I want to preface this post by saying this is a total rant about the state of Diablo 4, but also it's a post about how if you like ARPG's even a little bit, you should go play Path of Exile for free. I was inspired to make this post because a few Youtubers who play Diablo 4 started to play PoE and are now mad that D4 cannot compare even remotely to what PoE has on offer. That being said, here we go.
So I am a huge loot whore, and the best games for loot whoring are often the Diablo-like games now called ARPG's. However that term has been sort of hijacked by every game with traditional RPG elements but without the turn-based combat of a traditional RPG. So I suppose we have to go back to calling them Diablo-likes. Much like Rogue, Diablo started a whole genre of game. The dungeon crawler with character classes and randomize loot to find off monsters was a beautiful formula, one that many other games have tried to emulate. Grim Dawn, Titan Quest, Boarderlands, Nioh, the RNG loot system with character building potential is a system that many games across many other genres have tried to capture. Some of them have been pretty successful at it, Grim Dawn and Nioh come to mind as good examples. Others fail pretty hard like Titan Quest and Boarderlands.
For years and years and years the king of the genre has been Diablo 2, with its itemization and build capabilities there is a reason why it's a classic and nearly unmatched to this day.
Diablo 3 failed hard at launch for many reasons, but mostly the greed of Blizzard and the attempt to funnel players into spending money for items in their terrible auction house system. Thankfully they learned their lesson and removed the auction house with the expansion Reaper of Souls. Diablo 3 is a decent game but it fails in the worse aspect of what makes these games good. Itemization.
In order to explain why itemization is so important in a Diablo-like, I want to borrow an example Asmongold used to explain why Dark Souls is so good. Imagine the game is a math problem and the game wants you to make something equal 4. The bad games give you only one or two ways to get to 4, either 2+2 or maybe 3+1 if you're lucky. Diablo 3 is like this thanks to the class set items providing you with 100000000000% increased damage making them the only really viable items to get yourself to the number 4. A good game provides almost limitless options to get to 4, maybe you do the boring 2+2, or maybe you do 5-1, or maybe you do something crazy like -6+10, or 24 divided by 8. The point is the itemization is so vast that there are tons of ways to make your character do what you want it to do.
Diablo-likes have been around for a long time, and Diablo 4 did absolutely nothing to learn anything from the history of the genre. Diablo 4 is fundamentally a bad Diablo game in so many aspects that you only need to cross the street to a little game called Path of Exile to realize just how many core features of the genre Diablo 4 is actually missing.
Before I do any direct comparison let me talk a little bit about Path of Exile. PoE is the only game on the market that people who really like good itemization and really like Diablo 2 can really go to and get an equal or better experience. PoE does itemization right, it does endgame right, it does seasons right, it does almost everything a Diablo-like game can do and it does them all extremely well.
Like all Diablo-likes you start PoE by picking your class, but classes in PoE are nothing more than starting points. No class has any particular skills or special abilities unique to that class. This is because every skill in the game comes from a gem, and these gems get slotted into your gear. So long as the gem is equipped you can use whatever skill that gem provides. Want to be a Barbarian who throws Fireballs? Equip a fireball gem and go nuts. The gem system is incredible and also incredibly deep which makes building your character feel awesome as you mix and match gems to grant your character as much power and synergies and you could ever want.
The system is extremely easy but also extremely complex depended on how deep you want to get into it. For a noobie tutorial let me explain basics. Ever gear slot except jewelry has sockets in it that vary in color. Red, Green, Blue, and White. Gems can be slotted into any slot of a matching color on your gear. Each piece of gear can have 1- 4 sockets in the early game meaning you can have up to four gems in almost every item on your character. Which sounds like you would have a shitload of skills right? Well you can if you go that route, however in addition to sockets the gear will have links of those socks, meaning those sockets will be connected. Why? Well not only are there a ton of different skills in the game but there are also a ton of support gems in the game. Support gems are like boosts to any skill gem they are linked too. So say you have fireball connected to a linked socket of multishot, well that means when you cast fireball you'll cast three or four fireballs at once!
The gems also level up, which increases their power but also increases their mana cost and stat requirements to use them. This is core to why the itemization is so good in the PoE. Because it's all about the math problems again. You see getting a piece of gear or a new gem presents you with a problem that you need to use the stats on the gear to solve. For example you level up your holy smite gem, but now you are missing 12 intellegence to use it, so now you need to hunt for items with Int on them to push you over the requirement and use the spell again. It's brilliance because everything in PoE is connected. Your gear helps you use gems, your gems help you gain power and create a build for your character.
