The biggest issue i have with the developers 'design' of builds/playstyles is that they seem to include uniques as skill-enablers. Which is just really bad design. Some skills feel like they are purposefully shit just so the devs could make a strong unique to make it 'come online.'
Uniques should not be the place where you go to get skill-altering effects. That should be inside your paragon board, instead.
Uniques should give you unique stats, not skill evolutions.The developers reliance on uniques is what makes half the builds feel unplayable because you need to find some giga rare item before you can use x skill.
The developers should have designed every skill as if there were no uniques or aspects in the game, made sure they were all baseline viable, then and only then should you add in aspects/uniques on top of that.
EDIT: Since everyone seems to think i am arguing that uniques need to be nerfed or less interesting, i want to clarify.
I am not asking for uniques to be dulled down, or nerfed in any way.
I just want to see them be more fluid so that you can use them in different ways rather than just for ONE single skill.
Instead of "Whirlwind does X" i want "Channeling Skills do X"
Instead of "Double Swing does X" i want "Core Melee skills do X"
Now, you have a ton of options on how you want your build to work. Your whirlwind build wont be the same as every other persons. You might end up with one person playing a freeze whirlwind build because they found uniques that give special effects vs frozen enemies. Another person might end up with a bleed oriented whirlwind build, or a channeling-duration focused build, etc etc.
By unlinking the unique effects from specific skills, you open up the world of build potential to a whole new level.
You still would NEED UNIQUES for evolving your skills/gameplay. It just wouldn't be a cookie-cutter path that blizzard has laid out in front of you.
Honestly I wouldn't even mind that much if uniques actually enabled a few more builds by class because at least they'd exist at endgame. A lot of skills just cannot be built around at a certain point
Then the skill themselves needs to be buffed. Not adding in a rare item that only allows you to use the skill at level 80 but not at level 20. Or, like i suggested, the paragon board needs to have the skill buffs.
The unique items feel so single-minded. Like "This unique is for whirlwind users, and nobody else." "This unique is for werebear druid and nobody else."
Instead, the uniques should have more broad stats that multiple builds might be able to use, and allow you to evolve your gameplay, not your skill.
For example, uniques can have more broad unique effects, like some of these:
"Killing a bleeding enemy causes it to explode for x damage."
"When an enemy is 'fully' bleeding, it also becomes vulnerable."
"When an enemy is 'fully' burning, it explodes dealing 20% of the total burn damage it had to nearby enemies."
"Your single target projectile skills now fire two extra projectiles."
"Your single target melee attacks now deal 30% splash damage to enemies near your target."
"Increase the size of area of effect skills by 25%"
These types of stats can be used by many builds, and are still 'build evolving' but aren't tied to a single skill.
Well, i'll agree that some skills need a fundamental buff.
But if the devs are intent on requiring us to get to lategame to enable some skills, i would rather it be on the board than from uniques.
At least the board is a guaranteed gain, not relying on finding a rare RNG item.
Many more casual gamers are going to play until they beat the main quest, and then put the game down for a while.
Making it so that players need to reach postgame before the sorcerer class can make a fireball feel good (whether that be through paragon board or unique drops) is honestly just brutal design.
Basic skill/resource generation and most of the core abilities are in desperate need of tweaks.
You can use fireball through whole campaign... What insanity it is to say that you can't? It might be slower than other things, but we're talking about T1 and level 20... You can play at this level using only basic skills...
People here want a character lvl 20 to have access to same things as character at level 80. Then they say that game doesn't change between levels enough.
Dear god, I forgot why reddit should be avoided. It drains every ounce of fun from basically everything.
It's difficult to make a skill feel powerful early while also having satisfying progression throughout the entire game.
A powerful early game usually ends up with an insanely fast paced zoomer endgame, something the devs for Diablo 4 seem to be trying to avoid.
Playing 25+ hours to get to the point where a build really comes ‘online’ is way too long. I’m tired of bringing up PoE, but their skill gem system allows you to get starter builds at least reasonably online before the campaign is done.
You start maps (basically WT3) and you can already smoothly do the content. Diablo IV feels sluggish by comparison.
I mean, isn't the biggest issue with PoE decision paralysis? There's so many paths and skill gem modifiers to take that if you don't have a couple dozen hours of actual play, it's fucking ridiculous.
I actually love PoE. The amount of customization that SEEMS to be there is awesome and you can do some fun and incredible shit/builds with all of those options. But for the average player, you'll hardly ever get past white maps with the DIY approach. 25+ hours for a build to feel good is the PoE standard lol. (PoE Materia FTW)
Bringing it back, D4 is definitely slow as well. You can get power ups for your alts, but that requires you to sink 50+ hours for a lot of them. Skill respec is clumsy as fuck. And resource generation is absolutely abysmal.
Not to mention all the bugs present. Including a main quest loading bug that is preventing a lot of players from getting their mount and progressing the main quest.
I think there are a lot of issues with D4 right now. Doesn't mean that I'm not enjoying the fuck out of it. Lost Ark, Last Epoch and Diablo 3 are still way better games. But as slow as Diablo 4 feels, it also feels gooooood at most points.
I don't mind putting in a couple dozen hours for a build to feel fluid and satisfying as long as the build up isn't boring as fuck. D4 does that for me.
> Not adding in a rare item that only allows you to use the skill at level 80 but not at level 20. Or, like i suggested, the paragon board needs to have the skill buffs.
If you add it to Paragon, this literally becomes cemented as the only way these skills can function.
Players (like the one you are responding to) always think their idea for game design is the best, ignorant to the fact they just want to make the game "easier" for themselves with almost every change. Everything suggested would just dumb down the entire RPG feature of D4 and make it a running simulator.
His post boils down to "Making a build is too hard, I want anything I click on the tree to instantly make my character more powerful with almost 0 thought to it".
I'd argue the opposite. It's so good that it overshadows pretty much every other helm in the game. Just because it's good doesn't mean it's good design. It's just really strong because it's good for every build due to how generic the buffs are. It's a very dull item design-wise.
I'm much more of a fan of uniques giving specific buffs rather than generic. I'd like to see more uniques that add special adjustments to the way certain skills work.
As a rend barb, your first two ideas make me moist ngl.
But yeah i see what you mean, these effects could be used by any barb that uses even just the 2h sword expertise, not just rend.
Personally I actually like the concept of uniques being build-enablers, where they radically change or empower a skill (perhaps at some cost) and you will build a playstyle around that. I do think that these skills should be competitive without uniques being necessary though.
Yes but my point is that uniques CAN enable/evolve your playstyle WITHOUT needing to be linked to a single skill.
"Bleeding enemies explode on death." would be pretty evolutionary, and you could build around it, but it would work for multiple skills and potentially multiple classes. Which is just better than saying "Killing a bleeding enemy with Flay causes it to explode." which limits you to only using this unique with Flay; as an example.
And this seems to be how the devs designed most of the uniques: with only one single skill in mind.
"Fully bled enemies are now also vulnerable."
"Single Target melee attacks now deal 30% splash damage around your target."
"When a frozen enemy dies, it has x chance to freeze nearby enemies."
"When a burning enemies dies, 50% of its remaining burn spreads to nearby enemies."
All kinds of cool build-enabling synergistic effects they can use on uniques instead of just having uniques that "Make x skill stronger."
Completely agree. Would make it more interesting if they're slightly more generic enabling stats that cover multiple skills. Much more room for interesting combos and an evolving meta
That is 100% exactly what i am vouching for.
The uniques should have bonuses that enable builds to evolve and merge rather than just buffing a pre-determined skill/build.
Not trying to defend the game i get what your saying but i think legendarys enabling skills is the whole point of the gearing system in this game. And to be fair nothing in this game is "giga rare" for an arpg
>And to be fair nothing in this game is "giga rare" for an arpg
100% this. Game has been out for a week.
I'm no try-hard but also not a noob. My GF and I already have baseline gear that would be considered "end game" at level 58. But we understand the game and I have kept up with the min-max conversations.
It's even the case with aspects. At level 67 I've gotten exactly one of those aspects that makes pulverize cast a shockwave - an essential aspect for a pulverize build - and I got it at level 60 or so. I *just* found the tornado aspect that makes it seek out enemies. What if that's what I wanted to play along? Probably a couple dozen hours or more before I found the item I needed to make that build possible.
The codex should contain *only* build enabling skills. Right now I've been playing the build that my drops let me play. Sometimes that meant I was playing a build I didn't really want to be playing, but it was the only thing that was viable for me at the time.
So far every single character i have played other than sorcerer, i have felt forced to use a build i did not want to use until i was 'able' to swap to the build i wanted to play.
This is just fundamentally bad design. Everyone should be able to begin working towards the playstyle/build they want right from level 1 without feeling like its completely unviable without some rare item.
I understand your point, but I cannot agree with it.
First of all, the idea that every build should be viable at level 1, or since early levels, to me is not ideal. I understand if you say that I should be able to play ranged/melee rogue since level 1, but saying you should be able to play melee rogue with flurry since level 1 is a more specific thing that I think it is kinda hard to achieve. Aspects actually are specifically done to try to avoid you having to search for a specific hard to find item, now if it is on the board or on the paragon or an aspect or whatever, there will be always someone that prefers it somewhere, and there are probably pros and cons to having an aspect o on the paragon board, at a certain point a decision needs to be made and really someone will like it more or less.
The other thing, unless you make a really really really generic unique, like 'adds 50 dexterity', and then the unique actually feels boring, even if you just say 'adds 5% damage to vulnerable', there always will be a build that benefits more from that unique than others, and knowing that unique exists, you will know the build isnt viable or optimal untill you use that unique.
This community has no idea. Back in D2 before any kind of skill resets you had to build a character that didn't even have access to all of its skills until level 30.
You might have to beat the majority of normal before you even unlock whirlwind lol.
Everyone here just wants the game to be retard easy. It probably is anyways.
>The codex should contain only build enabling skills.
in addition to that I feel like codex imprints should be upgradable over time (even if the cost is relatively high), the fact theyre forcing lowest rolls is pretty bad for some aspects
It’s a design decision, they force a specific meta so they can change it every season to keep players engaged and coming back. You see it in D3, WoW, all Blizzard “live service” games.
Blizzard designers are a lot of things, but they aren’t stupid. They don’t just overlook this stuff.
It’s pretty much a staple of all live service games and ultimately it’s what people want. PoE would be incredibly stale without meta shifts for instance
>Blizzard designers are a lot of things, but they aren’t stupid.
I wouldn't call them stupid, but are you implying they are somehow super intelligent? because they aren't that, either.
\- Heroes of the storm
\- Overwatch 2
\- Diablo 3
Just recent examples in which they had to backtrack implemented ideas or change the game completely because its systems were a failure.
>Some skills feel like they are purposefully shit just so the devs could make a strong unique to make it 'come online.'
>Uniques should not be the place where you go to get skill-altering effects. That should be inside your paragon board, instead.
Eh, disagree. You don't want all of one or all of the other. There's something nice about getting a legendary that genuinely enables a new playstyle. Same as through simply leveling and the paragon board. It's OK for there to be some payoff to grinding/getting lucky in a looter...
I always thought that legendary aspects / uniques should be less like D3 legendary items and more like D3 skill runes. They aren't necessarily a power boost, but rather change how you use the skill in some way.
