Hi,
What are people using for chord progression learning? I like something gamefied as it helps drill the character of these chords at different scales and octaves. There is stuff like TonedEar but it doesn't let you dissect your mistakes by having play back.
There is chord crush but they want too much for it ($50 yearly sub lol with no monthly option, probably because people outgrow it quicker than that).
I am not a person who follows a build guide. In my opinion, it kills the point of the game.
What I like is the enjoyment of building up a character and progressing through the torment levels using my own creativity and learning the game systems. I don't care if I max out at Torment 8 or 12, as long as every time I sit down to play for 1-2h I feel like I am learning new things, finding synergies, am encouraged to experiment, etc.
Seasonal mechanics are nice, but they are often mostly fluff (like this season). Personally, they should be used to try out new systems that are being considered for the game long term. Much more interesting is adding new skill interactions, new unique items that enable interesting builds, and additional aspects (especially ones that rely on synergies, and not necessarily more % damage). Also, the more visual flair and variety something adds, the more interested I become.
As far as mythics, in this new iteration it's just numbers go up for no reason for mythic uniques. Honestly it adds nothing much to the game, and kinda kills the excitement around actual mythics - if everything can be a mythic, then nothing is. You're asking me to go through another layer of RNG BS just so I can see slightly higher numbers? You already have ancestral and GAs for that.
The Lord of Hatred expansion was *chefs kiss* because it let you see everything from a birds eye view and made theory crafting more accessible. I think Blizzard should lean into that more. But I am probably in the minority as I think people are too preoccupied with following the meta builds and pushing pit/tower.
The new skill system works well, where the skill tree is where you mostly change how skills function.
However, this makes it so that there is very little visually between when you select all your skills and reach late endgame. It just becomes strictly numbers go up (in many cases).
It would be good if more uniques added visual flair to the game. Eg. If a unique buffs a skill, give that skill a slightly different color glow or sound effect. If a unique debuffs an enemy, give visual feedback for it, etc.
It's not to say that no uniques do this, but a lot of them don't and it makes for a rather dull experience that would otherwise be much more interesting. Many people like D4 for the aesthetics, why not lean into it more?
I played D4 at launch, and back then thought the story was excellent, but then everything fell apart at the endgame. Came back recently for Season 13 / Lord of Hatred, and was very pleasantly surprised with how much fun everything was. It made me go back to some other ARPGs to look at how they have progressed.
Last Epoch - Has great crafting and skill trees, and aesthetically is fairly serviceable. The early game however is not particularly engaging, and rolling new characters means you have to slog it out each time (even with dungeon skips). The monolith endgame is fun, albeit repetitive, and the other modes (dungeons and arena) aren't particularly worth doing. I think also the feel of the game is a bit outdated by this point, lacking in dynamic animations and sound effects. It's fun for theory crafting, but it's an investment, with very large skill trees for each individual skill, sometimes it can be a bit exhausting.
Path of Exile 2 - The game had me hooked for a few hundred hours when the Beta first launched. The animations, skills, and build crafting was quite excellent. The issue for me is that it started to feel bloated with too many systems, ascendency was terrible, the various activities didn't feel particularly unique, the crafting was awful and almost mandates that you trade. Also this game has a bit of an identity crisis, it starts off as Dark Souls lite but then turns into your more typical ARPG. Rolling a new character is pain, because of large and tedious levels with little identity. I tried going through the 0.5 patch, but I honestly gave up. The moment to moment gameplay didn't feel that engaging and running across the maps just felt tedious. The giant passive trees and ability to mix up all the skills, and more and more needing to follow a build guide to avoid bricking a character, I think this game is just meant for a certain type of gamer.
Which brings me to D4. Despite the multitude of items for crafting/cube and whatever else, somehow it works. It's streamlined, the activities are fun-ish, the build crafting is manageable, rolling a new character to theory craft is fun, and having the pit/tower to score your build is a nice touch. The game also has a very cohesive identity, the skills, sounds, animations, all feed punchy and engaging. Sometimes I just aimlessly run around in the open world destroying mobs without a clear goal, because it's just stupid fun. Somehow the different layers of the build process (paragon, talisman, skill tree, gems, aspects, uniques, items, cube transfig) feel manageable, like there's always something you can be working towards to keep improving. The way the difficulty scales and the season rewards are also kinda fun. The game does do some unsavory things like push people towards the expansion by locking out skills, or push MTX but showing you stuff you can't have in your wardrobe (also the MTX prices are completely skewed towards the "whales"), but with the Lord of Hatred expansion (I also skipped Vessel because it was bad value by itself, so got both for the same price), it was very good value easily worth 100+ hours of gaming.
