A post over on Reddit’s Diablo 4 community made me think in a broader sense the wasted opportunities or things that need a serious upgrade in their implementation. On the post, the writer wished he was able to use Mercenaries for the Citadel (affectionately known by the community as “the raid”). It was something when I first heard about the Mercenaries as a new feature and later the “raid” that I too had hoped for considering that group content tends to be something people dislike being shoved down their throat in a genre like ARPGs. That led me down the path of the various problems in Diablo 4 right now. Since one of the lead class designers had announced his resignation from Blizzard, I have to wonder if Blizzard might hopefully look for ways to actually improve the game, not just enforce old metrics and KPIs as I suspect they do. Thus, I have come up with 10 elements or game philosophies that I think are on their death bed or require serious review.
Raid (Citadel) / Group Content
While Blizzard has refused to outwardly describe the Citadel as a raid (more group focused), the community in general had adopted the idea that it was more like a raid. Apparently, the developers believed that group content is something that should be in the game or that makes the game a lot more fun. While I can agree to a lesser degree, I think this idea works for situations where friends can group together or where groups are formed ad hoc like in the cases of world bosses, legion events and most of the open world areas. Those systems work in a group setting because they aren’t necessarily designed with strict grouping in mind but adapt and scale based on the number of people who join. The mechanics for these systems aren’t overly complex once you see the basics and no one is effectively forced to create a party. There is no group centered accountability whereas if one dies, it is that individual’s fault.
With the Citadel, the developers decided to make group accountability a thing, which doesn’t work because no one in ARPG wants to think. Worse yet no one wants to do puzzles in a pressure situation where you have other people that expect high standards for themselves and take gaming too seriously. That’s just a horrible formula that Blizzard should have known from their experience with World of Warcraft. If the Citadel had been designed to scale UP to a party OR if a player could level and gear their Mercenaries to fight against bosses, then I think the Citadel would have more success.
That said, the takeaway for Blizzard ought to be the KISS principal if they want to continue to engage players with group content. They have relative success with world bosses and legion events in terms of how to operate group style content. Heck, I would argue that the best group content in the game is that one legion event in the new area. That’s actually a lot of fun and bravo to whoever came up with that. But no one wants to be forced into coordinating positions, etc. in an ARPG.
Along those lines, I want to add that this current season 7 with the season journey baking in forced group content seems like Blizzard’s way of again either socially engineering people to use the new group finder and/or proving to management that forced group content is a rotten idea. I’m currently blocked on the last tier just because I haven’t been able to get into a group since the beginning of the season and don’t really want to put any effort into one. Oddly, before this season, people would regularly invite me into world boss and legion events for the experience gain. So something is really off.
And to combine the notion of group content in revisions/upgrades, let’s talk about Clans. If Blizzard plans to do anything with Clans, they need to make them a huge deal because right now I don’t see any good reason to belong to one. My Clan is dead and I have zero incentive to go out and join a new one. I mean even Lost Ark did a far better job in having their own guild system because they had rewards and quests associated with having a guild. Or Guild Halls in WoW. There’s absolutely nothing that’s done for a Clan in Diablo 4. It’s pathetic.
While I’m sure some of the fear is the perception of the lone ARPG player (like myself) not wanting to join a Clan in order to do certain content, at least provide some sort of incentive. Like a Clan stash or 10% gold earnings that go to a Clan bank. Or maybe even materials. Anything. Otherwise, just eliminate the Clan idea completely.
World Bosses
World bosses are another one of those pieces of content where you wonder why did they bother. The concept itself isn’t bad because it mirrors what they had in World of Warcraft. But their evolution from hard to kill entities, to easy loot pinadas where you can get the highest ilvl pieces, to HP cushions show that there’s no real direction nor purpose for these things. The Grand Cache you get from slaying one of these world bosses gives you nothing and you can do better fighting the seasonal content in getting better loot, runes, etc. heck everything than wasting your time on one of these guys. The only real reason to do a world boss is just to do it because you’re bored and need to get some seasonal achievement thing. But even then what’s the point?
I doubt changing the world boss mechanics will improve their significance. But there needs to be a better reason to continue doing them week after week or even day after day even with the 5 whispers or whatever you receive.
