How to make Diablo 4 ** FUN **

PC General Discussion
1

Hi Fellow Diablo players.

I am quitting diablo for a bit until it becomes fun to play again, but because I think there is a disconnect in what developers view as fun and what players view is fun I am going to give a full in detail synopsis of what makes a game enjoyable beyond Nightmare Dungeons. I will also describe why these dungeons are sooooooo BORING.

To define what is fun, we also need to look at some things that are not fun, so im going to use bullets to describe this because nobody reads this Sh@()$*7

NOT FUN

  • Dying to lag

  • Instant Pop dying

  • Dying because something popped off screen (if we are forced to be zoomed maybe allow us to rotate screen in a direction. ) Sorcs like to play where enemies are to the north for this reason, so a rotate feature might resolve this where the health bar is obstructing our view.

  • Dying from stupid game mechanics (Ice Things, poisons that melt entire healthbars etc. )

  • Chores , chores are not fun.

  • I would like to elaborate that Renown system = chores. Feels like chores, smells like chores.

  • Re-grinding a glyph because I want to try a different build

  • Not being able to trade good items to my friends, even just an affex would be good.

  • Solo gaming, Just disconnects me from my friends because we’re all trying to level independently and we cant share any items of value anyways.

  • Solo Self Found

  • Full Storage

  • Not having Choices, this will expand into my explanation of…

  • Dungeons are boring

  • Not having a bubble when completing a NM dungeon

  • Boss battles not rewarding (The battles are just basic and then rewards are not configured correctly)

  • Wasting Time doing things that have no value
    —Value is something that improves a character’s Power. This could be provided as Experience or Gear.

FUN

  • Boosting
  • Feeling Powerful when you level
  • Sharing Items with friends
  • Feeling powerful regardless of class, having multiple builds that feel strong.
  • Having choices of ways to play a class
  • Having choices on how to farm gear
  • Having choices on how to level
  • Having choices of gear (cool looking gear, ability to target farm gear etc.)

Think of Gear, like going on an easter egg hunt and you want to find an easter egg with some juicy item in it… While we game we are on that easter egg hunt, but there is no reward the meets FUN requirements. So a player might go on an easter egg hunt for Set gear if the set gear will make his character look cooler.

  • Why is each piece of gear just for 1 class?
  • If you make gear that works for all classes, you would only need to balance the items once then share across all classes.

As a Sorc, I would want to have some of the cool looking gears that a necro wears on my sorc but I cant because its exclusive to 1 class, you’re 5x-ing work by making gear for every character.

The Gems also feel useless, as a sorc i only use 2, and now with the new Mechanic you just added more gems that dont even stack. so now i’ve got inventory full of these seasonal gems.

  • Items- You don’t have enough, its not even close.
  • Items should be easier to target specific attributes on yellows.

As a player I think a few solutions would be nice

  • Target farming bosses for specific stats on drops, Like if im farming items with Crit damage, or vulnerable , or crit chance. make it so like ____ boss drops the crit items more frequently.
  • Target farming specific types of minions for specific types of gears.
  • Eg. Skeletons drop arm gear and daggers , Skeleton mages drop head gear. or wands etc.

Being able to pick our NM dungeons instead of playing NM Dungeon lotto. Again we have no choice everything feels like we have set choices, set dungeons.

I would like to elaborate on why the dungeons and boss battles are not fun. So The first thing I want to discuss is your dungeon mechanics, As a player we should have a choice to skip parts of dungeons we don’t enjoy, The cost would be experience or loot which you don’t even reward us for parts of the dungeon after we complete them , Example Phase 2… see below

The issue is that you have repetitive mechanics for all dungeons. So you force everyone into 3 phase dungeons.

  • Phase 1 , Find key or kill minions for a key to unlock door
  • Phase 2, Get locked in room and fight minions that dont drop loot
  • Phase 3, Kill all enemies or slay a boss

These phases give players no choice on how they want to play.
If I wanted to rush a boss and battle them I couldn’t in this scenario.

