I feel like D4 will be an entity that will not target veterans of the series like me who want it back to its grimdark roots focused on a tale of a small band of adventurers. D4 has to top everything that its predecessors did, and do so for a wide audience. It's going to be an epic-scale story between the forces of good and evil. The world would be explored even further, and we take the fight into new levels of heaven and hell like we've never seen before, maybe even to the cosmic level of fighting gods or something. I just don't think it can turn back to anything simpler now that we've done things like kill angels and we've been able to kill all the prime evils as the exist here.
What I'd actually want to see is a sidestory taking place in the Diablo universe. Something like a Dark Souls style game, maybe a prequel playing as the Horadrim and using archaic forms of weaponry and magic that aren't culturally specific. I think there's a bittersweet charm to the idea that you would be playing a character that fights a secret war against the demons, and is completely unknown to the world. Introduce an underground network across the world where the Angels appear in secret, operating different anti-demon organizations that would either join up and form the official horadrim, or be consumed in the process.
To be fair, Primal Ancients on its own is not a bad idea. It's just not a good or great one, and definitely one that isn't meeting our expectations for what the game needs. In the current state, they're just another layer of 'ooh shiny' loot that can drop, something that adds to the thrill of finding ancients.
Their rarity makes them comparable to Ramaldni's gift. The gift itself isn't a very interesting concept, only adding a socket to weapons which essentially lets you have another stat. The power of these drops is necessary for any end-game build, but no so much that you can't function without them. Yet despite being uninteresting and necessary for end game, no one specifically farms for them, and we still get a momentary feeling of excitement when they drop considering their rarity. Since they upped the drop rate recently, now they're just things you put in the bank, and that feeling is gone because they're no so rare any more.
That's where ancient Primals come in. They're the new Ramaldni's gift. They're not interesting at all, and an AP rolled on a useless legendary is still useless, but you'll get that brief feeling of excitement every time you see them drop just because it happens so rarely. That's their only true purpose for the long term of this game. After a while, you're going to forget they even exist, but the rare chance that they drop will give you a brief feeling of excitement because it's something out of the ordinary, just like when a Unique drops in Diablo 2 even though most of them are shitty.
But what is the alternative? What ARPG would you say has a successful loot drop system that works with Diablo 3's style of play?
As much as I hate the idea of grinding endlessly and praying to the RNG gods for the perfect ancient whatever-I-need, that's sorta been the ultimate point of the game. Outside of pushing higher GRs and fishing for the perfect rifts, there's nothing much to do but grind Paragon otherwise.
It's really not that hard to find and roll a full ancient set given you're dedicated enough to roll them through the cube. Bounties and GR run for a week and you have all the mats you need to roll all of what you need into ancients. Blood Shards and Legendaries you come across on the way will surely help as well. Once you're there, there's practically nothing else to upgrade cept augments, paragon or... rolling a new character/build and doing it over again.
I tend to be curious what people are expecting in terms of end-game content as well. I never really found Diablo 2's end-game to be appealing, but I was also a lot younger when it came out.
To me, GR's, Rifts and Bounties are a lot more variety in content than what D2 offered. The bloody Foothills and Baal runs are all I really remembered. I didn't do any specific mob farming, but i know that was a thing too. Is that the kind of content being missed in D3? The only real difference I see is that Diablo 2 offered open-ended gameplay that let you farm in the world rather than be pushed towards 'instanced' content of Adventure mode.
While I do have criticisms on bounties, rifts and GR's getting tiresome, I don't know what the alternative to that would be. I just know I don't want to go back to farming named mobs and rare spawns for specific loot.
It requires the same polish that we'd come to expect from a Blizzard product. This includes all facets of the character, from visuals of armor to spell effects to all the voice acting required from act 1-5. Anything less is unacceptable.
As for games like Heroes of the Storm, a lot of their heroes have been in development for much longer than we know. Characters that are being released now like Zul'jin and Varian were in development since the alpha. It was also the reason why we ended up getting like 7 Warcraft Assassin types in a row. It's not like they could toss out a SC2 or Diablo hero in between, because the work for their heroes was already planned out ahead of time.
