That’s a lot of world to hit Level 25 within the small area we’ve seen. Really wonder if experience gain will be slowed down in the real game. Wonder if the main storyline is intended to be completable by Level 50, or if it’s designed for you to have some paragon levels.
How weird I’m keen on D4. If you read through the thread i think my posts reflect that.
Im just observing that the season pass strategy etc looks like Destiny (which I also play).
Btw, if someone wants to check out Diablo II Resurrected, it’s on sale on Xbox this week for $13. It goes on sale regularly on other platforms as well, but just wanted to mention that for Xbox users here.
For me it’s this, but the next shiny is an alt. Maybe eventually one breaks through to higher levels but I get a whole lot out of these games without dealing much with the endgame content.
What I’ve heard of what they did here sounds perfect for me with my alt-itis. Free respecs means there is no need to try each class more than once since you can swap around to any old build on that class you want, the characters therefore don’t feel unique. Limited respec means two characters of the same class end up different based on how you build but you can still experiment and make mistakes since swapping some skill points around is relatively cheap.
I like restricted respec as well. That doesn’t mean d4’s current implementation is necessarily it, but I like that they’re trying a moderate approach to lock-in.
Cheap early respec means it’ll be possible to try a lot of skills in a class before deciding to really hone and optimize/customize a character. (Hoping for more customization than optimization.)
It should be easy to speed level once the game is out, too, though I realize that’s not a solution for single-player-only players.
I don’t understand why folks want restricted respecs. Curious to better understand that point of view. It seems strictly negative from my perspective. Would love to learn more as to what the advantages of restricting respecs are :-/
It makes choices meaningful and gives you a reason to re-level the same class more than once.
Of course seasons handle the latter bit anyway quite nicely.
This is me as well. I like having “the lightning sorceress”, the “fire sorceress”, the “cold sorceress”, “the weird melee sorcerer” in my character lists, not just “the sorceress who I can respec to be anything I want at any time”.
It also makes it easier to hand out equipment to each said sorcerer too. This one is for the Lightning Sorcerer!
It also makes hardcore characters different. In Diablo 3, hardcore characters all felt the same to me, as long as it’s a witch doctor, he’s always going to get frogs and use frogs for a while, and then use the next skill that unlocks, then use the next skill that unlocks, etc. And then when that Witch doctor dies, the next Witch Doctor I level up is always going to use Spiders in a jar, then frogs, all in the same order as last time as each skill unlocks.
Question for those that played the beta: how is the shared inventory handled? Does a character have a bunch of chests, and there’s one communal to be shared amongst them? or is it more like D3 where all chests are shared inventory?
I love D3 after the expansion, and played quite a lot of it - but the shared inventory between characters is one of the things I most loathe about it, and is the reason i stopped playing (til this season). Lol, thinking about that, i guess inventory is the reason i stopped playing New world, and probably some other games too. When you’re a bit of a gaming pack-rat, a good storage system is essential to sanity…
One shared inventory. At least in the beta.
This. It’s like having a 4X game and having to make a decision between building a settler or building up your army. If you over-expand and your new city is under threat, it would undermine the strategy if you could just replace that city with an army and then once victorious, convert that army back into a city.
That’s how I feel about frictionless respecs. I want some capacity to reshape my character but D3 it felt too much like I was just re-arranging a hotbar to suit what was in front of me, not actually developing a build. A lot of fun for me in these games is thinking up a character build, developing it, and then seeing how successful I can be with it. That character will inform my next build and gives me a reason to make a new character and play the game again.
Thanks for those insights – I see how friction in respecs adds to the “story/role-playing” component. (Arguably, for maximal narrative potential, there should be no respecs – it’s not like characters forget abilities they learn).
I guess I’m a different flavor of player – I want to explore the build space to find the optimal build for what I want to do (or try a concept – “can I get a build with X to work?”), then I want to play and refine that build. Understand the system, break it down, and figure out how to min-max the hell out of it.
Adding friction to respecs (via gold or rerolling) just makes it more painful to do that by adding tedious busywork that gets between me and exploring the build space. It makes me LESS likely to play a game because I don’t want to get “locked into” a non-optimal build and then have to reroll / farm gold tediously to get to the build I actually want to play. Leveling characters / farming gold is not the interesting part of the game for me, it’s the chore I have to do before I can play the game I want.
(My “ideal” ARPG would have no gear progression at all – you could create any gear you wanted, and build any build you want, and then just go have fun trying things out and see what sort of builds you can create. Explore the space. Be creative. Play around with ideas).
I don’t really understand why this is supposed to be a good thing (from a player POV).
It probably just comes down to what part of the ARPG a person enjoys. For some of us it’s the leveling experience and trying something new each time through, and fairly rigid respec constraints helps distinguish that character. For other people it’s endgame content, endgame loot chases, or maximizing builds. Maybe some people would be happiest with a single character that could freely change to any of the classes that they could level perpetually. It’s pretty clear to me from @alcaras posts that we come at these types of games entirely differently. I also don’t play/understand the appeal of hardcore characters in these games, but for plenty of people it’s the primary or only way they play. So Blizzard is stuck trying to balance all of these different kinds of players to build max appeal. Enough people were upset at the total free anytime respec in D3 that they are trying to find a more balanced approach here, but of course that upsets the people who were fully onboard with the D3 approach.
Yeah, for me the favorite aspect of ARPGs is two-fold:
- Theory-crafting a build. It should be good at low level, mid-level, and high-level.
- Seeing if my build actually plays well in practice as I level up the character and kill stuff. Sometimes what sounds good in theory, or works well in a high or mid level doesn’t really work well in low levels. Sometimes what works well in low levels doesn’t really work well anymore in mid-level. And sometimes skills that “work” in theory are just not as fun to kill stuff with, like Grim Dawn’s Word of Pain and throwing jars of spiders in Diablo 3, etc. They sound good on paper, and maybe they are good, but I just don’t have fun killing stuff that way, and that’s why I play.
I mean, that was Diablo 3 in terms of skills, except they decided to focus it around Set items which limited viable builds in the late game. Like all the builds were curated by the devs, instead of the playerbase coming up with them.
No item progression at all kind of takes away from what Diablo is mostly about. Killing mobs of enemies for phat loot. But I could go more radical and do a classless, level-less Diablo-clone. It sounds nuts, but Ultima Online already did it, minus the actually hack 'n slash horde killing combat.
Yep, I think the word “build” is key for me here. I had to do work to construct this build and it was a combination of planning, loot drops, and leveling work to achieve it. It was a process to build it. It’s the same appeal for doing construction projects in survival mode Minecraft. I had to do the work to achieve it and that provides satisfaction. Doing the same thing much more easily in creative mode doesn’t provide that to me.
But almost any build requires the right gear to reach its full potential, and you’re unlikely to have that gear while levelling. I get the wantiing to develop a build thing, I just don’t see why it has to be tied to levelling. And even if that does provide something, it can be achieved through seasons. I can also understand that “respec for free at any time out of combat” might feel too loose, but that doesn’t mean they should go completely the other direction. But we don’t know if they are doing that, so let’s just consider this discussion theorycrafting
That part usually takes care of itself, for me. As I play some characters, I find seemingly good items that this character can’t use. So they go to holder-characters (or more recently, shared stashes, thank god). So over time, a character build that’s leveling up has a variety of low-mid-high level items available to them from the shared stash or holders.
This is why without exception when I look for builds in games like this I look for “SSF” (solo, self-found) or “budget” (translation: you don’t have to spend hours farming/trading to do this) builds.