D4 goal is to be decked with Ancestrals. You cant just jump from WT2 to WT4. You have to complete the Campaign (or beat its Capstone) on WT2 by decking your toon with Legendaries. Proceed to WT3 and beat its Capstone by decking your toon with Sacred Legendaries. Then Proceed to WT4 and beat Capstone Elias by decking your toon with Ancestrals.
It was nerfed gazillion times becoz there’s too much noob back then. I remember my first visit of WT4 when I was level 55 on Season 0. I went back to WT3 becoz it was too hard.
If youre looking for challenge on WT4 now, there’s tons of them… solo World Bosses and solo World Events (login at 2AM PST when most people are asleep),NM100, Uber Bosses, Tormented Bosses.
That’s what you want. Are you entitled that we follow what you like? I want multiple games… NM100 is obsolete when Blizz introduced Masterworking. You can complete it at level 85s. Any game would be boring if it’s the same one doing it over and over. Helltide was a blast on me but I got bored too in time. That’s when I switch to NM100s with the most ridiculous affix so the game would have a chance to kill me… or do Pit… or do the Vault and break my old past records. When I get bored on all of them, I went back to Helltide. Variety is THE KEY.
It’s a Learn2play. You have to cover all the sides of the game to be successful. If you dont like it, make your own game, or quit and look for a game that you like. If the game is forcing you and you hate it, just leave the game. You are suppose to have fun not to be irritated.
It is part of the game. IT IS HOW TO PLAY THE GAME. I am completing those achievements without looking at it anymore. And I am just Casual. Those no-life players do way better than me.
No, they did not use the D3 engine.
People need to stop regurgitating false information.
Blizzard stated in an early dev-video that D4 is built on a brand new in-house game-engine.
With regards to the similarities between the item storage-issues, noone knows the facts as Blizzard haven’t made any information available. Maybe they used some the same database-code/backend, but that is just a small part of the complete platform anyway.
whatever you will call it, doesn’t matter.
All core systems in d4 are absolutly similiar to D3 core systems. Absolutely everything is identical, even toons animation. There are a lot of videos on YouTube confirming this.
So whatever you will call it, doesnt matter, core is D3.
This happen very often in business in this time. Big company try release product too soon, before designed release time. Disasters happen after.
But what is important after is they are trying repair issues with game or they pretend to do it or they have resources to do that or disaster continues?
The problem is not whether or not you want multiple games, the problem is whether or not they’re interconnected (i.e. the whole game having a “tree-structure” or separate/multiple lanes)
The latter thing is always bad (no matter what “branch” of subgame you do should somehow/someway impact the “main” game)
No, that’s bad game design, for an a/RPG especially
Don’t compare your own gameplay experience to others. People can get stuck with doing stuff without the game being informative to them on whether or not they’re making progress
That’s usually (not always but usually) bad. And for D3/D4-style game which imposes relatively high threshold of efficiency onto players = that’s bad
This is a Casual game. You can play it whatever or however you like.
But if you want to BEAT the game, you have to cover all the bases: Helltide Blood Maiden for 925 gear/GA gear with Tree of Whisper game with Gambling, NM for Glyph leveling, Pits for Masterworking, Maximize Paragon Board with more glyphs. Not all can beat the game. But if you cover the whole bases, you can beat the game even if you are Casual. I am a Casual and I did beat it with a non-meta build… (I used my own Mendeln Ring build not the stupid Mendeln Ring build in the internet).
What went wrong: The devs that made D2 left, and the devs that made D3 also left. The devs that are left likely have zero experience working on a Diablo game of old. They made the game the way they made it cause they thought that it was legitimately a good design, period.
And it wasn’t terrible but it wasn’t up to par with what the fans expected.
The expectation of fans for Blizzard games is very very high, and it has a very passionate and intelligent community that constantly expects great quality. It also has a lot of trolls as well but that’s another story.