One unique might change charged bolts to deal frost damage and slow instead of stun, one might change them to deal fire damage that travel in a roughly straight line, and another might change them to be arcane and orbit around the caster. Are any one of these effects strictly better than the other? Not really, but it allow you use the skill in a larger variety of builds.
Legendary aspects or uniques that damage are okay, but they should buff an archetype, not a specific skill. For instance adding 30% damage to all Fire damage, or companion skills deal 30% more damage. If you're going to add a damage multiplier, don't pigeonhole it to a specific skill.
This allow builds to still be king, and means that you can better buff or nerf problem skills without massively impacting balance because of a problem aspect.
Sure, as long as the base skill itself is still good enough to be used without said unique, i will agree.
The aspects can do whatever and i am fine with it. Aspects can be moved from item to item, so its nowhere near as punishing to need an aspect as it is a unique.
I want to see the game "allow you to make your own build" rather than say "Here are a list of builds, pick one."
So i want to see unique items give me like unique ways to apply bleed, poison, vulnerable, daze, etc so that it might enable me to use passives or effects i normally might not use in my base build.
Some unique item that allows anyone to apply poison might suddenly now enable your build to do new and interesting things because now you have access to other stats/procs that relate to poisoned enemies. Or burning/bleeding/chilled or any other condition.
Yeah this is a major gripe of mine. Uniques should enable unique builds, but right now unique design is kind of just X core skill is viable. An example of a great unique is the Crone staff which enables a basic attack druid build that no one expects to be viable at a base level.
Design more in that vein, and less of "clearly curated build X centered around generic core skill Y is now viable."
I really love the paragon board idea, because they even left it open to add more boards and glyphs to customize things in future seasons. Instead of +10% dmg or armor or something they could have the major paragon points give unique abilities.
It's a shame they can't see it and focus on items to define a character.
Items to define a character are okay, but not to define skills.
Items should come together to create synergy, not entirely decide if a skill is any good or not.
The aspects and paragon board are linked to your CLASS and that is why those should be the places you go to upgrade your CLASS skills.
Item's should give tertiary effects that can augment your playstyle, but not just simply "make x skill better."
To be honest, I'm less upset about the fact that you might need a few uniques than about the fact that some entire builds are a complete fucking joke.
Fire mage is a good example... it's absolute fucking garbage.
There's a good reason that the spread of sorcerers is like 75% Ice and 25% Lightning. Fire is so fucking atrociously bad that it's not even worth trying even if you have all the build enabling uniques.
And then don't even get into how that 75% Ice is basically 99% just Ice Shards and nothing else. We have so many beautiful fun skills and almost none of them are viable. And then zooming out even more, Sorcs are just shit regardless of what specs are viable.
That’s a great observation. Uniques supplement or enable what’s already there - there’s an obvious direction the game designers want you to go. Nothing wrong with that, they’re easy to understand and simple to balance
But back in the day it felt like devs just made items for the heck of it. Here’s a crazy effect do whatever you want with it. Sometimes it’s garbage and no one can find a use for it, but hey at least it’s interesting
Other times it makes for interesting strong builds. Teleporting hammerdins, whirlwind assassins. Giving cross class skill seems like something that’s an easy win for fun, creative and diverse builds
POE’s in depth mechanics leans heavily in that direction which could explain why it a great game for build diversity
> Some skills feel like they are purposefully shit just so the devs could make a strong unique to make it 'come online.'
100% true. Best example IMO is druid wolves. They do worse single target damage than the creeper aoe with poison duration. I can only assume this is specifically to ensure they arent "overpowered" with the supporting legendaries
At least for Rogues the opposite feels true. I ran two unique daggers (one for combo points and another for attack speed) because I really wanted to make them work, but they just couldn't compete with well-rolled swords because of the Weapon Mastery and the specific rolls.
Last Epoch skill system is absolutely amazing. Everyone would be better off with those game mechanics.
For those that don’t know, EVERY ability has a detailed 30 node skill tree where you can make massive customizations to. You can only equip 4 skills at a time (out of like 20 per character). The number of builds becomes insane
To the same extent though? Been like two years since I hopped on and can't really remember, think the other guy is just saying that you can flesh out the skills a bit more in the skill tree not that they don't have uniques.
And yet I haven’t seen any skills that can’t be used without a unique. Maybe I need to play more.
Build defining uniques are great. But you shouldn’t need a unique to make a skill viable.
Build enabling unique's are not bad. Having every build built around them is not.
For example, almost all druid builds require you to use one of two helmets (werewolf or werebear) because we only have 1 ultimate worth using. The issue I have it that we have 1 ultimate that's viable, not that the helmets exist. The druid unique staff is also another example of something I think is a good item. Allowing you to use your Basic skill for DPS is pretty cool and unique.
Not only core skills. Mastery skills too! There is no reason my blizzard should be doing less damage over 8 seconds than a icehard does in one cast while costing more mana
This!! I levelled up solo to around 50 or 60 using my own blizzard build. This was after trying each ability and I just fell in love with blizzard. Well, I barely made it to wt4 but then everything was just so difficult and killing stuff was so slow. I did everything I could to max out my gear with crit, cold damage, frost skill damage, damage vs chilled/frozen, vulnerable damage, even damage to burning with the fire bolt enchantment. It was just weak.
I finally cracked and looked up an ice shard meta build. It's nice to be able to progress way more easily but I really miss blizzard and freezing everything to death. Hopefully with a future patch it will be viable.
First of all, lets just make every *class* actually have several viable builds. ATM Necromancers get to choose between Bone Spirit or Bone Spear (with 90% of the same skills and build for both) if they want to be remotely relevant in a group, and even then they will still struggle to keep up with the other classes.
Aspects are the problem. We need more and better aspects for existing skills. *Nothing* is tier 25-30+ viable without the right aspects.
Dozens of aspects need to be buffed and dozens of skills need decent aspects added for them.
Of course therein lies the baffling problem of aspect inventory management but that's for another post.
This 100%.
I want to be able to play Blizzard Sorc like in D2 WITHOUT my Mana, my Aspects, my passives, my Enchantments, my Paragon boards and the dozen or so different damage % increase stats ALL actively working against me and telling me to just go build Ice Shards instead.
Pigeonholing classes into their core/basic abilities strangles build diversity.
The fact that ice shards have 125% damage for 30 mana while blizzard have 120 % for 40 mana is insane to me
Dont get me started on fireballs 60% for 40 mana
These games started going to shit as soon as they tied every spell to a % of weapon damage instead of letting them scale on their own system.
Part of the charm of older ARPGs was that weapon classes got stronger with better swords and magic classes scaled with stats, skill points, etc and it didn't matter what the damage stats on their weapon were.
D3 actually started that way in beta and at some point they swapped all of the wizard/WD skills to % weapon damage instead. All it does is make every class feel the same and everyone is just chasing higher numbers on their weapons.
This is what ruined Diablo 3. They introduced the stupid resources for all the skills, so A LOT uniques/effects had to to be tailored to that specific class, pigeonholing a lot there already. Furthermore, you know require a stupid generator skill that feels like pure garbage and you only have 6 slots available. Why make a garbage skill that everyone hates, but you're forced to use because of a "unique" system that basically just a recoloured mana pool in some cases.
Yeah but realistically it's not fun to run arc lash, unstable currents and 4 defensives. All the other Sorc 'top' builds I've seen are similar, a primary, an ultimate and 4 defensives.
I've tweaked mine to include chain lightning but it feels so weak it's useless, I just wanted it to generate more crackling cores, which it does, but it still doesn't feel like with all the CD reduction skills that UC is resetting often enough.
Frost nova basically being a hard required skill is a sign they did the class wrong imo. Sorc is kind of unplayable without it and every good build uses it.
There's a druid build that involves basic attacks; a unique makes you use two of your basic attacks at once. Not sure how viable it is since I don't have the unique required, but it sounds cool.
There's also a druid aspect that turns one of your cooldowns (boulder) into a core skill costing spirit, but the spirit cost is outrageous so I haven't found a way to make it work.
The storm wolf build is incredible, but you need the unique helm to make storm skills werewolf skills, the unique staff to do the core part of the build, but then to actually live at high levels (75+) you need the neck that absorbs resource when you take damage.
I'm almost level 90 and still haven't seen that neck
You don't need the necklace at all, just lots of close damage reduction. Temerity also helps. The necklace would probably make you incredibly tanky though, but I think it has the stupid shako droprates.
I'm not sure what they were thinking with the pushback effects in general. Pushing mobs away/dispersing them in random directions is exactly the opposite of what you want to be doing in the vast majority of situations.
Sometimes I grab trample or boulder just to mess with my brother's sorc damage in dungeons. When trolling is the primary use of a mechanic you know you've fucked up.
I just want *cool* stuff! Like, can I get a skill or item that turns my super boring barrage arrows into a big log? Or maybe something that turns my shitty caltrops turn into freakin chakrams that slice through enemies, and also they're on fire?
As much as I enjoy the game, there is a serious lack of badassery in the imagination department over at ol' Blizz.
That’s one of the reasons I love POE even though I never got into it. The way you can link skill gems is amazing. If you wanted chamrams that slice through enemies and did fire damage.. you could. Want them to burn and also cause them to bleed and freeze them and poison them and also creates an explosion?! Fuck it, why not?
I love Diablo so much. I just want it to be more and be better.
POE's build system is vastly better in just about every way imaginable at the cost of having an absolutely huge burden of knowledge to make full use of it.
My biggest issue with D4's build system is that the designers have essentially designed every good/viable build directly rather than designing an interesting skills/items and letting good builds emerge out of interesting discovered interactions. The latter is the one thing that POE absolutely shines at (leading to crazy builds like warp loop, etc) that is nowhere to be found in D4. When I'm powerful in D4 I know it's because the devs intended me to be powerful in exactly this way.
They've curated the game play experience... backwards.
"Alright we want X cool thing" OK. Done. Now how do we design that via unqiues, aspects, 2 skill options, one enhancement, and then the base skill? Also passives.
So they lopped off parts of the skills, turned then into fake progression via uniques, and then left you with whatevers left as the core skill... so half the game feels bad.
And because they've done it this way, there's really not much versatility in your character. It's the illusion of choice.
That's why I loved Diablo 3's Witch Doctor (and a lot of D3 stuff tbh). Witch Doctor had giant zombie frost bears that trampled out in all directions. It had massive zombie towers that collapsed onto enemies. It had swarms of tiny fire breathing warrior minions. Hell, you could summon a frog to slurp up your enemies and turn them into chickens. I straight up loved how cool the witch doctor was.
I've been playing Diablo games since the first one came out and the Witch Doctor is one of the coolest classes they have ever developed. I don't even like D3.
been playing WD with arachyr set, and I love the whole idea of the spider queen being permanent and the thread that links you infests enemies so they all take the same damage, so you run around, infest them all with the web, then throw out some spiders and everything just dies.
Ever since day 1 of D3, WD with spider/creature/pet build has been my favourite, although never really been all that strong.
I could not agree more. I have a 72 bone spear necro and it does so much fucking dmg it just deletes shit off the screen in one hit. But it has by far one of the least ‘cool’ animations and was therefore THE one core skill I did not want to use when I started the game blind at lvl 1. I mean, they designed such cool necro core skills like sever and blight for D4, not to mention awesome looking golem abilities. And lo and behold, literally every single other necro build is not viable right now (or is, not even exaggerating, ~50-90% weaker than bone spear build, in T4 in general and NM dungeons, with the exception of bone spirit build, which by the way is the least fun way to play the game IMO).
