Hi all,
as long fan of the diablo series, I wanted to give feedback on playing the beta excessively over the last two weekends. I tested a lot of classes and min-maxed my sorc to 760 attack rating, so I think I can comment on the game in its current state. Overall, I had a lot of fun. There are a lot of pros, but also cons in my opinion.
So let’s start with the good things:
- The graphics design team did an amazing job! I had all the settings maxed, and I never played an ARPG with such good graphics. The skills look amazing and many of them feel amazing. This is how it should be. Also, the level design is crisp. I liked the dungeon design and the outside world. Wow.
- The combat is very smooth. The animations look good, and everything feels very well in this regard.
- The sound/recordings are really good. I also liked the development of the story. The main characters you meet have some depth, and I was interested how this would develop.
- Character models and weapons look also really good. Whenever you put on a new armor or weapon, you can clearly see the difference. It felt great.
- The world boss was a lot of fun, so was the gathering legions event.
But there are also bad things, which lowered the overall experience a bit. I will list everything in priority, from most problematic to minor things
-
Monster hp and difficulty: as you level up, monsters level up with you. As a result, I almost never had the feeling that my character got very strong; this only happened once I completely min-maxed it with legendaries and upgrades, which I guess you would never do in the real game at level 25. I would be nice if at some point there are zones in the world map which are not dangerous to you anymore once you have cleared them. It feels weird for instance when at level 25, my fully geared guy still needs 3 shots to kill a skeleton outside the first town. I realize you don’t want to have completely trivial content everywhere, but I think there is enough room for challenges without having overpowered “trash” mobs.
Possible solution: dont scale monster HP everywhere in the same way with the player level. Scale it less in certain zones when you have reached a certain progress in the campaign. This would make the player feel some progress, and would make the game more appealing to casual gamers. -
I hear that in the beta legendary drop rates were tripled. This I think is particularly bad, as even with these drop rates, I never had the feeling that my character was really overpowered. It was quite the opposite actually. The reality is that most of the barb and druid builds just suck…you play sorc or rogue or necro, and you are good. You can make barb work, or even druid, but it requires a lot more effort and understanding of the game in my opinion, which should not be the case.
Also, you need those legendaries to test builds! Most druid builds currently suck - what happens if drop rates are only 1/3 of what they have been before? Likely you cannot play the only thing that works, which is tornadoes, unless you are super lucky to find the specific legendary aspect which makes tornadoes hit multiple targets.
I don’t want legendaries to be super common, that would be boring. But if you do a whole dungeon, there should be at least one legendary drop imho, otherwise it feels like wasted time and not a lot of progress. This was well designed in the beta. I hope it stays like this in the final game. -
The inter-class balance seems to be really off. Why is necro so powerful compared to barb/druid? A game like diablo will likely never be completely balanced, which is fine. I mean there can also be classes which only work with a certain playstyle, etc. But this difference is like day and night.
-
Combat: playing barb, I felt like I always hit the monsters, whereas they always hit me. Because of the barb playstyle of staying in close combat, you will automatically get hit a lot, so you will take a lot of damage. Sorc on the other hand can dodge from distance, necro can use minions to take damage, and rogue just kills everything quickly. Melee needs more work in my opinion. There needs to be a chance to hit, so monsters do not always hit you and you also dont always hit them. As barb, I just have to tank everything and use my skills to kill everything before it kills me. I realize that throughout the game you will likely find items to life leech, but the early game is important too. So hopefully at some point melee is changed a bit, so barb and druid have a better time in the early levels.
I realize that some players found ways to make the barb work for instance, with many good whirlwhind items. But again, in vanilla d4, we will not have as many legendaries, so the class must be better with basic gear and just by using skills. Currently this is not the case. -
Basic (resource generating) skills are very bad. With most classes, you need to rely on builds to constantly have enough resources, so you never have to use basic skills to generate them. As sorc, this is possible for instance with the chain lightning aspect that gives you 4 mana per monster hit. Because of this aspect and good damage, chain lightning is almost mandatory to use right now, at least if you want to easily sustain mana. I think there should be more aspects to generate resources, and also basic skills should maybe have a higher attack speed, so they become more viable. I don’t want to rely on a single skill per class only because it is the only one to make it easy to have enough resources.
