1000% … the funny thing is they had to know what would cause the powercreep and they still went to production with this game.
Reliable sources of vulnerable. Each class has pretty much one way. The classes that are better at it are on the “S Tier” list.
They then stuck it to the casual gamer by making everything more slow, more challenging … because streamers and powergamers.
This game is not built for people who just purchased the base game and are happy with that. They want to make it a chase of some type… $$ is the only motivation I can think of. The whales can’t get bored. We’re not happy with people just buying a game once.
It’s no longer about making a good game it’s about how to extract as much money from people as possible.
The journey to 100 is the game. This was their stated goal. They wanted everything to feel meaningful. If you bought the game after they said this it is your fault. If you have a desire to be max level and go brr in a matter of hours, they have a product for that, it seems like they plan on further support for it.
I hear this mentioned a lot… what issues? I had the most fun in D3 out of any RPG. I think adding MMO aspects like world bosses, and a shared world is the dumbest thing blizzard has done.
After watching the exilecon streams, I cannot wait for POE2 its everything D4 SHOULD have been… basically D4 have 1 year to fix the game before it dies.
That’s what confuses me the most. Who gives a bleep if players are generating millions on damage stats? It’s a SEASONAL game. Take risk Blizzard! Let people go wild.
They’re trying to balance this like it’s static WoW. No one gives a damn. If something goes sideways during a season … let it … the next one is a full reset!
The issue for me is its not fun to grind out rep. Its not fun to spend 70% of the playtime traveling. The builds and moment to moment gameplay are mediocre at best.
Until last Campfire I was pretty confident, that the game base is solid and it’s only a matter of balance, number tweaking and adding in UI and new content to improve over time… But after the tweets about why stash increases are problematic (They literally load every players Profile, Gear, Inventory, Stash in the city hub, which explains a lot why even my highend gaming rig is lagging out as soon as I port back into town) and their statement on monster density increase and zoom out being limited due to resources of what players systems might be able to do, I am also afraid of the future… I mean for sure it’s possible to sort all those potential bottlenecks/stoppers out over time, but that directly makes is a way more far away chance. It’s not unusual for a big project to have such technical depts, especially after such a long development and changing staff inbetween, but it’s indeed a little scray what limits it will bring us in regards of advancing the game. And the thing is, we can’t fully blame the current team, because they are the ones who would absolutely love not to have this situation all together and most likely are only partly responsible for it. Nontheless, we can just hope they will figure out good solutions and let Diablo 4 shine to it’s true potential it still definitly has!
This also indeed made me grin a little. When the class designer spoke about the idea, that overpower, dot, crit, vuln should have been different kinds of choices to get some extra power - Not only that they should have been aware of it (There was alpha and beta feedback about this) that there is a mechanic that work so much stronger due to it’s multiplicative nature, that a revisit before release would have been highly beneficial, it’s also a nice dream having players to chose if they want to multiply by A, B or C and not endup with players just stacking all togethe to have AxBxC It’s fine that they take care of vuln and expand on those systems for sure, but this is only one aspect of the 1.1 patch. It wouldn’t have been such a big deal, if they only tuned down vuln. Bigger problem here was they tuned everything down across the board…
Both can be true, so you can create a very good game and it can earn more money even after launch, the better the game is, the more people are fine to invest some more dollars to improve their visual experience - If the game is bad or not as good as it could be, it will still earn some money, but it could and partly will lead to less purchases. So overall I don’t think that’s in the overall sense of everyone, but of course if they can save a lot of money for development and still enough people buy stuff, it might even out and it leads to less incentive to invest more into the game development. Still I think the latter is the worse choice.
Actually I also don’t think big numbers are an issue, actually for most players it’s probably even more desireable, because it makes you feel even stronger, and if we are honest it just doesn’t matter if you hit with 100 Damage on a 3000 health boss or with a 2 Trillion hit on a 60 Trillion boss health bar. So it’s basically just a matter of how much you want to tune the numbers, but it doesn’t really change much of the gameplay itself.
The bigger issue was, regarding D3, that those numbers emerged from set bonuses that boosted specific setups beyond everything, while non affected skills became even more useless. So I for myself so desperatly watned to create a viable chain lighning mage build, but Delsere magnum opus buffed all core skills, but chain lightning… And the set less option was just not strong enough to play the high content, for some exceptions where legendaries had other absurd high percentage numbers that allowed the WD Barber Build for example. So while high damage numbers isn’t really an issue, only having a few skills buffed to high numbers is. So I am fine if they want to keep numbers lower to have a better overview as long as it fits into the gameplay. It still can lead to feeling powerful and if it helps to balance out all other options as well.
