I have mixed bag regarding current PTR changes.
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Ancentral legendary gear even in T4 is rare chance. I did many pits and NiD + WB highest Torment. Often i get 0 ancentrial legendarys that is IP800. I mean why didnt harder WB drop any 800 gear, only 750 legendary where i cant add 2 extra affixes?
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New Paragon board is really bad. Total only 5 boards and you pretty much have to pick useless rare nodes because a lot points have to go somewhere but very limited of total boards.
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Difficulty curve from T3 → T4 IS HUGE. Armor, resists ect penalty is major. Even three slotted highest tier skull gems (armor rating) wont be enough to hit armor cap 1k at Torment 4. I think casuals dont understand yet that these changes are bad for them. You need to farm A LOT more in expansion to be able to get same gear as in live atm. Forget about dreaming ancestral legendary gear with GA that are correct stats. Thats rare. I predict we will be stuck with 750 gear item level for very long due to rarity of good ancestral gear drops.
I think it may be even better to play specs that use a lot mythical items because you are guaranteed to get ancestral + 1 GA from crafting.
4 Likes
I agree however is this bad? How many seasons have you seen people dragged thru to the highest level and getting to 100 without much work. Also alts sitting in WT4 bosses getting all the loot they need. I think everyone who really wants a grunty end game character will be in T3 for a long time and then rewarded by being able to survive in T4. Its too hard to see after a few days of PTR but it will take a longtime to get all glyphs to 45, runestones levelled, mercs, plus another 100 paragon levels not to mention the 1570 obducite it takes to get an item masterworked to 12.
Yes, and Sorcerer struggles with basic gear (it looks a bit better with mythical gear + 800 IP items). Even when you drop an ancient item with 800 IP, it’s mostly useless. They’ve reverted their mentality to Seasons 0-3. They introduced tons of changes in Season 4, only to return to what it was before. Now I have this bad taste in my mouth, realizing that Season 4 didn’t have seasonal content because they were reworking itemization, only to abandon all those changes and revert back to what it was before…
Yeah, I think I’m done with D4. It’s 1 step forward and 2 steps backwards - I don’t know to what kind of feedback they’re listening to, or what crackheads provide feedback like this, but this is what we got:
- Paragon 2.0 they say… and all they did was move some nodes, slap another multiplier on Glyphs, added rng to upgrading them and called it a day. Legendary nodes are still outright useless - some even worse than they were before!
- Runewords - just bad, super trash bloat if they go live as is. I really don’t know what their understanding of it is, but it’s an ARPG for F’s sake! Why cuck us so hard on every single thing? Skills with 15-30s CD, Runewords conditional AF and they proc every blue moon, procs behind lucky hit, lucky hit chance AND crit/vuln/some other condition they figured!
- Every single activity that is worth doing, you have to do chores first - I swear it feels like they design for bots and RMT!
- Defenses feel like they do fk all. What’s the point in even farming better gear (unless we’re talking attack)?
- Artificial, lazy, dumb way of designing “difficulty” - give everything buttloads of HP, heaps of damage, loads of crowd control and less ways for players to deal with it. Simply great!
- No Auction House, because… nope, can’t find a reason!
- ANOTHER Stash Tab! Yeah, just 1 - because, apparently, Blizzard can’t afford the tech or the servers for it.
- NO LOOT FILTER STILL!
- Still no fix on formulas for damage/damage reduction or proper scaling; everything is scaled based on broken interactions, math that makes no sense and items 99.9% of the playerbase won’t even see for a season’s duration.
So yeah, I’d say we’re doing great! I guess it’s time I accept this game just wasn’t meant for me and move on…
3 Likes
Unfortunately jumps in difficulty amplify problems with balancing.
T4 being tough is not a problem. Requiring T4 to max out builds is a problem for low tier builds.
This is exactly what I was talking about—if you’re not playing the meta, you’re not doing anything… I built a Charged Bolts Sorcerer (my own build). The funniest part is that every other skill I used was dealing 5-9 million DPS, even skills from other elements were hitting for 1-2 million (all crit). But Charged Bolts, at best, did 600k xD! What a failure! I don’t know who designed the formula for this spell, but I can’t believe that with a level 20 skill, the description says it deals 70-90k DPS, and with 3000% crit damage, 3000% lightning damage, 1300% all damage + a lot, a lot of multiple damage… and I crit for 300k. For comparison, Lightning Spear at level 5 (1+4 from Shaco buff) crits for 5 million ;x… The glyph leveling is an even worse journey than before. Now we get 60% of our character’s power from glyphs and paragon xD! Blizzard is really good at making Diablo 3.
1 Like
I can see what they are trying to do. The devs are making the endgame longer and removing hard requirements.
What I dont understand is why it is so hard to balance. Just take a bunch of good players and let them max out builds. Then put them in the same fights and measure time to win.
