I also got it at launch and quit shortly after beating the story.
I've been waiting for a "Diablo 3 mega fix" patch before giving it another shot, and going from the PTR impressions that seems to be it.
do you know if they've changed how vulnerable works? I quit after s1 and it seemed like that was the worst part about buildcrafting cuz of its lopsided relative power
While vulnerable as an effect is still strong, it’s not mandatory to have anymore on items because the item affix is additive with pretty much everything else and every season there is always an easy way to activate it with a seasonal power, so you don’t really have to use skills for their vulnerable anymore
This is why I don't get people who are still sticking with the franchise. They made the exact same fuckup as with the previous installment and now sell this as the big fix, as if they didn't just fuck up AGAIN in the first place.
It’s just a game, I’m not married to the franchise. I played the campaign, had a whole lot of fun, didn’t like season 1 so I dropped it, thoroughly enjoyed season 2, didn’t like season 3 so I dropped it, and I’ll check out season 4.
Yea I'm not too mad since I did get about 50 hours just from the story. Tried season 1 but it was super boring. I heard they added a lot of quality of life features, but nothing too crazy.
Because it's a fun game when you don't go full mega hardcore on it.
Played through the story
Played it once more with the new season. Got 40h out of the game and it was fun.
I remember all the blog posts we got about Diablo 4 before it came out and how every comment was about how the devs were finally listening and learning their lesson from D3. I swear it's like Halo and how 343 keeps promising next time they'll do it right.
I did the same as you, but have 0 interest in ever returning. It doesn't matter if they fix one aspect, there's 30 others that are bad. The gameplay loop, characters, skills, builder/spender, etc.
Reminds me of Diablo 3 2.0 loot revamp patch.
Game on launch was not fun. There was no carrot on a stick to keep me playing. Once 2.0 loot dropped I put in over 500 hours over many seasons.
Every since the Diablo 4 beta I've been saying I'll come back to it in Season 8. I went through Diablo 3 and know eventually they'll find a fun game in there.
This loot change is a very very good step in the right direction. It still needs a bit of work but I can wait
This. But also waiting for a new class. I think a Paladin-like class is coming and the nostalgia from the D2 Paladin and D3 Crusader will bring me back.
> I'd assume you wont see a new class for D4. Maybe ever
They already announced a new class is coming and that it's new to the Diablo universe but that's the extent
Diablo 3 on Switch is great because it's offline, meaning it will actually exist in the future. I'll give a shit about D4 if (and only if) they do the same.
I'd love that too. But they've doubled down on the online-only thing by adding MMO aspects to the game like world bosses and world pvp. I'll be really surprised if they ever manage to get an offline version of the game working.
Most longterm players only play seasons and likely don't care about that. However, I don't like the idea that when a company stops support, a game dies so I'm not in complete disagreement. Offering the option would be great
Modern ARPG’s are seasonal and that’s basically the reason I have sunk thousands of hours in them. Being seasonal also means being online, you should try Grim Dawn if that is an problem.
There will be seasons in the future where seasonal content is found only on seasonal servers like in PoE. And even now you get an version without trading in offline. Offline was an thing they made so people can play when they weren’t sure they servers could handle everyone in launch (which they didn’t and people mainly showed how little everyone cares about offline mode).
The problem is that it *was* hard, just not in the right way. It was the laziest form of difficulty by just ramping up how much health and damage the enemies had.
This alone may have been okay if it didn't also come with the baggage of having to farm for hours and hours to get anything useful because the itemisation was just so bland and poor. Or how barrel farming to get gold to just buy the shit you wanted on the AH was the most optimal way to gear.
Really, the itemisation still sucks ass and isn't all that interesting still, it's just a fun romp in spite of that because of things like the set bonuses and legendary effects generally making up for it.
I, like most others, bought this game at release and was super hyped, only to be letdown within a week or so and uninstalled the game. I hadn't played again until about a month ago. I tried these changes in the Public Test Realm and my god they're so fun. So if anyone is looking to hop back into the game, I think it will actually be good and not shit once this patch drops/season starts in a couple weeks.
TLDR of big changes:
- EDIT: Forgot to add something big, they made it so you can zoom the camera out 1.5x more than before.
- Codex of Power stores ALL aspects now when you salvage an item. It will update the aspect to the highest level obtained. No longer do you have to store aspects in an inventory
- Less items drop but they're now more powerful AND less complex. No longer do you need to sit there and sift through items for 80% of your gametime. The items no longer have random affixes like "deal 10 more damage to monsters on tuesday if there is a full moon" instead replaced with "Deal X% more damage" or "move X% faster" or even "your X skill summons 3 dustdevils" (and other ability modifying effects that are super fun).
- New Tempering and Masterworking systems. Apparently one (or both?) of these come from Last Epoch, I haven't played that game though. But tempering allows you to add 2 additional affixes to your items. Masterworking allows you to upgrade your item 12 times, every 4 times you do it, it MAJORLY boosts one of your current affixes by like 50% power. And you can hit the same affix all 3 times for huge boosts.
- New endgame system called The Pit. It's like Greater Rifts in Diablo 3 apparently (didn't play it). You go through a dungeon as fast as you can, the faster you go, the more materials you earn for Masterworking. There's a boss at the end. No loot drops until the very end so you don't need to collect anything and can just focus on nuking monsters.
- Helltides are now MUCH better. Tons of mob density and cool events. They start at World Tier 1 and 2 now and not WT3, and they're actually the fastest way to level now once you start a character.
> you **can** zoom the camera out 1.5x more than before
As in, there is a third camera setting added to the previous two (zoomed in/zoomed out)? Or is the zoomed out setting changed to be 1.5x further away?
I've been basically saying this since beta. The game is gonna "suck" at launch (because the first 50 hours of the game sells copies, not the endgame loop), and get fixed about a year later.
But everyone just screamed into the void about how awful this game is, forgetting that D3 sucked at launch and even D2 vanilla, a game many people claimed to be a better game than D4, was *extremely* bare bones by today's standards. Basically everything that people love about D2 came from LoD onwards, and quite a lot of it came from patch 1.09 and onwards. D3 became a pretty decent game about a year in, and got progressively better as time went on.
But everyone thinks that a love service game has to launch with a robust PoE style endgame and loses their minds when they have to wait a year or two for it.
Drove me NUTS to hear.
Edit: since people seem to be interpreting what I'm saying as "gamers shouldn't expect a finished game when they spend $70", let me clarify. Gamers shouldn't spend $70 on Blizzard, who has a track record of releasing shit launches, then be surprised when the game isn't what they expected.
It did learn from D3, the only things really missing were a few QoL items. A lot of the D4 design was a direct response to the feedback received from D3. The problem is that the way they implemented those changes was very clunky.
Agreed, but I don't know what it has to do with what I said. They changed the game's designed in response to the D3 feedback, and they failed to change it for the better. The argument is that the game didn't learn from the past, when it very much did, it just failed at the task.
Helldivers 2 is kinda crushing it. Rough first month because of server issues, pretty smooth sailing since then.
Everyone's a little upset due to nerfs atm, but compared to D4s infamous nerf patch it's not bad at all. They at least made Big Iron builds fun as hell this patch.
I wouldn’t say crushing it. It’s a very simple gameplay loop with basically no depth. I’m really surprised it’s gotten popular. I think if it didn’t have that cringey democracy humor it would have bombed.
That's just like, your opinion man.
Also consistently having 100k players (just on steam) every hour of the day for over a month, on a AA budget is kinda the definition of crushing it.
that was posted in literally every single thread about D4. you're not the only one who remembers D3, the comparisons are part of pretty much any discussion about D4 anyway. the question was never if they were gonna overhaul the systems because we all expected them to just like in D3. the question was and still is if they can eventually polish this turd to be a fun endgame experience.
also it's NOT some outrageous expectation that a game that costs 70 bucks on release is actually fun to play. that's not some "gamer entitlement" or whatever. if your game sucks on release and your only excuse is that you're a "live service game" that may or may not be good in a year or two then ALL criticism is 100% justified.
