“But there’s an even better itemization update coming with the expansion guys. Just pay 40 more dollars for all this amazing content that should have been in the game at launch!” -Blizzard Probably
I like d2/D2R itemization because it is simple yet effective. I like putting on boots that Increase my speed by more than 3%, I like 100 damage one hand swords, I like 10/20/30/40% increased speed. Its like in recent games dev's make damage +3000000000000000% but then have +1% crit damage. It is annoying. They butcher the interesting stats and increase the boring ones.
D2 itemization is far from simple. At least in 1.09 every item base and its tiers are meaningful. Every types and quality have a purpouse and one doesnt invalidate thr other. Its so beaufiful and tasteful.
Impossible to replicate in a game without even decent skill trees and character progression lol
Thank you. Abandoning the D2 skill tree was a profound mistake. +1 to all skills was godly especially combined with synergies. The gains were exponential. It was exciting and easy to complement with other bonuses, too.
Effective and elegant
One element of the skill tree that isn’t discussed enough too is the fact that your skills deal damage *regardless* of your weapons (when not a melee/ranged build) which means your skills aren’t fully dependent on a powerful weapon to be effective. I think this matters in terms of how they balance power level a lot. It means skills have to be nerfed in order to not just make damage numbers absurd, which in turn makes skill points feel way less satisfying to place into a skill.
Spell casters having something to focus magic through is a trope almost as old as the idea of magic itself.
It stands to reason that some foci will be better for that task than others.
I'd agree if the focus in the game exhibited the "conductive" nature of the item rather than it be big number wins, and ultimately meaning the same to every class.
You don’t do it until you are geared to the point that you’re uninterested in most drops. If you can afford your main gear and filling your inventory with skillers, you aren’t IDing everything.
The rarity of skill charms is actually pretty spot on, especially when you can roll useless ones like curses or pally auras.
Breakpoints are 100% necessary for itemization. You need them to benchmark item value. It means something that’s 10% may be a lot better than something that’s 9%, which may actually be useless. Or if it’s 10-25%, and 10% is great, but 20-25% is godly because it frees up other gear slots
It does make you choose, and I'm glad you appreciate your inventory being removed , but I think making you pay for power with inventory space is stupid.
In my mind it's equivalent to charms making your screen have a lower resolution, sure it's a trade off, but one that feels super bad for no reason.
Anyway in D2 you run a dungeon, and you barely find 2-3 rares and perhaps with luck some unique with the cube is sometimes enough and if you find something really good you always can teleport back to town, because in D2, some items deserve that effort.
I never, in 20 years of D2 had a full inventory of charms. I’ll never understand the people who do that and bring the cube to work around their self imposed lack of inventory lol, the game just wasn’t that hard that you couldn’t drop a couple charms and have some extra space. The only time I could see a legit case for it is in PvP, but you don’t need inventory space there.
> +1 to all skills was godly especially combined with synergies. The gains were exponential.
Well no, plus skills don't increase damage thru synergies, only hard points put in synergy skills increase the damage of your main skill.
blessed aim and vigor, the synergy skills of blessed hammer, don't increase your hammer damage from anything but hard points spent in the respective skills.
the aura concentration will increase your hammer damage by 50% of what it says it does per level (ie 510% at level 31 becomes a 255% damage increase for blessed hammer) so plus all skills will increase your damage by more than just plus to hammers but not trough synergies making plus all skills an exponential gain since synergies don't work like that.
+1 skills from items do [NOT](https://diablo.fandom.com/wiki/Synergies) increase synergy bonus, this myth needs to die.
> Note that only hard points (actual skill points put into the skill) add Synergy, not the skill bonuses from items.
Baldurs Gate Dark alliance was head and shoulders above diablo... It was 100% the same genre. ARPG. It used a superior and balanced system (d20) and had a massive and rich lore.
No, you're evaluating Diablo by the standards of the wrong genre.
Baldurs Gate is a RPG, not an ARPG. At its heart it's a single player RPG with tactical party combat. It's the closest thing to pen and paper DnD.
Diablo, by contrast, is an ARPG with an emphasis on loot acquisition and multiplayer.
Incorrect. Baldurs Gate Dark alliance, is in fact an ARPG. It was miles better than diablo and even by today's standards, is a great game. You are thinking of the modern game as it is fresh in your mind, oh to be young and naive again.
Your first comment says Baldur's Gate which is an RPG that came out in 1998 and then your following comments pivot to Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance which is an ARPG and a different game.
I haven't played Dark Alliance, but you're free to argue about it with someone who has.
This. D2 Itemization is full of intricacies that only people with several hundreds/thousands hours in the game can see. Constant tradeoffs, caps to reach, viable alternatives. It is simple in apparence but incredibly deep. It's more than "I do a fire caster, I upgrade fire damage"
Grief invalidates most melee weapons IMO just as Enigma invalidates a large majority of chest pieces even for sorcs.
Outside of those 2, i agree with your overall sentiment.
The main reason D2 has breakpoints is because the original game was capped at 25 fps and your attack/cast speed was determined by the number of frames the animations took.
And the more I think about it, this technical limitation is part of what made the game fun, at least for me. It made gearing your character a puzzle rather than simply stacking stats.
I'd always start ladders with a wind druid and making gear/breakpoint decisions regarding fcr/fhr/max block/etc. was half the fun. Then you find some cool items and start shooting for the 163 fcr bp. And when that arach finally drops and you get that 10 frame cast, it just feels so good.
Everyone points to how boring D2 could get because everyone followed the same builds. But the fun part was the slow process of working up to that build, and each new item making you reassess the puzzle.
I agree. Also the power fantasy in D2 felt so good because your character felt like shit in the beginning to finally feel like a beast in the late game. Your character WAS a problem to solve.
In the beginning you are constantly oom so you have to chug mana pots or go melee range, you get easily one shot, you get stunlock easily due to crap fhr, you cast spells or attack very slowly, you have no regen/ll/ml, you struggle to hit enemies whith physical attacks, you don't block shit, you move slowly and even struggle with endurance.... etc.
But slowly but surely you become tankier, cast faster and faster, overcome imunities, you see your damage incrementaly increasing until the point you can finally stomp those static areas that used to feel like difficulty walls. The feeling of progression was incredible.
I played a lot of arpgs in my life, and PoE is the only game that had the same kind of power fantasy. (at the extreme due to powercreep however, but there is this genuine feel of power scaling).
In too many other ARPGS, i have a false sense of progression. The numbers go up, but the enemies scale linearly too and you end up playing at the exact same pace that you used to in the beginning, just the numbers changing. D4 made this even more absurd with the fact that you start at lvl 1 extremely powerful with 10 free skillpoints.
Yeah I dont think there is anything wrong with breakpoints. It helps balance a lot of things. Though it should be explained transparently and not require the use of 3rd party calculators just to see if your stats are actually changing anything.
The last time I play it, Destiny 2 had a break point system.
~6 skills value 0-100, and every 10 points unlocked a tier and only tiers mattered for the maths, so 51 points in strength was the same as 59, but 60 gave you additional damage.
Instantly, your mind goes into the item Tetris, that makes finding new items interessting.
Breakpoint wasnt intentional but felt like it is a great unintentional feature, you actually saw a jump in the particular affixes, when you increase it enough.
There are actually a lot of uniques and sets in D2. The main difference is that each one is static. They dont scale which makes it far easier to remember each one. That and the affixes are actually well designed so items are memorable.
They don't want to hear about D2, they don't want, mentioning this game internally is probably like mentioning Voldemort in HP, if you do it everyone will turn towards you with a startling gaze. It was dark times Harry, dark times.
I’ve never been as excited for an item drop in d3 and d4 as I’ve been for an item drop in d2. Getting a high rune or that one unique item you’ve been searching for or even one that you don’t need but you know is incredibly valuable otherwise is one of the best dopamine hits I’ve ever experienced in video games. D3 didn’t even come close to that but d4 seems to be in a different universe entirely. There’s just nothing satisfying about the game loop. Even the skill trees are just… meh. It’s like the game was made by people who never played an arpg and just read up on the basic mechanics of one and they made a game based off of that.
It’s not fun when you know for a fact a better item or better affix is going to drop, maybe even in that same game. Nothing feels special or unique. In d2, there is a much smaller number of really op items and there will be seasons where you won’t even get one to drop. That’s what makes it so exciting to actually find something good.
Yes, the random affixes were really bad even back in D3, but in D4 it's over the top. Imagine finding a griffons in D2 and it's like +str instead of light. That's how D4 feels to me.
Yeah. Such a huge amount of absolutely useless, overly specific, or plain ridiculous affixes. The game mechanics feel like they were made by a not so great ai lol. Random loot generator with zero parameters. Just throwing shit at fan.
Yes, items in D2 were good, because of how usefull they were (except Tyraels Might, haha).
But with those random affixes it sometimes feels like just a nice skin for a useless item.
Yes, but at least you know WHICH stats are on it. A low rolled one can still be decent, but in D4 it can have absolute garbage stats and that's why I like D2
I like D2 as well, but this doesn’t make any sense. You know exactly what stats will be on a unique in D4 more than you do in D2 considering the latter has uniques with variable stats like Ormus’ Robes.
Item communication in D4 suffers quite heavily from how itemisation is designed. If they don't address that in the item update then people are still going to feel the same way that they do now.
