Sure, this isn't the most exciting change, but it's necessary.
Full decently rolled ancient gear can be obtained after perhaps 100-200 hours into a season if you work straight towards that goal. At that point, with full level 80ish augment you can expect to have about 16k mainstat points. An additional 200 paragon levels gives another 1k mainstat points yielding a 6.25% increase in damage (and some associated survivability). The rate of return on this does diminish, but pitifully slowly. At 25k main stat points (around paragon 2600 or so) an additional 200 paragon levels is still giving an additional 4% damage increase.
By the time you have full augmented ancient, its going to take considerably longer to squeak 6.25% more damage from gear upgrades than it would to grind 200 paragon levels. If you ever get 2k+ paragon your gear would probably be nearly capped out. It's unlikely to even be possible to get 4% more damage out of gear upgrades by that point.
The end game progression turns into nothing more than a horrible slog of grinding paragon. There isn't isn't even another option on how to progress a given character let alone a competitive or compelling one.
Introducing super rare, more powerful versions of existing items greatly extends the longevity of the item hunt. I'm not sure it would extend all the way up to 2k+ paragon, but it would easily extend to 1500ish if not higher. Super rare meaningful items are necessary if the item hunt is ever to compete with the paragon hunt.
And besides, implementing primal ancients isn't exactly a huge time sink for the dev team. This is an easy and necessary improvement. It will shift the mid and late game back towards item hunting and further delay the importance of paragon grinding until levels past what most people ever achieve in a season.
I definitely want to see more new items, better balancing of builds, and other horizontal progression options. But for vertical progression, the benefits of implementing primal ancients FAR outweighs the costs. It's a no brainer.
Hellgate: London was a game that experimented with this style of view (though it was first person was available too). It was an ARPG made by some former employees of Blizzard North that left to make their own gaming company.
While the game ultimately failed, the first person view was really immersive. In reference to Lamack's list above, there were still large packs of mobs to aoe down. Speed builds were still popular for farming. Teleport skills still existed. The aoe effects were quite impressive (for the day). Pet builds were very viable (even a little TOO viable in some settings). There were more NPC's than in diablo, but that was for story reasons, not for gameplay reasons. Environmental factors were much MORE influential than they are in diablo (cover and elevation were very impactful on what builds worked at high difficulties).
There's no reason an ARPG cannot be made with that camera perspective and still maintain the mechanical variety we expect from an ARPG.
It will, however, have a dramatic impact on the perception of your character. A first person or over the shoulder view makes us view the characters as embodying ourselves. It's a much more personal style. Isometric views tend to have us think of someone controlling a character (as opposed to being the character).
I would argue this is a core aspect of the Diablo series thus far. Changing the camera view would shift the focus away from the world and towards the character. This shift in focus, both literally and figuratively, would be a gamble. But it isn't necessarily a bad one. Different isn't always worse. Blizzard certainly has the resources and talent to pull it off well if they desire to do so.
In the long run, I don't think simply blending the good aspects of diablo 2 and 3 will work. Games have progressed far too much in 20 years for that. If/when we ever see a Diablo 4, it will have to be a fairly substantial evolution of the series. A new camera perspective is likely first of many potential changes that will have to be weighed.
It doesn't affect it directly, but it will affect things indirectly because it is increasing your weapon damage.
The element type for the +damage on your weapon is irrelevant for nearly all skills. If i recall, it still does affect some things like being able to proc elemental exposure for a wizard, but largely its just a holdover from vanilla d3 that could be simplified into a simple +damage roll for the weapon without element modifier.
That is to say, if you had a 100 damage weapon and had +50 to poison on that weapon, your locust swarm would consider your weapon damage to be 150. If instead you had +50 arcane damage it would still treat your weapon damage as 150. And in both cases the element type applied by the skill (that is to say, what +% element gear would affect it) would depend solely on the skill/rune combo you use.
The magnitude of +damage matters enormously. The element type of +damage only matters in a few very specific scenarios (of which locust swarm would not be one).
3
Sure, this isn't the most exciting change, but it's necessary.
