Lets lay all our cards on the table. I am mildly exhausted with all the vitriol and hate about Diablo 4 like it is the worst game ever made. TLDR: It isn’t even close to the worst game.
How about we all just be honest and brave enough to answer with what we ACTUALLY want from Diablo 4. If you can’t answer, but all you have is insults about the game to hurl, you really don’t deserve to have an opinion that anyone can take seriously.
Since I started this thread, I’ll go first.
Changes I would like to see for Diablo 4:
Itemization changes: Cut out all the junk stats that no one uses and are too situational and replace them with more interesting stats. Now that I see the mechanical spider for Season 3, I would like there to be some way to augment skills in a similar way either through gear or the skill tree.
More Endgame Content: Adding more endgame content is cool, but if it is going to be the same thing only slightly different, that is boring. Uber Bosses were fun. How about overworld endgame content? How about Raids? How about adding in content that is different than Dungeons that we know? How about a fighting pit to fight increasingly more difficult skill based bosses? How about adding in some bonus levels like the Cow Level, Dark Whimsyshire, or Greed’s Lair? How about being able to “juice” up Dungeons in order to increase difficulty and rewards? How about a portal that sends you to the past (timewalking dungeon) that lets you fight in historic battles against Hell? How about Horse Racing with cosmetic rewards? How about Gear Crafting like in Diablo 3 but better? There is so much that can be added on this front that the possibilities are only limited by the game coding and developer imagination. Season 3 Vaults and Nightmare Vaults seems like an interesting variation on the dungeons that we have come to know.
Endgame Tree: There needs to be another progression tree besides the skill tree and paragon system that augments the way you play the game. It needs to have a long enough tail to keep players interested in playing the game until the end of the season. After a character gets to level 100, gets maxed out gear, completes the season journey, and completes the Battle Pass, there really isn’t anything left to do progression wise with your character. The carrot on a stick is gone. There should be something for players to keep shooting for if they choose to continue playing the game until the next season. It doesn’t have to be player power because our characters are already powerful enough at the high end. I would like it if it were more focused on augmenting gameplay of the current endgame activities such as nightmare dungeons, helltide, and Uber Bosses. Maybe in the case of Nightmare Dungeons and Uber Bosses, you can make them more difficult in some way (besides just increasing damage and health of monsters) for increased rewards. For Helltide, you could nerf your damage output and survivability to make it harder for increased rewards. Maybe you could directly turn off certain affixes on Nightmare Dungeon sigils through this system or allowing even more affixes to be added to sigils. Maybe you could make it so the Butcher has a higher spawn chance or more rare spawn chance. Maybe you could replace the Butcher with a different surprise boss of your choice. You get the idea. Changing up existing gameplay and allow players to customize their gameplay experience.
New Classes: Paladin (or Crusader), Blood Knight, and some sort of Van Helsing type class (duel wields and attacks with a whip and 1-H Crossbow). A whip wielding class would be so badass.
These are just my wants for the future of the game. If I don’t get them then it is what it is, but least I laid my cards on the table. I am hoping some of the negative people on the forums will have the courage to be honest about what they want to see out of this game. Not just “fix this and it would be gud” one line responses either. I want to see what specific thing or things need to change about each aspect they hate to make them feel happy about the game. Lets see it.
I would like to see the return of the Crusader from Diablo 3, I feel like the Crusader would be a good fit for Diablo 4. I would also like it if Blizzard would change the Fresh Blood marking color back to the way it was when the game first released, it looks like paint now.
I think you will find itemization to be top of the list across the entire spectrum of the playerbase. The “damage on tuesday” meme is funny because it highlights the frustration of the current system. I do find it interesting that they are experimenting with gem slots for our S3 companion. I hope they bring something like that for our characters in the base game. In tying that to your 3rd point, maybe make THAT our endgame tree.
As for engame content, I’m for anything different so long as it isn’t forced grouping content like Raids. I came to this game from WOW to get AWAY from that. I don’t like being forced to group with others just to progress my character. I don’t like playing with others, I have no interest in playing with others and Diablo at its core has always been a single player game. The WB are bad enough, but at least I can eventually fight them solo if I have a good enough build. Force me to group with other people to tackle a raid just to get better gear, then this game becomes World of Diablo and I’ll be on my way to another ARPG.
That is fair enough but what about endgame content that incentivizes group play but isn’t required. The best example I have for this is Diablo Immortal Raids (yes I know its a phone game). In DI, you can either do the Raid solo or with a group for more loot chests. Would that be ok or would that be stepping over your line?
Now that would be fine. As long as I can do it by myself then I would have no issues. How does the gear drops work for that? Does better gear drop depending on group/solo ?
