I posted my server slam feedback on the D4 forums, and I'll post it here too if anyone is interested to know what I think.
Diablo 4 Server Slam Feedback
Overall:
- Great experience, lots of fun.
- Played Sorc and Rogue to 20, finished Act 1 campaign.
- Killed Ashava with Sorc and Necro.
- Total playtime about 20+ hours.
- Changes from previous beta (40+ hours played in the previous betas):
- Dungeon layout is better. Good job.
- Dungeon objectives are less annoying. Good job. Could still use work, however.
- Performance was better on PC. Good job.
- No queues and less lag/rubberbanding. Good job.
- Class balancing changes - Needed. Good job. Could still use work, however.
- UI adjustments to the stats page and keybinding changes. Good job.
- Drop rate changes - Good. Legendaries should be rare. Could still use tweaking on some things.
Requested features:
- Stash access in every town/village
- Stash search
- Dedicated tab to store gems
- Item lock to prevent accidental salvage or extraction.
- One-click solution to upgrade all gems to max quality from available materials.
- Click party member profile to teleport to them as in Diablo 3
- UI additions to see minion stats. I currently don’t know what stats matter for minions.
- Persistent clan chat. Chat history clears when I start a new game.
- Option to zoom out more.
- Hold shift to see stats of items on ground.
- Option to display numerical values of stats like life, barrier, fortify, resource, crit chance, etc from HUD
- Practice dummies to measure DPS. Similar to the practice dummies at the Challenge Rift in D3.
- DPS reports after killing a boss.
- Better organized quest tracking system.
- Skills and gear loadout presets like in Diablo 3. Respecing individually takes too long.
- Level gate for World Boss events to prevent griefers or non-contributing members.
- Option to spawn World Boss in a separate instance for solo or private party attempts.
- More faces and hairstyles in the character creator, and finer adjustments to face and body.
- Faster loading time. Difference between D4 and D3 is night and day.
Detailed gameplay notes as follows. The following notes are based upon the following first principles of game design and balance.
- The game should feel good to play from the beginning. “Wait until endgame to have fun” is not acceptable.
- The game should encourage a plethora of interesting choices for the player to make. There shouldn’t only be a few choices that are so overpowered that they are the obvious choices to make. I’m looking at you, Diablo 3.
- All classes should be balanced with each other and be able to complete equivalent content with equivalent effort. It’s not fun to be a “weak” class just because it’s designed badly.
- In-game rewards should be proportional to the difficulty (or possibly rarity) required to win them. Two different players doing two different activities with equivalent difficulties should achieve equivalent rewards. Player A doing something difficult should be rewarded more than Player B who is doing something easy.
- The most efficient way to play should also be the most fun way to play. If there is an un-fun activity that people are forcing themselves to do because it’s efficient, either make that activity more fun or less rewarding. If there’s a bunch of fun activities available to do but no one does them because the rewards suck, buff the rewards.
- Skilled and dedicated players should be rewarded for their skill and effort, but the game should also be accessible for casual players to have fun and give them the right tools to learn how to become better players themselves.
Gameplay notes:
All skills should be fun and useful in their vanilla form, and not have to rely on legendary aspects to make them viable. If a skill is too weak, buff the actual skill itself, not a legendary aspect. Skills should be great in their vanilla form, and different/slightly better with legendaries. Of course you can still have build-defining items, but within reason, and while maintaining a variety of viable alternatives.
Legendary Aspects should make a skill different and interesting, not necessarily OP. This is a big problem with Diablo 3 where some skills get huge multiplicative damage multipliers on items, and other skills don’t. This makes the skills without any legendary buffs basically useless.
Min/maxing already leads to choices that are obviously better compared to others depending on the goal (single target DPS, multi target DPS, mobility, etc). This is probably inevitable, so to encourage class diversity, there should be activities that rely on different kinds of specializations. For example, some dungeons or events can be cleared faster if your character is better at single target DPS (it has more boss characters with lots of HP). Some dungeons or events can be cleared faster if your character is better at multi target DPS (it has a lot higher mob density). Maybe some dungeons require you to have both since there is a mix of both. This would also encourage parties. As a general rule, all characters should be at minimal, decent at both single target and multi target DPS. There are times in Diablo 3 where a particular build has great multi target DPS, but then takes forever to kill a lone boss (Trang Ouls, for example). Please don’t let this happen in D4.
Gamers will maximize efficiency. Design goal should be that the most fun way to play is the most efficient. In the first beta, killing the first bunch of elites in a select few dungeons and then resetting the dungeon is the fastest way to gain exp and gear. That’s obviously not in line with the design goal of wanting to encourage players to complete the entire dungeon.