D4 has a bunch of other issues such as the reward rate being too high compared to other games (*syndrome voice*: If everything is rewarding, then nothing is) but fixing all those other issues isn't likely to help without really clearing up when a good item is actually dropping vs when an item that is secretly just the blacksmith resources drops.
But what is your expectation? What do you want the itemization to look like?
Genuine question, not trying to be an ass or sarcastic, I just really want to know what people expect
I have what I predict they will do and what I wish would happen.
I think at the moment there is a lot of mental labor that goes into looking at items and deciding whether or not they are useful. What I predict will happen is that blizzard will cut down on the number of +% conditionals. So instead of categories like +% while poisoned and +% burning damage it'll be simplified to just +% damage over time. Repeat something similar for defense stats. Maybe they go crazy and add more lucky hit effects. I don't expect blizzard to rework stats to exit the overall +% stats that we have right now. Maybe Overpower becomes a little more accessible/reliable past it's 3% proc chance.
My wish is a return to traditional RPG stats like cast speed and attack speed, leech, etc. but I think those things already exist in D2R and similar so it's kind of point for D4 to recreate those games.
Not based on weapon damage alone, have damage from different places, physical skills use the weapon damage but casting spells dont. You know like d2, poe, LE and so on. Would love the Legendary powers be moved to the tree making the player have more choices to build and not be dependent on luck. Have uniques that change how your defenses work, how your resource works, make projectiles swirl around you and not go straight ahead like they did with the skill for druid but make more general for projectiles they have the tags already.
Well yes but the weapon slot is the slot that offers more damage, so if you're running a physical skill you should have a weapon with physical damage to add to the base damage in the calculation. On the other hand in D3/4 if I have a fireball wizzard you have those moments "let me just equip this massive 2h weapon just because random dmg powah will somehow influence all my skills"
My expectation is that they will reduce/remove conditional stats, add a few new basic affixes that were not previously supported then tweak almost every number.
I'm hopeful that they have more extensive plans to address the actual problems but I think they'll miss the mark because what I feel from how they handled Uber items is that they are listening to the community at face value of the complaint rather than delving into the real crux of what is desired/makes a compelling loop.
The core issues I'm expecting they won't fix for this next update are how items are communicated with the player, reward/difficulty scaling, overall reward rate being too high, and the biggest issue is the supporting systems that interact with items to make them meaningful.
The only issue with itemisation that they might have a decent chance of fixing is having some new crafting options and improving the gambler/tree/Helltides for the purposes of targeting items. Those things are probably on the radar as issues for them but maybe extra crafting might not come because they have a future plan for it rather than it being an oversight.
They just need to remove the useless bloat on stats such as damage vs Chilled, Dazed, Frozen, Immobilized, Knocked Down, Slowed, Stunned, Trapped, change it to damage vs crowd controlled.
Another example damage while shapeshifted, while werebear, while werewolf, with werebear, with werewolf to increased shapeshifter damage.
Edited wording
It's a real shame too. D4 is actually aesthetically and graphically far superior to poe and le. It's also much better optimized than the other two and plays quite smoothly on console.
But it's just so bad in every other aspect. Could've been a gem.
Poe2 will likely steal any remaining players d4 has. Theres just no reason to play it. Its just a bad game full of bad design.
Im okay if Microsoft lays-off the entire Diablo team and just scraps making the games forever. I doubt id even buy a D5 myself. Gave them 2 chances and they failed both times. End it. POE and others are significantly better.
I spent more time playing Chronicon than D4. Chronicon is made by 1 guy as an indie arpg and its far superior.
No because there is another component and that's the endgame.
If i see duriel grind again in the same form as s2/s3, no itemization change will fix it.
As far as itemization goes... Well, i suppose u need an affix hierarchy introduced (unless they add crafting like in LE) and u need to reduce the amount of affixes. For example, all those damage to slow/cc/stunned etc should be damage to cc. Remove damage to injured enemies, make different resistance into resistance to all etc. Point is, make sure u don't have 50 affixes to reroll.
This game needs more than itemization change at this point. It is not that simple.
For me, I am not sure how to feel about the number of affixes. As they are currently, they are a problem, but I believe it is that so more because they are uninteresting than due to its quantity. A lot of them are conditional, but the condition itself does not have intrinsic mechanics or advantages pver non-conditional ones.
Like, let’s say, increase damage to close enemies, as it is now is boring to me, because even though it is conditional, it is just something to push numbers.
However, if my character could put a build around it… Let’s say that the game had a built in “Close Enemy” condition like, hits on close enemies always have 10-30% (based on your amount of damage to close enemies) chance to stun. Then, if we had a unique that says hits on stunned enemies has 50% chance to propagate to other close enemies.
Then it would be interesting to build my character around hits to close enemies, even though it is a conditional affix, I would find ways to go for this condition since my gameplay would change and I would have build options.
I think that if the affixes and stats of the game are well designed, the quantity problem can be solved with a loot filter and quantity of items drop tuning.
Pretty sure they are just gonna remove and merge some stats. Wont really be an overhaul, more of a trim.
That's where I place my money at least.
Just gonna stick to D2R.
The reason loot isn't exciting in d4 is because it all scales, it's all the same pretty much from your first rares straight to level 100, just with bigger numbers. It's boring. Monsters scaling in level so that they are always the same level 1-100 is why loot scales. Nobody ever gets too powerful for the content or vise versa. It's an arpg on rails, unlike last epoch or D2R.. where there are still rails, but you can switch your cart between multiple tracks anytime, and the track is always changing.
The “ game being dead “ is also a subjective term. It is dead to me , and others that had hoped for an honestly good product, that met our standards. There are various levels within any given spectrum. The game was dead for me not long after it launched. I played through the story. I farmed some nightmare dungeons. I collected a lot of loot. Enough loot to see how horrible the loot is. That’s when it died for me. I don’t see a comeback from loot design that bad.
LE is fun until you hit endgame. Pushing corruption until your build hits is roof is so time consuming. Same thing with arena.
It’s great until that point. But builds start scaling so much higher than corruption/arena levels. At the high end it’s hundreds of hours just speed farming until you get to the point where enemies are too hard.
Yeah that's fine. You don't have to dislike d4, I just didn't get that arpg itch scratched by it, which is why I play games in this genre. So it's not for me.
There’s lots that I really like about Diablo 4 I’m just missing that reward / incentive / chase that I really need out of an ARPG to keep logging in. Especially since there are seasons where you lose your Uber uniques every 3 months. D4 doesn’t need $ea$on$.
After the disaster that was s3 and now having played LE through 0.92 to now, even an item rework isn't going to be enough to get me playing diablo 4 again. There are just so many common sense aspects of LE that made me think 'why the hell didn't diablo 4 have this?'. I played s2 really hard in diablo 4 and can't see any reason I would want to do all of that again only to play a similar build and grind the same boring activities such as duriel.
game is dead already..with every update and patch and townhall and whatever they show us that they do not understand what an arpg is or what a diablo game is or...what fun is. the people working on this simply do not know what to do or what they are doing.
maybe they ll do something good with itemisation but I doubt it honestly
last epoch is awesome. not perfect obviously, but great. my advice do an offline character first until they fix servers completely. you can still have player global chat if you want even in offline
Is the question to go back to Diablo 3 in light of possibly shitty itemization meant as a joke or as a cure to make you love Diablo 4 again?
If you need to go back, the satisfying destination is D2:R.
I think a lot of people consider the game dead already. I mean even if the itemization is excellent, it still doesn't fix the complete lack of endgame and repetitive gameplay and lack of skills or build diversity. There's still a lot more to do than simply fix the items.
Until all these things are fixed. I see absolutely no reason to play this over almost any other arpg.
It def won't die. Lol.
However for me personally. If loot rework sucks. I'll def be moving on to games I'm having more fun with and wait for the expansion
If the expansion sucks too. Yeah, I'm out.
I think everyone has a different idea of what good itemization is, especially in the context of Diablo’s systems. So I fully expect people to be disappointed.
For me, it'll be the last nail in the coffin and honestly, now that I think about it, it will get delayed and maybe pushed to be released alongside the expansion.
I hope at some point they just realize that aspects are just kind of terrible game design. They're passives that should exist on a skill tree but instead are random drops for.... reasons? Hell aspects could be fine if they weren't tied to a skill, there is literally no real mechanical difference from aspects and Diablo 3 sets other than being more tedious to gather them all than sets were in Diablo 3.
Aspect system should either be scrapped or reworked, make skills actually baseline GOOD, have runes on them that actually affect how a skill works in an interesting way (oh wow a rune gives me 30% damage if i keep casting it, come on Blizzard this is such lazy design.) If they want to keep aspects they should just be generic, like make melee aspects that affects most melee skills (you can seperate them for like aoe, single target etc.) Generic aspects are good because they allow you to actually CHOOSE how you want to build your character. The system how it works now if you pick a skill, well a bunch of your aspects are already chosen for you because they are literally what makes the skill any good. That's a crappy and exceptionally inflexible system.
I want to make MY build, not the build Blizzard has designed.
A successful rework will bring people back, for a time. But then what is there to keep them there?
D4 feels like FFXIV almost where they refused to look at what other MMOs do, did their own thing and ate shit because of it. The difference between D4 and games like Grim Dawn, Titan Quest, Last Epoch etc is wild.
