Hello. excited to dive into Season 4. In watching one of the recent Q & A’s on Rax’s channel, the question was asked about making the skill tree more complex or adding to it. One of the devs explained they feel they want the skill tree to remain an easy gateway for new and returning players.
With respect, I disagree. I think the new systems like tempering are more complex than adding to the skill tree or overhauling it. As someone who loves the lore and world of Diablo and has also played other ARPG’s out there, I think the skill tree is an area in need of tweaking in D4. I was hoping we would see it in Season 4 or in the expansion, but that appears off the table. For me, the skill tree seems to fall a little flat.
Some of the fun in the Last Epoch trees involve skills that you can use to increase the area of a spell - larger fireballs, or more of them, for example. Playing around with a third tier of skills for Meteor, for example, could be awesome if there was a skill you could invest in to make it larger or have more drop. For necro, perhaps having larger mages and less of them, or a third tier of amazing mages. That kind of thing.
Right now, it seems items and the new systems are the way D4 transforms skills, but as someone who kind of falls off at the end of the seasons, I usually miss out on those uber uniques. More ways to make changes to your build in the mid game would be really fun and help maintain interest.
Increase area effect size is a lot more accessible now through tempering in S4. You could get tempering manuals starting from early game that’ll add skill enhancing affixes to your items
There is no deepness or any choice this game, everything is simple and linear. Customization is an exaggeration for what this game offers; compared to the even to the flaccid LE.
Hopefully they back track on this in time and give the skill tree much needed love, whole sections of the rogue tree I skip because they do nothing in game, that’s straight up bad design.
I’ve seen my friend play Last Epoch. Area range doesn’t do much for KPS since movement speed is so high for both players and monsters. Not to mention the base range is generous. The other issue I saw was players can’t specialize. Can’t just focus all modifiers to boost one single skill. Last Epoch does have lots of interactions with the in game systems. Lots of way to do crazy builds that deals mediocre damage.
i know im being a party pooper there, but honestly, after the flood of trolls we have seen here, im happy if people read the CoC
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that being said, in a way i agree with you. the only thing in LE i did enjoy were their skill webs. They arent perfect, but they give you a sense of customization. but id also say that d4 is a little more brave when it comes to changing skills with items, so maybe its not that big of a deal.
It’s a tradeoff honestly. Personally, i feel like sometimes I want complexity not because it is always actually good for gameplay or progression, but just that i like the idea of complexity.
Downside of LE skill tree for me is it creates a sense of “endless” customization that it actually starts to negatively affect how I feel about the effect on the unique items. Maybe it was just a completely different paradigm for me, but looting in LE felt much less impactful than just upgrading your skill nodes.
The other problem I felt was the web was really elaborate and some of more build-changing nodes were at the very far end. This worked fine for balancing purposes within the skill itself, but once you tried to get that node to interact with other skills / items, it instantly imposed a lot of tediousness and imo, unnecessary complexity because it is hard to reference and compare. LE sometimes almost gives me the vibe it is “intentionally” trying to be as customizable as possible without a strong design principle (half the time it doesn’t need to be). D4 is over-simplistic to an extent, but it is cleaner to read imo because the build-changing effects are organized around a much flatter hierarchy and tied to individual aspects.
POE’s skill gems are more similar to Diablo than to LE in that your gems are all on the same flatter level, and you can socket with different effect modifying gems (like aspects in Diablo).
I do think that Diablo should improve its paragon system and introduce more uniques so it becomes more relevant to a build you want to choose. Perhaps time to have glyphs that are skill / skill category relevant instead of pre-defining the build in some cases.
I don’t mind removing their names. I’ve never seen this CoC you reference, but I understand your point. It probably would not feel great to wake up in the morning and see your name on a thread. I appreciate them going on and answering questions. I think you’re right about Last Epoch’s trees not being perfect either. I would prefer a balance of items altering skills with a more robust skill tree. Cheers!
It gets repetitive after the story and once you get to the end of the echoes. Then it is more of the same, just higher numbers all around.
I enjoyed it, but I enjoyed the building of the character and leveling to that point, the most.
Wolcen had a similar problem, it was just much more obvious in Wolcen and they did not bother dressing it up.
i wouldnt say that LEs skill tree offers “endless” or even “Super many options” personally. having played it myself for only 200 hours-ish id say, yes, it does offer some customization, but mostly when it comes to the element choices. it looks complex, but in the end, it isnt i guess?
tho i still think that what d4 lacks in the skill tree, it makes up in the aspects and uniques, it just doesnt look like a super cool skill tree you know? (id even dare to say that d4 has more build options than le now that i think of it)
Blizzards audience has changed a lot the last 15 years or so.
It’s no longer a “hardcore” audience that is the main playerbase. It has shifted more and more into a casual playerbase.
They want to make games for everybody so they can never truely make all time great games again for any specific audience.
Just as an example:
PoE: Hardcore players love it 100% and casuals like it 10%.
D4: Hardcore players like it 50% and casuals like it 50%.
For a systems arpg like D4, PoE, LE its dare i say impossible to make the hardcore audience 100% happy and the casual audience 100% happy. The more you design into the sweaty audience the more will the casual audience get pushed away and vice versa.
to say hardcore players love poe 100% is a stretch. id consider myself a hardcore player and i know others and we hate poe. poe has its own set of issues that people hate also
I’m shocked how much LE has fallen off. I think it has retained far less players then d4. the reason i think this happened is d4 is just so much more fun to play. I love the amount of passive trees and skill trees in LE. i still found myself logging into s3 of diablo more because it just feels massively better in actual gameplay. sometimes more options don’t make a better game.
I think there is room for improvements on the skill tree without making it increasingly complex.
In fact I think they should make it simpler in a way.
The main thing IMO, is that I think having skill ranks in the basic skill tree is terrible, especially for the casual player base they are targeting at.
How does a casual player know that adding ranks on a skill is better than taking a new passive for example?
In my opinion, skill ranking should be removed from the basic skill tree and put in a new system.
And they should add more basic node choices on the basic tree to compensate with the fact that you cannot invest in ranks anymore.
Having ranks on the basic skill tree is quite boring in my opinion. It’s just a number boost, which you really don’t need in your leveling experience. Especially as a casual. As a casual you want to see new effects popping up when you get a new skills. You don’t want to see a min-maxing number upgrade which should actually be an end-game system.
As Adam puts it, this skill tree is cursed.
I don´t think it was bcs it is repetetive (it is).
I never has problem with repetetive content, after all every aRPG has repetetive content sooner or later.
If I think about this genre it always same at my side. I had fun and it drived me forward untill I stopped seeing significant (increasing same affixes just so I have bigger numbers, doesn´t work for me) progress with my class. I never cared about some achievements or challenges.
When I feel I am max I lost interest immidietely.
I need to see some steps ahead of me, some goals I want to achive in term of skill/gears. But in later stages of the games I found it just in PoE.
D4 or LE lacking this, or at least I failed to find it yet.
Not sure if everyone is familiar with PoE so I give an example. (Btw I am PoE noob)
You have some mid build and you know if you will get some XY + mainstat on your gear (you have to have for some reasson), it would free one of your skill point for lets say mana reservevation cost, so you are able to use another aura, bcs of that, it will free some affixes for lets say ressist and you are able to add some mana reduction so you are able to cast some skill free etc etc. In the end this minor changes and tweaking will change your build almost completely. So classes in PoE are not so repetetive.
BTW don´t want to start some PoE/D4 war. just a bit brainstorming here.
