{"id":1349,"date":"2023-04-04T17:46:53","date_gmt":"2023-04-04T22:46:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.xenopulse.com\/blog\/?p=1349"},"modified":"2023-04-04T17:46:54","modified_gmt":"2023-04-04T22:46:54","slug":"random-late-thoughts-on-diablo-iv-beta","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.xenopulse.com\/blog\/?p=1349","title":{"rendered":"Random late thoughts on Diablo IV beta"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The game graphically looks really great and for the most part played really smooth.<\/li>\n<li>Open world map impressed me.<\/li>\n<li>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)<\/li>\n<li>Stronghold were real challenges for me, which is great even if some of the bosses felt over-tuned<\/li>\n<li>The story (presentation, acting, and related quests) all felt fine. Though some of those story dungeons were a bit long the first time through.<\/li>\n<li>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.\u00a0 I was hoping for much more impactful changes to skills to be found within the trees.\n<ul>\n<li>Example: Where is Lightning hydra, frost hydra, posion hydra nodes that change the element and way the hydra&#8217;s breath works.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li>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&#8217;t stop me from having fun with a high level character.<\/li>\n<li>The item trading rules felt a bit odd, from what I saw.<\/li>\n<li>Was not a huge fan of Splitting legendary aspects into two types: one in the codex and the other being consumables.\n<ul>\n<li>I guess they wanted to limit some of them more than others.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li>The common interaction points (vault, gambler, etc) in the main city are spread to far apart, lots of wasted time running back and forth.<\/li>\n<li>Some UI issues:\n<ul>\n<li>It would be nice to be able to zoom out farther in the skill tree ui.<\/li>\n<li>A lot of the UI panels felt dull or almost cheap looking.<\/li>\n<li>I didn&#8217;t like how the health and action button UI is different on console<\/li>\n<li>Why can&#8217;t I had the action button labels?<\/li>\n<li>Why aren&#8217;t the button labels overlaid on top the button so the buttons could be pushed down to the bottom of the screen?<\/li>\n<li>It would be nice to have the big map be translucent, or if there was some sort of overlay map.<\/li>\n<li>What is going on with &#8216;item cards&#8217;? They are mess.\n<ul>\n<li>so much information you have to scroll<\/li>\n<li>bonus are not in any order making comparing very difficult.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li>Backtracking in dungeons is tedious, (it always has been) but made worse by some of the &#8216;objectives&#8217; in them.\n<ul>\n<li>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.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li>Gems taking up regular inventory slots; they should have their own inventory tab<\/li>\n<li>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.\n<ul>\n<li>There should be an icon, UI, or NPC always up when the next boss spawn is, and they should happen way more often.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li>Many of the fights feel <strong>very<\/strong> punishing to melee focused characters\/builds.<\/li>\n<li>My general thoughts on the classes are:<\/li>\n<li>The Druid leveling experience was <strong>not<\/strong> fun.\n<ul>\n<li>I was always out of spirit, I didn&#8217;t seem to do any damage, and had poor mobility.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li>The barbarian leveling experience was also not great, but still way more fun than druid.<\/li>\n<li>Necro leveling felt very OP when taking on packs of enemies, a bit weaker on bosses (but still strong). Lots of fun.<\/li>\n<li>I found the Melee Rogue leveling was a lot of fun, due mostly to the mobility.<\/li>\n<li>Sorcerer leveling had some mobility, and strong damage, and I found it a lot of fun.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[64,9],"tags":[131],"class_list":["post-1349","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-beta","category-games","tag-diablo-iv"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.xenopulse.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1349","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.xenopulse.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.xenopulse.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.xenopulse.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.xenopulse.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1349"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.xenopulse.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1349\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1350,"href":"https:\/\/www.xenopulse.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1349\/revisions\/1350"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.xenopulse.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1349"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.xenopulse.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1349"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.xenopulse.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1349"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}