None of that touches on the passive skill tree you get by leveling up. I like to compare the skill tree to the sphere grid in Final Fantasy X, because I have to reference Final Fantasy right? I mentioned before how your class doesn't really matter? Well the Skill tree is basically where the class comes into play. Much like the sphere grid in FFX the different classes only choose where you start on the grid. This can mean it is hard for some classes to do certain things and sort of steers you to build a certain why depending on the class you picked. But there are ways to overcome those limits if you really want to.
Now let's look at Diablo 4, where every class is highly limited to being those classes. Now this isn't really a bad thing because sometimes having your classes have distinct identities is a good thing and helps players know what the character will expect of them. However now look at the skill tree for any class in the game, and compare those skills to what build guides say. There is a drastic disconnect between class skills and the itemization in Diablo 4 that is so drastic that every single class in the game has a selection of skills that are absolutely worthless. Not every skill has to be good, but every skill should be useful especially in a game where your skill selection is so limited on each character.
Let me give you an example, the weapon swapping mechanic on Barbarian is absolutely worthless. Not only does it drastically affect your damage in a negative way, but the skills that support it are so bad they might as well not exist. Weapon Frenzy is the worst example, this is a capstone ultimate passive for Barbarian that allows you to gain a buff for each weapon type you use and when you have every buff you gain an even bigger buff. On paper this sounds cool. However in order to get a buff for each weapon you have to hit things with that weapon, and once you have the buff it only lasts for 4 seconds, meaning it is absolutely impossible to ever have all four buffs up at once in order to trigger your super buff. Furthermore there are no items in the game that help make this passive useful. No legendary aspect to increase the duration of the small buffs, or anything that helps keep the weapon buffs going during downtime of which there is a lot in D4.
And Barbarian isn't the only class with dead skills like this. Every class has them and it comes down to not only bad class design but also bad itemization that "fixes" characters. Diablo 3 works on this principal, in that basically your character isn't very good at it's core. It's ok and you can kill things on lower difficulties without too much problem. But your kit is ultimately very basic and limited until you get yourself a class set which augments you with so much power that now improvements become exponential and your power ceiling goes insane. It's not the best system and it's why a lot of people don't like D3 for the mindset that starting the game hitting for 3-8 damage per hit only to end up doing hundreds of Trillions of damage just feels dumb. Personally I like this system quite a bit, I love the exponential growth and huge numbers, but I understand and I agree that tighter systems are better and more rewarding in the end.
Itemization problems dont stop there. Look at this shit https://mobalytics.gg/blog/diablo-4/gear-affixes-full-list/ the sheer amount of useless trash that can roll on gear is absolutely terrible. Damage to frozen, damage to chilled, damage to stunned, damage to close, damage to far, damage to healthy, damage to injured, on and on the list of potential garbage on your items makes getting new items feel terrible because the odds of getting something decent are way too low.
It's one thing to have "useless" stats on gear for certain builds, for example +X to mana, because maybe your built a character that doesn't use mana. But other builds will love more and more mana so the stat isn't a dead stat it just simply might not be right for what you're going for right now. But in D4 nobody gives a fuck about dealing extra damage to enemies with full health because all it means is that your damage sucks the moment you get them below 50%.
To make matters worse, the good stats in D4 that you actually want on your gear like Crit damage, Crit chance, and Vulnerable damage all got nerf 30-40%! Which showcases just how much the dev team doesn't understand what the fuck they are doing.
Of course in these RPG's crafting is a major component, Path of Exile's crafting system is so fucking crazy that you can take a basic piece of shit white item and craft it into something that rivals the best items in the game. You can change the color of the sockets, change the links, add modifiers, remove modifiers, customize basically everything. And it's not just gear you can customize, but also your dungeons. Path of Exile's endgame system is something called maps, which basically act like Rifts in Diablo 3, where you consume a map and you do a random dungeon with a boss at the end. But unlike rifts you can CRAFT Maps, allowing you to fully customize your endgame dungeons to feature and favor the things you like to do the most in the game and of course maximize the potential loot you'll get from it.
Diablo 4, has no crafting at all so.....anyway.
Path of Exile has seasons like Diablo 3 and 4 and Lost Ark, but each PoE season essentially adds a minigame to the game that allows of more endgame activities through out. And most of these minigames stay in the game forever, which adds to the things you can do in maps.
Here are some of my favorites:
Metamorphous, in this event monsters in your map will drop body parts and at the end of the map you will use these body parts to craft your own bossfight. The parts you use will give the boss abilities and also offer guaranteed loot from the boss upon defeat. So for example you use a brain that makes the boss deal extra fire damage but also forces the boss to drop legendary rings. This mechanic bleeds seamlessly into gameplay and takes the player no extra steps to take part in.
