Preamble / Intro
Hi everyone, my name is Tylicius and this is my feedback for S4. I made a S4 PTR Feedback post which can be found here - a few of these sentiments were already covered, so I’ll try not to repeat it (PTR Feedback (Long) - D4 Badass now?!).
This is after approx 90-100 hours of gameplay and two level 100 characters and level 94 pushing in the pit. Cleared all other content.
Some of this can come across as harsh, even though I do make alot of ‘frank’ points, it comes from a place of positivity to wanting to make the game better. I would not have spent all this time / effort if I didnt want that.
Good Stuff / Helltide.
Obviously helltide is the winner of the season in terms of levelling. Its great xp, great density, and honestly kind of scary if you’re not ready.
Pits. Pits are just good clean fun. Not a huge fan of the ‘shadow’ bosses that come and accost you during the boss fight, I just want it to be more about dps and less about dodging. But I appreciate no NMD affixes in there.
Itemisation. Itemisation via tempering feels alot less RNG now. Most of the base itemisation is very samey though: mainstat+maxlife+free stat+2 tempers. Mostly your free stats are armour to cap then res, defensive tempers are armor to cap then res, and the last one is utility. For weapons its usually your build defining choice, and rings much the same. Would like to see ‘bricking of items’ addressed. Suggestions below.
Masterworking conceptually is a great idea. Its theoretically very strong, but in practice its very grindy / costly.
Greater Affixes. Its nice to get good items, but the joy is often fleeting and can be the opposite of joy when you brick your tempers. Also it sucks that you cant keep the greater affix and reroll it. I feel there should be a way to level up the vendors to let you do this.
New Elixirs seem cool. Holy bolts is strong but on kill is kinda weird for bosses. It should be on kill and then on single targets its a 5% or 10% lucky hit chance.
Gems. Stronger gems is nice, but I dont think anyone appreciated the ninja nerf to gem dust (or increase in cost - whichever it was).
Bad Stuff
Theres much to discuss so I’ll just summarise them here:
- Old content farming / general philosophy
- Patching and Prelease Downloads.
- Leaderboards and lack there of
- Systems iteration and innovation is lacking.
- Bosses unrewarding.
- Necro Minions are JANKY
- Gold in sort supply, high demand.
- Season Mechanic lackluster.
- Tempering. Bricking Items. QOL missing.
- The Pit. Converting Materials. Troublesome affixes. QOL Missing.
- Stacks, Stash Space and Inventory Mgt still not right
- Ninja Nerfs / Patch Notes.
- Gems expensive / ninja-nerfed
- Obols QOL
- Rares usefulness
- One-shots. Still getting one-shot?
- Masterworking (MW). QOL needed. Reset cost increased (ninja nerf), Blizzard Math.
- Scattered Prisms shortage.
- Random QOL that is needed
General / Philosophies
The thing about an ARPG or SARPG is that the core systems are the fundamental building blocks of the game. If the core gameplay loop isnt fun, people are gonna hate it. If it is fun, they will spend more time in your game and more MONEY on your game.
Old content. I think that a major issue in the game is that content gets superseded very quickly. Yes helltide is awesome now because its got good density and gives lots of aspects. But once I get all my aspects and codex maxed out and Iron Wolves board complete (literally day 1 for the blasters), why would I go back? The mindcage sort of started looking at this issue, but I don’t think the full scale of the issue was understood because if it was, you would let it stack. (And right now it doesnt).
Scaling content. I keep saying this in every PTR feedback post i’ve done, and theres been one every season including Beta and PTR. Don’t force me to go back into old content. Scale the overworld with my gear / skill level. I gave ideas on how to scale this based on a meta progression system. And I can see that blizz are experimenting with things like ‘Profane Mindcage’. This is good but why doesnt it stack? If, at my current gear level, I’m clearing 154 monsters in NMD, let me eat 5 then go do lvl 150 monsters in HELLTIDE. Let me do lvl 150 monsters in whispers. Why is the mindcage just restricted to helltide, make it the entire overworld!!! And if you’re scared people are gonna juice too hard and get ‘stuck’, then make it a buff you can cancel or clear. Honestly no one wants to go back to ‘old content’ and right now we’re being forced to with things like WHISPERS giving the most gold (more below). And what level are whisper monsters, well its the same as the overworld, your level. Do you outscale your level? Yes its literally part of one of the core systems of fulfilling this power fantasy. If you’re not getting enough gold from doing the newest / hardest content the game has to offer - then you need to make a new piece of content that gives us ample gold and have it scale accordingly.
The newest / hardest content should always be the most rewarding way to play the game. If not then why make the content? Oh we spent 3 months making Vaults but they’re bad for gold, bad for glyph xp, bad for items and actually just bad overall. NO LIE THIS LITERALLY HAPPENED IN S3. And what was the response? Overwhelmingly negative. You have the stats, but I wouldnt be surprised if S3 was the worst season in terms of player retention before this changed. I dont know what the devs are so afraid of. (Actually I do, its that D4 will turn into D3, but there are other solutions around that like a stat squish every xpac which I wont get into).
I think that if you could stack mindcages, and it also said increase the droprate of gold and aquisition by 100% per 10 monster levels (or per mindcage) - it would be so much better. This isnt specific feedback too, this needs to be adopted for any and all systems moving forward. You’re on the right track with giving us the PIT and making it scale like AOZ25 (nearly impossible except for high end players), but it needs to be applied to the whole game. Keep doing that and keep buffing the underused / low level content. Or better yet, like the mind cages, give us an alternate way to make them relevant again.
