Whats the point of “more power” every season in a game where you 1-tap 99% of the content anyway?
Even with character level 30 I was able to faceroll the highest possible difficulty (Penitent) without effort…and this with random skills thrown together and gear that doesen’t even buff my chosen skills.
And from my experiance in this game it won’t become more difficult till certain Pit level…even Uber Bosses don’t offer any kind of challange and this braks my heart, becasue they look amazing.
Suggestion:
Instead of giving us the same recycled power every season, give us new & challanging content please…Content that requires us to min/max our character for weeks or even the whole season long.
F.e. let us “juice” pits, Uber Bosses and even the whole T4 world (I know the last one is unrealistic, but would be nice)…with the “high risk high reward” principle.
A juice mechanic where even very good min/maxed chars would have a challanging gameplay in fully juiced Pits or vs fully juiced Uber Bosses.
A juice mechanic where not only gear matters at the higher end but player skill & game experiance aswell (knowing dangerous mods and how to counter them f.e.)
A juice mechanic that requires us to “think outside the box” in terms of build creation and even adapt the build here and there.
And please if you do so, keep this content in future seasosn aswell…so we have more challanging endgame activities & diversity from season to season, not just higher Pits.
Because everyone and their mom wants to 1 tap everything in these arpg’s. Go to Path of Exile you have builds that nuke the screen, I’m sure Last Epoch is the same, Torchlight Infinite, Diablo Immortal, and so on…
There are games where it’s designed to feel slower and more like dark souls as an arpg.
Also D4 was designed more like what you’re suggesting when it launched but no one liked it.
I have no problems with 1-taping whole screens but being able to do so should be tied to at least a little bit effort.
And with “effort” I mean decent gear and a little bit min/maxing.
In Diablo 4 you can do so even with low level and potato gear…I mean whats the point to min/max the own char if you can 1-tap 99% of the content anyway outside of higher Pits?..To half hit all content?
1-taping certain content is fine but if theres no purpose or higher goal to improve the gear further it kills the most important endgame activity in ARPGs…the need to min/max the own gear, even with already owning very good gear.
In POE f.e. you need very good gear to 1-tap all Uber Bosses and this takes a lot of time and effort…effort that motivates in long term, becasue you want your character to become that strong.
In D4 you can faceroll bosses without even trying, after a very short time and with avarage gear…from that point on it’s all about 1-tap Ubers and speedrun Pit100.
And for what?..To find Mythics, so we can half tap the same unchallanging content?
With the currenty difficulty D4 feels more like a “clicker mobile game”, less like a real ARPG…bcs all we currently do is clicking to see flashy lights exploding, without any challange tied to the activity.
Yeah you have a point there. I think where we are now is where they ended up though after many many many iterations of leveling over the last 2 years. It was much slower at I think a few points when they were adjusting leveling and its feel. Though I think the current iteration is to just make you hit certain break points and that’s it. This also likely has to do with legendaries with aspects raining from the sky, tempering, and other things letting you reach pretty good power while you’re leveling up depending on the build.
I think we all know D4 isn’t exactly meant to be a super challenging mmoarpg. And for some highly skilled gamers that have it all figured out it’s likely an absolute borefest until they hit the Pits.
Imo, in the very least they could have harder modes like you suggest for all endgame pillars. A new affix/debuff/whatever system that makes boss ladders, NMD, IH, and Pits much much harder to keep you occupied. And perhaps even a hard mode leveling experience option to tick for penitent perhaps to level in.
I’m totaly fine that they want to make the game for the more Casual audiance but let’s be honest…People who play a game past the story and “grind” in a sandbox environment are not Casuals anymore.
The casuals I know play the story once, dip theyr toes maybe for 1-2 hours into the endgame and move to the next game in theyr collection.
People who level a new character every season aren’t casuals, we’re “Core players”.
This brings me to the question why they keep developing around an audiance, that isn’t the majority anymore…not after 10 Seasons.
And ofc there’s the hard working dad who has 1 hour playtime every 6 months…But this also isn’t the majority who grind such games, they’ve also became casuals who enjoy the story but skip the “grinding” part.
And I don’t want super challanging MMORPG stuff aswell (like Raids f.e.), this isn’t the spirit of ARPGs.
But 99% of the content in D4 is now built around Casuals, who don’t play the adveture mode anyway…why not let 90% of the content be for casuals and f.e. 10% of the content being challanging for the Core playerbase (via “juicing” f.e. as suggested).
Only 10% content that ties us old school fans and core gamer of the brand Diablo for weeks or even months…not being “finished” with the season after 1 week (A season that runs for 3 moths btw).
Are we long term fans not worth it in the eyes of Blizzard to have at least 10% challanging content for us, so we have challanging activities for the whole period of the season?
To be completely honest I think their only main motivation is getting everyone to endgame and being able to complete it (while adjusting for maximum player retention looking at their metrics). They do this to sell more skins that are overpriced as all hell, and of course the battlepass tiers, while they treat this like it’s a F2P mtx game.
I mean its their game to design though and that design might help kill it.
Yup you have a point here and the whole game feels like the only challange is to “beat” the Battlepass rather than beating certain challanges in the game.
But I fear that this idea backfired, becasue if a game already bore me after less than 1 week into a new season and offer 0 challange to play further I’m also not willing to support this kind of developement.
And I’m someone who always support companies if they deliver good game design…In POE I’ve surely spent more than €1000 into supporter packs or so, always if they’ve delivered a good league (and not if not).
I would love to support Diablo 4 devs aswell but so far they didn’t gave me a reason to do so…I’ve purchased the BP only twice bcs I loved the artdesign of the Vampire Season and the Season 1 one just for the hype.