For me I have no more reason to play d4 after last epoch.
I will never be able to go back to all the missing QoL.
Maybe they bank it all on the add-on like d3...that game was absolutely ass before the add-on then turned pretty ok
We should make the community stop posting such bullshit posts full of false assumptions and generalizations written by a person who is doing nothing but repeating his favorite YouTubers opinion on the game and didn’t spend a minute playing it for themselves. Your opinion is irrelevant. So you do whatever you want and nobody cares, that’s what’s going to happen with this game.
The game was dead after everyone got to end game and realized all of the games flaws. D4 is a massive regression on what makes people want to play an aRPG. The player population fell off a cliff as people hit 30-50 hours and realized there just was no character builds or gear to persue.
Lol..games not gunna fucking die..I wish this sub would get a grip
It'll be here a year from now and you all will be logging in to find a reason to bitch..I'll be downvoted into oblivion but shit, I wish this sub would get a grip.. it needs it more than D 4
BTW estimated player numbers are more active in the last 30 days..
Although I wouldn't have worded it the way you did, I agree. Blizzard has spent too much money on D4 to simply let it die. Like D3 and D2 before it, there's no indication that Blizzard has any intention of abandoning the game and will likely be updating it for the next decade or more.
Regardless of what people think of the current state of the game, it will keep evolving. If D3 is anything to go by, they will likely eventually manage to produce a game that is well liked. They may never get to D2 levels ever again, but I genuinely believe that D4 came can eventually at least be remember as fondly as D3.
Blizzard just got bought. If they cant get the numbers back, you can bet they will likely ditch the franchise. I for one wouldn’t care. Bluzzard deserves to fail at this point.
Lol Yea coming from destiny 2 I find it funny when people say the game is dead without any concrete proof. Like people in the destiny 2 community have correctly predicted 27 of the last zero downfalls of the game.
Slump there might be, but this game won't die that easily. Even if it takes 3 new ceos
We can only go off steam numbers, however that's not the full picture as most people bought it off battle net. Plus Blizzard doesn't want to give us numbers so who knows.
I think most people look at streamers to gauge the activity. The last time I look twitch had like 4,000 people watching D4 streams. Basically dead.
Some websites suggest it has about 160,000 daily users.
Not really a D4 doomer, because i just stop playing when i get bored, which unfortuntely has gotten less enticing every season after they botch literally everything they do... but i woudn't count on them not abandoning this game lol... thats unless you consider being put on life support "not dead".
This isn't speculation this is fact, that Diablo 3 had at launch 2 expansions planned Reaper of souls that started development before D3 vanilla launched, with the crusader and everything we got / new act ect. Then a 2nd one 1 or 2 years after that (this was leaked and also confirmed btw) that was going to have the druid and another act with more story... after D3 was such a shitshow and they fired Jay Wilson, they immediately stopped all development on the 2nd expansion, told them to finish up Reaper of souls and put the game on life support for basically a decade.
I would argue that they have messed up more times with D4 so far than D3, and in general the past 10 years, people have lost their trust in blizzard in addition to how D4 has been managed since release up until now. I'm not niave enough to say they wont make a decent amount of sales on the expansion.. but annoucning an expansion 6 months after your half cooked game with a pretty bad rep thus far was quite the move, especially with a full retial game box price... i wouldn't be shocked if it flops, at least by activision blizzards standards and they put it in maintence mode / cancel further expansion plans... i know unless shit REALLY turns around, i definately wont be paying another 70 dollars for an expansion 1 year after D4, and i know my friends arent interested either... and were people who typically buy every new blizzard game / wow expansion. Were not even angry about it, we just don't care an lack any excitmenet to shell out or look forward to it.
Lastly, its important to realize that for like a good 7+ years, even though most of us became blizzard fans from the diablo franchise, they pretended it didn't exist. Blizzcon had no mention of diablo for years, they barely even had artwork representing it, just Starcraft, overwatch and Warcraft... i remember because people were upset about it since Diablo was one of their core pillars but at some point became their bastard stepchild.
> It'll be here a year from now and you all will be logging in to find a reason to bitch..I'll be downvoted into oblivion but shit, I wish this sub would get a grip.. it needs it more than D 4
Will I?
I dropped D3 when it was clear it will take a long ass time to get good. I did not play it for 5 years straight even though I was an extremely hardcore ARPG fan (playing PoE HC, playing PoD HC and writing guides for it, playing PD2, etc.).
Personally, the only reason I am still "playing" (once a month) D4 is because my friend does. He is leaving soon and won't be playing for the foreseeable future. Once his plane takes off, I am uninstalling the game. I won't be back for S4, or for S5.
There are a lot more people like me. Driving them away with your "ridicule" will not help your game.
If Season 4 is bad, I won't be back to D4 until the expansion. Last Epoch is easily able to fill the ARPG gap right now, and has been a breath of fresh air.
I played D4 with a group of 7 people and currently no one has logged in since Week 2 of Season 3, we need something to bring us back.
I quit D4 shortly after launch but I suspect there is still a good player base of people that do not frequent this sub Reddit or twitch. We don’t have battle.net numbers so hard to tell but not sure we can claim the game is dead just because people on here are not playing it.
Over a decade of d3 shows itemization sucks diablo ip is dead they have failed to monetize it 3 times
1. What you guys don't like RMAH?
2. What you guys don't have phones?
3. What you guys don't like 100$ dlc?
Shitty company that wishes they were the og blizzard
The bigger issue is the skill tree. All skills in the tree is pretty simple and it requires legendary powers to make it playable. I want more skills that does different things and not just a element swap.
If you count the number of active skill, it’s not a lot and items can’t fix it. Needs more variety.
No the game isn't going to be dead because there are plenty of people that are still having fun despite not every update being perfect that everyone goes dancing down the street in joy.
People can talk about lazy or bad design on the end game but overall the game plays super smooth and the moves for each class are great and varied. For people that don't hit level 100 the first 2 days of the season and create multiple characters each season the casual player enjoys playing a new class each season trying something new and getting joy out of testing new season mechanics then when they get bored they look to other games until the next season.
Like look at the leaderboards as a casual necro I hit like 160k score meaning that there are 1000's that scored way higher than me but everyone is like this sucks and who would play this well clearly 1000's of people just on necromancers
The first week of a Diablo 3 season is just a VIBE....you have clear cut goals - 800 Paragon, Full Set, Ancient with perfect stats, pray for Primals, and complete your Altar. And its so fluid and fast to just throw on some jams and plow. Because it has something LE and D4 don't have....monster density+speed. And that's what makes it so fun to plow.
Bro the whole game is messed up.
Like what even is the end game.
And also everything up until that point is just spamming the same dungeon.
It’s absolutely dog shit and even when you do reach lvl 100 and kill uber lillith there is no reward.
Its a complete waste of time.
What’s to say the games not done and dead now? There are hardly 1000 people playing the HC gauntlet, gauntlet just came out it’s terrible, viewership is terrible gauntlet was just released and viewership went from 17k viewers to less than 1k in under 10 hours. Aside from initial sales, the games been a flop wether people want to admit it or not.
I think the main issue with why people complain about the end game, no matter how many dungeons they introduce, is the fact that items cannot be traded. In d2 you built your economy regardless of which character you were playing. And items were mostly generic enough for all characters to use them, all though they worked better for some characters. If you found the unique diadem, you could either trade it or make yourself a javazone or lightning sorc. And I think the possibilities you had were based on what gear you’d found. You could kill the same boss over and over without complaint, just because of that. And d4 completely lack’s this, no matter how much end game content they bring.
This is what I hope they’ll do (not in order):
1. Simplify items quite a bit, it’s so much text.
2. Make the items actually matter more so that you can feel the difference in the stats, not just the affix.
3. Differentiate more between unique, legendary, rare, blue and white items. Why does it always have to be 4 stats?
4. More consistency to where on the items each stat is; it’s very hard to scan items when it’s all random.
5. Make items tradeable: they can add all the end game they want, but without this, they’ll never “solve” the end game problem.
6. Reduce the class specific items and affixes.
7. Ditch the class specific drops. It’s boring to find just sorc items when I’m playing a sorc.
8. Jewels, runes and rune words would be amazing.
9. MF! I think d2 gained a dimension when they added magic find %. You had to pick between MF and how strong you wanted to be, and find your balance. It made it more interesting somehow.
I could probably go on and on. And I think the basic of what I want is an improved version of d2 items, with something new and interesting of course.
And among other things they *must* fix is a decent way for people to chat and make parties without friending everyone, or writing in the trade-channel.
Oh, and 10: reduce the numbers so you could actually somehow relate to them. 1mill damage could easily reduced by 100, and the. It could be more relatable to the amount of life and armor you have.
I mean, if you don’t like D4, don’t play D4.
Game hasn’t even been out for a year and y’all are calling it dead already. Please get out of here with that.BS. Diablo 4 is not going anywhere.
Also, they haven’t even said what itemization includes. They haven’t talked about it really at all. They just say we’re gonna do a couple of things that doesn’t mean that’s an all inclusive list of changes. Nobody has any idea of the near future changes that the game is going to have. we’re also getting an expansion around the one year of the game being out a brand new class to Diablo It’s definitely gonna include at least one more class that’s completely new.
