So how's Diablo 4?

Off-topic
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You make it sound like GGG has not righted at least the majority of those wrongs. You can knock GGG for a lot of things, but they listen to us. PoE is in a very heallthy spot right now despite a couple horrific patches.

The thing here is Bliz is not Bliz, its Activision. They dont care. People from the alpha testing were complaining about the same things that people complain about today. The game is getting slower, guess why? To sell battlepass skips. Thats the reality of D4. They do not under any circumstance deserve even an ounce of goodwill. This aint the Brevik days, its the Bobby days.

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it’s realy a shame when (lol) let’s say 100k people vent on reddit and another 100k vent on the Blizz forums. When such a huge part of the playerbase (rofel) is unhapyy everything must be on fire.

Sure the patch is a shitshow and ruins eternal league and is a compensation for totaly unbalanced anal bead league system but then again I have no idea what they aim at. Sadly Blizz looks incompetent if i compare the state of the rogue and the Sorc with each other.

D4 is in a sad state but it looks like 90%+ of the playerbase don’t care… at least when I look at the language areas i understand ^^. I even met 1 person so far who thougt the patch was a good thing but I still wait on the answer why said person thinks so :smiley: .

I’m eager to watch the shitshow… erm campfire whatever talk on friday ^^.

They most likely already made the changes we see here based onData from what do I know when but not from actual data they have from the game. There was no PTR and everyone knows how bad Blizz patches are when there is no PTR so EVERYONE who is suprised by the quality of the patch is a bit naive at least.

What? My Shred Druid was pretty fast alsmost on D3 monk levels as soon as mobs have been arround. Friend of mine played a Rogue and was fast as well. The only slowpoke we had in our Group was the necromancer because Blizzard thinks it’s good to have a class without a movement skill (Spriggan anyone? :smiley: ).

I just think we go down the D3 rabbit hole. D4 will stay in a sad state an then comes one big addon that changes anything and brings us back to the D3 rofelcopter state :smiley:

On the other hand the patch startet some good things too. The noisy part of the community is moving in the same direction for the first time the game startet and the memes range from good to very funny :smiley: . I hope other devs took notes from this little “how to not patch a game!” 101.

This is a joke right? You can’t be seriously bragging arround doing lvl 55’s on an equiped lvl 100 Rogue O.o. I mean okay you play Rogue the least nerfed and most OP class ingame so maybe for you everything is right. Play a Sorc next patch :smiley: .

Same goes for everyone who plays Bear Druid. The only thing that changed for my Bear Druid is that i see my HP bar move down sometimes untill I play NMD 80+.

I’ll play S1 as well need something to kill time with untill I can waste money on Atlas what might be the next flop ^^.

It get’s better and better. Who cares about the butcher? Every half decent lvl 20 fresh toon on a new account can kill the butcher and after that he is never again a problem untill late 80+ NMD. Druid had a lot of completely broken OP builds so if you haven’t played boulder or pets you were OP. Let me gues Bone Spear Necro? OP! Oh Rogue what faceroll build have you played? Barb is dead in the water doing only half dmg on WW. People are happy about chnges that make upheavel “good” while they forget that everything is in a dumped down state and upheavel is trash tier still.

Yeah that’s all the reason someone needs to play :slight_smile: .

And they’ll start to deliver QoL in season 3 or 4 because they most likely had everything for this 2 seasons in the pipeline already (or finished). they can’t develop such stuff all of the sudden! What do you think? Like they are a development studio that is making a game…oh wait ^^.

I would totaly jump on the PoE2 beta right now ^^.

tbf Blizz can do so as well and most likely noone speaks about this anymore in 6 months.

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Except thats not how the internet works. Those arbitrary numbers you made up, which are huge, are not isolated from the rest of the net. Everybody who cares about the game is pissed, including myself. Quin, Asmon, Wujido, Kripp, Llama, Actman…they have far more reach than you understand. All the content creators are making the same type of video, showcasing how awful the patch is. These videos are getting combined millions of views. Then the “journalists” start posting about it, from the shit stain kotaku to big boys like ign. Now everybody who plays games will be exposed to what’s going on one way or another. You or Jimmy or Bob may not care about whats going on, but the people with social power do, and they are going hard.

