Hello and welcome to my feedback for S4!
This contains the following topics: Overall (feel), (my) Character('s progression), Battlepass, Season, Helltides, Items & Itemization, Random likes, Random suggestions, Random dislikes, A few minor bugs, A few questions, The Pit & Gold.
Overall
- I had fun until lvl 100, not touching dungeons (and not because you made it easy, but because I had cool mechanics in helltide). Pits made me uninstall after the battlepass cosmetics put me off.
Character
- I played a summon necro, winging it at start, as I determined what fits where.
- Until 60-65 I played it my way, no guide, no nothing
- After the 1st paragon board, I got into 2nd board and thought I won’t find the right one too soon, so I caved in and took Raxx’s paragon board and the affixes to hunt for (I already had 2/3 right correct in most slots, which made me feel good)
- After 100, I discovered my main skills choices were only 1 off from the build I decided to follow
- had Corpse tendrils instead of Decrepify
- picked P4wnyhof’s version because it didn’t abuse any bugs, to my knowledge (just so I couldn’t blame myself on using any)
…and because he’s just an awesome kind of person that provides content and good mood, not just min-maxing and competition
- discovered sadly that
- Corpse Tendrils aspect doesn’t give the crit to minions as well, so ditched it (and I think that’s a bug)
- darkness Corpse tendrils doesn’t proc effectively the Shadowblight
- did 100% of the journey, but didn’t have patience for tormented bosses and Lilith
Battlepass
- If I could decide where my season pass money would go, it would be:
- 60% to Helltides
- 15% to itemization because we have more crafting
- 15% to class balance (not the OP necro part, but bringing new builds to attention…although let’s be honest, I waited for a long time for summon necro to be good, just didn’t expect it to be THIS good)
- 10% to QOL
- 0 or negative debt and community service to Thanos for the Pit
- 0 to battlepass cosmetics, which while they had a good aim (the Roman/Greek crazed? emperor/Olympian), also had a poor execution with the effects and over-the-top details (flowers on a character that represents grim, hello?) which made them way not too friendly to straight audience to even touch them
- more and more I believe this game is not for straight guys
- even the Macabre dance emote, which was awesome by itself, was touched by the plague of you know what with the aura
- The (olive leaves?) wreath didn’t cover hair, you had to get a soldier cut to use it and that was a downer (not you, Debbie!) for the look I was going for
Season
- At first, I thought I made my character in non-season by accident/bug, because I wasn’t greeted with a cinematic and just went to town.
- I went to helltides because I read about them, then found something that started the quest.
- The Iron wolves tier rewards interface reminded me of previous events (lunar and the Christmas one), not a season…I had almost forgotten that the Bloodseekers season had it too. So my first impression was…ah this is cheap…oh wait, it’s been there infact in seasons too. Going forward, I’d keep the simple tiers window to events and have something else worthy of a season quest chain rewards window.
- Learned the hard way (not really, just died alot in WT3 when I used Mind elixirs for journey) to not go into Blood Maidens with 300+ cinders, but this is good, because we need more ways to fail, so we can later say we got better at the game. Also, juicy HC rips.
- The elixirs
- Mindcage added some difficulty back into the experience, I only wish I could stack 1 more for the effect, to get a better challenge
- Holy bolts…what more to say. HOLY!BOLTS! If you lacked aoe dmg, this was the way to go with projectiles. I didn’t think they’re bugged until everyone cried they were, was just thinking how nice it is to have an elixir that solves single target builds problems.
- Momentum was good after I reduced the movement speed rolls count on gear (and with a momentary relapse of judgement later, swapped to double ms amulet for whispers, then forgot about it)
Helltides
- Love what you added to it and it’s no wonder that it’s heavily incentivized, because it has:
- all mechanics from bloodseekers season
- the Christmas event mechanics
- not sure about Lunar event, because all I remember was finishing it fast and getting (the girl with) the dragon tattoo
- open world! and I’m an open world enjoyer
- elixirs (this season)
- Only issue I had is that sometimes you want to go to town and can’t because you keep being swarmed. This is something I remember hating in D3 and is a possible vector for uninstalling.
