Not to mention have multiple portals around the Tree of Whisper's too so we can teleport to another party member from there instead of having to go to the main city to do so..
Also, bring back teleporting direct to a team member. Why of why was that removed since D3...? Having to TP to a major city first (if you're not already at one), then to the other person's purple portal. Just an entirely unnecessary 2-step waste of time, _especially_ on slower PCs.
The reason they don't implement the codex legendary change is because it will negate the item grind/farm. a way for them to implment the codex change, is that it stores your highest roll; which can only be accessed if you have enough charges(which are gained from dismantling said legendary power).
While that would be one of the best updates to the game, they'll likely never do it as Blizzard wants us to play as long as possible. Regardless of how frustrating that is.
The teleport straight into the NMD is also a great change you missed mentioning. I know the previous entrance teleport was a temporary band aid due to technical constraint so it's nice to see them fully rectify the coding behind it.
I never understood why they did not just make a portal spawn next to you that is treated as the dungeon entrance. shouldnt have been too hard to code i guess.
@@DarsusDwhat if you go to another area though? I'd rather just hit tab and click on the dungeon. Not every time I open a dungeon am I or my party is ready to go or next to each other. Would it open a portal to the entire group?
@@jason2089 no reason to close the Portal until the Dungeon is finished or you use a townportal from inside the dungeon. And ofc it would work for the whole party.
Dad with 4 kids, 6 jobs, and only 14 minutes a month to commit to Diablo IV - I'm glad to have you sticking up for my end-game progression. Thank you Rax!
Yes, please continue to make these "State of..." videos each season. This season has been a big leap forward. Hope we get that upgradeable codex for season 3.
I disagree on one thing with you Raxx. The puzzles suggestion. I don’t want to have to stop even longer to figure out some stupid puzzle. I just want to blast.
It blows my mind he can talk from start to finish for 30mins hitting every topic in an organized manor. Time stamps would be great for the viewers tho.
@@The0nlyyhe’s shown in other videos that he has a bulleted checklist for most discussion videos, so it’s definitely not improvised. Still an impressive arrangement 9/10, and it would be nice if he went the extra mile to bring it over to the video.
Not sure how many people have this problem, but on PlayStation the lag and rubber banding has been horrendous recently 🤷♂️ not a problem I had previously with the game…
I've gotten stuck in more doors than I can count, it catches up eventually but I didn't have this problem til season 2. I don't use Wi-Fi so I'm doubting its my connection. I got stuck in the magistrates office, had to reset. At least people are playing, Ive yet to play in a group but I know last season I barely saw players
i play ps5 and I don't have too much trouble with it - sometimes when going into blood harvests or world boss areas it will lag but during normal gameplay I never notice it
You’re a hero for that last suggestion. Perfect timing: right after MS acquisition, right before Blizzcon. They have no excuse to score big with the player base. Huge social credit score potential.
Defs appreciate the post release feedback! Haven’t started yet and I’m a dad that does like to min/max to a degree. Not as hardcore as I use to be. Was looking to play Druid since i played to much sorc in D2 haha.
Also they need to put every legendary power in the codex even if they don't give us a base level on any of them for free from dungeons/seasonal content.
A much better alternative to your emote wheel whisper teleport idea is to just be able to set where your teleport goes to. If I like Kyovashad, I want to be able to go there all the time. If I set that as my main TP then I only have to press down on my controller and I'll go there. I get that most people will choose Whisper for this, but some people might not. I personally would be okay with sacrificing a few seconds of walking if I get to TP to my favourite city where I know the layout well and have muscle memory in how I move around to all the vendors and whatnot.
Your knowledge and consistent delivery continues to impress me with every single video. Its obvious that Blizzard knows that too and I'm sure many of their developers and leadership takes your input to heart. As a Software Engineer I wish I had this level of feedback for my work. Cheers!
Grim Dawn had these unique items which completely changed spells: appearance, damage type, sometimes even the base principle about the mechanic. This feature alone doubled my playtime easily because when I found one I immediately wanted to roll a new character around that one item or just made me want to try new combinations which I never thought I'd enjoy.
Yes 100%, there needs to be more transformative uniques/L-Aspects. Grim Dawn is fucking sick and is somewhat slept on. It gets more traction as of late but not enough exposure. Also new DLC next year so that’s hype!
19:33 Actually, you don't even need to click "allocate". If you just Click the one you want and hit "ESC" on your keyboard it will automatically level that one up. 🙌
They need to add some cool cosmetics as reward for accomplishing certain feats. I know some are already there, but when you look at the shop and what the artists are capable of doing, it would be nice to have also something injected in the game for people that you know, bought the game.
they should make it so you can set a "home portal" location to wherever you want, so your town portal always ports to where you want to go. in regards to the dungeon events, they should make them more rare. like not in every single dungeon but only sometimes they show up and also buff the rewards. to make players WANT to go do it.
Lots of text ahead. I wanted to write down my thoughts on the topics you mentioned. The horse still gets stuck a lot, and I get dismounted after taking just one hit. Class Balance has never been Blizzard's strength, from what I was told regarding D3. The new skill animations look great! I don't feel a change regarding Crowd Control. Necromancer has no unstoppable (I don't want to rely on Metamorphosis. Takes up one slot of Vampire Powers and forces me to use +3 Evade Charge boots) and CC chains are not addressed. I can still get cc'ed when coming out of cc. Completely agree with the Tree of Whisper NPC/teleport parts. Season 2's theme is amazing. Actually having fun with it. But the instances are fragile, something is killing the servers - maybe another build like old Blood Lance, maybe the fact, that a pack of enemies spawns 5 and more Blood Bonds, while not every build is capable to clearing an entire screen with one click. Causing a lot of calculation build up. To be fair, you are playing the 2nd most broken build in the entire game. Of course Bosses are a joke, and you knew what you were getting yourself into when you started playing it. Because it was instantly obvious. PoE mapping is just as boring as Nightmare Dungeons in my opinion. So having it be the core of all endgame is a horrible thing. I am forced to to bad content and hate the game, before I can go and do something more fun. In D4 I can do whatever I want, much better - however, in the future, for future systems/seasons, they could add some extra chains to the current endgame options. What is auto salvage? Do you mean the "do not drop white and blue items in WT3/4"? Because that is clearly not in the game yet. I am getting spammed with white ancestrals everywhere I go. And blues.. blues everywhere. That is an amazing idea for the Codex! Where do I sign? Side Note about aspects: Resource aspects need to be made easier to find. 5000 Obols later, still nothing. And when I were to finally get one, it has a huge stat range. Aspect of Starlight is [20-40] everytime I heal for 25% of my life. That is.. disgusting. If Blizzard wants me to play more, having Vampiric Powers be shared amongst all seasonal characters would be benefitial. Making a new character and seeing, that I have to re-do all of this again, makes me not want to play another character. So I am left with my first characters, which will get boring shortly after, because I already did most or even all of the content. Uniques were intended to completely change a build, and how skills work. I would really like to see something like that. *cough* I was about to type the same example you brought up about Fireball. Resource management is really weird in this game. It felt very easy to be full at all times on Rogue. Sorc can spam cooldown skills ["We don't yet know why people tend to play Sorceress using all 4 defensive skills on most builds" - Blizzard during the S2 live streams]. There also is the option of Crackling Energy. But anything outside of these 2 options is not viable. On Necromancer it's even worse. CE spam to regenerate resources is a bad feeling, especially versus bosses. Lucky Hit based generation is unreliable (when I played Boner Boy in Pre-Season, in 200 hrs of gameplay, Exposed Flesh activated 5 times. No joke. And I was nearly capped on all Lucky Hit + Lucky Hit while Barrier affixes.). On Blood Necromancer all I really have is Potent Blood Aspect, but Blood Orb generation is Chance based, making it effectively the same thing. And CE build on the other hand doesn't require essence at all, yet it has the best essence generation out of all Necromancer builds. How can I make use of that? Melted Heart of Selig, Uber Unique Amulet.. great. (I actually got one when I was asked, if I wanted to leech an Uber Duriel kill. Lucky.) I would forgive Blizzard for a free first DLC aswell.
Please keep doing these videos every season. As someone who skipped S1 after playing preseason, your intelligent constructive feedback on both positive and negative sides are thoughtful and are easy to get behind. Keep up the brilliant work!
Thanks for the insight, Rax. I'll probably get to Season 2 eventually. But you also recommended (in a chat with DM) to try Last Epoch right away, and that's probably the best advice I ever got out of you. It's like 2 dozen gamers played Titan Quest (and/or Grim Dawn), Diablo 2, and PoE and got together to make their new favorite game. And now it's my new favorite game too.
That's basically what happened; the guy who started the company was a huge fan of ARPGs, and decided to create one. Went on reddit to find people with skills who also wanted to make 'the best ARPG ever'... and it seems like this plan has been working.
The ONE thing Raxx said that I'm begging for in the game is that aspects go straight to the codex. His idea for solving it was perfect so take a look into that D4 devs. It would save so much unnecessary time and confusion on so many levels.
Im not sure if u mentioned it, But when u do a dungeon and u get to a room with the like ''fog doors'' u have to pull a lever to get out or kill a pack etc, the room doesnt give XP at all, or drop any kinds of items.
