First off, I’d like to say that I enjoyed the beta immensely and am very excited and optimistic about D4. Yes, the dungeons felt a bit monotonous, the build choices felt forced, and the barbarian felt underpowered but those feel like very addressable things that can’t be properly assessed until we get to play the end-game so I’m choosing to withhold judgement until launch.
That said, what I found to be the biggest impediment to my enjoyment was the current Legendary Aspect system which encourages hoarding and needless inventory management.
As Legendary Aspects can only be extracted and applied once, players are incentivized to stockpile those that they know they’ll need and those that they think they might need later. With the frequency of legendary drops, stash space being limited, and aspect space being even more limited, this quickly creates an unwieldy and cumbersome inventory management problem for the player.
Though the current system is punishing and unenjoyable, I think there’s a simple way to vastly improve the mechanic.
Each Legendary Aspect has a range. For example and simplicity, let’s say a particular Aspect can add anywhere from +10 to +50 damage to a particular attack.
If the player completes the corresponding dungeon for that Aspect, they are permanently awarded with the lowest possible roll (+10 damage) that they could apply to as many items as they can afford. (This is an awesome mechanic that should be left as-is)
Now, the fix for the current system would be to allow the player to overwrite the Dungeon-provided Aspect with the Legendaries they find out in the world.
To continue the above example, let’s say the player completes the relevant dungeon and unlocks the +10 damage aspect and can apply it via the Occultist. Later on, the player finds a Legendary items with the same aspect and it rolls +30 damage. They could then take this to the Occultist and extract the Aspect. In doing so, the Dungeon Aspect (+10) would then be upgraded to +30 and would be permanently available to the character. Much later, the player lucks out and finds the same Legendary once again but this time, it’s a perfect +50 roll. They could then take this one to the Occultist and overwrite the +30 with the now perfect +50. That Aspect is now “perfect” and permanently available to the player.
This change would completely obviate the need for needless inventory management while providing iterative rewards for finding duplicate Legendaries (unlike Kanai’s Cube which just provided the maximum roll, regardless of the item’s stats).
In the current system, if you find a perfectly rolled Legendary, you’re going to be very hesitant to use it because you won’t want to apply it to a non-permanent item. In the proposed system though, you’d be pumped to find it and would feel comfortable immediately applying it to your current in-slot gear creating a more rewarding and enjoyable progression experience.
Less important but still a cool thing to add would be to change the icons within the Occultist Aspect menu to reflect the character’s Aspect progression.
E.g. Have a bland icon/color for the Dungeon provided Aspect, another icon/color for a Legendary-provided Aspect, and a different icon/color for a perfectly rolled Aspect.
Once again, very excited for this game and love the attention and transparency the devs have given us so far. Here’s to hoping others feel similarly and that the devs see this post.
Thanks!