Reality Check People - 7 months after release

PC General Discussion
1

We are almost 11 months out from open beta.

We’ve gone through 2 seasons, and now in the 3rd.

Expac due apparently at the end of this year, which leads us to have at least season 4 and 5 / possibly 6th - unless timed with blizzcon.

Historically, no ptr.

Everyone left reading this, if you are hanging on for season 4 and onwards, I salute you as the diehard loyalists of the game.

Most everyone else has left the stadium.

So, now that the herd is thinned considerably - we have a track records of what and how blizzard has managed the game, we should have realistic and pragmatic expectations for the game.

  1. Itemization, 2) stash, 3) effective trade channels, 4) effective social interface / clan support. 5) endgame loop redesign / balance

Are things that have been consistently been called out to be fixed.

#1 - to be fixed next season
#2 - to be fixed partially with codex next season.
#3/4 - not addressed I believe by anyone from Blizzard or commented on - workaround with 3rd party apps (discord).
#5 - minor changes at best at this point?

What other major issue do you want or would like to be addressed?

13 Likes
2

I like the game the way it is

I preferred it in closed end game beta, but thats me

Game is fun, doesnt take up my entire life to do most things in it each season

honestly its the perfect filler game between releases for me

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I generally just want the stash to be addressed, but I’m generally in the same boat. I am either okay or can live with everything else at this point outside of the stash.

4

I concurr, this is one ARPG that i actually spend more time killing monsters rather than sitting in town trying to sif through inv etc. Not against quality of life but dont make it so mind boggling like on POE level.

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5

I like to think of it more like being too lazy and comfortable to play something else. Kind of like when you’re dating someone you don’t really like but stay with them because you don’t feel like trying someone else.

*Or so I’m told.

6

Has to be #5 for sure. We need a redesign of what we do at level 100. The mat chase to kill bosses to get more mats to have a small chance at an uber can’t be it. We have to have more/different things to do…we lose the ubers every 3 months…

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Pretty much. Ive been a gamer since atari/nintendo days, pc gamer since 12 with Quake. Im hitting 40 years old this year with a career and family. I love the arpg genre but I hate POE (even after thousands of hours and years of playing) because every 3 months the game releases a bible of changes that take up half my morning to read. And then you must plan out builds otherwise your time will be wasted. I usedto enjoy that stuff, now I hate it.

For me, as an aging gamer that still puts in 2-5 hours per day, D4 fills up a cup for me. Sure, the developers are absolutely tone def with their decision making. The game has massive problems. But it also does a lot of things well, and even better than POE.

And Im also waiting for LastEpoch which is the perfect middle ground. No need to ever go back to poe and Im happy with that.

2 Likes
8

This list is missing the most important thing in from my perspective. That is the 1-100 progression and a real “season journey”. This should be the main focus and gist of the season (1.5-2 months of casual play). Currently there’s no meaningful progression. Leveling is too fast (two weeks and I’m done). Items scale with level so they don’t matter, because they are obsolete the next minute. With few exceptions there’s no difficulty, so skills and items don’t matter until the endgame (I usually run around with 10+ unspent skill points and 20+ paragon points, why bother if the world is designe to fall to your knees on sight). The only challenging and rewarding parts are the dungeons. While there’s a whole beatiful big wide open world that’s unchallenging and useless by design. Strongholds? After a while a piece of cake and of no consequence to the player. Quests? Absolutely without material reward (given that they are doable only once per character the rewards should be above a random drop). The whole overworld lags behind player in difficulty very soon and becomes irrelevant. And therefore things like helltides and whispers are boring and forced thus annoying. Legions, world bosses, all a joke. Nothing challenging, nothing rewarding. We can’t have fun in the overworld because it supposedly must remain accessible to “everyone”. While gamers are locked down in (nightmare) dungeons.

So called “endgame” is a red herring. It’s like suggesting to a mountain climber the fun only starts at the peak, let’s take a cable car. A good game is when I enjoy playing at every step and don’t feel like I’ve wasted my time, because I haven’t reached the end.

5 Likes
9

Support your untested drip fed content by buying 30$ dollar colored portals an intern made while having tea one mid summer morning.

