What do you think about creating an extra stash tab in the seasonal realm only that has only 1 slot. At the end of every season every player can put whatever item they want in that 1 slot tab and it carries over to next season?
Add a little ease on grinding gear requirements each season.
Add a little chaos as to what item is the best to carry over for what class.
also 3v1 PvP was pretty challenging
skill trees are an illusion. they’re effectively just a different way of presenting power which is boiled down to a few key gameplay numbers.
The equation is simple:
resource obtained = level = access to choices.
Resource gain is balanced around two things, 1 rate/viability of encounter
damage mitigation & attack power reduces X number of enemies hps to 0 before yours does.
Perhaps your choice means you can kill 1 mob in X time but 2 mobs in X*(2+Y) time.
The arbitrary part of this is how much resource gain is needed to open a choice. How many quests/mobs/whatever at whatever capped level is needed to increase your level.
2 rewards of encounter
gear obtained = rate of obtaining drop which is capped/modified by level of encounter.
this gear is balanced around odds of drop
drops have a % of total power based on range of stats/odds of drop
If you could turn off levelling, there is a limit to total number of drops you need to be as powerful as you can ever be at any given level
The arbitrary part of this is how common any given item is. This has multiple vectors in D4: level of dropper mechanism, RNG on stat lines appearing, RNG on the values on each stat line. Given equal weighting, if you have 3 statlines possible, with 2 lines per item, and 2 different values, you have a finite + predictable amount of drops until you cap drops.
So all of this reshuffling of dynamic/static/whatever choice is just feeding the “agency” fallacy. In the end it’s all just a math equation where you try to figure what increases power the fastest, by considering the arbitrary factors limiting “how many encounters to level, how frequency the good drops drop when you defeat an encounter.”
This illusion is reinforced by two absolutely dark design patterns:
Blizzard has done this since the beginning. Maybe at one point it was looked at as a nod/holdover to tabletop gaming, but it’s hard to ignore that it has this sort of stupefying effect on people trying to figure out their damage/mitigation, etc.
Instead of a weapon attack happening every 2 seconds, hitting for 100 damage every time, it hits every 1.9 seconds for 84-106 damage. That’s fine! It introduces things like haste, or procs, via distinctions of hitting slower and harder versus faster. Variety, right??? Wrong.
It pigeonholes the design into certain statlines that will obviously be superior, and encourages another dark design pattern of intentional meta shifting to keep interest. And it’s why, bizarrely, we have the first game in the history of the world to treat crit and “buckets” the way this does.
Further, this game absolutely intentionally breaks up its own momentum and flow by having you make microjudgements with intentional inventory friction to create decision pressure. The biggest diff is you can run so many more maps in POE and just throw all your drops into a huge bank to fiddle with when you’re done blasting. (base is lava). Here? You can’t escape the lava.
And the talent trees are ultimately vapid, deceptively complex.
If I do paragon1-9, that is the path that is immediately the strongest.
However, once I have 10 I am stronger if i undo 1-9 and reach a 10th in the other direction.
This loops back around to “skill/talent” agency as an illusion.
POE could set up their entire talent tree so that there are 0 dependencies. It would just be balanced around all of the possibilities at that point. It seems overwhelming (and interesting) to have so many branches and paths, but if you assess the stat gains at every single variation, it’s actually very mundane.
D4 could go to a D3 model where you choose your abilities, choose to buff them and then offset 100% of the non-ability nodes as paragon, glyph or gear power. They partially do that with +ability statlines, where some of the most OP builds use +ability on multipliers, and that 1 piece of statline is more valuable than a dozen other lines.
They could trivially reduce the power so that each level is capped at an exponential gain and the displays are what % of the cap you’re hitting for. They use this technique to make disparate levels work in groups, it could be applied to the display. If you’re fully level 1 maximum power geared with maximum talents, you’re at 100 and your display is 1. If you’re not, you’re less. If you’re fully 2, you’re 1,000 and hitting a level two is 1. Hitting a 1 (or anything at 10x+) just shows overkill.
If it sounds silly, it is, but it is the easiest way to never allow people 1 shotting things they should be for billions because some silly interaction wasn’t thought out.
You can claim that your dynamic skill choices are innovative, but it’s just lipstick on a pig as it all boils down to limiting choice based on a fixed and arbitrary power curve based on extreme outliers and expected power gains.
D4 also has those spikes, anyone can tell you how getting a specific aspect or item roll early basically overpowers you for dozens of levels, ie, the most efficient path is hitting a dungeon for an aspect unlock otherwise.
These talent trees are laughable because the power gain per node is so small they feel irrelevant.
TLDR: it doesn’t matter how you choose talents, as talents are always balanced around the arbitrary decisions of how fast and powerful you should ever be.
You’ve always got the bang-for-the-buck ideas. 