If you want to think about it in a different way, just go, okay ‘wudi’ (or any other high end streamer) ‘you think you’re good?’ ‘lets see you clear an AOZ50’. 'Oh and btw then you get an awesome full prestige xmog set, a new title, 1000 shop coins and a mount that isnt a horse. (Where is the hell dogs, pit fiend mount, where is the astaroth mount?)
(also as a side note, why isnt the battle pass self sustaining, if you cleared / finished the previous season’s battle pass, you should be able to afford the newest season battle pass based on the currency it gives… having it 300 coins shy is just greedy).
Prerelease
I know blizz said they were going to address this one so I’ll just give a quick note. Take a page from POE. They have the download ready well before the patch drops. Literally go and check out how they successfully launch a season every few months. Its such a painpoint that people take off time from work, people line up races (some official leaderboard support would be nice) but just because they live in rural australia (or anywhere remote) with potato internet they cant play / compete. It does not feel good. It didnt even impact me and I could feel for those people that it affected.|
Leaderboards
I would like to see official leaderboard support for Leveling (softcore, hardcore, SSF?!). Or if you can’t then just give access to your API to select websites / sources so the Community can actually do what we want. No-one cares about gauntlet leaderboard, it should have been NMD and definitely Pit leaderboards instead. Seriously you copied d3 on soo many fronts, surely you knew the greater rift leaderboard was a popular feature. If you’re going to copy a system, copy ALL of it, or better yet make it better in ‘every’ way. Same thing happened with enchanting and it releasing without the preview window…
Iteration
S4 is the first time we actually got new SYSTEMS in S4, and its borderline just copied from other games. I gonna be frank here: Masterworking is literally honing from Lost Ark, Greater Affixes is literally exalted items from Last Epoch combined with Primals from D3. The Pit is literally D3 Greater Rifts. Its cool that you’ve copied all of this, but where is the innovation, where is the iteration? Where is the oldschool blizzard we took your bad system, made it cool and we doubled it jay wilson? Tempering is kind of cool but its just a way to have more control over your items - still not happy with the possibility of bricking though (more below). I feel like this is what people wanted from diablo 4 on launch. So really up until now S1-3 was just beta testing. So we were your paid beta testers, but instead of you paying us it was the reverse (I guess bobby kotick knew what he was doing after all). But now its time to give back. Give us the new systems / content that we want and reward us for how successful we’ve made your game. Literally I think for a complete year of hyping everyone up into one of the most disappointing launches for the players, blizz needs to offer the expansion for free. (Also no news yet about any info / release date?). Please dont release it half-baked too, send it when its ready. People will understand if you tell them its not quite up to your standard now that they can see you moving in the right path, but ffs please do the right thing by the players who have supported you and want this game to be good / better. Its clear that D4 launch just got rushed, don’t rush the xpac and do make it free.|
Bosses
Tormented bosses still not rewarding enough. Its fine that you’ve 5x the drop rates for 3x the mats summon cost (down from 5x - compared to the normal versions). But what about a change the boss mats that they drop? They still drop a SINGLE (one) boss mat for the next boss in the ‘ladder’. This needs to change. Already reported in the PTR feedback notes. Where is the chase loot? Where is the cool mounts? Where is the mount that isnt a horse? Im so annoyed at horses, it feels like i’m back on Alliance on WoW…
Boss resets. Its annoying having to ‘leave dungeon’, reset then go back in. Can we just have an arena where the boss spawns and then after they die a new pedestal spawns? It feels like we’re pushed to farm ubers but the QOL is atrocious.
Tormented bosses didnt give a resplendent spark on first kill…|
Necro
Necro minions are JANKY. I reported this in the PTR feedback notes. Mages hide behind pillars and try to shoot something (their missiles just get absorbed by the pillar). They also stand in doorways and body block each other. The melee minions sometimes dont get to hit small melee box enemies. Check 7 reapers vs test dummy (one just sits there idle). In town they wig out and start twitching / fidgeting (super annoying / distracting). The golem active is so slow that mobs are usually dead by the time he gets there and does his ‘active’. Yes minions do good damage, but sometimes they just do 0 effective damage, and THAT IS AN ISSUE. In blood mist they wonder where the hell you’ve gone and they sometimes just flat out stop moving / attacking.
Minion targeting - this is a real problem. We need a way to tell them which target to attack / kill. Stuff like blood blisters, waller (that literally negates all minion dmg btw), and any priority mob. The fact this isnt in the game is BAD. Comon guys even last epoch has it. Copy them if you have to.
Skeleton / Mage / Golem Mastery. This was OP the way it was, I agree. Fine with the removal of it, but I think it should just move to necklace tbh like all other ‘passives’. Up the ranks and move it over there and let us put armour related stuff on armour. On PTR it was fine to just go full dps and steamroll everything. Now that The Pit is a challenge we need defense, and having ‘mastery’ stats on pieces that give defense is a BIG OPPORTUNITY COST.
Buffs. Buff bar and losing track of buffs is a problem. I think that grasping veins needs to move into the icon itself with a green bar showing its uptime (like bonestorm etc). You should also be able to pin the location of key buffs so they dont ‘fall off’.
The new tormented boss ‘debuffs’ are fine but they block buffs on the buff bar.