This goes further into the lack of creativity in dungeon design.
So for example when you key farm in Diablo 2, if you ever tried to obtain the Key of Hate, Summoner, that dungeon the player starts in the middle, then they have a choice and have to choose a path to go down to find the boss. that is a different style of dungeon . Even the boss after summoner , another dungeon aspect exist (Choose a door) to find Duriel.

SUGGESTIONS TO MAKE GAME FUN

  • Have more loot / gear (Cool looking gear )
  • Have gear that can be worn across all classes along side class specific gear.
  • Allow players to share with other players
  • Enable boosting ( It makes sense for HC players , and people who don’t want to sell their soul to the devil. )
  • Setup a Experience system for Glyphs, I was thinking you could have like gems that are used to power the glyphs, they represent experience levels, and you could take them out of the glyphs or apply them to other glyphs .
  • Fix your bubbles at end of NM dungeons, they don’t always appear, and if it doesnt appear I would like the dungeon experience to roll over to the next time it appears for glyphs.
  • Give us choices on how we play dungeons, how we find gear, and the abilities we choose on every class.
  • Have Set rolls of stats from specific bosses, ___ boss always has a Crit roll, or ___ boss always has a Cooldown Roll. etc. so we can target farm a boss or dungeon.
  • Renown can be fixed by having a % completion to achieve the bonus. So you would add side quests to each region making the % completion for side quests not be 100% resetting that for the new season. Same with Dungeons, if you add a dungeon or move a dungeon you could have % dungeons complete change per zone every season.
  • Cow level to find gear. Once you get more gear that has value added to the game.
  • I am also not a fan of the Level matching, I think this could be resolve by just having an “Enable level matching switch” so if a higher level plays with his lower level friends he can level match. but having zones of minions at a specific level to me just makes me feel powerful while i fight and i dont feel weaker as i grow.
  • To fix res, just make it like D2, its easy to understand you have a Res %, you also have -% res attributes. For example you could have a player with 150% Shadow Res, and a boss can apply -75% shadow res, they would receive 25% damage and only reduce 75% etc.

Ok, well anyways I’m a hydra sorc on Hardcore. I felt like the hydras got nurfed early and really none of the unique items even fit hydras, so I am going to stop playing this game till you can get some more gear added to the game. My expectations is I need some juicy items too do an easter egg hunt with, I need choices on how to play dungeons and I need choices on how to build my character. The Ice Shard Sorc shouldn’t be the only build.

5 Likes
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My notion of fun is not to read novels about how the game should be. Especially after reading the early parts and noticing that i have already read the same novel dozens of times over here. Thats not fun.

4 Likes
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I agree with everything except resistances. I didn’t like how they worked in D2 either. I would prefer they just get rid of resistances entirely and just roll everything into DR. Or just have like physical resistance and magic resistance and that’s it.

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I disagree. Solo gaming is fun, Solo Self Found is fun.
People have different definitions of fun, and I like to progress myself on my own merit without being made godly by someone else carrying me there.

In groups, i’m either being carried (not fun), or carrying others (not fun). There’s rarely any point where we’re all equal and helping eachother.

The only things that aren’t fun that ‘become’ fun when in a group are dying (weirdly), and watching others die (satisfyingly).

Boosting is not fun, and being boosted is not fun. It’s just a way to get to the ‘fun’ part of the game.

Blizzard are adding more gear with every season, and will be adding set items too.
I am hoping that they also include some kind of crafting system and improve the codex so that you can level up what’s in it - and maybe craft unique items once you’ve found said unique and perhaps done some thing that allowed you to learn its craft.

Gear can be worn across all classes… even class specific gear if it’s not a weapon/off-hand that your class can’t use. You just can’t make use of the aspects for other classes.

Players can share with other players if said players are in the same game together and the thing they’re sharing didn’t come from a loot box/reward. All loot that drops from enemies aside from unique is shareable with players in your group when it drops.

