I've always been a fan of grounded/"realistic" outfits. Especially when designed around things like the mythic items. Which do you like the best?
Score so far by comments at the time of this edit.
I've always found that system wayyyy more interesting. Being able to equip runeword items on a mercenary to supplement your playstyle. Along with the current ability of choosing their abilities. I've always found it weird they decided not to do that in this game. Since it seems like it worked well and was liked in the previous games.
I'd also say that they don't need to over complicate the mercenaries themselves. I noticed that there haven't been any new mercs since VoH. We don't need mercs with custom models, back stories, and all that fancy stuff that could introduce too much development resource requirements. If that's the problem. Just regular looking NPCs is fine. I know we technically already have an ex iron wolves NPC as a merc. But if you were to have made Raheir look like the iron wolves that were already in the game. I would have been perfectly ok with that and I think many wouldn't have mind either. There's tons of side quests in the game where the NPCs involved could be turned into Mercs. That gives them unique backstories with the player. The tools to do all this stuff are already there.
etc etc.
I think us being able to equip mercenaries like previous Diablos, combined with new mercenaries being a bit more frequent (like one new one per expansion). Would make the system far more intresting.
I have a feeling the future for Mercenaries is that (story spoiler) >!we're going to rebuild the Hoardric order and the "mercenaries" we will be recruiting will be members of the order. !<
But this system feels like it could be so much more than it is now.
Been playing a lot of Season 13. I thought LoH/this season were really well done. But there still are some major issues in my book. But its a great step in the right direction.
D4 has a major difficulty issue. What I mean by this is that difficulty in this game...it often isn't fun. Part due to encounter design. Part due to rewards. I'm not going to go deep into this aspect as its already well stated, but there are way too many after death effects. As with many others, most of my deaths have been due to that rather than monsters killing me. I think the major issue with this is that the counter is just mindlessly running around. Also skews balance heavily into high mobility/range. But I also find that some of the encounters aren't fun when difficult. Small projectiles/animations leading to almost instant deaths. Leaving you confused on what happened. There's many times where I have to google the boss and read about it and try to divine what is killing me. You almost need a combat log at this point to figure out what is happening. Which is a huge issue imo. It also doesn't help that when you go google some of the boss fights, many of the top results are "this is one of the worse fights ever created" or some variation. Like there's some attacks that look like fire damage, but deal poison damage. WHY? I looked on google and see other people confused about the same thing. Stacking fire resist and still defeating them. If it does poison damage, make it look like poison. Absolutely ridiculous.
The other part are rewards. Pushing yourself into higher difficulties is often viewed as not worth it. Not challenging yourself. A lot of top players will recommend things like "Play 1 or 2 difficulties below what you find hard, as a general rule". That is because the effort, time, etc. It makes it not worth it to challenge yourself. So what ends up happening is you end up fighting and doing encounters that kind of feel like the same challenge through the entire game. I would love to find some way to say "Hey, challenge yourself. It may take a bit more time, maybe a few tries. But once you do it, it will feel great and you'll be rewarded".
This is the second biggest issue, as many have stated. Your screen just gets filled with effects where you can't tell what's going on. Especially when playing with other players. You really start to feel this pain if you play a melee focused character. Like a shield bash paladin.
For you, do you have any big outstanding issues?
A video of the fight scene. I'm mainly talking about the teleporting they do. That was such a good way to do a teleport animation/fight of a boss. And I can't place why, but it fits an angel theme so well. They did a really good job at designing the angelic fight animations. I expect we're going to see more of this in the future when we inevitably have hostile run ins with angels. I honestly want arbiter's evade on paladin to do this instead of the same animation it has now.
If anyone googles around for fishing related information for Diablo 4, you'll notice a trend. Mentions of a mysterious fishing vendor. Someone to get new bait, fishing rods, trade fish for materials, etc.
However, every thread is the same. People can't find it. Nobody knows where these vendors are. Etc.
I believe what we have here is either lying or AI generated hallucinations or a combination of both.
It would appear that this may have started first with early gameplay footage. Looks like IGN. During this, they were fishing and a unique item dropped. However, the video didn't identify what that item actually was. Now that the game is live, we know those items were just rare fish. However, at the time there was speculation that they were unique/legendary items. Not just fish. It looks like Icy Veins suggested this in an article they released in early April.
Following this, we had another website a couple weeks later release a new article. From what I can tell of this website, they were the first to report this information and make the claims. But this website made the claim about being able to get equipment, poles, bait, trade fish in, etc. I believe this website is a "currency seller" website. I wont list it here for rules sake.
