The difference is choice

PC General Discussion
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In this game your choices are limited and controlled. In other games your given more free reign in how you can do things and upgrade your character towards whatever crazy build you want.

That is the difference.

Tempering was a good first step in the direction of choice but was made obnoxious due to its rng nature. It was still a good step in that direction of autonomy and control in the players hands. What other games do better is give you more agency, more free reign, and this is a difficult thing to solve in this game.

The skill tree to start is intentionally setup to limit you for good reason. They don’t want to overcomplicate it at the beginning, but I think this can be handled a bit better. Perhaps it could have advanced talents that further branch out and specialized your class, and perhaps that specialization could be Role Agnostic. Meaning you could do wacky things with a melee character it can’t normally do, but it’s unlocked after a player reaches a certain level and paragon perhaps. This way you know they have adequate knowledge about the game and understanding before you open up that feature on their alts.

Anyway, that choice and freedom is the main pain point I think and the limited endgame options and pathways. Currently there’s farming a few bosses or running the Pit as high as you can. The Pit while cool is only interesting for awhile and only to get your glyphs leveled and for the sake of vanity. What else is there though? Players need more choice.

In other games the loot is heavily random but you have a LOT of control over how those affixes appear and how to specifically even target the higher affixes and better loot. This leaves the loot with a wide array of possibility in rolls and power and equates to more power over choice and build freedom. And to top it off they allow a vast trade army which keeps the game alive even more. Then you have a vast skill tree with loads of freedom and freedom to make your skills do what you want them to do. With limited controlled options like in D4 though we’re limited to the mercy of the rng gods and Blizzards dev team releasing new tempering manuals to give more options.

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Agreed. There really is no need for a skill tree when many skills aren’t up to par with others. Instead of adjusting underperforming skills they rotate out a few of their favored builds per season in essence removing the choice from players to play other builds as they under perform for a few months or few seasons until and if they ever pop up in the devs favored picks. They cannot seem to balance skill damage across classes in the core game and only allow the seasonal mechanic to get a little crazy with damage numbers

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The problem is there doesn’t need to be perfect balance there needs to be more player choice though right? I mean what if we had advanced talents? What if we unlocked more advanced branching pathways in that tree that unlock after you’ve played the game enough the first time through? Hell they could even give you the option to skip that and go right into advanced talents if you wanted which could give you far more freedom with your skills, build, and more.

They could even add in Role Agnostic Paragon Boards that ANY class could use, and perhaps even allow you to borrow other classes Paragon Boards for insane build potential. Perhaps even allowing cross Glyph utilization that could make sense. But as it stands everything is so tightly controlled.

If they want D4 to be good/better they need to start unlocking the game for people to make the crazy builds they want. It can still be their take on it, but man let us play the game! And they can add in more uniques that help any class potentially.

How about a minion Warrior that has ghosts of the fallen warriors assisting you all the time? Or maybe you steal Druids wolves talent and make it your own? A Warrior with Druidic Wolves? That’d be interesting!

Let people make crazy broken stuff they love it anyway, but if the numbers are too insane obvious adjust it a bit down. Then give people lots of things to test their build with in the endgame.

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choices are limited without balance. Who chooses the subpar underperforming class? Can’t push pits… can’t run trials when they activate them again… can’t farm bosses…
essentially just running around spamming shiny graphics.
You’re talking about branching which we have in the skill tree and is nullified by the complete in effectiveness of some skills (branches). Crazy builds will come with making all the skills effective as people will have incentive to try different combinations instead of the seasonal meta that is effective.

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Well they did bring things up to par a bit in Season 7 right? I think a lot of classes got buffs to various things and there were some in this seasons mid season patch. I don’t think that’s enough though personally as the options there are very limiting.

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I see the balance thing different. If the dev-team has a hard time with giving players balance, then it is better to get more items, paragonboards, skill options etc instead. Season 7 looks promising, but what will be left after 3 months?

Personally, I dont care that much if I am limited to Torment 1 or if I can blast through T4. The gameplay experience and loot are almost the same in the end.
But I care if half way into the Season my character has a full set of everything available to the class. This bores me and leads me to quit.