Conduit is sometimes crap in NMD when you have out geared it, so its worse to take the conduit. We should be able to right click and cancel any buffs on our buffbar (or give us a setting / lock feature).
Corpse limit / indicator. Wouldbe nice to see the amount of corpses on the ground with a little number next to your minions. There should be a way to increase this limit also and to keep corpses persisting for longer. Right now they despawn too quick. Also they despawn faster than their animation shows so you sit there like an idiot using a corpse skill on a specific corpse (and have it not work) then afterwards realise that it de-spawned.
Minion’s have issues beyond their lack of targetting. They get cc’d - frozen, feared etc. They get walled. They dont move into melee range for suppression bubbles.
Unstoppable - Imo if they share your stats, you should be able to make them unstoppable when you are.
Stances / Formations. You should be able to select a stance for your minions. Right now they are ‘passive’, they need an ‘assist’ or ‘aggressive’ stance like wow pets. Also formations. They need to be maneuverable around the battlefield. Right now they just stand in any cc and dont respond to whats under their feet or not. You should be able to select the formation for each minion type. Golem - frontline / behind skeletons / near you. Skeleton Warriors - frontline, phalanx or around you. Skeletal Mages - Floating (as they are now), near you (in a formation / shape) or tight stack on the player. Also their ‘range’ needs to be updated because they leash after a certain distance and stop attacking a boss. Literally try it, if you have a boss on one side of the arena, and you stand on the other, the golem stops attacking and comes and stands by you…WHY?! Golem, you have one job - go do it lol.
Minion targeting. In other games the same key bind for telling a minion to attack a target can move them to that location. We need something similar in d4. Sick of minions doing zdps because they cant kill a wall (waller) or get inside a bubble (sometimes stun goes on DR).
Minion Stat Sheet. Yes minions gain 100% of your stats. But they still have a plethora of stats of their own which they can get separately / independently of you. We need to see detailed info on each minion type and their HP, their base attack, their current attack, their CDs, their base attack speed and their attackspeed increases. Also their crit rate and crit dmg. And also any caps - soft caps for attackspeed / cult leader etc.|
Bone Spear Mages
Cool idea but putting it on the minions that kill themselves is kind of nasty. Imo Bone Spear Upgrade 1 and 2 should be switched. Make them take less dmg and fire your bone spears / splinters for upgrade 2, and put the fortify on upgrade 1. So if you take 3 points in bonded essence they will stay alive, but it just means ANY external damage they take will kill them. Making you have to raise skeleton spam most of the time. We need more tools to keep them alive. Tried stacking +healing and life per hit to no effect. Tried stacking % life but it doesnt matter because they hurt themselves based on % life (10% per hit), so it doesnt matter if they have 100HP or 100k HP they die in 10 hits regardless. If its 10 hits then the bone spears need to be buffed slightly so it fires every 5th hit (instead of every 6 as it is on live). Also I think the % life drain should be capped at a certain amount. Say like 10% HP up to 5000 life per attack. So that after 50k HP (for example) you can help them sustain.
Gold
In the PTR we had infinite amounts of gold, so it wasnt really noticeable. What was noticeable was the lack of veiled crystals, so I’m glad you jumped on that. Now gold has become a real issue / choke point in the game. Need to up the gold values or give us like a boon of the horder or goblin treasure vault room equivalent (hint: moo moo moo! =P). Masterworking is just too damn expensive, a slight reduction in gold cost here would be good too. I personally still think rerolling is an issue and the transmute pit materials bags cost is an absolute joke. Honestly I dont know anyone that wants to waste their time in the outerworld doing whispers (low level content, as mentioned above). Please drastically up the gold income from NMD and Pit levels imo. Or use my mindcage suggestion.
Season Mechanic Lackluster
I keep saying this over and over, D4 just feels like the land of missed opportunities. The Iron Wolves were such an iconic part of D2 story and world, and you basically just reduced it to a rewards board - literally right out of the ‘limited time events’. This was literally the perfect opportunity to give us mercenaries that are actually good. Learn from the stupid robot from S3, give us QOL and power that we want. Dont use the excuse that we had to cull season themes / content because we were fixing the game, its your responsibility to both fix the game and give us a season theme that is enjoyable.
Ok its cool that you’re reworking the game, but my stance is that you should be doing that anyway. Its not good enough to say that its the new season theme. Its like me selling you a car, and go oh? you wanted one with tyres? ok that’ll be another year of ‘manufacturing’ time. But in the interim we’ll charge you full price and let you drive around just on your rims because we know you’re keen to drive. As you can tell I feel that blizz has some favour to give back / make up with the players, and although this is a step in the right direction, right now we’re down 1 year of content that we feel owed. Because the game should have released in this state.
