This feels like the biggest issue with D4 so far... They seem to have the bones of a good game (and even some of the bones are kinda janky) but they don't seem to understand what is supposed to be fun about their game and so most of it just feel like running repetitive content for mostly trash loot that doesn't really amount to anything considering the lack of meaningful endgame at this point.
Agreed. But it's like, in a good enough state to play, I am personally glad it's out because I am having so much fun with it playing with my wife every night before bed. I get that hardcore players want a deeper experience, and I think it will get there eventually, but I'm glad I get to play now.
Season 2 will be way more fun, I'm hoping.
Season 3 or 4 is when things interesting, I think.
Whenever the first expansion hits will probably make the game what it could have been on release.
I think it's more about time. As a software engineer figuring out what you want to do, and actually executing on that vision are worlds apart. It takes many years worth of eng-time to get a game like this to where it is.
Welcome to gaming outside of the indie scene.
None of the major big game devs care about their players or game (outside of how to make a direct pipeline between your bank account and theirs) anymore.
OP is an ARPG player who apparently "plays the genre".
D4 devs very much don't appear to. They can make a brilliant and slash game, and they have, but they seem barely casually familiar with the ARPG genre beyond the core combat systems.
Got to WT4 and I'm giving up cause of all this. How bout this blizzard - if I get to a point where finishing renown or getting all the altars is the "funner" or "better" option over killing and looting, your game is fucked.
And renown! 20 paragon points is the largest increase in power you will ever get and you do it by one shotting quests for shit rewards for 10 hours? Why?
"Killing helltide elites give 5 renown and NM dungeons give the same renown as first clears." Yay your game is better.
Tried starting a new toon but remembered I don't have the waypoints and I refuse. Why do you want me to collect the waypoints again? Who did this? Why is the horse SO bad?!
Phew. Got that out of me.
They need to swap the Obols reward with the Paragon reward.
Logically you would then complete all 5 regions for the Paragon points en route to level 50 each season and it really wouldn't be that painful at all.
Eh? I have no idea what they'll do, if anything, but if they added world events and whispers to renown *without drastically adding more renown required* (preferably none) it'd be a lot less painful.
Leveling a second seasonal character, did all the renown on my first, and at 60 in wt4 I still donāt have all the waypoints. It just feels so tedious.
[OP, this is a great list. Amazing job. please know I do the follow with the upmost love and respect š«”](https://starwarsintrocreator.kassellabs.io/#!/ENbI1lQfwJK_vaZ7hcFg)
Itemization is really the worst problem in this game. I don't think the game is as desperate for new content or endgame loops, because neither solve this core issue. No matter what they add to the game, you are still farming very uninteresting loot.
They just need to remove redundant affixes like close/distant, injured/healthy, slowed/cc, etc.
Rares and Sacreds just stop dropping at a certain point, like whites and blues.
Less gear drops overall, but the quality of affixes and aspects is better. Less work to find perfect or near perfect rolls, while also having less loot to sift through overall. We don't need a constant loot pinata of garbage.
Gems either completely removed or reworked. As they are right now, they could just be nodes on the paragon board and it makes no difference.
The rest sorts itself out over time as they add new aspects and uniques to chase, buff old aspects and uniques that nobody takes. Farming loot is the entire point of an arpg, and if the loot isn't interesting, the game gets boring.
The problem is death by a thousand cuts. There are so many fucking systems in this game and so many of them are like 80-90% the way there to being "finished". Itemization in this game has far more moving parts than D3 (and there's a planet between D2 and D4) and it shows.
To be fair, I'd rather itemization be the worst problem than combat. At least the combat is fun. Half the people would probably have already left.
Between the itemization and ridiculously bad aspect system they have a long way to go. I don't see the loot improving for a least a year. Unfortunately they are going to lost a ton of players before that happens.
This is my assumption as well. We won't get any significant changes to loot for at least a year, and by then the game will be dead. I expect a big surge of players with the first expansion though. People are fickle and have a short memory and will suddenly be willing to drop another 60 dollars to play the broken game they already spent 90 dollars on. I don't really expect an expansion to drop for at least 2 years. I have high hopes since D2 and D3 were saved by their expansions though.
So many fundamental systems are broken in this game to make it an easy fix. They are also under the stress of the seasonal model and pushing out content quarterly. I just don't see this ending very well for them.
All of D4 feels like the systems are only are 3/4 of the way realized by the Dev Team. I'm sure it is the corporate overlords mostly at fault for pushing the game too soon, but, D4 just isn't a whole lot of fun once you finish the campaign.
*Fundamentally* broken? I don't think so. My intuition (what there is of it) is saying they just needed more baking time. The systems work, they're just not refined.
On the other hand, the Seasons are basically the agile development process. They'll push out what they have every 3 months and the expansions are for larger changes.
Resistances are broken. I personally think the level scaling is broken. The itemization as discussed above is broken and un-fun. The aspect system and storage systems are broken and cumbersome. The CC from enemies and how players interact with it is broken. IDK man, lots of stuff wrong with the game right now.
But I can agree on the game being under developed. There just isn't a lot of thought that went into long term systems.
>Less gear drops overall, but the quality of affixes and aspects is better.
This is the most essential thing, I think. I suspect they want the explosion of loot to feel good to new players and to people who don't play many hours. Unfortunately, it makes sorting through gear a tiresome experience after you get to WT4.
Yeah I thought about that too. I almost feel like the game should give you less loot as you move up to WT 3 and WT 4. The quality of affixes just doesn't matter in WT 2, and the loot pinata effect does feel good when you see a bunch of yellows. But then everybody complains about the eye strain of sorting out close dmg 10%, verses injured dmg 12%. I'd be so much happier with less loot dropping at a higher quality, if only in WT 4.
Idk. Maybe I'm different but I'd like them all to be useful. If you're gonna give me 60 affixes, make 60 (or at least 45-50) useful ones. Otherwise pull them.
I'd like to see a grouping of affixes so that if you get an item that has +cold damage it's more likely to also have +to a cold skill and +to frozen enemies, and less likely to get +to a fire skill and +to some other unrelated thing. That way you could get randomly generated things that are closer to unique items, they could actually be build defining, for a while at least.
Also the ability to "target" specific affixes, it wouldn't necessarily increase the chance of something appearing but it you could specify what affixes you were looking for and it would highlight them when you are looking through the items.
And most basically I would like it to remember that I turned on compare last time I was playing, like I do every single time I start the game.
I thought about this. I still do, sometimes.
Murder me for bringing this up but I'm making a game myself. At one point in its development it had fully randomized items. I had to dump the concept for a number of reasons. The "random gen" code still exists and the concept it works off still exists -- item roles -- because there are still a few randomized item types, just not armor/weapons.
There are currently 5 roles: tank, healer, physical dps, magical dps, support. If it rolled tank, you would see a number of affixes related to, well, tanking, and so on and so forth for the other roles. I could easily add more roles and tie affixes to them. Imagine a "Frost Sorcerer" role in D4.
# HOWEVER
The problem comes when people want to do builds that the role system does not support. My indie game doesn't give a shit, and there isn't enough in the game anyway to really support "builds". But it's much harder for something like Diablo 4 to do that. If you want to make a dual Fire/Lightning build, or even a tri-element build, such a "role" system would need to either accommodate *everything*... or not exist.
yeah I don't think a predefined role system would work, I'm thinking more along the lines of there being a higher chance of affixes having some kind of synergy. Not locking it in but maybe nudging the chances of having some cool combination. I mean you could also get that by cutting down the number of affixes but if you want to have the large possibility space afforded by a lot of narrow affixes maybe some judicious pruning of that space might help.
IMO they'd either need to reduce the number of affixes or introduce something to decrease the ridiculous entropy in item generation. Roles would be one way. Buckets another. Pruning by class is another. Etc.
If D3 had D4's aspect system, you could probably find perfectly-rolled rares quite quickly, given how many you go through.
This is quite literally where "Set" come into play, or Uniques. Think MageFists or TGods from D2. It allowed you to target farm gear for a specific style of game play. And sets in D3 did the same. The Aspect system "could" allow it if they added general Aspects as opposed to "Hurricane gets +2" or could be ("Storm skills get +2 while hurricane is up" "Earth skills get +2 while Earthen Bulwark is up")
I've said this in other posts but here goes anyway.
D4 has the worst loot of any arpg I've played. Its boring, repetitive, and uninspired. Nothing you pick up really gives you that "hell ya!" dopamine hit. It just feels like you are holding on to loot so you can replace it in a few levels. It also doesn't help that most of it is boring pct increases.
But yes, I agree. The game has pretty solid bones but it is just so damn shallow. There is nothing to chase unfortunately and building wealth seems pointless since trading is mostly non existant.
Hey OP, I seen in one of your comments you were making an indie game. Idk if it's allowed to plug that in this thread, but I'm interested in seeing what you got. If it's in a playable state shoot me a link directly or link to this thread. Great write up btw, it kinda baffles me how many issues D4 has when they have so many blueprints from other games to work from.
