Theres some good additions dont get me wrong and it sounds like im a minority but i actually enjoy s0, 1 and 2 more
The reason i dont like it is i just like to play blind without a guide and struggle my way to lvl 100. Well now the difficulty and exp changes have trivialized this experience. The scary capstone dungeon boss gets one shot even when underlevelled, you might aswell just start at 100 now imo.
Its basically a lot of grinding trivial content before you engage with difficult endgame content. Its just so boring to me.
Give me ssf hard mode and better yet single player and i might perk up again but really if this is the direction im out.
The game had loads of issues initially but i liked the philosophy. Slower harder more thoughtful gameplay.
The difficulty curve needs to be more gradual. The early game is useless as it is. And really speeding everyone through the leveling is a dumb decision as there is no need for it to be there at all. They have removed the game for most, in favor of the people who just want to play the endgame. A better decision would be to have the vendor to instant 100 for people who want to use that.
And it may have been ok if the endgame was not so mind numbingly boring and catered to the people who play the select broken classes for the season.
The game is designed that way almost every piece of gear u want to be 925 so literally doing anything but speedy leveling is waste of time pretty much, so they would either need to rework gear or rework the leveling proccess as whole cuz nobody will even bother to play seasons, Diablo is definitly more casual arpg nowdays so I dont mind if I am “done” with season in like 2 weeks as long as its fun which have not been the case for D4 as the seasons are just boring and class balancing is non existant, still barely any endgame after a year and it honestly looks like devs dont even play arpgs just check Last Epoch patch 1.1 way smaller studio but the changes within just one patch are massive
This came up in another discussion for me. The items while they are better than at launch are really at the core of the problem for Diablo 4.
They all feel worthless because they have gone the route of showering you with them. This could be the worst decision in a game based around loot as it devalues all items. Nothing is special anymore. And yes I know this started in D3, but that game was also not to my liking. Rares don’t mean anything, Blues…why even have them? And pretty soon with S5 Uniques will render most legendaries as a lower class.
If you look at other games where the loot means something they do not do this. D2, D1…hunting for the loot was the core of the game, they did not just give it to you for showing up.
To be honest my best time in D4 was in S1 and I had a lvl 100 sorc back then. Good times - helping friends to lvl up, carrying people through capstones, playing pvp and doing nmds 100. It truly felt like a real World of Diablo. Now we only have zoom zoom through the whole game, ME DEAL BILLIONS OF DAMAGE AND SMASH DEMONS HEHE.
To be honest I currently play HC and let me tell you it is impossible to die outside the pits. I can fall asleep or go make me some coffee in the middle of helltide and still be alive.
1 - Difficulty is fine until lvl50 or so
2 - Speed is too fast (too fast getting to lvl30 and I’d argue lvl50 also)… I mean you over-level your gear by 15 levels in the early game lol
3 - Game needs to find a way to include/introduce surprises and milestones (individualize performance and impact/direction of individual runs earlier)
In other words:
Game needs to find ways to make individual runs and reward cycles different than one another
Evolve loot not just by level increase, but rather by completion of milestones
The game is too “streamlined” from start to finish IMO, always being limited to what happens and what the loot can drop
If I were to prioritize 3 is most important by leagues and bounds over all other issues
Say for example if they make things/milestones like:
First NMD completion unlocks imprinting gear
Second NMD completion unlocks re-imprinting
First helltide completion unloks Tempering
Second helltide completion unlocks Capstone dungeon
Something like that… But in order to do that they should do another look on gear, or more specifically gear-growth
That’s missing in D4 IMO
It is easier for other games (dungeon-crawlers) cause there’s a clear distinction of a Chapter. The moment of “oh whoa, this is awesome” is missing from the game completely, the gear-growth part of it
Passed a chapter ?, new gear available
There’s no such thing in D4. BUT in order to do it, have to take into consideration quite a few more things overall
I liked it but also not, mainly because there was too much “hidden power” i.e. Renown
I remember really struggling hard at lvl73 (and then later at lvl78 or so) just because didn’t have a 3rd Glyph opened (when did Renown game became 5x easier all out of a sudden)
That kind of “hidden power” design needs to also go, in other words a true SSF is no account-bound bonuses stuff, just want to play the game and see how far one can get (not do some background homework that will make the game a lot easier)
To solve blues and whites, they will need at least one season just for those.
Why? Because to solve it, they need to make blues and whites become base items (for you to do something on them, like crafting).
And to make this, they need to up the implicits of blues waaaaaaaaay higher. Or give them utilities that are irreplaceable. Making you need that base for whatever reason.
The other part after that is building the mechanic in which you will make them useful.
I don’t get why we don’t have a “play your way” approach yet?
Personally, I want end-game, I like end-game and levelling is just waiting for end-game…
Give levelling more difficulty, boost WT3/4 and open them up from the get-go or something… but give us an option to skip levelling - at least on alts - for those of us who want to make builds and do the grind…
I know this wont be popular, it’ll never happen and the game doesn’t have enough to skip this chunk of content but ya’know… I can dream!
If already beat the original game/challenge and have a lvl100 already, allow a creation of a fresh lvl100
BUT, the (baseline) game should be quite a bit harder (and better balanced overall)
In other words ?
