On July 08 2023 05:00 Vinekh wrote: I was wrong. They didn't go for the extra shrine or the extra treasure goblins season. They went for the extra legendary power one. This is Blizzard's "knock it out of the park" peak content for the first season of their new game, by the way.
More and more people are already bored with D4's game loop and this new season 'mechanic' does very little to improve that.
Oh, well. It's the expected quality from Blizzard at this point.
I think introducing stuff like socketable items and mechanics into a game generates gigantic build diversity and changes a lot of things if done right. I wish the mechanic also introduces some meaningful bosses. It would be very comparable with (even though lesser version) Abyss in Path of Exile which introduced new unique items, abyssal gems and some bosses.
Tbh I think people had way too high expectations and that what they announced for the season sounded decently interesting. I've considered just ignoring seasons, but I'll prolly pick it up again after season launch and play a sorc because the gems sound decently interesting considering that this is the first seasonal content.
I also think that D4 at launch is in a way better state than f.e. D3 on launch. It's certainly not the best ARPG on the market, but some people seem to expect D4 to be a better game than D2 at the end of D2's life cycle when D2 was arguably a masterpiece.
Overall I think the brand lead hit it pretty well when he said that it's been 6 weeks since launch. D3 was barely playable then and arguably was worse in every way.
On July 10 2023 08:14 Archeon wrote: I also think that D4 at launch is in a way better state than f.e. D3 on launch. It's certainly not the best ARPG on the market, but some people seem to expect D4 to be a better game than D2 at the end of D2's life cycle when D2 was arguably a masterpiece.
That's fair but I still personally expect a sequel to try and be better than the prequel even at launch! Which I think D2 definitely was to D1. D2's content and quality compared to D1 I think is AMAZING (even though D1 is a great game). Hard to beat that, but still gotta do it in some ways.
On July 10 2023 08:14 Archeon wrote: but some people seem to expect D4 to be a better game than D2 at the end of D2's life cycle when D2 was arguably a masterpiece
The thing is, there was a time where everything Blizzard put out was on that "masterpiece" tier. Across multiple genres even.
Sure Blizzard getting "lazy" and focusing more on money follows other companies in the space doing the same thing but the older people are always going to push back against what things have become, and it's especially sad to see Blizzard this way.
Once Season 1 ends and Season 2 begins, will all the Season 1 characters join our current characters in the non-season Eternal Realm? Or will the Season 1 characters carry over from season to season, allowing us to play as them in Season 2? Or will each season's characters stay within their own separate seasonal group, even when that season has ended (meaning a Season 1 character couldn't ever interact with the current Eternal Realm characters, even when Season 2 starts)?
On July 10 2023 10:14 DarkPlasmaBall wrote: Once Season 1 ends and Season 2 begins, will all the Season 1 characters join our current characters in the non-season Eternal Realm? Or will the Season 1 characters carry over from season to season, allowing us to play as them in Season 2? Or will each season's characters stay within their own separate seasonal group, even when that season has ended (meaning a Season 1 character couldn't ever interact with the current Eternal Realm characters, even when Season 2 starts)?
At the end of each Season, all Seasonal Heroes will be moved over to the existing non-Seasonal Hero pool. All items, currency, and materials obtained by your Seasonal Heroes will be made available to your regular Heroes. Items that were in your Seasonal stash will be sent to you through the in-game Messages system. To participate in the next Season, you'll have to create a new Seasonal Hero and start your journey anew!
On July 10 2023 10:14 DarkPlasmaBall wrote: Once Season 1 ends and Season 2 begins, will all the Season 1 characters join our current characters in the non-season Eternal Realm? Or will the Season 1 characters carry over from season to season, allowing us to play as them in Season 2? Or will each season's characters stay within their own separate seasonal group, even when that season has ended (meaning a Season 1 character couldn't ever interact with the current Eternal Realm characters, even when Season 2 starts)?
At the end of each Season, all Seasonal Heroes will be moved over to the existing non-Seasonal Hero pool. All items, currency, and materials obtained by your Seasonal Heroes will be made available to your regular Heroes. Items that were in your Seasonal stash will be sent to you through the in-game Messages system. To participate in the next Season, you'll have to create a new Seasonal Hero and start your journey anew!
Thanks for this info! Sounds more like option 1 imo Diablo 2 did that too, with two groups: current season characters and all other/previous characters.
On July 10 2023 08:14 Archeon wrote: Tbh I think people had way too high expectations and that what they announced for the season sounded decently interesting. I've considered just ignoring seasons, but I'll prolly pick it up again after season launch and play a sorc because the gems sound decently interesting considering that this is the first seasonal content.
I also think that D4 at launch is in a way better state than f.e. D3 on launch. It's certainly not the best ARPG on the market, but some people seem to expect D4 to be a better game than D2 at the end of D2's life cycle when D2 was arguably a masterpiece.
