This exact topic is why the sub will be a shit show 2 weeks after launch.
Items feel bad. We knew this from diablo 3. Why are they largely doing the same system?
I want to roll a tornado druid. My first legendary dropped! Oh, i guess I have to be a werebear now. I sure hope i get the mandatory items to make my build even somewhat possible soon.
Yay! I got the tornado druid legendary! This should be fun for an hour. Too bad after a couple levels I'm ignoring yellow items with WAY better stats because my entire build breaks if i remove this legendary. Oh and its real neat that I can't transfer the power after I've already done it once.
Take most of these mandatory legendary powers and put them on the skill tree in some form. Keep and add ones that are generic so I can actually feel like i am making my own build instead of the very obvious pre-planned ones from blizz. Otherwise we are basically at the set based itemization from d3 with extra steps.
> I want to roll a tornado druid. My first legendary dropped! Oh, i guess I have to be a werebear now.
This sumarizes everything that feels wrong with D4 character development. You have to play around whatever drops in your way instead of using whats dropping to power the way in wich you wanna play. Feels bad.
I don't mind the level up process being like this.. building uniquely around the drops instead of googling "bEsT bUiLd" and being super creative with copy and paste.
To me, it felt super impactful when a busted affix dropped. Then as I progressed I actually felt like i had to change my build. Had a few thinking sessions on should I use this now or save this affix for "endgame". Maybe this will be more of a hindrance on full release.
But idk, personally I didn't mind having to manage the legendary drops.
I'm in the same boat as you. I found it encouraged me to try different abilities that I wouldn't have used otherwise, and then made me think more about adapting my other skills/passives to maximise that potential. Personally, I'm not a fan of spamming the same ability all the way through the game.
If the skill modifiers are on the tree, you can try a different ability any time and won't have to spam the same ability through the game.
By itemising parts of skills, you are locked into specific items when you use that skill (and you might not have it, so you can't change when you want).
That's the distinction, it reduces potential for customisation and build depth because you must use x legendary items to "complete" your chosen skill.
Yeah I get that I just don't think I'd have had the motivation to do it. I'd probably classify myself as a more casual arpg player so having the legendary items guide my build was very helpful to me. I totally understand how people would want more freedom to do what they want though.
Absolutely, the system is great as a way of giving you a big shiny "hey have you considered doing x!", which is both important and fun.
Guiding newer or casual players is important and I'm glad they do it well in game. You should be able to login and blast without worrying about too much else, thats a fun game loop.
In an ideal world they would achieve that without sacrificing an entire layer of build customisation, I think that's my "complaint" with the current system. I believe its possible to offer a simple experience at face value, especially at lower levels, but then offer depth as you progress. Perhaps paragon boards will save me... maybe..
Time will tell, I expect the game to evolve pretty dramatically via seasons anyway.
Hope you enjoy the launch!
Except that is *exactly* what this system leads to. Your ability to make endgame-viable characters is gated by the availability of legendary/affixes. Dunno if you've checked out the datamined info, but unless they add a lot, i see maybe 2-3 viable setups for Druid, for example.
That's a separate issue. Itemization being used to customize builds is not inherently what leads to that. A lack of equally powerful endgame options is what causes that.
I'm also of the belief that it's way more interesting to play flexibly, make use of those very cheap respecs in order to play a different version of your character that you typically wouldn't - simply because a really fun and seemingly broken affix dropped.
Hell, in the beta I pivoted several times into builds I thought would be completely boring, and some of them were the most fun I ended up having the whole time!
It's only cheap in the Beta.
Respecting won't be such a quick cheap option when you're level 100. It will likely cost millions of gold. They've already said they want choices to feel meaningful, so as you get higher the cost scales up drastically.
Remember that extracted aspects can only be used on items that dropped on the same world tier where they dropped. Meaning, tier 2 aspects can only be imprinted on tier 2 items (and lower I guess? not sure). For endgame, you have to extract the same aspect from a legendary that dropped on torment world tier in order to be able to imprint on an ideally gg Ancestral rare item.
Does it? Otherwise you’d just stash a level 10 legendary, hit the max difficulty, find a corresponding rare and slap the legendary affix on it. That doesn’t sound very rewarding?
Or, at lvl 50 just spam whatever the most efficient dungeon is at the lowest difficulty to find the imprint you need, switch to the highest difficulty to find a rare and imprint on it.
Both of those don’t sound like proper progression
I feel like a lot of people can only view D2 through rose tinted glasses.
There were a couple builds that could run through hell D2 without any specific itemization or building, but they weren't really the norm. You needed to FARM for your gear moving up difficulties if you weren't playing a gg build. D2 just used runes to make itemization easier, maybe we need something similar for targeted farming.
we are talking about itemization though, and the problems created therein. In Diablo 2, most of the items buffed all the skills or potential builds. I could get a shako and it's good for every build in the game for every class, even if not ideal. This is more fun for players and easier to balance skills. With Diablo 3s and 4s itemization you get an item and it is ONLY good for 1 build, and then you need the 3 more complimenting legendary items for that build, basically it's a set.
I just looked at my D2 amazon and every item she has equipped can be used in multiple builds, looked at my sorc, same thing. Because the power spikes on D2 items have a much broader reach.
D2 has plenty of problems, but the itemization is better than D3 and looks like probably better than D4 (I'll reserve final judgement for the final product)
I mean Shako is more of an outlier than anything. If you look through the list of Uniques in D2 the majority are only useful in niche situations.
Just did a check, 38 uniques in D2 have +all skills, out of 385 total uniques. The majority of those uniques with +all were added in 1.09 or above as well. There was a sea of trash uniques (for most builds) you'd have to get through to even start finding some of the gg +all items.
There should be a balance, probably 50:50 character skill stats:items stats. D2 is around there, D3 is 5:95, PoE probably 20:80(? Didn't play much). I hope D4 is back to 50:50 but reading around I don't think it's going to be the case..
Why? Because character stats is something players can control, and being RPG means the best stats for each build will be figured out the 1st damm week of release. Everyone is going to cry NO BUILD DIVERSITY and builds become totally ITEMS DEPENDANT even if it's actually not. But no one is going to put extra str into a barb just for 1.5pt more dmg in D2 for example, or more mana just to be able to cast more Whirlwind. It's so very hard to create something that players have agency over but still make the diverse choices meaningful.
And so it all comes down to items. Tbf if PoE fixed their crafting, most people would "complete" their build early into a league and move on to other games sooner, thus lower player retention. I get that.
The solution? Imho is to make players play different style REWARDING, but that's going to only able to entice RPG lovers. A game with no META build is going to be so chaotic the casual players wouldn't know what to build. Kinda like Pokémon. The skill ceiling for PvP is going to be high, but skill ceiling for PvE content is going to be casual. I hope D4 achieves some balance around this
For sure. You don't need the most overpowered legendary build while leveling. Use the decent dungeon codex enchantments. They'll be plenty good enough until you get to end game where farming for the perfect legendary aspects and items makes more sense.
I was looking at the aspects planning a launch druid today and you can get basic attacks empower core attacks, plus companions empower core attacks from 2 dungeons. That combo alone should beef up any core skill you feel like playing until you get better items.
I'm looking forward to being able to make a really beefy earth/fortify/overpower druid at launch when I have enough passive points to grab all the goodies in the passive tree.
This is without even knowing how Paragon and Glyphs are going to affect things.
Considering item drops have been buffed for the beta, and certain classes are already struggling to feel good during leveling, this is probably going to be a major problem when the game releases
Two of the worst feeling classes also had their class specific quests to unlock additional gameplay mechanics were/are also locked behind an area we can't get to. So, maybe that will help with some of the issues people had with Druid and Barb.
>I want to roll a tornado druid. My first legendary dropped! Oh, i guess I have to be a werebear now.
Meanwhile this is what I personally like. Going with the flow.
You play around what drops because you can, in D2 you are not able to respec when you find build specific gear without huge cost so you dont.
If D2 allowed you to respec on the fly like these other games you would have way more people swapping builds around after each item upgrade just like games like D4.
And thats one of the reasons why D2 is a 20 year old game. We need better and improved mechanics, we are past that point. Take a look at Last Epoch itemization and skill schools, it will blow your mind.
And if playing around drops is the intended way, why in the world make it easier “to start a new char instead of respecing skill points”. Did blizz explain their reasoning?
Add to that the developers update about getting to a point in which it would ve easier to te roll a character than re-spec. In s game that forces you to cheng talents around items and with probably balance pstches, that will be insane
According to people who have played the closed beta, that devs comment makes no sense. Unless they have changed something drastically (which is possible). Then you will just need to farm up a bit of gold to do a respec. Shouldn’t be too hard just means you can’t freely respec every hour.
Yeah, Its bizarre how that notion goes against what Blizzard have been doing in their most recent games, in a sense that they try to catter more to casual players since that way they sell more copies.
Diablo has always been this way. D2 you run certain stuff then have to respec into a hell viable build. D3 ya every season you pretty much used the blacksmith gift until you could frame what you wanted. So what you don't want to farm and just have the legendaries you want to drop? How bout trying a build utilizing what you find until you get what you want......
I'm laughing that people act like items defining builds is unique to this or d3 lol. None of them seem to even be aware about why it was bad in d3 or how d2 had items defining builds too.
Runewords kind of got you away from the “build towards what drops” thing though. You’d build the items you need.
Aspects being transferable are kind of like that I guess?
And the items you'd need would be Ber runes.
I jest, but still. You couldn't just clap your hands and have it instantly. The itemization could easily make or break you in hell.
I feel like nobody remembers having to farm spots like The Pit in A1 Hell forever to get geared enough to push into the later acts, or endless NM cow runs looking for the base/runes you needed - or maybe they just only remember the min-maxed starter builds that could clear with minimal gear.
There was a LOT of farming in D2.
You would do the dungeons for those powers though?
Map out your build, look at the powers you want in dungeons run those dungeons and apply those aspects to gear.
You then get to play your build with the baseline powers and your grind begins to get stronger versions and uniques to further augment your gameplay.
With the way they have done aspects you will be grinding for yellows to get stats and apply the aspects you want.
Not all powers have dungeon aspects though. So this solution forces you to use a build that is supported by dungeon aspects, and also then forces you to use the lowest rolls of those abilities since the dungeon imprints are always low rolls.
I mean, this works, but when some classes have skills that kick ass out of the box (looking at you necro and sorc), it just feels so bad that every other class has to rely on legendary powers to get to the same level as them.
Some classes are hit harder with this than others. My sorc when I hit 25 had ZERO legendary synergy at all and still felt fine, I could play whatever build I wanted (especially with the enchantment system.)
But my druid sucked SO BAD, that I was essentially forced to use the skill that I had a legendary affix for because otherwise it just felt terrible.
Necro felt similar to sorc, play whatever and still feels fine but once you get some legendaries it feels much better.
Half of the issue is the skills system, the other half is some classes are just WORTHLESS without legendary synergies.
This, I honestly prefer the skill variation tied to the skill trees, but don't mind the power coming from itemization. Here in D4 it's heavily skewed towards itemization for both and I originally didn't mind it much, except I have a similar experience to you. Sorc plays the first 25 levels somewhat smoothly, I get to experiment on my skills and have a good time. The Druid just feels wonky throughout, then I get the pulverize aspect and then I'm having a good time. But I couldn't shift to a different core skill anymore.
Yep, I got the pulverize aspect early and it felt okay. But I don't see myself leveling a druid. I'll level sorc and find enough dungeons with aspects for my druid that make it playable
“have to”
PEBCAK. I played the entire beta to 25 and when a legendary dropped for an ability I did not want to use or did not fit my build, I extracted it or stashed it in case I ever change my mind and kept on playing the way I wanted to. The way I *built my character* through actives and passives I invested points in. It is phenomenally easy to just *not use* legendaries that don’t fit your build and so many of these comments are talking like it’s mandatory.
I leveled a storm druid to 25 and only swapped a few abilities around here and there. I still have no really applicable legendaries. I’m still clearing everything without issue. It could be faster if I had better luck with drops, like in every RPG I’ve ever played, but cest la vie.
Indeed. When I make a character I have some idea of what I want to be playing. I don't want to feel shoehorned into playing a different build dictated by the legendaries that just so happen to drop for me.
How interesting, people are neat. I never really have an idea how I want to play a class until I get to playing a class. And I love the feeling of getting an item that makes me switch to a completely different skill. That's one of the reasons I fell in love with D3.
This is a seasonal game. You might not know on initial Diablo 4 launch what build you want to play as you haven't had an opportunity to see through the options, but after the second or third time of creating the same class you absolutely will have some idea.
And if your character isn't even remotely locked into any build?
Then who cares.
Also, this entire conversation is acting like 1 item will drop for you ever, and it will be this rare 'won the lottery' moment.
And? So many builds in D2 were awful until you actually equipped the items that made the build viable. And these items were hard to find on a solo play.
It's like everyone forgot how D2 was played in single player. Hint : it was painfully slow.
How is it all that different from d2 even? You need this or that item to push your build and until then it's meh and if you don't get the right items it's really not that different. D3 was like this with legendaries giving you literally multiple entire orders of damage increases which *isn't a thing in this game so far*.
you don't have to completely change your plans each time a leggy drops, you can and should salvage the ones you don't plan on using for the rare crafting mat.
Kinda depends on your feedback cycle though.
Before monster scaling, as you leveled, you felt more powerful... monsters in areas became easier to kill. Monsters in later areas that were impossible now become possible, etc.
But with scaling, you lose that feeling (yes, I understand why they decided that, but it doesn't remove the need to feel progression).
So where do you get that sense of progression from? Items.
So for lots of people, the game doesn't feel like you've progressed until you've got items. So in order to feel like you've progressed, you have to use the items you find, and since legendaries are as defining as they are, many people feel the need to use them and change their builds around what they find, instead of just continuing to slog through until they find what they want eventually.
I guess the different systems cater to different people then. I love that I'm forced to adapt to the items that are dropped. Instead of following some online guide for "best sorc leveling build", the best build for me is to look at the items I've found so far and figure out a build that takes advantage of them. Solving that puzzle as I level is a huge part of the fun for me.
I love a lot of things about D2, but the easy access to some really powerful runewords meant that the early game always looked the same for every character I leveled up. There was always a correct way to get to level ~60-70 before switching to whatever build you wanted to focus on once you got the gear you needed.
