Major Feedback Thread

General Discussion
1

Core

  • This shared-world open world design has to be scrapped. The shared world exists to encourage mtx. From https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2017-10-18-activision-patented-method-of-tuning-matchmaking-to-boost-microtransactions

“For instance, the microtransaction engine may match a more expert/marquee player with a junior player to encourage the junior player to make game-related purchases of items possessed/used by the marquee player,” the patent reads. "A junior player may wish to emulate the marquee player by obtaining weapons or other items used by the marquee player.

  • Every form of dynamic monster level scaling must be scrapped - Normal, Nm, Hell you can even throw in Inferno if you want but these should function similarly to how they functioned in Diablo II. The game could become darker as you increase the difficulty.

  • The itemization needs to be completely reworked to be in more line with Diablo games.

  • “Legendary” items shouldn’t exist. Make them Uniques like in real Diablo games. In “Diablo” 3 they’re just bland Generic Item Templates that always roll higher than Magic and Rare items.

  • Magic and Rare items should exist for a reason that isn’t just “salvage fodder”. Generic Item Templates make sense in Diablo II because Magic and Rare items had an actual place in the game - Magic items roll fewer stats but higher values, Rare items roll more stats with lower values.

  • Uniques should have unique stats (like in Diablo II) and don’t have to modify skills at all. There’s really no need to tie skill modifications to gear.

  • Skill trees should exist for each individual skill where you can have multiple branching paths where the final choice could be a Legendary-esque alteration.

  • Hirelings / Followers / Mercenaries must exist and the game has to be rebalanced from the bottom up with these in mind. You can’t just slap them on when there’s 3 months left to release and hope to have the balance down. “Diablo” 3 followers were complete garbage and only existed to enable Unity.

  • Add a Charm inventory like the Talisman (I assume it was scrapped from “Diablo” 3 because it was actually good and we can’t have good design in our gamse). You didn’t want charms yet you added items like the Nemesis Bracers which annoyed players by forcing them to equip the item, click shrines and then unequip them which makes them worse than the charms.

  • Non-physical damage shouldn’t be tied to weapons.

  • Unbreakable nonsense must be removed. >muh CC build doesn’t fit a hack n slash.

  • Identification has to be brought back. For all items. Being able to trade unidentified items is very cool and it’s very Diablo.

  • Horadric Cube is the cube that is very Diablo, David Kim, not the cube from “Diablo” 3, that one has nothing to do with Diablo. Bringing this back in a major way would be appreciated by fans.

  • D4-style Runewords shouldn’t exist, they’re just repackaging “Diablo” 3 effects. Turning your healing potion into a “deal more damage” button isn’t interesting. Make items with sockets, white bases and superior white bases meaningful again. Don’t make the mistake of adding Runewords that renders other item qualities obsolete however (eg Grief or Enigma).

Lore & World

  • “Diablo” 3 must be retconned entirely and Diablo IV should be sold as Diablo III. You’re doing the fan base a disservice by trying to sell us on the idea that “Diablo” 3 is a Diablo game when the only thing Diablo about it was Deckard Cain and because he was too Diablo he had to be killed.

  • Acts were great for story telling and it helped make parts of the game different from one another. Diablo 4 has a tiny world and I don’t see how you’re going to be able to tell a compelling story when you’ve scrapped almost every characteristic of the franchise.

Fluff

  • Mounts have to be scrapped. They exist for you to sell cosmetics, not to make the game better.

  • Transmog shouldn’t exist.

  • Cosmetics shouldn’t exist. It was cool how different stats changed the colours of items in D2, what isn’t cool is making gear look bad just to sell cosmetics that had actual effort put into them.

  • Achievements shouldn’t exist. Players have their own goals, they don’t need you telling them what to think of as an achievement or not.

  • Rotational fluff shouldn’t exists - air punching to keep up effectively infinite buffs, using X just to make Y more powerful and so on. We want multiple spells and a well designed game where we get to make choices, we don’t want to use spells in a fixed rotation decided by you.

  • Just give the game some depth. This is at its core a PC franchise so don’t compromise the PC UX because you’re concerned with how it’s going to play on a 1st Gen PlayStation 4…

This isn’t a complete list of issues but I’d happily try the game out if everything mentioned here was remedied to a satisfying extent.

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We have to get MadKat to the dev team to tell them these STAT. +1

But because its Activision-Blizzard and as we all know, Activision ruins literally everything they touch, mounts won’t be scrapped. But the make or break for me is going to be how the game is difficulty wise. I would like to see Normal, Nightmare, Hell, and Inferno only being able to be beaten with end game characters. Players have the ability to see all 4 difficulties when making/joining a game unlike Diablo 2. And I wanna take someone’s butt in pvp when hostiling them. The whole 2 people have to agree to a duel sounds way to World of Warcraft to me and even reminds me of the SouthPark episode where they made fun of WOW.

