Diablo IV - The Real Official Thread

17 years ago TES Oblivion blatantly demonstrated how bad of a feature 'level scaling' is, seeing Level 1 bandits spawning in wearing expensive end game gear and hitting harder than bosses, while still begging for 5 gold coins. Leveling up made your character feel weaker.

I tuned in to a couple D4 streams today and both of them had similar comments by the streamer, "the bosses were much easier when they rushed them on a low level toon". That said it's still beta and can possibly be delayed again to give them time to fine tune things.

Good way to sum it up and I agree. I struggled kinda hard with one mid Act I boss then watched my buddy on stream many levels below me just kinda...walk through the same boss. Was very frustrating.

That said, I am largely enjoying the game overall and consider it a big upgrade over D3. That's just one gripe I have thus far, months out from actual release.
 
Same here, and I'd like to say the boss indicators (on the health bar) seem to indicate new phases of combat. The last couple of bosses I fought dropped health at random hits, possibly crits.
 
I played entirely on the 2nd difficulty and several boss fights took 15+ minutes on my barb/rogue.
I did most of my unlocking on the sorceress, just because she's ridiculously powerful.

Here's one of the more notorious bosses:



Roughly 30 seconds with a Hydra build. And I'm not even using my real build, which would go faster. I'm trying to find the last 2 quests I'm missing, so I'm using a movement build, with very little in offense or defense. And my gear is pretty generic. Right now, for leveling, the sorceress is just the way to go.
 
4. Not a fan of the overworld level scaling. Diablo is supposed to give you the ultimate power fantasy. In its current state, leveling and gearing up doesn't feel very impactful or noticeable. This makes questing feel very "samey" overall and lacking sense of progression.

This, so much so. This was my biggest complaint.

My second biggest complaint was too many sub-stats on gear. I couldn't make sense of them all. I'm a Diablo veteran, been playing since the franchise launched when I was in middle school.
I also don't like their decision to not have Sets. This is a staple. In DII, they were great for early progression. By mid-late and late game, you were on Uniques and RWs. The reason they gave for leaving behind Sets tells me the Game Director had zero time in end-game DII.
The gearing just feels...wordy.

I played a Barb only.

Started frenzy/rend, spec'd a few different ways after I hit 25. Frenzy should be much faster at tearing through trash.
Respec'd to WW/CoTA. Much much better. Very strange that the dual 1H swords that had double the combined DPS of my 2H Sword didn't even have 1.25x the DPS when WW, and the slow ass 2H sword was the better choice. Sheet math showed this was incorrect, but whatever. They need to explain this.

I completed the beta for a single characterx with the exception of 3 side quests and the non-barb/non-quest dungeons. Not sure where to go get the side quest starts from. Oh, also did not make a kill for the World Boss that had a single good time for those of us in the Eastern time zone.

Performance, as mentioned, was mostly great on my sig rig at 4K maxed, Gsync 117. Kyovashad was a slideshow once people started to make their way to it. It is, however a resource hog! My 3080 Ti's entire 12GB of VRAM was allocated. The entire 32GB of system RAM was also full. My W11 b0x idles at 3.7GB of RAM usage.
Texture quality streaming is horrific- Game is installed to a direct-to-CPU Corsair MP600(PCI Gen4 x4) that is only a games drive. Basically all of the HQ textures constantly popping in. For the amount of resources that the game was requesting, this shouldn't be an issue. Also, too many things reflecting light that shouldn't be reflecting light! And HDR doesn't work correctly. It's like it's doing whole-scene bullshit "HDR" rather than proper DV type HDR.
Game doesn't look remotely good enough to be pegging an overclocked 3080Ti 99% at 117FPS for 4K.
This needs to be addressed long and well before ray tracing gets implemented.

Voice acting is 258% excellent!! I think I also hear some familiar voices :)

Quite a few bugs with quest turn-ins getting hung, jumpy cut-scene transitions, etc... And why couldn't they motion capture a horse?! I'd host them at the farm for free, with two horses!!