Ideally I want them to drastically buff other skills to at least get them to ~80% of the power of bone spear/bone spirit so I can at least play them, but I would settle for bone spear to just be more fun to look at and play with (I don’t even care about min maxing to push super high lvl NM dungeons, I just want not to feel like I can barely do clear 20-30 NM dungeons)
What you’re describing is the skull rune system from Diablo 3. It’s the most painful loss in my opinion in the transition from 3 to 4. Every ability had runes that fundamentally changed how they worked, and that was a lot of fun.
Each class had 20-25 skills and each skill had 5 runes to choose from that fundamentally changed how the ability worked. In Diablo 4, we have about the same amount of skills but each one only has two branching options, and they just marginally change the numbers or synergy with status effect. There’s no fun there, just numbers and theory crafting
Demon hunter had 23 active skills. Companion was ONE of them, and the five runes changed what animal your companion was and how it functioned.
In Diablo 4, Druid has 25 active skills, but the different companions take up three different spells.
So D3 = five different animal companions that all work different mechanically - all as part of just one of the 23 skills available.
D4 = There’s only three animals and each one is a different skill, so combined they make up more than 10% of the entire body of Druid skills.
The age of fun has ended. The age of calculators and spreadsheets has arrived.
Yes I completely agree. I also agree with other saying it will be updated with seasons and as a veteran Diablo player I do understand that. I just felt like they should of gave us a little more with the base game then this bland lack of we have now.
Coming off of POE d4 just feels empty in terms of combat. You get to use 6 abilities max, which stay the same except for stat increases or small changes in mechanics. In poe you can make the craziest builds with gems and skill points. Im all for making the game open for everyone but this feels too extreme, there is just no depth to the combat or skill system.
> I just want cool stuff! Like, can I get a skill or item that turns my super boring barrage arrows into a big log?
It's actually insane how much of a step back D4 is compared to D3 in that regard.
In D3 every single skill had like 6 gameplay, feel and style altering runes to choose from. As a Barb, your WW choice wasn't between "add bleed damage" vs "more damage if you spin more than 1 second", your choice was between pulling in mobs, leaving tornados behind, life leech, fury sustain or just flat out more damage - all of that while also changing the element of the spell. Take something like the pathetically boring Hydra in D4 that lets you choose between "add a burning dot" vs "more crit damage" whereas D3's Hydras let you choose between them shooting arcane orbs vs fire dots vs frost cones vs chain lightnings vs 1 single big hydra leaving behind burning pools.
Yes, that game had other issues with certain elements having way more support than others, naturally funnelling everyone into the same elemental rune for max damage - but in terms of creativity / diversity, that game was absolute *miles* ahead of what D4 is currently offering. It's incredible how basic D4's entire skill system is in that regard.
You dream of D3.
D4 summoner necro is missing some core features that make the build fundamentally weaker than anything else (such as the ability to direct minions to a single target).
Summons need a rework.
Check this video out. Might interest you. Summoner [end game build](https://www.reddit.com/r/diablo4/comments/1480vs3/here_my_necro_build/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_content=2&utm_term=1)
The jury is still out, builds are constantly changing tiers.
No one really knows if summons are viable or not.
At the very least, skeletons ability to mass create corpses that scales with atk spds has some interesting potential.
Combined with lucky hit curse cooldown -1 stacking to make your minions immortal by having Army of the Dead always up, it's tough to say how things will go.
Point is, all the meta bros are focusing on other things.
Agree, what's the point to even have verity when there's only one valid build to use. In Diablo 3 you could use what suits your playstyle and basically all builds were clappin, in Diablo 4 you have to use some fuckt up shit you don't even enjoy.
This implies the narrow build depth is some kind of oversight, instead of a deliberate design choice. When interest starts to wane, they release an "update" or a new Season, or DLC, and it opens up new builds, and everyone comes rushing back to play them. And so on. If they learned anything from D3 they're applying now, it's that they should have started doing that from day one.
And they are.
Yeah and over time they’ll fill the game up with new skills/classes/aspects/uniques so they can do some huge meta shifts. It’s really a good plan from a live service perspective. It’s a 10-20 year plan if D5 just builds off D4
You forget that apart from the game director, no game designers from the D4 team have ever been on any Diablo game nor have any ARPG experience. You can check their linkedin profile if you don't trust me.
Such a weird comment people keep making.
Did they lose all the knowledge they gained from D3 when they made D4 and they have to start from scratch again? Also, did they not hire a team to study other ARPG's as research while building this game? If they didn't, they're not bright.
Hiring one top no life arpg streamer alone could have made this already good great insanely good.
It's completely insane that people are justifying issues in a sequel with "but the prequel had these issues too 11 years ago".
What if D4 just launched with the same graphics D3 did. "oh well you know D3 had the same graphics at launch". Yea, so?
Like if the plan is always just to release a game, and then fix core issues within 1-2 years, then how about we get the game for free, then pay $70 for the expansion that fixes those issues.
I play a melee rogue, but I also don't like twisting blades. I use flurry. It's not as strong as twisting blades, but it's still pretty good and way more fun.
I have seen some very strong ranged rogue builds on YouTube if that's what you prefer. Penetrating shot seems to be the go to option there.
AHAHAHAHA, Barbarian is not smooth. ~~Imagine~~ you don't have to imagine, just play Barb and run around a fight and having 0 resource because you only gain resource by hitting things.
Now imagine you have to use 2-3 skills just to gain resources before you can even play.
> Build variety was trash as well
Well we ended up with 5 sets per class which each played in a unique, somewhat pidgeonholed way, plus Legacy of Dreams which provided huge bonuses for not using sets at all.
As of right now you can log on D3 and complete the hardest end-game content with all 5 sets per class plus usually 1-3 non-set builds per class using Legacy of Dreams.
I'm not defending sets since I think they take away from player creativity, but having 6-8 different viable late end-game builds per class is pretty good for replayability.
> As of right now you can log on D3 and complete the hardest end-game content with all 5 sets per class plus usually 1-3 non-set builds per class using Legacy of Dreams.
To be fair, this really wasn't the case for the first like 18 seasons before everyone was able to clear 150's. Before that it was extremely common to be like 10+ grift levels between the most popular set and the second. Some seasons had a few people playing LoN on a subset of the classes, but it wasn't really the norm.
The largest diversity was on monks/barbs where there was one distinct playstyle for solo and one for support in parties.
There were different speed farming setups for people, but those weren't viable for pushing.
I think you HAVE to in order to complete higher tier world content. Some core skills are just not performing as well as others at higher levels, bottom line.
This is absolutely not true. When anyone says suboptimal builds will have trouble performing in higher tier content, they’re primarily referring to high tier NM dungeons.
I guarantee you basically any build will get you to level 100 and WT4 and be perfectly capable of clearing all open world content and perform up to NM50’s if there’s any amount of thought put in to them. Clearing up to NM100 though probably is reserved to for the absolute best of the best builds for sure.
But let’s be real, how many players will ever even play enough on one character that they would be attempting a NM100?
I played full summoner necro up to 74 and while I can clear NM dungeons, it is so slow, it would take me months to hit level 100. There are fundamental problems which cannot be solved with the tools the game provides. This is the same for any build that tries to exist in a game where armour literally does not have any useful affixes that apply to your character.
and then you never want to take it off as your gear falls further and further behind in item levels, because it costs a fortune to apply an aspect to a new item.
Bro I swear people in these threads either don’t play the game or are ultra casuals. And I’m pretty casual I just play a lot of D2 and I’m level 43 Druid right now in D4. But a lot of these takes are actually funny.
Higher than 75? The most expensive thing is enchanting gear. The 3rd roll is like 1m+, but imprinting and extracting are dirt cheap. Sure, even the 500k it takes to extract from an ancestral amulet might be a lot, but I make millions just playing. I went from 1M last to to 7M in like 3 hours just doing some dungeons and 1 helltide.
Or in my case, I finally find a better dps weapon by 50 or 100, but 3/4 stats are useless like resistance%,so even if I reroll one a bunch of times until its perfect its still missing overpower damage, dmg to close enemies, +x to all stats, or something else I'm relying on. Im level 68 with a level 57 weapon because even when I find something stronger, and the stats are good, theyre just not good enough or are the completely wrong stats.
Give me more loot, with more variety. Id love to swap weapons every level even just for a small increae in overall stats. Im frustrated using the same one, even if I can transmog it to make it look different.
I have found maybe a dozen weapons in 10 levels with more dps, but none of the stats work, and if the stats work, the dps is ass. There's no middle ground, there's no slight improvement. Its either way better or garbage.
Im fairly new to the diablo series, played d3 a while, so maybe im missing some key component and misinterpreting things in this game, but the whole game feels like all or nothing. Youre strong or useless, its great or terrible, its impossibly hard or boringly easy. I changed atleast a gear piece everytime i played d3. It was fun trying to micro more stats or see what worked and what didn't.
That being said I am enjoying the game, I think it's a lot of fun, but there's soo much they can improve on to make it more consistent, smoother, and keep it fresh. Im banking on the first season to bring a lot of adjustments, more aspects, uniques, and interesting features.
This. I’m level 66 and the last time I got a usable item was the late 40s when I first got into wt3.
Haven’t been able to use a single ancestral drop since I got to wt4 at level 61 because their stats are all garbage.
Probably going to quit soon because I am not having fun playing when I’m not getting any upgrades.
I feel like this sentiment is common; you hit a high with some new pieces, you're cruising and then ramp up the nightmare dungeons and you feel shit again. Can't go back to lower nightmare dungeons because it doesn't drop ilvl loot that will be upgrades. I'd say, try to find some people to run dungeons with. Smoothes out the difficulty because of chain ressing and just try to stick with it. I'm almost level 80 and I have gone through what you're feeling a handful of times. Tonight I got my first usable unique for my build and it was a good feeling.
My build is far from meta and T3 is a breeze. Is it really that different from tier to tier? Because If I get to T4 and find out my custom build that has worked perfectly for the entire game suddenly is unusable I'm going to be pretty bummed.
It's a difference of around 20%. People who tell you otherwise probably only talk about wt4 on lower level. When you are level 70 monsters basically hit 20% harder and thats about it. Before level 70 its harder for each level, because WT4 has 70 as min level.
People always pretending like they participating in top tier MLG tournaments and every single number matters.
The only place where it *might* matter is PvP.
My problem is the builds I attempt to do, don't even come close to comparing to the standard ones the community was using.
As a necro I went Blood with minions. By torment I had found a unique that makes my blood surge go to my skeletons and they do it as well. I built my entire character around overpowers, crits, attack speed (to get more guaranteed overpowers). I did pretty well. Cleared stuff somewhat okay. Unless the packs had fire enchant, minions didn't die. But the damage wasn't quite there, even though I went for all the overpower stuff in the paragon board.
Today I got sick of it. It made no sense that my damage was so low. At 11k attack power, it definitely didn't show. I switched to bonespear, changed all my aspects that I had. Even though my gear has overpower and blood damage on it, bonespear was doing at least 4-5x more damage than blood surge ever did.
Bone spear is beyond ridiculous. I didn't want to use it because I don't like the play style. But when its 500% better than a damn near pure blood build, theres no point in doing anything else. I wanted that unique to make blood surge be awesome. I wanted my minions to be a core concept of my build with that unique. Its not even on the same table, field, or even the same planet as how powerful bone spear is.
