Please don’t let my opinion on the game ruin your experience. Fun is subjective
Combat is boring, repetitive and spammy
Endgame modes are boring
The game’s too easy
Boss mechanics are absolutely terrible
Loot is terrible (except Uniques)
Class balance in non-existent
Bugs and exploits are considered part of the game from the developers and never get fixed
The entire game is balanced around FOMO seasonal builds
There’s no 1 point less important than the other, and all combined together paint the picture of why D4 is bad, imo. The competition just made all D4’s shortcomings so much clearer to pin-point.
The classes should be balanced to be at least within the planet as each other.
Each class should have, say, 5 builds that all perform in said power level. Ideally this would be more, but let’s start with a number you can count on one hand.
Player skill barely exists. If you tell me “Oh I cleared pit 115” what I translate that to in my head is “I have a build that’s powerful enough to clear pit 115”. There’s really not much game knowledge you can acquire or skilled play you can do to outplay someone with a stronger character to get to the same pit level as them. It’s 99% a gear check.
The end game is 90% grinding glyphs in the pit, 5% Duriel runs, 5% Infernal Hordes for masterworking mats. That’s too much pit for me. The ultimate final boss is really just your patience to see how many pit runs you can do before feeling bored.
It doesn’t help that the devs have seemed to have totally written off Season 6 half way through it.
Or that as a paragon 300 Rogue with all bis 2+GA ssf gear, I still don’t do one hundred of the damage a paragon 212 SB I just ran a Realm Walker with does.
Or that if anything the drop rate of good gear actually has seemed to substantially gone down in the last couple of weeks.
Or that it would be so easy to immediately make IFs a 100% better by just getting rid of spires and probably masses.
Bringing them more in line with Echoing Nightmares, which is the obvious inspiration to IH.
I appreciate your “probably”… something like masses could add fun, it just might not be implemented in a satisfying way. For all I know, getting rid of spires could be a “cure” for more than 1 thing.
They could imo make it 1 spire with several togglable modifiers that you pick at the beginning, and then it’s gone… but I guess removing the many long (player-controlled) pauses is scary bc it might chase away some of the busy sofa dads.
Here’s another “innovation” which I’m reminded of, in the game I currently think about when I’m afk from it ()… in solo softcore, when not in a boss fight, main menu pauses the game. I don’t see why not. It’s solo, it’s softcore, and it’s not a boss fight. Makes up for lack of in-between pauses, in case dev team is afraid of losing some sofa dads.
The thing that bothers me though is that a lot of the reason D4 is in the place it is in right now is because the dev team listens too much to the player base. I think they are too worried about pleasing everyone (especially the vocal minority, i.e. streamers) that now they are pleasing no one.
I also find it hilarious that many of the things that POE is getting praised for are exactly the things that people disliked in D4. Increased difficulty being chief among them.
For me, I dont think D4 is bad. But it absolutely needs to be better. I truly hope that Blizz takes some notes from their competitors and implements them in this game.
I still feel Diablo is the king of ARPGs. The bones in this game are the best out there hands down. If Blizz could just retake ownership of the game, lay down a blue print of where they intend to go and get there it could be great again.
Even though I don’t think D4 was difficult on release I do remember there was some discourse around difficulty and even comparisons to Dark Souls. At the time, I thought the comparison was absurd and unhinged.
But there’s a point to be made here. Some things D4 did good on release that the competition also is doing, Blizzard chose to abandon. Combat is the thing that comes to mind. The game had solid combat on release. Less density, a bit slower and more methodical. Blizzard erased all that by making combat a joke. Leveling also. That’s why everyone thought these guys had no vision whatsoever. They literally backtracked on every single design choice they’ve launched the game with.
I can go on and on but there’s no point. The competition is putting their foot down and drawing a line to what to expect. Every patch has a short explanation on why they do what they’re doing and what to expect moving forward. Simple as that.
LMFAOOOOOO, if they listened to the player base there wouldn’t be an issue. SO MANY threads with well thought out ideas, and why they should be implemented were completely ignored. They then took some ideas from D3 and threw them together quick.
How does that make any sense? If they were trying to please everyone wouldn’t that mean they pleased a lot of people instead of no one? Thats not true…there are 775k followers of D4 on Twitch, with around 400 viewers on any given day which means 0.05% are pleased with the game.
Lol, like what exactly?
No one complained about difficulty, this game has always been extremely casual and you have always been able to blast through it.
I have literally never seen this comparison, ever…and for good reason. This game has always been extremely easy, and forgiving.
Well clearly youre passionate about the topic and thats ok.
My point, which you are missing, is that Blizzard has been too reactive in response to player complaints. They are the gamer designers. We are the players. Look at what GGG is doing. They have their vision of the game and as of this moment they are holding to it and making adjustments with their vision of the game in mind. They are not just blindly catering to the players.
True there are some good ideas posted on the foums but the vast majority of the complaints in this game were things that ultimately made this game worse and ironically what GGG is doing now in there game is some of the stuff Blizz was doing in D4.
As to pleasing everyone, you kind of supported my point for me. Im not disagreeing that D4 is not as popular as it was. Im not disagreeing that it is in a down state. My comment “pleasing everyone pleases no one” is evident in what you pointed out. Blizz had a vision of where they wanted to go in the game at release. They lost that vision by being ultra reactionary to player complaints. In particular they listened way too much to streamers.
Now here we are. The lack of vision from Blizzard is what killing the game. In my opinion they are listening way to much to players. They need to figure out how to hit the sweet spot and I think if they focus on that they can.