I'm excited to play the rest of the game. I don't really want to play the same stuff I just played all over again in June. Would make me feel a WHOLE lot better if they'd get rid of the zone scaling. I really really really hate that. It's a garbage feature.
 
Yeah, the level scaling is at times confusing too - When we start out, just highlighting different areas within the zone says they're lvl 10, or 12 or whatever... but as you move into the zone as you progress, it scales to you. LOL
Is it possible they added level scaling for the beta only to ensure players could mingle more at the start? To add, level 25 area stays level 25, not sure if you guys did that yet or not.

Having now finished the Act with a Barbarian, I'm leaning more on disagreeing about the gear being near useless. Once I figured out a good skillset to use with my gear (Bash/WW/Rallying Cry/Iron Skin/Death Blow and popped an Armor exlist) it was pretty much game over.
I played on the hardest difficulty, and for the first few hours I did die once or twice, but even the last boss I took out in one try.
I'm assuming these stats will be far more helpful / useful as the game difficulties increase. Wasn't there an option to change sub stats in D3? Where'd that go?

I will say, a lot of the proc abilities did come in handy. For instance, my legendary sword:
1679286584772.png

Using WW made this Ancient come out all the time basically, resulting in added help.
Another piece of armor I had proc'd an immunity dome that basically negated all negative CC's on me(Freeze, stunned, etc) if I stood in it.
Rallying cry, Stomp, Iron Skin and WW are just too good to not use.
Rally Cry just merks with gaining resources - and I believe this increases ALL resources, including heals over time. Which is why I used iron skin so much after it.
Iron skin heals over time once you unlock the last tier, this helped a ton with when you're burning through potions.
Stomp was awesome, it heavily reduces the cooldowns if you get in the middle of mobs and use it.
I used Death blow just for elites and an occasional switch it up on adds, but overall, WW was the primary.


Gear sets not being in the game is kind of silly - has this been confirmed? Maybe it's just for the beta.
Regardless, had a really good time. There are definitively a few touch ups needed, but for the most part, I really like what I see.

The music always top notch in a Blizzard game, and this one I feel is no different. The world looks alive and beautiful. Can't complain.
The overall UI is good, but I did have some issues finding where the hell you claim your rewards when you hit a certain renown tier.
Haven't had the time to check out other characters, but I'll be back to play again on the open beta next weekend.

Give it time all, and make sure you're giving feedback on Blizzard's forums.
 
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I don't need to see more than a 15 percent slice of the game to understand how power scaling works in this game. The campaign is slated to be 35 hours long. That means I could essentially bring someone with me to the final act who's level 10 and I'm 45 their power would be roughly equivalent based on the system as it stands. Why not just have the open world be scale to certain level ranges? Top end areas in act 1 scale from 20-25, the earlier portions scale from 5-10 etc? I'm sorry but this is just bad game design. Then you can have an adventure mode at the end like D3 where everything is max level, it's honestly a way better system than what they have now. There's going to be difficulty levels in so I don't really understand what they're thinking.
I can tell the dungeon system is going to be a problem too, the way maps are generated the layouts are almost exactly the same for each map, they're different graphically but the layouts are near identical.
Yeah, you clearly haven't played D3 in early or late state of its existence to understand how this stuff works.
 
This, so much so. This was my biggest complaint.

My second biggest complaint was too many sub-stats on gear. I couldn't make sense of them all. I'm a Diablo veteran, been playing since the franchise launched when I was in middle school.
I also don't like their decision to not have Sets. This is a staple. In DII, they were great for early progression. By mid-late and late game, you were on Uniques and RWs. The reason they gave for leaving behind Sets tells me the Game Director had zero time in end-game DII.
The gearing just feels...wordy.

I played a Barb only.

