Patch 1.1.0 General feedback

DISCLAMER
This is meant to be general feedback on the games current state. Perspectives on game systems are always subjective, but I felt the need to give my feedback none the less. The devs have already said that some of the things I will be criticising, will be changed. Here’s my feedback none the less.

General Gameplay Elements

Leveling:
I leveled my necromancer to lvl 100 here in season 1. And honestly my biggest gripe with the game, is the leveling speed. I understand that the devs have said that they will make some incremental changes to leveling speed from 50-100, but in my opinion we don’t need incremental changes, but huge changes. The current state doesn’t incentivize leveling several new characters and trying other class builds. Not even close. The last 30 levels is awful to level through, both in terms of the content you’re doing, but also the speed itself, concidering I spammed nightmare dungeons as much as possible.

Waypoints:
Starting the season with no fog of war was great. It would be even better if we didn’t have to go collect all waypoints. I understand that you want players to experience the open world. But additional open world content that’s fun, would solve that problem. Collecting waypoints every season is not fun.

Nightmare Dungeons

Affixes:

Lightning Storm
Lightning storm is simply not a fun affix. It’s not exactly the affix making it challenging, it’s the mobs in the given situation that makes it challenging. It hardly follows you and slows down the entire experience. As I said, I played a necro which isnt the fastest class in the game. Yet I still experienced having to wait for no reason several times.

Empowered Elites (cold enchanted)
Simply just annoying to get perma CC’ed. Devs said they would fix it, so I’d leave it at that.

All the "Monsters take less damage from X
Why?.. This doesn’t make the game more challenging, it’ll simply just make everything take more time. Prolonging the dungeon for zero reason. It might sound harsh but it adds no fun or “challenge”.

Bosses

Lack of variety
With the only real option of leveling beyond 50 being Nightmare Dungeons I was very dissapointed and honestly very unhappy with the lack of variety in bosses. Boss difficulty is one thing, but having to do the same bosses over and over drove me mad. Some of the bossfight are fine, but considering the absolute insane amount of dungeons and therefore hours required to go from 50-100, boss variety is in my opinion way too scarce.

More engaging fights
Due to the amount of dungeons required to reach max level, the thought of making bossfights longer scares me. BUT if they decide to make them longer, I pray that you also make the fights more engaging. You have some really cool fights in the campaign bosses, and capstone bosses. USE THEM! Create more bosses like that and REWARD the players for actually completing the fight (for example with a proper amount of XP) and the experience will be much better.

Helltides
I know this (also) is a subjective standpoint, but I would love if the devs would remove the super lucrative 250 shard cost chests, and just make all chests more lucrative overall. The current experience is: “Well I opened that chest so now i’m off to do other things…” or “Well I died, but now I don’t have time to regrind 250 shards”. Make the entire helltide and all the chests lucrative. I feel it would create a better helltide experience.

Community
The clan feature is in my opinion lackluster. I would personally love it if you would implement the community feature that already exists in Diablo 3. This would be far more engaging. This would also make it easier to network and form groups with strangers, making this a more social game than it currently is.

Endgame
In my opinion there is none.
Uber lillith is great! And the new uber season boss is also fine! Besides that there is nightmare dungeons, and after spamming them from 50-100, you don’t really feel like doing that anymore. Atleast I didn’t :slight_smile:

They said they would add new endgame content, so i’m eagerly waiting for this.

Final remarks
I understand that this is live service game, and it will be improved upon in the future. I’m sadly just dissapointed with a lot of things. I can’t play 22 hours a day, which means that the commitment during a season for me to level to 100 and then restarting that grind on a new character isn’t interesting or feels rewarding at all. A new character would require grinding renown once again, getting waypoints, and 1500+ nightmare dungeons more with the same bosses and no endgame to look forward to.

In my opinion the gameplay loop is not interesting at it’s current state, and you are not incentivizing players to try out different classes or actually giving them something to strive for. Before you say “That’s an ARPG though!” previous diablo titles did it better in my opinion. Multiple affixes feels like a way to slow down the game and not challenge players. And finally I find it very hard to believe that a large percentage of players actually make it to max level before they quit with how things currently are.

Once again this is my opinions, I will respect yours, and I am looking forward to see what everyone else feels.

Thanks for reading.
Good day.

1 Like

Honest with you. If the game had long seasons, I wouldn’t touch the leveling experience. I do personally think that leveling is fine at the moment. But, at the same time, it is also true that some people may not be able to finish their season journey due to the span of time given by Blizzard.
As a veteran of the series since 2000, I can tell you that the leveling experience in the Diablo series was far greater than the current in Diablo IV.
Regarding the future patch, I am skeptical about changes like the goblin guaranteed legendary. The idea of effort/rewards could be affected by this change. Designers did well for nerfing Helltides. When you have scarcity, you are facing the concept of decision-making. It’s a roguelike element that has importance to the game. Diablo is a game that over the years had different generations of players. Their perspective on how the game should be balanced differs greatly. You are touching on a difficult subject. Should Temerity drop all the time? Should the game be oriented toward a roguelike making leveling a different experience every time you level a new character? The list is long. Should the game limit accessibility to certain items? Do these items affect the overall experience of players? In Diablo 2 LOD, this happens if you think about Enigma and other items that are so important. In Diablo IV instead, of the uber uniques, do they actually stop to play fancy builds? Maybe?

The idea of making leveling easier or harder. Put it that way. It’s not a change that should be undervalued especially if it destroys the experience of the player base.
Today, we live gaming in a different way. We log in to Twitch(put it on any random platform), and enjoy gamers from all around the world chasing their goals but at the same time, we exclude the ethics of those who, for example, chase the world first and they do it in a manner that can be detrimental to their health. Under that perspective, maybe leveling should be nerfed in order to avoid the vicious cycle carried out by gamers. It will also benefit us as we give a different perspective to audiences or external forces that could criticize us for our behaviors to be unethical. And first of all, protect the players who would induce unhealthy patterns. Criticism should be placed against streamers who incur in that pattern and do it in a manner that can put the true values of gaming. We play for fun.

Again, the change you are proposing is far more complex than you may think. The developers, if they make changes, should consider these aspects and the ones I am not mentioning or that could possibly come up. I touched on different elements to make you understand that probably the developers are really cautious about making changes due to these factors or anything else that hasn’t been mentioned.

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Blizzard, Revert back the mystery chests to 175 cinders, WITHOUT changing the cinder drops; grinding 250 on T4 and only getting 4 sacred after that is just UNFUN! And just remove cd from horse boost ability…frikin annoying mechanics that only makes the game worse, not more difficult not more easy, just worse

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