Beta signup Diablo 4

[Mehrunes]

The only problem I've run into with corpses is on bosses. I was using the scythe skeletons but switched to shield and noticed not real difference in corpses. If you have the legendary that triggers explosion with blood mist you only need 1 or 2 corpses to get enough damage to generate a corpse or kill.

I really like a blood necro. Hemmorage, blood lance, blood mist, and corpse explosion. On bosses the fortify you build up helps and gives time for corpses to pile up. Blood orbs spawn like crazy with the consume corpses skill/legendary. It might play differently at max but I hope not as it really is fun to carpet bomb the entire area.

Because you at least still had skeletons killing things for you. And that's on piss-easy difficulty with low HP enemies that you'll play for like 2 days on live, where unbuffed skeletons can easily kill stuff on their own before you can get your big damage skill ability ready. I tried a build with them sacrificed to free up ability slots because darkness builds have a lot going on as it is and getting 2-3 corpses to get the ball rolling is 5-7.5 seconds of channeling Decompose. Unless there are really weak enemies in a pack like ghouls (though, again, piss-easy difficulty with low HP enemies) that they will die from just a Blight and Decompose to speed up the corpse generation, that's rather atrocious gameplay. Maybe if the passive skill that gives lucky proc to generate corpses had huge increase to proc chance if you had skeleton warriors sacrificed that could go somewhere.

Though, fundamentally, a key class mechanic like the undead minions shouldn't require wasting ability slots to function, especially when there already is a separate sacrifice mechanic in it for when you don't want them around. The fact that the minions fuck off the moment you take the ability off the bar is outright moronic. Especially since taking other abilities off does not impair them in such a way and, for example, Corpse Explosion still works fine when getting activated by Blood Mist instead even if you take the Corpse Explosion itself off the ability bar and send it to Costa Rica.

[Jastall]

you don't care about the mom but you need her to cross the lake and follow Lilith.

And yes Neyrelle really is a discount Leah. And not remotely as interesting sofar. Leah provided a hook to get the player following along with the story and the new girl doesn't remotely come close to being as interesting.

Leah but with a more annoying attitude is what I'm getting from her, yes. Which either means she'll suffer a similar fate which would be a bit silly, or won't and she'll just keep being an annoying character that we need because the story says so.

Feels like the grim atmosphere of the game's opening scenes is slowly eroding away to me, but hey, it's still early in the story still.

[Nerph-]

My rtx 2070 doesn't like this game very much. A few times now I've heard the GPU fans going ham for 5 odd seconds, sounding like a plane taking off. First game I've noticed them do this. Tried setting everything on low but that doesn't help.

As for the game itself, it's slowly growing on me but I'm still not preordering.

[Gaidax]

I don't mind Leah 2.0 in isolation, however given they literally had same character Act 1 on D3 down to details and circumstances, it's really an odd choice here.

Maybe they actually want to remake Leah's story and give her some better ending, but overall - that's like "ehhhh?".

[Mehrunes]

I don't really mind the girl from the campaign per se. The only thing that bothered me was the ending narration about how she didn't know how super duper special she is at the end of the chapter. Not exactly a fresh trope.

[Nymrohd]

I don't really mind the girl from the campaign per se. The only thing that bothered me was the ending narration about how she didn't know how super duper special she is at the end of the chapter. Not exactly a fresh trope.

Yeah I was willing to give her a chance up to that point.

[Iliena]

I had a play around streaming it from my gaming PC to my HTPC with Moonlight game streaming so I could play on my main TV, I was shocked how well the game played with a controller.

Unfortunately I couldn't manage to get 4k as it maxes the encoder on the GPU and my TV only does 120FPS at 1080 anyway, so I turned DLSS off and at 1080 with all the settings maxed I was getting a solid 120 and looked good from couch viewing distance.

[Edge-]

Play some Sorc, felt much better than rogue.