Agreed with almost every single point he made here. A big one for me in the negatives section is the lack of Blizz being "brave" with the abilities. It's weird, too, because they were super good in this regard in Diablo 3. Every single ability had multiple versions that changed how it worked, sometimes dramatically. Some were just changing the damage type, but it did a lot to add variety in how every build felt. D4 barely does this at all. Some of the Aspects augment skills to behave differently, but there aren't nearly enough of them that do and it's pretty disappointing.
The one thing that always stuck with me back in D3 that we never got was that one gameplay trailer with the assault beast and after the players kill it, it's body melts into ash and little spirits fly out and into the ground and then all these skeletons start to spawn. It was like this brief moment of calm, after fighting this Ravenous beast that killed two players, turning into an "oh fuck" moment. We always needed that level tension and terror in modern Diablo and we still don't get that. So I can appreciate the vampire ambushes but I agree that we need more of that kinda gameplay that doesn't let us relax but is also really fun.
Interesting video, I actually disagree about the Tree of Whispers complaint you had Rax. Knowing that is the best gigantic place to get gold from incentivized that activity for me. I like certain activities only rewarding certain types of loot (gold for whispers), bc it makes me actually do those events out of necessity and therefore adds variety in gameplay. If nightmare dungeons were a one stop shop for every type of loot the game would suck. (like it did before) Maybe you disagree but I really like tree of whispers now.
funnily enough, keeping the "best" roll on an item you've ever found and having that saved to your codex is exactly how the system works in The Division 2. Once you find any item with a perfect roll (or better than what you've found) and extract it, you can apply that value to any new item you find so now every backpack you find, you can add +13.6% armour from your previous best backpack that rolled with +13.6% armour on it. There's also a bar beneath the numerical value that has a portion of it filled to show how close this roll was to max, and if you've extracted the power before, it has an arrow on the bar showing where your value saved in the codex is so you don't have to bother remembering exact numbers, you can just see at a glance if something is better
I do like the way you said take chances with Unique Items, maybe a skill that has within limits launches a different skill on impact, Fireball hits and a shower of sparks or a frost wave come out in say twice the AoE of the Fireball, but to stop it being to powerful the second effect cannot retrigger explosions so we dont get the PoE one skill clears the room.
Hey Raxx, yes, your endgame thoughts are right on. I can picture a new rift network (call it Rifts of Despair) that adds new rift types, and maybe adds in retired seasonal themes adapted for the network, like Rifts of Malignancy and Rifts of Blood. Add in some intra- and inter-rift quests and achievements that reward you with tokens to unlock some new pinnacle rifts (Abyssal Rifts?) that progressively present Uber-super-duper fights that culminate in that one fight that can only be won once in a thousand times. Yeah - that’s what I envision!
One little thing that just IRKS me to death is the stat calculations when comparing items. This may be hard to clearly convey in text... So items have "above the line" stats and "below the line" stats, I think it's like implicits and randoms or like prefixes and suffixes. But items can spawn the same stat type in both spots; for example, one item might spawn with Overpower dmg above the line, and another might spawn with Overpower dmg below the line. If this happens you will see the Overpower Dmg on the new item with the green + text as it's adding that, AND at the bottom it will show you losing the Overpower dmg that was on the equipped item. Essentially, you could net like +5% Overpower Dmg overall, but it will say +15% Overpower Dmg in one spot, and then -10% Overpower Dmg in the losses section. Last Epoch just does that math and in their nice little comparison summary you know what you've gained or lost. Does that make sense? It's not a problem when the matching stats appear in the same section, just when one is above the line and the other is below. Or weirdly both sometimes. It's a little thing, I just find it very annoying.
I would absolutely love if they implemented the codex idea you had. I have thought about the same thing. Heck do away with the aspect tab in inventory just keep it all in the codex.
Re: druid leveling. I think a big issue is that almost every good aspect is a drop only. You can only really start to ramp up your leveling once you get one of those powers (shockwave, aftershock, subteranean, trampled earth, symbiotic, stormchaser, etc). Other classes are able to get one solid power from the codex and so even early on, they have a decent power level.
Honestly, they should put all aspects in the codex. You still want to farm aspects for max rolls, so there's no reason not to put the min roll versions in the codex. This would also allow us to put aspects on our weapons while leveling without feeling like a dumbass.
As much as you said upgrading vampiric powers should be shared between characters, the same should apply to the emote wheel. I hate having to set it up again for each new character
Good video, thanks for this post and all your time that you put in Rax. I still spend a lot of time looking through gear and salvaging. A loot filter is a must for this game, hope to see it soon.
Thanks for the vid. I jumped right to the summary. I am currently playing Last Epoch and have no plans to return to D4. There is no universe in which I give Blizzard more money after foolishly dropping $90 on this. Nor would I ever chase around to finish finding altars of Lilith and a dozen other things.
Hey Raxx. You have forgotten one of the most important changes ;) The recalibration of the Item-Levels, wich makes the leveling prozess much smother now.
I have to say the way you explain negatives and positives in such detail, you do not shill, or click bait and the passion you clearly have to do these videos is just awesome and its rather refreshing. I could listen to you all day , sub earned...keep up the good work
We also need more character customization in the aesthetic sense. More armour skins, more hairstyles and also DYES (hair dye/colour and armour dye)! I miss messing around with dyes in D3, we were spoilt with dyes compared to D4.
You hit the nail on the head with endgame. When you get to the point of doing nightmare dungeons, for me they are insanely boring with no real point to them. I absolutely kills me just running nightmares over and over, especially since they limit the pool of available dungeons.
The dungeon pool should be limited i think. Regardless of how big the pool is you are gona do the most efficient ones anyways so why have a large pool all the time? You will end up doing the same dungeons every season. With these smaller pools you wont be.
@@kevinsims5791 there is no reason for them to not just make them all available. Should just be tier 1-100 and you use whatever 1 and it is random from them all. I honestly don't know how anyone can just do the same thing over and over and over and have fun with it. Mind numbingly boring.
One thing I noticed and I appreciate is when the dungeons have wings, they added a portal/gate to get back where the pedestal is to turn in the item you've collected. About the resources, the only skill that spends them should be the Ultimate Skill. Remove the CD from Ultimate Skills but you can only use it at 100% resources. Then the core skills will have X number of charges with Y seconds of charge CD -- IMO, 3 charges with 5s charge CD as baseline. And I'm all for the snake firewall upgrade. And I agree with more visual cues -- example, there's supposedly meteorites when I cast my ult...but I don't know if that's happening most of the time. If the meteorites comes out from a fire portal on top of my head, then shoots out, that's a better visual cue that the skill triggers.
Always like to hear your perspective on the seasons. I really like this season. Im not a big fan of the randomness of unlocking the Vamp powers but other than that I'm having a lot of fun this season.
Definitely do this for season 3! Great points made in this video raxx! I would love to see auto teleport to nightmare dungeons as soon as you click the key.
he does make some great points, but his view on difficulty is way skewed because his playing perhaps the strongest spec in the game. With that said the game is way easier but he hasn't taken into account that ball sorc is just overpowerd; it would even destroy season 0, t100's easy.
@@arturo_cruz I think making more difficult content doesn't mean taking away the easier content. It just gives people who are more experienced or have more time to play more things to do.
If they just add a lootfilter and some more difficult content to the game in season 3 I would say the game is pretty much finished (as in 1.0 release finished). Just season 2 alone brought alot of very important and good changes. Season 1 was the alpha, season 2 the Open beta and season 3 (hopefuly) a full release.
@@izaruburs9389 They'll get there eventually. However to me, the problem goes deeper than just those things you mention (which are GOOD fixes). But. Some of the fundamentals needs a huge rework in my opinion: the skill-tree is uninspiring and the Paragon-board is quite boring. I suspect they have held back on much of the interesting interactions to put them in the seasons. The Blood-skills are cool, but these interactions should've been in the base game and not only in the season if you ask me. I expect this to be intentional, and I don't expect to see REAL content and a proper rework until an expansion or two down the line. The other thing is the itemization, which is confusing af and badly implemented. How we acquire gear and how legendaries are implemented is really poor. Needs a total change. Legendaries aren't "legendary" at all. The mechanics such as Vulnerable, Crit, Lucky Hit and so on are clearly not very well tested and is not balanced, even in season 2. As it stands, the "mmo"-part makes NO sense and should be severely changed or totally removed. As it is, it makes no sense to always be online. It's "social" without having any social needs, or tools. So strange. Maybe it's to make you buy cosmetics to look cool for other players? Probably, cause there is not much else. So, this is very much a beta, especially when coming from the former great company Blizzard Entertainment.
Rax I keep suggesting it in Lost Ark you can record your default waypoint. This sets your default teleport location so you always go to the town or tree of whispers you prefer. In lost ark you click on the waypoint and get a prompt if you want to make the waypoint your default location.
There also needs to be a group finder! Just about every person that I know who left the game (everyone but me) left because they had no way of finding groups without using Discord or third party apps, at the very least for dungeons, particularly if Leader-boards are coming.
Agree 100%, small addition, I think Elixier Drop Rate is fine but give us the option to salvage them for part of their mats to let us craft the big boy elixiers and incents!
Sets *could* be cool, however I think most people are scarred from how D3 handled them; they somewhat pigeonholed you into a specific way to play instead of being creative with your build. Now if they made set bonuses smaller (2 or 3 piece set) and made them transformative and equivalent power to however many aspect slots they would take up.