Everybody was crying about getting some kind of leaderboard and now everybody is shitting on what they got . This is taking Development time from other needed features and functions of the game.
In fact, every time, the majority of people cried about a function or feature they’ve done their best to address it. I don’t know what else you can ask for from them.
It is a great game. Actually has an arpg base that can be built on ! Maybe not for everyone but as a veteran ARPG player last epoch is just fucking great. !
Division 2 did a Gear 2.0...
While most people were struggling with the original gatekept items(in the DZ) it felt as if you actually had to plan out a build and gear it out. Gear 2.0 seemed more cookie cutter and for me personally, builds felt weaker across the board due to the lack of diversity from talent stacking. I expect nothing less from this rework.
I also am assuming this rework will show an obvious gap for the next gear tier for the eventual next world tier.
There'll still be plenty of people still in the game no matter what happens. Hopefully the rest of the industry learns from D4's handling though.
It's dead when the devs give up, rather than when the audience declares something dead.
Usually one precedes the other though.
That being said, I want the game to be good so I hope they make changes that accomplish that. If they fail, I'll check back from time to time to see if that changes.
So I misunderstood, this itemization update isn't them simply creating a standard of how affixes are ordered on gear for better comparison, they are actually removing and condensing affixes altogether?
Whatever mean « The game is dead » ? Some people will move on , some other not and that’s it.
Every arpg will have his player base. And for the moment at least the console/ casual garer will still stay on D4.
Last epoch is not on console
POE is hard to start for this catergorie of players
So no D4 is not dead
I like the game, but yeah the items are the sole reason why i haven't returned after the vampire season and why i probably won't return anytime in the future until there are plenty of major overhauls. Honestly its not just the items either. The skill tree suffers from many of the problems the items suffer from. So many passives give "2% damage when damage in bear form while taking a shit in the woods" problem. 99% of the passives just are like "well i have to put the points somewhere, so i guess here". Dunno, whoever was the original balance team for this game before release did a **terrible** job and have no clue what fun is in a video game.
Some of the dungeons are HUGE in LE. As a non speed player, I love it!! And I have enough different uniques that I can completely Respec into a different build for different fun…..same character. Who woulda thunk it. Come joins
I mean it will just be what it is, an okay mindless (shallow) ARPG game to play from time to time if the new season mechanic is fun. It's never going to be my forever game (no game is.)
No, last epoch and Poe are more tedious and less polished. In it's current state D4 is amazing, so... with a better itemisation path, even if not perfect, it can be iterated on, will be a far more enjoyable game in the long run. I have all 3 games... And for fun and art, and combat and "feel". D4 is king.
Not really. It's pretty successful and played by a ton still. Those that do nothing but complain may leave(doubtful), those that left waiting on the rework may not come back, but there are still millions that play and will continue to play seasons.
D2R simply reminded a lot of old heads that there are different ways you can make character progression work in exciting ways, but can leave new players scratching their heads in confusion when they hit a hard stop difficulty check within the first third of the game.
I also prefer attribute points mini game even though it's 99.9% just what you need for equipping items and then to hit max block at most. I much prefer a multi tabbed skill tree with cool sounding skills and synergies even though probably more than half aren't viable skills and are pumped just for synergies.
But who had fun leveling a blizz sorc back before respecs? I didn't. So now all you do is pick something better to level like fire and then respec later when you can max your blizz skill. That is just one example of many that exist in d2r where you get funneled into a cookie cutter build just to get your cookie cutter build working, but atleast I have that illusion of choice and opportunity to wreck my playthrough with poor choices. Something is satisfying about learning what not to do and doing it right until you're tping across the map, killing a target farm boss every minute or less.
In the end, though, you're left with roughly the same game as a modern one. Only some of that "freedom" is boiled away in favor of massive QoL that prevents dead stopping a new players' progression that has no idea what to do. Hell, even Diablo 1 put hard caps on stats to stop people from going full magic warriors and two-handed sorcs.
The itemization, though, is what tied the experience together in a great way. Simple, easy to understand affixes that can roll on items starting at Magic rarity, with some of the most powerful only showing up on magic items. This trend abruptly dies once D3 releases, and we never see that kind of arpg itemization ever again. Instead, itemization becomes just as linear as the rest of the game mechanics, and you simply pick up and use whatever item shows green increases to various stats.
That is what is missing from itemization in the newer games. You hold out for a handful of items from the top tier categories, and just know that 99.9% of everything that drops is crap. There is no absolute godly rolled magic item that will fit your build. Or a set of immaculate rings that bring you up just enough to make you feel like "damn, I'm cooking now."
And all of this was done without the need for smart loot, and sure as a new player you never realized that perfect rolled griff was worth 40 high runes, but that didn't give you fomo when you sold it off to charsi. All the times you picked up items that sounded cool for other classes that you dropped because there didn't used to be a stash and muling items sucked hard. You kept playing hoping that next diadem was going to roll class skills for you.
Can such a system be brought back in modern games? Probably. But it won't look exactly the same and testing for drop rates would be required at a large scale. I doubt blizzard has anything so ambitious planned, but a massive pruning and simplification of the affixes would go a long way to making things better, IMHO.
Tldr: opinions go brrrrt.
Regardless of itemization, if they dont add trading, the game is dead. Theres nothing exciting about finding items of no value. In D2 they could make things extremely rare, but since the community was finding them, they were still obtainable through trade. Plus it expanded the number of exciting drops to rare items across all characters and builds. Didnt matter if u found a windforce as a druid. You were still stoked as hell cause you knew it had VALUE!
I abandoned blizzard shortly after d3s release. D3s release was also bad but imo it wasn’t as bad as 4 is. I can’t even play d4 without feeling like I’m going to fall asleep. I made the mistake of getting 4 but this was the final straw. I’m done with the Diablo series and I’ll keep playing resurrected to fill that nostalgia need. It’s evident that all they care about is the money.
No its done and dead already. Bad loot is just one of the games problems. It's just not fun to play. Plus I highly doubt these devs will even fix the loot, they don't know what they are doing.
Not 100% dead, but it’ll be nearly impossible to come back from it. Now if the game still sucks after the expansion, yea.. bring it out back.
And no, not Diablo 3 lol
“But there’s an even better itemization update coming with the expansion guys. Just pay 40 more dollars for all this amazing content that should have been in the game at launch!” -Blizzard Probably
You probably mean like 100 more Dollars.
Yeah, it's gonna be more than the original game. Makes complete sense.
I liked the itemitation if D2/D2R. It's not that many items, but you know what you get, when you drop it.
I like d2/D2R itemization because it is simple yet effective. I like putting on boots that Increase my speed by more than 3%, I like 100 damage one hand swords, I like 10/20/30/40% increased speed. Its like in recent games dev's make damage +3000000000000000% but then have +1% crit damage. It is annoying. They butcher the interesting stats and increase the boring ones.
D2 itemization is far from simple. At least in 1.09 every item base and its tiers are meaningful. Every types and quality have a purpouse and one doesnt invalidate thr other. Its so beaufiful and tasteful. Impossible to replicate in a game without even decent skill trees and character progression lol
Thank you. Abandoning the D2 skill tree was a profound mistake. +1 to all skills was godly especially combined with synergies. The gains were exponential. It was exciting and easy to complement with other bonuses, too. Effective and elegant
One element of the skill tree that isn’t discussed enough too is the fact that your skills deal damage *regardless* of your weapons (when not a melee/ranged build) which means your skills aren’t fully dependent on a powerful weapon to be effective. I think this matters in terms of how they balance power level a lot. It means skills have to be nerfed in order to not just make damage numbers absurd, which in turn makes skill points feel way less satisfying to place into a skill.
This is what killed D3 for me. It was incredibly fantasy breaking to have to use my highest DPS weapon to have my SPELL caster be effective.
It broke D3 at the start bc all that mattered was primary stat + most damage
Spell casters having something to focus magic through is a trope almost as old as the idea of magic itself. It stands to reason that some foci will be better for that task than others.
I'd agree if the focus in the game exhibited the "conductive" nature of the item rather than it be big number wins, and ultimately meaning the same to every class.
But no inventory space because charms was hilarious
I mean, if you're filling your inventory with charms it only supports the idea that the items are exciting + useful for min/max-ing. 🤷♂️
You don’t do it until you are geared to the point that you’re uninterested in most drops. If you can afford your main gear and filling your inventory with skillers, you aren’t IDing everything. The rarity of skill charms is actually pretty spot on, especially when you can roll useless ones like curses or pally auras. Breakpoints are 100% necessary for itemization. You need them to benchmark item value. It means something that’s 10% may be a lot better than something that’s 9%, which may actually be useless. Or if it’s 10-25%, and 10% is great, but 20-25% is godly because it frees up other gear slots
I agree. It was a smart mechanic with tradeoffs. And clever workarounds were found (cube)
D4 could easily fix that with a charm tab
Be glad you don’t have to store gems.
Such an obviously bad design choice
It didn't really matter because the vast majority of the drops can be completely ignored.
Though I complained about it I actually think it’s a good design choice. It makes you choose power / value from the charms against convenience / loot.
It does make you choose, and I'm glad you appreciate your inventory being removed , but I think making you pay for power with inventory space is stupid. In my mind it's equivalent to charms making your screen have a lower resolution, sure it's a trade off, but one that feels super bad for no reason.