I'm still "meh" on it. It's not bad, but there are some huge flaws in the game from my PoV that hurt my excitement. Will probably still get it around launchtime, but I'm still surprised that despite a lot of personal hype for it over the years I'm just kinda "eh" on it.

[Fencers]

Play some Sorc, felt much better than rogue.

I'm still "meh" on it. It's not bad, but there are some huge flaws in the game from my PoV that hurt my excitement. Will probably still get it around launchtime, but I'm still surprised that despite a lot of personal hype for it over the years I'm just kinda "eh" on it.

Rogue doesn't really come together for a while. Rogue need a few things to come online then they are shockingly effective.

People were soloing the world boss on Rogue in like a minute flat.

Sorcerer feels good because they take care of themselves at low level, IMO. But no sorc in my guild could beat my Necro or Rogue when I got there.

I was in melee on a Barbarian 100% of the time on the WB. Died once the first time he ever spawned.





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Yeah I was willing to give her a chance up to that point.

The way I rolled my eyes.

[xskarma]

People were soloing the world boss on Rogue in like a minute flat.

There's a level 35 mob out on the left side of the map of Fractured Peaks, a rare elite that is not very rare (it spawns every 5-10 min) and this mob drops gear that is FAR higher item level than other gear in the Beta. It can be used and abused to get really good item level by taking the high level rare items he drops and Imprinting legendary affixes on them.

Anyway

I was killing this rare on my pretty well geared Necro and that took like 30 seconds or so? maybe less if other people happened to be there. I met a rogue there and I was distracted, and was in a menu setting my title when the rare spawned. This admittedly very well geared Rogue took the rare down to half health before I had even gotten out of the menu again.

And while I was there with this Rogue the Rare kill time went from 30-40 seconds to like MAYBE 10 seconds. Several times, so not just some lucky 1 time highroll proc.

And on my Barbarian that I geared last weekend and touted that it was fine even if a little slower, cause it was tanky? It didn;t make a real dent in this rare and died, several times, before some other people also came by and helped me kill it.


I was all on the "it's fine" bandwagon last week about class balance, but after this week I have to say that they better spend some time on making sure the classes are better balanced at lower AND higher levels, cause Barbarian, and Druid too to a lesser extent, feel like they have a much worse time doing basic stuff than they should be.

[Fencers]

There's a level 35 mob out on the left side of the map of Fractured Peaks

i am aware. I farmed it extensively myself on all classes. I wrapped up my necro about 2 hours ago. And my experience was Necro and Rogue are DPS monsters.

I was all on the "it's fine" bandwagon last week about class balance, but after this week I have to say that they better spend some time on making sure the classes are better balanced at lower AND higher levels, cause Barbarian, and Druid too to a lesser extent, feel like they have a much worse time doing basic stuff than they should be.

I could not agree more. TTK is fine if you are soloing a dungeon. But they have to do so much more for so little by comparison.

The resource generation and decay for Drd/Brb is pretty poor, IMO. Inalsonthink some of the animation skill delay for their melee abilities also lends to the "clunky" feeling.

Additionally, I think Druid suffers from a not very well thought out design. The class design, in my opinion once again, is not in-line with the previous class archetype in D2 or a satisfying interpretation of that class in a modern sense.

Damage numbers and resoauce gain can be tweaked to whatever. Barbarian can be easily "fixed" as such because the design for that class is well-put together.

Druid, I would say is flawed as a point of design. Only an asymmetrical adjustment would bring relative parity.

[Stricks]

The more I play the more I'm into it. Tried a bunch of different builds on Druid. My favorite one needed more damage but could prob be balanced better and also my gear isn't geared towards it. It was:

Earth Spike
Pulverize
Trample
Boulder
Earthen Bulwark

I didn't have the ultimate yet, may go back and try again now. I liked rolling boulder one way and Trampling another way and smashing with pulverize. Weird build but was super fun. I liked that I could attack with basic at range and then close the gap with Trample and smash shit.