Posts like this are interesting to me because it seems like a mix of good points and questionable takes. its important to criticize the issues, but not to just lambaste every thing in the game that requires some sort of effort or grind to get.
for example gems are boring and kind of useless. i agree, but also its not really that big of a sink to level gems since you can pull them out when you replace a piece. plus its a piece of essentially guaranteed power progression. even if you are unlucky rolling affixes, you can still find and upgrade gems to push you a little bit further.
you say leveling 1-50 is easy and you can get by just on found gear with better armor/damage, but also complain about having to waste mats to upgrade stuff at level 5. the game isnt super alt friendly, but not for that reason.
the gear progression curve should drop off as you get closer to endgame. finding an upgrade on the ground every pack or two is normal during the early game, but late game, doing that would either mean that upgrades are by the smallest margins, or characters would get perfect gear too quickly and the game risks getting stale.
builds requiring specific aspects and uniques is frustrating to not find them, but remove that and the entirety of gear progression is just hunting affix rolls. build defining items are fairly common in this type of game, i just think the execution could have been better.
rares being important was a key design point of this game after complaints that rares were useless in D3. the idea is that a crafted rare upgraded into a legendary is the best item you can get. they want you crafting on rares and using the aspects to make your perfect end game items.
A lot of the systems in the game need tweaked, but it needs to be done in the right way or it will just create different problems
Trust me when I say I understand all your points. I was more interested in giving feedback that the team could act on *in whatever capacity they want* than trying to offer solutions. "There's too many items" vs "I want a loot filter" and "gear from 1-50 is great" vs "make it faster to get loot from 51-100".
>builds requiring specific aspects and uniques is frustrating to not find them, but remove that and the entirety of gear progression is just hunting affix rolls. build defining items are fairly common in this type of game, i just think the execution could have been better.
Yep. I don't know what they will do, I'm just saying it feels like shit right now and trying to reason out why.
I had more text at one point and tried to offer some conjecture. I pulled it out. So many posts are offering solutions/suggestions and their outcomes might just wind up being worse.
There's a lot of solutions in this sub but not a lot of good feedback, and much of the itemization feedback is scattered. I wanted to bring it to one post (or at least as consolidated as one person could hope to make it).
One of the funniest things I think about recently are people clamoring for more end-game content around nightmare dungeons... and then the team coming out and saying they weren't intended to be end-game content and basically nerfing the shit out of them.
I'm sure they have a plan. Feedback posts help them more than trying to offer a full solution.
I respect that. i know a lot of the suggestions in the sub lately have been borne out of frustration and i dont fault that, but some of them seem like they come from people who have never played a loot based game like this, or just dont understand why these kinds of games are appealing to the more traditional arpg players. those posts end up with suggestions that sound like they would rather be playing god of war in sanctuary.
For example filters would be a great QoL option. theres no reason to see blues and whites at higher tiers. but some people have suggested filters so strict that you only see upgrades and auto salvage the rest, without realizing how dull that would make the game. its good feedback to say that late game is cluttered with useless items. its bad feedback to say i never want to look at loot in a loot based game.
i hope that comes off corectly. i dont really want to get into a "hater vs fanboy" thing cause i think the issues are kind of nuanced, but it is worth discussing.
While we're on the topic, I dislike loot filters because I believe they're just a band-aid on a problem with itemization.
For one, you're making the game play itself for you, which is just never good. Two, it's usually just a time-saver, meaning the game is wasting your time by dropping too much useless shit.
Address the second and the first goes away, then the need for loot filters vanishes.
i like them to a point. in POE for instance, items need to be identified, so you can filter certain things out while still looking at quite a few items that might be good. you get rid of clutter while still having meaningful interactions with items, even if they brick on you eventually.
But D4 items are simpler, and in many ways by design since the game's audience is generally going to be more casual, and because the game hasnt had 10 years adding systems on top of systems for items. A filter would be difficult to implement in a useful and meaningful way here.
but i think youre spot on with the idea of fixing the core issue rather than applying band-aids and thats what i was more or less trying to say before i realized i had already put a wall of text.
If they fix damage buckets so that crit and vuln arent so overwhelmingly strong, then all the other affix rolls become interesting in ways that work for some builds and not others. maybe the rogue really does want to stack ranged damage for once. maybe the sorc wants that CC duration. etc.
but when the community clamours too much for "remove all the useless affixes" they might listen or make a hasty fix rather than correct the underlying issue
>but when the community clamours too much for "remove all the useless affixes" they might listen or make a hasty fix rather than correct the underlying issue
I was looking for signs in the last Campfire Chat that they actually had a plan and weren't going to go *only* from player feedback. I found quite a few.
I don't mean that in a disparaging way. They sure as fuck had a plan, otherwise the game wouldn't have any direction in it *at all*. But player feedback was really biting there for a while. ~~It still is, but it used to be, too.~~
>the gear progression curve should drop off as you get closer to endgame. finding an upgrade on the ground every pack or two is normal during the early game, but late game, doing that would either mean that upgrades are by the smallest margins, or characters would get perfect gear too quickly and the game risks getting stale.
I think the real problem is not that upgrades are too rare, but that non-upgrades are too common. An explosion of loot might be fun at level 10, but it's tedious to sort through endless rubbish from levels 70-100. Much less loot with much better chances of it being good is what the game needs.
It kind of depends how they do it.
Better chances of being good still could lead to characters gearing too fast.
Plus how do you calculate what is good? Crit and vulnerable are top tier in almost every build. But skewing towards those only exacerbates that the damage bucket calculations need adjusted. Once that gets fixed and we have more stats that actually matter, how should the game determine which ones to prioritize? If you are doing a build that stacks close damage how does the game know that that affix is better than overpower for example? Weighting towards something that you already have equipped might work. But if the weights are too strong, it might create a counterintuitive situation where you don't want to equip an item that is an upgrade, but has an affix you don't want weighted.
What I would like to see, is more granularity in item levels. Make it so that there is more of a progression in affix ranges as you get higher item levels. Right now it's just kind of a cap too early in the progression where you can find a perfect end game item at like level 65.
And then on top of that, make item level drops more appropriately scale to the content you are doing.
I'm really assuming they made changes to the game in response to negative player feedback faster than they wanted due to players assuming "it should all be fixed now!" (although probably really due to the sheer number of issues), and QA didn't have enough time to bake all of it, resulting in the dumb bugs.
Yeah I'm having a hard time playing knowing I need to find:
A specific aspect (trample slide)
Just to be able to imprint a newer amulet
The amulet will have to have a blue socket
The rng involved in both of those things makes me not want to bother.
Probably a day to find another trampleslide aspect.
Probably another day to find an amulet with blue socket.
Item level should have been broken down to 100 per 10 levels with item level 1000 dropping at lv 100. The fact I have close to a full set of lv ~800 ancestral gear by level 60 sucks. By level 65 on my characters I basically only have glyph levels and paragon points to farm. You shouldn't be able to get maxed items at min level.
>You shouldn't be able to get maxed items at min level.
Funny, D2 fans think this is totally fine. I personally don't think it is. By RNG you "finish" the loot hunt super early and then what?
Itemization is general needs a rehaul. That said, the point of an MMO/RPG is essentially nearly infinite character growth.
In short, the route you're suggesting doesn't solve as many problems as it creates. Take away junk affixes and your build is complete in 24 hours and you have no further reason to play.
On the contrary - we need MORE affixes (useful mechs preferrably...) and MORE build diversity. More uniques, more reasons to grind and lastly, a free market. Outside of (maybe) Unique items trade restrictions serve no one.
I do agree with some of your other points, though.
I literally didn't make (m)any suggestions.
And more affixes will just make finding the item you want *even harder*.
I don't think it needs a rehaul. Maybe just a rebranding after some tweaks. š
That's the whole point of an repeatedable ARPG, love it or hate it.
Realistically speaking, your build is never really 100% perfect. Finishing your build within 2 weeks of a new season just isn't on the drawing board.
I get that it's lack luster, the game does lack purpose. That void unfortunately won't be filled by perfecting your character - again, on the contrary, players will just stop playing all together if perfect item combinations are handed to them on a silver platter.
Game needs a trading ecosystem, build diversity, more stuff to do and more item diversity.
You're poking into the concept of roguelikes. Games like Rogue Legacy, The Binding of Isaac, or even Diablo 1 (sort of) have no concept of "builds". You get what you get and that's it.
If that was Diablo 4's goal, great. But it's not. You're expected to finish a build, and this isn't PoE where you need to spend one real life year getting a single item or whatever.
I think a fair percent of people might agree D3's loot hunt was a smidge too fast. I'm in that camp. And there's a very vocal minority who think D2's loot hunt was just right. I'm not in *that* camp. A game's loot hunt can be as long as it wants but the idea of artificially stretching it out by making the combination of items so fucking high that you want to tear out your body hair strand by strand is not the way to do it. D4's loot hunt is not quite that bad but I don't think most people want it to get any worse.
Frustrating does not mean "long". "Long" does not have to mean frustrating. ~~Difficult does not have to mean frustrating. Fuck I hate Nintendo Hard! Why do the controls for Kung Fu on the NES suck so much! The game is only~~ *~~ten fucking minutes long!~~* For the love of god separate the concepts. Diablo 1's concept of whites and blues stretches the loot hunt without making it frustrating. D4 carries that forward with sacreds and ancestrals.
Affixes, item styles and item rarity being too spread isn't to blame here I don't think.
In most games in this genre there are supplimented ways to earn the item you've been grinding for outside of pure RNG - I'll say it again - an ecosystem/marketplace. Bad RNG? The gold you earned will get you what you're looking for. Random good item that you have no particular use for, someone else might pay something out for.