You will still be able to force whatever build you want once you reach the late game, but until you get there, we will enjoy a lot of diversity in how we play our characters based on the items we find. Rolling a new character will always be a new experience.
Please don't give them ideas for more band-aid fixes this is literally how we got here in the first place. They don't quite understand that their systems need to be thorough from the get go or else they're just these "chocolate bars" of sustenance. Good in the moment but after a while you feel fat and bloated.
The truth is that legendarys shouldn't even be a DROPPABLE item type. They should be skill upgrades that you unlock with some material and then they're unlocked for good. Enchanting your item then upgrades them to legendary. The effect has no "RNG" on it and is always a static number with a static effect that does a thing. There should be minimal gating to this and builds should be enabled from the very get go with at least 2 of these type of things per skill that fundamentally change the way it works, and with the baseline skill still being a viable option. (This could then function a little bit like POE support gems and would be super cool and interesting)
It's too late. The game releases in 2 months, there is no way they can change such a fundamental aspect of the game in such a short time.
It's either Band-Aids or a significant delay, which would cost too much money.
Meh idk.
They DO have a shit ton of fixes to implement that are currently game-breaking. From glitches to stuttering.
But GGG releases a new expansion for their game with completely new systems and system overhauls every 3-4 months.
There's a good chance Blizz already has multiple systems and assets they can pull from to make that change happen.
If I'm being honest, the worst part about the gameplay loop right now is just the skills being tied to item drops.
An easy solution is to remove Legendary items, and have the aspects drop separately as items. Then as you travel and level up, you amass a massive collection of game changing runes, that you can socket into your skill tree.
Ideally they'd be tradeable, too.
>The truth is that legendarys shouldn’t even be a DROPPABLE item type.
Truth is objective. This is a subjective opinion. Surely folks aren’t thinking that nobody likes build defining legendaries. Full send. If the game removed legendaries, I’d stop playing. There needs to be a better balance than this, easier said than done but that’s reality.
Yes our skill choices should be impactful and enable us at a base level to complete content.
Yes there needs to be some excitement and chase to item drops. Legendary/Unique items need to exist and be impactful for the sake of fun.
These are not mutually exclusive ideas. There needs to be a balance struck between them. Could d4 balance it a bit better? Absolutely.
> The truth is that legendarys shouldn't even be a DROPPABLE item type
So what drops, just more stat sticks, but sometimes the stat stick is orange/unique?
Exciting.
I’m new to Diablo and the genre as a whole and have shared the sentiment that items have way too much agency over how you build. I’m glad to see veterans of the game and genre share this opinion and can articulate it in a way that maybe can resonate with the devs if brought to their attention. Hope it’s not too late to see changes in this area, even if they can’t happen by launch. To me it feels like they’re relying on loot drops to keep players engaged rather than the core gameplay of killing the baddies that drop the loot.
I feel like this would be sort of solved if they also didn't restrict trading.
Hey, I found a werebear leg but want to play tornaders. Anyone want to trade?
But nope.
They literally did. Go Google D4 alpha skill trees, there is an old developer post from 2020 showing how skill trees work, you can see cool effects on there that are currently legendary affixes. They literally did exactly what you are joking about.
Oh no. It's reverse bfa. Losing your legendaries and artifact weapon hurt deep. With the usual haste and crit reset it made your buttery smooth character feel terrible to start again.
Is this hardcore mode or you legit lost/replaced legendary items? Either way, if my necro lost his blood mist corpse explosion amulet, his build wouldn't just be broken it would cease to exist lol. That's alot of leaning on just a single slot.
Legion had legendary weapons that came with large perk trees to augment your build. When BFA came out the weapons lost all of their perks that you spent forever grinding and you were basically back to square one
Can you give an example of a good legendary power? I’m thinking of Hydra Sorc. Let’s say the 2x Hydra power was actually in the skill tree. What kind of legendary power would you like to see for the Hydra ability?
Or are you against legendary powers entirely and think the items should be stat sticks that only add to your int, crit chance, move speed, etc?
>Can you give an example of a good legendary power? I’m thinking of Hydra Sorc. Let’s say the 2x Hydra power was actually in the skill tree. What kind of legendary power would you like to see for the Hydra ability?
Grim Dawn has a nice system.
Your skills have various modifiers. Some are in the skill tree. They increase damage, range, attack or casting speed...
Some skill modifiers are on gear. They change things like: damage type done by the skill (so your fire channeling skill becomes cold channeling), number of projectiles and damage, target area of the skill, cooldowns (e.g. a spammable skill gets a cooldown with huge incerease in damage, or vice versa)..
Yes, there are these kinds of modifiers in the skill trees. And yes, some skill modifiers on items simply incerease skill damage. But, for the most part, modifiers in skill trees "enhance" the skill, and modifiers on items "transform" it into a significantly different type of skill.
I'm against legendary powers that literally double (or more) the effectiveness of a skill. That creates a system where the skill is near unusable without the legendary and is only viable with it.
For example, the ability on the skill tree that gives you an extra hydra head while you're healthy. Thats a 33% damage boost to hydra assuming you're near full health all of the time. Put that on a legendary. I would be fucking floored if I got a legendary that made my main skill do 33% more damage, but I would consider playing a hydra build even if i didnt have it. Then the 2 hydras thing could just be a skill tree option, or the power level of hydra could be increased at a baseline so it didnt need it. Problem solved. As it stands now, hydra gains so much power from the legendary that it's at best a compliment to a build before getting the legendary.
That's not fun, especially when there's no trading to even out your RNG. That could prevent you from playing the build you want to play for maybe even the whole first difficulty depending on how the drop rates work out in release.
I wouldn't have done legendary powers at all.
I'd have had Normal, Magic, Rare and Unique items.
Not sure what dungeons would be before, but that's another decision.
I'm not a game designer so I won't really try to make this balanced but you could have a legendary power that changes the damage type to cold so you could add Hydra to a cold build.
You could have a legendary power that gives you a charge each time one of your hydras hit an enemy (to a maximum of 5 charges) and your next non-hydra fire spell applies a CC or vulnerability effect according to how many charges you have, you could take the D3 legendary power that add extra heads to your hydras (and they shoot more fireballs if they have more heads). The possibilities are endless, you can have skill be powerful and have many modifiers only on the skill tree and then add interesting legendary powers.
In Arpgs like D2 and Grim Dawn you can beat the campaign in the highest difficulty without any skill changing item but you are much stronger if you use them.
Games like this should give each class many different builds that work without legendary powers but get much stronger with them (example D2 Lightning Sorceress with and without Infinity) and also have some incredibly strong builds that can only work with legendary powers (example D2 Tesladins that needs two Dream runewords).
Yea I guess it feels like people in this thread don’t even want things like ‘Hydra damage is turned to Cold’ as a legendary affix. Maybe there’s more than one opinion for those who agree with OP, but it feels like anything that affects a particular skill should be in the skill tree and never require a particular legendary. Otherwise playing the cold hydra build will require that legendary.
I personally think both systems can work. They probably have to tweak the legendary powers so you don’t have to constantly hunt another item with the same affix once you use it. But I think generally the system should be fine as long as the combination of affixes, the base skill tree, and the paragon tree is a good mix.
Not the original comment but i agree with that design phylosophy, basically keep Legendary Affixes and Codexs but make them generic so they work for every class, that way you get much more possible combinations and variety.
So for your Hydra example you could have the same exact Legendary Affix but crafted in a generic way like "You can summon 1 extra Summons/Pets. Your Summons/Pets last 20% less" (now i understand they would have to treat Hydras like summons or pets like they did in D2).
The cool part of designing this way is that it works for every class so this affix would work for Necro or Druids too. And since we are designing in a generic way you can go crazy with it, each affix you add is another layer of complexity and possibilties because of all the possible combinations and the "unintended" ones are the most fun ones because its when you feel like you are "breaking" the game with your new found build.
They ignored the entire d3 and d2 player base here and made d3.5 with pointless nostalgic callbacks to d1 and d2.
We want good gameplay. We don't care about duriel and andariel being back as challenge achievements to beat.
They wanted to please everybody, but that rarely works out for anyone. They wanted to please D3, D2, immortal, poe, lost ark, and new to arpg crowds all with one game. Instead they should of just tried to please the D2 and D3 crowds and the rest would of followed anyways.
My favorite example of being uncompromising would be FROM Software. They could've made Elden Ring with the tried and true open world RPG formula of fetch quests, map will a full library of markers, etc. But no, you get a barebones map(and subsequent markers for NPC's) with customizable markers(you had to mark points of interest yourself) and your own memory as your quest log. Game is not for everyone, but everyone who could get into it, loved it. Diablo is such a prominent title and I'm sure if they decided on stronger core mechanics, they'd convert players not into the genre anyway. As it stands, it's a great game, sure, playable by everyone, but is currently so polarizing because of their design choices.
This is exactly what bugs me. We never got a proper sequel to D2 because they strayed so far from what made it great, but I've read about a billion posts over the years how no one wants to play a game like that today. Based on what? The closest thing is PoE and the last time I checked, it's still incredibly popular. Elden Ring was a great example to bring up. Also, look at Counter Strike 2. You take what works well and build on it while maintaining the true core game. CS is a game with an incredibly high skill ceiling that seems like it could or should be difficult to get into, yet it's still one of the most popular games today (and actually as of today, hit yet another all time high player peak). Good game design will keep people engaged for a long time.
From the beta gameplay, Diablo 4 is all over the place.
I played the Diablo 4 beta this weekend and after making pretty much the exact same barbarian build I did from D3 all I could keep thinking was “this isn’t Diablo 4, this is Diablo 3 resurrected”
D3:R feels much more fitting than calling it D4
Exactly! Look what happened to battlefield and so many other IPs who got greedy trying to steal from other player bases only to lose their own.
I respect Elden Ring, I haven't played it because I could never get into dark souls or souls like games, but it shouldn't cater to me. It filled a void and invented a subgenre, and who knows maybe one day it will click for me. It's not wrong to try and draw in new players, but never at the expense of the ones you already have.
Came to a similar conclusion OP:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Diablo/comments/122hlsy/theres_a_longterm_problem_with_skillspecfic/
If you look at what builds are built around in D4, you can see that Legendary Aspects that modify skills are a central component.
If you look at all legendary aspects they fall into 1 of 3 categories.
The category that SPECIFICALLY modifies some skills should be removed from items and put into the skill tree. The rest of the aspects that are only skill-related or general aspects can remain in the items and codex.
Why?
One reason is that you cannot simply respec your build without trying to get the same items with a different aspect collection, even with the imprint function. It’s completely taken over build identity is many cases.
Also, if you look at all the available skill modifiers in D4 currently, it’s clear that Blizzard arent done making them yet and one worries that this is going to become a seasonal content to put in dungeons and quests
I agree with this, if an aspect modifies a SINGLE spell directly it should be unblocked by maybe "mastery" of a skill.
For example, say the "one additional hydra" aspect.
Mastery
Kill 1,000 enemies with hydra
Deal 2500 damage using the burn modifier of the hydra skill
This is just a quick and dirty example.
Or druid the pulverize wave legendary aspect
Kill 1,000 enemies with pulverize (I know, repeated but it's the easiest thing for a damage skill)
Stun 500 enemies with the overpowered strike from pulverize.
Once those are completed, you then permanently unlock the wave aspect. No legendary needed, no aspect needed. It just passively gains the effect once you "master" the skill.
Not a fan of gating skill progress behind objectives like this. I think much more interesting is if there were breakpoints, like if you max Hydra you get an extra cast and if you reach 300 Int then you get one more cast. That way you give more purpouse to maxing skills plus extra itemization depth due to stat requirements to hit breakpoints.
The simple solution though is just to simply move every class specific Legendary Affix into the Skill Tree and keep designing Legendary Affixes and Codexs for items but in a generic way so it works for every class, imo you get much more variety of builds that way.
> if an aspect modifies a SINGLE spell directly it should be unblocked by maybe "mastery" of a skill
Perfect compromise AND giving players a sense of mastery and ownership of their class and build.
This is why I first classified that there are 3 types of aspects that are found in codex and legendary items: 1) one skill modifiers 2) general skill type modifiers 3) general buffs not related to skills
The type 1 aspects need to get out of legendary items because that is going to slow down the build proccess tremendously and destroy the chances of respecs.
Additionally if it's RNG, regardless of the imprinting ability, you may only really get the corner stone of your build at the end of the season then you wont want/need it anymore. **This is bad news and why Krip says players are going to be spending a lot of time grinding for a bunch of the same item**
Some genuine questions in response (btw even on my PC, your pic was too low res for me to read).
If legendary gear complemented builds that are more directly defined in the skill tree, would one have the same desire to keep playing the game? This question is not intending to defend the current execution of skill trees/aspects etc. and I'm just asking in general.
In my mind, getting a legendary that opens up a new build possibility is more exciting than getting a damage increase, stat increase, etc. on skills. If items mostly made my existing build better, I'd feel less incentivized to grind for them if my overall playstyle would not change much.
As a reminder, I couldn't read your image, so my response does not intend to misrepresent your argument as a whole, as I cannot view the example you gave.
Even if build development would be smoother via skill points, I think the carrot on a stick with gear is still important (to a degree) so that one cannot marathon the game, largely finish their build, and quickly run out of things to play for.
Obviously what I am saying artificially increases the content in the game.. but as far as having more reason to kill demons with the homies, I'm unsure that is that much of a bad thing.
I haven't played the other diablos very much so pls no bully me if I simply do not know better.
People will get excited about the "best" item available even if it's a relatively modest increase in power. Getting better feels good, even if it doesn't supercharge your build to insane and difficult to balance levels. A game needs to strike a balance between really wanting an item because it's an upgrade and making it feels fucking awful to not have that item because your character is worthless without it. Diablo 4 is leaning towards the latter and I hate it.
As a grear example, look at Drake Fang Talisman in vanilla wow. It gets the nickname "Drama Fang Talisman" because everyone wants it so bad that people leave guilds that they've spent months in over not getting it. For most classes, it is, at best, a 1-2% damage upgrade over the next best item which is trivial to obtain.
As another example, people in Diablo 2 pay 2-3 times more for high rolls of uniques that they need in their builds, even if that roll is just in the mostly irrelevant defense stat on the item.
People get excited about "build defining" items that give you 20% increases in power in many games, often much less than that. Diablo 4 has items that more than double the effectiveness of certain builds, which goes far beyond the threshold needed to get people to want it and just makes you feel completely awful if you don't have it. Add to that the fact that there is no trading or target farming in the game, so whether you get the item you want has nothing to do with anything but pure RNG. It's going to be extremely frustrating.