My idea would be some kind of token that you use to elevate the difficulty of world bosses that do things like buff their HP, increase damage, add the Butcher, etc. just to make the fight more interesting for the group. Then the reward would be a new unique that you can only get from these creatures. Or perhaps some other very rare item like a currency but highly desired that can boost your own power or modify your equipment. But again give these things a real purpose again.
Player vs Player (PVP)
Again, this is partly influenced by another post on Reddit but the bottom line is that no one that I know clamors for PVP in Diablo 4. While I figure part of the idea for having PVP was due to internal popularity at Blizzard for Arenas in Diablo 3 and the occasional murmuring of nostalgia for PVP from Diablo 2 in niche instances, the vast majority of players don’t want nor care for PVP. The numbers don’t lie and eventually Blizzard realized it themselves when they admitted that the old season passes in containing PVP had very low numbers.
I get that certain players might want the option of PVP (mostly old school assholes that were probably in high school fucking unsuspecting schlubs over as well as Twitch streamers that are associated to PVP like Swifty), the reality is that PVP is very niche in terms of a mind set. It really doesn’t make a whole lot of sense adding it into a game like Diablo 4 because the real adversary supposedly are demonic and vile creatures (well players can be vile but that’s a separate discussion). At best, PVP should just be a flag that one turns on for the thrill and not be zone specific. I bet if that happened, more players would actually enjoy the PVP aspect in Diablo 4 because those people are probably the same ones that enjoy hardcore game modes and like the thrill as wannabe adrenaline junkies.
Now, to throw my $2 into the pot, I think if you wanted to make PVP zones a success for Diablo 4, you’d need a separate skill tree along with Aspects and gear kinda like what they did with World of Warcraft. That way, you create an incentive to actually do PVP. The cosmetic aspect just isn’t enough and bragging rights aren’t enough to really pull in a casual player into that universe. Tangible rewards like gear and builds would have to be the real chase for that aspect of the game. However, I think in doing that style of PVP, you’d only wreck the game harder than just giving up on the idea and making PVP a flag setting with a 10 – 30 minute cooldown.
Going back to the linked article to reddit, I think at this stage unless they choose my suggestions on PVP in general, repurposing those two PVP zones probably is the way to go. They just aren’t most people’s cups of tea and outside of the two waypoints, there’s no reason to venture near them.
Mercenaries
Originally, when I saw that we were going to get Followers, I was excited because Followers in Diablo 3 became quite useful once their gear slots were expanded and certain pieces of gear received the Emanate ability. Boy howdy, in seeing Mercenaries in Diablo 4, I felt like I was given an anal probe after being threatened by old Rod Ferguson’s phallus itself.
First, I love the concept of Mercenaries. Having someone to aid you when you lack friends or people to help you on your journey is great. Filling in certain areas such as Raheir giving you a nice elemental resistance bonus is nice while you work on filling in that gap. But once you receive them, they feel more like an accessory. There’s virtually no customization, no gear and almost no truly noticeable difference beyond perhaps Subo’s see everything on the mini map affect.
But the bottom line is that they’re so boring. They feel more like a percentage boosting up a thing here and there rather than someone you can customize or give personality to. It’s already bad enough that our gear slots were cut even shorter and that the Aspect pool has increased over time (more on that in a moment). Then you get only 10 levels and most of those aren’t significant.
With all the new Aspects, I wish there were Mercenary only Aspects or at least Aspects that got repurposed for Mercenaries that Emanated. I know people will complain about more power creep but I prefer power creep and making use of something in the game rather than sharding all this extra, worthless gear and having a massive pool of Aspects where the bulk just sit around as filler for RNG to make me frustrated. Even that little Construct thing got more “gear” than these Mercenaries.
Now, I’m sure that the idea of the Mercenary was to allow in future expansions more Mercenaries. While that may seem like a great idea, the truth is that there’s no real reason to have these as they are besides hitting a checkbox that they existed in the previous two games. And as I mentioned and was alluded to in the earlier article, if the Citadel had been created as scaling group oriented content where Mercenaries using their AI could take the place of a real party member, then they would thematically have made more sense in this expansion. I think that the designers couldn’t get their AI to work with the mechanics in the Citadel and the whole thing took a massive shit because of competing factors. If not, then these people are even bigger bozos that just have no idea how to design in the first place.