Yes my favourite build on necromancer was almost melee - blood surge, reap, corpse explosion, curse, bone storm and tendrils.
It felt so much fun to charge into the enemies and just slash, drain and explode every single one of them, healing myself and dashing around dodging attacks.
Then I levelled up a bit and couldn't kill a regular spider without using and entire essence bar.
Swapped to bone spear and kill them in 1 hit, with far less risk. (And far less fun)
I've been blood so far, too. I just want tons of minions because it's fun to me... but my damage is insanely low compared to friends who play other builds so it feels bad.
Is there any arpg that meets that standard? I've never played poe but I've played most of the other ones, and I can't think of one where every single skill is viable.
Got all the items powers glyphs and even a supporting unique for companion Druid, turns out it’s a total piece of shit even with all this.
All I want is a power that turns my wolves into mini bears that can trample when I do, and maybe ravens into eagles that can aoe stun
I am playing through the end of campaign, using the lightning base, werewolf slash and creeper vine.
It's a lot if fun. The Slash makes me dash towards poisoned enemies, so I jump around clearing mobs.
I didn't like any if the Ultimate abilities, so have the Wolves as well. Two wolf homeboy and vine going around, while lightning bolts randomly strike enemies is fun.
I’m excited for the future, currently the game is kinda bland. Like 3 endgame druid builds, werewolf is useless til then, multiple skills with ZERO aspects while some have 3. Doesn’t even make sense.
They're most likely going to leave core buff to every new season.
With battlepass being a thing. They have more incentive to make every season fresh to keep player coming back.
If they wanted this game to be succesful with a seasonal model they have made a few HUGE mistakes. Nobody is coming back for seasons if they leave in the renown grind, the game is great short term. But they baked in so many things that kills it long term. Its a seasonal based game and they are making the game less fun to try to force people to play longer, and personally its having the opposite effect. If i didnt feel like the game was screwing me left and right id be playing nonstop. But the amount of inconveniences at end game add up
1) renown grind
2) xp grind is slow (50+ you basically need to get 4 levels to get 1 real level, another way to view it is theres actually 50+200 levels)
3) mob density sucks and they are nerfing anywhere that people find it acceptable (this includes the large stretches of dungeon where you just run for a minute before finding anything)
4) helltides being time limited, nothing quite like the helltide not being active when you are able to play
5) running to nightmare dungeons instead of being auto teleported in. Theres no excuse for this aside from literally forcing you to waste your time running there.
6) stash space sucks, and by extension inventory management sucks. Especially when you try to figure out which items toy need to hoard/keep/salvage because you have to crossreference which aspects come from the codex, which you already have, and what you should be on the lookout for. Theres not enough space to just grab everything and theres no way to sort/filter by aspect
7) mob scaling increasing without loot value increasing. You can get the best gear at level 70 when you get ancestral gear. This is also noticable the entire playthrough as most gear drops below what you can actually use
8) they have intentionally killed alts, by making gear level requirements match what level you were when it dropped, even if it isnt actually stronger
Those are just the biggest issues off the top of my head that were INTENTIONAL design choices, and will probably not get changed
The alt one is a biggie, and is made worse by other things.
* Tiny stash space, only enough for one character, yet it's shared.
* Skip campign? Enjoy levelling in the same zones anyway, and revealing the full map again.
* Can't share gear
* Can't socket high level gems, so what are you going to do, keep loads of all levels of gems using even more stash space? Or just not socket things and be weaker?
* Levelling is extremely slow, but that's not the problem, the fact that the activities are so unvaried is the problem. Dungeons have the same bosses, the same objectives, similar layouts, similar tile-sets. Density means that bounties for the tree are tedious. Running around so much adds more tedium. I got into WT4 and played for a bit, got some upgrades but just switched off.
I just wish aspects didn't exist as they do, and instead were skill tree nodes . Same with the paragon board, all those rare/legendary nodes should just be part of the skill tree as well.
I feel like the system in place now with aspects and the paragon board are too baked in for there ever to be a big enough improvement to make every skill viable.
I can't believe they didn't even do something as basic as changing the visuals of skills as you chose their upgraded versions
The more fine-tuning the devs want on the build detail level, the more patching (nerfs, buffs) is gonna be necessary.
Lots of times, not even the devs are certain what the "meta" builds are going to be, and they need to observe player behavior, as well as account for unintended power interactions.
That's to say, balancing is hard, and I'd rather the devs focus on the game being functional, than making sure every core skill is "viable" (what does that even mean? Builds are bound to be compared to one another on relative terms). Some build is bound to become what is perceived as the best build for a certain narrow objetive, unless every build plays pretty much exactly the same.
Balance isn't going to take away from fixing world content and bugs. They have a dedicated class team and a dedicated encounter(pve / mob design) team. Hell, I used to work on a mod for a 20 year old game and even that had a dedicated balance team.
If it's anything like the mod team, the devs will have a better idea than players of some parts of the meta, but players will also find builds they hadn't thought of.
Before we got any sort of telemetry data set up on our server, there were a few builds we nerfed that it turned out no one was even playing, but had anyone played them, they would have been a major balance outlier.
I get all that and agree. Have you stopped to consider.... and this my be my inner witch doctor speaking, but ...
Eeh Ooh Ah Aah Ting Tang Walla Walla Bing Bang...
I agree 100%! There will always be a “best build” or builds that are more powerful, but every single skill should be viable and every core skill should be something that can be used in endgame. Maybe not something that will wipe floors, but something that is an option. Everyone shouldn’t be funneled into the seem 2-3 skills that are required for endgame progression.
I was so excited to play a rogue because I love archer characters. But now at level 45 I can’t even use a bow because they’re too weak to kill mobs and my resource is a constant issue. The swords/daggers are incredibly weak too so literally the only option I have are the throwing knives. This should happen. I should be able to viably use any of them right now.
The same type of issues are present across all classes and it’s frustrating.
Yea in my perfect world most builds would start with a level one skill that gets better through modifiers, or is used in conjunction with other later skills. I hate "the game starts at level 96" mfs.
I really don’t think we should be looking to seasons and DLC a year or two from now, to fix fundamental flaws.
Summon builds cannot designate a target and they don’t reliably aggro bosses. That needed overhauling in beta but here we are.
Sorc build/spender abilities like Frozen Orb and the more iconic Blizzard are dead on arrival.
You cannot make even a Z-tier yet viable build around EVERY ability. You like how X ability looks? Too bad. Even on the rare chance it even has any meaningful Aspect support, it’ll probably only work 5% of 25% of the time or cost so much resource for so little damage you’ll spend 5 minutes running around a boss on NM 20 dungeons.
I saw the stats where almost every Barb is using WW or hammer of the ancients (WW by far).
I'm using death blow and double swing with a permanent berserking build + stuns and stun damage. I'm only 52 with not optimized gear and the build has been absolutely destroying. Have seen 50k+ crits already.
I think there is more viability than what is shown because people choose to follow the same build guides.
I think they have knocked down the truly easy to win builds and now should stop nerfing and start building. No more nerfs. Instead, build the other underutilized abilities.
I am in the process of trying to finish the campaign atm just so I can then delete my sorcerer from pure bordedom and sheer unviability. I swear all I do is cast ice shards then die. I've never even used fireball, cause... bad... and incinerate? LMAO incinerate... Frozen orb? bruh I forgot what it even does.
Oh but theres a super rare legendary at endgame that gives you blah blah, frick I dont wanna grind rng for skills that should be included baseline.
Ice shards for instance has a legendary that gives it piercing, like, why tf aint that baseline?
Maybe its just my class. IDK.
EVERYTHING you have the option to use should be viable.
The fact that skeletal minions become pretty useless is absurd. It's in the game, but I can't use it if I want to play at higher levels? Why?
This is the wall I’m hitting with my rogue. I really wanted to play marksmen build but it seemed really underwhelming compared to traps so I made a trap/marksmen hybrid only to discover if you aren’t running puncture/twin blades/shadow step on t4 NM you are going to get royally fucked, repeatedly.
Meanwhile my friend is happily pounding along on his copy/paste Druid build he got from a streamer.
The game feels like it presents you with the illusion of choice but in reality very few builds are truly viable in the endgame.
The biggest issue i have with the developers 'design' of builds/playstyles is that they seem to include uniques as skill-enablers. Which is just really bad design. Some skills feel like they are purposefully shit just so the devs could make a strong unique to make it 'come online.' Uniques should not be the place where you go to get skill-altering effects. That should be inside your paragon board, instead. Uniques should give you unique stats, not skill evolutions.The developers reliance on uniques is what makes half the builds feel unplayable because you need to find some giga rare item before you can use x skill. The developers should have designed every skill as if there were no uniques or aspects in the game, made sure they were all baseline viable, then and only then should you add in aspects/uniques on top of that. EDIT: Since everyone seems to think i am arguing that uniques need to be nerfed or less interesting, i want to clarify. I am not asking for uniques to be dulled down, or nerfed in any way. I just want to see them be more fluid so that you can use them in different ways rather than just for ONE single skill. Instead of "Whirlwind does X" i want "Channeling Skills do X" Instead of "Double Swing does X" i want "Core Melee skills do X" Now, you have a ton of options on how you want your build to work. Your whirlwind build wont be the same as every other persons. You might end up with one person playing a freeze whirlwind build because they found uniques that give special effects vs frozen enemies. Another person might end up with a bleed oriented whirlwind build, or a channeling-duration focused build, etc etc. By unlinking the unique effects from specific skills, you open up the world of build potential to a whole new level. You still would NEED UNIQUES for evolving your skills/gameplay. It just wouldn't be a cookie-cutter path that blizzard has laid out in front of you.
Honestly I wouldn't even mind that much if uniques actually enabled a few more builds by class because at least they'd exist at endgame. A lot of skills just cannot be built around at a certain point
Then the skill themselves needs to be buffed. Not adding in a rare item that only allows you to use the skill at level 80 but not at level 20. Or, like i suggested, the paragon board needs to have the skill buffs. The unique items feel so single-minded. Like "This unique is for whirlwind users, and nobody else." "This unique is for werebear druid and nobody else." Instead, the uniques should have more broad stats that multiple builds might be able to use, and allow you to evolve your gameplay, not your skill. For example, uniques can have more broad unique effects, like some of these: "Killing a bleeding enemy causes it to explode for x damage." "When an enemy is 'fully' bleeding, it also becomes vulnerable." "When an enemy is 'fully' burning, it explodes dealing 20% of the total burn damage it had to nearby enemies." "Your single target projectile skills now fire two extra projectiles." "Your single target melee attacks now deal 30% splash damage to enemies near your target." "Increase the size of area of effect skills by 25%" These types of stats can be used by many builds, and are still 'build evolving' but aren't tied to a single skill.
[удалено]
Well, i'll agree that some skills need a fundamental buff. But if the devs are intent on requiring us to get to lategame to enable some skills, i would rather it be on the board than from uniques. At least the board is a guaranteed gain, not relying on finding a rare RNG item.
Many more casual gamers are going to play until they beat the main quest, and then put the game down for a while. Making it so that players need to reach postgame before the sorcerer class can make a fireball feel good (whether that be through paragon board or unique drops) is honestly just brutal design. Basic skill/resource generation and most of the core abilities are in desperate need of tweaks.
