Diablo 3 is designed to be fun.
Diablo 4 is designed to milk braindead dads who compensate for the lack of fun by purchasing pixels on the shop.
Simple.
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Which Diablo game is hard?
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They aren’t exercising the gaming industry practice of using difficulty levels that actually… Do anything…
So basically, they’re trying to make everyone happy with what may as well be one difficulty level and are just adjusting it back and forth. It doesn’t work well. They will never really be able to make everyone happy like this.
Hopefully eventually they get some functional selection of difficulty and then players can more pick what they like instead…
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The question is in this precious ARPG genre is the industry standard common sense? Or have “difficulties” just been transformed into a character progression tool?
A part of it is that games that are designed like Diablo IV admittedly don’t mesh perfectly with anything, really…
They design the game around rapidly bloating math and huge variations in player power which is a serious design challenge, they needed to use numerous difficulty levels in III to try and handle it.
Games with similar numbers bloat have basically the same issue no matter what the game is. The window where combat “feels good” isn’t that numerically huge yet the numerical variation between builds IS huge, so you need lots of “windows” or a scaling system to handle it.
I still think it’s better to try and come up with a solution than it is to lose half your playerbase to boredom, mind ^^;
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In essence what this genre needed is to be rethought rather than remade, and clearly the Blizzard teams who have worked and are working on this game are not the thinking types. In their attempt to play it safe they have created a gleaming husk of a game with a rotted inside.
Now the season is easy again. Blizard needs to think about 2 games before 100 and after 100. After 100 the damage scales exponentially due to many multipliers from the paragon and aspects. Ideally the runes would be blue in tier 1 to 2, yellow at tier 3 and legendary at tier 4. With 30% more damage the robot will destroy everything at the lower levels so that at level 100 it will have some damage.]
No no no I mean MORE HARD not take more time. SO hard it’ll make you cry!
What they did right in PoE is follow the roguelite mechanics pretty well from D2. No full respeccing unless you have a currency, progression through various difficulty levels and you can go back and dominate things, lots of power choices through gems and uniques.
What they did wrong imo was Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too many systems and everything else that turned it into an overcomplicated clunky mess. Sometimes simple but complex and requiring skill is better, or at least imo.
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Rod Ferguson whispered in demonic in my ear and I was entranced. They did a very good job of marketing what little they showed us before release. They knew what they were doing and it seduced a lot of us, especially all the hype and answers they gave us to assure us things would be great.
After buying Diablo 3 back in the day and now this I’m 99% sure I won’t buy another Diablo cause of how both of those launched. Both games imo are pretty bad.
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What they have done is give a shot at replayability of the season with the buffs to the stone drops. The pet and the stones do not carry over in between characters. Imagine wanting to play multiple characters as a solo player for hundreds of hours to max your pets and then tacking the Uber boss farm on top of that. Considering the seasonal quest itself can be done in 30 minutes I think it’s a fair trade.
Also if a player decides to go full meta they will be OP with or without the pet. Barb is in a ridiculous place right now and they got buffed significantly with the changes to key passives. I will eventually test one of my homebrew barbs this season and see how it stacks up compared to seasons past.
Considering it got through Uber Lilith and a couple rounds of AoZ last season I expect it will again perform well once the powers are in place. The difference between last season and this season is that I won’t have maxed powers in the first 15 minutes.
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huh? what do you mean by “this gear”?
the streamer only uses evernight and genesis, no ubers on the chars.
That’s why the Hardcore mode exists. If the game is too easy for you, play in hardcore mode. Or is it too hard for you ?
I am impressed how people complain about every single aspect of the game.
If don´t like the game like it is, just leave, go play anything else that fits your expectations.
90% of the players have limited time to play so the game shall be made to everyone and not for a specific niche.
In season 1 people complained that the char was leveling too quick. Blizzard changed it and the same people started to complain that it was taking too long to level up.
In season 2 we had AoZ dungeon, did you play it ? That was hard. Which level did you reach or did you just complained for being too hard ?
For season 3, the gauntlets are coming which is supposed to be hard.
And finally, Diablo series never been a hard to play game.
They messed up by trying to appeal to everyone because it’s simply not possible. Some of the most successful and critically acclaimed games are easy to understand and play from an accessibility and interface standpoint, but they have depth and are challenging… like Zelda, Red Dead Redemption, even Dark Souls with its insane difficulty was hugely successful. Even Mario isn’t that easy. All of those games sold upward of 20 million copies, with RDR at 60 million. They sold well over time and had positive word of mouth on top of being backed by major companies and having hype. Diablo 4 was huge out the gate then died off.
Diablo 4 is easy to play and has no real challenge, depth or difficulty. It’s just grindy and repetitive… and some of the mechanics are frustrating on top of that. The only “challenge” is when mobs deal insane damage to the point of one-shotting or use annoying mechanics like freeze / fear / stun where you literally can’t do anything. But even that is preventable once you get some decent gear from pretty much everywhere. There’s only an intermediate sense of progression or getting better.
Hardcore isn’t a solution because dying once and losing everything permanently isn’t fun or challenging. It’s just lazy mechanics. Maybe if they set up a system similar to the Souls games instead.
It’s like they’re catering to casuals while trying to appease the hardcore and it’s not working. Old Blizzard had the mantra “easy to get into, difficult to master” and people still love their games… even WoW Classic is desired over retail and what gets mentioned as a positive in their financial reports.
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I dont understand why we can not have multiple layers of difficulty. Blizz is a big company and now with the MS money I cant understand why a key franchise is having such a hard time getting their game right.
We can have content thats easy to fly through and content that is challenging.
Challenging can mean takes more time. Challenging can mean that, gasp, not everyone may be able to do it. Challenging can mean that we might need a group to do it.
Also, not to mention the other many QOL changes still missing. Ex: Group finder, trade improvements, loot filter, loot itemization, in game earnable cosmetics etc. to just name a few.
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I honestly think they’re just going the easy route, to try and sell as many copies and cosmetics as possible by going for the casual and mobile crowd. There’s so many gaps in this game that really shouldn’t be there… and wouldn’t be if they had the passion and dedication for it.
I doubt it’s the developers fault, but whoever is making the big decisions on how the game should be and who it should cater to and how quickly content should be released. The actual gameplay, production and concept isn’t that bad.
Blizzard was a big company. Activision was slowly corrupting, warping Blizzard into something else entirely. Take for example how EA handled Bioware. Same fate. Only with Blizzard it was much slower. But even great devs can fall just the same.
Microsoft can still get Blizzard making good games. It won’t be like the golden era of Blizzard but, it can be at least better than what was going on when Blizzard was under Activision. It’s just not going to happen over night.
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the dream!
but blizzard caters to money and hitting the widest population possible… not very niche friendly… sadly.
that’s what’s so “sexy” about poe. they picked a niche and stuck to it until it wasnt so niche anymore. ballsy, respectable, and fun!
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Yeah the pet is fine. It may not seem so early on, but mine just came online. 
Btw something we discussed previously, I made the build with Temerity and Soulbrand 
You would laugh at how funny the result is. It is actually good at keeping me alive.
I’m still in the high 70’s (my player level) though…but I am keeping it to see if it scales. Yes this is not my normal build, I was waiting for Tibaults…but I think Temerity at the least is a keeper for me.