Overall I think the brand lead hit it pretty well when he said that it's been 6 weeks since launch. D3 was barely playable then and arguably was worse in every way.
yeah sorry, but thats not much of an achievement, considering D3s start was one of the worst of any game. just the fact that plenty of well recived QoL features from D3 (armory, port directly into the bloody dungeon f.e.) are completly missing in D4 shows me that the game was certainly not quite finished as of june 2023.
and why shouldnt it be even better (whatever better means here) then D3 or D2? its a new game and not an expac to either of the games.
i see no reason to be all that lenient with blizz here just because they messed up even more in the past
Enjoyed D4 so far but now that I've reached 65 I'm not enjoying the itemization much, the combat and feeling is really good though
Was hoping S1 would do something about the itemization issues but not very encouraged by the proposed season mechanic. It feels like there needs to be another tier of rarity or something.
Still if it's anything like PoE, early leagues will be content light and then will get deeper as time goes by.
On July 07 2023 07:20 iamperfection wrote: so i think they somewhat confirmed before but they explicitly stated now for seasons
Once you have completed the Campaign, any Seasonal character will start the game with:
The option to skip the Campaign. Your Mount available immediately. All previously discovered Altars of Lilith unlocked, and the corresponding Renown for them. All previously discovered areas of the map revealed, and the corresponding renown for them.
I think a lot of people were still worried about these (despite the devs already stating them), so repeating them is probably a good thing.
It's obviously not their first plan considering they needed a work around of having people log in with their most advanced character on July 18 to save progress for their seasonal character.
On July 10 2023 08:14 Archeon wrote: Tbh I think people had way too high expectations and that what they announced for the season sounded decently interesting. I've considered just ignoring seasons, but I'll prolly pick it up again after season launch and play a sorc because the gems sound decently interesting considering that this is the first seasonal content.
I also think that D4 at launch is in a way better state than f.e. D3 on launch. It's certainly not the best ARPG on the market, but some people seem to expect D4 to be a better game than D2 at the end of D2's life cycle when D2 was arguably a masterpiece.
Overall I think the brand lead hit it pretty well when he said that it's been 6 weeks since launch. D3 was barely playable then and arguably was worse in every way.
I imagine that considering the monetization of D4 and its competition that people are expecting PoE level seasons. New and interesting mechanics that integrate into the general player experience that keeps things fresh from season to season.
And honestly that is what I am hoping for aswell. I enjoyed post RoS D3 but D3's seasons did not change things up nearly enough and as such after a few it just becomes to boring. PoE style seasons would have kept me playing a lot longer.
I feel like a lot of complains about Diablo 4 come from people who have put an unhealthy amount of hours in the game. I was thinking playing diablo, how wonderful the world was and how good the mood is.
Of course there are things that I miss from other diablo game, but sadly it seems clear that the trend is not toward what Diablo 1 was offering.
The beauty of diablo 1 was that there was no hard boundaries between classes. Your fighter could learn and cast a healing spell.
The second thing that I have tried to minimize with the game settings is the amount of indication on screen, I don't like the overload of text indication, of how many damage point was made, how many coin of gold lie on the floor. I like to have that information when I hover my mouse. It feels like this remove one tiny rewarding feel when you hover over an item and it is unique.
I am always surprise how poor some of the writing can be. It reminds me of the Baelin's Route - An Epic NPC Man Adventure by Viva La Dirt League. Simple generic mistake are made such as the generic specific quote. If you are going to have an npc repeat the exact same phrase, it needs to be generic, not specific. Like the beggar who says he has 17 warts now... Very clumsy, very specific.
On July 07 2023 07:20 iamperfection wrote: so i think they somewhat confirmed before but they explicitly stated now for seasons
Once you have completed the Campaign, any Seasonal character will start the game with:
The option to skip the Campaign. Your Mount available immediately. All previously discovered Altars of Lilith unlocked, and the corresponding Renown for them. All previously discovered areas of the map revealed, and the corresponding renown for them.
I think a lot of people were still worried about these (despite the devs already stating them), so repeating them is probably a good thing.
It's obviously not their first plan considering they needed a work around of having people log in with their most advanced character on July 18 to save progress for their seasonal character.
What's this about?
Blizzard wasn't sure they wanted altars of lilith and map progress to carry over to a seasonal character. Map progress doesn't even carry over from one char to another currently. Pretty obvious to me that they decided this after D4 was already released. In order to unlock these on a seasonal character, you need to log in with your most progressed character after the July 18 patch but before you start your season journey.
On July 10 2023 08:14 Archeon wrote: but some people seem to expect D4 to be a better game than D2 at the end of D2's life cycle when D2 was arguably a masterpiece
The thing is, there was a time where everything Blizzard put out was on that "masterpiece" tier. Across multiple genres even.