- I could use a challenge to kill all Blood Maidens (so far seen 4+: Anidia, Exsari, Vyola, Dhire and I forgot the rest) and seeing them give live birth to 4 Bloodborne (born from blood?) was chefs kiss
- From a hunter-gatherer perspective, I felt more like a gatherer, than a hunter, because mobs came to me alot more often. I’m almost enticed to try a thorns build.
- a bit overtuned, I’d reduce 10-20% density
- Sense of progression
- from my understanding, regardless of difficulty, you have the same +level of monsters (3)
- you could progressively increase their levels across difficulty: +1 in WT1, +2 in WT2, +3 in WT3, +4 in WT4
- that way players feel another kind of progression
- dying with 500+ cinders to a hellborne explosion pisses me off
Items
- For 1-100: less modifiers made me worry, but there’s a more clear impact of gearing, seeing bigger upgrades as I level (or at least that’s the perception). I enjoyed not reading every single item’s affixes. In lvl 100/content with 925s, NMDs kept the variety and pit just gave the ones you’d stay and read affixes of. If you want trifecta stats, you have to do pit.
- For endgame/lvl100 gameplay: when I see rares get 2 affixes and Legendaries get 4 (yes, I count the aspect as one too) I think my road to getting 3 wanted base affixes enough times to also hit the right temperings will take more than the game will hold my interest. I’d have rares get 3 base affixes at 100.
- Enchant removes the greater affix and I sort of don’t like it. One ah crap moment, later just more things to vendor. It’s click bait, that’s what it is.
- I couldn’t understand removing the chance to fail masterworking (or was it tempering? one of them anyway).
- I’d love to see a consumable that lets you temper 1 more time (can use as many consumables as they drop…and hopefully not make it BoA)
Random likes
- icon on map at alchemist reminding you of available potion upgrades
- Seasonal cosmetics interface having images, not the 3d model right away, so only if you choose to see the item, it loads the 3d model
- I can speed on horse in town
- You can do the season tiers again for new characters, which means you can just play the game 4x to 100 and get 1 uber unique. It’s long and tedious enough vs farming materials to discourage leveling enough characters to get all uber uniques. (effect, but not a like: Barb is at a clear disadvantage here)
Random suggestions
- Readd the gear upgrading, got so used to it that it looks like my gear is suboptimal, even if it isn’t. The pit is a horrible experience that should have never seen the light on prod.
- Tempering recipes: “A more powerful recipe is already known” - why do they still drop then?
- Allow Exit dungeon to work inside the Gauntlet Trial. It makes 0 sense from UX perspective to tie exiting content to an interface where I go to check my progress. It’s like adding you’d add Exit Dungeon emote to leaderboards. Doesn’t.Make.Sense.
- The Codex of power window at the Occultist has some buttons that don’t look like buttons (the filters by icon)
- => You have alot of work to do on teaching the players INGAME all they can do with your interface
- Add more traversables to the world. Make a fun minigame/events about traversables, with the goal of puzzles from cellars being offered to the open world.
- Less pinnacle/top bossing in season journey. I’d rather x10 each boss than 1 Tormented Boss. I’d rather Lilith per difficulty than only Uber Lilith. Outside of campaign, she just an unused boss except for a carry for Season journey and it’s sad.
- Increase interaction range for the hole leading to Varshan, but not the size of the hole. It feels like only 1 place lets you do it. We don’t want to give Elias an opportunity to fall and go head-in to become tormented in another hole.
- The Whisper for 7 harbingers should easily be a 3 or 5-pointer. You know exactly where to go for the Blood Maiden and you finish her faster than you would 7 harbingers
Random dislikes
- I’m not ok with Salvage all items destroying uniques as well
- The Beast of Mordaine in wolf form looks so unfed that it survived…something I’m not allowed to say here.
- Wallers in tight closed quarters in timed content are uninstall material. They only consume everybody’s time.
Bugs
- Unyielding Commander’s Aspect doesn’t have the minion tag in aspects interface, but affects minions
- The small icon showing you can upgrade your potion is not always displayed on world map, only top-right minimap
- The homing projectiles shot by Blood Maidens didn’t expire (died alot up to WT4 to that)
Questions
- Are chests considered monsters for the purpose of Profane mindcage?
- Can you get WT4 rewards in a lvl 75+ helltide in WT3 via Profane mindcage?
