Opinion: bring back material variety

PC General Discussion
1

One thing I still really miss after playing this season is material variety.

I think they should bring back the different unique herbs and monster parts and use different unique recopies for elixirs and incense.

  1. It encourages exploration in different zones and farming different monster types.

For example in previous seasons one thing I liked is that I might be out of crushed beast bones so I’d make the decision to go run a NMD to get my glyph experience and chose a dungeon that is heavy in the beast class of monsters to get some crushed beast bones. or say I’m low on on a certain plant I’d run around doing some whispers in the given zone to get that zones exclusive herb. To me this was a fun and simple bit of target farming. I also liked the fiend roses were exclusive to helltides again if I was low on them that was part of the hunt in the helltide and made that event unique.

Personally I like the feeling of having some resource limitation as it makes me have to make a choice, I never felt like I was in a situation where it was impossible to get the resource but I like running out of things and having to get more. Crafting materials are and should be part of the item hunt as well if you give them so freely or make them super generic that there is no scarcity or difference there is no point to having them in the first place.

  1. it’s thematic and world building

recipes for things require different ingredients it’s what makes them interesting and unique. It thematically does not make sense that every thing is made from the same bundle of grass. I do like the idea resistance potions having different types of gem dust as an ingredient currently.

it also just adds flavor to the world you can have you little lore bits describing each item and has a bit more RPG feel to it.

I know people seem to want to simplify everything and just get everything they need from what ever single activity they want to play, but I think a game with more variety and the need to think about where you get your crafting resources and how you farm them is more interesting and encourages playing different types of content.

I think they took it too far in this direction this season as now no zone or monster family is different or unique in terms of drops which in my opinion is a step in the wrong direction.

On a positive note I do feel gold is in a good place this season as I’m running out of it every once and a while and it’s exciting to find a greed shrine now (goblins should also drop a tone more as that would make them a lot more fun too in my opinion)

2

While you make some good points, I have no doubt one of the major reasons they decided to get rid most of the materials was due do the fact the majority of players just didn’t engage with the Alchemy system more then they needed to. As the majority of random materials you had to find were for either upgrading your potion or crafting elixirs.

Think of your average casual player, the limited time they have to spend in the game. They are less willing to run around gathering items from all points of the world in a game that heavily promotes killing and looting enemies at a fast pace.

Now for the most part people have already done their exploring, and while the world building is important to some, in the long run D4 isn’t focused on that, nor does it cater to the average player. If the devs want you to get back to killing and looting more quickly (as they’ve noted in recent live streams), reverting this change would have the opposite effect.

Not that what you propose is bad mind you, but I doubt it will ever come back in the form you want moving forward, if it received any changes at all.

3

There were too many options and they were not that compelling.
You spent way too little time using some of those, even if you so decided, unless you intentionally wanted to stop your progression by going WT1-2 with lvl 50 mobs on a higher character.
Most ppl just go endgame and don’t stop too long.

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4

Yeah you and I had this discussion before during PTR.

And I agree with your rational for why they did it I just think it is ultimately the wrong decision. I think there is a happy medium between the (A) action part and the (RP) roleplaying part of the (G) game.

I guess I’m just here to voice my opinion and say I think they are missing the mark.

In my opinion this just tear through things in a rift mentality is exactly what led to D3 losing players and dying off, it may have made a boat load of money right off the bat but it didn’t have the staying power it should, especially given the acclaim of it’s two predecessors.

I think we are going to end up in a similar situation where we get one expansion and then they realize it’s not profitable anymore and kill the game like D3. I really don’t want to see that as Sanctuary/Diablo universe is such a cool IP and it would be so incredible if we could get a game where we eventually had access to all of Sanctuary.

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5

I wouldnt miss alchemy if it was removed entirely.

But on a similar node, it feels weird to gather gem dust, NMD sigil dust and what not. Everything has been turned into silly progression numbers, removed from the thing they were, No gems to find, just a number on a screen etc.
It all feel meaningless.

I love spreadsheets. I love spreadsheet games. But something is lost here.

Yeah, definitely agreed.

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6

I think that is more an implementation fault than a fault to the idea of having more resource variety. I agree it was not implemented in a very compelling manner, but i think it’s a step back to reduce the variety.