Sure Blizzard getting "lazy" and focusing more on money follows other companies in the space doing the same thing but the older people are always going to push back against what things have become, and it's especially sad to see Blizzard this way.
Can't agree with that. Go all the way back to Starcraft and everything needed an expansion to turn into a masterpiece. D4 is already fun and playable at its current iteration. It just needs a lot of balancing and adjustments here and there that could only come from months of player feedback and actual play.
I got level 100 on my Rogue finally. Gonna take a break until S1 starts, and then I'll probably play barb or something.
Last 20 or 30 paragon points were a pretty massive boost in damage(~10-15%) as I could just focus on getting damage nodes for my glyphs rather than transiting the board.
Final damage maxes out at 1.2M per hit on a fully debuffed elite mob and 3 combo point flurry. Average is probably like 500-700k crits, and most trash gets blown up by shadow imbue up to about 60.
Didn't try to push NM dungeons too hard, but I could probably do up to low 70's if I really picked and chose dungeons and affixes.
On July 10 2023 08:14 Archeon wrote: Tbh I think people had way too high expectations and that what they announced for the season sounded decently interesting. I've considered just ignoring seasons, but I'll prolly pick it up again after season launch and play a sorc because the gems sound decently interesting considering that this is the first seasonal content.
I also think that D4 at launch is in a way better state than f.e. D3 on launch. It's certainly not the best ARPG on the market, but some people seem to expect D4 to be a better game than D2 at the end of D2's life cycle when D2 was arguably a masterpiece.
Overall I think the brand lead hit it pretty well when he said that it's been 6 weeks since launch. D3 was barely playable then and arguably was worse in every way.
yeah sorry, but thats not much of an achievement, considering D3s start was one of the worst of any game. just the fact that plenty of well recived QoL features from D3 (armory, port directly into the bloody dungeon f.e.) are completly missing in D4 shows me that the game was certainly not quite finished as of june 2023.
and why shouldnt it be even better (whatever better means here) then D3 or D2? its a new game and not an expac to either of the games.
i see no reason to be all that lenient with blizz here just because they messed up even more in the past
It is better than D3 imo. And which ARPG is realistically better than D2 LOD 1.10+? They prolly didn't understand half of the things they did right in that game.
On July 10 2023 08:14 Archeon wrote: Tbh I think people had way too high expectations and that what they announced for the season sounded decently interesting. I've considered just ignoring seasons, but I'll prolly pick it up again after season launch and play a sorc because the gems sound decently interesting considering that this is the first seasonal content.
I also think that D4 at launch is in a way better state than f.e. D3 on launch. It's certainly not the best ARPG on the market, but some people seem to expect D4 to be a better game than D2 at the end of D2's life cycle when D2 was arguably a masterpiece.
Overall I think the brand lead hit it pretty well when he said that it's been 6 weeks since launch. D3 was barely playable then and arguably was worse in every way.
yeah sorry, but thats not much of an achievement, considering D3s start was one of the worst of any game. just the fact that plenty of well recived QoL features from D3 (armory, port directly into the bloody dungeon f.e.) are completly missing in D4 shows me that the game was certainly not quite finished as of june 2023.
and why shouldnt it be even better (whatever better means here) then D3 or D2? its a new game and not an expac to either of the games.
i see no reason to be all that lenient with blizz here just because they messed up even more in the past
It is better than D3 imo. And which ARPG is realistically better than D2 LOD 1.10+? They prolly didn't understand half of the things they did right in that game.
that "imo" is the key here.
for me D3 is a better game then D2, as is Last epoch. and just by player numbers alone a lot of people prefer PoE over D2. i am firmly convinced a lot of the love for D2 is because it was by far the best ARPG when LoD was released and we all loved it back then, not because it holds up all that great, but thats my very personal "imo"
no wonder, D2 was done for me after they introduced waay to powerful runeword combinations (with spamable spells from other classes) and the lack of endgame (for me at least running the same paths with the same monsters over and over is no satisfactory endgame). D3 has greater rifts, and by that alone it has better endgame then D2. plus a bunch of other little reasons i dont need to go into cause its offtopic in a D4 thread
But there is no point in shouting each others opinions at each other, my point was just that for a full priced game D4 is quite underwhelming and D3s terrible launch should be a dreadful exception that shouldnt be repeated at all costs, not an excuse for releasing games that will hopefully be good 1-2 years from now
I think those games kinda cater to different audiences. D3 was more Action than RPG, with crazy numbers, blazingly fast pace just blasting through stuff and seeing loot piniatas and constant gear treadmill. D2 was more laid back, where most builds (apart from a few that are super gear dependent) are pretty much complete around level 70 and then you're free to do what you want. Run the same stuff over and over to find gear for your alts, level up to 99, find slightly better versions of your gear, make an alt, do a speedrun etc. etc. No pressure, barely any need to "chase" anything, you can just enjoy the game at your own pace.
