Diablo Immortal Closed Alpha In-Depth Feedback
After an incredibly successful technical alpha test, Blizzard went back to work and built an entire endgame PvP system into Diablo Immortal. I have now played 400+ hours of the closed alpha, and it is seriously impressive. By my analysis, Diablo Immortal is hands down the best Diablo game ever made. The closed alpha represents an entire expansion’s worth of additional content, and includes Diablo Immortal’s endgame systems. The new content is much in need of fixes, balance changes, and improvements, and is much rougher around the edges than the content present in only the technical alpha. This feedback post will go in-depth and analyze each system in the game, including systems from the technical alpha. The hope is to direct development efforts to the systems most in need of fixing, and providing an excellent experience for players at release time.
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Overall
Diablo Immortal is showing that it can be the best mobile game ever made and in many ways is already the best Diablo game ever made. I prefer Diablo Immortal’s core systems and gameplay to any Diablo game thus far made. That might sound strange considering this is a mobile game, but Blizzard has done something special here. This is a mobile game unlike any other, and you will find yourself considering an upgrade to your mobile device in order to play the game at the maximum settings, in much the same way you would consider upgrading your PC for a landmark game release. This feedback is targeting some of the new systems in Diablo Immortal and looking at weaknesses in the game. Blizzard has already fixed many issues during the closed alpha, and that gives much hope towards fixing other issues before release that this feedback will cover.
Immortals
The endgame system in Diablo Immortal is a faction based PvP system. The Immortals represent the strongest players on the server who reign over everyone else. The Shadows are an unlimited number of players who organize themselves into Dark Houses and compete with the Immortals. The top ranked Dark House can overthrow the Immortals in a special event called the Rite of Exile. If their effort in combination with the other Shadows is successful, then the top ranked Dark House will become the new Immortals. The cycle of Shadows becoming Immortals is called the Cycle of Strife.
The #1 issue with Diablo Immortal Closed Alpha is that being an Immortal is not rewarding. Immortals have significantly less content to play, that is significantly less polished, for significantly less reward than Shadows, and especially Adventurers. In theory, being an Immortal should be the thing you want the most in the game. It should give you the most rewards, the best loot, and/or the greatest opportunities to advance your character. It should have unique gameplay that you can’t experience elsewhere in the game. Right now, the best way to advance your character is to simply not participate in the Shadows or the Immortals and instead be an Adventurer, because Adventurers get the ability to buy extra Scoria from the Honor Vendor each day, and also get a unique quest that gives them additional Scoria. Scoria is important because it helps you progress the Helliquary. The Helliquary is the endgame PvE system, featuring demonic bosses that give your character powerful upgrades. (More on this later). Let’s go into detail on why being an Immortal is not currently rewarding, and look at some potential solutions to the problem.
The Vault Rewards
The Immortals have a Vault which holds loot that is distributed to anyone who is an Immortal at the end of the week. The Vault holds 4 different things: gold, Honor, Essentia, and legendary items. The gold and honor distributions are good, and may need some minor tuning based on data from the closed alpha. Honor in particular, provides players in the Immortals a constant source of resource that cannot be farmed from the world. However, none of these are a great reason to join the Immortals and do very little to make your character more powerful. The legendaries in the Vault are all VENDOR TRASH. Each legendary is most likely a single attribute legendary with nothing else special about it. Anyone can simply go play the game and acquire legendaries of this poor caliber and chances are good that if you are one of the most powerful players on the server (as the Immortals should be), then you already are fully equipped with high tier double stat legendaries in every slot. This means that even double stat legendaries in the Vault (of which, there are typically only a few), are not even close to a good reason to join the Immortals. So far on the North American closed alpha server, we have had 1 triple stat legendary for Demon Hunter in three weeks of Vault rewards. That means only one person out of the current 220 Immortals has even had a chance at something decent in three weeks. No one in their right mind would want to join the Immortals, grind the daily goals, and climb the ladder of contribution points in order to have a chance that their class has a triple stat legendary. Simply put: It is not compelling to do anything in the Immortals, and if the system stays in the present state, the results at release will leave a sour taste in the mouth of players who work hard and compete for slots in the Immortals.
