Why D4 is not quite measuring up to its predecessors

PC General Discussion
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The people leaving the game are the casuals, not the die hards. Die hards stay in games until the game shuts down (usually). Casuals play until the next title comes and interests them more, and then blizzard loses that persons potential revenue from cosmetic sales.

Catering to casuals has been gaming suicide for every company that ever did it. No title that ever favored casuals kept a game running long enough to be proud of it. World of Warcraft is living proof of that. Largest MMO in HISTORY bar none with nothing that even came REMOTELY close, but once they started making the game easier and catering to casual play, they lost almost 3/4 of their player base in less than 2 years and it forced them to finally stop reporting their player counts to save face from investors. Players don’t care about the meaningless crap in between. The end chase has to be rewarding to hit. It has to feel like an achievement to finish, even if it is a brutal grind.

The biggest problem d4 has right now is, it doesn’t have any achievement that makes you actually feel like you’re done with the game OR the character. Level 100 used to be it because it was at least somewhat time consuming (particularly on hardcore), but now they give level 100 away for basically free, so now it’s just an endless gear chase in order to just keep chasing more gear. You don’t need more or better gear if getting it doesn’t help you DO anything else. There’s no point. The game right now, feels like it ends at level 100 because there’s no goal that isn’t just a “side quest” feel. There’s no goal post after that for real character progression. Killing a specific boss is not really a goal post for character development. It’s as impactful feeling as any side quest. You don’t get any more paragon points. You get no more talent points. It’s JUST gear. It’s pointless to chase when that’s ALL that’s left to chase. The whole point of chasing gear, is to have better gear so you can chase your OTHER main goal more efficiently. They have the entire order of importance upside down right now.

A few suggestions to fix this;

  1. Make 90 the easy baseline you have it as now, and give us a very difficult to achieve, 100.

  2. Nerf damages of several classes. Damage numbers are already WAY out of control.

  3. Increase mob danger. I fear NO mob packs anymore and haven’t since level 10. The damage to mob danger ratio is WAY out of whack with the most recent increase to item power this patch. Most mobs at appropriate content levels, I can stand in the middle of and they don’t even hurt me, and I play a bow rogue…Mobs were previously balanced around a much lower average item power vs level. It is broken now.

  4. Focus on class balance. It is completely unfun to hit a boss numerous times for a small % of their hp, and then watch another class come just stand next to a boss and not even do anything, and the boss falls over in less than half a second. That level of imbalance is gross negligence of coders and at this point has to be intentional trolling. And the mere concept of 1 shotting an uber with ANY class / combo / ability is only a reflection on your inability as coders to understand what fun actually is in games.

  5. Reimagine how players that are NOT extremely tightly close in levels might actually be able to play together. It is completely ridiculous that a level 100 and a level 92 (for example) shouldn’t be able to at least participate in similar content, but the difference is so massive that if the 92 gets hit, they’re dead. Another example of the upside down imagination of what is fun. People play this game often times with friends. It’s no fun to be the friend who has to watch their other friend 1 shot everything while they can’t do anything, and since levels do not coalesce very well, that gap never actually closes.

  6. Stop focusing on unique drops. Focus on legendary drops actually being legendary by balancing classes to function well when they get good drops. Unique crap can come later. The uniques right now don’t matter anyways because the only time you start chasing em, you’re already 100 and don’t even have to care about them anyways because the importance of the game structure is upside down. So so so few people actually cared to push the ubers because of how everything is just structured so improperly in this game.

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Tldr. D4 better than D3 but not nearly as good as D2.

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And don’t forget, it’s the casuals fault this time. :laughing:

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Wait you think WoW didn’t cater to the casual player base in vanilla? Clearly you never played any of the older MMORPGs such as EQ, DaoC, RuneScape, FFXI, etc. If you had played any one of those you would know how much WoW catered to the casual player base on launch. It made things more streamlined by far. Sadly it’s still taking them forever to get out of outdated practices, but that’s besides the point.

Also I like how you say any game that caters to the casual player base hasn’t had any success. Blizzard has strived on this notion for years with all its iterations into various genres. They used to be known for making games that were easy to get into but difficult to master. Hate to break it to you but WoW survives off of the casual player base subscribers not the die hard fans.

Let’s break down your points though.

  1. For what purpose would this serve in the long run? Prolonging the leveling process does nothing but waste time. They already keep you in the game through monotonous grinding for materials to summon bosses with. What would be the point of adding another time gate behind this?
     
  2. Must be your first diablo game, changes are definitely coming, expect them in the next season as per the norm. Also expect new skills to take the spotlight and be overpowered as well, along with other broken mechanics.
     