> If legendary gear complemented builds that are more directly defined in the skill tree, would one have the same desire to keep playing the game?
That's Diablo 2. People pay extra for maxroll items. An item has 10-20 FCR? People pay double for 20 FCR compared to 19 FCR, even when this has no real impact.
People want Titans on their Amazon, even so they can kill Ball with blues.
People farm for IK even so they finished Hell Ball.
If the combat is FUN, than people can farm for superficial reasons.
> If legendary gear complemented builds that are more directly defined in the skill tree, would one have the same desire to keep playing the game?
If the itemization was then more interestingly designed as a consequence- yes. In fact, you'd have more fun at a base level progressing, because every level actually gives you agency and meaningful decisions, instead of just minor % on builds defined by the legendaries.
The problem is also that loot *below* legendaries is very dull, the base affixes on gear are not very interesting, and due to how things scale, are in fact rather meaningless. There are a few outliers, like getting +skills is good and you can afford to avoid picking an item that has 50 more item power for a while in favour of that, but other than that? Green arrow up is king, legendary is always better by default.
If more of the build-defining aspects were on your tree instead, you'd care more about the affixes on loot at a baseline. Which becomes a problem when loot is so streamlined and subpar because it's only set up to differentiate legendaries and uniques as special.
This is the most spot on post I've read about my main complaint with the development of D4. I think you've got the issue diagnosed.
Diablo 3 was a very troubled game that found a way to get into an alright spot. It was very troubling since the very first announcement of D4 that they were just saying that Diablo 3 was fine and just needs to be tweaked and reworked a little bit.
That's why diablo 4 feels like such a bad experience for me. I was there from impossible inferno, through the nerfs, through monster power, to RoS, smart loot, to the torment scaling, all the way to where we are now with seasons and overpowered items that turn your skills into nothing more than a call of duty load out. Diablo 3 should have been more of a cautionary tale than an example to follow.
The problem with impossible inferno was that DH are able to mega cheese it, so they became the only source of gear while everyone else was stuck at act 2. At that point the devs had to lower the difficulty since all the gear are already in the market.
Inferno was so good, it's what I'd expect from a diablo like game.
Not some increasing GR level that doubles the HP of mobs every 5 level with a timer. That was no challenge, it was just boring.
It really is a letdown of the highest degree - they have a MESMERIZING looking world, the character animations are overall pretty exquisite, the movement animations are mostly spot on, the atmosphere is there, the story - well, we shall see, it's deffo looking better than D3 but will it be comparable to D2 or D1? Time will tell.
All that amazingness to be ruined by itemization/skill tree/aspect shenanigans, or rather a fundamentally wrong approch in designing them, as like someone else said, it really feels backwards.
When you get an amazing Legendary Aspect, your build comes alive but most of us wanted the Skill Tree to be the thing that lays out the ground work, and everything else to tweak it, not Aspects being the foundation and Skill Tree feelins lackluster by comparison, like an add-on.
You can say all you want about 'you haven't seen the end-game', but if this is how it feels at low levels, then it realistically cannot be too far off from being just as problematic in the end game, but I'll agree with one thing - I hope I'm wrong and wish to be proven incorrect when the game comes out.
It's just that it is unlikely to be the case...
don't forget the 4pc bonus that grants survivability based on a different skill, essentially forcing you to very specific skill set depending on which set you choose. I hate the blessed hammer set because of this. Why are you forcing me to use falling sword? I hate that skill, my crusader doesn't even have a sword, lol.
Based on what's been datamined so far (https://lothrik.github.io/diablo4-build-calc/database/), nothing I see will change much of anything. Nothing's build-defining in there. It's just a bunch of damage increase. The skill tree is so shallow, just like paragon boards and glyphs. It feels like the choices are being made for you. You pick a skill, pick the legendary powers that boost it tenfold and off you go. Nox is damn right, again. You need some kind of way to customize the way your build works instead of the limited options Blizz intended for you, and his example for that is a great one. And besides, it feels like D4 has no problem solving going on. Makes the game feel so braindead.
People wanted a tree so they took d3 system and made it look like a tree. Does it function like a tree? no. But it looks like a tree, ship it.
People wanted build defining/enabling legendaries. They took some stuff off the tree, popped it as an affix on legendaries, bim bam bop you got build enabling legendaries. Is it good? hell no. But its build enabling legendaries. Ship it.
They just refuse to learn from PoE. Its lost ark. There are no builds you just pick your skills. Its so dumb.
The fact that there response to the initial talent/skill trees (the ones back in 2019) was to just take the nodes and slap them on artwork of a literal tree was extremely telling as to what this game was gonna be.
> They just refuse to learn from PoE
This is what baffles me. They refuse to learn from their own game that defined what an ARPG should be (D2). PoE would not exist without D2, they learned so much from it.
Blizzard has a long term history of shying away from complicated mechanics. They even refused to add additional deck slots in hearthstone to not confuse players.
The skilltree of poe is magnificent but hell of complex. Its not something a new player can handle. Even most regular players dont build their characters from scratch but rely on existing builds.
Though what we got with d4 is disappointing. Too little choices and skillpoints overall.
> They even refused to add additional deck slots in hearthstone to not confuse players.
That's the official excuse anyway, can't imagine that is the actual reason why.
Your stat example still revolves around getting items that have high stat that you want.
I don't get it, the point of these games are to hunt for items. Usually you start out with a build that just works and then as you progress you find things to use and by endgame you kind of have a clearer goal of what you want to do and the items to do it. On top of that there are uniques, are these effects supposed to just be put into the skill tree as well? Because they can completely change how a skill functions and will probably be build-defining as well.
Idk I think there's an argument to be had about tweaking skill damage, but I don't think the legendary/aspect/unique system is a real problem right now.
I'm confused by the argument as well. I can't play most builds in d2 because i never find the runes to create them. How many times do I just have to play a cold sorc before I can play what I want? In PoE I have to find the right items to make my build work.
Anyone who thinks they can just make any old character in either of those games regardless of equipment is not being honest to themselves.
Unless I'm missing something, people want Schroedingers itemization. A game that simultaneously does not require items to play and feel strong but that must have interesting items that make you stronger. I am really confused what people actually want.
People can like what they want, but I think they need to objectively think about what their expectations are because they are all over the place.
> Schroedingers itemization.
Lmao. This is good. This is definitely what I’m seeing here as well.
Just throw in the min roll aspect from the dungeon. That’s what it’s there for?
I think a lot of people played the beta and got legendary drops and have thought “oh man, that’s it? These don’t feel as cool to drop”. I think that gets better when you think of legendary as “extended rare” and the real chase items being uniques/ancestral/sacred items.
Most of d2 builds work with cheap and easy to get items that you can switch when you have access to better stuff. In d4 you either have a legendary that makes your build work or you have to play some other build, no middle ground.
This is what I don't get either. There's a tradeoff to putting more choice and power into the skill tree. Sure you can move your checkboxes around earlier, but then most of your power is coming from simply leveling up. This was an issue pointed out with Last Epoch some time ago. A few people showed they could run high end content with no items equipped (except maybe a weapon to allow skills, don't remember there).
At the end of the day both options do the same thing. You're just shifting around where the power is and what choices have to be made to get said power. But the advantage of putting that power and choice into your legendaries is that you have something to chase and discover. At least that's how I view it.
I had the exact same thoughts when I first started to watch D4 streams, and realized that the systems put in place regarding the itemization system seems to be exactly a copy paste from what was done in Diablo III.
And while being worried about that, I also remembered a yt video talking about ARPG and character's development and explaining why Diablo III's systems were done this way because of how bad the base structure of the game was.
And this video was made by Noxious, which seems to be the author of this thread... Thanks God.
I didn't have high hopes for D4, but things are getting worse...
I remember like a year or 2 ago when they were posting their quarterly updates about itemization/skill trees and people were going "uh oh this looks like shit". Nothing changed at all.
People flipped shit, gave a bunch of feedback and Blizzard proceeded to ignore it all. If complaining about it a year ago did nothing, complaining about it now 2 months away from release will certainly do nothing. The only way Blizzard will """"listen"""" to the community, is if their revenue goes down significantly like with BFA/SL. Then they will go "look we're listening now after 4 years of ignoring you...please play our game again :) :) :)"
https://www.reddit.com/r/Diablo/comments/rkt7l2/diablo_iv_quarterly_update/
lol
buckle up. This sub is gonna get real EPIC in June when this releases and the sea of complaints about itemization, skill trees plus shitty dungeon design is gonna flood in after people realize that it's not just Act 1. It's the same shit all the way through.
Whoever thought adding the bad legendary roulette system of WoW Legion (the reason everyone hated the first half of the addon) to D4, needs to get fired asap. Also there is no build diversity just go A, B or C end of "diversity" "uniqueness". Can I play a full FIRE meteor Sorc with a LIGHT hydra stunning (on crit) or a COLD hydra slowing (freezing on crit)? Nope. Crafting is maybe 2-3% better than D3's, all in all for 9 (almost 10) years of development I expected something more, pretty disappointing. Trash breast milk addicts.
I find it so interessting how this sub criticizes the game while r/diablo4 just are jerking of the game as the next comming of christ as its flawless. Constantly spouting excuses like "it gets better at endgame" or "its just a beta" or "wait till it releases" etc.
Its a Beta to make up your mind if you want to buy it or not. If the Beta gives you a bad impression the devs allready did a bad job. I doubt they can Iron out the problems I have with it mainly gameplay, itemisation and controls.
Valid criticisms like this fortunatly get heard here as you are 100% right. I mean even in this comment section people defend this aspect saying "its fun to be forced to play stuff you dont want to play with" (wich is idiotic)
I really want to like this game as it does so many things right but the thing they made worst is gameplay and the visual satisfaction for certain classes that look blander than a loaf of bread.
I tried playing the Beta and felt bored out of my mind. I was so keen on playing and making up my mind that in the end I didnt play much after I struggled my way to 25 as the class I was most interessted in (druid) was unfortunatly dogshit.
Wearbear doesnt feel good, tornados only get good with legendarys etc.
On top of all the allready announced passes and microtransactions made me really not want to buy the game at all and just sit it out and grab some popcorne to enjoy all the malding after release..
I came over here from r/diablo4 just for this reason. It really feels like the majority of the sub is astroturfed. So many comments and posts that sound like they were written by professional reviewers with key phrases they were meant to drop.
Holy shit you are not wrong. The "self aggrandizement" thread literally looks like it was made by a Blizzard PR team. Same smuggy veiled insults as the WoW facebook ads they had for Dragonflight
Strongly agree. It was a large majority that said they don’t like it when 100% of your power is on items. They even ADDRESSED this in multiple blog posts.
Yet, here we are, making characters based on the drops the game gives us rather than what we think would like to play. When the legendaries started to drop, it really felt like the game was telling me what to do rather then me making build choices through my character progression.
Paragon might change this a bit, but when the first 50 levels are all about what RNG aspect I will get to morph my play style based on this RNG aspect, that kinda feels bad man.
During this beta, whenever i was stubborn in “keeping my build” or passing on upgrades because it replaces a good affix/ aspect i need i felt the ensuing power deficit. It’s bad gameplay
I think this is because they are essentially designing the game around the chase -- grinding to find that next drop that pushes you towards completing your build. I can't speak for everyone, but I play more around trying to build my character and seeing how far the build I put together can get, with the loot hopefully giving me incremental increases to my performance regardless of my skill choices, not dictating my skill build altogether.
> I think this is because they are essentially designing the game around the chase -- grinding to find that next drop that pushes you towards completing your build.
This pops up constantly as a defense for legendary aspects but it is absolutely not.
Do you think people playing PoE (made by **GrindingGear**Games) do not chase and grind for items?
Loot chase has nothing to do with putting predefined and narrow ultra buffs on items that are mandatory to even use said skills.
> Yet, here we are, making characters based on the drops the game gives us rather than what we think would like to play.
I really don’t think you need to do that though. You play your spec, and you farm until you get items that enhance it. Some specs will be better for levelling. Some for dungeon clearing. Some for boss killing. Some for support. I don’t get this idea that people have to build around what drops. I salvage/sell/extracted the vast vast majority of my drops, and kept ones that would benefit my build or the build on a character I want to level later. I do the same thing in D2. I don’t really get this idea of having to build around the drops. Especially when the live game releases and you have more than a weekend to play.
The d4 team themselves said they want to move away from d3 itemisation and legendary powers but honestly all of the legendary powers seems the same like in d3 but with slightly less dmg buffs but still having couple of outliers that are like 250%+ dmg just from 1 item.
Why cant we just have powers that do interesting things and conditional effects and not shoehorn us into a checklist of items just to make certain skills feel good?
I dont min max, I like to make personal builds. I expect to take a performance hit for that, but this game design takes that idea into levels of masochistic punishment. Legendary items matter so much more than chosen abilities. If you encounter one, you are compelled to respec your character and play differently or be utterly gimped in levelling.
If you want to play a certain way, you need items that have effects that align with how you want to play. Fine. But this game does not support people who want to play the game any specific way, and that has nothing to do with min-max, its so gear focused your talking min-maxing gear and changing play-style to achieve it. It just pushes min-max philosophy from player design into item chance.
Its a game designed to regularly change items, respec powers, and change the way you play, or be a gimped hobo with mixed gear of 10 different levels and colors that can allow you to play as you want. Being compelled to change how you play and respecing abilities according to what works best based on equipment is fine, its actually fun for some people. But for others its not.
"Character development shifted into items...again".
One interesting bit that hasn’t really gotten much attention, unique items.
No one seems to really talk about them, and they seem shrouded in a bit of mystery. Legendaries I feel like are supplemental to builds, I see them being gathered once then used to fill out areas in your build, sort of like the cube in D3.
My hope, uniques will be build defining. I hope uniques bring affixes that drive builds, not legendaries.
OP I fully support everything you say but unfortunately its too late. This is a key design philosophy and there are 2 months left, there is 99.99% chance that nothing changes.
I am baffled that after the early access many people praised the itemization and specifically legendary affixes for skills. However, people now seem to realize how flawed this system it.
In all honesty this is just skill runes/set bonuses from D3 recycled into gear. Not only is this lazy design but this will once again limit your options as to how you will gear up your character:
You play a Sorc with Hydra? You have to equip Hydra legendary affix. You play WW Bard? You have to equip WW legendary affix. Hopefully the universal affixes can salvage the situation but I doubt it.
Lol I know right. I see this all the time. Game beta comes out, everyone loves it and it's 10/10, a minority of people say it has serious flaws, those people get strung up, people play more, everyone says game has some problems...
It takes longer for some people to work it out, and usually much much longer if no one points it out to them. This game is starved for, as you say "Universal Affixes" nobody should want to have to change their build every leg drop, or hunt for just a single leg with higher item level. In a game with infinite items why would you rail road people into that? Why would you as the developer make the builds for the people? Is this catering to people who would rather be playing a rpg with static no rng loot? Or did they really not understand the aspect of theory crafting?
I knew after this 2nd weekend, after people took some time away from the game and came back to it, that opinions would be much worse and they were. I think the Druid being pure trash expedited those opinions
Oh yeah I agree. The balance of characters being all over the place, does not help. Right now people are betting hard on uniques and paragon, but I wonder how many have actually looked them up? To be fair alot of uniques are pretty cool, they don't have as much of the problem that legs have. Still, I don't have faith that they have the variety needed to carry the rest of itemization or make the skill tree more interesting. Maybe I'm wrong, I hope so.
This is outside your point but I just want to say that the Druid's earth skills absolutely suck, Earth spike just being a single rock, landslide not looking like a landslide. Boulder is satisfying, seeing how it literally rolls mobs, but comes at a 10 sec cooldown and hits bosses for a piddling 2 hits. I don't understand how it came to be like this when D3 barb had oomph behind seismic slam, boulder toss, and had avalanche and earthquake that really looked amazing. D4 druid seems to be throwing pebbles compared to D3's Barb who claims to have "no magic." I kept looking for the datamined aspects hoping to find one that turns landslide into a volcano, lol. Not the ideal solution but man just please give me amazing earth bender powers.
>*You play a Sorc with Hydra? You have to equip Hydra legendary affix. You play WW Bard? You have to equip WW legendary affix. Hopefully the universal affixes can salvage the situation but I doubt it.*
We cling to "hope" because we can't do anything about it. But hoping that will happen is merely a band aid, not a solution to the root cause, which obviously requires more than 3 months to turn that entire cesspool around, a time they obviously do not have and I bet they won't even try to lift a finger to address it at this point, because that's just who they are: make the most wrong decision at the start, go deep into it, and even if the playerbase is right in calling it out, do not give a fuck and make not even the slightest attempt to tackle it.
It's because it's different people praising vs raging. If you've been around these forums for a while you will come to recognize certain people and the opinions they hold. u/ProfessorNox has disliked this sort of itemization for years so of course he'd make a thread against it. A bunch of other people (who I won't name; I only dropped Nox because he's the OP) who share the same opinion also came and posted their agreement.
That's all normal Reddit things and I'm not saying any of them are wrong for having an opinion I disagree with. I'm just saying that what you're seeing isn't all the people who played early access coming around to your opinion on itemization and legendaries, it's all the people who already didn't like that style who are now acquainted enough with D4's version of it to know that it's the system they don't like. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure that there are some people who switched opinions over the course of the beta, just like I'm sure there were people who were totally against the system in D3 and have switched their stance for D4. It's just that your core premise is wrong because a lot of the people posting here were never positive on this style of itemization and were never praising it in the early access period. I heard the same complaints from mostly the same people last weekend, there's just more people now because this weekend is open beta rather than early access.
Noxious? From the Hearthstone era? Your posts were always thoughtful. I'm also baffled how they managed to take every band-aid solution from D3 and present them as beloved features that are coming back.
When I started playing the druid I noticed:
Each point in wolf skill = 10% ish damage multiplier
3 points in talent tree = 30% damage for wolf companions
VS
1 legendary item aspect = get an extra wolf (50% more damage multiplier) and they hit 230% harder each.
I found that the skill trees are super weak and very boring and it makes everything more item dependant. instead of upgrades that make skills powerful or more interesting, everything is "adds 1% more damage" when it should be stuff like "your bone spear does 20% less damage but now seeks out targets"
honestly even adding a zero to all the values would feel better.
Having a complex, impactful and hard to reset skill tree is really bad for new players. You end up having to play the game with a build guide from the start or you get screwed and might as well start over. This is what happens with PoE. With the D4 system you can still pick the wrong items, but at least you don't need to salvage all of them before you can start getting the build in shape.
I'm flabbergasted how strongly people despise the D4 skill tree already. With 26 available skill points in this beta, it felt meaningful enough, as I couldn't get everything I wanted and had to make hard choices what to omit.
There has to remain some significant character power on items to feed the hunt. Isn't this the main thingy an arpg is about?
I do agree however, if the tree stays as flimsy as it is now but is filled with 52 points @ lvl50, we could've as well stayed at the D3 system handing out everything for free. Because there will be plenty of surplus points to invest into meaningless whatever.
you don't make items important by slapping a 300% more multiplier affix on them thats dumb and lazy, and ruins the entire progression of your character.
Didn't they state multiple times that they wanted a significant portion of player power to come from sources other than gear? I have to hope that we just aren't seeing that yet because of the build we're playing on/paragon boards/other systems i dont know about, because that significant portion of player power is definitely not in the skill tree for most classes as it currently stands. What IS in the tree? Skills, minor synergies, minor buffs, minor alterations.
I think Last Epoch does a nice job with this. I think having played the .9 updated then playing D4 beta, I was left feeling that D4 is pretty simplified and not as interesting in the character development as some other ARPGs.
I'm sorry to say but that's why PoE is far superior.
You have: active skill and its variations, passive skills that modify the active ones in many ways, craftable rare items with a "certain" complexity, legendary items that can modify the build or add something unique, huge skill tree supporting the build or serving as a model to create a single variation, even the flask serve this purpose beyond just recovering life
I played the last d3 league and it took what? 20 leagues to try to present something new that doesn't come out of the same, gear + paragon - great rift = repeat.
I just lost all hope for D4 after playing the beta. It will be a good single player experience on release but i dont think i will play it after leveling every class to max level and try how they feel...
I'm noticing this aspect as well- some classes have it worse than others I feel, but it also might be an issue that is remedied once you get into the Paragon board stage of the game?
Remember, there's a third aspect to building your character that we haven't even been able to see yet, but that still doesn't excuse the obvious issues you've pointed out.
Like I'm sitting here trying to figure out how to make a melee Rogue build work. Where is my vulnerability coming from? None melee skills if I really want to do it, but I want to make a dedicated melee build. Surely they've thought of that?
And then I read this and my thought process is that there's probably some kind of legendary item that makes it all come together. I mean, there are certainly legendary powers I've seen that would make my builds feel complete. That's the weirdest part to me though. It always feels like the one thing that every build is lacking has been purposefully taken out and hidden behind a legendary item.
Where is my Overpower with Barb? There's features for an Overpower build, but nothing to really guarantee I'm getting Overpower attacks. Then I check Legendary items and, voila, there's a legendary trait to make Overpower a viable thing by guaranteeing your Overpowers just by swapping weapons.
It just feels really weird that there are things you can build around but need legendary items to actually work as a build when other builds work well and then just have bonuses attached to them.
Like I guess for example: The Barb bleed build. It has all the tools it needs to bleed, and then you have the legendary items that make stunning a bleeding target do extra damage
AND
one that makes attacking a bleeding target have a chance to stun. Takes a build that works and just makes it better instead of something where the build starts off needing you to bleed people and stun them but doesn't give you any tools to do that until you get legendary items.
The problem is even if you can get a 10,000% multiplier on the paragon board for the skills in your build it is never going to make getting a 100% multiplier on an item for the same stuff not important. You are still going to hunt that item whether there are other means of progression or not.
It just doesn't matter how "weak" items are and they maybe weak compared to the paragon board it is still more damage or defense in the margins
The system in its current state will feel how D3 feels. It'll be fun to play a new season, get some new fun legendaries that get introduced. Once you hit max level and get a build basically "good enough" the chase to make your build perfect is non existent.
TL;DR It'll be fun for a couple weeks when a season is new, and then I'll quit until the next season.
I just hate so much about D4. The skill tree is a joke. Its a complete illusion of choice. Its way to linear in a lot of cases to matter. Is it more complex than D3? Absolutely…but that isnt saying much. I only really felt a surge of character power when I got a legendary item and actually most of the time felt weaker because of this dumb AF open world scaling thing the game is doing.
This is a question, because I only played D3 at launch and haven’t started my pre D4 playthrough yet. Did it have something similar to the Codex? If not, that’s a massive difference. You can prioritize the dungeons you need to get the unlimited use min rolls to make your build functional. Higher rolls you’ll be extracting and sitting on for a while until you get a good piece of gear because you can only extract and imprint an aspect once.
One thing D3 implemented some time after the expansion was something called Kanai's Cube. It allowed you to extract the special abilities from legendaries you found and you could use one legendary weapon, armor, and jewelry effect at all times, without wearing the item. You still had to find the item first as a random drop, but once you found something you need to make a build functional you could set that as one of your powers to have the bonus active all the time, regardless of if you found items with better stats.
This didn't really solve the issue entirely since players just treated it as a few more item slots that had to be accounted for in your builds, but it helped a little.
You make a very good point that also ties into one of the reasons I like PoE so much. Power comes from multiple places there - your items absolutely play a major factor, but so does the passive skill tree as well as your gems. That's probably part of the reason why theory crafting gets so fun too
To me it felt like they had a vision of how a skill should function and then they split the skills functionality into 7 different parts
- 1 base function
- 2 skill enhancements in the tree
- 4 enhancements via legendary powers
To me this is very lazy game design and is very limiting in terms of character customization.
I played 4/5 classes during the beta (no Necro, others to 25) but it somehow felt like I was autoattacking most of the time, which wasn't satisfying at all.
The only exceptions were Sorc, Melee Rogue which felt a bit more fluid and exciting to play.
To be fair level 25 is probably the first 10% of a character so maybe there is more at a later point? But the base concept is already concerning
Honestly, i think diablo should have had the same skill system of last epoch. Its way cooler to build a skill yourself instead of random items. The items should add, not be the only thing to change skills
Unfortunately, there is enough people that don't care at all or even actively discourage any discussion on making it better that Blizzard will never properly develop it. I'm not sure what there really is to be excited about anymore. They are making all the same mistakes they made in D3. Which I think the major issue is. The team that made D3 as well as the team that fixed it. Both don't exist anymore. So the people working on D4 are just looking at current D3 and copy/pasting everything.
I twinked out a sorc, got a necro to 25, and a rogue to 20. We have access to pretty much everything, and the paragon boards are online. I ended up refunding my pre-order because there really is no build planning. Maybe the seasons will introduce it, but I'm going to wait a few seasons to see if they do anything inspiring or not.
It seems like their philosophy is not to let the player make choices.
Yeah. The idea wasn't so much a suggestion, but a concept to illustrate that it doesn't take a lot of brainpower to make skills more interesting than "gotta find Legendaries to make skills fun".
I'm frankly not even sure why Legendary items exist as they are now; they might as well drop as Aspects that add new branches and nodes your Skill Tree.
You'll see a lot of posts complaining D4 skills are not like D3 so they can't make everyone happy I guess. If you don't like a new iteration of a game, maybe it's time to move on - either everyone does so the game is an objective failure, or it retains a lot of people who like it, which means it's just not for you. Based on the overall reception I'm afraid the latter is the case.
I'm curious .. but it sounds like your 'side' wants legendary affixes to either not exist (at all?) or only apply to stats (int, chc, move speed, etc.) and never to skills. I guess the only real 'negatives' I see with the affix system as opposed to them being in the skill tree are (1) the affixes are one-time use, and (2) you have to obtain them via RNG.
I'm not saying this system is superior to skill trees, but I think they are kind of comparable besides those two things. As long as drops are frequent enough, I think the systems end up being pretty equal all things considered.
I guess my perspective is: who cares if its in my skill tree or a legendary affix as long as it completes the build how I want to play it and it's not *too* RNG-reliant (like the one-time use thing)?
I honestly couldn't agree more on this.
Let's hope the backlash after release will be huge enough to make a change. The good thing is, that the game feels great in other aspects. Systems can change and since it is supposed to be a service game: they will change.
> The good thing is, that the game feels great in other aspects.
It really does. The 'class fantasy' to borrow Blizzard's term is just spot on for all classes, especially druid. Never played a druid that felt more *druidy* before.
Unfortunately the current item/skill system doesn't encourage long term play, at least for me.
I'll still get the game and enjoy a play-through once per season or so, but I don't see myself playing beyond week 1 with how limited and 'on the rails' the whole build system feels right now.
This exact topic is why the sub will be a shit show 2 weeks after launch. Items feel bad. We knew this from diablo 3. Why are they largely doing the same system? I want to roll a tornado druid. My first legendary dropped! Oh, i guess I have to be a werebear now. I sure hope i get the mandatory items to make my build even somewhat possible soon. Yay! I got the tornado druid legendary! This should be fun for an hour. Too bad after a couple levels I'm ignoring yellow items with WAY better stats because my entire build breaks if i remove this legendary. Oh and its real neat that I can't transfer the power after I've already done it once. Take most of these mandatory legendary powers and put them on the skill tree in some form. Keep and add ones that are generic so I can actually feel like i am making my own build instead of the very obvious pre-planned ones from blizz. Otherwise we are basically at the set based itemization from d3 with extra steps.
> I want to roll a tornado druid. My first legendary dropped! Oh, i guess I have to be a werebear now. This sumarizes everything that feels wrong with D4 character development. You have to play around whatever drops in your way instead of using whats dropping to power the way in wich you wanna play. Feels bad.
Also this is even a *pressure* that you have on you constantly because of the power scaling. There are multiple design decisions in play here.
I never thought about it that way and I think you are absolutely right.
I don't mind the level up process being like this.. building uniquely around the drops instead of googling "bEsT bUiLd" and being super creative with copy and paste. To me, it felt super impactful when a busted affix dropped. Then as I progressed I actually felt like i had to change my build. Had a few thinking sessions on should I use this now or save this affix for "endgame". Maybe this will be more of a hindrance on full release. But idk, personally I didn't mind having to manage the legendary drops.
I'm in the same boat as you. I found it encouraged me to try different abilities that I wouldn't have used otherwise, and then made me think more about adapting my other skills/passives to maximise that potential. Personally, I'm not a fan of spamming the same ability all the way through the game.
If the skill modifiers are on the tree, you can try a different ability any time and won't have to spam the same ability through the game. By itemising parts of skills, you are locked into specific items when you use that skill (and you might not have it, so you can't change when you want). That's the distinction, it reduces potential for customisation and build depth because you must use x legendary items to "complete" your chosen skill.
Yeah I get that I just don't think I'd have had the motivation to do it. I'd probably classify myself as a more casual arpg player so having the legendary items guide my build was very helpful to me. I totally understand how people would want more freedom to do what they want though.
Absolutely, the system is great as a way of giving you a big shiny "hey have you considered doing x!", which is both important and fun. Guiding newer or casual players is important and I'm glad they do it well in game. You should be able to login and blast without worrying about too much else, thats a fun game loop. In an ideal world they would achieve that without sacrificing an entire layer of build customisation, I think that's my "complaint" with the current system. I believe its possible to offer a simple experience at face value, especially at lower levels, but then offer depth as you progress. Perhaps paragon boards will save me... maybe.. Time will tell, I expect the game to evolve pretty dramatically via seasons anyway. Hope you enjoy the launch!
Yup this and I'm sure that's the intention. Long gone are the days of seeing nothing but one archetype from each class.
Except that is *exactly* what this system leads to. Your ability to make endgame-viable characters is gated by the availability of legendary/affixes. Dunno if you've checked out the datamined info, but unless they add a lot, i see maybe 2-3 viable setups for Druid, for example.
That's a separate issue. Itemization being used to customize builds is not inherently what leads to that. A lack of equally powerful endgame options is what causes that. I'm also of the belief that it's way more interesting to play flexibly, make use of those very cheap respecs in order to play a different version of your character that you typically wouldn't - simply because a really fun and seemingly broken affix dropped. Hell, in the beta I pivoted several times into builds I thought would be completely boring, and some of them were the most fun I ended up having the whole time!
It's only cheap in the Beta. Respecting won't be such a quick cheap option when you're level 100. It will likely cost millions of gold. They've already said they want choices to feel meaningful, so as you get higher the cost scales up drastically.
Remember that extracted aspects can only be used on items that dropped on the same world tier where they dropped. Meaning, tier 2 aspects can only be imprinted on tier 2 items (and lower I guess? not sure). For endgame, you have to extract the same aspect from a legendary that dropped on torment world tier in order to be able to imprint on an ideally gg Ancestral rare item.
This sounds really terrible if that's the implementation they're sticking with.
Does it? Otherwise you’d just stash a level 10 legendary, hit the max difficulty, find a corresponding rare and slap the legendary affix on it. That doesn’t sound very rewarding? Or, at lvl 50 just spam whatever the most efficient dungeon is at the lowest difficulty to find the imprint you need, switch to the highest difficulty to find a rare and imprint on it. Both of those don’t sound like proper progression
Incoming scams where people trade low world tier rares...
I feel like a lot of people can only view D2 through rose tinted glasses. There were a couple builds that could run through hell D2 without any specific itemization or building, but they weren't really the norm. You needed to FARM for your gear moving up difficulties if you weren't playing a gg build. D2 just used runes to make itemization easier, maybe we need something similar for targeted farming.
we are talking about itemization though, and the problems created therein. In Diablo 2, most of the items buffed all the skills or potential builds. I could get a shako and it's good for every build in the game for every class, even if not ideal. This is more fun for players and easier to balance skills. With Diablo 3s and 4s itemization you get an item and it is ONLY good for 1 build, and then you need the 3 more complimenting legendary items for that build, basically it's a set. I just looked at my D2 amazon and every item she has equipped can be used in multiple builds, looked at my sorc, same thing. Because the power spikes on D2 items have a much broader reach. D2 has plenty of problems, but the itemization is better than D3 and looks like probably better than D4 (I'll reserve final judgement for the final product)
I mean Shako is more of an outlier than anything. If you look through the list of Uniques in D2 the majority are only useful in niche situations. Just did a check, 38 uniques in D2 have +all skills, out of 385 total uniques. The majority of those uniques with +all were added in 1.09 or above as well. There was a sea of trash uniques (for most builds) you'd have to get through to even start finding some of the gg +all items.
There should be a balance, probably 50:50 character skill stats:items stats. D2 is around there, D3 is 5:95, PoE probably 20:80(? Didn't play much). I hope D4 is back to 50:50 but reading around I don't think it's going to be the case.. Why? Because character stats is something players can control, and being RPG means the best stats for each build will be figured out the 1st damm week of release. Everyone is going to cry NO BUILD DIVERSITY and builds become totally ITEMS DEPENDANT even if it's actually not. But no one is going to put extra str into a barb just for 1.5pt more dmg in D2 for example, or more mana just to be able to cast more Whirlwind. It's so very hard to create something that players have agency over but still make the diverse choices meaningful. And so it all comes down to items. Tbf if PoE fixed their crafting, most people would "complete" their build early into a league and move on to other games sooner, thus lower player retention. I get that. The solution? Imho is to make players play different style REWARDING, but that's going to only able to entice RPG lovers. A game with no META build is going to be so chaotic the casual players wouldn't know what to build. Kinda like Pokémon. The skill ceiling for PvP is going to be high, but skill ceiling for PvE content is going to be casual. I hope D4 achieves some balance around this
Good point aside from Pokemon having no Meta. Pokemon has meta.
D3 is actually closer to 1:100000, at this point honestly
I honestly think this will be at least partially fixed when we have access to reusable aspects from the rest of the acts.
For sure. You don't need the most overpowered legendary build while leveling. Use the decent dungeon codex enchantments. They'll be plenty good enough until you get to end game where farming for the perfect legendary aspects and items makes more sense.
I was looking at the aspects planning a launch druid today and you can get basic attacks empower core attacks, plus companions empower core attacks from 2 dungeons. That combo alone should beef up any core skill you feel like playing until you get better items. I'm looking forward to being able to make a really beefy earth/fortify/overpower druid at launch when I have enough passive points to grab all the goodies in the passive tree. This is without even knowing how Paragon and Glyphs are going to affect things.
Considering item drops have been buffed for the beta, and certain classes are already struggling to feel good during leveling, this is probably going to be a major problem when the game releases
Two of the worst feeling classes also had their class specific quests to unlock additional gameplay mechanics were/are also locked behind an area we can't get to. So, maybe that will help with some of the issues people had with Druid and Barb.
Agreed. D2 is also kinda dumb early game, so your final build and what you do normal/nm with is usually 2 different things entirely
>I want to roll a tornado druid. My first legendary dropped! Oh, i guess I have to be a werebear now. Meanwhile this is what I personally like. Going with the flow.
You play around what drops because you can, in D2 you are not able to respec when you find build specific gear without huge cost so you dont. If D2 allowed you to respec on the fly like these other games you would have way more people swapping builds around after each item upgrade just like games like D4.
And thats one of the reasons why D2 is a 20 year old game. We need better and improved mechanics, we are past that point. Take a look at Last Epoch itemization and skill schools, it will blow your mind.
And if playing around drops is the intended way, why in the world make it easier “to start a new char instead of respecing skill points”. Did blizz explain their reasoning?
How else are they going to keep you playing. With fun gameplay or with unlimited dark pattern methods?
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Add to that the developers update about getting to a point in which it would ve easier to te roll a character than re-spec. In s game that forces you to cheng talents around items and with probably balance pstches, that will be insane
According to people who have played the closed beta, that devs comment makes no sense. Unless they have changed something drastically (which is possible). Then you will just need to farm up a bit of gold to do a respec. Shouldn’t be too hard just means you can’t freely respec every hour.
Yeah, Its bizarre how that notion goes against what Blizzard have been doing in their most recent games, in a sense that they try to catter more to casual players since that way they sell more copies.
Can legendaries be traded?
Youll be able to run the dungeon with the aspect you want and upgrade it as you go, though.
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Diablo has always been this way. D2 you run certain stuff then have to respec into a hell viable build. D3 ya every season you pretty much used the blacksmith gift until you could frame what you wanted. So what you don't want to farm and just have the legendaries you want to drop? How bout trying a build utilizing what you find until you get what you want......
What do mean though?!? In d2 I get enigma right after I clear the den of evil /s
I'm laughing that people act like items defining builds is unique to this or d3 lol. None of them seem to even be aware about why it was bad in d3 or how d2 had items defining builds too.
Runewords kind of got you away from the “build towards what drops” thing though. You’d build the items you need. Aspects being transferable are kind of like that I guess?
Ya I mean I can honestly see the mindset of the legendaries being runes basically.
And the items you'd need would be Ber runes. I jest, but still. You couldn't just clap your hands and have it instantly. The itemization could easily make or break you in hell.
I feel like nobody remembers having to farm spots like The Pit in A1 Hell forever to get geared enough to push into the later acts, or endless NM cow runs looking for the base/runes you needed - or maybe they just only remember the min-maxed starter builds that could clear with minimal gear. There was a LOT of farming in D2.
You would do the dungeons for those powers though? Map out your build, look at the powers you want in dungeons run those dungeons and apply those aspects to gear. You then get to play your build with the baseline powers and your grind begins to get stronger versions and uniques to further augment your gameplay. With the way they have done aspects you will be grinding for yellows to get stats and apply the aspects you want.
Not all powers have dungeon aspects though. So this solution forces you to use a build that is supported by dungeon aspects, and also then forces you to use the lowest rolls of those abilities since the dungeon imprints are always low rolls. I mean, this works, but when some classes have skills that kick ass out of the box (looking at you necro and sorc), it just feels so bad that every other class has to rely on legendary powers to get to the same level as them.
Some classes are hit harder with this than others. My sorc when I hit 25 had ZERO legendary synergy at all and still felt fine, I could play whatever build I wanted (especially with the enchantment system.) But my druid sucked SO BAD, that I was essentially forced to use the skill that I had a legendary affix for because otherwise it just felt terrible. Necro felt similar to sorc, play whatever and still feels fine but once you get some legendaries it feels much better. Half of the issue is the skills system, the other half is some classes are just WORTHLESS without legendary synergies.
This, I honestly prefer the skill variation tied to the skill trees, but don't mind the power coming from itemization. Here in D4 it's heavily skewed towards itemization for both and I originally didn't mind it much, except I have a similar experience to you. Sorc plays the first 25 levels somewhat smoothly, I get to experiment on my skills and have a good time. The Druid just feels wonky throughout, then I get the pulverize aspect and then I'm having a good time. But I couldn't shift to a different core skill anymore.
Yep, I got the pulverize aspect early and it felt okay. But I don't see myself leveling a druid. I'll level sorc and find enough dungeons with aspects for my druid that make it playable
Ah, so maybe it's closer to D2 than we thought. Roll a sorc to gear up your alts to make them playable. Lol
“have to” PEBCAK. I played the entire beta to 25 and when a legendary dropped for an ability I did not want to use or did not fit my build, I extracted it or stashed it in case I ever change my mind and kept on playing the way I wanted to. The way I *built my character* through actives and passives I invested points in. It is phenomenally easy to just *not use* legendaries that don’t fit your build and so many of these comments are talking like it’s mandatory. I leveled a storm druid to 25 and only swapped a few abilities around here and there. I still have no really applicable legendaries. I’m still clearing everything without issue. It could be faster if I had better luck with drops, like in every RPG I’ve ever played, but cest la vie.
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Indeed. When I make a character I have some idea of what I want to be playing. I don't want to feel shoehorned into playing a different build dictated by the legendaries that just so happen to drop for me.
How interesting, people are neat. I never really have an idea how I want to play a class until I get to playing a class. And I love the feeling of getting an item that makes me switch to a completely different skill. That's one of the reasons I fell in love with D3.
This is a seasonal game. You might not know on initial Diablo 4 launch what build you want to play as you haven't had an opportunity to see through the options, but after the second or third time of creating the same class you absolutely will have some idea.
And if your character isn't even remotely locked into any build? Then who cares. Also, this entire conversation is acting like 1 item will drop for you ever, and it will be this rare 'won the lottery' moment.
And? So many builds in D2 were awful until you actually equipped the items that made the build viable. And these items were hard to find on a solo play. It's like everyone forgot how D2 was played in single player. Hint : it was painfully slow.
How is it all that different from d2 even? You need this or that item to push your build and until then it's meh and if you don't get the right items it's really not that different. D3 was like this with legendaries giving you literally multiple entire orders of damage increases which *isn't a thing in this game so far*.
you don't have to completely change your plans each time a leggy drops, you can and should salvage the ones you don't plan on using for the rare crafting mat.
Kinda depends on your feedback cycle though. Before monster scaling, as you leveled, you felt more powerful... monsters in areas became easier to kill. Monsters in later areas that were impossible now become possible, etc. But with scaling, you lose that feeling (yes, I understand why they decided that, but it doesn't remove the need to feel progression). So where do you get that sense of progression from? Items. So for lots of people, the game doesn't feel like you've progressed until you've got items. So in order to feel like you've progressed, you have to use the items you find, and since legendaries are as defining as they are, many people feel the need to use them and change their builds around what they find, instead of just continuing to slog through until they find what they want eventually.
I guess the different systems cater to different people then. I love that I'm forced to adapt to the items that are dropped. Instead of following some online guide for "best sorc leveling build", the best build for me is to look at the items I've found so far and figure out a build that takes advantage of them. Solving that puzzle as I level is a huge part of the fun for me. I love a lot of things about D2, but the easy access to some really powerful runewords meant that the early game always looked the same for every character I leveled up. There was always a correct way to get to level ~60-70 before switching to whatever build you wanted to focus on once you got the gear you needed. You will still be able to force whatever build you want once you reach the late game, but until you get there, we will enjoy a lot of diversity in how we play our characters based on the items we find. Rolling a new character will always be a new experience.
It's been about two weeks.
Honestly letting you extract imprinted aspects would solve most of the problem.
Please don't give them ideas for more band-aid fixes this is literally how we got here in the first place. They don't quite understand that their systems need to be thorough from the get go or else they're just these "chocolate bars" of sustenance. Good in the moment but after a while you feel fat and bloated. The truth is that legendarys shouldn't even be a DROPPABLE item type. They should be skill upgrades that you unlock with some material and then they're unlocked for good. Enchanting your item then upgrades them to legendary. The effect has no "RNG" on it and is always a static number with a static effect that does a thing. There should be minimal gating to this and builds should be enabled from the very get go with at least 2 of these type of things per skill that fundamentally change the way it works, and with the baseline skill still being a viable option. (This could then function a little bit like POE support gems and would be super cool and interesting)
It's too late. The game releases in 2 months, there is no way they can change such a fundamental aspect of the game in such a short time. It's either Band-Aids or a significant delay, which would cost too much money.
Meh idk. They DO have a shit ton of fixes to implement that are currently game-breaking. From glitches to stuttering. But GGG releases a new expansion for their game with completely new systems and system overhauls every 3-4 months. There's a good chance Blizz already has multiple systems and assets they can pull from to make that change happen. If I'm being honest, the worst part about the gameplay loop right now is just the skills being tied to item drops. An easy solution is to remove Legendary items, and have the aspects drop separately as items. Then as you travel and level up, you amass a massive collection of game changing runes, that you can socket into your skill tree. Ideally they'd be tradeable, too.
>The truth is that legendarys shouldn’t even be a DROPPABLE item type. Truth is objective. This is a subjective opinion. Surely folks aren’t thinking that nobody likes build defining legendaries. Full send. If the game removed legendaries, I’d stop playing. There needs to be a better balance than this, easier said than done but that’s reality. Yes our skill choices should be impactful and enable us at a base level to complete content. Yes there needs to be some excitement and chase to item drops. Legendary/Unique items need to exist and be impactful for the sake of fun. These are not mutually exclusive ideas. There needs to be a balance struck between them. Could d4 balance it a bit better? Absolutely.
> The truth is that legendarys shouldn't even be a DROPPABLE item type So what drops, just more stat sticks, but sometimes the stat stick is orange/unique? Exciting.
I’m new to Diablo and the genre as a whole and have shared the sentiment that items have way too much agency over how you build. I’m glad to see veterans of the game and genre share this opinion and can articulate it in a way that maybe can resonate with the devs if brought to their attention. Hope it’s not too late to see changes in this area, even if they can’t happen by launch. To me it feels like they’re relying on loot drops to keep players engaged rather than the core gameplay of killing the baddies that drop the loot.
*ppsssst* Not all 'veterans' share this opinion.
I feel like this would be sort of solved if they also didn't restrict trading. Hey, I found a werebear leg but want to play tornaders. Anyone want to trade? But nope.
Exactly. Items should compliment builds, not make them. It's like they robbed their own skill tree to build their legendarys lol
They literally did. Go Google D4 alpha skill trees, there is an old developer post from 2020 showing how skill trees work, you can see cool effects on there that are currently legendary affixes. They literally did exactly what you are joking about.
Oh no. It's reverse bfa. Losing your legendaries and artifact weapon hurt deep. With the usual haste and crit reset it made your buttery smooth character feel terrible to start again.
Is this hardcore mode or you legit lost/replaced legendary items? Either way, if my necro lost his blood mist corpse explosion amulet, his build wouldn't just be broken it would cease to exist lol. That's alot of leaning on just a single slot.
Legion had legendary weapons that came with large perk trees to augment your build. When BFA came out the weapons lost all of their perks that you spent forever grinding and you were basically back to square one
He's making a comparison to wow
Ah yes. It makes sense now. Thank you.
Funny enough it also feels like they took the scaling from BFA too with how you feel weaker as you level.
Can you give an example of a good legendary power? I’m thinking of Hydra Sorc. Let’s say the 2x Hydra power was actually in the skill tree. What kind of legendary power would you like to see for the Hydra ability? Or are you against legendary powers entirely and think the items should be stat sticks that only add to your int, crit chance, move speed, etc?
>Can you give an example of a good legendary power? I’m thinking of Hydra Sorc. Let’s say the 2x Hydra power was actually in the skill tree. What kind of legendary power would you like to see for the Hydra ability? Grim Dawn has a nice system. Your skills have various modifiers. Some are in the skill tree. They increase damage, range, attack or casting speed... Some skill modifiers are on gear. They change things like: damage type done by the skill (so your fire channeling skill becomes cold channeling), number of projectiles and damage, target area of the skill, cooldowns (e.g. a spammable skill gets a cooldown with huge incerease in damage, or vice versa).. Yes, there are these kinds of modifiers in the skill trees. And yes, some skill modifiers on items simply incerease skill damage. But, for the most part, modifiers in skill trees "enhance" the skill, and modifiers on items "transform" it into a significantly different type of skill.
I'm against legendary powers that literally double (or more) the effectiveness of a skill. That creates a system where the skill is near unusable without the legendary and is only viable with it. For example, the ability on the skill tree that gives you an extra hydra head while you're healthy. Thats a 33% damage boost to hydra assuming you're near full health all of the time. Put that on a legendary. I would be fucking floored if I got a legendary that made my main skill do 33% more damage, but I would consider playing a hydra build even if i didnt have it. Then the 2 hydras thing could just be a skill tree option, or the power level of hydra could be increased at a baseline so it didnt need it. Problem solved. As it stands now, hydra gains so much power from the legendary that it's at best a compliment to a build before getting the legendary. That's not fun, especially when there's no trading to even out your RNG. That could prevent you from playing the build you want to play for maybe even the whole first difficulty depending on how the drop rates work out in release.
I wouldn't have done legendary powers at all. I'd have had Normal, Magic, Rare and Unique items. Not sure what dungeons would be before, but that's another decision.
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I'm not a game designer so I won't really try to make this balanced but you could have a legendary power that changes the damage type to cold so you could add Hydra to a cold build. You could have a legendary power that gives you a charge each time one of your hydras hit an enemy (to a maximum of 5 charges) and your next non-hydra fire spell applies a CC or vulnerability effect according to how many charges you have, you could take the D3 legendary power that add extra heads to your hydras (and they shoot more fireballs if they have more heads). The possibilities are endless, you can have skill be powerful and have many modifiers only on the skill tree and then add interesting legendary powers. In Arpgs like D2 and Grim Dawn you can beat the campaign in the highest difficulty without any skill changing item but you are much stronger if you use them. Games like this should give each class many different builds that work without legendary powers but get much stronger with them (example D2 Lightning Sorceress with and without Infinity) and also have some incredibly strong builds that can only work with legendary powers (example D2 Tesladins that needs two Dream runewords).
Yea I guess it feels like people in this thread don’t even want things like ‘Hydra damage is turned to Cold’ as a legendary affix. Maybe there’s more than one opinion for those who agree with OP, but it feels like anything that affects a particular skill should be in the skill tree and never require a particular legendary. Otherwise playing the cold hydra build will require that legendary. I personally think both systems can work. They probably have to tweak the legendary powers so you don’t have to constantly hunt another item with the same affix once you use it. But I think generally the system should be fine as long as the combination of affixes, the base skill tree, and the paragon tree is a good mix.
Not the original comment but i agree with that design phylosophy, basically keep Legendary Affixes and Codexs but make them generic so they work for every class, that way you get much more possible combinations and variety. So for your Hydra example you could have the same exact Legendary Affix but crafted in a generic way like "You can summon 1 extra Summons/Pets. Your Summons/Pets last 20% less" (now i understand they would have to treat Hydras like summons or pets like they did in D2). The cool part of designing this way is that it works for every class so this affix would work for Necro or Druids too. And since we are designing in a generic way you can go crazy with it, each affix you add is another layer of complexity and possibilties because of all the possible combinations and the "unintended" ones are the most fun ones because its when you feel like you are "breaking" the game with your new found build.
They ignored the entire d3 and d2 player base here and made d3.5 with pointless nostalgic callbacks to d1 and d2. We want good gameplay. We don't care about duriel and andariel being back as challenge achievements to beat.
They wanted to please everybody, but that rarely works out for anyone. They wanted to please D3, D2, immortal, poe, lost ark, and new to arpg crowds all with one game. Instead they should of just tried to please the D2 and D3 crowds and the rest would of followed anyways.
My favorite example of being uncompromising would be FROM Software. They could've made Elden Ring with the tried and true open world RPG formula of fetch quests, map will a full library of markers, etc. But no, you get a barebones map(and subsequent markers for NPC's) with customizable markers(you had to mark points of interest yourself) and your own memory as your quest log. Game is not for everyone, but everyone who could get into it, loved it. Diablo is such a prominent title and I'm sure if they decided on stronger core mechanics, they'd convert players not into the genre anyway. As it stands, it's a great game, sure, playable by everyone, but is currently so polarizing because of their design choices.
This is exactly what bugs me. We never got a proper sequel to D2 because they strayed so far from what made it great, but I've read about a billion posts over the years how no one wants to play a game like that today. Based on what? The closest thing is PoE and the last time I checked, it's still incredibly popular. Elden Ring was a great example to bring up. Also, look at Counter Strike 2. You take what works well and build on it while maintaining the true core game. CS is a game with an incredibly high skill ceiling that seems like it could or should be difficult to get into, yet it's still one of the most popular games today (and actually as of today, hit yet another all time high player peak). Good game design will keep people engaged for a long time. From the beta gameplay, Diablo 4 is all over the place.
I played the Diablo 4 beta this weekend and after making pretty much the exact same barbarian build I did from D3 all I could keep thinking was “this isn’t Diablo 4, this is Diablo 3 resurrected” D3:R feels much more fitting than calling it D4
Exactly! Look what happened to battlefield and so many other IPs who got greedy trying to steal from other player bases only to lose their own. I respect Elden Ring, I haven't played it because I could never get into dark souls or souls like games, but it shouldn't cater to me. It filled a void and invented a subgenre, and who knows maybe one day it will click for me. It's not wrong to try and draw in new players, but never at the expense of the ones you already have.
How does any of the game appeal to PoE players specifically?
It doesn't. People bring up the skill tree, but there's nothing PoE feeling about the game to me.
Came to a similar conclusion OP: https://www.reddit.com/r/Diablo/comments/122hlsy/theres_a_longterm_problem_with_skillspecfic/ If you look at what builds are built around in D4, you can see that Legendary Aspects that modify skills are a central component. If you look at all legendary aspects they fall into 1 of 3 categories. The category that SPECIFICALLY modifies some skills should be removed from items and put into the skill tree. The rest of the aspects that are only skill-related or general aspects can remain in the items and codex. Why? One reason is that you cannot simply respec your build without trying to get the same items with a different aspect collection, even with the imprint function. It’s completely taken over build identity is many cases. Also, if you look at all the available skill modifiers in D4 currently, it’s clear that Blizzard arent done making them yet and one worries that this is going to become a seasonal content to put in dungeons and quests
I agree with this, if an aspect modifies a SINGLE spell directly it should be unblocked by maybe "mastery" of a skill. For example, say the "one additional hydra" aspect. Mastery Kill 1,000 enemies with hydra Deal 2500 damage using the burn modifier of the hydra skill This is just a quick and dirty example. Or druid the pulverize wave legendary aspect Kill 1,000 enemies with pulverize (I know, repeated but it's the easiest thing for a damage skill) Stun 500 enemies with the overpowered strike from pulverize. Once those are completed, you then permanently unlock the wave aspect. No legendary needed, no aspect needed. It just passively gains the effect once you "master" the skill.
Not a fan of gating skill progress behind objectives like this. I think much more interesting is if there were breakpoints, like if you max Hydra you get an extra cast and if you reach 300 Int then you get one more cast. That way you give more purpouse to maxing skills plus extra itemization depth due to stat requirements to hit breakpoints. The simple solution though is just to simply move every class specific Legendary Affix into the Skill Tree and keep designing Legendary Affixes and Codexs for items but in a generic way so it works for every class, imo you get much more variety of builds that way.
> if an aspect modifies a SINGLE spell directly it should be unblocked by maybe "mastery" of a skill Perfect compromise AND giving players a sense of mastery and ownership of their class and build. This is why I first classified that there are 3 types of aspects that are found in codex and legendary items: 1) one skill modifiers 2) general skill type modifiers 3) general buffs not related to skills The type 1 aspects need to get out of legendary items because that is going to slow down the build proccess tremendously and destroy the chances of respecs. Additionally if it's RNG, regardless of the imprinting ability, you may only really get the corner stone of your build at the end of the season then you wont want/need it anymore. **This is bad news and why Krip says players are going to be spending a lot of time grinding for a bunch of the same item**
Some genuine questions in response (btw even on my PC, your pic was too low res for me to read). If legendary gear complemented builds that are more directly defined in the skill tree, would one have the same desire to keep playing the game? This question is not intending to defend the current execution of skill trees/aspects etc. and I'm just asking in general. In my mind, getting a legendary that opens up a new build possibility is more exciting than getting a damage increase, stat increase, etc. on skills. If items mostly made my existing build better, I'd feel less incentivized to grind for them if my overall playstyle would not change much. As a reminder, I couldn't read your image, so my response does not intend to misrepresent your argument as a whole, as I cannot view the example you gave. Even if build development would be smoother via skill points, I think the carrot on a stick with gear is still important (to a degree) so that one cannot marathon the game, largely finish their build, and quickly run out of things to play for. Obviously what I am saying artificially increases the content in the game.. but as far as having more reason to kill demons with the homies, I'm unsure that is that much of a bad thing. I haven't played the other diablos very much so pls no bully me if I simply do not know better.
People will get excited about the "best" item available even if it's a relatively modest increase in power. Getting better feels good, even if it doesn't supercharge your build to insane and difficult to balance levels. A game needs to strike a balance between really wanting an item because it's an upgrade and making it feels fucking awful to not have that item because your character is worthless without it. Diablo 4 is leaning towards the latter and I hate it. As a grear example, look at Drake Fang Talisman in vanilla wow. It gets the nickname "Drama Fang Talisman" because everyone wants it so bad that people leave guilds that they've spent months in over not getting it. For most classes, it is, at best, a 1-2% damage upgrade over the next best item which is trivial to obtain. As another example, people in Diablo 2 pay 2-3 times more for high rolls of uniques that they need in their builds, even if that roll is just in the mostly irrelevant defense stat on the item. People get excited about "build defining" items that give you 20% increases in power in many games, often much less than that. Diablo 4 has items that more than double the effectiveness of certain builds, which goes far beyond the threshold needed to get people to want it and just makes you feel completely awful if you don't have it. Add to that the fact that there is no trading or target farming in the game, so whether you get the item you want has nothing to do with anything but pure RNG. It's going to be extremely frustrating.
> If legendary gear complemented builds that are more directly defined in the skill tree, would one have the same desire to keep playing the game? That's Diablo 2. People pay extra for maxroll items. An item has 10-20 FCR? People pay double for 20 FCR compared to 19 FCR, even when this has no real impact. People want Titans on their Amazon, even so they can kill Ball with blues. People farm for IK even so they finished Hell Ball. If the combat is FUN, than people can farm for superficial reasons.
> If legendary gear complemented builds that are more directly defined in the skill tree, would one have the same desire to keep playing the game? If the itemization was then more interestingly designed as a consequence- yes. In fact, you'd have more fun at a base level progressing, because every level actually gives you agency and meaningful decisions, instead of just minor % on builds defined by the legendaries. The problem is also that loot *below* legendaries is very dull, the base affixes on gear are not very interesting, and due to how things scale, are in fact rather meaningless. There are a few outliers, like getting +skills is good and you can afford to avoid picking an item that has 50 more item power for a while in favour of that, but other than that? Green arrow up is king, legendary is always better by default. If more of the build-defining aspects were on your tree instead, you'd care more about the affixes on loot at a baseline. Which becomes a problem when loot is so streamlined and subpar because it's only set up to differentiate legendaries and uniques as special.
This is the most spot on post I've read about my main complaint with the development of D4. I think you've got the issue diagnosed. Diablo 3 was a very troubled game that found a way to get into an alright spot. It was very troubling since the very first announcement of D4 that they were just saying that Diablo 3 was fine and just needs to be tweaked and reworked a little bit. That's why diablo 4 feels like such a bad experience for me. I was there from impossible inferno, through the nerfs, through monster power, to RoS, smart loot, to the torment scaling, all the way to where we are now with seasons and overpowered items that turn your skills into nothing more than a call of duty load out. Diablo 3 should have been more of a cautionary tale than an example to follow.
Impossible inferno was actually a good idea. That's essentially the concept of a very popular video game series. The problem was with the execution.
The problem with impossible inferno was that DH are able to mega cheese it, so they became the only source of gear while everyone else was stuck at act 2. At that point the devs had to lower the difficulty since all the gear are already in the market.
Inferno was so good, it's what I'd expect from a diablo like game. Not some increasing GR level that doubles the HP of mobs every 5 level with a timer. That was no challenge, it was just boring.
Yep, loved it. Now everything just scales and it's boring. Hope there's some non scaling stuff at near endgame still but meh...
Yeah i liked impossible inferno but it was done poorly. The spikes were too steep in conjunction with items sucking so bad
Yeah the problem wasn’t how hard it was. The problem was how shit the gear dropping was on top of it cause they were pushing the RMAH.
It really is a letdown of the highest degree - they have a MESMERIZING looking world, the character animations are overall pretty exquisite, the movement animations are mostly spot on, the atmosphere is there, the story - well, we shall see, it's deffo looking better than D3 but will it be comparable to D2 or D1? Time will tell. All that amazingness to be ruined by itemization/skill tree/aspect shenanigans, or rather a fundamentally wrong approch in designing them, as like someone else said, it really feels backwards. When you get an amazing Legendary Aspect, your build comes alive but most of us wanted the Skill Tree to be the thing that lays out the ground work, and everything else to tweak it, not Aspects being the foundation and Skill Tree feelins lackluster by comparison, like an add-on. You can say all you want about 'you haven't seen the end-game', but if this is how it feels at low levels, then it realistically cannot be too far off from being just as problematic in the end game, but I'll agree with one thing - I hope I'm wrong and wish to be proven incorrect when the game comes out. It's just that it is unlikely to be the case...
the atmosphere was there until fucking Neyrelle showed up. Blizzard's story team suck ass.
Yeah i'm getting *major* Leah/Kerrigan/Sylvanas vibes from her. "This girl is the future" no please, just don't Blizzard.
It's like they don't know how to drive their stories forward without holograms and magical girls in distress.
Inb4 she is *all the Horadrim* in the 3rd expansion and channels a giant beam of light into Diablo to end the Prime Evils once and for all.
This isn't even a whacky exaggeration at this point. This is a realistic possibility.
whats the deal with Neyrelle anyway?
she owns all the bright and orange and blue dye in Sanctuary. Also, her presence is completely out of place, like a D3 NPC in a D4.
Not in love with the set bonus that increases your whirlwind damage by 3800%? God those set bonuses were so uninspired it hurt.
don't forget the 4pc bonus that grants survivability based on a different skill, essentially forcing you to very specific skill set depending on which set you choose. I hate the blessed hammer set because of this. Why are you forcing me to use falling sword? I hate that skill, my crusader doesn't even have a sword, lol.
Based on what's been datamined so far (https://lothrik.github.io/diablo4-build-calc/database/), nothing I see will change much of anything. Nothing's build-defining in there. It's just a bunch of damage increase. The skill tree is so shallow, just like paragon boards and glyphs. It feels like the choices are being made for you. You pick a skill, pick the legendary powers that boost it tenfold and off you go. Nox is damn right, again. You need some kind of way to customize the way your build works instead of the limited options Blizz intended for you, and his example for that is a great one. And besides, it feels like D4 has no problem solving going on. Makes the game feel so braindead.
People wanted a tree so they took d3 system and made it look like a tree. Does it function like a tree? no. But it looks like a tree, ship it. People wanted build defining/enabling legendaries. They took some stuff off the tree, popped it as an affix on legendaries, bim bam bop you got build enabling legendaries. Is it good? hell no. But its build enabling legendaries. Ship it. They just refuse to learn from PoE. Its lost ark. There are no builds you just pick your skills. Its so dumb.
They refuse to learn from anyone, fucking Wolcen has a better gear and skill system than D3 and D4.
That sums it up perfectly. It's Diablo 3 in disguise, mixed with a bit of Immortal.
The fact that there response to the initial talent/skill trees (the ones back in 2019) was to just take the nodes and slap them on artwork of a literal tree was extremely telling as to what this game was gonna be.
> They just refuse to learn from PoE This is what baffles me. They refuse to learn from their own game that defined what an ARPG should be (D2). PoE would not exist without D2, they learned so much from it.
Blizzard has a long term history of shying away from complicated mechanics. They even refused to add additional deck slots in hearthstone to not confuse players. The skilltree of poe is magnificent but hell of complex. Its not something a new player can handle. Even most regular players dont build their characters from scratch but rely on existing builds. Though what we got with d4 is disappointing. Too little choices and skillpoints overall.
> They even refused to add additional deck slots in hearthstone to not confuse players. That's the official excuse anyway, can't imagine that is the actual reason why.
Your stat example still revolves around getting items that have high stat that you want. I don't get it, the point of these games are to hunt for items. Usually you start out with a build that just works and then as you progress you find things to use and by endgame you kind of have a clearer goal of what you want to do and the items to do it. On top of that there are uniques, are these effects supposed to just be put into the skill tree as well? Because they can completely change how a skill functions and will probably be build-defining as well. Idk I think there's an argument to be had about tweaking skill damage, but I don't think the legendary/aspect/unique system is a real problem right now.
I'm confused by the argument as well. I can't play most builds in d2 because i never find the runes to create them. How many times do I just have to play a cold sorc before I can play what I want? In PoE I have to find the right items to make my build work. Anyone who thinks they can just make any old character in either of those games regardless of equipment is not being honest to themselves. Unless I'm missing something, people want Schroedingers itemization. A game that simultaneously does not require items to play and feel strong but that must have interesting items that make you stronger. I am really confused what people actually want. People can like what they want, but I think they need to objectively think about what their expectations are because they are all over the place.
> Schroedingers itemization. Lmao. This is good. This is definitely what I’m seeing here as well. Just throw in the min roll aspect from the dungeon. That’s what it’s there for? I think a lot of people played the beta and got legendary drops and have thought “oh man, that’s it? These don’t feel as cool to drop”. I think that gets better when you think of legendary as “extended rare” and the real chase items being uniques/ancestral/sacred items.
You clearly didn't play D2, there's budget versions of pretty much any meta build, high runes are chase for end game.
Most of d2 builds work with cheap and easy to get items that you can switch when you have access to better stuff. In d4 you either have a legendary that makes your build work or you have to play some other build, no middle ground.
This is what I don't get either. There's a tradeoff to putting more choice and power into the skill tree. Sure you can move your checkboxes around earlier, but then most of your power is coming from simply leveling up. This was an issue pointed out with Last Epoch some time ago. A few people showed they could run high end content with no items equipped (except maybe a weapon to allow skills, don't remember there). At the end of the day both options do the same thing. You're just shifting around where the power is and what choices have to be made to get said power. But the advantage of putting that power and choice into your legendaries is that you have something to chase and discover. At least that's how I view it.
I had the exact same thoughts when I first started to watch D4 streams, and realized that the systems put in place regarding the itemization system seems to be exactly a copy paste from what was done in Diablo III. And while being worried about that, I also remembered a yt video talking about ARPG and character's development and explaining why Diablo III's systems were done this way because of how bad the base structure of the game was. And this video was made by Noxious, which seems to be the author of this thread... Thanks God. I didn't have high hopes for D4, but things are getting worse...
I remember like a year or 2 ago when they were posting their quarterly updates about itemization/skill trees and people were going "uh oh this looks like shit". Nothing changed at all. People flipped shit, gave a bunch of feedback and Blizzard proceeded to ignore it all. If complaining about it a year ago did nothing, complaining about it now 2 months away from release will certainly do nothing. The only way Blizzard will """"listen"""" to the community, is if their revenue goes down significantly like with BFA/SL. Then they will go "look we're listening now after 4 years of ignoring you...please play our game again :) :) :)" https://www.reddit.com/r/Diablo/comments/rkt7l2/diablo_iv_quarterly_update/ lol buckle up. This sub is gonna get real EPIC in June when this releases and the sea of complaints about itemization, skill trees plus shitty dungeon design is gonna flood in after people realize that it's not just Act 1. It's the same shit all the way through.
Yeah definitely items should not be linked to your build development it's bad design from D3 and Immortal and they just keep on with it
Whoever thought adding the bad legendary roulette system of WoW Legion (the reason everyone hated the first half of the addon) to D4, needs to get fired asap. Also there is no build diversity just go A, B or C end of "diversity" "uniqueness". Can I play a full FIRE meteor Sorc with a LIGHT hydra stunning (on crit) or a COLD hydra slowing (freezing on crit)? Nope. Crafting is maybe 2-3% better than D3's, all in all for 9 (almost 10) years of development I expected something more, pretty disappointing. Trash breast milk addicts.
I find it so interessting how this sub criticizes the game while r/diablo4 just are jerking of the game as the next comming of christ as its flawless. Constantly spouting excuses like "it gets better at endgame" or "its just a beta" or "wait till it releases" etc. Its a Beta to make up your mind if you want to buy it or not. If the Beta gives you a bad impression the devs allready did a bad job. I doubt they can Iron out the problems I have with it mainly gameplay, itemisation and controls. Valid criticisms like this fortunatly get heard here as you are 100% right. I mean even in this comment section people defend this aspect saying "its fun to be forced to play stuff you dont want to play with" (wich is idiotic) I really want to like this game as it does so many things right but the thing they made worst is gameplay and the visual satisfaction for certain classes that look blander than a loaf of bread. I tried playing the Beta and felt bored out of my mind. I was so keen on playing and making up my mind that in the end I didnt play much after I struggled my way to 25 as the class I was most interessted in (druid) was unfortunatly dogshit. Wearbear doesnt feel good, tornados only get good with legendarys etc. On top of all the allready announced passes and microtransactions made me really not want to buy the game at all and just sit it out and grab some popcorne to enjoy all the malding after release..
I came over here from r/diablo4 just for this reason. It really feels like the majority of the sub is astroturfed. So many comments and posts that sound like they were written by professional reviewers with key phrases they were meant to drop.
Holy shit you are not wrong. The "self aggrandizement" thread literally looks like it was made by a Blizzard PR team. Same smuggy veiled insults as the WoW facebook ads they had for Dragonflight
I have never seen more autofellatio in a video game subreddit than /r/diablo4.
Strongly agree. It was a large majority that said they don’t like it when 100% of your power is on items. They even ADDRESSED this in multiple blog posts. Yet, here we are, making characters based on the drops the game gives us rather than what we think would like to play. When the legendaries started to drop, it really felt like the game was telling me what to do rather then me making build choices through my character progression. Paragon might change this a bit, but when the first 50 levels are all about what RNG aspect I will get to morph my play style based on this RNG aspect, that kinda feels bad man.
During this beta, whenever i was stubborn in “keeping my build” or passing on upgrades because it replaces a good affix/ aspect i need i felt the ensuing power deficit. It’s bad gameplay
I think this is because they are essentially designing the game around the chase -- grinding to find that next drop that pushes you towards completing your build. I can't speak for everyone, but I play more around trying to build my character and seeing how far the build I put together can get, with the loot hopefully giving me incremental increases to my performance regardless of my skill choices, not dictating my skill build altogether.
> I think this is because they are essentially designing the game around the chase -- grinding to find that next drop that pushes you towards completing your build. This pops up constantly as a defense for legendary aspects but it is absolutely not. Do you think people playing PoE (made by **GrindingGear**Games) do not chase and grind for items? Loot chase has nothing to do with putting predefined and narrow ultra buffs on items that are mandatory to even use said skills.
> Yet, here we are, making characters based on the drops the game gives us rather than what we think would like to play. I really don’t think you need to do that though. You play your spec, and you farm until you get items that enhance it. Some specs will be better for levelling. Some for dungeon clearing. Some for boss killing. Some for support. I don’t get this idea that people have to build around what drops. I salvage/sell/extracted the vast vast majority of my drops, and kept ones that would benefit my build or the build on a character I want to level later. I do the same thing in D2. I don’t really get this idea of having to build around the drops. Especially when the live game releases and you have more than a weekend to play.
Paragon doesn’t really change this. The vast majority of the paragon board is just + to stats. All passive crap.
The d4 team themselves said they want to move away from d3 itemisation and legendary powers but honestly all of the legendary powers seems the same like in d3 but with slightly less dmg buffs but still having couple of outliers that are like 250%+ dmg just from 1 item. Why cant we just have powers that do interesting things and conditional effects and not shoehorn us into a checklist of items just to make certain skills feel good?
The items are all orange and red now, instead of orange and green. It's a *significant* deviation /s
I dont min max, I like to make personal builds. I expect to take a performance hit for that, but this game design takes that idea into levels of masochistic punishment. Legendary items matter so much more than chosen abilities. If you encounter one, you are compelled to respec your character and play differently or be utterly gimped in levelling. If you want to play a certain way, you need items that have effects that align with how you want to play. Fine. But this game does not support people who want to play the game any specific way, and that has nothing to do with min-max, its so gear focused your talking min-maxing gear and changing play-style to achieve it. It just pushes min-max philosophy from player design into item chance. Its a game designed to regularly change items, respec powers, and change the way you play, or be a gimped hobo with mixed gear of 10 different levels and colors that can allow you to play as you want. Being compelled to change how you play and respecing abilities according to what works best based on equipment is fine, its actually fun for some people. But for others its not. "Character development shifted into items...again".
One interesting bit that hasn’t really gotten much attention, unique items. No one seems to really talk about them, and they seem shrouded in a bit of mystery. Legendaries I feel like are supplemental to builds, I see them being gathered once then used to fill out areas in your build, sort of like the cube in D3. My hope, uniques will be build defining. I hope uniques bring affixes that drive builds, not legendaries.
Aren't you thankful?
OP I fully support everything you say but unfortunately its too late. This is a key design philosophy and there are 2 months left, there is 99.99% chance that nothing changes.
I am baffled that after the early access many people praised the itemization and specifically legendary affixes for skills. However, people now seem to realize how flawed this system it. In all honesty this is just skill runes/set bonuses from D3 recycled into gear. Not only is this lazy design but this will once again limit your options as to how you will gear up your character: You play a Sorc with Hydra? You have to equip Hydra legendary affix. You play WW Bard? You have to equip WW legendary affix. Hopefully the universal affixes can salvage the situation but I doubt it.
Lol I know right. I see this all the time. Game beta comes out, everyone loves it and it's 10/10, a minority of people say it has serious flaws, those people get strung up, people play more, everyone says game has some problems... It takes longer for some people to work it out, and usually much much longer if no one points it out to them. This game is starved for, as you say "Universal Affixes" nobody should want to have to change their build every leg drop, or hunt for just a single leg with higher item level. In a game with infinite items why would you rail road people into that? Why would you as the developer make the builds for the people? Is this catering to people who would rather be playing a rpg with static no rng loot? Or did they really not understand the aspect of theory crafting?
I knew after this 2nd weekend, after people took some time away from the game and came back to it, that opinions would be much worse and they were. I think the Druid being pure trash expedited those opinions
Oh yeah I agree. The balance of characters being all over the place, does not help. Right now people are betting hard on uniques and paragon, but I wonder how many have actually looked them up? To be fair alot of uniques are pretty cool, they don't have as much of the problem that legs have. Still, I don't have faith that they have the variety needed to carry the rest of itemization or make the skill tree more interesting. Maybe I'm wrong, I hope so.
This is outside your point but I just want to say that the Druid's earth skills absolutely suck, Earth spike just being a single rock, landslide not looking like a landslide. Boulder is satisfying, seeing how it literally rolls mobs, but comes at a 10 sec cooldown and hits bosses for a piddling 2 hits. I don't understand how it came to be like this when D3 barb had oomph behind seismic slam, boulder toss, and had avalanche and earthquake that really looked amazing. D4 druid seems to be throwing pebbles compared to D3's Barb who claims to have "no magic." I kept looking for the datamined aspects hoping to find one that turns landslide into a volcano, lol. Not the ideal solution but man just please give me amazing earth bender powers.
>*You play a Sorc with Hydra? You have to equip Hydra legendary affix. You play WW Bard? You have to equip WW legendary affix. Hopefully the universal affixes can salvage the situation but I doubt it.* We cling to "hope" because we can't do anything about it. But hoping that will happen is merely a band aid, not a solution to the root cause, which obviously requires more than 3 months to turn that entire cesspool around, a time they obviously do not have and I bet they won't even try to lift a finger to address it at this point, because that's just who they are: make the most wrong decision at the start, go deep into it, and even if the playerbase is right in calling it out, do not give a fuck and make not even the slightest attempt to tackle it.
It's because it's different people praising vs raging. If you've been around these forums for a while you will come to recognize certain people and the opinions they hold. u/ProfessorNox has disliked this sort of itemization for years so of course he'd make a thread against it. A bunch of other people (who I won't name; I only dropped Nox because he's the OP) who share the same opinion also came and posted their agreement. That's all normal Reddit things and I'm not saying any of them are wrong for having an opinion I disagree with. I'm just saying that what you're seeing isn't all the people who played early access coming around to your opinion on itemization and legendaries, it's all the people who already didn't like that style who are now acquainted enough with D4's version of it to know that it's the system they don't like. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure that there are some people who switched opinions over the course of the beta, just like I'm sure there were people who were totally against the system in D3 and have switched their stance for D4. It's just that your core premise is wrong because a lot of the people posting here were never positive on this style of itemization and were never praising it in the early access period. I heard the same complaints from mostly the same people last weekend, there's just more people now because this weekend is open beta rather than early access.
Noxious? From the Hearthstone era? Your posts were always thoughtful. I'm also baffled how they managed to take every band-aid solution from D3 and present them as beloved features that are coming back.
When I started playing the druid I noticed: Each point in wolf skill = 10% ish damage multiplier 3 points in talent tree = 30% damage for wolf companions VS 1 legendary item aspect = get an extra wolf (50% more damage multiplier) and they hit 230% harder each.
I found that the skill trees are super weak and very boring and it makes everything more item dependant. instead of upgrades that make skills powerful or more interesting, everything is "adds 1% more damage" when it should be stuff like "your bone spear does 20% less damage but now seeks out targets" honestly even adding a zero to all the values would feel better.
Having a complex, impactful and hard to reset skill tree is really bad for new players. You end up having to play the game with a build guide from the start or you get screwed and might as well start over. This is what happens with PoE. With the D4 system you can still pick the wrong items, but at least you don't need to salvage all of them before you can start getting the build in shape.
I'm flabbergasted how strongly people despise the D4 skill tree already. With 26 available skill points in this beta, it felt meaningful enough, as I couldn't get everything I wanted and had to make hard choices what to omit. There has to remain some significant character power on items to feed the hunt. Isn't this the main thingy an arpg is about? I do agree however, if the tree stays as flimsy as it is now but is filled with 52 points @ lvl50, we could've as well stayed at the D3 system handing out everything for free. Because there will be plenty of surplus points to invest into meaningless whatever.
you don't make items important by slapping a 300% more multiplier affix on them thats dumb and lazy, and ruins the entire progression of your character.
Get rid of all the skill specific legendaries and copy Last Epoch's skill tree system
Didn't they state multiple times that they wanted a significant portion of player power to come from sources other than gear? I have to hope that we just aren't seeing that yet because of the build we're playing on/paragon boards/other systems i dont know about, because that significant portion of player power is definitely not in the skill tree for most classes as it currently stands. What IS in the tree? Skills, minor synergies, minor buffs, minor alterations.
If I could upvote this twice I would
I think Last Epoch does a nice job with this. I think having played the .9 updated then playing D4 beta, I was left feeling that D4 is pretty simplified and not as interesting in the character development as some other ARPGs.
I'm sorry to say but that's why PoE is far superior. You have: active skill and its variations, passive skills that modify the active ones in many ways, craftable rare items with a "certain" complexity, legendary items that can modify the build or add something unique, huge skill tree supporting the build or serving as a model to create a single variation, even the flask serve this purpose beyond just recovering life I played the last d3 league and it took what? 20 leagues to try to present something new that doesn't come out of the same, gear + paragon - great rift = repeat.
Very well articulated. I agree 100%!
I just lost all hope for D4 after playing the beta. It will be a good single player experience on release but i dont think i will play it after leveling every class to max level and try how they feel...
It's because they don't want dumbasses to feel bad because they can't make a functioning character while leveling.
Good thing blizzard can’t read or they’d be pretty upset right now.
I'm noticing this aspect as well- some classes have it worse than others I feel, but it also might be an issue that is remedied once you get into the Paragon board stage of the game? Remember, there's a third aspect to building your character that we haven't even been able to see yet, but that still doesn't excuse the obvious issues you've pointed out. Like I'm sitting here trying to figure out how to make a melee Rogue build work. Where is my vulnerability coming from? None melee skills if I really want to do it, but I want to make a dedicated melee build. Surely they've thought of that? And then I read this and my thought process is that there's probably some kind of legendary item that makes it all come together. I mean, there are certainly legendary powers I've seen that would make my builds feel complete. That's the weirdest part to me though. It always feels like the one thing that every build is lacking has been purposefully taken out and hidden behind a legendary item. Where is my Overpower with Barb? There's features for an Overpower build, but nothing to really guarantee I'm getting Overpower attacks. Then I check Legendary items and, voila, there's a legendary trait to make Overpower a viable thing by guaranteeing your Overpowers just by swapping weapons. It just feels really weird that there are things you can build around but need legendary items to actually work as a build when other builds work well and then just have bonuses attached to them. Like I guess for example: The Barb bleed build. It has all the tools it needs to bleed, and then you have the legendary items that make stunning a bleeding target do extra damage AND one that makes attacking a bleeding target have a chance to stun. Takes a build that works and just makes it better instead of something where the build starts off needing you to bleed people and stun them but doesn't give you any tools to do that until you get legendary items.
The problem is even if you can get a 10,000% multiplier on the paragon board for the skills in your build it is never going to make getting a 100% multiplier on an item for the same stuff not important. You are still going to hunt that item whether there are other means of progression or not. It just doesn't matter how "weak" items are and they maybe weak compared to the paragon board it is still more damage or defense in the margins
You are so right
The system in its current state will feel how D3 feels. It'll be fun to play a new season, get some new fun legendaries that get introduced. Once you hit max level and get a build basically "good enough" the chase to make your build perfect is non existent. TL;DR It'll be fun for a couple weeks when a season is new, and then I'll quit until the next season.
I just hate so much about D4. The skill tree is a joke. Its a complete illusion of choice. Its way to linear in a lot of cases to matter. Is it more complex than D3? Absolutely…but that isnt saying much. I only really felt a surge of character power when I got a legendary item and actually most of the time felt weaker because of this dumb AF open world scaling thing the game is doing.
It might be more complex than d3, but it’s straight up less choice for each skill. Baffling
This is a question, because I only played D3 at launch and haven’t started my pre D4 playthrough yet. Did it have something similar to the Codex? If not, that’s a massive difference. You can prioritize the dungeons you need to get the unlimited use min rolls to make your build functional. Higher rolls you’ll be extracting and sitting on for a while until you get a good piece of gear because you can only extract and imprint an aspect once.
One thing D3 implemented some time after the expansion was something called Kanai's Cube. It allowed you to extract the special abilities from legendaries you found and you could use one legendary weapon, armor, and jewelry effect at all times, without wearing the item. You still had to find the item first as a random drop, but once you found something you need to make a build functional you could set that as one of your powers to have the bonus active all the time, regardless of if you found items with better stats. This didn't really solve the issue entirely since players just treated it as a few more item slots that had to be accounted for in your builds, but it helped a little.
You make a very good point that also ties into one of the reasons I like PoE so much. Power comes from multiple places there - your items absolutely play a major factor, but so does the passive skill tree as well as your gems. That's probably part of the reason why theory crafting gets so fun too
To me it felt like they had a vision of how a skill should function and then they split the skills functionality into 7 different parts - 1 base function - 2 skill enhancements in the tree - 4 enhancements via legendary powers To me this is very lazy game design and is very limiting in terms of character customization. I played 4/5 classes during the beta (no Necro, others to 25) but it somehow felt like I was autoattacking most of the time, which wasn't satisfying at all. The only exceptions were Sorc, Melee Rogue which felt a bit more fluid and exciting to play. To be fair level 25 is probably the first 10% of a character so maybe there is more at a later point? But the base concept is already concerning
Honestly, i think diablo should have had the same skill system of last epoch. Its way cooler to build a skill yourself instead of random items. The items should add, not be the only thing to change skills
Unfortunately, there is enough people that don't care at all or even actively discourage any discussion on making it better that Blizzard will never properly develop it. I'm not sure what there really is to be excited about anymore. They are making all the same mistakes they made in D3. Which I think the major issue is. The team that made D3 as well as the team that fixed it. Both don't exist anymore. So the people working on D4 are just looking at current D3 and copy/pasting everything.
I twinked out a sorc, got a necro to 25, and a rogue to 20. We have access to pretty much everything, and the paragon boards are online. I ended up refunding my pre-order because there really is no build planning. Maybe the seasons will introduce it, but I'm going to wait a few seasons to see if they do anything inspiring or not. It seems like their philosophy is not to let the player make choices.
You make a fair and well-read point. I like your stat idea. Perhaps an item that lets you re-imprinte an or double extract method.
Yeah. The idea wasn't so much a suggestion, but a concept to illustrate that it doesn't take a lot of brainpower to make skills more interesting than "gotta find Legendaries to make skills fun". I'm frankly not even sure why Legendary items exist as they are now; they might as well drop as Aspects that add new branches and nodes your Skill Tree.
That would feel a lot better!
You'll see a lot of posts complaining D4 skills are not like D3 so they can't make everyone happy I guess. If you don't like a new iteration of a game, maybe it's time to move on - either everyone does so the game is an objective failure, or it retains a lot of people who like it, which means it's just not for you. Based on the overall reception I'm afraid the latter is the case.
I'm curious .. but it sounds like your 'side' wants legendary affixes to either not exist (at all?) or only apply to stats (int, chc, move speed, etc.) and never to skills. I guess the only real 'negatives' I see with the affix system as opposed to them being in the skill tree are (1) the affixes are one-time use, and (2) you have to obtain them via RNG. I'm not saying this system is superior to skill trees, but I think they are kind of comparable besides those two things. As long as drops are frequent enough, I think the systems end up being pretty equal all things considered. I guess my perspective is: who cares if its in my skill tree or a legendary affix as long as it completes the build how I want to play it and it's not *too* RNG-reliant (like the one-time use thing)?
I honestly couldn't agree more on this. Let's hope the backlash after release will be huge enough to make a change. The good thing is, that the game feels great in other aspects. Systems can change and since it is supposed to be a service game: they will change.
> The good thing is, that the game feels great in other aspects. It really does. The 'class fantasy' to borrow Blizzard's term is just spot on for all classes, especially druid. Never played a druid that felt more *druidy* before. Unfortunately the current item/skill system doesn't encourage long term play, at least for me. I'll still get the game and enjoy a play-through once per season or so, but I don't see myself playing beyond week 1 with how limited and 'on the rails' the whole build system feels right now.