Now, I hope you take a breath and relax. In the end it is just a game.
Theres nothing wrong to listen to players feedback.
The real problem is when the devs are simply not good enough and dont know what to do with that feedback.
But all this is pointless since they simply werent good enough from the beggining to deliver a game worthy of Diablo 4.
This all was messed up from the start, so to be honest the only solution is to wait for a new dev team for diablo 5. History repeats itself at Blizz, pretty much like with Diablo 3 original debacle.
This was my final straw with Blizzard, i abandoned the ship for the other game.
end game totaly boring i agree. The only challenging content is pit and pit in his actually form is boring. Pit need a rework, maybe all end game need a rework. IH and Kurast are cools but 0 challenge, i finish this mode in T4 in 3 days…
This post in an example of why generalizations are often pointless.
Idk what you imagine “Increased difficulty” involves, but in the other game (the EA one) there’s no trivialized early progression. Every mob is a threat in early progression. That’s an example of what people might mean when they argue for “more difficulty”.
Every boss is also a threat, at least until you’ve geared up substantially, following a long progression arc.
That difficulty arc should not rise asymptotically vs character progression. It should be a challenging & reasonable curve that feeds into the addictive loop. (Read the week 2 feedback notes for how devs who pay attention & have talent, calibrate such things.) What early Diablo games got right.
The actual endgame loop should not consist of a single mob summoned & killed over and over in one spot, and mats + levels farmed over and over in 2 monotonous locations with zero fun engagement.
If “paragon 300 is scaled specifically to SB, which was never balance tested” is what you consider equivalent to “the game is too difficult” then I’m convinced you don’t understand the problem. The problem is the devs don’t test their game, and a season patch consists of a series of knobs turned this way and that almost at random.
“You tuned max paragon grind to SB, and you tuned SB separately from other classes” is a better representation of that complaint. Once you properly describe it, then you’re forced to acknowledge that “endgame bosses are trivial meat piñatas on a loop, and they don’t even have real skill-based mechanics” is also a common complaint. So is “endless boring grind to yank on the Tempering/MW slot machine is boring”. You’d have to honestly represent what the complaints actually are, IOW - something unappealing if the objective is to dismiss & not to inform.
If whatever S6 is = their best attempt to please streamers, they failed, amirite? Would you acknowledge they don’t know what they’re doing then? If they don’t know what they’re doing, the honest diagnosis would be that fact, not ‘you don’t know what you’re doing, so in the meantime don’t try to please streamers’… which is in fact what’s implied here.
I can spin knobs left and right at random too, without testing the result… so can you & so can anyone. Can we get jobs as senior devs at Blizzard now? Sweet! That’s going to surprise a lot of low-wage plebs, I bet.
Every camp is a “vocal minority” (including every opinion in this forum). That’s what ppl say when they don’t want to back their specific argument… they label themselves as part of the silent majority - it’s a dishonest rhetorical tactic.
Yep, the bones are there. The bones don’t require a lot of innovation. Which means potentially everything that isn’t the bones, is what doesn’t sit right with you or with most ppl in aggregate, i.e. everything that requires innovation, i.e. talented developers.
They literally haven’t. Take a look at this season…it is supposed to be a massive hype machine with the expansion. People were excited and then we come to find out that they changed the drop rates of ancestral items in the extreme. One class absolutely destroying content while other classes struggle. Next season they are nerfing the absolute SHIZ out of sorc again…historically the most played class. They arent reactive…they basically say “We heard you, but we are moving in this direction” and then the players moved in another direction…to Wraeclast.
Thats a damn lie, are you playing the game? They have made big changes to the game completely based off of what the player base has been saying. Bump rolling to get out of getting swarmed, loot drops, difficulty such as damage being lowered next patch, changes to mapping…all based off of player feedback.
Again, like what? This isn’t true at all…
They had to, people enjoyed the campaign…then immediately starting getting pissed off at what was actually at endgame. Nothing. If it weren’t for the player base you would still be farming statues, and renown every season. If they had kept their vision fully the game would have been DOA. That, and helltide changes were about all they listened to which was ok…but everything else was pulled from D3, poorly.
How? They literally haven’t. If they had been the game would have been in a much better state.
Like what? What have they implemented in regards to listening to players other than what I listed above? Still haven’t answered.
What are you talking about? LOL, you went hard and I just replied to your post. Im over in Wraeclast chilling. I look in once in awhile hoping blizz changes direction because having two ARPG’s to go hard on would be awesome…dont think that is going to happen though, especially with sticking to horrible ancestral drops staying, and the sorc being basically non playable after the patch drops season 2…I mean 7.
But since my posts are generating so much heat from two different people, being taken out of context and I do not have the time nor inclination to keep repeating myself so Im leaving the discussion.
I stand behind my points. But for the record Ive got over 1k hours in D4 since release and Ive been playing POE 2 since release as well. Playing right now in fact.
I dunno, poe2 seems to be following suit, just made loot plentiful like d4 did. My confidence in poe2 is disappearing sadly. I hope it doesn’t turn out to be another d4 but we will see
I gather there’s quite a bit of frustration built up in the community, especially since the competition is swinging hard and we’re left with whatever D4 is right now.
)… in solo softcore, when not in a boss fight, main menu pauses the game. I don’t see why not. It’s solo, it’s softcore, and it’s not a boss fight. 
Makes up for lack of in-between pauses, in case dev team is afraid of losing some sofa dads.