Of course math provides context or a framework, but it’s not as simple or exact as you claim. One of the horrifying possibilities of why Blizzard have become mediocre developers is thinking along these lines failing to realize how feeble and arbitrary their math can be. In gaming math is a tool, not a religion. You can have fun with it. There is no illusion when a player has three or four available choices to pick from on the spot. Some may align with a build, some may be single-target or focused, some may be broader area of effect, some can be mobility, some can be buffs, some can be debuffs, some can be crowd control or counter crowd control, you get the picture. Choice in traditional skill trees matters as well. “Play your way” and complexity is very arguably an illusion to a large extent, which players can intuit, but your argument that choice doesn’t matter in general and the ideas discussed here don’t augment it is based on some flimsy fallacy. But it’s certainly unusual nowadays for game developers to come up with something fresh or enthralling, from my perspective anyway. I wonder what sort of crap they’re bogged down in. You certainly have to suspect the role of money in present-day gaming, for one. Another possible factor is gaming becoming a professional realm that attracts too many numbskulls who can only apply or think of what they have studied, which they may well not have mastered to begin with and which may have features of sophistry (as you just briefly displayed). Something for sure seems to have sapped purposeful imagination, which is how we end up with what is becoming a real train wreck like Diablo IV. I see it as wasted potential. Gaming nowadays rather than moving forward has an undertone of scared mediocrity. There is a preponderance of forgettable games and retreads, to the point of defining the state of the market imo. It’s not about passion anymore. It’s just plain weird.
I’ve been told by multiple people now that the 1 slot stash tab to carry an item of your choice over each season was one of the best AARPG seasonal realm ideas they’ve ever heard.
Leave it to me to revolutionize an
entire genre and a game that ripped my ideas and never gave me credit.
Best joke about it was this “it’ll take me longer to figure out what item I want to carry over every season than it will for them to code it.”
But again, according to the masses I’m an idiot. Despite all my ideas being nothing but bangers
My solutions unlike everyone else’s would require minimal coding in comparison to the complete reworks everyone else wants.
But blizzard you should totally listen to the mob, its worked out so far yeah? I’m sure the mob has an IQ above 160.
How about this one? Why not turn the Tree of Whispers into a more worthwhile and interesting activity? It spans the whole map with its different settings and monsters and even has a little bit of quest variety.
Agreed. You should be able to stack more than 10 whispers at a time
A skill tree should be like a map.
You need to make priorities while leveling but in the end you can uncover it all.
That’s how it works in many games that are actually fun to play.
I’m sure it’s all a nightmare to implement.
I don’t even know what this means.
I know why aliens don’t talk to humans.
Imagine a species so intelligent it can traverse the universe. They arrive at earth to find a small minority of humans possess some degree of intellect.
To the chagrin of the aliens however, the most intelligent humans are often ostracized and ridiculed.
After all, you can solve a song of ice and fire, one piece, the fountain of youth, d b cooper, the invisible college, and forest fenn and still be considered a fool by those who wish they could be your peer.
I’m one of the smartest humans who will ever exist and I have a low to middle management job. The human race is doomed.
Lol, I don’t have any job. What’s your management job?
Maybe ask why that is.
Mainly due to how the system is designed. There is no reward for intelligence, just luck, good timing, knowing the right guy, or being the slapping mule
Talent and intelligence usually rises to the top. I would say again, you should probably ask yourself how the self-proclaimed “one of the smartest humans who will ever exist” is only in a low to middle management job. This is painfully obvious why.
What does solving one piece, game of thrones, the invisible college, d b cooper, forrest fenn and the fountain of youth say about my intelligence?
How many others would be capable of such?
You can’t even solve one of the above, let alone all of them. Baby don’t feel bad
That coupled with your admitted lack of success in the real world proves you have done none of that. Like I said, painfully obvious.
lol baby girl I have done all of those things.
D b cooper was 3 people debra bob and forest fenn.
Forrest fenn treasure hunt ends in Wyoming
Fountain of youth is located in Wyoming
Bran stark is the night king, Brienne of Tarth is Rhaenys targaryen.
Zoro is the one piece and the man Roger was waiting for.
Invisible college riddle answer is the astronomical clock in Prague. It’s not a clock, it’s a lock that functions as a clock.
Not only did I solve all these things, they were not complex or challenging at all.
For me it was as easy as breathing. I know I am leagues smarter than the majority of people due to the fact most of you think Danny or Jon was Azor ahai, pathetically I might add as George left no hints to such delusions.
Yet here you are with nothing to show for your claimed intelligence
Nothing you wrote means absolutely anything.
Its painfully obvious what is going on with you.
Why do I need to prove my statements? Anyone with half a brain would realize that
I don’t have to prove anything to the likes of you. When I walk in a room I’m the most interesting person in it whether the room is aware or not. I’m not in the room to entertain you. You are in the room to entertain me, now dance chump.
Go lick some more glue
Oh, its so obvious. News flash - One of the world’s smartest humans can only manage to fill a mid level job.
It’s more like I won’t suck my boss off to get a promotion. But keep thinking a group of mostly 120 or less IQ individuals are intelligent.