The Vault Rewards: Possible Fixes
The Vault should distribute the best loot in the game (the game is called Diablo Immortal after all), and this loot should not be able to be acquired through other means. There’s a few ways loot could be interesting and worth it from the Vault.
- The Vault should be the only source of triple stat legendaries in the game. This appears to be the design intent of the closed alpha version of the Vault, however there are some critical problems with the current implementation.
- Triple Stat Legendary item pools — triple stat legendaries can be acquired from certain loot pools in the game, such as Shadow Contracts, Immortal daily goal drops, Lassel, and potentially certain kind of loot drops. These drops are so rare that many of them are unconfirmed through screenshots and videos. Hopefully these loot pools are a bug and will be fixed. If not, then it means the best way to farm triple stat legendaries is to be a Shadow and do contracts forever.
- Not enough triple stat legendary drops from the Vault — The drop chance of a triple stat legendary from the Vault seems far too low. The minimum should be at least 10 triple stat legendary items each week, if not more.
- Uneven class distribution — The chance that a triple stat legendary or a good double stat legendary appears entirely random, and this has resulted in a few weeks where the rewards were entirely lopsided for one or two classes with nothing for other classes. Each class should have a relatively equal ability to compete for good rewards from the Vault.
- Unclear distribution rules — The rules for distribution seem very complex for no reason whatsoever. I can request 3 items from the Vault but even if I’m #1 I can only receive the first one I choose? I think this is some sort of ranked-choice system, but it’s very poorly explained.
- Adding to the Vault is mysterious — When you finish an Elder Rift using a crest as an Immortal, it will add gold, honor, and/or items to the Vault. Why does this happen? This is never explained anywhere in the game. I ran into this completely by chance. How else are items getting added to the Vault? I don’t think spending crests is the only mechanic here, there seems to be some other scheduled automatic adding of rewards to the Vault that’s completely mysterious! I’d like to understand more around how and why rewards get added to the Vault in general. On this note: The message in chat and the message at the end of a rift aren’t exactly the same. The message at the end of a rift says, “New rewards have been added to the Vault.” I think the passive voice here is bad. But it would be really fantastic if it was EXACTLY the same message as is announced in the Immortals chat — “[Immortals] New in the Vault: 16400 Gold,1 items.” That would really connect these two events and make the mechanic obvious.
Overall giving triple stat legendaries to the Immortal’s Vault isn’t my favorite way of making the Immortals the most attractive faction in the game. Although I think if some additional changes were made so that Shadows could steal these triple stat legendaries from the Vault, it would become much more interesting (more on this later).
2. The Vault should drop a unique crafting material that starts an epic quest line for an extremely rare legendary item. This would be akin to obtaining the Thunderfury in Classic WoW, or Sulfuron. It would require the support of all of the Immortals to obtain, and be a supremely powerful item. The Vault could have a chance to drop the item that starts the quest to allow you to obtain all the materials to craft the item. Perhaps there is one item available for each class. Something like this that is a unique reward would inspire the top players to push as hard as possible for the Immortals — but would still leave a hole for “hardcore-but-not-top-tier” players. Perhaps some other solution can make the Immortals attractive for these players.
The Vault Gameplay
The Immortals are expected to defend the Vault from the Shadows. This activity is limited to the hours of 10:00–22:00 server time. This is a great way to prevent players from having to camp the Vault 24/7, and is a very healthy thing for the game. However the implemention of the gameplay is not fun. I think that the gameplay for the Vault is in an extremely early state and needs the most gameplay improvement of any system in Diablo Immortal. In the closed alpha, the best way to defend the Vault is to keep the game opened and camp the entrance to the Vault, potentially staring at the blue portal to the Vault for hours without any interaction or gameplay. When the Immortals receive a notification that the Shadows are invading the Vault, they can immediately enter, and one of a few things happens:
- The Shadows are already instantly teleporting out of the Vault and a second after you enter the Vault, they escape.
