My Grand Dissertation On Everything Wrong With D4

PC General Discussion
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Okay, been toying with doing this for some time but currently feeling sufficiently bored enough to do it. And before anyone gets any funny ideas, yes this will be a fairly long post but no, it’s not all doom & gloom or dunking on the devs just for the sake of it. My intent here is to highlight what I feel are currently the most egregious problems with the game and offer (and welcome from you all) solutions for them since the devs have thus far been unwilling and/or incapable of fixing some basic crap.

To their credit they have evidently at least acknowledged some of the things I am about to get into, but talk is cheap. So without further adieu…

The Skill Tree is too basic

I could just leave it at that frankly, but this has been a point of contention since the beta. Now I understand that Blizzard has something of a history with regards to streamlining and making their games accessible, but D4 feels like 3rd grader math (and seems to also employ said math in some areas…)

There are a multitude of issues with the tree. Far too many skills simply do not adequately reward investing more than a single point into (looking at you Necro curses and virtually every defensive skill)

Most if not all of the secondary upgrades just aren’t compelling - Raxx often references Fire Ball as a prime example of this lol and it’s true, the upgrades are both equally pathetic. Now I don’t necessarily think each skill needs its own tree like in Last Epoch, but they absolutely need to be expanded and given greater emphasis. Furthermore I think far too much power for any given skill is assigned to aspects and in some cases uniques.

This a major problem. Aspects and Uniques should be chosen according to how they change your gameplay, not simply because they offer massive, multiplicative damage boosts that IMO should be coming from the Skill Tree and Paragon instead. Once again, while this game does have a very casual audience, we’re not mostly children either we can handle some more complexity please.

Masterworking and Tempering

I’ve been screaming this for what feels like an eternity now but Tempering *absolutely should not be random it makes no ***ING sense!

Who goes to a Blacksmith for upgrades and basically says “surprise me.” ?! Just let us choose the affixes we want already, like a proper crafting system should and increase the costs along with the floor for rolls so that it’s less likely to get a maxed out roll. That’s what Tempering scrolls and RNG should be saved for, whether or not you wanna risk that 47/48 going down to just 30 or less and being stuck with it. This way you can only ever “soft brick” an item and not risk making your character objectively weaker, which brings us to MW.

And I use that phrase deliberately because that’s often now Wudi describes it and I agree. I also think his idea of having MW reset only 4 ranks at a time is the ideal solution - getting 2/3 Crits and then having to reset on the 12th step is beyond painful.

You lose a tonne of power, materials and have to gamble a whole bunch all over again it just feels miserable and I’m sure is one of if not the biggest barrier to endgame progression for many if not the majority of players. Both of these issues honestly should have been a priority back in Season 5, yet here we are. If this isn’t addressed during this week’s campfire then I dunno what to say other than the devs do not know what the eff they’re doing.

I might add to this later but I actually have stuff I wanna do so I will try to be quick with the final segment and what may well be the #1 issue for a good number of folks;

Class “Balance” is complete Joke.

Time and again we keep seeing the exact same builds being top dog, just with seasonal variations while the overwhelming majority of builds remain middling at best. Also very quickly just wanna say that allowing the SB to just run wild like that for an entire season was just obscene, new shiny or not that was ridiculous - and so is locking out target crafting mythics for anyone who doesn’t own VoH btw since they can’t get runes.

Anyhoo, yeah there are no shortage of threads on here ranting about X skill being weak or unusable, meanwhile they keep buffing the top performers because why not? This season also further highlights the problem of a lot of builds basically being carried by the seasonal theme, as they fall flat in Eternal where stuff like the various powers are no longer available. Maybe try adding actual mechanics and cool stuff to do like POE ? While I personally love the borrowed powers, it loses impact when you do it every single season.

Okay I said I’d try to keep this last bit brief so for now I will attempt a quick class by class rundown;

Barb - Core skills still feel weak especially Rend, could use more Thorns synergy and a bit of an over-reliance on Berserking. Rupture still wonky AF too.