Started frenzy/rend, spec'd a few different ways after I hit 25. Frenzy should be much faster at tearing through trash.
Respec'd to WW/CoTA. Much much better. Very strange that the dual 1H swords that had double the combined DPS of my 2H Sword didn't even have 1.25x the DPS when WW, and the slow ass 2H sword was the better choice. Sheet math showed this was incorrect, but whatever. They need to explain this.

I completed the beta for a single characterx with the exception of 3 side quests and the non-barb/non-quest dungeons. Not sure where to go get the side quest starts from. Oh, also did not make a kill for the World Boss that had a single good time for those of us in the Eastern time zone.

Performance, as mentioned, was mostly great on my sig rig at 4K maxed, Gsync 117. Kyovashad was a slideshow once people started to make their way to it. It is, however a resource hog! My 3080 Ti's entire 12GB of VRAM was allocated. The entire 32GB of system RAM was also full. My W11 b0x idles at 3.7GB of RAM usage.
Texture quality streaming is horrific- Game is installed to a direct-to-CPU Corsair MP600(PCI Gen4 x4) that is only a games drive. Basically all of the HQ textures constantly popping in. For the amount of resources that the game was requesting, this shouldn't be an issue. Also, too many things reflecting light that shouldn't be reflecting light! And HDR doesn't work correctly. It's like it's doing whole-scene bullshit "HDR" rather than proper DV type HDR.
Game doesn't look remotely good enough to be pegging an overclocked 3080Ti 99% at 117FPS for 4K.
This needs to be addressed long and well before ray tracing gets implemented.

Voice acting is 258% excellent!! I think I also hear some familiar voices :)

Quite a few bugs with quest turn-ins getting hung, jumpy cut-scene transitions, etc... And why couldn't they motion capture a horse?! I'd host them at the farm for free, with two horses!!

I'm excited to play the rest of the game. I don't really want to play the same stuff I just played all over again in June. Would make me feel a WHOLE lot better if they'd get rid of the zone scaling. I really really really hate that. It's a garbage feature.
Set the textures to medium, high setting is busted. You're right the HDR looks horrible.
 
The only thing I have a really uneasy feeling about, to be honest, is the unique items. It doesn't seem like there actually are uniques anymore. You can just swap the extra attribute to whatever the hell rare item you want.

Something about that really takes the magic away from grinding away and seeing the item you're looking for drop.

Edit: Nevermind I'm stupid. Evidently there are Legendaries and Uniques. I never saw a Unique lol
 
I have hundreds of hours in D3, there are separate modes for level scaling and difficulty
I misread what you said originally and I do agree with you that the open world level scaling right now doesn't make a lot of sense. It will if they implement the same structure D3 has and the expectation is that once you hit max level you obtain gear that will really supercharge your power like sets do in D3. I'm level 23 right now as Barb and while I've gained a lot of improvement in gear its hard to determine because the world just scales with you.
 
There are pro's and con's to the world scaling that I think you can logically argue either way.

Personally, I enjoy it because the player base is not splintered into 20 different tiers. Yeah, it's weird seeing someone half my level killing stuff with me, but it's really cool just having a stranger pop in out of nowhere to help. To me, that outweighs going back to a locked in instanced game without world scaling.

The real game doesn't start til max level anyways. THEN you'll be able to tell who is geared well and who isn't.
 
So I managed to get my sorc to lvl 25, rogue to lvl 15 and barbarian to lvl 10 in this beta. Didn't really feel like playing more as I wasn't progressing.
My experience is very positive. I bought the Ultimate edition and I'm sticking to it. I'll give it a try on PS5 next weekend and see how it plays with a gamepad.

