Hardcore became a joke with Diablo III and its sea of cheap off screen one shots but D4 took it even further with everything wrong with the previous game plus unrewarding everything. Echo of Lilith, unrewarding. The Butcher, tedious and unrewarding. Nightmare Dungeon 100 unrewarding/present day irrelevant unless you need to upgrade a glyph and then come the GR re skin for this game, boring grind all the way to 60 so you can beg for 20 upgrade materials per run until you have the 50 you need just for the first RNG upgrade of your RNG stats. Would it really be that tiresome for the devs to actually bother balancing their game and add idk 9 tiers that actually mean something rather than 200 where everything feels the same just with more oneshots after a while?.. As for the people claiming this is due to lack of positioning skills, this isn’t a frikin WoW Raid you cannot place Bayonetta style reflex checks on a game made primary for cursor based movement input in a map that is not even full 3D.
No. As a D3 fan boy, I only bought D4 2 weeks ago, after I read about the pits and so.
I just finished the first pit with my lvl 95 sorc and had my first seconds of fun in the game. I wish Pits lvl 1 would be accessible much earlier during the level process. Everything takes way too long compared to D3.
Take away the one shots and reduce boss health pools would be a dramatic improvement.
You can still take heavy damage you just don’t have to be dead in the blink of an eye. Bosses can still have big health but right now it’s like when you feel full but you still have this big sandwich to eat because you don’t want to waste food. That’s Pit boss health pools.
The pit was a great addition . Bringing GRs to D4 was fantastic idea and added endgame with masterworking
i think some people are playing HC even tho they arent suited for it.
especially on hc, find the pit tier you are comfy on. sadly thats not too different from d3.
well D3 was a trash game, with trash end game, it’s even a bit of a pity that they continue to insist on a similar end game loop in d4.
GRs probably are the worst and boring end-game system that i ever met in ARPGs, hope there will be an alternative.
But it seems to me that creating alternatives such as maps for example are near impossible on D3 archaic engine.
Imagine maps in this game. These would just be nmd’s. Or do you think they would create new assets, new locations… or slicing up the open world into small locations and throw them into some item to run. Hell no.
Maps ala poe wouldnt make any sense in this game. No they need something creative and new. But if we face reality that will probably never happen.
My problem is that it is mind numbingly boring. Balance and difficulty is the least of my problems.
I wish helltides had some kind of endgame aspect to it.
Pit is fine, but needs to be redesigned so defenses matter. It’s fine to have a fight or two like uber lilith if you want fights where dodging mechanics matters, but it doesn’t make sense that the rest of the game is just a gear check and then all of the sudden things start one shotting you.
It’s great for people that love skill based games, but that traditionally hasn’t been diablo, even from the first game when it’s usually about become massively overpowered by acquiring godly gear.
Yes there are cheap one shots…but everything has a marker…it may be short but it is there.
Don’t know how far you went through GR but remember when GR 150 was more of a gamble for a good map plus hoping you don’t get Vesalius as a boss, well it is the Sharpshooter and the one with the Echo of Lilith on its spam mechanic this time (Honestly why are all pit bosses overtuned basic attacks and a one shot mechanic they keep spamming (The one with the red telegraph).
Worldbosses regarding Scattered Prism was called unrewarding. Now i already have 139 prisms. What to do with it? I dont find any better gears for tempering so my stock is growing and growing.
The problem like I mentioned before is the lack of time and the lack of any kind of counter mechanic, Don’t know about people that play on console but on pc first I need to get the cursor out of the boss in a direction to roll and roll before the attack completes. Plus there’s the lack of any kind of counter mechanic, like in the game I mentioned you can negate damage by pressing dodge the moment you get hit or even in Diablo III you can just use Blood Rush/Teleport/Spirit Walk to get away from the myriad of Wormholes/Walls/Sentries on the screen (This kind of skills is something I’ve been asking for since day one tho).
Tempering is awful, bricking items is awful and masterworking is awful. The entire process of how we upgrade items is awful now. RNG for the item drop, RNG for a GA, RNG for tempering and RNG for masterworking.
Also, the stupid shadow bosses are not needed. Oneshot mechanics are stupid. This reminds me of pre nerfed NMDs when crap one shot me off screen. I abhor NMDs to this day and The Pit is almost right there with it.
Eh I wouldn’t mind one shots if they actually bothered to design encounters while keeping in mind cursor control capabilities and limitations. My problem is how they just keep spamming one shot mech after one shot mech on pit bosses or off screen overtuned mob attacks while making your way to the boss.
I’m not disagreeing with you entirely.
There is a half monkey half Mr. Potato head walking around the Blizzard halls as we speak, making decisions like:
A poison pee pool should last 3 minutes, after the monster that pee’d is dead.
And health potions should disappear off the ground .5 seconds before you reach them.
Yes he exists. And he should run headfirst into a brick wall.
But for Pit boss stuff, I use Earthen Bulwark to get out of the messy stuff. I suspect it is the Unstoppable feature but it may just be the combination with barrier also. Most things you can avoid by going to the other half of the room.
Are some things still cheap? Sure. Some of the shadow attacks are just too wide if you lack speed…so add speed.
It is definitely something you can adjust to deal with. Is it fun? NO.
And again in case it was not clear, I am agreeing with you that cheap stuff is not fun.
One thing i recognized was the low poison damage while doing NM100 & Duriel (normal & tormented) this season. I thought the poison would kill me if i accidently stand there for a sec or make me chucking all my healthpotions. But no. I was still living and my undying aspect did the healing.
There are two types of pools. One that is shallow and disappears pretty quickly.
And one that looks fairly deeper or multiple pools layered on top of each other those are the ones that last. And still do a lot of damage. Make sure you are visiting the right type of pool. 
Now there is an idea. Let us zoom in to an instanced helltide that scales up. I think that would be pretty popular.
“or cursor based movement input” - how about controller)) it’s a nightmare to avoid a lot of trash in battle with pit boss