But I agree with everything said. :slight_smile:

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Sounds like you just want D2 but remastered. Not everyone feels this way. I’m excited for an open world, and everything else doesn’t bother me.

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Why do you think anyone who doesn’t like “Diablo” 3 or their current plans wants “D2 but remastered”? I want a new game that doesn’t try to reinvent the wheel. You can improve on everything and add new stuff that is in line with what exist, that doesn’t make it “D2 but remastered” at all m8

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No it is an awesome idea, just think of the possibilities a open world environment can bring to the table to a game such as Diablo. We as a community should help the Dev-team with cool ideas so we can avoid a World Of Warcraft rip-off experience. Open World is great, but it has to be from Diablo 4s point of view

in a open world environment, mounts can be a really cool idea. Microtransaction all you want as long as it is purely cosmetics and never pay to win. If we want updates and big expansions for the game in the future, this is one way to do it.
Diablo 3 lacked any form of income for the team (except for expansion and 1 DLC packet that should have came with a second expansion) so the game basicly diead and expansions were scrapped. If a game generates money that means future content. As long as it doesent interfere with the gameplay so that you can buy better items, who cares? You are never forced to buy a cosmetic.

Listen I know im coming of like a azz-licker for Blizzard right now. Just know I have been banned from these forums before for expressing my opinion when the great immortal fiasco happened. This is the first time in years they seem to be listening to the consumers rather than their headquarters. The game is maybe 3-4 years away but I hope they keep their peomise of updating the community 4 times a year untill release. In the meantime, lets help the team with ideas and not just shittting all over everything

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It could’ve been interesting in a spin-off game (they scrapped multiple projects so I’m assuming they’re reusing a ton of assets) but they’re just doing this to sell cosmetics.

No. No. No.

Diablo 2 had a single expansion yet it was supported for YEARS with updates and even to this day they’re doing ladder resets. They can just sell expansions like LoD as long as D4 Classic is still playable.

You having been banned doesn’t make you right. I get banned from their forums a lot and Blizzard have even threatened to ban me for bashing lying GMs should.

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True but as with time everything changes. This is considered a bad business move nowadays. You have to take into consideration that there are many similar games out there today so the market are heavily competitive. Just releasing 1 expansion and then just have 2 more legendaries every 2 months is gonna kill the game in the long run. So if the microtransactions leads to frequently updates (that are free) and big expansions, why wouldnt I want that for the game?

Trust me in a perfect world I wouldnt want microtransactions either but this is 2019 and it is the way the gaming industry have evolved. Cosmetics aint even that bad, I know it is a meme and everyones hating on it but look at POE they have cosmetic microtransactions and they are doing great. They release big new stuff all the time because of it.

The game being open-world won’t change much for you as a Diablo player if they do it right. Like I said if they dont steal everything from WOW and let D4 become its own open world experience that allows itself to differ from the WOW-formula. Then it could be really exciting.
Open world allows the game to go in a sligthly different path that the franschise havent been to before (and hopefully) without losing the core Diablo experience.
Having a big living breathing community of players you can meet and trade with all over the map will 100% evolved the D2 experience when everyone was just staying in town, chatting and trading. Now when the world is so big you can meet up with players, making the whole thing much more organic and awesome

And it isnt JUST for cosmetic microtransaction. I thought it was a cool idea to ride your horse through the world and even be able to make spells from horseback and so on. I think they are doing this as a way to make you as the player feel like this is a real world that is big and that is kinda cool if you ask me. 100% I would want to ride on a horse with a chopped off head attached to the saddle. Maybe you could collect head from pvp and display it on the horse or something?

You OK there chief?

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This paragraph you quoted talks about matching a new player with another more experienced one. In so doing, they want the new player to use micro-transactions to buy what he become equal to the older player (pay-to-win).

You really enjoy cherry-picking, eh?

What you neglected to mention was that the entire article (for which you thankfully provided a link) has absolutely nothing to do with Diablo, but is indeed all about Call of Duty.

Blizzard has already made it abundantly clear that they are considering micro-transactions for cosmetics only, and that under no circumstances will it be for buying hero power (pay-to-win):

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I linked it just to show you that this isn’t some far-fetched conspiracy theory, they’re literally this greedy. This happens in a lot of FPS games or MOBAs, you see your killer’s skins etc… They never let you turn skins off for other players because it’s necessary so that others can feel like they’re better than you for buying skins.