All great ideas! Thanks Raxx! (Guys where do I find this legendary power "auto salvage"? I'm still picking up and seeing whites and blues in WT4 inventory.)
I've enjoyed this season way more than last. I've been won back for now. I already have an 80 druid. I didn't get past 55 last season. Good progress. My only last thing would be adding more FUN loot. Excruciatingly going over every rare item to see if it is minor upgrade kinda stinks.
Hi raxx, for the codex of power my personal preference is instaid of upgrading the codex forever you get a charge in the codex to use when you decide. So that doesnt take of the farm you need to do and solve the inventory issue
It would be nice if : - in the dungeons where you have to find the key by killing some guard and not looting by mistake, mark it on the map with some blue star - after doing the objectives ( find key/ destroy 3 things/etc ) to accesss the door, the lock of the door on the minimap disapear, so in some layouts it is dificult to sometimes spot the door/ entry to the next area. It would be nice to have a general marker, like in some maps a ping. It should be evident, not some faint ping once and it gone.
One minor thing I like is the early game pacing. I developed my early season routine of 1) unlock all waypoints/strongholds, 2) unlock aspects I need, 3) play the season quest. I'll also do some seasonal stuff and world boss whenever they show up. And for this season when I'm approaching the end of these routine I'm basically ready for keystone, so I spent no time actually grinding level before I go to WT3. This simply just feel good.
Agree with 95% of what you said Rax. The only thing I am not so sure about is the difficulty described as too easy... you are running an uber OP build, but many other builds still have quite some fun at Duriel or Lilith... I am running the not so fast Firewall build and although I am not having all the uniques yet, Duriel took me a few minutes at lvl 88 and got me almost killed several times with 75% poison ress. I agree, some finetuning might be needed, but in general the state of the game right now is FUN again and I am tempted to try other classes and builds for the 1st time since the launch. Comparing to lets say Last Epoch, that game is very similar in terms of difficulty, but has well telegraphed mechanics... not like Lilith, where you just see 50 shades of red and cant see 50% of those 1 shot mechanics. Good job on this video and as usual, stellar analysis!
Nightmare dungeon objectives feel like chores and are not fun. For example, much better implementation for "free 7 prisoners" would be to have an actual prison section in the dungeon where all 7 prisoners would be in that same area in different cells. Each time you free one prisoner in that area, elite will spawn. One of the 7 prisoners would drop a key that opens the door for the dungeon boss. You could choose to free all 7 prisoners just to fight the elites or you could stop once you got the key.
One thing that always felt great about seasons in d3 was that after you maxed out or had your fill on one class, you could easily progress from the start with paragons and gear found from the previous characters. There's really not much incentive to do this on d4 unless theres some build you're hell bent on trying. You'll have the extra aspects sure, but no gear to use for leveling like you could make in d3 or craft at the blacksmith. No real way to speed level yourself using things you earned on your higher levels. I would be much more into re rolling if things like paragon carried over and were accessible earlier on. It'd probably be broken but that really made it more fun to start a new character and crank up the difficutly.
Great video Rax. I 100% second the codex idea. Let me farm that perfect one and be able to use it on any item from that point on. Also I would love to see character rebirth. I don't want to have to delete my characters. Rebirthing would help build some kind of connection to my toons. Also, yes please free expansion. That would go some distance towards repairing morale from this failed launch.
Appreciate the video. Slightly long, but quite informative and constructive. I think that the vampire zone is great, and the events in the vampire zone is amazing. I'm loving the siphon, loving the big event. XP seems to be flying. When I tried stepping into a NM dungeon, it just felt slow and unrewarding in comparison, so I'll prolly wait for world tier 4 before I do more dungeons.
What a fantastic video, Raxx. No one lays things out so nicely and orderly as you do in your content. Really nice there were so many positives to take away this season!
Your discussion of the dungeon objectives was perfect. In the overworld, if you see the orange-marked events on the mini-map, you can opt-in. Do I want to protect the caravan NPCs, or stop the blood-marked enemies from reaching the elite? Then I can head over and engage. If I'm not in the mood I can just ride on by. Dungeons need something similar. Lock the door behind a kill percentage or something if you must, but the pedestal mechanic and prisoner mechanic should be for optional loot or something. Forcing me to do it is a chore and pulls me out of my groove, disrupting my tempo and enjoyment of the game.
Good points there. Codex powers really need an update in a form of library or something. I think Division did similar thing and it worked really well. Basically you exctract an affix from item and then you upgrade it. As for being brave, I might be wrong, but in one of the blogs there were snippets of skills working with eachother. Like you cast twister as druid and when sorc casts fire wall, you get a fire tornado.
I just appreciate how you provide constructive criticism as a player and as how the development of this game might improve in the future. One of my favorite content creators out there. Your commentary is measured and wise, I greatly appreciate all your content
Agreed on all accounts. I'd love to see a video of you trying to build an endgame loop system, taking into account that D4 isn't POE (meaning in general it opts for simpler/easier to understand systems. Keep up the good work
Excellent video. I'm a 20+ year fan of the franchise and my partner and I straight up stopped playing after completing the campaign. Your videos have been a great way for me to keep tabs on the changes being made to the game for us to gauge when we're going to pick it back up. I also really appreciate your tone and level-headedness when it comes to the balance, changes, things that have worked/missed the mark, etc. So much of content creation in general is really polarizing/extremely negative and focusing on the wrong things. Your content is quite frankly refreshing as hell and I love it! Keep up the awesome work!
Easiest fix for the pedestals is have a loop with a gate next to the turn in so they have to go around the loop, hit the lever at the end that opens the gate and you end up right next to the door so you don't have to back track at all.
Great video, some of my points as a casual (with a lot of time currently ^^): - I think we have reached a point, where good in-game chat and/or grouping/improved clans would be helpful. Thinking about the new bosses and the mats you need for them, I need to hope for a fun group through different Discord servers currently. Also about the blood drop thingy (150) in the "green" helltide, while it is fun if you run into random players assisting or starting the event as well (so many drops ^^), I feel like this could be improved. I'll be sad actually once this new helltide with combined whispers (now I actually do them kinda automically but still) is gone. I also like that you don't loose your progress and that one event starts right after the last one ended, not like helltide. - I would still like to see more and different loot tables for bosses. It's great that we have new bosses now and yes it shouldn't be easy to gather stuff to spawn Duriel, but I feel like doing helltides all the time will be annoying and going for that 300 cinder chest just to spawn one boss before Duriel? At least give the chest some normal rewards as well, that's my take. - To add on the last point: We got a bunch of new bosses (I haven't tried Duriel or the Ice dude yet, but the others felt pretty easy even on level 75), but I think the loot tables need work, same goes for world bosses (make them hard again please). For my build I basically need one unique from Varshan, all other bosses don't have anything I need or care about and all the stuff missing is on Duriel. If I need to farm two other bosses in order to spawn Duriel, why not make those bosses somewhat useful/fun as well? I get that you (Blizzard) want to sell cool stuff in the shop for real money to make even more money with D4. Still the cosmetics in the loot table are a start but not enough. Why can't I have a small chance to get cool glowing/burning weapon skins, like fire/ice for sorc? Why is this limited to the real money store? - I realize that Raxx and others would not care about the above stuff at all, but I would and I guess others as well? (even if it is more the casual players). For me a leaderboard/ranking (who made it the furthest in nightmare dungeon level) isn't really interesting tbh, this would not keep me playing D4. What would do it, is the above mentioned stuff. I dislike having to do one thing to do the one I actually care about (helltides and fighting two bosses without interesting drops, to spawn the boss I care about). - The "new" helltide is great, but I used it a lot so far, I did maybe 3 nightmare dungeons from 50-65 before I went into WT4 and now I did like 1 dungeon and I'm 75 and my glyphs aren't really leveled of course. But I had way more fun with the open world instead of doing the same dungeons 500 times+ like in Season 1. This new helltide will sadly be gone after S2 which is honestly a shame. Maybe redo the normal helltide to make it more like the new vampire zones? - Legion and World Boss farming makes (more) sense now with the added drops that you need for boss spawns, on the other hand world bosses are still so underwhelming, when compard to WoW or so (I know different genre) and I don't want to make D4 a WoW copy ;) That's just some added input from me and great points from Raxx as usual
@@onche9555 yes, I know, some have very limited cosmetics, which is nice and a start, but I meant more stuff like that, especially the bosses besides Duriel. Make them rare, I don't care, but I want to play and hope for a rare/cool drop, that would increase my fun in actually farming bosses I need to kill to spawn Duriel ;)
I'm with you on the gold allocation. However, I'd say if you're playing the season... you should be doing the season journey which would lead you to the tree of whispers / blood harvests.
Yeah I didn’t agree with his argument. Dude killed the same one half of one dungeon over and over for 47 levels and expected to make the same gold as someone actually completing large events, seasonal content, full clearing things. Like dude that’s the trade off. You want a shit load of gold, do one thing, you want a shit load of xp do another. Same as people running normal dungeons to 100 and complaining they have no glyph levels.
yes and no, season journey shouldn't dictate optimal gold accumulation as an always strat. one thing to be achievement hunting to do a said thing and another when that's the only optimal strat until higher world tiers
@@__________8997 I'm with you. More balance is needed. But new season = new content (shiny stuff)... new shiny stuff fills that whisper bar stupid fast. Most efficient for leveling? No. My point is coming back to play the new season and ignoring new content for more efficient leveling is silly for the average user.
