• Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.

Diablo IV Beta |Mini OT| READ THE OP

What would you rate Diablo IV

  • 1 (Amazing)

    Votes: 116 37.3%
  • 2

    Votes: 111 35.7%
  • 3

    Votes: 62 19.9%
  • 4

    Votes: 12 3.9%
  • 5 (Dreadful)

    Votes: 10 3.2%

  • Total voters
    311

Bitmap Frogs

Mr. Community
Aside from my own Druid build I’ve seen some really slick ones come out on YouTube today .

Barbarian is truly the only shit class in beta. Which sucks because it’s what I play in all Diablo games my first time all the way through.

Has anyone found a build that is on par with rogue Necro sorc on Barb? It seems fine at mob clear but bosses completely ruin it.

There’s been a lot of experimentation on the Barbarian and there’s a build combining thorns + bleeding that does a lot of dps. That’s what Kripp reported.
 

Miyazaki’s Slave

Gold Member
Wait what???? That’s kinda awesome. Going back to Tristram and Westmarch in future expansions will be dope.

You go back to Tristram in the beta and after D3 that place is pretty much a ghost town (literally). Baal takes you there and is all “the Horodrium suck…you suck…everything sucks…especially Lilith please kill her.”

No more blood to squeeze from that rock.
 

Kacho

Gold Member
Yeah thorns + bleed is the safe build for Barbs right now. The problem with that is it goes against the design philosophy for Diablo 4. They want to move away from checklist cookie cutter builds, so if people are asking how not to suck on Barb and Druid there’s a big problem.
 

MikeM

Member
Going PC here for the ultrawide life but played it a decent amount on PS5 and Series X and it runs really well on consoles as well

I do agree dungeon crawlers don't NEED 120fps but there are a lot of things in life I don't NEED but with tweaked settings getting close to my monitors 240 fps and its butter
Lol yeah I hear you. I like the 120fps at 4k on mine but I also like the idea of potential couch co-op with the kids, especially since the console penalty on this game is minimal.

🤷‍♂️
 

Minsc

Gold Member
Lol yeah I hear you. I like the 120fps at 4k on mine but I also like the idea of potential couch co-op with the kids, especially since the console penalty on this game is minimal.

🤷‍♂️
Good thing it supports playing the same account over multiple platforms! Just buy it everywhere! Too bad all games aren't like that.
 

DryvBy

Member
What's the end game content like? Dungeons? I read the level cap is some 50 and paragon 50. That's seem low for a GaaS game coming from Diablo 3.
 

amigastar

Member
Level Cap in D4 is 100, you unlock Paragon Boards at lvl 50. You get 4 Paragon Points every lvl you reach starting from 50.
 
Last edited:

Dr. Claus

Vincit qui se vincit
Deleted it after playing another 4 hours. The game is beyond shallow and mindless. Fun for a few hours, but man its a farcry from what made D1 and 2 great. Blizzard really is a shell of its former self.
Did you fought the Butcher ?
Try beating him.

Even Diablo 2 was hard. But the real game even in that started at Hell difficulty.
D4 is made to play forever. The insane difficulty spikes will come.
D2 was fun and challenging from the outset and only became more challenging as you got further in. I should not have to play for tens of hours to have any semblance of a challenge. That is shitty design and shows that the devs have no clue what they are doing. D2 is made to play forever. D4 feels like the worst of every modern game design decision rolled into one pretty looking package.
 

Minsc

Gold Member
I’m not paying for it twice lol I have been playing the beta between ps5 and pc.
At least the upfront cost is not repeated - if you buy in at $60/platform, then it's $10/month for the battle pass each season, after 5 years the cost for 1 platform would be $660 and the cost for having two different platforms would be $720, so I guess the difference is less terrible there... still quite a bit I guess.
 

Minsc

Gold Member
Deleted it after playing another 4 hours. The game is beyond shallow and mindless. Fun for a few hours, but man its a farcry from what made D1 and 2 great. Blizzard really is a shell of its former self.

D2 was fun and challenging from the outset and only became more challenging as you got further in. I should not have to play for tens of hours to have any semblance of a challenge. That is shitty design and shows that the devs have no clue what they are doing. D2 is made to play forever. D4 feels like the worst of every modern game design decision rolled into one pretty looking package.
I have countless fond memories of D2, and none of them are of it's difficulty anywhere from before Act V. Actually outside a few cheap bosses, I have very little memories of anything being difficult in D2. I definitely feel like you're exaggerating a ton here, especially since what we have in this beta is basically only comparable to Act I.
 

