Diablo 4 / IV / IIII / Fore / Cope / Seethe

Brahma said:

Come on with this BS man.

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What Nahantu Monk? Isn't that where they're from?

So I picked this back up to give it another try for a few weeks. My biggest gripe is still that there is no sense of progression at all. I quickly learned that gear is largely irrelevant. You only need to change gear 4 times on the trip all the way to looking for greater affixes other than keeping your weapon up to date. You get your first set, temper life and damage on, then it's just a waste changing gear. You get to world tier 3 at level 35, gamble a new set of sacred rares, repeat the process. You get to 55, go to world tier 4 and repeat the process of gambling a rare set of ancestral gear ... maybe do some tempering for resists at this point rather than life. Then your gear is set all the way to the max level 925 gear. You get your first set of 925 and its largely a waste of time to look through the stacks of legendaries for the right rolls because everything has and will continue to die in 1 hit (4-5 hits for bosses) unless you go deep in the Pits.

From there, there is no sort of logical progression route. You want to upgrade your gear to Greater Affix gear but have no path leading you forward. You'd expect facing higher level enemies would be the way the game incentivizes better rewards but Blizzard are retards so of course they don't. The best way is to just farm an endless amount of mobs your level, which don't even try to fight back and haven't at any point so far, in the Blood Maiden spawns or temporarily fight goblins at the minimum level possile for 925 gear to drop.

The only point the game tried to fight back at all was going straight to 70+ pits from leveling or uber bosses. It's just not enough. Why am I wasting hours playing a progression system before anything even pretends to do damage back to me? Sure the game makes you feel powerful but its akin to playing a 10 year old in basketball. When the game doesn't even remotely try to stop you, what are you accomplishing exactly?

Yeah, basically it all comes down to finding a build and the gear to farm 94/99/104 pits in 3-4 minutes. Other than gold the only real endless grind in the game is masterwork mats.

Pushing pits is nothing but bragging rights. For boss farming all you need is a half assed minion necro and a supply of holy bolts. Not great for Lilith, but if your main is a heartseeker rogue or bash barb then you've got her covered already. Really no reason to kill her more than once anyway. That leaves NMDs which are such shit that nobody touches them after getting their 6-7 glyphs to 21, and Helltide which is completely trivial by like level 75.

Byr said:

So I picked this back up to give it another try for a few weeks. My biggest gripe is still that there is no sense of progression at all. I quickly learned that gear is largely irrelevant. You only need to change gear 4 times on the trip all the way to looking for greater affixes other than keeping your weapon up to date. You get your first set, temper life and damage on, then it's just a waste changing gear. You get to world tier 3 at level 35, gamble a new set of sacred rares, repeat the process. You get to 55, go to world tier 4 and repeat the process of gambling a rare set of ancestral gear ... maybe do some tempering for resists at this point rather than life. Then your gear is set all the way to the max level 925 gear. You get your first set of 925 and its largely a waste of time to look through the stacks of legendaries for the right rolls because everything has and will continue to die in 1 hit (4-5 hits for bosses) unless you go deep in the Pits.

From there, there is no sort of logical progression route. You want to upgrade your gear to Greater Affix gear but have no path leading you forward. You'd expect facing higher level enemies would be the way the game incentivizes better rewards but Blizzard are retards so of course they don't. The best way is to just farm an endless amount of mobs your level, which don't even try to fight back and haven't at any point so far, in the Blood Maiden spawns or temporarily fight goblins at the minimum level possile for 925 gear to drop.

The only point the game tried to fight back at all was going straight to 70+ pits from leveling or uber bosses. It's just not enough. Why am I wasting hours playing a progression system before anything even pretends to do damage back to me? Sure the game makes you feel powerful but its akin to playing a 10 year old in basketball. When the game doesn't even remotely try to stop you, what are you accomplishing exactly?

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Yeah. The only reason to loot gear at all is to upgrade aspects.

The core of the game...the mechanics under the hood are too shallow and I honestly don't think they understand them at all aside from making things laughably OP and bolting +gooder mechanics and stats onto everything.

All I can say beyond that, preorder is a hard no and maybe a no go at 50% off.