From here, between this website and the previous speculation; it started show up as "true" when googling questions about fishing. This potentially led to AI agents that generate text from prompts into hallucinating as these were truth. Maybe the post itself on the currency seller website was AI generated. Confusing Diablo with another game or another Blizzard title like WoW or the IGN/Icy Veins information as a jumping off point. We also saw someone post this data to the Diablo subreddit, further spreading the false information. From what I can tell of their post, it almost mirrors that of the currency seller website. Not making the claim they went there, but if they asked via prompt to generate/gather/collect information about Diablo 4 fishing, the response may have confused the currency seller website information as truth when it was not.
Now I have completed the fishing quest. I've been running all over the place. I have not been able to find any information or any confirmation from Blizzard that this information is true. As far as I can tell, fishing is just a collection and you sell the fish to a vendor. With a POTENTIAL of hoardric cube recipes (I haven't seen any confirmed, but some are thinking cow level type of stuff). So that may happen. But as far as a "fishing vendor" is concerned, it does not appear to be true.
If someone can prove me wrong, let me know and I will delete this post.
Now I started Diablo with Diablo 2 26 years ago. I've played all the Diablos since then and every expansion.
I wont try to say which is better than which. But I think Lord of Hatred is up there in ranking with Lord of Destruction and Reaper of Souls. tldr at the bottom.
Honestly, I absolutely loved the story in this one. It started out a bit slow, which I didn't mind. Was establishing Skovos, the political system of the island, introducing the different characters, the factions, etc. I liked this part due to the world building aspect of it. Thought it was super interesting. And then once things picked up, it just didn't stop. So many amazing points in the story, cinematic battles, encounters, etc. I was captivated by it all the way through.
This is one thing that Blizzard is pretty consistent with. But they've knocked it out of the park again. This sound track is fantastic. I'll sometimes listen to while playing other games or doing other things. Very captivating and catchy.
Again, another consistent win for Blizzard. Environment looks amazing. The architecture, zone design, fantastic. Very ancient Greece inspired and that's one of my favorite aesthetics. So easy win in my book for me. The detail in the environments in every part is fantastic. The main city, Temis, was very well designed. I think this style of using height to represent the scale of cities is very well done. Bg3 did it too and I think it really works well. The city feels like a major city. And the overall graphics and of the new gear look great.
Fantastic job with the NPCs and voice acting. I honestly can't think of any issues I saw. Felt high quality and believable. I also think the Amazon NPC fighters are some of the coolest "allied NPCs" they've created so far. For one, they brought over the classic Amazonian battle cries from Diablo 2. So that worked well for me since D2 is one of my favorite games. The other aspect is the battle formation attacks. You may not notice this while playing, but occasionally the NPCs will "get into formation" And then do a group attack together. Its a really cool bit of tech. Was kind of disappointed the whole "amazons fighting in the wilderness" NPCs disappeared after the campaign ended. At least get them to return for helltides!
Fantastic side quests. There's so many super interesting ones. First time in awhile I'm actually seeking out side quests to do them. There are some MAJOR lore drops in some of them and world building. Now I wont do any spoilers here and please if you comment with spoilers, mark them appropriately. But the side quests have been fantastic. If you're interested in lore and world building, do them 100%.
It feels like both these classes are really well designed in terms of going for that "feel" that they're aiming to go for. And being interesting to play. Yeah balance, especially with warlock, needs some tuning. I was expecting that. But from an overall archetype theme fantasy and skill design, I really enjoyed them.
Originally I wasn't sure how this was going to turn out. And at the start, I didn't care much for it. But once you start getting more interesting charms and set items, I really enjoyed it. I think its a good addition.
It seems like they shifted gear progression away from drops and put some of that into crafting via the Cube. Its hard right now, for me, to gauge how much of a pacing change it is. Because the cube is sorta locked behind early quests designs and I didn't give it really any attention until I was pretty much ready to go to T2. But my initial impression is that it does feel slower. I played paladin when they released and it seemed like during that season, I flew through the progression. Felt like I was in T4 in a very small amount of time. Right now it feels way slower than that. It will be interesting to see how it feels the next season where I know the systems and don't have to play through the story. But I am a fan of slower progression vs what we had before. And the crafting/cube stuff. But overall it seems like they said "instead of getting legendaries/uniques constantly from drops, we reduced that frequency. However, now you have the cube which can get you legendaries and uniques to supplement that". By the time I reached T2, I was able to create two uniques, and I think 5 or 6 legendaries. Then I was able to get like 10-12 uniques from lord zir via the key recipe.