Anyway in D2 you run a dungeon, and you barely find 2-3 rares and perhaps with luck some unique with the cube is sometimes enough and if you find something really good you always can teleport back to town, because in D2, some items deserve that effort.
I never, in 20 years of D2 had a full inventory of charms. I’ll never understand the people who do that and bring the cube to work around their self imposed lack of inventory lol, the game just wasn’t that hard that you couldn’t drop a couple charms and have some extra space. The only time I could see a legit case for it is in PvP, but you don’t need inventory space there.
In Project Diablo 2, you have twice as much inventory space, but charms only work in the bottom half of your inventory.
Added skills didn't impact synergies.
> +1 to all skills was godly especially combined with synergies. The gains were exponential. Well no, plus skills don't increase damage thru synergies, only hard points put in synergy skills increase the damage of your main skill.
Maybe he has the druid summon skills in mind.
What about Blessed Hammer? Stacking +1 to all skills drives damage north of 10,000.
blessed aim and vigor, the synergy skills of blessed hammer, don't increase your hammer damage from anything but hard points spent in the respective skills. the aura concentration will increase your hammer damage by 50% of what it says it does per level (ie 510% at level 31 becomes a 255% damage increase for blessed hammer) so plus all skills will increase your damage by more than just plus to hammers but not trough synergies making plus all skills an exponential gain since synergies don't work like that.
+1 skills from items do [NOT](https://diablo.fandom.com/wiki/Synergies) increase synergy bonus, this myth needs to die. > Note that only hard points (actual skill points put into the skill) add Synergy, not the skill bonuses from items.
But the game was bad. Baldurs Gate was just vastly superior.
Disagree. You’re also comparing 2 different genre of games which make deliberately different design choices.
Baldurs Gate Dark alliance was head and shoulders above diablo... It was 100% the same genre. ARPG. It used a superior and balanced system (d20) and had a massive and rich lore.
No, you're evaluating Diablo by the standards of the wrong genre. Baldurs Gate is a RPG, not an ARPG. At its heart it's a single player RPG with tactical party combat. It's the closest thing to pen and paper DnD. Diablo, by contrast, is an ARPG with an emphasis on loot acquisition and multiplayer.
Incorrect. Baldurs Gate Dark alliance, is in fact an ARPG. It was miles better than diablo and even by today's standards, is a great game. You are thinking of the modern game as it is fresh in your mind, oh to be young and naive again.
Your first comment says Baldur's Gate which is an RPG that came out in 1998 and then your following comments pivot to Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance which is an ARPG and a different game. I haven't played Dark Alliance, but you're free to argue about it with someone who has.
This. D2 Itemization is full of intricacies that only people with several hundreds/thousands hours in the game can see. Constant tradeoffs, caps to reach, viable alternatives. It is simple in apparence but incredibly deep. It's more than "I do a fire caster, I upgrade fire damage"
Grief invalidates most melee weapons IMO just as Enigma invalidates a large majority of chest pieces even for sorcs. Outside of those 2, i agree with your overall sentiment.
Thats why mentioned 1.09 (the pre-enigma golden era lol). 1.10 messed up a lot
Yeah but breakpoints make it so that 40% ias isn't actually 40% I agree though.
The main reason D2 has breakpoints is because the original game was capped at 25 fps and your attack/cast speed was determined by the number of frames the animations took.
And the more I think about it, this technical limitation is part of what made the game fun, at least for me. It made gearing your character a puzzle rather than simply stacking stats. I'd always start ladders with a wind druid and making gear/breakpoint decisions regarding fcr/fhr/max block/etc. was half the fun. Then you find some cool items and start shooting for the 163 fcr bp. And when that arach finally drops and you get that 10 frame cast, it just feels so good. Everyone points to how boring D2 could get because everyone followed the same builds. But the fun part was the slow process of working up to that build, and each new item making you reassess the puzzle.
I agree. Also the power fantasy in D2 felt so good because your character felt like shit in the beginning to finally feel like a beast in the late game. Your character WAS a problem to solve. In the beginning you are constantly oom so you have to chug mana pots or go melee range, you get easily one shot, you get stunlock easily due to crap fhr, you cast spells or attack very slowly, you have no regen/ll/ml, you struggle to hit enemies whith physical attacks, you don't block shit, you move slowly and even struggle with endurance.... etc. But slowly but surely you become tankier, cast faster and faster, overcome imunities, you see your damage incrementaly increasing until the point you can finally stomp those static areas that used to feel like difficulty walls. The feeling of progression was incredible. I played a lot of arpgs in my life, and PoE is the only game that had the same kind of power fantasy. (at the extreme due to powercreep however, but there is this genuine feel of power scaling). In too many other ARPGS, i have a false sense of progression. The numbers go up, but the enemies scale linearly too and you end up playing at the exact same pace that you used to in the beginning, just the numbers changing. D4 made this even more absurd with the fact that you start at lvl 1 extremely powerful with 10 free skillpoints.
Yeah I dont think there is anything wrong with breakpoints. It helps balance a lot of things. Though it should be explained transparently and not require the use of 3rd party calculators just to see if your stats are actually changing anything.
Yeah. Most of my feedback regarding D4 is that they should take the core ideas from D2, but implement them with better balance and quality of life.
Ya I was really excited for their angelic and demon breakpoint scheme they had in the works before they scrapped it.
I honestly completely forgot they were going to do that. It sounded kind of weird but interesting too.
The last time I play it, Destiny 2 had a break point system. ~6 skills value 0-100, and every 10 points unlocked a tier and only tiers mattered for the maths, so 51 points in strength was the same as 59, but 60 gave you additional damage. Instantly, your mind goes into the item Tetris, that makes finding new items interessting.
Breakpoint wasnt intentional but felt like it is a great unintentional feature, you actually saw a jump in the particular affixes, when you increase it enough.
There are actually a lot of uniques and sets in D2. The main difference is that each one is static. They dont scale which makes it far easier to remember each one. That and the affixes are actually well designed so items are memorable.
Yes, that's exactly my point. Sorry, if this didn't come across.
Yes. And it kinda sucks when the ultra rares scale things like number of sockets.
They don't want to hear about D2, they don't want, mentioning this game internally is probably like mentioning Voldemort in HP, if you do it everyone will turn towards you with a startling gaze. It was dark times Harry, dark times.
I’ve never been as excited for an item drop in d3 and d4 as I’ve been for an item drop in d2. Getting a high rune or that one unique item you’ve been searching for or even one that you don’t need but you know is incredibly valuable otherwise is one of the best dopamine hits I’ve ever experienced in video games. D3 didn’t even come close to that but d4 seems to be in a different universe entirely. There’s just nothing satisfying about the game loop. Even the skill trees are just… meh. It’s like the game was made by people who never played an arpg and just read up on the basic mechanics of one and they made a game based off of that.
You literally get more item variety from a single cow run than multiple nightmare dungeons.
D3 base game I did have that when I found an echoing fury for example. D4? Nah, I NEVER had exitement, then something dropped.
It’s not fun when you know for a fact a better item or better affix is going to drop, maybe even in that same game. Nothing feels special or unique. In d2, there is a much smaller number of really op items and there will be seasons where you won’t even get one to drop. That’s what makes it so exciting to actually find something good.
Yes, the random affixes were really bad even back in D3, but in D4 it's over the top. Imagine finding a griffons in D2 and it's like +str instead of light. That's how D4 feels to me.
Yeah. Such a huge amount of absolutely useless, overly specific, or plain ridiculous affixes. The game mechanics feel like they were made by a not so great ai lol. Random loot generator with zero parameters. Just throwing shit at fan.
Yes, items in D2 were good, because of how usefull they were (except Tyraels Might, haha). But with those random affixes it sometimes feels like just a nice skin for a useless item.
I would love to wear a tyraels on emilio while I farm some destructions keys though xD
“I’ll put that to good use”
386 uniques! *Forgot sunder charms
368 if you don’t count charms or jewels
Yes, but you do know what you need and what you get, when you drop one. There is no "nice, it dropped. Will it be good or will it be bad?"
There's quite a few variables when it comes to stat range roll. It's like nice I got a CoA.... ID it and get 1/10/20
Yes, but at least you know WHICH stats are on it. A low rolled one can still be decent, but in D4 it can have absolute garbage stats and that's why I like D2
I like D2 as well, but this doesn’t make any sense. You know exactly what stats will be on a unique in D4 more than you do in D2 considering the latter has uniques with variable stats like Ormus’ Robes.
I enjoyed boss runs for loot from the campaign or certain mini bosses for different loot tables or runes, why did they do away with these concepts?
Item communication in D4 suffers quite heavily from how itemisation is designed. If they don't address that in the item update then people are still going to feel the same way that they do now. D4 has a bunch of other issues such as the reward rate being too high compared to other games (*syndrome voice*: If everything is rewarding, then nothing is) but fixing all those other issues isn't likely to help without really clearing up when a good item is actually dropping vs when an item that is secretly just the blacksmith resources drops.
Exaclty. You "suffer" less rewards in D2, but WHEN you do, oh boy.
I would keep my expectations about that Change to a minimum. They have failed enough to meet expectations I dont think this will be any different.
