Diablo IV - Page 99

On July 20 2023 03:15 [Phantom] wrote:
So… I ended up purchasing Diablo 4 a couple of days ago… maybe should have waited

On July 19 2023 21:57 Archeon wrote:

I mean people feel that way cause it was the way to build. If you nerf the top outliers you tend to make others more viable.

Like on the one hand we have a video of a guy who says that all the more common barb uniques are trash cause their mods aren't the 5? good ones, and people call classes trash that don't have easy access to vulnerable because vulnerable amp is a mandatory way to build, on the other hand people cry wolf if Blizzard nerfs the top outliers and tries to change the meta. At this point I'm halfways convinced that the fanbase is just being toxic for no reason, they don't want change, they want outrage.

On July 20 2023 03:15 [Phantom] wrote:
So… I ended up purchasing Diablo 4 a couple of days ago… maybe should have waited

On July 20 2023 15:56 uummpaa wrote:


thats a really good point, Duriel in particular is a core gaming memory for an entire generation, those difficulty spikes add A LOT to the overall feel of a game and D2 (also D1 with the Butcher f.e.), i didnt realize it until now that D3s story did miss a major roadblock like this (at least Malthael was somewhat of a challange at the start)

On July 20 2023 07:44 Manit0u wrote:
I've just had a very interesting discussion with a fellow Diablo fan over beers. A lot of points were brought up that rarely show up in the content creator's videos and such so I thought I'd share them (aside from the usual stuff about items being shit and stuff). I'll leave D1 out of this to not move too far into the past. I will also leave D3 out of this which is an excellent game but a very poor Diablo game. So focus will be mostly on D2.

Lack of challenge

I know that Act Man in his now famous "D4 is a bad game" video brought it up but he didn't really provide specifics.

In D2 you had certain "WTF" moments where you had to consider your approach to the game. Not really power spikes but just challenges you have to overcome in order to progress the campaign. I don't even mean the hell difficulty or anything like that, consider this:

1. Act 1, normal difficulty: You have to tackle the Blood Raven for the first time (I know nowadays for people who know the game inside out it's a walk in the park). You meet a boss that attacks at range, hits like a truck, has lifesteal and keeps rising zombies to swarm you/shield herself. This happens when you're level 4-6 with shit gear and barely any skills.
2. Rakanishu. You meet your first lightning-enchanted enemy that can hurt you as you hurt it (often times he'll hurt you more than you hurt him).
3. Andariel. Even after all of Act I you're not really expecting this big ass monster to go at you, especially with all the poison and such.

I mean, even as simple thing as going from Blood Moor (first zone out of starting town) to the Cold Plains (second zone) and getting charged by spearwomen who roam in packs and you don't kill them in 1 hit can be terrifying.

That's just Act I. Don't even get me started on stuff like Duriel (I wonder if there's a single player in the world who managed to survive his first ever encounter with him - assuming pre-internet days when you went into games blind).

The game kept challenging you all the time, presenting problems to solve and overcome. I will never forget my first playthrough as minion necro, where the game was a cakewalk until normal Diablo who simply deleted your minions. It took me like 2 hours to kill him, first teleporting back to Act I to kill some weak mobs for more skellies, then just trying to summon clay golem over and over again until finally (took me 20+ deaths) figuring out that I can stand in a corner where his abilities can't reach me and just spamming level 1 bone spirit (homing missiles FTW) and teleporting back to town to get more mana potions until he was dead.

15 years later I remember more details about this one particular fight in D2 than anything I did in D4...

Boring story

D4 story is such a mess... Going through the campaign felt like a big chore with chunks of it being completely meaningless. It really surprised me because there's a good story there, it's just told in a terrible way. The best two elements of the story (and world in general) are super under-utilized.
1. Nafain and the Amalgam of Rage - fuck me sideways, I'll take stories like this in my Diablo games every day of the week. Unfrotunately most people won't even know what this is and everything about it is brilliant:
a) new and awesome area
b) interesting characters
c) really dark stuff

Except for the fact that it's never really built up and never mentioned later so it feels more like a side quest than key part of the main story that it is.

2. The Tree of Whispers - fuck me sideways twice! More of the dark occult stuff that's actually innovative and interesting? Pity I had no idea it was coming, no one mentioned it earlier, no one knew where we were going (although it's revealed that characters around you knew about it) and it just shows up all of a sudden as some magical MacGuffin to never be mentioned again later. Another major point of the story, and major thing location/lore-wise that feels more like a side quest than part of the main story. WTF?!