[infinitemeridian]

I'm still trying to understand what makes Sorc so strong. Granted, I don't really have any amazing legendaries, but the damage seems pretty eh compared to Rogue / Necro. It does have a lot of tools, but outside of that it only seems marginally stronger than Barb / Druid.

[Trifle]

Additionally, I think Druid suffers from a not very well thought out design. The class design, in my opinion once again, is not in-line with the previous class archetype in D2 or a satisfying interpretation of that class in a modern sense.

Might depend on what you did with your druid in d2, certainly the summoning is pretty weak in d4. I think the werewolf/werebear are pretty similar in theme to d2 (even sharing many of the same skills). The spells they switched up a bit replacing the fire spells with earth ones.

That being said I definitely think the skills need a bit of tweaking. I didn't like spirit as a resource, it fills up too slowly and the spenders cost huge amounts of spirit so it feels like you spend most of your time basic attacking. Also because it doesn't naturally regenerate it leads to this odd playstyle where you try to finish off packs with basic attacks so you have some spirit at the start of the next fight.

I think it needs more movement speed too. You can get something like +9% from the skill tree? That's not really enough. Trample is on a 14 sec cooldown, evade is pretty short range. The dash on shred is good, but it's tied to spirit and relies on enemies being where you want to dash to. If you get stuck walking slowly between enemies or having to walk out of attacks it feels bad.

[Ophenia]

Well damn I had fun in this open beta. Surprisingly there was (or at least I had) absolutely 0 queue for the 3 times I logged in, and never crashed during the weekend, so either that was smooth as hell or nobody was playing it.

There are a few bad things, but overall it seems to be an enjoyable game - even though we've only seen 25%.

Talent Trees look straightforward, mostly boring tbh with little room for agency. There are a few obvious "OP" spells, the rest you can play around but with largely minor impacts. I've only played sorceress so maybe that's only a sorceress' problem.

Quests are okay-ish. Didn't expect any mind-blowing things, but secondary quests were not too tedious so that's a positive for me. Main quest so far is OK, I'm just a big sad I missed Inarius' cinematic as I received a call exactly at this time rofl.

Dungeons... hell that's a lot of backtracking, whatever these devs say. Especially where you have to find some objectives to unlock the doors in non-linear dungeon, more often than not I found the door before everything else... Pretty shitty design. I hope that the endgame has nothing to do with those dungeons and that they're only here for story.

Butcher... seen him 4 times. Twice I defeated him, once he killed me as I ran into a dead-end and could not kite too much, and once he despawned, I suppose I kited him too far away but there was a goblin + I was looking for a pillar to get some buff as the tileset didn't allow to kite very easily anyway.
Not really fun encountering him tbh. Hardcore players will enjoy that I guess heh

Goblins, I think I've seen like 5 or 6 of them. Some were crazy fast and you have to hope they'll run into a wall otherwise you'll never catch up. That was fun chasing them, but limited rewards.

Itemization looks OK-ish, guess we'll see at higher levels. As usual lots of stats, plenty of which are pretty irrelevant and/or would have deserved some expanded tooltips as I'm not sure what some of them are doing. I even had a few which I think had badly-translated legendary affixes as I'm not sure to understand what it did, like the "If the enemy has more DoTs on them than remaining life, you deal XX% additional damage to them" ? Most of my DoTs were like 3 seconds long, so they'll be dead in less than that anyway, maybe that's a legendary for another class with longer DoTs ?

"MMO" aspect was good, it's nice to see other people around with the possibility to interact. But those outworld events were weird, I tried to do all those I passed by, and I was very often alone. So either no-one played the beta again, or the instances have too few people, or they're worthless and nobody was doing them anyway. But it was weird not seeing many people do them considering we only had access to one zone, it'll be even worse with the full game.

World Boss is a nice addition. It suffered a bit from the same thing I disliked in Lost Ark : Range classes have to play at melee otherwise you don't see the boss entirely (unless you play with widescreen monitors potentially ?), and it'll then be difficult to anticipate telegraphed attacks.

