vanilla Inferno was a combination of the RMAH needing value because Blizz was taking a cut of every sale and, as admitted by the devs themselves, a honeypot for broken builds
honestly the godawful itemization was a bigger issue and that wasn’t fixed until console D3 with Loot 2.0
not that what RoS/Loot 2.0 did was objectively better, it just made it so you got gear that was good for you and the side benefit was it got rid of shit like wizard gear with strength on it (which is important when every class has one offensive main stat by design, to not get literal useless set pieces)
actually there’s a few monk builds that involve ranged attacks
I think this was in the game from the start, it just did not matter because of the way their difficulty scaling worked
but yeah these days melee is generally fine in D3, or at least it was the last time I played it. they should add the flat DR for melee to D4. as it stands, you get 10% DR under very conditional scenarios with the fortify system, but fortification isn’t even an innate system, it all comes from specific items or skills that you have to take in order to benefit at all. my assumption is that it scales well later in the game, but who knows. as it stands, sorcerers have better defensive skills than barbs do
The item dependency in the D4 was such that we were able to mostly just use the gear dropped to get through the entirety of Act 1 at the hard difficulty.
Will that change as you push further? Probably. But the pacing for the beta was really good and I hope that’s the case for the final game.
really amazed that of all the early Blizzard classic franchises Diablo is the first one to get a part iv. although i guess it makes sense in a certain way because the stakes are too high for warcraft/starcraft bc of how they are basically just like pro gamer arenas anymore.
the main reason it is so weird to me is because satanic shit just isn’t that huge a part of the pop culture landscape in 2023, where it seems like the public’s appetite for generic high fantasy/space sci fi stuff is endless. will diablo iv make satan cool again? from what i’ve seen though it looks more like they’re just trying to downplay the demonic aspects of it and turn it into just another, perhaps slightly edgier, high fantasy world. like diablo is now the robert howard to warcraft’s tolkien or whatever.
make diablo satanic again! i think this trend started all the way back with the expanded world in diablo 2 tbh, but the first one did have a very consistently evil vibe. i’m not going to say that made it stand out, in fact what with Doom and all that if anything it felt more ‘on trend,’ but in retrospect it is a kind of unique atmosphere for a game that is so unserious from a gameplay perspective. like just click on guys till they explode… but… darkly…
I may have totally misread or remembered the amazing plot of 3 but I’m pretty sure she was Adria’s daughter, which raises even more questions
Anyway Diablo is dead for real this time we swear by the end of 3 so I can only assume the plot of 4 is about Lilith taking advantage of the power vacuum of there being no prime evils left (which technically was the plot of 3 but shhh)
edit: I wonder if they’re ever going to address the fact that you kill Sanctuary’s version of the grim reaper by the end of the expansion, seems like a big deal that death is… dead
Coming from Mork Borg aka “the D&D they warned you about” I’ll tell you this: if everything comes up Satan it’s just a bad joke.
Diablo 4’s aesthetic and world building is, as far as early access beta, very evocative and grounded. The main story and characters are at least on par w/ D2 in terms of “darkness”, but it’s also like… much better realized as a world. The towns could exist without your characters (partially because of the other players). There’s exposition if you want it, and if you just want to dungeon and loot, there’s that too.
I guess yeah tldr Conan + Satan is actually what Diablo 4 feels like and it’s like pretty good.
this sucks so bad too, she is a major character and then just like, erupts into diablo offscreen IIRC? she explodes into meaty chunks and it’s just like, in a text box??? i may be misremembering but that’s how it is in my head
it’s like, a 15 second cutscene. it’s absurd how fast the game moves past it. And then guys on battle.net complained that DIABLO HAS TITS NOW for like two months in line behind all the guys who complained Tyrael was black
the Diablo with Boobs thing is a cool visual design decision that elegantly portrays a lot world building and relates to whom Diablo had canonically possessed in past appearances
and he still spoke with a deep, bassy male rasp
and all the other goddamn things wrong with the plot of 3
and you die on the hill of “that fictional demon has boobs”
(I don’t really care about Tyrael being black other than what kind of implications it has for the other seraphim but then again, no other seraphim got turned into people so I don’t have to worry about it)
I think the vibes in D4 are somewhere near D1 but way more “hell is people”/“people make their own hell (with institutional neglect and a little demonic suggestion)”. It also feels a lot more tied to actual occultism than the previous games.
The clicking from just one day was destroying my thumb muscle though
I think the thing that most ties this to D1 for me is that both have really strong and moderately grounded senses of place. D2’s areas always seemed on the WoW side of themeparky and that was the sense I got of the bit of D3 I played too. This actually feels like there’s a structured, lived world you’re zooming around, which was how I felt playing D1 too (maybe weirdly?) - and PoE. I think starting you out very low in the muck and then the dread mounting as you visit more towns and see the greater societal landscape…
Also it had a very FFXIV everyone celebrating while you drink from a flagon quite early on which weirdly enamored me to it