Add more skill slots. Why? Opportunity cost. Lessening the opportunity cost will help with game balance. If all skills are equally useful, then it’s not an issue, but not all skills are equal, so if you have more skill slots, then you won’t feel so bad by not picking up a skill you want to use, when you can have both. 7 or 8 is a good number. This is in line with the people who want a dedicated ultimate button.
You should also add more skill slots so that a character can use multiple damage dealing skills in order to be more well-rounded. This way, I don’t have to respec for multi-target DPS or single target DPS every time, because I have both. This would cut down on the need for respecs.
Skills/passive with very short durations are bad and not fun to use. Too little duration for too little of a benefit. 10 minute Wizard shields from Diablo 3 were more fun. Make them an active/passive ability like Crusader auras.
Character customization: Great start, but could be better. Need more face variety and eye variety, and hairstyles. Could be good DLC/feats of strength rewards opportunity. Keeping a body archetype to each class is cool, but it doesn’t have to be as strict as it is now.
Cut back the damage ramp up. If you’re not careful, you’ll be in Diablo 3 territory with 9 digit numbers clogging up the screen. Remember, everything is relative. Doing 100,000 damage to a monster that has 1,000,000 HP and doing 100 damage to a monster that has 1,000 HP is functionally exactly the same. One just clutters my screen more. Human brains aren’t designed to process impossibly huge numbers. As long as the relative damage and health pools on players and monsters are balanced, it still plays well but doesn’t have ridiculous numbers like Diablo 3.
Item balance - always useful vs contingently useful. Always useful should be lower than contingently useful because always useful is always relevant. For example, life gems should give less toughness than fortify gems because fortify gems are contingent on the character being fortified, and life gems are always applicable.
Goblins felt bad. The concept of goblins should be rare but rewarding. In the first two betas, goblins dropped a guaranteed legendary, but the goblins didn’t appear very often, so it was balanced, and fun. In the server slam, the goblins dropped garbage, and it felt bad.
Silent Chests need a buff - all of them dropped garbage for me. Not worth the key investment and not proportional to their rarity. I suggest they drop more/better loot and are a guaranteed cursed chest event.
Unique bosses like The Butcher - same concept. Basically goblins that can fight back and possibly (probably? lol) kill you.
General drop rate in server slam - it’s fine. Legendaries shouldn’t be raining from the sky like in Diablo 3. Scarce but powerful is the key here. We can craft legendaries using the codex anyway, so it doesn’t matter as much.
Necro skeletons were over-nerfed, so I’m glad you fixed that. Hydra seems too weak now. The rest of the changes are acceptable. There were a lot of obvious choices before. Now, it’s not so clear, which indicates better balancing.
Balancing options - ways to balance items, skills, and builds.
There are 3 main ways to judge a character’s effectiveness and overall power.
1. How much DPS does the character output?
2. How difficult is the character to play?
3. How difficult is it to find the right items for the build to work optimally?
If different builds have different maximum DPS, is that a problem? Not necessarily, no.
Build A: DPS 5/5, Ease of play: 3/5, Accessibility of items: 4/5, total 12/15
Build B: DPS 4/5, Ease of play: 5/5, Accessibility of items: 4/5, total 13/15
Build C: DPS 5/5, Ease of play: 4/5, Accessibility of items: 3/5, total 12/15
Build D: DPS 4/5, Ease of play: 4/5, Accessibility of items: 4/5, total 12/15
Build E: DPS 5.5/5, Ease of play: 3/5, Accessibility of items: 2/5, total 10.5/15
For example, Build A might have a little more DPS than build B, but Build A requires a lot more button inputs and spatial awareness, so is much harder to play, and requires a lot more skill for optimal DPS. Build B is braindead, so it’s more fitting for players who don’t wish to think so much. Both builds are still viable, however.
Build C might have a little more DPS than Build D, and while they both require the same amount of technical skill to play properly, the items that require Build C to work are much more rare.
In general, while the power of each build is slightly variable, none of them are completely useless relative to the others, and players who take the time to put that build together. A theoretical Build E has the highest DPS potential out of all of them, but is balanced by the fact that it is hard to play, and requires a lot of investment into getting the right items with the right affixes. At the end of the day, while Build E has theoretically the highest DPS potential, it is still not overwhelmingly so relative to the other builds.
Buff skills depending on what difficulty level you’re playing on. Example - Necro minions were viable on World Tier 1, but instakilled on World Tier 2. Fix - Give minion defense a slight buff whenever you go to a higher World Tier. This form of balance is only used as a LAST RESORT, and should only be used when there is no better option available. It should ONLY be used to bring a skill from useless to usable.
Thanks for reading!