The Pit
- We had 1 GR-like experience, now we have 2 (and this one is much worse). Who thought more of the bad part of D3 would be better for D4? I hated that mindless ramping difficulty (and many others did too), that I’ve seen in D3 as well. I hate this power progression tied into mechanics I hate. I won’t be buying the next season pass if things like this happen again. This is D4, are you so afraid to make it your own?
- The leveling experience looks like it got balanced around Pit 200 being the new top. It felt so trivialized that it’s not a game as much as Click Accept to hit level 100 if you don’t go to NMD/use Mindcage. It annihilates the 1st time experience and discovery from the game. And this is an issue for new players and retention because if they get used to this, it’s the base with wrong expectations, going forward. And I say wrong because they’ll expect to grow in power as they learn the game and the pit slams any resemblance of feeling good when you get to 7 min grinding a boss.
- This is also the reason I’m not organizing this feedback more than it already is. When players see examples of “I don’t care enough/don’t have passion for what I’m working/I don’t have time for this but a manager wanted it so here it is.” it translates into players thinking “If you don’t bother, why should I?”, then will just quit and then you wonder where the playerbase went. Releasing/giving the go to release for incomplete/WIP content still holds you accountable because you decide to release it and it hurts your career.
- The masterworking rewards from Pit are too few and the costs ramp easily. It doesn’t jump enough and when it does, it’s already too late.
- It dilutes the experience to a full stop. It is a spectrum of difficulty that is just not fun. It’s a cheap trick that moves from the designer to the player the decision of how much difficulty is fun and gives too many options. You could reduce the tiers 5 times, to 40, and it would still be too diluted, to signal a difficulty jump to the player and make him learn and adapt.
- The RNG-picked layouts detract from a cohesive experience. I’m playing Slaughterhouse simulator 2024, not Diablo 4.
- If you die from the boss, you get resurrected 2 levels before it, having to walk 2 checkpoints instead of 1 (this is a bug) (happened with Slither boss in Pit 46)
Gold
- I understand the need for gold sinks and friction, but you need to do your research/analytics on how much time it takes to perfect 1 character with your values, then think how many perfect characters should a player have in a season, to enjoy it, but not do everything in the game, so he comes for the next one (because realistically I don’t think it’s healthy to pull the Loot Reborn rabbit out of the hat every season). I really can’t think that in the whole week of PTR, nobody reached 70-90% of a perfect character.
- If you want to stop gold sellers
- you can make gold BoA (but please don’t, as it’s a taboo to bind)
- or you can also limit gold trading to:
- 100m per day (24 real hours)
- 700m per week (24x7 real hours)
- OR 100-150m per 3 hours of playtime (not afk, not in town) (in WT4 this means 3.3m per whisper cache done in casual style at 10-15 minutes = 13.2m-19.8m/hour = 39.6-59.4m/h…still 100-150m is heaps above that)
- this would be calculated per difficulty as (whisper avg. time to complete) x (whisper cache gold in difficulty you trade) x (timespan when you can trade)
- this would not let you get WT4-achievable gold quantities while playing lower difficulties
- “oh I played for 1 month, I should be allowed 100B trade” no no, you need to play if you want rewards
- this way, you don’t get more in 1 trade than you would have farming all day and you incentivize trading tokens, bartering, which imho is more healthy for economy
- limited max gold traded/time is so it’s rewarding to actually play the game, not cutting corners
- and then make gold not mean anything for trading by making it abundant
- this way you have only gold friction between players/in economy, while also letting players perfect their characters
- You shouldn’t be able to hand-me-down get all gold to afford all gear upgrades in 1 day (of course wallet warriors will cry, but you have to ask yourselves how long you would want your playerbase to actually play the game in a season), but you also shouldn’t have to farm a week just to afford to upgrade your whole gearset to masterwork 12 with maxed gems
- On more accessible/abundant: If you think spending days doing whispers to afford to perfect your gear is fun, I suggest you analyze how much gold is needed to complete 1 item, then multiply that by 9-12, then spend a week doing whispers, then ask yourself if you in your right mind would spend any more on this game.
It’s not fun and it’s another reason to quit before you’re done progressing 1 character. And we should have fun with more than 1 build in a season. I’d say 3-5 total or 1-2 per class but 3 classes at most would be better.