Some thoughts from the first time actually playing the game, please share your thoughts my feedback or the game in general below. Overall I enjoyed my time playing over the weekend but there are a few items I think will get stale very quick.
D4 beta feedback:
- Most interesting to me: I saw that there were “capstone” bosses/dungeons to get to higher world tiers, this is a great idea, I hope a similar system exists at the highest world tier as a form of progression of something like 10 capstone/uber/pinnacle bosses, this gives players something to aim for, allows for friends to discuss how strong they are/where they are in progression friend a: “oh I killed boss 3/10” friend b: “I killed boss 4/10 last night” friend a: “nice you must be a bit stronger than me”, this serves as a gauge of power that everyone can understand and gives players something to discuss and shoot for. This also adds 1 more high-end activity for dedicated players and could be a good candidate for leader boards, top 100/1000 to kill x boss as y class, top 100 fastest kills per class etc.
- Second most interesting to me: would be nice if skills had breakpoints for bonus effects such as, at +10 chain lightning gains 1-2 additional bounces, at +15 or 20 it gains 5% chance to stun on hit, this gives players something interesting to aim for if they want that ability instead of a flat add xx damage, gives more agency to player on what they want their gear to have and theory crafting, 2 people playing WW barb might decide that its worth pursing all rank+ gear and the other might forgo it to get another stat they value more for what they are trying to do, such as +15 WW gives 15hp/hit, maybe one of them has another way to take care of healing so does not care for this perk; should be something that’s not to difficult to add in the future
- Item requirement level drops seem incorrect or too random, at level 25 I am constantly finding level 11-14 gear and never found anything over level 19 when doing dungeons or in the open world, feels bad to never have a chance at an upgrade
- Not sure if legendary drop rates were turned up for testing but seemed considerably high
- Most of the dungeons felt very samey-same, go collect souls, get 2 bloodstones, get 2 keys, kill these 3 guys to open the doors, going to get boring quick especially with the amount of backtracking required on some maps, just walking in empty rooms after you killed them, need a solution here, most times you just want to blast to the boss, have an interesting encounter you need to engage with the mechanics of, and be done. This will hurt longevity.
- Not sure how seasons will work with the Statues of Lilith, but people will get very tired of/hate having to collect them all every 3 months, maybe just unlock them on season after the player has cleared the campaign in that zone if they have collected them all previously in another season
- Skill trees could use 1 more row of choices for each branching path for a bit more customization; main skill pick up > 2 choice branch > 2 or 3 more choices, can be done at a later season but I feel it would open up a lot more diverse builds if balanced correctly
- Some of the skill upgrades seem a bit to niche/silly like 5% chance on crit to do x, we are talking about a % of a %, same with stuff like “execute” injured non-elites, worthless stats just there as filler
- Some of the Sorc enchantment slots seem way better than the others, I see no point in ever using some of them, for example the ice blades one with the passives seems broken and should be changed in some way, you can keep everything off CD permanently, maybe reduce it to .5 secs from 1 sec, and reduce the talent that other skills are impacted from 50% to 25% or change altogether
- Some of the skills themselves seem way out of balance such as hydra, melts everything and can be cast from off screen, will be a required skill reducing customization if its leagues ahead of everything else, goes for any skill, hydra and ice blades just come to mind
- Some abilities can be cast extra far on widescreen which will break the game, on an normal monitor you can only teleport so far but with ultra-wide you would travel over 2 time further, this will lead to problems when you can skip stuff that wasn’t intended
- The UI for the char and stat pages feels unfinished, might just be the fonts, seems like they are not consistent and there are to many of them that don’t fit the theme of Diablo, same with item names on the ground, should be an easy fix
- Make all lucky hit abilities show on the stats page with a breakdown of where the %s come from and what the power/damage/ability will do when it procs, the Sorc meteor didn’t show up so I had no idea what the chance was but stuff like execute or some other lucky shots did show up so make them all show up and show a breakdown of what comes from where like gear vs skills vs other
- I tested meteor enchantment slot for about an hour with 20% lucky hit on the stat page and 3% from the enchantment itself, i assume this means it had a 23% chance this is an example of something that could be explained better so the players knows if this is how it works and what the outcome will be to make decisions, i feel like this system could be very cool/interesting if it was more transparent and impactful, 23% on a 25% coefficient move is only like 6% not worth taking over lot of other cool choices and will never be picked
- A fair number of the stats feel silly/unimpactful like the proc on a proc stuff such as 10% more crit damage when enemy is frozen/stunned, these normally only lasts for about 2-4 seconds or not at all on bosses, this isn’t enough time for anything to feel impactful, maybe this is resolved at endgame with good gear but in the beta it felt bad
- The Barb technique abilities seem very niche and uninteresting, most of them don’t work at all on bosses unless I misread them and they seem very weak in general, bosses/endgame is where we will spend the vast majority of our time so seems kind of pointless
- Combat felt very smooth and responsive, the slower pace, more tactical game play was nice, great work.
- Not sure if combat is the same at end-game or not but hoping its not as fast as D3 style teleport 20 times hit 1 button, whole screen explodes, repeat, if you are with friends they get to do nothing as whoever is fastest clears it all
- Leaving town often caused me to run into “invisible walls” which forced me to have to teleport somewhere else to get rid of it
- Leveled Corc first and then Barb, Sorc seemed way easier and did way more dmg, cleared everything easily on Sorc, very annoying to chase succubus or another enemies programmed to run/move around a lot on the Barb, or just put down a poison cloud and stand in it, seems off but maybe a non-issue later as games are not balanced around the first 3 hours of gameplay but some of the programmed actions listed here will most-likely still be an issue, see next point as well
- Some bosses seemed heavily melee unfriendly, we see this a lot in games like WoW also, some abilities maybe shouldn’t trigger if you are in melee range, the one vampire guy at the stronghold with the 3 hearts comes to mind, has some kind of blood beam/dagger thing that just kind of hits you no matter what if you are in melee, is avoidable if you are at ranged, most if not all abilities should be avoidable in an ARPG imo