As the title suggests, this will outline my personal findings and feedback from my time in the beta weekend. A few quick points, I levelled all three available playable classes to 25, over the three characters combined I completed all quests, side quests, dungeons, and found almost every location. Participated in and killed Ashava (on Barbarian).
Overall gameplay experience was good, I particularly enjoyed the chain side quests and overland events, cellars need improvement (sometimes you get an event, sometimes a puzzle, sometimes a random group of mobs) and they are not created equal.
I was not particularly theory crafting my character builds, just read tool tips and picked skills I wanted to use, did not respecc to min/max, did not pursue over or under performing builds. Just tried to give the classes and game a try and see how it felt.
That being said, I stuck to my chosen builds and did not give other skills/combinations passed my initial choices any testing so I can only speak about what I experienced.
Skill Points: investing additional skill points into a skill after getting its initial point and its augmentations felt lackluster, I feel like the skill scaling should be more in line with skill point expenditure and not so heavily reliant on the items (arguably a 1/5 skill with better legendary effect synergies is better then a 5/5 skill or a 6/5 skill). Skill point investment should improve the skill more than it appears to. Also on the topic of skill magnitude, adding additional points to skills like blizzard, meteor, and frozen orb should increase the radius of the effect by 10-20% per skill level (for orb maybe not the explosion radius but its size is the same at 1/5 as 6/5) IMHO casting a blizzard that is rank 6/5 should be the size of 4 blizzards cast side by side.
The monster scaling runs into some weird issues across all available classes where at certain points even though your level parity is there with the monsters your gear effects skills and defense so much that if you don’t regularly just chase every small green boost in gear upgrades you can quickly struggle to keep up to the monster scaling (from under levelled gear).
The Rogue; during the beta the rogue’s class systems seemed to be the most developed with 2/3 of the final class mechanics available to try out (inner sight and combo points) they both played similarly and felt equally as good depending on your build (combo points is better hands down for melee). I mainly focused on ranged skills and its power scaled with the level consistently the whole time.
The Sorc; during the beta one passive skill slot was available to unlock and it seemed like a cool unique system although I just put one point into meteor threw it in there and never touched it again. Hydra seemed very powerful, and hydra shots also triggered your on hit effects making the meteor passive a nice choice as with 8 hydra heads shooting at the rate they do it triggered meteor often. Chain lightning and hydra are performing better then traditional AoE skills like meteor, frozen orb and blizzard because of the very small radius on the skills when they are cast, that is not to say these skills didn’t feel like they were underpowered, just underperformed comparatively due to the very small effect scale.
The Barbarian: call him a slot machine cause you just spin to win! Seriously tho, barb felt fun to play and scaled relatively well, my only gripes were with the health pool really, and how noticeable it would get if you passed a few levels quickly without picking up some new weapons.
The overarching theme I found that I lean toward dislike of, is the scaling between skill point investment and items, items effect skill efficiency way more than investing more skill points and I think this is something that needs to be adjusted inversely to the monster scaling, at lower levels (under 50) skill point investment should impact skills more, after level 50 then item values should have a greater effect. What this would do is allow people to lean into their chosen builds more while levelling, leaning on the power boost from skill points and taking some of the pressure off the current need to pick up any upgrade and losing effects you want to use.
(Not counting pulling the aspect and applying it to the new item but there are affixes like +rank to skills you can lose for 20 more damage but the 20 damage multiplied into your skills is worth way more than the + rank of skill).
Itemization - the rates at which rare and legendary items were dropping in the beta was too high in my opinion. Alternatively the loot from silent chests was abysmal comparatively as you need the special key and with how rare they seemed to be, only to get some health potion charges and magic items. On the topic of magic items, the one or two effects they receive should be boosted by about 50%, and they should also have a chance to have up to 4 sockets (weapons/armor). This would make certain magic items competitive as a choice as they could add up to 3 ranks to a single skill and receive for example 4 chipped rubies providing 20% life, that would make magic items a viable choice for niche builds/circumstances and make people at least pick them up to look at them.
Health regeneration stopping completely while in combat did not play well under some circumstances, rather than 0 health regen during combat maybe instead limit it to 1/4 of your total health regen is available during combat, dying in the middle of a boss fight cause you simply ran out of health potion charges and had no way to regain hp near the end of a boss fight felt cheap.
QoL suggestions:
‘D3 Armory’ - some people would like to quickly and easily switch between builds/items, I think this would be best tied into the wardrobe system that is already in, simply add a check box that allows you to save the currently equipped gear to the outfit, they have to spend gold for more slots, people who want it can use it people who don’t want to, don’t have to.
Dungeon Finder - a dungeon finder tool, dungeon entrances have to be discovered before they show up in your available list. Also with a solo/group check box. Dungeon difficulty should scale based on player count.
Character Creation Build - Have the skill tree available in the character creation screen, let people put in their selected skill points for all their normal level-earned skill points and have the option to save it and have it automatically apply those points in that order while your levelling.
An Option to prevent accidentally opening menus while in combat (ability menu / inventory menu).
Overall I enjoyed the beta weekend and the way the game played and the environment. The beta blocking some of the class specific systems is unfortunate but this is definitely a diablo game.