Druid - Slow early game, human form still sucks even with the new helmet, over-reliance on shape shifting bonuses, snapshotting still a thing, companions do not scale well and Boons could maybe stand out a bit more? Also having to do Tul Dulra every season is annoying.

Necromancer - Minions suck, do not scale hard enough and are still buggy. Mendeln absolutely necessary, and Blade of Zir is a lie ARMY OF THE DEAD IS NOT A SUMMON SKILL. IDGAF if the tag says it is, it absolutely does not go into a pet build. More curses would be nice, as well as more options to invest skill points into for minions.

Rogue - Still too reliant on stagger for bosses, Shadow Clone is much better but still needs some love. Poison Trap sucks even with the new gloves. Virtually no real distinction between Barrage and Rapid Fire, would love to see one of those changes to Multishot. Would love to see more emphasis on dodge and imbuements.

Sorcerer - Not enough reward for fully specializing in a single element. 3rd Enchantment Slot desperately needed, as well as an overhaul to many enchantments (revert fire bolt please… Or at least make it good?) including adding Ultimates. Would love to see Enchantments changed so that if set as one, you cannot equip it as an active skill but the bonuses are much stronger to compensate. Oh and Ice Spikes are still not garbage, please unify their damage and scaling so ranks into all 3 skills boost the damage regardless of the source.

Spirit Born - Could use some more synergy between spirits and like Sorc, emphasize specialization. It actually has some cool crossover between Thorn and Poison but itemization makes it overly clunky. Also the Hubris Glyph doesn’t update in the stat sheet and in general is just too awkward to take advantage of. Mixing evasion and thorns is just weird anyway as it’s inherently counter intuitive.

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I can agree with much of this, although I feel you missed some key points

  • Too many useless aspects which fall as priority (life, life per 5 sec, etc)
  • Damage equations are horrible and I say that as a compliment (wherever does anything hit below the item dps? Yet every skill is 25% of weapon damage, basic anyway for the better classes)
  • Farming, okay if mat rain or if people use trade…
  • Way too much grind for gain

The only way to fully play the game and build your class is in eternal (massive loss for those of us here with the constant changes), where you have 70 years of the same class to work on building based on drops only.

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D4 Dev have stole the idea of using RNG to time gate(prolong) their content release and using Collab without content to just sell Cosmetic to entice FOMO.
Picking up bread crumbs to trade in for some cosmetic =/= content. Normally, a Collab event would have a story of how to two Universes got mixed into each other; that’s minimal.
Dev could have make Griffith got enticed by Belial(The Lord of Lies) and turn the Legion event into an Eclipse where we would help Mercenaries fight against Demon.

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Honestly, that’s something else I wanted to rant about.

This was such a colossal waste of literally the perfect collab.

I would have made it so that the Bhaelits only drop in Helltide, and have appearances by Guts and the Skull Knight and others - including maybe even a rare chance for Griffith to show up in his Demonic form as a superboss.

Really drive home the central theme of Berserk where basically the whole world has gone to s*** and it’s a fight for survival. It’s actually criminal how lazy this collaboration is, and insulting to the memory of Kentaro Miura.

There’s other small QoL annoyances as well, mostly with regards to the map feeling empty now and like fr, why can’t we just have all the waypoints and strongholds unlocked at the start of a season?

Put in some option for people to replay them if they really want to, maybe with a one-time XP boost per character since they do give a lot of XP that doesn’t scale with difficulty so they’re based saves for levels 50-60.

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Zoomed in on a random point, haven’t read the post yet:

I figured out that doing anything else until you’re fully stocked with that green stuff, before ever touching the place, is the sanest approach. Show up at Túr Dúlra (which was always in the bottom half of strongholds for me as a then-Druid main, even back in beta)… with the full supply, just so you never have to climb up & down those stupid cliffs extra times to reach the animal spirits.

It’s not much, but it helps. They probably need to flatten that place a bit - very simple temporary solution. It needs a makeover the way the Tree hub needed one.