@@wraht I think it's two problems: dictating player behavior via a shoddy battle pass doesn't feel good if too arbitrary and dumb when it's a check list of things you'd do anyways which ultimately feels frivolous and hollow the other issue is penalizing play as you'd be interacting with the Tree of Whispers regardless due to Varshan target farm and getting XP for it unintentionally as the objectives rotate around the map and overlap with other shit one be doing like Helltides. No reason to not up gold like from events across the board with extra from inside dungeons and nightmare dungeons to be around the same benefit as Whispers with the tree still providing more overall due to the fat reward from caches
Hi. I am currently lvl 70 ish with my sorc and I wonder if the game has really become very easy or if maybe that is your impression because you are using what everyone is calling the best build in the game. Very good video 🎉
wow, this is easily the most accurate and comprehensive feedback of the state of D4. POE player with 8,000+ hours, you nailed every single pieces of my feedback and what stopped me from playing at level 25. Honestly, the biggest one was the generator spender system. It feels like shit to play. Give us mana back, and the ability to solve our resource problems in multiple ways. POE, not enough mana? Remove a gem from socket until you get some more mana regen, want to brute force it? Pop some mana flasks. It's just in such a shit state right now that it feels like you're only way out of the puzzle is by hitting level 60+ when your build is fully realized with high reduced resource cost rolls etc. Also the aspect one is huge, it feels like such a fucking chore right now and I can't do it again. PLEASE BLIZZARD, listen to this man. Every point is so spot on and will save your game.
for me D4 really need more pvp activities. My friends and I talked about something like a raid or a seige or just divining players into 2 opposite side for them to smash each others and how much fun d4 would be, but I think it’s going to take a long time before we got there
As soon as Raxx mentioned the vampiric powers solution, I thought "Man... he should really be on the design team." Even if it's not for a 'Diablo' game, I feel like he's really good at play testing and finding solutions. Might go so far as to say he should make his own game at some point. I'm sure given that creative freedom he could come up with some insane stuff.
Being an informed consumer and able to critique doesn't translate to development of fresh content. Always easy to tell somebody how to improve but inventing things is hard
For me the biggest fun is completing the build. Love when there are elemets that are required for it to work and without them the build doesn't work. you need to farm them and thats what keep me going. Once the build is done and dominates there has to be purpose to use it. It cant be just doing nm dungeons to upgrade sigls.
Loving the season, already 64 and yet to go into a nightmare dungeon. Enjoying the open world events. Will probably start glyph progress around 70. Only unfortunate thing is no leaderboards. Not for the rankings but to have your own personal timestamps/levels recorded. I will probably hop back into d3 for one more blast and stick with d4 when leaderboards come in S3, then there is reason to min/max ur chars
@affirazer not for trying to top 100 rankings but to have your own personal timestamps to see how the gear upgrades is making you more powerful. Right now, you can't really tell between semi good gear and good gear when the semi good gear is good enough to clear all the content.
i really like the idea of leveling up the codex. put all aspects in the codex starting at the lowest roll. Then every time you find an aspect in the wild, you can either use that one directly if its a good roll, or if you salvage or extract it, then it automatically adds like 1% (or whatever increase makes most sense) more to the roll of the same aspect in your codex. that way every time you are finding legendary aspects, even if its not what you're looking for, you feel like you are still increasing the overall power of your codex for other builds. This also completely frees up your storage space. I would even take it a step further and increase the drop rate of aspects for other classes too. so while im playing sorc, I can level up aspects in the codex for druid. Swapping characters and builds become much less painful that way and you feel like you are working towards something.
For me the biggest issue is the lack of objectives in endgame. Last season I’ve put together bulwark Druid and crushed T100 dungeon at lvl 80 and it was it. I stopped playing 2 days after cause there was no point anymore. At least in D3 we had the leaderboard to give us incentive to always search for better gear and paragons
Love your videos Raxx! You always have a way of "hitting the nail on the head." Season 2 is definitely an improvement but Blizzard still has a way to go!
hey rax. whats a good stopping point/soft cap for vuln and crit dam since raising them to the moon has diminishing returns? old habits makes me just roll for vuln n crit to no end
I kinda stopped at lvl 52 before, now my S2 character is already 58, loving the game so far! Season 2 definitely fixed a lot. On the point of making hard content, is that even realistic? If you make bosses so difficult that top 1% of players can beat them, what's the point? The games are designed for the majority of people, telling nearly everyone "Fuck off, you're not good enough!" is not good game design.
Rax, the emote wheel key binding for tree of whispers TP is very anti-console. I would rather they allowed us to change the destination of "TP to current region's main city" action.
So changes shouldn't be made to the PC version because it can't be done on console? Or are you saying you'd be fine with the PC version getting that kind of update, but you just wouldn't want to be forced to use it on console?
I haven't reached level 100 but I do think you need to keep in mind that the seasonal powers makes players way more powerful than eternal players are. The entire point of their seasons is to make players feel more powerful. The game may still be too easy but seasonal play is supposed to feel too easy considering how they described what they wanted from seasons.
So happy you mentioned resource management, it feels so bad sometimes, i know its their attempt to slow combat but i feel like that can be done with other methods
Id love to see a option to turn off “You cannot cast this skill” warnings on my screen, im almost 999999% sure this issue has been talked about and i’m even more sure the core reason a option hasn’t been added is to discourage macros, for instance if you have a skill that has no animation, you can cast it during other skills and well it’s just a good idea for QoL to macro a few skills with no animation togeyher, however the cannot cast this skill warning screen is annoying side note WASD support would be also great i mean even as an option, also im pretty sure there is a bug with melee skills that sometimes when attacking a enemy and that enemy dies or maybe even they don’t have to die, but you spin in small tight circles sometimes, it’s pretty annoying happening randomly when attacking seems only with melee type abilities.
I would love to see an option to set the default town (including tree of whispers) to teleport to whenever I press "T".
This is an understated QOL improvement that would be SO GOOD
I kept hoping I was missing some quick key to teleport to the tree.
Not to mention have multiple portals around the Tree of Whisper's too so we can teleport to another party member from there instead of having to go to the main city to do so..
This would be so good
I have been saying the same thing since day one😢
I really like the idea of leveling up the codex legendary powers. Also setting your home point so you teleport to your chosen spot.
Also, bring back teleporting direct to a team member. Why of why was that removed since D3...? Having to TP to a major city first (if you're not already at one), then to the other person's purple portal. Just an entirely unnecessary 2-step waste of time, _especially_ on slower PCs.
The reason they don't implement the codex legendary change is because it will negate the item grind/farm. a way for them to implment the codex change, is that it stores your highest roll; which can only be accessed if you have enough charges(which are gained from dismantling said legendary power).
SHIT if we could set a homebase I would honestly be a Diablo 4 fanboy. I hate most cities.
that would be nuts
While that would be one of the best updates to the game, they'll likely never do it as Blizzard wants us to play as long as possible. Regardless of how frustrating that is.
The teleport straight into the NMD is also a great change you missed mentioning. I know the previous entrance teleport was a temporary band aid due to technical constraint so it's nice to see them fully rectify the coding behind it.
look where this game went, lol. like this is a great feature.
It's nice, but I'm still so used to the old behavior that I always find my self immediately leaving NMDs after entering them.
I never understood why they did not just make a portal spawn next to you that is treated as the dungeon entrance. shouldnt have been too hard to code i guess.
@@DarsusDwhat if you go to another area though? I'd rather just hit tab and click on the dungeon. Not every time I open a dungeon am I or my party is ready to go or next to each other. Would it open a portal to the entire group?
@@jason2089 no reason to close the Portal until the Dungeon is finished or you use a townportal from inside the dungeon. And ofc it would work for the whole party.
Dad with 4 kids, 6 jobs, and only 14 minutes a month to commit to Diablo IV - I'm glad to have you sticking up for my end-game progression. Thank you Rax!
did you get a 15th minute over christmas?
Yes, please continue to make these "State of..." videos each season. This season has been a big leap forward. Hope we get that upgradeable codex for season 3.
I disagree on one thing with you Raxx. The puzzles suggestion. I don’t want to have to stop even longer to figure out some stupid puzzle. I just want to blast.
Fr, leave puzzles to the cow level community.
Puzzles are cool but it doesn’t belong in this game
That’s boring AF dude
I fucking hate puzzles
Fr. Fuck puzzles. Any video game with stupid ass puzzles are an instant turn off.
Rax, I love you brother but you must start using video chapters
Real
It blows my mind he can talk from start to finish for 30mins hitting every topic in an organized manor. Time stamps would be great for the viewers tho.
And stop using that dam sweater.
Agreed
@@The0nlyyhe’s shown in other videos that he has a bulleted checklist for most discussion videos, so it’s definitely not improvised. Still an impressive arrangement 9/10, and it would be nice if he went the extra mile to bring it over to the video.
