After Blizzard hot fixed the Helltide cinder drop rates last week, I decided to give that and season 1 a try over the weekend and these past few days. When I logged into my Eternal realm character, there was around 45 minutes left in a Helltide (where I was able to get two Mystery chests and two protection chests; so around 650 cinders). So it looks like the drop rates are back to what they were before the 1.1 patch. Still, the increase to 250 cinders for the Mystery chests makes it more difficult to get to all of them like before (making the event less rewarding).
I then decided to give Season 1 a try; I rolled a necromancer. First thing I noticed was how backasswards the seasonal character creation process is. Rather than select which specific realm you wanted to create this character from the start, you go through the entire customization and naming process first, before the client gives you that choice. At first, I thought I was missing something as I kept looking for that checkbox at the beginning; basically, just some poor UI choices they continually make with the game.
Once I got that out of the way, leveling up outside the campaign was straightforward starting from the seasonal quest line (that introduces the theme and focus of the season). Unfortunately, it came across as very underwhelming. And this underwhelming/lackluster feeling ended up permeating the entire seasonal aspect of the game. Why?
The content itself (the malignant tunnels, malignant mobs, and malignant hearts) has turned out to be underwhelming. A lot of these are obviously repurposed dungeons (shorter in scope) with some artwork changes. The majority of these tunnel entrances are out of the way (not near any waypoint) while the dungeons themselves lack mob density. During their emergency fireside chat (VOD embedded below), what became apparent is that their so called design objectives has constantly been disproved by the actual implementation. They stressed that mob density was important, but their actions have been the opposite since they previously nerfed elite density in some normal mode dungeons, and further nerfed density in patch 1.1 (and we see low mob density in these new malignant tunnels).
While I give them kudos for trying to offer some mea culpa during this stream, it’s becoming even more obvious they do not play the game at end game levels. However, I am leveling through the content and notice how bad (and buggy) it is. Buggy in the sense that some basic things are missing including pinning the dungeon for an aspect (it looks like they still have these revision control issues that also plagued D3 early on where you would see these regressions). Like players were reporting the inability to reposition their characters on the selection screen on PC (so I tried it, and sure it enough, it is broken) whereas it still works if you plug in a controller. While these look like minor UI bugs, the point is that they are both regressive since they were working in the patches prior to 1.1. The point is that their QA is almost non-existent given these oversights (it’s also really sloppy, and going to be problematic given their live service approach).
Most of my character leveling came from re-running strongholds, and taking part in as many legion events as possible. I test tried the capstone dungeon at level 40 just to see where my gearing was at, and dipped out within 5 minutes. I retried again at level 48 and was easily able to complete it since even though necro is also intelligence based like sorc, the biggest difference is it also has fortify (sorc only has barrier). The initial foray into WT3 was really painful though since Tree of Whisper caches looked like they had been nerfed. My first usable Sacred gear pieces came via mob drops from the first Helltide I ran (which was a struggle to stay alive). Due to a bunch of events chain spawning in the same area (along with better geared players helping complete the event), I got my first usable Sacred legendaries from a Mystery chest that made WT3 more manageable.
As of now, I am level 54, but have almost no desire to continue since the seasonal content/journey is really uninspiring. The mechanic (of the hearts) isn’t exciting, and I haven’t noticed much of a difference with the season specific aspects that I’ve unlocked so far. There’s also no dopamine hit with loot drops in D4 similar to how D3 was early on (and it only got interesting to me when they added stuff like Thunderfury, Shard of Hate, Serpents Sparker, etc into the game). Additionally, it is also clear they didn’t even bother trying to prioritize stash since the same “technical” issues that plagued D3’s inventory design are present, as well as some other confounding design decisions that was mentioned in this article (which followed up on a tweet made by associate game director Joe Piepiora about how the game loads up other players stash inventory when you are in close proximity to them).
I recall how the character data looked like from game saves from the PS3 versions of D3 (since those were decrypted) where the inventory data was in this array. So I can see how this could be a memory/perfomance hog given how server sharding works in D4. This is just another thing that highlights how the game was not ready for launch; where they obviously didn’t bother trying to solve the stash design (and essentially just reused previous designs that worked within the constraints of a 4 player multiplayer co-op setting like D3, but just does not play nicely in D4 where the other players you encounter are constantly changing due to how server shard instances work in the open world, and in hubs). To put it even more bluntly, it shows a level of technical incompetence (likely caused by the forced brain drain at Blizzard) to launch a loot heavy focused game with insanely small inventory like this in 2023.
Additionally, while they reiterated (in the above chat) that it is not their intention to slow down the game, their actions say other wise given how most of the malignant tunnel entrances aren’t near most waypoints (not to mention the most obvious designed “slow downs” being mount cooldowns + constant obstructions, or the layout of major hubs where the things you use the most are far apart from each other). Again, players complained about having to town portal way too often back to town just to salvage stuff in D3 (but at least everything including your stash was close to each other). And the D3 designers addressed this when talking about taking players out of the action too often or too long (which is much worse in D4 since part of the game play loop is a “walking simulator”), so it’s tone deaf when the D4 designers (some who also worked on D3) decided that immersion was way more important (this is also the other reason they decided against a map overlay).