-
Multiplayer experience: I met some players but interaction is very limited. The chat is barely used by anyone. I think the colouring has to be changed, as currently it is hard to see if someone has written something.
Possible sol: Maybe you can think of two chat modes: one for players who like to interact/trade/pvp etc, so they get notified by some sound whenever someone writes something. And the other one for players who want to be undisturbed. Or alternatively just change the general colouring, so writing becomes more visible, but chat could be minimized/deactivated any time by the users if they want. -
Also in multiplayer, I would like to have a real party function, like in diablo 2 or 3, for example. So if I want to play with friends, I can do all content with them. Right now playing in a team feels weird, because once you enter dungeons or certain zones, you will suddenly be alone again.
-
Event farming: In the beta, at some point, players camped at event spawn points just to have a chance to farm them as quickly as possible. Often you ran into a spot which was already farmed out. I did not like that competition for events. The multiplayer aspects should be supportive, not harmful, to the overall experience.
-
Cusomization and itemization: I feel with the current aspects, there will be very limited variety. I watched some youtube videos of streamers arguing the possibilities are endless, but I very much doubt this. There will likely be one meta build per class, and everyone plays it. At least this is the case if itemization continues to be like it is from level 1 to 25.
We really need mechanics that let us modify or vary skills. For example, think of an aspect/rune/whatever, which makes hydra change from fire to poisen. Visually, its colours should become completely green…wouldn’t that be amazing? Or similar mechanics to make skills work from nova into a cone form, or from physical into one of the elements. Change its size/shape/function in any meaninful way you can think of. Or tansform melee skills into caster skills. That would give us maybe some variety. -
Let me give you an example why I think currently there will not be any variety. I played a lot of sorc, and I was mostly using ice shards/hydra or ice shards/frozen orb. I wanted to play blizzard, but it simply sucks. It does roughly 800 damage over 8 seconds, that’s like 100 damage per second…frozen orb did 300 per attack, so did ice shards. Someone should go over the skills and make sure they are at least viable to use. I mean blizzard would have to do at least 200-250 damage per second, so it is worthwhile to use in comparison to the other two skills. And there are many other skills like that, which seem to be undertuned.
-
Extracting aspects: imprinted aspects should also be able to be extracted, maybe for a higher price. If you dont allow this, players will be very careful in using aspects, and will not experiment with builds, which is a sad thing. This is especially problematic when drop rates will be nerfed in vanilla d4.
-
Itemization: I think it’s a bit weird that you find so many jewelry with + damage to distant enemies or damage to close enemies (tooltip is missing how these are defined exactly), whereas jewelry with + elemental damage of some type is rather rare at the beginning and much worse in terms of stats. It would be nice to have some more elemental based gear. So if want to make a cold or fire sorc, I can do so by using gear that boosts just this element. There was one monster (magician) who dropped a staff of the elements, a rare item with cold, fire and lightning damage. But by the time I killed it, I already had much better gear, so it was useless. Also, I think this staff should be unique, and not rare. First time I sold it without realizing it was special.
-
In this regard, the info on attack rating does not seem to be calculated correctly. There are a couple of issues if you upgrade items, it will not do the comparison correctly anymore when you consider new gear. Also, it doesnt change properly for + elemental damage it seems, neither for + damage vs distant enemies, or vs close enemies. These aspects are just ignored in the attack rating, so I was not sure if it really showed me the true damage I was doing.
-
Atmosphere/music: The score is very sad. Where is the epicness in any of the fights? Why does none of the bosses in the dungeons say anything or at least make some noise? That would make the world feel more alive and dangerous. To give an example, in diablo 1, the skeleton king had a famous line (In youtube, search for " Diablo 1 - The Skeleton King "). Or in terms of music listen to the score of Bg2, some masterpiece for real (in youtube, search for " Baldur’s Gate 2 Throne of Bhaal Main Theme "). I’d love to see more atmosphere added to the game by adding voicelines and a proper score. Make important fights epic by adding good music, not some melancholic piano please
Thanks for considering my feedback. See you in June 