Barbarian: I kinda disliked this class. I didn't click with the big guy/girl looks but the gameplay was okayish. I didn't quite understand how to play only with a 2h weapon and found annoying seeing my character run around with a bunch of weapons on her back. Rend was also quite op.
Rogue: Tons of fun in melee! Hopefully Blizzard will add transmog to remove the crossbow/bow from the back, or transmog crossbows into bows, as I never liked the look on crossbows.
Sorcerer: I usually main this class. I got her decked in pretty much all legendaries in beta and got a 2h staff which gave me double Hydras on top of having that skill 7/5. It was trashing everything within seconds. Bosses were a joke. I would just pop 2 Hydras and run around. And on top of that if I was "healthy" I would get 4 hydra heads instead of 3. So 8 heads total shooting fireballs and burning enemies. I can see this nerfed by release.

Anyway, I'm setting my expectations to MMORPG style of play and gearing, not ARPG. I think people should expect something between World of Warcraft and Diablo and if they are fine with that then this game will be perfect for them.

Performance @ 4k/120hz:
13900k @ 5.6ghz
32gb ddr5 @ 6ghz
7900 XTX
Somewhat low since 7900 XTX performs at 4k about the same as RTX 3090. The game was mostly running fine and usually steady 120 fps (I locked this since I have a 4k/120hz screen). Some microstuttering after teleporting to towns (lasted for a few seconds) and very low fps in some places (also lasted a few seconds). Hopefully AMD releases drivers to boost performance. I believe the game normally runs around 145 fps. The game allocated almost all 24gb (23.8gb).
 
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I like the feeling of the world scaling, even though it may not be the way the final game plays. You actually need to strategize and play the game slower. I got so sick of the gameplay loop where you're just steamrolling through every enemy to improve your gear numbers perpetually. Even at the point where the HP pool of rift guardians went into the quadrillions the fight would still be over in seconds. I played from the start of the beta on WT2 and thoroughly enjoyed the boss fights. They had me on the edge of my seat utilizing everything in my arsenal to beat them.
I believe there is a fear of strength for getting all classes to 25 during the beta...
There are only two feats of strength for the beta: Get to Kyovashad and level one character to 20. Getting both shows 100% in the Challenges menu.
I don't need to see more than a 15 percent slice of the game to understand how power scaling works in this game. The campaign is slated to be 35 hours long. That means I could essentially bring someone with me to the final act who's level 10 and I'm 45 their power would be roughly equivalent based on the system as it stands. Why not just have the open world be scale to certain level ranges? Top end areas in act 1 scale from 20-25, the earlier portions scale from 5-10 etc? I'm sorry but this is just bad game design. Then you can have an adventure mode at the end like D3 where everything is max level, it's honestly a way better system than what they have now. There's going to be difficulty levels in so I don't really understand what they're thinking.
I can tell the dungeon system is going to be a problem too, the way maps are generated the layouts are almost exactly the same for each map, they're different graphically but the layouts are near identical.
Only 35 hours is BS. I played the beta for about 10 hours and only completed about a third of the first act they gave us. Looking at the Challenges menu there are a total of 6 acts. Maybe if you just speed through all the campaign missions it will be 35 hours, but that seems like a waste with how expansive the game looks.
So I managed to get my sorc to lvl 25, rogue to lvl 15 and barbarian to lvl 10 in this beta. Didn't really feel like playing more as I wasn't progressing.
My experience is very positive. I bought the Ultimate edition and I'm sticking to it. I'll give it a try on PS5 next weekend and see how it plays with a gamepad.

Barbarian: I kinda disliked this class. I didn't click with the big guy/girl looks but the gameplay was okayish. I didn't quite understand how to play only with a 2h weapon and found annoying seeing my character run around with a bunch of weapons on her back. Rend was also quite op.
Rogue: Tons of fun in melee! Hopefully Blizzard will add transmog to remove the crossbow/bow from the back, or transmog crossbows into bows, as I never liked the look on crossbows.
Sorcerer: I usually main this class. I got her decked in pretty much all legendaries in beta and got a 2h staff which gave me double Hydras on top of having that skill 7/5. It was trashing everything within seconds. Bosses were a joke. I would just pop 2 Hydras and run around. And on top of that if I was "healthy" I would get 4 hydra heads instead of 3. So 8 heads total shooting fireballs and burning enemies. I can see this nerfed by release.

