Anyone else love d4 story but find the combat and looting to be completely unenjoyable?

Anyone else love d4 story but find the combat and looting to be completely unenjoyable?

I am a supporter of almost all ARPGs, but I couldn't find a way to enjoy the combat and loot at all. Lore, story, and graphics—all of those things were stellar, but the combat is so contrived and boring. I did play on WT2 the whole time, but it just felt cumbersome and time consuming without the reward for the time. the "A" in ARPG stands for action but there was virtually no action. Just felt like waiting for things to die that couldn't kill me. No challenge. There's nothing to dodge. Every mob had the same composition of melee and ranged attacks, where the ranged would kite to artificially lengthen combat without genuine difficulty. Mob sizes are ridiculously small and spread out. And the overwhelming lack of variety of attacks is mind boggling. I was burned out from combat by the end of the story. Outside of that, I love everything else other than the few soft-locked quests that popped up. I'm sure they will fix that, though.

Also, the lack of skins for skills baffles me. If you buy one of their skins, how is anyone even going to see it with everything happening on the screen? None of them looked that unique or interesting. When I party with people, I prefer tequila...JK. I tried to throw in a twist there. But seriously, when i'm in a party, I'd like everyone to know I'm the coolest. If you get a skin, don't you want people to notice?

I think the game is excellent everywhere but combat and they are going to suffer horrendously for making a combat and level/loot progression that is on part with 2010 MMO's. There is no way I'm the only one that got bored of combat. Some are going to get bored later than I am but it's going to happen.

Honestly, I think wolcen, grim dawn, PoE, D2, a slew of other ARPG's and even D3's combat is more enjoyable than D4's.

hoho perhaps.

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xPiranha wrote:

hoho perhaps.

I have zero understanding of what you mean and I even decided to google in case I was supposed to, in fact, know what that means. Wouldn't mind you explaining unless it's a variation of "haha" or "here is some candy to feel better" or something. Or is it a variation of QQ?

Nobody knows what it means.

This is a fair assessment. They clearly put a LOT of energy and time into getting the writing to a level we haven't seen in a Blizzard game in decades. Maybe not ever. And for some of us, that plus a pretty superficial gameplay loop suffices. I am enjoying my meleemancer a hell of a lot but mostly due to figuring out how to make Aspects really work for him. Still just debuffing, spending, gaining, spending...

I am a few levels off Paragon which I know nothing about so can't speak to. An old friend has hinted that it has a lot to chew on but we have a no spoilers policy so I didn't press for details.

Right now I am annoyed at myself for taking on too many side quests, because the main story is quite intriguing and I can't really progress it leaving too many side quests in the backlog. Good thing they are almost all well-written too.

I know the game offers campaign skip for alts once you finish it but if I did have to replay it to play other classes it really wouldn't bother me. There are other ARPGs that have far worse campaigns in dire need of the same feature.

Anyway back to helping the poor sods of Estuar in their seemingly endless struggle against daily life in Estuar.

PS "Hoho" means "I really care about my post count and presence on the forum but couldnt be arsed earning either". I am a big fan of this approach.

PPS Wolcen has the best combat of any ARPG ever. Shame the devs are horrifically incompetent and/or non-existent otherwise.

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鬼殺し wrote:

PS "Hoho" means "I really care about my post count and presence on the forum but couldnt be arsed earning either". I am a big fan of this approach.

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鬼殺し wrote:

And to non-Exiles, PoE "2" will be just another ARPG trying to look like Diablo IV.

Only to non-Exiles?

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PS "Hoho" means "I really care about my post count and presence on the forum but couldnt be arsed earning either". I am a big fan of this approach.

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鬼殺し wrote:

Right now I am annoyed at myself for taking on too many side quests, because the main story is quite intriguing and I can't really progress it leaving too many side quests in the backlog. Good thing they are almost all well-written too.

I did very close to 100% of the side quests and did exactly 100% of the lillith statues for a1 and a2 and it wasn't until my 3rd soft lock on a quest in A2 (a collectable is permanently not spawning for me) that I decided to skip side quests and just complete the story. In doing so, that is what may have caused the combat burnout as it is lower level combat. I was level 53 when I was about to finish the story, which is apparently high. I was so annoyed with Combat that I actually just uninstalled it and watched it on YouTube. I was tired of going back and forth to places over and over and having to deal with these meaningless mobs. Go here, collect that, come back, go there, talk to her, talk to him, go there, come back, then a fraction of story. In between were these terribly unimportant and unrewarding trash mobs.

I do understand that combat is supposed to improve later, and I put a few hours into watching videos and reading about it so I could convince myself to come back. Honestly, almost all of the builds are cousins to D3 builds so I'm not exactly sure why it seems so exciting to people. As much as I enjoyed D3, that was the D3 generation, and I have more than enough hours in that. It's like playing PoE 2 while everyone is doing RF, it just makes me quite bored with both games. If you're making a D4, it should feel like a sequel in every sense, not just the story.

I just think they copied the greater rift formula of increasing eHP and DPS of enemy mobs at a set scale and that is something MMO's did in 2010. It's 2023. I have higher expectations. I want to see new enemy skills and craftiness.

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鬼殺し wrote:

PS "Hoho" means "I really care about my post count and presence on the forum but couldnt be arsed earning either". I am a big fan of this approach.

That makes perfect sense. Thanks. I really didn't think of it as a meme.

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鬼殺し wrote:

PPS Wolcen has the best combat of any ARPG ever. Shame the devs are horrifically incompetent and/or non-existent otherwise.

I would say that Grim Dawn had the best combat ever for me, with PoE a remarkably close second. However, PoE offers significantly more in other areas than Grim Dawn. D3 and Wolcen were tied for 3rd. A few other games tied for spots in the top 5. I also agree that the developers sort of quit on wolcen and copied the greater rift formula of D3 for the end game. However, I did think it was refreshing to have expeditions, and I would like to see more games have a sort of passive earning system for content based on completing dungeons/maps.

I guess a PoE translation might be able to level up the quality of my content. For example, instead of an atlas skill tree, maybe a tree for all different content, and I can put points into improving Harvest, Breach, or what have you, and choose a specific path for a specific way of playing it based on my accomplishments in doing said content. Maybe I can have a Harvest where I sacrifice pink plants for yellow plants but then that side of the tree might focus on pack size and maybe the other side of the tree might focus on currency quantity. I hope that makes sense.

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鬼殺し wrote:

PPS Wolcen has the best combat of any ARPG ever. Shame the devs are horrifically incompetent and/or non-existent otherwise.

It's quite unfortunate how unpolished the game is in terms of unfixed bugs and glitches cause the game has a quite decent presentation with combat/story and cut scenes and would have quite the potential to be a good game without all the faulty issues.

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Pashid wrote:

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鬼殺し wrote:

PPS Wolcen has the best combat of any ARPG ever. Shame the devs are horrifically incompetent and/or non-existent otherwise.

It's quite unfortunate how unpolished the game is in terms of unfixed bugs and glitches cause the game has a quite decent presentation with combat/story and cut scenes and would have quite the potential to be a good game without all the faulty issues.

They corrected quite a lot of it. I got back and play a bit here and there and it clearly has improved a great deal. However, the first year was not kind to that game and I agree with you about that.