This game is going to be huge - it’s the first game I’ve played that really gets the mix between open world/multiplayer experience and solo adventuring right. Love the world map and character depth so far (some rebalancing probably needed), and the fact that I played the game on three platforms and could use the same character etc. was wonderful. Not having to have your friends all buy the same platform makes it far more likely I’ll do more multiplayer, but I never felt like that was needed either, which is rare for games that have tried this sort of thing before.
I’ve already played more D4 than D3 and it’s not particularly close.
I got some aspect that heals you around 35 every time you shape shift, and if your health is full then it fortifies you.
Then there are various skills that do things like give you sorry every time you turn into a human, or attack damage onto anything that shape shifts.
Then for a core skill use pulverize, which does overpower damage (damage bonus based on his much health and fortify you have).
So the main attacks with this are the electric melee, and the bear maul. Just alternate them every attack, and you constantly switch back and forth between human and bear, constantly healing yourself and fortifying yourself. Even if you don’t even hit a target, it heals you and fortifies you. You don’t even need to be in combat. You can just do it while running around.
The electric attack immobilizes enemies and inflicts vulnerability on them.
When your spirit is full, you can just spam it and do pretty huge damage due to vulnerability and overpower.
It’s by far the tankiest build I’ve found, you can just face tank pretty much everything.
This is what my build was as well. I used Blood Howl with the AS buff, Wolves, Trample, and Grizzly Rage. Then you can use Predatory Rage for Iron fur. The good thing about Storm Strike is you can use it with any weapon while swapping back and forth between forms as you are restricted with some skills.
Well, I spent the weekend playing the beta, and overall I have to say that I’m just not feeling it. And I’m not entirely sure why, everything seems pretty well put together and it’s definitely more Diablo. But it may just be that I’m still so burned out from playing all the other Diablo games through the years that I’m just not ready for whatever they’re serving up. I mean I’ll definitely pick it up and play it somewhere down the road, it just won’t be day one. I can wait on this particular experience.
I dabbled with the barb a bit. Definitely felt better than the Druid, control-wise for me. But the skill tree design just baffles me. I get that gear is meant to be important, but it seems so shallow, so restrictive (more so than it actually is, I think), and so difficult to visualize.
I mean seriously, most people are playing on widescreens off some form or another, so why orient the bloody skill tree vertically? Of course, they could easily change it before launch, I just don’t see how anyone could have thought that was a good idea, even as a prototype.
You may be on to something. I loved D1-3, and was skeptical of 4 at first, but after getting a Sorc to 25 and poking around a bit with a Rogue, yeah, they have a winner here unless they inexplicably screw it up somehow. I agree that the dynamic of multiplayer, solo, cosmetics, things to do, story, all of that seem to come together really nicely.
Now if they just could figure out a way not to make every damn underground setting look like a pile of melted plastic, I’d be happy.
It’s about the length of the campaign in Diablo 1 and 2, I’d say. But yeah, it’s much shorter than the campaign in Grim Dawn or Path of Exile, I’d say.
Got a rogue up to level 24. I really enjoyed it and it’s a solid game. The combat feels right and although not sure about the skill tree layout the build options seem to be there. Looking forward to the release in June. The only thing I not sure about is seeing other people running around in my game.
I’ll pick this up when it comes out, it seemed a lot more fun than the last iteration of Diablo, at least to me.
I’m interested to see how the Druid turns out.
At first, it seemed very underpowered, at least compared to what I was seeing Necros and Sorcs doing.
But eventually, by the end of the weekend after I had experimented, it seemed to have some very strong builds. That was with major components of the class just disabled entirely for the beta weekend.
That suggests it could be extremely strong in the final release.
The Skill Tree UI is pretty bad, kind of like a style over ease-of-use thing. Hopefully they’re iterating on it and it will be improved before launch. I do think a lot of the UI design decisions are being made to keep things as consistent as possible between PC and console, and the article upthread mentioned one of the goals of the console UI was to make it easier for people to work on their skill and gear at the same time in couch co-op.
D3 was a lot of fun playing co-op on the console, but any time we’d stop for gear/skill updates, everything kind of screeched to a halt because only one person could have the UI open. I played for an hour last night with my wife on the XBox and it was nice to be able to have the character UIs open at the same time.
It looks like the downside of this is that couch co-op is limited to two players for D4, whereas I think it was four players in D3.
That’s a very good point. The talent tree is unwieldy and would work much better horizontally oriented. I assume it was done this way to facilitate couch co-op, which is something I don’t care about at all.
From a usability stance that would actually be better, at least I can see the whole thing at once. But yeah, also really bad.
Better UI would be to have separate panels for each major tree, with later panels unlocking via points investment in the same way. One panel for primary skills/builders, one for primary/spenders, defensives, utility/movement, and ultimate. Probably navigated via a tabbed UI at the top.
I agree that the skill tree UI feels like a solution in search of a problem. Speaking of weird Uis, I had to google to find out where resistances were listed. They were at the bottom of the window that lists bonuses, and you only see them when you scrolled down to the bottom of the secondary window. I understand streamlining things and having a clean interface but that seems a bit excessive.
The biggest issue I had with the skill tree was that once you get down towards the end, and are tightly constrained on your skill points left, you can’t unallocate stuff up near the top to shift it around, without unallocating later stuff, just because the nodes are temporarilly disabled until you reallocate the early skills.
They need to just let you leave stuff down there, and disable those skills, so that you can shift earlier skill stuff without having to jump through a bunch of hoops and waste money unallocating stuff that you’re going to reallocate a few seconds later.
Didn’t play the beta, but will pick this up cause I like the diablos, and it’s kinda funny to read reviews all over the spectrum from ‘worst elements of d2/3’ to ‘will be best game ever’.
