Diablo IV - Catch All

Robear wrote:

Vargen, if you simply right click on an assigned skill, it will deallocate. Easy mode. Also, when you have four health charges but still are not full, running onto a health potion will auto-heal you.

Yeah, discovering that is what helped me figure out how to do it on the controller. Makes perfect sense with mouse and keyboard. Is bass-ackwards on controller. Other than that quibble, it's been a dream to play on controller. I had expected that I would be using the mouse a lot in the menus and such, but I really haven't been.

It seems that in an effort to move on from Diablo 3's weak story they also threw out some of the innovations they had in the actual telling. Namely: plot NPCs would accompany you and drop exposition while you killed things and kept making progress towards your objective. D4's story is nice enough so far, but I feel like I've done too much standing around while people talk.

It is more MMO-ish, which makes it one of the better ones out there. And the scaling means that anywhere you go, it's still a challenge. I like the pick-up partying; just be in the vicinity of another player to get benefits.

The crafting is different but understandable. I think they greatly increased Legendary drops; I have 3 and I'm level 14 or so. And I've redone my skills once to fit a great pair of Legendary gloves.

I hope they do another Beta soon. This is entirely too comfortable a game for me to have to wait until June for my next taste.

Glad to see mostly good impressions so far, but I'll be holding out a few months after release to see how hard they lean into monetization.

Sounds like I’m going to have to go through the process of recovering my battle.net account. It’s been years and I have a new phone and computer.

Apparently I have to send my photo ID and pray it works.

But new Diablo must be worth it, right?

Namely: plot NPCs would accompany you and drop exposition while you killed things and kept making progress towards your objective. D4's story is nice enough so far, but I feel like I've done too much standing around while people talk.

D4 has this too. Even one of the side quests where you are looking for a woman's husband has it.
One of the side effects of having a dash skill is that you can't use space to skip/advance conversations. (using the mouse button is more clunky I've found) Not too much of a big deal. Just I didn't need a dash and space worked better

The story adds even further to the gothic horror atmosphere. The other beta didn't have any of it so things were just drab.

Any guesses on the identity of the decaying faced wolf?

Read something about the beta closing at 12pm Pacific today so hopped on this morning to play until the very end. Noon came and went and I was still playing. I guess it runs until tomorrow morning then?

12pm PST tomorrow

fangblackbone wrote:
Namely: plot NPCs would accompany you and drop exposition while you killed things and kept making progress towards your objective. D4's story is nice enough so far, but I feel like I've done too much standing around while people talk.

D4 has this too. Even one of the side quests where you are looking for a woman's husband has it.

I've had NPCs accompany me, but there wasn't much conversation while we were on the move. And I keep having to stop and have visions.

I tried the other two classes. Skipping the cut scenes really made the opening sequence go faster. They're pretty good about making sure it skips you ahead to the next playable bit and not just the current scene.

Did anyone else randomly get jumped by... an old friend?

Spoiler:

I was checking out my first dungeon and I was a little ways in when I heard "FRESH MEAT" and The Butcher came charging at me Diablo 1 style. He was fast enough to basically hard counter my dodge-and-kite build and he killed me good. After I respawned and trudged back to where I saw him he was gone.

Same thing happened to me! I was level 7 I think? Died quickly.

So I love this game. I thought I would miss critting an enemy with a meteor for 6 trillion points of damage, but the aesthetic and the detail the put into this gives me a happy. The best parts of 3 and 2 went into this and I'm. f*cking. Hooked. I always knew I would buy it, but I didn't think I'd fall this deep this fast.

I'm with you man. Totally hooked.

Agreed. Nowhere near as simple as the first one. More towards the Path of Exile system set, just not as complicated. Can't wait to see the end-game, though.

Robear wrote:

Agreed. Nowhere near as simple as the first one. More towards the Path of Exile system set, just not as complicated. Can't wait to see the end-game, though.

Yeah, if it's at least as good as Adventure Mode I'll be very happy.

That jumping by an old friend absolutely guaranteed I am not going to play hardcore, ever.
At least you had to open the door in past games, giving you the option of avoiding him.

My sorc ended up lvl 21. My rogue almost 15. My barb ended up almost 8.

I hope they continue to work on the barbarian. It got better but I find her the least fun. She probably passed the druid though unless they made some changes to her as well. We will see next week.

I know there are some crazy OP barb builds out there. But are they fun?

I'm gonna wait until release to pick this up but from what I was reading local co-op is only available on the console versions and there's cross-play. That makes me want to go with the PS5 version.

I played on the PS5. The controls are fine, and it looked like I was able to join the build, but is there ever a moment where they go over the systems and UI in detail? I ended up having to hunt around for various things. All I saw was a brief pop-up saying "Aspects do this" but then having to figure out where to find them, and then finding two areas labeled Aspects. I almost put it down because it was such a slow start, but got into it once the map opened up and I figured out how to use additional skills. Hoping the on-boarding and training in the full game is a little more fully fleshed out. My son, who loves these types of games, bounced right off it because he couldn't figure out the various systems or how to do anything beyond just basic attacks.