There are just so many options it would take awhile to list…but given the way the skill tree is designed and how limited they are, every skill should have a place somewhere (even at end game). Seasonal bugs and poorly executed unique items seem to hold many builds back, or push certain builds lightyears ahead of everything else.
To the point the player knows the purpose of the activity and the rewards are balanced for your time investment. I don’t think they are far off achieving this and Uber Duriel is clearly an example of an activity that is well defined and worth the time investment. NMDs on the other hand lost their way a little in S2 IMO.
Honestly, more ways to engage with random players via chat and the ability to quickly find and join Groups for various types of content. These features do no exist right now within the game, other than a very basic chat system.
All of the above, they have virtually no depth to them and feel more like an afterthought than something that was imbedded into the games design from the outset. They are simply too shallow and I limit player choice.
I would be happy with either Runewords as they are in D2 (properly balanced), or something similar to POE with half the complexity attached to it.
The main point here is the ability for players to craft end game items and have some control over the process, versus the pure RNG of picking up items. It can be time consuming and require serious time investment but crafting a Runeword or creating items in POE is extremely fun IMO.
Just give me rare builds to set goals for when I get to endgame grinding. I don’t care about stat sticks. Give me something like a Tesladin to go after, for example. Rare items for rare builds – But these builds cannot be much more powerful than the standard builds. Just rarely seen. With unique effects so all can see your accomplishment.
Also, let me just grind helltides all day and be able to come out with the same payload I would have doing anything else in the game. Same with legion events. Just let me do them all day if I want. Don’t pigeonhole me in nightmare dungeons to efficiently get the best gear.
Not sure if they have already changed that or not since I haven’t played since season zero.
Actually I’ve gotten great gear from WB, Legion, Helltides and Endgame bosses during season 2. The real issue is that NMD are still the only place to get glyph XP. They increased the XP gain late in season 2. But there is still no other option.
They at least seem to be moving in the right direction by making helltides ongoing. That and WASD are why I’m trying this season out.
They just need to move away from the idea that everyone must go through all the content to be efficient. Choice is a better way to go at it. Let players choose how they want to play and don’t punish them for not playing the way that you (Blizzard) don’t want them to play.
more stash space than I can do with (20 more tabs)
this will never happen, but get rid of seasons - just 1 mode and continually update it. i want to use my leveled chars with my found items to try new content, i hate hate hate releveling stuff
The gear and rewards are the same. Groups just get more chests with loot. Clan Groups also get a special cosmetics for their portrait border (similar to D3 portrait cosmetics) to signify they completed that Raid challenge in a Clan group. That is really the only difference.
So you want all the skills to be relevant in the endgame in some way. Would more legendary aspect powers help with that or is it a number tuning issue with some skills?
I think Blizzard has been fairly clear on this but that is just me.
Yeah NMD’s can’t give players 925 gear in Season 2. I think that is one of the things that is planned on being changed in Season 3 though.
I agree with this.
So just adding more complexity into the skill tree. I doubt this will happen as they are meant to be new player friendly but I can see them adding in a little more to each tree without making them overly complex for new players.
I agree that the game needs a crafting system. Whether that is Runewords or just some sort of crafting would be awesome. Maybe bringing in the gems or elixers into play to make the stats roll a certain way on crafted gear would be cool too. One thing I didn’t like about Runewords is that you needed to farm and combine Runewords into new runewords. If I could just have a specific Runeword drop from certain sources and combine it with crafting materials, I could get a chest piece that rolls with certain stats I want. That is kind of what I want out of Runewords.
I couldn’t agree more. In previous Diablo games, rewards were randomly dropped from all sources of gameplay. I think Diablo 4 took something away from the game when they decided that only playing NMDs can give you glyph experience. That is one of the things that is killing me about NMDs. It isn’t that they are bad necessarily. Its that you are forced into it to progress a major part of your endgame power.
While I agree with the sentiment, and I hear this over and over again, I don’t think it really means anything. Or that it means a lot of different things to whoever is reading the sentence. Blizzard might read this and just think hey we have to add more uniques. But that doesn’t remotely negate the problem of itemization.
I think it’s better stated as an “end game meta loop”. Or a reason to farm items beyond just finding incremental stat sticks.
I could go into great detail of a variety of ways this could be approached, but that’s probably overkill for this post.
The changes I would like is PoE2 coming with new features meeting players expectation (like WASD) so the Diablo 4 devs are pressured to come with better and more fun designs.
- just 1 mode and continually update it. i want to use my leveled chars with my found items to try new content, i hate hate hate releveling stuff