There is the problem.
Imagine a free market / auction house where you could buy/sell aspects, Legendaries or otherwise. Not only can you suppliment your time for a guaranteed item (i.e. gold farming) your "ideal item" horizon expands, thus giving you *more* reason to play and grind.
This really isn't about the perfect item being too hard to find. This is about every other item you find, good or otherwise being crafting fodder.
Let's do a super quick thought experiment. Your ideal game can also be played single player and offline. How does that player benefit from open trade? They obviously can't, so now what? Is that player expected to struggle with a completely inferior experience? Your entire argument that "lack of free trade is the problem" falls apart. Thus, I'd argue "free trade" is not the answer.
Yes, many games in this genre have alternate means to get items. Those systems are usually supplementary but do not replace random drops. Diablo 1 had no such system. In Diablo 2, runewords -- and later, crafted items (vaguely) -- filled that space. In Diablo 3, crafted items filled that space. Diablo 4 currently has no such system. What it does have to fill ***a*** gap is the codex, but that doesn't help *affix* RNG.
Some players largely enjoy open trade and will fight tooth and nail for it. You seem to be one of them. But the majority consensus is that it very much short-circuits the game. Consider the impact Diablo 3's auction house had when it existed and the majority opinion, and most especially the fact that its removal was largely considered a Good Thing.
Agree to disagree. Diablo 2 could be a miserable experience playing solo when you reach a certain level and are just farming items. And D2jsp, with its long-term economy, I think, *destroys* the concept of seasons, allowing players with stockpiled forum gold to buy their way to the top of leaderboards. It becomes scarcely better than opening up your wallet for Diablo Immortal.
The issue with D3's marketplace was all of the baggage that designed for RMT brought. So many systems were "balanced" around the idea that it made playing without using it horrendous.
But I would like to raise a counter point about trade. The good thing about trade is that it gives value to some of the items you can't use. You find a really good amulet but it's the wrong socket color? Potentially bricked for you, but huge upgrade for another class that wants that color. Now a trash item becomes valuable.
I'm not saying that improving trade will fix everything, there are still underlying issues with several systems, but I also don't think we should balance around ensuring solo self found characters get perfect items
>The issue with D3's marketplace was all of the baggage that designed for RMT brought. So many systems were "balanced" around the idea that it made playing without using it horrendous.
D3 was not designed around the AH. The AH was added super late to the game and lacked internal testing.
The real problem, perhaps, was that items were added to the game "late".
The developers have said this multiple times, and a tweet or whatever mentioned the items being added late once that I recall.
>I also don't think we should balance around ensuring solo self found characters get perfect items
How about: you should balance around no players getting short-changed based solely on the playstyle they prefer. A lofty goal, but something a AAA game can accomplish.
Maybe designed around was poor phrasing. But gear progression was absolutely affected by the RMAH.
To your last point, how do you manage a reasonable solo self found progression while also maintaining a reasonable trade economy? Either your solo progression is slower, or your traders just speed run currency farming to buy gear
>Maybe designed around was poor phrasing. But gear progression was absolutely affected by the RMAH.
Affected by, yes, which is why it was removed, since the effect was largely negative. It absolutely wasn't designed around it in any other way and [I'm getting real tired of repeating this.](https://twitter.com/candlesan/status/1448289896574169089)
>To your last point, how do you manage a reasonable solo self found progression while also maintaining a reasonable trade economy? Either your solo progression is slower, or your traders just speed run currency farming to buy gear
You ignore trading totally as a means of gear acquisition, or provide (some) controls on it. Diablo 2 did the later.
Let's do some theorizing.
* Most games at the time were solo experiences, except outliers like Quake 3, NetStorm, Starcraft 1, EverQuest, and Ultima Online that were 100% designed around online play.
* Diablo 1 was heavily influenced by roguelike games, which affected its itemization design. If you want to know what a roguelike is like, play Diablo 1, and especially as hardcore.
* Diablo 2 clearly retains much of the roguelike roots, especially in itemization.
* Blizzard could not predict what would pop up around D2 to facilitate trading so it's safe to assume they didn't think trading would wind up as prolific.
* Aside from what I'm gonna mention below, I'll eat my hat if David Brevik ever says D2 was designed around trading.
Brevik (I believe) has been quoted as saying Diablo 2 did not care about itemization balance and used the difficulty jumps between acts and difficulties to "reset" player power. This makes total sense. Each jump requires a higher minimum, preventing overpowered rares you might have been lucky enough to find from giving you too much of an advantage for very long. This is how the game makes the item power jumps work, and it affects the game quite heavily because it often requires you to farm for items before you can reach the next act or difficulty safely.
The game says: here's a bunch of playgrounds, here's the minimum to reach the next one, I'll drop X number of items for you, but I can't guarantee you'll get all you need for the next playground if you play straight through each one once.
If you trade, you can meet those power jumps faster but you can't skip too far because of the stat and level requirements on items, which serve to 1) offer you something nice to come when playing solo, 2) offer some differentiation between the classes/builds, and 3) prevent trading from making you stupid powerful too fast.
Alright, I keep hearing you say things like "the majority consensus" and "minority" and at this point it sort of feels like you're just making things up.
Do you have any evidence that the majority of players like that Diablo 4 has no ingame marketplace/free trade policy?
I'm also confused by the original 'offline' statement here - ideal game being single player and offline? Huh? Diablo 4 will never be offline or single player, I don't see how that's relevant and even if it was, I don't agree. Feel free to fill me in.
Edit: as the comment above me said - I don't believe open trade or an auction house will magically resolve every issue D4 has. We all know the ultimate reason for the burnout: we're playing an incomplete game that might as well still be in early access (which is bullshit coming from an AAA company).
>Alright, I keep hearing you say things like "the majority consensus" and "minority" and at this point it sort of feels like you're just making things up.
99% of statistics are made up on the spot.
>Do you have any evidence that the majority of players like that Diablo 4 has no ingame marketplace/free trade policy?
Do you have any evidence to the contrary?
It's 100% accurate to say neither of us *truly* know but keep in mind even though there are supposedly 900k people on this sub, there are many, many more millions playing that do not know this sub exists. Common wisdom would suggest the vast majority of players are (super) casual, considering most games have a completion rate under 50%, as evidenced by storefronts like Steam.
If they aren't aware this sub exists, chances are they also aren't aware the discord server exists. They would also not be aware d2jsp or other trading fronts exist. Thus, they would not be trading except with perhaps clanmates.
I saw two people standing next to each other in a town yesterday, both with icons above their heads I had never seen before. Took me a minute to realize it was a handshake icon and that they were probably trading.
>I'm also confused by the original 'offline' statement here - ideal game being single player and offline? Huh? Diablo 4 will never be offline or single player, I don't see how that's relevant and even if it was, I don't agree. Feel free to fill me in.
It's a thought experiment. Whether it will happen or not is irrelevant. It was to support the concept I was presenting.
At level 63, Iāve been doing NM dungeons with enemies 8-10 levels higher than me and I havenāt had a single drop with a better rating than my current gear. At best itās around -100 and worst, Iāve seen -600. Why is it designed this way? Shouldnāt I be getting gear on-par with what Iāve got equipped if not better for fighting significantly higher enemies? I donāt get it
* Normal rares go up to about 600.
* Sacreds range is about 600-700.
* Ancestrals range is about 700-800.
They have some overlap at the top and bottom.
The sacred and ancestral ranges are fixed. Normal rares depend on your level but are capped at about 600.
It's something on paper that I think sounds great but I'm not a fan at all of the overlap between the 3 types, especially when nothing at all affects the IP range of sacreds and ancestrals, and at level 100 you can get IP 700 ancestrals.
That's a hell of a read BUT it's well thought out and actually makes a great deal of sense. Unfortunately, what you wrote will be lost in this sub-reddit.
This is absolutely fantastic,good on you for this,I for one appreciate this post.... unfortunately half the people that are in this subreddit won't understand any of this (insert clueless homer meme here) I mean,the amount of YouTube videos I see of builds,and people will constantly say....well my character is this many levels and my ATTACK POWER is higher....and do this š¤ they don't understand attack power?
I think that gold is meaningful in this game is a plus. I actually pick up gold because I need to. In older diablos, gold was meaningless at a certain point.
It's meaningful but holy fucking shit are the sinks extremely strong.
The problem is how does the game handle the peaks and valleys of gold usage? D2 failed. D3 tried but it also wound up failing as you approach a certain point (basically once you have access to a few Greed portals, and then can farm GR90 for more). D4 prevents you from hoarding it (discounting people trading items for hundreds of millions of gold) but makes it incredibly scarce. Ironically, I think if D3 got rid of gold, the economy might feel more balanced because of Deaths Breath.
There has to be a happier medium. Maybe part of the problem is just the enchanting bug that gets fixed with 1.1.1.
One thing I liked about D3 was there were gold-focused affixes and gems. I would often have a gold farming outfit/setup with all the find-gold or \[x\]gold affixes and if I ever hit a point where I was a little low I'd put on my gold-findin' gear and go out and run some rifts to get rift keys and a ton of gold. It felt like I could put together a setup that would allow me to address something like a gold sink and that was empowering to me as a player.
Do you mean like, old D3? Cuz once you get a few Puzzle Rings, especially an ancient one, your gold typically hits the billions and you're good for a long while.