So, to me, the quantity of choices unrelated to power is way more interesting. And I see it as fun to get my favourite choice working in higher tiers.

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Just be glad they didn’t replace our boobies with large bowls of fruit.

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The last thing I need is to be distracted by bouncing bettys while slaying the demonic hordes.

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In this game your choices are limited and controlled. In other games your given more free reign in how you can do things and upgrade your character towards whatever crazy build you want.

I strongly disagree. The reason why “Torment 1 is the end-game” is because pretty much any build you can come up with will get there and you can, with any build under the sun, go to at least torment 2. The reality is that if we go through your points we find that they’re actually less restrictive, for example:

Tempering was a good first step in the direction of choice but was made obnoxious due to its rng nature. It was still a good step in that direction of autonomy and control in the players hands. What other games do better is give you more agency, more free reign, and this is a difficult thing to solve in this game.

Most ARPGs do not have a lot of agency. I think you are mistaking certainty for control. Tempering gives you a very limited roll in a very narrow band with zero negative outcomes. Most ARPGs including “the new one” actually give you almost no control over what pops out (it can be anything in the pool) and the items you can add tend to be restrictive or insufficient (i.e. you can add only 1 to only body armor) when it comes to their effects which, when deterministic, are very low.

The only thing that would make tempering better would be if it were infinite in nature. It is, by far, one of the most friendly systems I have ever seen in an ARPG.

The skill tree to start is intentionally setup to limit you for good reason. They don’t want to overcomplicate it at the beginning, but I think this can be handled a bit better. Perhaps it could have advanced talents that further branch out and specialized your class, and perhaps that specialization could be Role Agnostic. Meaning you could do wacky things with a melee character it can’t normally do, but it’s unlocked after a player reaches a certain level and paragon perhaps. This way you know they have adequate knowledge about the game and understanding before you open up that feature on their alts.

Again, I think you’re mistaking diversity for chaos. Besides the fact that there are a lot of options in D4 to do things that aren’t classical for the class, i.e. a lot of the aspects are class agnostic or add abilities that do defy what you would anticipate for the class and a number of uniques do the same, there’s the fact that you have a lot of control over almost every skill and you can pretty much respec at any time, the game is friendly towards playing multiple classes by “preserving” some progress universally, and while it isn’t a salad of “anything goes” few ARPGs with defined classes ever are.

Historically the everyman expansion (Seraphic/“POE” tree) creates interesting, but very sensitive to failure, options. It’s chaotic in that if you can dream it, it can exist, but that doesn’t mean it’s viable. And it’s that chaos that destroys fun in games; you really can’t be a warrior who has skeleboys as a good warrior.

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I agree with the need for more events and activities.

In other games the loot is heavily random but you have a LOT of control over how those affixes appear and how to specifically even target the higher affixes and better loot.

No. D4’s item system is tiered to be always max at best drop class for base. This means that while you can get a crappy max level weapon in another ARPG you will always get the best base range and best inherent affix in D4. It’s stuff like this that I think a lot of people miss; setting aside the fact that they are fixing the GA thing and the affix thing for tiers localizing that further D4 was already pretty good about ensuring that progression in gear rarity and level equated real progression.

Last Epoch comes to mind where there’s a level 20 staff that once you get it carries you through the game. While that’s cool and all the fact that a level 100 staff is not desirable over a level 20 rare is a problem. D4 does do a great job of steering clear of that. POE had that problem too and still does in it’s second iteration. So while I can see where some complaints about loot make sense this one does not. You can log in and check but your degrees of freedom for choosing your loadout are maximized 100% of the time and you suffer no penalties for changing gear.

One of the things I like about D4 is how hotswappable it actually is. The game has a very, very low amount of risk embedded into it. You never have to worry about tempering pauldrons and never finding any that were inherently (meaning the base stats of the item) just as good ever again.

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I’ve already mentioned this in other posts. Just reformulate the first paragon frame or transform them into a special frame, with changes to the selected ability. So… bigger radius, ice damage to hydras, 2x drop chance, etc. It would be a Simple way to greatly improve the game. Without a complex and difficult to understand tree.