What I’m saying here is to me it had some compelling aspects that need to be improved on, like I said I enjoyed running low on a resource and having to solve the issue by making a choice of what and where to farm it added variety to my experience. I think they could make it more compelling by actually developing neat recipes that do require variety and make it fun to farm different zones.

I disagree that resource variety forced you to stop progression I never once had to go to lower levels to get what I want I just had to change my target activity to get what I wanted. To me that’s part of a good experience is having to make choices too maybe I’m not doing the activity that gets me the most experience but at that moment I’ve shifted my concern from leveling to resource gathering, again this adds some form of choice and sacrifice which to me is a compelling game. if a player wants all activities to give all the same things all the time I would suggest they just sit at their computer and click the mouse as fast as they can it will save you the $70 price of the game.

the concept of “the endgame” is also one of the worst gamer based phrases in existence (this is nothing against you personally, but a general comment). The game should be compelling and fun throughout the entire experience, telling me I have to get to the end of a game to experience the game is just foolish and bad game design. If all people want is to immediately have everything and be uber-powerful and done right away, my question then is why are you even playing the game? A good game needs to be an appropriately metered journey when you get to the end that means you are done. Sorry that term is just so foolish I had to rant a bit.

This to me is a very important observation. Which I think stems from the fact that as you pointed out:

Their is no scarcity, no need to hunt for some materials.

The best materials in the game are the ones where you feel compelled to find them and you are excited to get a hold of them. The ones where they feel like they have value (i.e. prisms or boss mats) and that value is derived from the level of scarcity.

As I said that is why herbs are useless now, where as before at least I could potentially run out of one type so I’d have to go farm it again or monster parts too. Granted you don’t want everything to have the same scarcity but you do need a spectrum and at least some level of scarcity to each. So herbs and monster parts were on the lower level of that scarcity scale but it still gave them purpose and meaning.

I actually like conceptually where gem dust is right now. It falls out of the ore piles (which I think is good theme wise), in theory it has multiple sinks in both gem and elixir crafting so you have to make a choice as to where to spend it although I think elixir drop rate is too high right now to make that sink a meaningful choice.

I think elixir drop rate is also part of why alchemy is not compelling is you honestly pick up so many elixirs you don’t really need to craft them so the incense really becomes the only crafting thing in alchemy that matters.

7

That’s not what I meant.
The items you could make with herbs were useful for a little while. Due to that and the majority going min-maxing/following guides and evolving fast towards high levels, this majority would naturally want the best ones only.
If you wanted to enjoy simply picking flowers, you could still progress. If you really wanted to ONLY pick flowers, you could go to WT2 and pick whatever dropped there. There was no forced action.

I am not against having some variety of herbs. We had too many and now too few.
My pet peeve is getting a bundle of herbs, regardless of the type of colored plants.
There should be a decent middle ground to be found, where you can enjoy specificity, a decent but not overwhelming variety of herbs, so as not to be highly-detracting from the main goal of the game, which is definitely leaning on action and not on plucking plants.

Given that we have more on the crafting side of things, we can say that the player is already being distracted from fighting by this activity.
I would argue that they consider action vs inaction playtime and how long they (should) take.
I would go even further and say that the herbs being reduced is not only due to having too many layers/things to remember/places to go to beside fighting monsters, but ALSO about balancing action vs relaxed playtime.

Let me clarify what I meant by endgame, because many people use it in many contexts and then it gets interpreted in even more ways.
In this game you don’t lose XP to dying. You can only go forward, when it comes to that concept. You reach this “endgame” at 100 rather easily. At 100, you are forced, due to balancing mobs always around your level to fight mobs AT your level or higher. This then gives a LOT more reason to use the best or highest elixirs, which means best herbs.

I agree with you that the experience throughout the road should be meaningful. At the same time we have a car with no breaks. We’re going down that road/sleigh/cliff regardless. And from what I see, getting there is only getting smoothed out, not adding rough patches or reasons to stay at a lower level, to enjoy lower materials, to enjoy low-level activities (like in D2 with lld, mld, iron man tournaments).

This endgame gives the designers a bit easier time to balance because they know everyone will be 100 and have 225 paragon points.

