Diablo III Catch-All 2.0

I've been poking at Diablo Immortal for a bit. I didn't see a catch-all thread and don't think I'm invested enough to maintain one, so this seemed like the best place to share my thoughts.

It's surprisingly good on my iPhone Mini, quite good on my iPad, and basically unplayable on Windows 11 due to input lag. It's a little bit sluggish with the mouse and has at least half a second of delay when I plug in an Xbox Series X controller. The same controller paired with my iPad over Bluetooth works great, though the touch controls are good enough that most of the time I don't bother.

The various abilities are familiar, but things work just differently enough to make things interesting, and combo together in interesting ways. For example, the Crusader's shield throw now pulls enemies to you when it returns, which is good for gathering them up for your AOE sweep attack. The Wizard has a cone of air that pushes enemies away, and if you send it through your fire AOE it'll pick up the fire and do a bunch of extra damage. One interesting thing about that... I was on my Monk and did my Cyclone Strike on top of that Wizard fire and it picked up the fire too.

Your abilities don't have inherent variations like they do in Diablo 3, but they seem to be accomplishing the same thing with legendaries. I've got 2 on my Monk. One of them adds a fire DOT to 7-Sided Strike. The other changes Cyclone Strike from the D3 skill into a whirlwind with a duration that picks enemies up as I run through them. All told it's probably simpler than Diablo 3, but the combos work well and they can keep adding new legendaries for as long as they want.

Oh yeah... is this a MMO? That depends on your definition. Is this a WoW clone? No, not really. Is this a Massively Multiplayer Online game? Yes. That mostly hasn't mattered. I've had fun playing solo. But the "Guide" tutorial quest line does now want me to hop in an 8 person group. I'll probably just go back to the story quests.

So far the story has been fine. It's a good excuse to visit different places and fight different enemies. I do like that there seem to be a whole bunch of nefarious factions rather than one unified army of Hell. When I hit level 32 the story took me into a level 35 zone, and the game told me to go level up with the daily kill quests and the 2 kinds of rifts. In a console or PC game that would be a problem but those things actually fit better into the mobile play patterns and I've been happily doing them through level 38.

I've been playing a bit too. No issues with mouse & keyboard on Win 11 for me though.

While I’ve been mostly playing on my phone, I played for a couple hours on Windows 11 just to test it out and also didn’t have any problems with the controls. I was mostly just put off by how lazy of a port it is.

The Diablo Immortal controls work on M/K but they have issues. I feel they are a step backwards in terms of misclicking and attacking when you wanted to move. Problems with large or erratic hit boxes only amplifies this.

It is a game that you can play as long as you want in the campaign as F2P. But stay away from end game or PVP as you will end up getting reamed with the monetization if you play more than very casually.

I don't understand why they didn't go with the mobile puzzle game money grabs. It would have been much less predatory than potentially $100K to max out your character or currencies on top of currencies that you pay real money for.

Oh hey, I had assumed that GET MORE button on all the resource tooltips took you to the store. Turns out it just tells you where things drop. That's much less obnoxious.

I still have very little clue as to how all the currencies and upgrades work. Then again I can say the same thing about Path of Exile and I've beaten the story campaign...

Every new build you do in PoE, you start by beating the story mode... Theorycrafting is strategy, and mapping is endgame...

fangblackbone wrote:

The Diablo Immortal controls work on M/K but they have issues. I feel they are a step backwards in terms of misclicking and attacking when you wanted to move. Problems with large or erratic hit boxes only amplifies this.

The M/K controls are surprisingly not-tight...I mean given how much experience Blizzard has in this space on the PC. I suspect it's because they are supporting a WASD control scheme for the first time ever and the overall feel is like this weird marriage between the traditional click-for-movement & attack and this WASD system.

Diablo 3 for consoles ruined me for industry-setting ARPG controller support and I really hope they clean this up for Immortal because right now it feels like I'm controlling my character with the help of a foreign language translator.

Side note (and to stay within topic relevance): because of Immortal I'm totally down to scratch a D3 itch. Might try to eke out a quick run with a Monk in the current season.

I just did that after becoming deflated and losing steam when the season launched.
I chose Demon Hunter because I've already leveled Wizard and Monk to 70 (T16 capable Inna and T11 capable Typhon)

Maclintok wrote:

The M/K controls are surprisingly not-tight...I mean given how much experience Blizzard has in this space on the PC. I suspect it's because they are supporting a WASD control scheme for the first time ever and the overall feel is like this weird marriage between the traditional click-for-movement & attack and this WASD system.

It's input lag. The lag is small enough with the mouse controls that I didn't peg that as the problem right away, but after comparing it to the obvious lag on the controller... that's what it is.

My theory is this isn't so much a port as it is an officially sanctioned translation/emulation layer for the Android version.

Maclintok wrote:

Diablo 3 for consoles ruined me for industry-setting ARPG controller support and I really hope they clean this up for Immortal because right now it feels like I'm controlling my character with the help of a foreign language translator.

Immortal is great with a controller... on my iPad. It's arguably better than III because direction and area targeted effects give you an appropriately-sized reticle that you can aim with the right stick.