Not sure how many people have this problem, but on PlayStation the lag and rubber banding has been horrendous recently 🤷♂️ not a problem I had previously with the game…
I've gotten stuck in more doors than I can count, it catches up eventually but I didn't have this problem til season 2. I don't use Wi-Fi so I'm doubting its my connection. I got stuck in the magistrates office, had to reset. At least people are playing, Ive yet to play in a group but I know last season I barely saw players
PlayStation isnt a good console for multiplayer sadly 😂
i play ps5 and I don't have too much trouble with it - sometimes when going into blood harvests or world boss areas it will lag but during normal gameplay I never notice it
Yes it is
@@alvaroruiz3009 I mean that’s fair, but playing the game was fine until this specific season - it seems to be a recent issue 🤷♂️
You’re a hero for that last suggestion. Perfect timing: right after MS acquisition, right before Blizzcon. They have no excuse to score big with the player base. Huge social credit score potential.
Defs appreciate the post release feedback! Haven’t started yet and I’m a dad that does like to min/max to a degree. Not as hardcore as I use to be.
Was looking to play Druid since i played to much sorc in D2 haha.
The Codezlx thing and the loot filter IS A MUST HAVE. Also let us choose our own city to auto teleport out to instead of default closest city.
Codezlx what is that?
You can choose wherever you wanna teleport to now. Auto teleport is nearest main city to you
@@Daniel-xv3nwcodex
Yeah with the jeweler added to whisper tree it would be the perfect main city
Also they need to put every legendary power in the codex even if they don't give us a base level on any of them for free from dungeons/seasonal content.
A much better alternative to your emote wheel whisper teleport idea is to just be able to set where your teleport goes to. If I like Kyovashad, I want to be able to go there all the time. If I set that as my main TP then I only have to press down on my controller and I'll go there. I get that most people will choose Whisper for this, but some people might not. I personally would be okay with sacrificing a few seconds of walking if I get to TP to my favourite city where I know the layout well and have muscle memory in how I move around to all the vendors and whatnot.
Your knowledge and consistent delivery continues to impress me with every single video. Its obvious that Blizzard knows that too and I'm sure many of their developers and leadership takes your input to heart. As a Software Engineer I wish I had this level of feedback for my work.
Cheers!
I like to think how weird it sounds to non blizz players in general lol. Or if you just start abreviating everything
Great video! Time to sub :)
Grim Dawn had these unique items which completely changed spells: appearance, damage type, sometimes even the base principle about the mechanic. This feature alone doubled my playtime easily because when I found one I immediately wanted to roll a new character around that one item or just made me want to try new combinations which I never thought I'd enjoy.
Good point
Yes 100%, there needs to be more transformative uniques/L-Aspects. Grim Dawn is fucking sick and is somewhat slept on. It gets more traction as of late but not enough exposure. Also new DLC next year so that’s hype!
I did that for the Sorc fire ball items. Sadly, the build was unplayable, with Ice Shards doing 12.000% more damage.
Also larger character inventory and stash space.
I mean D2 wich is more than 20 years also did it with runewords@AshmakerTV
19:33 Actually, you don't even need to click "allocate". If you just Click the one you want and hit "ESC" on your keyboard it will automatically level that one up. 🙌
great video. Agree so much with the elixir tab and upgrading your codex when you disenchant an item so you can have actually have stash space
The idea with leveling aspects is fantastic! I’m always keeping my best aspects for later cuz I dont want to waste them
They need to add some cool cosmetics as reward for accomplishing certain feats. I know some are already there, but when you look at the shop and what the artists are capable of doing, it would be nice to have also something injected in the game for people that you know, bought the game.
Buying the game wasn't enough, they need a few more of your dollars for the good stuff. They have big pockets to fill :)
That idea for a teleport directly to the Tree of wispers is phenomenal 👌
theres literally a waypoint right by it
they should make it so you can set a "home portal" location to wherever you want, so your town portal always ports to where you want to go. in regards to the dungeon events, they should make them more rare. like not in every single dungeon but only sometimes they show up and also buff the rewards. to make players WANT to go do it.
@@yoteslaya7296lazy gamers bro. Might as well take away the open world since people wanna tp to everything
Ya they should traveling is boring
Lots of text ahead. I wanted to write down my thoughts on the topics you mentioned.
The horse still gets stuck a lot, and I get dismounted after taking just one hit.
Class Balance has never been Blizzard's strength, from what I was told regarding D3.
The new skill animations look great!
I don't feel a change regarding Crowd Control. Necromancer has no unstoppable (I don't want to rely on Metamorphosis. Takes up one slot of Vampire Powers and forces me to use +3 Evade Charge boots) and CC chains are not addressed. I can still get cc'ed when coming out of cc.
Completely agree with the Tree of Whisper NPC/teleport parts.
Season 2's theme is amazing. Actually having fun with it. But the instances are fragile, something is killing the servers - maybe another build like old Blood Lance, maybe the fact, that a pack of enemies spawns 5 and more Blood Bonds, while not every build is capable to clearing an entire screen with one click. Causing a lot of calculation build up.
To be fair, you are playing the 2nd most broken build in the entire game. Of course Bosses are a joke, and you knew what you were getting yourself into when you started playing it. Because it was instantly obvious.
PoE mapping is just as boring as Nightmare Dungeons in my opinion. So having it be the core of all endgame is a horrible thing. I am forced to to bad content and hate the game, before I can go and do something more fun. In D4 I can do whatever I want, much better - however, in the future, for future systems/seasons, they could add some extra chains to the current endgame options.
What is auto salvage? Do you mean the "do not drop white and blue items in WT3/4"? Because that is clearly not in the game yet. I am getting spammed with white ancestrals everywhere I go. And blues.. blues everywhere.
That is an amazing idea for the Codex! Where do I sign?
Side Note about aspects: Resource aspects need to be made easier to find. 5000 Obols later, still nothing. And when I were to finally get one, it has a huge stat range. Aspect of Starlight is [20-40] everytime I heal for 25% of my life. That is.. disgusting.
If Blizzard wants me to play more, having Vampiric Powers be shared amongst all seasonal characters would be benefitial.
Making a new character and seeing, that I have to re-do all of this again, makes me not want to play another character. So I am left with my first characters, which will get boring shortly after, because I already did most or even all of the content.
Uniques were intended to completely change a build, and how skills work. I would really like to see something like that.
*cough* I was about to type the same example you brought up about Fireball.
Resource management is really weird in this game.
It felt very easy to be full at all times on Rogue. Sorc can spam cooldown skills ["We don't yet know why people tend to play Sorceress using all 4 defensive skills on most builds" - Blizzard during the S2 live streams]. There also is the option of Crackling Energy. But anything outside of these 2 options is not viable.
On Necromancer it's even worse. CE spam to regenerate resources is a bad feeling, especially versus bosses. Lucky Hit based generation is unreliable (when I played Boner Boy in Pre-Season, in 200 hrs of gameplay, Exposed Flesh activated 5 times. No joke. And I was nearly capped on all Lucky Hit + Lucky Hit while Barrier affixes.). On Blood Necromancer all I really have is Potent Blood Aspect, but Blood Orb generation is Chance based, making it effectively the same thing. And CE build on the other hand doesn't require essence at all, yet it has the best essence generation out of all Necromancer builds. How can I make use of that? Melted Heart of Selig, Uber Unique Amulet.. great. (I actually got one when I was asked, if I wanted to leech an Uber Duriel kill. Lucky.)
I would forgive Blizzard for a free first DLC aswell.
You have to move slow on the horse in town so that other players can see your micro-transactions you bought
Lmao, I believe this.
@@smokelord2002Can easily see some Activision manager pitching this idea. 😂
How else are people going to know that I killed Uber Lilith?
((i didn't actually kill her I got carried by a stranger on discord))
In every game they force you to move slower or walk in the home base.
Lmao "micro" transactions
Please keep doing these videos every season. As someone who skipped S1 after playing preseason, your intelligent constructive feedback on both positive and negative sides are thoughtful and are easy to get behind. Keep up the brilliant work!
Thanks for the insight, Rax.
I'll probably get to Season 2 eventually. But you also recommended (in a chat with DM) to try Last Epoch right away, and that's probably the best advice I ever got out of you. It's like 2 dozen gamers played Titan Quest (and/or Grim Dawn), Diablo 2, and PoE and got together to make their new favorite game. And now it's my new favorite game too.
That's basically what happened; the guy who started the company was a huge fan of ARPGs, and decided to create one. Went on reddit to find people with skills who also wanted to make 'the best ARPG ever'... and it seems like this plan has been working.
The ONE thing Raxx said that I'm begging for in the game is that aspects go straight to the codex. His idea for solving it was perfect so take a look into that D4 devs. It would save so much unnecessary time and confusion on so many levels.
Im not sure if u mentioned it, But when u do a dungeon and u get to a room with the like ''fog doors'' u have to pull a lever to get out or kill a pack etc, the room doesnt give XP at all, or drop any kinds of items.
Agreed with almost every single point he made here. A big one for me in the negatives section is the lack of Blizz being "brave" with the abilities. It's weird, too, because they were super good in this regard in Diablo 3. Every single ability had multiple versions that changed how it worked, sometimes dramatically. Some were just changing the damage type, but it did a lot to add variety in how every build felt. D4 barely does this at all. Some of the Aspects augment skills to behave differently, but there aren't nearly enough of them that do and it's pretty disappointing.
