wow D4 is crap

I gave it a go. the compaign is fine, even good.
but its just hateful..all the looking for zillion numbers to pick the best ones... and the "chores" to do...

devs lost it..

i did enjoy the campaign.

but its just not even calling to me..there's no yearn to play, like in d2 or other good games..

even though the graphics are amazing.

shame really.

Original devs aka Blizz North were fired long ago because Blizz thought that they can make Diablo by themselves. They were wrong

Yeah it sounds soulless. I waited for my D2 personalities to give a final verdict and when they all said it sucked that made my decision not to purchase simple.

I have fun playing through once with friends, but it didn't really feel like "Diablo". Loot system is wonky and I never got that "one more run" feeling that keeps D2 going endlessly.

all the quests and exploration were really cool, it had lots going for it. But once you get into endgame, it's just so much of 'do this, do that, maybe get better gear that's got an extra 2% crit damage'

I'll probably play a bit of seasons here and there, but I doubt I'll ever grind a character to max like I'm doing in d2r right now

I have literally zero interest in the D4 endgame, but I'll get through the campaign eventually (was enjoying the campaign and the world exploration, got side tracked by summer, vacation and other games), and might even play the campaign again as a different class eventually, or try parts of the season "journey" at least once, but yeah, I don't see myself doing the endgame grind. I never took much interest in the D3 endgame either, I mainly played the campaign (and a little bit of adventure mode, but no rifts).

ShadowHeart wrote: 8 months ago

I have literally zero interest in the D4 endgame

That's because there is none.


I suppose anyone who has been around for the pre-launch/beta D4 discussions remembers my let's say "not convinced" take on it.
Some may also recall that I predicted there would eventually be a drunk night at the end of which someone would successfully abuse my vulnerable state to talk me into buying D4 regardless. And that's basically exactly what happened. (Fun fact: That's also how I ended up ever getting D3)

Combine said drunk purchase with having played too much (is there such a thing though? ^^) D2:R since it got released (i.e. needed a break anyways) and quite a few Rain-days here since then and I dare say I've played the shit out of D4 well past the point of being able to judge it fairly, despite my inherent bias.
By that I mean I'm sitting on a couple 100s and a mid-50, completed the normal + season campaign, finished the season journey, did every single bloody side quest/fully completed every zone...twice, ran lvl 100 sigils (solo and team, including before the recent massive nerf to them), killed the echo of

Lilith (solo) and spent enough time "PvPing" to get the entire cosmetic set and then some. So..ya know..did literally everything there is to do.

After all that, I firmly stand by every single thing I said pre-launch as it all remains true and was maybe even still giving them too much of the benefit of the doubt.

Just to name a few things (since there's no way I'll actually remember/list all of it plus it'll already be a wall of text.. :p):


The good:
- Environmental art. The visual atmosphere in D4 is simply great. No question. The artwork is beautiful, the perspective is nigh perfect, environments (in the open world) are distinct, feel creative and have actual character.

- Theoretical build variety. Not gonna lie, the paragon system turned out a lot more intriguing than I had anticipated. The degree of theorycrafting you can throw at that in order to optimize things goes well beyond anything D2 or the like have ever offered and is actually quite entertaining for spreadsheet-nerds like myself. It is simple enough for everyone to understand yet complex enough to be an actual challenge (read: time-sink) to really optimize.


The bad:
- The soundtrack is...non-existent? I genuinely didn't think this game even had music for the longest time. After setting music volume to basically twice the level of everything else, you do get random chimes every now and again but 99.9% of the time, there simply is no audible soundtrack to it, regardless of volume settings. I've since turned that slider down again as the random environmental-feeling chimes got a bit annoying without any real soundtrack supporting them.

