As I’m on that top 10 train of thought currently, I figured it would be a good time to put together a list of my top 10 fixes for Diablo 4: Lord of Hatred for Season 14. Not all of these are what the community at large may want and some might be more abstract issues. But I think a few are real game killers that have sprung up because Season 13 effectively is a global test realm situation. In a few cases, certain issues may have surfaced recently and might even be fixable for the current season. But it is good to point them out.
- Warlock Visuals – I don’t think this is going to be an easy fix that will get out in time for Season 14 but the Warlock is simply too noisy and visually busy for no good reason. Even something as simple as an opacity slider for player effects could make a huge difference because of how badly the various effects interfere with the environment. The biggest issue is the conflicting ground effects that can determine the life and death for a situation.
- Not Quite on Death Effects – It was clear that the game needed a change to increase the danger players can encounter. However, on death effects are a thing more ARPG players loathe because they’re generally considered unfair when they occur. While having danger is still required, it should not be an all-or-nothing scenario especially when defenses generally have little impact on blunting these effects. The fix would be to figure out a good spot where Toughness translates into mitigating a percentage of the overall damage. So instead of seeing your entire health bar taken off, you see percentages at a time. In boss fights, this change makes a much bigger difference especially in cases where bosses are phased and have poorly telegraphed mechanics. I think that might be easier to change compared to another revamp where the developers inspect each mechanic to add better telegraphing. The long term solution is to improve the visuals and telegraphing of mechanics but I think that’s a monstrous feature that would take a very long time to get right.
- War Plans Shared Experience on An Account – This is something I think most people want. As someone who has done five characters already, it would be nice to have my experience be spread across the account since I’m still the individual playing but simply changed context with the alt. I don’t mind the grind itself but to get to the lower levels of the trees is pretty bad. I do hope to see more upgrades and more activities for War Plans but I have stated that if that is to occur, they need the shared experience part to balance out having more nodes added as well as deeper trees. For leveling to 70, I think they can have limited trees to prevent players from overextending themselves. But the overall experience should be shared. That way you can customize your activity on what you need such as getting gear or glyphs upon hitting level 70.
- Better Unique Affix Management – I think the way Uniques were handled was basically laziness by the developers. At this point, the only real “Uniques” are Mythics. Uniques would be better off if their powers were turned into Greater Aspects or some other recipe and allow players to imprint them. The old Unique affixes were better done and made them worth farming. This was a major mismanagement on their part since they cut out passives and were in all likelihood rushed to get this part of their system out rather than sitting down and really examining each unique’s affixes and figuring out what deserved to stay. The long term fix is to make the Unique Aspect a property that goes into its own Aspect box once you salvage the item. That way, you can still use a unique that drops but are required to farm it. And it can still be build enabling since they would be rare. But at least allow players to optimize the affixes on them by letting up imprint the Aspect onto a rare.
- Remove Indestructible Transfiguration Property – No one liked the bricking effect during Santification so the developers relented in only having legendaries and not Greater Affix uniques be affected by a “brick”. Given how difficult is already is in finding a decent item, the idea of indestructible is merely adding insult to injury. Something like this is good for streamers to be embarrassed by their viewers but it’s terrible for the average player as an experience where you feel like you’ve wasted your time. If they intend to keep this, then bring back adding prized legendary aspects and mythic properties to Transfiguration similar to Sanctuary. That makes it worth the effort of Transfiguration’s gamble.
- Temis Obol Vendor – It’s become a recent issue someone discovered where they realized that the Obol vendor in Temis does not provide Uniques. It blows my mind how the Obol vendors don’t share the same loot table but I did confirm last night that I could gamble a unique elsewhere. This sounds like a low hanging fruit situation to fix maybe in a patch for this season. But it is frustrating knowing that I missed numerous unique opportunities because a single vendor was either bugged or intentionally designed in this manner.
- Echoing Hatred Rarity – I think a major complaint from most people is that the one new end game activity simply is too rare. I think it was an experimental mode and that the developers didn’t know how well it could scale or destroy their servers. So they made it into a rare event because it’s probably built really badly behind the scenes. They didn’t have a PTR to really help them determine how to scale this thing either, which is why I think they limited the access. Not to mention they wanted a broader group to test this feature out rather than just hardcore types or streamers.