Tempering
Bricking items via Tempering is NOT GOOD / FEELS BAD MAN… Like if you get a 3x GA item with your BIS Stats you’re over the moon (GET THE CAMERA/ POST TO REDDIT), then if you dont hit your required stats from tempering its like FML - now you feel like quitting. I guess I’ll go salvage this godly item… and then go neck myself. Point is, there should be a way to recover it. I suggested this on PTR but just make a hard to get currency item that resets the tempering. Make it somethign related to blacksmithing and make it drop from the hardest content, Pit 200 (or maybe 150+ since its buffed now) or Tormented Bosses. As above they still feel unrewarding, so getting a 10% chance to get one of these ‘bis’ consumables would make it worth. My other suggestion is that any item with a GA just gets +5 rerolls per greater affix on the item. So if you’re tempering a 3GA item you get 5 base + 15 = 20 rerolls (you could never get more because 4GA items are unique only and they cant be tempered). Then once you start getting low on rerolls you really need to consider your options. This actually happened to me day 1 of the new season, got a 2GA 2H Scythe for the Necro Minion build (hit int and max life), went to temper, got one of the ones I wanted first try (roll was mid but it was fine), then I went to temper on the other stat (it was only a 1 in 4), and MISSED EVERY SINGLE ROLL 4 or 5 times in a row (didnt get a single roll of the stat I wanted). WTF. I was actually so mad i just instantly logged out, contemplating whether to quit the season or not. For a game like POE i can understand this, because theres a hardcore aspect. And trading is actually supported. Diablo 4 is NOT POE. Its too punishing. You might think its not, until you brick a perfect item because of something that was outside of your control. If anyone else has found a perfect item or near-perfect and bricked it, please comment below.
Some QOL that would be nice is if it could keep the same recipe you just used, so you can just hit temper again instead of having to reselect it from the list. Also the amount of rerolls left always needs to be available / visible on the screen tempering screen.|
Helltide
Generally pretty fun with the density and events changes. Love the doomsayers and the blood maiden event. Its weird that some hellborne are super tanky (native found / spawned in the world), and some (that the event summons) are very weak. Is this because it spawns 2-4 of them depending on player number?|
QOL I would like to see:
- Cinders persist through helltides (like the hearts)
- Big worm leaves an impassable terrain fix (reported in my PTR feedback)
- Some way to see if someone is starting the helltide hearts event (maybe they only loaded 1 or 2 hearts in). Maybe a small bell they can ring in the middle of the event to call others to come help contribute man-power / mats.
- More events like this in the helltide would be rad
NMD
NMD Events are still hit and miss.
Last Stand. If you get a dungeon with poison mobs, these guys just die. They need some DR or some mad HP buffs (or make them immune to ground effects).
Potent Blood. This one is the hunter who drains the animals that spawn. His drain takes too long so its really hard to get full mastery. He wants 5 animals but the animals take like 5-10sec to spawn in then another 5 seconds to drain. They need to spawn faster.
All pick up the bloodstones or mechanical boxes or carved stones needs to let you pick them all up at once. Or if in a party, let us hold multiple at once.
All the ‘click’ to free the prisoners needs to be instant or removed. The game is about killing monsters, so it should be about that and not clicking random stuff. Remove the painpoints.
Gauntlet rooms. These still dont give any xp. Needs to be changed / buffed. It was like this since beta. Why in a game about killing monsters for XP you dont get any xp for killing these monsters?
Butcher is kinda stupid on minion builds. He knocks them away so you get very low uptime on dps. And when you’re just starting out he can kill minions easily. In the necro section I described that all minions should be unstoppable when you are. And also should be immune to knockbacks.
The Pit
Materials. Getting materials then having to spend money to convert them just seems like a blizzard created problem that every player is having to suffer / pay for. We already have gold issues, making these bags just to convert mats that should just drop naturally in the pit is actually so effing stupid. Like I suggested in my PTR feedback, once you kill the boss and you get the reward at the end - just take 10% of all nethiron that drops and convert it to Ingolith, then take 10% of all that ingolith and convert it into obducite at the same rates / ratio as the alchemist bags do now, and just remove the alchemist transmute entirely. Making the alchemist recipe cheaper isnt the best option because its still annoying. Yes you saved us from 1000 clicks, but this shouldnt’ve even been an issue. I’m not a dev and it took me 10seconds to come up with a better solution. DONT CREATE PROBLEMS. CREATE CONTENT! LIke if I was a manager and my people did this, I would tell them to make all mats drop in the pit after a certain level and move on. Even if you think the low mats arent useful now, its always good to have it handy because it saves you time if you want to reroll something or if you get a new upgrade. And unless there is an issue with reaching the materials cap, then I dont see why anyone would care. Even if you do reach the cap (hardcore blasters), make it convert into gold or something. Voila - problem solved.
My alternate solution / suggestion to the above issue - is to make enough mats drop so that players dont have to backtrack: lets break it down using some logic.
Ok so we all know that every piece of gear needs 12 ranks. Obducite is from Pit 1-30 for ranks 1-4, then Ingolith from 31-60 and ranks 5-8 and finally Nethrion from 61-90+ and ranks 9-12.
So from pits 1-30, you need to give a player exactly how many obducite they would need:
Rank 1 = 10, Rank 2 = 20, Rank 3 = 30, Rank 4 = 40. So one piece needs 100 obducite (which will leave you at rank 4). Assuming everyone is a barb because they have the most slots = 12 gear slots x 100 obducite = 1200 obducite. This is the amount required from Pits Level 1 to 30.
So what needs to happen is that the pit needs to give 1200 obducite by the time you reach level 30 (or close to it for optimal design).
The issue right now is that because you fly through the early stages of the pit, you dont get enough low materials (because you’re jumping 3 levels per pit), causing you to have to backtrack and farm lower content to bring your gear in line (upgraded).
In order to alleviate this, my idea is that the game needs to incentive pushing, therefore, the pit should give cumulatively more and more materials as you push - so much so that every new tier of pit gives you all of the rewards of every pit level below it (in essence giving you a cumulative total).