For me I'd say this is a fun ARPG, and I hope they lean more into giving us more build options and fun synergies. The one other downside is that visually the gameplay doesn't change much once you have all your skills. It would be nice if uniques added a bit more flair and variety, but I understand they wanted to keep that mostly in the skill tree as part of the recent changes.
As I am playing through the game and trying different builds, one thing that becomes clear is that the whole legendary aspect system feels highly redundant. Very often you’ll get a new set of gloves you want to use, and then have to slot in the same legendary aspect you already have on your existing gloves.
Effectively the concept of “legendary” items is meaningless since eventually you collect all aspects. Why not just have aspects slots tied to gear slots. If you use a unique for a piece of gear, it disables putting an aspect there. If you use a 2H, you get rid of an aspect slot but double the other one. This way, I don’t have to run around swapping aspects constantly. It would be so satisfying to have such a clean interface and much easier to check and plan how to balance out the aspects across the various slots with unique tradeoffs.
As far as drops, instead of dropping legendary items, just drop legendary aspects. Whenever the player picks them up, show a progress bar to the next upgrade level. Extra dopamine hit! This would be such a massive QoL change.
Thanks for any thoughts.
Has anyone come across the issue that making a B-tier or homebrew build just doesn't scale well into the highest season content? I'm not saying I need to push pit 150, but at least let me have a chance to beat Mephisto in the season journey if I do a good job.
I don't know who is in charge of math at Blizzard, but the game seems a bit too dependent on stacking very large global multipliers, which washes out a lot of the other tweaks you can do to the character.
For example, let's say an synergistic build that is optimized can stack 10 multipliers at 60%, vs. an unoptimized one that stacks like 5 (these are my estimates).
The delta in power would be 1.6^5 ~ 10 x power difference. If they are at 30%, this would translate to 3.7x.
But there is broader problem. It seems Blizzard is struggling to figure out what to do with these damage buckets. There is + vulnerable damage and also + vulnerable damage multiplier, the former goes into a generic damage trash bucket (assume target is vulnerable) while the latter adds to a separate specific multiplier. This is a giant headache for anyone who is not going to read up / watch a video on how damage works. It also doesn't help that Blizzard is fairly opaque on this topic.
Right now there is the additive damage trash bucket, various mini-buckets that are somewhat arbitrary, and I know this was as a remnant of the fix for the multi-bucket disaster of how the game launched, still why retain certain buckets and scrap others without sufficient transparency? IMO the way damage is handled is so opaque and confusing it's no surprise so many youtube creators had to make extensive videos about it, and even they seem confused sometimes.
Right now:
- additive damage, especially in paragon and tempering, ends up feeling meaningless, as it all goes into the additive damage trash bucket
- other multiplicative buckets feel confusing and arbitrary
- there is confusion between what is a global multiplier and what gets added into a specific damage bucket
- to get a viable build you have to perfectly balance the various damage buckets, eg. if you have 2x crit damage and 1.2x vulnerable adding 0.5x crit is much less effective than adding 0.5x vulnerable multiplier (2.5*1.2 vs. 2*1.7)
- paragon nodes like +5% damage don't mean anything to the player, as they go into the large additive bucket, why note just tell me how much % I will be adding to the current additive bucket so that it reflects the real impact on the base damage?? This works with all other increases. eg. +10% to elites, but if my additive bucket is already 1000%, that 10% is more like a 1% increase
- you are forcing the user to do annoying math.
We have base damage x skill multiplier x stat bucket/multiplier x additive bucket x crit bucket x vulnerable bucket x all damage bucket x global multiplier 1 x global multiplier 2...etc
People say Diablo 4 is more for casuals compared to say something like Last Epoch, but the damage system in D4 is all over the place. It's pure spaghetti in my opinion.
What could improve:
- Tempering: there is often little transparency in terms of the impact. Things like +X life, +X armor, +X crit chance, very intuitive. Things like +X% damage are not (same problem as the paragon board). Why not just do +X flat damage (scaled based on level to not break that aspect), so much more intuitive, and maybe actually make tempering matter more by giving higher stats? (ie. make it a harder choice between crit and flat damage). Lucky damage hit also feels useless, as it doesn't take stat and skill scaling into account, again, can we not make this more interesting.
- Damage buckets: the bucket selection feels arbitrary and there is a lack of transparency. The numbers in the character sheet are a combination of additive and multiplicative, but what matters is the optimization of the various buckets. So either give us a clear view of every single bucket and multiplier that is driving the damage, or greatly simplify the entire system by having just 1 additive bucket that is harder to fill so it feels more meaningful in endgame (this will have to come alongside tuning down the global multipliers).
I know this is not easy and likely they have been thinking about it quite a bit, but the way the system is now makes theory crafting and custom builds that are endgame viable kind of not fun given the VAST distance between S and A/B tier builds and how damage scaling just skyrockets.
Thank you for coming to my Ted talk.