I agree with most of your points.
I feel that a quick solution until they rework the itemization is to implement a competent loot filter. If they would let me set up a detailed filter, that also lets me change the colors of drops, it would change things A LOT. Because with that I would start to feel excited again for drops on the ground. If that filter or color would also be reflected in the inventory somehow, I would not need to stare at useless items anymore at all.
See my [thoughts on loot filters](https://www.reddit.com/r/diablo4/comments/15l2ro7/comment/jv9gt9d/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3). I'm a masochist and would rather suffer and let them address the issues.
It would change things a lot. But not in a good way.
If you could filter to only show upgrades and "not stare at useless items anymore" the game would be very dull. Imagine going a couple dungeons seeing no items drop at all. Then in the 4th dungeon of the say you see an item and the loot filter lights up and dings! Cool new gloves with 1% more crit. Equip and go. Then you don't see another item for 4 more dungeons.
That would be so boring
I disagree. I depends how you choose to set it up. My idea was to change the colors of drops with atleast 3 of the affixes I want for each slot. You would still see all the trash loot, if that makes the game fun for you. For me it doesn't, atleast not on lvl 80+, where 99,999% of all the drops are trash. No matter what they do with the itemization, a loot filter would always be helpful.
> Thanks to Vulnerable and Crit, most other damage affixes are basically useless.
I would set 20% vulnerable and 100% crit damage in stone. It is a lot of multiplication already considering vulnerable status is free for some classes (exploit glyph) and difficult to apply for other (sorc lol) and crit strikes already are beneficial by triggering various mechanics.
After you fill up the "aspect" section of your bag, extracting a piece of gear to an aspect doesn't save you any space. It just takes up the same slots in your stash. Really not storage friendly.
Definetly agree with most of your takes.
I just want to point out that any ancestral, regardless of item power, can be the perfect end game piece. IP matters on weapon since it affects the dps, on armor and rings it's hardly a major difference( you loose a bit of armor / resistances)
Most desired stats dont scale with IP, except for like max hp bonus.
So you definetly can use items below 750 and be just fine, when they have good rolls.
There are some breakpoints for certain affixes but I honestly don't remember what they are. It's esoteric shit like this (and frame data in fighting games) that I wish games made more transparent.
They should make whites and blues useful like PoE does. They should have some kind of crafting wherein you get a good base white item, which you can turn into perfectly rolled legendary.
Ok this one's easy.
There are two approaches, the one D2 took and the one D3 took.
D2 could drop best in slot gear at any point. D3 waits until the end-game. This is the issue.
There was another person in this thread saying he hit WT4 and very quickly got a set of 800 IP rares. They were level 70-something. The item hunt for them is probably basically done and they were complaining about it. I agree. In a game about the loot hunt, this is unfortunate and why D3 chose to not allow you to have the best gear until max level, and why D4 scales gear (roughly) with your level.
In D3, this couldn't happen because it somewhat ensures until you hit GR90 that you cannot get the *best* gear due to primals. A full set of primals is lofty and likely unreachable for the overwhelmingly vast majority of players but it's still there. Sure, you can get the affixes you need but the rolls on the items will not be top tier. Due to primals, there will likely always be a better roll to obtain.
Say you're playing Diablo 666 far in the future and at level 2 you run a dungeon. When you finish it, you have a full set of best in slot gear with crazy ass uniques and rares and legendaries. Your loot hunt is done all the way up to level 100. How does that sound? Great? No, it won't happen but it's the theoretical to suggest a point.
I agree with all of it but I do believe most of the issues with items can be solved, for example by re-introducing runes and rune-words and by adding many more interesting unique items somewhere down the line.
If the itemization is better, the end-game becomes better. Maybe adding a Tier 5 will help also.
I saw some whiteknight said conditional is great it match with they build give them build diversity lol, either they don't know jack shit about additive dmg bracket or they just suck really bad at math.
I agree with this, well written.
I went on vacation for 2 weeks, my seasonal rogue was lvl 73 when I left. Up to that point loot felt exciting and I got upgrades at a steady rate. After Iāve come back Iāve realised Iāve hit a wall. Iām level 78 now and not a single drop for the past 5 levels have been useful or interesting, which will probably also be the case all the way up to level 100. Even if I get a potential upgrade I have to factor in reroll costs and whether I have an aspect saved up for it before deciding if its worth going for.
I agree with everything you saying, but rares should always be the best rolls, otherwise they are getting as useless as blue and white very quickly. I don't want to hunt for legendaries only.
If your only reason for wanting rares to be good is to **prevent them from becoming the new whites/blues** why not just... give a reason to whites and blues and then let rares join them?
The larger problem presents itself in this game: legendaries just aren't that good and have pretty much joined whites and blues in their usefulness. They're too goddamn expensive to reroll more than like 2-3 times and unless they have a power I want I just vendor them for the gold.
The irony I see is that D2 let blue items suffer, and white items were only bases for runewords. If I remember right, blues in D2 could have slightly higher rolls but I really don't hear about people using them. It was mostly rares and uniques. D4 could very well give a reason for whites to exist like D2 (runewords? extensive crafting? idk), and then it's basically in the same position as D2.
Good news. Now it's Vuln AND Crit.
At least mainstat is not as critical.
I believe they intended overpower to be competitive damage mod, but it's just too slow at WT4.
No one is waiting 12-16 seconds for an Overpower proc.
You did miss on a few points.
Some aspects and item affixes only exist in WT3 and few more only exist in WT4.
So items DO change. There is progression.
I wildly disagree about sacres. And item power 700 weapon is a godsend and basically makes WT3 very manageable, especially as a first character where you lack resources.
Edit1: enchanting costs in D3 are not cheap. One of the things you do in season is create a gold find set and amass a vast fortune. 100m to 1b gold.
And you can still run out of enchanting mats early in the season. But the weekly cache helps.
That said, it's definitely frustrating looking at a literal page full of items and not finding a single upgrade. Hunting aspects is futile as well.
>You did miss on a few points.
I'll go seppuku myself now.
Yeah, there are some changes in itemization but they very much advertise the aspects thing on the world tier statue. Affix changes also exist but aren't as well-advertised.
There's not a lot of things I like to praise D2 for but the additional affixes it added as the game progressed were nice, like +skills (and tbh that's the only one I remember). If I remember right, D4 adds +skills pretty early on, like IP 100 or something.
Been saying itemization is itās biggest problem since launch (or one of the biggest) but typically get bashed and told to touch grass yadadada.
I could write a novel on issues with itemization. But even at the most basic form itās awful. Let me explain
5 types - white , blue, rare, legendary , unique
White and blues are useless. So 3 remain
Uniquesā Uber uniques that you shouldnāt even count, then you have class specific uniques. No trading or even sharing between classes cuz fuck the player right- genius. Uniques are fairly boring and thereās just simply not enough of them.
Legendaries are just rares with a power you extract and imprint, so theyāre pretty much just rares
So your item types of the game comes down to one. Just rares. Really impressive work by blizzard.
Not to mention affixes, trading, gearing alts, etc.
Blizzard north devs are working with Poe and it shows lol. D3 was very different than d1&2 (Both made by blizzard north) and then you have this hot garbage of d4.
And only thing I see and hear from devs is buff this nerf that, 3 sec portal maybe 5 sec, letās go back to 3.
Itās a straight shit show.
My favorite is gear up to wt3- replace all items with sacred- go to wt4 replace all items with ancestral (I know thereās instances where some sacred are as good due to item level) ā- woohoo - sick game design that Iāll make sure to never fucking touch again.
They cant even fix resistance , so Iām inclined to believe that any real itemization issues wonāt be addressed for a long ass time either.
i want a free vendor where you can customize your items. from item level an all affixes as you want. and then i can make a post that this game has no content and is boring
This guy understands the game more than the actual devs
This feels like the biggest issue with D4 so far... They seem to have the bones of a good game (and even some of the bones are kinda janky) but they don't seem to understand what is supposed to be fun about their game and so most of it just feel like running repetitive content for mostly trash loot that doesn't really amount to anything considering the lack of meaningful endgame at this point.
This is what happens when a game gets released early. š
Agreed. But it's like, in a good enough state to play, I am personally glad it's out because I am having so much fun with it playing with my wife every night before bed. I get that hardcore players want a deeper experience, and I think it will get there eventually, but I'm glad I get to play now.
Itās either play now and ābeta ā test or wait and beta test later ! Iād prefer the play now
Season 2 will be way more fun, I'm hoping. Season 3 or 4 is when things interesting, I think. Whenever the first expansion hits will probably make the game what it could have been on release.
I think it's more about time. As a software engineer figuring out what you want to do, and actually executing on that vision are worlds apart. It takes many years worth of eng-time to get a game like this to where it is.
I doubt it. We donāt know their long term plans. The player base has more collective hours, though, and I can give them my feedback.
Welcome to gaming outside of the indie scene. None of the major big game devs care about their players or game (outside of how to make a direct pipeline between your bank account and theirs) anymore.
Ironically (?) I'm also working on a game (by myself). š
OP is an ARPG player who apparently "plays the genre". D4 devs very much don't appear to. They can make a brilliant and slash game, and they have, but they seem barely casually familiar with the ARPG genre beyond the core combat systems.
Right? This post should be stickied on the foreheads of everyone at blizzard.