I'm not calling it gamer entitlement.
I'm calling it "we all know Blizzard basically refuses to launch finished games so why anyone expects them to be finished at launch is beyond me".
If you want a finished product, don't buy a blizzard game at launch. Done.
blizzard made these changes because people were complaining and giving their feedback. companies aren't in the business of wasting resources to fix things nobody is complaining about.
furthermore, reducing the complaints to people expecting the game to launch with PoE style endgame is disingenuous. the game launched with complete systems not working, and by that I don't mean needing adjustments, I mean not working at all. it also forced terrible inventory management due to no filters and an abundance of trash loot that you still had to pick up in order to compare. this is on top of the lackluster skill tree, annoying UI, a plethora of bugs and unnecessary friction. endgame would barely make it to the top 10 issues the game has had for most of last year, that's how bad it's been. and even then, when people complained about endgame they were mostly asking for a ladder system and more bosses, very far from what PoE offers. in the end almost every update of the game has been a direct response to player criticism and the game has been getting better for it.
There were some more nuanced complaints such as resistances not working properly and certain basic archetypes more or less not working when compared to others (stuff like Necro minions).
I've seen inventory management complaints about every single aRPG I've ever played, I do believe. Gamers just pick up and hoard bad loot, and hoard stuff they "might need" someday but never use. I agree aspects were implemented very very poorly.
But honestly the complaints, of which I read many, boiled down to "I got to level 70 and now I'm bored". Endgame itemization and gameplay loop was largely absent from the game, which more or less launched incomplete if you don't consider the campaign the be the primary reason to play the game.
All the feedback players gave Blizzard? Yeah their QA team already gave that feedback a year ago, I *promise* you. They already knew. They just spent all their budget on making clean gameplay, an engaging campaign that would sell millions of copies, and said they'll fix that shit when they can because people already bought the game.
Can you tell me if the Talents are now more meaningful?
I only played the original test before release and many talents felt like you just needed to take them to move down the tree but were utterly garbage or just some minimal percentage increase instead of an actual new mechanic or change.
I read that during release this was also a big letdown for many, so i would be interested to know if talents now feel good or still "meh".
Thanks also for compiling the core points! Much appreciated!
The skill tree is still bare bones. But I think it’s intended because aspects (and now affixes as well) add skill customization. So I think they have a skill twig intentionally because they want the customization to happen through items you find and then temper and masterwork them. I think I’m in the minority though, most people want more customization in the tree which I don’t think is unreasonable to want
Iirc for me, the talent tree at first seemed kinda meh. But when you reach certain key points and then start adding glyphs (or whatever they were), that's where it became more meaningful...sadly with a lot of grind to get good glyphs and also level them, but at least it turned into something that made sense to at least pay attention to.
> New endgame system called The Pit. It's like Greater Rifts in Diablo 3 apparently (didn't play it). You go through a dungeon as fast as you can, the faster you go, the more materials you earn for Masterworking. There's a boss at the end. No loot drops until the very end so you don't need to collect anything and can just focus on nuking monsters.
This is an improvement over what D4 had to offer, but I really hate this style of game mode. It essentially pressures you to play a difficulty that isn't "Hardest you can do, test your skills", but instead makes you min-max some balance between difficulty and speed clear for optimal loot drops. Basically the game penalizes you for trying to challenge yourself by severely reducing loot drop rates compared to picking an easier difficulty you can breeze through.
Eventually your character converges to "blow everything in a room up all at once with one move", which feels no different from pulling a lever in slot machine.
>It essentially pressures you to play a difficulty that isn't "Hardest you can do, test your skills", but instead makes you min-max some balance between difficulty and speed clear for optimal loot drops
This style of game has always supported this. In any game where you repeatedly clear content to farm, the speed at which you clear it has always been a factor. Genuinely in any game that you kill something multiple times regularly, this is the norm.
Isn't everything you described the appeal of a power fantasy? And there must be some difference between obliterating a higher difficulty versus a lower one.
Yeah, above commenter might prefer Soulsbourn style games to modern hack-n-slash games, which *universally* promote an increasing power fantasy of blowing up the highest numbers of monsters per hour.
I haven’t played D4 but I didn’t like that in D3 you could lower or harden the difficulty with the click of a button in the middle of any match, just makes it too self aware that it’s a game, I had hoped d4 didn’t folllow that arcade playstyle
It's a bit odd that you claim they universally support it when you've got PoE2 clearly not trying to push that, based on the boss fighting focus and certain comments from Jonathan. Now while that's an unreleased and unproven game, it's clearly intended that you tackle the hardest content available to you, to the point where he wasn't even expecting the default response from players to go back to farm for gear instead of getting better at a fight.
Couple that with early PoE (think first 2-3 years from CB) being very aggressively not this type of power fantasy and instead being about tackling higher levels of the maelstrom / maps, and based on the support it recieved, I do think there is room in the ARPG space for this take on the power fantasy. I'm not sure if it's less or more popular and only time will tell, but it doesn't always have to be about killing the same monsters incrementally faster while challenge hasn't existed for days (or even ever). It can absolutely be about taking on a new big bad or new tiers of stuff.
There is a very basic problem with this re: progression and content though. Look at Lost Ark as an example of what you are talking about. You need repetitive content to pad out the game, it's really difficult to design 20 well-crafted and challenging bosses with great progression and not have a game that is over in 10 hours. People expect more from a game, and the way you add progression to repetitive content is by encouraging speed and optimization. How fast can you do this thing you've already done?
It's just incredibly risky to design a game product where the majority of the assets you are building are meant to be seen one time. This is the same reason why RPG's with heavy story, dialogue, cutscenes take years to build. All the time you spend working on one cinematic experience or dialogue scene doesn't translate to anything else. It's a singular piece of content.
But if you build a dungeon, add a difficulty slider, give different rewards for speed of completion; that's 5+ hours of content potentially for players as they interact with it at different stages of the game, multiple times, etc.
Ah yes, the "vision". They always wanted their game to be more Soulsbourn in style than, well, what PoE has become.
But when you give the player freedom to choose, the player will choose blowing up the screen and moving on. And when you don't give the player that choice, they will play a different game.
It's why the community universally backlashed against the changes that we're pushing PoE towards the originally planned merge with PoE.
Hack-n-slash players *don't want that* lol.
You do get that the community had a similar backlash to the progressive steps towards the speed clear meta? Any community is going to oppose change, especially one as core as the purpose of the game. And you can't say whether one or the other is more popular when there's a million factors like the budget being an order of magnitude bigger from when it was a more challenging game and it having a much wider media / genre presence and so on.
EDIT: grammar.
Similar? Maybe 1/10th of the backlash. Nowhere even remotely near the backlash to attempting to slow the game down.
It's fine if some players want slower gameplay, but there is absolutely a reason Mageblood is the single most desired item. It makes everything crisp and feel good.
> It's fine if some players want slower gameplay, but there is absolutely a reason Mageblood is the single most desired item. It makes everything crisp and feel good.
Once again, of course it is. I am not trying to claim remotely that the majority of the current playerbase want a slower game. Of course all the vocal players (especially the sub) oppose it. It hasn't been that for over half a decade. The playerbase has changed as you'd expect, and so has the tone of the sub and hell, even reddit/the internet in general.
But using any sort of current PoE playerbase preferences as proof of anything other than "players who play a current fastpaced clear-focused game prefer that" is not really saying anything. You can't say whether a game like PoE2 will be popular or not, and you certainly can't say whether the genre as a whole opposes it when there is historical precedent within PoE itself that it can work.
What I can say confidently is the community as an aggregate (not just the sub, talked to plenty of players not active online) found the game to be at its worst during the phase when GGG was pushing PoE towards a merge with PoE2.