Agreed, there’s not a lot of reasons to go into dungeons outside of quests, pits, NMDs, etc. Same with world events at 1st they were so cool. Especially in beta because people would be doing them. Same with world bosses. Our power level was capped card so they were a challenge.
For all the cool stuff going on in the open world Blizzard is doing their best to make it irrelevant. Same with dungeons and cellars.
So, they are in a good place now, then? Item budgeting should be really hard. That’s a sign of a good system with lots of worthwhile options.
All of these are present in D4 also.
Creating a compelling game with that “one more turn” feel means creating lots of overlapping arcs, so that when you finish one there’s always another about to finish. D4 does a good job of this early on: you are leveling up, finding higher-power items, leveling your codex powers, finding needed uniques, completing capstones, and leveling glyphs / unlocking higher tier NMDs. You also have the season journey and the seasonal reputation track to give short-term successes. Originally, they had renown and codex dungeons for this purpose, but everyone hated it.
The issue D4 runs into is that you hit the end of leveling really fast and then quickly get to the point where your only loops are finishing the specific content you are running and masterworking your items. Even items drops tail off except for ubers.
In theory, runes gave two separate things: extremely rare items to chase, and a way to steadily progress towards a desired item. In practice, I think they actually played a lot more like chasing Uber uniques does in D4.
The xpac is separating paragon as its own levels. I think this gives them the opportunity to extend the process of leveling paragon to max while incorporating some of the other loops at the same time. Then you get 4 very clear loops: (1) the current piece of content you are completing; (2) completing the journey and reputation track steps; (3) leveling up; and (4) getting better items. There’s also a meta-progression to (1) where you are able to unlock (and are good enough to defeat) higher- and higher-tier content.
The main thing missing once they do this would be an overhaul of NMDs and glyph XP. I think the goal of that should be to fit them into a smooth content-progression system where instead of leveling the overworld and helltides and other content based on your level, they level it based on your highest-completed NMD tier. And then they can make it so that you get glyph XP from chests and whispers based on the level of the content you are facing. Who knows, maybe we will get something like this in the xpac.
Of course, I’d still like to see them implement a more exploratory dungeon run, where you have reasons to hunt around the dungeons for all the cool stuff and you can unlock deeper and deeper levels (and come back to them later, allowing you to log out in between). But they won’t need that for the sake of creating compelling game loops.
D4 eventually gets to this with NMDs and Pit tiers (and presumably with the Infernal Hordes), but the overworld scaling muddies it for everything except the capstones, and pushing NMD tiers isn’t really that central of a thing. Another case that will be improved by shifting to have you get into the endgame at level 60, and more slowly level your paragon while pushing NMDs high enough to unlock Pits, then pushing Pits.
I don’t think this is a requirement or a particular reason for D2’s success. In fact, having ways to target farm specific desirable items is one of the things that makes D2’s endgame interesting. Exclusive rewards are not that different from strong target farming zones. I do think it’s a good check on the content types in general, though: if an activity is only being done because it has exclusive rewards and would therefore never be done if you gave small amounts of those rewards for the other activities, then the activity needs some dramatic improvement.
It doesn’t make up all your power in D4 either - that’s D3 you are thinking of. Gear is the goal in D2 just as it is in D4. Top level gear makes you way stronger than not having it, but you still have inherent power in your skill tree and paragon. That power is then multiplied by the gear, which means that having no gear makes you much weaker. If you don’t think that’s true, try doing a corpse run in D2 without grabbing any backup gear.
You left out the key thing that D2 has that D4 does not have: problems your character has to solve at the higher levels that are different from (and in addition to) simply raising the thresholds of the lower-level problems. D4 tried to do a little of this, but the problems they introduced were hard CC, healing monsters, fields that shut off ranged damage, and off-screen spike damage. All of those are annoying or impossible to fight and the item / skill system simply wasn’t designed to fight them in a reasonable way. They need to take a hard look at how they want difficulty to evolve and create a new layer of challenges that builds actually have multiple different tools against. Not just “stack life and DR because you take more damage,” but rather “stack armor or max resist or DR or life.” And that same tradeoff for other problems like CC or monster healing or monster resistances, etc.
