Hello fellow beta testers and server stressers!
This feedback was initially discussed on Reddit, wanted to wait until the end of the beta before sharing it here. For context, I played mostly rogue. Main accomplishment was my sub 3 min 1vs1 Ashava kill on Hardcore Veteran (Diablo 4 Open Beta - Ashava 1vs1 - Rogue Veteran Hardcore - Sub 3 min solo kill - YouTube). I watched but didn’t touch the other classes myself, so I won’t comment on them.
Disclaimers: I am aware that the beta took place in the 0.8 version of the game, release will be 1.0 and many things could already be different by then. This is feedback based on beta gameplay, nothing else. Also, these are only my opinions, feel free to disagree! And finally, I won’t mention bugs or lags: it’s a beta, I’m sure they’ll be fixed. Anyway, long post ahead, sorry!
First of all, the purely positives:
- The game feels amazing, it’s extremely smooth to play, it’s very snappy, I love it.
- The art direction is dope, back to that grim world, sound is top notch as well, recognizing musics and sounds from Diablo 1 & 2 was a pleasant surprise! The voice actors nailed it as well!
- The story was interesting, can’t wait to see what happens next!
- The scroll of escape is a fantastic addition to hardcore. Put it on the wheel, bind that wheel slot to the key you want, and boom. You’re always one button press away from safety. It’s like the logout macro of PoE, except it’s a game feature and doesn’t actually log you out! Congrats on this idea, this is amazing.
Let’s speak about Rogue now. The class is very versatile, very mobile, very fast. It feels amazing to play and I had a lot of fun. However:
- The Core Skills felt a little boring. As much as I enjoyed Twisted Blades, and Penetrating Shot and also the others that I tried more sparsely, I wish there was a bit more creativity. As of the beta, rogue currently have those Core Skills: Strong stab that comes back to you / Quick stabs! / Piercing line shot! / Rapid line shots! / Rapid conal shots! Compared to D3 which had Strafe, Cluster Arrow, Elemental Arrow, Multishot… It feels a little lackluster in terms of creativity right now.
- Specializations: Combo Points are amazing at aoe farming, Inner Sight is the best thing in the game for bosses. I only played with Inner Sight this weekend to properly test it, it’s definitely not as bad as I initially thought. It’s pretty amazing on anything that stays alive more than 2s. Both are great, can’t wait to see what Preparation is!
- Dash: I wish we could dash to the cursor, instead of always “max distance in that direction”.
Now some gameplay elements:
- “Move” and “Interact” should be bindable to the same key (left click), without Basic Skill.
- A WASD movement option would only be positive for the game on pc. It’s the PC equivalent to console joysticks movement, which allows them to move in a way and target in another way.
- Respec shouldn’t be hard, even at endgame. Blizzard mentioned that at some point, creating a new character would be more viable than respeccing. However, once I maxed a Rogue, I don’t want to have to max another Rogue to test a different build (one single target, one aoe…). I’d rather level up another class and be able to test everything on each of them. I see no positives to this.
- Dungeons look amazing, I especially love all the little random events that can spawn inside that make them feel way more “alive”. However a bit more randomness on the layouts would be appreciated.
- I would love to have one or two more skill slots. This probably won’t happen, but 6 still feels too limited to me. Many skills will never be used because others are simply more important or better. This wouldn’t be the case with a little more slots. (And don’t tell me it’s for console players, FF14 is great on console and they deal with 30+ simultaneously available skills on each class!)
- Inventory management is a problem. We could have a new tab specific to gems, but there might be another option: why do gems, rings and amulets take the same amount of space as a two-handed weapon? If the grid was more detailed, smaller items could take up less space and it would fix the gems taking space issue. Diablo 1, 2 and 3 did it like that and it felt much better. Returning to town after every single dungeon (or in the middle of one) isn’t fun.
Onto UI feedback and QoL features I would like:
- Loot filter: once more, I wish I could only see the items I want to loot. This is especially important because of the extremely limited inventory space we have.
- Let us see items stats on the ground. Again, limited inventory, don’t want to pick up everything.
- Extracting aspects should unlock wardrobe appearance, just like salvaging them does.
- An option to have all skill slots unlocked from level 1.
- Auto-consumption of health globes if full on potions but not full on HP. Last Epoch does that, it’s great.
- Occultist should show us the possible stats when we reroll. Just like the Mystic does in D3.
- An option to scale up or down the HUD. Especially down.
- An option to show Health and Resource numbers at all times instead of on hover only.
- A way to have a transparent map overlay taking the whole screen, like it’s done on every other ARPG, previous Diablo titles included.
- An option to zoom out a bit more at all times. I don’t have my hopes up for this one… Technology is there though, as we’ve seen against world bosses.
- An option to transform the wheel UI (clearly made with consoles in mind) into bars for PC. We can already set the keybinds we want for each slot anyway, let us see them at all times if we decide to.
- Could you separate the materials tab from the stats tab? I don’t understand why these two are grouped together, and why it’s defaulted to materials.
- An option to mute all voice messages about lack of energy or cooldown. I know it’s not ready, I just like to spam the thing early so it goes as soon as it’s ready!
- A load out system (maybe added to the wardrobe) could be interesting. I don’t see myself using the same gear in PvE and PvP for example. If respec was free, I’d add the current skill tree to that load out, but I’m probably dreaming at this point hehe.
Some last few things that are a bit less important to me:
- Give a max range to skills. Wider screens already see more, they shouldn’t be able to also target further (teleport, hydra are the main culprits here).
- Most cellars show the completion reward before they’re actually complete. Which isn’t too big of a deal, except for the fact that this pop up appears during combat and hides potentially important enemies / attacks.
- Was it intended that we could not farm story bosses? This felt really weird in a Diablo game.
- When you upgrade your gear, sometimes some stats go down. Probably not intended?
- Scrolls of escape are white drops. Many hardcore players missed them, thinking they were items they didn’t want to loot. Maybe give it a different color?
- Some rare items cannot be added to the wardrobe. This is sad, let us use the Darkblade appearance please!
- The “unequipped” look on the wardrobe doesn’t work well with weapons. My rogue was a purely melee build. I tried to hide my bow. It was an option the wardrobe gave me, and it seemed to work in the wardrobe. Didn’t work in game though. Probably because we might use skills with them one day and it would bug things out, but then remove the option maybe (on weapons only, obviously)?
- I don’t think I will enjoy hunting down every single Lilith altar in every season. I love the open world in this game, but completing it every 4 months will quickly feel repetitive, in a bad way, in my opinion.
Alright, that’s it for me. See you on June 2nd!