Hi Blizz, fellow adventurers! Herewith my 2 cents on my experience with the open beta weekends.
Overall I had a blast, to the point of foregoing real-life obligations to squeeze out an extra hour whenever I could, and now that it’s over I feel the tinge of withdrawal. Very much looking forward to launch and regardless of the final state of the game I know already I am going to sink a lot of time into it. What follows is personal opinion, please take it as such.
Firstly the excellent - the game looks and feels amazing! I love the dark broody themes, the return to sombreness, the visceral gritty feel of the character animations and the sound design on their actions is brilliant. Hearing the flesh tear when the druid transforms, the clink of weapons against armour, hack against wooden shield and thud against bone, the crackle of power in lightning directed at our foes… chills man. I love the character design, that each class has their own distinctive look, posture, mood, and those characteristics fit the fantasy of the class. The variety and design of armours and weapons and the uniqueness to each class as well was breathtaking. One can tell from taking all this in that an immense amount of effort was spent on the art direction and carefully crafting the theme and the world, and I can gladly say it was all worth it. The action and combat felt great, smooth as I’ve come to expect from the more recent iterations of the franchise, yet still somehow retaining the nostalgic feel of the action from earlier titles, very well done.
Onto my personal experience. I played all 5 classes across the two weekends and got 4 of them to 25. Like most of the community I found Barb and Druid to be a bit tougher than Sorc and Necro with Rogue somewhere in the middle. On the first weekend I felt a bit cheated when, after switching out Barb for Sorc I found a much easier time of it.
Then on the second weekend I made a crazy blow-up-the-whole-screen Necro, which I thoroughly enjoyed before giving some time to the Druid. At first playing the Druid felt like a bit of a slog, I couldn’t find a build that worked well, and all I really wanted to play was Werewolf. I switched to Rogue for a bit, but then came back because I really wanted to play a Werewolf, so I perservered with the Druid, and discovered something interesting - maybe I’m just masochistic, but I actually started to enjoy it. I found it really tough - dying several times. But I also found that I had to pay attention to mob mechanics and boss patterns and actively move around in combat instead of just standing in one place and hitting skill buttons on cooldown. I had to git gud, and when I did, the fights - even with trash mobs - felt very rewarding. It is reminiscent of the difficulty in D2 in a way, but with a modern twist - instead of the risk of missing an attack or suffering hit recovery mechanics you have to actively engage in the fight, dodging at the right moment and setting up your big hits. I also discovered that the Werewolf felt better to use 1H and totem than a beefy 2 hander with more damage and it started to feel fun. By 25 I had, by chance, picked up a legendary that beefed up companions and found that having wolves around also drew some attention off me, and by the end of it I was thoroughly enjoying the Druid, dashing around with shred, dodging out of the way of massive goat axes and tearing priority targets to pieces felt so rad. So much so that I felt sad that it might get buffed in rebalancing - that experience of facing up to tough challenges and figuring out how to pull through it in a strategic way may be gone come release. I realised that in D4 I do not actually want the same play style as D3 where mobs live less than a second and regardless of the mob type theyr’e all just fodder for the skillsplosions. Though I enjoyed the blood mist splosion build on the necro, in the end I preferred the methodical build up of player and character skill with the druid.
I think the nature of the beta and also that of future seasons will push players to run the bestest, fastest build possible, but maybe something interesting is lost in that. Perhaps, for example, if the wolf pack was unlocked by simply spending 3 hours in game instead of reaching a certain level, there would be less pressure to go straight for the strongest most optimal class/build.
The things I would change if I could. The skill tree or “twig” as I’ve seen some people affectionately call it, feels like it suffers a conflict on design direction. I was sad to find it so far reduced from what was shared during the quarterly feedback last year, but I think I understand the reason - they do not want to make players feel like they have to stick to once archetype eg. fire v lightning v cold only - so you can pick and choose at each step of the path. This philosophy does not seem very consistent however, since at the end of the tree you select a passive capstone which then reinforces these archetypes, also there are internal synergies within each archetype eg crackling energy. Then there is respec cost to discourage experimentation. It seems the current state of the skilltree is a transition somewhere between a casual approach and a more permanent, committed kind of skill choice system leaning towards the former. Personally I would prefer the latter approach, forgoing some parts of a tree during character development in order to specialise into a specific archetype, like a subclass within the class, assuming there would be at least some variety within each archetype/subclass too, maybe some side bar with a selection of passives.
Minor gripes; as others have mentioned the art design of the necro skeletons does not feel quite right. The world boss spawning at a fixed time (and also the fact that there are only 3 world bosses in total!). I saw a suggestion somewhere that world bosses could be “summoned” by performing a series of activites in the overworld - which would be anounced to other players so they can either join in or at least be aware the boss will spawn soon. But I understand with the current implementation of online multiplayer this could be quite challenging to accomplish (ie the fact that each mini region is somewhat instanced and limited to 12 players which may or may not be the same 12 players if they all travel across). the WB on a timer just feels too MMORPGy and ruins immersion for me - I have to check my real world clock to see when the game is doing the thing and organise my real world life to make it. I slightly agree with the sentiment that dungeons feel uninteresting, but I have faith the final implementation will not suffer these problems.
Thanks for all the hard work and effort so far, as I said before I can tell I will be playing this for many many hours on release. I understand it cannot be everything to everyone, but so far it’s looking really good to me! Good luck on the final sprint, see you on the other side!