2. The Immortals rush in. The Shadows attempt to teleport out, but continually get interrupted by mobs inside the Vault. Then they kill all of the Shadows (usually just 1) instantly.
3. The Shadows intentionally trigger the alert and camp the entrance to the Vault, and instantly kill the Immortals while they are on a loading screen.
All of these interactions happen in a few seconds. If you are not camping the Vault door as an Immortal you stand no chance to even participate in the Vault. If you get a notification on your phone, by the time you are even halfway logged into the game, the Vault interaction is already over.
There are many ways to solve the gameplay problems with the Vault, but overall it simply is too shallow feature-wise and needs some major work or improvements. Below are some of my suggestions.
- Change the alarm from a binary decision to a more complex system of alarm levels. The Warden system should be replaced entirely. Shadows should be able to make a risk assessment when they are raiding the Vault. This should include things such as potentially passing up smaller treasure chests in higher levels of the Vault for a chance at a higher payout at the end. One way you could do alarm levels is to have certain actions increase a progression bar that increases the level of danger in the Vault.
- When certain actions are done (such as a high alarm level), a set of security doors could lock, trapping the Shadow inside the Vault and notifying the Immortals. The Shadow would then need to find an alternative means of escape, such as an “escape hatch” to get out. Meanwhile, the Immortals are racing through the Vault, opening doors themselves to try to hunt down the Shadow. This would increase the amount of time of gameplay in the Vault, and also give a sense of suspense to the Shadow (“will I make it out in time?”) instead of the current state of the Vault.
- The current method of increasing the defense of the Vault is boring and unclear. What exactly does “Vault level 5” even mean? This seems very difficult to determine. Instead, the Immortal’s “Bolster the Vault” strategy should allow the Immortals to contribute salvage materials to build purchasable defenses, such as doors, traps, monsters, and other environmental effects. This could open up a new avenue of gaining Contribution Points (it should be capped weekly).
- When certain alarm levels are hit in the Vault, there should be a sound to give the Shadow a sense of dread, rather than simply a text notification.
- When in-game, the Immortals should have a noticable alarm sound to go with the notification that the Vault is under attack. (There is already a sound but it’s hardly an alarm!)
- There should be a way for the Immortals to load into the Vault without being instantly killed at the entrance.
- There should be multiple entry points for the Immortals to make it more interesting and less predictable. (Perhaps multiple entry points is another thing that can be purchased when using the “Bolster the Vault” strategy).
- When the Vault is secured after a notification goes out, there is still a red diamond on the Daily Goals and Activities tab. It’s annoying to have this diamond show up when there’s actually nothing to do besides hit the menu to dismiss it.
- From the Shadow’s perspective, you can’t use your keys all at once and get the same reward as if you spent one key each day. You should receive the same reward and participation regardless of how you spend your keys, so long as you spend them.
- The Vault allows the Shadows to steal a huge amount of Essentia, making it impossible to do Kion’s Ordeal. This pushes the Immortals to do Kion’s Ordeal first thing in the morning (before the Vault opens). Either there needs to be a smarter schedule for the Vault, and/or the Immortal should be able to “pre-spend” Essentia to open Kion’s Ordeal, with a set time later when it will actually open. (More on this later under the section for Kion’s Ordeal)
- When the Shadows escape from the Vault, there is a message that says “The Vault is secure!” …shouldn’t this message say “The Shadows escaped!” instead? It’s kind of weird that that the Vault is secure, right after they steal from it.
Contribution Points
In order to get an item from the Vault, you must earn Contribution Points each week. Contribution Points are a stack ranking system, where the person with the most points is the rank 1, and those with less points are ranked accordingly. Contribution Points are reset every week during the normal weekly reset (Monday at 3AM server time for us), and rewards are also distributed at this time. During the week, a player can open the Vault and tap on an item to Request that item from the Vault. If they are the top Contribution Point player that is requesting that item, then they receive the item. Players can request 3 items from the Vault, with their first choice being the choice that they receive. Players rank 1–3 receive 3 items, players rank 4–20 receive 2 items, and players 21+ receive 1 item. The Contribution Point system itself has several problems that need to be addressed.
