When the game launched leveling to 100 took time and effort. Sure, it was probably a bit too grindy. It shouldn’t necessarily take 85+ hours to hit level 100. But now the leveling process is trivial and pointless. It is 8-10 hours to hit level 100. Then the grind starts, and for some, ends relatively quickly after that.
The game needs to be slowed down. Enemies need to take more time to kill, bosses need to last longer than 1-2 seconds–this goes for dungeon bosses and world bosses (especially world bosses).
Rod recently talked about the initial approach to be more like D2 and now the game is shifting to more of a D3 approach based on community feedback, but some of the D2 influence needs to still exist. Slowing the game down, making enemies tougher to kill, having to think about positioning, making leveling a more meaningful experience could make the game and seasons have a longer life. I finished this season 100% in about 2 weeks and I am by no means a no-lifer.
The D4 launch experience for leveling and the game’s difficulty is better than the game’s current state. I am hoping the itemization update is partially the cause of this, but the game needs to be slowed down, leveling needs to take longer, and enemies need to be more difficult to kill.
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Surely you aren’t doing proper pit tiers.
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How can we have one group complaining it’s too fast and another complaining it takes forever to get anything done. Both things can’t be true.
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Make haste slowly. The game and the grind start at level 100 so I want to be there as fast as possible.
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It’s funny to hear this because the moment I hit 100 is when sense of “progression” ceases and a character/build gets old to me. Yes I could endlessly grind pits to get bigger numbers to run higher number pits but the gameplay loop is essentially rigid at that point.
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https://steamcharts.com/app/2344520#1m
There are more players playing now than were playing at the start of season 4. This league has the best retention of any season of any arpg on steam, ever. We don’t have data for the first two seasons, but it’s extremely unlikely that it was better than this.
TL:DR; Most people are enjoying the current season enough to still be playing a month after release, and that’s incredibly rare for an ARPG.
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When you’re presented with two extremes the answer is likely somewhere in the middle.
In this case, leveling feels juuust right.
I do agree that leveling should give you a sens of progression. I was so disppointed when I hit my level 100 and I hadn’t started yet the pits. I mean, leveling should also give you this sens of progression while upgrading your gear. Now, doing pits and upgrading only your stuff id kind of boring to me too, I must admin. I prefer the D2 like approch, where getting close to 100 should be taking more time and be rewarding. I hated the fact that in D3, this sens of progression was cut at 70, but the thing is in D3, you had the paragon level that were infinite maintaining this sens of progression too, unlike D4.
To my point of view, they should try to improve this part of the game and get a nice balance. Don’t mistake my comment with the pace of the game that I actually like (it’s fast and fun to play), but the end goal being only about griding yout stuff I,m not sure to play as much as I’d have expected too cause I feel like my toon is completed at some extend. At, seeing everybody lvl 100 next to you don’t make you feel so special after all. I can remember in d2 having hit my lvl 95+ and people had respect for you and it felt very good cause people knew you had work very had to be there.
I’d also add that working toward your level is also an activity toward the end-game.
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They should just re-add the vendor in Kyovashad (from PTR) for those who don’t want to level to 100, and then slow it down to meaningful for those who do.
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the vast majority of diablo players have bad taste, most of them come from d3, most grabo suggestions come from all these low IQ streamers who played 10k hours of d3, nothing good can be made out of that, If devs and designers would actually make a game, not based on stupid community suggestions but on the general paradigm of making an arpg, d4 would be decent, but now is all downhill non stop.
Imagine elden ring devs-designers listening to community nonsense, game would be d4-like trash, meanwhile, that game bash on most people hard, yet everyone playing it likes it.
9 Likes
I dropped off Season 1 after leveling 4 or 5 characters and none got past level 75. The game was just boring as hell. I slogged my way through the battle pass to get all the tier rewards and that was the most I could bear in the game. Didn’t even finish the seasonal journey.
The experience was so bad, Diablo IV completely dropped off my radar and I skipped season 2 and 3 completely. Never logged in once or even checked out news on the game.
If not for all the marketing on Loot Reborn and videos talking about this huge change with Diablo IV, it’d probably never occur to me to come back to the game.
Now I have 2 level 100 and my third is at 55 already. I just need to gear up my Barb and take down one of the Tormented bosses and I’d even be done with my seasonal journey.
