Diablo 4: Quality of Life Wishlist

With the change to Nightmare Dungeon Sigils, it’s clear that the game designers for Diablo 4 showing a willingness to listen to the community to improve the game in fundamental ways that actually are pretty good overall improvements. As I wrote up my previous post, I realized that there’s still a great deal of work that needs to be done to make the base game more polished. And hopefully, I can capture some of that based on reddit posts and my own experience.

• Doors in Instances – One common complaint about Nightmare Dungeons is that there’s too many doors for certain dungeons. The issue partly is that the pace being set makes one want to push forward as fast as possible and doors are a hindrance that not only slow your progress down but serve no purpose outside of being a nuisance. There are two ways of interacting with a door where you either click on it or you can use the “F” key (or possibly another one) to open it. Alternatively, if a monster is in the next area, they can occasionally open them as well. The real issue to me is that neither way of interacting with the door feels good because the radius of interacting is small and I find myself occasionally misclicking. Also, the animation is annoyingly slow. I think a better solution would be nearing a door that causes them to auto open or they become destructible. If doors served a more strategic purpose such as being able to lock monsters inside a room, then I would think they’d have a better reason to exist. Otherwise, for a game that’s moving into a faster pace, why keep them around?
• Pet Pickup is Slow – This is becoming more noticeable with the reddit forums now remarking on this subject. But I find myself often backtracking so that my pet can pick up gold. Sometimes, it’s difficult to see whether the pet can path to an object at all because it might get blocked. I read that flying pets offer better pick up which leads me to believe that pathing probably is the issue. Either way, I’m certain that people are missing a ton of gold due to the speed of a pet’s pick up ability.
• More Pickup Options – The Animus quests for dungeons are one of the most tedious and hated parts because it’s very easy to miss a tiny globe since you have monsters that drop these late. Thus, many people have suggested the pets once again should serve another purpose by picking up Animus along with things like experience globes. If pets aren’t going to have this responsibility, then increase the pick up radius for these options by a lot because they drop very slowly and require you to run over them for no good reason. When I see a higher level dungeon with the experience node attached, I might just leave the XP globes lying around because it’s a pain backtracking for a small amount of XP gain.
• Change XP Globes – I have no idea why these things were implemented like this. Wouldn’t have been better simply to build in the extra experience into the monsters themselves? Or just provide a flat percentage based bonus as opposed to a nonsensical, time wasting mini game?
• Increase Radius for Interaction – There’s so many various things in the game that are just a pain to interact with from doors, to prisoners to Chaos Rifts, etc. Prisoners are one of the worst because they require a precise, close up click. I dread getting instances where you need to untie these incompetent prisoners since you have to wonder just how many times they get caught. But not only do you require a precise click, but they are channeled. At least if you’re going to force a channeled interaction that’s painfully slow, improve the zone for clicking on the object. Otherwise, it’s just beyond frustrating. Items too can be painful especially things that are small like runes.
• Change Runes into Auto Pick up – Even if a rune has a special glow, you can’t necessary see it on the mini map and they don’t automatically enter your inventory if you change zones. I’m certain many people are missing a ton of runes, maybe even higher quality ones because they simply did not see it on the ground. Since runes are treated as gems, my suggestion is to make them automatically picked up. Now, this would cause issues with trading if all a person does is drop it on the ground. But I think if a person wants to trade, they should just use the trading options. But there’s really no reason for runes to be something someone has to manually grab when they’re painfully small and again require that shitty precise clicking.
• Ending Negative Effects in Nightmare Dungeons – So one of my beefs is that they got rid of the protective globe in Nightmare Dungeons (even though mysteriously kept them in The Pit). Some effects like Volcanic seem to linger after finishing the objective in a Nightmare Dungeon. I’m certain there’s a trigger/flag that indicates when a dungeon’s objective is completed such that you can just run something to end all events for that dungeon.
• Make Portals Faster – I never understood why Diablo 3 turned portals into a channeled effect. It was a stupid move that had no real purpose. Eventually, they allowed some forgiveness in introducing the shoulders effect that prevented people from being interrupted. Nonetheless, you still could get killed which is annoying. For whatever brain dead reason, the developers for Diablo 4 decided to reintroduce the channeling effect for portals except that there’s no way to counter an interruption. Again, I don’t see why portals require a channeling effect nor forcing players to be interrupted once they start summoning one. At least, if you’re going to force channeling as part of the effect, then create a protective shield over the player. Otherwise, get rid of the channeling so you can summon a portal instantaneously to avoid wasting unnecessary time.
• Rework the Mount System – I truly despise Diablo 4’s mounting system. I don’t know who thought of how it was implemented but that person is fucking stupid. They did correct the earlier wretchedness of the most offensive aspects but there are a few things that still need to be updated. First, standardize the speed at which you run at. I truly hate the speed boost effect. It really serves no purpose. If you want to get to point B faster, you’re going to get there faster. But don’t put in another stupid cooldown effect where it just exist for FOMO. Part of the problem is that the minute you spend a charge to go faster but hit some object, you lose the speed. WTF? Why is that a thing? This constantly happens too because you’re zoning in and out of areas which can affect this. Also, there’s an attack ability that only occasionally works. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t. At this point, that ability once again serves no purpose outside of some idiot developer saying, “Hey, check out this feature.” I honestly would prefer if they just removed it because it’s stupid and causes other issues especially with zoning or when assets get loaded and the system can’t load up the environment fast enough. If it were me, I’d just eliminate mounts altogether but I realize this is one of their hairbrained monetization schemes. Instead, they should just make it so it’s even less annoying than it already is.
• World Boss Timed Event – I don’t get why World Bosses were meant to be a thing. I think they were testing a larger scale raid type of system that never got flushed out. But there’s almost no reason to do World Bosses anymore. The fact that they’re on a timer makes them even worse. My pet peeve is the timing aspect. At this point, why have a timer if there’s almost no reason to have these? Or just have them up every half hour or something frequent to coincide with other Whisper quests.
• Better mapped keys – This one started to really annoy me because I constantly am accidentally hitting the reliquary or challenge screens. Now with the reliquary key mapped to “R”, I’m really suspicious because of how that incentives moving towards purchasing a battle pass. But it’s really annoying where you’re trying to click “T” to open a portal up and you end up loading the slow as fuck Reliquary screen. Similarly, the shop is horribly slow with the woman and her repetitive dialog. I’ll have to go back into my settings to see if I can disable these but these are just so poorly designed.
• Non-skippable Dialog – I redid the Spiritborn hall quests because apparently doing it the first time didn’t allow me to skip it the next time I tried a new seasonal Spiritborn character. But the worst part was the slogfest of dealing with slow as fuck dialog that you can’t skip over. Too much of this game allows for non-skippable dialog that’s painful to listen to and a sheer waste of time. Call me callous but I’d honestly prefer to have AI voice act skippable dialog than listen to some of this shit over and over when I simply don’t care. I really hope for the expansion that every dialog and story line element is skippable. I simply don’t care about atrocious writing and want to just play the damn game.

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