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Remove the warning triangle “enemies are stronger than you” that pops-up every time you engage them. Challenge rifts are painful to do because of this. When opened, blocks the entire screen during the fights. I lost count on deaths due to this.
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Disconnected from battlenet pop-up. Same thing. Giant pop-up during gameplay.
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Make it an option to “not open the mini-map” on click. The right side of the screen is easy to click during the rifts, which opens up the mini-map unintentionally. On PC we simply press “m”.
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Remove the “leave dungeon/rift/instance” near the mini-map. Same reason, easy to click unintentionally.
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The left layout is to big… The player only needs to see the timer and the progress made. When collapsed, that info should be displayed with lower/smaller letters/numbers.
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“Branded one” NPC has a bug. While it is casting, or pulling back his arm to throw his spear, he is immune to all damage. There are other…
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Elite NPCs (blue and yellow) should not reset their position. When dragged through the map, they should always pursue the player. Even when the player straights to far, they should stop at that location. Not reset to the initial spawn position.
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The rifts have to many dead-ends. The cross-roads are not an issue, but the forks leading to the dead-end are a problem. Avoid them please. Also, there are areas of the map, that have no NPCs… There might be an issue on your spawning mechanism.
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There are areas of the map that prevent the final boss from moving. (e.g., doors, tight corners, and stairs)
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There are assets in game that block ranged attacks and skills. (e.g., small stones, and tables). They should instead be destroyed or let the attacks go through/pierce.
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Unlocking Hell 2 (and consecutive difficulties) should be by solo Challenge Rift level 30, or achieving paragon level 30. One or the other.
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Rift boss is spawning far from the player, losing precious seconds. Also, some locations are choke points that lock its movement, making it very difficult (if not impossible) to kill the boss as ranged character.
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Legendary gems. The ranks are understandable, the stars aren’t. No idea why implement a system that negates 99% (I am assuming most people don’t pay thousands of dollars/euros) of players to achieve/obtain/farm one of the main items to progress challenge rifts.
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Normal rifts (Elder rifts) I don’t understand why you decided to de-spawn all enemies when you reach 100% progress, and the boss spawns. The existing enemies should always persist on normal rifts, since they all drop gear/gold/loot.
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Normal rifts. Some of the affixes added by the crests are dumb. I personally dislike added damage to the character on specific instances. Or movement modifications like wind, and ice that slips… It makes the game arcade-like, maybe even childish.
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Rift maps are very similar, lacks variety.
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Bosses are too limited, probably less than 20. Now since the game is mostly around grinding rifts, the number of bosses is too low. Also, bosses should have more features, they have less than D3… (e.g., physics: swings could pushback players and summoned minions, instead of passing through the models; squashing attacks should insta kill independently of the defense, instead of passing through the model; the minions spawned by the boss, should be different and do different mechanics; there are few if none bosses with phases or transformations; etc). Your targeted audience is younger people and others who never heard of blizzard, (even if you rated it for 15+) so it is understandable that the game is easy to play, but in higher challenge rifts I believe it is somehow expected to have more mechanics and difficulty, besides a bigger-sponge-to-soak-damage.
Even your incoming D4 bosses only have a limited number of features. If you notice, not all attacks pushback, or insta kill if the boss jumps on a player and squashes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogA7FwDRZ30
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Challenge rifts. The resources material rewards, are inappropriate. Not to mention you only receive it once, first time clear. Actually, it is offensive when compared with D3 rewards for competitive players.
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Paragon and Bots. This is a problem that exited in D3, and increased even more in Immortal. and by the way, it will remain in D4… Paragon is a bad system… Anything that requires endless grinding based on some kind of activity creates an incentive to use bots. xP farm to acquire/unlock power, is a lazy design to lock people from content/skills and artificially create content or buy-time for devs to create additional content. This design has plagued video games for quite some time, and it is a tactic that does not respect player-time. It is a double-edge sword that increases player interaction/activity but burns-out players since they are systematically doing the exact same thing, over and over, with the mere objective of acquiring more power, and not because they are having fun. Ultimately, you keep hardcore players who have a lot of time and are willing to use third-party apps (bots and currency-shops/web-sites) and discard the majority of players who do not have time and are not willing to install/use third-party apps. This is one of the reasons why your player base appears to increase (artificially due to bots and forced interaction), at the expense of losing individual players who can’t grind the limitations you created/designed.
As a comparison, MOBA and Battle Royale do not have this issue, because the “grinding” aspect is the leader board alone. Not Power!! Freeing players to choose if they want to play ranked or normal games. No forced interaction… -
Legacy of the Horadrim. Don’t understand the existence of this system (another one…). All these stats were in the old Paragon system of D3. They are a small source of power that a player can unlock to progress in challenge rifts… No point in having this. I would rather see legendary powers associated with the horadrim, instead of these stats! The “grinding” of the keys to unlock the power are also absurd.
Conclusion
It is a downgraded version of D3 rifts (both normal/elder/torment and competitive/challenge), in respect to all its features. There is nothing worth praising about the immortal version of rift(s). In my personal opinion this is a lost opportunity to show (or test) something else, different, or even innovating. There is nothing fun or competitive about them… Once the player realizes everything is behind either endless time-grinding and/or money.