It is completely unfair to call people who did not see this coming naive, not all people are diehard arpg nerds like a lot of us here. Bliz sold out and went the easy route, appealing to anybody with a pulse. Did you see how many people were upset because they did not understand something we take for granted, seasons? People who get to play a couple hours a week learned the hard way that their “main character” would not be usable during league. D4 represented the first arpg for a lot of people, and all they feel blindsided.

D4 is in trouble. Their lame ass camp fire on Friday will be full of laughs. Bliz cares so little they couldn’t even do this little talk BEFORE the season starts, instead opting for the day after.

Diablo is dead, it isnt Blizzard making the game anymore, rather its Activision. The game was nerfed to shit for 1 reason. Wanna guess? Slower progression = slower battle pass progression = hey guys just to let you know we also sell battle pass skips so you can get ahead! Its all a ploy to extract every cent out of us. Its gross.

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And yet… they all play S1.

And yet they’ll play S1

And yet they’ll cover S1 because it’s good for viewer counts.

Jimmy and Bob are 80% of Blizzards playerbase and guess what… most of the Jimmys and Bobs out there will play.

No it’s not if you look at Blizzards trackrecord. When I bought the game I knew I wasted money untill the first payed addon hits IF I’m lucky. If someone wasn’t informed how Blizz messes up stuff sine the 2000s that another fail.

I don’t start a game and go crzy about it because I’m the pleb that wasn’t making his homework about the game. I know what I buy as soon as I press the button and I know what I get because I research it. It takes 1 minutes to find and read and comprehend what seasons are in D4. Again if people run into it blindly it’s on them. In all honesty Blizz even explained how seasons work almost a year before release. If people aren’t able to read and understand stuff it’s on them and not on Blizz… what is most likely the only thing that’s not on Blizz :smiley: .

100% agree but not in so much trouble that they don’t print millions of dollars each season.

As usual they’ll only answer stupid questions noone cares fore and deliver footage for the next gen memes about how well Blizz understand their own game and playerbase.

They’ll most likely deliver some half assed answers and promise to look at the data they have what is the absolute thing to balnce they game about and we as players can’t imagine.

Some games want a playerbase that is as big as the number of people who complain about patch 1.1 so it’s far from dead. it’s far from it’s former glory that was reached when D2 was released and since then failed to be reached again why some people still think that relic of a game is good by todays standards.

Yes it took me more then 1 hour to level my test toon from 1-50 what a shocker :smiley: . Overall Blizzard just reverted their XP buff and that’s it. You can still hit level 100 easiely in 2-4 days if you want to. (Okay given that the last 10 levels don’t take 100x more xp then then level 89-90 what is possible given it’s a Blizzard game).

That’s like every game in a nutshell. Look at EHG and the ingame shop and pricing and how they all of the sudden reacted and chenged the prices of the shop in one day and are now praised by people who don’t think further.

There are plenty of gross examples to make here. There are some good as well as Vampire Survivours that offered me hours upon hours of gameplay for 2 bucks. Or a game like Grim Dawn where the price you pay is the price you pay without any fomo or catches attached to it.

Games as a service are designed to milk players as much as possible and I won’t be suprised if Blizzard introduces some kind of Gache mechanic in on of the coming addons.

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Thats a huge reply that I truly respect, but its 2:30am here and you deserve a far better response than what I can reply with at the moment. Will most def get back to this convo tomorrow!

Im not sure if you are playing league, but if you are, hope you enjoy it. I deleted D4 and wont touch it until these tone def ass devs do something right. Its such a bummer too, D3 is what got me hooked to the genre. Even though it was plain as day what D4 would be, I truly did have high hopes. Now I derive enjoyment from D4 in a totally different way - reading forum posts of unhinged people and watching vids of sorc teleporting to other games :joy:

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I play it with friends and we have most likely more fun with each other then with the game. All tha bad jokes about the terrible patchnotes were fun while we still arguing if we start as 4 mages and lokk who has the worst time or if we don’t ^^.

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The so called legend was not from night to day, it was constructed over the years specially from players who enjoyed early titles from the company. It is a bad company (we could discuss a year about the extent of what means bad) but that doesn’t mean nothing. Their goal is make money as any company goal should be and they are successful at it.

It’s only “Irony” if you ignore all the context from both games as you deliberately have ignored.

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I understand, and to some limited extent agree, with the rest of your post, but this bit sounds weird…
My feeling is that the people making a huge fuss right now are the ARPG diehards, as you call them. I was mostly expecting it, Diablo 4 would be too casual for them.