If I play say 3 hours, and in those 3 hours I level up from say level 25 to 39 (not rushing, no pushing or anything, just “casual” 3hrs of gameplay where happened to level ~14 levels)
In D4 I get absolutely NOTHING that I might use later… In D2 you get runes/gems/jewels, stuff that CAN be used later (can use immediately sure, but perfectly fine to use later as well)
There’s nothing like that in D4, early gameplay doesn’t impact later levels of gameplay (AT ALL)… Unless counting on Renown Paragon but really nothing like that in the game tbh
Like Smoldering Ashes ?
I mean technically yeah, if you’re splitting hairs and behaving like a lawyer in a court then yes D4 has EVERYTHING also (but we both know it doesn’t)
Come on, you can’t be serious with arguments like those
You aren’t getting any runes or gems that are hard find at levels 25-39. Like sure, you could theoretically save and use them at some point, but you could also farm them in a few minutes if you needed them at high level. By that logic, the mats you get from salvage in D4 can also be used later.
No, season journey and reputation track reward items and materials. Sounds like in S5 the reputation might also reward an XP bonus.
You haven’t actually played at all, so I guess that’s why you don’t what it is, but there’s a reason the reputation track was popular: it filled a gap in terms of second, parallel progression alongside your XP.
No, Uniques are not in a good place. Too many of them enable different builds to work. It is one thing when you only really need 1 Unique, it is another when you have 3-4+ which is a shame because there are a lot of interesting Aspects out there. I can almost guarantee you however that some Aspects players might not ever even Imprint. They keep adding Aspects and Uniques but here we are with the same amount of Item Slots.
I am of the opinion that the Skill Tree and Paragon Boards should be overhauled with a lot of these Aspects added that way. It is silly that the Skill Tree ends at LVL 50. Perhaps a proficiency tree opens at 50 in parallel with the Paragon Board.
Having uniques enable builds seems like a good thing to me. Uniques that are auto-includes (other than mythics) are a bad thing. There is a danger, of course, if it turns out that each build has a specific set of uniques that make it vastly better than any other combination or any aspects that might have used those slots. Then it just becomes a D3 set. That danger is far easier to avoid than it would be with the D3 sets, though, because all you have to do is tune down one of the uniques or buff an aspect and you get back to have options when building. Compared to D3, then, you are talking about 3-item sets at most, with some of the items being support tools that can be replaced without losing the “set bonus”.
The last year has been filled with them trying to carve out both a good set of builds for each class, with itemization that supports each build, and some content that you can use to validate a build and to incrementally improve it. This is the first season where they are starting to push the envelope of giving multiple options for the same build, and no one (including maybe the balance team) has really caught up to that complexity.
So I suspect there are some aspects that are currently being dismissed that will actually prove worthwhile when combined with the value you can get from tempers. My hope is that this just means there are variants of a build: use a legendary to be a little bit more tanky or a little better single-target, use a unique to move better or have better AoE. I also think there are a bunch that are now undertuned but that would be BiS if more good tempers were added to the utility, defense, or offense categories.
The goal, though, should be that there are variants of a build where it actually plays differently. For example, I think it’s interesting if the Axial Conduit build is one that wants fewer chain lightnings but higher damage. Like if you could charge up Crown of Lucion by spamming incinerate, then drop 1-2 powered-up CLs, then swap to Flickering Arc Lash to power the conduit, then repeat the cycle so that you spawn new CLs just after the first ones explode. I don’t think that will actually work with the balance as it is right now, but it at least points to the kind of world where you don’t just equip everything that says, “Chain Lightning” in order to make a CL build, because there are distinct branch points in what you need the build to do.