UI could deal with a polish. I'm glad I had read somewhere about the "leave dungeon" function because that's not clearly indicated anywhere. Sometimes when finishing dungeons, the Esc button lead to the Codex of Power with no way to go back to the map... until you hit Esc for the 20th time.

Performances were surprisingly good for me with good ol' 1070. I toned down a bit some graphics but I'm pretty sure I could have left everything at high/ultra without suffering too much. The stuttering parts at each zone change were a bit boring but not really problematic, we'll see if it was a Beta issue or if it'll remain.

Transmog system looks good. Well at least I found my sorceress with her current gear looks great so that's a good thing, that was the thing I was the most afraid of with the MTX/Pass tbh. I didn't want it to go the PoE route where your char looks like shit with in-game stuff.

[Gaidax]

I was in melee on a Barbarian 100% of the time on the WB. Died once the first time he ever spawned.

Sorc does practically the same, Blades/Hydra/Spark/Ult/Barrier build and you just sit on top of WB, because it can't bring your shield down at all, while bursting it. This build is super spread thin at the moment, because it mixes like everything and there is just not enough points for it to shine. But it already wrecks well.

I do think rogue has more deeps, but getting 6 world boss kill in 15 mins is no biggie - we did it as Sorc team yesterday 2 times. The issue mostly is finding the shards, rather than killing boss. Killing boss takes 40 second if it's full HP.

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I'm still trying to understand what makes Sorc so strong. Granted, I don't really have any amazing legendaries, but the damage seems pretty eh compared to Rogue / Necro. It does have a lot of tools, but outside of that it only seems marginally stronger than Barb / Druid.

You need to pick actual synergetic build.

Most people just take 2x Hydra and chill. Hydra is great by itself, but it's not end all be all.

You also need to take proper legendary effects as well. For example, with generic hydra build aside from +1 Hydra, you also pick these:



Then you add this passive talent:



Pick cooldown skills like Teleport and Ice Armor

You end up having 100% uptime on Barrier and ~+110% to all damage output passively, because Hydra build uses almost no mana.

THEN

You add Spark + Unstable Currents, which does not use mana and offers a burst CD. And finally, you top it off with



And add it as enchantment.

You end up ulting every 20 seconds, being immortal with rolling barriers, while pumping.

[Nymrohd]

I was killing this rare on my pretty well geared Necro and that took like 30 seconds or so? maybe less if other people happened to be there. I met a rogue there and I was distracted, and was in a menu setting my title when the rare spawned. This admittedly very well geared Rogue took the rare down to half health before I had even gotten out of the menu again.

And while I was there with this Rogue the Rare kill time went from 30-40 seconds to like MAYBE 10 seconds. Several times, so not just some lucky 1 time highroll proc.

The twisting blade built opener is explosive. You do want to have the combo points build beforehand but it can delete mobs quite well with the right gear to support it. Plus the rogue actually uses multiple skills to achieve this in the right order so it's also more rewarding to play imo. I was very much planning to play summoner druid before beta but I am almost certainly playing rogue after it. Plus I just don't like the druid model; it's not the bear body, the faces just don't work for me. Male rogue can look much hotter.

Though I wish the full sleeve tattoo could be placed on either arm; it defaults on the right arm but almost every asymetrial rogue mog I found in the beta covers the right arm and leaves the left one open so you cannot show it off.

[Mehrunes]

Itemization looks OK-ish, guess we'll see at higher levels. As usual lots of stats, plenty of which are pretty irrelevant and/or would have deserved some expanded tooltips as I'm not sure what some of them are doing. I even had a few which I think had badly-translated legendary affixes as I'm not sure to understand what it did, like the "If the enemy has more DoTs on them than remaining life, you deal XX% additional damage to them" ? Most of my DoTs were like 3 seconds long, so they'll be dead in less than that anyway, maybe that's a legendary for another class with longer DoTs ?