I leveled my Sorcerer to 100 with incinerate and what I call the SMB Build. Single Mouse Button Build. I ran around the whole time holding down that button and didn't press anything else. Ah well, at least it is a good movie watching build.

Fucker said:

Yeah. The only reason to loot gear at all is to upgrade aspects.

The core of the game...the mechanics under the hood are too shallow and I honestly don't think they understand them at all aside from making things laughably OP and bolting +gooder mechanics and stats onto everything.

All I can say beyond that, preorder is a hard no and maybe a no go at 50% off.

I leveled my Sorcerer to 100 with incinerate and what I call the SMB Build. Single Mouse Button Build. I ran around the whole time holding down that button and didn't press anything else. Ah well, at least it is a good movie watching build.

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The reality is without a rounded out crafting aspect its all going to feel shallow no matter the ARPG. Armor/Weapon/Jewelry drop in PoE is 99% pointless outside of the tier 1 uniques and super rare bases from Heist, its all about picking up cards/currency/whatever seasonal bs they add then selling it for an item you find on PoE trade or be one of the 1% of people who are master PoE crafters. Build diversity is the real difference, they can add a skill gem like Holy Relic that interacts with a pile of nodes, gems and items in some weird way and you can have a ton of fun, Blizzard doesnt really have a way to do that every season with how the skill trees are implemented.

Does it matter so much if xp gain in D4 is insane and getting max level isnt hard? I dunno, I consider level 90 the end in PoE so any points past that are not required so 90 might as well be the end game, its just running around finding currency, maybe hitting the jackpot and getting a Mageblood or something and doing a super weird build that you need 200 div to even contemplate. Thats not going to fly for the greater overall playerbase of ARPG's, people do actually like finding some +gooder stuff to do Pit+1 while they are sitting on their couch. Diablo 3 was wildly successfull on XBox and Playstation for a reason.

Its two entirely different playerbases, PoE is the niche and I think they are going to try to find a way to expand PoE to the casuals in PoE2. It looks slower, less efficient, more controller supports. You dont need to follow a Path of Building to get the exact tree with the exact stats and nodes to work with a unique in some super unintuitive way that ends up letting you blast a map in 2 minutes while going 50000 miles an hour, cause if you don't you are being inefficient and its not designed around you doing anything but.

No I didnt preorder an expansion when there is unlimited copies and I dont care about cosmetics at all, but I have no doubt it will sell very well, cause Alkaiserx to lose his mind on twitch before he going back to PoE or Grim Dawn and cause a trillion memes here. It will be fun to play though for a few weeks every season, and atleast I dont need to buy stash tabs.

LOL, the aspect system is the only part of D4's "crafting" system I actually like.

I despise all forms of gambling, and the only thing worse is actually being able to render an item unusable, so that pretty much covers everything else in their crafting.

Juvarisx said:

atleast I dont need to buy stash tabs.

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I wouldn't buy stash tabs in this, but only getting six is one of the most retarded things in the game's design.

Vorph said:

LOL, the aspect system is the only part of D4's "crafting" system I actually like.

I despise all forms of gambling, and the only thing worse is actually being able to render an item unusable, so that pretty much covers everything else in their crafting.


I wouldn't buy stash tabs in this, but only getting six is one of the most retarded things in the game's design.

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Lol are you capped at 6? I only bought a few of the gold ones and was offered more.

Dont get me wrong I love PoE and play every season for three weeks to a month and I know GGG needs to monetize, I just prefer it to be cosmetic only but stash tabs are too important so its more an annoyance then anything.

There needs to be a progression of where to get better gear, also 2 and 3 GA gear is laughably bad it’s almost always 1 or 2 horrible affixes, they really should let you reroll GA affixes at the enchanter.

I dont think we should be judging anything by how the Necromancer is playing, right now. He's a literal fucking God at max level. Ive swapped some shit out for these higher tiers, and corpse tendril drags them in, bone prison them, then blight them and while theyre melting - my pets are fucking them up. I know bone prison is sort of a defensive, but thats.. about it. Nothing else in my entire build is a defensive. Ive hit soft cap on armor and resists and I havent even really perfected my gear, much less master crafted it up all the way. My Sorcerer has 3 active defenses I can use for comparison. Hell, I think all the other classes incorporate Unstoppable some kind of way into their builds, but not the Necro Minion build.