- Controls are just dumb. First and foremost, the game is blatantly obviously designed as a console game. Short of racing games and mortal kombat, it is the only game I've ever played on a controller (and continue to do so). To me, that's just a dumb-ass idea for an RPG but it is just so blatantly tailored towards it (and dumbed down because of it) that keyboard/mouse just "feels wrong" and has me beyond annoyed. And yet, even with that, the controller implementation is idiotic. Ignoring for a second the bugged bits where BT controllers repeatedly get disconnected when alt-tabbing out of D4 (yeah..), they actually did manage to correctly check stick movement to let you move slowly or run faster, depending on how far over you push it. Yet at the same time, they were too dumb to make that a thing for aiming so no matter how far over you push your stick, you cannot control the distance of something like a

Hydra or a

Bone Prison or whatever area-targeted skill you use. It'll always be in the same damn (typically entirely useless) spot. That in and by itself more or less effectively disables a few build options for controllers. Plus the sticky targeting is just dumb...auto-target random mobs 5 rooms over with 3 locked doors in between and ignore the entire pack right in front of you?...yup, makes sense!

- Just don't call it diablo...it plays like a hybrid between D3 (which should've already not be called diablo) and WoW. There's zero of the original Diablo or Diablo 2 feel.

- Character art is still "mweh" at best. As baller as the environmental art is, character and especially minion art just isn't up to par and follows a different stylesheet (moving from more realistic to in parts more cartoony/D3 [not quite that extreme but still]), resulting in an artistic clash between the two. Plus they're either too lazy or just plain too incompetent to fix clipping issues so weapons clip through armor, through cloaks, back pieces clip through back weapons, random pieces of entity art clip even clip through themselves (e.g. ashava's spawn pool 'living wall')..entity/character quality and polish are really just sad.

- Cinematics and storytelling are insanely bad by comparison. If there's one thing blizz (even more recently) has still been known for then the fact that they reliable came up with industry-leading cinematics, cutscene sequences and surrounding storytelling. Apparently though, come D4, they just didn't give a F anymore. This is the first ever blizz game where I started skipping through every single dialog and every single cutscene well before even being halfway through the initial campaign because all of them were just in-game-asset, slow-motion, zero-atmosphere, total lack of an interesting storyline type wastes of time. That's true for the initial campaign but even more so for the pathetic excuse of a "story" that is season 1.

- Difficulty. Or lack thereof. The entire game is just too damn easy. Given a bit of build-tailoring and minor amounts of practice, top-level sigils were perfectly doable even in sub-par gear....and got nerfed to be easier. The echo of

Lilith is about as scripted and predictable as it gets (until you cheese it in which case mechanics bug out, break down and everything can go to hell indefinitely), making it the equivalent of an average WoW raidboss except far easier because only 1 person needs to not suck as opposed to an entire raid. World bosses are just beyond pathetic in that they pose no real threat to you and give you 15 freaking minutes to kill them while even in a group full of mainly low-lvl leachers any kill that takes longer than a minute is already considered slow. It is just kinda sad...


The ugly:
- Numbers. Not "numbers are too big zomg!" as some complained..honestly couldn't care less if a game deals in 1,000s or 1,000,000s. But the way damage (and reduction) is calculated is just idiotic and inherently gives certain builds/classes an unbeatable advantage over others. Specifically (simplified just a tad bit), you basically deal damage equal to base dmg x primary stat multiplier x additive damage x multiplicative dmg. I.e. if you deal 500 base dmg get x2 from your primary stat, x5 from additive sources and x5 from multiplicative sources (arbitrary numbers), you end up dealing 500 x 2 x 5 x 5 = 25,000 dmg. If you add another 100% additive dmg to that, it changes the x5 to a x6, resulting in 30,000 dmg overall. If on the other hand you add 100% as a new multiplicative source, you end up not turning the x5 into x6 for that but adding a whole nother x2, turning the 25k not into 30k but into 50k dmg total. Thanks to that concept, things like vulnerable damage and

Critical Strike damage (which are multiplicative) inherently beat all other dmg stats (to various cc'd, close, skill type, distant, whatever) which roll into a single, combined additive bucket. Basically, the highest possible damage is achieved by spreading all of your stats out in a way that evens out the base, additive and every multiplicative bucket as much as possible and by actually being able to make use of all of them. This not only creates insane inherent discrepancies based on paragon boards and passive skills alone (e.g. Bone necro crit dmg pushing to levels that are just plain absurd for many other classes/builds) but it also makes any build (excluding those clearly broken) that cannot actually utilize those buckets effectively pointless. Simple example: Any sorc that would like to not use cold skills will not have a single way to make things vulnerable, loses that entire multiplicative bucket and ends up just a pathetic little pea shooter. And even cold sorcs, when looking at groups of mobs, kinda needs to roll into melee range to