Anyway, I'm setting my expectations to MMORPG style of play and gearing, not ARPG. I think people should expect something between World of Warcraft and Diablo and if they are fine with that then this game will be perfect for them.

Performance @ 4k/120hz:
13900k @ 5.6ghz
32gb ddr5 @ 6ghz
7900 XTX
Somewhat low since 7900 XTX performs at 4k about the same as RTX 3090. The game was mostly running fine and usually steady 120 fps (I locked this since I have a 4k/120hz screen). Some microstuttering after teleporting to towns (lasted for a few seconds) and very low fps in some places (also lasted a few seconds). Hopefully AMD releases drivers to boost performance. I believe the game normally runs around 145 fps. The game allocated almost all 24gb (23.8gb).
It's working well on NVIDIA cards. Have had feedback from family and friends on everything from a GTX 1660 to my RTX 4090 and the game is running well on all of them. I only experienced some bad server hiccups that were not related to the machine's performance, which sounds like what you're describing.
 
It's working well on NVIDIA cards. Have had feedback from family and friends on everything from a GTX 1660 to my RTX 4090 and the game is running well on all of them. I only experienced some bad server hiccups that were not related to the machine's performance, which sounds like what you're describing.

I wonder if some websites will release performance charts for different GPUs like Techpowerup and Hardware Unboxed do for certain games. I know it's beta but it would be interesting to see and compare when the game is released.

Also, I just heard open beta will let us play Necromancer and Druid. I initially planned to barely play open beta, but this time I might have to run Act 1 again :)
 
I like the feeling of the world scaling, even though it may not be the way the final game plays. You actually need to strategize and play the game slower. I got so sick of the gameplay loop where you're just steamrolling through every enemy to improve your gear numbers perpetually. Even at the point where the HP pool of rift guardians went into the quadrillions the fight would still be over in seconds. I played from the start of the beta on WT2 and thoroughly enjoyed the boss fights. They had me on the edge of my seat utilizing everything in my arsenal to beat them.

There are only two feats of strength for the beta: Get to Kyovashad and level one character to 20. Getting both shows 100% in the Challenges menu.

Only 35 hours is BS. I played the beta for about 10 hours and only completed about a third of the first act they gave us. Looking at the Challenges menu there are a total of 6 acts. Maybe if you just speed through all the campaign missions it will be 35 hours, but that seems like a waste with how expansive the game looks.

It's working well on NVIDIA cards. Have had feedback from family and friends on everything from a GTX 1660 to my RTX 4090 and the game is running well on all of them. I only experienced some bad server hiccups that were not related to the machine's performance, which sounds like what you're describing.
I'd be ultimately disappointed if the game was only 35 hours.

I expect a good 35 hours on torment just for one act. lol . I do remember the devs saying about 100 hours to get to level cap, that's including paragon apparently. So we'll see.

Six acts eh? Didn't know that - that's actually nice to hear.

Comixbooks Cap is lvl 100.
lvl 50 + 50 paragon points
 
I'd be ultimately disappointed if the game was only 35 hours.

I expect a good 35 hours on torment just for one act. lol . I do remember the devs saying about 100 hours to get to level cap, that's including paragon apparently. So we'll see.

Six acts eh? Didn't know that - that's actually nice to hear.

Comixbooks Cap is lvl 100.
lvl 50 + 50 paragon points
Yeah, there are some "minor" spoilers in the Challenges menu since they included them all from the full game, so don't go reading them all if you don't want to be spoiled.
 
Tried creating a Clan for everyone here, but the request keeps timing out.