If they start to develop the game just a little bit around us Core player and not just around Casuals, I’m willing to invest more as “thank you” for theyr work and respect to us Core player.
Because this is a mediocre green skeleton crew dev team who are all designing an arpg for the first time .
No one there understands what makes a Diablo game , and they are out of ideas .
I mean they want to sell another expansion, shouldn’t they please theyr whole audience if they want to sell as many copies as possible?
I hope not…this will simply be horrrible and a sign to me that they’ve given up.
And why should I pay €60 for an Expansion in a game that is developed half-hearted or already in “maintainance-mode” by releasing recycled seasons?
That’s why we core player are here…give construcitve critics and hope for better.
Back in the days the Diablo 2 Blizzard North devs were happy about every feedback, constructive critic or even suggestion…and me and my friends sent 100ts of A4 pages of feedback during the D2 Beta.
But guess times changed…
I do this anyway but as a Diablo fanboy since hour 1 in Diablo 1 I want this brand to succeed and it breaks my heart how uninspired the brand became with D4.
But I won’t give up and will never stop to give constructive critics and make suggestions in this forum…I think this helps the devs more to improve than most of the threads who only write “Diablo 4 bad” without any context.
Even if I fear that they don’t read any threads in this forum…but hope dies last.
Because they’ve replaced secondary power-sources for characters with MW
That’s it
Takes a while to understand but that’s it
D4 does not have charms/idols/advanced-sockets that are “tailored” to what you look for and will make you pleased when you see them. It has Runewords but does not have individual Runes (that surprise drop that will make you feel like you wanna continue playing)
It has replaced ALL of that with MW and currency gathering (which does not require luck or thought or experimentation, it just requires TIME)
Said it before will say it again, remove/replace/rework MW to not be such a powerful mandatory source of power and add new “bits and pieces” to interact with and 60% of complaints either about power bloat or lack of endgame will go away
What class and build were you using at level 30 on penitent?
I’m having a hard time with believing you “facerolling” everything at level 30 on penitent. I’m level 40 Sorc on Expert and I have issues with some of those rifts in helltides. Good issues, where I cant faceroll them at level 40. I dont have great gear at all though.
That is only one of the many major conundrums with the development of this game.
They want a game where you can sink in a lot of hours. maximize player retention.
So you would want to slow down the overall pace so people do not fly through the content there is. Yet since day1 they started to change the game in a way that gives every player a Jetengine on progression and then wonder why people stop playing after a few days
Every 3 months not the players should get a “Power” actualy the enemies should.
That would make it much more interesting. Every season there is just more tools to faceroll the same content over and over, instead of making the content more interesting in adding certain buffs to enemies and so on.
They kinda do everything from the wrong side.
Imagine you beat a game and the developer wants you to beat it again. What would make you think " i wanna beat the game again"
Is it a game that is significantly less challenging then before cause you get more and more buffs as a player
or is it
tougher enemies that put up a challenge where you ince succeded.
What is the point in getting stronger and stronger and stronger when you cannot show it cause nothing is there to proof it.
Kinda like you develop more and more chest muscles but you can not show off as all you got is the same 50lbs wheight you can push all day.
We never wanted them or asked for them, the dev team promised they would never add them, went to all the trouble of handcrafting NMDs and adding the framework for interesting affixes and scaling, then threw it all away for that low-effort crap from D3 that was outdated a decade ago.
I’m totaly fine if they keep the current pacing in early and even midgame (would wish myself harder content here aswell, but would be fine if not).
But what I would love to see is a mechanic at the higher end, where every player can individualy create his own challange.
And the first thing that comes in mind is juicing.
With some kind of currency (Lets call them “Nemesis Stones” f.e.) people can buff Pits, NMDs & even Uber Bosses that add deadly modifier to the map or boss (up to 6 extra mods f.e. the last being unique and even more challanging).
Every Nemesis Stone buff comes with a upside (20% more Chance to get 2GA or even 3 GA items, 15% more chances to get 1 additional Mythic, more Gold, more XP, etc…)
But also with downsides (Monster have more res, more life, more DMG…up to being immune to certain elements, Bosses having immunity phases after taking 25% damage, etc…)
As harder the negative mod as better the reward in return.
It’s a small change but would have a big impact in term of longlivity of the game.
People who love to faceroll all content can do so becasue it’s still possible in 90% of the content…but those who want to challange theyr min/maxed character can individualy juice theyr content to test theyr limits.
Nope. The problem is they’re all “predetermined” and implemented as a limited list type. One of the key points of “external power sources” is they should be drops, and more over, they should be surprise drops (or have the potential to surprise)
Right now noone bothers if a Tempering manual drops because it’s a permanent unlock. Same with “powers”, you unlock them and they no longer “carry” a potential for further surprise
The “secondary sources” of power in D4 feel like FPS weaponry. There are like 15-20 of them and you pick one. You can change it, swap it, whatever, but you can’t interact with it or upgrade, or find upgrades. You find it once, and it is there always. Even if they add “suboptions” it will still feel too “rigid” and too limited
It’s literally like Quake or Doom in that regard, which is why back even from S1 I urged the devs to make D4 more like “Doom Eternal” playstyle (by prioritising and focusing on monster evolutions for the later stages of the game before anything else)
But that ship has long sailed and is fine. The problem remains though, “secondary powers” should be something people can “invest” into, find something to interract with, not a predetermined list of possibilities before you even start the game
D4 lacks non-GG surprise incremental sources of power, and replace some of the existing power sources that are “too predictable” and too big (like the MW I already mentioned). People should “find” their potential late-game upgrades (or even just adjustments), not gamble for them
outta luck mate will NEVER!! Happen