- Contribution Points from inviting Adventurers — Immortals currently can receive up to 500 Contribution Points weekly for inviting players to the Immortals. This should be removed entirely, as becoming an Immortal itself should be its own reward. The Immortal and their Lieutenants should have the right to conduct invites to the Immortals in the way that they wish — whether this is by simply inviting anyone who is suggested (first come first serve), or by doing something as heavy as mandating a Discord interview for the player, to ensure that they will do their dailies and contribute accordingly. Don’t try to game the invite system.
- Invite sniping Adventurers — The points rewarded for inviting players can be sniped by the Immortal and their Lieutenants, or given to friends, by simply declining the invite when approving the player in the member’s list, and then inviting the player themselves, or “giving” the invite to another Immortal that they wish to gain the Contribution Points to. Furthermore, a petty Immortal and/or Lieutenants can snipe every invite as a method of ensuring that no players can ever gain more Contribution Points than they have, by a wide margin (500 points).
- Contribution Point ties are determined by first acquired — In the event of a tie, the player who attained the highest Contribution Points first, will be ranked first. Ultimately what this means is that the top players will have to wake up at 3am server time each day to do their Immortal Daily Goals (should there be high competition). This isn’t great. There should be a mechanism to resolve ties that does not rely on first acquired (random would be just fine).
- Vault Defense is uncapped — In the closed alpha it appears that the amount of Contribution Points available from Vault Defense is uncapped. Meaning that the most rewarding activity an Immortal can do is to camp the entrance to the Vault 12 hours a day. This effectively does not give other players the opportunity to interact with the Vault. This Contribution Point source should be capped in order to allow other players to participate.
- No Contribution Points for organizers — One of the tasks the Immortals will need to do is to organize. They will need to get people into Discord, work to schedule raids, elect Lieutenants, figure out who the elites are, and so on. These people receive no Contribution Points for this time. I propose that the Immortal be able to designate one person per week for 100 extra contribution points. The Immortal can use it to fill this need (“oh hey, you’re organizing everyone, here’s some extra points”), or use it as a soft loot council mechanic, or use it to break ties at the top.
- The Shadows can steal too much Essentia from the Vault — I was surprised during my time as a Shadow to be able to steal anywhere from 300–600 Essentia in one run. Immortals can typically contribute a maximum of 10 or so Essentia per day. Add to the fact that Shadows are completely uncapped in population and this dynamic is completely unbalanced. At a minimum, a Shadow should only be able to steal as much Essentia per day as an Immortal is able to contribute, and even that’s a bit questionable of a balance decision (Shadows would still have a tremendous advantage due to them being uncapped).
Dominance and Immortal Progression
The Immortals can level up collectively by gaining Dominance. Dominance is gained from the Immortal Daily Goals, by contributing Essentia, completing Kion’s Ordeal, and winning the Rite of Exile.
The progression system feels very good, and in particular is a great contrast to how Shadows progress (collective vs individual goals). The pace of progression feels good — currently the North American server Immortals have reigned for 2.5 weeks and are almost Iron 3 (Rank 7 out of 16). So the grind feels good so far. Each level offers a special chest, and unique upgrades for the Crowns, and even some cosmetic upgrades, such as cooler-looking capes for the Immortal Lieutenants. I am interested to see how the difficulty curve of the required Dominance per rank is at higher Immortal ranks. Overall, I’m very happy with the progression system, although it may need some fine tuning. There are a few problems that may need to be addressed:
- There is a hypothetical exploit to gain infinite Dominance and Essentia. You can have a group of people build characters or alts to level 43 (the minimum you can invite to Immortals) and then rotate alts into the Immortals each day. The alts would do their dailies, contribute their Essentia, and then immediately leave the Immortals to make room for the next alt. This exploit might also incentivize botting or “gold farming” behavior for these alts and the daily goals, etc.