Even if it takes similar time to develop as what we'd expect from an expansion, that's generally what goes into game dev considering all the iterations and internal approvals that need to be made. It doesn't take much less time to make one sausage link than it does a whole package.
I can see where the disconnect happens when they show off some polished material at Blizzcon, and we're left to wonder why things take so long to actually get here.
As a 3d artist who has worked in the games industry, I can say that Blizzard showing off a playable Necro is not a normal thing in game dev. Usually all features are left in an unpolished, bug-ridden development state that is not ready for people to see, let alone play at a con. Sausages don't look like sausages until the final step, but Blizzard's magic is making you think they're naturally produced.
The Necromancer is still in alpha. They're still designing its abilities as they even explained in the QnA. They just roughly know what direction they want to take everything, but they're not settled on any of the particulars like how many golem types there would be, what the different runes on Revive will be or if the Necro will be able to have zDPS support roles. I don't think it's as far along as we think it is just because we saw it playable with a handful of spells at Blizzcon. This isn't even factoring the internal balance that they have to go through, and we don't even know if it will go through a closed beta for testing.
I take templar with windfury/wyrdward/freeze deflection all the time. Specced with CDR, I get plenty of heals, plenty of extra CC and a mini tank I can hide behind to soak up solo boss projectiles. I use templar on all my characters.
Necromancer will have its story covered the same way all the other characters did, through their interactions with the existing NPCs through the campaign. We didn't get a Crusader-only area in the old acts, and frankly we didn't need it to understand what or why the Crusaders exist now. We'll just have to wait and see how much unique NPC interaction there will be, and whether we'll get some new NPC lines.
I doubt they're going to do a new expansion later if they're doing character packs now.
Noob question - I know Vyrs gives Archon all runes, but (afaik) the damage type is defined by the rune choice. Most builds I've seen use the Fire rune to proc Tal Rasha meteors. Doesn't this make Archon deal fire damage, which means it doesn't proc paralysis?
I'd like an Amazon but I don't see how they could retrofit them into D3 with them being exclusively female. I don't want a male Amazon, but I don't want a generic alternative for such an iconic class either.
but removing the time it takes to manually swap out that gear, gems, paragon, skills, passives and cube items is itself a QoL change, whether it saves space or not. Even something simple like swapping +goldfind and movespeed in rifts was a pain when someone decides to change the pace with a Grift run. It should be as simple as set and forget, not a constant fear of getting locked into a GR wearing your boon of Hoarders or having nemesis still cubed by accident.
So, we should blame Activision Blizzard , but not the Dev Team. They do as much as they can.
That could be true. But let's see how this works out: (made-up numbers)
Necro DLC. (1 class-2 stash - a pet.) 20-25 $.
2 million people buy it. totalling 40-50 million $.
Is it gonna be the Dev team who is gonna receive it for, as you told, using the resources to work at a better pace?
Or is it gonna be Activision Blizzard getting the cash, who ,then, is gonna invest this money in OW and WOW because their Return of Investment is better?
See what I did here? If we don't protest with our wallets, we are accepting the situation. Or even prolonging it, making it harder to solve.
Abut NO CONTENT hyperbole: Yeah, no content is an exaggeration. But reusing old skills, adapting d2 old models and animations to d3..., there's nothing NEW in here. Reused aint new. Content , following your logic, would be changing all skill coefficients; rendering old builds useless, creating new ones. Reusing.
What I call content is NEW CONTENT. And in over a year , there's been none.
There's a working example of that right now with what they're doing with Starcraft 2. It's a 'dead game' as far as overall Blizzard Fans are concerned. Most people are playing WoW, Overwatch and Hearthstone. SC2 sales aren't even as high as when it first launched, and less people care about the game now considering its current age. Yet they're opting towards a DLC business model, and it works for them. They don't need a 3rd and 4th expansion to keep the game running. At the same time, part of the team is likely working on developing the next RTS, be it Warcraft 4 or Starcraft 3 or something else completely.