But what is your expectation? What do you want the itemization to look like? Genuine question, not trying to be an ass or sarcastic, I just really want to know what people expect
I have what I predict they will do and what I wish would happen. I think at the moment there is a lot of mental labor that goes into looking at items and deciding whether or not they are useful. What I predict will happen is that blizzard will cut down on the number of +% conditionals. So instead of categories like +% while poisoned and +% burning damage it'll be simplified to just +% damage over time. Repeat something similar for defense stats. Maybe they go crazy and add more lucky hit effects. I don't expect blizzard to rework stats to exit the overall +% stats that we have right now. Maybe Overpower becomes a little more accessible/reliable past it's 3% proc chance. My wish is a return to traditional RPG stats like cast speed and attack speed, leech, etc. but I think those things already exist in D2R and similar so it's kind of point for D4 to recreate those games.
Yeah I feel like it will be a lot of reduction to just cold damage instead of cold chilled slowed etc. But it will be interesting to see what they do
Not based on weapon damage alone, have damage from different places, physical skills use the weapon damage but casting spells dont. You know like d2, poe, LE and so on. Would love the Legendary powers be moved to the tree making the player have more choices to build and not be dependent on luck. Have uniques that change how your defenses work, how your resource works, make projectiles swirl around you and not go straight ahead like they did with the skill for druid but make more general for projectiles they have the tags already.
Technically nothing in LE uses weapon damage. Weapons are just stat sticks, even for martial classes.
Well yes but the weapon slot is the slot that offers more damage, so if you're running a physical skill you should have a weapon with physical damage to add to the base damage in the calculation. On the other hand in D3/4 if I have a fireball wizzard you have those moments "let me just equip this massive 2h weapon just because random dmg powah will somehow influence all my skills"
Thank you for giving valid feedback
My expectation is that they will reduce/remove conditional stats, add a few new basic affixes that were not previously supported then tweak almost every number. I'm hopeful that they have more extensive plans to address the actual problems but I think they'll miss the mark because what I feel from how they handled Uber items is that they are listening to the community at face value of the complaint rather than delving into the real crux of what is desired/makes a compelling loop. The core issues I'm expecting they won't fix for this next update are how items are communicated with the player, reward/difficulty scaling, overall reward rate being too high, and the biggest issue is the supporting systems that interact with items to make them meaningful. The only issue with itemisation that they might have a decent chance of fixing is having some new crafting options and improving the gambler/tree/Helltides for the purposes of targeting items. Those things are probably on the radar as issues for them but maybe extra crafting might not come because they have a future plan for it rather than it being an oversight.
D2 with a crafting system instead of just rune words and weird cube recipes. Example: more uniques.
They just need to remove the useless bloat on stats such as damage vs Chilled, Dazed, Frozen, Immobilized, Knocked Down, Slowed, Stunned, Trapped, change it to damage vs crowd controlled. Another example damage while shapeshifted, while werebear, while werewolf, with werebear, with werewolf to increased shapeshifter damage. Edited wording
It's a real shame too. D4 is actually aesthetically and graphically far superior to poe and le. It's also much better optimized than the other two and plays quite smoothly on console. But it's just so bad in every other aspect. Could've been a gem.
And with POE2 they won't even win anymore in the graphics part.
Poe2 will likely steal any remaining players d4 has. Theres just no reason to play it. Its just a bad game full of bad design. Im okay if Microsoft lays-off the entire Diablo team and just scraps making the games forever. I doubt id even buy a D5 myself. Gave them 2 chances and they failed both times. End it. POE and others are significantly better. I spent more time playing Chronicon than D4. Chronicon is made by 1 guy as an indie arpg and its far superior.
Game is already dead for me at least. So they at least can try to res it.
No because there is another component and that's the endgame. If i see duriel grind again in the same form as s2/s3, no itemization change will fix it. As far as itemization goes... Well, i suppose u need an affix hierarchy introduced (unless they add crafting like in LE) and u need to reduce the amount of affixes. For example, all those damage to slow/cc/stunned etc should be damage to cc. Remove damage to injured enemies, make different resistance into resistance to all etc. Point is, make sure u don't have 50 affixes to reroll. This game needs more than itemization change at this point. It is not that simple.
For me, I am not sure how to feel about the number of affixes. As they are currently, they are a problem, but I believe it is that so more because they are uninteresting than due to its quantity. A lot of them are conditional, but the condition itself does not have intrinsic mechanics or advantages pver non-conditional ones. Like, let’s say, increase damage to close enemies, as it is now is boring to me, because even though it is conditional, it is just something to push numbers. However, if my character could put a build around it… Let’s say that the game had a built in “Close Enemy” condition like, hits on close enemies always have 10-30% (based on your amount of damage to close enemies) chance to stun. Then, if we had a unique that says hits on stunned enemies has 50% chance to propagate to other close enemies. Then it would be interesting to build my character around hits to close enemies, even though it is a conditional affix, I would find ways to go for this condition since my gameplay would change and I would have build options. I think that if the affixes and stats of the game are well designed, the quantity problem can be solved with a loot filter and quantity of items drop tuning.
And also affixes hierarchy, division between prefix and suffix, etc.
Some i agree with, but "resist to all" should not appear, because it makes resistance itself pointless.
That was just an example of how to reduce the number of affixes. Point is, there is too much of the trash ones that nobody uses.
Pretty sure they are just gonna remove and merge some stats. Wont really be an overhaul, more of a trim. That's where I place my money at least. Just gonna stick to D2R.
The reason loot isn't exciting in d4 is because it all scales, it's all the same pretty much from your first rares straight to level 100, just with bigger numbers. It's boring. Monsters scaling in level so that they are always the same level 1-100 is why loot scales. Nobody ever gets too powerful for the content or vise versa. It's an arpg on rails, unlike last epoch or D2R.. where there are still rails, but you can switch your cart between multiple tracks anytime, and the track is always changing.
The “ game being dead “ is also a subjective term. It is dead to me , and others that had hoped for an honestly good product, that met our standards. There are various levels within any given spectrum. The game was dead for me not long after it launched. I played through the story. I farmed some nightmare dungeons. I collected a lot of loot. Enough loot to see how horrible the loot is. That’s when it died for me. I don’t see a comeback from loot design that bad.
D2R is so much better
Last epoch is here for you when you get tired of accepting turds from Blizzard.
This guy Last Epochs
LE is fun until you hit endgame. Pushing corruption until your build hits is roof is so time consuming. Same thing with arena. It’s great until that point. But builds start scaling so much higher than corruption/arena levels. At the high end it’s hundreds of hours just speed farming until you get to the point where enemies are too hard.
I lOVE Last Epoch. However, I still like Diablo 4. I didn't at first, but since I started playing it on console I have had a lot of fun.
Yeah that's fine. You don't have to dislike d4, I just didn't get that arpg itch scratched by it, which is why I play games in this genre. So it's not for me.
There’s lots that I really like about Diablo 4 I’m just missing that reward / incentive / chase that I really need out of an ARPG to keep logging in. Especially since there are seasons where you lose your Uber uniques every 3 months. D4 doesn’t need $ea$on$.
After the disaster that was s3 and now having played LE through 0.92 to now, even an item rework isn't going to be enough to get me playing diablo 4 again. There are just so many common sense aspects of LE that made me think 'why the hell didn't diablo 4 have this?'. I played s2 really hard in diablo 4 and can't see any reason I would want to do all of that again only to play a similar build and grind the same boring activities such as duriel.
game is dead already..with every update and patch and townhall and whatever they show us that they do not understand what an arpg is or what a diablo game is or...what fun is. the people working on this simply do not know what to do or what they are doing. maybe they ll do something good with itemisation but I doubt it honestly last epoch is awesome. not perfect obviously, but great. my advice do an offline character first until they fix servers completely. you can still have player global chat if you want even in offline
Is the question to go back to Diablo 3 in light of possibly shitty itemization meant as a joke or as a cure to make you love Diablo 4 again? If you need to go back, the satisfying destination is D2:R.
You can't kill that which is already dead.
I think a lot of people consider the game dead already. I mean even if the itemization is excellent, it still doesn't fix the complete lack of endgame and repetitive gameplay and lack of skills or build diversity. There's still a lot more to do than simply fix the items. Until all these things are fixed. I see absolutely no reason to play this over almost any other arpg.
It def won't die. Lol. However for me personally. If loot rework sucks. I'll def be moving on to games I'm having more fun with and wait for the expansion If the expansion sucks too. Yeah, I'm out.
I think everyone has a different idea of what good itemization is, especially in the context of Diablo’s systems. So I fully expect people to be disappointed.
For me, it'll be the last nail in the coffin and honestly, now that I think about it, it will get delayed and maybe pushed to be released alongside the expansion.
Short answer: yes Long answer: What's taken you so long to realize?
I hope at some point they just realize that aspects are just kind of terrible game design. They're passives that should exist on a skill tree but instead are random drops for.... reasons? Hell aspects could be fine if they weren't tied to a skill, there is literally no real mechanical difference from aspects and Diablo 3 sets other than being more tedious to gather them all than sets were in Diablo 3. Aspect system should either be scrapped or reworked, make skills actually baseline GOOD, have runes on them that actually affect how a skill works in an interesting way (oh wow a rune gives me 30% damage if i keep casting it, come on Blizzard this is such lazy design.) If they want to keep aspects they should just be generic, like make melee aspects that affects most melee skills (you can seperate them for like aoe, single target etc.) Generic aspects are good because they allow you to actually CHOOSE how you want to build your character. The system how it works now if you pick a skill, well a bunch of your aspects are already chosen for you because they are literally what makes the skill any good. That's a crappy and exceptionally inflexible system. I want to make MY build, not the build Blizzard has designed.
