EDIT: Wow! I didn’t expect this thread to get so much traction/attention. I just wanted to thank everyone for responding, even if it’s in a negative manner. I’m also going to edit a few details here to be a little less salty. Again, thanks guys. Also, I did hop in and play for a short period on the eternal realm, a couple times, since 1.1. And yes, it’s as bad as I expected.
I haven’t played the game hardly at all for about a month now, and honestly, after still posting on the forums in an effort to ensure the white knights aren’t the only ones with a voice here, I just have to move on. I’ll still check back on the game periodically, and even the forum, but I won’t be regularly posting like I have been since release.
I had really hoped D4 would be a banger, but honestly, it doesn’t have the most basic of features, even features we saw in D1 like social support, lol. It just feels like a huge step backward. I have the battle pass that came with the more expensive preorder option, and I don’t know if I’ll ever even use it.
And it isn’t just that, it’s the fact that no matter how bad a game is, the forums inevitably default to being a white knight echo chamber, because the critical posters who use their brains leave (since they aren’t playing the game), move on with their lives, and the white knights dedicate every fiber in their beings to defending the game.
White knights enable bad game development, and like most forums, this place is slowly morphing into nothing but an echo chamber that enables those decisions. So, as someone who values their time and effort, I have to allocate my effort into something else.
To the great, critical posters here (with actual ARPG experience outside D4), thanks for being the voice(s) of reason. I hope to see you guys in PoE 2.
Just in case, I’m going to leave my list of what I’d change in D4:
Itemization
- Allow players to add an additional stat to unique items, this stat is re-rollable
- Triple the amount of unique items, prioritizing uniques in the general pool rather than the class specific pools
- Up the drop rate of uber uniques so they’re about 10% as likely to drop as other uniques, but make it so you have to be level 90 for them to drop, that chance raises a bit as you get closer to 100 (maxed at 100), and give a boost to the drop rate in NM 100 dungeons or Uber Lilith
- Build defining uniques (like those of the druid) no longer exist, but their unique abilities are now legendary glyphs on the paragon board
- Build defining legendary aspects no longer exist and are placed on the paragon board as legendary glyphs
- Quadruple the amount of legendary aspects, but they’re much more broad/general, so they contribute to build diversity rather than detracting from it by pigeonholing everyone into certain builds
- Reduce the amount of gold required to reroll item stats by 50%
Skills
- Buff all underperforming skills on each skill tree, half of them get single target damage enhancements, the other half get AOE damage enhancements
- Abolish all prereqs in every skill tree
- Take all skills with cooldowns and reduce their effects, damage, and cooldowns by 66.6% (this means all skills with cooldowns only have 33.3% of their current cooldowns, but their damage and effects are reduced by the same amount, so the DPS is the same, but you no longer have long cooldowns. For skills with utility and/or mobility, their effects are reduced by the same amount, for example, teleport’s distance is reduced by 66.6%). This creates a more active playstyle and reduces dependency on CDR from items
- Reduce the hard cap of 5 for skills, but give exponentially diminishing returns on hard skill points beyond 5
- Double the volume of active skills, prioritizing underrepresented skill types. For example, agility and grenade skills for the rogue
End-Game
NOTE: The end game loop would effectively be much better already because the item hunt actually exists after the improvements to itemization, but I’d propose further changes to improve the end game:
-
Helltides now spawn random boss encounters from any point in the game, yielding a large, noticeable boost to item drop rate and exp. Even Uber Lilith is capable of spawning here. Imagine the difficulty of this encounter, coupled with the boost to item drops (since she can now drop uber uniques). This would be quite rare, but also amazing and exciting. Everyone in the immediate area would flock there, and with the difficult nature of the encounter, you’d have people in the chat (yes, that exists now) asking for help. This would be a huge deal
-
Whispering chests only reward legendaries. Once you’re level 70, they only reward ancestral legendaries. The likelihood of getting specific legendary aspects scales inversely with their power
-
Dungeons completed for whispering chests default to NM dungeons and you pick the tier before entering the dungeon
-
Uber Lilith now drops a unique item that is only capable of being ancestral
PVP specific end-game
- The Fields of Hatred is now an instanced area that matches players based on level brackets
- The armor debuff one receives from fighting higher level opponents no longer applies to PVP
- The damage reduction specific to PVP is increased from 92% to somewhere around 96% (requires testing)
- Rewards purchased with Seeds of Hatred now include paragon experience. The rate should be about 10% slower than NM dungeons
- Team based arena battles
- Duels
- 2v2
- Official leaderboards
Quality of Life
- Global chat for each shard
- Shared chat for each zone (shard specific, of course)
- LFG chat
- Trading chat
- PVP chat
- Fix the stupid horse
- Stash tabs
- Legendary aspect inventory tab
- Gem stash tab