I think it's a concious choice that the Diablo team is moving towards Diablo 4, but at some point there were plans to make a second D3 expansion and part of it was already developed. I think what's happening now is that some of that is being cut up and released as DLC or future patch content, but they don't have the full design team available to crunch out enough content to be a full expansion or provide story DLC because they're focused on developing the sequel. What we're getting is the stuff picked up from the cutting room floor, polished and packaged for consumption. I don't think they'll be putting effort into providing NEW stuff (ie story campaign, another act); only content that supports what we already have in play.
0
I feel like D4 will be an entity that will not target veterans of the series like me who want it back to its grimdark roots focused on a tale of a small band of adventurers. D4 has to top everything that its predecessors did, and do so for a wide audience. It's going to be an epic-scale story between the forces of good and evil. The world would be explored even further, and we take the fight into new levels of heaven and hell like we've never seen before, maybe even to the cosmic level of fighting gods or something. I just don't think it can turn back to anything simpler now that we've done things like kill angels and we've been able to kill all the prime evils as the exist here.
What I'd actually want to see is a sidestory taking place in the Diablo universe. Something like a Dark Souls style game, maybe a prequel playing as the Horadrim and using archaic forms of weaponry and magic that aren't culturally specific. I think there's a bittersweet charm to the idea that you would be playing a character that fights a secret war against the demons, and is completely unknown to the world. Introduce an underground network across the world where the Angels appear in secret, operating different anti-demon organizations that would either join up and form the official horadrim, or be consumed in the process.
1
None of this adds up, so I'm gonna assume you were playing on console, and the guy you ran with was running with modded/hacked gear.
1
To be fair, Primal Ancients on its own is not a bad idea. It's just not a good or great one, and definitely one that isn't meeting our expectations for what the game needs. In the current state, they're just another layer of 'ooh shiny' loot that can drop, something that adds to the thrill of finding ancients.
Their rarity makes them comparable to Ramaldni's gift. The gift itself isn't a very interesting concept, only adding a socket to weapons which essentially lets you have another stat. The power of these drops is necessary for any end-game build, but no so much that you can't function without them. Yet despite being uninteresting and necessary for end game, no one specifically farms for them, and we still get a momentary feeling of excitement when they drop considering their rarity. Since they upped the drop rate recently, now they're just things you put in the bank, and that feeling is gone because they're no so rare any more.
That's where ancient Primals come in. They're the new Ramaldni's gift. They're not interesting at all, and an AP rolled on a useless legendary is still useless, but you'll get that brief feeling of excitement every time you see them drop just because it happens so rarely. That's their only true purpose for the long term of this game. After a while, you're going to forget they even exist, but the rare chance that they drop will give you a brief feeling of excitement because it's something out of the ordinary, just like when a Unique drops in Diablo 2 even though most of them are shitty.
0
But what is the alternative? What ARPG would you say has a successful loot drop system that works with Diablo 3's style of play?
As much as I hate the idea of grinding endlessly and praying to the RNG gods for the perfect ancient whatever-I-need, that's sorta been the ultimate point of the game. Outside of pushing higher GRs and fishing for the perfect rifts, there's nothing much to do but grind Paragon otherwise.
It's really not that hard to find and roll a full ancient set given you're dedicated enough to roll them through the cube. Bounties and GR run for a week and you have all the mats you need to roll all of what you need into ancients. Blood Shards and Legendaries you come across on the way will surely help as well. Once you're there, there's practically nothing else to upgrade cept augments, paragon or... rolling a new character/build and doing it over again.
2
They're not mutually exclusive. It's a nerf to paragon AND an increase in power creep.
0
I tend to be curious what people are expecting in terms of end-game content as well. I never really found Diablo 2's end-game to be appealing, but I was also a lot younger when it came out.