The one thing that always stuck with me back in D3 that we never got was that one gameplay trailer with the assault beast and after the players kill it, it's body melts into ash and little spirits fly out and into the ground and then all these skeletons start to spawn. It was like this brief moment of calm, after fighting this Ravenous beast that killed two players, turning into an "oh fuck" moment. We always needed that level tension and terror in modern Diablo and we still don't get that. So I can appreciate the vampire ambushes but I agree that we need more of that kinda gameplay that doesn't let us relax but is also really fun.
Interesting video, I actually disagree about the Tree of Whispers complaint you had Rax. Knowing that is the best gigantic place to get gold from incentivized that activity for me.
I like certain activities only rewarding certain types of loot (gold for whispers), bc it makes me actually do those events out of necessity and therefore adds variety in gameplay.
If nightmare dungeons were a one stop shop for every type of loot the game would suck. (like it did before)
Maybe you disagree but I really like tree of whispers now.
funnily enough, keeping the "best" roll on an item you've ever found and having that saved to your codex is exactly how the system works in The Division 2. Once you find any item with a perfect roll (or better than what you've found) and extract it, you can apply that value to any new item you find so now every backpack you find, you can add +13.6% armour from your previous best backpack that rolled with +13.6% armour on it. There's also a bar beneath the numerical value that has a portion of it filled to show how close this roll was to max, and if you've extracted the power before, it has an arrow on the bar showing where your value saved in the codex is so you don't have to bother remembering exact numbers, you can just see at a glance if something is better
I do like the way you said take chances with Unique Items, maybe a skill that has within limits launches a different skill on impact, Fireball hits and a shower of sparks or a frost wave come out in say twice the AoE of the Fireball, but to stop it being to powerful the second effect cannot retrigger explosions so we dont get the PoE one skill clears the room.
Hey Raxx, yes, your endgame thoughts are right on.
I can picture a new rift network (call it Rifts of Despair) that adds new rift types, and maybe adds in retired seasonal themes adapted for the network, like Rifts of Malignancy and Rifts of Blood. Add in some intra- and inter-rift quests and achievements that reward you with tokens to unlock some new pinnacle rifts (Abyssal Rifts?) that progressively present Uber-super-duper fights that culminate in that one fight that can only be won once in a thousand times.
Yeah - that’s what I envision!
Rax.. all i can say thank god that we have you here, covering this game and fingers crossed that devs will consider your feedback!
Thank You 🤞 !
I feel like I was getting between half and a whole paragon point in every dungeon event. The density on them was insane and awesome.
One little thing that just IRKS me to death is the stat calculations when comparing items. This may be hard to clearly convey in text... So items have "above the line" stats and "below the line" stats, I think it's like implicits and randoms or like prefixes and suffixes. But items can spawn the same stat type in both spots; for example, one item might spawn with Overpower dmg above the line, and another might spawn with Overpower dmg below the line. If this happens you will see the Overpower Dmg on the new item with the green + text as it's adding that, AND at the bottom it will show you losing the Overpower dmg that was on the equipped item. Essentially, you could net like +5% Overpower Dmg overall, but it will say +15% Overpower Dmg in one spot, and then -10% Overpower Dmg in the losses section. Last Epoch just does that math and in their nice little comparison summary you know what you've gained or lost. Does that make sense? It's not a problem when the matching stats appear in the same section, just when one is above the line and the other is below. Or weirdly both sometimes. It's a little thing, I just find it very annoying.
I would absolutely love if they implemented the codex idea you had. I have thought about the same thing. Heck do away with the aspect tab in inventory just keep it all in the codex.
Re: druid leveling. I think a big issue is that almost every good aspect is a drop only. You can only really start to ramp up your leveling once you get one of those powers (shockwave, aftershock, subteranean, trampled earth, symbiotic, stormchaser, etc). Other classes are able to get one solid power from the codex and so even early on, they have a decent power level.
Honestly, they should put all aspects in the codex. You still want to farm aspects for max rolls, so there's no reason not to put the min roll versions in the codex. This would also allow us to put aspects on our weapons while leveling without feeling like a dumbass.
As much as you said upgrading vampiric powers should be shared between characters, the same should apply to the emote wheel. I hate having to set it up again for each new character
Good video, thanks for this post and all your time that you put in Rax. I still spend a lot of time looking through gear and salvaging. A loot filter is a must for this game, hope to see it soon.
Thanks for the vid. I jumped right to the summary. I am currently playing Last Epoch and have no plans to return to D4. There is no universe in which I give Blizzard more money after foolishly dropping $90 on this. Nor would I ever chase around to finish finding altars of Lilith and a dozen other things.
Hey Raxx.
You have forgotten one of the most important changes ;)
The recalibration of the Item-Levels, wich makes the leveling prozess much smother now.
I have to say the way you explain negatives and positives in such detail, you do not shill, or click bait and the passion you clearly have to do these videos is just awesome and its rather refreshing. I could listen to you all day , sub earned...keep up the good work
We also need more character customization in the aesthetic sense. More armour skins, more hairstyles and also DYES (hair dye/colour and armour dye)! I miss messing around with dyes in D3, we were spoilt with dyes compared to D4.
You hit the nail on the head with endgame. When you get to the point of doing nightmare dungeons, for me they are insanely boring with no real point to them. I absolutely kills me just running nightmares over and over, especially since they limit the pool of available dungeons.
The dungeon pool should be limited i think. Regardless of how big the pool is you are gona do the most efficient ones anyways so why have a large pool all the time? You will end up doing the same dungeons every season. With these smaller pools you wont be.
@@kevinsims5791 nope, I do not run "the most efficient" anything. I would rather have a huge pool of complete random chance for what one I run.
@@panerdar then 24-25 should be enough if you always go random
@@kevinsims5791 there is no reason for them to not just make them all available. Should just be tier 1-100 and you use whatever 1 and it is random from them all. I honestly don't know how anyone can just do the same thing over and over and over and have fun with it. Mind numbingly boring.
One thing I noticed and I appreciate is when the dungeons have wings, they added a portal/gate to get back where the pedestal is to turn in the item you've collected. About the resources, the only skill that spends them should be the Ultimate Skill. Remove the CD from Ultimate Skills but you can only use it at 100% resources. Then the core skills will have X number of charges with Y seconds of charge CD -- IMO, 3 charges with 5s charge CD as baseline. And I'm all for the snake firewall upgrade. And I agree with more visual cues -- example, there's supposedly meteorites when I cast my ult...but I don't know if that's happening most of the time. If the meteorites comes out from a fire portal on top of my head, then shoots out, that's a better visual cue that the skill triggers.
0:15 Trippy. First time seeing the like button do that.
Always like to hear your perspective on the seasons. I really like this season. Im not a big fan of the randomness of unlocking the Vamp powers but other than that I'm having a lot of fun this season.
Itd be fine if it was acct wide
Definitely do this for season 3! Great points made in this video raxx! I would love to see auto teleport to nightmare dungeons as soon as you click the key.
he does make some great points, but his view on difficulty is way skewed because his playing perhaps the strongest spec in the game. With that said the game is way easier but he hasn't taken into account that ball sorc is just overpowerd; it would even destroy season 0, t100's easy.
@@arturo_cruz I think making more difficult content doesn't mean taking away the easier content. It just gives people who are more experienced or have more time to play more things to do.
Yay! It's almost out of Beta. I'd say we're about at version 0.3. By season 7 we'll get there for sure!
How many "beta" hours you played? 400 ?
@@jenkyg In the eternal realm, about 100. In season 1, about 50. How so?
If they just add a lootfilter and some more difficult content to the game in season 3 I would say the game is pretty much finished (as in 1.0 release finished). Just season 2 alone brought alot of very important and good changes. Season 1 was the alpha, season 2 the Open beta and season 3 (hopefuly) a full release.
@@izaruburs9389 They'll get there eventually. However to me, the problem goes deeper than just those things you mention (which are GOOD fixes).
But. Some of the fundamentals needs a huge rework in my opinion: the skill-tree is uninspiring and the Paragon-board is quite boring. I suspect they have held back on much of the interesting interactions to put them in the seasons. The Blood-skills are cool, but these interactions should've been in the base game and not only in the season if you ask me. I expect this to be intentional, and I don't expect to see REAL content and a proper rework until an expansion or two down the line.
The other thing is the itemization, which is confusing af and badly implemented.
How we acquire gear and how legendaries are implemented is really poor. Needs a total change. Legendaries aren't "legendary" at all.
The mechanics such as Vulnerable, Crit, Lucky Hit and so on are clearly not very well tested and is not balanced, even in season 2.
As it stands, the "mmo"-part makes NO sense and should be severely changed or totally removed. As it is, it makes no sense to always be online. It's "social" without having any social needs, or tools. So strange. Maybe it's to make you buy cosmetics to look cool for other players? Probably, cause there is not much else.
So, this is very much a beta, especially when coming from the former great company Blizzard Entertainment.
Rax I keep suggesting it in Lost Ark you can record your default waypoint. This sets your default teleport location so you always go to the town or tree of whispers you prefer. In lost ark you click on the waypoint and get a prompt if you want to make the waypoint your default location.
There also needs to be a group finder! Just about every person that I know who left the game (everyone but me) left because they had no way of finding groups without using Discord or third party apps, at the very least for dungeons, particularly if Leader-boards are coming.
Agree 100%, small addition, I think Elixier Drop Rate is fine but give us the option to salvage them for part of their mats to let us craft the big boy elixiers and incents!