Useless Aspects / Uniques / Gear
As I have hinted at, the idea of useless, expansive Aspects in a game of useless bloat grind my gears (not to take aim at GGG btw). I feel like these designers just add shit because they think it’s cool but lack a cohesive vision of how things ought to work together. An example is the new Aspect where you can cast Hurricane on your Wolves. I have yet to see anyone use this Aspect. I tried it on PTR but couldn’t thematically make it work. You’d require more action slots on your bar, more paragon boards and more slots on your gear to make it worth taking. But this just points to how pointless Aspects are at times.
I think part of the philosophy is that when you find a legendary early on, the Aspect might be useful at that stage. The reason why this philosophy makes no sense is that your time under level 60 is minuscule. Those early Aspects become throwaways quickly and probably won’t be used again unless serendipitously there’s end game build that you switch to which requires a particular Aspect in between certain builds. The other half of the philosophy is simply to bulk up that RNG pool to prevent you from finding all the best things at once. Yet it feels like a giant waste because most of those things won’t be used for anything. So why even keep them in the game? The same can be said about Uniques.
There’s a few solutions I have for the Aspect/Unique bloat:
- Kanai’s Cube – As Blizzard announced the next expansion in 2026 for Diablo 4, one has to ask what idea can they steal…I mean inherit from a past Diablo game that would make sense and be effective? Kanai’s Cube as implemented in Diablo 3 makes the most sense by far. Here’s how I would solve Kanai’s Cube with regards to the Aspect bloat:
– Add one slot per category. They have the categories for Aspects that nicely divide each slot so this wouldn’t be problematic
– Add a unique item slot. In cases where you have a conflict between say a Mythic and a BiS type of unique, allow for that unique to go into this slot. I would snapshot that unique similar to how the Armory uses the specific item to be placed inside. - Add a rare currency to allow uniques to have an “Aspect” slot. An example of where I think this helps is Spirit Bond and Tyrael’s Might or Shroud of False Death as a choice. Most Companion Druids need Spirit Bond and cannot sacrifice their leg slot because of Storm’s Companion. So they either have to give up the chest or head slot which means there’s only a single slot for a Mythic. In having a specialized currency that perhaps only drops off certain situations (can anyone say World Bosses for those who read my earlier statement?), you can allow for more Aspects to be played around on a build rather than forcing this shitty jigsaw puzzle one of the developers said they wanted. Heck, if you really want to make this currency interesting, either allow only a single unique, a single Mythic or one per major slot (weapon, armor, jewelry) to be applied.
- Give Mercenaries equipment and allow Aspects to Emanate. If the gear itself doesn’t Emanate, give them a currency to make that slot have the capability of Emanating. See what I did there? Now, you have more reasons to farm this currency up, you gave Mercenaries more meaning, Aspects have more uses and things became more interesting. Heck, maybe part of the idea here is to help augment Mercenaries’ inherent abilities with existing Aspects. Like turning an attack into Elemental damage. But it would be nice being able to use that spare gear on Mercenaries.
- Create a new “elevated” item that allows for double “Aspects”. Greater Affixes are basically your Ancient items from Diablo 3, which mean they’re boring because they only have elevated stats. But if you want a really cool idea for an item, have a very slot double slot that permits an item to receive the second Aspect. If you want to mix and match, do this along with the currency item I proposed earlier.
- Start consolidating Aspects together. In effect, you’re getting the “elevated” feature through consolidating Aspects. For instance, I think Necromancers saw the bonus Skeleton Warrior and Mages receive something like this. This really isn’t a creative solution but it’s one of those things that should happen sooner or later if they expect to continue expanding that pool of Aspects.
Trade
Everyone wants it. No one enjoys going through sketchy 3rd party websites to handle trade. While I’m glad the current team at Blizzard has embraced trading everything except Mythic items almost, the mechanism for trade is too painful and potentially nefarious to use. The thing is that Blizzard already has the capability of adding an Auction House in the game. It was done in World of Warcraft and Diablo 3. Diablo 3’s mistake was connecting it to actual money where people could dupe and get away with murder. Since Blizzard learned a legally scarring lesson from the RMT ordeal, they should know by now that the basic Auction House in World of Warcraft does work and should be the thing they implement in the game to make trading feel modern.