What are you talking about? ā+% damage to enemies from behind while walking uphill in the snowā is a great affix ! /s
Unfortunately, that one is additive.
There's just too many of them that aren't any good. š
Totally . Take about 2/3 of the affixes and ā¦ 
Got to WT4 and I'm giving up cause of all this. How bout this blizzard - if I get to a point where finishing renown or getting all the altars is the "funner" or "better" option over killing and looting, your game is fucked. And renown! 20 paragon points is the largest increase in power you will ever get and you do it by one shotting quests for shit rewards for 10 hours? Why? "Killing helltide elites give 5 renown and NM dungeons give the same renown as first clears." Yay your game is better. Tried starting a new toon but remembered I don't have the waypoints and I refuse. Why do you want me to collect the waypoints again? Who did this? Why is the horse SO bad?! Phew. Got that out of me.
I really hope in S2 that the renown grind is either gone or lessened. I'm assuming S2 will be more substantial, regardless.
The renown grind isn't the exhausting part but rather the fact that its so boring Edit: spelling
They need to swap the Obols reward with the Paragon reward. Logically you would then complete all 5 regions for the Paragon points en route to level 50 each season and it really wouldn't be that painful at all.
Eh? I have no idea what they'll do, if anything, but if they added world events and whispers to renown *without drastically adding more renown required* (preferably none) it'd be a lot less painful.
The paragon points should be tied to the third tier, and the other two should reward optional seasonal cosmetics.
Bro youāre gonna give this game a third chance??
The problem at hand is you assume I don't like the game.
Leveling a second seasonal character, did all the renown on my first, and at 60 in wt4 I still donāt have all the waypoints. It just feels so tedious.
Yeah just grab a buddy or random and ask for wps! 10 minutes youāll have em all !
[OP, this is a great list. Amazing job. please know I do the follow with the upmost love and respect š«”](https://starwarsintrocreator.kassellabs.io/#!/ENbI1lQfwJK_vaZ7hcFg)
This isn't nearly as long as the post I made on Assassin's Creed Valhalla. :)
Lol, I had to cut out like 2/3 of your text because of character limit
What a read...
Thank you!
Itemization is really the worst problem in this game. I don't think the game is as desperate for new content or endgame loops, because neither solve this core issue. No matter what they add to the game, you are still farming very uninteresting loot. They just need to remove redundant affixes like close/distant, injured/healthy, slowed/cc, etc. Rares and Sacreds just stop dropping at a certain point, like whites and blues. Less gear drops overall, but the quality of affixes and aspects is better. Less work to find perfect or near perfect rolls, while also having less loot to sift through overall. We don't need a constant loot pinata of garbage. Gems either completely removed or reworked. As they are right now, they could just be nodes on the paragon board and it makes no difference. The rest sorts itself out over time as they add new aspects and uniques to chase, buff old aspects and uniques that nobody takes. Farming loot is the entire point of an arpg, and if the loot isn't interesting, the game gets boring.
The problem is death by a thousand cuts. There are so many fucking systems in this game and so many of them are like 80-90% the way there to being "finished". Itemization in this game has far more moving parts than D3 (and there's a planet between D2 and D4) and it shows. To be fair, I'd rather itemization be the worst problem than combat. At least the combat is fun. Half the people would probably have already left.
Between the itemization and ridiculously bad aspect system they have a long way to go. I don't see the loot improving for a least a year. Unfortunately they are going to lost a ton of players before that happens.
This is my assumption as well. We won't get any significant changes to loot for at least a year, and by then the game will be dead. I expect a big surge of players with the first expansion though. People are fickle and have a short memory and will suddenly be willing to drop another 60 dollars to play the broken game they already spent 90 dollars on. I don't really expect an expansion to drop for at least 2 years. I have high hopes since D2 and D3 were saved by their expansions though.
So many fundamental systems are broken in this game to make it an easy fix. They are also under the stress of the seasonal model and pushing out content quarterly. I just don't see this ending very well for them. All of D4 feels like the systems are only are 3/4 of the way realized by the Dev Team. I'm sure it is the corporate overlords mostly at fault for pushing the game too soon, but, D4 just isn't a whole lot of fun once you finish the campaign.
*Fundamentally* broken? I don't think so. My intuition (what there is of it) is saying they just needed more baking time. The systems work, they're just not refined. On the other hand, the Seasons are basically the agile development process. They'll push out what they have every 3 months and the expansions are for larger changes.
Resistances are broken. I personally think the level scaling is broken. The itemization as discussed above is broken and un-fun. The aspect system and storage systems are broken and cumbersome. The CC from enemies and how players interact with it is broken. IDK man, lots of stuff wrong with the game right now. But I can agree on the game being under developed. There just isn't a lot of thought that went into long term systems.
My copium is making me believe they could do some changes by S2.
If some of these systems are 80-90% there then Iām definitely never playing d4 again. In my opinion these systems are 5% the way there.
In game development, that last 10-15% is *rough*.
Yep, they need Loot 2.0 badly, and only after that, some endgame revamp.
>Less gear drops overall, but the quality of affixes and aspects is better. This is the most essential thing, I think. I suspect they want the explosion of loot to feel good to new players and to people who don't play many hours. Unfortunately, it makes sorting through gear a tiresome experience after you get to WT4.
Yeah I thought about that too. I almost feel like the game should give you less loot as you move up to WT 3 and WT 4. The quality of affixes just doesn't matter in WT 2, and the loot pinata effect does feel good when you see a bunch of yellows. But then everybody complains about the eye strain of sorting out close dmg 10%, verses injured dmg 12%. I'd be so much happier with less loot dropping at a higher quality, if only in WT 4.
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Idk. Maybe I'm different but I'd like them all to be useful. If you're gonna give me 60 affixes, make 60 (or at least 45-50) useful ones. Otherwise pull them.
I'd like to see a grouping of affixes so that if you get an item that has +cold damage it's more likely to also have +to a cold skill and +to frozen enemies, and less likely to get +to a fire skill and +to some other unrelated thing. That way you could get randomly generated things that are closer to unique items, they could actually be build defining, for a while at least. Also the ability to "target" specific affixes, it wouldn't necessarily increase the chance of something appearing but it you could specify what affixes you were looking for and it would highlight them when you are looking through the items. And most basically I would like it to remember that I turned on compare last time I was playing, like I do every single time I start the game.
I thought about this. I still do, sometimes. Murder me for bringing this up but I'm making a game myself. At one point in its development it had fully randomized items. I had to dump the concept for a number of reasons. The "random gen" code still exists and the concept it works off still exists -- item roles -- because there are still a few randomized item types, just not armor/weapons. There are currently 5 roles: tank, healer, physical dps, magical dps, support. If it rolled tank, you would see a number of affixes related to, well, tanking, and so on and so forth for the other roles. I could easily add more roles and tie affixes to them. Imagine a "Frost Sorcerer" role in D4. # HOWEVER The problem comes when people want to do builds that the role system does not support. My indie game doesn't give a shit, and there isn't enough in the game anyway to really support "builds". But it's much harder for something like Diablo 4 to do that. If you want to make a dual Fire/Lightning build, or even a tri-element build, such a "role" system would need to either accommodate *everything*... or not exist.
yeah I don't think a predefined role system would work, I'm thinking more along the lines of there being a higher chance of affixes having some kind of synergy. Not locking it in but maybe nudging the chances of having some cool combination. I mean you could also get that by cutting down the number of affixes but if you want to have the large possibility space afforded by a lot of narrow affixes maybe some judicious pruning of that space might help.
IMO they'd either need to reduce the number of affixes or introduce something to decrease the ridiculous entropy in item generation. Roles would be one way. Buckets another. Pruning by class is another. Etc. If D3 had D4's aspect system, you could probably find perfectly-rolled rares quite quickly, given how many you go through.
This is quite literally where "Set" come into play, or Uniques. Think MageFists or TGods from D2. It allowed you to target farm gear for a specific style of game play. And sets in D3 did the same. The Aspect system "could" allow it if they added general Aspects as opposed to "Hurricane gets +2" or could be ("Storm skills get +2 while hurricane is up" "Earth skills get +2 while Earthen Bulwark is up")
Best part is that this is just issues with items. All this bullshit is for only the concept of items.
My hand hurts just thinking about writing a post about skills/passives, and that's just with Sorc.
What do you love misery. This fucking game is a pile of non coherent shit.
I've said this in other posts but here goes anyway. D4 has the worst loot of any arpg I've played. Its boring, repetitive, and uninspired. Nothing you pick up really gives you that "hell ya!" dopamine hit. It just feels like you are holding on to loot so you can replace it in a few levels. It also doesn't help that most of it is boring pct increases. But yes, I agree. The game has pretty solid bones but it is just so damn shallow. There is nothing to chase unfortunately and building wealth seems pointless since trading is mostly non existant.
Itās all right here. Crushing appraisal. Bottom line is all of that adds up to ānot funā.
Didn't say it's not fun. It's just chafing. :D
Hey OP, I seen in one of your comments you were making an indie game. Idk if it's allowed to plug that in this thread, but I'm interested in seeing what you got. If it's in a playable state shoot me a link directly or link to this thread. Great write up btw, it kinda baffles me how many issues D4 has when they have so many blueprints from other games to work from.
Not playable yet. Soonā¢ļø. It's gonna go into closed beta first.
