Finally, I managed to spend sometime leveling a new druid (because I couldn’t load my existing Eternal Realm characters earlier) on the PTR. I went with a Companion style Druid because it felt pretty strong and there were a few adjustments I wanted to make especially in anticipation of the real patch (i.e. Runewords) that drops tomorrow. With that in mind, I wanted to go over my current experience with the PTR as they (Blizzard) wanted us to provide some sort of feedback on the new system.
I started out my Druid in Hard mode. Even before that, I wanted to re-create another Druid character I had been calling Rude Rick (because I found a funny version that had Rick’s infamous mustache). For whatever reason, I was not able to load that version and ended up creating another generic Druid based slightly off the way a friend of mine looks. So I’m a bit disappointed because I felt something was missing for no good reason. But that along with not being able to load my old Eternal characters practically set the rest of the tone for the game play to me.
In the pre-2.0 system, I use WT2 for leveling. There can be challenges at the start if you lack Tempers, Aspects and use a bad build. But there are some catch up mechanisms during a season to help boost your progress faster. On the PTR, there are no seasons and you’re playing just the Eternal realm. That means, it’s pretty vanilla and the overall lack of content demonstrates a key issue in Diablo 4 that I have been saying for a while. But I tried Helltides for my initial leveling and struggled a bit at the start. You get virtually no drops and you’ll find yourself getting overwhelmed quite quickly. However, my strategy was to acquire a few rares in gathering up enough resources to open Mystery Boxes for some gear. I managed to get three legendaries from crafting which made leveling to 20 a bit more manageable.
Fortunately, once you hit 20, you can simply craft leveling gear. For a fresh season, this will be more difficult because you probably won’t have much resources and probably will only be able to craft 1-2 items at a time. So I think doing things like Legion events and Tree of Whispers to build up your leveling crafting resources are going to be a higher priority while acquiring the seasonal reputation rewards.
However, you also won’t have Season 5’s mistaken advantage of most Tempers from Season 4 and will need to re-acquire all the recipes. There is one small positive because of all the changes that has come up as a result of the change in itemization (meaning removing Sacred and just having normal and Ancestral legendaries or uniques): you will receive 6 retries for Tempering on normal legendaries. Also, a lot of the recipe pools have been rearranged and shrunk to make it a little easier to hit the right Temper you need. That said, I still believe what I had blogged previously on this shitty system.
The other thing you will encounter is the infamous stat squish. I’m still in debate whether or not this is good. The earlier part of leveling won’t really have a huge difference but you probably will want to replace gear every 10 levels or so between 1-50. Within every 10 levels though, the amount of difference in stats isn’t that huge so you probably won’t have to replace your gear as frequently. Also, once you get into Torment 1 and hit level 60, most items will be 750 unless you acquire an Ancestral which will be item level 800. However, with Ancestrals those items will be supremely rare. They are now the equivalent of Ancients from Diablo 3 and I’m guessing their drop rate is around 2-10%
From what I’ve heard the main grind is going to start in WT3 where you try to obtain all Ancestral item slots. That probably will be very tedious given the far lowered drop rates. And because World Tier difficulties now are gated behind The Pit difficulty completion, you will require both a decent build and the gear preparation before moving forward. However, one positive from this is that Nightmare Dungeons are the place that drops Masterworking materials (because their role was swapped with The Pit with respect to leveling Glyphs). Considering the new rarity for Ancestrals, I expect people to Masterwork 750 item level gear and combine that with grinding a variety of content as they try to progress to higher difficulties.
In terms of the Pit, I’m not happy that it’s a requirement. While I didn’t mind Greater Rifts, the Pit just sucks to me. It’s monotonous and feels dreary with bad rewards. Of course, it has two main purposes which is to help you push into higher world tiers and elevate your Glyphs. But the amount of points you get to level up Glyphs is quite low and the experience feels quite tedious. Each Glyph can receive up to 100 levels as the Pit now goes up to 100. However, someone pointed out on the Reddit forums that many Glyphs don’t scale beyond a certain point whether it’s their levels, some perquisite that first unlocks them but does nothing more even after their radius expands, etc. Because of this I’m guessing most people will just leveling up their Glyphs to the point where they can unlock the Legendary effect as those are multipliers. Beyond that it seems like a waste of time.
