Season 4 The GOOD, The BAD, and the BUGLY! 🐛

First an overall grade = B+. I have played quite a bit for the last couple days and can make some judgements here. Overall the game is much better. The storage issues are gone, its easier to compare items, crafting is fun, and the new season is a hit. However, it is not a smash hit. There are lingering issues here and so I present a list for devs on what works (GOOD), what does not work (BAD), and what is either a BUG or is just UGLY aka BUGLY!

Lets keep this post civil and respectful in your responses. Devs have worked hard here and overall this relaunch is a success.

THE GOOD: :angel:
1] Aspects to codex. Such a great change. Free up inventory. Max ones turn yellow. Clean and effective.

2] Smooth! Framerate was solid for me in all areas of games. Never had 1 slowdown and that is quite extraordinary with so many ppl in helltide.

3] Endless opportunities to hunt items. The endless grind for items that hit what you want in tempers and masterworks and greater affixes is a stroke of genius. There is really no end here and this will entertain the masses all season long going for that perfect and elusive item.

4] Crafting system. This is hit for me overall. I do have to bring up the fact it gets expensive quickly with gold. I also have bricked a couple items already which I cover in the bad section.

5] Rares can eventually be ignored. I wasn’t sold on this before but I am now. Its ok for items to eventually be replaced and inferior. You get to the point you only need to pick up legos and uniques and this saves a lot of time. Totally on board with this.

6] Momentum / Artillery Elixir. These are really fun and relevant elixirs. Momentum is so good running dungeons and speeding helltides while artillery is awesome when you use the helltide +10 level thing.

7] Helltides esp Ritual Site. This is smartly mirrored from S2. These are hubs of activity and all players should keep an eye out for these. The amount of items, experience, and such can just go off the chart as it naturally gathers all players to it with the map flash symbol when active so and then you encounter other player hell tide threat bar monsters. Love the hate meter thing as well.

8] The Pit. Havent got too far but it is a nice way to challenge your build. No challenges left = bored players. Bored players quit. I would like to see more ways to interact here. I will give one example as this brings the game in line to a sort of mapping system that is so popular and needed. When you enter the Pit you can enter in one Pit Crystal on the pit interface. These generally drop from pit chest at end but also rarely from other aspects of game. They have rare, legendary, unique, and mythical (purple) rarity. Here is my build of this with 3 examples:

Rare Pulsing Crystal of Lesser Duplication
Rewards - Up 9% (5-10)
Monsters - Contains 21% more enemies. (15-25%)
Lesser Duplication - Rewards at end chest are 50% duplicated if you did not die.
Pulsing - You pulse every 30 seconds. This is like a mini blast wave shrine.

Legendary Power Crystal of Greater Duplication
Rewards - Up 19% (11-20%)
Monsters - Contains 31% more enemies. (26-40%)
Greater Duplication - Rewards at end chest are duplicated if you did not die.
Power - Aspects from dropped items have a 50% chance to be max.

Mythical Corrupted Crystal of the Nine Pedastle
Rewards - Up 50% (41-50)
Monsters - Contains 82% more enmies (62-100%)
Corrupted - Area contains Duriel or Andariel. 5% both.
Nine Pedastle - Area contains a unique item on a pedestle protected by 9 elites.

THE BAD (:imp:)
1] Dungeon completion rewarding lowest aspects. These are basically meaningless now. You never really need to do dungeons early for aspects. Its a waste of time to do it. You get items enough that you will quickly get what you need as any drop is better than dungeon aspect and you never need to get it more than once which is why they were done before.
SOLUTION: First time completing a dungeons now drops a legendary with a random range aspect of that dungeon on it. Perfect solution here.

2] Prisms are too hard to get. These are items to add a slot to gear. Im 85 and only got a handful of these. IT seems they only drop from World Boss. I am hearing also treasure goblins and legion events but I can not confirm this.
SOLUTION: Greater items have a low chance to salvage into these with more greater affixes being more of a chance with 3 greaters being 100% chance (you should try to sell it first though!).

3] Experience is too fast. Its not a smooth leveling process. You are leveling much too fast to invest much time really getting your normal items good to go to tier 3 and your sacred good to get to tier 4. The sheer volume of enemies in helltides is great fun but its also is too easy to level. I got to one point there were 7 ppl doing it nonstop and I had 37 paragon points to assign.
SOLUTION: Every single elixir doesnt need a 5%+ bonus so that can go. The Urn XP gain can be changed such as one of these 3 examples:
Urn of Charisma. Reduce crafting and vendor costs by 6% and vendors have a 1% chance to sell legendary items.
Urn of Haste. Movement speed increased by 5%. Its so hard to get good movement speed now.
Urn of Hoarders. Goblins have an 8% chance to drop double loot.