Really, If D4 gave me less of a campaign but more of the stuff like the two mentioned above I'd be overjoyed. As it is it just feels like really good parts were butchered and sacrificed just to pad the game with lots of meaningless stuff to artificially make it longer and have "more content."

There are kernels of greatness buried under the mountain of mediocrity and blandness. Sadly I don't really trust the Blizzard of today to get it right on track

On July 20 2023 19:10 WombaT wrote:
Plus as a casual, play through a few times with various classes kind of Diablo fan, it seems a lot of people just prefer the optimise/cleanly wipe everything/loot kind of loop anyways

On July 20 2023 07:44 Manit0u wrote:
1. Act 1, normal difficulty: You have to tackle the Blood Raven for the first time (I know nowadays for people who know the game inside out it's a walk in the park). You meet a boss that attacks at range, hits like a truck, has lifesteal and keeps rising zombies to swarm you/shield herself. This happens when you're level 4-6 with shit gear and barely any skills.
2. Rakanishu. You meet your first lightning-enchanted enemy that can hurt you as you hurt it (often times he'll hurt you more than you hurt him).
3. Andariel. Even after all of Act I you're not really expecting this big ass monster to go at you, especially with all the poison and such.

I mean, even as simple thing as going from Blood Moor (first zone out of starting town) to the Cold Plains (second zone) and getting charged by spearwomen who roam in packs and you don't kill them in 1 hit can be terrifying.

That's just Act I. Don't even get me started on stuff like Duriel (I wonder if there's a single player in the world who managed to survive his first ever encounter with him - assuming pre-internet days when you went into games blind).

On July 20 2023 15:56 uummpaa wrote:


thats a really good point, Duriel in particular is a core gaming memory for an entire generation, those difficulty spikes add A LOT to the overall feel of a game and D2 (also D1 with the Butcher f.e.), i didnt realize it until now that D3s story did miss a major roadblock like this (at least Malthael was somewhat of a challange at the start)

On July 20 2023 10:09 Turbovolver wrote:

You're not wrong about this, but I think it's kinda separate to where I was going with my post. I think it's good to try to balance things so vuln and friends aren't the be all and end all, and so yeah it's dumb when people just interpret a patch as "I chased the old meta and now the meta changed, this sucks" which you see a lot of.

But okay, so let's math out the damage bucket system and the nerfs applied to it. You get say, pre-nerf, +100% damage, +100% vulnerable and +100% crit. So that gives you 2 * 2 * 2 = 800% increased damage (on critting a vulnerable enemy). Roughly, because there's also the extra damage from vulnerable itself but whatever.

Now post-nerf, those first two get reduced by 30% and the first gets increased by 25%. So now you have 2.25 * 1.7 * 1.7 = 650% increased damage.

Which is still considerably higher than I would get if I replace all my nerfed vulnerable and crit stuff with pure damage stuff - in that case my 70%'s become 125% but go in the same bucket, and we have
4.75 * 1 * 1 = 475% increased damage.

Of course, when you consider needing to apply vulnerable and land a crit, maybe 475% increased damage as a guarantee actually sounds better. But the higher you can make the modifiers, the more benefit you will see from splitting across buckets as compared to sticking it together in one bucket:

If all mods are 200% instead of 100%:

Pre-nerf: 3 * 3 * 3 = 2700% increase using buckets, versus 7 * 1 * 1 = 700% increase when stacking mods
Post-nerf: 3.5 * 2.4 * 2.4 = 2016% increase using buckets, versus 8.5 * 1 * 1 = 850% increase when stacking mods

If all mods are 50% instead of 100%:

Pre-nerf: 1.5 * 1.5 * 1.5 = 338% increase using buckets, versus 2.5 * 1 * 1 = 250% increase when stacking mods
Post-nerf: 1.75 * 1.35 * 1.35 = 318% increase using buckets, versus 3.25 * 1 * 1 = 325% increase when stacking mods


So pre-nerf, bucket spreading is just always better assuming similar levels of mods between each group. Post-nerf, we have that early game (lower levels of mods) you are punished for using vulnerable as a mechanic instead of just stacking more +% damage that has the buffed numbers. Late game (high levels of mods) it's still as stupidly ridiculous as it was before.

I don't consider this a very good fix at all? At best it's a fix that works for current numbers in the game but is liable to break if the modifier amounts that are available change up or down.