The people who are not usually into arpgs have a massive and beautiful open world to explore, a long story with stunning cutscenes to play through, far enough (from a casual point of view) different classes and skills to experiment with.
The fuss is about high-end endgame builds being nerfed. I doubt this is what matters to the people who don’t usually play arpgs. Most of them are probably not even in endgame yet.

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Isn’t that the essence of balancing though? You either nerf the over-performing ones (assuming that popularity is a good metric for actual performance, which it may not) & buff the less popular ones (ie, what they’ve done), or they “just” buff the under-performing ones (power creep) and buff the mobs to get back to some semblance of the desired time to kill (assuming there is such a thing).

If you read the patch notes, there are a lot of offensive affixes that got buffed & a lot of defensive affixes that got nerfed (from memory).

No, I read the Barb notes & the bits about affixes being buffed/nerfed. The main bits I skipped where the other classes, so I read most of them.

Quite…

Yup. People don’t like having their favourite things taken away. This is like reverse-anchoring, give players nice things, set their expectations at a particular level … then remove them/make it harder/etc. This is why EHG doesn’t want to try out certain things then take them away if they decide they aren’t happy with them.

4 months. It started 7th April 2023. I think you’re thinking of Sentinel which started in May 22 & you’ve forgotten/missed Kalandra & Sanctum which were in-between.

Don’t worry, a lot of them will be back after a few days/weeks grinding their teeth.

I’m confused, which is correct? Is 100k-200k (there would be some overlap) a huge part of the playerbase or less than 10%? Stay on-message mate!

Erm, no? Got some proof for that unfounded assertion?

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I think he means 100k is a very tiny part of the playerbase. Look at the (rofel) he inserted after “huge part”. :wink:
(And I agree with Macknum, 100k is a very small number by Diablo’s standards. But Fknflo also has a point, some of this tiny part of the playerbase can be influential.)

Ah ah, I had missed that part.
I was lucky enough to meet the Butcher at level 13 on my very first character. It was a very brief encounter. I guess I was less than half decent.
(And he took me by surprise, but even prepared, I believe he would have slaughtered me at that level without breaking a sweat).

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Yes and no. In this case, it’s an over-reaction to make up for poor design. They didn’t nerf them because they were too strong. They nerfed them because they didn’t “want them to feel mandatory”. The problem is they have too many effects and too many affixes that add based on them. Some are more synergistic with builds than others, so they are better to use and used more.

It seems more like they are trying to add a rancid band-aid to fix crafting (rather than balancing over-powered affixes). Which is completely fuxored due to the massive amount of affixes available in the pool… the limited number of affix slots on the items… the exponentially increasing cost of ‘crafting’ and the fact you can only change one affix on an item. So, unless you happen to pick up a perfectly rolled item, you’re going to be punished by not either having one of the ‘good’ affixes, or you’ll go broken trying to get them. All I see it really doing is punishing builds that focus on one or 2 status effects, and not able to cash in on their desire to spread the love around to the rest.

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When I look at the user numbers that have been aktive in a certain timefram there are between 100k-220k people who are loud. On the other hand you have a ton of people who looks like htey don’t mind or don’t want to voice their thoughts. What’s not on message there when I compare loud people vs silent people? i don’t have 100% accurate numbers (outside of user numbers on foums) so I can only guess then again what’s not understable? A few people voice their oppinion and the biggest part of the playerbase is never heared off because they either play the game or move on in silence.

Erm, yes? Did it with every class before 1.1 and did with 4 classes before I had additional skillpoints and pots. Mage and necro have a terrible time in the beginning but as soon as you have a basic build there were no issues with other classes.
After the awesome patch things got harder but I killed the butcher on level 7 with my Druid BUT I already had additional skillpoints and pots. As a Druid (who are stupid OP rather fast) this easy up to a point where you’ve been able to ignore the butcher and kite him through whole NMD.

For real mate isn’t that something normal everyone did before 1.1? After 1.1 it might take lvl 30 untill you are able to do os, then again I need to look closer on the squishy classes and how bad they have it aka mage & rogue. From all the people I played with only one person was crying about the butcher but he hasn’t used aspects in his gear because it was to “expensive” :smiley: so he don’t count ^^.

Lvl 13 and 20 is a huge difference :smiley: in Ilvl and skillpoints as well as first legendaries. As I said above it would be completely new to that everyone has real problems with the butcher. If so I guess I had luck 95% of all times I met him and just wiped the floor with him.