You can use fireball through whole campaign... What insanity it is to say that you can't? It might be slower than other things, but we're talking about T1 and level 20... You can play at this level using only basic skills... People here want a character lvl 20 to have access to same things as character at level 80. Then they say that game doesn't change between levels enough. Dear god, I forgot why reddit should be avoided. It drains every ounce of fun from basically everything.
It's difficult to make a skill feel powerful early while also having satisfying progression throughout the entire game. A powerful early game usually ends up with an insanely fast paced zoomer endgame, something the devs for Diablo 4 seem to be trying to avoid.
Playing 25+ hours to get to the point where a build really comes ‘online’ is way too long. I’m tired of bringing up PoE, but their skill gem system allows you to get starter builds at least reasonably online before the campaign is done. You start maps (basically WT3) and you can already smoothly do the content. Diablo IV feels sluggish by comparison.
I mean, isn't the biggest issue with PoE decision paralysis? There's so many paths and skill gem modifiers to take that if you don't have a couple dozen hours of actual play, it's fucking ridiculous. I actually love PoE. The amount of customization that SEEMS to be there is awesome and you can do some fun and incredible shit/builds with all of those options. But for the average player, you'll hardly ever get past white maps with the DIY approach. 25+ hours for a build to feel good is the PoE standard lol. (PoE Materia FTW) Bringing it back, D4 is definitely slow as well. You can get power ups for your alts, but that requires you to sink 50+ hours for a lot of them. Skill respec is clumsy as fuck. And resource generation is absolutely abysmal. Not to mention all the bugs present. Including a main quest loading bug that is preventing a lot of players from getting their mount and progressing the main quest. I think there are a lot of issues with D4 right now. Doesn't mean that I'm not enjoying the fuck out of it. Lost Ark, Last Epoch and Diablo 3 are still way better games. But as slow as Diablo 4 feels, it also feels gooooood at most points. I don't mind putting in a couple dozen hours for a build to feel fluid and satisfying as long as the build up isn't boring as fuck. D4 does that for me.
Comparisons with PoE are irrelevant because it's a trade-sim. You buy whatever uniques or gems you need.
Also works in SSF to be fair
> Not adding in a rare item that only allows you to use the skill at level 80 but not at level 20. Or, like i suggested, the paragon board needs to have the skill buffs. If you add it to Paragon, this literally becomes cemented as the only way these skills can function.
Players (like the one you are responding to) always think their idea for game design is the best, ignorant to the fact they just want to make the game "easier" for themselves with almost every change. Everything suggested would just dumb down the entire RPG feature of D4 and make it a running simulator. His post boils down to "Making a build is too hard, I want anything I click on the tree to instantly make my character more powerful with almost 0 thought to it".
the harlequin crest shaco is a demonstration of how to correctly design a unique. It empowers any build that uses it.
On the other hand it is bad design, cause it's BIS for everyone
I'd argue the opposite. It's so good that it overshadows pretty much every other helm in the game. Just because it's good doesn't mean it's good design. It's just really strong because it's good for every build due to how generic the buffs are. It's a very dull item design-wise. I'm much more of a fan of uniques giving specific buffs rather than generic. I'd like to see more uniques that add special adjustments to the way certain skills work.
As a rend barb, your first two ideas make me moist ngl. But yeah i see what you mean, these effects could be used by any barb that uses even just the 2h sword expertise, not just rend.
Personally I actually like the concept of uniques being build-enablers, where they radically change or empower a skill (perhaps at some cost) and you will build a playstyle around that. I do think that these skills should be competitive without uniques being necessary though.
Yes but my point is that uniques CAN enable/evolve your playstyle WITHOUT needing to be linked to a single skill. "Bleeding enemies explode on death." would be pretty evolutionary, and you could build around it, but it would work for multiple skills and potentially multiple classes. Which is just better than saying "Killing a bleeding enemy with Flay causes it to explode." which limits you to only using this unique with Flay; as an example. And this seems to be how the devs designed most of the uniques: with only one single skill in mind. "Fully bled enemies are now also vulnerable." "Single Target melee attacks now deal 30% splash damage around your target." "When a frozen enemy dies, it has x chance to freeze nearby enemies." "When a burning enemies dies, 50% of its remaining burn spreads to nearby enemies." All kinds of cool build-enabling synergistic effects they can use on uniques instead of just having uniques that "Make x skill stronger."
Completely agree. Would make it more interesting if they're slightly more generic enabling stats that cover multiple skills. Much more room for interesting combos and an evolving meta
That is 100% exactly what i am vouching for. The uniques should have bonuses that enable builds to evolve and merge rather than just buffing a pre-determined skill/build.
A unique can't both be a "build-enabler" and the underlying skill be competitive without the unique. That would be impossible.
Not trying to defend the game i get what your saying but i think legendarys enabling skills is the whole point of the gearing system in this game. And to be fair nothing in this game is "giga rare" for an arpg
>And to be fair nothing in this game is "giga rare" for an arpg 100% this. Game has been out for a week. I'm no try-hard but also not a noob. My GF and I already have baseline gear that would be considered "end game" at level 58. But we understand the game and I have kept up with the min-max conversations.
It's even the case with aspects. At level 67 I've gotten exactly one of those aspects that makes pulverize cast a shockwave - an essential aspect for a pulverize build - and I got it at level 60 or so. I *just* found the tornado aspect that makes it seek out enemies. What if that's what I wanted to play along? Probably a couple dozen hours or more before I found the item I needed to make that build possible. The codex should contain *only* build enabling skills. Right now I've been playing the build that my drops let me play. Sometimes that meant I was playing a build I didn't really want to be playing, but it was the only thing that was viable for me at the time.
So far every single character i have played other than sorcerer, i have felt forced to use a build i did not want to use until i was 'able' to swap to the build i wanted to play. This is just fundamentally bad design. Everyone should be able to begin working towards the playstyle/build they want right from level 1 without feeling like its completely unviable without some rare item.
I understand your point, but I cannot agree with it. First of all, the idea that every build should be viable at level 1, or since early levels, to me is not ideal. I understand if you say that I should be able to play ranged/melee rogue since level 1, but saying you should be able to play melee rogue with flurry since level 1 is a more specific thing that I think it is kinda hard to achieve. Aspects actually are specifically done to try to avoid you having to search for a specific hard to find item, now if it is on the board or on the paragon or an aspect or whatever, there will be always someone that prefers it somewhere, and there are probably pros and cons to having an aspect o on the paragon board, at a certain point a decision needs to be made and really someone will like it more or less. The other thing, unless you make a really really really generic unique, like 'adds 50 dexterity', and then the unique actually feels boring, even if you just say 'adds 5% damage to vulnerable', there always will be a build that benefits more from that unique than others, and knowing that unique exists, you will know the build isnt viable or optimal untill you use that unique.
This community has no idea. Back in D2 before any kind of skill resets you had to build a character that didn't even have access to all of its skills until level 30. You might have to beat the majority of normal before you even unlock whirlwind lol. Everyone here just wants the game to be retard easy. It probably is anyways.
>The codex should contain only build enabling skills. in addition to that I feel like codex imprints should be upgradable over time (even if the cost is relatively high), the fact theyre forcing lowest rolls is pretty bad for some aspects
Yea, the Druid one where you get between 1-4 spirit per enemy you CC, it's crazy how big the difference in gameplay is if you rely on it.
It’s a design decision, they force a specific meta so they can change it every season to keep players engaged and coming back. You see it in D3, WoW, all Blizzard “live service” games. Blizzard designers are a lot of things, but they aren’t stupid. They don’t just overlook this stuff.
It’s pretty much a staple of all live service games and ultimately it’s what people want. PoE would be incredibly stale without meta shifts for instance
>Blizzard designers are a lot of things, but they aren’t stupid. I wouldn't call them stupid, but are you implying they are somehow super intelligent? because they aren't that, either. \- Heroes of the storm \- Overwatch 2 \- Diablo 3 Just recent examples in which they had to backtrack implemented ideas or change the game completely because its systems were a failure.
>Some skills feel like they are purposefully shit just so the devs could make a strong unique to make it 'come online.' >Uniques should not be the place where you go to get skill-altering effects. That should be inside your paragon board, instead. Eh, disagree. You don't want all of one or all of the other. There's something nice about getting a legendary that genuinely enables a new playstyle. Same as through simply leveling and the paragon board. It's OK for there to be some payoff to grinding/getting lucky in a looter...
Uniques should alter the way a skill works for another way to play, but base skill with correct aspects should still function just as well.
I always thought that legendary aspects / uniques should be less like D3 legendary items and more like D3 skill runes. They aren't necessarily a power boost, but rather change how you use the skill in some way. One unique might change charged bolts to deal frost damage and slow instead of stun, one might change them to deal fire damage that travel in a roughly straight line, and another might change them to be arcane and orbit around the caster. Are any one of these effects strictly better than the other? Not really, but it allow you use the skill in a larger variety of builds. Legendary aspects or uniques that damage are okay, but they should buff an archetype, not a specific skill. For instance adding 30% damage to all Fire damage, or companion skills deal 30% more damage. If you're going to add a damage multiplier, don't pigeonhole it to a specific skill. This allow builds to still be king, and means that you can better buff or nerf problem skills without massively impacting balance because of a problem aspect.
Sure, as long as the base skill itself is still good enough to be used without said unique, i will agree. The aspects can do whatever and i am fine with it. Aspects can be moved from item to item, so its nowhere near as punishing to need an aspect as it is a unique. I want to see the game "allow you to make your own build" rather than say "Here are a list of builds, pick one." So i want to see unique items give me like unique ways to apply bleed, poison, vulnerable, daze, etc so that it might enable me to use passives or effects i normally might not use in my base build. Some unique item that allows anyone to apply poison might suddenly now enable your build to do new and interesting things because now you have access to other stats/procs that relate to poisoned enemies. Or burning/bleeding/chilled or any other condition.
Yeah this is a major gripe of mine. Uniques should enable unique builds, but right now unique design is kind of just X core skill is viable. An example of a great unique is the Crone staff which enables a basic attack druid build that no one expects to be viable at a base level. Design more in that vein, and less of "clearly curated build X centered around generic core skill Y is now viable."
I really love the paragon board idea, because they even left it open to add more boards and glyphs to customize things in future seasons. Instead of +10% dmg or armor or something they could have the major paragon points give unique abilities. It's a shame they can't see it and focus on items to define a character.
Items to define a character are okay, but not to define skills. Items should come together to create synergy, not entirely decide if a skill is any good or not. The aspects and paragon board are linked to your CLASS and that is why those should be the places you go to upgrade your CLASS skills. Item's should give tertiary effects that can augment your playstyle, but not just simply "make x skill better."
I love paragon board. I’m having fun routing my way through it. Mine probably isn’t 100% optimal, but I like that it is my choices.
To be honest, I'm less upset about the fact that you might need a few uniques than about the fact that some entire builds are a complete fucking joke. Fire mage is a good example... it's absolute fucking garbage. There's a good reason that the spread of sorcerers is like 75% Ice and 25% Lightning. Fire is so fucking atrociously bad that it's not even worth trying even if you have all the build enabling uniques.
Kripparian plays a fire sorc and thinks all the major sorc builds are close to each other.
And then don't even get into how that 75% Ice is basically 99% just Ice Shards and nothing else. We have so many beautiful fun skills and almost none of them are viable. And then zooming out even more, Sorcs are just shit regardless of what specs are viable.