Not entirely sure where PoE fits into this as I was never really able to get into it. For me there were just too many weird mechanics in there that felt completely unnecessary and made everything too complex to try and figure out on your own (not impossible, just not worth the time IMO).
On July 10 2023 08:14 Archeon wrote: Tbh I think people had way too high expectations and that what they announced for the season sounded decently interesting. I've considered just ignoring seasons, but I'll prolly pick it up again after season launch and play a sorc because the gems sound decently interesting considering that this is the first seasonal content.
I also think that D4 at launch is in a way better state than f.e. D3 on launch. It's certainly not the best ARPG on the market, but some people seem to expect D4 to be a better game than D2 at the end of D2's life cycle when D2 was arguably a masterpiece.
Overall I think the brand lead hit it pretty well when he said that it's been 6 weeks since launch. D3 was barely playable then and arguably was worse in every way.
yeah sorry, but thats not much of an achievement, considering D3s start was one of the worst of any game. just the fact that plenty of well recived QoL features from D3 (armory, port directly into the bloody dungeon f.e.) are completly missing in D4 shows me that the game was certainly not quite finished as of june 2023.
and why shouldnt it be even better (whatever better means here) then D3 or D2? its a new game and not an expac to either of the games.
i see no reason to be all that lenient with blizz here just because they messed up even more in the past
It is better than D3 imo. And which ARPG is realistically better than D2 LOD 1.10+? They prolly didn't understand half of the things they did right in that game.
that "imo" is the key here.
for me D3 is a better game then D2, as is Last epoch. and just by player numbers alone a lot of people prefer PoE over D2. i am firmly convinced a lot of the love for D2 is because it was by far the best ARPG when LoD was released and we all loved it back then, not because it holds up all that great, but thats my very personal "imo"
no wonder, D2 was done for me after they introduced waay to powerful runeword combinations (with spamable spells from other classes) and the lack of endgame (for me at least running the same paths with the same monsters over and over is no satisfactory endgame). D3 has greater rifts, and by that alone it has better endgame then D2. plus a bunch of other little reasons i dont need to go into cause its offtopic in a D4 thread
But there is no point in shouting each others opinions at each other, my point was just that for a full priced game D4 is quite underwhelming and D3s terrible launch should be a dreadful exception that shouldnt be repeated at all costs, not an excuse for releasing games that will hopefully be good 1-2 years from now
I feel like people should still keep their expectations in check. You can't expect a new fighting game to have a similar roster as the previous entry's, for example. Something like Street Fighter 6 doesn't even have half the roster of SF5 right now. Similarly, a new Civilization game is going to be extremely bare bones compared to the previous one. The series has had 2 expansions since Civ 3 IIRC. Civ 7, when it launches, can't really be realistically compared to current Civ 6 until its likely 2nd expansion.
D4 is a solid game that just launched. I know people remember the disastrous D3 launch and yes, it's an easy comparison to beat. But vanilla D2 was nowhere near current D2 when it launched as well. It's not D3 terrible but it wasn't polished either. Vanilla D4 is comparable and imo, better, compared to vanilla D2. It just needs more fine tuning and QoL improvements that will come with time. Considering all the changes they made, they can't just add all of D3's and D2's features to it.
And yeah, D2's success involved a lot of luck. Blizz didn't know wtf to do with the paladin and whoever discovered the BH/Conc "bug" saved them a heap of trouble. People keep clamoring for the class but I doubt it will be well received in D4 if it involves an OP build throwing magical little hammers around. The rest of the class sucked otherwise.
On July 11 2023 08:42 andrewlt wrote: And yeah, D2's success involved a lot of luck. Blizz didn't know wtf to do with the paladin and whoever discovered the BH/Conc "bug" saved them a heap of trouble. People keep clamoring for the class but I doubt it will be well received in D4 if it involves an OP build throwing magical little hammers around. The rest of the class sucked otherwise.
Oh come on... Zeal Paladin has always been one of my favorites, real nice and easy, you get fanaticism, holy freeze merc, 1 point in vengeance for physical immunes and you're golden. Simple and effective A tier build that can clear the entire game. Hammerdin is some OP bullshit (and one of if not the most gear reliant build in the game).
Although D2 without LoD was kinda scuffed (Zeal not capping at 5 attacks for example) it did have some charm that later went away to never return again (which is a pity). Examples of gone stuff would be Thorns Paladin and my personal favorite Iron Maiden Necromancer with Blood Golem (this shit was bonkers, I only wish they toned it down a bit instead of outright killing the combo).
EPT
Diablo 2 did that too, with two groups: current season characters and all other/previous characters.