  3. Wouldn’t personally mind a little more difficulty in mobs myself, just change how corpse bows work and we’ll be golden.
     
  4. Also in the works and another one of those never ending processes. Unexpected outcomes are found by the player base before any developer, as such they find the broken builds, the odd item interactions, the skills not quite working as intended. D4 devs have a hard stance of not changing this balance mid season though, and changes come in the next season instead.
     
  5. Genuinely confused on this one. Open world is scaled to the level of the player, makes no difference if you have a level 70 grouped with a level 100, it’s all about percentage of health taken. NMD and Uber bosses have a set level regardless of the player level, so again wouldn’t matter what levels the players were at all. If they can’t stand the heat get out of the kitchen philosophy for that one.
     
  6. Judging by the amount of uniques versus legendary affixes, I would say they are focusing on the legendaries more so. In fact more aspects come out each season then uniques do. They’ve also stated big changes coming for itemization in S4. What exactly we don’t know yet, but we’ll find out come March/April I’m sure.

Some of your concerns they’ve already spoken about, numerous times in fact. I get it, not everyone watches the streams or the videos posted afterward, or pays attention to the recaps posted on these forums. But a little research would go a long way.

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D3 is far better than D4. Kinda sad.

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WoW was Uber casual compared to everquest. everyone competing for spawns and loot, training, xp debt on death, first game I ever really loved was EQOA on the ps2, to this day still not replaceable.

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I played MMO’s way older than that. Asheron’s call and neverwinter’s for example…but I also played DaoC and EQ. So your evaluation here is wrong. Those games were as grindy as any, and yes vanilla wow was easier, but it was still harder than most. To be clear, there was no MMO more brutal of a grind than Asheron’s Call 2. Nobody ever made it even 2/3 of the way to max level. Ever. But that was no good either. It was however my favorite MMO of all time…

Prolonging the leveling process allows people to have a greater end to chase. Chasing a side quest isn’t a chase, it’s an option. You’re finished at 100 because your character doesn’t progress.

No, it’s my 4th diablo game, thanks for the horrible assumption. Every game has was weaker than the last until they released 4. 4 is better than 3, but it’s still a train wreck because it has no proper direction and the damage is out of control.

There is a dev interview recently, where the dev specifically states “we’re going to ignore ball lightning and barbs overpowered-ness right now, let them have fun for now, we’ll get to it later”. How uninspiring is that? Blizzard saying “well get to it later” historically means “F it”.

Nobody is talking about open world. Open world content is hardly content. We look for the fastest ways to get THROUGH the open world TO THE actual content. The only thing we do in open world whilst leveling is the events, but the events give us such overpowered gear, that the open world content is simply deleted on contact.

Good, but the primary outcry has been uniques drop rate as of lately and I want to make it clear that ignoring that outcry will go a long way towards not doing more damage to this game. There was talk on a campfire stream about unique adjustments and it nearly engulfed half the entire stream, so my concern about their fixation on uniques is well warranted.

You’re stating this as if I haven’t done the research, but I do more than almost anybody. The things you say I somehow am not aware of or didn’t do, I did, or was aware of. You’re just making bad assumptions.

The only part of your description here that wow didn’t include was xp debt on death. Wow literally had every element (except xp debt), times 100 on wow’s first release. I was in both. WoW was infinitely worse for fighting for mobs for xp, even with the madly increased spawn timers, and that problem followed you for the ENTIRE game because people obsessed way harder over wow than they ever did over EQ. While EQ was great for it’s time and definitely had the same problems, they were a much smaller scale. But this is all besides the point. EQ did eventually cater to casuals. And it died. Wow eventually did too. It died as well. HOTS was built under the FLAG of casual, during a time where MOBA’s couldn’t even fail. It was DOA by comparison (even though I enjoy launching it every now and again). See the pattern? A game that leans towards casuals ALWAYS dies shortly after. D3 - Extremely casual play, worst reputation in the franchise, bar none. It never fails. The more d4 leans that way, the more people become aggravated and drop the game. How do they expect to sell cosmetics if people stop playing?

Next season, we should just go back to NO seasonal powers like it was pre season 1, and focus on a total rebalance of items and classes. Once we get to a point where each class / spec can feel at least ALMOST equally as useful as the next in most ways, THEN progress towards these insane seasonal powers. There’s too many buckets in the equation right now to keep things balanced and the more they keep screwing with the buckets, the more busted the already broken classes become.

