Ruin Explorer
Legend
The new Lord of Hatred expansion for D4 came with a massive revamp to most of the systems in the game, including how the skill tree worked. It's so extensive it's hard to describe, but overall, it's a massive upgrade, turning an okay-ish game into a really solid one with a lot of potential!
That's the thing though - a lot of the changes they've made are clearly ones that will allow them to build on, and which will, when balanced correctly and added to, be really cool, but... right now they're kind of only decent to good-ish. So I feel like it's like gone from like a high-production-values 6/10 to a sort of in-parentheses (8/10), like, where if they keep work on it, it'll stay that high or get even higher, but if they leave it like this, I might re-rate it to like 7/10. I really does add and rationalize a ton of systems at least. The new classes - Warlock and Paladin - are, hilariously, kind of underpowered, but are conceptually cool and have some nice visuals (esp. the Warlock, which looks approximately a zillion times cooler than a WoW Warlock).
That said, they failed to solve D4's most fundamental problem, which is that the gameplay kind of breaks down and becomes increasingly mindless (in a bad way) as you approach the upper echelons of the game, because of the huge numbers (due to insane multiplier stacking) involved. This isn't true of other ARPGs - it isn't true of Path of Exile 1 or 2, for example, nor Diablo 2, nor Grim Dawn or Last Epoch, and even Diablo 3 handled it with a bit more grace (in part because of very limited options though). You go from doing hundreds to thousand of damage at max level, to doing hits for literally billions or tens of billions. Some people like that but I feel like it's holding their design back, because the most fun the game was, was actually long before that.
And it's a bit too easy to break as well. In earlier versions, I never got past about Pit 105 (usually lower, more like 90-95) because I refused to play anything actually bugged/broken/exploit-y, and I've stuck with that, but now with a build not relying on any nonsense I'm handling Pit 130 (and can probably go further), finished all the content in the game on absolute maximum difficulty (Torment 12), am in the top 250 people for my class in the only ranked mode (which with millions of people playing, though an unclear number competing, seems decent, but is more down to just understanding mechanics than "skillz" - I don't think I'm particularly amazing at the game). I haven't invested the huge amounts of time I see others on the ranked mode (Tower) have either. And now I'm like, what's next? Because unfortunately until they make some changes, playing alts isn't a lot of fun, as one of the cool new systems is, for no apparent reason, character-specific and doesn't carry over at all.
At least the new campaign is mostly good, and a huge improvement on the previous campaign!
That's the thing though - a lot of the changes they've made are clearly ones that will allow them to build on, and which will, when balanced correctly and added to, be really cool, but... right now they're kind of only decent to good-ish. So I feel like it's like gone from like a high-production-values 6/10 to a sort of in-parentheses (8/10), like, where if they keep work on it, it'll stay that high or get even higher, but if they leave it like this, I might re-rate it to like 7/10. I really does add and rationalize a ton of systems at least. The new classes - Warlock and Paladin - are, hilariously, kind of underpowered, but are conceptually cool and have some nice visuals (esp. the Warlock, which looks approximately a zillion times cooler than a WoW Warlock).
That said, they failed to solve D4's most fundamental problem, which is that the gameplay kind of breaks down and becomes increasingly mindless (in a bad way) as you approach the upper echelons of the game, because of the huge numbers (due to insane multiplier stacking) involved. This isn't true of other ARPGs - it isn't true of Path of Exile 1 or 2, for example, nor Diablo 2, nor Grim Dawn or Last Epoch, and even Diablo 3 handled it with a bit more grace (in part because of very limited options though). You go from doing hundreds to thousand of damage at max level, to doing hits for literally billions or tens of billions. Some people like that but I feel like it's holding their design back, because the most fun the game was, was actually long before that.
And it's a bit too easy to break as well. In earlier versions, I never got past about Pit 105 (usually lower, more like 90-95) because I refused to play anything actually bugged/broken/exploit-y, and I've stuck with that, but now with a build not relying on any nonsense I'm handling Pit 130 (and can probably go further), finished all the content in the game on absolute maximum difficulty (Torment 12), am in the top 250 people for my class in the only ranked mode (which with millions of people playing, though an unclear number competing, seems decent, but is more down to just understanding mechanics than "skillz" - I don't think I'm particularly amazing at the game). I haven't invested the huge amounts of time I see others on the ranked mode (Tower) have either. And now I'm like, what's next? Because unfortunately until they make some changes, playing alts isn't a lot of fun, as one of the cool new systems is, for no apparent reason, character-specific and doesn't carry over at all.
At least the new campaign is mostly good, and a huge improvement on the previous campaign!
