In my opinion, the best combat experience in Diablo 4 occurs during the first few days of the season. If you create a new character and select the highest difficulty, combat feels great. You have to pick and choose what to pull, when to attack, when to back off, etc… This experience doesn’t last long at all, though.
After I become fully decked out, the game becomes nothing more than instant screen-clearing, where the only real challenge becomes very high Pit pushing.
The Pit is not fun. It’s just non-mechanic mobs with trillions of health and high damage. There is no dodging, timing, kiting, etc. It’s just maul, maul, and maul… herding the mobs into one spot and just spamming the same attack over and over and over again.
D4 combat is very underwhelming.
IDEAS TO FIX:
Limit the power we can achieve. Being a complete boss is boring.
Make us afraid of certain monsters. I saw a recent video of a D4 Campfire Chat where a developer stated, “We want them to be afraid, so we made a monster (pretty much a turd with teeth) that spits PURE HATRED at its target.” Us players aren’t afraid of the aesthetics. The developers are missing the point completely. It’s about the ferocity of the monster… I remember being on the edge of my seat via D2 Hell Mode when those exploding Bone Fetishes would come flying out of the bushes. I wasn’t afraid of their look, but the fact that they would run at you full-speed, stun lock you, and explode upon death.
Give each monster a unique way of attacking and/or defending. The original The Legend of Zelda, for instance, has a variety of different monster types. Some were cannon fodder, but many would actually cause some anxiety. The Blue Knights would not only hit hard, but they were completely immune to frontal attacks. I remember my dad walking into a room with 10 of them. He was like, “Everyone SHUT $#$ UP! Let me concentrate!” One had to either be quick and/or stun in order to deal damage from behind. The Centaurs were feared as well. They were quick and agile. They would hurl a big damage projectile towards you with no sense of timing or prediction. Avoiding it was pure reflex. The Wizards also could be very difficult fights with their warping around while firing big damage wand blasts. One thing to note is that these monsters didn’t have a lot of health; they were just mechanically difficult.
Diablo 4 has none of this. I feel like the D4 team thinks that difficulty is all about Big Monster Damage and Big Monster Health. That’s it.
The more monster damage can be something nice, but the problem is that you can’t even tell what is hitting you with all of the particle effects and screen-cleaning skill set. It’s all just mush.
Start by GREATLY reducing all of the particle effects so us players can actually see what is going on. Give monsters unique abilities that give true reason to fear:
The mega-armor Knights Penitent… Make them like the Blue Knights via Legend of Zelda. Slow, but hard hitting and immune from frontal attacks. Make us want to use skills like stun grenades etc.
The Polearm wielding Skeletons… Their big-hit wind-up is perfect. However, where is the fear? When the attack happens, it doesn’t even tickle. It does nothing. Make us fear it. We can clearly see it coming, so make it nuke.
The Skeleton Archers… Give us clear indication of when they are ready to loose an arrow. Make it hit hard. As the difficulty level increases, so does the damage and speed of arrow.
The Shaman Imps / spell-casting Cultists etc… Let them be able to mez us for a few seconds. Make us prioritize killing such monsters first during pack fights.
The Highway Robbers with the fuse-lit bomb on their back… Make 'em explode on death with some big damage. I know most players hate this kind of thing, but this particular mob isn’t that common and is very noticeable. When it dies, give us a 2 seconds to stand away from its explosion.
etc etc etc
Us players don’t mind dying in this game when it’s clearly out own fault. What we do hate is dying to something we can’t even see, something that’s not even on the screen, or connection related on your end.
I feel like PoE 2 has done a decent job with their non-boss combat. Much more fun than Diablo 4. However, PoE 2’s graphics… They don’t compare to how wonderful Diablo 4 looks.
This game could be so good…
how it feels for me.