Frost Nova as that's the only reliable way to make more than 1 thing vulnerable. So not only are you looking at "sorcs must be melee range!" (said no other game ever...) but you're also looking at needing cooldowns up to actually enable that entire rather essential damage bucket. Compare that to other classes where many (if not most) builds simply automatically make everything vulnerable reliably, simply via the main attack and you might see how that's not exactly helpful for balancing purposes. Hell, my necro can easily be pushed to doing literally 10x the damage my sorc does (assuming 1 target..significantly more than 10x with multiple targets) while being significantly more tanky at the same time (which is a separate topic in and by itself).

- "NO CC FOR U!". Making the above even worse, some classes (poor, pathetic, little sorc again being a prime example) are designed around crowd control. That is not only reflected in their skills but also in the design of their paragon boards which offer far (FAR) more potential against various types of CC'd targets vs. others. In and by itself, that'd actually be somewhat creative and possibly even fun. The way D4 works however is that bosses cannot be CC'd (unless you cheese the F out of them to spam-stagger) and even non-boss elites go unstoppable (=no more CC) quite quickly, resulting in you losing every single bit of that theoretical CC-based bonus. And even if you do manage to stagger bosses in record time, non-CC-based classes will have typically done more dmg by then than you will have done afterwards because they don't suffer from all of that ramp-up to stagger. Not being able to actually really CC bosses is one thing but having that result in losing nearly all of your bonus damage is just dumb..even more so on targets that cannot be CC'd AND cannot be staggered...if ever you want proof of that, go run a lvl 100 sigil with the health-regen affix that asks you to break down a gate/barricade as a class/build that is cc-based...there's a good chance you will simply have to either quit or call for help because no cc means you literally cannot outdps said gate's health regen...ever...you literally fail to a freaking door! Simply changing that whole approach from "no cc" to "capped CC" (e.g. "bosses can be chilled but never more than 5% unless staggered") would make the CC effect still virtually useless but would at least leave those builds able to damage stuff.

- Actual build variety is just plain pathetic. The above two points, combined with a few other things, result in a game where a handful of builds are just ridiculously strong because they are built to capitalize on all of the inherent mechanics whereas others get actively punished for being poorly designed by blizz and not being able to capitalize on core mechanics of the game. This creates a gap in performance that is frankly bigger than anything D2 ever had to offer. You thought hammerdins were too strong compared to say summon druids in D2? You ain't seen nothing yet..

- Lazy-ass design + blatantly obvious moneygrabbing. There is no hiding the fact that they rushed this whole thing out the door, paying no mind to actually polishing things off or even creating different assets. "YOU GET TO TRANSMOG UR STUFF FOR CRAZY VARIETY! EVERYONE GETS TO BE THEIR OWN UNIQUE THING!"...right...until you look at what they actually call "different". Hell, if you actually look at "different" armor sets side by side, you're basically looking at one of those magazine-riddles where you have to spot and circle the 5 tiny differences (or more like 1 in this case). Simple example, yet again using pathetic sorcs, have a look at archon vs.

Boneweave vs. sovereign armor sets. And yeah..that's the full set for each (helmet, chest, gloves, pants,

Boots)..blizz actually calls that different and distinct...

Spoiler

To make it even more pathetic, that same approach extends to a few of the shop-transmogs where you now get to pay a solid like 25 bucks for an equally tiny difference.

- Pay for each season. Pay even more for each season + accelerated. Ignoring the accelerated bit for a second, both because tier skips are entirely useless as they're super quick anyways and because the one extra emote you get from it (which is also lazy AF by comparison and the same across all classes) is certainly not worth even an extra cent, this is the only game I'm currently aware of where the currency you earn for completing everything in a season is actually not enough to buy even the base version of the next premium season. Just under 2/3 of the bullshit-coin needed to be specific so even if you finish 3 of them, you won't have enough for 2 more. And that's with season content being just absurdly half-assed and lackluster, not to mention untested and bugged to hell and back.