I always played a Barb. Had some time today and tried the Rogue. Wow. That is fun. I mean a lot of fun compared to the Barb. Never thought I'd like Rogue.

I tried the beta on PC with mouse and PS5. Never played D3 on console. But wow, it is really easy to play. It's natural. Now I can't decide if I should keep my PC preorder or get the PS5. Or both. It's so nice to play while laying on the couch.

I had such a good time playing the classes and getting back into Diablo! I got my rogue to 21, Barbarian to 9 and Sorceror to 5. Really had fun trying out all 3 differing playing styles and cannot wait to delve into the necro and druid later this week. I didn't play barb and sorceror as much more due to time more than anything.

Loved the dark overall feel and atmosphere of the game. It brought me back to my earlier Diablo days and really amped to play at release as well!

I'm really digging the mix of ranged and melee that you can do with the Rogue. I hope they can maintain a good balance there; I'll be disappointed if the only viable builds are to focus on one or the other.

I like what they're doing with the character stats. Each class has one stat that's a primary damage boosting stat, like in D3 or WoW, but they derive things like critical strike chance and resource regeneration from the stats that aren't "theirs." So gear drops aren't as siloed between the classes, but are still better for some than for others. I'm sure that will all go out the window when Legendary effects become a big part of builds but it'll be interesting while it lasts.

Balthezor wrote:

I tried the beta on PC with mouse and PS5. Never played D3 on console. But wow, it is really easy to play. It's natural. Now I can't decide if I should keep my PC preorder or get the PS5. Or both. It's so nice to play while laying on the couch.

IV has controller support on the PC. I played it that way all weekend and it worked great. Not sure how easy it is for you to run it on the PC while you lay on your couch, but it could be a relevant data point.

The really cool thing about playing a bow Rogue was still being able to equip all the fancy daggers and swords and whip out a melee-based skill if needed. I used Dash for this purpose for the majority of my time as it provided an additional escape skill beyond the standard dodge that could still be relied on to add some damage here and there.

Anyone else notice the legendary item abilities weren't specific to gear type? I really like the idea that I'm not pigeonholed to one specific weapon if the same ability can role on boots.

I had not noticed that. Very cool.

The Rogue build I liked used the basic archery shot with the knockback/knockdown for crowd control and building combo points plus one of the ranged core skills for plinking away at distant enemies and bosses. I also had the stick-your-knives-in-them-and-they-fly-back-to-you-in-a-bit skill that I would combo with the dash for AOE. Then I added in the stealth skill and the skill that gives you 100% crit on the attack that breaks stealth. That applied not just to the initial hit, but also to the fly-back damage, so I could obliterate entire groups in one go if I set it up right. Towards the end there I was imbuing most of those with shadow, making enemies explode on death (or take the damage themselves if they lived through it). I never quite made it up to mixing in any of the Ultimate skills, but that gives me something to look forward to.

fangblackbone wrote:

That jumping by an old friend absolutely guaranteed I am not going to play hardcore, ever.
At least you had to open the door in past games, giving you the option of avoiding him.

I have a hard time believing they'll keep it like that, just because of hardcore. I think it was just a beta thing, I at least hope it was.

I rather like it in Eternal, assuming you'll get the occasional encounter with him and it isn't one-and-done. I imagine beating him for the first time on a character will feel great.

It does need some balancing for Hardcore, but I wouldn't want them to nerf the mechanic in Eternal because of it. Hopefully they'll be able to adjust the experience independently in the two modes.

Maybe it's possible to just retreat and preserve your character that way. I didn't try that because I didn't realize this was a special thing until after I was dead.

Grenn wrote:

Anyone else notice the legendary item abilities weren't specific to gear type? I really like the idea that I'm not pigeonholed to one specific weapon if the same ability can role on boots.

Yes, but did you notice that the effects of the aspect scale differently depending on which item type it's on?

The effects are increased by 50% on an amulet, and by 100% on a weapon. Pretty interesting!

Don't forget that you're only level 25. The cap is 100 IIRC.

In watching some of the reviews of the game and of the dev team updates, they pointed out something that I missed. We all know that Barb is demonstrably harder than Sorcerer in the beta. But long term? Barbs have the most weapon slots of all the classes. That's 1-3 more legendary weapon affixes than all the other classes. Doesn't matter if you're spin to win or HotA all day. You still get that many more legendary buffs. That could make Barbs insanely powerful late game.

Grenn wrote:

In watching some of the reviews of the game and of the dev team updates, they pointed out something that I missed. We all know that Barb is demonstrably harder than Sorcerer in the beta. But long term? Barbs have the most weapon slots of all the classes. That's 1-3 more legendary weapon affixes than all the other classes. Doesn't matter if you're spin to win or HotA all day. You still get that many more legendary buffs. That could make Barbs insanely powerful late game.

I think that was obvious in the short term too. Barb was more gear dependent than other classes, but it was very easy to become powerful as a barb by unlocking aspects and legendary pieces.

Good interview with the D4 team after last week's beta.

https://www.eurogamer.net/beta-has-b...

Didn't realize that this upcoming weekend (24th-26th) was a free weekend. I guess I'll be giving this a shot if the queue times are in my favour.