Diablo IV - Page 47

1. Last night’s queue time (6 PM Eastern time) was around 60 minutes, but this morning’s queue time was less than 1 minute (at 7:15 AM Eastern time), and this afternoon at 2 PM Eastern time had a < 1 minute queue time too, granting immediate access into the game. After about another half hour of playing (1.5 hours total), I completed the single-player-only starting area and entered the main city of Kyovashad, complete with a waypoint, shops, and stash. This is where I also started to experience lag spikes for the first time, perhaps since there are other players here, and the pathing issues of my character still persisted.

2. Picked up frozen orb at level 5. Seems like a fair skill – hitting a ton of enemies at the expense of a lot of mana – and a solid contrast to my free frozen bolt. Mana regeneration is very fast in this game. Cast two frozen orbs, then cast a few free frozen bolts while my mana simultaneously recharges, then cast two more frozen orbs if needed. By level 10, I had maxed out my frozen orb and found a legendary staff that doubled all my spell damage.

3. Not needing a scroll to create a town portal or to identify items is nice.

4. Large inventory size and customizable/expandable stash are both good improvements, although the images for the actual gear look pretty basic, drab, and uninspiring. I kind of miss each item and armor and weapon having their own different sizes and shapes, even if that meant that my inventory filled up faster; I wonder if I’ll easily get accustomed to everything being standardized as the same size in my inventory. As of right now, the gear seems pretty boring and the look of each item is completely forgettable.

5. The areas outside of town are occasionally laggy for me, even when soloing, to the point where I had to close my other programs so that only Diablo 4 was running. This solved about 80% of my lag issues.

6. It’s pretty cool to naturally encounter other players completing quests or attacking a bunch of strong enemies, and getting to join in. I also teamed up with two friends of mine – I’m a sorc, and they’re a barb and a rogue – and I was surprised that the lag wasn’t unbearable for us, even when we’re all blowing things up at the same time, on the same screen.

7. I was originally worried that it would be hard to find my two allies or for us to be in the same place at the same time, but Diablo 4 does a great job of keeping us together: Adding a friend to the party immediately warps them into your version of the world (once they accept), and then each party member has their own unique, permanent town portal by the waypoint, that's separate from the standard "I opened a temporary town portal to go home". These unique, personal town portals allow you to always warp to the exact location of your ally at any given time, so you can always rejoin them whenever you want. This is excellent.

8. We’re exploring a lot of areas and completing a lot of objectives despite being notified that quests aren’t actually being completed (like defeating Neyrelle’s mom). We’re consistently receiving notifications that certain areas and quests aren’t counting for us because we’re “not yet eligible”. It’s very confusing, but I assume it’s because it’s the beta and that these messages will all be removed once the game releases.

9. Maxed out hydra is also pretty awesome, and the three of us are around level 20 so far. The last 6 hours have been really fun – tons to explore. Monsters are getting harder and smarter too. No connection issues, no queue / wait time issues, just some lag spikes and the pathing problems. Loading times between zones are also extremely fast.