And there is no excuse for how the mount in this game is one of the worst unfun designs ones where even Carbot Animations has turned it into a meme. Tip: when pinning a route and using the mount, that route will often times guide you to where the most obstacles are; I don’t follow the line exactly and have mostly avoided a lot of the obstacles and barriers except for the ones they put at those choke points that have no alternative route nearby).
I’ve mentioned it before; designs that are frustrating seem to be a hallmark with the D4 designers (toss crowd control spam by mobs in Nightmare dungeons into this mix where they also touched on this in their fireside chat, and how they intend to retune some of this in the future) so it ends up making sense to me why they ended up nerfing Helltides into the ground with 1.1 (and had to undo this so called “bug”, and how they plan to increase mob density in them) or why Nightmare dungeons were unrewarding (and to some extent, still are even though they’ve been buffed twice to give more loot and experience when looking at it relative to other content where experience gain was nerfed globally, and how that has affected Helltides along with the increase in cinder turn-ins for the Mystery chest).
Additionally, they did talk about how things like vulnerable damage or cooldown reduction is always sought after in builds. I’m always flabbergasted when designers try to talk about this as if it were surprising when it shouldn’t be since they designed it (damage and CDR) this way. It’s just like how the original D3 designers didn’t seem to fully comprehend the wizard’s original (but removed with the loot 2.0 patch) Critical Mass design which was focused on critical hit procs from skills that could reduce cooldown (the wizards original proc based design also had an impact on things like Arcane Power on Crit aka APoC which would keep your resource completely full). And on launch, the class was initially broken because a basic signature skill (that used no resource) like Living Lightning would constantly proc it (each multi-hit from Living Lightning would proc CM which allowed spamming stuff like Frost Nova, Diamond Skin, etc) with high attack speed and critical hit chance stacked to the required breakpoint. I refused to play the class that way (on top of the Archon Teleport invulnerability bug that wasn’t patched until a month after launch; both pretty much allowed clearing pre-nerf Inferno). And when Blizzard “fixed” this by nerfing the proc rate and limiting attack speed, players found other ways including the perma-freeze Wicked Wind (Energy Twister) CM wizard (which just required even more critical hit chance). Blizzard ultimately removed Critical Mass with patch 2.0 but failed to undo a lot of the internal proc nerfs made to the class (they eventually worked around this with bigger number multipliers on sets for the class).
The point is that theorycrafters will always find ways to push or break these designs (and they will be OP game breaking if internal QA fails to properly find the most basic of issues or if the designers don’t see clear outliers in their data collected from such game play testing; which in D4’s case, they ran a month long NDA end game closed beta test (where a lot of the issues being complained about, should’ve been captured and dealt with before launching). So when the designers are confounded by build diversity not being a thing and/or players stacking vulnerable/crit damage/crit chance/lucky hit chance along with CDR, my response is “this is how you designed the game”.
The cracks in D4 clearly show how the leadership and personnel turnover at Blizzard (lot of it due to the scandals while also taking place during the pandemic) have had an effect on the launch product. D4’s original game director was Luis Barriga (and may have had differing priorities). Barriga was terminated as part of the sweeping change resulting from the harassment lawsuits (the entire bro-culture aspect that Blizzard had managed to keep out of public view for decades). Joe Shely (who worked on D3 as a designer) was his replacement (Shely was often times part of the group that was brought on stage during BlizzCon to discuss designs in RoS). While it would seem he would be a perfect fit (understanding the issues to avoid in D4), it seems like he ended up inheriting a project that lacked key focus. Regardless, listening to him and Piepiora speak about issues with D4, hasn’t inspired much confidence that they aren’t being managed by the actual executive bean counters who care more about metrics that are usually the polar opposite of what players expect from the actual in-game experience.
The graphics, sound, and cinematics are leagues above the core design (and that uninspiring game play design drags down all of that other hard work). Yes, they can salvage this game over time (D3 did it piece meal starting with the initial Paragon implementation, before the overhaul with loot 2.0 and Reapers of Soul). However, the D4 team are going to have to compromise on the immersion aspects that interferes with the core aspects of an ARPG (and that includes all of these designed time sinks). While I originally gave the game a 7.5 (out of 10) rating (and revised it downwards to 7 as the flaws became more apparent with actual end game), the current state of the game is more like a 5.5 (since this is more like a buggy beta that has been pushed into live service).
As someone who was gifted D4 (and not planning to buy or play the game), I know right now that purchasing the expansion content is a non-starter. While it could end up being like how Lord of Destruction addressed a lot of the shortcomings in the base Diablo II game, I don’t see that really happening with D4.