That's a fire Sorceress legendary. And it's not about the duration of the dot, but about the damage it deals. When an enemy is burning from fire skills of a Sorceress their HP bar gets converted to a darker shade to show that a certain part of their health bar will be gone from the dot alone even if you leave them alone afterwards. That legendary applies the bonus damage to enemies whose entire lifebar got converted, i.e. they are afflicted with a dot that can kill them on its own.

[Mamut]

Rogue doesn't really come together for a while. Rogue need a few things to come online then they are shockingly effective.

People were soloing the world boss on Rogue in like a minute flat.

Sorcerer feels good because they take care of themselves at low level, IMO. But no sorc in my guild could beat my Necro or Rogue when I got there.

I played rogue, necro and sorc to 25 level and druid to like 18.

Necro and rogue deal more damage than sorc but I still had more fun on sorc. I don't know how to say this but the gameplay just "flows" while playing sorc.
Necro is strong but theres are few things that annoyed me, the most important no movement skill. After switching from rogue/sorc it felt so slow. The second thing that annoyed me skeletons and golems occupy two skill slots and that limits my skill choice alot. I know most optimal builds don't have problem with this but sometimes I just wanna mess around with skills and this limited me alot.

Now I'm torn between sorc and rogue as first char, sorc felt better for me overall but rogue on the other hand have more playstyle diversity due being able to be melee, ranged and trapper and thats appealing too.
Druid is also interesting but due not enough time I did not test him enough.

You need to pick actual synergetic build.

Most people just take 2x Hydra and chill. Hydra is great by itself, but it's not end all be all.

You also need to take proper legendary effects as well.

Pick cooldown skills like Teleport and Ice Armor

You end up having 100% uptime on Barrier and ~+110% to all damage output passively, because Hydra build uses almost no mana.


And add it as enchantment.

Yeah, after getting all those aspects I switched from hydra/chain lightning sorc to hydra/blades/barriers and it felt really strong. I removed generator tho and just kept using chian lightning. With ice armor mana regeneration was not an issue and I was always almost full on mana.

[Gaidax]

That's a fire Sorceress legendary. And it's not about the duration of the dot, but about the damage it deals. When an enemy is burning from fire skills of a Sorceress their HP bar gets converted to a darker shade to show that a certain part of their health bar will be gone from the dot alone even if you leave them alone afterwards. That legendary applies the bonus damage to enemies whose entire lifebar got converted, i.e. they are afflicted with a dot that can kill them on its own.

Yes, it's practically a big boost to all dots you do and dots stack into a pretty good persistent effect with pretty good HP bank on target.

In Beta it's a moot point (unless lolbarb), because kindergarten difficulty baby act 99% of shit blows up in 0.7 seconds flat, so no point, But in actuall difficulty at top end I imagine it will no longer be the case and make these builds make much more sense, especially given how gems offer straight damage boosts to dots and how they combine on targets.

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Now I'm torn between sorc and rogue as first char, sorc felt better for me overall but rogue on the other hand have more playstyle diversity due being able to be melee, ranged and trapper and thats appealing too..

Personally, I am going Sorc, it REALLY clicked for me in Beta. It's just a combination of everything.

Like Rogue 100% can do better ST, but then melee (and I bet down the road it won't be such a walk in the park) and you REALLY need to know wtf you're doing. Necro - I'm not sure it actually outdoes Sorc on damage dept, but let's say it does - I just don't like minions management in D4 (imo D:I, of all things, had it best so far) and it's also slooooow.

Now Sorc, is just good at everything - not the best at some single thing, but very good overall. Does it do same dam as Rogue? No, but it can still pump 90% at full range, is it as fast as Rogue? No, but it still has teleport which is the best mobility ability there is and sorc does not have to be in melee to make whole screen of mobs blow up. Can Sorc have minions tank for it like Necro and heal like mad? No. But Sorc's minions are invulnerable and always at full power when you want it and you can spam barrier like crazy too.

It's like you have everything others can do one way or the other.


The only Sorc issue I see is that everyone and their mothers will be Sorc on launch.