MikeM

Member
At least the upfront cost is not repeated - if you buy in at $60/platform, then it's $10/month for the battle pass each season, after 5 years the cost for 1 platform would be $660 and the cost for having two different platforms would be $720, so I guess the difference is less terrible there... still quite a bit I guess.
There is a battlepass? I did not know that
 

Dr. Claus

Vincit qui se vincit
I have countless fond memories of D2, and none of them are of it's difficulty anywhere from before Act V. Actually outside a few cheap bosses, I have very little memories of anything being difficult in D2. I definitely feel like you're exaggerating a ton here, especially since what we have in this beta is basically only comparable to Act I.

You could still die in Act 1 of D2. You still had to heal and use some modicum of strategy. regardless of the class I played, I just steamrolled everything and never had to worry about dropping health aside from a single optional boss in D4's "harder" mode. The only way you could get harder difficulties is by completing major acts/milestones within the campaign - which means playing for 10s of hours or finding a guide to rush to the point where you can unlock it. Neither are good design choices. Let me play on harder difficulties if I want to from the outset.

I wouldn't even mind if it was just the beta that they limited those difficulties on, but the harder torments specifically list beating/completing particular acts/reaching particular areas to unlock. I doubt that will be changed come the full release.
 
Last edited:

Nydius

Member
This will probably be an unpopular opinion but having now gotten three classes to 25 (Druid, Sorc, Rogue), my biggest take away from this beta was… boredom.

Open world and dungeons play out like this: Run 15-30 seconds, run into a group of 5 enemies, run 15-30 seconds, run into a group of 8 enemies, run 15-30 seconds, oops dead end, backtrack a minute or more with no combat. In the open world, at least you occasionally run across an event to break the monotony, unless someone else is already there and it’s mostly over.

Then there’s the dungeons that play the same every time: Kill everything in small clumps of mobs around the map, open door OR find items/levers, open door, move to next area with the same tile set; repeat until you reach boss room where you get a predictable sub-boss that spams the same set of moves and summons the same blood, spirit, or skeleton adds.

The skill trees are also boring because they’re the typical “increase damage/function by %” crap skills that are difficult to qualify in the gameplay experience and really only benefits people who make spend more time making builds in Excel spreadsheets than actually playing. Adding another x% to my resource pool is an utterly meaningless and unfulfilling “skill” point. It also means that there will be mathematically quantifiable “best/meta builds” that people use to the exclusion of everything else, and if you’re not “meta”, you’ll be on the outside looking in (similar to old end game raiding back in vanilla through WotLK WoW).

Interacting with characters for dialog is a slog. Ask a NPC a question, wait for camera to do a slow zoom, hear dialog, wait for camera to zoom back out before getting the dialog box again to ask another question or progress the quest. So much wasted time on pointless slow zoom animations…

Say what you will about the pitfalls of Diablo 3 but I was never bored. In D4 Beta I was continually bored by the lack of action, the lack of enemy and dungeon diversity, and the really slow NPC interactions.
 
Last edited:

amigastar

Member
So far i like the experience D4 gives me, but coming from Diablo 2 Resurrected the whole game feels more streamlined, more safe. Can't explain it but it is simplified for now.
Anyways i will get the game on Release.
But i hope Path of Exile will get an open beta soon since i really wanna try it out.
 
Last edited:

Minsc

Gold Member
This will probably be an unpopular opinion but having now gotten three classes to 25 (Druid, Sorc, Rogue), my biggest take away from this beta was… boredom.

Open world and dungeons play out like this: Run 15-30 seconds, run into a group of 5 enemies, run 15-30 seconds, run into a group of 8 enemies, run 15-30 seconds, oops dead end, backtrack a minute or more with no combat. In the open world, at least you occasionally run across an event to break the monotony, unless someone else is already there and it’s mostly over.

Then there’s the dungeons that play the same every time: Kill everything in small clumps of mobs around the map, open door OR find items/levers, open door, move to next area with the same tile set; repeat until you reach boss room where you get a predictable sub-boss that spams the same set of moves and summons the same blood, spirit, or skeleton adds.