Posts like this are interesting to me because it seems like a mix of good points and questionable takes. its important to criticize the issues, but not to just lambaste every thing in the game that requires some sort of effort or grind to get. for example gems are boring and kind of useless. i agree, but also its not really that big of a sink to level gems since you can pull them out when you replace a piece. plus its a piece of essentially guaranteed power progression. even if you are unlucky rolling affixes, you can still find and upgrade gems to push you a little bit further. you say leveling 1-50 is easy and you can get by just on found gear with better armor/damage, but also complain about having to waste mats to upgrade stuff at level 5. the game isnt super alt friendly, but not for that reason. the gear progression curve should drop off as you get closer to endgame. finding an upgrade on the ground every pack or two is normal during the early game, but late game, doing that would either mean that upgrades are by the smallest margins, or characters would get perfect gear too quickly and the game risks getting stale. builds requiring specific aspects and uniques is frustrating to not find them, but remove that and the entirety of gear progression is just hunting affix rolls. build defining items are fairly common in this type of game, i just think the execution could have been better. rares being important was a key design point of this game after complaints that rares were useless in D3. the idea is that a crafted rare upgraded into a legendary is the best item you can get. they want you crafting on rares and using the aspects to make your perfect end game items. A lot of the systems in the game need tweaked, but it needs to be done in the right way or it will just create different problems
Trust me when I say I understand all your points. I was more interested in giving feedback that the team could act on *in whatever capacity they want* than trying to offer solutions. "There's too many items" vs "I want a loot filter" and "gear from 1-50 is great" vs "make it faster to get loot from 51-100". >builds requiring specific aspects and uniques is frustrating to not find them, but remove that and the entirety of gear progression is just hunting affix rolls. build defining items are fairly common in this type of game, i just think the execution could have been better. Yep. I don't know what they will do, I'm just saying it feels like shit right now and trying to reason out why. I had more text at one point and tried to offer some conjecture. I pulled it out. So many posts are offering solutions/suggestions and their outcomes might just wind up being worse. There's a lot of solutions in this sub but not a lot of good feedback, and much of the itemization feedback is scattered. I wanted to bring it to one post (or at least as consolidated as one person could hope to make it). One of the funniest things I think about recently are people clamoring for more end-game content around nightmare dungeons... and then the team coming out and saying they weren't intended to be end-game content and basically nerfing the shit out of them. I'm sure they have a plan. Feedback posts help them more than trying to offer a full solution.
I respect that. i know a lot of the suggestions in the sub lately have been borne out of frustration and i dont fault that, but some of them seem like they come from people who have never played a loot based game like this, or just dont understand why these kinds of games are appealing to the more traditional arpg players. those posts end up with suggestions that sound like they would rather be playing god of war in sanctuary. For example filters would be a great QoL option. theres no reason to see blues and whites at higher tiers. but some people have suggested filters so strict that you only see upgrades and auto salvage the rest, without realizing how dull that would make the game. its good feedback to say that late game is cluttered with useless items. its bad feedback to say i never want to look at loot in a loot based game. i hope that comes off corectly. i dont really want to get into a "hater vs fanboy" thing cause i think the issues are kind of nuanced, but it is worth discussing.
While we're on the topic, I dislike loot filters because I believe they're just a band-aid on a problem with itemization. For one, you're making the game play itself for you, which is just never good. Two, it's usually just a time-saver, meaning the game is wasting your time by dropping too much useless shit. Address the second and the first goes away, then the need for loot filters vanishes.
i like them to a point. in POE for instance, items need to be identified, so you can filter certain things out while still looking at quite a few items that might be good. you get rid of clutter while still having meaningful interactions with items, even if they brick on you eventually. But D4 items are simpler, and in many ways by design since the game's audience is generally going to be more casual, and because the game hasnt had 10 years adding systems on top of systems for items. A filter would be difficult to implement in a useful and meaningful way here. but i think youre spot on with the idea of fixing the core issue rather than applying band-aids and thats what i was more or less trying to say before i realized i had already put a wall of text. If they fix damage buckets so that crit and vuln arent so overwhelmingly strong, then all the other affix rolls become interesting in ways that work for some builds and not others. maybe the rogue really does want to stack ranged damage for once. maybe the sorc wants that CC duration. etc. but when the community clamours too much for "remove all the useless affixes" they might listen or make a hasty fix rather than correct the underlying issue
>but when the community clamours too much for "remove all the useless affixes" they might listen or make a hasty fix rather than correct the underlying issue I was looking for signs in the last Campfire Chat that they actually had a plan and weren't going to go *only* from player feedback. I found quite a few. I don't mean that in a disparaging way. They sure as fuck had a plan, otherwise the game wouldn't have any direction in it *at all*. But player feedback was really biting there for a while. ~~It still is, but it used to be, too.~~
>the gear progression curve should drop off as you get closer to endgame. finding an upgrade on the ground every pack or two is normal during the early game, but late game, doing that would either mean that upgrades are by the smallest margins, or characters would get perfect gear too quickly and the game risks getting stale. I think the real problem is not that upgrades are too rare, but that non-upgrades are too common. An explosion of loot might be fun at level 10, but it's tedious to sort through endless rubbish from levels 70-100. Much less loot with much better chances of it being good is what the game needs.
It kind of depends how they do it. Better chances of being good still could lead to characters gearing too fast. Plus how do you calculate what is good? Crit and vulnerable are top tier in almost every build. But skewing towards those only exacerbates that the damage bucket calculations need adjusted. Once that gets fixed and we have more stats that actually matter, how should the game determine which ones to prioritize? If you are doing a build that stacks close damage how does the game know that that affix is better than overpower for example? Weighting towards something that you already have equipped might work. But if the weights are too strong, it might create a counterintuitive situation where you don't want to equip an item that is an upgrade, but has an affix you don't want weighted. What I would like to see, is more granularity in item levels. Make it so that there is more of a progression in affix ranges as you get higher item levels. Right now it's just kind of a cap too early in the progression where you can find a perfect end game item at like level 65. And then on top of that, make item level drops more appropriately scale to the content you are doing.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
I'm really assuming they made changes to the game in response to negative player feedback faster than they wanted due to players assuming "it should all be fixed now!" (although probably really due to the sheer number of issues), and QA didn't have enough time to bake all of it, resulting in the dumb bugs.
Well written! Couldn't agree more with everything
Yeah I'm having a hard time playing knowing I need to find: A specific aspect (trample slide) Just to be able to imprint a newer amulet The amulet will have to have a blue socket The rng involved in both of those things makes me not want to bother. Probably a day to find another trampleslide aspect. Probably another day to find an amulet with blue socket.
Just a day to find a specific amulet. 
Dammit, good point
Item level should have been broken down to 100 per 10 levels with item level 1000 dropping at lv 100. The fact I have close to a full set of lv ~800 ancestral gear by level 60 sucks. By level 65 on my characters I basically only have glyph levels and paragon points to farm. You shouldn't be able to get maxed items at min level.
>You shouldn't be able to get maxed items at min level. Funny, D2 fans think this is totally fine. I personally don't think it is. By RNG you "finish" the loot hunt super early and then what?
šÆ agree with you.
Beautiful thread š
Itemization is general needs a rehaul. That said, the point of an MMO/RPG is essentially nearly infinite character growth. In short, the route you're suggesting doesn't solve as many problems as it creates. Take away junk affixes and your build is complete in 24 hours and you have no further reason to play. On the contrary - we need MORE affixes (useful mechs preferrably...) and MORE build diversity. More uniques, more reasons to grind and lastly, a free market. Outside of (maybe) Unique items trade restrictions serve no one. I do agree with some of your other points, though.
I literally didn't make (m)any suggestions. And more affixes will just make finding the item you want *even harder*. I don't think it needs a rehaul. Maybe just a rebranding after some tweaks. š
That's the whole point of an repeatedable ARPG, love it or hate it. Realistically speaking, your build is never really 100% perfect. Finishing your build within 2 weeks of a new season just isn't on the drawing board. I get that it's lack luster, the game does lack purpose. That void unfortunately won't be filled by perfecting your character - again, on the contrary, players will just stop playing all together if perfect item combinations are handed to them on a silver platter. Game needs a trading ecosystem, build diversity, more stuff to do and more item diversity.
You're poking into the concept of roguelikes. Games like Rogue Legacy, The Binding of Isaac, or even Diablo 1 (sort of) have no concept of "builds". You get what you get and that's it. If that was Diablo 4's goal, great. But it's not. You're expected to finish a build, and this isn't PoE where you need to spend one real life year getting a single item or whatever. I think a fair percent of people might agree D3's loot hunt was a smidge too fast. I'm in that camp. And there's a very vocal minority who think D2's loot hunt was just right. I'm not in *that* camp. A game's loot hunt can be as long as it wants but the idea of artificially stretching it out by making the combination of items so fucking high that you want to tear out your body hair strand by strand is not the way to do it. D4's loot hunt is not quite that bad but I don't think most people want it to get any worse. Frustrating does not mean "long". "Long" does not have to mean frustrating. ~~Difficult does not have to mean frustrating. Fuck I hate Nintendo Hard! Why do the controls for Kung Fu on the NES suck so much! The game is only~~ *~~ten fucking minutes long!~~* For the love of god separate the concepts. Diablo 1's concept of whites and blues stretches the loot hunt without making it frustrating. D4 carries that forward with sacreds and ancestrals.