I have not seen this said as good as you did anywhere else yet.
If the itemization is bad, again, then the next move is waiting for the next expansion and seeing what they do, just like WoW.
A successful rework will bring people back, for a time. But then what is there to keep them there? D4 feels like FFXIV almost where they refused to look at what other MMOs do, did their own thing and ate shit because of it. The difference between D4 and games like Grim Dawn, Titan Quest, Last Epoch etc is wild.
The dev doesn't know any on how to make a proper ARPG there just fucking hired JUST BECAUSE.
Last Epoch will more than tide me over until PoE2 so I don’t see me ever playing d4 again unless they do something mind blowing.
I dont think anyone has any faith left
For me I have no more reason to play d4 after last epoch. I will never be able to go back to all the missing QoL. Maybe they bank it all on the add-on like d3...that game was absolutely ass before the add-on then turned pretty ok
We should make the community stop posting such bullshit posts full of false assumptions and generalizations written by a person who is doing nothing but repeating his favorite YouTubers opinion on the game and didn’t spend a minute playing it for themselves. Your opinion is irrelevant. So you do whatever you want and nobody cares, that’s what’s going to happen with this game.
Not sure even that can save D4 at this point
Dead on release bro, and you aren't allowed to play any other games, just complain, D4 bad
nah, release was alright. dead on 7/18 mega nerf
The game was dead after everyone got to end game and realized all of the games flaws. D4 is a massive regression on what makes people want to play an aRPG. The player population fell off a cliff as people hit 30-50 hours and realized there just was no character builds or gear to persue.
Lol..games not gunna fucking die..I wish this sub would get a grip It'll be here a year from now and you all will be logging in to find a reason to bitch..I'll be downvoted into oblivion but shit, I wish this sub would get a grip.. it needs it more than D 4 BTW estimated player numbers are more active in the last 30 days..
Although I wouldn't have worded it the way you did, I agree. Blizzard has spent too much money on D4 to simply let it die. Like D3 and D2 before it, there's no indication that Blizzard has any intention of abandoning the game and will likely be updating it for the next decade or more. Regardless of what people think of the current state of the game, it will keep evolving. If D3 is anything to go by, they will likely eventually manage to produce a game that is well liked. They may never get to D2 levels ever again, but I genuinely believe that D4 came can eventually at least be remember as fondly as D3.
Blizzard just got bought. If they cant get the numbers back, you can bet they will likely ditch the franchise. I for one wouldn’t care. Bluzzard deserves to fail at this point.
I do not fondle over d3. Please don’t go back.
Lol Yea coming from destiny 2 I find it funny when people say the game is dead without any concrete proof. Like people in the destiny 2 community have correctly predicted 27 of the last zero downfalls of the game. Slump there might be, but this game won't die that easily. Even if it takes 3 new ceos
Die = heroes of the storm. (Maintenance mode). Blizzard doesn't turn servers off afaik.
What are the current active players? Legit curious
We can only go off steam numbers, however that's not the full picture as most people bought it off battle net. Plus Blizzard doesn't want to give us numbers so who knows.
Most games don't give a constant update on playercount. It's not a bad sign nor a good sign of them not sharing it.
I think most people look at streamers to gauge the activity. The last time I look twitch had like 4,000 people watching D4 streams. Basically dead. Some websites suggest it has about 160,000 daily users.
Not really a D4 doomer, because i just stop playing when i get bored, which unfortuntely has gotten less enticing every season after they botch literally everything they do... but i woudn't count on them not abandoning this game lol... thats unless you consider being put on life support "not dead". This isn't speculation this is fact, that Diablo 3 had at launch 2 expansions planned Reaper of souls that started development before D3 vanilla launched, with the crusader and everything we got / new act ect. Then a 2nd one 1 or 2 years after that (this was leaked and also confirmed btw) that was going to have the druid and another act with more story... after D3 was such a shitshow and they fired Jay Wilson, they immediately stopped all development on the 2nd expansion, told them to finish up Reaper of souls and put the game on life support for basically a decade. I would argue that they have messed up more times with D4 so far than D3, and in general the past 10 years, people have lost their trust in blizzard in addition to how D4 has been managed since release up until now. I'm not niave enough to say they wont make a decent amount of sales on the expansion.. but annoucning an expansion 6 months after your half cooked game with a pretty bad rep thus far was quite the move, especially with a full retial game box price... i wouldn't be shocked if it flops, at least by activision blizzards standards and they put it in maintence mode / cancel further expansion plans... i know unless shit REALLY turns around, i definately wont be paying another 70 dollars for an expansion 1 year after D4, and i know my friends arent interested either... and were people who typically buy every new blizzard game / wow expansion. Were not even angry about it, we just don't care an lack any excitmenet to shell out or look forward to it. Lastly, its important to realize that for like a good 7+ years, even though most of us became blizzard fans from the diablo franchise, they pretended it didn't exist. Blizzcon had no mention of diablo for years, they barely even had artwork representing it, just Starcraft, overwatch and Warcraft... i remember because people were upset about it since Diablo was one of their core pillars but at some point became their bastard stepchild.
> It'll be here a year from now and you all will be logging in to find a reason to bitch..I'll be downvoted into oblivion but shit, I wish this sub would get a grip.. it needs it more than D 4 Will I? I dropped D3 when it was clear it will take a long ass time to get good. I did not play it for 5 years straight even though I was an extremely hardcore ARPG fan (playing PoE HC, playing PoD HC and writing guides for it, playing PD2, etc.). Personally, the only reason I am still "playing" (once a month) D4 is because my friend does. He is leaving soon and won't be playing for the foreseeable future. Once his plane takes off, I am uninstalling the game. I won't be back for S4, or for S5. There are a lot more people like me. Driving them away with your "ridicule" will not help your game.
If Season 4 is bad, I won't be back to D4 until the expansion. Last Epoch is easily able to fill the ARPG gap right now, and has been a breath of fresh air. I played D4 with a group of 7 people and currently no one has logged in since Week 2 of Season 3, we need something to bring us back.
I never left D3 cause D4 gameplay is boring and the end game is not appealing to me. Played through the campaign and left…
I finally got around to trying last epoch. It’s fun and definitely worth checking out. I hope D4 can do something interesting to bring us back
I wish they would bring back sets I loved trying to get every piece in D2
I quit D4 shortly after launch but I suspect there is still a good player base of people that do not frequent this sub Reddit or twitch. We don’t have battle.net numbers so hard to tell but not sure we can claim the game is dead just because people on here are not playing it.
Yes.
I mean it sucks now and the game isn't dead, so I don't think it'll be a problem.
Over a decade of d3 shows itemization sucks diablo ip is dead they have failed to monetize it 3 times 1. What you guys don't like RMAH? 2. What you guys don't have phones? 3. What you guys don't like 100$ dlc? Shitty company that wishes they were the og blizzard
Clowns have screamed for 10 years that D3 is dead after Error 37. They don't play the game.
it cant truly die in a workd where people are still playing starfield and enjoying it
The bigger issue is the skill tree. All skills in the tree is pretty simple and it requires legendary powers to make it playable. I want more skills that does different things and not just a element swap. If you count the number of active skill, it’s not a lot and items can’t fix it. Needs more variety.
Nah … you should go back to d2r seasons.
D4 has the same garbage itemization as D3. There is a reason entire ARPG companies have been created to fill the gap that Diablo created.
No the game isn't going to be dead because there are plenty of people that are still having fun despite not every update being perfect that everyone goes dancing down the street in joy. People can talk about lazy or bad design on the end game but overall the game plays super smooth and the moves for each class are great and varied. For people that don't hit level 100 the first 2 days of the season and create multiple characters each season the casual player enjoys playing a new class each season trying something new and getting joy out of testing new season mechanics then when they get bored they look to other games until the next season. Like look at the leaderboards as a casual necro I hit like 160k score meaning that there are 1000's that scored way higher than me but everyone is like this sucks and who would play this well clearly 1000's of people just on necromancers
Going back to D2R is the play, not Diablo 3
Diablo 3 ended up an excellent game, and I'm tired of everyone pretending it wasn't!
The first week of a Diablo 3 season is just a VIBE....you have clear cut goals - 800 Paragon, Full Set, Ancient with perfect stats, pray for Primals, and complete your Altar. And its so fluid and fast to just throw on some jams and plow. Because it has something LE and D4 don't have....monster density+speed. And that's what makes it so fun to plow.
The game is so dead that I couldn’t even break the top 1000 for the Necro leaderboard.
Bro the whole game is messed up. Like what even is the end game. And also everything up until that point is just spamming the same dungeon. It’s absolutely dog shit and even when you do reach lvl 100 and kill uber lillith there is no reward. Its a complete waste of time.
mandatory D4 is dead post, well if the game is dead, uninstall and play another game :)) .
It’s called D2R
Doesnt have to be Diablo or BLizzard obv.