Also it thinks the clan name HardForum is profanity... zzzz.....
Try HardOCP like the D3 one, or [H]ardOCP, [H]ardForum. I forget what I did for the D3 guild, (I am hardly playing D3 anymore), but it was accepted
 
I like the feeling of the world scaling, even though it may not be the way the final game plays. You actually need to strategize and play the game slower. I got so sick of the gameplay loop where you're just steamrolling through every enemy to improve your gear numbers perpetually. Even at the point where the HP pool of rift guardians went into the quadrillions the fight would still be over in seconds. I played from the start of the beta on WT2 and thoroughly enjoyed the boss fights. They had me on the edge of my seat utilizing everything in my arsenal to beat them.

There are only two feats of strength for the beta: Get to Kyovashad and level one character to 20. Getting both shows 100% in the Challenges menu.

Only 35 hours is BS. I played the beta for about 10 hours and only completed about a third of the first act they gave us. Looking at the Challenges menu there are a total of 6 acts. Maybe if you just speed through all the campaign missions it will be 35 hours, but that seems like a waste with how expansive the game looks.

It's working well on NVIDIA cards. Have had feedback from family and friends on everything from a GTX 1660 to my RTX 4090 and the game is running well on all of them. I only experienced some bad server hiccups that were not related to the machine's performance, which sounds like what you're describing.
Welp I did both of those feats. I found a couple of cool legendary items and had fun advancing my MU... I think I found all of the waypoints.. I ran out of the play zone and got warped back inside of it. I had a couple boss fights that required me using all my skills, lots of running around, a few swipes, run heal run, swipe.. etc.. I almost made it into a loot goblin portal. So so so close. Saw the loot goblin twice during the event. He shows up on the radar as like a pot of gold type thing.

Played Fri-Sat-Sun on and off.. load times were fine Sat-Sun. 1min or less. I wasn't terribly engaged with the story line but the cinematic cut-scenes were up to Diablo caliber. The side quests reminded me a little of WT3.. I got WT3 vibes from this one a lot in areas. The muddy/wet city streets covered in NPCs reminded me of Novigrad at times.

Played the beta on my new z690/13700k/rtx4080 on a 42" LG C2 OLED build at 4k with every option maxed basically.. I did run into some hitching and rubber-banding sort of (server side stuff) but only a few times over ~15 hours of playing.. For the most part it ran smooth as silk and the game is gorgeous. Though I wish they would unlock the camera so you can zoom around more and postion it around your character in different spots. More like Grim Dawn.

Def wanna play a necromancer next beta if they unlock that class.
 
I agree with a lot of the complaints people have about the game. But I enjoyed it and want to play more.

I had horrible latency issues that never cleared up. Several times a minute I was stuttering and rubber banding back.
Gigabit cable and no problems with other games from Blizzard and other companies. Hope that gets fixed otherwise I won't be playing.
Did manage to get to 25 on my sorc, chain lightning let me survive the lag. Switched to hydra for the world boss.
Rogue I only got to 12 but was also fun to play. Looking forward to the necro this weekend.

Anyone else get a surprise visit from the butcher? He showed up for me twice and slaughtered me in under 30 seconds.
 
I agree with a lot of the complaints people have about the game. But I enjoyed it and want to play more.

I had horrible latency issues that never cleared up. Several times a minute I was stuttering and rubber banding back.
Gigabit cable and no problems with other games from Blizzard and other companies. Hope that gets fixed otherwise I won't be playing.
Did manage to get to 25 on my sorc, chain lightning let me survive the lag. Switched to hydra for the world boss.
Rogue I only got to 12 but was also fun to play. Looking forward to the necro this weekend.

Anyone else get a surprise visit from the butcher? He showed up for me twice and slaughtered me in under 30 seconds.
Found the Butcher twice this weekend, but both with my sorc, so didn't really have a problem. I only died once with them, due to a level 35 enemy when I was like level 9, and wasn't paying attention to the enemy level. Other than that, never got into a situation where I fell below half health.

Overall, I found the sorceress super easy (hydra build). The barb I also found was fairly competent (bleed build). The rogue was the only class I ever ended up dying on (no clue what I was doing build).

Fought the world boss twice. The first time it was fairly close, but the second time, as mentioned above, we absolutely slaughtered it.