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I don’t mind and don’t care about cosmetic microtransactions. I love shared living world idea becouse it will keep the game fresh, changing maps every season, changing quests and bosses, so much possibilities. Of course they will add cosmetics why wouldn’t they, gamers are proving every day that they want to buy them so from business standpoint it’s a must have.

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have some semblance of standards… cmon

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I wouldn’t call it greedy. Not by a long shot! It’s simply and alternate means of generating an income in order to finance continued development of the game.

And this is why I will support micro-transaction in Diablo IV. Provided, of course, that such are limited to cosmetics only.

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So far this isnt major yet, hence i will elaborate some of my views. I never post here so doing this means i actually care.

Let’s start of with the end. End-game by that i mean. Rule of thumb is now that when you reach max level, end-game begins. Why can’t reaching max level be an end-game goal? Adding this does imply that quite the numbers of levels should exist, example 100, or - how D2-ish - 99. Reaching 3/4 of that must be doable by all, and getting to the top should take longer and be a goal per se.

Difficulty, another topic where there are two camps. One that supports scaling difficulty, and one that absolutely despises it. Here again is a solution midway. Keep the open world with a fixed difficulty, normal - nightmare - hell - inferno, where inferno should be inferno hard as D3vanilla, with monster health indeed scaling with player numbers (also to not make world bosses pieces of cake with plenty players). The special dungeons on the other hand would scale depending on the key level.

If the open world has different levels of fixed difficulty, this means numbers must be deflated. As shown a level 1 amulet has 100 “power level” and the most powerfull items will grow “over 9000” making everything other than ancient items and mythics pure trash. D3 introduced ancient items and later primals because there was no trading anymore and legendaries actually rained from the sky so getting geared is very simple. Perfecting gear takes some more time. Nonetheless, this is absolute donkey dung.
In short, numbers must be deflated. It just may not be possible that the difference between level 1 and max level is over 1000T damage. Again, scaling should be linear and not exponential.
There must be a perfectly clear difference between white, magic, rare, legendary and set items. Keeping mythic out of this because they are very unique in playstyle, in a positive way.
White items are now 100% trash. This need not be. Quick example, a white chest armor can have 4 sockets, whereas a magic/rare/legendary can only have 2? Opens up space for more rune combinations. Will i drop stats for more effects? Will i drop in 1 condition rune and 3 effect runes? Or the other way around, or perhaps 2/2?
Magic items should be magic, purely purpose built. They add a few attributes, but in higher quantity. Rare items must be (with crafted) the go-to end-game items. Varied rolls with varied stats.
Legendaries should add a twist to skills, and not just be rares with higher stats. Then we can just as well remove all items except legendaries.
Don’t dumb all stats down. How resistance worked in D2 was magnificent. This can also be applied to monsters (but do NOT add elemental immunity to monsters). Example a monster in the desert area can have 33% fire resistance. A water based monster 33% cold resist. Big ass boy 33% physical resist. Enough to work with.

Skills and talents…tough subject. My point of view is that damage dealt should not depend only on weapon damage. A fireball thrown has absolutely nothing to do with how endowed my staff is. It depends on my magical prowess. If i whirlwind through a pile of mobs, this should absolutely depend on my weapons.
This in mind a sorc will not need to find the biggest sword out there, but can opt for utility instead. A wand with mana regen, or max mana, or +2 to fire skills, whatever suits.
To get more diversity - which is key in 2019 and later - skills should be leveled for strength, and have talents for effect. Example: lvl 1 fireball: 25-50 damage, lvl 10 fireball: 60-95 damage.
In the fireball talent tree options: splits into 2-3-4 firebolts without aoe damage. Or increase aoe radius by 2-3-4 yard. Or make it piercing. Plenty ideas to come up with in the coming years.
Barbarian weapon throw, weapon damage based. Talent: instead of throwing your weapon, summon a massive boulder to hurl at your enemies. Damage now will depend on skill level instead of your weapon. Or flame throw: ignite your weapon when your throw it. Damage now depends on both skill level and weapon damage, since you still actually throw your weapon.
Opens up space for itemization.
In short: categorize skills, being spells, attacks, or hybrids. Talents should add effects to skills instead of just +x% damage (+damage by talents is totally fine, as long as it does something else as well). Your skills and talents must define your character and playstyle, not your items. At least 50% of your power should be from skills and talents, and the rest be item based. Unlike D3 where a lvl 70 character cant even dent a zombie.

Remove flashy effects when a monster is hit. It should bleed, not transform into a flickering TL light.

Sums it up for now, wish i were a better writer however i think the idea is clear. Players are not dumb sheep, so pealse don’t oversimplify the game.