Menagerie, in this event there will be 5 rare monsters on the map that you have to hunt and capture, this happens automatically when you defeat them. Your beastmaster friend NPC will take these monsters to a special camp that will allow you to refight an arena of this bosses for special loot rewards and different combinations can be used for tons of different items.
Temple of Azoc, in this event there will be small stations that teleport you into a temple where you must kill monsters to find keys that unlock different rooms in the temple. The goal is to unlock all the rooms in the temple so that you can run a special temple map with cool bosses and rewards at the end.
Delirum, in this event you walk through a portal that causes a delirium effect to cover your whole dungeon. New monsters will appear and the goal is to kill as many monsters as you can while also getting as far away from the starting point as possible for ever increasing rewards before the timer ends.
There are tons more of events including a full rogue-like dungeon, a capture the flag battle arena, a heist mini game with recruitable thieves. And the best part about all of this is that the map system has it's own skill tree where you can increase the odds of your favorite events appearing in your maps while also increasing the reward potential from them. None of which is forced upon you, if you don't like one of the mini games, simply don't spec into it and ignore it. Focusing on only your favorites mean the things you enjoy doing will become even more rewarding and more common so you can enjoy them more.
Diablo 4 has....the same 20 dungeons over and over again with bigger numbers.
Path of Exile is completely free. No upfront cost however you will want to buy stash tabs at the endgame to make life easier and the microtransaction shop always has discounts during the last week of every month. So you can get new stash tabs for like 3 dollars, and these stash tabs are customized to specific things which helps organize everything automatically for you. And even the basic stash tabs have search functions.
Diablo 4 is $70 with no search function in your stash and no extra stash to buy because they decided to program the game to load every single player's entire stash for everyone at all times.
To me what Diablo 4 highlights more than anything is that Blizzard's developers are drinking some sort of Kool-aid and falling victims to their own hubris. This is a development team that made a Diablo game without even playing the older Diablo game let alone other ARPG's in general. There are problems with Diablo 4 that were solved or not issues in the first place with previous Diablo and even Blizzard games in general. How a development team could think to make a game with this kind of scale in a bubble is beyond me and as a result a fucking FREE 10-year-old game is outright embarrassing them in terms of just playability and usability. I'm not even blaming the content, because I expect the 10-year-old game to have more content. But that doesn't excuse Diablo 4 from having a lack of content.
If you like ARPG's or Diablo-likes. Go play Path of Exile.
So I am a huge loot whore, and the best games for loot whoring are often the Diablo-like games now called ARPG's. However that term has been sort of hijacked by every game with traditional RPG elements but without the turn-based combat of a traditional RPG. So I suppose we have to go back to calling them Diablo-likes. Much like Rogue, Diablo started a whole genre of game. The dungeon crawler with character classes and randomize loot to find off monsters was a beautiful formula, one that many other games have tried to emulate. Grim Dawn, Titan Quest, Boarderlands, Nioh, the RNG loot system with character building potential is a system that many games across many other genres have tried to capture. Some of them have been pretty successful at it, Grim Dawn and Nioh come to mind as good examples. Others fail pretty hard like Titan Quest and Boarderlands.
For years and years and years the king of the genre has been Diablo 2, with its itemization and build capabilities there is a reason why it's a classic and nearly unmatched to this day.
Diablo 3 failed hard at launch for many reasons, but mostly the greed of Blizzard and the attempt to funnel players into spending money for items in their terrible auction house system. Thankfully they learned their lesson and removed the auction house with the expansion Reaper of Souls. Diablo 3 is a decent game but it fails in the worse aspect of what makes these games good. Itemization.
In order to explain why itemization is so important in a Diablo-like, I want to borrow an example Asmongold used to explain why Dark Souls is so good. Imagine the game is a math problem and the game wants you to make something equal 4. The bad games give you only one or two ways to get to 4, either 2+2 or maybe 3+1 if you're lucky. Diablo 3 is like this thanks to the class set items providing you with 100000000000% increased damage making them the only really viable items to get yourself to the number 4. A good game provides almost limitless options to get to 4, maybe you do the boring 2+2, or maybe you do 5-1, or maybe you do something crazy like -6+10, or 24 divided by 8. The point is the itemization is so vast that there are tons of ways to make your character do what you want it to do.
Diablo-likes have been around for a long time, and Diablo 4 did absolutely nothing to learn anything from the history of the genre. Diablo 4 is fundamentally a bad Diablo game in so many aspects that you only need to cross the street to a little game called Path of Exile to realize just how many core features of the genre Diablo 4 is actually missing.
