This is from a casual player. I stopped playing D4 season 1, had a vacation and decided to give it another go.
1-60. This felt really quick. I was polishing up the main quests and unlockables at 60. It felt like a fairly normal but short dungeon crawler experience and the free stuff to get me started on T1 felt solid. I think its in a good place for people who have experienced the game as intended and want to rush to the tourments.
T1, im not gonna lie… getting my legendaries into a respectable place is the worst part of this experience. SOO many drop and 99% of them are trash (i was not once excited about a standard legendary beyond level 30). Enchanting costs to fix this ramp up so fast that i figured they were junk after a few tries. I spent way too long just looking at a full stash of junk. A filter in the options that look for 2/3 of the stats you are looking for would be amazing for this portion.
Full starter gear. Once i was to the point of being able to vendor all standard legendaries, the game felt much smoother. Ancient legendaries are rare enough where i didn’t have to stop to look every run.
The grind for power after that was a bit confusing, as there are so many options and collectibles that i constantly felt like I was doing the wrong thing. For better or worse, there’s a lack of direction in the game.
Full ancient / mythic set up. Once i was primarly on the hunt for higher glyphs, paragon xp and GS gear, the grind felt a little pointless, but i left feeling accomplished. My build was imperfect, but complete. The hunt for mythic lengendaries was imo pretty fun, but at least for my set up, i didn’t have to change up my build at all. I personally would’ve had a goal of build changing and powercreep rather than shako (i do love the d2 throwbacks).
New (to me) features.
Tempering is a fun addition, especially the ones like vortex size. Masterworking on the other hand completely killed it for me. Its a time consuming way for me to not be able to touch my gear anymore in exchange for bigger numbers. Id make 2 adjustments to this feature. 1)Drop the all buff down to 4%. 3,6 and 9 are the individual buffs and lvl 12 is just a bigger all buff. (Reducing the grind for getting what you want). 2) allow us to keep tempering / enchanting our gear.
Runewords. I love the concept and enjoyed this. I think tweaks over time are going to turn this into what really could be a fun season thing.
Mercenaries… i couldn’t tell if they were useful or not tbh. There’s so much stuff happening that any features have to be visual as hell or build defining for the majority of players to notice
Armor and resistances. Bang up job here. Giving hard caps gave me gear goals for the next difficulty. Having goals rather than trying to math while killing demons feels SO MUCH better. Honestly my favorite change.
Boss encounters are boring tbh. I felt like i had 2 options. For sure / probably die, or slaughter the thing in seconds. I feel like incorporating this into the pit so i could adjust the difficulty would’ve created a better grind experience (having them all in one place after your first kill would be better for groups anyway) . Having something stupid like a badge with the highest kill level for each one would be cool too.
Aspect imprinting. Honestly my second favorite change. Limiting the base item grind and allowing me to try new things in one swing. I would honestly like to see this changed so I don’t need a higher roll to level it up. Maybe an experienced based system or something, idk. I would like these to be close to / maxed when im trying to enter T4.
New paragon changes. I feel like paragons are stronger than they really feel in the moment. It felt like background noise 90% of the time, but imaginary breakpoints that i would spend time to reorganize felt solid. Favoriting a rune would be nice so i could highlight a path for an immediate goal. Legendary and rare runes felt more impactful this time around and while i can’t comment on the balance, no glyph felt mandatory like exploit did in the past. I don’t really get excited about the paragon board, but it is so much more interesting than D3 paragon and again, the achievable hard cap is awesome.
Torments. I don’t really understand the philosophy behind them being the same outside of numbers. I’m not a game developer, but there is so many options you give players, teiring it out somehow seems like it would be less overwhelming right away and bosses at a later teir would feel more like an accomplishment. Opening up fun features like runes on teir 2, and more perfecting grinds like tempering and masterworking on teir 3 seems cool (at least in theory).
I want to leave this with a positive note for the devs. The game i left I spent way too much time walking backwards on maps and staring at a stash of useless items. The improvements have been significant and i plan on picking it up again next season.