Hey guys what’s up, new poster here. Been reading the forums for a while, and i basically signed up to object to the “The game has a great foundation, surely it’s gonna be awesome at some point” argument which is all over the place. While I would love for that to be true being a huge ARPG fan myself, I think D4 has some fundamental flaws in both design and implementation which will - unless adressed - keep D4 in the gutter. Note that I plan to short ATVI stock in anticipcation to the Q3 earnings report, but have not yet done so, so I’m not incentivized to bash the game anymore than is fair… yet. 
I’ll try to stay as objective as possible.
The main 2 gripes I have with the argument are as follows:
1.) Technical debt. Don’t want to get too deep into this, but being a software dev myself when i hear something like “we have this legacy code from D3 which loads all the storages of everyone, and that’s why people can’t have too much storage” it makes me feel really, REALLY pessimistic. This code obviously wasn’t fit for purpose in D3 to begin with (I don’t recall interacting with another person’s storage… ever. Is/was this even possible?), yet they not only migrated it to D4 but ALSO doubled down by increasing player count. Now, this is something that has a tangible impact on the game, so we have heard from it - but in my experience that’s usually just the tip of the iceberg, there’s probably a LOT more badly written legacy code which works for now but will need to be refactored at some point during the game’s lifecycle. Code that does not impact gameplay right now, but slows down development of patches and fixes behind the scenes. Then again, dead horse and speculative on top of that, so onto the main point.
2.) Numbers, balancing and lack of content direction: Unlike most other games which have significantly less power creep, everything in D4 scales off of everything else. You stack crit on top of vuln on top of legendary modifiers on top of certain glyphs, etc, you get the point. In consequence, someone who has 15% better gear than the next guy will find himself not 1.15 times as strong, but rather 1.15 to the power of X times as strong. If your build has access to 6 multiplicative damage modifiers (which i believe all builds do), that’s already a factor of 2.3 up from 1.15 - 2 times as high. Most builds have more - this is why we see some builds struggling to get to a mil of damage without barber, and others easily chunking out HUNDREDS of millions. Now, this exponential scaling by itself isn’t neccessarily a bad thing, in certain types of games this can work. The obvious example would be D3, where the power creep is just as bad but somewhat balanced out as the main end game activity is greater rifts, which just so happen to also exponentially scale up monster stats - the end result being “endgame=leaderboards”, and most builds falling within a couple of grift stages of each other. Not perfect, but works. That, however, is not what D4 is trying to be.
Let’s look at the uber Lilith encounter, for example. Depending on how you built your character (and whether you managed to pick the FotM upon season start), the fight will play out in one of the following ways:
Build 1: 10/10 offense, 4/10 defense (S1 for me, took her down in about 1.5 evenings worth of tries)
- Most incoming attacks will tickle
- Everything that doesn’t tickle will instead oneshot
- Fight is over in about 2 minutes on a successful try, with a significant portion of that time being transitions
- Most mechanics are skipped (no blood boils, just 1 Ad phase on P1, fight is basically over as soon as you’ve finished dodging spike waves)
- Somewhat reasonable to farm gear for
- Close to min-max required, usually need something like Crit+Vuln+Resource on every piece where those stats can go
Build 2: 4/10 offense, 10/10 defense
- YOUR attacks will tickle
- Nothing can really kill you, short of soaking whole barrages of spike waves and ghosts
- Fight takes forever, but is… well, simple
- Most mechanics can be safely ignored
- Terrible to farm gear for
- min-max required, can’t have conditional stats such as “reduced damage from poisoned enemies” as that will have no effect on spike waves
Build 3: 7/10 offense, 7/10 defense
- Your attacks will hit hard, but not hard enough, so you end up in a weird spot where you have to slow down DPS at a point in Phase 1
- Most incoming attacks will tickle (basically no different to build 1)
- Everything that doesn’t tickle will instead oneshot (basically no different to build 1)
- You have to artifically make sure YOU play around the mechanics as they’re intended or else she bugs out and becomes unkillable
- Easy to farm gear for, this is where most people will end up at level 100 - take a bit of offense here, a bit of defense there
This leads to a situation where both build 1 and build 2 have it SIGNIFICANTLY easier than build 3, and this is probably also where most of the complaints on the forums come from - she’s not hard if you have a specialized build, but a nightmare if you don’t. “Play your way” is out the window either way. And there is little hope of that changing - because of the exponential scaling on both defense and offense: Increase Liliths health/defense to the point where build 1 needs to engage with all the mechanics, and build 2 and 3 will probably not be able to get through the fight in a single playsession’s time. Increase Liliths damage to the point where Build 2 starts feeling threatened, and build 1 and 3 will get oneshot by basically everything including unavoidable sources of damage. The content model “strong benchmark boss at a constant power level” simply does not fit the player scaling model “quadruple dip on everything”. A different example would be PvP - we have this bandaid-fix of a flat 93% reduction in damage, which btw in software development is called the “magic number” anti-pattern - you pull some arbitrary number that handles most test cases reasonably well out of your rear end, and then call it a day rather than fix the underlying issue. Naturally this breaks down in edge cases: thorns shanennigans, oneshotting pets, permanent invulnerability and the likes come to mind. There is just no scenario where build 1-3 can co-exist on the same map and not run into oneshot / practical immortality problems with the current game design.
Here’s 2 pools of game design ideas that go well together:
Pool 1: Exponential player scaling, endless dungeons, HUGE PHAT numbers, life-on-hit, high number of player power scaling systems, pay2win (most mobile team builder games are in this pool)
Pool 2: Linear player scaling, challenging benchmark content (bosses, …), balanced PvP, lifesteal, low number of player power scaling systems
Unfortunately, Blizzard tried to mix & match. And because committing to one of those models at this point would require significant rework of skills, glyphs, paragon, content etc to accomodate, and we already have a mountain of technical debt to begin with which may or may not get in the way of that, I do not think this game has a great foundation at all. Or that it will or even CAN become a lot more fun in the future.
TL;DR: Player power scaling model does not fit game content types, major rework needed. Check cheap illustration sketch: imgur.com/a/9ocpn10
Your opinions?