We really need to start accepting to the design philosophy of what the devs vision has for this game.
“Embrace the power fantasy”
“builds that is super OP during a season is fun”
These are what D3 successful. And you can see how the D4 team does not want to copy /paste everything from D3 design philosophy because you would then also welcome power creeps .
D4 devs obviously does not want too much power creep and is controlling it within the realm of their vision. But they do want some of those design philosophy from D3.
D4 teams has already showed us since S2, they have already had a change in direction and vision for the game to adapt to current market and what they want their game to be. Even though it might drift closer and closer to D3, but it is what majority of the players enjoy and it is successful. Numbers don’t lie.
We need to stop comparing D4 with some “other” arpg out there, that is clearly with a completely different design philosophy and vision. Which target different player base and has 0 competition with D4. I am not going to name what “other” arpgs are. I am sure some of you know what I am talking about.
You have a niche group of player that want those kind of play style, you have a game for it. You also have a large audience that enjoys power fantasy and fast paced blasting, grinding and loot hunt type of player base, which will stay with D4.
At the end of the day, D4 has already defined to it’s player base what the game is and will be since S2. This will not change.
Let us together make D4 a better game for what it is, and continue to provide feedback. And there is really no need to try and make turn this game into something that it is against the devs vision and never meant to be anymore.
The problem is it’s not a design philosophy. It’s a series of bug and exploit interactions that provide this power fantasy.
A design would be intentional with a framework or system in place. It’s not by pure luck because some untested random bug or unknown exploit was discovered.
If you had watched the stream, lead live class designer Adam Jackson has showed us what he meant by not wanting to buff everyone to the level of the most powerful character. As the power will grow higher and higher without ceiling. That is called power creep. He clearly showed us how they don’t want that but they do want to balance the classes within a realm of power that they think is healthy and fun for the game
Any power you gained right now, today, are power that the devs think is ok to have and for the game , for you to gain. If you know what I mean.
Saying the words and doing the deed is not the same. They have kept powercreeping ever since release, and the campfire chat indicating they would keep doing so, with a fresh round of buffs.
Them thinking the power creep is okay, does not make it any less power creep.
I think we might have a different understanding and acceptance of what power level a player should have.
For example, I think doing millions, and billions of dmg in late game with good gear and build is absolutely fine and should be the case. Because that is a direct indicative of power growth that a player can see, and feel. Big number is the easiest way for a player to see how powerful they are and is fun, for me.
Do you agree with me above statement? or share the same view ? if the answer is no, then we already have a different take on what power creep is.
Imo nothing should ever do more than about 100k dmg.
But the size of the dmg number itself is not what creates power creep. Those numbers going up patch after patch is. But more so, it is about those numbers going up in relation to the content. Making the content more and more meaningless.
For what it’s worth, this is what made D2 so great for a lot of players too. Everyone started every ladder with a Sorc because teleport allowed you to farm 100x more efficiently than everyone else.
nothing should do billions of damage (and lets be real, SB is way past billions).
also the numbers themselves are absolutely meaningless, if you kill elites in one or two hits, is there any difference if the number that pops up says 20.000 or 20.000.000.000?
it’s all relative to the health of the enemies, there is no reason for the numbers to get so big so fast in D4.
you start the game and you’re already in the thousands after a few minutes… why?
also, every ARPG is about the power fantasy, about building a strong character, solving the puzzle of skills and items to get the best outcome. and getting to trivialise the hardest content is always the endgoal.
it’s just that D4s puzzle has the least number of pieces.
and powercreep is not a design philosophy, making the numbers bigger every season is not design, it’s bad balance.
that’s how D3 ended up with 20+ difficulties:
normal/nightmare/hell/inferno on release
“inferno is too hard” blizz goes and buffs players / nerfs inferno
“inferno is not hard enough we need more difficult content” blizz redesigns their difficulties to go up to torment 6
“T6 too hard” buffs
“T6 not hard enough” T20
“too hard” buffs
“not hard enough” enemy hp has reached the integer limit
I did my first trillion 20 hours after creating my SB and my gears were trash.
I mean they say a lot but rarely deliver.
What philosophy did they actually manage to implement successfully?
Druid has tons of stuff that is straight up not working for 5 seasons now, and they never bothered to address in the campfire let alone fix them. What kind of philosophy is this?
They stated to reduce the number of RNG layers in the last season’s campfire, you would think: Oh, philosophy! But look at what they did
I don’t know, to me this team doesn’t seem to have a philosophy at all. All they’ve been doing is react (ironically, at al very slow speed too), they haven’t managed to create or maintain anything to deserve the status of “Philosophy”.
Edit: and don’t get me started on “power fantasy”. Last season we found an A tier build for Druid, immediately killed this ss. You just can’t explain when it comes to D4 because they just react and reaction requires little to zero thoughts so it never makes sense.
Their only philosophy is to avoid getting the playerbase too mad until the next paid expansion comes out. It feels like a lot of this campfire was designed to lower expectations for this and future mid season patches.
Very glad to dodge this bullet of an expansion. Keeping broken interactions in a game for 3 months is insanity.
This is like an experiment on negligence: let’s test the relationship between negligence and product abandonment, then let’s study the folks who stick around and continue to play an objectively broken video game.
“They’re still here after 36 days? Jerry, add some more manure… just shovel the rest of it into this bag of mid season patch.”
“It seems they believe they found the 1st floor of the cow level?”
“Wow, look how many of them are kissing the ground.”
Dev teams philopshy is ’ we will tell you what is fun’ rather then listen to you. They trolled us with season of loot reborn - they showed us what they could do to make the game fun - then they removed it in season 6. VoH is literally a punishment to those who stayed playing this game!
Revive, you have it all wrong and have misinterpreted what the devs mean.
They confirmed that SB damage OP is unintended. Other classes are getting buff to bring them up to what SB would be doing if it wasn’t broken and doing insane Blizzardillions of damage.
They are keeping SB broken for the rest of the season to avoid the time put into SB builds by casuals (who are the majority of players it seems)
This is true. That’s what they keep saying. However, these things are directly contradictory in how the game works with all the multiplayer content and them doubling down on it, but that’s on them not us. They are trying to have it both ways and it clearly doesn’t work. They also keep saying how important multiplayer is for them yet want to trivialize the experience altogether. It makes no sense.