Boosting should be avoided as much as possible.

Glyphs are the same as legendary gems, it’s fine the way they are. I wouldn’t mind having some kind of points system instead where as you gain glyph points they go in to your paragon board, boosting the levels of all socketed glyphs equally… That way you could play around with different glyphs. But the system works how it does right now, we just need more ways to build glyph experience.

Bubbles have been fixed, most of them just take time to spawn.

You have choices on how to find gear and play dungeons - be more specific.

You shouldn’t have to target farm a specific boss or dungeon, that leads to things like we apparently had in D2 where people all just farmed the same boss over and over and over. You can however target farm by going to certain mob types. Skeletons for example have a high chance to drop bows and crossbows.

Once you know what mob types drop what items, you can target those in the world or in dungeons (plural, not a single dungeon).

You can complete your renown by completing all the dungeons in a zone, unlocking all areas of the map, and doing a dozen side quests. There’s about 30+ side quests in each zone and half of them is more than enough to get full renown. So you’re asking for something that already exists.

There is no cow level. The cow level is a lie.

“Level matching” is not a thing. We have level scaling, and it’s in place to allow you to play how and where you want, as you’ve been asking for. Taking that out reduces your options significantly, which is not what you want.

Nothing should be just like D2. They want to balance resistances, so that you can make a choice between Armor, Resistances, Damage reduction and not feel gimped by doing so. You might be stronger against magical affixes than physical hits or vice versa, but it should be a balance. At the moment it’s just stack Armor and DR and ignore all resistances. They’re working on this, it’s not easy to balance this stuff, as decades of WoW has taught them.

It seems like you didn’t really put a lot of thought in to this.

4 Likes
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My justification on boosting is that if you’re playing Hardcore and all your friends are level 70, you need a way to get back to that spot quick. D2 has BAAL runs that you can do to boost.

There is still a time / cost associated with boosting. The higher level player needs to take time away from their normal grind to get the lower level player to that point. But if you’re playing with friends, then all the sudden cannot play with your friends for 3 days, its not Fun in my opinion.

So, having a choice of how to play and how to level needs to exist. Someone still needs to get to that Point or above that point in order to boost anyways. And seasons only last 4 months, I think gear should be the end game and once people reach level 100, the item Power should control their true level, which would be gear dependent. Getting to lvl 100 should not be the end goal. We need more gear options. Like why isn’t magic find a thing. They could at least make yellow gems magic find.

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You can be boosted if you choose, but it’s not like you can go to a dungeon or event and get to your friends current level in minutes.

You’ll get experience based on the maximum you can (which I believe is still +3 levels above your level), but you’ll get it much quicker with something killing stuff than you would get. And if they take you to WT4 at low levels, you get all the xp boost too, so you can effectively do 1-50 very quickly.

But in hardcore, any kind of boosting is putting both you and your friends characters at risk. Either they have to lower the content level that they play in order to boost you without making it too hard on themselves, or they need to lower it to a point that you won’t get 1 shot by the environment or something teleported to you etc…

I can see how boosting would be useful for catching in softcore, but it doesn’t really work in hardcore, at least not until you can boost from 1-100 in minutes, and that’s not going to happen for several years.

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How it was, wasn’t bad we would have the guy sit in the root of a NM dungeon as we clean it. So it didn’t fully take away from our grind, I disagree with the 1-100 in minutes , but i also think like 1 day of grinding should usually catch you up, so (4-8hrs of in game time) to grind back to a level if being boosted. Increasing that time by reducing all dungeons to the 3+ level gap, now taking (14-20hr reduces fun) this is just too long I just play when I get off work .

The root issue is still I don’t even have anything like a Ber rune or like juicy items to be like! CHECK THIS OUT! the lore of this game is seriously needing an overhaul which I just think will just take time. I’ll come back in a few seasons and see how it goes.

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Yet here you are. Doing it again.

Guess you just enjoy doing things you say are not fun? Seems odd.