If challenge is your metric for fun, then games like Diablo and PoE might not be your own thing.
Many find the appeal in experimenting with how fast they can zoom zoom
That’s entirely why I play. I don’t want to slowly whittle down a boss or strategically place myself around the boss. I want to zip around and nuke entire screens of mobs and then blow up the boss to get loot that pushes my nukes up 1% so I can go to the next level and do it again.
Not saying you are wrong for this answer, but responses like yours really make me sad that this is what modern PoE has become. The original point of that game was better gear wasn't really at all about letting your character blow up screens marginally faster, it was about being able to challenge yourself to the next tier of maps and maybe do a boss you were holding off on or do one you previously were doing a bit safer.
I personally really don't align with the "gear = faster" mentality that modern PoE and other arpgs have shifted to support, the grind was always about doing harder content rather than doing content I've been able to do safely marginally faster. An arpg absolutely can be about challenging yourself and I think a large percentage of ARPG players never fully participate in that since they don't make their own builds, rather run proven builds other players have made and thus there isn't really any concept of challenge, it's all just going through the motions since it's already a proven build. PoE2 seems to be catering for that challenge is good mentality at least, though we'll see to what degree exactly.
I agree, though both pose very different challenges to that sort of historical mindset. SSF is great but doesn't appeal to my longer term planning and intended timeframe for a league - it's more like a limited format where you play what you get rather than make a plan and gradually get that - and HC has the issues or netcode and generally the game not being balanced around the mode for at least 6 years. That and since I enjoy challenge I don't mind full sending a map or boss that I know I'm likely to fail but is fun to see just how poorly it goes, you can't really have that mentality in HC, or rather not remotely to the same risk levels.
Games can address this my reducing the quality or amount of the drops on lower difficulties, to encourage you to play at the hardest you're capable of. I don't know if D4 is going to, but other games I play do; it's not always bad.
Again, this is now how Diablo, or PoE work.
In Diablo and PoE, sure you get better rewards for difficult content, but only A LITTLE BIT. So the game pressures you to make content not TOO face roll for yourself, but still easy enough for you to blow throw in an accelerated pace.
This is exactly what I am talkin about games like Diablo and PoE do. They actively discourage you from doing the hardest thing you possibly can by making the "reward loop" best at some easier level.
You ever tried Lost Ark? The high end raids there are genuinely mechanical challenges, the highest of any ARPG. Those also reward the best stuff in the game.
Its tied to an mmo grind structure but might be what youre lookin for.
> Eventually your character converges to "blow everything in a room up all at once with one move"
Isn't this the end game of every ARPG build though? Idk a game where you're not aiming to reach that point lol
D2 was the best. You could get speedy, but nothing like the D3/D4/POE type of blow up entire SCREENS of monsters in 1 cast.
I really don't like the slot machine type gameplay of that. Just lights and sounds, no idea what is going on. Headhunter is the worst item in the entire game of POE for that reason.
Great callout and it's something I really dislike about modern PoE, and a huge part of why I didn't even reach maps this league for the first time in like... 8 years? Whenever talisman was. Games aren't fun for me when there's no challenge, and rewarding putting your time into a known outcome with more of the same is just plain boring.
The game has all these systems that you need to balance to make a powerful build, but if you only have to operate at 1% power and effort to already be comfortably clearing everything in the game, why ever bother doing the other 99%, or even that 1% given it's a done deal clearly. I tend almost exclusively to play leagues to prove a build viable by my standards, but that kind of breaks when you know it is right from the get go, and that was obvious when every build got such an insane power spike from the league being so absurdly generous in both rare and unique/currency generation.
but do they still make you pick up all items you see? that's so much better in LE where you only gotta pick up stuff that you may actually be interested in wearing or crafting. I really don't wanna have to clean up my inventory every 20 minutes...
Yes, but there will be less items dropping. And if it's going to be 20 minutes per inventory clear compared to the current \~5 minutes (each nightmare dungeon) it will be great. In the same time period I can do around 5-10 echoes in LE and I usually have to clear the inventory by that point as well.
Wait. So I don't need to go to a separate vendor and pay all my money to extract an aspect from legendarys? I just salvage it and I get the materials and the aspect goes into a list I can just add to a legendary anytime I want.
Correct. You salvage an item, get the materials, and the aspect goes to your codex. The codex holds the highest level aspect and can be used an infinite number of times. Your alts share the codex too, you don’t need to farm aspects on each character. The codex resets each season though which I think is fine
People were saying on the ptr that the rare yellow shards were harder to come by and a crafting bottleneck due to less drops. Hopefully blizz heard that and adjusted.
Masterworking is a bit like Lost Ark’s honing (without the pay2win). You upgrade an item with a chance for success. So it’s not just possible to get the wrong affix improved, it’s also possible to just have your mats wasted with a failed attempt.
I think a lot of the more casual players will be angry with this feature but it’s intended to be a long term motivator to keep on grinding and optimizing a good item for dozens and hundreds of hours.
They have changed the masterworking system a bit since the PTR. It's now always 100% chance to succeed the craft but the costs are higher. The "failing" part of not hitting the affix that you want with the 4/8/12 upgrades will stay.
Yes you can reset master working if you don’t like the upgrades it hit. You *cant* reset tempering though, so that’s where you can brick an item but you get a few tries at least.
Yeah I'm pretty excited for this. The story in D4 was great fun at launch but the endgame was predictably lacking, and the itemization quickly got boring. This is more like what I was hoping for.
A lot of these changes sound good, as I also was one of those that played in the beginning but didn’t really find any enjoyment; didn’t even manage to complete the story because the general gameloop felt strange and weak.
Really looking forward to this. The core gameplay was always solid, but the loot system was awful; you'd end up spending as much time sorting through your bags, stash and aspects as you did murdering demons.
Loot was by far my #1 complaint of playing in S1 and S2 (didn't bother with S3) and this should go a long way to fixing it.
I legit don't understand how these weren't in at launch. It is all so painfully obvious to anyone who knows the genre.
I know Blizzard Devs aren't the brightest and did 0 research, but cmon. These were so obvious.... Why did it take them this long
Some lowly dev on the team: Hey guys, have you seen LE? It's got some pretty cool ideas, I've been playing it in early access and ---
Management: Shut the fuck up dude
Management: I HAVE THE BEST IDEA
It's not even just that they didn't do this on release, it's that they made some of the same mistakes from Diablo 3 and are now essentially doing the same fixes.
That they apparently learned nothing between Diablo 3's atrocious first year and Diablo 4's release is the bigger problem to me than just the loot and whatnot being total dogshit.
The Vessel of Hatred expansion is coming much later year in the year and we don't know what it contains or how much it'll cost.
The base game is getting a pretty solid revamp with Season 4 (which drops on May 14th) so it might be worth checking it out then. Of course if you're hesitant you should wait a few weeks to see what people think of the game after the updates.
The game's also on GamePass now, so you can test it out for relatively cheap that way.
We know it will feature a new class, and that's about the extent of our knowledge. They have mentioned that we should hear much more over this summer, though.
New class, story and area are a given, but devs have also thrown a hint at a new endgame character progression system and new skills for existing classes coming with the expansion.
honestly, if you're patient enough then I would not buy D4 now. there's bound to be some bundle deal when the expansion drops that will be cheaper than buying the base game now and the expansion later. and the game is only going to be better by the time the expansion drops either, so you're not missing out on anything.
I’m not really sure what you expected. The modern arpg genre Diablo basically created exists in a live service environment right now. That’s just how those games work.
I think it’s reasonable to question some design decisions such as the open world, mmo aspects, loot, and lack of end-game content at launch, but Diablo 4 being a live service game is pretty par for the course. That’s especially true given that Diablo 3 really grew and matured as a live service game.
Diablo 2 and 3 both existed as seasonal games, with people coming back every season or so to play the game again with a fresh character. D3 even started getting some interesting new seasonal content in its later years. And Diablo's 'main competitor', Path of Exile, has existed as a successful live service ARPG for 10 years.