Of course, there’s going to be players who will find the Auction House disdainful no matter what especially when it comes to progression. The best solution for those players is to enable a flag that prevents a character from trading. Simple. These characters can interact with everyone still but are prohibited from trading which ought to at least satisfy a degree of self-found in the game. I don’t understand why this should be difficult in theory (i.e. gray out trade in the wheel and prevent them from seeing others drop items on the ground in a party setting).
Dungeons
I know some streamers heavily dislike the way Dungeons are currently implemented. For the most part, they don’t really have much of a purpose after they moved Glyph experience into The Pit (which I personally hate). Currently, Dungeons mostly provide bad loot, the occasional whisper, Altar farming (for the current season), maybe a task or two in a seasonal pass and Masterworking material. Beyond that, there’s not really any great reason to do Dungeons outside of sheer boredom. You could say that they provide bottom level Aspects but you can easily get those at this stage just by doing the season content and receiving the rewards naturally. Those may not be targetable but the bulk of the Dungeon Aspects aren’t nearly as good as they once were.
Part of the hate is the layouts where you might have to backtrack and the stupid and occasional buggy objectives. Without the tie in to Glyphs, defeating a boss really serves no purpose unless you are desperate to get a certain Aspect or might farm one for a character you want to make. Even the Butcher isn’t a challenge anymore compared to his most fearsome appearance in Season 3 where he seemed practically impossible to kill. So why have these things if they’re just bland content? In all honesty at the moment, there are no reasons. So how can we repurpose these to make them more interesting?
Before talking about the solution, let me address some things here. For me, I honestly hate the Pits. When they swapped the Masterworking material for Glyph leveling, I thought it was sensible yet silly at the same time. But the problem with the Pits is that they get stale quickly. I’ve ranted already on why I hate the Pit vs Greater Rifts from Diablo 3 and I firmly stand my ground. I prefer Dungeons but Dungeons no longer scale and they don’t present any challenging content nor real reason to do them. It’s obvious that the makers wanted Nightmare Dungeons to be the end game because of the way they were connected to Glyph leveling. However, in the pre-Pit days, once you hit level 21 on a Glyph, that was it.
The Pits would allow for much loftier scaling and difficulty but with 5 Glyphs, you can get bored easily. In my case, once I get my Glyphs to level 46 or so, I stop leveling them as I don’t see much of a point outside of the occasional whisper. I know you can get them to level 100 and that you can go up as high as Pit 150 or whatever but for someone like me, that’s just a big fat waste of time because there’s no meaningful gain besides showing off ones penis size.
When they introduced Inferno Hordes as a new method for getting Masterworking material along with legendaries, etc. it demonstrated that Blizzard was willing to have alternative mechanisms for doing similar content. That to me is clearly a great thing because doing one type of content, especially when the number of layouts, mobs and play style are incredibly confined, you’ll just give up and find something else to do. I still think the Pit’s only true purpose ought to be for those who enjoy measuring their penis (or boob/vaginal size to be of equality here). Beyond that, I want more variety in which to achieve that type of content.
With that said and given the current problems of Nightmare Dungeons, here’s my proposal: They need currencies similar to the Helltide Mindcage, the Undercity Tribunes, etc. that a person can augment a Nightmare Dungeon seal to add difficulties and rewards. I think these currencies should not be treated exactly like a Tribute nor Mindcage in that you only use one (or 3 in the case of Mindcages) but can be customized in giving say 5 different affixes for certain benefits. Like let’s say you add x5 increase mobs damage where you can go x1 … x5 in exchange for more gold. Or perhaps, triple bosses for a higher chance at a unique (maybe one of those elevated items I mentioned). Maybe you don’t have a good boss build and prefer to face more powerful elites that are doubled or gain one more affix than usual in exchange for Glyph XP. Now, you get the customization aspect/agency that players want without unnecessarily needing to add artificial Torment levels that do little besides boost up mob HP and damage.
You could add this type of currency to apply to the open world too but it’s better if it’s isolated to Nightmare Dungeons to give them a very specific purpose, an identity as well as a clearly defined reward structure. They certainly have the elements in the game already to do this (look at the penalties vs rewards one get from doing Root Holds in Season 7). So this would make an excellent Nightmare Dungeon 2.0 type of rework.