This also means that the early / lower levels of the pit will give very low amounts of materials at the start, then exceedingly more scaling into the deepest levels of the pit (exponential). So if you make the Cumulative Total after pit 30 around 300 to 400 obducite, it means someone only needs to push Pit 33 or 34 to have enough obducite to make their gear rank 4 throughout. And removes the need (actually disincentivizes the need) to farm low level pits. (Note that if you give only 1 material per level, until level 30, you will be giving 465 obducite cumulatively at level 30)
30+29+28…+3+2+1 = 465 OR (lets get mathy)
Total = n/2 x (a + z). Where N equals the number of levels. A equals the lowest level and B equals the highest level
Total = 30/2 x (1 + 30) = 15 x 31 = 465
Obviously the idea will need to be continued for Ingolith and Nethiron (I’ll leave that to you - hopefully I’ve explained it well enough) but it should ensure there are much more materials dropping and lessen the need to use the costly transmute at the alchemist. Infact just remove that and use either this solution or the one suggested above. And if someone does reach the ‘material cap’, as above just convert any ‘excess’ materials into gold. Voila both issues solved. Hire me!
Affixes:
Thanks for clearing the affixes after the boss is dead. I suggested the immune bubble like NMD in my PTR feedback but this works well - cheers!
Alot of the affixes in the dungeon part itself are still kinda BS. In essence everything ‘bad’ needs to be CLEARLY TELEGRAPHED.
Frozen, is kinda BS that it starts damaging you before you see the visual indicator. For some reason someone thought it was cute to go from no circle to showing a circle - just show the circle straight away. And make it red. Now I see it appear like 3 seconds AFTER I die. In the pit EVERYTHING hurts, so all the small annoyances come out into the light.
Shock towers go through like 3 rooms, the range on this ability needs to be reduced. Its hard to see where they start or end sometimes with the ‘lack of wall clipping’ for doorways and archways (stuff is always blocking my ‘player LOS’). This is an issue with the ‘far’ view distance, it needs to be polished in some dungeons / tilesets. Pretty-much every indoor map.
Walls - waller is BS for minion builds. It just absorbs all missiles making effective dmg 0. Cant command them to attack ‘breakable segment’ of the wall, I hit it with a curse and do like 5 blights on it and they still dont attack it. The ‘breakable’ part of the wall is often out of LOS. The best you can hope for is that the ‘breakable’ part spawns directly between where your mages are and where they were attacking and maybe a few stray missiles hit it and break it. All parts of the wall should be breakable imo. And minions should prioritize walls like they do blood blisters. Once again this ties into bad minion AI.
Frozen Spiders. Their volley has no ground indicator, you only see it after you’re dead. Thats on normal monsters btw. God forbid you get a bunch of elite cold spiders, you might as well leave and reset (rip hardcore players). D4 needs to be balanced so that it doesnt just become like D3 a ‘fishing’ bonanza. Their dmg is just too strong for full resistance cap + armour cap. It feels lke this game is turning into POE. If you stand still for more than half a second you get targeted by ground effects and you die. Similar to frozen this needs a proper red circle on the ground indicating a hazard. All bad affixes need a clear telegraph.|
Boss Room / Affixes:
Persistent ground effects. Any persistant ground effects are really annoying. Its hard enough trying to run around like a headless chicken for 5min, but when theres ground effects too that snare you or blind you or immobilise you it feels very punishing. I think its fine to have ground effects during the boss fight but they need to dissapate alot quicker.
Drowned Sea Hag - Her little puddles slow you on hit, and even if you move you can get one shot from the explosion - which is much bigger than the puddle animation size suggests. This needs a look into.
Oneshots. Still getting one shots with capped armour, capped res and currently 65k life. Almost every item has a GA on max life. Still have a bunch of masterworking to finish off, most things are between rank 4 and rank 8, and gems arent maxed (gem dust / gold is the limiting factor as mentioned). Maybe with maxed gems and a max life elixir I could get to 75-80k life but what is the expected HP value that you expect players to have? Not everyone is a barb with 4 weapons that can wear doombringer without consequence and get 160k life. Same thing as AOZ I feel that one shots are fine if they are telegraphed, right now its just like oh you died because there was a frozen under your feet that you couldnt see until 3 seconds AFTER you’re dead. This isnt good design, it demands perfect play and not everyone can do this for hours and hours and hours on end to grind up pit levels.
Its as the devs said, having infinite scaling on things and going in there for hundreds of hours makes you care more about stuff you wouldnt normally care about. It also shows all the flaws in the system, and I dont think that doing a mass damage reduction nerf to all the mobs in the pit is the right answer either. We want to get better at it, but go play games like hades and check the telegraphing. Then give us the same clear indicators / telegraphs on the ground in PITS and see what we can do.
Fishing. Fishing in Pits starts at around GR90. Either you’re happy with doing a 5-10min boss fight and dodging for your life (everything oneshots as above) or you find a boss with adds and blow it up with Elixir of Holy Bolts. As much as I think holy bolts is fun, I dont really like fishing.
Insta leave conditions (that need to be fixed to reduce fishing):
- Pit Boss without adds from the start (some spawn adds starting at 50%, others dont spawn any)
- Cold Spiders (as above in affixes these are BS and need clearer telegraphing)|
QOL.
- On the PTR we saw a small summary of all items that were picked up appear above your health orb. I think this was good and should come back. Now stuff gets picked up and all the text is just overlayed with each other so its impossible to read. So to check you gotta go to your materials tab every time (not good). Having that small summary pop up was incredibly elegant and useful, dunno why it was removed? Please bring it back.