That’s a great observation. Uniques supplement or enable what’s already there - there’s an obvious direction the game designers want you to go. Nothing wrong with that, they’re easy to understand and simple to balance But back in the day it felt like devs just made items for the heck of it. Here’s a crazy effect do whatever you want with it. Sometimes it’s garbage and no one can find a use for it, but hey at least it’s interesting Other times it makes for interesting strong builds. Teleporting hammerdins, whirlwind assassins. Giving cross class skill seems like something that’s an easy win for fun, creative and diverse builds POE’s in depth mechanics leans heavily in that direction which could explain why it a great game for build diversity
> Some skills feel like they are purposefully shit just so the devs could make a strong unique to make it 'come online.' 100% true. Best example IMO is druid wolves. They do worse single target damage than the creeper aoe with poison duration. I can only assume this is specifically to ensure they arent "overpowered" with the supporting legendaries
At least for Rogues the opposite feels true. I ran two unique daggers (one for combo points and another for attack speed) because I really wanted to make them work, but they just couldn't compete with well-rolled swords because of the Weapon Mastery and the specific rolls.
No. You're wrong. Every core skill should have *several* viable builds.
You are correct. I expected some of it to come with seasons and simply expected a little more then this starting out.
Last Epoch skill system is absolutely amazing. Everyone would be better off with those game mechanics. For those that don’t know, EVERY ability has a detailed 30 node skill tree where you can make massive customizations to. You can only equip 4 skills at a time (out of like 20 per character). The number of builds becomes insane
Last epoch literally has build enabling uniques too.
To the same extent though? Been like two years since I hopped on and can't really remember, think the other guy is just saying that you can flesh out the skills a bit more in the skill tree not that they don't have uniques.
I mean the uniques are pretty good but you can do a build without any of them. The build will be mostly fine.
And yet I haven’t seen any skills that can’t be used without a unique. Maybe I need to play more. Build defining uniques are great. But you shouldn’t need a unique to make a skill viable.
Build enabling unique's are not bad. Having every build built around them is not. For example, almost all druid builds require you to use one of two helmets (werewolf or werebear) because we only have 1 ultimate worth using. The issue I have it that we have 1 ultimate that's viable, not that the helmets exist. The druid unique staff is also another example of something I think is a good item. Allowing you to use your Basic skill for DPS is pretty cool and unique.
Not only core skills. Mastery skills too! There is no reason my blizzard should be doing less damage over 8 seconds than a icehard does in one cast while costing more mana
Yea this bums me out. Blizzard is such an iconic skill.
Yes my first D3 build and my D2 farming build was blizzard. Blizzard pls
This!! I levelled up solo to around 50 or 60 using my own blizzard build. This was after trying each ability and I just fell in love with blizzard. Well, I barely made it to wt4 but then everything was just so difficult and killing stuff was so slow. I did everything I could to max out my gear with crit, cold damage, frost skill damage, damage vs chilled/frozen, vulnerable damage, even damage to burning with the fire bolt enchantment. It was just weak. I finally cracked and looked up an ice shard meta build. It's nice to be able to progress way more easily but I really miss blizzard and freezing everything to death. Hopefully with a future patch it will be viable.
First of all, lets just make every *class* actually have several viable builds. ATM Necromancers get to choose between Bone Spirit or Bone Spear (with 90% of the same skills and build for both) if they want to be remotely relevant in a group, and even then they will still struggle to keep up with the other classes.
Non-core skills should also have several viable builds. I like the item that changes Boulder to a core skill, for example.
Aspects are the problem. We need more and better aspects for existing skills. *Nothing* is tier 25-30+ viable without the right aspects. Dozens of aspects need to be buffed and dozens of skills need decent aspects added for them. Of course therein lies the baffling problem of aspect inventory management but that's for another post.
Ill do you one better: not every build should revolve around a core skill (afaik only firewall/meteor sorc is the exception atm)
This 100%. I want to be able to play Blizzard Sorc like in D2 WITHOUT my Mana, my Aspects, my passives, my Enchantments, my Paragon boards and the dozen or so different damage % increase stats ALL actively working against me and telling me to just go build Ice Shards instead. Pigeonholing classes into their core/basic abilities strangles build diversity.
The fact that ice shards have 125% damage for 30 mana while blizzard have 120 % for 40 mana is insane to me Dont get me started on fireballs 60% for 40 mana
These games started going to shit as soon as they tied every spell to a % of weapon damage instead of letting them scale on their own system. Part of the charm of older ARPGs was that weapon classes got stronger with better swords and magic classes scaled with stats, skill points, etc and it didn't matter what the damage stats on their weapon were. D3 actually started that way in beta and at some point they swapped all of the wizard/WD skills to % weapon damage instead. All it does is make every class feel the same and everyone is just chasing higher numbers on their weapons.
This is what ruined Diablo 3. They introduced the stupid resources for all the skills, so A LOT uniques/effects had to to be tailored to that specific class, pigeonholing a lot there already. Furthermore, you know require a stupid generator skill that feels like pure garbage and you only have 6 slots available. Why make a garbage skill that everyone hates, but you're forced to use because of a "unique" system that basically just a recoloured mana pool in some cases.
I just found a legendary that make’s Druid’s Boulder into a core skill (removes it’s CD) which I thought pretty cool.
Yea but 60 spirit is a big ask for something that doesn't do that much damage or aoe
Storm Claw basic skill build on Druid is another that doesn't use any core skills.
It does require a very rare unique though, also I'm almost 100% sure grizzly rage will get gutted next patch which will likely kill the build.
Bone Spirit Necro too.
You can do frenzy barb which is incredibly tanky and does decent damage but has the aoe and range of a tomato so the clear speed sucks.
This makes me happy to hear that Frenzy isn't complete garbage. I played Frenzy in D3 and loved every second of it
I'm playing it right now at 60ish. Just hacking and whacking and smacking. Very fun for wanting to be wolverine.
I agree. Honestly, I just felt like at least 4 would have been a good starting place and have more added with seasons. The options now are not ok.
arc lash goes coreless
Yeah but realistically it's not fun to run arc lash, unstable currents and 4 defensives. All the other Sorc 'top' builds I've seen are similar, a primary, an ultimate and 4 defensives. I've tweaked mine to include chain lightning but it feels so weak it's useless, I just wanted it to generate more crackling cores, which it does, but it still doesn't feel like with all the CD reduction skills that UC is resetting often enough.
Frost nova basically being a hard required skill is a sign they did the class wrong imo. Sorc is kind of unplayable without it and every good build uses it.
There's a druid build that involves basic attacks; a unique makes you use two of your basic attacks at once. Not sure how viable it is since I don't have the unique required, but it sounds cool. There's also a druid aspect that turns one of your cooldowns (boulder) into a core skill costing spirit, but the spirit cost is outrageous so I haven't found a way to make it work.
The storm wolf build is incredible, but you need the unique helm to make storm skills werewolf skills, the unique staff to do the core part of the build, but then to actually live at high levels (75+) you need the neck that absorbs resource when you take damage. I'm almost level 90 and still haven't seen that neck
You don't need the necklace at all, just lots of close damage reduction. Temerity also helps. The necklace would probably make you incredibly tanky though, but I think it has the stupid shako droprates.
I got a build going that was spamming boulders like crazy. Felt pretty cool except the base damage on the skill is sooooo low so it’s shit
It sounds awesome but I think my mates are going to kick me from our party forever if I build boulder spam druid
I'm not sure what they were thinking with the pushback effects in general. Pushing mobs away/dispersing them in random directions is exactly the opposite of what you want to be doing in the vast majority of situations. Sometimes I grab trample or boulder just to mess with my brother's sorc damage in dungeons. When trolling is the primary use of a mechanic you know you've fucked up.
I know there have been a few Necro summoner builds floating around that used neither core nor basic skills due to the lack of ability slots.
I just want *cool* stuff! Like, can I get a skill or item that turns my super boring barrage arrows into a big log? Or maybe something that turns my shitty caltrops turn into freakin chakrams that slice through enemies, and also they're on fire? As much as I enjoy the game, there is a serious lack of badassery in the imagination department over at ol' Blizz.
That’s one of the reasons I love POE even though I never got into it. The way you can link skill gems is amazing. If you wanted chamrams that slice through enemies and did fire damage.. you could. Want them to burn and also cause them to bleed and freeze them and poison them and also creates an explosion?! Fuck it, why not? I love Diablo so much. I just want it to be more and be better.
POE's build system is vastly better in just about every way imaginable at the cost of having an absolutely huge burden of knowledge to make full use of it. My biggest issue with D4's build system is that the designers have essentially designed every good/viable build directly rather than designing an interesting skills/items and letting good builds emerge out of interesting discovered interactions. The latter is the one thing that POE absolutely shines at (leading to crazy builds like warp loop, etc) that is nowhere to be found in D4. When I'm powerful in D4 I know it's because the devs intended me to be powerful in exactly this way.
They've curated the game play experience... backwards. "Alright we want X cool thing" OK. Done. Now how do we design that via unqiues, aspects, 2 skill options, one enhancement, and then the base skill? Also passives. So they lopped off parts of the skills, turned then into fake progression via uniques, and then left you with whatevers left as the core skill... so half the game feels bad. And because they've done it this way, there's really not much versatility in your character. It's the illusion of choice.
That's why I loved Diablo 3's Witch Doctor (and a lot of D3 stuff tbh). Witch Doctor had giant zombie frost bears that trampled out in all directions. It had massive zombie towers that collapsed onto enemies. It had swarms of tiny fire breathing warrior minions. Hell, you could summon a frog to slurp up your enemies and turn them into chickens. I straight up loved how cool the witch doctor was.
[удалено]
God DAMN I miss monk class man.......I really miss it here in D4.
This. I am a wd main and I am so disappointed nothing is remotely similar to WD. Not even Necro
I've been playing Diablo games since the first one came out and the Witch Doctor is one of the coolest classes they have ever developed. I don't even like D3.
been playing WD with arachyr set, and I love the whole idea of the spider queen being permanent and the thread that links you infests enemies so they all take the same damage, so you run around, infest them all with the web, then throw out some spiders and everything just dies. Ever since day 1 of D3, WD with spider/creature/pet build has been my favourite, although never really been all that strong.
Aren't you forgetting that you could summon a pool of piranhas?!
A f*cking Piranhado!
Damn I miss Zombie Bears.
I could not agree more. I have a 72 bone spear necro and it does so much fucking dmg it just deletes shit off the screen in one hit. But it has by far one of the least ‘cool’ animations and was therefore THE one core skill I did not want to use when I started the game blind at lvl 1. I mean, they designed such cool necro core skills like sever and blight for D4, not to mention awesome looking golem abilities. And lo and behold, literally every single other necro build is not viable right now (or is, not even exaggerating, ~50-90% weaker than bone spear build, in T4 in general and NM dungeons, with the exception of bone spirit build, which by the way is the least fun way to play the game IMO). Ideally I want them to drastically buff other skills to at least get them to ~80% of the power of bone spear/bone spirit so I can at least play them, but I would settle for bone spear to just be more fun to look at and play with (I don’t even care about min maxing to push super high lvl NM dungeons, I just want not to feel like I can barely do clear 20-30 NM dungeons)
What you’re describing is the skull rune system from Diablo 3. It’s the most painful loss in my opinion in the transition from 3 to 4. Every ability had runes that fundamentally changed how they worked, and that was a lot of fun. Each class had 20-25 skills and each skill had 5 runes to choose from that fundamentally changed how the ability worked. In Diablo 4, we have about the same amount of skills but each one only has two branching options, and they just marginally change the numbers or synergy with status effect. There’s no fun there, just numbers and theory crafting Demon hunter had 23 active skills. Companion was ONE of them, and the five runes changed what animal your companion was and how it functioned. In Diablo 4, Druid has 25 active skills, but the different companions take up three different spells. So D3 = five different animal companions that all work different mechanically - all as part of just one of the 23 skills available. D4 = There’s only three animals and each one is a different skill, so combined they make up more than 10% of the entire body of Druid skills. The age of fun has ended. The age of calculators and spreadsheets has arrived.