The skill trees are also boring because they’re the typical “increase damage/function by %” crap skills that are difficult to qualify in the gameplay experience and really only benefits people who make spend more time making builds in Excel spreadsheets than actually playing. Adding another x% to my resource pool is an utterly meaningless and unfulfilling “skill” point. It also means that there will be mathematically quantifiable “best/meta builds” that people use to the exclusion of everything else, and if you’re not “meta”, you’ll be on the outside looking in (similar to old end game raiding back in vanilla through WotLK WoW).

Interacting with characters for dialog is a slog. Ask a NPC a question, wait for camera to do a slow zoom, hear dialog, wait for camera to zoom back out before getting the dialog box again to ask another question or progress the quest. So much wasted time on pointless slow zoom animations…

Say what you will about the pitfalls of Diablo 3 but I was never bored. In D4 Beta I was continually bored by the lack of action, the lack of enemy and dungeon diversity, and the really slow NPC interactions.

I definitely had a similar feeling, but it IS just the first Act. If Act 2 and 3 and so on all are exactly the same, then I would absolutely regret my purchase. I'm guessing that the rest of the game being a bit more dynamic than the beginning... there's a lot of stuff I haven't gotten, like the horse, the cube/equivalent, and so forth. Half of the fun of D2 for me was collection the chipped/flawed gems and getting yourself up to perfect gems, and making items out of other items. I was happy to see the gems are back in.

I definitely feel like the beta isn't really the best indication of the moment to moment gameplay in D4. I almost would have preferred to see everyone having level 100 characters in the middle of final act somewhere and just dying every other mob left and right haha, but I don't think that would have been any better on getting them positive word of mouth, especially with the copy/paste builds that would come out and so forth. At least in the early stages you don't feel there's a whole lot of things you can mess up, but that is also a bit of the game's problem.

Though from what I read if you find yourself fighting level 35-40 enemies in this beta they can kill you pretty easily. I wasn't sure on the level scaling at first, but since there's an upper limit I'm fine with it, if anything it just speeds up the early parts of the game, rather than make you feel like completing level 3 quests is a complete waste of time because you get absolutely no experience to do them.
 
Last edited:

Rentahamster

Rodent Whores
Yeah thorns + bleed is the safe build for Barbs right now. The problem with that is it goes against the design philosophy for Diablo 4. They want to move away from checklist cookie cutter builds, so if people are asking how not to suck on Barb and Druid there’s a big problem.
I've gotten my barb to the point where I have functionally unlimited fury and 80% crit chance due to items that proc fury gain on CC and +crit chance the longer I channel whirlwind. It slaps pretty hard. I fought Ashava and was whirlwinding 90% of the time. Barb is going to be dope, but very HIGHLY gear dependent.
 

aries_71

Junior Member
Tried the beta. Is there any kind of in game codex or mission summaries? An RPG with lots of secondary missions without some kind of past missions summaries is confusing.
 

Shodai

Member
This will probably be an unpopular opinion but having now gotten three classes to 25 (Druid, Sorc, Rogue), my biggest take away from this beta was… boredom.

Open world and dungeons play out like this: Run 15-30 seconds, run into a group of 5 enemies, run 15-30 seconds, run into a group of 8 enemies, run 15-30 seconds, oops dead end, backtrack a minute or more with no combat. In the open world, at least you occasionally run across an event to break the monotony, unless someone else is already there and it’s mostly over.

Then there’s the dungeons that play the same every time: Kill everything in small clumps of mobs around the map, open door OR find items/levers, open door, move to next area with the same tile set; repeat until you reach boss room where you get a predictable sub-boss that spams the same set of moves and summons the same blood, spirit, or skeleton adds.

The skill trees are also boring because they’re the typical “increase damage/function by %” crap skills that are difficult to qualify in the gameplay experience and really only benefits people who make spend more time making builds in Excel spreadsheets than actually playing. Adding another x% to my resource pool is an utterly meaningless and unfulfilling “skill” point. It also means that there will be mathematically quantifiable “best/meta builds” that people use to the exclusion of everything else, and if you’re not “meta”, you’ll be on the outside looking in (similar to old end game raiding back in vanilla through WotLK WoW).

Interacting with characters for dialog is a slog. Ask a NPC a question, wait for camera to do a slow zoom, hear dialog, wait for camera to zoom back out before getting the dialog box again to ask another question or progress the quest. So much wasted time on pointless slow zoom animations…

Say what you will about the pitfalls of Diablo 3 but I was never bored. In D4 Beta I was continually bored by the lack of action, the lack of enemy and dungeon diversity, and the really slow NPC interactions.