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10

well, if that wasn’t the ultimate reality check ever…

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The yellow one tastes like butter.

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Once they get the stash sorted out, assuming they ever really do, as it’s very sad how we have a handful of tabs and most games in this space basically offer as many as you could ever dream of, even if for a nominal fee, it mostly comes down to endgame and the itemization.

I suspect that the itemization changes will be a stop-gap measure of sorts (though hopefully a decent one) given that they somehow didn’t realize the itemization was poor before launching the game, with a meatier suite of changes arriving with the expansion, and then probably a rework to the rework to the rework coming on the back of the second expansion. That’s likely where the game more or less becomes whatever it will ultimately be.

In a similar vein, we need a whole lot of expansion to available skills and skill customization. The game barely has builds right now in any player sheet sense of the term. It’s mostly down to gear, with a few select skills and passives presenting nice scalars to buff gear effects further. I want to control the size, speed, quantity, impact AoE, chaining, charges, etc. properties of my skills. What we have right now is really, really barebones compared to most other offerings and it’s a bummer.

Better clan options, social channels and some kind of actual player marketplace/trading hub in-game would be great but I’m not holding my breath if I’m being honest.

Beyond all that, the most important thing will be endgame progression, some newfangled version of the Horadric cube and crafting, and activities that push builds, hopefully with different emphases, not just DPS, but maybe CC, speed, elemental focus, etc. as well. We’ll be getting large batches of new items with expansions and small batches seasonally for years to come, so I’m sure we’ll have enough items in time, but right now there’s just not a damn thing to do with them, so we need a lot more of that.

All in all, the game’s decent now, and it was good for a launch product, but changes seem slow-going and that’s making it feel like a very casual experience since I’m just not strongly compelled to play as I wait for more to arrive, so I hope that’s going to start looking better as the team hunkers down and rounds out the initial fixes that were necessary to put the game in an ok place, leading to more robust future development with a bit more adventurous an attitude on the devs’ parts. :v: :slight_smile:

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itemization and real mony oction house, these are the most important ones that need to come in the game to save it from rok bottom.

14

That first part will never come even if you had spelled it correctly

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One additional small thing people gloss over is that AoZ required you to be level 100 (in addition to season journy being completed). Gauntlet, I think will require level 100 if Im not mistaken. The level 100 requirement for these endgame activities is going to be a problem for some.

Not everyone wants to grind to 100 just to do these ‘pinnacle’ endgame activities. Hell, even in POE I think the highest level I achieved was 92 or 93 but still completed all pinnacle content. Level 100 was just vanity and leaderboard stuff (level leaderboard,not D4 gauntlet leaderboard lol).

So…I hope they aren’t leaning into the idea that you need to be level 100 in order to participate in these activities. That is still a decent grind with minimal interesting content between 50-100… basically the same NM dungeon and mini boss loop content cycle for 50 levels. Gets stale.

16

NO thank you.

I would rather not send money to china.

1 Like
17

no. thank. you.

Seriously, I sometimes almost want to step away from D4 even as a filler game because of the community… Why on earth would RMA be a good thing? Because it worked out so well in D3. Hell, I had a guy arguing with me last night that POE isn’t the current goat of arpgs and D4 itemization isnt bad but POE’s is. lol

and I dont think these people are trolling either with their horrid suggestions and ideas.

1 Like
18

I remember one of the dev videos they said you can do them before you are 100 but they advise against it. So it should not be limited by the level number.

19

Monetization is the biggest one for me. I will die on this hill: I paid full retail price for a game, and I did not get 100% of the game for it. This should be criminal.

2 Likes
20

The only class I’d wanna play is the bow/ranged class, And from my own viewpoint the Rogue is just too boring and or broken, Rogue not as good as the Demon Hunter and Demon Hunter while OK Isn’t as good as the Amazon but Buzzard in their Infinite Wisdom{Ha :rofl::laughing::joy:} deleted the Amazon, So why did they delete the Demon Hunter? Because the Dev’s perhaps wanted to create something new? If so they did a piss poor job. And yes OP Good job on the list of the other issues