- They prove time and time again that they neither understand nor play nor test their own game. The simple truth is that they have no clue whatsoever as to what they're actually doing and just throw out random changes for the sake of changes, pissing off the entire playerbase even more and not even coordinating internally to create any sense of coherence in those changes. Prime example: "we heard resource burn was a shit and overly punitive mechanic so come the S1 patch, we're removing it as a dungeon affix!", immediately followed by "so for S1, we came up with this awesome new mechanic! devious mobs you encounter will...wait for it...resource burn!". You honestly can't help but facepalm at what they do.

- "Do what we tell you to do and only what we tell you to do!". There's an entire, beautifully designed outside world in this game. And yet, blizz wants you to stick to the same repetitive dungeons over and over and over and over and over and over and over and.... fact: you HAVE to do sigil dungeons if you ever want to really progress your character, simply because you need to level your glyphs (which you literally cannot do anywhere else). That alone forced you into enough of them from day 1 to where one should say "ok, that's a good chunk...but let's allow other activities for the rest of what you do". But because other activities were still being utilized (e.g. normal dungeons/strongholds for raw xp) and blizz doesn't want you to be anywhere outside of sigil dungeons, sigil dungeons got buffed. After the dungeon buff, some folks still dared to run other things for xp. So...basically every other place got nerfed..hard..into oblivion. Hell, apart from a very small level range per tier, you can't even fight mobs your own level in the outside world (or normal dungeons anymore). They're now artificially dropped to 5 levels below you, just to ensure that they are utterly useless in every regard and you run more sigils!
Except they're once again being inconsistent asshats in the whole approach because you still need to run outside world for side quests and normal dungeons for dungeon completions for reknown..but both of those are now basically entirely worthless for anything other than "make that completionist counter go up".
Hell, you wouldn't even have to run said normal dungeons (which they obv. don't want you to) if they weren't such idiots but nooooo...only a sub-set of dungeons is actually available as sigil dungeons. Not because they never got the others set up as sigil dungeons but because they actively went out of their way to disable them for no reason other than to go "F U, U ONLY RUN WHAT WE WANT YOU TO RUN! NO INCREASED VARIETY FOR U!"). Though then again..most dungeons feel exactly the same anyways so mweh.

- The netcode in D4 is just beyond bad. Like...insanely bad. I genuinely cannot remember ever having this horrid of a network performance in any game ever. And that includes dial-up days. The second someone else joins your shard, you get rubber-banding. You get invisible walls. You get (massively) delayed reactions. You just get f'd. I guess knowing that it makes sense that they want to force you into nothing but isolated dungeons but good lord, it is just sad. Even more so in zones with higher player density such as PvP zones and especially if you join someone cross-ocean. The whole thing simply turns into a 2-frames-a-minute slideshow. At least in D2 your client still worked and you only rubberbanded back into sync'd position every so often. But D4 genuinely stops your entire client. As a result, you also have zero actual immersion in the game because every time you shift from one shard to the next and get other players doing the same (e.g. running to a legion event), you get the same ol' transition lag and other people just randomly

Teleport into and out of your screen as you move from one shard zone to the next.

- "PvP". I honestly, genuinely do not understand why this even exists. Not because it shouldn't - quite the contrary, I love me some PvP - but because it is so insanely, utterly bad and half-assed that it should have never seen the light of day. Even if you ignore the inherently unplayable PvP lag (see above), class balance is so utterly non-existent that PvP shouldn't even exist. And even if you ignored that, "PvP" only exists in two zones..two zones that they call "PvP zones" but that are actually quite possibly the most densely populated PvE zones out there. So you're not PvPing but more often than not you're fighting 50 mobs and maybe 1 random player that is hiding between them. Who the F came up with that idiotic idea?!? And to make it even worse, the whole thing is wide open. So if you decide to want to say level there as a lowbie on low difficulties..guess what? You'll be steamrolled by a party of lvl 100s because there's nothing stopping them. No "solo vs. party" gating. No difficulty gating. No lvl gating. Nothing. The entirety of "PvP" is really just a combination of a PvE farmathon and the occasional party-zerg steamroll. And just to make it even more absurd (yup, there's more!)....guess what! you want pvp rewards?...well....you're not getting them for PvPing, only for PvEing! Yup, you read that right...PvP rewards in D4 are earned exclusively through PvE. Killing another player gives you NOTHING for killing that player. It creates zero new reward. The only thing you MIGHT get is the shards that one drops upon Death but those are not PvP rewards but simply his earlier PvE rewards for killing mobs/looting chests in the zone. If people actually just PvPd in there, noone would ever get a single PvP reward (EVER) because noone would have any of the PvE-reward shards to drop upon being killed. The entire concept is just absurd, honestly...

