Blizzard said play your way.
Which means you have to stay in the game like a job if you want to do it.
This was not done to appease Hardcore ARPG players. As someone who has played RPGs for over 30 years now and has played numerous titles in the ARPG genre specifically, I want to be able to try out everything and experiment. Diablo 4 makes this very difficult to do.
The reason this was chosen is so that players stick to the game longer (was the thought) and leveled Alts. This of course has backfired and they are slowly experimenting with Scrolls to reset Paragon (yet entirely miss the point).
I continue to be baffled by why anyone who wants to experiment and try everything would refuse to make alts in this game. Getting to level 60 with a new build is a ton of fun. You get to experience the ride from weak to strong to godly, you get to find new items and use new powers all along the way instead of just in one burst when you respec. And you get to experiment cheaply when your items aren’t locked in and you are still learning what’s best in the new build. What is the point of respeccing a character that is already done progressing only to try out what it feels like to not progress on a different character?
I suppose I meant by Hardcore ARPG players I mostly meant Path of Exile players… they spammed these forums in beta about not being able to easily switch and making the game “hardcore”.
I’ve played since D1, and that mentality has definitely ruined this game for now. Hopefully they get back to their roots and make fun content instead of catering to these kind of people.
Many builds can’t even be optimized until you are in WT3… you can’t even gauge a builds potential until you have all the available skill points and at least one paragon board open. I don’t want to see how they level… I want to see how they perform in the end game and you can’t do that while you are leveling. You do you champ… I prefer leveling specs so I can get through it as fast I can and get the the most challenging content.
You have to start in WT1 or WT2. Speaking for myself, Capstones, the early foray into new world tier unlocks, WT4 NM’s and a single pinnacle boss is the only content presenting a modicum of challenge. Those first three only apply if they’re done against over-leveled mobs.
Everything else is wack-a-mole. It’s barely even that. Incidentally, starting a new character to enjoy the experience consists of wack-a-mole for 90% of it. It’s tough to remain engaged with it.
In short, D4 doesn’t properly implement it’s difficulty options. Players facing a similar predicament cannot experiement or change things up with a character progressed up to content with relevant difficulty. Since the game is quite clearly fixated on extending the time sinks with it’s itemization.
Undoing paragon boards costs anywhere around 3.5-7 million gold.
The cost is not really that high.
The UI is wanting however. You should be able to refund a board at a time or swap boards, you’re telling me it is that hard for code to just count the number of nodes on the board and refund it?
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The cost is annoying, but it isn’t a barrier… what IS a barrier however is the fact that you have to manually deactivate every single individual node. That is way more prohibitive than the cost.
Agree. In current S1 im focused on reaching lvl 100 on hardcore. There are a lot of other classes and builds I would like to try, but I save those for next season. That way i’m already looking forward to the next season.
I also make my own builds. I like tinkering with skills / aspects that are used less. This season I tried to make boulder work for druid. Also used seismic shift aspect a lot.
Next season I might try out Barbarian, or make another druid build focused around shapeshifting with bestial rampage and Hunter’s Zenith.
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well thats one point, but the most important in that regard is loot filters.
You all experienced how tedious it is to always look at every item after every nm. It takes away a lot of your playtime.
if that would be gone and you can identify and mark items for different builds right when they drop, w/o having to hover over everything.
Having played LE with such filters on it is such a major improvement over that archaic d4 system.
Farming would be fun again, right now i absolutely hate the hovering over every drop i find.
Well, let’s see. Maybe my build isn’t peforming like I thought it would, or I got a bunch of gear for a different build, I am bored with my current build, I want to see if the grass is greener and if I can optimize differently. The list is extensive and I REALLY do not find it “fun” to relevel with the limited game time I have available the very same class in the same Season or ER.
If I find BOTH builds to be enjoyable, while I could level the same class up, what is the point since I can only play one character at a time? What is the difference between me going to login and selecting a character or me selecting a Loadout profile?
The point about making Alts is to make different CLASSES not have to arbitrarily relevel. You are free to do that if you want still. If a system of Loadouts would prevent you from releveling, well maybe it really isn’t that fun then is it? We all know also that people who really are running mulitple Alts are getting Power Leveled with the closest thing to Exploits available anyways dude.
This will be coming in the first paid expansion pack. Extra loadout slots will be on the paid portion of the battle pass, but you will have to buy two seperate coin packs to purchase it, and you’ll have leftover currency that you won’t be able to buy anything with.
And i wont buy those just like i dont buy whats currently for sale in the cash shop
I have the money but i wont support a company that doesnt sell a complete game and charges extra to make it a complete game.
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The entire game is punishing bro doesn’t matter what you do.
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- enchantment cost are crazy.
- reset cost are crazy…
- no reset all button on paragon is really crazy…
- no poosibility to save and load build and items like d3 armory.
this game is really really a backstep in things which are present in the game before.
this is really… having no words
I disagree. Making alts of the same class has been a thing in every ARPG except D3. Making a build that has an identity and refining that identity over time is the heart of these games. If you reach a level where the build is so weak or boring that you don’t want to try to tweak it anymore, that’s the point where you make a new character and try something different. You aren’t “releveling” because you are doing something different.