Or a d2 style elixir fusion
different and varied bosses, different keys to farm special bosses like D3 and sets would be really good. I can't wait to see what they're cooking up.
Sets *could* be cool, however I think most people are scarred from how D3 handled them; they somewhat pigeonholed you into a specific way to play instead of being creative with your build. Now if they made set bonuses smaller (2 or 3 piece set) and made them transformative and equivalent power to however many aspect slots they would take up.
Thank you for making this. I have yet to dabble with season 2 but this was very insightful and helpful!
All great ideas! Thanks Raxx!
(Guys where do I find this legendary power "auto salvage"? I'm still picking up and seeing whites and blues in WT4 inventory.)
I've enjoyed this season way more than last. I've been won back for now. I already have an 80 druid. I didn't get past 55 last season. Good progress. My only last thing would be adding more FUN loot. Excruciatingly going over every rare item to see if it is minor upgrade kinda stinks.
Loving this direction that this season is taking the game. They just really need to add in more bosses and builds.
I love that your channel is growing and you are doing such a bad ass job man! Keep blasting. Thank you for representing us grinders to the masses.
Grinders?? Like homo stuff?? Huh
Pro tip: you don’t even need to click upgrade the power. Select it, press escape. It will upgrade the selected one.
Yep, once I got my main 5 to lvl 3 I now just click and escape to auto upgrade whatever.
I found that out accidentlly while leveling, it's the only thing I do now 😆
what is this for?
He actually mentions thi while he demonstrates normal upgrading.
He says this. Watch the video
Hi raxx, for the codex of power my personal preference is instaid of upgrading the codex forever you get a charge in the codex to use when you decide. So that doesnt take of the farm you need to do and solve the inventory issue
It would be nice if :
- in the dungeons where you have to find the key by killing some guard and not looting by mistake, mark it on the map with some blue star
- after doing the objectives ( find key/ destroy 3 things/etc ) to accesss the door, the lock of the door on the minimap disapear, so in some layouts it is dificult to sometimes spot the door/ entry to the next area. It would be nice to have a general marker, like in some maps a ping. It should be evident, not some faint ping once and it gone.
Thank you Raxx for this summary. Would love to see this for the next seasons!
One minor thing I like is the early game pacing.
I developed my early season routine of 1) unlock all waypoints/strongholds, 2) unlock aspects I need, 3) play the season quest.
I'll also do some seasonal stuff and world boss whenever they show up.
And for this season when I'm approaching the end of these routine I'm basically ready for keystone, so I spent no time actually grinding level before I go to WT3.
This simply just feel good.
Agree with 95% of what you said Rax. The only thing I am not so sure about is the difficulty described as too easy... you are running an uber OP build, but many other builds still have quite some fun at Duriel or Lilith... I am running the not so fast Firewall build and although I am not having all the uniques yet, Duriel took me a few minutes at lvl 88 and got me almost killed several times with 75% poison ress. I agree, some finetuning might be needed, but in general the state of the game right now is FUN again and I am tempted to try other classes and builds for the 1st time since the launch. Comparing to lets say Last Epoch, that game is very similar in terms of difficulty, but has well telegraphed mechanics... not like Lilith, where you just see 50 shades of red and cant see 50% of those 1 shot mechanics. Good job on this video and as usual, stellar analysis!
Nightmare dungeon objectives feel like chores and are not fun. For example, much better implementation for "free 7 prisoners" would be to have an actual prison section in the dungeon where all 7 prisoners would be in that same area in different cells. Each time you free one prisoner in that area, elite will spawn. One of the 7 prisoners would drop a key that opens the door for the dungeon boss. You could choose to free all 7 prisoners just to fight the elites or you could stop once you got the key.
I’d still try to beat everybody😡
One thing that always felt great about seasons in d3 was that after you maxed out or had your fill on one class, you could easily progress from the start with paragons and gear found from the previous characters. There's really not much incentive to do this on d4 unless theres some build you're hell bent on trying. You'll have the extra aspects sure, but no gear to use for leveling like you could make in d3 or craft at the blacksmith. No real way to speed level yourself using things you earned on your higher levels. I would be much more into re rolling if things like paragon carried over and were accessible earlier on. It'd probably be broken but that really made it more fun to start a new character and crank up the difficutly.
Great video Rax. I 100% second the codex idea. Let me farm that perfect one and be able to use it on any item from that point on.
Also I would love to see character rebirth. I don't want to have to delete my characters. Rebirthing would help build some kind of connection to my toons.
Also, yes please free expansion. That would go some distance towards repairing morale from this failed launch.
Appreciate the video. Slightly long, but quite informative and constructive. I think that the vampire zone is great, and the events in the vampire zone is amazing. I'm loving the siphon, loving the big event. XP seems to be flying. When I tried stepping into a NM dungeon, it just felt slow and unrewarding in comparison, so I'll prolly wait for world tier 4 before I do more dungeons.
What a fantastic video, Raxx. No one lays things out so nicely and orderly as you do in your content. Really nice there were so many positives to take away this season!
Your discussion of the dungeon objectives was perfect. In the overworld, if you see the orange-marked events on the mini-map, you can opt-in. Do I want to protect the caravan NPCs, or stop the blood-marked enemies from reaching the elite? Then I can head over and engage. If I'm not in the mood I can just ride on by. Dungeons need something similar. Lock the door behind a kill percentage or something if you must, but the pedestal mechanic and prisoner mechanic should be for optional loot or something. Forcing me to do it is a chore and pulls me out of my groove, disrupting my tempo and enjoyment of the game.
Good points there. Codex powers really need an update in a form of library or something. I think Division did similar thing and it worked really well. Basically you exctract an affix from item and then you upgrade it. As for being brave, I might be wrong, but in one of the blogs there were snippets of skills working with eachother. Like you cast twister as druid and when sorc casts fire wall, you get a fire tornado.
I just appreciate how you provide constructive criticism as a player and as how the development of this game might improve in the future. One of my favorite content creators out there. Your commentary is measured and wise, I greatly appreciate all your content
Agreed on all accounts. I'd love to see a video of you trying to build an endgame loop system, taking into account that D4 isn't POE (meaning in general it opts for simpler/easier to understand systems. Keep up the good work
Excellent video. I'm a 20+ year fan of the franchise and my partner and I straight up stopped playing after completing the campaign.
Your videos have been a great way for me to keep tabs on the changes being made to the game for us to gauge when we're going to pick it back up.
I also really appreciate your tone and level-headedness when it comes to the balance, changes, things that have worked/missed the mark, etc.
So much of content creation in general is really polarizing/extremely negative and focusing on the wrong things. Your content is quite frankly refreshing as hell and I love it!
Keep up the awesome work!
Easiest fix for the pedestals is have a loop with a gate next to the turn in so they have to go around the loop, hit the lever at the end that opens the gate and you end up right next to the door so you don't have to back track at all.
Great video! Also, farming forgotten souls right now is driving me mad
Great video, some of my points as a casual (with a lot of time currently ^^):
- I think we have reached a point, where good in-game chat and/or grouping/improved clans would be helpful. Thinking about the new bosses and the mats you need for them, I need to hope for a fun group through different Discord servers currently. Also about the blood drop thingy (150) in the "green" helltide, while it is fun if you run into random players assisting or starting the event as well (so many drops ^^), I feel like this could be improved. I'll be sad actually once this new helltide with combined whispers (now I actually do them kinda automically but still) is gone. I also like that you don't loose your progress and that one event starts right after the last one ended, not like helltide.
- I would still like to see more and different loot tables for bosses. It's great that we have new bosses now and yes it shouldn't be easy to gather stuff to spawn Duriel, but I feel like doing helltides all the time will be annoying and going for that 300 cinder chest just to spawn one boss before Duriel? At least give the chest some normal rewards as well, that's my take.
- To add on the last point: We got a bunch of new bosses (I haven't tried Duriel or the Ice dude yet, but the others felt pretty easy even on level 75), but I think the loot tables need work, same goes for world bosses (make them hard again please). For my build I basically need one unique from Varshan, all other bosses don't have anything I need or care about and all the stuff missing is on Duriel. If I need to farm two other bosses in order to spawn Duriel, why not make those bosses somewhat useful/fun as well? I get that you (Blizzard) want to sell cool stuff in the shop for real money to make even more money with D4. Still the cosmetics in the loot table are a start but not enough. Why can't I have a small chance to get cool glowing/burning weapon skins, like fire/ice for sorc? Why is this limited to the real money store?
- I realize that Raxx and others would not care about the above stuff at all, but I would and I guess others as well? (even if it is more the casual players). For me a leaderboard/ranking (who made it the furthest in nightmare dungeon level) isn't really interesting tbh, this would not keep me playing D4. What would do it, is the above mentioned stuff. I dislike having to do one thing to do the one I actually care about (helltides and fighting two bosses without interesting drops, to spawn the boss I care about).
- The "new" helltide is great, but I used it a lot so far, I did maybe 3 nightmare dungeons from 50-65 before I went into WT4 and now I did like 1 dungeon and I'm 75 and my glyphs aren't really leveled of course. But I had way more fun with the open world instead of doing the same dungeons 500 times+ like in Season 1. This new helltide will sadly be gone after S2 which is honestly a shame. Maybe redo the normal helltide to make it more like the new vampire zones?