He has a lot of points and even good ones and I like the discussion so far but it’s a bit to much black and white for my taste. Blizzard isn’t listening to anyone right now because if they did there would never be a 1.1 patch like this. There are a bunch of people out there with tens of thousands of hours in the gerne and in the diablo fenchise alone… said people should be asked because their oppinions show more common sense then Blizzards patchnotes and approaaches.

At the end of the day it’s just a game and it’s farm to warm to be melodramatic about it or argue for extended periods of times.
I had 2 endless loadingscreens today and wasn’t able to travel from region a to region b two times and just logged off.

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New players were very upset, they had no idea they could not use their “main character” in league. The idea of starting from scratch, doing all the same content over, but this time slower because of all the nerfs, is unappealing.

But ya, its the tryhards making the most noise. The noise is valid imo.

edit

@Macknum

How is the season so far? Very interested how this plays out. So excited for the camp fire tomorrow, lets see how much hot air the devs can shit out this time :rofl:

Are resists still broken? Assuming yes. Nerfing armor to shit and not fixing resists, Bliz doing Bliz.

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Suprisingly the season is not bad but it runs like crap like on release day. The sewason feels a bit like stop and go because you kill a boss and the add click the heart so the same boss spawns again.
I look forward to the campfire fuck up as well because it’ll b comedy gold. Resists never worked so they aren’t broken at all they are not in existence :smiley: . The Armor nerf hurts ^^.

On the other hand I play a class I intentionally haven’t played that much at all so it feels a bit new and engaging while I focus on builds with the new gear. Overall I’m pleasently suprised and it’s not that bad. I just need to get to level 70+ and do 50+ NMD to see if it’s worth to keep playing after level 85 ^^.

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No, you are clearly a much better player than me. I’ve encountered the butcher twice (on a Barb) and got munched both times within seconds (in D4, obviously, not D1). Just because you are capable of doing something with your eyes closed does not mean its “normal”/easy.

Then they’ve obviously never played an arpg with leagues (ie, D3 or PoE) before as this is the standard.

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The season mechanics are just cancer. Outside of the no-feedback login queue yesterday, the process for carrying over Eternal realm progress was stupid. You had to log into your Eternal realm character with the most progress in order for Renown to transfer to Season. On top of that, only waypoints for the 1 major city of each region were activated. Meaning you still had to run all over the fsking place to do anything (on the most annoying ‘mount system’ ever conceived), even though your map was completely open. Also, I ran into a few issues with pathways being impassable, since they seemed to be linked to Main Campaign progress (mainly evident in the desert regions).

It also seems bass-ackwards to require players to regrind all their renown, while also offering a new seasonal quest. I am torn between working on season progress, and re-grinding my renown, to get my additional skill points (and paragon). It’s counter-productive to enjoying the Season, at least for me. I would like to focus on the new content/mechanics, but instead I am forced to waste hours re-grinding non-seasonal renown. Having to reacquire legendary aspects wouldn’t be bad, since I can target-farm the ones I need. But this renown farming is turning me off…

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Regardless they are upset and its justified whatever your position is. Bliz wanted everybody with a pulse playing the game, so here you go team L, teach the masses about the genre.

Well I hope you are having fun, even though I hate what the game is right now, I still want those of you who play it, to enjoy it. The heart mechanic looks very tedious, and of course there isnt a dedicated stash :joy: Yea, the armor nerfs were overkill, that aspect change deleted sorc. I did see what looked like a very busted necro build, Im sure they will hotfix that cause of the whole no fun policy.

Im gonna google for the camp fire vod right now, Im sure there a lol’s abound.

That sounds about what I thought after going through the patch notes.

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They don’t nerf anything in the next patches :smiley: . The campfire blabla wasn’t to bad at all and sounded promising so MAYBE with a huge junk of LUCK and ithe sars align in the right order they might stick to what they’ve said an make the game better. At least they knew and aknowledged they messed up. 1.1.1 will help a bit with QoL stuff and XP and whatnot and in the next ~5 weeks Sorc and Barb will get love as well. All in all someone who isn’t familiar with Blizzard might be mildly positive about the future of D4.

I think at season 4-6 they make a good game but then most people don’t care anymore.