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→ Flagged post removed by staff
i didn’t know talking about character customization was a taboo in this community.
dragon age veilguard’s character creation offers full customization on this.
i guess this d4 community and its mods are more ccp-minded than i thought.

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is a game feature and PhysX responses, same as sparks / fire debris / rocks that interact with the environment.

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That game has crafting mats like essences and omens which give similar levels of outcome control to tempering.

I’ve said since it was released that people underappreciate how vastly better your odds of getting the preferred 5 affixes are with tempering.

The biggest problem with tempering isn’t tempering itself, it’s the idea behind greater affixes. Tempering is designed to not be perfect, there is supposed to be a risk of failure. You’re supposed to get another base item and do it again, like you do in other games with similar systems. That runs counter, however, to the rarity of GAs as base level chase items.

The game should make the chase item the final result of the crafting, but as we all know a multiple GA item with the proper affixes is already an extremely rare item before you even attempt to craft on it.

The entire game is on rails. You’re not falling off, but you can’t leave the track, either.

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Choices and balance are two sides of the same coin. Not much value in having one without the other. Blizzard need to focus on adding more choices, the current skill tree remains a bad joke. And focus on making a lot more choices within classes balanced.

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The entire game is on rails. You’re not falling off, but you can’t leave the track, either.

I like to think of it more like being unable to veer into the wilds and get murdered by your own choices. You want a raven druid? You can do that.

Does it work?

In Torment 1 it will!

I agree with you on the tempering though but that’s mostly because I hate the GA system altogether and find it to be annoying and lackluster. The only way to fix it is to allow you to Enchant without losing the GA effect. I’ve no idea why it was decided that wasn’t a way to manage that since it is so frictionless.

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A compromise, of sorts, I think. From the very introduction of uber uniques (mythics), the dev team have been torn on how to handle the idea of chase items. The drop rate of those at launch was clearly much too rare. Since then they’ve been trying to find compromises on making powerful items people will want but still remain elusive enough to give those that want an item to chase. Greater affixes promise to be more powerful, but they have to roll naturally as a compromise.

When you look at the major systems of the game, they’ve all moved towards a compromise. How to make things elusive, yet accessible. The paragon xp curve is fairly flat until it goes vertical, the torment system drops everything, it just drops more at higher levels, and of course the itemization system like we’ve talked about.

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I agree that it is probably some form of compromise system but it is such a poor one in this case in my opinion. I think this only because it generates th"90% problem" too quickly in this game; most people end up about 90% of the way to a maxed out character very rapidly, which is normal over a decent amount of time in any game, but then it becomes extraordinarily rare to find upgrades.

Forcing GA behind true luck is therefore just jamming the last 10% behind an insurmountable wall. This is especially egregious because there is an enchanting system in play and they won’t let you use it in order to protect that already fragile system and keep the last 10% from being achieved. This just generates frustration in any game.

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I second the idea of opening up all skills and boards to every class.

Start with your first class node, then each time you open a new node you get to pick what class it’s from.

You want build diversity… that’s build diversity.

Also, screw balance. This isn’t a pvp game. I wanna try a melee werewolf Sorc, with minions!

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Perfect balance should always be the goal regardless how hard it is to reach. Otherwise we get lack luster low effort balance with classes in the gutter scraping for scraps and pieces of crud to survive and other classes going Super Sayain 3 and blasting all over everything.

Put some effort into perfect balance Blizzard. Hard to accomplish? Awwww…poor babies. Poor game designers awwwww…

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Start with your first class node, then each time you open a new node you get to pick what class it’s from. You want build diversity… that’s build diversity.

Diversity is when things that are different exist.

Optionality is when things can be chosen but don’t have to be.

Confusing optionality for diversity is a game’s death knell; yes, you can absolutely have a Sorceress w/ Druid wolves and maybe that’s even a neat little gimmick but the option to do that will fade quickly under the reality that there’s an optimal strategy and that strategy cannot be denied to exist.

Build diversity only exists when there is not an optimal strategy. Build optionality however is just the goofy nonsense players think they want.