There is another topic called “[…] is no longer a video game”, where the OP also tried to express that this “only forward” mentality is detrimental to game experience, but we’re diverging from the OP topic.

8

They canceled the final D3 expansion.

Not sure why they’d want to completely follow the same path here when they announced the intention for multiple expansions on D4.

Maybe they just want to start working on D5 lol.

9

Thanks for extrapolating on your points and clarifying, much appreciated.

Out of curiosity how many different types would you deem enough? As it seems you also agree just the generic herbs and angelsbreath are too few, if I understand your comment correctly.

Obviously I liked the old way as there was 1 common (gallowvine) and 1 rare (angelsbreath) that was universal and then each zone (including helltide) had their own unique one for a total of 8 which I thought if implemented appropriately with monster parts could effectively make a unique recipe for each elixir and incense, the problem became a lot of recipes were redundant and elixirs frequently dropped so there was no reason to craft them.

10

Option 1 has 5 natural herbs and 1 synthetic (Angelbreath)

1 herb per region. They belong to their natural habitats. This way we keep exploring all regions.
Helltides don’t have herbs as everything natural died there and they already have many incentives to go to.

We have these layers currently:
5 regions
7 types of gem fragments

Considering 2 expansions, we can expect 2 regions, which would match the gem type count.

On elixirs though, we have 11 basic, 11 advanced and some more.
I’m getting a headache just thinking how each match would make sense with the elixir effect.

Option 2 has 5 natural herbs and 2 synthetic, with a mix of philosophy

I don’t consider Angelbreath a herb, rather think of it like Death’s Breath (which was completely artificial) but from the good side.
The demons slew angels and their remnants fell from heaven and into ground. This being
philosophical/fantasy, we can say the essence of their good spirits influenced nature in order to help humanity and so, they grew into this “spirit” plant called Angelbreath.

I liked the Fiend’s Rose in Helltides too, so it’s hard to not want an “essence of discord” type of demon plant, a counterpart, so to speak, to the Angelbreath.

And with this we get to the old good vs bad or the alignments. This gives birth to another landscape for elixirs, which would be their rehaul.

  • All elixirs made with Angelbreath would have a good theme, be inclined on defenses or natural traits (basic stats,resources,resists,armor).
  • All elixirs made with Fiend’s Rose would have offensive traits. As an option, we can also represent the corruption of the spirit, reducing some other natural trait. After all, it was meant for demons, not heroes. Think of it like the green essence the orcs had in Warcraft, that made the stronger but aged them. We may drop the “corrupt the spirit” part if community doesn’t want drawbacks.

In this scenario, each expansion adds 1 natural herb (and 1 region), as the sides stay the same.

Option 3 - iterate on old way

Your move, Blizzard!

Long term

A 3rd expansion (ok, I’d like this, but it may be too far for now) would add both a gem (soulstone) and a region (and a herb).
The hard parts are about how it all fits:

  • retaining natural habitat/roots
  • having room to grow the system with expansions (making it an organic system, lending itself to grow or kill parts of it as the story/world/landscape evolves)
  • numbers crunching (how many of what material to combine, which makes sense to combine with which)
  • philosophy (what they represent vs. what their outcome is)
  • how it can be misinterpreted and clarifying intent/cutting content to avoid that
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11

Very much agree with this I liked the idea of the fiend rose as essentially a demon plant that only grows in the Helltides and a counterpart to angels breath.

I currently don’t like the idea of finding angel’s breath in the Helltide it just doesn’t feel right from a theme perspective.

I fully recognize that I like stuff to fit theme and world build probably more than the average ARPG player but I do think attention to little details and building the right atmosphere goes a long way in helping a game capture peoples imagination and desire to stay a while and continue to play in the universe.

I do really like your idea of the angel’s breath playing into traditionally defensive elixirs and fiend rose going into offensive ones, for me that’s the kind of simple but cool thematic detail I like to see.

I agree it would be cool if they introduced expansion specific herbs (and monster parts in my opinion) as you could then introduce new expansion exclusive elixir and incense recipes as the game expanded.

Thank you for sharing your thoughts on the matter.

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12

They won’t. They were forced to abandon their abysmal monetization of D3… hence the cancelled expansion.

D4 monetization is going strong.