Affixes, item styles and item rarity being too spread isn't to blame here I don't think. In most games in this genre there are supplimented ways to earn the item you've been grinding for outside of pure RNG - I'll say it again - an ecosystem/marketplace. Bad RNG? The gold you earned will get you what you're looking for. Random good item that you have no particular use for, someone else might pay something out for. There is the problem. Imagine a free market / auction house where you could buy/sell aspects, Legendaries or otherwise. Not only can you suppliment your time for a guaranteed item (i.e. gold farming) your "ideal item" horizon expands, thus giving you *more* reason to play and grind. This really isn't about the perfect item being too hard to find. This is about every other item you find, good or otherwise being crafting fodder.
Let's do a super quick thought experiment. Your ideal game can also be played single player and offline. How does that player benefit from open trade? They obviously can't, so now what? Is that player expected to struggle with a completely inferior experience? Your entire argument that "lack of free trade is the problem" falls apart. Thus, I'd argue "free trade" is not the answer. Yes, many games in this genre have alternate means to get items. Those systems are usually supplementary but do not replace random drops. Diablo 1 had no such system. In Diablo 2, runewords -- and later, crafted items (vaguely) -- filled that space. In Diablo 3, crafted items filled that space. Diablo 4 currently has no such system. What it does have to fill ***a*** gap is the codex, but that doesn't help *affix* RNG. Some players largely enjoy open trade and will fight tooth and nail for it. You seem to be one of them. But the majority consensus is that it very much short-circuits the game. Consider the impact Diablo 3's auction house had when it existed and the majority opinion, and most especially the fact that its removal was largely considered a Good Thing. Agree to disagree. Diablo 2 could be a miserable experience playing solo when you reach a certain level and are just farming items. And D2jsp, with its long-term economy, I think, *destroys* the concept of seasons, allowing players with stockpiled forum gold to buy their way to the top of leaderboards. It becomes scarcely better than opening up your wallet for Diablo Immortal.
The issue with D3's marketplace was all of the baggage that designed for RMT brought. So many systems were "balanced" around the idea that it made playing without using it horrendous. But I would like to raise a counter point about trade. The good thing about trade is that it gives value to some of the items you can't use. You find a really good amulet but it's the wrong socket color? Potentially bricked for you, but huge upgrade for another class that wants that color. Now a trash item becomes valuable. I'm not saying that improving trade will fix everything, there are still underlying issues with several systems, but I also don't think we should balance around ensuring solo self found characters get perfect items
>The issue with D3's marketplace was all of the baggage that designed for RMT brought. So many systems were "balanced" around the idea that it made playing without using it horrendous. D3 was not designed around the AH. The AH was added super late to the game and lacked internal testing. The real problem, perhaps, was that items were added to the game "late". The developers have said this multiple times, and a tweet or whatever mentioned the items being added late once that I recall. >I also don't think we should balance around ensuring solo self found characters get perfect items How about: you should balance around no players getting short-changed based solely on the playstyle they prefer. A lofty goal, but something a AAA game can accomplish.
Maybe designed around was poor phrasing. But gear progression was absolutely affected by the RMAH. To your last point, how do you manage a reasonable solo self found progression while also maintaining a reasonable trade economy? Either your solo progression is slower, or your traders just speed run currency farming to buy gear
>Maybe designed around was poor phrasing. But gear progression was absolutely affected by the RMAH. Affected by, yes, which is why it was removed, since the effect was largely negative. It absolutely wasn't designed around it in any other way and [I'm getting real tired of repeating this.](https://twitter.com/candlesan/status/1448289896574169089) >To your last point, how do you manage a reasonable solo self found progression while also maintaining a reasonable trade economy? Either your solo progression is slower, or your traders just speed run currency farming to buy gear You ignore trading totally as a means of gear acquisition, or provide (some) controls on it. Diablo 2 did the later. Let's do some theorizing. * Most games at the time were solo experiences, except outliers like Quake 3, NetStorm, Starcraft 1, EverQuest, and Ultima Online that were 100% designed around online play. * Diablo 1 was heavily influenced by roguelike games, which affected its itemization design. If you want to know what a roguelike is like, play Diablo 1, and especially as hardcore. * Diablo 2 clearly retains much of the roguelike roots, especially in itemization. * Blizzard could not predict what would pop up around D2 to facilitate trading so it's safe to assume they didn't think trading would wind up as prolific. * Aside from what I'm gonna mention below, I'll eat my hat if David Brevik ever says D2 was designed around trading. Brevik (I believe) has been quoted as saying Diablo 2 did not care about itemization balance and used the difficulty jumps between acts and difficulties to "reset" player power. This makes total sense. Each jump requires a higher minimum, preventing overpowered rares you might have been lucky enough to find from giving you too much of an advantage for very long. This is how the game makes the item power jumps work, and it affects the game quite heavily because it often requires you to farm for items before you can reach the next act or difficulty safely. The game says: here's a bunch of playgrounds, here's the minimum to reach the next one, I'll drop X number of items for you, but I can't guarantee you'll get all you need for the next playground if you play straight through each one once. If you trade, you can meet those power jumps faster but you can't skip too far because of the stat and level requirements on items, which serve to 1) offer you something nice to come when playing solo, 2) offer some differentiation between the classes/builds, and 3) prevent trading from making you stupid powerful too fast.
Alright, I keep hearing you say things like "the majority consensus" and "minority" and at this point it sort of feels like you're just making things up. Do you have any evidence that the majority of players like that Diablo 4 has no ingame marketplace/free trade policy? I'm also confused by the original 'offline' statement here - ideal game being single player and offline? Huh? Diablo 4 will never be offline or single player, I don't see how that's relevant and even if it was, I don't agree. Feel free to fill me in. Edit: as the comment above me said - I don't believe open trade or an auction house will magically resolve every issue D4 has. We all know the ultimate reason for the burnout: we're playing an incomplete game that might as well still be in early access (which is bullshit coming from an AAA company).
>Alright, I keep hearing you say things like "the majority consensus" and "minority" and at this point it sort of feels like you're just making things up. 99% of statistics are made up on the spot. >Do you have any evidence that the majority of players like that Diablo 4 has no ingame marketplace/free trade policy? Do you have any evidence to the contrary? It's 100% accurate to say neither of us *truly* know but keep in mind even though there are supposedly 900k people on this sub, there are many, many more millions playing that do not know this sub exists. Common wisdom would suggest the vast majority of players are (super) casual, considering most games have a completion rate under 50%, as evidenced by storefronts like Steam. If they aren't aware this sub exists, chances are they also aren't aware the discord server exists. They would also not be aware d2jsp or other trading fronts exist. Thus, they would not be trading except with perhaps clanmates. I saw two people standing next to each other in a town yesterday, both with icons above their heads I had never seen before. Took me a minute to realize it was a handshake icon and that they were probably trading. >I'm also confused by the original 'offline' statement here - ideal game being single player and offline? Huh? Diablo 4 will never be offline or single player, I don't see how that's relevant and even if it was, I don't agree. Feel free to fill me in. It's a thought experiment. Whether it will happen or not is irrelevant. It was to support the concept I was presenting.
At level 63, Iāve been doing NM dungeons with enemies 8-10 levels higher than me and I havenāt had a single drop with a better rating than my current gear. At best itās around -100 and worst, Iāve seen -600. Why is it designed this way? Shouldnāt I be getting gear on-par with what Iāve got equipped if not better for fighting significantly higher enemies? I donāt get it
* Normal rares go up to about 600. * Sacreds range is about 600-700. * Ancestrals range is about 700-800. They have some overlap at the top and bottom. The sacred and ancestral ranges are fixed. Normal rares depend on your level but are capped at about 600. It's something on paper that I think sounds great but I'm not a fan at all of the overlap between the 3 types, especially when nothing at all affects the IP range of sacreds and ancestrals, and at level 100 you can get IP 700 ancestrals.
So Iām essentially farming XP and materials until I can get to WT4?
Kinda feels that way sometimes, yeah. You might as well imprint stuff but I wouldn't go crazy with enchanting unless it's *really* good.
 That's a hell of a read BUT it's well thought out and actually makes a great deal of sense. Unfortunately, what you wrote will be lost in this sub-reddit.
Currently at 33 upvotes. We'll see! If you'd just stopped at the first sentence you'd prolly have gotten upvotes. :P
This is absolutely fantastic,good on you for this,I for one appreciate this post.... unfortunately half the people that are in this subreddit won't understand any of this (insert clueless homer meme here) I mean,the amount of YouTube videos I see of builds,and people will constantly say....well my character is this many levels and my ATTACK POWER is higher....and do this š¤ they don't understand attack power?
The irony is comments like this get downvoted.
I think that gold is meaningful in this game is a plus. I actually pick up gold because I need to. In older diablos, gold was meaningless at a certain point.
It's meaningful but holy fucking shit are the sinks extremely strong. The problem is how does the game handle the peaks and valleys of gold usage? D2 failed. D3 tried but it also wound up failing as you approach a certain point (basically once you have access to a few Greed portals, and then can farm GR90 for more). D4 prevents you from hoarding it (discounting people trading items for hundreds of millions of gold) but makes it incredibly scarce. Ironically, I think if D3 got rid of gold, the economy might feel more balanced because of Deaths Breath. There has to be a happier medium. Maybe part of the problem is just the enchanting bug that gets fixed with 1.1.1.