Before I do any direct comparison let me talk a little bit about Path of Exile. PoE is the only game on the market that people who really like good itemization and really like Diablo 2 can really go to and get an equal or better experience. PoE does itemization right, it does endgame right, it does seasons right, it does almost everything a Diablo-like game can do and it does them all extremely well.
Like all Diablo-likes you start PoE by picking your class, but classes in PoE are nothing more than starting points. No class has any particular skills or special abilities unique to that class. This is because every skill in the game comes from a gem, and these gems get slotted into your gear. So long as the gem is equipped you can use whatever skill that gem provides. Want to be a Barbarian who throws Fireballs? Equip a fireball gem and go nuts. The gem system is incredible and also incredibly deep which makes building your character feel awesome as you mix and match gems to grant your character as much power and synergies and you could ever want.
The system is extremely easy but also extremely complex depended on how deep you want to get into it. For a noobie tutorial let me explain basics. Ever gear slot except jewelry has sockets in it that vary in color. Red, Green, Blue, and White. Gems can be slotted into any slot of a matching color on your gear. Each piece of gear can have 1- 4 sockets in the early game meaning you can have up to four gems in almost every item on your character. Which sounds like you would have a shitload of skills right? Well you can if you go that route, however in addition to sockets the gear will have links of those socks, meaning those sockets will be connected. Why? Well not only are there a ton of different skills in the game but there are also a ton of support gems in the game. Support gems are like boosts to any skill gem they are linked too. So say you have fireball connected to a linked socket of multishot, well that means when you cast fireball you'll cast three or four fireballs at once!
The gems also level up, which increases their power but also increases their mana cost and stat requirements to use them. This is core to why the itemization is so good in the PoE. Because it's all about the math problems again. You see getting a piece of gear or a new gem presents you with a problem that you need to use the stats on the gear to solve. For example you level up your holy smite gem, but now you are missing 12 intellegence to use it, so now you need to hunt for items with Int on them to push you over the requirement and use the spell again. It's brilliance because everything in PoE is connected. Your gear helps you use gems, your gems help you gain power and create a build for your character.
None of that touches on the passive skill tree you get by leveling up. I like to compare the skill tree to the sphere grid in Final Fantasy X, because I have to reference Final Fantasy right? I mentioned before how your class doesn't really matter? Well the Skill tree is basically where the class comes into play. Much like the sphere grid in FFX the different classes only choose where you start on the grid. This can mean it is hard for some classes to do certain things and sort of steers you to build a certain why depending on the class you picked. But there are ways to overcome those limits if you really want to.
Now let's look at Diablo 4, where every class is highly limited to being those classes. Now this isn't really a bad thing because sometimes having your classes have distinct identities is a good thing and helps players know what the character will expect of them. However now look at the skill tree for any class in the game, and compare those skills to what build guides say. There is a drastic disconnect between class skills and the itemization in Diablo 4 that is so drastic that every single class in the game has a selection of skills that are absolutely worthless. Not every skill has to be good, but every skill should be useful especially in a game where your skill selection is so limited on each character.
Let me give you an example, the weapon swapping mechanic on Barbarian is absolutely worthless. Not only does it drastically affect your damage in a negative way, but the skills that support it are so bad they might as well not exist. Weapon Frenzy is the worst example, this is a capstone ultimate passive for Barbarian that allows you to gain a buff for each weapon type you use and when you have every buff you gain an even bigger buff. On paper this sounds cool. However in order to get a buff for each weapon you have to hit things with that weapon, and once you have the buff it only lasts for 4 seconds, meaning it is absolutely impossible to ever have all four buffs up at once in order to trigger your super buff. Furthermore there are no items in the game that help make this passive useful. No legendary aspect to increase the duration of the small buffs, or anything that helps keep the weapon buffs going during downtime of which there is a lot in D4.
And Barbarian isn't the only class with dead skills like this. Every class has them and it comes down to not only bad class design but also bad itemization that "fixes" characters. Diablo 3 works on this principal, in that basically your character isn't very good at it's core. It's ok and you can kill things on lower difficulties without too much problem. But your kit is ultimately very basic and limited until you get yourself a class set which augments you with so much power that now improvements become exponential and your power ceiling goes insane. It's not the best system and it's why a lot of people don't like D3 for the mindset that starting the game hitting for 3-8 damage per hit only to end up doing hundreds of Trillions of damage just feels dumb. Personally I like this system quite a bit, I love the exponential growth and huge numbers, but I understand and I agree that tighter systems are better and more rewarding in the end.
