Diablo 4, cross-platform, now in beta

Is there an Armory like D3? If so I can’t find it and swapping full sets of gear is really tedious here.

I’ve gotten to the fight with Vhenard with my barbarian and cannot for the life of me figure out how to win. The third wave is just not beatable in less time than I run out of healing potions.

As a necromancer, the only struggle I remember was having to revive my skeletons over and over again. But I wasn’t really in danger. It was mostly annoying. I did have to keep on my toes and move around a lot.

I think your build and gear matter for that particular fight. And maybe barbarians struggle early on. (I haven’t played one so I can’t say for sure.)

I think the closest thing is the “ensemble” in the wardrobe, but it’s only for cosmetics, not actual gear.

I’m curious what you are swapping out gear for. I’ve never felt the urge to do it, and it’s not a feature I’ve seen people requesting for the game.

In Diablo Immortal, I used the armory constantly, in fact I had wished there were more slots. I understand why it would be necessary. I had gear sets and legendary aspects (and talent builds) for raids, for normal questing, for PvP, and so on. I just haven’t found the need here. I equip all the best stuff for my build and keep it until I find better. The game isn’t set up to swap between different builds at will, it makes you pay for that, so I don’t see why swapping gear would be useful.

Damnit I had the damn butcher under 5% health in a tier 10 nightmare dungeon, if it hadn’t been for the specific modifiers on it he’d be dead.

What level are you? Vhenard kicked my ass when I was Level 12. I came back closer to Level 20 (with an additional potion slot) and it was easier. Those succubi things are vulnerable to ground stomp and then when they were stunned, I rended the hell out of them. I also stocked up on shadow resistance items.

To be honest, melee in this game kind of sucks. I’m level 25 now and I was doing a bunch of side quests to get those extra potion slots. A lot of the terrain felt like a joyless slog, just difficult enough to make you feel like you suck, with what feels like extremely limited gameplay because of how hard it is to generate fury. And when I venture into dungeons I always end up with something hard. The first one I ran into Blood Bishop. Of course on my last dungeon I ran into the freakin’ Butcher. I didn’t realize he was a random spawn so after my first ignoble death I fled the scene.

Let’s just say I did worse than you. It’s rare in a fight you immediately realize you haven’t got a prayer.

That’s why I struggled so much with Druid. It’s like running around with an empty gun and you have to load it in the middle of combat. I don’t run into that issue with my Necro or Sorcerer. Their resources top off constantly.

The only way I can see really enjoying a class that you need to spam resource generators all the time to use, is if that resource generator itself is good enough to base your gameplay around, and then the spender is a bonus.

Between live and the beta weekends he’s wrecked my shit more times than I can count. This was the first time I put up any kind of fight.

I ran into him a couple of times in beta, and it never turned out well for me.

So far in release, I’ve only run into him once. I didn’t even know he was there at first. All I know is that I was doing a quest and then suddenly I’m dead. I’m going… WTF just happened?!

I run back to where I had died to continue my quest, and then I hear the “FRESH MEAT!!!” or whatever and realize, oh, it’s the freaking BUTCHER. That explains it.

That was followed by a Benny Hill montage of me running around after he immediately smashes my skeletons with disgusted contempt. I halfheartedly tried to toss a couple of attacks his way but it was like throwing darts at King Kong. Note that I wasn’t very high level and was using a build primarily designed for leveling quickly through standard content. I think he got tired of chasing me and despawned eventually, and that was the end of it.

I’d like to think that I could handle him better now. I no longer have minions, I’m extremely tanky (both with damage mitigation and self-healing), and I’m really built to handle harder encounters. But I won’t know until I run into him again.

I think the worst thing about him is that he just shows up out of nowhere, no warning, just BOOM there he is. You can’t really prepare and if you aren’t paying attention it’s hard to react immediately.

He’s both terrible and maybe the coolest thing in this game.

I’d like to try another class but I’m kind of dreading the slog through the story I’ve already done.

You can skip the story on alts if you already finished it.

I’m at the end of the story (or I really hope I am), and I’m holding off on playing alts until then.

I made a couple but those were just to experiment with appearances and reserve names. Once I get to Tier III on my main, I’m deleting and recreating my alts so that I have the option to start them at paragon level.

I think we are having concerns about the replayability of this one. But I have some faith that in the long run Blizzard is going to fix a lot of these issues. It seems a lot of games are starting to go with the strategy of releasing the content earlier and then fixing all the problems later, and I’m not sure how I feel about that. On the one hand, it’s good to be responsive to users in real time, on the other hand, I want a fun game now, not six months from now.

