During the two Diablo 4 Beta weekends, I jotted down a bunch of random thoughts. Then promptly forgot about it, until this evening and figured I might as well post it so I can look back on them after I play retail.

The limits on the beta do make some things hard to judge; such as lack of some specializations, high legendary drop rate, and the extra time spent at level 25, so any thoughts on balance/fun might not apply at all to retail.

• The game graphically looks really great and for the most part played really smooth.
• Open world map impressed me.
• The ability to run into other players, and work together on events was great (not sure how it works with various levels but /shrug still fun)
• Stronghold were real challenges for me, which is great even if some of the bosses felt over-tuned
• The story (presentation, acting, and related quests) all felt fine. Though some of those story dungeons were a bit long the first time through.
• My biggest disappointment in the game was that the skill tree and customization felt very shallow compared to D3, PoE, and Lost Epoch. I see no nodes that dramatically (or even elementally) alter skills.  I was hoping for much more impactful changes to skills to be found within the trees.
  • Example: Where is Lightning hydra, frost hydra, posion hydra nodes that change the element and way the hydra’s breath works.
• Not a fan of the constantly increasing repec cost. I want to be able to swap things around at any time. Some cost is fine, and expected, but please don’t stop me from having fun with a high level character.
• The item trading rules felt a bit odd, from what I saw.
• Was not a huge fan of Splitting legendary aspects into two types: one in the codex and the other being consumables.
  • I guess they wanted to limit some of them more than others.
• The common interaction points (vault, gambler, etc) in the main city are spread to far apart, lots of wasted time running back and forth.
• Some UI issues:
  • It would be nice to be able to zoom out farther in the skill tree ui.
  • A lot of the UI panels felt dull or almost cheap looking.
  • I didn’t like how the health and action button UI is different on console
  • Why can’t I had the action button labels?
  • Why aren’t the button labels overlaid on top the button so the buttons could be pushed down to the bottom of the screen?
  • It would be nice to have the big map be translucent, or if there was some sort of overlay map.
  • What is going on with ‘item cards’? They are mess.
    • so much information you have to scroll
    • bonus are not in any order making comparing very difficult.
• Backtracking in dungeons is tedious, (it always has been) but made worse by some of the ‘objectives’ in them.
  • Example: Kill all enemies objective and you missed one way back at the start. Or objectives where you need to hit 3 things and miss a side path and have to run back.
• Gems taking up regular inventory slots; they should have their own inventory tab
• On the first weekend I never saw the world boss due to timing, and visibility of the event. Meaning, I had no way to even know where or when it was.
  • There should be an icon, UI, or NPC always up when the next boss spawn is, and they should happen way more often.
• Many of the fights feel very punishing to melee focused characters/builds.
• My general thoughts on the classes are:
• The Druid leveling experience was not fun.
  • I was always out of spirit, I didn’t seem to do any damage, and had poor mobility.
• The barbarian leveling experience was also not great, but still way more fun than druid.
• Necro leveling felt very OP when taking on packs of enemies, a bit weaker on bosses (but still strong). Lots of fun.
• I found the Melee Rogue leveling was a lot of fun, due mostly to the mobility.
• Sorcerer leveling had some mobility, and strong damage, and I found it a lot of fun.