Well in the loadout case, the characters use the same slot, have the same hair and tattoos and face and so on, and most importantly your additional builds require dramatically less investment to create. Which means that players using loadouts essentially get a free “level to 100” (or whatever level they’ve reached) for every loadout they create. The current respec costs mean that if you choose to go that route, you would have to pay every time you switch characters, which at least means that there is some cost associated with all the free XP you’re getting.
The UI convenience of being able to reset all paragon points on a board (for the same fee that unclicking them would have) seems like something they should definitely add. I also think it would be nice if they let you plan out a paragon setup and then see which point is next as you are leveling.
So why not add loadouts and just charge the fee associated with swapping manually? Because including an armory that also swaps your skill tree / paragon points is a statement that you are intended to play a class only once and that builds have no more meaning than a suit of gear.
If they include an armory that lets you swap equipped items and skills on your bar, then I think that could be interesting because it potentially encourages skill/paragon builds that can take advantage of it and it reinforces the difference between your character power and your loadout selections.
And they are making an effort to stop these exploits and curtail power leveling. Which is a good thing. They also let you just pay some gold to respec. I don’t think they should make either approach to skip the leveling process easy. Both should be even harder, IMO, and if people aren’t enjoying leveling, then that’s where the focus of these complaints should be. Not “give me more ways to skip leveling” but “give me more challenges from 1-60”.
Every build can be online by level 25 unless it requires a specific unique. And if the issue is that you need a level 60 unique, then the solution isn’t free respecs, it’s lowering the level req for uniques. Getting to the end game should be part of the challenge and the fun of a build. Not just copying/pasting from a planner then seeing if it “works” against some arbitrary high level content.
If you need more challenge in WT2, go to the areas with level floors way above you, do the capstones way early without someone carrying you. There’s plenty of challenge to be had and there’s no rush to “see how it performs” when fully completed vs how it does along the way. How early can that build beat the strongholds in Khejistan? the curator? NM10? Elias? NM40? Lilith?
It’s not a step back, it’s a different (and better, IMO) design. Resetting paragon by board would be a good addition, but honestly all this stuff should be controlled by tradeable currencies that you find as drops: an orb to refund a paragon board, an orb to refund a skill cluster, an orb to enchant an affix, an orb to extract an aspect, an orb to upgrade an item.
Then vendors could let you craft orbs using the mats in the world and some high amount of gold. Maybe the item-related orbs could have tiers that build up from the lower tiers + rarer mats so that you can get better enchants or upgrades or extracts with higher-tier orbs. For example, the base enchant orb might be totally random with no choices, but a better orb gives you two options a better one gives you two options with boost min rolls, etc. Base extraction orb might extract only a min roll, higher tier one might extract rolls but cap them at the middle of the range, higher tier extracts fully, even higher tier extracts and boosts the value, etc.
Anyway, this kind of upgrade to the crafting is probably somewhere in their plan, I just wish they planned to use dropped and tradeable items to gate it instead of gold costs at vendors, because people get really prickly about gold costs in a way that they don’t about currencies / materials.
Releveling is very boring which has been a pretty vocal complaint. This is explicitly why Power Leveling is a thing and has been a thing in most titles. Everything until WT4 is filler non-sense. This is the argument about Renown which they are finally listening to players because of how mind-numbingly boring it is to keep redoing Renown.
I do not understand how it negatively impacts you if Loadouts were a thing you could swap Paragon, Skills, and Gear. Your entire argument is that players should be forced to relevel a different character which is antiquated way of thinking. We already have Seasons where players have to do this. I do not want to have to level a character to 75 of the same class just to test another build. That is extremely stupid and pointless.
You are still able to level another character of the same Class within the same Season or ER if you want for silly RP and aesthetic reasons. Whatever, go for it.
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Having a better stash system with more space and better search/filter features would also make it a lot easier to plan for and organize new builds.
Here is my reco for a better stash system that wont hurt performance.
Like and comment if you agree:
Your whole argument is undermined by the stupidity of this comment. The reason to not have free respecs is the same as the reason for every pushback in the game. Would you want a system that allowed any player to invisibly set HP and damage multipliers for each boss or NM dungeon? A vendor that let you specify the exact item you wanted and then buy it for 100 gold? You could ignore those systems and they wouldn’t impact you, right? Even dramatically toned down versions of those systems would harm the game by undermining the value of beating hard content or by undermining the value of finding good items, respectively. Free respecs do the same, but for XP.
You’ve never complained about PvE class balance? I mean, it doesn’t affect Sorc players just because Rogues can beat content way easier.
Yup this is the attitude that baffles me. Especially considering how many people (including you, I think? Though I apologize if I’m wrong) are complaining that there isn’t any content once they’ve been in WT4 for a hot minute.
The same people also complain it is mind-numbingly boring to keep doing NM dungeons. Renown is actually way more interesting than NM dungeons, people just don’t like have a reward taken away and the account-wide rewards feel like they are being taken away when renown resets.