- A massive middle finger to completionists. As is, really the only semi-tempting goal and only kind of real lasting "endgame" is to be a completionist. I.e. get each char to 100. Get all zones completed on each. Get all achievements done. Well, the thing is...you probably can't. Ever. EVER. Why? Because unlike literally every other f'ing game in history (to the best of my knowledge), achievements actually show a progression counter not only for normal achievements but also for feats of strength. Those include things like beta participation feats and more likely than not future blizzcon participation and such nonsense. As a result, if you haven't played beta or you don't attend every blizzcon or whatever feat they come up with that will - by definition - become unachievable, your overall progression counter will apparently never hit 100%. Ever. You can play for 100 years and do every single bloody thing in the game a million times over. If you haven't participated in the beta, you are eternally f'd as a completionist.



/rantoff

There's countless points I've not listed above. Some ok, some mweh, some equally inexcusable, from horrific inventory management to respec costs too prohibitive to ever really even experiment (in both, time and gold) and so on and so forth but ya gotta stop ranting at some point...

Long story short, D4 is a mediocre-at-best, rushed, half-assed console game with a metric ton of inexcusable shortfalls that is in no way worthy of the diablo title. It does actually have a lot of potential in terms of making it a good (albeit still non-diablo) game (which is the only reason I'm still bothering with current chars when bored - kind of "in preparation") but that will take a while (comparable to how D3 got worlds better with RoS I guess) and realistically, looking at what their devs are doing so far, may more likely never happen at all...but the option is there...in theory.

As a slow player still having not completed act 1 (! But level 49...), I am still enjoying D4.

It's not THAT bad, and I think with necro I may have accidentally chosen the funniest class to play.
But overall I'll most likely come back to d2 at the end - and I do keep playing it anyway.

Necrarch wrote: 8 months ago

and I think with necro I may have accidentally chosen the funniest class to play.

I'm inclined to agree with that..

I purchased the game on 08/12 to game with a close family member. We both have limited play time because he lives in the Pacific Northwest and I live in the Southeast. So far I can sum my D4 experience with one word "BORING."

Necrarch wrote: 8 months ago

As a slow player still having not completed act 1 (! But level 49...), I am still enjoying D4.

It's not THAT bad, and I think with necro I may have accidentally chosen the funniest class to play.
But overall I'll most likely come back to d2 at the end - and I do keep playing it anyway.

yep, i enjoyed the campaign very much , and I'm guessing everyone else did. as are you.

the problem is after "the honeymoon is over"

you'll see.

The D4 metacritic user reviews sum it up quite well:

https://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/diablo-iv

Was hilarious watching it go from an 8+ rating to below 3 in one day (after 7/18 mega nerf). They might have actually been able to keep players for a bit longer, had they not killed all the endgame builds in one foul swoop. Really shot themselves in the foot with that one.

Also, the day of Helltides where Uber uniques dropped at an unintended higher rate and 140+ players got to keep one, left me a bit salty. Was really hoping for a rollback of some sort. But of course, the lucky few were able to keep their winnings, while everyone else sat in FOMO hell.

And now the latest fiasco has been the gold dupe. I heard they had to disable trading all together, although I'm not sure that would affect much, given how I never bothered to trade in my 100 levels and had no desire to at any point.

It took me 3 years and over 4000 hours to get bored with D3. But D4? Game was ruined in a little over a month. Really wish I could've gotten a refund for that bait n switch.

D4 was very disappointing. Feel like I wasted my money on it and I ended up like everyone else here going right back to D2.

When I was actually playing it, I didn't think it was a bad game per se, but when I wasn't playing it, I had no desire to play it. In the end I only got to act 2 with a level 25 Roque and I can't see me going back.