- This has to do with backtracking (doing lower pit levels for mats) but I think until this is solved, every pit that you open needs to ‘save’ its level. What I mean is that if you’re farming obducite, at level 30, it needs to remember your choice next time you open the obelisk (now it doesnt and goes to my current max and i have to scroll up every time). Unless you do the max pit level then it goes to the new max that you unlocked (i.e. while pushing). I’m pretty sure D3 had this tech and we all know they had spaghetti code - please bring it to D4.
Stacks
Stacks are still not effing right in this game and I dont know how to convey the message. Guys people do not want to sit around and friggen manage their inventory for hours and hours and hours, they want to kill mobs, get loot, parse the loot and if its GOOD, then and only then, spend time on it to make it better. Everything needs to stack to 9999, i dont care what it is. And don’t tell me its a server issue / code issue, stop using recycled spaghetti code from D3. We all paid good money for this game, for actual content, not to go through the same friggen hassles that d3 went through but now with a different crew. Literally call a meeting with anyone involved in the big decisions on D3, then do a case study and find out everything that went wrong and how they fixed it. In the hope that your current team can learn from this and not make the same makes (which frankly it looks like you are).
Stash Space
Ok great so we got all the aspects out of the codex. The codex is great and what we asked for - it took friggen ages but thanks and well done.
But now we go from hording aspects to hording:
- Greater affixes. Normal 925 legendary gear is trash. Blues and rares are trash. So you’re just keeping uniques or legendaries with 1GA or more. The stash doesnt let you search between 1, 2, 3 or 4 (pog) greater affixes. The game doesnt let you filter greater affixes for specific stats. So you STILL have to look through greater affix items and see what the greater affix landed on and if its good or worth keeping. Give them different colours and let us filter / search for them in the stash. Not to mention out in the world (more below)
- Boss mats. Boss mats are plentiful and thats good, but why does it only stack to 50? Gave this feedback ages ago. If you’re going to push us to do the boss ladder, give us more QOL. Now I have a full tab of boss mats. Every season we get more and more boss mats. Its great that we’re getting bosses, but man what about our inventory / stash… Just make it go into the materials tab, its even called a boss material, so why isnt in there already???
- Elixirs, its cool that you buffed / changed elixirs but now there are 2 versions of the same elixir instead of 1. So elixirs space just got doubled. Its actually impossible for us to hold all NMD Sigils, Boss Mats, Elixirs and Misc Scrolls of Amnesia in our consumbles tab - and as such it begins to bleed into the Stash. Eventually just clogging that up. Like I suggested previously, you have a good elixir quick menu, just make all elixirs go into the materials tab and make it accessible it via the quick menu.
- In general, everything that isnt equippable gear should just go into a currency / materials tab. Why do we need to have it clog up our stash. I need you to take what you did for gem dust, and literally apply it to everything else in the game. Otherwise this game is going to turn into POE with a Currency Tab and a Fragments Tab and Map Tab…
Inventory Management
Items still take too long to parse through. Anyone who’s atleast 12-24 hours into the season knows that all you care about are 925 items with atleast 1 GA, some gigachads might be only looking for 2 or more greater affixes (if they have full 1GA gear).
To help make it easier to parse through loot we need:
- GA Beam Colours. Beams need to be different for 1GA, 2GA, 3GA and 4GA. They should just go from orange to red with special star icons and different colour beams. I thought you said you were looking into this. And all we got is a star? It needs a different colour item tag (font), it needs a different colour beam, it needs a coloured border in the inventory. You’re really killing the hype by not having this. Surely it cant be that hard, just literally steal the D3 primal spaghetti code and add some RBG colours.
- Loot effing Filter. Jesus guys are you really going to make us beg for this. The game still needs a loot filter. Please please please. Been saying it since beta. Let us pick our threshold for loot and send everything else to auto-salvage. Auto-salvage is one of the things that you guys have actually done right. Remove all of the white and blue items from WT4, like you said you would (they still show up from various sources), and make everything that isnt filtered by our loot filter automatically go to salvage (just drop the mats on the ground).
- Filter by / Categories: Greater Affixes (1,2,3,4), Item Slot (Helm, Chest, Gloves, Weapon), Weapon Type (1H Sword, 2H Axe, 2H Scythe), Normal Stat or Greater Affix Stat (Int, Will, Str, Dex, Max Life, All the different Res [Fire, Cold, Lightning, Shadow, Poison], All the diffferent passives etc [Skele / Mage / Golem Mastery]), Autosalvage threshold - have two columns here, rarity (common white, magic blue, rare yellow, legendary, greater affix) and tier (normal, sacred, ancestral)
Ninja Nerfs
Guys, I dont know why blizzard is so scared of telling us about the changes. Yes people will be upset about nerfs, but not telling us is worse. There are people whose literal career is making guides, if you dont get them all of the information to make the best, most informed choices, then we’re better off just putting all our skill points in every basic ability and spender ability. Like seriously, stop being scared about the backlash and stop sharing ‘new’ info to random interview websites. Have EVERYTHING on your OWN website / patch notes. Like its okay if you forget a few minor things here n there, but seriously this is terrible and its annoying to anyone that wants to have a go at theorycrafting. And I dont wanna hear that you dont have enough resources, you literally have one of the biggest gaming studios with the biggest number of employees - and someone can’t type out the tempering changes? BS. We hear it second hand on a podcast, with literally no specifics. Please I know this sounds harsh but it will cost you more in the long run if this is not fixed.
