The real problem with the game as I see it

It's not that the games too challenging. I think the elitists on here have it wrong. there are a LOT of issues with the game and I'll list what I believe makes it bad along with things that would make the problems less of an issue.

Clunky game play. The responsiveness of the controls is easily the worst I've ever seen in an ARPG. It's like moving in a swimming pool. Every movement is labored, delayed, and heavily unresponsive. The game play feels like its from a much older game. It's not crisp or refined in the least. I would call it poorly coded but in all actuality, it's worse than that. I play with a good buddy of mine and we both picked up on this right away. The game play is just awful. Abilities from bosses are coming at you in real time but, you have to dodge while underwater and can't hardly respond to attacks.

The dodge ability has a number of problems. Not being able to roll while being surrounded feels incredibly bad. I also feel the animation is too slow. It creates no actual space and there is a split-second delay at the end of the animation. The roll really either needs a faster animation or the roll itself should cover a longer distance. It's pretty bad in it's current state.

This one is more of a personal gripe and I figured it should be mentioned. I truly HATE that every aoe ability is like a skill shot in League of Legends. Frost Bomb, earthquake, Lightning Orb, again, remember that thing about clunky movement and delayed ability execution? In that kind of a situation, It's really difficult and frustrating to time a skill of this type when it feels like you are playing in high latency. Everything is moving fast on the screen but you have to time a tiny little skill on enemies that are trucking along in real time with a spell that has a hit box not much bigger than your character. The fix, make the starting size for these abilities 50% larger. First and foremost, fix the games quicksand like responsiveness. I'm moving in a world of PeanutButter honestly.

Now, for the real elephant in the room. The rare item drop rates. The reason the act 1 boss feels like we're facing the final boss of the game is because we're all arriving there still wearing gear we found around levels 1 through 10. I'm at the final act 1 boss still wearing blue gear from level 5. I'm not joking. They have been crafted with the maximum I can to a blue item but they are the best I've been able to find. It's hilariously sad. I have 1 stash tab mostly full of rares for other classes that have dropped but they do my Sorc zero good. I kill tons of rare bosses and champion packs and they never drop anything useful. The quest rewards are also bad. In short, the game progressively gets harder and enemies get tankier all while your gear doesn't scale at all. That my friends is the CORE progression issue. Yes the game plays like Pinetree sap and that's compounding the problems further but, the gear needs to appear a lot more in an ARPG. It's all about the loot guys. There is none. Hot fix this yesterday. We need rares.

Fix these things and people will enjoy the game.

This is like D4 launch all over again. The developers have a specific intended gameplay experience that most people won't agree with. So either they will change it, or the players will gaslight themselves into accepting it. It'll be interesting to see which happens.

Anyone who is playing this as melee who thinks the game is just meant to be "hard" NEEDS to play ranged. The game isn't hard at all. If anything it's rather easy--it just plays out like Sanctum. You're not meant to get hit by anything, you're supposed to play ranged and just constantly be moving. In that case, almost nothing is dangerous. If you DO get hit by bosses, though, you'll get killed.

It reminds me badly of Dark Souls in that way; not to say the game is a lot like Dark Souls, but it has a similar mechanic of making stats not matter very much. When a hit is balanced to almost kill you no matter what, investing heavily into stats just seems less relevant than avoiding hits. Needless to say, this isn't how ARPGs are supposed to play. It's fine if GGG wants to make a new type of ARPG, but most people who play ARPGs aren't looking for this experience.

Fundamentally, the number of people who will enjoy that kind of gameplay in this genre is much smaller than the number of people who are already GGG customers.

I only have a little over 6 hours in the game at this point but decided to come to the forums to talk about some issues I have with the game so far. I was very surprised and happy to see someone already made a post addressing the major issues I have with the game. I came over from D4 like many people I'm sure and for all the issues with D4 as a whole the one thing that game does great is movement. I really hope the dev's can overhaul the character movement and make it feel as smooth as D4. With smoother character movement and a few other small tweaks this could be the greatest game I've played. This is only the first few days of EA so I'm hopeful they can make the changes. Time will tell.

Havn't seen enough people mention this. This is exactly my experience. You can slow down a game (Monster hunter worlds being a prime example) without introducing EXTREME clunky slow unresponsive mechanics. The unresponsiveness is seriously jarring. Nothing "feels" good. It feels like I am fighting my character constantly.