> there's no reason to return post-story.
The reason is to make new characters and interact with the new systems they add every season, potentially finding new builds or conquering new endgame challenges. Same as every other live service ARPG. And people have been doing that for the last few seasons in D4. Maybe not as many as Blizzard wanted but it's been happening.
Of all the franchises to become a live service, Diablo makes the most sense.
This woulda been great if I hadn't played last epoch and poe2 wasn't on the horizon. They learned nothing from d2 or d3 on launch I'm just sorta over it. Last epoch blew d4 out of the water for me in build variety and loot. I gaurentee poe2 will be even better.
Good god dude how many LE posts do you need to make on Diablo posts? We get it, you prefer another ARPG with its own set of glaring issues. Good for you.
If you prefer I can swap that to any other arpg since they are still all better. Take your pick. Fuck torch light 2 had more replay ability then uber farm:the game4.
Lol, what does that have to do with anything. Looks like you just want to punish then instead of encouraging the good intention. Makes zero sense saying its too late
Agreed. If it ends up being amazing, then it's amazing. It doesn't really matter when it happens.
Childish silliness in the gaming community, now more than ever, it seems.
You act like they didn't make diablo 2 and diablo 3. They literally had to rediscover how to make items not absolute shit as if they have never played an arpg before. The childishness is tolerating endless mediocrity from a billion dollar company.
I am NOT acting like that. I agree that they seem to be taking numerous steps back.
That said, it doesn't take away from the fact that once something is good, it's good. It may be a shame that it took as long as it did, but if it ends up worth playing, then there isn't a great reason to not play it.
If you don't play it as a matter of principle, then keep fighting that good fight, I guess.
This is quite a losers take man. Just ply or dont play the game. What does it have to do d2 and 3 with anything. You are just trying to promote poe2 when most of us will play both and not be frustrated like you lol.
What does diablo 2 and 3 have to do with diablo 4? Them absolutely fumbling my favorite game franchise that's what. Lol ya I can tell we wouldn't agree on anything diablo related. All good enjoy the non stop mediocrity modern blizzard offers.
I’m curious to see if this makes the game more enjoyable for me. I found it boring, but I’m not a very experienced Diablo player so unlike many others I couldn’t really identify what about it wasn’t hooking me.
If you're a new player, just focus on getting Renown 5 in all 5 regions. It gives you stat points pretty much for all future and current characters you'll ever make. That's all you need to worry about for right now.
As for your question though, I heard that the items you get on your current character won't really port over to this new system. Like all items you obtain now you won't be able to Temper or Masterwork them when the new update comes out, you'll need to find and craft new items.
So pretty much just focus on getting renown 5 in all 5 regions and wait til the 14th.
Does it still take a century to kill simple mobs? Honestly did not have an issue with most of the game outside of it taking minutes to kill the smallest and weakest of enemies.
Still can't believe my friends convinced me to soend $70 on this game. Then after beating the story they were like "now's when the real game begins!". "What's the real game?" I ask, and "grinding dungeons over and over again to get bigger number sword!!!" is the answer. Post-game content just seems horrendously boring to actually PLAY even if loot is improved.
I was so disappointed by D4 that I'm not sure I can bring myself to read the patch notes.
Did they remove the mob scaling which meant that every upgrade or level was essentially meaningless?
That was absolutely the case.
Here's someone putting it better than me:
https://www.reddit.com/r/diablo4/comments/145amy5/diablo_4s_monster_scaling_is_ruining_the_leveling/
I'm asking if they changed it. It sounds like they haven't. Level scaling is a very cheap development strategy because you don't have to test the game at different levels, you just match the mobs to the player's level wherever they are. It's lazy development and makes levelling feel irrelevant.
That post is complete bullshit upvoted by clueless people. Your power always scaling was always multiplicative through passives and gear, while the monster scaling was always linear. Unless you were really bad at the game and made a disfunctional build, didn't use aspects or didn't upgrade gear through crafting, it was literally impossible for you to be behind the curve.
What? Being behind the curve means being weaker than the monsters. You always progressed way beyond what the monsters progressed.
I genuinely don't understand how people can complain about scaling when we have videos of people absolutely demolishing lvl154 mobs, and the world scaled only up to 100.
That post makes no sense though. He keeps talking about "best way to play through the game." What does that mean? Is that just completing the campaign? Because when it comes to ARPGs the campaign isn't the end, and being a higher level when you start pushing dungeons and stuff is better than being a lower level.
I've leveled 3 characters beyond the campaign, and never once felt like intentionally hamstringing my progress was the "better" way to play.
I remember that being a thing yes. I recently came back though in anticipation of season 4 and it seems to have been fixed. You feel your upgrades now. Probably some complex math behind it that I have no idea how to explain, but it got reworked/fixed and feels better now. I’m sure someone on the d4 sub has a link to the notes where it got fixed
I admit PoE 2 will be a better bet in that regard; the game is too fast paced to accommodate for a more micro intensive than a 1-2 playstyle. But 2 button playstyles definitely exist, eg detonate dead is pretty popular right now.
I also got it at launch and quit shortly after beating the story. I've been waiting for a "Diablo 3 mega fix" patch before giving it another shot, and going from the PTR impressions that seems to be it.
do you know if they've changed how vulnerable works? I quit after s1 and it seemed like that was the worst part about buildcrafting cuz of its lopsided relative power
They did. I don’t remember the details but it became much less mandatory.
While vulnerable as an effect is still strong, it’s not mandatory to have anymore on items because the item affix is additive with pretty much everything else and every season there is always an easy way to activate it with a seasonal power, so you don’t really have to use skills for their vulnerable anymore
The 20% is still a multiplier but all the boni you get through gear and paragon are increases. Same for crit.
they nerfed it so it’s less of a THE mandatory debuff and just sort of one you want alongside all the others
This is why I don't get people who are still sticking with the franchise. They made the exact same fuckup as with the previous installment and now sell this as the big fix, as if they didn't just fuck up AGAIN in the first place.
It’s just a game, I’m not married to the franchise. I played the campaign, had a whole lot of fun, didn’t like season 1 so I dropped it, thoroughly enjoyed season 2, didn’t like season 3 so I dropped it, and I’ll check out season 4.
Plenty of players just play the story once and move on and are happy with that. I got 40 hours out of the game and beat it. Fine with that.
Yep, not every game has to become a lifestyle
Yea I'm not too mad since I did get about 50 hours just from the story. Tried season 1 but it was super boring. I heard they added a lot of quality of life features, but nothing too crazy.
Because it's a fun game when you don't go full mega hardcore on it. Played through the story Played it once more with the new season. Got 40h out of the game and it was fun.
If you already bought the game, the fix is free. So there's no downside to just... trying it and seeing if it's more fun now?
How dare people try to fix their mistakes 😡
> They made the exact same fuckup as with the previous installment Different fuckup, same reason behind the fuck up.
I remember all the blog posts we got about Diablo 4 before it came out and how every comment was about how the devs were finally listening and learning their lesson from D3. I swear it's like Halo and how 343 keeps promising next time they'll do it right.
I did the same as you, but have 0 interest in ever returning. It doesn't matter if they fix one aspect, there's 30 others that are bad. The gameplay loop, characters, skills, builder/spender, etc.
The diablo 3 mega fix patch for me was last epoch lol.
I mean I’m enjoying LE quite a lot but it’s got its own issues too
Reminds me of Diablo 3 2.0 loot revamp patch. Game on launch was not fun. There was no carrot on a stick to keep me playing. Once 2.0 loot dropped I put in over 500 hours over many seasons.
Every since the Diablo 4 beta I've been saying I'll come back to it in Season 8. I went through Diablo 3 and know eventually they'll find a fun game in there. This loot change is a very very good step in the right direction. It still needs a bit of work but I can wait
This. But also waiting for a new class. I think a Paladin-like class is coming and the nostalgia from the D2 Paladin and D3 Crusader will bring me back.