- Characters can currently leave and rejoin the Immortals with no penalty except a 24 hour wait. Currently this means that the optimal way to play is to leave the Immortals each day, do your Adventurer dailies, rejoin the Immortals, do your Immortal dailies, and repeat. This sort of optimization behavior of leaving and rejoining the Immortals should never be possible.
- Players can currently have characters in both the Shadows and Immortals, which enables spying behavior, and using alts to sabotage certain events. If possible, make it so that an account can only have characters in one faction at a time.
A simple fix to some of these problems is to add an Essentia cost to inviting a character to the Immortals that is equal to ~3 days of Essentia gained from daily goals (around 30 Essentia at the time of the closed alpha). This cost could be refunded one-time when the character completes the “True Immortal” questline, or a similar timeframe.
Immortal Daily Goals
The Immortal daily goals are a unique kind of daily quest that the Immortals have access to. Each daily goal allows the Immortal to contribute dominance and gain Contribution Points. In contrast to the Shadow’s unique daily quest (Contracts) the Immortal daily goals do not feel great.
Unlike the Shadow Contracts, the Immortal daily goals do not feel “Immortaly”. I would expect something similar to Contracts, but with an Immortal RP twist on it, such as going to defeat some demons, stop certain demonic activities, or spy on evil demonic summoners to stop the powers of hell from invading Sanctuary. Some of the daily goals feel like you’re completing the tutorial for the game (Upgrade Your Equipment, Salvage An Item, Upgrade A Gem), and are a bit patronizing to the player. There are a few particular problems that need to be addressed:
- The Daily Goal to complete Kion’s Ordeal should be removed from the game. This daily goal is akin to asking a World of Warcraft player to kill Ragnaros, when they likely have already completed their weekly lockout. It’s neither something that they could do daily, and even if it was possible, they may not be invited to the raid.
- Requiring players to Win a Battleground and Participate in a Battleground is not an activity that all players are interested in doing. As a result, players will queue for the battleground and leave once inside (if Participate). Some players simply do not want to participate heavily in PvP. A way to reroll a daily goal might be able to fix this particular problem.
- The pool of daily goals is very shallow and repetitive and should be expanded (if it is not going to be overhauled into something like Shadow Contracts — Note that Shadow Contracts essentially have their own version of a reroll mechanic, where you can choose one of two Contracts to complete).
- The screen to receive the rewards from daily goals does not allow you to spam open the chests. Instead, it “refreshes” the screen each time you open a chest, making it very annoying. This should be spammable.
- The “True Immortal” questline felt unnecessarily time-gated. I have no idea why we can’t just complete this all at once, just like the Shadows do.
Essentia and Kion’s Ordeal
Essentia is a currency only available to the Immortals that is used to open Kion’s Ordeal — a 48 character raid with 4 bosses. In theory, this raid should offer top-tier loot for the Immortals who participate, but in practice, it offers nothing but vendor trash. (At the time of closed alpha, the rewards offered are equivalent to 3 minutes of materials farming.)
Kion’s Ordeal has several difficulty levels, and higher difficulty levels offer more rewards. You can receive Dominance and loot from Kion’s Ordeal. The Dominance gained feels rewarding and gives a good amount of progression to the Immortals. It is important that each higher difficulty of Kion’s Ordeal offer relatively more Dominance per Essentia spent. We can refer to this as the D/E ratio, and each higher rank should have a D/E ratio that is greater than the previous level. We have so far only done rank 1 and rank 2 of Kion’s, and rank 2 does offer a higher D/E ratio, but the development team needs to ensure that this is true at each higher ranking as well. In other words, it should never be optimal to do a lower rank of Kion’s Ordeal to farm Dominance.
