Hope you all had a great Halloween!
I’m very easy to please when it comes to a game like Diablo; I want to switch off my brain and shred screens full of enemies, their bodies vomiting forth copious amounts of shiny NUMBERS GO UP goodness.
It seems like such a simple formula, but for some reason Diablo 4 struggled with it at launch. Like Blizzard had forgotten every lesson they’d learned with Diablo 3.
I enjoyed D4 enough at launch, but burned out really quickly when Season One rolled around. It was just so… bleh. Grindy, dull, uninspired. Everything felt slowed way down, and the whole “Ooh it’s a bunch of enemies you usually fight, but now they’re CORRUUUUPTED” thing was such a snoozefest. And similarly, I find Season 2’s vampires equally boring as an antagonist.
But it doesn’t matter, because season 2 is finally figuring out what counts: showering you with power fantasy. The XP/level advancement feels brisk and the loot is plentiful. Oh my goodness is the loot plentiful. I am regularly sorting through an inventory full of legendaries, and I love it. This is what I want from a Diablo. This I’ll come back for every season despite whatever nonsense plot they come up with to justify it.
All the need to do for Diablo 4 is add resource on hit and life on hit and bam all is good š
After being burned twice with D3 and D4, I just give up and stick to Path of Exile. Honestly it’s just such a better game at giving you exactly what you’re looking for that I don’t know why people try to find it in DIablo when PoE provides that in spades.
Because they don’t want to deal with this nonsense? XD https://assets.maxroll.gg/wordpress/passivetree2-519×506.jpg Path of Exile is fine. I played it at launch, and a few periods since then. Sometimes I love it and it feels really good, and sometimes it doesn’t. It’s had good times and bad times, just like a Diablo game. I don’t think you can claim POE’s devs have never introduced poorly received mechanics or nerfs š It’s possible for people to like different games, at different times. These games are always evolving. I’m not writing one off just because it goes through one season of downturn, when… Read more »
Yep. D4 skill tree may be rather small, but PoE is the opposite extreme. And it doesn’t help that the size of the PoE skill “web” is an illusion. There a few juicy skills, but most of the time you are wasting level ups on traversal nodes with generic +stamina (or some base stat like that).
PoE is stuck in the old grindy, time-waste-y mentality, but games have eventually evolved past that. These days when you level up, games usually offer some interesting choice and actual benefit when investing into skills/perks/talents.
Not to put too fine a point on it… but that same site has a large collection of build guides that are very helpful at getting you past that scariness. Last league I got 3 separate builds to late game without feeling bored once. Admittedly, I have been on again off again actually playing PoE since closed beta, but it has everything. š
Yeah, but that’s its own kind the problem. POE has gotten so complex and developed such a reputation for being hardcore and min-maxy, that you either invest dozens of hours diving into your own theorycrafting, or just give up and follow a guide for what other people say is “best”.
Gonna disagree on needing hours of theorycrafting. Sure my first time through Path of Exile was a hard lesson. I did not value defensive stats and abilities nearly as much as i should have and hit a brick wall. But once I understood some basics of making a build, I have found myself able to come back every two or three Leagues when the fancy strikes me and with a concept in mind, simply build towards the concept organically and generally do pretty well. Now, I am not a hardcore endgame grinder, but for some casual fun going through the… Read more »
By all means, play the games that you enjoy. Not every game is for everyone. But it is confusing at times hearing the D4 community beg for the game to have more. More strategy, more depth, more build variety, more options, more loot, more interesting bosses, etc. When there’s a game right around the corner that offers just that. For people like me, seeing that big of a skill tree got me EXCITED rather than intimidated. I couldn’t wait to dive into it and come up with some goofy stuff, and I have. PoE has more than its fair share… Read more »
If you think you could be interested in a happy medium, give Last Epoch a try. Its builds have some meaty depth to them but it’s very smartly designed to avoid being overwhelming. Rather than a single giant passive tree, you get a medium sized one for your core passives and then smaller, highly impactful ones for each of your active skills.
What I loved on d3 and didnt fount on d4 nor poe, is the fast & easy way to have fun. Sorry, but I cant play 200h on a season, poe will never really be for me.
Grim dawn is better than poe
I wouldn’t say that. It’s good but a completely different game in the same genre catering to a different audience. Which is perfectly fine but nothing I would ever call better in general. That’s like trying to argue why Sci-Fi is a better genre than Fantasy
Not just you, can’t see anything either.
I’m on a computer, Opera browser. If that makes a difference.
Diablo has always been “grindy, dull, uninspired” (to quote your post), it’s just that when Diablo 2 was new, this was a relatively fresh formula for gameplay. But at it’s core, it sitll involves you cycling through the same locations and enemies on slightly higher difficulties to get equipment so you can do the same thing again but harder. Your expectations of what makes a fun game have just shifted overtime and so many others have followed the same formula at this point that it doesn’t feel as exciting as it once did.
D4’s Season 2 is much better than S1, even though there’s still some glaring issues. It’s getting there, season by season. Kinda wish they’d fix bugs faster tho, living steel chests should NOT be invisible sometimes 3 weeks later. Not to mention exploits that allow you to one-tap uber bosses (seriously, just look it up on youtube “d4 s2 barb one hit uber”)
I’m not there yet, but I hear the endgame farm-for-specific-uniques system is still a little bullshit. But in season 1 I felt like I ran into a brick wall at level 50. Season 2 so far has retained some enjoyable forward momentum.
yeah season 1 talked about all the new uniques and I hadn’t gotten any out of season yet and then didn’t get much past 50 in season. Like sure I’m not the gamers who are playing it constantly but as someone still playing d3 seasons I should be able to enjoy d4 some and at least complete a season if not max everything out.
still gonna wait a few season to play it againt bh
It’s good to know what you want in a game.
I hate that Diablo has turned into a loot pinata fest. It ruins the atmosphere of the world and the challenge
Well, diablo 3 was absolutely like this and was my favorite diablo by far
See, I look at a screen like that and see all that loot and go “oh great, I have to sort through all this loot now?” It’s like an additional mental burden and just turns me off of the genre as a whole.
Remember Marvel Heroes Online? One of the core reasons that game worked is because the developers understood the joy of using bright flashy lights to make scores of enemies explode into showers of shiny objects. Hardly any ARPG developers understand this. If Blizzard has finally figured it out, maybe I’ll pick D4 back up. I probably won’t mess with the seasonal content, though.
Borderlands still has it funnier with the massive amount of loot being in an outhouse.
Honestly, when you describe it like that. It sounds like you’re pretending that Diablo is a Dynasty Warriors game.
If you need to pretend that a bad game is a good game. Maybe you should just play that good game instead. Then again, if you’re enjoying yourself, who am I to judge? I enjoy Sonic R despite it being a bad game.
That being said, I think it would be awesome if Diablo got a Dynasty Warriors spinoff, like Zelda and Fire Emblem did.
Nobody tell him about Vampire Survivors.
VS isn’t “a game like Diablo,” though. It’s more roguelite than ARPG.
I also can’t stand the graphics on VS:)
Eh, that’s fair. I was just comparing them in terms of their quantities of shiny stuff and numbers.
I appreciate the Chandler/Matthew Perry reference.
Liked that subtle nod to Chandler Bing, though. š
so is ctrl alt delete done?
Never.