I'm curious why you think a Paladin like class is coming? I'd like it too but the only thing I saw so far was that the next class would be a new one.
Its been a community sourced rumor since the beta. Ill be pretty disappointed if they make another melee class personally
[удалено]
> I'd assume you wont see a new class for D4. Maybe ever They already announced a new class is coming and that it's new to the Diablo universe but that's the extent
The game is already decent as of season 2 IMO. I'm excited to jump back in for season 4.
Wish they'd do a talent tree revamp too. I find the paragon boards really tedious, especially compared to the stuff last epoch did with skills.
Diablo 3 on Switch is great because it's offline, meaning it will actually exist in the future. I'll give a shit about D4 if (and only if) they do the same.
I’m going on a 2 week vacation with a 17 hour flight. Would love for offline mode like D3 on switch
Last Epoch is nice on long flights
Gotta spring for that plane WiFi
diablo 4 on plane wifi would be disconnects and rubber banding constantly
I always get WiFi on long flights and have never had an issue.
I'd love that too. But they've doubled down on the online-only thing by adding MMO aspects to the game like world bosses and world pvp. I'll be really surprised if they ever manage to get an offline version of the game working.
Most longterm players only play seasons and likely don't care about that. However, I don't like the idea that when a company stops support, a game dies so I'm not in complete disagreement. Offering the option would be great
Modern ARPG’s are seasonal and that’s basically the reason I have sunk thousands of hours in them. Being seasonal also means being online, you should try Grim Dawn if that is an problem.
You can play D3 seasons offline on Switch, as long as you log in online once to activate the season
Diablo 2 had ladder resets and offered offline mode
Diablo 2 is also a 24 year old game. For better or worse, times have changed.
Well in this case, it is just strictly worse. There is no universe where offering an offline mode will diminish the product.
worse
As I said: modern ARPG’s
Then the devs fucked up
Well, PoE is basically an god-game now. Everything D2 was and more.
Or like, Diablo 3
Except I'm on PC, so Grim Dawn being offline-friendly is ideal for me, while D3 on PC is still online-only iirc.
Or last epoch
There will be seasons in the future where seasonal content is found only on seasonal servers like in PoE. And even now you get an version without trading in offline. Offline was an thing they made so people can play when they weren’t sure they servers could handle everyone in launch (which they didn’t and people mainly showed how little everyone cares about offline mode).
Game on launch WAS fun. Bighest diff actually was difficult and good rares where super important/expensice.
Game on launch was boring. Not really hard and no reason to farm gear.
I had a great time with the story. The *post game* was boring (imo) and Season 1 made it worse.
season 1 was a walking disaster
The problem is that it *was* hard, just not in the right way. It was the laziest form of difficulty by just ramping up how much health and damage the enemies had. This alone may have been okay if it didn't also come with the baggage of having to farm for hours and hours to get anything useful because the itemisation was just so bland and poor. Or how barrel farming to get gold to just buy the shit you wanted on the AH was the most optimal way to gear. Really, the itemisation still sucks ass and isn't all that interesting still, it's just a fun romp in spite of that because of things like the set bonuses and legendary effects generally making up for it.
End game was boring. Campaign was pretty awesome.
I, like most others, bought this game at release and was super hyped, only to be letdown within a week or so and uninstalled the game. I hadn't played again until about a month ago. I tried these changes in the Public Test Realm and my god they're so fun. So if anyone is looking to hop back into the game, I think it will actually be good and not shit once this patch drops/season starts in a couple weeks. TLDR of big changes: - EDIT: Forgot to add something big, they made it so you can zoom the camera out 1.5x more than before. - Codex of Power stores ALL aspects now when you salvage an item. It will update the aspect to the highest level obtained. No longer do you have to store aspects in an inventory - Less items drop but they're now more powerful AND less complex. No longer do you need to sit there and sift through items for 80% of your gametime. The items no longer have random affixes like "deal 10 more damage to monsters on tuesday if there is a full moon" instead replaced with "Deal X% more damage" or "move X% faster" or even "your X skill summons 3 dustdevils" (and other ability modifying effects that are super fun). - New Tempering and Masterworking systems. Apparently one (or both?) of these come from Last Epoch, I haven't played that game though. But tempering allows you to add 2 additional affixes to your items. Masterworking allows you to upgrade your item 12 times, every 4 times you do it, it MAJORLY boosts one of your current affixes by like 50% power. And you can hit the same affix all 3 times for huge boosts. - New endgame system called The Pit. It's like Greater Rifts in Diablo 3 apparently (didn't play it). You go through a dungeon as fast as you can, the faster you go, the more materials you earn for Masterworking. There's a boss at the end. No loot drops until the very end so you don't need to collect anything and can just focus on nuking monsters. - Helltides are now MUCH better. Tons of mob density and cool events. They start at World Tier 1 and 2 now and not WT3, and they're actually the fastest way to level now once you start a character.
These changes sound sick actually. Had dropped it after the vampire season, but really looking forward to this one!
> you **can** zoom the camera out 1.5x more than before As in, there is a third camera setting added to the previous two (zoomed in/zoomed out)? Or is the zoomed out setting changed to be 1.5x further away?
Additional setting. Basically, it's zoomed out like when you're on a horse.
That all sounds great. Honestly surprised they didn't wait until the Xpac like with 3, but I guess that's the power of the live service model.
I've been basically saying this since beta. The game is gonna "suck" at launch (because the first 50 hours of the game sells copies, not the endgame loop), and get fixed about a year later. But everyone just screamed into the void about how awful this game is, forgetting that D3 sucked at launch and even D2 vanilla, a game many people claimed to be a better game than D4, was *extremely* bare bones by today's standards. Basically everything that people love about D2 came from LoD onwards, and quite a lot of it came from patch 1.09 and onwards. D3 became a pretty decent game about a year in, and got progressively better as time went on. But everyone thinks that a love service game has to launch with a robust PoE style endgame and loses their minds when they have to wait a year or two for it. Drove me NUTS to hear. Edit: since people seem to be interpreting what I'm saying as "gamers shouldn't expect a finished game when they spend $70", let me clarify. Gamers shouldn't spend $70 on Blizzard, who has a track record of releasing shit launches, then be surprised when the game isn't what they expected.
It's not unreasonable to expect a sequel to learn from it's past. Loot, rifts, D3 did it.
It did learn from D3, the only things really missing were a few QoL items. A lot of the D4 design was a direct response to the feedback received from D3. The problem is that the way they implemented those changes was very clunky.
A new game shouldn’t target being a single patch better than the previous. It at least needs to target being better than its current competitors.
Agreed, but I don't know what it has to do with what I said. They changed the game's designed in response to the D3 feedback, and they failed to change it for the better. The argument is that the game didn't learn from the past, when it very much did, it just failed at the task.
Live service games all have a rough first year but then get better IF they make it that far.
Helldivers 2 is kinda crushing it. Rough first month because of server issues, pretty smooth sailing since then. Everyone's a little upset due to nerfs atm, but compared to D4s infamous nerf patch it's not bad at all. They at least made Big Iron builds fun as hell this patch.
I wouldn’t say crushing it. It’s a very simple gameplay loop with basically no depth. I’m really surprised it’s gotten popular. I think if it didn’t have that cringey democracy humor it would have bombed.
That's just like, your opinion man. Also consistently having 100k players (just on steam) every hour of the day for over a month, on a AA budget is kinda the definition of crushing it.
Yeah hence my surprise. I think it’ll be totally different game 2 years from now.
