I’m a big Diablo fan, I’ve played since D1, and I’ve put thousand of hours into them so I’m intimately familiar with the games… D4 is tearing me apart, because I “want” to keep playing it, but there are so many little things (not huge things!) that are just causing me to just hit the Exit button after short sessions.
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1. Please improve the horse.
→ The Charge System is janky, and barely feels like your speed increases until you mash it all three times… but then its gone and you slow down and have to wait. If the cooldown was a bit shorter, or the Charge lasted longer, you could possibly have a situation where you could get into a rhythm of tapping it to stay charging (but then that unfortunately would be interrupted so often by the below points I make!).
→ Its hooves get stuck on every pebble and blade of grass, especially going round corners. Please have some sort of smoothing on it so it doesn’t just keep bumping into a tiny rock and stopping.
→ The server lag/rubber banding. This is crazy even after 2 weeks. Half the time you mash Charge, get a little speed, change area, rubber band to heck, and lose all that momentum (a side-note to the rubber banding… the game keeps running out of memory, and when playing lags my OTHER screen, so videos and streams stutter. This needs sorting asap!).
→ Charges in Cities. Please allow this. It breaks nothing, and would make things less frustrating, even though I’m not a fan of Charges.
→ Jump Points. Inconsistent. Some you can use, some you can’t. Always frustrating to remember which.
→ Climb and Duck Points. Utterly frustrating, more so than the Jump Points.
→ Blockades. Same as Climb/Duck points, but you also have to attack them out of frustration.
→ Re-Mount Timer is unnecessary. Taking into account the above points… oh my God. Example: "I’ll just get on my horse… barricade, crap… kill it, wait 8 seconds to re-mount… use my three charges to speed up… hit a Climb/Duck point 2 seconds later. Come on! Or get stuck on an enemy, not even get dismounted due to damage, but you hit them and can’t get through so you just dismount to kill them out of sheer spite, then have to wait 8 seconds to horse again!
→ Horse Attack Cooldown. Why is it on cooldown the moment you get on the horse? It does so little damage that I rarely use it anyway. I wouldn’t mind if it was a big burst, but its like 1 auto attack worth.
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2. Skills and Paragons.
→ Please allow us to save Builds. As many as we want. Does it break immersion? No. It just stops us having to reset all the trees and spend a dumb amount of time to put in the points by hand (either remembering them or by using a guide). Just have a popup that goes “You will spend X gold changing your Skills and Paragon Boards. Yes/No.” Sorted!
→ We WANT to try out different builds! Having to do the above by hand each time, especially if we don’t know if we’ll like the build or find it better than our old one, is a chore that makes things less fun.
→ Paragon Points. I like that you get 24(?) points to play with on an Alt at 50 because you’ve completed all the renown. That’s great! But leveling to 50 as a solo is pretty slow (in a party being boosted seems ludicrously fast). Would it be possible to get those Paragons at level 1 for a quick power boost?
→ Another idea, perhaps paragon could be account wide? Where the amount of points you have is equal to the amount your highest level would have. So for example, you hit 50 on 2 characters, then take one to 60. That character then has about 50(?) more points. Your level 50, or 1 if the idea above was also used, could then spend those points at their lower level, but would NOT earn any points themselves until they surpassed the level 60.
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3. World Events.
→ Not Enough of them. There are only 3 events (World Bosses, Legion Invasion, Helltide). And they’re all essentially the same.
→ Helltide is the only one that feels rewarding, but it also doesn’t have enough to hold my attention for more than grabbing 2x chests before going “Well, I think I’m done here.”
→ Legion Events would be better if they were more frequent, and gave more exp (not necessarily more items, though that would be nice).
→ Not having timers for them show up feels bad if you miss them. Especially if you’re logged out. It would be nice to see something like “Boss will spawn at X time” so if you do have the time to log in later, you can remember and come back.
→ There’s so many things you could do based on the locations! Things in the Desert that you wouldn’t get in the Snow, and vice-versa.
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4. Instances and Events.
→ Cellars are very sparse, and 99% of the time look the same depending on the region. The events in them are also the same as the ones you can find in Dungeons, and are not really too rewarding. I only go into them if they’re part of the Whispering Tree Event.
→ Dungeon Events. There’s only about 4 of these in total. I say that, knowing there ARE more, however those “more” ones are just re-skins of the classic three with different NPCs/Narratives. There’s “Protect the dude”, “Protect the 3 dudes”, “Wander around with the spirit”, “Survive the waves of mobs”. These pretty much repeat in every single dungeon throughout the game, with no customization based ON the dungeon (or Cellar) where they’re taking place.