I think this season has progression tuned very well for casuals.
If next season we go back to the kind of slog season 1 was, then I’m just gonna drop out again. I don’t need my games to feel like work. I already work in real life. I’m here to have fun.
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I don’t mind slowing down the game speed, but if they do they must take out almost all the gold sinks in the game, and remove tempering limit.
I like playing all classes. I don’t want to play just one character every season. Even with the hyper speed we have now, I still don’t have enough time to max out all the classes and try out all the builds I want to try and get them all to Pit 100. We’re already at mid-season and I have only gotten one character to Pit 100, and one more getting there at Pit 80.
I don’t buy gear and I don’t engage in trade. And I experiment with my own builds and change it up all the time and I don’t follow cookie cutter build guides. That is how I want to play Diablo.
If the gamespeed is any slower, I can do with that but I cannot cope with the exorbitant gold costs of respeccing and experimentation. Worse, I cannot cope with spending an entire week looking for a great 2GA item and bricking it because of the stupid temper system.
The game speed is fine. Slow it down is fine, but take out all the gold costs or lower them down to reasonable levels (Masterworking is crazy), remove the Temper limits, and/or finally get rid of the ridiculous Diablo 3 RNG crafting systems and let us just choose what affix we want our Enchanter and Smith to put on our gear. Come on.
Diablo 2 had slow game speed progression, it took a week or more to level your character from 1 to 100, but I never felt bothered by it because I was never frustrated by the RNG of enchanting and crafting. Here in Diablo 4 I can get to Level 100 in a day, but take weeks to get my gear in the right spot.
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I agree but what Rod said is basically nailing that shut in the coffin. They’re just designing for numbers and metrics. Best hope is for PoE2 where they are designing out of passion. Then use D4 for an occasional quick break, after they add Paladin/crusader of course.
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we need diablo 2 hell difficulty act 1 porcupine.
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Elden ring has rune farms built into certain areas of the game for when players hit a wall with their progress. The options to getting past the wall are either get good, or grind until you can move on by attrition.
Here the entire game is the gear grind and everything that you do before WT4 is essentially useless. So the devs front loaded a lot of power to get us there faster and tacked on a few endgame activities to grind gear and marginally improve your player in much smaller increments. To engage with the endgame it’s much less of a skill check and much more of a gear check. Because these things are capped there is no beating the game by attrition and only beating the game through math.
In other words is much more shallow, and much easier for the casual gamer to pick up for a few hours, engage with a fair bit of content, occasionally be rewarded with something cool and then put down.
If you no-life and try-hard, sure, but that’s nowhere near what the average (not casual) player is going to experience.
The doing something above pit 60, lol
We have all we need from D2, save for runewords (nobody wants those), sets (very few seem to want those), and the horrid tedium of grinding the same content for weeks to get just a couple levels so we can have the exact same builds with 0 variation.
/doubt
You’re the only person that thinks that, and not only the game, but the community are better off for it.
The lvl up/xp buff wasnt necessary to me, since you could hit 100 easy in old seasons.
In fact, lvl and quests are the best part to me in this game.
I would like, instead xp buff, more pit material drop per run, so we could test more builds in the same season, or some event.
Or at least give us a garanted stygian stone per run after pit lvl 80-90+.
Pit become boring after some runs, way more than nm dg to me. In Nm Dg you at least lvl up glyphs, get items, gold, and has some objetives to do. This last part is personal opinion, and i know most people dont agree.
Diablo has never been a skill check. Or at least, it never was originally. Diablo requires a little mecahnical skill, but not much. Diablo has always been a gear check, and a system understanding check of making your build. The check was determining how well you understood the game’s systems to create a good build with what you’re given.
Modern Diablo (from 3 and up) is a little different because of the proliferation of influencers everyone is now just copy-pastaing builds so the “system understanding” part is basically gone. Diablo 3 even gift-wrapped the builds in a neat tiny package with Set Items, which were very specific in what you could do with them and were realistically the only way to real power. System knowledge and building skill has been replaced by higher mechanical skill requirements to the point that it’s like a Dark Souls game dodging around avoiding one-shot attacks.
That is not what Diablo is supposed to be, though. Or at least, not what it originally was.
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echo lilith phase 1 wave… rng check, skill check or gear check?