On July 09 2023 05:12 Loco wrote:
Level 31 one month after release? Real dad energy over there. Meanwhile I have two level 100 characters and beat Uber Lilith today. I'm recovering from surgery though and can't wait to be able to resume physical activities, really tired of this game and lost what little respect I had for the devs behind it.
Why don't you respect the devs?
I think the real question is why would there still be any respect left at this point. Blizzard started sucking around 2008 when they sold their soul to activision. I think Diablo Immortal was when it should have been gone. I've heard this game is better than 3 though, at least.
One of 3 non decent human beings on a site of 5 people with between 2-3 decent human beings
On July 10 2023 19:38 Stroggoz wrote:
Probably none, learning a second language at this age is painfully slow.
I'm currently learning japanese in Duolingo at ok pace :3
DiabloIV is cool, it doesnt seem aimed at super hardcore grinders and that is fine, theres PoE for them, there has been some stupid shit like the uniques droprate as loco mentioned tho, I think shako drops rate is of 1 item per 5million hours of play LOL
Literally everyone that I've seen review this game who has played any D3 in recent seasons agrees, and it's not hard to agree on this fact. D3 has received countless hours of work, and it has an endgame that is much more agreeable than D4. D4 had a bunch of devs leave during covid/the sexual harassment case, they lost a ton of talent, and they have some really silly people making really silly decisions that are on par with the real money auction house in the first iteration of D3.
Do you even have a level 100 character Baal? Probably not. If you did you'd know that the endgame here is shit compared to D3 and PoE (while it's trying to stand somewhere in the middle). The affixes are super convoluted, the map selection is extremely limited and involves (still, even after changes) a lot of running and backtracking that was never an issue in D3. The game punishes you in so many ways. Some shrines are total crap, whereas they were pretty much all cool in D3. There are one or two viable builds for every class to perform well in the late endgame, and you basically just grind to have a few more % on the same one or two aspects. Most uniques are trash, so you don't even get excited when you see them drop. D3 at least had primals, and you could reroll them, which is a much better system than unalterable uniques for the late game, especially when those uniques have been designed to be crap. The only noncrap ones being unobtainable. With D3 you could swap between completely different builds with a single click. In this one you have to spend literally millions of gold to respec, and most likely you do not have this gold because it costs an obscene amount to reroll items after the first time. You have enormous gold sinks but no way to obtain a lot of gold quickly (you had goblins and Greed's lair for this in D3). The game was designed for you to restart a new character and do the 1 to 100 grind again if you want to play a different build, which is not a great design - it doesn't respect people's time. Also guess what, even if you do have the gold, you don't even have a respec button (at least on PC) for your paragon tree. Also no respec tokens to be earned anywhere in the game. Seriously, how hard would it have been to implement this?
This is clearly an unfinished game, it's missing some of the most basic quality of life options, and it cannot be compared with a game like D3 that received a ton of content and quality of life upgrades over many years. Anyone who just played a lot of Season 28 in D3 and who came to D4 after felt like it was a big downgrade on all points except obviously graphics quality.
The PvP zone is also a complete lagfest unless you disable crossplay, in which case you get a ghost town on PC, with one or two people with super optimized imbalanced builds that will steamroll you coming in once in a while.
fuck I should just sell some of my Pokemon cards, if no one stakes that is what I will have to do - lostaccount
but the way I play diablo is I play through one single player campaign with one character and then I say goodbye, and then maybe I do the same with another character later on. For that, d3 was actually a very cool game, although it got ruined once I stepped foot into the auction house (not real money) and quadrupled my damage making me plow through everything. :'(
lol POKER
1
Stroggoz New Zealand. Jul 13 2023 00:45. Posts 5299
On July 12 2023 19:21 Loco wrote:
The game was designed for you to restart a new character and do the 1 to 100 grind again if you want to play a different build, which is not a great design - it doesn't respect people's time. Also guess what, even if you do have the gold, you don't even have a respec button (at least on PC) for your paragon tree. Also no respec tokens to be earned anywhere in the game. Seriously, how hard would it have been to implement this?
.
Working as intended for sure. If you look at WoW that game declined once it was easy to do things, like looking for raid for example. They made dual spec in wotlk, looking for dungeon, then after that they made looking for raid. All of these made the game boring as it was too easy. The sweaty no lifer neckbeards hate that shit and say it ruined the game. Blizzard is trying to undo some of this it seems. For example they just made hardcore classic wow.
One of 3 non decent human beings on a site of 5 people with between 2-3 decent human beings
Just lvl 70 currently, I like to play with friends wich limits my playtime.
I agree with all of your criticism with uniques, gold sinks etc but Its not the fairest comparison D3 after 10 years than just released D4, D3 at launch was atrocious, remember the constant server issues and the auction house, the atrocious cartoonish graphics, weak story.
Story wise I really liked the Lilith arc but I really disliked the random insertion of Andariel and Duriel for cheap nostalgia points.
Of course it's not a fair comparison, but if games were released without rushing them, it would not have been that hard to implement most of D3's lessons into D4 from the beginning. They have the ideas and they have the coding already. D4 was in development for 10 years, and it just doesn't show aside from the cinematics. For example you have buffs that all have the same icons, literally, for different buffs. I can have 3 different buffs active at the same time on Necro and they all show the same icon, and no information about the buff. How lazy is that? There is no filter for items anywhere, or for glyphs. You spend half your time hovering over things in search of the one thing you need.
