me, I’ve put in a decent amount of time already this season and played 20 hours so far. I’m in torment 2 paragon 60 playing druid for the first time, but I already have a few uniques and I’m making good progress. I’m not following a build one for one, but I am playing pulverize which seems quite strong this season.
I think for some players, this level of progress may be quite quick while others will view this as very slow. My theory is that if you are the type of player who progresses much quicker and you play more hours, then you move through these progression systems so quickly that they become meaningless. You quickly get to a point where the only progress is playing for the sake of playing. I usually stop each season once I reach T4 and feel like my character has gotten most of the available power to it. I don’t pit push much at all and I typically don’t fully level my glyphs either. I’ve never reached Paragon 300 or even level 100 in season 0 (although I did make it to mid 80s and low 200s in paragon), so I am likely not nearly as burnt out as many of you. With that said, how many hours is reasonable for a game like this? D4 is a casual ARPG with MMO elements. I don’t think that makes it a bad game and I wish the community was a bit more positive. I want to break away from the algorithm simply deciding my content. I used to spend a ton of time on forums discussing game strategy but that seems to have vanished from gaming entirely. The people who care about strategy turn it into content and those who are left in forums/social media are just angry (and the system rewards this anger).
Anyway, that was a bit of a rant, but my main question is still, how much do you play and do you think that impacts your perspective of the game? As a follow up if you want to engage, how much time do you think is reasonable to play this game per season without getting bored/finding your own personal motivation for playing (i.e. the difference between the game creating a progression system or you finding your own joy)?