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Good Samurai sai shin.

Agree on basicly everything.

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What makes you feel you have to do this every season?

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Besides wanting to play Druid, or…? :thinking:

Is there a secret loophole idk about? Spill it. :plate_with_cutlery:

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Do we think we have to unlock Tur Dulra for druid spirit boons? The only reason to do the druid quest, like the other classes, is for the sad little cache that they added. Druid has all spirit boon functionality as soon as they hit 15.

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You have some interesting points. I agree with skill trees. It’s the main weakness of D4… we need to change its elements… ice hydra?? More area of ​​damage… etc.

  • I like MW and tempera… I didn’t change these systems. If tempera were infinite, just find a 3 GA bow and you’ll never need a new item again. The system needs some adjustments. I would make uber manuals in which the tempera affix comes at maximum or maybe with GA. But that could get a little out of control… even if they are very rare items.

  • The issue with MW… it’s the last tier of the item… So it should be difficult. I don’t see any problems with that.

  • I would like one more tier… Something like corrupting the item and finishing it. Maybe a chance to make the item level up to 801… 802. Maybe 13 MW… 14 and you would block the item.

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“Malachite”

End of story from my {View Point and most of it has been posted

before} this P.O. :poop: Game was made to sell Cosmetic MTX

not to have fun as the earlier Diablo games were even D3

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That would be the disconnect for me, yes. Haven’t leveled up a Druid since S5 & didn’t notice the… change. I assume it was a change since then & I wasn’t “doing it wrong” before.

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You were not doing it wrong before. S6 or S7, they made the class quests optional on new characters if you’ve completed it previously.

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From someone’s pov in the company, maybe. But unless there was a catastrophic nosedive in game/ expac sales in year 2, the only way it was intentionally made “to sell cosmetics” is if they think they screwed the pooch so bad with the quality of the core game (& expansion) that they’ve changed their entire revenue plan this past year & have just kept up a facade (like they did when D3:RoS was released & the decision to defund the game had quietly been made already).

Either way, we’ll probably know by the quality of expansion 2, or if the core game miraculously blows everyone’s mind before then. (If expansion 2 is undeniably “great”, then that’s what most of the resources have gone to ensure, & that explains why MTX seemed more ‘important’ in the interim. Ditto for core game “miracle”.)

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Ohhhh…. Riiiiight. That does ring a bell.

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The real problem with the “game” is D4 leadership does not see it as a game. They aren’t even leaders, they are salespeople.

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It is required to open the dude to talk to for Druid’s spirit boons. He is in that bottom area that has nothing until the stronghold is beaten.
And then you need to run into the woods to get the deer skull.
Yes they give you the spirit you needed to have dropped before…but you still have steps to get to this.
Plus you can only pick a bond down in that area also, this cannot be done from the screen.

They made every other one purely optional.
Except Druid and I heard barb from someone else…I have only leveled Druid and Sorc since.

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Yeah

Master working reset is very expensive this season ,as I don’t trade at all

Am always low on gold due to MW

Tempering rng is a mixed bag for me
Break the item is sad but it’s also gone by the next season wipe

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I agree but I have bad news for you. They’re going exactly the opposite way of what you’re saying here. In their latest livestream or interview, not sure, they said they want to make the skill tree in a way that when you pick a node they want you to change the way you play the game but not affect your power. They said they want to make it so that the power comes from items, not the skill tree. Which is exactly what D3 did and it’s a terrible system. Get comfy with the idea of +200%, +500%, +5000% dmg, etc. aspects because they are coming soon :joy:

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This is incorrect.

I’ve made 2 druids in the last week and 1 last season. The only reason to do the quest is for the sad little archetype cache. As soon as you reach 15 and unlock spirit boons, you have all 4 animals plus spirit bond. All you have to do is click in the animal in your UI to select your spirit bond.

The quest does drop 25 druidic spirit offerings and they have no function. I dropped them because Blizzard can’t do anything without leaving some dumb behind.