Another example of something silly is the devs saying they wanted to move away from D3's big numbers, and we currently have Shred Druid doing upward of 2 BILLLION crits (which devs now want to nerf). Devs have already backtracked on a bunch of shit that everyone knew was bad design, but there is a long laundry list left if they want to increase retention.
If you play Diablo casually and focus on the campaign then it's not a bad game. There are some issues with the campaign/storyline but nothing near as frustrating as the endgame, where the lack of content and quality of life really makes itself felt.
D4 did great server-wise at release, they learned a lot from previous releases and were lucky enough to have a ton of people help out on the weekend beta events. They also did a powerful marketing trick with the double release, which also meant that server loads were going to be a lot less serious if you have all the casuals come 5 days later. If only they had also learned their lessons about other important things and implemented them.
fuck I should just sell some of my Pokemon cards, if no one stakes that is what I will have to do - lostaccount
The mroe I think about it the more I think D4 sucks tbh, the story and look are great, but the skill scaling is retarded, the loot is almost as exciting was D3's auction house, the only time I was excited about something is my first legendary then you realize they have a very specific power that won't go with your build so its salvagable crap like 99.9% of the items, "common" items are actually very rare to find lol, the open world has too many characters and the sidequest rewards are shit so they become a chore rather than content you want to do even for the first time.
The cinematics are masterful but theres only like 3 of them, the only thing that D4 really lands is story and graphics, the overall gloom is good but the demons are so repetitive plus you find the same demons in lvl1 than in hell and whoever designed those bandit ghost ruined the whole vibe, also they brought back the most retarded demon from D2.. the fucking evil purcopines ffs.
What, you mean to tell me that after doing a repetitive side quest for almost an hour you are not satisfied with your 1 veiled crystal reward?!?
The best items in the game are rares, which is similar to what D3 wanted to do upon release (except blues could be better than rares sometimes too). Which means you spend all your time filtering your inventory before selling or salvaging to make sure it's something you wouldn't need/another class wouldn't need (since there is always the possibility of getting something useful for another class you could trade). It's very tedious, since it's the best way to make gold, you can't escape it. Also when legendaries drop, you actually want them to be Sacreds, which is super counter-intuitive, because it costs less to extract them, and they can roll just as high as Ancestrals for the Aspect specifically. They can also roll their normal stats just as high as Ancestrals if the item power is between 700-724 and you upgrade them.
The rewards for salvaging are also random, you don't get a blue crafting material for salvaging a blue.... you occasionally get one randomly for salvaging anything, it's a weird inconsistent system. Just like crafting nightmare dungeons. They force you to randomly craft them within a specific range, instead of allowing you to choose an exact number, like you could do in D3. So if I want to do a NM 100, I have to waste a bunch of Sigil Dust and time crafting a ton of 91-99 until I find a decent 100 (range is 91 to 100). And since they had capped the crafting materials before the last patch, everyone's Sigil Dust was quite limited, which means we could only craft like 20-25 of those high dungeons, so it's very easy to run out before you even get an ok 100 from crafting... absolutely abysmal design.
fuck I should just sell some of my Pokemon cards, if no one stakes that is what I will have to do - lostaccount
Rares have the same number of stats except when low level or when they are special items dropping from rare spawns (those have a quote at the bottom)
they just don't come with an aspect (legendary power) attached but you imprint them at the occutist so every rare is a legendary eventually, making them the best items
Actual legendaries are rarely going to be useful because they would have to have rolled the perfect stats on both the item and the aspect and have a high item power for weapon slots too. Almost always you end up extracting their power or imprinting another on top of the base like if they were a rare.
fuck I should just sell some of my Pokemon cards, if no one stakes that is what I will have to do - lostaccount
Article from last year explaining why/how they rushed the game for release
"The employees interviewed by The Post said it was not simply people quitting that posed a problem, but the kinds of employees who left. Many with institutional knowledge and decades of experience exited, leaving new employees and developers brought in from elsewhere at the company to fill in.
“Every single individual that we lost, for whatever reason, definitely was a huge impact,” said the former team lead. “And that was something that I don’t think that leadership paid enough attention to and was very flat-footed about. They weren’t very proactive about it.”
fuck I should just sell some of my Pokemon cards, if no one stakes that is what I will have to do - lostaccount
On July 14 2023 15:13 Loco wrote:
Rares have the same number of stats except when low level or when they are special items dropping from rare spawns (those have a quote at the bottom)
they just don't come with an aspect (legendary power) attached but you imprint them at the occutist so every rare is a legendary eventually, making them the best items
Actual legendaries are rarely going to be useful because they would have to have rolled the perfect stats on both the item and the aspect and have a high item power for weapon slots too. Almost always you end up extracting their power or imprinting another on top of the base like if they were a rare.
Oh i checked and yeah ancestral ones have the same number of stats, good to know since I was auto-trashing them
I haven't been low level for a long time so I don't remember the rule but Sacred will always have 4 stats at some point, probably item level related. Sacreds at item power 700-724 only require to be upgraded in order to have the same stat range as ancestrals, so they are basically ancestrals with a little less armor. They can also be the best items in the game.
fuck I should just sell some of my Pokemon cards, if no one stakes that is what I will have to do - lostaccount