I saw someone with a PvP title. Not sure how they got that in HC, and was kind of scared about walking into an area where pvp could happen. I've never really been a fan of pvp, especially not in HC.

I had everything unlocked, except 22/23 dungeons, and 33/35 quests. The remaining quests are just rng based, and there are like 7 of them that were like that, so I had no clue which 2 I was missing.

I wasn't a fan of the interface. A lot of work needs to be done on that, as it's very unintuitive. I prefer the older Diablo games of being able to join people when at the title screen, rather than having to get into the game, especially when there were queue's.

And right now, the game's just too slow for my personal taste. There only felt like 3 different styles of dungeons, and they pretty much were all the same, every time you entered in one. Also, I wasn't a fan of the itemization.

But I'll give it a shot next weekend, and complete the last two classes. Right now though, my thoughts are that most people who like the game are in the honeymoon phase, and I'm worried that it's going to be like Diablo 3, that 2 months into the game/season, its dead.
 
I saw the Butcher once. It looked like it was going to be one of those 10min run swipe heal run swipe heal things so I ran off.. Just wanted to explore more towards the end of my playing yesterday..
 
Taking off in June for sure 3 day early Access for Dlx edition. These spoiler videos won't wreck me cause the stuff is so small on my phone
 
As far as it stands, right now, leveling is just a bit too slow. There are a couple zone events that people are just going to spam over and over again to level up as fast as humanly possible.

I'm just wondering if the scaling will go from 1-50, or if it will cap at some point, so that if you're level 40, and go back to the original zone, it will stay at 25 at most.
 
Hmm.. Thinking of pre ordering on ps5 to play beta tonight. Beta is available to all pre orders right?
 
Hmm.. Thinking of pre ordering on ps5 to play beta tonight. Beta is available to all pre orders right?
No, the early access beta ended an hour ago. You'll have to wait until Friday to try it, and you won't need to preorder the game to do so.
 
Got to LV25 before they brought servers down. Didn't have a lot of time to dedicate to the game so only really played Babarian but was grouped multiple times with Sorc and Rogue so was cool seeing that. Ended up settling on a WW/Rend setup with Death Blow for those enemies I could 1 shot and get the reset on. Barb felt little underpowered vs the other 2 classes. Something else notably different from D3 is D3 all melee classes immediately received something like 30% less physical damage vs ranged class. That isn't the case in D4. Trash mobs were pretty easily cleared but boss fights weren't pretty on Barb at least not with my gear. Hoping this is just the very very tip of the iceberg like what D3 was about this time. If so, this game will be epic.

Also, Call of the Ancients and Wrath of the Beserker as "Ultimate" skills didn't feel real ultimate. They last a whopping 5 seconds then you're on a ~60 second cooldown. They need to buff the damage output or length of time or both.
 
Got to LV25 before they brought servers down. Didn't have a lot of time to dedicate to the game so only really played Babarian but was grouped multiple times with Sorc and Rogue so was cool seeing that. Ended up settling on a WW/Rend setup with Death Blow for those enemies I could 1 shot and get the reset on. Barb felt little underpowered vs the other 2 classes. Something else notably different from D3 is D3 all melee classes immediately received something like 30% less physical damage vs ranged class. That isn't the case in D4. Trash mobs were pretty easily cleared but boss fights weren't pretty on Barb at least not with my gear. Hoping this is just the very very tip of the iceberg like what D3 was about this time. If so, this game will be epic.
Barbarian and Monk got a flat 30% damage reduction in D3, not just against physical. I was thinking the same thing playing Sorceress that Barb would have a hard time with bosses. It looks like Barb equipment get a lot of dodge chance compared to Sorc, though. I was able to get 6% on Sorc with what I found/made and I've seen Barbs with 30% or more.
 