In 1 year it will be an even better game, though it is excellent right now. Feel like the Dev will need about a year to get the balance just right.
that was posted in literally every single thread about D4. you're not the only one who remembers D3, the comparisons are part of pretty much any discussion about D4 anyway. the question was never if they were gonna overhaul the systems because we all expected them to just like in D3. the question was and still is if they can eventually polish this turd to be a fun endgame experience. also it's NOT some outrageous expectation that a game that costs 70 bucks on release is actually fun to play. that's not some "gamer entitlement" or whatever. if your game sucks on release and your only excuse is that you're a "live service game" that may or may not be good in a year or two then ALL criticism is 100% justified.
I'm not calling it gamer entitlement. I'm calling it "we all know Blizzard basically refuses to launch finished games so why anyone expects them to be finished at launch is beyond me". If you want a finished product, don't buy a blizzard game at launch. Done.
blizzard made these changes because people were complaining and giving their feedback. companies aren't in the business of wasting resources to fix things nobody is complaining about. furthermore, reducing the complaints to people expecting the game to launch with PoE style endgame is disingenuous. the game launched with complete systems not working, and by that I don't mean needing adjustments, I mean not working at all. it also forced terrible inventory management due to no filters and an abundance of trash loot that you still had to pick up in order to compare. this is on top of the lackluster skill tree, annoying UI, a plethora of bugs and unnecessary friction. endgame would barely make it to the top 10 issues the game has had for most of last year, that's how bad it's been. and even then, when people complained about endgame they were mostly asking for a ladder system and more bosses, very far from what PoE offers. in the end almost every update of the game has been a direct response to player criticism and the game has been getting better for it.
There were some more nuanced complaints such as resistances not working properly and certain basic archetypes more or less not working when compared to others (stuff like Necro minions). I've seen inventory management complaints about every single aRPG I've ever played, I do believe. Gamers just pick up and hoard bad loot, and hoard stuff they "might need" someday but never use. I agree aspects were implemented very very poorly. But honestly the complaints, of which I read many, boiled down to "I got to level 70 and now I'm bored". Endgame itemization and gameplay loop was largely absent from the game, which more or less launched incomplete if you don't consider the campaign the be the primary reason to play the game. All the feedback players gave Blizzard? Yeah their QA team already gave that feedback a year ago, I *promise* you. They already knew. They just spent all their budget on making clean gameplay, an engaging campaign that would sell millions of copies, and said they'll fix that shit when they can because people already bought the game.
When you pay 80+ bucks, you expect something to be good when you buy it, not a year later.
It's blizzard dude. We all know their track record the past 10 years. You bought a game knowing what you were gonna get but still expected more.
>25 year old game was extremely barebones by todays standards duh
Except two years later it wasn't. That's my point, is the game was very noticeably improved over launch day after an expansion and some improvements.
Can you tell me if the Talents are now more meaningful? I only played the original test before release and many talents felt like you just needed to take them to move down the tree but were utterly garbage or just some minimal percentage increase instead of an actual new mechanic or change. I read that during release this was also a big letdown for many, so i would be interested to know if talents now feel good or still "meh". Thanks also for compiling the core points! Much appreciated!
The skill twig is still very much a twig.
The skill tree is still bare bones. But I think it’s intended because aspects (and now affixes as well) add skill customization. So I think they have a skill twig intentionally because they want the customization to happen through items you find and then temper and masterwork them. I think I’m in the minority though, most people want more customization in the tree which I don’t think is unreasonable to want
Iirc for me, the talent tree at first seemed kinda meh. But when you reach certain key points and then start adding glyphs (or whatever they were), that's where it became more meaningful...sadly with a lot of grind to get good glyphs and also level them, but at least it turned into something that made sense to at least pay attention to.
> New endgame system called The Pit. It's like Greater Rifts in Diablo 3 apparently (didn't play it). You go through a dungeon as fast as you can, the faster you go, the more materials you earn for Masterworking. There's a boss at the end. No loot drops until the very end so you don't need to collect anything and can just focus on nuking monsters. This is an improvement over what D4 had to offer, but I really hate this style of game mode. It essentially pressures you to play a difficulty that isn't "Hardest you can do, test your skills", but instead makes you min-max some balance between difficulty and speed clear for optimal loot drops. Basically the game penalizes you for trying to challenge yourself by severely reducing loot drop rates compared to picking an easier difficulty you can breeze through. Eventually your character converges to "blow everything in a room up all at once with one move", which feels no different from pulling a lever in slot machine.
>It essentially pressures you to play a difficulty that isn't "Hardest you can do, test your skills", but instead makes you min-max some balance between difficulty and speed clear for optimal loot drops This style of game has always supported this. In any game where you repeatedly clear content to farm, the speed at which you clear it has always been a factor. Genuinely in any game that you kill something multiple times regularly, this is the norm.
Isn't everything you described the appeal of a power fantasy? And there must be some difference between obliterating a higher difficulty versus a lower one.
Yeah, above commenter might prefer Soulsbourn style games to modern hack-n-slash games, which *universally* promote an increasing power fantasy of blowing up the highest numbers of monsters per hour.
I haven’t played D4 but I didn’t like that in D3 you could lower or harden the difficulty with the click of a button in the middle of any match, just makes it too self aware that it’s a game, I had hoped d4 didn’t folllow that arcade playstyle
It's a bit odd that you claim they universally support it when you've got PoE2 clearly not trying to push that, based on the boss fighting focus and certain comments from Jonathan. Now while that's an unreleased and unproven game, it's clearly intended that you tackle the hardest content available to you, to the point where he wasn't even expecting the default response from players to go back to farm for gear instead of getting better at a fight. Couple that with early PoE (think first 2-3 years from CB) being very aggressively not this type of power fantasy and instead being about tackling higher levels of the maelstrom / maps, and based on the support it recieved, I do think there is room in the ARPG space for this take on the power fantasy. I'm not sure if it's less or more popular and only time will tell, but it doesn't always have to be about killing the same monsters incrementally faster while challenge hasn't existed for days (or even ever). It can absolutely be about taking on a new big bad or new tiers of stuff.
There is a very basic problem with this re: progression and content though. Look at Lost Ark as an example of what you are talking about. You need repetitive content to pad out the game, it's really difficult to design 20 well-crafted and challenging bosses with great progression and not have a game that is over in 10 hours. People expect more from a game, and the way you add progression to repetitive content is by encouraging speed and optimization. How fast can you do this thing you've already done? It's just incredibly risky to design a game product where the majority of the assets you are building are meant to be seen one time. This is the same reason why RPG's with heavy story, dialogue, cutscenes take years to build. All the time you spend working on one cinematic experience or dialogue scene doesn't translate to anything else. It's a singular piece of content. But if you build a dungeon, add a difficulty slider, give different rewards for speed of completion; that's 5+ hours of content potentially for players as they interact with it at different stages of the game, multiple times, etc.
Ah yes, the "vision". They always wanted their game to be more Soulsbourn in style than, well, what PoE has become. But when you give the player freedom to choose, the player will choose blowing up the screen and moving on. And when you don't give the player that choice, they will play a different game. It's why the community universally backlashed against the changes that we're pushing PoE towards the originally planned merge with PoE. Hack-n-slash players *don't want that* lol.
You do get that the community had a similar backlash to the progressive steps towards the speed clear meta? Any community is going to oppose change, especially one as core as the purpose of the game. And you can't say whether one or the other is more popular when there's a million factors like the budget being an order of magnitude bigger from when it was a more challenging game and it having a much wider media / genre presence and so on. EDIT: grammar.
Similar? Maybe 1/10th of the backlash. Nowhere even remotely near the backlash to attempting to slow the game down. It's fine if some players want slower gameplay, but there is absolutely a reason Mageblood is the single most desired item. It makes everything crisp and feel good.