I do actually really like the "endgame activity" progression aspect of war plans. Where you get exp for doing activities and then unlock different changes/perks to the endgame activities. Thought it was a really nice system that adds a new layer of agency for the player. Now personally, I never had an issue with the endgame in D4. Tree of Whispers, Nightmare Dungeons, Helltides, The Undercity, Lair Bosses, Infernal Hordes, The Pit, the raid. I always felt like there was a ton of different things to do in this game for fun at endgame. So I've always thought it was fine. This progression system amplifies that for me.
Always a plus
All the new encounters. New bosses, new legion events, etc. I've enjoy all these encounters and thought they were pretty well done.
Now there are some things I'm lukewarm on. That is feature additions that I don't think are bad. But I'm also of the "meh, didn't really care about it" perspective.
Hasn't mattered a bunch to me. I think part of the issue is that fishing in games like MMORPGs, its sort of a calming, aesthetically pleasing activity. You're enjoying the views, chilling while fishing. It can be hard to do that in D4 outside of safe areas. I think Fishing would be cooler, for me at least, if there were also (along side what is currently there) "vista fishing spots". In D4, mainly vanilla, there were some parts of the map where you could force the camera into this like third person over the shoulder view and get a really nice looking vista of something. It would be cool if they put something like that in the game, but for fishing. Where you go up, activate it and put it into this third person vista mode. And then you can fish while in that view. Maybe something that prevents enemies from trying to kill you while fishing would be nice too. Again, not a bad feature, but not something that was "noteworthy" to me.
The whole war plans aspect where you sign up for a chain of activities to do. I didn't really care for it. Again, its there, I'm not against it. But it just didn't invoke a sense of care from me. I think its a good tool to help drive people and give them some direction though.
The skill tree changes didn't have a huge impact for me. At least for Paladin so far. I'm still roughly playing the same builds as I was before. It just feels like they moved things around. It isn't bad. But it isn't something I paid significant mind to. I think the current system will be far better for balance as it gives the developers more levers to pull and variables to change. But from the player perspective, hasn't made a huge different to my experience. Worse or better.
Things I wish they had/ look forward to
I think overall, there's two outstanding items for me in regards to the game overall. For one, I hope they add in more followers. Like this would be the perfect time to add in an Amazonian follower. There's tons of more updates between now and the next expansion. So who knows what the future holds. But I love me some followers. I think I know there they're going to take the overall design of followers.
But alongside that, I think the follower system may need a rework. Its current system is better than nothing. But its never felt....as interesting or impactful to me than the D2 version. I really enjoyed gearing out followers and trying to get them to be compatible with your current character. They felt significantly more noticeable and impactful in D2. That's not to say they don't matter in D4. But man, it feels like I forget they are there at times.
I also sort of wish the rune system was more interesting. Again, D2 is my golden standard. And runes in D2 felt more...interesting/impactful/fun to use than D4. I can understand what they were going for in D4 with it and why they did what they did. But yeah, just doesn't land the same for me personally.
I still like the rune and follower system of D4. Not saying its bad. But it feels like it could be so much more.
Overall, I'm super happy with this expansion and how it turned out. Story was fantastic, side quest were great, environment was fantastic, sound design/track was fantastic. Endgame progression, charms, and gear progression changes I felt were good. Really looking forward to where they take the game from here.
I haven't seen many people discuss this and some even say that D4 feels like its closed.
I'm not sure if this will be a content update or the next expansion. I'm leaning on it being the next expansion. But there's numerous references in the latest expansion/story to Westmarch.
I haven't done all the side quests yet, but if I find any side quests in Skovos with more references to Westmarch, I will add them here.
It really seems like all the hints/fingers are pointing to hopping a boat and going to Kingsport/Westmarch next is my guess.
Also random guesses. Tyrael is going to some how get is divinity back and become an angel again. Probably when our situation is most dire. The first "part" of the fight in Westmarch will probably deal with Mathael and his legacy, then flow into a prime evil. I think we may even start content in which we fight angels. Perhaps they view humans being able to send primes to the void as a threat to them.
I haven't seen many people discuss this and some even say that D4 feels like its closed.
I'm not sure if this will be a content update or the next expansion. I'm leaning on it being the next expansion. But there's numerous references in the latest expansion/story to Westmarch.
I haven't done all the side quests yet, but if I find any side quests in Skovos with more references to Westmarch, I will add them here.
It really seems like all the hints/fingers are pointing to hopping a boat and going to Kingsport/Westmarch next is my guess.
Also random guesses. Tyrael is going to some how get is divinity back and become an angel again. Probably when our situation is most dire. The first "part" of the fight in Westmarch will probably deal with Mathael and his legacy, then flow into a prime evil. I think we may even start content in which we fight angels. Perhaps they view humans being able to send primes to the void as a threat to them.