Barbarian and Monk got a flat 30% damage reduction in D3, not just against physical. I was thinking the same thing playing Sorceress that Barb would have a hard time with bosses. It looks like Barb equipment get a lot of dodge chance compared to Sorc, though. I was able to get 6% on Sorc with what I found/made and I've seen Barbs with 30% or more.
Yeah I almost said just flat 30% but couldn't remember for certain. That's a huge difference and for a melee class you can really feel it. I was usually with a Sorc and/or Rogue in group and I was having to tank what felt like 80-90% of the damage. Was a bit rough.
 
Kripp has posted his thoughts so far.


A summary is available here, this bit caught my eye:

"Level scaling and party system is terrible, makes you feel weaker, and is not something that may ever be fixed in the game. Gives an example of automatically grouping up with a lower level character that 3 shots a bear, while a level 40 character may struggle with the bear. The level 3 character is going to be stronger in some instanced zones than the level 40 character. It’s too core to the actual game to change as all the monsters scale to your level. The main consequence is that when you level up you are always weaker, because one point on the skill tree at most is 10% damage, and the monsters are most likely gain more than 10% health. So your character isn’t getting stronger, you’re just trying to gear up to keep up with the level scaling. There are no lower level zones. “I hate this, and it doesn’t feel good as you try to progress your character."
 
You could always, I dunno, not group up with lowbies? Just a thought.

It's about being inclusive. We all have friends or situations where one of us is further ahead in some game or another.
Not my fault you work X schedule while I work Y, and visa versa. At the end of the day, if I have an opportunity to play with a friend and we aren't further blocked by another obstacle, why not?

To be honest, I rarely played with other players in the beta. A handful at best were around the same encounter, but for the most part I solo'd probably 90 - 95% of the time without doing anything special to avoid them.

I used to despise ESO from adding the level scaling - but it turns out as what most other games do, they block the lowbies from certain content. Oops, needed to complete this quest or get to this level or get this item level, etc... It's okay folks - it's just a fraction of the game that we saw.
Willing to bet the same will happen here with separating lowbies from being able to play in end game content.
 
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Anyone else get a surprise visit from the butcher? He showed up for me twice and slaughtered me in under 30 seconds.

Only once!! At first I completely WTF'd and the wife ran into my office lol. He one-shotted me. Never saw him again. He straight up "Fresh meat"'ed me with his chains, instagibed me, and was gone before I even ghosted.
 
Who cares, it took 5 hours to reach 25. How long for 50? 10-15 hours? Levels 1 to 50 are just the tutorial. Same as D3.
The only scaling that matters is what happens at 50.
I have no idea how people forget this. Once the paragon boards open up the game really begins just like getting to 70 ASAP is the only thing that matters in D3 leveling.

But the best thing I've seen from the beta is how much variety there is in builds just at level 25. People did a great job trying all sorts of different things out and a ton of builds look amazing, which I find to be encouraging. I don't doubt there will be less variety at 100 but I do fully expect considerably more variety than D3.

And just wait til you all get ahold of the paragon boards and start upgrading various nodes. There's soooooo much more power there
 
I put at least 12 hours into this beta. I ended up with a fully geared sorc (ice shards 7/5 build) I tested chain lightning, fireball, meteor, hydra etc but felt ice shards was the best all around for my gear. I was sitting around 180int, typically a single volley of ice shards was hitting lvl 25-27 mobs for 1600. My friend was having a very rough time with his barb -- it seems all the legendries had fooled them into thinking their gear was good when in reality they were stacking gear with 15% resist elements instead of +15 str and +8 all stat gear. At lvl 25 my friends barb in full legend gear was hitting for 80-100 with whirlwind per tick (he had 55 str) You know its a problem when my sorc had 74Str and i was avoiding str gear, lol. After he fixed his gear, he respec upheaval and was much happier. He saw crits over 4k

Anyway, here it is Monday and im going through Diablo 4 withdrawal. I played diablo 3 today and it just feels empty and flat -- Sure Diablo 3 is fast, but just doing rifts feels so boring now.
 
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