Gems
Did gem dust get ninja nerfed? If so why? This is the first time I’ve levelled a character and not had enough gem dust to make the highest gems… I’m actually like 25-30 hours into the season and still dont have full max rank gems in my gear. And I’m full 925 with atleast 1 GA in every slot and pushing pit. Wtf happened? Also did it always cost so much gold to make gems, this feels like another ninja nerf (related to gold issue above). I’ve actually had to go back to helltide and NMD just to farm gem dust, because I feel like I need the power bump for the pit. If the pit just dropped more dust this would be a non issue.
After extensive playing with alts and doing dungeons, I’ve noticed that gem dust actually scales with player level. If you’re lower level you get less gem dust / fragments, but when you level up it gives you more. Why? Whatever you guys changed since S3, it needs to be reverted. Max gems have become like this stupid grind that requires NMD or Helltide. Guys once I’m finished NMD (glyphs to 21) and Helltide (max codex / rewards board) I dont wanna go back. Dont force me. This goes back to my General Philosophy. Don’t make us do ‘old content’ that we’ve outscaled. Or make it scale with us and make it better - simple. NOT HAPPY WITH THIS CHANGE.
Another thing thats cucking gems is having to spend gem fragments making elixirs / incense… Once again not sure wtf happened but I dont like it.
Glyphs
Extra glyph xp buff felt good. I also wish the blessing glyph xp was baseline and didnt need to be a blessing. Also the blessings that we lost from last seson I think just need to be BASELINE - anything that was QOL like horse boost CD, Elixir increased duration etc etc
Obols
Extra cap is nice but why not just make it infinite? You spend enough time running back and forth to sell / salvage anyway if you stockpile too much obols. Maybe I wanna just stockpile everything and get an alt kitted out in 925 gear (a flaw that D3 had). Its great that the vendor gives GA items too, but do they need to give white and blue items in WT4? They stopped dropping in wt4 so why do they come from the obols vendor in WT4? Everytime I feel blizz makes a change like this, theres always a few things that slip through the cracks. Needs alot of polish.
Rare Items
Rare items are literally useless now, in the same bucket as white and blue items. Just make them stop dropping from all sources period. And if they were to drop just make it auto-salvage and drop the mats on the ground. This is 100000% better. I literally stopped picking up yellows after a few hours into the game. (When I was sure veiled crystals wouldnt be an issue anymore - thanks for that change btw. It was so bad on PTR so its refreshing not having to worry about veiled crystals anymore). People should stop using yellows in WT2 or WT3 at the latest.
Masterworking
Appreciate the animation removal for non-crit ranks. But honestly the animation is a waste of time, you can just hover over the item and see it sooner…
Would still like to see +4 and +12 buttons. As I said in my PTR Feedback, at proper end end game (after weeks / months into the season), people are going to get tired of the clicking. So having a +4 would mean a quick check of the result, then reset or keep going. And if you have infinite mats / gold, you just +12, check and reset, +12, check and reset etc etc.
Masterworking Reset. You sneaky mofos. Tempering resets are so expensive now! On PTR it was just 1 million gold (it didnt say, it just deducted it like the banks). Now it says the mats and its 5million gold. WTF happened??? Btw this is regardless of rank too. So if your item is rank 1 its 5 million, if its rank 12 its 5 million… LOL. Definitely needs a bit more thought, at a minimum it should be a sliding scale with a pro rated cost based on rank. 5million is okay for max rank (12) but lower ranks should only be like 10k or 20k
Blizzard Math. I reported this in my S4 ptr feedback notes but the masterworking math is janky / wrong. Items dont actually gain +5% for ranks 1-3, 5-7, 9-12 (+45%) and +25% every 4 levels with ranks 4, 8 and 12 (+75%) on a crit. If so then it should be +120% (or 2.2x) on an orange crit. And the math is nowhere close, its always less than expected. For ease of reading I call a blue crit a SINGLE, a yellow crit a DOUBLE and a orange crit a TRIPLE.
EXAMPLE
Rank 4 GA Max Life on Chest - SINGLE (Blue)
1310 is the base GA for Max Life
+15% for ranks 1-3 = 1506.50
+25% for rank 4 (crit) = 1834.00 (expected multiplier = 1.4x which is correct [15+25%])
ACTUAL VALUE = 1659 (actual multiplier = 1.266x, so 14% LESS THAN EXPECTED).
Props to whoever came up with the skele mages cast twice affix roll being 45% because if you apply a 2.2x multiplier (it goes to 99% - on a Triple / Orange) which is just kind of pleasing on some nerdy level. I’m hoping in the background its actually 45.45% so it actually lands on 100% with a triple / orange crit. But we will never know because blizzard doesnt show the decimals. Maybe if I can get super lucky or if I want to grind it out, I’ll try and post a screenshot to reddit if I hit 99% or 100%.
And I think this is part of the problem. I say part because I’m not sure if the decimals themselves can account for this much variance. And if the % per rank / crit is wrong then please tell us. We’ve been working under the assumption that what Joe P told us in the dev chat is correct (5% to all stats per rank except for every 4th its +25% for one stat on a crit or colour change).