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As a MMO vet… the launch of WoW was more catering to casuals than EQ, Shadowbane, or a myriad of bad MMOs I had played prior were.

Agree w/
#1, #3. #4 (to a better degree, can’t expect perfect here).

#6 is a bit torn. Druid in s0 had some uniques which really felt amazing to get and unlocked builds. That seems to be a bit of what you want. You start targeting these before lvl 100 even in the current game; however, you hit 100 so quickly that it doesn’t feel like you did

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I played FFXI for a couple years and classic wow was incredibly casual compared to that.

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yea i just disagree. wow was the casual mmo of that time in my opinion, and i played them all. and the everquest i played never catered to casuals, it died because they could not make it work on the next gen console, so they shelved it, and never picked it up, then SOE went down, as a company. It still had active players when they shut the servers off. and PC EQ is still there. My main memory when i first tried Wow back then was being disappointed with how easy and generic it was, idk, I am just biased I think, I can admit that.

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I dont think WoW catered to anyone on launch. It catered to both sides, casuals and the hardcore gamer. It had stuff for everyone. Honestly, it probably turned some casuals into HC players.

Comparing WoW to any of the diablo games is silly. They are 2 different animals. One an MMO the other a hack-n-slash.

I think part of the problem here is blizz set the bar so flipping high, everything they have put out since those titles are just mediocre at best:

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No way am I reading all of that. What makes people think they are so special these days that everyone is going to want to read a novel about their meaningless opinion?

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Yeah. Sadly this is the truth.

Agree with most of this.
Especially #1, 2.
Monster danger should be increased a lot, but not convinced that increasing their dmg is the right approach. I mean, in some of the easier content it definitely is, but D4 also suffers from a senseless one-shot combat balance, where more dmg wont help.
Instead, monsters need to offer more challenge through the abilities the monsters use, rather than their pure dmg.
And player healing needs to be dramatically reduced, so even smaller amounts of dmg taken, can still represent a danger to the player.

Yeah, #4 and 5 too, the dmg scaling is completely ruined, and needs a fresh start. Dmg should indeed scale sensibly, so a lvl 90 and lvl 100 player could play together and both feel like their contribution matters.
And players should never oneshot most enemies, just like enemies should not oneshot the players.

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I don’t think we need such a post…diablo 4 is just unfinished…and unfinished is just a word, it doesn’t have anything new to even keep people in the unfinished game.

If you have a continuous integration game and the base game is just nothing , you paid for nothing…Good thing we paid for something that probably will be playable later and you will pay more for an expansion, and you will probably get the base game as bonus :confused:

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So true. I was there when WOW changed the game. I was playing SWG and WOW was SUCH an easier MMO to get into compared to MMOs at the time. No permadeath, building your character ws easier to understand and leveling was fun thanks to all the quests. In SWG you leveld by grinding mobs for hours on end which was SO boring. Everquest was at that time the top MMO with around 700k subs. WOW blew that number out of the water within months and that because of all the casuals entering the genre. The hardcore MMO fans complained for years that WOW was killing the genre because of all the casuals. It’s been there since the very beginning.

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Agreed. FFXI was the best MMORPG I ever played 20 years ago.

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I played D1 on ps1 & pc, d2 & LoD was about only game i played for yrs back when it was new (legit main game until WoW came out)
D3 was rough but still played it for yrs.

D4 is not a game i’ll play (as is) for more than a few hrs a season.

time consuming doesnt mean anything.

the difference between lvl 80 & lvl 100 was pointless.

Take Diablo 2 for example…even for the dedicated lvl 100 took forever to hit…but it didnt mean anything.
whats that? few more skill points than a lvl 90? in skills that arent really needed for your build thats already been maxed by the time you 90.

thats always what Diablo was.

thats the entire point of loot based games like Diablo IP.

You kill to get loot to kill more faster to get more loot faster.

PvP was optional side content once you got done with the loot chase.

incorrect.
The point of diablo ip is killing stuff & the loot.

its been that way since Diablo 1, stayed that way into D2, diablo 3 as well.

the 2 core mechanics of the IP are loot & killing stuff. Its never been an achievement type of game.

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The major flaw in this entire discussion, top to bottom… if we wanted to play WoW we would play WoW.

I don’t understand this intent on all sides to compare D4 to some mmo. Started with The Act Man and here it keeps going.

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But it wasn’t at first, when it first came out it was dubbed a huge failure… At least D4 has the bones of something that will be great. And aesthetically it’s way better than D3, plus D3 was finite which is why it had to go and be replaced.

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Because they haven’t made a popular Diablo game in 30 years. People actually like wow.