Diablo 4, anyone playing this weekend?

[BugFreak]

I didn't watch the whole thing but went to the 14:20 mark and 100% agree. I think the game so far is for a casual gamer with a little time to waste on gaming in between real life and does an excellent job at it. I'm lucky enough my son and I can game together but if we were doing sports or that type of thing I don't see having hours upon hours to play games. D4 would allow me to jump in, play a dungeon or two then log off while most games these days don't offer me that. Ones that do I'm totally outmatched because of items or skills so I lose interest fast.

 

[Woomack]

My son usually has some random crap running in the background like Roblox or something so I'll probably up him to 32g based on what you're seeing. If that doesn't fix it I will try upping his GPU.

I also barely see players out in the world. The auto party thing is nice but it seems no one uses it like Blizzard thought people would by sticking together. I'm already starting to see farmers around the repeat event locations though which is sad. Someone will be sitting just in range of the event so when it starts they get whatever drops when they come back. I usually drag a mob over to kill them but I'd imagine most people don't care so the farmer gets something out of it. I hate to see that in a new game.

I didn't play last night which is odd for me and a new game I like so I get what you're saying. It was primarily due to the login issues they were having. That type of thing usually bothers me but last night I just went back to my normal World of Warships and didn't think twice. When I do play I get sucked in for hours though.

I noticed a weird issue at ~32GB. I have 64GB in my gaming PC, but when it reaches 32GB, then I get an error in D4 saying that the game had to be closed as there is not enough memory. When the error appeared, then the game was still running, but I could only accept it, and then the game closed. D4 had a max of 14GB after about ~3-4h. The error has been exactly the same three times so far.

I'm playing Black Desert Online, as I already said, but I haven't seen many gamers taking a break, leaving, or staying afk all the time because of Diablo 4. Like nothing really happened. I remember that people were leaving or taking a break because of some other games in the past.

I was playing on Steam Deck yesterday for 2-3h without issues. The game lags in the same places in the same way on such weak specs as SD has, and the same on my main gaming PC. I also run D4 from a micro SD card (~100MB/s) on Steam Deck, so if there are any significant issues, lags, or anything else, then it seems to be on the game's side, not used hardware.

 

[dfonda]

So to be clear, is this a game for single players ? Or do you have to join up online for it to be successful?

It would be handy to play it on the Steam Deck...

 

[BugFreak]

It is an online game but can easily be played without joining a group. So far the only time I've joined a group is with my son.

 

[BugFreak]

I've been playing a good bit for the past couple days so I thought I would put out an update. I'm up to 46 on my barb and just starting act 3. I would say I'm doing quite a bit of exploring and random dungeons and still haven't explored half the map. When I zoom the map out there is a ton of space still hidden which is really just amazing to me. I do not have a horse yet but I can surely tell I will need one soon. I have to do some quest to get the horses which hopefully is soon. I feel the drop rates are perfect. I get a ton of yellow (rare) items and enough brown (unique) items to keep my item-driven barb fun. At this point I'm overpowering most things I run into on the Veteran level. I'm running mostly brown items with a couple rares that add power. It's been fun learning the new damage metrics. I just realized the true impact willpower has on fights, at least with my fury/hammer of the ancients barb. I also like that the rare items are useful instead of just random crap compared to uniques like in D3.

One thing I'm really appreciating is how we actually use gold in the game. Prior versions it was just another item that really didn't add much to the game once the AH closed. There are plenty of gold sinks, upgrading, enchanting, etc all use a large amount of gold. The gambling uses its own currency and results in about a 1 in 5 unique ratio. I usually save up enough to gamble five times before doing it so I'm not sure the ratio of doing it one at a time.

Its taking me some urging to start playing but once I start I'm in for hours at a time. Its definitely not one of those games I can login, play for a little while then log out. I get too into the story line or finishing a quest to do that. At this point I'm not sure if this will be good for longevity or not because I don't always have an hour or two to play except for a weekend morning or something like that.

I'm starting to see more players in town and in the wilds. I've made it to a couple big world events and saw multiple people there. It was pure chaos during the event so I have no idea how many were actually there but it was a bunch. These aren't the little repeating events all over the map, these are special large events that move around the map a couple times a day. At this point I'm starting to wonder if Blizzard is limiting how many people show up at a time or that I'm on a server that has a lower population versus one on the west coast or something like that. Its either that or I'm moving along too slow and people are in the nightmare or hell levels already.

