The biggest issue I have with Diablo 4 right now is the 6-Skill keybind limitation. There’s no way around it and even at just Level 25, I found it extremely restrictive to overall game enjoyment and character specialization. I’m sure once the rest of the skill trees open up and you can spec multiple active and passive skills a lot of this could change, but having more Skills with points in them could make this situation and decision-making even harder.
Skill Types: Categorized by how I view them
- Resource Generator - Basic Attack to build resource (Basic)
- Resource Spender - AoE or high DMG spender (Core)
- Distractions/Passive Dmg/Force Multipliers - Traps, Pets, Conjurations
4. Buffs - Shouts, Imbuements - Movement - Leap, Teleport
- CD or AoE DMG - Weapon Mastery, Blizzard/Meteor, Traps + Imbuement
- Armor/Mitigations - Ice Armor/Fire Shield, Iron Skin, Dark Shroud
- Ultimates - 1 of 3, high CD
The categories don’t directly align with how Blizzard has them in the Skill trees and everyone is going to fit them into their style of play a little differently, but that’s how I would categorize the main purpose/tactical usage of each skill.
One problem is that’s at least 8 skill slots and that’s before even looking at some of the categories where you might want to have more than 1 type from that tactical category. The clearest examples of this Skill logjam were with Barb Shouts, Rogue Imbuements, Sorc Conjurations and I’m sure Necro Pets/Summons are as bad if not worse, where you can easily tie up 3-4 Skill slots on situational uses, or in the case of Barb, forego the use of Shouts altogether because you get more mileage out of other Skills.
The Second problem is that you are almost forced into slotting points in some of these Skills to keep the tree unlocked. So in addition to not being able to put a Skill on a hot bar, you might still be forced to put points into it to keep your skill tree open. Maybe redistributing some passives down the tree would help, or make unlocks a cumulative requirement instead of having to put points in specific clusters.
Lastly, there’s the problem of what is still UNKNOWN. Will you get so many points by end-game you don’t care about 1 point in Skills you don’t plan to use anyways? Will items and Paragon completely negate resource generation in the future so you don’t even need a Basic generator? Will CDs not even be a thing due to item CD reduction or Aspects? Will you be able to just press 2-3 buttons in the end-game and clear the screen in 3 seconds regardless of what 2-3 buttons you push? I already started getting rid of some Basic skills as I found other generators in passives, or relied on other Skills in rotation.
Possible Solutions:
- More Skill Slots! I’ve read the Devs want there to be some choice taken into which Skills to slot, but 6 seems far too restrictive. I’d say at least 8 total Skill slots as a starter.
- Hot Bar swap palette. This seems to be the most common recommendation, for Console to hit left trigger or bumper and open up an alternate palette of Skills. This is popular in MMOs and while I know D4 is fighting the comparisons to MMOs, this is more of a Quality of Life design feature than an MMO issue for games that want to have varied skills and gameplay styles.
- Saveable Profiles. I’m sure there’s some Destiny 2 fans here and it only took them 5+ years to implement, but Profiles are great for changing Gameplay styles with gear and Skills. Limit swapping Profiles to Skills on Hot Bar only and not re-specing Skills.
- Arbitrary Hot Key Binding Limit - Limit up to 4 Hot Key Binds for Skills.
- Auto-Cast some Skills or Hard Code Triggers. Set these from the Skill Trees or from the S-button Skill View. Trigger on Dodge would be a good one for Iron Skin. Toggle Auto-Cast by right-clicking some skills to re-cast automatically on CD, especially for Skills that have no limited duration. Give the other Skills 100% uptime but limit their effectiveness. Or trigger them at certain Health thresholds (this is already in the game with Aspect Barriers). Sure this will reduce some of the “skill” and strategy involved with maximizing usage, but it will certainly be more useful than sitting there with a point and not being used at all because you can’t fit it on your Hot Bar.
- Smart Cycling of Skills. Taking another page from Destiny 2 here. If you can slot a single Skill “type” like Imbuements for example, but want to situationally change which type you are using, you can cycle through by hovering and pressing a key/scrolling mouse wheel. Another example would be for Core Skills. If I wanted to swap between WW/Rend or Barrage/Rapid Shot depending on the situation and what I’m up against, I could toggle between the two quickly without changing any key binds or going to the clunky Skill trees. Being able to swap Imbuements quickly would be amazing. Implementing this would be the tricky part. Maybe hitting the key bind button brings up your options above the currently selected Skill on the hot bar and presents you with the other Skills in that cluster that you have spec’d for, then you left click that Skill and it becomes set on your Hot Bar.