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The experience for me in D4 was below average and I think the game won’t recover for me till at least season 4.
Tried out 4 class (rogue, necro, druid, and sorc).
Ended up not liking how the rogue played out and sent them to the shadow realm.
Went druid up to 50 and realized they are reliant on items you don’t get till WT4 so I ended
up sidelining them.
Tried sorc and I loved the class and played till 40ish till I started reading up on the class. Turns out sorc used to be way stronger and was significantly nerfed and even had their 3rd enchantment slot removed in beta… After learning a bit more of the mechanics of the class I sidelined this class completely disappointed.
Took necro up to 60 and it’s been my most solid experience. I played blood surge and it took me a while to find info on how overpower works and it turns out it’s very janky… Still I completed renown, tried nightmare dungeons, killed world bosses and got to WT4.

After the recent dev podcast I decided to put down the game till like 9-12 months later. To sum it up this gave me Wolcen vibes but not quite as severe.

The base design of some of the systems and actiblizz’s direction don’t make sense to me compared with other arpgs. My biggest peeves ended up be the scaling and player power, build variety and their seasons philosophy.

Monsters scaling with your level sounds great but why do you end up feeling weaker?
Monsters get a straight boost to health and damage as you level but for your character your gains in power are inferior. Paragon doesn’t feel significant till your already buried deep in it.
Putting points into damage skills seems to not be a factor (more about passives and aspects). Worse is the gear cause starting out you don’t understand that higher base damage/item power is always better for your weapon over desirable stats and you don’t consider stats till ancestral gear. The gearing itself is terrible cause only a few stats are relevant with the rest being junk unless your able to stack a stat with skill passive, paragon, and aspects.

Very brief on the build variety. Sorc is a complete disappointment. Druid’s power seems very backloaded and completely uneven for some specs. Necro seems more balanced with shadow, blood, and (very few and hybrid) minion builds. Bone is the outlier with the crazy damage it does. The mandatory skills and passives for each class and extremely limiting. Vulnerability and crit damage being necessary to deal damage at the higher end, leaving dots and overpower in dust.

Now their season design philosophy… At the end of every season everything (except your character, their equipped seasonal items and achievements) are deleted. I don’t understand this at all. Not even invigorating softcore/eternal with new mechanics. I can’t find any reason to play softcore or seasons. When the next seasons starts you basically have a wasted character slot with any old seasonal characters. Makes me think more of this planned obsolescence crap retail companies do for their products applied and implemented in actiblizz’s design philosophy. I actually like to keep my characters around especially ones I’ve been rather successful with and throwing the 10 character limit on top? I already see where this is going and it’s not in a positive direction…

This experience was my first with diablo (my experience with immortal doesn’t count) and I’m left really dissatisfied after playing similar games (PoE, grim dawn, LE). Figure I’ll check it out later to see if it has some sort of revival like I hear about D3.

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Bringing in Diablo 3’s evolution is very interesting. I do believe Diablo 4 will follow a similar pattern, for a simple reason: Blizzard is addressing a much, much wider audience than PoE, Grim Dawn or LE, and they know it very well.
This audience encompasses people with very different interests in games.

Now, my experience with Diablo 3:
I played it a lot as soon as it launched. It was pretty, and the campaign was long, interesting, filled with nice scenery and fun characters to talk to (yes Llama, I know, the writing was not top notch :wink:). Completing the campaign was also reasonnably challenging, not super-hard but death was always a possibility.
Then I stopped playing. Recently, to warm up for Diablo 4. I decided to reinstall it. And I was shocked.
The campaign has become a complete joke, waaaaaayyyy easier than it used to be. And you level far too quickly as well (in any game, I try to level up as slowly as possible). Compared to what it was at launch, the campaign has been diluted a lot, only endgame matters nowadays (The chat is a ridiculous spam of “Anyone can level me to 70 please?”, but that’s another story).

Conclusion of this too long post:
Blizzard started by focusing on their wider audience, with graphics, quests, story that would appeal to general RPGists. Then as time passed, they tried more and more to please the more “hardcore” ARPG crowd, who have no interest in a story or graphics but just want to reach endgame as fast as possible and repeat some rifts or maps or monoliths ad vitam aeternam.

I believe the same “audience switch” will happen in Diablo 4. Right now it is rather casual in its approach, because non-arpg-specialists are by far the biggest part of the audience. Over time, the focus will probably turn more and more towards endgame.

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