For me it’s all about playing a fluid, fast paced game, where I can feel powerful, fly over maps and through tunnels, send hordes and hordes of mobs back to hell and grind for those nice gear pieces to do all that even faster, harder, better as an result. And as soon as I am bored, go to another build, class or mode and do the same with a new look and feel - That’s what an ARPG is about for me
If you have to build your game around what players are demanding in the moment you’ve already FAILED. It’s their job to have a vision and execute it. It’s not the player’s job to tell them how to design it.
I’ve felt like this since 60 and I’m about 70 now.
The absolute lack of a meaningful end-game, nothing to chase (uber lillith drops…nothing special and only rewards players with a sense of pride and accomplishment), and continue design decisions that both actively contradict stated goals and make the game less fun/more of a chore to play (world scaling and XP changes) leave me wondering why I should even continue playing beyond “it’s fun” which yeah, combat is fun! But I need a bit more than fun combat as I’ve got tons of other games I want to play that are also fun, too.
And with how the developers speak of the genre I continue to wonder if any of them are actually ARPG fans that play the broader genre or even deeply play D2/3. Because they continue speaking of the genre as if it’s new to them and making mistakes that any longterm ARPG player would have called out instantly. I still can’t believe they shipped the game with multiplicative vulnerable mods weighted at equal value to additive mods like holy heck did nobody even do a basic math check?
Stats, mods, item design, etc. can change, they can fix this - the same happened with Diablo 3, which was also a mess item-wise at launch. I’m 100% sure that they actually will, it will just take time.
What scares me is all of those limitations related to engine/software., like significantly higher mob density will make the game feel like a slide show (they even said it during that campfire talk), they don’t even want to touch the camera distance issue (I wonder why), the game already has some lag spikes when outdoors, leaving or entering towns, etc. Yes, some optimizations probably could be done, but there’s a limit for those also.
It feels like they work with what they have, and what they have is very limited.
True, I had extreme much luck lately - Rolled Druid for S1 and found Tempest a few days ago, yesterday I got the Greatstaff of the Crone with a 150%/9 Ranks Claw at level 77 - You can’t imagine how fun that was and I can only imagine the level of frustration, if you’re looking forward to play a build and not get the desired items, like at all.
It always was a thing, that RNG slightly dictates what you can play in that Moment, and it worked okayish in D3, since you found a build definin item and you just switched to it - In D4 however this is pure pain, you just can’t adapt to your drops, because (even after the nerf to costs in upcoming 1.1.1) it will remain tidious to respec towards a different item, since it will still be expensive and time consuming as hell. I am running Pulverize right now and even with a BIS Item I am heavily thinking if I should switch now, because of all the cumbersome lackluster that is involved in doing so… Stop Leveling Glyphs, but Level others, respec over one hundred Paragon Points one by one? It drives me crazy.
So there are 2 things that have to change:
→ We need loadouts, where we kinda can put a build in parallel to prepare a switch and as soon as we want we just swap over to that build from our armory
→ A way to have a more distinct way to find build defining items, so they either rework those items and move them to a different system that we can unlock more targetted and items remain as more common power buffs that can be used across builds, or they allow us to really target farm for specific stuff, because otherwise it will be impossible to work towards a specific build, especially over time, when they increase the loot pool more and more…
I believe they are striking a subtle balance between being responsive to player feedback and not devolving into making a game by committee by letting players take over the conversation.
We wont get direct lines to devs. Thats why they don’t participate in here. Theyll read and try to understand the vast amount of feedback and data, but they WONT let us directly tell them what “today’s issues to resolve are”.
Instead, questions are selected by their community lead, and i bet he knows exactly what questions are bad pr if answered by devs on stream, and which questions have promising answers.
The fireside chat is cool in a sense. Its what weve wanted out of Blizz devs for over a decade. Open communication, some Q and A, and willingness to discuss the good, bad and ugly. But make no mistake, its curated, prepared, and measured. They had a whole powerpoint for us last time.
Except for that dudes malignant bunghole apparently. Thats the wild card.
the grind from 75 to 100 is a lot better now, takes a little more time - but in group play its a days work… so we really need to bring group play down to solo play - remove the resets or limit the benefits from group (proximity for exp etc).
The game is to easy, there are no attachments, you are suppose to create characters left and right… “fast food gaming”
It’s fine that they take care of vuln and expand on those systems for sure, but this is only one aspect of the 1.1 patch. It wouldn’t have been such a big deal, if they only tuned down vuln. Bigger problem here was they tuned everything down across the board…