In talking about Glyphs, let me address another highly controversial issue that has appeared: 5 paragon boards maximum. I read that the developers weren’t happy that players were mostly bum rushing to unlock Glyph slots, which is why they ended up limiting the paragon boards to 5. However, a lot of the paragon boards didn’t change much from what I could tell and there’s mostly useless nodes on the board that are not much better than +5 main stat memes from Diablo 3’s “end game” grind. With 100 additional points, you would think that the developers should have added at least 1-2 new boards for players to unlock or more to really scale up their characters. Instead, we’re stuck with a bunch of worthless nodes that are boring along with bad glyphs.
At least for these end game “systems,” I think they’re pretty fucked. I hated the paragon boards because they were visually a mess and overly complicated without actual complexity. I’m certain some math genius over at Blizzard found some masturbatory formula that appeased the higher ups to get his little puzzle system approved. For the bulk of the player base, it’s really non-intuitive even if with the now limited 5 boards. Yes, you’re supposed to pick boards that align with your build but a lot of the boards themselves are absolute trash. In all honesty, instead of having 5 generically useless boards, I would have preferred to scrap the entire thing and just have a dedicated board that scale up the fantasy of what you’re doing.
Like I’m playing a Companion Druid with a primary emphasis on Wolves. I already have a version of the Storm Companion leggings which effectively converts my Wolves’ damage to lightning. And I know there’s something new coming out for Ravens that converts their damage to lightning. If that’s the case, why can I just have nodes that scale up what my Companions can do with the lightning that I want to customize? Like why can’t I have some sort of node that bounces lightning between my wolves to compensate for my general lack of AoE. Then perhaps, additional points could increase the number of arcs or change the effect to a partial stun.
While I’m on this train of thought, that gets me thinking about the 10 new skill points we receive. I honestly don’t see how we get much out of these. The trees haven’t been modified by that much. Maybe they wanted us to all use Ultimates with the additional points we can place into these. But I didn’t really think what was offered was that great. At least not for my current build. If anything, they should’ve let us select 2 passives to make things more interesting.
None of these things really synergize into anything that makes a build more interesting. I keep saying that a real build is something that truly allows a player to customize how skills operate. You have a base skill such as Wolves. You can have an enabler like those Storm Companion pants to give it flavor. But you then have multiple modes to enhance the behavior of those skills. The current system in place is so schizophrenic, haphazard and thoughtless because there’s no uniform way that the developers can figure out to make any of this really enticing.
The original idea of Tempers sounded interesting up until the RNG selection. But the idea of increasing the size of a fireball was great. The idea of using a system like Masterworking to enhance that attribute was great, except for the RNG portion. But what’s the point of skill points, paragon stats and Glyphs? There’s too many things where this system overlaps functionally with another system. At this point, it’s all just stat soup with little real coherency.
When it comes to skill based systems, I’ve only seen three that ever got it right. Those were Wizardry 6, Wasteland and Shadowrun. Wizardry 6 is probably my favorite by far and made tons of sense. You just had certain skills allotted to a class and assigned them a few points every time you gained a level. However, for certain skills upon usage, you could level them up. Wasteland did something similar but did not use a percentage based system like Wizardry. And Shadowrun’s system was similar to Wastelands minus being able to level one’s skill up through usage. Instead, you received a certain number of karma points that could be spent on attributes or skills. But the way those skills operated using the 1d6 per level method vs a hit target probably helped the system avoid the nuttier stuff that probably lies at the bottom of some stupid math code on the Diablo 4 backend.
With the Diablo 4 skill and paragon systems, I honestly can’t tell the purpose of one or the other apart at times. You get these weird conditional bonuses or straight bonuses and some arbitrary percentage value multiplier. But the numbers at face value don’t really seem to mean a lot. They’re more for calculations that seem to sound good which means we’ll use them. Yet you can’t really scale much beyond types of damage or damage reduction, etc. And there’s very few things to really scale an ability, although Tempers does try. But it feels really limited and uninteresting. I know you can do something like give cold damage to a sword. But most people won’t do anything like that because the skill itself is meant to have a very obvious value that it needs to work with. That’s the part that drives me crazy. Like why can’t I customize how for instance, I have a bunch of wolves that shoot lightning between each other and paralyze enemies and scale that damage? Why am I being forced to use Neurotoxins even though my wolves should be more lightning based? It’s this stuff that makes no sense and limits what we can do and prevents me from calling the Diablo 4 system a real build enabling system.
At any rate, I’m not that hopeful for the game right now. I think the developers are clueless and too afraid of focusing on balance rather than fun or that some oddball KPI metric is keeping the game in such a shitty state. The end game activities just aren’t engaging for long periods and there’s not enough true build diversity in place due to systems that don’t really boost what you want but what the developers can test.
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