[Spoilers] Under The Fat Goose Inn (D4 general talk)

[Edge-]

https://www.icy-veins.com/d4/news/di...-in-season-11/

Checked in and seems like they're still reworking a lot.

I'm confused why they're going back to scaling resistances with diminishing returns instead of flat values. IIRC one of the reasons for changing back to flat values was because the diminishing returns design was confusing and unclear.

Will be curious to see how the Fortify rework ends up playing out. This description is a bit confusing but it sounds like it's basically "overlife" that gets consumed to fill your missing life when you take damage? Could be neat to design mechanics around that specifically on uniques.

[Biomega]

It's hard to evaluate the changes fully because the PTR is *cough* just a TEEEENY TINY BIT full of bugs right now.

But to me it seems the resistance change is a step backwards and something that will hit casuals especially. Having clear caps to work towards was neat and easy to grok, while this whole asymptotic scaling thing with some imaginary toughness value that never tells the whole story is not only a conceptually flawed idea, it's proven to be a flawed idea because we've already had it in this game and previous ones. I get the appeal of giving people a single number to look at, but while that's superficially easy it really isn't as simple in practice. And the hidden implications of all toughness not being equal will get ya.

I'm not sure what the problem was with 1000 armor and 75 all res, tbh. That seemed like a good system where you can work around something concrete and fiddle with your gear to tick the box at every new stage. I guess maybe if they plan on further expanding difficulty tiers upwards it could make sense to have a less rigid scaling system? But is there any indication of that?

There's a lot of wonky mismatches in design goals and actual results, though as I said it's hard to tell if that's just PTR bullshit or real. For example, leveling seems to outpace your gear acquisition quite seriously at the beginning. I ended up lvl 30ish with terrible starter gear because of things like world bosses giving me 7 levelups but legendaries being much rarer drops. The result was that it felt like things weren't scaling properly, because I had the gear of a lvl 15 but I was 35+ and that just sucks. Gear drops need to keep pace. Is this just a desperate attempt by them to try and salvage blue/yellow gear, which really just has NO purpose or business existing, really? I was still in full legendaries by about lvl 40 or so and never looked back. Why make 1-40 annoying and wonky just so you can say SEE SOMEONE EQUIPPED A BLUE ITEM YOU GUYS?

Similarly, the new monster affixes felt like a nothingburger so far. Granted I'm not in high Pit levels yet so maybe it's different there, but I expected a lot more going on with the new monsters in the early game and there's just NOTHING. Like, if I didn't know there'd been a rework I wouldn't even have noticed. It's just boom boom visual screen spam nonsense, then everything dies instantly because that's the goal you work towards. This is a zoom-zoom-delete-screen type of game, and that's still the go-to. So all these fancy new affixes don't do anything because things still die instantly. They're mostly just pretty colors and I honestly couldn't name even three of them. And I'm in T3 right now (fresh toon, no boosts). Maybe it's all about Pit 100+ and having to actually dodge things or something? I might check that out tomorrow.

The season mechanic feels like it's... there. There is barely any choice since you equip everything at all times, which is kinda odd. I'll join the chorus of outcries in Sanctify though - the stats don't make sense. Slamming an item for a 25% brick in PoE or some of the D2 mods is one thing, but this is more like a 90% brick or effective brick, because a weak stat might as well be a brick with the way itemization works. I've been a big fan of models that make slamming an exception rather than the rule, and then have something like 25% brick 50% solid improvement 20% big improvement 5% insane improvement. Meaning 75% of the time it's an upgrade, and you're gated by how many slams you can earn - not by how lucky you get on 50,000 tries, which is kinda of what D4 gearing has been so far in various ways. Gear is just so binary. The gaps are so big - and therefore also so small. Because it's not like you have three items and it's 10% between them, but rather it's one item is +1,000% and the rest are +10% and then it's just about finding 500 copies of that same +1,000% item to hit the right RNG to make it +1,100%. You never go to the +10% item because nothing would ever make it compete in any way. That makes gearing super linear and super contingent on the RNG-prone improvement systems which capitalize on expanding gaps rather than closing them. Ideally I'd want to go man I can't get the +100% item, but if I improve this +50% item maybe I can get it to +90% and that's a great alternative.

I'll test it more over the next few days but it doesn't seem like this new system actually gets at the core problems in D4's gearing, it's just a reshuffle of doing conceptually the same things slightly differently.