Random List of Other Problems:
- Weapon Archetypes - From what I’ve seen so far, there’s already clear favoritism toward high damage weapons and fast/instant cast Skills. The damage dealt with 2H weapons for some of these Skills is so much higher that I can’t see 1H even being viable, especially when you can’t face tank some of the harder content (Butcher with Frenzy/WW was a no go, Butcher with Rend and Run you’ve got a chance). DoTs or fast-animation spenders all seem to favor higher base damage even though “DPS” numbers on the weapon might be similar. A great example is Rogue with Bow vs. Crossbow. Sure there are some weapon mastery differences, but I was doing 50% more damage per hit of Rapid Shot with 5-8 hits, that’s a huge difference in damage. Even if animation is slightly longer, the animation isn’t the primary limiter of dealing damage with a Core resource spender, the actual resource spent is. Maybe scaling number of attacks with weapon speed is a viable solution? Or some kind of dmg multiplier formula (basespeedhands)?
- Stat Sticks - Looks like this is not only a thing in D4, its an even bigger impact with all the extra slots and weapons on Barb, Rogue. Even if you’re a ranged Rogue for example, the stats on your blades and the gems too seem to carry over to your ranged attacks and Ultimates.
- Open World Map - This was a big letdown to me, it wasn’t really an open world, more like a series of corridors with a nice looking background. The actual open spaces were refreshing, maybe more open spaces and shorter connecting corridors between them? I don’t know how to fix this, but on the Map it looked like it would take forever to get anywhere when in reality it took about 1/2 as long as expected traversing mostly boring tunnel-like structures with some random mobs and events along the way. I know its not procedurally generated but it kind of feels like it, sadly.
- Dungeon Design - Most of these were pretty bland, or repetitive. I did however enjoy the quest Dungeon in the Bear Clan area. Mainly because there were 3-4 quests in the same Dungeon, or even built-in Events that made the dungeon more interesting. There was less “dead space” tunnels and every time I got to a big room there was some “special” activity. Also, there was some MMO-style kill/collect progression going on in the background, which I didn’t mind at all.
- Strongholds - These felt underwhelming. Like Events in a bigger space with more <-> to traverse along the way. I feel like these should be queued/instance events and closer to the World Event monsters where you are committing to some challenging content for 10-15 minutes with a good payoff at the end. These should take awhile, have more people involved, be challenging overall and have a nice reward at the end.
- Inventory/Gems. Can Gems just have their own Coin Purse? Like a Horadric Cube just for Gems? I feel like Gems always end up being trivialized anyways once you get to higher level content where Gems drop and skip 3-4 combinations and before that, you’re reluctant to slot any gems because you get drop so frequently and you’re so far from “end-game” or even needing the gems to be effective. They already do this with the other crafting items, Gems seem like a natural extension of this.
- Barrier/Fortify/Iron Skin. I still don’t know exactly how each one of these works, its way more complicated than it should be and then you have to pick and choose passives/aspects and other buffs/mitigations based on 1 of the 3 types too that don’t even last 100% of the time? The Tool Tips could help more here to explain the skill differences and how much dmg they mitigate. Even better, a short video of what each Skill does would be awesome (Ghost of Tsushima style). My barb at one point had 4 different shades of buff on his health globe and they were all pretty randomly triggered except Iron Skin…
I’m not really too concerned right now because I’m hoping we’re playing a build that is way older than what the Dev team is working on for launch. I’m hoping the content, quests and world/dungeon design have been updated significantly already, because 2 months isn’t enough for a major overhaul imo.
Its possible that maxing out levels, Paragon and gear focusing and Aspects reduces Skill slot importance, but I still see the need for at least some modification as 6 skills is just too limiting. Also, I’m willing to bet re-spec costs are going to be a LOT higher in Retail than in Beta, so this is going to be a major downside for those saying just re-spec and focus on what Skills you need for what fight. I don’t think its going to work that way if Re-specing costs a lot of gold early on.
Also, I think +Skill itemization and hunting for specific Skills on items, along with Aspects that maximize your favorite Skills will be much more important in Retail. +1 to an entire Skill cluster is going to be REALLY valuable but also make the ability to situationally change them much more important, and valuable if you can change them quickly based on situation.
I completely re-spec’d my Barb, Sorc, and Rogue to be effective against Ashava for example, but if the cost is prohibitive, it will be a lot harder to do that. I also had almost entirely different Skills on my Hot Bars, fast attacks that dealt a lot or put a DoT on, high CD skills like Ultimates, followed by mobility skills (Leap/Teleport) and some defensive/buff skills. I managed to kill Butcher around Lv 20 on both my Sorc and Rogue by kiting and sniping with damage. My Sorc didn’t have much trouble with my normal spec, but I would’ve loved to swap to Poison Imbuement instead of Shadow against Butcher if I had the time or the UI allowed it easily.
Overall I really enjoyed the D4 Beta and can’t wait for retail. I’m sure I’ll put a ton of hours into it regardless, but obviously a great game will hold my attention longer. I really hope a lot of the issues are ironed out early and if there are glaring problems, the D4 team addresses them faster than they did in D3. It felt like it took a season or more for them to fix major issues in D3 and by the time they got it to a good place, a lot of people had already given up on it. Hopefully that’s not the case with D4.