- Legion and World Boss farming makes (more) sense now with the added drops that you need for boss spawns, on the other hand world bosses are still so underwhelming, when compard to WoW or so (I know different genre) and I don't want to make D4 a WoW copy ;)
That's just some added input from me and great points from Raxx as usual
The bosses do have cosmetic drops, I just got a mount armor from Grigoire
@@onche9555 yes, I know, some have very limited cosmetics, which is nice and a start, but I meant more stuff like that, especially the bosses besides Duriel. Make them rare, I don't care, but I want to play and hope for a rare/cool drop, that would increase my fun in actually farming bosses I need to kill to spawn Duriel ;)
I'm with you on the gold allocation. However, I'd say if you're playing the season... you should be doing the season journey which would lead you to the tree of whispers / blood harvests.
Yeah I didn’t agree with his argument. Dude killed the same one half of one dungeon over and over for 47 levels and expected to make the same gold as someone actually completing large events, seasonal content, full clearing things. Like dude that’s the trade off. You want a shit load of gold, do one thing, you want a shit load of xp do another. Same as people running normal dungeons to 100 and complaining they have no glyph levels.
yes and no, season journey shouldn't dictate optimal gold accumulation as an always strat. one thing to be achievement hunting to do a said thing and another when that's the only optimal strat until higher world tiers
@@__________8997 I'm with you. More balance is needed. But new season = new content (shiny stuff)... new shiny stuff fills that whisper bar stupid fast. Most efficient for leveling? No. My point is coming back to play the new season and ignoring new content for more efficient leveling is silly for the average user.
@@wraht I think it's two problems: dictating player behavior via a shoddy battle pass doesn't feel good if too arbitrary and dumb when it's a check list of things you'd do anyways which ultimately feels frivolous and hollow
the other issue is penalizing play as you'd be interacting with the Tree of Whispers regardless due to Varshan target farm and getting XP for it unintentionally as the objectives rotate around the map and overlap with other shit one be doing like Helltides. No reason to not up gold like from events across the board with extra from inside dungeons and nightmare dungeons to be around the same benefit as Whispers with the tree still providing more overall due to the fat reward from caches
I still sell items at a vendor as well. Why not just do that too. He didnt sell one thing?
Hi. I am currently lvl 70 ish with my sorc and I wonder if the game has really become very easy or if maybe that is your impression because you are using what everyone is calling the best build in the game. Very good video 🎉
this
Game is way to easy right now, we either need a wt5 or the system from D3 easy-torment16
wow, this is easily the most accurate and comprehensive feedback of the state of D4. POE player with 8,000+ hours, you nailed every single pieces of my feedback and what stopped me from playing at level 25. Honestly, the biggest one was the generator spender system. It feels like shit to play. Give us mana back, and the ability to solve our resource problems in multiple ways. POE, not enough mana? Remove a gem from socket until you get some more mana regen, want to brute force it? Pop some mana flasks. It's just in such a shit state right now that it feels like you're only way out of the puzzle is by hitting level 60+ when your build is fully realized with high reduced resource cost rolls etc. Also the aspect one is huge, it feels like such a fucking chore right now and I can't do it again. PLEASE BLIZZARD, listen to this man. Every point is so spot on and will save your game.
for me D4 really need more pvp activities. My friends and I talked about something like a raid or a seige or just divining players into 2 opposite side for them to smash each others and how much fun d4 would be, but I think it’s going to take a long time before we got there
As soon as Raxx mentioned the vampiric powers solution, I thought "Man... he should really be on the design team." Even if it's not for a 'Diablo' game, I feel like he's really good at play testing and finding solutions. Might go so far as to say he should make his own game at some point. I'm sure given that creative freedom he could come up with some insane stuff.
Being an informed consumer and able to critique doesn't translate to development of fresh content.
Always easy to tell somebody how to improve but inventing things is hard
Still qualified for the playtesting position that is supposed to be between development and live release.@@gowanlock
@@gowanlock
How many brand-new ideas is D4 bringing to the ARPG genre
For me the biggest fun is completing the build. Love when there are elemets that are required for it to work and without them the build doesn't work. you need to farm them and thats what keep me going. Once the build is done and dominates there has to be purpose to use it. It cant be just doing nm dungeons to upgrade sigls.
well then play poe or epoch. oh wait you wont bcuz you got hyped and bough 70usd early access game
@@ImotekhtheStormlord-tx2it And?
@ImotekhtheStormlord-tx2it cool story bro. What are you doing in comments for d4 video then?
@@ImotekhtheStormlord-tx2itNobody wants to play Last Epoch.
agree, lol I start thinking about my next class as soon as I get the item or aspect I need to make the current on work.
Loving the season, already 64 and yet to go into a nightmare dungeon. Enjoying the open world events. Will probably start glyph progress around 70.
Only unfortunate thing is no leaderboards. Not for the rankings but to have your own personal timestamps/levels recorded.
I will probably hop back into d3 for one more blast and stick with d4 when leaderboards come in S3, then there is reason to min/max ur chars
Who even cares for Leaderboards? Always thought its for the one percent so no reason to care for Blizzard.
@affirazer not for trying to top 100 rankings but to have your own personal timestamps to see how the gear upgrades is making you more powerful. Right now, you can't really tell between semi good gear and good gear when the semi good gear is good enough to clear all the content.
i really like the idea of leveling up the codex. put all aspects in the codex starting at the lowest roll. Then every time you find an aspect in the wild, you can either use that one directly if its a good roll, or if you salvage or extract it, then it automatically adds like 1% (or whatever increase makes most sense) more to the roll of the same aspect in your codex.
that way every time you are finding legendary aspects, even if its not what you're looking for, you feel like you are still increasing the overall power of your codex for other builds. This also completely frees up your storage space.
I would even take it a step further and increase the drop rate of aspects for other classes too. so while im playing sorc, I can level up aspects in the codex for druid. Swapping characters and builds become much less painful that way and you feel like you are working towards something.
please no nerfs. This is a non competitive PVE game. It makes no sense to nerf anything during a season, its so fun to destrou waves of enemies.
Is it worth coming back yet?
Nope
nope
no
I mean the most successful change is that the horse is now fast 🤷♂️ that should tell you about the pace of change to game issues.
nope
Picks the most broken build in game, has the most optimal stats and uniques to one shot everything..
Raxx - "This game is too easy"
👁️👄👁️
i love raxx but his remark about uber lilith with ball lightning, a broken build atm made me go "tf? for a second
me when i miss the point
Leveling is a lot more fun. Still on that so I don’t know about endgame.
Another good QoL feature (not sure if it was there before this patch) was the space bar lock item toggle in your inventory (cycles with mark as junk).
It’s a new feature, and yeah it’s great
For me the biggest issue is the lack of objectives in endgame. Last season I’ve put together bulwark Druid and crushed T100 dungeon at lvl 80 and it was it. I stopped playing 2 days after cause there was no point anymore. At least in D3 we had the leaderboard to give us incentive to always search for better gear and paragons
Love your videos Raxx! You always have a way of "hitting the nail on the head." Season 2 is definitely an improvement but Blizzard still has a way to go!
I would love to see more PVP modes in this game
This is such a helpful, conscructive and well thought out video. I love it and I hope Blizzard gives it the deserved attention.
Your idea for leveling up the codex is brilliant, that would be so good.
hey rax. whats a good stopping point/soft cap for vuln and crit dam since raising them to the moon has diminishing returns? old habits makes me just roll for vuln n crit to no end
I kinda stopped at lvl 52 before, now my S2 character is already 58, loving the game so far! Season 2 definitely fixed a lot. On the point of making hard content, is that even realistic? If you make bosses so difficult that top 1% of players can beat them, what's the point? The games are designed for the majority of people, telling nearly everyone "Fuck off, you're not good enough!" is not good game design.
Rax, the emote wheel key binding for tree of whispers TP is very anti-console. I would rather they allowed us to change the destination of "TP to current region's main city" action.
..... selection wheels are made for console .....
How is that anti console? I play console and see nothing wrong with that, just the same as leave dungeon option
@zarthemad8386 but not key bindings.
@Gomu_Gomu_No_ because we can not key-bind it. We already have a TP to town button, why not improve it instead?
So changes shouldn't be made to the PC version because it can't be done on console? Or are you saying you'd be fine with the PC version getting that kind of update, but you just wouldn't want to be forced to use it on console?
I haven't reached level 100 but I do think you need to keep in mind that the seasonal powers makes players way more powerful than eternal players are. The entire point of their seasons is to make players feel more powerful. The game may still be too easy but seasonal play is supposed to feel too easy considering how they described what they wanted from seasons.
So happy you mentioned resource management, it feels so bad sometimes, i know its their attempt to slow combat but i feel like that can be done with other methods
Id love to see a option to turn off “You cannot cast this skill” warnings on my screen, im almost 999999% sure this issue has been talked about and i’m even more sure the core reason a option hasn’t been added is to discourage macros, for instance if you have a skill that has no animation, you can cast it during other skills and well it’s just a good idea for QoL to macro a few skills with no animation togeyher, however the cannot cast this skill warning screen is annoying
side note WASD support would be also great i mean even as an option, also im pretty sure there is a bug with melee skills that sometimes when attacking a enemy and that enemy dies or maybe even they don’t have to die, but you spin in small tight circles sometimes, it’s pretty annoying happening randomly when attacking seems only with melee type abilities.