To me, GR's, Rifts and Bounties are a lot more variety in content than what D2 offered. The bloody Foothills and Baal runs are all I really remembered. I didn't do any specific mob farming, but i know that was a thing too. Is that the kind of content being missed in D3? The only real difference I see is that Diablo 2 offered open-ended gameplay that let you farm in the world rather than be pushed towards 'instanced' content of Adventure mode.
While I do have criticisms on bounties, rifts and GR's getting tiresome, I don't know what the alternative to that would be. I just know I don't want to go back to farming named mobs and rare spawns for specific loot.
1
It requires the same polish that we'd come to expect from a Blizzard product. This includes all facets of the character, from visuals of armor to spell effects to all the voice acting required from act 1-5. Anything less is unacceptable.
As for games like Heroes of the Storm, a lot of their heroes have been in development for much longer than we know. Characters that are being released now like Zul'jin and Varian were in development since the alpha. It was also the reason why we ended up getting like 7 Warcraft Assassin types in a row. It's not like they could toss out a SC2 or Diablo hero in between, because the work for their heroes was already planned out ahead of time.
Even if it takes similar time to develop as what we'd expect from an expansion, that's generally what goes into game dev considering all the iterations and internal approvals that need to be made. It doesn't take much less time to make one sausage link than it does a whole package.
0
I can see where the disconnect happens when they show off some polished material at Blizzcon, and we're left to wonder why things take so long to actually get here.
As a 3d artist who has worked in the games industry, I can say that Blizzard showing off a playable Necro is not a normal thing in game dev. Usually all features are left in an unpolished, bug-ridden development state that is not ready for people to see, let alone play at a con. Sausages don't look like sausages until the final step, but Blizzard's magic is making you think they're naturally produced.
The Necromancer is still in alpha. They're still designing its abilities as they even explained in the QnA. They just roughly know what direction they want to take everything, but they're not settled on any of the particulars like how many golem types there would be, what the different runes on Revive will be or if the Necro will be able to have zDPS support roles. I don't think it's as far along as we think it is just because we saw it playable with a handful of spells at Blizzcon. This isn't even factoring the internal balance that they have to go through, and we don't even know if it will go through a closed beta for testing.
0
I take templar with windfury/wyrdward/freeze deflection all the time. Specced with CDR, I get plenty of heals, plenty of extra CC and a mini tank I can hide behind to soak up solo boss projectiles. I use templar on all my characters.
0
Necromancer will have its story covered the same way all the other characters did, through their interactions with the existing NPCs through the campaign. We didn't get a Crusader-only area in the old acts, and frankly we didn't need it to understand what or why the Crusaders exist now. We'll just have to wait and see how much unique NPC interaction there will be, and whether we'll get some new NPC lines.
I doubt they're going to do a new expansion later if they're doing character packs now.
0
Noob question - I know Vyrs gives Archon all runes, but (afaik) the damage type is defined by the rune choice. Most builds I've seen use the Fire rune to proc Tal Rasha meteors. Doesn't this make Archon deal fire damage, which means it doesn't proc paralysis?
1
I'd like an Amazon but I don't see how they could retrofit them into D3 with them being exclusively female. I don't want a male Amazon, but I don't want a generic alternative for such an iconic class either.
Druid is definitely a must though.
1
but removing the time it takes to manually swap out that gear, gems, paragon, skills, passives and cube items is itself a QoL change, whether it saves space or not. Even something simple like swapping +goldfind and movespeed in rifts was a pain when someone decides to change the pace with a Grift run. It should be as simple as set and forget, not a constant fear of getting locked into a GR wearing your boon of Hoarders or having nemesis still cubed by accident.
0
Are they even tradeable?
1
I think it's a concious choice that the Diablo team is moving towards Diablo 4, but at some point there were plans to make a second D3 expansion and part of it was already developed. I think what's happening now is that some of that is being cut up and released as DLC or future patch content, but they don't have the full design team available to crunch out enough content to be a full expansion or provide story DLC because they're focused on developing the sequel. What we're getting is the stuff picked up from the cutting room floor, polished and packaged for consumption. I don't think they'll be putting effort into providing NEW stuff (ie story campaign, another act); only content that supports what we already have in play.