- The Latest Gem Implementation – Personally, I didn’t really care enough because I wasn’t interested in min/maxing my characters out this season. But I will say that the farming portion for getting top Gems is ridiculous. One might say it’s balanced against the power that the Gem Strength affix provides via Transfiguration (which can be further Masterworked). But the way you get these Gems is mostly through a single dungeon or by trading. I know some people are calling for the nerf to Gem Strength but that would only work if the power of the gems are reduced correspondingly with the effort to farm them. Oddly, a lot of those people who are in some of those camps are the types that want a hardcore grind. So I don’t get it. Either way, I’m probably in favor of reducing gem power, decreasing the amount of materials required for higher level gems and keeping the Gem Strength affix as-is since it’s already a rare enough Transfiguration that it’s like hitting the lottery when you get one.
- Making War Plans Selection a REAL Play List that can be Customized – I think it was false advertising by Blizzard when they said that War Plans would be customizable for your play style. No, it isn’t. War Plans forces you into a nonsensical RNG grouping that has limited number of changes. WTF is this. I think this game mode had zero need for an RNG layer that made no sense. If you wanted an RNG layer, you’d have to compensate the player by adding something like triple rewards because the RNG layer defeats the purpose. Instead, War Plans should be a game mode that theorycrafters can help other players plan out their activities based on the need. I’ve argued in the past that you should have a path to help players obtain their goals. If you’re focused on paragon leveling, then provide a tree that optimizes your boards. If you need gear, especially build enabling uniques as you’re trying to get your build online, give me that type of tree. Honestly, if they want to fix the War Plans piece, get rid of the experience points part, have the activities get unveiled as a character levels up with certain breakpoints that permits that character to gain access to an activity (e.g. lair bosses only start appearing in Torment) and make the selections completely available and deeper. Or perhaps, the experience gained from activities goes into a general pool that function as activity upgrade points that can be placed into the available nodes. That would solve the bulk of the issues with this system. The current system is half baked and only was popular due to the novelty from its freshness. But it was far from what was promised in my book.
- Loot Filter Upgrade – Besides improving on tooltips (because certain parts make no sense when you look at them), I think the Loot Filter should simply be changed into a Loot Vacuum with a checkbox that makes auto pickup turned on by default. But you should be able to uncheck it if you prefer the carpal tunnel inducing experiencing of clicking on microscopic items that have a tiny pickup radius and are placed haphazardly on the ground in a manner that makes clicking impossible.
10b. Auto pickup for Currency, Charms/Seals and Runes – Instead of the Loot Vacuum, then at least let the Pet pick up these microscopic items. There’s really zero reason why anyone in 2026 should have to sift through the ground for these imperceptible items. We know the technology exist because the Pet can pick up gold and other materials. So why not the rest?
Final Thoughts
Why didn’t I add Mephisto and the cut scene to this list? I think Mephisto is such a poorly done boss that it should be outright scrapped. Whoever the lead encounter(s) person/people are need a mandatory probationary period at Blizzard. I’m not sorry nor will I apologize for making that comment. There’s something clearly wrong with this person in believing that they can add a raid style phased boss to a farming, casual game and then force some sort of social engineering to cockblock seasonal progress because of how bad the system is designed. I feel like the Diablo 4 team invited the raid boss encounter people from WoW to the Diablo 4 side without realizing that they are two differently designed games. Many encounters that have the horrible pulled out view should be removed from the game and revamped from the ground up because they defy any common sense for UI/UX and game play in this genre. Even high end streamers who can farm these bosses do so through gritting their teeth because of how bad these mechanics are. The difficulty for these bosses is purely artificial. If you want a raid style boss, go play Dark Souls or find a mythic guild in WoW. I don’t want Diablo 4 to be a game for everyone. There’s some limits where you need to put your foot down and say enough is enough. Same thing for the Tower and high level Pit situations. The so-called broken builds that people complain about wouldn’t be a thing if leaderboards and this misguided notion of esports were removed as a core value from Blizzard in all of their games. It’s something that makes a game like this toxic since the competitive assholes, who are a very tiny vocal minority, are the ones ruining the fun by calling for nerfs and not really understanding how a game like this ought to be made.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.