I asked myself why I could farm Pindleskin and Mephisto in D2 or rifts in D3 over and over even though they are objectively worse activities than the variety available in D4.
It didn’t make sense to me so I thought about it for a bit and the answer was simply loot. When loot drops in D4 its not fun or exciting at all. When loot dropped in D2 (and even D3 albeit for a shorter window of time towards the end due to drop rates) I was excited to see what I got.
My feedback is all either loot related or at least loot adjacent.
There are nowhere near enough uniques.
Legendary powers are far too numerous and the game is balanced around this. They were a bad idea in general and only uniques should exist.
There exists uniques that literally just make your character weaker. (Sorc fireball unique is 100% useless as it lowers your damage far too much, and its small benefit of more clear power doesn’t matter as there is no density in this game.
Item tiers are a garbage loot system and anything below the top tier is useless.
You gain the first 80-85% of your power really early into the game and have to grind out 25 levels of nothingness and minor upgrades and tweaks.
The 2 chase uniques are FAR too chase.
Mob scaling makes you have periods where you simply feel weaker
Legendary nodes on the paragon board (mostly) are too weak.
Too many Aspects are specific to a SINGLE skill making them nearly almost required or useless with no in between.
Resists don’t matter and if they did there’s no room to stack them on gear anyway.
Vulnerable is on a different level and is way too powerful compared to the others. (Why are there powers that require BOTH vulnerable AND something else like barrier? why not just barrier to add more diversity?
There are not enough sources of vulnerable, including exploit being useless for sorc etc. (solvable if vuln isn’t as broken comparatively and is merely an option)
Blue and white items are 100% useless. It was said Blue would be able to have higher rolls of things in early development and this isnt the case. Blues should have a 50% higher ceiling and floor for stats to allow sacrificing certain stats for others in niche scenarios. White items were always going to be useless however this could be fixed by having more bases for each slot and having a way to turn white items into yellows.
Items drop smart loot and only drop for your current class (95% of the time, 100% of the time for uniques) making the desire to farm for alts non-existant.
Items requirements scale to the level they were received at and not their stats. This makes what little trading there was mostly obsolete. Items level requirements should scale with the stats on the item, not arbitrarily the level it was received. (this also hurts gathering items for alts.
Weapons/offhands are class restricted. This lowers diversity further. These should instead have attribute requirements to disincentivize ‘off-class’ usage but not limit it completely. Could open up new build styles.
Itemization needs fixed. The content and and combat are fun. Density could be upped a little but the main problem of this game is itemization. Itemization is THE core of Arpgs, ironically a standard set by Blizzard themselves.
Edit: Adding great points made below by other commenters.
Weapon ilvl scales damage purely on its own, making that king and removing a lot of build options.
Yellows and legendaries have 4 affixes instead of 6 from previous and other arpgs making it harder to stack proper stats, and locks in GG items far earlier giving even less of a carrot on a stick.
The real issue is how the core game works. Skills deal no damage.
Damage is based on weapon damage for all skills, that makes no sense for magic skills.
All that you look in item is base damage/vulnurable damage/crit change/core damage/crit damage, all of which are multipliers and mandatory for any build
The core of the game is the main problem. If that’s not fixed no matter what they add, it will suck
Hard agree just ran some Chaos Sanctuary runs earlier. Didn’t find anything worth picking up. And enjoyed it more simply because I wasn’t reading rares for days. Mind you I could’ve picked up some rare boots or something for tri resist rolls but I ain’t doing that all the time cuz I don’t have to and those are rare af anyway.
I mean, we agree on what’s wrong with the game
Anyone who has played a good arpg knows what’s wrong
Playing WT1 is fun, then you go to wt3 and get exactly the same items with 1 more affix, same items, same build just slightly higher numbers
Then you go to WT4 and have to just get the same items again, with just slightly better numbers
Now they will add WT5 so you have to do it again, while being locked into 1-2 builds because no other build is as efficient as them. No items that allow you to use your imagination and put a crossbow on a sorc and have it to be viable. Just add more crit and vulnerable, damn boring design.
Yes agreed. I definitely enjoyed D2 more than D3 but at least even in D3 (especially if you ignored sets like some of the seasons) had some freedom to gear and experiment. Even at their launches both the other titles had better itemization and freedom to experiment.
This feels like they only started this game AFTER the backlash of Diablo immortal and rushed it out creating only a handful of items.
I agree somewhat . Collecting yellows and blues is just for material or money. There is no use for any of it other than that once you start getting sacred/ancestral uniques which is pretty early
I was just askin myself why the Loot Quality is so dam bad. Iam hardly getting any items in the 700s range (char is lv63). Its mostly low 600s with the occasionally high 500s and 680s.
Why is there an actual level requirement on the item when it has zero influence on the item rolls. How can a level 30 ring be as good as a level 50ish ?
Every level should add some extra points on the item.
When the whole game revolves around Crit / Crit Damage / Vulnerability /main stat and all the other stats are just about worthless, loot feels terrible. It also does not help that your skills damage is all scales around your main hand weapon ilevel. The game was design very poorly with regards to how skills work in relation to the gear dropping.
If only they had solved this in games they already made before hmm… Maybe like base items having certain requirements by base type and affixes rolling based on the level of the area they dropped in.
It’s always odd to me when game companies (this isn’t a Blizz exclusive problem) completely ignore their past games when making a sequel.
When you are leveling 1-50, actually its interesting to chase the yellow drops, they upgrade your power, DPS, armor etc. At level 65/70 you find some ancestrals and high sacreds and your done. After that maybe you chase 1 or 2 uniques if you Druid, close game. Season done in 2 weeks.
That is being generous. You can get to 70 with a character in a day split farming dungeons in a group. After that, you farm out the rest of the battle pass, which may take you an extra day and you quit. It is working as designed.
Yep, I can see people bashing on d2r not holding players, you need a few days at season start to get average gear on a char at level 90+
You need less than a day to do that in d4 currently
That 1-50 grind, while the majority of the “number of levels” is only like 20% of the game. Its a flash in the pan. While I do agree its interesting early, that’s done in a day or 3 for most players. Even D3’s “free set item” had slightly more longevity.
2 weeks is very generous. At the rate launch went (without any seasonal gimmicks that likely will up rates) it was done in 3-4 days for me.
What made d2 good was you could still beat the game with crap items until you found bis uniques/runewords and when you got them you were excited cos you got a powerspike
İn d4 you get all the aspects you need until lvl 50
And you just look for higher item power of the same items or with 1 - 2 better rolls but the power spike is still kind of marginal so you dont get excited
Uniques are so few and so boring they are near useless (most of them)
TLDR the game is more of going through ton of rares to spot a marginal increase which is a chore mainly
You know what, if asmongold ever played d2 he might have bashed blizzard more on the boring itemazation, he is now comparing it to d3 which is trash as well, still better tho
And obviously blizzard is listening to streamers only