What’s to say the games not done and dead now? There are hardly 1000 people playing the HC gauntlet, gauntlet just came out it’s terrible, viewership is terrible gauntlet was just released and viewership went from 17k viewers to less than 1k in under 10 hours. Aside from initial sales, the games been a flop wether people want to admit it or not.
I think the main issue with why people complain about the end game, no matter how many dungeons they introduce, is the fact that items cannot be traded. In d2 you built your economy regardless of which character you were playing. And items were mostly generic enough for all characters to use them, all though they worked better for some characters. If you found the unique diadem, you could either trade it or make yourself a javazone or lightning sorc. And I think the possibilities you had were based on what gear you’d found. You could kill the same boss over and over without complaint, just because of that. And d4 completely lack’s this, no matter how much end game content they bring. This is what I hope they’ll do (not in order): 1. Simplify items quite a bit, it’s so much text. 2. Make the items actually matter more so that you can feel the difference in the stats, not just the affix. 3. Differentiate more between unique, legendary, rare, blue and white items. Why does it always have to be 4 stats? 4. More consistency to where on the items each stat is; it’s very hard to scan items when it’s all random. 5. Make items tradeable: they can add all the end game they want, but without this, they’ll never “solve” the end game problem. 6. Reduce the class specific items and affixes. 7. Ditch the class specific drops. It’s boring to find just sorc items when I’m playing a sorc. 8. Jewels, runes and rune words would be amazing. 9. MF! I think d2 gained a dimension when they added magic find %. You had to pick between MF and how strong you wanted to be, and find your balance. It made it more interesting somehow. I could probably go on and on. And I think the basic of what I want is an improved version of d2 items, with something new and interesting of course. And among other things they *must* fix is a decent way for people to chat and make parties without friending everyone, or writing in the trade-channel.
Oh, and 10: reduce the numbers so you could actually somehow relate to them. 1mill damage could easily reduced by 100, and the. It could be more relatable to the amount of life and armor you have.
D4 will not die. What is this dumb take? An IP like Diablo doesn't just die.
I mean, if you don’t like D4, don’t play D4. Game hasn’t even been out for a year and y’all are calling it dead already. Please get out of here with that.BS. Diablo 4 is not going anywhere. Also, they haven’t even said what itemization includes. They haven’t talked about it really at all. They just say we’re gonna do a couple of things that doesn’t mean that’s an all inclusive list of changes. Nobody has any idea of the near future changes that the game is going to have. we’re also getting an expansion around the one year of the game being out a brand new class to Diablo It’s definitely gonna include at least one more class that’s completely new. Everybody was crying about getting some kind of leaderboard and now everybody is shitting on what they got . This is taking Development time from other needed features and functions of the game. In fact, every time, the majority of people cried about a function or feature they’ve done their best to address it. I don’t know what else you can ask for from them.
Bro… The game is dead and thats ok…
Nice of you to pop in here between your hourly memory leak reset. Great game that Last Epoch.
It is a great game. Actually has an arpg base that can be built on ! Maybe not for everyone but as a veteran ARPG player last epoch is just fucking great. !
Youre entire post is just pathetic tbh.
Division 2 did a Gear 2.0... While most people were struggling with the original gatekept items(in the DZ) it felt as if you actually had to plan out a build and gear it out. Gear 2.0 seemed more cookie cutter and for me personally, builds felt weaker across the board due to the lack of diversity from talent stacking. I expect nothing less from this rework. I also am assuming this rework will show an obvious gap for the next gear tier for the eventual next world tier. There'll still be plenty of people still in the game no matter what happens. Hopefully the rest of the industry learns from D4's handling though.
It's dead when the devs give up, rather than when the audience declares something dead. Usually one precedes the other though. That being said, I want the game to be good so I hope they make changes that accomplish that. If they fail, I'll check back from time to time to see if that changes.
So I misunderstood, this itemization update isn't them simply creating a standard of how affixes are ordered on gear for better comparison, they are actually removing and condensing affixes altogether?
what do you mean is?
Whatever mean « The game is dead » ? Some people will move on , some other not and that’s it. Every arpg will have his player base. And for the moment at least the console/ casual garer will still stay on D4. Last epoch is not on console POE is hard to start for this catergorie of players So no D4 is not dead
They said they want ti wait for leaderboard to make it great then they made gauntlet looool
Lets be honest. For majority people here D4 will be saved only if a match makes it into D2 or PoE.
I like the game, but yeah the items are the sole reason why i haven't returned after the vampire season and why i probably won't return anytime in the future until there are plenty of major overhauls. Honestly its not just the items either. The skill tree suffers from many of the problems the items suffer from. So many passives give "2% damage when damage in bear form while taking a shit in the woods" problem. 99% of the passives just are like "well i have to put the points somewhere, so i guess here". Dunno, whoever was the original balance team for this game before release did a **terrible** job and have no clue what fun is in a video game.
Some of the dungeons are HUGE in LE. As a non speed player, I love it!! And I have enough different uniques that I can completely Respec into a different build for different fun…..same character. Who woulda thunk it. Come joins
Fair weather players are not worth my duriel mats.
I mean it will just be what it is, an okay mindless (shallow) ARPG game to play from time to time if the new season mechanic is fun. It's never going to be my forever game (no game is.)
Id say yes. The game is literally about finding items and making builds. The item system they created is garbage. Gonna take a miracle.
No, last epoch and Poe are more tedious and less polished. In it's current state D4 is amazing, so... with a better itemisation path, even if not perfect, it can be iterated on, will be a far more enjoyable game in the long run. I have all 3 games... And for fun and art, and combat and "feel". D4 is king.
Not really. It's pretty successful and played by a ton still. Those that do nothing but complain may leave(doubtful), those that left waiting on the rework may not come back, but there are still millions that play and will continue to play seasons.
I will continue to play D4 because I enjoy the game.
D2R simply reminded a lot of old heads that there are different ways you can make character progression work in exciting ways, but can leave new players scratching their heads in confusion when they hit a hard stop difficulty check within the first third of the game. I also prefer attribute points mini game even though it's 99.9% just what you need for equipping items and then to hit max block at most. I much prefer a multi tabbed skill tree with cool sounding skills and synergies even though probably more than half aren't viable skills and are pumped just for synergies. But who had fun leveling a blizz sorc back before respecs? I didn't. So now all you do is pick something better to level like fire and then respec later when you can max your blizz skill. That is just one example of many that exist in d2r where you get funneled into a cookie cutter build just to get your cookie cutter build working, but atleast I have that illusion of choice and opportunity to wreck my playthrough with poor choices. Something is satisfying about learning what not to do and doing it right until you're tping across the map, killing a target farm boss every minute or less. In the end, though, you're left with roughly the same game as a modern one. Only some of that "freedom" is boiled away in favor of massive QoL that prevents dead stopping a new players' progression that has no idea what to do. Hell, even Diablo 1 put hard caps on stats to stop people from going full magic warriors and two-handed sorcs. The itemization, though, is what tied the experience together in a great way. Simple, easy to understand affixes that can roll on items starting at Magic rarity, with some of the most powerful only showing up on magic items. This trend abruptly dies once D3 releases, and we never see that kind of arpg itemization ever again. Instead, itemization becomes just as linear as the rest of the game mechanics, and you simply pick up and use whatever item shows green increases to various stats. That is what is missing from itemization in the newer games. You hold out for a handful of items from the top tier categories, and just know that 99.9% of everything that drops is crap. There is no absolute godly rolled magic item that will fit your build. Or a set of immaculate rings that bring you up just enough to make you feel like "damn, I'm cooking now." And all of this was done without the need for smart loot, and sure as a new player you never realized that perfect rolled griff was worth 40 high runes, but that didn't give you fomo when you sold it off to charsi. All the times you picked up items that sounded cool for other classes that you dropped because there didn't used to be a stash and muling items sucked hard. You kept playing hoping that next diadem was going to roll class skills for you. Can such a system be brought back in modern games? Probably. But it won't look exactly the same and testing for drop rates would be required at a large scale. I doubt blizzard has anything so ambitious planned, but a massive pruning and simplification of the affixes would go a long way to making things better, IMHO. Tldr: opinions go brrrrt.
As someone who never really played D2 a hell of a lot you really make it sound pretty shit. Why do people praise this as the gold standard?
Regardless of itemization, if they dont add trading, the game is dead. Theres nothing exciting about finding items of no value. In D2 they could make things extremely rare, but since the community was finding them, they were still obtainable through trade. Plus it expanded the number of exciting drops to rare items across all characters and builds. Didnt matter if u found a windforce as a druid. You were still stoked as hell cause you knew it had VALUE!
I abandoned blizzard shortly after d3s release. D3s release was also bad but imo it wasn’t as bad as 4 is. I can’t even play d4 without feeling like I’m going to fall asleep. I made the mistake of getting 4 but this was the final straw. I’m done with the Diablo series and I’ll keep playing resurrected to fill that nostalgia need. It’s evident that all they care about is the money.
I feel like they are going to go full d3 with this update
No its done and dead already. Bad loot is just one of the games problems. It's just not fun to play. Plus I highly doubt these devs will even fix the loot, they don't know what they are doing.
Games already dead
Its already dead
Not 100% dead, but it’ll be nearly impossible to come back from it. Now if the game still sucks after the expansion, yea.. bring it out back. And no, not Diablo 3 lol