TLDR: It feels like a couple builds are always exponentially better than others. It seems too easy to unlock the majority of your power, with most of your power coming from easily-gotten uniques. With how powerful some of these builds are, there’s nothing in this game that’s challenging apart from pushing over pit 100, therefore interest wanes in minmaxing or “progressing” when the bar of required power is so low for the rest of the content in the game. Like a movie with no middle, this game feels poorly paced.
This is my first season in Diablo 4, and while I’ve enjoyed it, I’ve quickly hit a point where the sense of progression feels meaningless. The power creep is overwhelming, with much of my strength coming from a single unique item for my build, rather than from things like paragon, affix rerolling, runes, or glyphs. For example, after switching to a bloodwave build, I went from struggling on T3 bosses to one-shotting T4 bosses and clearing Pit 100s without having to upgrade anything else—just from the new gear. I didn’t even level up any witch powers or equip an occult gem (I don’t have any). The disparity between builds is stark, and once you unlock that power, there’s little else to strive for besides pushing Pit levels.
I’ve seen friends quickly level up, hit high torment, and then lose interest once they’re in Pit 100s all within two days, since there’s no more challenge outside of pit pushing given how strong builds become with common uniques. With everything dying in a single hit on T4, there’s no real incentive to min-max or improve gear further. I might not even ever craft an occult gem; what’s the point? The gear and build variety are great, but the pacing feels off. Ironically, I struggled more with the first season story headless boss, when only a couple blues dropped in the room before the boss, than with anything this season.
Build variety?
same builds over and over and opver each season without any build improving…and you talk about build variety? we are not playing the same game
They do campfires where they showcase 1 skill or build being buffed headed into a season. How much work would it really be to buff 10 skills or builds heading into a season? 5?
Blizzard needs to learn having 1 option is boring. Imagine describing this game to someone and you told them only 1 build is good per class and 1 class is exponentially better than the others. They would tell you that game sounds like it sucks.
Well…Imagine telling them 1 class is literally millions of times stronger than the 5 other options. They’d say what the hell? Why?
Imagine being able to describe Diablo in a way that sounds good to people who have not played it. Imagine.
There always has been a huge disparity between the best skills/builds, and the rest. At release, we needed to stack different crowd control to use the “unintended” multiplier stacking from stagger against bosses, and we had to stack vulnerability and critical damage. Any class or build that didn’t have access to all three didn’t fare very well, or simply had a harder time to reach the hardest content we had back then (Uber Lilith and Nightmare Dungeon 100).
Even there, many skills were lackluster.
However, with the ridiculous damage multipliers we now have from multiple sources, a skill that has one or two stacking multipliers and passives reach disproportionnally high levels of power compared to the others. This is Blizzard we’re talking about : They test their game at Torment 1, and call it a day. Nowhere do they seem to realize that some passives or buffs are too easy to stack through Tempering (e.g. Resolve stacking in Season 6, Heavy Hitter in S7).
We’re not asking for every skill to be within 30% of another, but those skills that hit 10-1000 more than the rest are just ridiculous. A lot of skills are quite fun and offer a challenge (e.g. you could reach Pit 100 with a lot of time, almost perfect gear/mythics and near max glyphs), and I feel like it’s the intended difficulty, but those OP skills just are exponentially better.
Yet another fairly well thought out post that will disappear into the Blizzard archive and never see the light of day.
They have your money.
They do not care.
For as long as the Streamers are pumping out broken builds that a large portion of the community are just going to copy pasta like the braindead little dafties they are this isn’t going to change.
Hate to say it but you’d be better getting used to it or finding a way to accept it. It’s made my playtime much more fun not worrying about it because they will NOT do anything about it. We’re 7 seasons in now - they’ve had many oppurtunities to demonstrate a willingness/desire to address these types of concerns. They haven’t and won’t.
It has to do with your personality and ambition. Some people are content with a modest living while others work longer hours and achieve higher goals. Some people play for a week or two while others are driven to do the work to hit Paragon 300 and push for Pit 150.
Even if he is paying people to grind for him it is not surprising a person as ambitious as Elon Musk likes a game like Diablo for expressing his ambitious nature.
I agree that Blizzard should try their best to rein in the progression trivializing outliers builds every season. With that said, some of you seem to self sabotage your experience willfully then cry after pretending like you had no control over the outcome. You willfully switch over to the the most busted build you look up online then wonder why your progression experience got trivialized? This outcome wasn’t obvious to you?
