So, I finished Act 1 and got to level 20. A few notes for the CMs/Community in general.
I did enjoy the game overall, but feel that there are some issues that could be tackled by launch/in future patches as the game updates. For the stuff set in stone (ie not going to change), the story was mildly interesting, but tbh, I never was huge on any of the Diablo games’ stories, and this is usually the nature for mmo styled/online rpg stories (though Endwalker really set the bar for how great they can culminate, but every Diablo game is really only loosely connected by lore/world as opposed to character stories).
I feel that the lack of a quick party system might hurt the social aspect a bit of the game, since D1-2 had lobby based game instances, D3 had auto join game instances based on checkpoints and tags, and DI had a matchmaking system for dungeon/raid content. However, from what I understand of endgame being based around using keys with modifiers on dungeons, I can understand why D4 does not have this sort of system in place.
UI Issues:
Some common things I’ve seen and agree with are being able to move the chatbox to the left (like D3/D2R), being able to pull back some on the camera zoom. I do miss the map overlay while playing like D2 has as well. Other things I’ve not seen mentioned yet are; if I click a skill bar hotkey without a skill assigned, please bring up the skill assignment menu; give some more custom ability to the mini map like zoom in or out, resize to be bigger, etc. It is slightly annoying to keep having to pause the action or find a safe zone to look at the big map for next quest marker or find a dungeon.
Another aspect of the UI I feel should be adjusted is quest markers. I feel that limiting to only one quest to track and display on the map is too restricting, and forces you to constantly shift your current quest track as you pick up sidequests. The less time in a menu, the better.
The final thing about the UI I’d say, is beta specific. If we are unable to complete the quest of our level 15 class due to being in restrictive area, the quest itself should denote that like the storyline quests do.
Barbarian/Gameplay Feedback:
I think that the overall consensus I’m seeing is agreeing that as you rise in level, get better equipment, level skills, etc that there is no feeling of being more powerful. I ran Frenzy/WW for most of my beta play, and my damage numbers seemed to be mostly consistent the entire playthrough, despite upgrades. Some of this is nature of the beast with enemies scaling to your level, but I believe that there is also some degree of skill damage/weapon damage scaling is not outpacing this.
On mobs, I didn’t have that much of an issue, though my time to kill seemed roughly the same from 1-20. Bosses however, were too damage spongy and damage bursty. I took my first boss aprx level 9, and died multiple times and quit; I just couldn’t outpace it’s damage with my DPS. When I hit my first story based dungeon, I fared better on the boss since I leveled up a few times and had a couple of cooldown skills.
The Barbarian has a core issue, the same core issue since Diablo 3, which is the Fury Resource. I understand the thematic idea behind it, but it is still a lackluster mechanic and is the only class forced to build it’s resource and use it or lose it through automatically degenerating. At least D3 did have the level 55 skill which brought the resource back more in line with the other classes; I seen no such skill however for D4.
The Builders themselves are also fairly unremarkable, with the exception of Flay (which I switched to towards the end of Act 1) on bosses with Bleed, in combination with Thorns helped. Suggestions would be to have Flay cleave enemies in front of the swing, rather than the single foe targeted, and have Frenzy hit an adjacent target with the second weapon, much in the way how Double Swing works on Diablo 2.
Shouts, not a fan of them being super short duration, cooldown spams. While I did not level the skill to increase duration 10% (30% I figure at level 3), 30% of an 8 second skill isn’t really that much. This works in heavily party based content, like a full fledged MMO, but this game feels heavily designed towards solo play.
Those are my current thoughts at the moment, and I look forward to launch (which hopefully will have stable enough servers to actually play the game on launch).