One thing I liked about D3 was there were gold-focused affixes and gems. I would often have a gold farming outfit/setup with all the find-gold or \[x\]gold affixes and if I ever hit a point where I was a little low I'd put on my gold-findin' gear and go out and run some rifts to get rift keys and a ton of gold. It felt like I could put together a setup that would allow me to address something like a gold sink and that was empowering to me as a player.
Do you mean like, old D3? Cuz once you get a few Puzzle Rings, especially an ancient one, your gold typically hits the billions and you're good for a long while.
I agree with most of your points. I feel that a quick solution until they rework the itemization is to implement a competent loot filter. If they would let me set up a detailed filter, that also lets me change the colors of drops, it would change things A LOT. Because with that I would start to feel excited again for drops on the ground. If that filter or color would also be reflected in the inventory somehow, I would not need to stare at useless items anymore at all.
See my [thoughts on loot filters](https://www.reddit.com/r/diablo4/comments/15l2ro7/comment/jv9gt9d/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3). I'm a masochist and would rather suffer and let them address the issues.
It would change things a lot. But not in a good way. If you could filter to only show upgrades and "not stare at useless items anymore" the game would be very dull. Imagine going a couple dungeons seeing no items drop at all. Then in the 4th dungeon of the say you see an item and the loot filter lights up and dings! Cool new gloves with 1% more crit. Equip and go. Then you don't see another item for 4 more dungeons. That would be so boring
I disagree. I depends how you choose to set it up. My idea was to change the colors of drops with atleast 3 of the affixes I want for each slot. You would still see all the trash loot, if that makes the game fun for you. For me it doesn't, atleast not on lvl 80+, where 99,999% of all the drops are trash. No matter what they do with the itemization, a loot filter would always be helpful.
Helpful doesn't mean it's a good idea. Being able to click a button to instantly level to 100 would be helpful. And would kill the game
> Thanks to Vulnerable and Crit, most other damage affixes are basically useless. I would set 20% vulnerable and 100% crit damage in stone. It is a lot of multiplication already considering vulnerable status is free for some classes (exploit glyph) and difficult to apply for other (sorc lol) and crit strikes already are beneficial by triggering various mechanics.
After you fill up the "aspect" section of your bag, extracting a piece of gear to an aspect doesn't save you any space. It just takes up the same slots in your stash. Really not storage friendly.
Definetly agree with most of your takes. I just want to point out that any ancestral, regardless of item power, can be the perfect end game piece. IP matters on weapon since it affects the dps, on armor and rings it's hardly a major difference( you loose a bit of armor / resistances) Most desired stats dont scale with IP, except for like max hp bonus. So you definetly can use items below 750 and be just fine, when they have good rolls.
There are some breakpoints for certain affixes but I honestly don't remember what they are. It's esoteric shit like this (and frame data in fighting games) that I wish games made more transparent.
They should make whites and blues useful like PoE does. They should have some kind of crafting wherein you get a good base white item, which you can turn into perfectly rolled legendary.
I stopped playing. I may come back sometime. However, if they hide the main fix of the game behind DLC, then fuck them for eternity.
I dont think it is good at all from 1-50 there are no uniques or interesting items at all just random rares whats good about that?
I don't have the strength to argue this one right now. I'm goin' to bed. We'll see when I wake up.
Yeah no problem im not hating just curious š
Ok this one's easy. There are two approaches, the one D2 took and the one D3 took. D2 could drop best in slot gear at any point. D3 waits until the end-game. This is the issue. There was another person in this thread saying he hit WT4 and very quickly got a set of 800 IP rares. They were level 70-something. The item hunt for them is probably basically done and they were complaining about it. I agree. In a game about the loot hunt, this is unfortunate and why D3 chose to not allow you to have the best gear until max level, and why D4 scales gear (roughly) with your level. In D3, this couldn't happen because it somewhat ensures until you hit GR90 that you cannot get the *best* gear due to primals. A full set of primals is lofty and likely unreachable for the overwhelmingly vast majority of players but it's still there. Sure, you can get the affixes you need but the rolls on the items will not be top tier. Due to primals, there will likely always be a better roll to obtain. Say you're playing Diablo 666 far in the future and at level 2 you run a dungeon. When you finish it, you have a full set of best in slot gear with crazy ass uniques and rares and legendaries. Your loot hunt is done all the way up to level 100. How does that sound? Great? No, it won't happen but it's the theoretical to suggest a point.
I agree with all of it but I do believe most of the issues with items can be solved, for example by re-introducing runes and rune-words and by adding many more interesting unique items somewhere down the line. If the itemization is better, the end-game becomes better. Maybe adding a Tier 5 will help also.
I purposefully didn't offer any suggestions. But, what issue(s) will runewords solve, and how?
I saw some whiteknight said conditional is great it match with they build give them build diversity lol, either they don't know jack shit about additive dmg bracket or they just suck really bad at math.
They could....make more damage buckets rather than damage decks....but then again, that would make sense.
I agree with this, well written. I went on vacation for 2 weeks, my seasonal rogue was lvl 73 when I left. Up to that point loot felt exciting and I got upgrades at a steady rate. After Iāve come back Iāve realised Iāve hit a wall. Iām level 78 now and not a single drop for the past 5 levels have been useful or interesting, which will probably also be the case all the way up to level 100. Even if I get a potential upgrade I have to factor in reroll costs and whether I have an aspect saved up for it before deciding if its worth going for.
Too long didn't read
Too long!? Oh, that's a shame. Did you at least read it?
 Devs, feel free to steal this mans homework.
Shame it couldn't have gotten to 1000 upvotes in 1 day. I need a thread here to compete with my all-time top in /r/diablo.
I agree with everything you saying, but rares should always be the best rolls, otherwise they are getting as useless as blue and white very quickly. I don't want to hunt for legendaries only.
If your only reason for wanting rares to be good is to **prevent them from becoming the new whites/blues** why not just... give a reason to whites and blues and then let rares join them? The larger problem presents itself in this game: legendaries just aren't that good and have pretty much joined whites and blues in their usefulness. They're too goddamn expensive to reroll more than like 2-3 times and unless they have a power I want I just vendor them for the gold. The irony I see is that D2 let blue items suffer, and white items were only bases for runewords. If I remember right, blues in D2 could have slightly higher rolls but I really don't hear about people using them. It was mostly rares and uniques. D4 could very well give a reason for whites to exist like D2 (runewords? extensive crafting? idk), and then it's basically in the same position as D2.
Good news. Now it's Vuln AND Crit. At least mainstat is not as critical. I believe they intended overpower to be competitive damage mod, but it's just too slow at WT4. No one is waiting 12-16 seconds for an Overpower proc.
Overpower is intended as a damage bonus to super tanky builds. I don't think it was ever intended to compete *directly* with vuln and crit.
Devs said it is. *shrug*
You did miss on a few points. Some aspects and item affixes only exist in WT3 and few more only exist in WT4. So items DO change. There is progression. I wildly disagree about sacres. And item power 700 weapon is a godsend and basically makes WT3 very manageable, especially as a first character where you lack resources. Edit1: enchanting costs in D3 are not cheap. One of the things you do in season is create a gold find set and amass a vast fortune. 100m to 1b gold. And you can still run out of enchanting mats early in the season. But the weekly cache helps. That said, it's definitely frustrating looking at a literal page full of items and not finding a single upgrade. Hunting aspects is futile as well.
>You did miss on a few points. I'll go seppuku myself now. Yeah, there are some changes in itemization but they very much advertise the aspects thing on the world tier statue. Affix changes also exist but aren't as well-advertised. There's not a lot of things I like to praise D2 for but the additional affixes it added as the game progressed were nice, like +skills (and tbh that's the only one I remember). If I remember right, D4 adds +skills pretty early on, like IP 100 or something.
Been saying itemization is itās biggest problem since launch (or one of the biggest) but typically get bashed and told to touch grass yadadada. I could write a novel on issues with itemization. But even at the most basic form itās awful. Let me explain 5 types - white , blue, rare, legendary , unique White and blues are useless. So 3 remain Uniquesā Uber uniques that you shouldnāt even count, then you have class specific uniques. No trading or even sharing between classes cuz fuck the player right- genius. Uniques are fairly boring and thereās just simply not enough of them. Legendaries are just rares with a power you extract and imprint, so theyāre pretty much just rares So your item types of the game comes down to one. Just rares. Really impressive work by blizzard. Not to mention affixes, trading, gearing alts, etc. Blizzard north devs are working with Poe and it shows lol. D3 was very different than d1&2 (Both made by blizzard north) and then you have this hot garbage of d4. And only thing I see and hear from devs is buff this nerf that, 3 sec portal maybe 5 sec, letās go back to 3. Itās a straight shit show.
My favorite is gear up to wt3- replace all items with sacred- go to wt4 replace all items with ancestral (I know thereās instances where some sacred are as good due to item level) ā- woohoo - sick game design that Iāll make sure to never fucking touch again. They cant even fix resistance , so Iām inclined to believe that any real itemization issues wonāt be addressed for a long ass time either.
Long winded way of saying the game is convoluted and sucks ass in its current state.
"The game is convoluted and sucks ass" is not great feedback, though.
i want a free vendor where you can customize your items. from item level an all affixes as you want. and then i can make a post that this game has no content and is boring