There are many builds out there that allow for very nice smooth progression from t1 to t4 experience and most of them can be found by trial and error of improving your own self made build.
“One game Andy’s” seem to be taking over gaming, they used to be relegated mostly to MMOs. They want endless content (for free of course) and infinite “meaningful” progression. The idea of playing other games and taking breaks from their one game seem so alien to them.
I suppose it should be defined if “build variety” includes only viable builds or just meta builds. I think there’s a vast amount of different playstyles and items that encourage those playstyles in this game that can all viably complete most endgame content. But yes, there are gross outliers that might make all other builds seem nonviable and equivalent to not existing. Just depends on your perspective, I guess.
Ever sense stats squish, Overpower builds has always seemed to shine the most with the changes. Look at this season Top 3 class build are all overpower, Last season was Overpower quilvolly SB (the bugs it had didn’t help either), and course for first few days witch power related to overpower was bugged.
I played a good bit of PoE2, but it has a vastly different philosophy behind it’s gameplay. It’s designed with trading to be most efficient way to gear by far. Notice, I didn’t say only way, but rather that it’s such a more efficient method, there practically is no other way.
I played through the entire campaign and almost never found my own upgrades. Even dozens of hours into the endgame, upgrades would never drop on the ground. Rather, you’d have to go online and play shopping simulator for hours to trade with others. It’s very disconnecting, and it’s all because the developers don’t know how to create deterministic ways to acquire gear (their “crafting” system is terrible) and they don’t know how to balance out ground drops in such a way to provide a satisfying power progression curve.
I’m not arguing PoE2 is bad and D4 is good; they both have their issues and strengths. However, this idea of painting Diablo 4 as some mega corp game that’s out of ideas and PoE as this underdog revolutionary with only good ideas is tiring (especially since GGG is owned by Tencent). The hype PoE2 had at release was crazy irrational. It didn’t take long for many people to see the many holes the game has, but, of course, since it’s released under the scapegoat of Early Access, the white knights of PoE have the perfect excuse to brush aside glaring oversights and issues.
Isn’t the “game hoper Andy’s” the ones who are demanding their time and fomo be respected so they can get to their other games or main game?
Some people been there done that, and know what they like.
A satisfying journey =/ endless. People aren’t asking for endless paragon like d3. Some like a journey up the mountain. Others want to be airlifted to the top. Blizz instead cut the mountain down to size, in fact its not a mountain anymore, just a hill.
But its not one game andy vs game hopper andy. Its more managing power creep and expectations. Take D3 for example. D3’s early seasons would be plenty busy the whole season. People who enjoyed that expected that to continue. After years of power creep, new people that came in, their perspective is that of exponential orders of power creep and super short season journeys have a different perspective and expectation.
With D3 you did have endless paragon to buffer the power creep. But D4 you don’t (and I don’t want it). New power creep creates new expectations. When blizz refused to fix Spiritborn it created a new expectation of pit 150. Now with Necromancer its getting reinforced. Now you have threads complaining for all classes to be pit 150 viable. What’s next? multiple build viability per class pit 150 viable?
If you’re told not to play meta build… ok what happens when power creep makes a “c” tier build is just as capable? Just don’t min/max? just go play PoE? that’s getting tired already. I don’t want PoE, even if the campaign experience is better.
I agree with this. It was my experience as well. And I am not saying D4 is absolute dogpoo, I like that I can come, level up fast and blast, and I rarely trade in D4. But the 2 biggest issues for me are:
No build variety. Every season they choose 1 build per class, throw it at you and say “play this or go home”. In PoE2 I can pick anything, dozens of skills, and they feel great!
No competitive end-game - they have completely removed any leaderboard and they killed the pvp entirely with VoH. There’s nothing to do once you farm your build.
NM100 was more fun than today’s Pit even not many builds can clear them. In NM100, if you get jumped by an elite before you crowd control him, you are instantly dead. It gives us the sense of challenge and dangerous.
After Blizzard nerf Nightmare dungeon and cap mobs damage because of babies cry about one shoot mechanic. The difficulty of content is based on how much HP of the mobs. It become boring as always few build has the dps can clear the content.
Blizzard should redesign the content difficulty which challenge the players how to mitigate the damage and deal with game mechanic. Not just lazily stack the HP of mobs hope no build can clear them, this just create a sense of false difficulty.
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