Is this shit? My dad is going to play w/friends and me if I decide to get it. Watched a video and it seems very deterministic in regards to items and skills. Can monsters posit unique challenges and how is class variety?
I was disappointed with the server slam beta and find it unbelievable it's being released in this state. I played a Druid, you basically choose a basic (free attack skill) and a mana cost attack skill, a defensive skill, and then a couple of attacks on cooldown. But the skills are not fun at all and even the animal companion skills feel anemic. The enemies are zombie trash mobs with basic simple AI no different than PoE and the bosses are just dodge patterns and hp sponges just like PoE. We basically only played the first act but there were only two tilesets- a snowy tundra overworld and a mine/ cavern dungeon, with no real distinguishing landmarks like mountains, forests or rivers.
Sadly, I couldn't compare it to other classes cause the slam ended rather abruptly on me, but I had pretty much the same experience with the druid. Not sure why I picked this one first, could it be that it was the magic of finally feeling included and represented in a vidya game? But I digress... I recently had a fresh go with a melee werewolf in D2R and in this context it compares rather favorably because you can now fluidly change between forms and a few abilities trigger off it when you do, so at least the new approach promises to be more involved (D2R melee druid is basically LMP for main attack, RMB to rack up life and mana leech, recast werewolf when needed, recast buffing spirit if it dies). Then again, the game has moved on a bit in the years since D2 came out.
Considering that, I could say that dodge patterns are actually an improvement over the D2 formula where the bosses were JUST damage sponges. Games in the genre really struggle to make melee interesting. Some higher tier mobs also have telegraphed attacks you have to dodge, this spices things a little bit. Though I hate the modifiers introduced by D3 with a passion, especially wallers feel redundant with all the narrow corridors. Was a really unpleasant surprise to see it in D4.
To be fair, trash mobs with no AI is basically the genre's staple at this point. Very few games dare to do anything with it. For some perspective, I recommend trying Last Epoch which really shat the bed with monster design as far as I am concerned (shame, cause the skill system, redability and other mechanics are really great). Seriously, most games in the genre compare poorly even to D2, which at least had some most basic interactions down, like devilkin running away on kill and being raised by shamen, some ranged enemies keeping their distance, you start missing simple things like that.
Regarding the limited tilesets and landmarks, I think the game opens up at a later point when we get horses and stuff. Hopefully this will also do away with sausage-corridors (coincidentally, I also had my fill of this shit in Last Epoch).
