Hello!
With the D4 new season starting today, I’ll stop playing this cycle and decided to give some feedback. FYI, this is my first time playing the game, and I’ve only played as a CoF sorcerer.
The good
I’ll start with the things I like. Overall, this is a great game. There’s still a lot of work to be done, but judging by the roadmap I’ve seen, I believe the dev team is moving in a good direction. Here are the main things I like about the game:
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Blessings: having monoliths as an endgame activity that is actually a part of your build is a really nice idea.
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Class variance: the amount of different classes and builds is really cool! It’s a bit unbalanced for sure, but I do believe this will be adjusted with time.
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Dev team listening to player feedback: after reaching empowered monoliths and realizing that I would have to grind monoliths from 100 to fight the harbringers I actually dropped the game and joined the angry mob on Reddit complaining about this. The fact that this was fixed mid cycle not only made me come back to the game but showed me that the dev team actually cares about feedback.
The bad
These are the things that I feel like could be improved.
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Non build defining blessings: I liked the blessings thing, but it feels a bit bad to have 5 monoliths with blessings that do nothing for your build. Increasing drop rates is a cool thing, but not for blessings. Having 5 monoliths with this kind of blessing just feels like wasted potential.
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Lack of cycle specific rewards and challenges: There needs to be some sort of achievement system in place. I like the idea of a season pass (with cosmetics only), but it can be anything else. Even something really simple like a cool pet or mtx piece for defeating aberroth would do wonders.
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Clunkyness: The game still feels a bit clunky on certain classes. When playing with my sorcerer things felt fine, but I have also tried playing a sentinel and a primalist and I have to say that something was really off with the game feel.
The ugly
These are the 2 things that stopped me from spending more hours into the game.
- Itemization and endgame gear progression as a CoF player:
I’ll start this saying that CoF is an awesome mechanic and one of the reasons why I gave the game a chance. However, the moment I started looking for endgame gear I regretted not choosing the merchant guild.
I know that ARPGs are RNG loot based games, but the amount of RNG layers for legendaries in this game is just crazy. First you have to find the unique, which by itself is not an easy task. Then you have to pray it has at least 2 LP, since 1 LP itens are worse then 0 LP with the nemesis. After that, you have to find a nice exalted item from the same type. After these 3 RNG layers (finding unique, LP, exalted) you still have to go through the slam which is another RNG layer and can actually break the item, making all my past effort go down the drain. I don’t know, maybe it’s just me but all of that just makes me anxious.
Finding new gear is also hard because of all the defensive stats you have to track. Juggling 7 different resistances, HP, endurance, crit avoidance, armor, ward and God knows what else just make it seem impossible to swap a piece of gear without having to readjust every other piece.
CoF was supposed to help with this but I felt it was a bit lacking in the endgame. The loot explosions were a nice thing, but after a while you realize it’s just an explosion of mainly shit loot. As an example, I looked up a couple of builds that had idols with +mana and mana%/armor% so I tried farming those. I did lots of echoes and prophecies with idol rewards and after filling 8 stash tabs with idols I had found ZERO of those.
Same thing for uniques, you complete a prophecy and get a bunch of them, but it’s mainly trash. Overall I feel like CoF needs a serious buff to really compete with MG. Maybe some form of target farm, rare unique increase drop rate, 2LP+ increase drop rate, I don’t know.
- No Campaign Skip: Even though I like the amount of class variance this game offers, I just couldn’t bring myself to finish the campaign again with a new character. Nothing against LE campaign, I just dislike ARPGs campaign in general. I can understand forcing you to finish the campaign at least once per cycle, but that’s it. Having to do it again is too much and will just make me drop the game earlier.
Conclusion and TLDR
Awesome game with some cool systems and mechanics, I’ll definetely come back to the next season but I’m done for now. The main things that I dislike about the game are: Endgame gear progession (and how CoF doesn’t mitigate that) and no campaign skip.