Sorry if some of this seems like I'm repeating what youtube or website people are saying but I purposely haven't watch any of those or read any guides because I want to learn it as I go and follow the story (which is very good btw) at my own pace. At this point in the story I've been chasing Lilith all over and know the end is coming but it still feels like there is something bigger coming after Lilith, maybe in an expansion or something like that.

 

[FoldingAddict]

I got to world tier 4 and have no desire whatsoever to continue. I'm not sure if it's because I'm playing such a nerfed class or what, but they made WT4 harder mostly by making every mob for the most part CC you. It's not fun to play. Maybe if I was playing druid and one-tapping everything it'd be fine, I'm not sure. WT3 is too easy and zero upgrades are dropping too. They nerfed sorcerer too hard pre-release and now there's really no build diversity at all due to no way to effectively apply vulnerability without frost nova. Even the Exploit glyph doesn't work the same for sorcerer as it does for barbarian, druid, and rogue. I should have known not to play sorcerer on release after all the hype it got in the betas for being overpowered.

 

[MisterEd]

Did anyone here play the Diablo 4 beta a few months ago with a Gigabyte RTX 3080 Ti GPU? It seems some people with this card had them crash or fail while playing the game.

 

[BugFreak]

Not that specific card but I played an eVGA 3080 without problems.

 

[Woomack]

I finished the story yesterday at 51lvl. I wasn't doing everything on the way, but I wasn't skipping anything on my path. I had some free-of-work days last week. If I count it right, finishing it took me 30h or a bit more. About 60% map was explored.

The game is often reconnecting with servers. It causes it to crash from time to time, or servers have problems, and I have to relog. Sometimes 3h+ no problems, sometimes I see in the corner info that it's trying to connect, but the game is still working for some time.

 

[Kenrou]

Did anyone here play the Diablo 4 beta a few months ago with a Gigabyte RTX 3080 Ti GPU? It seems some people with this card had them crash or fail while playing the game.

I've "heard" rumors of people having the same FPS/overheating problems as New World did at launch, but too few to make it credible?

 

[rainless]

So I logged in played at about 12:30 with no problems. Went in right away with no queue. Unfortunately, I logged off to take care of some things and know I'm in an 87 minute queue.

Earlier I played through the first dungeon quest and messed with the settings some. DLSS was off by default which was odd to me.

Yeah I didn't get to play until after the official release and DLSS was STILL off by default.

Somehow this game makes my graphics card fans go insane... which is weird given that it doesn't strike me as a graphics powerhouse... Like not AT ALL.

The fans were going as if it were the realtime rendered 4K graphics that nearly brought my system to its knees in Midnight Suns 2... but this is not that.

It's as if it's using all those system resources just to generate billions of particles of dust...

 

[Woomack]

I guess it still uses a lot of memory ... or is not loading data often and uses whatever is already in the VRAM. I was only checking how it uses RAM, but I didn't check the graphics card memory. I couldn't hear any difference as I have custom water loop in one PC and the second one is Steam Deck, so it always makes noise.

On the other hand, when I was playing longer then the game was acting like it loads a lot of data all the time. I only wonder what it loads when my character is barely changing locations.

 

[BugFreak]

I guess it still uses a lot of memory ... or is not loading data often and uses whatever is already in the VRAM. I was only checking how it uses RAM, but I didn't check the graphics card memory. I couldn't hear any difference as I have custom water loop in one PC and the second one is Steam Deck, so it always makes noise.

On the other hand, when I was playing longer then the game was acting like it loads a lot of data all the time. I only wonder what it loads when my character is barely changing locations.

I'm noticing this too. Especially when going from land to land in the lower parts of the map used later in the campaign. It must be something to do with the "online only" status or something but I don't like it at all. Hopefully they will get this fixed soon.

I finished the campaign and I'm very happy with the purchase so far. I'll put the rest in a spoiler tag so I don't ruin anything for someone though.

Spoiler: Spoiler

The new looks for Duriel and Andariel are amazing! Also, even though I'm through the campaign I don't feel like I'm even close to being done with the game. I still have about 25-30% of the map to uncover and the nightmare level is giving me some challenge for sure.

My one complaint is they basically set it up for the expansion pack so the story line isn't really "complete" and feels like one of those cliffhanger tv shows.

 

[Woomack]

I finished the campaign and I'm very happy with the purchase so far. I'll put the rest in a spoiler tag so I don't ruin anything for someone though.