E-sports
I have a Kontroversial Keith view on the subject of E-sports with regards to the entire Diablo franchise: kill it. I think there’s a core mandate in Blizzard that probably needs to die out where they wanted to tie as many games as possible to some sort of e-sports concept. It might’ve worked for Starcraft, World of Warcraft Arena/Raiding, etc. but I think it’s such a niche thing because the number of people actually interested in e-sports is small and the number of people who want to participate is even tinier.
E-sports to me works when it’s organic and the community itself formulates the rules. When it’s obvious that the designers try to enforce an e-sports type of setting into the game (e.g. timers) for no good reason, it kills off a lot of the design of the game. For instance, if the Pit didn’t have a timer, then any build should be able to do higher levels. But because the Pit is timed, people will select whatever the “meta” build is and then the game designers are forced to have a flavor of the month problem where they end up being unable to fix core issues while other builds suffer.
And it’s quite clear that each time Blizzard attempts to insert a e-sports like feature into the game, it fails miserably. The Gauntlet is one prime example that ended up going nowhere. I think the Citadel was done in the hope of matching competitive Raiding between teams. PVP zones feel as though they were meant to be something more but never caught on. And the Pit remains a feature because we need it to progress in Torments and level our Glyphs. But I think if there were alternative mechanisms, people wouldn’t use the Pit for Glyphs at the least.
I think it would take a lot of pressure off the game designers to give up on the e-sports idea and leave it up to the community to decide how those things are run whether it’s a world first to level 60 or paragon 300 or whatever, highest Pit level, etc. But e-sports just has no place in this game. There’s no incentive to be competitive and I don’t think enough people really care to watch it either.
Balance
If you remove the idea of e-sports, then I think it relaxes the pressure on the idea of balance. The only reason balance comes up in conversation is because of the Pit if we need to be honest. There’s no other mechanism in the game that requires specific builds to be playable. And the Pit itself is a soul sucking feature that is a thing because it has a timer and acts as a wall to get to your next tier of Pit as well as increasing your Glyph levels. Without the Pit, game balance wouldn’t need to be as emphasized and there would be far more build diversity since optimizing builds won’t be guide dependent as they are now.
In short, removing e-sports features from the game should help improve game balance with regard to build diversity and make constant bugs or the issue of characters being overpowered seem less of an issue moving forward.
Seasons
Lastly, I decided to focus on Seasons as an idea that needs to be eliminated/re-imagined last because as I may have mentioned in a previous blog, I simply don’t see a point. Right now, I interpret Seasons as more for developers than for players because it allows the developers to experiment with concepts in a live environment. There are some monetary aspects tied with seasons like their pass and cosmetics but I feel these are really minor points compared to some of the core problems I see with the way seasons currently are handled.
First, the so-called Eternal Realm has no real meaning in the scheme of things anymore. Your gear gets invalidated each season because of all the changes that keep getting made and your builds die off. There’s no rebirth option and not even a website to view ones character to see any achievements for a player nor their characters. The silly developers on a recent fire chat boasted that “it’s cool seeing those paragon levels transfer to your Eternal Realm characters to see your overall progress.” Not really because my only time logging onto an Eternal character is to check if they have any Mythics I need to shard for spare sparks before I delete them and create a brand new character. So right there the idea of an Eternal Realm itself is flat out dumb and shows the disconnect with how the game operates with the developers themselves (and if they’re trying to justify bad ideas publicly, they might as well not say anything at all to prevent them from looking even dumber).
Next, let’s talk about what a season originally was conceived as in terms of Diablo 2 vs what it has come to mean now (with some Diablo 3 thrown in). According to other people who played Diablo 2 season content, the primary notion was to freshen up the economy. Seasons in Diablo 2 (or ladders) were meant to be long lasting periods and slow grinds. I can’t cite the exact time frame for how long a typical Diablo 2 ladder would last, but by all accounts it wasn’t meant to be as short as Diablo 4’s 3-4 month period.
When Diablo 3 began introducing the idea of seasons, it was to provide some new content (namely improved gear), a reset point for old characters and gradually new flavored content with a few bonus awards for completing the seasonal objectives (mostly repetitive cosmetics, pets and portraits). Diablo 3’s seasons could last anywhere between 6 – 9 months before the next season started. It worked since the beginning because each season did feel mostly unique and in having the Rebirth feature (i.e. the reset), you still could retain your favorite characters (mostly the name) and kill count (which was what mattered to us since everything else was removed). The Rebirth if anything allowed the emotional and mental connection to stay alive between the player and the game content.