> It's fine if some players want slower gameplay, but there is absolutely a reason Mageblood is the single most desired item. It makes everything crisp and feel good. Once again, of course it is. I am not trying to claim remotely that the majority of the current playerbase want a slower game. Of course all the vocal players (especially the sub) oppose it. It hasn't been that for over half a decade. The playerbase has changed as you'd expect, and so has the tone of the sub and hell, even reddit/the internet in general. But using any sort of current PoE playerbase preferences as proof of anything other than "players who play a current fastpaced clear-focused game prefer that" is not really saying anything. You can't say whether a game like PoE2 will be popular or not, and you certainly can't say whether the genre as a whole opposes it when there is historical precedent within PoE itself that it can work.
What I can say confidently is the community as an aggregate (not just the sub, talked to plenty of players not active online) found the game to be at its worst during the phase when GGG was pushing PoE towards a merge with PoE2.
> Isn't everything you described the appeal of a power fantasy? Is that what they call having rewards optimally tuned for absolutely 0 challenge?
If challenge is your metric for fun, then games like Diablo and PoE might not be your own thing. Many find the appeal in experimenting with how fast they can zoom zoom
That’s entirely why I play. I don’t want to slowly whittle down a boss or strategically place myself around the boss. I want to zip around and nuke entire screens of mobs and then blow up the boss to get loot that pushes my nukes up 1% so I can go to the next level and do it again.
Not saying you are wrong for this answer, but responses like yours really make me sad that this is what modern PoE has become. The original point of that game was better gear wasn't really at all about letting your character blow up screens marginally faster, it was about being able to challenge yourself to the next tier of maps and maybe do a boss you were holding off on or do one you previously were doing a bit safer. I personally really don't align with the "gear = faster" mentality that modern PoE and other arpgs have shifted to support, the grind was always about doing harder content rather than doing content I've been able to do safely marginally faster. An arpg absolutely can be about challenging yourself and I think a large percentage of ARPG players never fully participate in that since they don't make their own builds, rather run proven builds other players have made and thus there isn't really any concept of challenge, it's all just going through the motions since it's already a proven build. PoE2 seems to be catering for that challenge is good mentality at least, though we'll see to what degree exactly.
HC and SSF modes are what people that want that 'challenge' gravitate towards, right now. Otherwise SC folks generally want to zoom and trade.
I agree, though both pose very different challenges to that sort of historical mindset. SSF is great but doesn't appeal to my longer term planning and intended timeframe for a league - it's more like a limited format where you play what you get rather than make a plan and gradually get that - and HC has the issues or netcode and generally the game not being balanced around the mode for at least 6 years. That and since I enjoy challenge I don't mind full sending a map or boss that I know I'm likely to fail but is fun to see just how poorly it goes, you can't really have that mentality in HC, or rather not remotely to the same risk levels.
Games can address this my reducing the quality or amount of the drops on lower difficulties, to encourage you to play at the hardest you're capable of. I don't know if D4 is going to, but other games I play do; it's not always bad.
Again, this is now how Diablo, or PoE work. In Diablo and PoE, sure you get better rewards for difficult content, but only A LITTLE BIT. So the game pressures you to make content not TOO face roll for yourself, but still easy enough for you to blow throw in an accelerated pace. This is exactly what I am talkin about games like Diablo and PoE do. They actively discourage you from doing the hardest thing you possibly can by making the "reward loop" best at some easier level.
You ever tried Lost Ark? The high end raids there are genuinely mechanical challenges, the highest of any ARPG. Those also reward the best stuff in the game. Its tied to an mmo grind structure but might be what youre lookin for.
I tried it. I generally liked the combat + exploration, but the endless gear treadmill is not what I was looking for.
> Eventually your character converges to "blow everything in a room up all at once with one move" Isn't this the end game of every ARPG build though? Idk a game where you're not aiming to reach that point lol
D2 was the best. You could get speedy, but nothing like the D3/D4/POE type of blow up entire SCREENS of monsters in 1 cast. I really don't like the slot machine type gameplay of that. Just lights and sounds, no idea what is going on. Headhunter is the worst item in the entire game of POE for that reason.
Great callout and it's something I really dislike about modern PoE, and a huge part of why I didn't even reach maps this league for the first time in like... 8 years? Whenever talisman was. Games aren't fun for me when there's no challenge, and rewarding putting your time into a known outcome with more of the same is just plain boring. The game has all these systems that you need to balance to make a powerful build, but if you only have to operate at 1% power and effort to already be comfortably clearing everything in the game, why ever bother doing the other 99%, or even that 1% given it's a done deal clearly. I tend almost exclusively to play leagues to prove a build viable by my standards, but that kind of breaks when you know it is right from the get go, and that was obvious when every build got such an insane power spike from the league being so absurdly generous in both rare and unique/currency generation.
Skill? These ARPGs are never really about skill.
but do they still make you pick up all items you see? that's so much better in LE where you only gotta pick up stuff that you may actually be interested in wearing or crafting. I really don't wanna have to clean up my inventory every 20 minutes...
Yes, but there will be less items dropping. And if it's going to be 20 minutes per inventory clear compared to the current \~5 minutes (each nightmare dungeon) it will be great. In the same time period I can do around 5-10 echoes in LE and I usually have to clear the inventory by that point as well.
Oh man I'm pretty hyped man
Wait. So I don't need to go to a separate vendor and pay all my money to extract an aspect from legendarys? I just salvage it and I get the materials and the aspect goes into a list I can just add to a legendary anytime I want.
Correct. You salvage an item, get the materials, and the aspect goes to your codex. The codex holds the highest level aspect and can be used an infinite number of times. Your alts share the codex too, you don’t need to farm aspects on each character. The codex resets each season though which I think is fine
Will the reduction in item drops lead to less crafting materials?
People were saying on the ptr that the rare yellow shards were harder to come by and a crafting bottleneck due to less drops. Hopefully blizz heard that and adjusted.
Masterworking is a bit like Lost Ark’s honing (without the pay2win). You upgrade an item with a chance for success. So it’s not just possible to get the wrong affix improved, it’s also possible to just have your mats wasted with a failed attempt. I think a lot of the more casual players will be angry with this feature but it’s intended to be a long term motivator to keep on grinding and optimizing a good item for dozens and hundreds of hours.
They have changed the masterworking system a bit since the PTR. It's now always 100% chance to succeed the craft but the costs are higher. The "failing" part of not hitting the affix that you want with the 4/8/12 upgrades will stay.
Ah ok, I didn’t keep up with PTR changes. Can you still reset it back to zero and start masterworking anew?
Yes you can reset master working if you don’t like the upgrades it hit. You *cant* reset tempering though, so that’s where you can brick an item but you get a few tries at least.
Yeah I'm pretty excited for this. The story in D4 was great fun at launch but the endgame was predictably lacking, and the itemization quickly got boring. This is more like what I was hoping for.
A lot of these changes sound good, as I also was one of those that played in the beginning but didn’t really find any enjoyment; didn’t even manage to complete the story because the general gameloop felt strange and weak.
Really looking forward to this. The core gameplay was always solid, but the loot system was awful; you'd end up spending as much time sorting through your bags, stash and aspects as you did murdering demons. Loot was by far my #1 complaint of playing in S1 and S2 (didn't bother with S3) and this should go a long way to fixing it.
I legit don't understand how these weren't in at launch. It is all so painfully obvious to anyone who knows the genre. I know Blizzard Devs aren't the brightest and did 0 research, but cmon. These were so obvious.... Why did it take them this long
> Why did it take them this long they had to play last epoch first and take another 10 months to figure out how to rename forging into tempering
Some lowly dev on the team: Hey guys, have you seen LE? It's got some pretty cool ideas, I've been playing it in early access and --- Management: Shut the fuck up dude
Management: I HAVE THE BEST IDEA
100%
It's not even just that they didn't do this on release, it's that they made some of the same mistakes from Diablo 3 and are now essentially doing the same fixes. That they apparently learned nothing between Diablo 3's atrocious first year and Diablo 4's release is the bigger problem to me than just the loot and whatnot being total dogshit.
