Levelling Pros:
· Feels great and rewarding
· Capstones are fun and challenging
· The levelling and Seasonal Journey encourages playing all the different mechanics
· Harder but with an OP levelling build you can still blast
· Super quick (if you want it to be)
· WB massive XP boost
Levelling Improvements
· 1-30 the legendary drop rate should be reduced.
· Undercity drops too much legendary items, and makes the blue/yellow items worthless
Tempering / Master Working Pros
· The new system appreciates the players time by reducing the time to complete tempering and MW
· Final stage of MW gives a GA
· Reroll system
· Good options to control balancing
Tempering / Master Working Improvements
· Tempering needs a search feature and grouping system
· Allow players to clear the tempering and apply different temper from a different group.
· MW doesn’t feel rewarding at each milestone. It just feels like something you need to do, so it is grind for mats, go to the blacksmith and slam the craft button 20 times.
Sanctification
· With the re-balance to tempering/mw/gear is Sanctification really an optional system or are we going to use it
· This system is locking casual players out of trying this system in fear of bricking an item
· I think Sanctification has a place in Diablo 4 but not in its current version
· We don’t need a portal in the towns, just make it a marker on the World Map
Toughness Pros
· I can see the long term benefits of moving away from the current system
Toughness Improvements
· There is a lot of confusion around what is a good number to allow you to survive. This will lead to a lot of guessing and eventually frustrations. For example, if you are in HC you want to know you are going to survive by being Armor capped or resistant capped, but with Toughness is 100k going to be enough?
Leaderboards
· Keeping it as a separate system in a beta version is a great way to test and make improvements.
· Seeing you rank against friends is good.
Leaderboards Improvements
· In the leaderboard, allow us to see what skills the player is using instead of see the entire character profile
Economy
Grinding for mats, money and gear will be a big part of the upcoming season, the devs need to make sure the systems are designed to be rewarding so are not lacking one specific item. They could combine RNG or gamble into these systems. For example, at the horde you could have the normal chest which give you a flat bonus based on the points you introduce OR you could put all your points into a gamba chest which gives you double the amount of gold or 1% of what you normally would. This way if you just want to grind, you can do or you can gamble it!
Tempering/MW/Affixing is going to be very expensive, which is a good change, but it may lead an increase in real-money gold buying unless there is rewarding system in-game.
Overall
I think a lot of the changes are really good but maybe controversial or confusion which may lead to frustrations before people have had time to play the new systems. Before the next season, I think there needs to be more marketing or context as to why they have made these changes and what benefits it has to the players.
In S10 every class and build was overpowered, so a lot of players will see S11 as a massive power nerf. Even though it needed to happen, players will be frustrated by “nerfs”. What made S10 fun was you could go almost any class/build and do all the content in the game, it was still challenging but not impossible. In the S11 PTR it felt on the off-meta builds almost impossible to do all content (including getting glyphs to 100). There isn’t an easy way to solve this problem apart from working with Content Creators to ensure that is at least 2/3 builds per class that can have fun in the endgame. If they can solve this then player retention would go up and would have a season were everyone will be the exact same build.