I don't feel like my character is getting stronger. And that makes me sad

PC General Discussion
1

I got diablo 4 on a whim because I’ve been a diablo fan for years. I think my sorc is level 30 or something. It should say something about the feel of progression that I’m not 100% on what level my character is, especially when I only have one.

I just killed that Astaroth demon that terrorized a whole region to the point that children still sing songs about its demise and I don’t feel powerful, mostly because I can’t kill trash mobs anywhere in 1 hit, but also due to a whole bunch of other contributing factors.

  • Skills

    • Why do I have to take time to roll again during a life or death situation? Why is that evade on a cooldown? Just because “it’s too powerful” if it’s not? Sounds like lazy enemy design, considering the success of dark souls, elden ring. It’s doable, let me roll my way through the fields of Hyrule.

    • Passive skills bonuses are so tiny that I can’t see the point of putting spending a skill point on them that could be better used towards maybe making my damage dealing skills be able to kill things in one hit, and therefore maybe make myself feel a bit stronger.

    • Active skills are underwhelming.

      • Why am I restricted to 1 hydra? That feels arbitrary, considering d2 could have a crap ton of hydras.
      • Frozen orb, my darling from d2, is small. Its explosion is small (it shouldn’t explode in the first place), the shards it shoots out don’t hardly shoot out any distance to be useful, and, with so much emphasis on the explosion, it explodes when I don’t want it to. Generally too far away. Feels more like a cold beach ball than the terrifying Frozen Orb that would absolutely slaughter everything on the screen.
      • Blizzard feels weaker than it should for something labeled a mastery level skill.
      • I picked the flame serpent ultimate because I didn’t want to be stuck in place with the ice ult and find myself in a bad spot after the ice broke. Because I knew the ultimates were also going to be underwhelming with respect to damage, which I was right about, and there’d still be things alive after they finished.
      • Ice armor is poorly named, doesn’t last long enough, and has too long of a cooldown. It feels pretty effective as a defensive ability, I’ll give it that, but what about the rest of the time?

    • Active skill based passives (the enchant things that sorc’s get. I’m not sure what other classes get or if it’s the same or not or what.)

      • They’re underwhelming. They all seem to be chance based or actively make my character worse. Or are just not useful at all. Literally all of them. I just picked up my second one, but I’ve had the first for a bit, and I put the frost nova in it, to enchant my hydras to have a 30% chance to trigger a frost nova on attack. I’ve seen it go off maybe 5 times. It is not a 30% chance, it’s some scaled bullcrap with their attack speed or whatever to make the devs feel better about who knows what. I don’t really care how it works, I’m here to have fun. My days of min maxing through mechanic overanalysis are behind me. I’m here to have fun and have my stupid little hydra heads freeze things with bolts of fire. And it’s not happening nearly enough to be 30%.
      • If that’s how this one works, why bother trying to find a better one? The game is just going to monkey’s paw me again.

  • Itemization

    • The first time few times something dropped with unoptimized stats, I thought it was neat, that they went back to d2 itemization.
    • Combined with the level scaling, though, I find myself concerned that I’m going to get bricked before I get a good upgrade.
    • I hate to bring d3 into this because it was very much a different beast, but at least equipping a major upgrade felt like equipping a major upgrade. Here, between having leveled a few times before finding one, it feels like the damage sponge trash mobs just grin and come at me harder.
    • Too many stats that basically mean the same thing. Overpowered skills? Lucky Hit? Vulnerable? That’s all basically critical hits but needlessly complicated. And it takes up stat space that I want for things like Intelligence, willpower, and effective health.

  • Progression

    • All of that, combined with level scaling so you can’t even outlevel an area, make it feel like I’m just slogging through quicksand made of trash mobs.
    • It’s not difficult, I’m not failing, I end every fight at full health and full potions. But it feels like I’m having to fight my way through molasses.
    • Idk, maybe a lower time to kill on weaker enemies would help that.
    • Just because I don’t have a lot of points here, doesn’t mean that this isn’t the biggest issue. I slog through molasses in real life, don’t make me do it in something I do for stress relief or I’ll end up playing something else while watching Blizzard fall into even more mediocrity than it already has.

This game isn’t looking like it’s going to be fun long term. If this game isn’t fun, it’ll be the last Blizzard game I ever buy. I stopped playing WoW when they cranked the FOMO up to 11 in cataclysm, I stopped playing classic WoW when my friends stopped playing because they farmed for PVP, I never started playing Classic WOTLK because of the community and their OCD about min maxing, I stopped playing d3 when they turned it into that Greater Rift Runner thing that played on your FOMO of shinies.

I never played diablo immortal. I thought the whole unveiling of it was incredibly insulting and none of the gameplay I saw looked any more interesting than D3.

I get that us millennials aren’t the target demographic anymore, and that companies need to make money, but it seems like Blizzard games just aren’t fun anymore. I’ve got time to play them. I have money to spend on them, now. But if they’re not fun, I won’t.

