A message for the Game designers
Diablo 4 is the BEST and WORST diablo game yet. I have been a fan of the diablo games ever since I purchased the first diablo back in ’98. Diablo 3 was great if not a little repetitive with the limited content, but it was still good and the set item drops were plentiful. I was excited to see that Diablo 4 was in the pipeline and saw a few tester videos with the druid showcased which I ultimately started my D4 journey with. I think the game looks great and the classes are good, if not sometimes imbalanced as is the nature of most games with class structures. The imbalances are addressed well for the most part, but some classes still excel more than others, which brings us onto the issues.
Firstly the classes, Spiritborn is great but massively overpowered, or rather the other classes are not on par with the Pit content. While the Pit is only one aspect of the game, it would be more enjoyable to see the other classes have the power to reach pit 150 also, with mastery of the game build mechanics.
The gear. Some unique / mythic items are great and others are just useless, even when somebody finds an obscure way to use them in a build, the developers close off that ‘loop hole’. Adjust the item then, maybe have certain items only drop for lower levels. Ultimately it would be better to see unique and mythic gear combinations be able to lead to just as powerful builds, albeit with different playstyles, that are able to complete Pit 150.
Drop rate. Some people have great success in finding the best greater affix items, others have no luck at all. The forum has plenty of posts complaining of such and I agree. It would be better to have the higher or highest difficulties guarantee at least 2 GA drop with a higher chance for 4 GA. With an increase in Boss health or difficulty. Also when you do get a 4 GA item sometimes it has the lowest unique aspect, example 4 GA Tibults will with 10% increased damage. It would be better to have 4 GA items always roll with maximum unique aspect. Also crafting mythic items in the highest difficulty would be better to again guarantee at least 2 GA drop with a higher chance for 4 GA.
Masterworking. While this helps to maximise potential of gear, it is also very easy to take a good item, try to forge the affix you want, and end up with 7 rolls of thorns, when you didn’t want thorns, then you reset with the scroll of restoration for another 7 and end up in the same situation. It would be better to have a targeted system, with increased material requirements, or harder to obtain materials, that allows you to roll the affix you want and then gamble on the value, e.g. overpower damage 100%-200% with 5 rolls to achieve the maximum or not. That way you don’t end up trashing a long sort after item.
Ancestral Legendary. It would be nice to see as described before, a greater chance for these to drop with 2 and 3 GA with greater variety than GA on resistances or other rarely used affixes, particularly on offensive aspect legendary items.
Runes. Runes are great but crafting runes is just another gamble system, increase the requirements to target craft what you actually want.
Gear trading. Now there doesn’t appear to be an easy way to make an abundance of gold so people are sell items for billions. According to some streamers, non blizzard sources are selling in game gold. This could all be avoided by implementing an auction house that limits the sale price of items accordingly, to what developers believe is apparent based on the ability of characters to generate in gold game. For example, the best activity for gold yields only 10 mill per run, so a 4 GA unique for example could be capped at 500 mill. These are arbitrary numbers of course, but the concept would be a Blizzard controlled economy, that also would limit player to player trades i.e. if a max sale price on the auction house is 1 billion then a player to player transaction would not be worth while for more than this, prevent to a certain degree, exploitation and overly inflated prices. OR increase the gold generation, however 3rd party vendors of gold would still be a problem.
Last season with the addition of the Hordes and the race to gather aether to get that relatively huge payout from the gold chest was fun, and enjoyable. Now Hordes are all but useless, at least the gear chest drops 1 GA items. Now 1 aether is not very different from 1000 aether spent on the gold chest. I would like to see this fixed and also for the enemies to have boost in HP, or rebalance all the classes.
All of this feedback comes from the point of view from someone who is not playing for 12 hours each day and streaming about it. Casually playing the game, or even semi-try-hard does not feel as rewarding as the previous series titles. Well that’s all I can really think of at the moment, and while some people will not agree or have different ideas, I just felt that I needed to vent some frustrations as I am not enjoying the game as much as I was last season. Despite the increase in activities, which is welcome, and the spiritborn, which is nice to see trillions of damage but also makes the game too easy, and other classes lost, and forgotten about, in the jungle. PLEASE HEED THESE WORDS, as a lifelong Diablo fan this is the BEST and WORST diablo game so far.
Thank you