Joined the clan. Will add my bud MacGreeve
The Vhenard fight is bullshit as a barb btw. Couple 100% 1 shot deaths I still don’t understand.
I think l lost five to six hours to this today. It’s what I wanted. A big, openish map with stuff to do. Kind of like an ARPG Skyrim.
So impressed with this, the detail on the characters is incredible and being a horror fan loving the cut scenes that advance the story. The scene in the church early on gave me chills!
I’d love to see World of Warcraft abandon the cartoony look for this.
I don’t want to complain too much, but I found this to be incredibly dull. Aside from Chain Lightning, most of the sorcerer abilities felt anemic and lacking impact. Meteor is one of the worst examples. It’s this pumpkin that falls from the sky and hits as hard as a couple basic attacks? Maybe it has something to do with me playing on veteran or playing with a friend or something? I don’t know, I played Diablo 3 with a friend as well and that game always felt great, even at release (I had a lot of problems with the release version of that game, but it felt great).
Tried all the Sorc spells up to L23 and was very meh on everything except for Chain Lightning and the ice barrage skill in the same Core tier. Hydra was okay as well I guess.
And way way way too much interaction with NPCs, dialog, etc. For my tastes, anwyay.
EDIT: To have something positive to contribute, I do like that there’s a bit of an open world! I’ve been wanting that in a ARPG for a long time so it’s nice to see someone taking that approach.
I mean, you can just skip all the dialog, that’s what I’ve been doing.
Of course, but it’s just very frequent. Just not what I’m looking for, I’m sure it’s great for those who want the narrative.
I’ve been trying out using a controller with my new sorc, and so far it’s been a lot more natural for me to navigate around bad stuff and aim at mobs than the old mouse point and click.
I was able to one shot the dungeon boss that gave me grief yesterday, but maybe part of that is the sorcerer. Chain lightning is pretty OP, where you can just press it without really aiming, and all the adds just die.
Yeah, I think controller is great for exactly that reason. Less confusion/misclicks/pathfinding issues than the mouse in these games.
I have only been playing solo veteran so I’m sure it would be much easier if I played with a party. I have had more than 1 hairy situation with Lair bosses. Everything overworld or the events are pretty easy with Frost Nova/Chain Lightning. I haven’t liked the fire spells at all. My guess is that unlike Diablo 3, you will need to get the right Aspects unlocked and on your gear and multiple enchantments to see some of the better playstyles with some of these other elements.
I’m pretty much wrapped at this point. I got my rogue to level 25, but a couple of hours too late to do the World Boss. The next ones are at 1AM and 3AM Eastern if I’ve read that picture I posted properly, and I’m not staying up for that.
I enjoyed it, and it was a nice little teaser for what’s to come in June. I’ve had my fill and I. An happily wait for the real deal now. I doubt I’ll play much, it at all, during the public beta weekend. I really want to save the majority of the experience for launch.
As far as my character goes, she’s pretty lethal. After some continuous boss dungeon mob deaths (on veteran) with my ad hoc mix of melee and ranged skills, I respecced a bunch of times following some online guides until I found one that clicked. It was a melee based backstabby one, which I doubt I would ever play again. I was constantly out of energy and it was annoying. I honestly felt like I was playing Hades, only the controls were clunkier and the characters were a lot less sexy.
I am digging the grim storyline, though.
Blizzards art dept, as usual, did some amazing work.
So I have two questions about the final game:
- How big will the final open world be?
- Will it have an end game adventure mode like D3?
Yeah, best in class.
I have a lot of mixed feelings about what I’ve seen so far.
Really liked: the character customisation. It’s not hugely in-depth but it’s enough, and welcome. Plus holy cow king the female rogue is ripped. That’s awesome! Expected for the barb but it’s cool the rogue isn’t weedy - I did archery for a little while and the upper body strength there is real. Someone brought in a medieval style war bow, my noodle arms could barely pull the string back like an inch (it was something absurd like well over a 100lb draw).
Really liked: loot and skills seem fun, and flexible. Legendaries seem… a bit too common tho. Guess that’s a legacy of D3’s launch, where they were both extremely rare and extremely shit. Maybe the drop rate was just set artificially high for the beta to ensure people got cool stuff to brag about? Barely brushed the various systems but it does look very intriguing. I’m right in thinking you can transfer legendary abilities to yellow items? That’s a cool way to make yellows actually appealing/useful long-term.
Didn’t like: the open world approach. Killing a bunch of enemies only to see them reappear 15 seconds later always kinda sucks. Clearing the map was part of what I enjoyed about the Diablo experience but that’s gone now. It’s all very… Lost Ark. Plus it feels like enemies are constantly just spawning right on top of me and it’s sorta suffocating. Fine if you’re a barb, I guess. Not sure why but even in the dungeons I was soloing there seemed to be a lot of spawning going on as opposed to enemies just mooching about previously.
Didn’t like: the grim darkness of the art direction. The technical execution is great but this is probably the most generic Blizzard’s art output has ever looked to me. Diablo was always cartoony (tho I’d describe D3 as ‘painterly’) but, sadly, they finally gave in to the (very selective memory) of parts of the D2 crowd and it all just feels… brown. Quake brown. Even the snow. It feels so over-egged too. There are mountains of corpses, tentacles, guts, gore everywhere you go. Which is fine, but it’s like… act 1. It feels post-apocalyptic and the battle between heaven and hell hasn’t even started yet. What happened to those moody, empty fields.
Hated: lacks that silky smoothness of D3. Every ARPG I’ve tried since does. :( I guess they’ve really toned down the pace and pizazz of your abilities and such but as a result it all just feels… sluggish. Imprecise. I hit various terrain bugs, not often, but had invisible walls, character not going quite where I expected (esp. with evade) and a bunch of other extremely minor jank which just ended up feeling like grains of sand lodged in… uncomfortable places. It’s a beta, I hope this can be fixed/smoothed out.
Anyway. Got to level 20 for cosmetics and bailed. Doubt I’ll bother going back before launch. fox.mrs didn’t like how it looks which makes me all sorts of sad; we played a lot of D2 and D3 together and that may not happen this time without me begging. (╥﹏╥)
My fire sorc is level 16, just hit a bug trying to town portal out of a dungeon , frozen up on the loading screen. But I have a choice to make with her now. she has been using a hat with +1 hydra, which is great, because I’ve been using that skill and I like it, but I just got a hat with much better stats, but bonuses to ice skills, so I need to decide whether to respec to ice…
Personally I’d keep the hydra hat because hydra is fucking terrific.
It’s basically free to respec at will I say go for it and try everything.
Chain lightning and Hydra puts this game on easy mode. Low risk from range and high damage. Hydra is so automatic sometimes I’m not even anywhere near the boss when he goes down.
Sounds like they really need to do a lot of damage mitigation, crowd control and DPS bump for the melee classs otherwise it’s just too easy for sorc glass cannons to wax everyone.
Maybe those mechanics are much higher in the level and gear chain.
At least for the rogue, I’ve had to respec for some of the harder bosses (for me it was the Den Mother and some spider boss), where I had to focus on either single or multi target. I’d struggle with a “balanced” build, where my basic and energy attacks were split between the two types. Either I couldn’t do enough damage on the boss, or I’d get overrun with the adds.
Have most people been respecing for bosses? Respecs are free or cheap for lower levels, but it seems like they’ll get really expensive later on. So I’m wondering if I’m using respecs as a crutch right now and just need to get good, haha.