Itemization problems dont stop there. Look at this shit https://mobalytics.gg/blog/diablo-4/gear-affixes-full-list/ the sheer amount of useless trash that can roll on gear is absolutely terrible. Damage to frozen, damage to chilled, damage to stunned, damage to close, damage to far, damage to healthy, damage to injured, on and on the list of potential garbage on your items makes getting new items feel terrible because the odds of getting something decent are way too low.
It's one thing to have "useless" stats on gear for certain builds, for example +X to mana, because maybe your built a character that doesn't use mana. But other builds will love more and more mana so the stat isn't a dead stat it just simply might not be right for what you're going for right now. But in D4 nobody gives a fuck about dealing extra damage to enemies with full health because all it means is that your damage sucks the moment you get them below 50%.
To make matters worse, the good stats in D4 that you actually want on your gear like Crit damage, Crit chance, and Vulnerable damage all got nerf 30-40%! Which showcases just how much the dev team doesn't understand what the fuck they are doing.
Of course in these RPG's crafting is a major component, Path of Exile's crafting system is so fucking crazy that you can take a basic piece of shit white item and craft it into something that rivals the best items in the game. You can change the color of the sockets, change the links, add modifiers, remove modifiers, customize basically everything. And it's not just gear you can customize, but also your dungeons. Path of Exile's endgame system is something called maps, which basically act like Rifts in Diablo 3, where you consume a map and you do a random dungeon with a boss at the end. But unlike rifts you can CRAFT Maps, allowing you to fully customize your endgame dungeons to feature and favor the things you like to do the most in the game and of course maximize the potential loot you'll get from it.
Diablo 4, has no crafting at all so.....anyway.
Path of Exile has seasons like Diablo 3 and 4 and Lost Ark, but each PoE season essentially adds a minigame to the game that allows of more endgame activities through out. And most of these minigames stay in the game forever, which adds to the things you can do in maps.
Here are some of my favorites:
Metamorphous, in this event monsters in your map will drop body parts and at the end of the map you will use these body parts to craft your own bossfight. The parts you use will give the boss abilities and also offer guaranteed loot from the boss upon defeat. So for example you use a brain that makes the boss deal extra fire damage but also forces the boss to drop legendary rings. This mechanic bleeds seamlessly into gameplay and takes the player no extra steps to take part in.
Menagerie, in this event there will be 5 rare monsters on the map that you have to hunt and capture, this happens automatically when you defeat them. Your beastmaster friend NPC will take these monsters to a special camp that will allow you to refight an arena of this bosses for special loot rewards and different combinations can be used for tons of different items.
Temple of Azoc, in this event there will be small stations that teleport you into a temple where you must kill monsters to find keys that unlock different rooms in the temple. The goal is to unlock all the rooms in the temple so that you can run a special temple map with cool bosses and rewards at the end.
Delirum, in this event you walk through a portal that causes a delirium effect to cover your whole dungeon. New monsters will appear and the goal is to kill as many monsters as you can while also getting as far away from the starting point as possible for ever increasing rewards before the timer ends.
There are tons more of events including a full rogue-like dungeon, a capture the flag battle arena, a heist mini game with recruitable thieves. And the best part about all of this is that the map system has it's own skill tree where you can increase the odds of your favorite events appearing in your maps while also increasing the reward potential from them. None of which is forced upon you, if you don't like one of the mini games, simply don't spec into it and ignore it. Focusing on only your favorites mean the things you enjoy doing will become even more rewarding and more common so you can enjoy them more.
Diablo 4 has....the same 20 dungeons over and over again with bigger numbers.
Path of Exile is completely free. No upfront cost however you will want to buy stash tabs at the endgame to make life easier and the microtransaction shop always has discounts during the last week of every month. So you can get new stash tabs for like 3 dollars, and these stash tabs are customized to specific things which helps organize everything automatically for you. And even the basic stash tabs have search functions.
Diablo 4 is $70 with no search function in your stash and no extra stash to buy because they decided to program the game to load every single player's entire stash for everyone at all times.
To me what Diablo 4 highlights more than anything is that Blizzard's developers are drinking some sort of Kool-aid and falling victims to their own hubris. This is a development team that made a Diablo game without even playing the older Diablo game let alone other ARPG's in general. There are problems with Diablo 4 that were solved or not issues in the first place with previous Diablo and even Blizzard games in general. How a development team could think to make a game with this kind of scale in a bubble is beyond me and as a result a fucking FREE 10-year-old game is outright embarrassing them in terms of just playability and usability. I'm not even blaming the content, because I expect the 10-year-old game to have more content. But that doesn't excuse Diablo 4 from having a lack of content.
If you like ARPG's or Diablo-likes. Go play Path of Exile.