Tried it tonight: the game does play excellent on the iPad with the Dualshock 4. I want this responsiveness on the PC!

I've been playing quite a bit as well, I'm really liking it. a Level 33 Barb and a level 20 Necro. Using the Elite 2 controller on an iPad the abilities that charge just don't work, it'll not even register the button press reliably and the long charge never. Barb has currently only instant skills so it works fine. Touch works surprisingly well.

Wonder why they didn't incorporate roll from console D3, could be they couldn't figure how to make it fit mobile screens.

Maclintok wrote:

Tried it tonight: the game does play excellent on the iPad with the Dualshock 4. I want this responsiveness on the PC!

The "quick fix" of uncapping the frame rate and disabling vertical sync (by default anyway) on PC helped a little bit with the input lag. Still looking forward to a proper patch.

Any of you guys started a warband yet? I’m having fun but would love to get a group going.

Warband?

*does a Google*

Capped at 8 people? That seems like an awkward size for something that looks long-term.

I'm not opposed to grouping in principle, but as a parent of a 14 month old child I tend to have to quit out mid activity...

@jdzapppa: I'm not a fan of how they implement this Warband system. I started one thinking it was like my own clan, until I discovered the actual Clan feature and how it costs much resources to start your own and the group size is much larger.

Warbands still seem kind of linked to Clans? Kind of? I'm in a very casual clan now and feel like leaving because it is so casual that there's absolutely zero top-down communication from the leader and/or officers and it's hard to get people together for activities, even for really quick rift runs.

So TL;DR: I'm on the hunt for new clan and would definitely love to warband with you jdzappa but I think we'd also need to be on the same server. I'm on Burning Hells server (west coast).

n/a

Season 27 is going to be another monster:
Get an item to convert anything into its primal ancient version.
Lots of awesome changes to tragouls, akkhans, and tal rasha.
Plus a half dozen other things like magic missile casts 20 missiles and your gargantuan casts locust swarm and summons zombie dogs with all their runes

I highly recommend playing the PTR.
It is bonkers.
In a sense, it is sort of like playing higher level Path of Exile.

*looks at Diablo 4 looming on the horizon*

*looks at Heroes of the Storm development petering out unceremoniously*

Maybe the D3 team figures their days are numbered and they're determined to go out in a blaze of glory before they all get punted over to [unnamed survival game].

So I have crap gear, no gems and 400K damage but my necro annihilated T11 and is probably T14 capable if not higher but I have some toughness issues that need addressing.

The rub is the necro is a corpse explosion/lance build with the pestilence set and the golem season special property. The golem property allows your golem to pick and hold up to 30 corpses. When you use a corpse skill it uses one of the golem's corpses regardless of whether there is one of the ground nearby. So you can cast corpse skills at any location and at any time if the golem has corpses. Also, the corpse skill only uses one corpse but casts as if the max corpses were used. I have yet to try it with the revive + the legendary property that grows in power with the number of corpses used. I think that could be incredibly powerful.

But right now, I use the 2 piece pestilence to cast free ricocheting corpse lances whenever I cast final embrace corpse explosion. It is such a blast right now where groups of most things are one shotted by the explosions. The lances expand the AoE damage even further. And I will never run out of corpses so long as enemies don't take 4 hits or more and I gather big enough groups of enemies.

edit: And with just about an hour of play and reconfiguring, my necro is totally over T16 capable. She only has 670K damage, 2 sub 55 gems, and 40% crit chance. So there is a LOT of room to grow. She is pretty squishy though.

Hey, so am I the only one where the "who else is playing" display hasn't worked for, like, 3-4 years?

When I change the difficulty and the "rifts/bounties/etc" setting, it'll say there are 397 players in that mode, but then time out trying to join a game, or it'll say 0 players and join me instantly into a full game. I can't remember it ever having worked.

I've never used that feature.
Bummed that I am sick so I haven't played much.

Ok. My Meteor Wizard can teleport for days and walks through T16 like it's a stroll through the park. I finished Boss Mode with five minutes to spare twice. I promised myself I wouldn't do this to myself again. But I think it's time. The white whale. The castle in the sky. The pipedream.

The Cosmic Wings.

IMAGE(https://c.tenor.com/CIfteVbUwgcAAAAC/mike-myers-wayne-campbell.gif)

Since I just found rainbow sword the other day, you may be in luck this season. Or out of luck since I used it all.

fenomas wrote:

Hey, so am I the only one where the "who else is playing" display hasn't worked for, like, 3-4 years?

When I change the difficulty and the "rifts/bounties/etc" setting, it'll say there are 397 players in that mode, but then time out trying to join a game, or it'll say 0 players and join me instantly into a full game. I can't remember it ever having worked.

This sounds like a NAT issue

Having now leveled up, I think the "who else is playing" thing shows numbers for max level games, so it's just meaningless if you haven't leveled yet. (I also now remember having had this same realization in previous seasons.)

So my necro found this thing:

https://diablo.fandom.com/wiki/Funer...

Holy hell it's AMAZING. I just roll through groups now and it is absolutely DELIGHTFUL.

Combine that with the equipment that cause a free death nova to be cast when you use siphon blood and you are golden
The offhand Iron Rose...