If I took the time to analyze everything going on with the Necro, I think I could figure it out. But.. I dont expect the Necro to stay this powerful.

Daidraco said:

I dont think we should be judging anything by how the Necromancer is playing, right now. He's a literal fucking God at max level. Ive swapped some shit out for these higher tiers, and corpse tendril drags them in, bone prison them, then blight them and while theyre melting - my pets are fucking them up. I know bone prison is sort of a defensive, but thats.. about it. Nothing else in my entire build is a defensive. Ive hit soft cap on armor and resists and I havent even really perfected my gear, much less master crafted it up all the way. My Sorcerer has 3 active defenses I can use for comparison. Hell, I think all the other classes incorporate Unstoppable some kind of way into their builds, but not the Necro Minion build.

If I took the time to analyze everything going on with the Necro, I think I could figure it out. But.. I dont expect the Necro to stay this powerful.

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Decrepify is a defensive and in all Golem minion builds I've seen, but yea, it's certainly less than other specs, like Druid Wind Shear that has 3 defensives and so does Barb Bash.

The main thing with necro in this season is that the easiest spec is also the best spec, so that's why it feels OP. On release, the best spec was a no-pet spec where you gotta actually line shit up and play well.

It's not the best spec though. Holy bolts is the only reason it's competitive at all in pit pushing; without that it's down with Druid at the bottom while barb and sorc are like 12-14 ahead. For speedrunning, bash barb and heartseeker rogue are way faster, probably frozen orb sorc too. Necro is really only king of one particular niche -- blowing up uber Duriel even when your gear is complete shit.

Also, I'd argue that heartseeker rogue, bash barb, and wind shear druid are all easier to play, and at least the rogue is easier to gear as well.

Vorph said:

It's not the best spec though. Holy bolts is the only reason it's competitive at all in pit pushing; without that it's down with Druid at the bottom while barb and sorc are like 12-14 ahead. For speedrunning, bash barb and heartseeker rogue are way faster, probably frozen orb sorc too. Necro is really only king of one particular niche -- blowing up uber Duriel even when your gear is complete shit.

Also, I'd argue that heartseeker rogue, bash barb, and wind shear druid are all easier to play, and at least the rogue is easier to gear as well.

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Quite strange that my personal measurement of best spec was blowing up uber Duriel with shit gear then! Oh, you mean I don't need to run dull dungeons get runes to 21 and run the tedious pit to max out masterwork gear, ok then, I guess I will keep playing a little longer!

Also, I meant that the golem spec is the best spec for necro, not across the whole game.

Ah, my bad. I probably should have quoted the post you did instead of yours.

I've been playing mine again since I got that HC amulet to see how much of a difference it makes. (Spoiler: Very little.) Once you've been playing barb or rogue for a while, the necro minion builds are just clunky as fuck and not OP in the slightest outside of Duriel. I was doing a bunch of NMDs last night since I've been cycling through all five classes to farm goblins while getting their glyphs to 21. Necro is the absolute worst at it by a mile. The goblins don't die before they even fully spawn like they do with every other class, then they run off and the pets are too stupid to chase them down and get distracted by the other mobs that the goblin ran past. I was averaging less than 1 goblin per greed shrine and even had a few escape. Stopped doing Extra Shrine ones entirely and just switched to Ancestral Awakenings to get the pain over with. I'm sure the mage build is a lot better for stuff like that but I rolled all my gear for golem.

I've said this in the POE thread, but this game would really benefit from a Last Epoch loot filter since everything drops identified.

Penance said:

I've said this in the POE thread, but this game would really benefit from a Last Epoch loot filter since everything drops identified.

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All I really want is to be able to flip a switch and not see anything less than rare ever, and not even rares while in Helltide. Using a filter any more granular than that would just fuck you over in the mid/long term, because you can never have enough gold which comes from picking up every legendary, and when you're not doing Helltide you really need to grab the rares too or else you will find yourself out of veiled crystals as well.

Sure, it would be nice to have something on the ground highlighted in some way if it happened to roll with +2/3 to a skill I use or if it happened to hit the cdr/ias/cc trifecta or something equally special. Really don't see D4 devs putting any time into creating a system like that though.

Yep