4] The Urn bonus for Iron Wolves rep gain is useless. What is the point of this? All the others are miles better and eventually the reputation rewards run out so you will hit it eventually.
SOLUTION: This urn is now changed to mean something:
Urn of Iron Connections: Keeps the bonus reputation gain but also turns excess reputation gain into Iron Wolves Tokens. Tokens can be spent at a new merchant that functions like obals but gold is also an option helping us with our gold issues.

5] Season 4 theme was too light. This is partly D4 itemization dev team fault as they made this crafting system so easy to understand and navigate that mastering it was easy and we crave more from season now.
SOLUTION: I think we needed just a bit more like dungeons within helltides can drop cinders, enemies increased powers and loot, and doing these unlock some powers for your character. I was wrong on this as I thought new stuff would be semi overwhelming and we needed a light theme. I goofed.

6] Temper Bricking items is not fun. Even though I think the crafting is overall fantastic I still fear for this later. Imagine getting a 3 greater item or buying it and you brick it missing say your frozen orb roll on wand. This is a major feel bad.
SOLUTION: No item will temper roll what it just rolled. This may require all tempers have 4 options as ones with just 3 may be too easy but I think its a nice slight improvement overall. Example is you are rolling a helm defensive and hit lightning resist. If you temper it again, then it will not roll lightning resist on the next roll but then it could on the one after. Alternate solution is a new uber type rarity drop called the Mystical Hammer. The mystical hammer resets an items tempers back to max. This item has uber type rarity though. This gives ppl hope they can fix those perfect items but it is going to be extremely expensive.

7] Why I so broke? Many different ways to approach this.
SOLUTION: Add AH back in game. I know this is controversial but its time to give it another try with this idea → The Case in Favor of a S4 Auction House :house: - PC General Discussion - Diablo IV Forums (blizzard.com). Note that all bought items bind so that should solve many issues. By making items easier to buy and sell you give players the ways to make and spend extra gold. Relying on third party websites when 99.9% of items are tradeable is not acceptable.

8] Hard to activate paragon boards. (EDIT ADD) Loss of all stats is really hurting here.
SOLUTION: Very simple in that all stats needs to return.

THE BUGLY :bug: (Bugs or just plain Ugly)

1] Cursed chests still break. (BUG): Had one break and I completed whole dungeon and killed every mob and it was still stuck on mastery waiting to do something.

2] Treasure goblins still disappear if you horsie near them. (BUG) There is no way to hurt them or prevent them from escaping if you get to close with horsie. This is a known bug for a very long time now.

3] Bosses dropping common and magic items. (UGLY) What are we doing here guys? This is so ugly looking. Enough items drop that I never equipped one white or blue item. This is a complete waste of time here. Remove these items from the game or at least from boss drop tables. Your devs thinking we need these for progression are just woefully wrong. We dont.

4] Getting waypoints every season. What is the point of this? Making us run around to get some waypoints added. If we can avoid the lilith statues every season then why make us do this???

5] Shop needed its own Reboot. Prices are still too high. Needs more flashy mounts like lightning and ice ones. Need way to just buy certain pieces instead of entire bundle. Needs a way to preview different dyes. Shop is way behind the times here. Back items are glitchy and almost all terrible. Also some of the costume cosmetic items are just plain ugly so it goes in ugly pile.

What do you make of my list here?

I tried to just cut to the issues here while heaping deserved praise.

Is my list itself good, bad, or fuglies?

:thinking:

1 Like

I agree with much of what you are saying but disagree RE Tempering. I feel its better to just add a ‘no change’ option and leave at that…everything just becomes to dumbed down and simple if Blizzard keeps catering to the instant gratification crowd IMO.

I also disagree RE Gold, its nice that it has a value now and a degree of scarcity - its an actual resource players will care about again.

I also think NMD’s are a little redundant at this point and have a flimsy reason for existence with the addition of the PIT.

Helltides are awesome and I really hope that consider adding greater variation to them. For example they could have 3-4 Helltide variations with different themes that can randomly spawn. This would breakup the repetitive nature of running the same thing over and over again (something for an expansion maybe?).

They are also going to need a WT5 with how much power creep is being thrown at the game.

Unque’s will need some serious work next Season.

Class balance is in a poor state. For example, I am playing a Flurry Rogue and I feel weaker than a single Necro Skeleton.

All that said, the game is significantly more enjoyable right now and Season 4 is the best so far IMO

Thx for support!!! :+1: