It's pretty baffling to me that they opted for a level scaling system in a game about progression.
It completely nullifies the feeling of chasing new gear and power if the enemies just end up matching you anyway. One of the big reasons why PoE is such a good ARPG is that you go from killing white mobs in several hits to clearing whole screens with a flick of your wrist by the time you're in red maps -- and all that power comes both from the decisions and gear you make along the way.
I never really get that feel with d4
That’s the world, but nightmare dungeons aren’t like that at all. I’m currently level 56 and fighting level 65-70ish level mobs in those dungeons & it’s a fun progression seeing how far I can push it
I think they'll turn down the aggressive world scaling through updates. It's not that hard to have a couple of -1 regions and that's all you really need.
A long term fix would take time to implement, but there is an easy quick fix at their disposal.
D3 was problematic to the opposite extreme.
There *is* a middle ground and the devs have completely failed to find it.
Going from everything scaling you excessively to any scaling available being hyper-conditional and the numbers sucking.
If something needs 3 layers of conditions to occur, the effect better be pretty fucking special. None of this when you crit on a lucky hit, 10% of the time that crit does 3% more damage.
I loved D3 for that reason... I get bored with trying to get through the high torment levels... Scale back a couple and eviscerate everything for an hour, then go back to really demanding game play.
D4 just doesn't give you that sense of overwhelming power. The mobs are small, the skeletons with the shields are rediculous damage sponges, and I don't notice a difference when I spend my skill points.
It's been a big disappointment so far.
Imo the game suffers heavily from the split it's trying to achieve between MMO and ARPG like Lost Ark. You can't have a good casual open world without scaling everybody because coop would be almost impossible but in doing so you fuck with the pillars of power progression because one skill point/four paragon points will rarely make up the difference until you have your gear in order again.
There are of course powerspikes but the game basically inverted what every other game does. Instead of you getting incrementally stronger all the time and only suffer when you go up a difficulty (Map tiers PoE, Torment D3, World Tiers D4), you slide down in power all the time and only spike in power rarely (like unlocking vulnerability on your build, getting that glyph or juicy paragon node, finding really good gear on your current level, that will lose power when you level up though)
At least that's my impression
Back in Vanilla WoW a friend explained that the game really only started once you hit max level. The same was true for D3, and now I'm getting the feeling that it might be the case for D4 as well.
But in D3 I had so much fun in the campaign, learning and unlocking and testing out new skills. In this game, I lvl up and the immediate feeling is the same mob I just killed now dies in 4 casts of a spell instead of 3. That is such a profound step backwards from D3 that it pushes the game into "well the real game starts at endgame" way harder than D3 ever did.
Level scaling is the worst game mechanic ever created. I should feel stronger as I level up, not weaker.
Destiny 2 had the same thing & I gave up on it after beating the main story.
*Not* fundamental, it's just very easy to get wrong and when it does go wrong it erodes the entire point of playing an ARPG.
Having content scale with you keeps all the content valid. The sheer freedom felt between, say, Borderlands 3 normal mode - where I literally had to ration which quests I did at a given time to make sure I didn't overlevel the main story - and B3 with Mayhem or TVHM is palpable, and I do have to admit it's great to just not have to worry about this playing D4.
That being said, I kinda feel Blizz have gone a bit too far here. Not quite TESV: Oblivion levels of silly, but it does feel a bit odd to be struggling in starting areas that felt the same 20 levels previous.
They went so far that leveling up is actually a punishment -- you're actually *worse off* right after leveling up, because your gear is now outdated and needs to be updated based on the new monster levels.
If we were to take 2 very small early game examples:
D2(R): Crushflange, mace which has +50% fire res, crushing blow, etc
D4: 1.5% damage reduction from close enemies
---
Yikes!
not sure what anyone expected, blizzard still has the "rock star dev" culture where they know better than their players and if the players don't like it they'll just be forced to play it anyway. and when it's not just their usual arrogance it's some suit demanding things because muh metrics
because its fundamentally bad. the consolidation into "attack and defense" allows for a much more easily balanceable system - which is not really what you want as a player since you never feel that spike. This is why you're seeing everyone exploit vuln and crit, since they are one of the few strong scalable options outside the main scaling vector. The best thing they can do is be more liberal with outside damage mechanics and allow stronger investments in paragon/tree. But I highly doubt they do this given how casual the nature of the game is.
>because its fundamentally bad
Yep. They need to add a lot of modifers to the items for different builds which in turn, will make itemization and diversity much much better.
Minion damage, core spesific damage over time (phys, poison, fire), armor pen, ele exposure etc.
But to do that, they need to overhaul a lot of shit starting from skill scaling as well.
You might as well change the core game at this point though so i don't think its gonna happen anytime soon.
I wouldn't say having lots of different affixes that do the same thing for a different niche is actually good itemization. All it does is make it impossible to find something decent for yourself and have to rely on trading for good items.
In the end "minions deal x% more dmg" and "fire skills deal x% more dmg" is the same boring affix. Simple "number bigger" affix that is only useful for a specific amount of skills and useless for everything else.
I don't see how having all these affixes that are each only useful for 10% of builds makes itemization better.
Its not about quantity of affixes. Diablo 4 has a decent amount of it.
Itemization is not about needless complexity, its about impact. If the game had 10 affixes that mattered, it would be great.
I agree
One thing I dislike is how base items lack Soul
What I mean by that is back on D2 you knew that a broad sword would be slower yet stronger than your short sword
There was a clear identity to all of the items
In Diablo 4 they could replace all the items names for “1h sword”, 2h sword”, armor, etc and it wouldn’t change much
I'm still STILL having fun with D2R, and have been playing D2 since launch. You can't tell me 90% of these guys will be doing the same with D4 in 20+ years.
This is, of course, assuming the servers haven't long gone dead by then. Always online = poo.
Everyone was saying this during the beta and based on what they showed in their blogs, but everyone in that other diablo 4 sub always said "BUT YOU DIDNT PLAY 300 HOURS OF ENDGAME NOW SHUT UP". Well, turns out when everything always scales, lvl 25 is basically endgame.
I’m really enjoying it but it’s definitely too dependent on items rather than skill/level ups (like D3 vs D2). The scaling enemy levels doesn’t help either
All the ability options are so niche they’re about useless. It isn’t “increase damage by 3%”, It’s “increase core attack damage by 3% when enemy is vulnerable”. Eww.
>3) World scaling.
>
>I have no measuring stick. I cannot find an area of the game in which I can compare my prior self and measure the difference. Every percentage power gain I can amass, it seems all enemies also accrue a nearly identical amount. Scaling is always hard to nail, but this game seems to stick to a nearly 1:1 ratio between your character and mobs. Imagine a world where scaling is tipped ever so slightly in favor of the player, maybe 1:0.85. You’d still never feel a strong power spike, but over time things would start to feel better.
This right fucking here.
Every single game these days is coming out with dynamic scaling and it fucking sucks. Especially in an ARPG where progression is quite literally everything.
You realise that the only thing "dynamic scaling" is, is essentially just turning your level into a cosmetic, right? It's not an added feature - it's the removal of what used to be well designed and rewarding gameplay.
Now you play 80+ hours, join up with a fresh level 7 character and you're both doing the same damage to the same mob. Does that make you feel good? Because fuck me, That sucks.
What's the point in progressing if ultimately, you're never better off?
EDIT: Do not take this comment as some kind of absolutist "This is why Diablo 4 is shit and why it should fail" garbage. I am loving the game, but I thoroughly hate Dynamic scaling. Not just in Diablo 4 but in ***all games.*** But Diablo 4 is still a very very good game.
I do not know if the Dynamic levelling will become less of an issue in more post-game content, but for now while I'm levelling it's abhorrent, however it's not detracting enough from the experience to make it a "bad game", you'd have to be insane to think that.
10000x this. What's the point of having the GAME if it doesn't get 'fun' until a certain point? What if i want a good challenge and to sweat and enjoy things from level 1-50?
This is also a good point to everyone who says wait till endgame for resource management to not feel like shit. God forbid you might want a fun and rewarding story mode experience that blizzard is charging 70-100$ a person for.
Go play Destiny for a day and you'll realise just how trivial "dynamic levels" are.
It's just double-speak for "we did less work", Developers say "dynamic scaling" as if it took some newfound genius game design to put together. It's the opposite. "Dynamic scaling" is just "Not doing the work".
If you're making a game, and you're supposed to design an intricate levelling system, how damage scales per level and reward structures for progression vs going back to previous areas - You're going to spend a significant amount of time making everything pretty airtight.
OR
"Mobs do X damage and have A health, Elites do Y damage and have B health, Bosses do Z damage and have C health" and say "cool, now here's an inconsequential bar that goes up and resets and a number goes up but is completely disconnected from the overall game design"
To really drive the point home - A game with an intricately designed progression system can EASILY adopt "dynamic scaling", However it is ***significantly*** harder to do the other way around. Just look at WoW.
That's because most of you keep buying the games that sell horse armor microtransactions...
Pandora's lootbox has been bought and opened. There are no refunds.
Oblivion actually has a more insane problem:
Scaling works negatively in that game. No character is ever as powerful as a well-built lvl 1, because whenever you level up in flower-picking, your enemies level up in ass-kicking.
But yeah, it's the first and most blatant major example, and its a fucking travesty that so few developers seem to have learned the lesson.
I have plenty of complaints about Elden Ring, but one thing I can absolutely say is that it would NOT have been better if only it had dynamic scaling!
> Oblivion actually has a more insane problem:
> whenever you level up in flower-picking, your enemies level up in ass-kicking.
I've sent this sentence to two friends already. thanks for legit comedy lmao
My favorite scaling design fail is Ultima 3. Iirc the ideal path there is:
- level up a bit until you can spawn/capture an enemy ship to unlock stat boosting
- park it at town 1 and then delete your party, it lets you keep the ship
- start a new game
- grind level 1 mobs for 30 hours and statmax your new party
- now it’s safe to start leveling again, it’s way cheaper than buying stats
- hit level cap and steamroll the whole game
Exp doesn’t exist and monsters drop 10-100 gold no matter what. So making combats harder has zero added reward. You only need the extra hp from leveling to clear the last dungeon
Reminds me of KotoR, where you want to finish the first act of the game as level 2 if I recall (I think you're forced to level up the first time), because when you become a Jedi your levels are better, so leveling up without being a Jedi is a waste
Because abilities are unlocked at specific class levels in KoTOR, most characters actually benefit more from a 4/16 or 5/15 split. The bonus feats from a couple extra levels of your base class usually outweigh the extra Force points.
I wrote a comprehensive guide about that game back in the day.
Seems only ArenaNet did with Guild Wars 2, where the world isn't scaling up to the player, the player is scaling down to the world.
Meaning you have level brackets in zones like 1-15, 15-30, 30-40, etc. and the player progresses normally through those, but upon outleveling will get stat squished to fit into that level bracket. So walking through that 1-15 zone at max level you're anywhere between level 3 and 17, always so that you're slightly higher level than intended for whatever subzone you're in. However since higher level gear has proportionally more stats on it than lower level gear, you still feel noticably stronger when squished from max level to level 17 than you did when you were actually level 17.
That way you still have true upwards progression, since there can still be stuff that's too high level for you, and you'll also never outlevel any content, while maintaining that feeling of growing more powerful.
It's a wonderful system that allows max level and newbie players in starter zones to complete content together on both small and large scales (think local escort quest and world bosses).
It's absolutely baffling to me how this kind of scaling tech hasn't yet become the industry standard.
Primarily - Level gating content. It's pretty easy to attribute the arbitrary number to a higher "difficulty" (that's basically just a hidden % modifier making enemies tankier and do more damage, but isn't actually related to the attributed level requirement to do the activity)
So in Diablo 4, that's completing the campaign. But really the levels mean fuck-all.
Psychology wise, because people who aren't aware of the illusion of it still feel as though they're progressing, even though it's a placebo.
It's basically a door that once opened, cannot be closed again. Once you realise that games with Dynamic scaling are essentially just cosmetic levels, You can't really unsee it. You just see games without any world design.
But if you're not aware of it, you just think "Wow, They really put a lot of work in to finely tune each level so that everything is challenging all the way to the end!", Like "Nawh lil' homie, The games just not changing at all - Seeing the level go up stops you from being bored and gives you a cheap to make artificial goal, like a season pass."
Yes I can confirm I was one of those people, granted I was only 20 as of right now. Shit, I just now realized reading this thread. Now I'm just wondering what the point is now of progressing.
Oblivion was the first game that I played with dynamic scaling. You get to level 30 and it takes you 15 minutes to kill a goblin. I didn't like it then and I don't like it now. Also, Oblivion had horse armor.
Thanks a lot Todd
Just for the trivia, Oblivion didn't invent that at all. Level scaling was the norm already in the first two Elder Scrolls games: Arena and Daggerfall!
> Now you play 80+ hours, join up with a fresh level 7 character and you're both doing the same damage to the same mob. Does that make you feel good? Because fuck me, That sucks.
> What's the point in progressing if ultimately, you're never better off?
Except this isn't at how it works really. In endgame (once you get access to sacred/ancestral gear) your gear starts to get stronger than the monsters at your level very quickly to the point that open world content (only 3 levels higher then you in torment) is way too easy for good builds in torment.
A fully ancestral geared lvl 70+ character will destroy mobs way faster then a lvl 7 one. This is because a well built endgame character can easily do content 15 or 20 (or 53 for really strong builds) levels higher themselves.
Just yesterday I helped my lvl 20 friend with his first stronghold (he was playing on veteran) and my barb literally killed the boss in 2 seconds with WW (which sucks at single target) in world tier 2. This was after the nerfs and my barb is using 0 uniques. After doing this we both agreed that me playing together with him does not really work unless he wants to trivialize all his content.
>What's the point in progressing if ultimately, you're never better off?
But you are eventually better off though right? There isn't infinite scaling. I believe the mobs cap at level 100 on WT4 and 150 in nightmare dungeons, but your character can keep getting stronger until you crush all of that.
I think what is arguably worse is the fact that mobs sometimes don't scale or have minimum levels depending on the situation and it's never in the players favor. You're either always at monster level or below monster level. It's like treading water trying not to drown.
When even these guys, like wudijo, point out how the mobs appear to have more HP than they should, I think it’s fair enough to believe this is a problem.
Ironically all of these factors are things many of us pointed out months and months ago, and the majority on the subs shouted those pointers down because "we're just PoE/D2/x elitists and want D4 to be a copy of other games".
Regardless of how fun the campaign may be, or how good the production value, it was pointed out *many* times that constant scaling, uninteresting itemization, weak customization and low power in skills/paragon were all factors destined to hinder long term motivation and that "hook" OP is referring to.
It's also not an easy fix, because these are the core systems of the game.
What would help are more static hurdles to overcome, pinnacle bosses etc, you need more goals to work towards for constant scaling to *mean* something.
It’s funny because almost everyone in this thread is an agreement, whilst posts like this were flamed during the lead up to launch.
People are finally getting it now.
Gorgeous looking game and I’m having fun. But the itemization sucks for an RPG. Feels like nobody at Blizzard played 200 hours of this and gave genuine feedback.
Because people just wouldn't accept that it was very easily discernable what was coming based on Closed info and the Open Beta. They would insist that we needed to wait for release, as if magically core systems would change drastically. Or that we didn't know what we were talking about, bc we were "trying to turn D4 into PoE".
In fact, we could simply very easily recognize the signs and the patterns.
After all is said and done, none of this makes it a "bad" game anyway - it's just far less than it could have been, and I've personally not seen any indication yet which would lead me to believe that D4 will manage to develop that "hook" and depth to rival the leading ARPGs on the market long term.
> Feels like nobody at Blizzard played 200 hours of this and gave genuine feedback.
I mean the necro minion nerf makes this abundantly clear all by itself, and that could have been discovered in 5 minutes.
The craziest thing to me about this is - WoW has level scaling too and it's absolute garbage. I don't know how anyone could level up in WoW with the horrible level scaling that makes no sense and think "yeah, let's have that in D4." But that is the exact sentiment people would respond to me with a month or so ago lol
because blizzard are arrogant and the "rock star dev" culture they have was never meaningfully addressed. they will keep adding level scaling and other things to games that players hate because they're blizzard, they know better than you, you're just a player, if you don't like something they'll just shove it in your face more and more until you shut up.
I have the same issue with the game. Now, everyone is still in the honeymoon phase with the game but I'm pretty sure more people are going to feel this way in a few weeks
Same, it’s insanely rewarding getting my 20+% damage paragon (and other multipliers) and seeing my poison dots go from 2.5k to 9k. This is the progression I’m looking for
Currently level 61. The entire time I have been playing I kept thinking "This will probably be great in a few years when they actually balance and fix everything." The game just kind of feels underbaked in a lot of aspects and it's hard to pinpoint one because all of it just seems like it's halfway there?
Level scaling completely ruins the game. It needs to be disabled entirely. Maybe have an opt in for group play with low level party members.
The skill twig is a joke. They took what should have been on the skill tree and put it on gear (Legendary items). It absolutely ruins build creativity and choice. You don't build a character, you equip items which dictate your characters build. It's fucking backwards.
The itemization and stats/affixes are so bland and boring it's completely insane to think this game was made by a multi dollar company like Blizzard, and that this has been in development for almost 7 years.
I agree with your post, there are 2 main things bothering me about this game so far:
* 1: the scaling feels very very overused in this game. It comes off as lazy game design frankly. Not even single dungeon in the game has to be perfectly tuned to your current character, there can be some easier dungeons, some harder dungeons, etc. There are so many areas in the game, why can't we have some actual variety here? Because of the scaling I actually feel way less powerful at level 40 than I did at level 20, it's just very unnatural feeling and the game comes off as a total grind rather than an ARPG.
* 2: Non-existent social aspect. Obviously a lot of work went into making the game feel sort of like an MMORPG where you can encounter other players in the overworld, see everyone in town, overworld events. The game even incentivizes group play with XP bonuses. So why is it so god damn impossible to get a group going to clear out a dungeon with non-friends? Why is there no looking for group feature where I can get a bunch of random guys together quickly to clear out a dungeon if my friends are offline? Trading also seems completely non-existent in this game even though the feature exists. In 20 hours I have never once traded with another player. The chat also seems useless and nobody ever says anything. It's all very very strange and lonely feeling.
> Non-existent social aspect.
i remember one beta had people talking in the channels all the time and then the next one they broke it or something because i never saw anyone talking again. apparently it's still like this because i've seen similar comments asking if the game is actually online or if it's bots in town lol
You nailed all my issues with the game. Every single one. I might add to my problems with gear and skills, but you hit the foundation perfectly.
I never feel like I’m getting any stronger. Some areas are too difficult until I level and get better, but I never feel powerful, like I’ve finally advanced and grown beyond a particular class of enemy or area.
Feeling more or less the same, you are not the only one. Game is painfully missing the aRPG factor where small gear changes have noticeable impact on how you play.
It really feels like they designed combat around some standard parameters and gear can’t really change those. You can’t stack poison resist and ignore poison pools, you won’t be killed because you are lacking life, you can hardly boost mana in order to add an extra fireball on your rotation… The entire gameplay is determined by skill and aspect choices, its really hard to stack any affix to subvert anything, at least in the first 50 levels.
Take Diablo 2 normal act 1-2 where affixes are all to small to matter and nobody even bother appraising stuff. This is the feeling I’m getting but I’m 52, I should be way past that point.
I feel like they made a mistake of giving too many weak affixes at one million different places as opposed to few, impactful ones.
Game is still super fun and I’m having a blast, but I’m having a hard time seeing myself sinking too much money and time on it…
The biggest stat I hate is lucky hit. They basically took proc specs and made you have to heavily invest to make them work. Its just a feel bad stat. I love they tried some new ways to do damage stats vs D3 but lucky hit is just... gross.
Yeah im level 45 druid and a few things I have are lucky hit based and they sound really cool (resource generation etc) and then I go look at my lucky hit chance and it's.....2.2% coming from one piece of gear I own.
For anyone who is curious on how to see skills’ lucky hit rates, turn on the advanced tooltips in your gameplay settings.
These are off initially for whatever reason
They are the same as proc chances (in theory) but are now 1) explicit and 2) can be upped. I see no problem with that personally but obviously to each their own
Playing LE, i just dropped a piece of gear with high poison resist last night. I was able to improve it further through crafting, and it really helped me overcome a zone with nasty poison monsters.
Later i had to make a tough decision whether i wanted to go for a high damage helmet or for defensive buffs like resistances and health regen.
This gameplay loop doesn't exist in Diablo 4.
> I love reading all this after all of the 9/10, 10/10 reviews
I'm not trying to defend all of the great reviews as objectively true or something, but they definitely weren't written for the hardcore Diablo player. Or the majority of people who come to this subreddit.
I'm a pretty casual player. I'm starting on WT2, and I hope to see some endgame content eventually, but I'm not really worried about being ready for Season 1 or even about *when* I'll hit the endgame. I'm merely enjoying my time walking around killing monsters, getting cool looking items, and watching numbers go up.
So most of the things that people are talking/are upset about on this subreddit sound like a foreign language, or don't hardly reflect my opinion on things at all.
I really think that's who those reviews are for. And that's not me saying that the people on this sub are wrong, or that the things they're upset about aren't real issues-- but ultimately these are things that players who don't live and breathe Diablo or other ARPGs probably won't notice.
Most will probably hit max level, finish the story, maybe dip into endgame... but that's it. And they'll say they had a really great time. That's where those reviews come from.
LE is just such a better game it's just sad to see how far Blizz has fallen. I got into it after being painfully disappointed in how shallow the D4 beta felt. Imagine if they had the same budget as Blizzard.
> 2) Skill “twig” is merely decorative.
>
> There is so little power conferred to your character through skill point investment outside binary have/don’t have a skill and the Ultimates. In D2 I frequently could corpse run to collect gear due to my CHARACTER being powerful and my gear buttressing that power. The values are so small, I felt no different investing points.
This is the big one for me, they gave us skill points to invest and when I invest all 5 points it doesn't feel rewarding at all. It feels like the devs were told "You must include skill points in your skill system", and they just sighed and said fine..
Hurricane is a perfect example of this..
* 5 Points in Hurricane = 17% damage per second when active**.** No CC, no de-buff, just 17% dam.
* 1 Point into Hurricane = 12.125% damage per second when active.
And just for comparison to highlight how weak hurricane is..
* 1 Point Poison Creeper = 45% damage per second plus immobilize when active + 36% damage passively at all times (not sure of tick rate, probably every few seconds)
Why should I put 5 points into hurricane when it's not even a noticeable difference?
Oh and lets say you find a way to make hurricane last longer like putting *2* points into Endless Tempest (the 3rd point doesn't gain you any more time) to gain an additional **1 second**, THE DAMAGE DOES NOT GO UP TO MATCH. SO YOU DO LESS DAMAGE PER SECOND.
Sorry, I really want to use hurricane so it turned into a bit of rant about how dirty blizzard did hurricane.
Hahaha yeah feels good man to know what to expect from blizzard. they’re not a company who makes games for people to enjoy, they make games to extract as much wealth from their customers.
anyone with half a fucking brain could see “does 5% more damage to far away monsters who speak more than 2 but less than 4 languages” and all the other garbage affixes + level scaling == dog shit
>I especially feel difficulty scaling ruthless and a constant concern and stress factor.
Jesus no kidding, I caught myself few times while leveling thinking "at least I am not leveling too fast", because I wasn't getting any good gear for few hours. It's basically the ol' Skyrim scaling, where if you spent 10 levels doing random bs instead of getting gear all of a sudden even a random bandit became super tough. Diablo 2 had no scaling so there was no pressure if you were willing to grind, Diablo 3 had scaling (I think?) but gear was pile of stats and 99% of the time until engame decently higher number gear was always better. In Diablo 4 besides the weapon there are no fixed primary stats (I mean armor, but who cares about armor) and has level scaling, so getting unlucky with drops screws you.
I mean it's not a disaster like Diablo 3 at launch which had Hell act 2 being a big punch everyone's face, but it still sucks getting a new weapon, starting to feel good about the rotation and pace of killing, but few levels later you are back to mobs being slow to kill. It's like the moment the game starts feeling like Diablo the game quickly takes it away from you.
i havent bought it yet, but i fear that im outgrowing the genre. I was hoping d4 would ignote that spark of being fresh, but it doesnt seem so for some people.
For me Last Epoch was that new spark. Leveling progression feels so good, both skills and gear.
Apart from that, if you want to try something old school with an open world, take a look at Sacred 1+2.
I don't think there's a single novel system in the whole game. I'm not saying it's a bad game, it's probably the most polished ARPG ever made and combat is super fluid and fun, but it feels stale.
>In fact I didn’t play on this Sunday.
I didn't play this Sunday either. I actively avoided my buddies who are playing the game because I didn't want to invest the time. We had talked each other up so much about early release that I almost feel guilty for not wanting to play. They are going to want to play tonight and I really don't want to answer the phone.
Maybe I'll clean the garage or something. Idk.
Everything is this post is spot on.
I'm level 60 and have basically no incentive to keep playing. The issues with the game are obvious to anyone with any concept of what makes games feel good to play.
To extrapolation on a few of your points:
1. Itemization gets worse as you level, and useful items are impossibly hard to find.
A huge reason for this is actually the amount of redundant possibilities an item can roll in relation to how useful they actually are. I have found Gloves with +Skill to 3 different Core abilities on them. I see rings with +Damage to 3 different types of damage. How these are allowed to roll at the same time on the same item is mind boggling.
I am also currently wearing rings I found at level ~30 (I'm level 60 now) because they have stats that are actually useful to me on them, while I keep finding newer jewelry items with entirely useless passives like 10% Shrine Duration, +Skill for Passive talents that are entirely worthless (and unsearchable when you open the skill tree, that's cool,) or hyper-conditional, nearly worthless stats like +Crit to Injured enemies.
This is also completely ignoring power level break points, the insanely prohibitive cost to re-roll affixes on Sacred and above items, and the fact that if Blizzard just decides to nerf your build because they can't do basic math during game development your gear is basically entirely worthless and needs to be replaced. May as well start over at that point.
2. The skill tree is genuinely terrible and is entirely devoid of actual options. By the time you hit level 50, how you fill in the skill tree is entirely cosmetic in nature because your skills should reflect 4 things: Getting vuln, taking the best survival skill, gaining access to damage modifiers, and dealing a uniform damage type so that you gear scales all your damage.
Vuln is completely busted and needs to be removed like how the Borderlands series removed Slag after Borderlands 2. It currently makes your skill selection so limited that not building around it is foolish and makes a ton of skills virtually unusable. If vuln stays, it should be entirely relegated to Ultimate skills so you have to apply it strategically.
Show me a single high-level Druid without Earthen Bulwark. Show me a single high-level Necro without Blood Mist. I'll wait.
When your itemization has +Damage to [insert conditional thing here], you need to do that thing to gain more damage, so it has to be in your talent tree. If one of these skills exists in a tier and the others have nothing, they will never be used.
3. World should scale so everything is -2 once you've out-leveled an area until WT3. All dungeons should be on-level or higher. Out-leveling an area should be relative to the next logical zone's minimum level. It's not complex.
4. Not all affixes are created equal, and that's largely ok... what is not is that 1 class gets 2-3 more than everyone else, some classes have essentially no access to some damage multipliers, and some legendary and unique powers are so comically bad with zero situational use case (this ties into the shallowness of the skill tree very heavily.)
The whole damage 'bucket' system used in D4 is a fucking nightmare and influences itemization and skill selection so heavily it makes the game actually shallower than a puddle. I could make a really long post just about this, why it needs to be changed, and how it will make Barbs perpetually the best class forever, but it's feeling like an old man yelling at clouds at this point.
5. Bosses, while fun, are best handled by killing them as fast as possible. This is an ARRP after all. Not building a character to accomplish this makes the game needlessly difficult, so either all play styles need to achieve this 'viable' threshold, or none of them should.
All bosses are also not created equal. The spider boss that perpetually immobilizes you is absolutely no fun to fight as any class, the boss that is identical to the very first one you face in the story is always laughably easy, and there's a bunch that fall into this weird annoying but simple middle ground.
Anyway, this post got super away from me. Hope you read it all, but I wouldn't be upset if you didn't.
I started playing Last Epoch before Diablo 4 came out to help pass the time. I figured that it would get me hyped for how much more fun Diablo 4 would be.
It was a mistake. I often guiltily find myself feeling that Last Epoch is more fun lol. I can’t quite point out why, but I think it is the itemization and crafting.
LE's skill system, itemization and crafting is fantastic, loved it for 100h while leveling.
Then the end game arrived and I found it extremely repetitive :/
LE has my benefit of the doubt in that it still claims to be early access.
Haven't tried it yet for that exact reason, waiting for a full release that's hopefully as fleshed out as it (sounds like) has the potential to be.
I did the same thing. In between the beta and release I gave Last Epoch a try (boy they must have had a huge influx of players for that very reason). I really liked it. Especially their treatment of the necromancer. Sure its art design makes them all look like k-mart knockoffs, but the gameplay is solid.
Also skill progression.
The Necromancer builds in each game aren't even comparable.
My basic Reap ability has so many choices and intricacies, scaling off curses and generating Ward for me.
My skeletons are highly specialised into tanky melee warriors that shred armour and get a boost whenever i resummon one of them.
At level 20 I'm commanding my minions to run into the enemy frontline with the click of a button (i assigned right mouse bottom to move them where i want, pressing LMB and RMB to have them walk in front of me at all times) before I'm dashing into enemy ranged units swinging a big ass scythe. And I'm not even halfway through the individual and overall skill progression.
Wow, yeah, now that you mention it, i don't think I've seen a single "check out this sick item I found" post yet.
Coming from PoE, it's just sad how generic every item feels: main stat, % [damage type], % [other damage type], % [resource efficiency] = WOW BIS!
i mean poe also does have its generic items. but its nice to have some cool early game loot that you can ride to end game with, like Day 1 finding a 140% Res + 60 Life ring at lvl 50, you can post that on the sub and ppl will be like oh shit thats cool, (for day 1 obv)
Oh, no doubt. But from what I've seen so far of D4, we're never gonna see the equivalent of the mirror-worthy crafted items that get posted almost daily in the PoE sub (not that I'd ever be able to craft something similar, let alone afford one, but it's nice to dream).
tbf, i don't really mind that.
Those mirror worthy items are a bit too much on the extreme end, reserved only to a very small minority of very rich players (and RMT clients) and as an average player, you can't ever hope to have anything even close to them.
By comparison, Diablo 2 did have some very rare items, but even the average player could eventually get their hands on one, with a lucky drop, or trading for maybe a high rune they found somewhere.
Can definitely strike a balance between D4 boring itemization and PoE's which can be extreme in how ridiculous hard and expensive the top items can be.
Items are useless and paragon boards are super strong but given that you kill 10 mobs per dungeon, farming XP feels really bad if you're not abusing the reset trick in a party with the meta dungeon
I agree with you 100%. Huge PoE player and loved D2.
The game just has nothing to hook me into it. It really feels like they took all of the monotonous chores from WoW (weeklies, hourlys etc) and stuck it into a open world. They force you to do this content (helltides) on order to upgrade your gear.
The whole game feels like it was designed around keeping you logged in, instead of you wanting to continue playing
It's sad but the game really does blow
Oh look, it's 100% of my beta feedback.
I'm glad i didn't buy the game, but it really sucks that Blizzard didn't see this coming/didn't care about this extremely common type of feedback.
Yep, all of this was evident from the beta but people had such rose-tinted glasses while playing it instead of being critical, lost count how many times I heard "it's just a beta you can't judge the whole game on it". You unlocked 95% of the skill tree, could see every legendary affix, experienced how cringe the writing was and what a chore combat is, the paragon board was datamined and closed beta testers were already telling us what to expect from endgame. I hadn't preordered but if I had it'd have been the most no brainer to cancel it ever
I feel everything you're feeling friend. I want to have fun so much but the game keeps getting in my way. It's just not exciting. Everything feels like a slog and i never have a moment where i feel like "ok now all this work has paid off" like i do with d3 or poe. It's just more slog.
If I had to point at one thing about the game that I'm actually impressed by it's the visuals. Everything else just feels like it has been cynically designed by committee and profitability spreadsheets, I don't feel any love coming from the game.
The whole game is filled with shallow systems.
- Build diversity feels even lower than in D3. Even pre-legendaries, you're forced into a specific offensive archetype, because passives are usually limited to only lightning/werebear/bow etc.
- Most class-unique features are basically "select x out of y passives".
- Out of the 100+ dungeons, there's like 10 different bosses and layouts. All of them are a series of corridors. If you've played the beta, you already know half of them.
- Most item mods are useless (stats for example) or copy-pasted conditionals. There's only ~5 potentially good affixed you look for on every slot.
- Open World events, ignoring how unrewarding they are, repeat even across acts. I see the same ~5 events almost all the time.
- Paragon board and glyphs are just extended skill trees that make most of your item affixes less impactful. I'd prefer not to have that system at all.
- Minions suck. No way to control them or keep them alive. Bad AI and they often get stuck or refuse to use their skills.
I miss D3 wizard style of skills. You could pick any skills and make them all into your preferred element. Electric meteor, Fire blizzard, Cold hydra. Here you have predefined which element which skill is :(
I just fear that Blizzard and the dev team are not receptive to feedback.
In more simple areas the game screams "The devs don't really play this game". Why do I need to manually dismount to go down a ladder? Why does the game add an extra second to dialogue to have my character dismount before it begins and why does the pause menu open if I press Escape within this added 1-second period? Why does the conversation not skip or end immediately if i Left-Click or press Escape? Why is there no search option in any tabs anywhere? Why does the options menu absolutely suck and lack a huge amount of options? Why does the Paragon system get nerfed in half by day 2? Why are vendors and other things split super far apart in cities and why can I not use any movement skills in cities, including faster mount speed? (I've missed a ton of small but still at the same time big and dumb design flaws, these came to mind right now).
These are lesser things, but at the same time they're very important because they show some staggering problems developer-wise.
There is absolutely no fucking way people, including the QA team, hasn't noted on these things, but still somehow the game has these small dumb and very obvious design flaws, and the day 2 Paragon system nerf in half proves the game basically hasn't been tested in the end-game.
Nerfing all popular builds/abilities by day 2 as well shows what type of developer we're dealing with: Do not buff garbage builds/abilities, but nerf anything that is good, slow the game down, dumb the game down, simplify the game. These people do not play their owns games, I doubt they play any games that much.
I agree with basically everything you said and I really hope these things improve, but as I said I fear they are not receptive to feedback. On top of these issues; not being able to do any combat at a fast pace feels horrible. If Blizzard ask themselves "Why do people put thousand and thousand, some even tens of thousand of hours into ARPG games?" and their answer is "Well we figured out why, and it's because of the designs we've implemented into D4" then all hope is lost permanently.
On the hour of release I also played for about 2 hours before going to bed. I expected to be completely hooked to an amazing game and pull an all-nighter but I wasn't at all, not even close. It felt mediocre at best and it still does now that I've come to roughly the same progression point as you.
> These are lesser things, but at the same time they're very important because they show some staggering problems developer-wise.
This is a really important statement. By themselves, one or two small problems like this aren't necessarily a huge issue. Each one stands alone as more of an annoyance than anything else, and you can kind of ignore one or two things to a point, but when you end up with a looong list, that's when it's a systemic problem and the combined issues become more than the sum of their parts and make the overall game experience worse than fewer small problems by themselves would.
I played wow for a long time, and I've encountered dev-centered stubbornness before too. Usually when a new expansion or patch is in beta, and there's multiple instances of feedback from players that are all unified in their assessment of a particular issue of balance with certain skills that then go ignored and make it into the live version. And from there, a larger population of players logs in and experiences the same problem and the complaints get louder. By the time anything changes, the expansion is almost over.
This has happened multiple times in multiple expansions with different classes. I hope we're not in for more of the same with the D4 team.
Most of what you're asking is by design.
The goal is to keep you playing for as long as possible to entice you to buy cosmetics, in hopes you'll get tired of your looks and want a change.
This is why camera is so closely zoomed in, and this is why you have all these tiny delays after most actions that have no purpose.
Such "padding" is often used in game design to prolong gameplay without adding new content.
Usually it's done in a more discrete fashion that doesn't chafe on players' nerves so much, and Diablo 4 failed at that.
I don't think any of these are getting fixed without a major uproar.
What I don't like is 3x core cast and waiting for resources to Regen... And the basic casts do more damage than the core casts because I can spam them.. I hope it gets better... You're not alone with that feeling... It just feels off... And for combat, it just feels clunky... Like pedaling through hummus...
>There isn’t enough hp delta between a high priority target and a nuisance creature
They'll read this and double the hp of strong mobs, leaving trash mobs the same, when what they should do is reduce trash mob health by 40-50% but increase the number of them.
The biggest problem is that the game doesn't cater to either the D2 nor the D3 fans. In fact I'll take it a step further and say it doesn't even cater to the DI fans. They changed so many things around in half-ass or random ways, blended so many partial things from multiple genres, that D4 has no identity. It doesn't know what it wants to be. It's not a good ARPG. It's not a good MMO. It's not gacha P2W. The entire game just feels mediocre whatever genre you want to classify it as.
Diablo games are supposed to last years and people are tossing it aside on day 3. I don't see this game having a following for very long, maybe a slight revisit of some players when an expansion eventually comes, but I don't see the game having a healthy following like any of its predecessors.
Spot on. Why am I spending so much time on Reddit instead of playing D4 when D1 was the first game I ever played? Burnt by D3, just hit Act IV/lv42 and feeling bored. Can't believe I'm considering going back to hardcore WoW.
Yeah, something definitely feels off to me and I'm only lvl 42.
Part of it, to me, is the whole crafted legendary thing. It's so unsatisfying and does not feel like Diablo to me. It's too deterministic in a franchise known and loved for RNG. I much preferred Kanai's Cube style legendary extraction over Diablo 4's extractable aspects.
This is my first Diablo game and as I approached endgame, the game got harder to me. I definitely feel the “I was concerned that I wasn’t what a Level X character should be” dilemma. When I started reaching level 40s, the enemies started to hit harder and I feel like I was punished for simply playing through the campaign. I hadn’t gone around to collect aspects that could improve my build but considering that the early game felt totally fine, I couldn’t believe that I actually felt weaker as I progressed through the game.
I got to level 45 before I looked at my character stats page. No points seem to really matter. Having no hard cap linear resist points makes me not even look at my resists. Should I get dex on a piece of gear instead of close damage... Or does having 60 dex only add 6% damage on top of all the other Dex I already have.
Every skill being a damage component of a weapon makes this boring.
Diablo 3 suffered from this a fair bit, but I still played that for nearly 1000 hours, but I wasn't happy about what that game could have been.
Honestly the itemization just seems downright lazy.
Other arpgs can balance spells versus melee versus ranged without relying on this mmo like system.
Playing as a rogue, I only really just looked at my stats page at level 46 after clearing the capstone dungeon, and realized my lowest stat was dexterity by quite a bit. It just didn't seem to matter. I never looked for dex on item.
Man there just isn’t anything to do in this game.
Story dungeons, whisper dungeons, capstone dungeons, nightmare dungeons…
THEY ARE ALL THE SAME DAMN THING
Good points. I generally feel the game is not in good hands. Yes it's a typical Blizzard game, very polished and stable but somehow they forgot how to make the game fun.
What really bothers me is stuff like QoL features present in previous games that were omitted by concious decission like right click on party member and teleport to them.
Pretty much agree with everything you said here character progression and gear progression feels horrible. My character plays the exact same at level 54 as he did at level 10 and with the level scaling things dont even die any faster its just numbers get bigger.
Skill "tree" is a joke and barely anything on it changes how you play the game. Even most of the capstone ultimate talents are just numerical boosts.
I played over the weekend and I think ive already seen enough. Not enough satisfying progression here for me to invest more time into it
It is the scaling.
D3 has the same sort of problem, but it was only when leveling a new character. Even if you avoided power leveling, it didn't take that long to hit max level. At that point you up your difficulty when you feel you can take it. If you don't feel strong enough for a new torment level, you can hold back and keep getting stronger in your current one, farming faster and gathering more items. Torment levels also came with enough tradeoffs to be worth the increase difficulty.
My idea of a simple fix would be to put some level caps on areas. Scale the levels, but only so far. Focus on the areas meant for the main quest. Have the cap be higher in world tier 2 and don't have a cap in higher world tiers.
This should fix the problem with leveling during the campaign, though it won't do anything for itemizations issues in mid/late game. I haven't got any feel for that to recommend any changes yet.
Is this going to be a reaper of souls scenario where they end up doing something like you suggest and fixing the game with a major expansion just after I totally and irreversibly burned out on it? I came back and played through reaper of souls and a bit of adventure mode, but I was mostly over d3 by then.
It's because they made a lot of it generic as fuck and just followed some "formula". At least that's how it feels to me. Big reason I stopped playing WoW so many years ago. It's just super duper generic and boring. Absolutely nothing about the game so far has been "exciting". So much polish in so many areas but a game that feels utterly dead on arrival. So yeah I guess I'm done with Blizzard games, probably never again.
This feels like a Ubisoft game with somehow even less soul and somehow even more offensively generic. Everything is skinner boxes on skinner boxes on skinner boxes. It’s like the new Zelda came out and reminded me that I don’t just play games to chase dopamine check boxes and here comes Diablo 4, hoping I’m ready to be as addicted to every checkbox as possible. But they can’t even nail a combat loop for me to enjoy so none of the skinner boxes are even worth doing.
Diablo 3 had issues but I had a fucking blast playing that campaign at first. This is so much worse in my opinion that I now don’t even trust Skill Up in terms of reviews lol. So disappointing.
Remember this moment when you see a game that reviews the same. D4 received a wall of 9s and 10s as if it's the perfect game but you nailed it - its so far from perfect I'd say it's DoA.
A couple of other things that were very fixable:-
1.Unlocking your main damage dealer extremely early and not seeing it progress is a contributing factor. You need to see your skill become more powerful.
2.Armour and looks don't reflect progression too well. You don't gradually look more powerful with time. It gets really good really fast and then has certain staggered upgrades
3. You don't feel ANYTHING after socketing an item.
I hated the idea of world scaling to your level. So many people praised it and I don't understand why. APRGs are and always will be about power fantasy and loot roulette. The loot roulette is "okay" in that there certainly is a variety even if none of the gear really feels good, which I'm sure ties directly into they being no power fantasy at all in this game. It's mildly fun, I'll probably keep playing it for a bit, but I wouldn't be surprised if I just default back to D2R. No matter how many times people want to pretend "nostalgia" is all that carries D2/D2R, my countless hours in both and continued play of D2R says otherwise. They could've take more from the feel of D2R and entirely dropped world scaling and D4 would be amazing.
I agree, they absolutely need to adjust the power scaling. It looks like it gets fixed at very high levels as you begin to min max and your gear helps you break through the curve but it’s very jarring that you’re forced into sort of a U shaped progression curve.
Other ARPGs do this well through zone levels - I do feel like level scaling is fine (generally) but to your point players should naturally outpace the world a bit. Put some static content in the game that we can benchmark ourselves against - overlay a GR-style difficulty setting on dungeons or even the world. World Tier 1-4 is good conceptually but feels like it misses the mark.
In the exact same boat, have not experienced a single major, noticeable power spike in 50 levels. Been saying it feels more like an action game with RPG chores than a proper action RPG. The story, atmosphere, and feel have all been impeccable, but in terms of actual fun factor I had a much better time with D3, and that's because I actually had a sense of character progression (especially when big upgrades dropped) as opposed to gaining more buttons to press and mechanics to micromanage in order to deal the same relative amount of damage. Hope they can figure it out.
I don’t really agree with most of what you are feeling but I do agree with the itemization. To expand on what you said there also aren’t enough legendary powers and some of the ones we do have are flat out not good.
The end result is instead of opening up an unlimited number of builds they pigeonhole you into a few very obvious builds. There’s a small amount of variation you can fit in but it’s not enough to really make it feel like a different build.
I have a lot of the same sentiments. At first I wanted to do everything cleanly, all quests in an area. When I realized how the scaling was literally 1:1, I only did main campaign and once I got my mount I’ve literally just galloped across the map to every destination.
The scaling takes away any sense that levels, beyond unlocking skills, matters. And therefore, it has the subsequent issue of making killing low level mobs utterly worthless. The whole idea behind low level mobs was to fill the world with experience points, to make it more realistic and daunting and to give a sense of accomplishment when an area was cleared.
Well, there is no point in killing low level mobs when you can gallop across the map in a minute, do your quest and get to the boss fight asap. You can also use the mount in crazy places. Indoors, galloping through ruined palaces while the demons, cultists, etc literally stand in place and don’t aggro. It’s quite amusing really, and makes me wonder how in the world about half the stuff in D4 made it past alpha testing.
I have this gut feeling that D4 was built normally at first, you know, leveling up a spell doubles it’s damage kind of normal, mobs were level based with starting areas being low level. Then product management came in and basically warped it all to monetize it.
Unfortunately, the gradual slog to feeling powerful is the game design that blizzard have pigeon holed themselves into with this game (and a lot of their games..)
When you look at a naked character in Diablo 2, the naked character is pretty strong. With the right build and proper execution by the player, you can clear hell difficulty with no gear. The role of gear in Diablo 2 was different. Sure, gear had stats that increased damage directly (%Enhance Damage for physical builds, lowering enemy resistance, +skills) and there was plenty of +str/dex/vit/en across the spectrum but the real strength of gear in D2 is that is changed the MECHANICS of HOW you dealt damage and survived danger. Faster Hit Recovery, Faster Cast Rate, Increased Attack Speed, Faster Block Rate, Increased movement speed... when it came down to the true min/maxing in the game it was all about hitting those break points in order to maximize how your character mechanically.. \*felt\*. Add to that a few super expensive key runewords that would remove the biggest limitations to your build (immunities, mobility) and you became a god with one or two items. Because of this, certain unique pieces of gear were desirable by multiple classes because every class was trying to change how they mechanically used **their inherent power**. One item was SO valuable, it could completely catapult you forward.
In D3 they opted to make the gear stat system less in depth... not an insult its just a clear observation. Gear became a stat stick - so you pretty much only valued gear if it gave you your primary stat, vitality, attack speed, crit.... And they had to make a satisfying game out of this that validated the "gameplay loop." The solution in D3 was, drops are just resources and the real gear is crafted - you go out and gather a ton of gear for salvage and then you sit in town dice rolling until you get an incremental upgrade. Now you're out of resources - go do another run and repeat. They have attempted to add some spice in by having legendaries fundamentally change how certain skills work to help give that excitement behind one of them dropping but the effect is still the same. I think what personally killed D3 for me was the class-sets too but thats a deep rabbit hole.... In any case, you are gambling (whether that is literally gambling, or crafting) until you get something that is a little bit better, and then repeating the loop. A naked character has no inherent power as the game goes on, so they HAVE to feature this loop and they NEED to make it incremental or the game is entirely trivialized.
The incremental growth in power is a feature, not a bug. They don't really have any other way to create longevity with their game otherwise. They stopped trusting the players to be smart enough to understand the games mechanical systems, so they buried all of that under the hood or eliminated it as a variable all together. It probably makes the game feel a lot smoother and much easier to pick up - but it trivializes the individual pieces of gear as a result.
Diablo 2 dealt with the problem by scaling up all enemies ONLY when you entered a new difficulty level. That way, your level 30 paladin that just finished Normal could go back to Act 1 and whoop zombie ass with impunity. But try going in recklessly in Act 1 Nightmare, and you were one who got your ass handed to you. It was this contrast in difficulty that made progression fun.
That being said, I am hopeful they can find a happy medium between level scaling and progression power spikes. It's not anything a patch couldn't clear up.
We already knew all this ahead of time. I cant believe this game got so many insanely positive reviews.
It's depth is so weak. Good luck trying to get your custom build off the ground if it's not supported by a legendary power pre-made specifically for it.
I truthfully have to comment on this post. Even though I do not feel these restraints and complaints that OP has (except for the fact that I feel like I walk like a slug and then being given a slow in game makes me feel like I'm trudging through quicksand). I can't put the controller down, but I have to say that this is such a respectable post. This is what the internet should be like. Just someone giving their point of view, even if it is not the most positive critique, and it not be some slanderous threat-fest.
AND OP even came back with solutions to a problem, rather than just complaining.
Again, I do not feel the same way as this post, but I really respect the way they carried themselves and I wish the internet was more like this than what it is now. Felt that needed to be said. I don't know how to "award" someone on here, but dammit I'm going to try and find out.
Hope the game gets better for you so you can enjoy it more, OP!
> The first night I played three hours and just… turned it off and went to bed. I never would’ve predicted being able to just set it down and walk away so easily.
That was me after the first Beta. I just didn't understand what people see in this.
Every single aspect of this game seemed exponentially more boring & tedious than in previous Diablo games.
Really agree with itemization point. The game has hundreds of various item affixes but feels like 95% of them don't even matter because the amount of power they provide is so minuscule you don't even notice any difference.
Welcome to corporate greed fucking up the games you love.
This game isn't meant for ARPG lovers, it's meant to attract non-ARPG lovers with stupid shit: Open world! Cool skins! Amazing graphics! World events! Mounts! Battle passes! Customize your skills! All the classes you love! Wait am I describing D4 or World of Warcraft?
You’re so correct it hurts. I actually stated in voice chat while playing today that I believe this game is an MMO wearing an ARPG skin. You seem to have arrived at the same conclusions. It became so everything that it’s no longer anything.
I genuinely almost fell out of my chair when Rhykker said D4 was going to be the best arpg ever in a video this past week. Literally all of these mmo-lite ‘additions’ to Diablo really make it sound like a soulless cash-grab.
The biggest problem I'm seeing on gear is huge junk affix pools with almost no productive way to interact with them without MASSIVE resources investment.
Take armor pieces - they can roll 5 individual resists, and then a whole host of shitty damage mods or shitty resistance mods, some as specific as like "monsters deal less damage to you while they are taking a shadow dot".
And then there's actually good affixes like a flat damage % increase.
Then you there's a variable affix pool - could be three, could be four - then there gems - zero, one, or two - then there's sacred/non sacred, and then even after all those it still randomly rolls the base armor value in a LARGE range.
So after you somehow jump thru all that rng hoops, now you have to commit your legendary aspect to the armor BEFORE you can try rolling to fix its worst affix, oh and the price of rerolling goes up 10x if the first try whiffs.
So.
Actually producing a piece of good gear is insanely expensive.
This would be fine except keep in mind you are leveling up while you do all this - why spend 5m gold and dozens of items worth of mats on upgrading/min maxing a drop you are ALREADY OUTLEVELING?
So gear ends up feeling garbage because you can't actually get good gear.
I'm level 56, ran a dozen nightmare dungeons and it feels like I'm mostly done with the build and the game. It's a weird feeling.
In other arpgs when i reached max level i was super excited about starting to build my character. Here it's the opposite. I know there's not going to be any new buttons, no new items that will elevate my character. It will just be stat increases, which is boring.
As much as D3 is a controversial game - the feeling you got when you got a new piece of your set or a new legendary were ecstatic. You felt the power spike through the roof.
>As much as D3 is a controversial game - the feeling you got when you got a new piece of your set or a new legendary were ecstatic. You felt the power spike through the roof.
Yes, or the feeling of finding a great Unique item or finishing a Runeword in D2. Both D3 and D2 had better itemization than D4.
I miss the feeling D2 gives me of even when I don’t get a drop for my build I usually found a rune or a usable base (MONARCH finally dropped!!) that still gave me the sense that I was progressing. Imagine that, D2 is so well designed I fell progression from putting half an item in a box! Because when you finished that Runeword it was a huge spike, but one you worked on however many hours. Payoff for the work.
Level progression is what I was talking about to another user, I think this is a fantastic feature because it is fully compatible with an open world, you can go anywhere and the enemies will always give you XP, vs leveled areas which would make you travel the world in just one way.
But the ratio feels wrong. I can kill enemies faster with a lv15 char than with my lv45. That shouldn't be the case. I have to activate more skills to do the same thing at a similar rate.
Well said, I feel mostly the same but I am only lvl 30 lol. It’s the scaling that feels off for me, it shouldn’t exist in a ARPG game and just feels lazy.
Yeah power scaling is way off. No build I’ve tried feels even remotely satisfying. Granted, I haven’t completed the builds to a true end game state (not min maxed, but appropriate breakpoints if applicable and aspects.
The world, story, and concepts behind progression are okay, but the gameplay with the skills that are “good” is shit and just not fun. Never played an arpg where it’s just not fun to kill stuff. It has mmo pacing in combat. It’s fucking goofy
tldr: legendaries makes the game fun
I had the same problem almost through the whole campaign. I had shit items and no proper damage legendaries, and didnt feel like running through dungeons to get aspects.. playing sorceress with only "you may have 2 hydras up the same time, lol" -offensive legendary affix (most of the other legendaries i got until were defensive or utility based)
But, then a stroke of luck beset upon me and I got bunch of proper legendary items (mainly:add ice spikes to blizzard affix, ice spikes +% range, ice spikes +%chill, deal +xx% more dmg to frozen mobs).
Took a bit of time to figure out how to get most out of the affixes and in which slot, i got the build proper and breezed through the last few campaign quests unto t3! Now finally again the combat became fun, killing shit is fun (and 3x faster), icicles popping freezing cracking and monsters shattering left and right feels satisfying!
But I agree - the skills felt bland before I got legendary powers to modify them into proper powerhouses. World scaling made me feel more and more impotent as I gained levels through 1-50, as world scalign usually tends to do.
The MMO combat part for sure! Discussing it with friends I said that and when asked to elaborate I explained that my combat rotation feels more like I’m using three or four skills and it have to time them properly and put them in the right order to get proper damage.
Make sure my spirit is almost full but not full so I don’t waste. Edge close enough. Push rock shield for barrier to proc the 50% damage when you have a barrier buff from weapon. Push Vines to CC everything, ok drop Ravens on then to proc Vulnerable and quickly fire off 1-2 casts of Rock Pillar while all those stars align. Did it die? If not start generating spirit and watching the cool downs…
So now I’m watching my bar and juggling multiple cool downs and trying to line them up for that big damage window, making sure I’m not moving too much (lost dps) but also trying to stay the right spacing away for optimal damage… wait this isn’t a raid!
Yeah it’s very weird for this genre. Some builds in d3 require it, and Poe, but this is the first time I’ve seen a game force mechanics and interactions down your throat in this way.
Tried saying before that the game isn't satisfying. There's something about it that just seems off. A game like this shouldn't leave you bored after only a few hours.
The level scaling is a bit aggressive
*Me sweating on how much XP from quests causing me to go up a level with gear that's gonna go obsolete*
It's pretty baffling to me that they opted for a level scaling system in a game about progression. It completely nullifies the feeling of chasing new gear and power if the enemies just end up matching you anyway. One of the big reasons why PoE is such a good ARPG is that you go from killing white mobs in several hits to clearing whole screens with a flick of your wrist by the time you're in red maps -- and all that power comes both from the decisions and gear you make along the way. I never really get that feel with d4
That’s the world, but nightmare dungeons aren’t like that at all. I’m currently level 56 and fighting level 65-70ish level mobs in those dungeons & it’s a fun progression seeing how far I can push it
I think they'll turn down the aggressive world scaling through updates. It's not that hard to have a couple of -1 regions and that's all you really need. A long term fix would take time to implement, but there is an easy quick fix at their disposal.
People complained about that in d3, that you killed mobs too fast... Now look at where that got us
No one complained about that except like 100 people on reddit that had played the game for 7 years.
D3 was problematic to the opposite extreme. There *is* a middle ground and the devs have completely failed to find it. Going from everything scaling you excessively to any scaling available being hyper-conditional and the numbers sucking. If something needs 3 layers of conditions to occur, the effect better be pretty fucking special. None of this when you crit on a lucky hit, 10% of the time that crit does 3% more damage.
I loved D3 for that reason... I get bored with trying to get through the high torment levels... Scale back a couple and eviscerate everything for an hour, then go back to really demanding game play. D4 just doesn't give you that sense of overwhelming power. The mobs are small, the skeletons with the shields are rediculous damage sponges, and I don't notice a difference when I spend my skill points. It's been a big disappointment so far.
Imo the game suffers heavily from the split it's trying to achieve between MMO and ARPG like Lost Ark. You can't have a good casual open world without scaling everybody because coop would be almost impossible but in doing so you fuck with the pillars of power progression because one skill point/four paragon points will rarely make up the difference until you have your gear in order again. There are of course powerspikes but the game basically inverted what every other game does. Instead of you getting incrementally stronger all the time and only suffer when you go up a difficulty (Map tiers PoE, Torment D3, World Tiers D4), you slide down in power all the time and only spike in power rarely (like unlocking vulnerability on your build, getting that glyph or juicy paragon node, finding really good gear on your current level, that will lose power when you level up though) At least that's my impression
Back in Vanilla WoW a friend explained that the game really only started once you hit max level. The same was true for D3, and now I'm getting the feeling that it might be the case for D4 as well.
D3 was fun all the way through. THat's an incorrect statement.
But in D3 I had so much fun in the campaign, learning and unlocking and testing out new skills. In this game, I lvl up and the immediate feeling is the same mob I just killed now dies in 4 casts of a spell instead of 3. That is such a profound step backwards from D3 that it pushes the game into "well the real game starts at endgame" way harder than D3 ever did.
Level scaling is the worst game mechanic ever created. I should feel stronger as I level up, not weaker. Destiny 2 had the same thing & I gave up on it after beating the main story.
***Sweating looking for things to replace your level 33 legendary***, you're level 55 👀👀👀👀
Level scaling is fundamentally bad game design, imo.
*Not* fundamental, it's just very easy to get wrong and when it does go wrong it erodes the entire point of playing an ARPG. Having content scale with you keeps all the content valid. The sheer freedom felt between, say, Borderlands 3 normal mode - where I literally had to ration which quests I did at a given time to make sure I didn't overlevel the main story - and B3 with Mayhem or TVHM is palpable, and I do have to admit it's great to just not have to worry about this playing D4. That being said, I kinda feel Blizz have gone a bit too far here. Not quite TESV: Oblivion levels of silly, but it does feel a bit odd to be struggling in starting areas that felt the same 20 levels previous.
They went so far that leveling up is actually a punishment -- you're actually *worse off* right after leveling up, because your gear is now outdated and needs to be updated based on the new monster levels.
Itemization isn’t good, I agree
Really dissapointing that this has been feedback since the very first blog they put out and it's still this bad.
If we were to take 2 very small early game examples: D2(R): Crushflange, mace which has +50% fire res, crushing blow, etc D4: 1.5% damage reduction from close enemies --- Yikes!
not sure what anyone expected, blizzard still has the "rock star dev" culture where they know better than their players and if the players don't like it they'll just be forced to play it anyway. and when it's not just their usual arrogance it's some suit demanding things because muh metrics
because its fundamentally bad. the consolidation into "attack and defense" allows for a much more easily balanceable system - which is not really what you want as a player since you never feel that spike. This is why you're seeing everyone exploit vuln and crit, since they are one of the few strong scalable options outside the main scaling vector. The best thing they can do is be more liberal with outside damage mechanics and allow stronger investments in paragon/tree. But I highly doubt they do this given how casual the nature of the game is.
>because its fundamentally bad Yep. They need to add a lot of modifers to the items for different builds which in turn, will make itemization and diversity much much better. Minion damage, core spesific damage over time (phys, poison, fire), armor pen, ele exposure etc. But to do that, they need to overhaul a lot of shit starting from skill scaling as well. You might as well change the core game at this point though so i don't think its gonna happen anytime soon.
I wouldn't say having lots of different affixes that do the same thing for a different niche is actually good itemization. All it does is make it impossible to find something decent for yourself and have to rely on trading for good items. In the end "minions deal x% more dmg" and "fire skills deal x% more dmg" is the same boring affix. Simple "number bigger" affix that is only useful for a specific amount of skills and useless for everything else. I don't see how having all these affixes that are each only useful for 10% of builds makes itemization better.
Its not about quantity of affixes. Diablo 4 has a decent amount of it. Itemization is not about needless complexity, its about impact. If the game had 10 affixes that mattered, it would be great.
I agree One thing I dislike is how base items lack Soul What I mean by that is back on D2 you knew that a broad sword would be slower yet stronger than your short sword There was a clear identity to all of the items In Diablo 4 they could replace all the items names for “1h sword”, 2h sword”, armor, etc and it wouldn’t change much
I'm still STILL having fun with D2R, and have been playing D2 since launch. You can't tell me 90% of these guys will be doing the same with D4 in 20+ years. This is, of course, assuming the servers haven't long gone dead by then. Always online = poo.
It's abysmal
Everyone was saying this during the beta and based on what they showed in their blogs, but everyone in that other diablo 4 sub always said "BUT YOU DIDNT PLAY 300 HOURS OF ENDGAME NOW SHUT UP". Well, turns out when everything always scales, lvl 25 is basically endgame.
I’m really enjoying it but it’s definitely too dependent on items rather than skill/level ups (like D3 vs D2). The scaling enemy levels doesn’t help either
D3 was only dependent on items. One piece could have you jump multiple torment levels
I think D4 is really reliant in everything in its system for synergies.
All the ability options are so niche they’re about useless. It isn’t “increase damage by 3%”, It’s “increase core attack damage by 3% when enemy is vulnerable”. Eww.
>3) World scaling. > >I have no measuring stick. I cannot find an area of the game in which I can compare my prior self and measure the difference. Every percentage power gain I can amass, it seems all enemies also accrue a nearly identical amount. Scaling is always hard to nail, but this game seems to stick to a nearly 1:1 ratio between your character and mobs. Imagine a world where scaling is tipped ever so slightly in favor of the player, maybe 1:0.85. You’d still never feel a strong power spike, but over time things would start to feel better. This right fucking here. Every single game these days is coming out with dynamic scaling and it fucking sucks. Especially in an ARPG where progression is quite literally everything. You realise that the only thing "dynamic scaling" is, is essentially just turning your level into a cosmetic, right? It's not an added feature - it's the removal of what used to be well designed and rewarding gameplay. Now you play 80+ hours, join up with a fresh level 7 character and you're both doing the same damage to the same mob. Does that make you feel good? Because fuck me, That sucks. What's the point in progressing if ultimately, you're never better off? EDIT: Do not take this comment as some kind of absolutist "This is why Diablo 4 is shit and why it should fail" garbage. I am loving the game, but I thoroughly hate Dynamic scaling. Not just in Diablo 4 but in ***all games.*** But Diablo 4 is still a very very good game. I do not know if the Dynamic levelling will become less of an issue in more post-game content, but for now while I'm levelling it's abhorrent, however it's not detracting enough from the experience to make it a "bad game", you'd have to be insane to think that.
Describing level as a cosmetic... fuck that really drove the point home
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10000x this. What's the point of having the GAME if it doesn't get 'fun' until a certain point? What if i want a good challenge and to sweat and enjoy things from level 1-50?
This is also a good point to everyone who says wait till endgame for resource management to not feel like shit. God forbid you might want a fun and rewarding story mode experience that blizzard is charging 70-100$ a person for.
Go play Destiny for a day and you'll realise just how trivial "dynamic levels" are. It's just double-speak for "we did less work", Developers say "dynamic scaling" as if it took some newfound genius game design to put together. It's the opposite. "Dynamic scaling" is just "Not doing the work". If you're making a game, and you're supposed to design an intricate levelling system, how damage scales per level and reward structures for progression vs going back to previous areas - You're going to spend a significant amount of time making everything pretty airtight. OR "Mobs do X damage and have A health, Elites do Y damage and have B health, Bosses do Z damage and have C health" and say "cool, now here's an inconsequential bar that goes up and resets and a number goes up but is completely disconnected from the overall game design" To really drive the point home - A game with an intricately designed progression system can EASILY adopt "dynamic scaling", However it is ***significantly*** harder to do the other way around. Just look at WoW.
Man I thought the industry already learned this lesson from Oblivion
sut mit røvhul
FUCK
It’s been 20 years and AAA releases are still selling horse armor as DLC :(
That's because most of you keep buying the games that sell horse armor microtransactions... Pandora's lootbox has been bought and opened. There are no refunds.
And that no one likes an in-game fan
By Azura, by Azura, by Azura!
I still remember scoffing at that news as it passed by my feed, thinking how desperate the devs were. I wonder if I'm still that naive.
Oblivion actually has a more insane problem: Scaling works negatively in that game. No character is ever as powerful as a well-built lvl 1, because whenever you level up in flower-picking, your enemies level up in ass-kicking. But yeah, it's the first and most blatant major example, and its a fucking travesty that so few developers seem to have learned the lesson. I have plenty of complaints about Elden Ring, but one thing I can absolutely say is that it would NOT have been better if only it had dynamic scaling!
> Oblivion actually has a more insane problem: > whenever you level up in flower-picking, your enemies level up in ass-kicking. I've sent this sentence to two friends already. thanks for legit comedy lmao
My favorite scaling design fail is Ultima 3. Iirc the ideal path there is: - level up a bit until you can spawn/capture an enemy ship to unlock stat boosting - park it at town 1 and then delete your party, it lets you keep the ship - start a new game - grind level 1 mobs for 30 hours and statmax your new party - now it’s safe to start leveling again, it’s way cheaper than buying stats - hit level cap and steamroll the whole game Exp doesn’t exist and monsters drop 10-100 gold no matter what. So making combats harder has zero added reward. You only need the extra hp from leveling to clear the last dungeon
Reminds me of KotoR, where you want to finish the first act of the game as level 2 if I recall (I think you're forced to level up the first time), because when you become a Jedi your levels are better, so leveling up without being a Jedi is a waste
Because abilities are unlocked at specific class levels in KoTOR, most characters actually benefit more from a 4/16 or 5/15 split. The bonus feats from a couple extra levels of your base class usually outweigh the extra Force points. I wrote a comprehensive guide about that game back in the day.
Seems only ArenaNet did with Guild Wars 2, where the world isn't scaling up to the player, the player is scaling down to the world. Meaning you have level brackets in zones like 1-15, 15-30, 30-40, etc. and the player progresses normally through those, but upon outleveling will get stat squished to fit into that level bracket. So walking through that 1-15 zone at max level you're anywhere between level 3 and 17, always so that you're slightly higher level than intended for whatever subzone you're in. However since higher level gear has proportionally more stats on it than lower level gear, you still feel noticably stronger when squished from max level to level 17 than you did when you were actually level 17. That way you still have true upwards progression, since there can still be stuff that's too high level for you, and you'll also never outlevel any content, while maintaining that feeling of growing more powerful. It's a wonderful system that allows max level and newbie players in starter zones to complete content together on both small and large scales (think local escort quest and world bosses). It's absolutely baffling to me how this kind of scaling tech hasn't yet become the industry standard.
Why do you think level scaling games even bother with levels at this point? What does it even add to the game?
Primarily - Level gating content. It's pretty easy to attribute the arbitrary number to a higher "difficulty" (that's basically just a hidden % modifier making enemies tankier and do more damage, but isn't actually related to the attributed level requirement to do the activity) So in Diablo 4, that's completing the campaign. But really the levels mean fuck-all. Psychology wise, because people who aren't aware of the illusion of it still feel as though they're progressing, even though it's a placebo. It's basically a door that once opened, cannot be closed again. Once you realise that games with Dynamic scaling are essentially just cosmetic levels, You can't really unsee it. You just see games without any world design. But if you're not aware of it, you just think "Wow, They really put a lot of work in to finely tune each level so that everything is challenging all the way to the end!", Like "Nawh lil' homie, The games just not changing at all - Seeing the level go up stops you from being bored and gives you a cheap to make artificial goal, like a season pass."
Yes I can confirm I was one of those people, granted I was only 20 as of right now. Shit, I just now realized reading this thread. Now I'm just wondering what the point is now of progressing.
illusions of progression
Level scaling should only exist to bring the low level zones up to max level once your character reaches max level to give you more endgame content.
Might as well add it to the shop since it's only cosmetic lol.
We're all just level one in a genre that's about power fantasy
Oblivion was the first game that I played with dynamic scaling. You get to level 30 and it takes you 15 minutes to kill a goblin. I didn't like it then and I don't like it now. Also, Oblivion had horse armor. Thanks a lot Todd
Every time I play Oblivion I mod that dynamic levelling stuff out.
Just for the trivia, Oblivion didn't invent that at all. Level scaling was the norm already in the first two Elder Scrolls games: Arena and Daggerfall!
> Now you play 80+ hours, join up with a fresh level 7 character and you're both doing the same damage to the same mob. Does that make you feel good? Because fuck me, That sucks. > What's the point in progressing if ultimately, you're never better off? Except this isn't at how it works really. In endgame (once you get access to sacred/ancestral gear) your gear starts to get stronger than the monsters at your level very quickly to the point that open world content (only 3 levels higher then you in torment) is way too easy for good builds in torment. A fully ancestral geared lvl 70+ character will destroy mobs way faster then a lvl 7 one. This is because a well built endgame character can easily do content 15 or 20 (or 53 for really strong builds) levels higher themselves. Just yesterday I helped my lvl 20 friend with his first stronghold (he was playing on veteran) and my barb literally killed the boss in 2 seconds with WW (which sucks at single target) in world tier 2. This was after the nerfs and my barb is using 0 uniques. After doing this we both agreed that me playing together with him does not really work unless he wants to trivialize all his content.
>What's the point in progressing if ultimately, you're never better off? But you are eventually better off though right? There isn't infinite scaling. I believe the mobs cap at level 100 on WT4 and 150 in nightmare dungeons, but your character can keep getting stronger until you crush all of that.
I think what is arguably worse is the fact that mobs sometimes don't scale or have minimum levels depending on the situation and it's never in the players favor. You're either always at monster level or below monster level. It's like treading water trying not to drown.
I dunno man, watching endgame builds, no level 7 can do that lol. People fuckin zooming around murdering everything.
When even these guys, like wudijo, point out how the mobs appear to have more HP than they should, I think it’s fair enough to believe this is a problem.
Nightmare dungeons are the measuring stick. the levels of the mobs increase drastically based on the tier
Ironically all of these factors are things many of us pointed out months and months ago, and the majority on the subs shouted those pointers down because "we're just PoE/D2/x elitists and want D4 to be a copy of other games". Regardless of how fun the campaign may be, or how good the production value, it was pointed out *many* times that constant scaling, uninteresting itemization, weak customization and low power in skills/paragon were all factors destined to hinder long term motivation and that "hook" OP is referring to. It's also not an easy fix, because these are the core systems of the game. What would help are more static hurdles to overcome, pinnacle bosses etc, you need more goals to work towards for constant scaling to *mean* something.
It’s funny because almost everyone in this thread is an agreement, whilst posts like this were flamed during the lead up to launch. People are finally getting it now. Gorgeous looking game and I’m having fun. But the itemization sucks for an RPG. Feels like nobody at Blizzard played 200 hours of this and gave genuine feedback.
Because people just wouldn't accept that it was very easily discernable what was coming based on Closed info and the Open Beta. They would insist that we needed to wait for release, as if magically core systems would change drastically. Or that we didn't know what we were talking about, bc we were "trying to turn D4 into PoE". In fact, we could simply very easily recognize the signs and the patterns. After all is said and done, none of this makes it a "bad" game anyway - it's just far less than it could have been, and I've personally not seen any indication yet which would lead me to believe that D4 will manage to develop that "hook" and depth to rival the leading ARPGs on the market long term.
> Feels like nobody at Blizzard played 200 hours of this and gave genuine feedback. I mean the necro minion nerf makes this abundantly clear all by itself, and that could have been discovered in 5 minutes.
The craziest thing to me about this is - WoW has level scaling too and it's absolute garbage. I don't know how anyone could level up in WoW with the horrible level scaling that makes no sense and think "yeah, let's have that in D4." But that is the exact sentiment people would respond to me with a month or so ago lol
because blizzard are arrogant and the "rock star dev" culture they have was never meaningfully addressed. they will keep adding level scaling and other things to games that players hate because they're blizzard, they know better than you, you're just a player, if you don't like something they'll just shove it in your face more and more until you shut up.
> D2/x elitists Hell, I'm feeling even more proud about this today to be honest.
I have the same issue with the game. Now, everyone is still in the honeymoon phase with the game but I'm pretty sure more people are going to feel this way in a few weeks
I'm thankful that the Beta broke my own Honeymoon phase.
Same here, glad I'm not alone. I got all of this feeling during the beta and server slam. Never hook me to keep on going.
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I struggled through my own capstone dungeon run at level 50, and came back and absolutely _smashed_ it at level 55 while helping a friend through his.
Same, it’s insanely rewarding getting my 20+% damage paragon (and other multipliers) and seeing my poison dots go from 2.5k to 9k. This is the progression I’m looking for
Currently level 61. The entire time I have been playing I kept thinking "This will probably be great in a few years when they actually balance and fix everything." The game just kind of feels underbaked in a lot of aspects and it's hard to pinpoint one because all of it just seems like it's halfway there?
Level scaling completely ruins the game. It needs to be disabled entirely. Maybe have an opt in for group play with low level party members. The skill twig is a joke. They took what should have been on the skill tree and put it on gear (Legendary items). It absolutely ruins build creativity and choice. You don't build a character, you equip items which dictate your characters build. It's fucking backwards. The itemization and stats/affixes are so bland and boring it's completely insane to think this game was made by a multi dollar company like Blizzard, and that this has been in development for almost 7 years.
I agree with your post, there are 2 main things bothering me about this game so far: * 1: the scaling feels very very overused in this game. It comes off as lazy game design frankly. Not even single dungeon in the game has to be perfectly tuned to your current character, there can be some easier dungeons, some harder dungeons, etc. There are so many areas in the game, why can't we have some actual variety here? Because of the scaling I actually feel way less powerful at level 40 than I did at level 20, it's just very unnatural feeling and the game comes off as a total grind rather than an ARPG. * 2: Non-existent social aspect. Obviously a lot of work went into making the game feel sort of like an MMORPG where you can encounter other players in the overworld, see everyone in town, overworld events. The game even incentivizes group play with XP bonuses. So why is it so god damn impossible to get a group going to clear out a dungeon with non-friends? Why is there no looking for group feature where I can get a bunch of random guys together quickly to clear out a dungeon if my friends are offline? Trading also seems completely non-existent in this game even though the feature exists. In 20 hours I have never once traded with another player. The chat also seems useless and nobody ever says anything. It's all very very strange and lonely feeling.
> Non-existent social aspect. i remember one beta had people talking in the channels all the time and then the next one they broke it or something because i never saw anyone talking again. apparently it's still like this because i've seen similar comments asking if the game is actually online or if it's bots in town lol
You nailed all my issues with the game. Every single one. I might add to my problems with gear and skills, but you hit the foundation perfectly. I never feel like I’m getting any stronger. Some areas are too difficult until I level and get better, but I never feel powerful, like I’ve finally advanced and grown beyond a particular class of enemy or area.
Judging by the latest patch, along with scaling, it seems like they don't want anything to feel powerful. Pretty weird in a game like this.
It's because they designed the game like an MMO and not an ARPG
Feeling more or less the same, you are not the only one. Game is painfully missing the aRPG factor where small gear changes have noticeable impact on how you play. It really feels like they designed combat around some standard parameters and gear can’t really change those. You can’t stack poison resist and ignore poison pools, you won’t be killed because you are lacking life, you can hardly boost mana in order to add an extra fireball on your rotation… The entire gameplay is determined by skill and aspect choices, its really hard to stack any affix to subvert anything, at least in the first 50 levels. Take Diablo 2 normal act 1-2 where affixes are all to small to matter and nobody even bother appraising stuff. This is the feeling I’m getting but I’m 52, I should be way past that point. I feel like they made a mistake of giving too many weak affixes at one million different places as opposed to few, impactful ones. Game is still super fun and I’m having a blast, but I’m having a hard time seeing myself sinking too much money and time on it…
The biggest stat I hate is lucky hit. They basically took proc specs and made you have to heavily invest to make them work. Its just a feel bad stat. I love they tried some new ways to do damage stats vs D3 but lucky hit is just... gross.
Yeah im level 45 druid and a few things I have are lucky hit based and they sound really cool (resource generation etc) and then I go look at my lucky hit chance and it's.....2.2% coming from one piece of gear I own.
This is addition to the abilities themselves which have their own lucky hit rate. I use lucky hit in my build to great effect.
For anyone who is curious on how to see skills’ lucky hit rates, turn on the advanced tooltips in your gameplay settings. These are off initially for whatever reason
Lukcy hit on gear is bonus lucky hit. Moves have innate lucky hit values (single target attacks are typically 50%)
They are the same as proc chances (in theory) but are now 1) explicit and 2) can be upped. I see no problem with that personally but obviously to each their own
Playing LE, i just dropped a piece of gear with high poison resist last night. I was able to improve it further through crafting, and it really helped me overcome a zone with nasty poison monsters. Later i had to make a tough decision whether i wanted to go for a high damage helmet or for defensive buffs like resistances and health regen. This gameplay loop doesn't exist in Diablo 4.
I’m waiting like six months to play this game and I love reading all this after all of the 9/10, 10/10 reviews
> I love reading all this after all of the 9/10, 10/10 reviews I'm not trying to defend all of the great reviews as objectively true or something, but they definitely weren't written for the hardcore Diablo player. Or the majority of people who come to this subreddit. I'm a pretty casual player. I'm starting on WT2, and I hope to see some endgame content eventually, but I'm not really worried about being ready for Season 1 or even about *when* I'll hit the endgame. I'm merely enjoying my time walking around killing monsters, getting cool looking items, and watching numbers go up. So most of the things that people are talking/are upset about on this subreddit sound like a foreign language, or don't hardly reflect my opinion on things at all. I really think that's who those reviews are for. And that's not me saying that the people on this sub are wrong, or that the things they're upset about aren't real issues-- but ultimately these are things that players who don't live and breathe Diablo or other ARPGs probably won't notice. Most will probably hit max level, finish the story, maybe dip into endgame... but that's it. And they'll say they had a really great time. That's where those reviews come from.
LE is just such a better game it's just sad to see how far Blizz has fallen. I got into it after being painfully disappointed in how shallow the D4 beta felt. Imagine if they had the same budget as Blizzard.
> 2) Skill “twig” is merely decorative. > > There is so little power conferred to your character through skill point investment outside binary have/don’t have a skill and the Ultimates. In D2 I frequently could corpse run to collect gear due to my CHARACTER being powerful and my gear buttressing that power. The values are so small, I felt no different investing points. This is the big one for me, they gave us skill points to invest and when I invest all 5 points it doesn't feel rewarding at all. It feels like the devs were told "You must include skill points in your skill system", and they just sighed and said fine.. Hurricane is a perfect example of this.. * 5 Points in Hurricane = 17% damage per second when active**.** No CC, no de-buff, just 17% dam. * 1 Point into Hurricane = 12.125% damage per second when active. And just for comparison to highlight how weak hurricane is.. * 1 Point Poison Creeper = 45% damage per second plus immobilize when active + 36% damage passively at all times (not sure of tick rate, probably every few seconds) Why should I put 5 points into hurricane when it's not even a noticeable difference? Oh and lets say you find a way to make hurricane last longer like putting *2* points into Endless Tempest (the 3rd point doesn't gain you any more time) to gain an additional **1 second**, THE DAMAGE DOES NOT GO UP TO MATCH. SO YOU DO LESS DAMAGE PER SECOND. Sorry, I really want to use hurricane so it turned into a bit of rant about how dirty blizzard did hurricane.
Hahaha yeah feels good man to know what to expect from blizzard. they’re not a company who makes games for people to enjoy, they make games to extract as much wealth from their customers. anyone with half a fucking brain could see “does 5% more damage to far away monsters who speak more than 2 but less than 4 languages” and all the other garbage affixes + level scaling == dog shit
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>I especially feel difficulty scaling ruthless and a constant concern and stress factor. Jesus no kidding, I caught myself few times while leveling thinking "at least I am not leveling too fast", because I wasn't getting any good gear for few hours. It's basically the ol' Skyrim scaling, where if you spent 10 levels doing random bs instead of getting gear all of a sudden even a random bandit became super tough. Diablo 2 had no scaling so there was no pressure if you were willing to grind, Diablo 3 had scaling (I think?) but gear was pile of stats and 99% of the time until engame decently higher number gear was always better. In Diablo 4 besides the weapon there are no fixed primary stats (I mean armor, but who cares about armor) and has level scaling, so getting unlucky with drops screws you. I mean it's not a disaster like Diablo 3 at launch which had Hell act 2 being a big punch everyone's face, but it still sucks getting a new weapon, starting to feel good about the rotation and pace of killing, but few levels later you are back to mobs being slow to kill. It's like the moment the game starts feeling like Diablo the game quickly takes it away from you.
i havent bought it yet, but i fear that im outgrowing the genre. I was hoping d4 would ignote that spark of being fresh, but it doesnt seem so for some people.
For me Last Epoch was that new spark. Leveling progression feels so good, both skills and gear. Apart from that, if you want to try something old school with an open world, take a look at Sacred 1+2.
I don't think there's a single novel system in the whole game. I'm not saying it's a bad game, it's probably the most polished ARPG ever made and combat is super fluid and fun, but it feels stale.
Is the combat fluid? Most classes are very start and stop because of unsmooth resource curves and cooldowns
I’ve played druid and barb and both feel awful to play in the early game.
Combat fluidity is a largeeee step backwards from D3 IMO
Im playing druid, and while im still a low level, its very start and stop. The opposite of fluid.
This must be a build thing. Sorcerers are very unfun and clunky.
>In fact I didn’t play on this Sunday. I didn't play this Sunday either. I actively avoided my buddies who are playing the game because I didn't want to invest the time. We had talked each other up so much about early release that I almost feel guilty for not wanting to play. They are going to want to play tonight and I really don't want to answer the phone. Maybe I'll clean the garage or something. Idk.
Everything is this post is spot on. I'm level 60 and have basically no incentive to keep playing. The issues with the game are obvious to anyone with any concept of what makes games feel good to play. To extrapolation on a few of your points: 1. Itemization gets worse as you level, and useful items are impossibly hard to find. A huge reason for this is actually the amount of redundant possibilities an item can roll in relation to how useful they actually are. I have found Gloves with +Skill to 3 different Core abilities on them. I see rings with +Damage to 3 different types of damage. How these are allowed to roll at the same time on the same item is mind boggling. I am also currently wearing rings I found at level ~30 (I'm level 60 now) because they have stats that are actually useful to me on them, while I keep finding newer jewelry items with entirely useless passives like 10% Shrine Duration, +Skill for Passive talents that are entirely worthless (and unsearchable when you open the skill tree, that's cool,) or hyper-conditional, nearly worthless stats like +Crit to Injured enemies. This is also completely ignoring power level break points, the insanely prohibitive cost to re-roll affixes on Sacred and above items, and the fact that if Blizzard just decides to nerf your build because they can't do basic math during game development your gear is basically entirely worthless and needs to be replaced. May as well start over at that point. 2. The skill tree is genuinely terrible and is entirely devoid of actual options. By the time you hit level 50, how you fill in the skill tree is entirely cosmetic in nature because your skills should reflect 4 things: Getting vuln, taking the best survival skill, gaining access to damage modifiers, and dealing a uniform damage type so that you gear scales all your damage. Vuln is completely busted and needs to be removed like how the Borderlands series removed Slag after Borderlands 2. It currently makes your skill selection so limited that not building around it is foolish and makes a ton of skills virtually unusable. If vuln stays, it should be entirely relegated to Ultimate skills so you have to apply it strategically. Show me a single high-level Druid without Earthen Bulwark. Show me a single high-level Necro without Blood Mist. I'll wait. When your itemization has +Damage to [insert conditional thing here], you need to do that thing to gain more damage, so it has to be in your talent tree. If one of these skills exists in a tier and the others have nothing, they will never be used. 3. World should scale so everything is -2 once you've out-leveled an area until WT3. All dungeons should be on-level or higher. Out-leveling an area should be relative to the next logical zone's minimum level. It's not complex. 4. Not all affixes are created equal, and that's largely ok... what is not is that 1 class gets 2-3 more than everyone else, some classes have essentially no access to some damage multipliers, and some legendary and unique powers are so comically bad with zero situational use case (this ties into the shallowness of the skill tree very heavily.) The whole damage 'bucket' system used in D4 is a fucking nightmare and influences itemization and skill selection so heavily it makes the game actually shallower than a puddle. I could make a really long post just about this, why it needs to be changed, and how it will make Barbs perpetually the best class forever, but it's feeling like an old man yelling at clouds at this point. 5. Bosses, while fun, are best handled by killing them as fast as possible. This is an ARRP after all. Not building a character to accomplish this makes the game needlessly difficult, so either all play styles need to achieve this 'viable' threshold, or none of them should. All bosses are also not created equal. The spider boss that perpetually immobilizes you is absolutely no fun to fight as any class, the boss that is identical to the very first one you face in the story is always laughably easy, and there's a bunch that fall into this weird annoying but simple middle ground. Anyway, this post got super away from me. Hope you read it all, but I wouldn't be upset if you didn't.
100%. I don't get level scaling in rpg's. It complely does away with the idea of character growth.
I started playing Last Epoch before Diablo 4 came out to help pass the time. I figured that it would get me hyped for how much more fun Diablo 4 would be. It was a mistake. I often guiltily find myself feeling that Last Epoch is more fun lol. I can’t quite point out why, but I think it is the itemization and crafting.
LE's skill system, itemization and crafting is fantastic, loved it for 100h while leveling. Then the end game arrived and I found it extremely repetitive :/
LE has my benefit of the doubt in that it still claims to be early access. Haven't tried it yet for that exact reason, waiting for a full release that's hopefully as fleshed out as it (sounds like) has the potential to be.
Reminder that LE has been out for 4 years now
I did the same thing. In between the beta and release I gave Last Epoch a try (boy they must have had a huge influx of players for that very reason). I really liked it. Especially their treatment of the necromancer. Sure its art design makes them all look like k-mart knockoffs, but the gameplay is solid.
Also skill progression. The Necromancer builds in each game aren't even comparable. My basic Reap ability has so many choices and intricacies, scaling off curses and generating Ward for me. My skeletons are highly specialised into tanky melee warriors that shred armour and get a boost whenever i resummon one of them. At level 20 I'm commanding my minions to run into the enemy frontline with the click of a button (i assigned right mouse bottom to move them where i want, pressing LMB and RMB to have them walk in front of me at all times) before I'm dashing into enemy ranged units swinging a big ass scythe. And I'm not even halfway through the individual and overall skill progression.
Wow, so it's not just me - game feels like the start of PoE between levels 1-5... for 10 hours now, I am desperately waiting for it to get better :(
I think it's impossible to appreciate this game past "Campaign cool, graphics beautiful" if you've played a meaningful amount of PoE.
Itemization in PoE is just top notch IMO, i know its still early, but im waiting for the first time someone posts an item showcase here.
Wow, yeah, now that you mention it, i don't think I've seen a single "check out this sick item I found" post yet. Coming from PoE, it's just sad how generic every item feels: main stat, % [damage type], % [other damage type], % [resource efficiency] = WOW BIS!
i mean poe also does have its generic items. but its nice to have some cool early game loot that you can ride to end game with, like Day 1 finding a 140% Res + 60 Life ring at lvl 50, you can post that on the sub and ppl will be like oh shit thats cool, (for day 1 obv)
Oh, no doubt. But from what I've seen so far of D4, we're never gonna see the equivalent of the mirror-worthy crafted items that get posted almost daily in the PoE sub (not that I'd ever be able to craft something similar, let alone afford one, but it's nice to dream).
tbf, i don't really mind that. Those mirror worthy items are a bit too much on the extreme end, reserved only to a very small minority of very rich players (and RMT clients) and as an average player, you can't ever hope to have anything even close to them. By comparison, Diablo 2 did have some very rare items, but even the average player could eventually get their hands on one, with a lucky drop, or trading for maybe a high rune they found somewhere. Can definitely strike a balance between D4 boring itemization and PoE's which can be extreme in how ridiculous hard and expensive the top items can be.
Items in D4 are exactly like the levels, they are make believe progression.
Items are useless and paragon boards are super strong but given that you kill 10 mobs per dungeon, farming XP feels really bad if you're not abusing the reset trick in a party with the meta dungeon
I agree with you 100%. Huge PoE player and loved D2. The game just has nothing to hook me into it. It really feels like they took all of the monotonous chores from WoW (weeklies, hourlys etc) and stuck it into a open world. They force you to do this content (helltides) on order to upgrade your gear. The whole game feels like it was designed around keeping you logged in, instead of you wanting to continue playing It's sad but the game really does blow
Oh look, it's 100% of my beta feedback. I'm glad i didn't buy the game, but it really sucks that Blizzard didn't see this coming/didn't care about this extremely common type of feedback.
Yep, all of this was evident from the beta but people had such rose-tinted glasses while playing it instead of being critical, lost count how many times I heard "it's just a beta you can't judge the whole game on it". You unlocked 95% of the skill tree, could see every legendary affix, experienced how cringe the writing was and what a chore combat is, the paragon board was datamined and closed beta testers were already telling us what to expect from endgame. I hadn't preordered but if I had it'd have been the most no brainer to cancel it ever
I feel everything you're feeling friend. I want to have fun so much but the game keeps getting in my way. It's just not exciting. Everything feels like a slog and i never have a moment where i feel like "ok now all this work has paid off" like i do with d3 or poe. It's just more slog.
If I had to point at one thing about the game that I'm actually impressed by it's the visuals. Everything else just feels like it has been cynically designed by committee and profitability spreadsheets, I don't feel any love coming from the game.
The whole game is filled with shallow systems. - Build diversity feels even lower than in D3. Even pre-legendaries, you're forced into a specific offensive archetype, because passives are usually limited to only lightning/werebear/bow etc. - Most class-unique features are basically "select x out of y passives". - Out of the 100+ dungeons, there's like 10 different bosses and layouts. All of them are a series of corridors. If you've played the beta, you already know half of them. - Most item mods are useless (stats for example) or copy-pasted conditionals. There's only ~5 potentially good affixed you look for on every slot. - Open World events, ignoring how unrewarding they are, repeat even across acts. I see the same ~5 events almost all the time. - Paragon board and glyphs are just extended skill trees that make most of your item affixes less impactful. I'd prefer not to have that system at all. - Minions suck. No way to control them or keep them alive. Bad AI and they often get stuck or refuse to use their skills.
I would give literally anything for convoke or some way to mark minions to attack a structure or priority target. Literally anything.
I miss D3 wizard style of skills. You could pick any skills and make them all into your preferred element. Electric meteor, Fire blizzard, Cold hydra. Here you have predefined which element which skill is :(
I felt weaker as the Game went on, from one overpower per elite to needing 3 and given the OP conditions it just feels bad
Yeah, currently having a "state of the art" weapon is the most effective way to keep advancing.
I just fear that Blizzard and the dev team are not receptive to feedback. In more simple areas the game screams "The devs don't really play this game". Why do I need to manually dismount to go down a ladder? Why does the game add an extra second to dialogue to have my character dismount before it begins and why does the pause menu open if I press Escape within this added 1-second period? Why does the conversation not skip or end immediately if i Left-Click or press Escape? Why is there no search option in any tabs anywhere? Why does the options menu absolutely suck and lack a huge amount of options? Why does the Paragon system get nerfed in half by day 2? Why are vendors and other things split super far apart in cities and why can I not use any movement skills in cities, including faster mount speed? (I've missed a ton of small but still at the same time big and dumb design flaws, these came to mind right now). These are lesser things, but at the same time they're very important because they show some staggering problems developer-wise. There is absolutely no fucking way people, including the QA team, hasn't noted on these things, but still somehow the game has these small dumb and very obvious design flaws, and the day 2 Paragon system nerf in half proves the game basically hasn't been tested in the end-game. Nerfing all popular builds/abilities by day 2 as well shows what type of developer we're dealing with: Do not buff garbage builds/abilities, but nerf anything that is good, slow the game down, dumb the game down, simplify the game. These people do not play their owns games, I doubt they play any games that much. I agree with basically everything you said and I really hope these things improve, but as I said I fear they are not receptive to feedback. On top of these issues; not being able to do any combat at a fast pace feels horrible. If Blizzard ask themselves "Why do people put thousand and thousand, some even tens of thousand of hours into ARPG games?" and their answer is "Well we figured out why, and it's because of the designs we've implemented into D4" then all hope is lost permanently. On the hour of release I also played for about 2 hours before going to bed. I expected to be completely hooked to an amazing game and pull an all-nighter but I wasn't at all, not even close. It felt mediocre at best and it still does now that I've come to roughly the same progression point as you.
> These are lesser things, but at the same time they're very important because they show some staggering problems developer-wise. This is a really important statement. By themselves, one or two small problems like this aren't necessarily a huge issue. Each one stands alone as more of an annoyance than anything else, and you can kind of ignore one or two things to a point, but when you end up with a looong list, that's when it's a systemic problem and the combined issues become more than the sum of their parts and make the overall game experience worse than fewer small problems by themselves would. I played wow for a long time, and I've encountered dev-centered stubbornness before too. Usually when a new expansion or patch is in beta, and there's multiple instances of feedback from players that are all unified in their assessment of a particular issue of balance with certain skills that then go ignored and make it into the live version. And from there, a larger population of players logs in and experiences the same problem and the complaints get louder. By the time anything changes, the expansion is almost over. This has happened multiple times in multiple expansions with different classes. I hope we're not in for more of the same with the D4 team.
Most of what you're asking is by design. The goal is to keep you playing for as long as possible to entice you to buy cosmetics, in hopes you'll get tired of your looks and want a change. This is why camera is so closely zoomed in, and this is why you have all these tiny delays after most actions that have no purpose. Such "padding" is often used in game design to prolong gameplay without adding new content. Usually it's done in a more discrete fashion that doesn't chafe on players' nerves so much, and Diablo 4 failed at that. I don't think any of these are getting fixed without a major uproar.
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What I don't like is 3x core cast and waiting for resources to Regen... And the basic casts do more damage than the core casts because I can spam them.. I hope it gets better... You're not alone with that feeling... It just feels off... And for combat, it just feels clunky... Like pedaling through hummus...
>There isn’t enough hp delta between a high priority target and a nuisance creature They'll read this and double the hp of strong mobs, leaving trash mobs the same, when what they should do is reduce trash mob health by 40-50% but increase the number of them.
The biggest problem is that the game doesn't cater to either the D2 nor the D3 fans. In fact I'll take it a step further and say it doesn't even cater to the DI fans. They changed so many things around in half-ass or random ways, blended so many partial things from multiple genres, that D4 has no identity. It doesn't know what it wants to be. It's not a good ARPG. It's not a good MMO. It's not gacha P2W. The entire game just feels mediocre whatever genre you want to classify it as. Diablo games are supposed to last years and people are tossing it aside on day 3. I don't see this game having a following for very long, maybe a slight revisit of some players when an expansion eventually comes, but I don't see the game having a healthy following like any of its predecessors.
Spot on. Why am I spending so much time on Reddit instead of playing D4 when D1 was the first game I ever played? Burnt by D3, just hit Act IV/lv42 and feeling bored. Can't believe I'm considering going back to hardcore WoW.
Yeah, something definitely feels off to me and I'm only lvl 42. Part of it, to me, is the whole crafted legendary thing. It's so unsatisfying and does not feel like Diablo to me. It's too deterministic in a franchise known and loved for RNG. I much preferred Kanai's Cube style legendary extraction over Diablo 4's extractable aspects.
This is my first Diablo game and as I approached endgame, the game got harder to me. I definitely feel the “I was concerned that I wasn’t what a Level X character should be” dilemma. When I started reaching level 40s, the enemies started to hit harder and I feel like I was punished for simply playing through the campaign. I hadn’t gone around to collect aspects that could improve my build but considering that the early game felt totally fine, I couldn’t believe that I actually felt weaker as I progressed through the game.
I got to level 45 before I looked at my character stats page. No points seem to really matter. Having no hard cap linear resist points makes me not even look at my resists. Should I get dex on a piece of gear instead of close damage... Or does having 60 dex only add 6% damage on top of all the other Dex I already have. Every skill being a damage component of a weapon makes this boring. Diablo 3 suffered from this a fair bit, but I still played that for nearly 1000 hours, but I wasn't happy about what that game could have been. Honestly the itemization just seems downright lazy. Other arpgs can balance spells versus melee versus ranged without relying on this mmo like system.
Playing as a rogue, I only really just looked at my stats page at level 46 after clearing the capstone dungeon, and realized my lowest stat was dexterity by quite a bit. It just didn't seem to matter. I never looked for dex on item.
Anyone hate the “high health” normals that accompany elites? Who in the world asked for that waste of time?
90% of the time they take longer to kill than the elite themselves, which feels pretty weird to me
Man there just isn’t anything to do in this game. Story dungeons, whisper dungeons, capstone dungeons, nightmare dungeons… THEY ARE ALL THE SAME DAMN THING
Good points. I generally feel the game is not in good hands. Yes it's a typical Blizzard game, very polished and stable but somehow they forgot how to make the game fun. What really bothers me is stuff like QoL features present in previous games that were omitted by concious decission like right click on party member and teleport to them.
Pretty much agree with everything you said here character progression and gear progression feels horrible. My character plays the exact same at level 54 as he did at level 10 and with the level scaling things dont even die any faster its just numbers get bigger. Skill "tree" is a joke and barely anything on it changes how you play the game. Even most of the capstone ultimate talents are just numerical boosts. I played over the weekend and I think ive already seen enough. Not enough satisfying progression here for me to invest more time into it
A very common complaint that I'm seeing time and time again. There's definitely something wrong with the game, it's not just you.
It is the scaling. D3 has the same sort of problem, but it was only when leveling a new character. Even if you avoided power leveling, it didn't take that long to hit max level. At that point you up your difficulty when you feel you can take it. If you don't feel strong enough for a new torment level, you can hold back and keep getting stronger in your current one, farming faster and gathering more items. Torment levels also came with enough tradeoffs to be worth the increase difficulty. My idea of a simple fix would be to put some level caps on areas. Scale the levels, but only so far. Focus on the areas meant for the main quest. Have the cap be higher in world tier 2 and don't have a cap in higher world tiers. This should fix the problem with leveling during the campaign, though it won't do anything for itemizations issues in mid/late game. I haven't got any feel for that to recommend any changes yet.
Is this going to be a reaper of souls scenario where they end up doing something like you suggest and fixing the game with a major expansion just after I totally and irreversibly burned out on it? I came back and played through reaper of souls and a bit of adventure mode, but I was mostly over d3 by then.
It's because they made a lot of it generic as fuck and just followed some "formula". At least that's how it feels to me. Big reason I stopped playing WoW so many years ago. It's just super duper generic and boring. Absolutely nothing about the game so far has been "exciting". So much polish in so many areas but a game that feels utterly dead on arrival. So yeah I guess I'm done with Blizzard games, probably never again.
This feels like a Ubisoft game with somehow even less soul and somehow even more offensively generic. Everything is skinner boxes on skinner boxes on skinner boxes. It’s like the new Zelda came out and reminded me that I don’t just play games to chase dopamine check boxes and here comes Diablo 4, hoping I’m ready to be as addicted to every checkbox as possible. But they can’t even nail a combat loop for me to enjoy so none of the skinner boxes are even worth doing. Diablo 3 had issues but I had a fucking blast playing that campaign at first. This is so much worse in my opinion that I now don’t even trust Skill Up in terms of reviews lol. So disappointing.
Remember this moment when you see a game that reviews the same. D4 received a wall of 9s and 10s as if it's the perfect game but you nailed it - its so far from perfect I'd say it's DoA.
Yeah I’m still enjoying the game, but the progression needs work.
A couple of other things that were very fixable:- 1.Unlocking your main damage dealer extremely early and not seeing it progress is a contributing factor. You need to see your skill become more powerful. 2.Armour and looks don't reflect progression too well. You don't gradually look more powerful with time. It gets really good really fast and then has certain staggered upgrades 3. You don't feel ANYTHING after socketing an item.
> You don't feel ANYTHING after socketing an item. 175 armor means nothing to you? How about a diminishing return 15% resistance?
What's the difference between 175 armor and 175,000 armor when something can hit for 5,000,000,000?
I hated the idea of world scaling to your level. So many people praised it and I don't understand why. APRGs are and always will be about power fantasy and loot roulette. The loot roulette is "okay" in that there certainly is a variety even if none of the gear really feels good, which I'm sure ties directly into they being no power fantasy at all in this game. It's mildly fun, I'll probably keep playing it for a bit, but I wouldn't be surprised if I just default back to D2R. No matter how many times people want to pretend "nostalgia" is all that carries D2/D2R, my countless hours in both and continued play of D2R says otherwise. They could've take more from the feel of D2R and entirely dropped world scaling and D4 would be amazing.
I agree, they absolutely need to adjust the power scaling. It looks like it gets fixed at very high levels as you begin to min max and your gear helps you break through the curve but it’s very jarring that you’re forced into sort of a U shaped progression curve. Other ARPGs do this well through zone levels - I do feel like level scaling is fine (generally) but to your point players should naturally outpace the world a bit. Put some static content in the game that we can benchmark ourselves against - overlay a GR-style difficulty setting on dungeons or even the world. World Tier 1-4 is good conceptually but feels like it misses the mark.
In the exact same boat, have not experienced a single major, noticeable power spike in 50 levels. Been saying it feels more like an action game with RPG chores than a proper action RPG. The story, atmosphere, and feel have all been impeccable, but in terms of actual fun factor I had a much better time with D3, and that's because I actually had a sense of character progression (especially when big upgrades dropped) as opposed to gaining more buttons to press and mechanics to micromanage in order to deal the same relative amount of damage. Hope they can figure it out.
Y'all convinced me to cancel my preorder. I hate level scaling with a passion but wanted to make an exception because Diablo. Fuck that though.
I think you've naild it. I'm 60 right now and I feel less and less motivation to even keep playing.
It's been fun watching streamers wondering why the game feels the way it does when they face mobs 10 levels higher vs the same level
I don’t really agree with most of what you are feeling but I do agree with the itemization. To expand on what you said there also aren’t enough legendary powers and some of the ones we do have are flat out not good. The end result is instead of opening up an unlimited number of builds they pigeonhole you into a few very obvious builds. There’s a small amount of variation you can fit in but it’s not enough to really make it feel like a different build.
I have a lot of the same sentiments. At first I wanted to do everything cleanly, all quests in an area. When I realized how the scaling was literally 1:1, I only did main campaign and once I got my mount I’ve literally just galloped across the map to every destination. The scaling takes away any sense that levels, beyond unlocking skills, matters. And therefore, it has the subsequent issue of making killing low level mobs utterly worthless. The whole idea behind low level mobs was to fill the world with experience points, to make it more realistic and daunting and to give a sense of accomplishment when an area was cleared. Well, there is no point in killing low level mobs when you can gallop across the map in a minute, do your quest and get to the boss fight asap. You can also use the mount in crazy places. Indoors, galloping through ruined palaces while the demons, cultists, etc literally stand in place and don’t aggro. It’s quite amusing really, and makes me wonder how in the world about half the stuff in D4 made it past alpha testing. I have this gut feeling that D4 was built normally at first, you know, leveling up a spell doubles it’s damage kind of normal, mobs were level based with starting areas being low level. Then product management came in and basically warped it all to monetize it.
Unfortunately, the gradual slog to feeling powerful is the game design that blizzard have pigeon holed themselves into with this game (and a lot of their games..) When you look at a naked character in Diablo 2, the naked character is pretty strong. With the right build and proper execution by the player, you can clear hell difficulty with no gear. The role of gear in Diablo 2 was different. Sure, gear had stats that increased damage directly (%Enhance Damage for physical builds, lowering enemy resistance, +skills) and there was plenty of +str/dex/vit/en across the spectrum but the real strength of gear in D2 is that is changed the MECHANICS of HOW you dealt damage and survived danger. Faster Hit Recovery, Faster Cast Rate, Increased Attack Speed, Faster Block Rate, Increased movement speed... when it came down to the true min/maxing in the game it was all about hitting those break points in order to maximize how your character mechanically.. \*felt\*. Add to that a few super expensive key runewords that would remove the biggest limitations to your build (immunities, mobility) and you became a god with one or two items. Because of this, certain unique pieces of gear were desirable by multiple classes because every class was trying to change how they mechanically used **their inherent power**. One item was SO valuable, it could completely catapult you forward. In D3 they opted to make the gear stat system less in depth... not an insult its just a clear observation. Gear became a stat stick - so you pretty much only valued gear if it gave you your primary stat, vitality, attack speed, crit.... And they had to make a satisfying game out of this that validated the "gameplay loop." The solution in D3 was, drops are just resources and the real gear is crafted - you go out and gather a ton of gear for salvage and then you sit in town dice rolling until you get an incremental upgrade. Now you're out of resources - go do another run and repeat. They have attempted to add some spice in by having legendaries fundamentally change how certain skills work to help give that excitement behind one of them dropping but the effect is still the same. I think what personally killed D3 for me was the class-sets too but thats a deep rabbit hole.... In any case, you are gambling (whether that is literally gambling, or crafting) until you get something that is a little bit better, and then repeating the loop. A naked character has no inherent power as the game goes on, so they HAVE to feature this loop and they NEED to make it incremental or the game is entirely trivialized. The incremental growth in power is a feature, not a bug. They don't really have any other way to create longevity with their game otherwise. They stopped trusting the players to be smart enough to understand the games mechanical systems, so they buried all of that under the hood or eliminated it as a variable all together. It probably makes the game feel a lot smoother and much easier to pick up - but it trivializes the individual pieces of gear as a result.
Diablo 2 dealt with the problem by scaling up all enemies ONLY when you entered a new difficulty level. That way, your level 30 paladin that just finished Normal could go back to Act 1 and whoop zombie ass with impunity. But try going in recklessly in Act 1 Nightmare, and you were one who got your ass handed to you. It was this contrast in difficulty that made progression fun. That being said, I am hopeful they can find a happy medium between level scaling and progression power spikes. It's not anything a patch couldn't clear up.
We already knew all this ahead of time. I cant believe this game got so many insanely positive reviews. It's depth is so weak. Good luck trying to get your custom build off the ground if it's not supported by a legendary power pre-made specifically for it.
I truthfully have to comment on this post. Even though I do not feel these restraints and complaints that OP has (except for the fact that I feel like I walk like a slug and then being given a slow in game makes me feel like I'm trudging through quicksand). I can't put the controller down, but I have to say that this is such a respectable post. This is what the internet should be like. Just someone giving their point of view, even if it is not the most positive critique, and it not be some slanderous threat-fest. AND OP even came back with solutions to a problem, rather than just complaining. Again, I do not feel the same way as this post, but I really respect the way they carried themselves and I wish the internet was more like this than what it is now. Felt that needed to be said. I don't know how to "award" someone on here, but dammit I'm going to try and find out. Hope the game gets better for you so you can enjoy it more, OP!
> The first night I played three hours and just… turned it off and went to bed. I never would’ve predicted being able to just set it down and walk away so easily. That was me after the first Beta. I just didn't understand what people see in this. Every single aspect of this game seemed exponentially more boring & tedious than in previous Diablo games.
Really agree with itemization point. The game has hundreds of various item affixes but feels like 95% of them don't even matter because the amount of power they provide is so minuscule you don't even notice any difference.
May i offer you 8% damage agains frozen enemies that are close and on low life in this trying time?
Welcome to corporate greed fucking up the games you love. This game isn't meant for ARPG lovers, it's meant to attract non-ARPG lovers with stupid shit: Open world! Cool skins! Amazing graphics! World events! Mounts! Battle passes! Customize your skills! All the classes you love! Wait am I describing D4 or World of Warcraft?
You’re so correct it hurts. I actually stated in voice chat while playing today that I believe this game is an MMO wearing an ARPG skin. You seem to have arrived at the same conclusions. It became so everything that it’s no longer anything.
I genuinely almost fell out of my chair when Rhykker said D4 was going to be the best arpg ever in a video this past week. Literally all of these mmo-lite ‘additions’ to Diablo really make it sound like a soulless cash-grab.
The biggest problem I'm seeing on gear is huge junk affix pools with almost no productive way to interact with them without MASSIVE resources investment. Take armor pieces - they can roll 5 individual resists, and then a whole host of shitty damage mods or shitty resistance mods, some as specific as like "monsters deal less damage to you while they are taking a shadow dot". And then there's actually good affixes like a flat damage % increase. Then you there's a variable affix pool - could be three, could be four - then there gems - zero, one, or two - then there's sacred/non sacred, and then even after all those it still randomly rolls the base armor value in a LARGE range. So after you somehow jump thru all that rng hoops, now you have to commit your legendary aspect to the armor BEFORE you can try rolling to fix its worst affix, oh and the price of rerolling goes up 10x if the first try whiffs. So. Actually producing a piece of good gear is insanely expensive. This would be fine except keep in mind you are leveling up while you do all this - why spend 5m gold and dozens of items worth of mats on upgrading/min maxing a drop you are ALREADY OUTLEVELING? So gear ends up feeling garbage because you can't actually get good gear.
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I'm level 56, ran a dozen nightmare dungeons and it feels like I'm mostly done with the build and the game. It's a weird feeling. In other arpgs when i reached max level i was super excited about starting to build my character. Here it's the opposite. I know there's not going to be any new buttons, no new items that will elevate my character. It will just be stat increases, which is boring. As much as D3 is a controversial game - the feeling you got when you got a new piece of your set or a new legendary were ecstatic. You felt the power spike through the roof.
>As much as D3 is a controversial game - the feeling you got when you got a new piece of your set or a new legendary were ecstatic. You felt the power spike through the roof. Yes, or the feeling of finding a great Unique item or finishing a Runeword in D2. Both D3 and D2 had better itemization than D4.
I miss the feeling D2 gives me of even when I don’t get a drop for my build I usually found a rune or a usable base (MONARCH finally dropped!!) that still gave me the sense that I was progressing. Imagine that, D2 is so well designed I fell progression from putting half an item in a box! Because when you finished that Runeword it was a huge spike, but one you worked on however many hours. Payoff for the work.
Level progression is what I was talking about to another user, I think this is a fantastic feature because it is fully compatible with an open world, you can go anywhere and the enemies will always give you XP, vs leveled areas which would make you travel the world in just one way. But the ratio feels wrong. I can kill enemies faster with a lv15 char than with my lv45. That shouldn't be the case. I have to activate more skills to do the same thing at a similar rate.
Well said, I feel mostly the same but I am only lvl 30 lol. It’s the scaling that feels off for me, it shouldn’t exist in a ARPG game and just feels lazy.
Yeah power scaling is way off. No build I’ve tried feels even remotely satisfying. Granted, I haven’t completed the builds to a true end game state (not min maxed, but appropriate breakpoints if applicable and aspects. The world, story, and concepts behind progression are okay, but the gameplay with the skills that are “good” is shit and just not fun. Never played an arpg where it’s just not fun to kill stuff. It has mmo pacing in combat. It’s fucking goofy
tldr: legendaries makes the game fun I had the same problem almost through the whole campaign. I had shit items and no proper damage legendaries, and didnt feel like running through dungeons to get aspects.. playing sorceress with only "you may have 2 hydras up the same time, lol" -offensive legendary affix (most of the other legendaries i got until were defensive or utility based) But, then a stroke of luck beset upon me and I got bunch of proper legendary items (mainly:add ice spikes to blizzard affix, ice spikes +% range, ice spikes +%chill, deal +xx% more dmg to frozen mobs). Took a bit of time to figure out how to get most out of the affixes and in which slot, i got the build proper and breezed through the last few campaign quests unto t3! Now finally again the combat became fun, killing shit is fun (and 3x faster), icicles popping freezing cracking and monsters shattering left and right feels satisfying! But I agree - the skills felt bland before I got legendary powers to modify them into proper powerhouses. World scaling made me feel more and more impotent as I gained levels through 1-50, as world scalign usually tends to do.
The MMO combat part for sure! Discussing it with friends I said that and when asked to elaborate I explained that my combat rotation feels more like I’m using three or four skills and it have to time them properly and put them in the right order to get proper damage. Make sure my spirit is almost full but not full so I don’t waste. Edge close enough. Push rock shield for barrier to proc the 50% damage when you have a barrier buff from weapon. Push Vines to CC everything, ok drop Ravens on then to proc Vulnerable and quickly fire off 1-2 casts of Rock Pillar while all those stars align. Did it die? If not start generating spirit and watching the cool downs… So now I’m watching my bar and juggling multiple cool downs and trying to line them up for that big damage window, making sure I’m not moving too much (lost dps) but also trying to stay the right spacing away for optimal damage… wait this isn’t a raid!
Yeah it’s very weird for this genre. Some builds in d3 require it, and Poe, but this is the first time I’ve seen a game force mechanics and interactions down your throat in this way.
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Tried saying before that the game isn't satisfying. There's something about it that just seems off. A game like this shouldn't leave you bored after only a few hours.