If I had finished the campaign just now, I’d be asking for a refund. I don’t expect my opinion to change over the course of the rest of the campaign. I’d really appreciate a Blue response to this post, as it seems like Blizzard doesn’t care about the satisfaction of its customers. If that really is the case, I don’t see me buying anything else from them ever again.

I’m not mad. A little frustrated, maybe. Disappointed, for sure. Dismayed, and maybe even a little hopeless. I grew up with Blizz games. Warcraft: Orcs & Humans, Starcraft, Diablo 2, Diablo 2: LoD, WoW: BC, WotLK, and some Cata. I’m aware that no one can reasonably compete with all that nostalgia. But Diablo 4 should be fun. Instead, character progression feels reluctant. Campaign progression feels like trudging through thick mud in the rain. You can do it, it’s not hard, it’s just unpleasant and you feel tired at the end.

And I can’t help but feel that, with the amount of effort that’s gone into this game, it’s intentional. That frustration, that teasing nibble of a character upgrade, might be exactly what you’re going for. And that design philosophy, designed to make me want more instead of just being fun, is likely why I’ll be asking for a refund.

I’m posting this in hopes a Blue will reply and tell me I’m mistaken, that many, many things have gone wrong in the project management of this game, and that they’ll be fixing the issues I’ve highlighted as they can get to them.

8 Likes
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Correct - it certainly is lacking that “it” factor that makes ARPGs addictingly fun.

You are probably right to say that millennials aren’t the target demographic, but conversely, we are the ones with the disposable income to spend. If this game was like “OMG SICK SO MUCH FUN” I’d have no problem dropping hundreds on it over the years.

Unfortunately, this game is like, “omg what sick minds ruined the fun of Diablo?”

2 Likes
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I hearted and replied bc it looks like you spent some time on this.

4

The scaling needs to be tuned down a tad.

5

I didn’t feel like slogging to the next quest, was mad that I finished act 2 and didn’t have a mount when there’s that stable store thing that says Donan has the mount, and thought I’d write a quick post before grabbing a snack and doing other things, instead of playing the game.

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haha so true i plowed through the main story to get the mount first then explore the world didnt know id beat the storyline almost before getting it lol

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7

It’s a very overly complicated formula. I would just watch some YouTube videos and take the shortcut to understanding how to gear and which stats. Most everything is useless except a few “buckets” of stats.

8

The items you can loot or buy are always a few level lower. The legendaries are worse. After the campaign, I tried world boss and legend events hoping to see something different but nothing special about the loots.

From streamers, it seems this will be same all the way up. I stop at 53 and never find any motivation to play anymore.

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9

Scaling strikes again! Yeah, it’s lazy game design, I noticed it too and it sucked a lot of the fun out of the game. Also skill points having no visual difference with spells is an issue too. I will say it does finally get better at 50+ with paragon. A lot of the power gains is baked into paragon.

10

They have planned to make billions off this game over the next ten years so they will be motivated to figure out how to fix “it”.

They procrastinated for five years, dawdled for a couple more, then went into “OMG gentlemen, our phony-baloney jobs are on the line!” mode and cranked out D4 in about three years.

Because they took so long there wasn’t really time to do proper Blizzard lazy development where you go slowly but you constantly play-test and revise, revise, revise, un till all the un-fun has been designed out of it. But here, they had a serious business business deadline because people wanted to start actually make some money off it.

To make this happen, they had to convince themselves that what they were doing was right and did not need further feedback-based iteration. As a result while they might have solicited feedback from early alpha/beta players, any suggestions that the game was not going to be fun had to be downplayed until they had self deluded themselves into believing everything was great.

There’s nothing wrong with D4 that another couple cycles of playtesting and cycling through ideas for creative solutions to all the un-fun parts can’t fix and that’s what’s going to happen now. We all just paid $100 for the privilege of being extended-alpha/beta testers for the next year or two.

One of my hopes for the Microsoft acquisition is that MS might actually impose some oversight on the development organization which has to be THE laziest procrastinating bunch of people in the entire industry. Usually they get away with it, but it has come back to bite them in the rhymes-with-bass badly here, and I don’t know how the game producers are keeping their jobs at this point.

11

I’ve gotten to level 66, been in world tier 4 for a while. I can tell you that it does not get better. It honestly boggles my mind that this is the case. I just don’t get how the people who worked on this game could think this would be at all okay.

I mean, I guess if this was like your very first Diablo and/or ARPG game then maybe it wouldn’t be so bad. But I don’t see how they could think that this kind of itemization and character progression, or the lack therof, would at all satisfy any veteran Diablo or ARPG players.

The only thing that I can imagine is that they purposefully made 1.0 to be this boring and lackluster so that they would have a ton of room to grow for future season content.

12

Everything has friction attached to it and the tools we’re given to overcome every bit of friction are sub par and underwhelming.

Even leveling has friction attached to it that we do not have tools to overcome.

If you are a level 75-80 character, even with the difference in paragon- if your gear is on point, you are likely a stronger character for most content than a lvl 100.