While the currently planned 1.1.1 patch has many interesting improvements, I think many players would agree that many essentials are missing. Here’s the patch notes I wish we would’ve seen, as well as a longer discussion on particular aspects of the game that I believe need improvement in order to prevent an exodus of players. This is a great game for the first 50-100 hours in a season, but it has the potential to becoming a game that stays great for 1000s of hours with the right improvements.
Leave your comments of what you wish patch 1.1.1 would have contained.
Sorcerer
- Defence of Sorc armor has been increased by 25%.
- Unstable Currents cooldown has been decreased from 70 secs to 25 secs.
- Ice Armor and Fire Shield cooldown has been reduced from 20 secs to 10 secs, so you no longer require 4 defensive skills on your hotbar.
- Damage of single-target attacks increased to 100% + 10% per skill level. (Similar changes to damage should be done to each class based on their attack speed / reuse time)
- Damage of AoE attacks increased to 70% + 5% per skill level. (Similar changes to damage should be done to each class based on their attack speed / reuse time)
- Damage of DoT attacks increased to 30% per second for 8 seconds. (Similar changes to damage should be done to each class based on their attack speed / reuse time)
Necromancer
- Hit points and defences of minions have been increased by 30%.
- A maximum of 20% of a minion’s total life can be taken away by any attack.
Barbarian
- Barbarian damage has been increased.
Druid
- Druid followers will now buff the Druid and surrounding players.
Bug Fixes
- Resistances have been fixed to reduce incoming damage as per your stats page. For example, if an attack would’ve done 100 lightning damage, and you have 50% lightning resistance, the attack will only hit by for 50.
Quality of Life
- Stash space has been increased to have 5 private stash pages per character, plus 10 shared stash pages per world.
- Character page has been redesigned, giving 10 x 10 inventory spots instead of the current 3 x 11.
- Horse reuse time has been changed to 10 seconds if you were forced to dismount due to enemy attacks, 5 seconds if you dismounted by using your attack skill, and 2 seconds if dismounting using the dismount keybind.
- Barricades have been repositioned so you can run around them.
- An icon will appear on the mini-map if a world boss or legion is visible. The icon will remain visible until the boss or legion spawns.
- World bosses will now spawn every 2 hours. Legions will now spawn every 30 minutes.
Nightmare Dungeons / Sigils
- Sigils have been redesigned to no longer be tied to a particular dungeon.
- Sigils of the same level are now stackable.
- Affixes are no longer attached to the dungeon. Instead, when activating a nightmare dungeon, you are given a random choice of a few positive and negative affixes to chose from.
World Experience
Experience and drops gained from various activities should now give about 90% of the experience from doing nightmare dungeons.
This includes the following:
- World Events
- Hell Tides
- World Bosses
- Tree of Whispers
Crowd Control
- In order to prevent chain-CCs, when the effects of a CC ends, you will become immune to that type of CC for 5 seconds.
- Regular monsters will no longer use Crowd Control attacks.
- Elite monsters will have a 10% chance of having the ability to use crowd control attacks if their type of monster has one.
- Bosses will have a 20% chance of having the ability to use crowd control attacks if their type of monsters has one.
** On-death effects **
- Regular monsters will no longer use on-death effects.
- Elite monsters will have a 10% chance of using an on-death effect if their monster type has access to one.
- Bosses will have a 50% chance of using an on-death effect if their monster type has access to one.
- An icon has been added below the health bar of monsters if they will be using an on-death effect.
- On-death effect visuals will now receive priority and will always be visible.
Renown
The following activities will now grant renown points in the respective region:
- Completing a Legion Invasion
- Killing a World Boss
- Completing a Tree of Whispers Quest
- Opening a Hell Tide Chest
General discussion
1. Sorc issues
While patch 1.1.1 will bring a lot of improvements to the Sorc class, it is falling short in a few ways, namely survivability and damage. Instead of a glass cannon, Sorcs feel like a paper nerf gun. They crumble like a piece of paper, and paper cuts would hurt more than the little plastic nerf bullets they are throwing at monsters.
1.1 Sorc Survivability
Sorcs are currently too weak from a survivability point of view. On a mid-70s Sorc, I can go out of town and get one-shot by most mobs unless I use one of the 4 defensive skills on my bar. Yes, if you look at most Sorc builds, you’ll see either 3 or 4 defensive skills out of 6. Basically you’re either invulnerable, or you die in a few hits.
