I have been playing Diablo 4 on release. I quite enjoyed the story mode experience back then, but sadly the end game content felt a bit underdeveloped, so I lost interest relatively quickly after and stopped playing.
Some time has passed since, and patches have happened. A friend bought the game recently and starts as a new player so he has to do the story still (which he wants to anyway). I play together with him.
But I cannot believe how bad the campaign feels to play now in World Tier 2 (and we cannot increase the difficulty until we finished the campaign). The level gain is even faster than it was at release, so we are already level 50 as we just finished Act 2. We play on Hardcore but there is no challenge whatsoever. We take basically no damage from anything so you don’t even need to use defensive skills. Enemies melt very quickly, bosses die in seconds, whereas at release those fights actually took a while without being super difficult most of the time. But now its basically back to how it is in Diablo 3, where you just rush through the game and everything feels meaningless. “Luckily” bosses here dont have so many voice lines so you dont have the same comical moments where the boss cannot even finish one sentence because he is already dying.
I have not tried the end game / out of story content yet where most of the effort in the last patches seems to have gone to. But the whole concept of you just rushing through the entire game as quickly as possible so you can get to the “actual game” which is just spamming some Rifts 24/7, murdering 1000 enemies in a split second was what ruined D3 for me and it seems they brought it back to D4 now. What even is the point of creating this huge world and putting effort in creating an atmospheric campaign if this is how it plays out now?
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Because they released an unfinished game (at least a year too early) and now they have to perform surgery on a living organism.
There is a video on YT how Rax is doing capstone dungeon (50lvl) with 1lvl character in hardcore mode. With items ofc, but still…
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I agree. Back on release there were plenty of things that were still in an unfinished state, but overall playing the campaign the first time around on World Tier 2 provided a bit of challenge as long as you solely focused on the main story and were a bit underlevelled. If you did go and do side stuff that levelled you up, things tended to become too easy already.
I haven’t tried to run through the campaign in this season, but levelling even the first character this season is crazy fast. And after you’ve gotten the first character and the natural tempering recipes and saved legendary aspects, levelling the next becomes trivial if you engage with the systems. Even if they’re a different class, the general tempering recipes and legendary aspects can push you through. You could have the very first items you find, slap a temper on it and relevant legendary aspect, then blast through the first capstone dungeon. Then you grab the first sacred gear pieces, rinse and repeat and finish the second capstone dungeon barely having to look at what’s happening on the screen.
I don’t know if the game allows you to use tempering recipes and/or legendary aspect codex entries in the campaign that you’ve found on a different character, but if it does then it should absolutely be limited or you’ll trivialize the entire experience. And from what you’ve written and my own experience in levelling a non-campaign characters, the challenge is completely gone.
I guess in a way it’s logical that there’s a focus shift to the post-campaign development, as that’s where the majority of players spend their time and things like a battle pass and seeing other people’s cosmetics become more relevant. Still through, it’s such a shame that in focusing on the post-campaign, they seem to have completely trivialized the actual campaign experience.
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Yeah Tempering is indeed available in the campaign. I have not really thought much about it, I used it because its there, but now that you say it that might actually make a big part of the difference, as the stat increases to damage are quite large.
I give this advice too all new players.
“Focus campaign and class quests”
“Try not get side-tracked by dungeons, side-quest, or sexy npcs 
”
Then move tiers and have fun.