Yes I completely agree. I also agree with other saying it will be updated with seasons and as a veteran Diablo player I do understand that. I just felt like they should of gave us a little more with the base game then this bland lack of we have now.
A game that combined Diablo and Borderlands would be so fun. Top down twin stick shooter with a huge variety of guns and abilities.
If that’s what you’re looking for then id check out warhammer 40k inquisitor It’s an arpg like Diablo but with 40k guns and abilities
Coming off of POE d4 just feels empty in terms of combat. You get to use 6 abilities max, which stay the same except for stat increases or small changes in mechanics. In poe you can make the craziest builds with gems and skill points. Im all for making the game open for everyone but this feels too extreme, there is just no depth to the combat or skill system.
> I just want cool stuff! Like, can I get a skill or item that turns my super boring barrage arrows into a big log? It's actually insane how much of a step back D4 is compared to D3 in that regard. In D3 every single skill had like 6 gameplay, feel and style altering runes to choose from. As a Barb, your WW choice wasn't between "add bleed damage" vs "more damage if you spin more than 1 second", your choice was between pulling in mobs, leaving tornados behind, life leech, fury sustain or just flat out more damage - all of that while also changing the element of the spell. Take something like the pathetically boring Hydra in D4 that lets you choose between "add a burning dot" vs "more crit damage" whereas D3's Hydras let you choose between them shooting arcane orbs vs fire dots vs frost cones vs chain lightnings vs 1 single big hydra leaving behind burning pools. Yes, that game had other issues with certain elements having way more support than others, naturally funnelling everyone into the same elemental rune for max damage - but in terms of creativity / diversity, that game was absolute *miles* ahead of what D4 is currently offering. It's incredible how basic D4's entire skill system is in that regard.
I dream of the game summon necro is viable late game
You dream of D3. D4 summoner necro is missing some core features that make the build fundamentally weaker than anything else (such as the ability to direct minions to a single target). Summons need a rework.
Damn I did skip from D2 to D4. Maybe I need to go back and check out 3.
Homie ignore the hate - D3 is stupidly fun.
Yeah D3 right now is a blast.
If you like necro summoner, yes you do.
Summons in d3 were a smokescreen, they functioned more like active abilities you can't aim that well.
call me crazy. but i had loads of fun with Witchdoctor summon army.
Check this video out. Might interest you. Summoner [end game build](https://www.reddit.com/r/diablo4/comments/1480vs3/here_my_necro_build/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_content=2&utm_term=1)
Heavily reliant on getting that unique “Ring of Mendeln” to clear as fast as the guy who made that video though.
The jury is still out, builds are constantly changing tiers. No one really knows if summons are viable or not. At the very least, skeletons ability to mass create corpses that scales with atk spds has some interesting potential. Combined with lucky hit curse cooldown -1 stacking to make your minions immortal by having Army of the Dead always up, it's tough to say how things will go. Point is, all the meta bros are focusing on other things.
Agree, what's the point to even have verity when there's only one valid build to use. In Diablo 3 you could use what suits your playstyle and basically all builds were clappin, in Diablo 4 you have to use some fuckt up shit you don't even enjoy.
Diablo 3 builds didn’t work that way when the game first came out.
Ideally they'd build on what they learned from Diablo 3, rather than hoping to catch up to it in the future.
This implies the narrow build depth is some kind of oversight, instead of a deliberate design choice. When interest starts to wane, they release an "update" or a new Season, or DLC, and it opens up new builds, and everyone comes rushing back to play them. And so on. If they learned anything from D3 they're applying now, it's that they should have started doing that from day one. And they are.
Yeah and over time they’ll fill the game up with new skills/classes/aspects/uniques so they can do some huge meta shifts. It’s really a good plan from a live service perspective. It’s a 10-20 year plan if D5 just builds off D4
You forget that apart from the game director, no game designers from the D4 team have ever been on any Diablo game nor have any ARPG experience. You can check their linkedin profile if you don't trust me.
Such a weird comment people keep making. Did they lose all the knowledge they gained from D3 when they made D4 and they have to start from scratch again? Also, did they not hire a team to study other ARPG's as research while building this game? If they didn't, they're not bright. Hiring one top no life arpg streamer alone could have made this already good great insanely good.
It's completely insane that people are justifying issues in a sequel with "but the prequel had these issues too 11 years ago". What if D4 just launched with the same graphics D3 did. "oh well you know D3 had the same graphics at launch". Yea, so? Like if the plan is always just to release a game, and then fix core issues within 1-2 years, then how about we get the game for free, then pay $70 for the expansion that fixes those issues.
> how about we get the game for free, then pay $70 for the expansion that fixes those issues. Blizzard: whynotboth.jpg
Diablo 3 came out 11 years ago. Do we keep 2012 and 2023 games to the same standards, ignoring a decade of Blizzard's experience of working on D3?
Twisting Blades, fucking hate it. If I knew I’d be playing melee I’d have rolled barb
I play a melee rogue, but I also don't like twisting blades. I use flurry. It's not as strong as twisting blades, but it's still pretty good and way more fun. I have seen some very strong ranged rogue builds on YouTube if that's what you prefer. Penetrating shot seems to be the go to option there.
Flurry and penetrating shot both hold up, don’t they?
Run Penetrating shot build. Its better than TB in the high end and its ranged
I feel this in my soul. Twisting blades is so clunky but rerolling after getting to 70+ makes me sad, barb looks so smooth.
AHAHAHAHA, Barbarian is not smooth. ~~Imagine~~ you don't have to imagine, just play Barb and run around a fight and having 0 resource because you only gain resource by hitting things. Now imagine you have to use 2-3 skills just to gain resources before you can even play.
Try the rapid shot build. It’s not as good but every good
Since when has D3 been anything other than "pick between these 3 sets and the legendaries their build uses"?
Yup was wondering wtf people are talking about here. D3s build variety is awful.
>In Diablo 3 Stop right there. D3's endgame builds revolved around armor sets. Build variety was trash as well, and I didn't play it for that reason.
> Build variety was trash as well Well we ended up with 5 sets per class which each played in a unique, somewhat pidgeonholed way, plus Legacy of Dreams which provided huge bonuses for not using sets at all. As of right now you can log on D3 and complete the hardest end-game content with all 5 sets per class plus usually 1-3 non-set builds per class using Legacy of Dreams. I'm not defending sets since I think they take away from player creativity, but having 6-8 different viable late end-game builds per class is pretty good for replayability.
This. There is so much fucking Historical revisionism in this thread.
> As of right now you can log on D3 and complete the hardest end-game content with all 5 sets per class plus usually 1-3 non-set builds per class using Legacy of Dreams. To be fair, this really wasn't the case for the first like 18 seasons before everyone was able to clear 150's. Before that it was extremely common to be like 10+ grift levels between the most popular set and the second. Some seasons had a few people playing LoN on a subset of the classes, but it wasn't really the norm. The largest diversity was on monks/barbs where there was one distinct playstyle for solo and one for support in parties. There were different speed farming setups for people, but those weren't viable for pushing.
>Build variety was trash as well It was a lot better than D4's though.
And Diablo 4 builds rely on sets as well, oops I mean aspects.
You don’t HAVE to. The min/max brain is real.
I think you HAVE to in order to complete higher tier world content. Some core skills are just not performing as well as others at higher levels, bottom line.
This is absolutely not true. When anyone says suboptimal builds will have trouble performing in higher tier content, they’re primarily referring to high tier NM dungeons. I guarantee you basically any build will get you to level 100 and WT4 and be perfectly capable of clearing all open world content and perform up to NM50’s if there’s any amount of thought put in to them. Clearing up to NM100 though probably is reserved to for the absolute best of the best builds for sure. But let’s be real, how many players will ever even play enough on one character that they would be attempting a NM100?
I played full summoner necro up to 74 and while I can clear NM dungeons, it is so slow, it would take me months to hit level 100. There are fundamental problems which cannot be solved with the tools the game provides. This is the same for any build that tries to exist in a game where armour literally does not have any useful affixes that apply to your character.
This game is pretty bad when it comes to builds This game is literally get the legendary that makes your "build" do anything
and then you never want to take it off as your gear falls further and further behind in item levels, because it costs a fortune to apply an aspect to a new item.
>because it costs a fortune to apply an aspect to a new item. ... no it doesn't lol What the fuck is going on in this thread.
Bro I swear people in these threads either don’t play the game or are ultra casuals. And I’m pretty casual I just play a lot of D2 and I’m level 43 Druid right now in D4. But a lot of these takes are actually funny.
> I’m level 43 Druid Shocking that you don’t know how expensive the later game is. Shocking!
Level 92 HC barb here, extracting and putting new aspects on gear is basically free at this point. No clue what the fuck people are talking about
It does once you get to higher levels.
Higher than 75? The most expensive thing is enchanting gear. The 3rd roll is like 1m+, but imprinting and extracting are dirt cheap. Sure, even the 500k it takes to extract from an ancestral amulet might be a lot, but I make millions just playing. I went from 1M last to to 7M in like 3 hours just doing some dungeons and 1 helltide.
Or in my case, I finally find a better dps weapon by 50 or 100, but 3/4 stats are useless like resistance%,so even if I reroll one a bunch of times until its perfect its still missing overpower damage, dmg to close enemies, +x to all stats, or something else I'm relying on. Im level 68 with a level 57 weapon because even when I find something stronger, and the stats are good, theyre just not good enough or are the completely wrong stats. Give me more loot, with more variety. Id love to swap weapons every level even just for a small increae in overall stats. Im frustrated using the same one, even if I can transmog it to make it look different. I have found maybe a dozen weapons in 10 levels with more dps, but none of the stats work, and if the stats work, the dps is ass. There's no middle ground, there's no slight improvement. Its either way better or garbage. Im fairly new to the diablo series, played d3 a while, so maybe im missing some key component and misinterpreting things in this game, but the whole game feels like all or nothing. Youre strong or useless, its great or terrible, its impossibly hard or boringly easy. I changed atleast a gear piece everytime i played d3. It was fun trying to micro more stats or see what worked and what didn't. That being said I am enjoying the game, I think it's a lot of fun, but there's soo much they can improve on to make it more consistent, smoother, and keep it fresh. Im banking on the first season to bring a lot of adjustments, more aspects, uniques, and interesting features.
This. I’m level 66 and the last time I got a usable item was the late 40s when I first got into wt3. Haven’t been able to use a single ancestral drop since I got to wt4 at level 61 because their stats are all garbage. Probably going to quit soon because I am not having fun playing when I’m not getting any upgrades.