During levels 1-50, Sorcs felt pretty decent, but as you get near level 70, things become much worse. Adding damage resistance in the paragon board will not help much, because it’s forcing us to spend even more of our build and focusing it on surviving. Sorcs need a NATIVE boost to defences. I’m not sure what makes other classes survive more, if it’s higher innate hp/def, or if Sorc gear is built squishier, but something must be done so you don’t spend 90% of your time casting defensive spells.
1.2 Buffing unpopular playstyles
Buffing call lightning will possibly allow the call lightning build to be used more in end-game, which is great to see. Then you have the buffs to the fire builds, which we’ll see if they’re enough to make something viable out of. But what’s massively missing are buffs to the existing lightning builds and ice builds which are weaker than other classes.
Don’t only buff what’s not getting used, in some cases buffing skills that are used to make them on par with other classes would be better.
1.3 Sorc Current Rotation
One of the few half-decent builds (in my book no Sorc build currently deserves higher than a C on the tier-lists), is arc lightning. Using this build, you spend most of your time casting defensive skills. Once per minute or so, you use your ultimate to do a burst of damage for a few seconds, then you spend the next 50 seconds or so using defensive skills and waiting for your cooldown to
Sorcs are damage-dealers, their rotation shouldn’t feel like a tank’s, spamming mostly defensive skills.
2. Farming locations / Time Distribution
Thanks to having to re-farm renown, the first 100 or so hours of every season is spent doing boring things, such as re-completing quests that give you minimal xp/loot, or redoing dungeons.
Once your renown farming is complete, the only end-game activity that gets any focus is nightmare dungeons, which I’m sure some players are having fun with, but most players see them as a necessary evil if you want to get xp / level up your glyphs.
The over world in Diablo 4 is absolutely fantastic, but other than Legions giving decent XP, everything else feels like you are wasting your time. I feel the xp/drops of the fun activities (random events, hell tides, world bosses, Tree of Whispers) should be increased so they are at or near parity to doing nightmare dungeons.
3. Frustrating Mechanics
There are a number of frustrating mechanics in the game that greatly stop the fun right in it’s tracks. These need to be prioritized higher. As a product owner in a different industry, I know better than most the hard decisions that need to be taken, but having these issues remain in the game many months after they were reported during open beta is inexcusable. Many of these fall in the “drop everything and get these fixed ASAP”.
3.1 On Death Triggers
On-death triggers in this game are getting a bad rap for multiple reasons:
- They do too much damage
- They are too hard to see
- They are much too frequent
Having some bosses have strong on-death events is good, and is what we’re used to expect from ARPGs. The elites you fight every 10-15 seconds (or every 1 minute if you’re a Sorc) either shouldn’t have on-death triggers, or they should be much weakened, or much less frequent. Visibility should be increased to they are on top of all of the action.
3.2 Crowd Control
There are too many crowd control effects happening in the game. Reduce the types and quantity of monsters (for example only elites or super-elites should be able to use them, and not every elite you encounter should have a CC). Once a CC effect leaves, you should be immune to that effect for 5 seconds to prevent chain-CCs.
3.2 Inventory/Storage Space
Thank you for sharing the challenges around stash spaces. It’s ridiculous that the game went live with such an architecture, but I think it’s almost more ridiculous that it’ll take months to get a proper fix.
3.3 Survival of NPCs during events
Events where you have to keep x NPCs alive usually end up with them dying in a cheesy mechanic, such as an on-death skill that kills them in one hit. Just like Sorcs, NPCs need a large survivability boost.
3.4 Horse Reuse Time
The time required to get back on your horse means you spend too much time walking when you should be riding to you destination. Change the CD timers.
4 Items
As you are hunting, your inventory fills too quickly with worthless items. Please make it so you can sell / salvage items without having to waste time going back to town. Also reduce the quantity of items that drop by half, but increase the quality / value of items that do drop accordingly, which would greatly help reduce clutter.
Item filters is a bad solution to an even worse design. Make it so we don’t feel the need to filter out item drops, but instead make it feel like a good thing whenever something drops. Gear should drop at the appropriate level of the difficulty level you are in.