I’m having an absolute blast. I think the game is incredibly fun. I feel like I’m really being challenged but progressing a lot. I’m also excited that they will be dropping new content every 3 months for free.

The only big complaint I have is the asinine decision to soft cap the game when you hit 50 unless you finish the campaign. It means you are forced to rush through the story to prevent being stymied. I love to take my time and enjoy all the content in an area, and not rush to the end. They punish you for that in this game.

So, I’m rushing to finish the campaign, then going back to do all the stuff I was forced to skip. And my alts are going to to skip the campaign.

Why even bother making a campaign if you push people to run past it? Awful decision Blizzard.

You don’t start at a higher level, you just don’t need to do the campaign.

Well I finally got the Butcher and it was very anti-climatic, no achievement no more reward than any regular boss. Not even a cool title.

I feel this way about my Druid, though I may be slightly riding the coattails of my husband’s Sorcerer. My skills are all Storm skills and I have a ton of Storm skill passives and bonuses. My Cataclysm now makes huge crowds of enemies Vulnerable pretty much every time I cast it. Oh, and every time I cast a Nature skill that requires spirit, I heal 3%. I keep forgetting that lightning storm is a channeling skill, but every time I use it, I heal, so it’s at the point where I’m not having to use many health potions. We are in Act III and it’s getting kinda easy in places.

My solo Barb is less fun. And the reason this bugs me is that melee is my favorite class to play, my go-to, and everything about the Barbarian sounds so cool. I might switch to another class.

You should have at least got a cool weapon drop.

As I said upthread, I was choosing between Sorc and Necro, because ranged dps is normally my preference in games, with melee being a rare choice of mine. And I ended up going with Sorc since one of my close friends is doing Necro right now - and I was pretty unhappy with my frost/shock build. Because most things (not all of course) get in close and personal, and since you can’t zoom out all that far, you have a harder time making use of the range.

I recently switched to a fire / shock close range sorc and found it worked a lot better. Which was weird for me. Of course, it could all change again later on, as I’m only in the low 30s right now. On the gripping hand, I expect the first few weeks of fully on play is going to lead to a whole new cycle of buffs, nerfs, and mechanic alteration, so who knows!

As I said earlier, I was 100% all in to be a Druid until I actually played the game, and now I am all about the Necromancer even though I had absolutely no interest before I had a chance to get into beta and try it out.

It seems that not every class and every build works for everyone, but chances are that something will work for you. And it’s not even that they aren’t all viable, I think just about everything is, but these builds might not work for the way you want to play.

I also think, and at least this seems to be the case for me, that since every build has some kind of flaw, you’re going to find something about it that bothers you. So the trick is to figure out what to change to fix that, and that might even mean a different class. For Druid, I hated that Spirit didn’t restore on its own, and it felt like a pain to keep working to top it off. Necro and Sorcerer both resolved that issue.

I felt like Sorcerer was too squishy for me (even though it does have plenty of skills to mitigate that, mostly in the form of shields) but Necromancer with minions to tank for you and all the abilities to do self-healing resolved that.

And I found minions to be a pain, so switched to a minion-free Blood build. But the recommendation I found online left me using up Essence so fast with no good way to restore it, so I tweaked it on my own to put in Corpse Explosion and a passive that gives me Essence per corpse consumed (because the build had literally nothing that consumed corpses), and then another passive that helped create more corpses, and now I never run out of Essence for long. I gave up some skills and passives from the original build that I never used or needed and don’t feel like I’ve lost anything in the process.

To me this is one of the beauties of the game, how many options there are and how you can basically make up your own build to suit how you want to play. Don’t cling tenaciously to your class or build and gripe about how bad it is. Make a change. Try something you don’t think you’d like, just to see how it feels. You might surprise yourself.

I fully agree. It reminds me of the changes in Dragonflight (World of Warcraft) - that after years of talents being streamlined to 3 options every 15 levels, one of which was good, one underpowered, and one good for PVP, they reinstated full trees. You could go with options that were suboptimal for high level play, but worked better for -your- playstyle.

Thankfully the cost for tinkering with the build is, as promised, cheap enough to be largely ignorable so far.

I still feel the lack of the paladin and demon hunter, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see one or both in future content.

Some classes work better early and then taper off and some take a while to get going but end up very powerful like druid.