All there is to do left is adjust the skill damage and you are done with rough balancing.
Either they programmed themselves into a corner and nobody wants to touch certain codes anymore, or the work flow for balancing is too inefficient.
Still, the trend goes in the right direction.
You see, this is where you’re wrong. You shouldn’t balance around maxed-out stuff & bis items, especially in ARPG’s! A maxed out build in any ARPG is supposed to feel overpowered - to the point you’re feeling like you’re breaking the game.
And this is especially the case with Diablo 4, with all the multipliers. If you miss a few of the multipliers you’re simply not going to be able to perform.
If you ask me, they’re trying to cast too wide of a net and they’re trying to cater to both the 1% and the 99%, which simply won’t happen - let’s be honest here… the wheel was already invented and there’s little to no improvements to be made.
This idea of broken being fine is precisely what disables cooperative play in Diablo 3 and 4.
There is no point in multiplayer, if one in the group deals 100 times more damage.
And the lack of player interaction is precisely what kills all live service games.
But this problem has existed since the beta (before the game even launched)… and many others. First, they said that the game wouldn’t rely on items like in Diablo 3. They claimed that the power of the character would depend on the configuration and synergies created by the players. However, aspects on legendary items and unique item powers (as well as uber uniques) account for the majority of a player’s DPS. In Season 6, paragons will provide another boost. And here’s another problem… Aspects act like Diablo 3 sets; without them, you can’t progress further. As for paragons, well… we were supposed to get “Paragon 2.0,” and I thought they would change the synergy on glyphs, introduce more glyphs that would expand builds, and create synergies between builds and other glyphs… But instead, we got another copy-paste job, with the max level of glyphs increased and some rare and magic nodes swapped around, and that’s it. No interesting changes, just more ridiculous numbers in the form of multiple DPS and increased DPS. If this is Paragon 2.0, I’m afraid to know what awaits us in future seasons, if their idea of balance is just playing with numbers without any real innovation.
I think you misunderstood what I said. Also, maybe 2-3% of the players care about group play.
My main point was there are too many dumb multipliers. Here’s a quick fix (I have suggested this since the early access):
- Bring back old Critical Damage, where all of it is multiplicative;
- Change Vulnerability to chance only, with a pre-set multiplier of 20-30%;
- Change Overpower to be additive to final damage and make it more viable instead of a 3% chance;
- Change all other damage increases to additive (from aspects, glyphs, legendary paragon nodes, etc.); OR, even better, provide gameplay altering effects with those instead of more damage.
Pretty simple, no? It will make balancing a heck of a lot easier, as well as lower the gap between classes. As a bonus, everyone understands how and where their damage comes from and it will actually be a stat squish - not the current abomination they came up with.
There is absolutely no reason to having this ridiculous number of multipliers and keeping the broken interactions between them!
1 Like
I’ll just add that for each piece of equipment, I would add slots for runes/gems. Armor, pants, and two-handed weapons could have a maximum of 3-4 slots, helmets and one-handed weapons 2 slots, and boots and gloves 1 slot. Aspects should be removed from weapons, and instead, they could be embedded into runes, or the runes themselves could have aspects… And that’s it.
I’m fairly certain we’re rambling on for no reason anyway… like I said - I don’t know where they source their feedback from or what sort of crackheads provide such feedback, but here we are.
I looks to me that they know where the problems are.
I assume the resources are currently on making money with new content in season 6.
That’s funny, genuinely! To me, it looks like they have no idea what they’re doing, no clear direction for the near or far future either. Absolutely no innovation, no passion or drive for it. They’re just pushing out mid (and I’m being generous here) stuff to milk the franchise - and this comes as no surprise knowing Rod’s industry history.
To each their own I guess… Overall it’s a good year for arpg players: we got LE and PoE2 is just around the corner, regardless of how the D4 expansion turns out.
The game is constantly getting better in small increments. Obviously the devs know where the problems are.
If you expect innovation, you will get disappointed. Blizzard has not been taking any chances in the last 20 years and they are not going to start now.
1 Like
In VERY VERY VERY small increments, and it makes no sense when you consider the size of the team behind it. As for the devs knowing there the problems are, I can 1000% say they don’t - I’d only ask you to look back when the playerbase crashed and they asked content creators for ideas and suggestions. This is very well documented, especially in DM’s case; he even refused saying “it’s not his job to fix the game”. Sadly, links are not allowed, because that’s what a “forum” is all about - removing posts, the ability to add context to an opinion, etc.
LE: If you're actually wondering what I'm talking about just go on youtube and look up "We Need To Talk About Diablo 4" and starting at 2:17 is the part I'm referring to.
This part I really can’t argue with. I’m just wondering how much longer players are going to put up with it… At the same time, seeing how this worked for them for around 20 years, why would they do more when they can do the absolute minimum and still cash it in? I’d say most of the blame falls on us.