With an understanding that the beta is fairly limited in scope - On Friday my battle.net friends list was filled with people in D4. Today, it's barren, and most are playing WoW.
 
I have countless fond memories of D2, and none of them are of it's difficulty anywhere from before Act V. Actually outside a few cheap bosses, I have very little memories of anything being difficult in D2. I definitely feel like you're exaggerating a ton here, especially since what we have in this beta is basically only comparable to Act I.
This. Hilarious to me that people are now saying D2 is difficult, it's pure nostalgia. It was so easy to farm and finish the game even on hell
 

Arsic

Gold Member
Got Barb to 25, legendaries, etc and I can see it will absolutely be top tier in full game.

- We don’t have access to the specialization stuff
- You literally get perma stats from leveling up weapon types
- Certain legendaries can make it broken like one that makes thorns effects on one enemy spread to all in area. So if thorn is proccing from even 1-2 enemies in an instant a whole screen just pops without you touching a thing

I was going to pass on maining it even though I always beat Diablo games on Barb first but after my time with it here in beta I’m back on board 100%.
 

Shodai

Member
- You literally get perma stats from leveling up weapon types
The whole expertise/weapon leveling system seems so antiquated and makes no sense in a Diablo game. Seemingly not a lot makes sense in this game given its protracted development (or maybe the length of development explains exactly why things don't make sense).
 

Arsic

Gold Member
The whole expertise/weapon leveling system seems so antiquated and makes no sense in a Diablo game. Seemingly not a lot makes sense in this game given its protracted development (or maybe the length of development explains exactly why things don't make sense).

I enjoyed it. To each his own though.
 
Last edited:

Rentahamster

Rodent Whores
Ayye can you share it? Like the build? 👀
The main components to make it work are the items and skills that help generate fury

+3 fury regen on shouts (per shout, so I can pop all 3 of my shouts and get to 100% fury in 2 seconds) This also helps with the legendary that increases your damage for every point above max fury. I can get to 180% damage buff purely on my shouts alone.

+fury on CC. I have the skill that applies slow whenever I apply bleed. Since I'm using a two hand sword, I always apply bleed, so therefore I always apply slow. I also have the legendary aspect that sometimes stuns bleeding enemies. So that's more CC fury proc. I also have the legendary that makes the procced CC sometimes AOE. So that's even more CC proc chances and +fury gain.

+critical chance for every second whirlwind is channeled. Since I have perma-whirlwind, I have perma +90% crit chance.

+attack speed for every critical hit legendary aspect.

I'm basically doing unlimited whirlwind on bosses and critting for 1.5K+ every hit.

All I need to comlpete the build is that legendary aspect that adds 1 second of berserk time for every critical hit.
 

Arsic

Gold Member
It is funny how I get bored with Diablo 4. The same old shit. They put so much effort into making the same old shit.
Genre may not be for you plus it’s only a small slice of the full game?

You don’t have the other acts, class specs, paragon tree, mounts , more world bosses, end game in its entirety and much more.

To some extent you don’t want to deviate too far from what works which is why Diablo sells millions. But they’ve added so much that isn’t in any prior entries of the series to say “same old shit” is odd.
 
Last edited:

SatansReverence

Hipster Princess
Finished with the beta I think. Absolutely looking forward to being able to open up the game and work towards that endgame.

Art style is just
perfection GIF


And easy transmogs that stay even after you change gear

taxi driver perfection GIF



abfb679f065edd00f1c778b987d0779b.jpg


a42e26daa27e0e25d3475b2c66b0a23c.jpg


575e159351834f47cb2de4d9fad12306.jpg


Only got these 3 to level 25.

I couldn't possibly be less interested in playing a necro and sorc was mind crushingly boring to play so I stopped at level 15 or something. Might revisit in the final release at some point.
 

amigastar

Member
Finished with the beta I think. Absolutely looking forward to being able to open up the game and work towards that endgame.

Art style is just
perfection GIF


And easy transmogs that stay even after you change gear

taxi driver perfection GIF



abfb679f065edd00f1c778b987d0779b.jpg


a42e26daa27e0e25d3475b2c66b0a23c.jpg


575e159351834f47cb2de4d9fad12306.jpg


Only got these 3 to level 25.

I couldn't possibly be less interested in playing a necro and sorc was mind crushingly boring to play so I stopped at level 15 or something. Might revisit in the final release at some point.
Seriously i'm gushing over the artstyle and graphics in this game. Gear looks so awesome.
 