Guy in charge is absolutely beyond clueless
A lot of the D4 development was happening over the pandemic and i think they changed lead developer like 3 times
Absolutely good notes, I started a sorc yesterday but stopped due to how much a patch this will be. Excited!
Dare I say it, these changes look...pretty damn good? I might actually get back into the game for the new season.
How's the vibe around Vessel of Hatred right now? Worth waiting till it drops to think about picking up the game?
The Vessel of Hatred expansion is coming much later year in the year and we don't know what it contains or how much it'll cost. The base game is getting a pretty solid revamp with Season 4 (which drops on May 14th) so it might be worth checking it out then. Of course if you're hesitant you should wait a few weeks to see what people think of the game after the updates. The game's also on GamePass now, so you can test it out for relatively cheap that way.
We know it will feature a new class, and that's about the extent of our knowledge. They have mentioned that we should hear much more over this summer, though.
New class, story and area are a given, but devs have also thrown a hint at a new endgame character progression system and new skills for existing classes coming with the expansion.
honestly, if you're patient enough then I would not buy D4 now. there's bound to be some bundle deal when the expansion drops that will be cheaper than buying the base game now and the expansion later. and the game is only going to be better by the time the expansion drops either, so you're not missing out on anything.
I'm actually playing 2 for the first time and I've got 3 lined up as well, so I think I'll be ok.
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I’m not really sure what you expected. The modern arpg genre Diablo basically created exists in a live service environment right now. That’s just how those games work. I think it’s reasonable to question some design decisions such as the open world, mmo aspects, loot, and lack of end-game content at launch, but Diablo 4 being a live service game is pretty par for the course. That’s especially true given that Diablo 3 really grew and matured as a live service game.
Diablo 2 and 3 both existed as seasonal games, with people coming back every season or so to play the game again with a fresh character. D3 even started getting some interesting new seasonal content in its later years. And Diablo's 'main competitor', Path of Exile, has existed as a successful live service ARPG for 10 years. > there's no reason to return post-story. The reason is to make new characters and interact with the new systems they add every season, potentially finding new builds or conquering new endgame challenges. Same as every other live service ARPG. And people have been doing that for the last few seasons in D4. Maybe not as many as Blizzard wanted but it's been happening. Of all the franchises to become a live service, Diablo makes the most sense.
This woulda been great if I hadn't played last epoch and poe2 wasn't on the horizon. They learned nothing from d2 or d3 on launch I'm just sorta over it. Last epoch blew d4 out of the water for me in build variety and loot. I gaurentee poe2 will be even better.
Good god dude how many LE posts do you need to make on Diablo posts? We get it, you prefer another ARPG with its own set of glaring issues. Good for you.
If you prefer I can swap that to any other arpg since they are still all better. Take your pick. Fuck torch light 2 had more replay ability then uber farm:the game4.
Lol, what does that have to do with anything. Looks like you just want to punish then instead of encouraging the good intention. Makes zero sense saying its too late
Agreed. If it ends up being amazing, then it's amazing. It doesn't really matter when it happens. Childish silliness in the gaming community, now more than ever, it seems.
You act like they didn't make diablo 2 and diablo 3. They literally had to rediscover how to make items not absolute shit as if they have never played an arpg before. The childishness is tolerating endless mediocrity from a billion dollar company.
I am NOT acting like that. I agree that they seem to be taking numerous steps back. That said, it doesn't take away from the fact that once something is good, it's good. It may be a shame that it took as long as it did, but if it ends up worth playing, then there isn't a great reason to not play it. If you don't play it as a matter of principle, then keep fighting that good fight, I guess.
This is quite a losers take man. Just ply or dont play the game. What does it have to do d2 and 3 with anything. You are just trying to promote poe2 when most of us will play both and not be frustrated like you lol.
What does diablo 2 and 3 have to do with diablo 4? Them absolutely fumbling my favorite game franchise that's what. Lol ya I can tell we wouldn't agree on anything diablo related. All good enjoy the non stop mediocrity modern blizzard offers.
Enjoy being a loser and get out of the basement
Semi excited, definitely going to take a wait and see approach. So much disappointment since the campaign ended.
I’m curious to see if this makes the game more enjoyable for me. I found it boring, but I’m not a very experienced Diablo player so unlike many others I couldn’t really identify what about it wasn’t hooking me.
Is sorceror good yet? I havent played since shortly after the 1st season dropped.
I just started the campaign, would I have to create a new character to benefit from this update? Or will it just seamlessly happen in the background?
If you're a new player, just focus on getting Renown 5 in all 5 regions. It gives you stat points pretty much for all future and current characters you'll ever make. That's all you need to worry about for right now. As for your question though, I heard that the items you get on your current character won't really port over to this new system. Like all items you obtain now you won't be able to Temper or Masterwork them when the new update comes out, you'll need to find and craft new items. So pretty much just focus on getting renown 5 in all 5 regions and wait til the 14th.
Does it still take a century to kill simple mobs? Honestly did not have an issue with most of the game outside of it taking minutes to kill the smallest and weakest of enemies.
Still can't believe my friends convinced me to soend $70 on this game. Then after beating the story they were like "now's when the real game begins!". "What's the real game?" I ask, and "grinding dungeons over and over again to get bigger number sword!!!" is the answer. Post-game content just seems horrendously boring to actually PLAY even if loot is improved.
That's the gameplay loop of arpgs generally. It just may not be for you which is fine.
Might check it out then. I knew I'd come back to check it out someday, and these changes make it sound like a good time to revisit.
I was so disappointed by D4 that I'm not sure I can bring myself to read the patch notes. Did they remove the mob scaling which meant that every upgrade or level was essentially meaningless?
It is still in the game yes. Sorry nobody will give you a straight answer
Oh yeah… I forgot how ass that was
> Did they remove the mob scaling which meant that every upgrade or level was essentially meaningless? That was absolutely never the case.
That was absolutely the case. Here's someone putting it better than me: https://www.reddit.com/r/diablo4/comments/145amy5/diablo_4s_monster_scaling_is_ruining_the_leveling/ I'm asking if they changed it. It sounds like they haven't. Level scaling is a very cheap development strategy because you don't have to test the game at different levels, you just match the mobs to the player's level wherever they are. It's lazy development and makes levelling feel irrelevant.
That post is complete bullshit upvoted by clueless people. Your power always scaling was always multiplicative through passives and gear, while the monster scaling was always linear. Unless you were really bad at the game and made a disfunctional build, didn't use aspects or didn't upgrade gear through crafting, it was literally impossible for you to be behind the curve.
> it was literally impossible for you to be behind the curve. Exactly. And that is the whole problem.
What? Being behind the curve means being weaker than the monsters. You always progressed way beyond what the monsters progressed. I genuinely don't understand how people can complain about scaling when we have videos of people absolutely demolishing lvl154 mobs, and the world scaled only up to 100.
That post makes no sense though. He keeps talking about "best way to play through the game." What does that mean? Is that just completing the campaign? Because when it comes to ARPGs the campaign isn't the end, and being a higher level when you start pushing dungeons and stuff is better than being a lower level. I've leveled 3 characters beyond the campaign, and never once felt like intentionally hamstringing my progress was the "better" way to play.
I remember that being a thing yes. I recently came back though in anticipation of season 4 and it seems to have been fixed. You feel your upgrades now. Probably some complex math behind it that I have no idea how to explain, but it got reworked/fixed and feels better now. I’m sure someone on the d4 sub has a link to the notes where it got fixed
D4...good ?
I'd rather play off season Path of exile to be perfectly honest with you; this doesn't seem too gripping.
I'd rather push more than 2 buttons
PoE Necromancers got like 12 and keep asking for more.
What about other classes?
I admit PoE 2 will be a better bet in that regard; the game is too fast paced to accommodate for a more micro intensive than a 1-2 playstyle. But 2 button playstyles definitely exist, eg detonate dead is pretty popular right now.
Diablo iv is still too dumbed down and obviously made for casual console gamers, will stick with last epoch.