I complain about some things, but in general, it's fun to play. There are not many games that I even wanted to touch, not to mention spending 30h+. No matter what I said, it's hard to say I dislike D4. I just expected some more.
I think I will back to exploring and finishing some dungeons. I'm playing something else right now, but I guess I will be bored soon and switch back to D4 ... or focus some more on Zelda as I barely started it (barely considering how large it is).

 

[Evilsizer]

I still have never recovered from the 10 plus play through's in D2...

light weight!

use to do dungeons runs with friends so we could get the right loot for our builds. GRIND!

i am not sure on D4, i feel like i took a big chance on D3. i never finished D3 and that is saying something.

 

[BugFreak]

I'm a huge fan of the Diablo franchise but I hated D3. When it first came out it was great but it quickly went down hill as they patched it to make Forum whiners happy. If you liked D2, you will like D4 imo.

 

[Woomack]

57 level now, ~95% map explored. I wanted to check other classes, but after necro, all others feel boring or somehow weak (maybe it's a matter of low level and not many skills).

That 32GB memory bug is annoying. The game literally crashes once OS reaches 32GB of used RAM. Everything else works great, only D4 crashes. In the last week, the game is lagging and rubberbanding when I only run anywhere with more monsters around. All is fine when I'm almost alone. What is weird is that the same is on PC and SD while the specs is totally different, so hard to blame too weak SD specs.
Yesterday was a DDoS attack as they said, so most players had problems to even log for like 10h, and later everything was lagging more than usual.

 

[BugFreak]

I played late yesterday and didn't see any lag problems so I must have missed that fortunately. I'm getting the rubberbanding at times after I upped the gameplay resolution but it isn't crashing. I mainly get it in the dungeons but it will be one spot that goes away when I leave that area. Have you tried to reinstall or at least verify the install? Also once my son turned off the 30 fps limit his cut scenes are way better.

Not playing the other classes I can't speak for them but my barb really struggled alone until the mid 40s. I'm at 57 and I'm one hitting almost everything but elites when I use hammer of the ancients now that I've stacked the bonus damages. Even my fury hits are 2-3 hits then dead. All the paragon points are helping big too. Most are either str/dex or 5% damage bonus for mine. This is NM.

 

[Woomack]

On Monday, after the last post, I had no lags for maybe 2h. Yesterday was fine for about 1h. I noticed that I have to turn off and on the game so it works better. Something is wrong as lags usually appear after 2h, and they're almost only when more opponents are on the screen.
I don't know about the cut scenes. Since I finished the story, there wasn't even one. Maybe they fixed it, as there were two larger updates in the last few days. Yesterday was one that took some time to download everything. I wasn't checking what they improved.

Yesterday I also finally moved to a higher difficulty level. For some reason, 1 and 2 feel the same. I moved to 3 / nightmare, and the game suddenly started to be more interesting. At 1/2, I could leave my necro, and summons were killing everything around. At 3, summons are often dying when is more pressure from monsters. There are better items and some additional events. The exp from monsters is also much higher, so I can finally see that the exp bar is moving.
Necro has one downside. When you want summons, they block 3 skill slots, so there is not much to do with 3 skills that are left, especially when one has 60 sec+ refresh.
I was a bit disappointed when I found out I can't stack +max summon amount add-ons on gear. I can add +2 to warriors and +2 to mages, so with golem, I'm at 13 summons max, and I'm not sure if I can get more. Considering there is not the best choice in higher damage aoe skills, I'm not changing anything since about 30 level, and I only slightly improve stats from time to time.

 

[BugFreak]

I haven't played necro but I feel your pain on the skill limits. I designed my barb with all three warcrys and berzerker, fury as my primary and hammer of the ancients. I would love to add another skill but I'm also limited. I'm hoping they add an expandable skills bar or something like that down the road.

Level 3 does add some challenge to it for sure. I actually died last night for the first time in many games. I don't plan to move up until at least level 70 at this point but it sure will be interesting to see the challenge it brings and how my gold survives. repairing is getting expensive and imbuing is taking a ton of my cash but keeping my barb competitive at this point.

I played for a good bit last night taking part in the Helltide event. If you haven't tried one of those you should give it a go. The shrines you use the points at give some pretty good stuff. Also the Whispering Tree thing gives some great items. I'm not sure if that is available under level 3.

I also started playing with glyphs on the paragon board which is adding a whole new challenge. Luckily they are pretty cheap to refund at this point but I'm sure they will go up as I progress. Definitely a nice way Blizzard allows us to customize our characters.