Last edited:

StreetsofBeige

Gold Member
Played the beta for 3 hours. I think I got to level 12 or 13. Necromancer. Played on the easy adventure difficulty as I just wanted to plow through some of the game.

This is on Series X. So maybe the PC game has a different UI (as usual).

- Got lucky as I got into the game right away with a queue time of only <1 minute
- Solid graphics. The grittier earth tone colours, and more realistic character models looks so much better than D3
- Oddly had some skeleton helper hitching. The game was fine but suddenly they all jerked around at 3 frames per second. But I entered a dungeon and it solved it
- Typical smooth playing gameplay
- Game seems to have an inventory slot system like D2. Each item takes up slots. But I think every item was one slot, so it makes it easy to juggle without puzzle piecing to fit
- The second town you find is big, so lots of running around for certain peddler stalls (ie. the jeweler stall opens at Level 20 and it's all the way on the west part of town from the waypoint)
- The over world seemed less populated of monsters than other games. More running around
- The skill tree will take getting used to as it's skill tree you got to move around from node to node. Each node then branches off into skills and more spiderwebbing. So it seemed like a pain just skimming to see what's there even though my character is low level and couldnt do a lot of stuff
- I didn't see too many online gamers. You see a bunch in town seemingly just standing there, some are running around. I only saw one guy roaming the overworld and we hacked away at some chest events then went our separate ways
- Wasnt hard as I just played on easy skill, but got to that level 25 Karagon stronghold and got my ass whipped, so I bailed asap back down the ladder

It's Diablo with a new coat of paint. 8/10.
 
Last edited:

treemk

Banned
You could still die in Act 1 of D2. You still had to heal and use some modicum of strategy. regardless of the class I played, I just steamrolled everything and never had to worry about dropping health aside from a single optional boss in D4's "harder" mode. The only way you could get harder difficulties is by completing major acts/milestones within the campaign - which means playing for 10s of hours or finding a guide to rush to the point where you can unlock it. Neither are good design choices. Let me play on harder difficulties if I want to from the outset.

I wouldn't even mind if it was just the beta that they limited those difficulties on, but the harder torments specifically list beating/completing particular acts/reaching particular areas to unlock. I doubt that will be changed come the full release.

Yep, by default most characters just suck in D2, up to you to allocate stats, skills, and find gear to make it better. Lots of things will kill you, you never have enough mana, and you will run out of stam if you try to run away. The whole point of an rpg was the process of making your character strong. I don't get the point of level scaled games where the entire world levels up with you. They've removed everything that makes it fun, interesting and rewarding and all that's left is a facade and grinding for the sake of grinding.
 

Shubh_C63

Member
Deleted it after playing another 4 hours. The game is beyond shallow and mindless. Fun for a few hours, but man its a farcry from what made D1 and 2 great. Blizzard really is a shell of its former self.

D2 was fun and challenging from the outset and only became more challenging as you got further in. I should not have to play for tens of hours to have any semblance of a challenge. That is shitty design and shows that the devs have no clue what they are doing. D2 is made to play forever. D4 feels like the worst of every modern game design decision rolled into one pretty looking package.
You must be good at it maybe. I found D4 to be about the same difficulty as D2 for now. D2 you also gets killed by either sudden lightning enchanted mini mob or straight up bosses, and felt about the same in D4 too. Bosses in D4 is definitely done better than D2 and adding dodge and removing health potion drinking spam was a good move. Otherwise in D2 difficulty you just spam Rejuvenation potion and keep hit-run.

Also you were on Realm-2 right. Realm-1 isn't made for diablo veterans.
 

Dr. Claus

Vincit qui se vincit
You must be good at it maybe. I found D4 to be about the same difficulty as D2 for now. D2 you also gets killed by either sudden lightning enchanted mini mob or straight up bosses, and felt about the same in D4 too. Bosses in D4 is definitely done better than D2 and adding dodge and removing health potion drinking spam was a good move. Otherwise in D2 difficulty you just spam Rejuvenation potion and keep hit-run.
To reach that point in D2, you had to grind. In D4, I was so inundated with potions that if I would literally never run out if I had to use them - which I didn't. I maybe used one or two potions throughout the entire time I was playing. I don't consider myself skilled at these games either.

Also you were on Realm-2 right. Realm-1 isn't made for diablo veterans.
Torment 2 or whatever its called. The highest available difficulty in the beta.
 
Top Bottom