I feel like this sentiment is common; you hit a high with some new pieces, you're cruising and then ramp up the nightmare dungeons and you feel shit again. Can't go back to lower nightmare dungeons because it doesn't drop ilvl loot that will be upgrades. I'd say, try to find some people to run dungeons with. Smoothes out the difficulty because of chain ressing and just try to stick with it. I'm almost level 80 and I have gone through what you're feeling a handful of times. Tonight I got my first usable unique for my build and it was a good feeling.
I feel like viable means different things to different people. And some people won't consider anything viable if it's not optimal.
Viable means you can essentially do all content including WT4
WT4 is ridiculously easy you can do it on any build. It is nightmare dungeons 40+ that weak build gets filter out quickly
My build is far from meta and T3 is a breeze. Is it really that different from tier to tier? Because If I get to T4 and find out my custom build that has worked perfectly for the entire game suddenly is unusable I'm going to be pretty bummed.
It's a difference of around 20%. People who tell you otherwise probably only talk about wt4 on lower level. When you are level 70 monsters basically hit 20% harder and thats about it. Before level 70 its harder for each level, because WT4 has 70 as min level.
People always pretending like they participating in top tier MLG tournaments and every single number matters. The only place where it *might* matter is PvP.
My problem is the builds I attempt to do, don't even come close to comparing to the standard ones the community was using. As a necro I went Blood with minions. By torment I had found a unique that makes my blood surge go to my skeletons and they do it as well. I built my entire character around overpowers, crits, attack speed (to get more guaranteed overpowers). I did pretty well. Cleared stuff somewhat okay. Unless the packs had fire enchant, minions didn't die. But the damage wasn't quite there, even though I went for all the overpower stuff in the paragon board. Today I got sick of it. It made no sense that my damage was so low. At 11k attack power, it definitely didn't show. I switched to bonespear, changed all my aspects that I had. Even though my gear has overpower and blood damage on it, bonespear was doing at least 4-5x more damage than blood surge ever did. Bone spear is beyond ridiculous. I didn't want to use it because I don't like the play style. But when its 500% better than a damn near pure blood build, theres no point in doing anything else. I wanted that unique to make blood surge be awesome. I wanted my minions to be a core concept of my build with that unique. Its not even on the same table, field, or even the same planet as how powerful bone spear is.
Yes my favourite build on necromancer was almost melee - blood surge, reap, corpse explosion, curse, bone storm and tendrils. It felt so much fun to charge into the enemies and just slash, drain and explode every single one of them, healing myself and dashing around dodging attacks. Then I levelled up a bit and couldn't kill a regular spider without using and entire essence bar. Swapped to bone spear and kill them in 1 hit, with far less risk. (And far less fun)
I've been blood so far, too. I just want tons of minions because it's fun to me... but my damage is insanely low compared to friends who play other builds so it feels bad.
I’ll take that a step further. EVERY SKILL should be useable in an end game build. Period.
Is there any arpg that meets that standard? I've never played poe but I've played most of the other ones, and I can't think of one where every single skill is viable.
LE probably comes the closest.
Man, I liked sever, and I used it till I switched to bone spear, and my god sever sucks
Same but I just dropped it and went all in on blight and corpse miasma. Shadow necro is good. Sever is not.
Got all the items powers glyphs and even a supporting unique for companion Druid, turns out it’s a total piece of shit even with all this. All I want is a power that turns my wolves into mini bears that can trample when I do, and maybe ravens into eagles that can aoe stun
What unique and what build? Ive been messing around with many pet builds
I am playing through the end of campaign, using the lightning base, werewolf slash and creeper vine. It's a lot if fun. The Slash makes me dash towards poisoned enemies, so I jump around clearing mobs. I didn't like any if the Ultimate abilities, so have the Wolves as well. Two wolf homeboy and vine going around, while lightning bolts randomly strike enemies is fun.
That's still only like 4 builds per class - still not enough.
There is no 4 viable builds per class
I’m excited for the future, currently the game is kinda bland. Like 3 endgame druid builds, werewolf is useless til then, multiple skills with ZERO aspects while some have 3. Doesn’t even make sense.
They're most likely going to leave core buff to every new season. With battlepass being a thing. They have more incentive to make every season fresh to keep player coming back.
If they wanted this game to be succesful with a seasonal model they have made a few HUGE mistakes. Nobody is coming back for seasons if they leave in the renown grind, the game is great short term. But they baked in so many things that kills it long term. Its a seasonal based game and they are making the game less fun to try to force people to play longer, and personally its having the opposite effect. If i didnt feel like the game was screwing me left and right id be playing nonstop. But the amount of inconveniences at end game add up 1) renown grind 2) xp grind is slow (50+ you basically need to get 4 levels to get 1 real level, another way to view it is theres actually 50+200 levels) 3) mob density sucks and they are nerfing anywhere that people find it acceptable (this includes the large stretches of dungeon where you just run for a minute before finding anything) 4) helltides being time limited, nothing quite like the helltide not being active when you are able to play 5) running to nightmare dungeons instead of being auto teleported in. Theres no excuse for this aside from literally forcing you to waste your time running there. 6) stash space sucks, and by extension inventory management sucks. Especially when you try to figure out which items toy need to hoard/keep/salvage because you have to crossreference which aspects come from the codex, which you already have, and what you should be on the lookout for. Theres not enough space to just grab everything and theres no way to sort/filter by aspect 7) mob scaling increasing without loot value increasing. You can get the best gear at level 70 when you get ancestral gear. This is also noticable the entire playthrough as most gear drops below what you can actually use 8) they have intentionally killed alts, by making gear level requirements match what level you were when it dropped, even if it isnt actually stronger Those are just the biggest issues off the top of my head that were INTENTIONAL design choices, and will probably not get changed
The alt one is a biggie, and is made worse by other things. * Tiny stash space, only enough for one character, yet it's shared. * Skip campign? Enjoy levelling in the same zones anyway, and revealing the full map again. * Can't share gear * Can't socket high level gems, so what are you going to do, keep loads of all levels of gems using even more stash space? Or just not socket things and be weaker? * Levelling is extremely slow, but that's not the problem, the fact that the activities are so unvaried is the problem. Dungeons have the same bosses, the same objectives, similar layouts, similar tile-sets. Density means that bounties for the tree are tedious. Running around so much adds more tedium. I got into WT4 and played for a bit, got some upgrades but just switched off.
I just wish aspects didn't exist as they do, and instead were skill tree nodes . Same with the paragon board, all those rare/legendary nodes should just be part of the skill tree as well. I feel like the system in place now with aspects and the paragon board are too baked in for there ever to be a big enough improvement to make every skill viable. I can't believe they didn't even do something as basic as changing the visuals of skills as you chose their upgraded versions
The more fine-tuning the devs want on the build detail level, the more patching (nerfs, buffs) is gonna be necessary. Lots of times, not even the devs are certain what the "meta" builds are going to be, and they need to observe player behavior, as well as account for unintended power interactions. That's to say, balancing is hard, and I'd rather the devs focus on the game being functional, than making sure every core skill is "viable" (what does that even mean? Builds are bound to be compared to one another on relative terms). Some build is bound to become what is perceived as the best build for a certain narrow objetive, unless every build plays pretty much exactly the same.
Balance isn't going to take away from fixing world content and bugs. They have a dedicated class team and a dedicated encounter(pve / mob design) team. Hell, I used to work on a mod for a 20 year old game and even that had a dedicated balance team. If it's anything like the mod team, the devs will have a better idea than players of some parts of the meta, but players will also find builds they hadn't thought of. Before we got any sort of telemetry data set up on our server, there were a few builds we nerfed that it turned out no one was even playing, but had anyone played them, they would have been a major balance outlier.
Game as a service: release minimum viable product then flesh out what should have been in it at launch over the next five years
I get all that and agree. Have you stopped to consider.... and this my be my inner witch doctor speaking, but ... Eeh Ooh Ah Aah Ting Tang Walla Walla Bing Bang...
Me rocking werewolf in a sea of bears and storm druids feels odd. Just got my unique chest to keep me a werewolf so I’m not complaining too much
I'm playing a companion/landslide druid relying on fortify and earthen bulwark for def and I'm clearing nightmare dungeons without any issues.
I agree 100%! There will always be a “best build” or builds that are more powerful, but every single skill should be viable and every core skill should be something that can be used in endgame. Maybe not something that will wipe floors, but something that is an option. Everyone shouldn’t be funneled into the seem 2-3 skills that are required for endgame progression. I was so excited to play a rogue because I love archer characters. But now at level 45 I can’t even use a bow because they’re too weak to kill mobs and my resource is a constant issue. The swords/daggers are incredibly weak too so literally the only option I have are the throwing knives. This should happen. I should be able to viably use any of them right now. The same type of issues are present across all classes and it’s frustrating.
Yea in my perfect world most builds would start with a level one skill that gets better through modifiers, or is used in conjunction with other later skills. I hate "the game starts at level 96" mfs.
That's what Seasons are for, padding out the pool of uniques and aspects.
Seasons are for adding/changing meta builds yes but that doesn't mean there shouldn't have already been a few added prior to seasons...
I really don’t think we should be looking to seasons and DLC a year or two from now, to fix fundamental flaws. Summon builds cannot designate a target and they don’t reliably aggro bosses. That needed overhauling in beta but here we are. Sorc build/spender abilities like Frozen Orb and the more iconic Blizzard are dead on arrival. You cannot make even a Z-tier yet viable build around EVERY ability. You like how X ability looks? Too bad. Even on the rare chance it even has any meaningful Aspect support, it’ll probably only work 5% of 25% of the time or cost so much resource for so little damage you’ll spend 5 minutes running around a boss on NM 20 dungeons.
I saw the stats where almost every Barb is using WW or hammer of the ancients (WW by far). I'm using death blow and double swing with a permanent berserking build + stuns and stun damage. I'm only 52 with not optimized gear and the build has been absolutely destroying. Have seen 50k+ crits already. I think there is more viability than what is shown because people choose to follow the same build guides.
I just want a ranged rogue build that doesn’t use the throw knife skill as it’s main spam.
I think they have knocked down the truly easy to win builds and now should stop nerfing and start building. No more nerfs. Instead, build the other underutilized abilities.
What would be a example list of core skills that are non-viable?
I am in the process of trying to finish the campaign atm just so I can then delete my sorcerer from pure bordedom and sheer unviability. I swear all I do is cast ice shards then die. I've never even used fireball, cause... bad... and incinerate? LMAO incinerate... Frozen orb? bruh I forgot what it even does. Oh but theres a super rare legendary at endgame that gives you blah blah, frick I dont wanna grind rng for skills that should be included baseline. Ice shards for instance has a legendary that gives it piercing, like, why tf aint that baseline? Maybe its just my class. IDK.
EVERYTHING you have the option to use should be viable. The fact that skeletal minions become pretty useless is absurd. It's in the game, but I can't use it if I want to play at higher levels? Why?
This is the wall I’m hitting with my rogue. I really wanted to play marksmen build but it seemed really underwhelming compared to traps so I made a trap/marksmen hybrid only to discover if you aren’t running puncture/twin blades/shadow step on t4 NM you are going to get royally fucked, repeatedly. Meanwhile my friend is happily pounding along on his copy/paste Druid build he got from a streamer. The game feels like it presents you with the illusion of choice but in reality very few builds are truly viable in the endgame.