→ World Events. Kind of the same as Dungeon events, to be honest. There are however a handful more, like “Stop the sacrifices”, “Stand on the plates”, “Kill in the circles”, and “Kill the channelers to remove the boss shield”… but the majority are re-skins of the Cellar/Dungeon ones. For example “Protect the Carts” or “Protect the villagers from the spiders” are just “Protect the three dudes” again. And, again, these are not customized for the areas where they take place, they’re the same events regardless of whether in somewhere like Fractured Peaks or Hawezar, like a “Wandering spirit looking for its lost love” is the same wherever you go.
→ Like the events… the bosses are identical to each other wherever you go, and it was only AFTER hitting 50+ that I started to see a handful more bosses, but even then I encountered them more and more too. For example, the bosses aren’t tailored around the dungeons specifically, more just a theme, and they don’t really have any “character” to them, or different abilities based on their location or what other things were in the dungeons. Sure, it would be really really hard to come up with unique bosses for so many dungeons. I get it. But by the time you’ve seen one Blood Bishop, or Denmother you’ve really seen them all.
→ The Butcher spawns. Love him. Keep him coming! In fact, why aren’t more bosses like that showing up randomly? That’d be sweet, right? There’s also no “reason” he shows up, he’s just kinda “there”. Could this be the start of a Nemesis-style system? I think it very well could be if you put the time into fleshing it out!
→ Strongholds. Love 'em. Think they are a great feature, but would like to see more, especially dynamic ones. For example, not the monsters re-taking the ones you cleared exactly, but say you clear our the “main” stronghold, new mini-strongholds could pop up in the region as events like “We’re building back our forces in this area as you kicked us out of our base!”, and you can then go there, do some events, etc. Maybe even have monster reputations like in another ARPG Grim Dawn where they remember you beating them, send champions/nemesis creatures after you, etc!
→ The PvP area. Not really been here much to be honest, and when I did there wasn’t much PvP. I need to try this out more, but it just seems like “Do the PvE things, with a chance to get jumped and lose your currency.”.
→ Player Density in-general. Seems low. For example, in the Helltides I do see other people, but when encountering certain events like the really high-health bug boss… nobody’s ever around, or responds and comes to help if I say in local “Hey, bug boss near X place”.
→ Cellars do not count for Cull quests when mobs inside are the same type. This would be nice. Went in with 54/75 spiders, killed spiders inside, this didn’t update.
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5. The Inventory (and some Vendor stuff).
→ The size overall is fine for carrying regular items. No qualms there.
→ Aspect Storage. This would be great, because D3’s Cube was perfect, you didn’t need to lug around the same extracted aspects over and over because they’re not the ones you can make the enchanter learn from completing the dungeons. Please have a separate tab that can hold as many aspects as you have, maybe also even have them sorted by which ones they are.
→ Aspect Imprinting. Please have the names written ON the aspects the enchanter has available. Mousing over them each time, when you may even start to learn the names is kind of a drag. Having the name just under them would be a nice touch. Also, why even have a “show my class” aspect option? (I haven’t checked if you can imprint for your alts, but why would you really need to if you have the saved aspect?), so that could just be removed and only show your class aspects.
→ Consumables Tab. Same as the aspect tab really, very small, and ends up getting filled far too quick with Sigils. I know you’re meant to disenchant the ones you don’t need, but it still feels like a very small space.
→ The Stash. So much smaller than D3, and it makes me sad, as my Druid is taking up 90% of all the tabs, now I started a Rogue and I’m like “Err, where do I put the Rogue Items/Aspects?”. Maybe having 4+ Stash tabs uniquely for each character, and then one shared one (for Gems, Elixirs, Sigils, etc) that is the first one that opens by default.
→ Sell All. We have a an array of disenchant buttons at the Blacksmith, but none of the same on the Regular Vendors. This would just be a nice touch, so like when you get your mats from the Blacksmith, if you do it at a Vendor you’ll just get the gold values.
→ Gems. A gem tab would be super. You get so many, and that takes away slots from gear, so you may have to keep TPing to town more often, or choosing to ditch an item at a time. You could spend that time killing!
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6. The Map and Journal.
→ Quests. Please don’t cap them. Every game does this, and it just gets frustrating. Is there a reason to cap them? If there is I can’t really see it. I do like that the ! stays on the map though, that is neat so you can go back and know where they are in the wild after abandoning them.
→ Tracking Quests. Please let me track more than one quest on the left-side of the screen. It works for WoW, it’ll work for Diablo. A second point here, is that if I go somewhere where I have an active quest (but not the one I’m tracking), the tracking doesn’t switch to that quest or even just ADD the quest for the area I’m in as a “Hey, might wanna do the quest while you’re in the area!”. Same goes for going into Cellars or Dungeons. That would be a nice quality of life improvement.
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I feel like I’m being overly critical, but for a game I’ve waited for for years, played the heck out of the first four (yes, even Immortal)… there’s a lot that I think (THINK! OPINION! SPEAKING JUST FOR MYSELF!) could be improved. And I hope it is.
Good luck, and I can’t wait to see what the next patches bring!