S0/1 was fine, game would’ve worked IF
Removed Paragon points from Renown (too much of a powerful account-bound bonus)
Removed Exploit and reduced Crit/Vuln a notch
Added a few new features like XP shrines (instead of kill the whole game completely by bombarding it with trash mobs and hasting it up more)
Reworked Heart of the Barber to be limited (affect up to 10-15 monsters at a time or so)
Consolidated gear better (add new affixes for Overpower and LH in late game) and include a small chance for a “WT5” item affix (such as Physical Damage rating, Non-Physical damage rating, Damage vs Elites, X% Damage based on Resource/Barrier, Damage vs CC-ed) to roll
Introduced some evolution of monsters past lvl75 or 80 or so
Game overall would likely play better if they did not have enemies level up alongside the player from the start. May have been better to have each region have level specific content for new characters (Ex. Peaks is 1-20 then go to where ever for 20-30 etc.), then have the levels change to match the player either once they complete certain content or achieve max level.
Main issue in the early seasons/build of this game was that enemies scaled beyond the player and anyone who had bad luck with gear drops got stuck with no way to progress. Slower leveling and white/blue gear being more useful early-on would be great but at the same time players should always feel powerful in an ARPG.
Lost Ark does this really well even if it is with an out-of place robot. You need to run the content once and then you can use the robot to boost your alts.
Oh yeah, they were trying to make loot more relevant and impactful by instantly salvaging sacred etc. Well after 15 min in helltide your bags again full of useless legendaries.
Nothing matters in this game, its like dredging through sludge for those boosted affixes. Idk how anyone does it. Maybe ill try d2 again and just hope poe 2 doesnt make the same mistake.
Ive pretty much given up on d4 now and i was initially optimistic during s1, s2 etc.
It was like that before with the capstone bosses. Maybe it’s a bit more pronounced now, but you can never play a game fresh again after that first run. Even playing a different class, you’re going in equipped with a lot more understanding of the game’s systems. The main difference is you leveled a lot more slowly, and thank the gods they changed that. There’s absolutely no need to have it take weeks to months to reach cap, especially with a season/league mechanic in play.
The games focus on level 100 content comes from item level dependent stats and gear that is no longer viable after 5-10 player levels.
But its not something that cant be fixed. If what you find has potential at every level or over a longer period of time, your play time will matter much earlier and feel good to spend. The developers should consider removing some items from this ladder system (earlier).
Yes I think its a minority but I am also part of it.
To be honest, I liked the item system before Season 4 and, this might be a minority of the minority, I absolutely loved the damage on Tuesday affix system, haha. I really thought they were on a good track with the introduction of these “stack affix X and get Y percent of damage”.
I also liked going through my inventory, but the critics have a point. In Season 1 I started very soon to only pick up and improve one type of equipment at a time. Its way easier to compare 30 chest armor pieces for example. Other items stay on the ground. And I avoid going for efficent runs because the fun goes out of the window by doing that. Only one class every season, not more. These are decisions you can make for yourself. For me, those decisions turned out to be good ones and I am still a happy player.
But I do feel that Season 4 brought the game into an identity crisis. In need of another, bigger rework. The newly introduced features, like tempering and masterworking are ok. They dont really look like they absolutely needed an itemisation overhaul for that though. Balancing has taken a big hit. A lot of stuff got trashed or overlooked (which is embarassing) but I assume they are working on it. Equipment slots and their new available affix lists turned out pretty bad. I played Sorcerer this season and I never felt much excitement in finding items. Everything is very samey. But I heard it might be partly because I play Sorcerer.
It was a bit too over the top and didn’t represent Lucky Hit and Overpower, but there were Movement Speed shenanigans lol
So basically here’s what I used to write about it overall:
Remove Lucky Hit: Chance to slow, and put it on Barb Skill Tree
Remove Movement speed after Elite kill and put it on Skill Tree of Necro (also warned how bad this Affix was and turning the game into wrong direction on the long term)
Combine damage vs Chilled, Slowed into Damage vs Impaired
Combine damage vs Stunned, Immobilized, Frozen into Damage vs CC-ed
Combine damage vs Burning, Bleeding, Poisoned, Cursed into Damage vs Afflicted (actually called it Suffering, i.e. Damage vs Suffering)
Add 2 new affixes for each LH and OP so they can carry some weight later on
** Lucky hit % chance of Basic/Core/Ult/Mastery/e.t.c. Skills increased by X%
** Lucky hit % of all equipped Lucky Hits on gear increased by X%
** Every Xth attack against CC-ed/Afflicted/Immobilized/Elite target is an Overpower
** Overpower occurs Twice in a row
Then all that would remain is to add what would be “Tier 5” affixes that would occur more rare than other affixes and would “carry weight” more
Spellpower % (Remember the Pyromancy, Shock, Lightning, Shapeshifting, e.t.c. Skills damage % increase ? - this would increase that number - baseline - to ALL of them)
Damage % based on Resource % (Basically Edgemasters’ Aspect put on gear as a regular roll)
Damage % while Fortified or having a Barrier (Conceited Aspect turned into an Affix for gear)
And that’s it, that’s all that they really needed to do
1 - Consolidate affixes
2 - Add more affixes that affect LH and OP
3 - Add new affixes that occur more rarely and are supposed to a kind of a “higher power”
What we had instead ? - a full gibberish of 20 affixes that noone wanted designed specifically to ruin Enchanting (i.e. Gamble)
Almost as if they never wanted us to play an actual game but rather be addictive gamblers
Freakin’ amazing if you ask me, considering each “gambling system” that is supposed to keep us playing longer (or somewhat longer) is also doubling-down and increasing the amount of needed dev work