Masterworking issues / TIP. As the masterworking goes up in rank, the roll range gets larger - and I’m not all too sure why. So if you want to re-enchant your item, it just makes it harder to get that perfect roll once its fully MW at 12/12. Personally I disagree with this, the roll range should stay the same. Its already hard enough to nail perfect stats. But until they change it, the best course of action is to enchant your weapon to a perfect or near perfect roll of the stat you desire BEFORE masterworking it. Unless you have infinite gold then it doesnt matter.
Scattered Prisms
This was a problem on PTR and its also a problem on live. Its just too rare. Its a static drop off the worldboss which is every 3-4 hours, and a rare drop off random elites. Considering the amount of NMD and Pits that we do, we should be getting bucket-loads more than we do. I only just managed to get full gem sockets in my gear after 48 hours of in-game time. (Also still cant afford the best gems in all my gear lol - due to gem dust / gold issue)
Random QOL
I’m just gonna rapid fire a bunch of QOL things that I think would be nice (some of which I already mentioned):
- Helltide. Really like the new helltide, the density is cool and the new boss / events are sick. Would really like to see some QOL if somone places 1 heart down, maybe it throws a notification that someone is attempting to start the summoning event.
- Helltide hellworm just leaves an impassable terrain where they pop up. Sometimes it blocks chests / loot.
- Helltide hellworm knocks you off your mount.
- Sell all button at vendor. Not everyone wants to mark every item as junk just to sell all items in one go. Please add a button to all vendors (sells everything that isnt marked as ‘favourite’). Its nice that it has that little icon showing it still has a codex upgrade. Good touch!
- Mentioned this before but blessings from previous seasons just need to be rolled in baseline, CDR on Horse Boost, Elixir Duration, Glyph Xp, Anything else cool etc.
- Boss Mats and Summoning. Would be nice if the boss summoning ‘pedestals’ would just read how many mats you have in your bags as well as your stash. And if they would respawn after the boss dies. Leaving, resetting and running back in is stupid / archaic.
- Stygian stone droprate seems low compared to PTR. Not sure why it was nerfed?
- Let mindcages stack and effect the entire overworld (all non-instanced content).
- Loot filter with an ‘auto-salvage threshold’. E.g. ‘Auto salvage all items below: 925 legendary’
- GA with new beam colours, text colours and border colours
- Gold droprates buffed / costs fixed or nerfed.
- SSF. I would like to try and solo a world boss
- Test Dummies. I would like to see a test dummy with a dps meter, or a summonable boss that I can whale on and choose whether it fights back, and also see what my dps is for single target and aoe situations.
Dev Streams
More Colin F. We need more Colin, hes down to earth, doesnt mind swearing (which is understandable given the frustration) and hes based. Colin, if you’re reading this please come back for the next dev streams and also help push some of these changes. Will leave it up to you mate, you seem to know what the people want and what is reasonable or not. This isnt to say I dont like the other people, they all seem nice - I just think Colin is gold.
Questions
Heres a bunch of questions I’ve been wondering about. If I’m lucky enough to have any of these questions asked, my name is pronounced Tie-lish-ee-ous (for Adam =)):
(Please dont ask these questions if they already get answered by any info from the dev stream - please and thank you)
- S4 went a long way to rebuilding the game but alot of people believe that they were just paid beta testers up until now and that S4 is what should’ve been out at 1.0 release. That being said, what are the chances we could get the expansion for free? And when will we hear more expansion news? (time is running out!)
- We heard talks of runewords pre-beta. Will runewords be coming to diablo 4 in a way that isnt ‘locked’ behind an expansion?
- Mercenaries. Alot of people were expecting S4 to be the season of mercenaries, especially with Iron Wolves from D2 (and disappointed when it wasnt). Is this still a possibility? This could help bridge the gap between solo and group players - by letting you have up to 3 mercenaries while solo, but upto a limit of 4 ‘players’ in your group.
- What was the reason to make masterworking so expensive? (Gold issues currently)
- What was the reason to make masterworking ‘resettable’ but not tempering? Have you thought about high end players who brick perfect 3GA items? Could we get a currency from Pit 150-200 or Tormented Bosses that could reset tempering rerolls or add +5 or +10 rerolls? Could we make GA items roll with +5 extra rolls per greater affix that is on the item (a 1GA will have 10 rerolls, a 3GA (pog) would have 20 rerolls).
- Will we still get a season theme with the expansion? If not, will the expac introduce new systems that will keep us busy for the forseeable future (few months)?
- Profane mindcage is cool but was there ever any ideas to take it further? Make it stack? Make it apply to all of the overworld and not just helltides? Right now one of the main issues that stops me going back into the overworld is that its considered ‘old content’ once you get passed monster level 100/110. If you let it scale it could become ‘more relevant’ for longer.
- Going back to farm low level pits feels bad. Its effed and I dont like it. Could you please make all materials drop at high pit levels (90+)? Transmuting is BS because of the gold costs. Just remove the alchemist transmute and make pits drop every type of currency above a certain level. My other suggestion as noted above is that pits have a cumulative total reward. I.e. each pit you clear will give all of the previous levels’ pit rewards. Its seriously something we need to think about because the current system is unnessarily grindy for no reason. It goes back to ‘stop forcing us to do content we’ve already out-geared’. Like going back to pit 30 for obducite, or going back to kill level 100 monsters for whispers / gold - it frankly doesnt feel good. I realise its a ‘casual’ game so then just give us more player agency and the choice to scale it ourselves.|
Thanks for reading and I hope you found it useful and food for thought.
Kind regards,
Tylicius.
(Had to edit because the table format showed up good in the preview but terrible on the actual forums)