When the new seasons started introducing cool features such as Ethereal Weapons or the Soul Stones, these ideas were great flavors that made playing a specific season worth engaging. Certain seasons such as the one for Followers and Altar eventually were adapted across the board (well the Altar remains season only but it’s still a thing). With seasons now in rotation, the game gets to reuse old seasons that had very unique flavors such as the Angelic Crucibles (which is in the current one).
Diablo 4’s adopts just the resetting of currency and season specific flavor but does not have the emotional connection to ones character because of the lack of a Rebirth feature. I think the lack of a Rebirth feature is more annoying than anything but given that outside of the look and name, there’s really nothing to salvage from an old character and Blizzard is simply too cheap to allow for more storage for whatever reason.
Now, what really irritates me is that the season flavor is meant more as an experimental for the developers. I get annoyed by this because it feels like the effort ends up going to waste down the line. I felt something was wrong internally over at Blizzard when Season 2’s Vampiric powers ended up getting re-released as Aspects in Season 3 during their mid-season patch/update. They probably saw the Season 1 content of the Malignant powers coming back as Uniques as a success in Season 2. But moving the Vampiric powers into Aspects felt really lazy, not to mention beginning what I call the Aspect bloat.
More than that, I feel that if the Vampiric powers and zone were reintroduced as a timed event that ran say every 3 hours and were nerfed to a degree, people would’ve been really excited to stick with Season 3. Season 3 itself was considered a semi-failure because of how poorly the traps and the season dungeons were implemented initially. Once those were fixed, I think Season 3 became reasonably decent. The Constructs themselves weren’t bad little companions just bland. But if you added the Vampiric powers plus the previous zone, it would’ve given people more content along with more power to diversify their builds. Yes, the power creep would’ve been there still but you could control that by culling the useless powers and trimming down the numbers a bit. The idea of how Vampiric powers were acquired and what they could do made them interesting.
Nonetheless, since Season 3, Season 4 – 6 weren’t as character focused. Season 4 had the Loot Reborn thing, which was needed and exciting but outside of that, the season itself was bland. I think the main feature was the revamped Helltides along with the Mindcage thing that everyone liked but disappeared after season 5. Season 5 revamped unique powers, which again was great but the main thing we received there was Inferno Hordes that became part of the core game.
Season 6 was overshadowed by the expansion and introduced us to that big world creature (forgot the name already). And here again I’m upset that it wasn’t repurposed because the creature in giving out those items that allowed some boost in difficulty, XP and specific rewards were great. Maybe the creature itself wasn’t fantastic but I can see myself periodically doing those events now just for the bonus loot things.
So here’s my frustration: what happens to these pieces of content? Maybe not all are grand slam hitters but they just go away for the most part. My biggest issue with Diablo 4 is that I get bored easily. I did enjoy Season 7 for a limited time but there’s not enough to keep my attention. Yes, the new Head Hunt zones have plenty to do but it’s the same kind of content and output where you feel burnt out quickly. The season journey and the main season quest line were draining to me because I just got burnt out doing the same zones over and over. If the three previous major seasons with the Vampire zone, the Construct zone and Dungeons as well as that world event were still around and perhaps if Mindcages were kept, there would’ve been more for me to do. I enjoy building my characters up and if there’s multiple routes where I can do all these little activities, my engagement is kept high.
I get that there’s a need internally for the developers to experiment to justify putting out new seasonal content but it really feels more like for KPIs at the end of the day. You know your company is dead in the water once you’ve gone completely KPI driven for accounting.
Final Thoughts
I really want Diablo 4 to be better. I’m not sure if that recent resignation, the (false) promise that releases will be less buggy and the 2026 expansion release announcement are any indication of the intention for the direction of Blizzard with regards to Diablo 4 but after that flop of a release for their Spiritborn expansion, I don’t think people have any confidence left in this company. That’s it. Something else is needed to really make this game feel like it’s worth playing as opposed to giving some ancients developers a paycheck without good justification. Call me cold but at least I provided some feedback here on where I think the game can/should be optimized.
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