Full decently rolled ancient gear can be obtained after perhaps 100-200 hours into a season if you work straight towards that goal. At that point, with full level 80ish augment you can expect to have about 16k mainstat points. An additional 200 paragon levels gives another 1k mainstat points yielding a 6.25% increase in damage (and some associated survivability). The rate of return on this does diminish, but pitifully slowly. At 25k main stat points (around paragon 2600 or so) an additional 200 paragon levels is still giving an additional 4% damage increase.
By the time you have full augmented ancient, its going to take considerably longer to squeak 6.25% more damage from gear upgrades than it would to grind 200 paragon levels. If you ever get 2k+ paragon your gear would probably be nearly capped out. It's unlikely to even be possible to get 4% more damage out of gear upgrades by that point.
The end game progression turns into nothing more than a horrible slog of grinding paragon. There isn't isn't even another option on how to progress a given character let alone a competitive or compelling one.
Introducing super rare, more powerful versions of existing items greatly extends the longevity of the item hunt. I'm not sure it would extend all the way up to 2k+ paragon, but it would easily extend to 1500ish if not higher. Super rare meaningful items are necessary if the item hunt is ever to compete with the paragon hunt.
And besides, implementing primal ancients isn't exactly a huge time sink for the dev team. This is an easy and necessary improvement. It will shift the mid and late game back towards item hunting and further delay the importance of paragon grinding until levels past what most people ever achieve in a season.
I definitely want to see more new items, better balancing of builds, and other horizontal progression options. But for vertical progression, the benefits of implementing primal ancients FAR outweighs the costs. It's a no brainer.
1
Hellgate: London was a game that experimented with this style of view (though it was first person was available too). It was an ARPG made by some former employees of Blizzard North that left to make their own gaming company.
While the game ultimately failed, the first person view was really immersive. In reference to Lamack's list above, there were still large packs of mobs to aoe down. Speed builds were still popular for farming. Teleport skills still existed. The aoe effects were quite impressive (for the day). Pet builds were very viable (even a little TOO viable in some settings). There were more NPC's than in diablo, but that was for story reasons, not for gameplay reasons. Environmental factors were much MORE influential than they are in diablo (cover and elevation were very impactful on what builds worked at high difficulties).
There's no reason an ARPG cannot be made with that camera perspective and still maintain the mechanical variety we expect from an ARPG.
It will, however, have a dramatic impact on the perception of your character. A first person or over the shoulder view makes us view the characters as embodying ourselves. It's a much more personal style. Isometric views tend to have us think of someone controlling a character (as opposed to being the character).
I would argue this is a core aspect of the Diablo series thus far. Changing the camera view would shift the focus away from the world and towards the character. This shift in focus, both literally and figuratively, would be a gamble. But it isn't necessarily a bad one. Different isn't always worse. Blizzard certainly has the resources and talent to pull it off well if they desire to do so.
In the long run, I don't think simply blending the good aspects of diablo 2 and 3 will work. Games have progressed far too much in 20 years for that. If/when we ever see a Diablo 4, it will have to be a fairly substantial evolution of the series. A new camera perspective is likely first of many potential changes that will have to be weighed.
1
It doesn't affect it directly, but it will affect things indirectly because it is increasing your weapon damage.
The element type for the +damage on your weapon is irrelevant for nearly all skills. If i recall, it still does affect some things like being able to proc elemental exposure for a wizard, but largely its just a holdover from vanilla d3 that could be simplified into a simple +damage roll for the weapon without element modifier.
That is to say, if you had a 100 damage weapon and had +50 to poison on that weapon, your locust swarm would consider your weapon damage to be 150. If instead you had +50 arcane damage it would still treat your weapon damage as 150. And in both cases the element type applied by the skill (that is to say, what +% element gear would affect it) would depend solely on the skill/rune combo you use.
The magnitude of +damage matters enormously. The element type of +damage only matters in a few very specific scenarios (of which locust swarm would not be one).
1
If we assume 16 hour days for 30 straight days it takes an average of a little over 6.5 billion xp per hour to go from 0 to Paragon 800.
Averaging 6.5 billion xp per hour for 16 hours a day for 30 straight days is miles away from casual and borders on seriously needing intervention.
This is not something we need to be worrying about.