The way loot is distributed at the end of Kion’s Ordeal is fantastic. It is essentially equivalent to a Need roll in World of Warcraft, but the implementation is that you move your character to stand in a circle around the item that you want to roll on. This gives you a quick and easy visual indicator of who is rolling on which item and allows you to make complex decisions about what you want to bid on without the use of a spreadsheet for DKP/EQP etc. While I would also sometimes enjoy an option for some kind of loot council at some point, the current rewards do not make loot council a good option. Finally, the Immortals receive Daedessa’s Blessing, which allows you to get 3 chests by completing Elder Rifts. These chests can drop either 1 Rare Crest or 50 scrap materials. The Rare Crest is particularly desirable, while 50 scrap is a decent consolation prize.
There are a few problems with Kion’s Ordeal that need to be addressed:
- Kion’s Ordeal is not nearly difficult enough — For both rank 1 and rank 2, we have been able to complete these with less than 30 players, with no Discord, no organization beyond zerging down the bosses. At a minimum, the difficulty should at least require all 48 players present, with higher tiers offering an additional challenge. It does not feel good to kill the raid bosses in less time than it took to organize the group in the first place.
- Kion’s Ordeal is not actually a raid and the gameplay is underwhelming — Shouldn’t this be a dungeon with the bosses at the end? Where’s the trash mobs? The pulls? The main tank(s) and DPS mechanics? The boss wipes because someone stood in the fire too long? I’m not expecting full on Black Wing Lair here but this needs alot more content to be worthy of the title of “raid”. It’s expensive and hard to organize 48 people (and drama the organizers will ultimately need to endure), so I don’t understand why there’s less than 10 minutes of gameplay available here.
- The loot available from the raid is vendor trash — The loot should be desirable (triple stat legendaries, powerful yellows, unique quest rewards as suggested with the Vault). Otherwise the raid is simply a waste of everyone’s time.
- Essentia should not be bought from the Honor Vendor — It feels very strange to spend 100 honor per day in order to add to Immortal progression. I’m currently the maximum Prestige, which gives me 300 honor per week. That means I’m in the hole 400 honor per week — at the maximum rank! Honor is a very limited resource — and most likely, a very important resource to manage for free-to-play players. I should never feel obligated to spend one of my most precious personal, non-farmable resources to maximize an ephemeral contribution. (I suspect any well managed Immortal group will REQUIRE all players to maximize their daily Essentia contribution — that’s what I would do on a real server as Immortal leadership). I recommend changing these to be purchasable instead for scrap materials, gold, or any other farmable resource. It’s fine if it’s not that cheap, just make it farmable.
- Kion’s Ordeal has no scheduling tool — Lieutenants and the Immortal should be able to set a schedule for the next raid so everyone knows exactly what time it happens. The Rite of Exile already does this, so this shouldn’t be surprising that a scheduling or signup tool is necessary. It would be also nice if this scheduling tool could make an announcement to /6 Immortals and notifications to let people know at least 24 hours in advance. The MOTD available in the game is simply not enough.
- You should buy keys to Kion’s Ordeal with Essentia, and spend the keys whenever you want — Currently there is a strange situation where the Shadows raid the Vault at 10am, making it impossible to actually schedule a raid during the day due to Essentia being robbed from the Vault. This leads to strange 8:00am raid times. Allow the Immortal and/or Lieutenants to buy a key to Kion’s Ordeal once they hit the threshold to do so.
- Please remove the limit on the number of elites allowed. We are now in the situation where every time we do Kion’s Ordeal we have to remove/add elites just to get people in. Not everyone is going to show to every raid and this is unnecessarily tedious. If there is a scheduling tool, simply allow leadership to set player groups and invites there instead, similar to how the Rite of Exile functions today.
Crowns
The Immortal and the four Lieutenants each get a crown and a buff to go along with it. The buff appears as a new button next to the potion that you can press. This buff has a 30 minute cooldown, and lasts for 10(+) seconds. The effect of the buff is not good. I personally have held both the Crown of the Wind and the Eternal Crown and both buffs last so little time that I don’t even really think they’re worth using as currently presented in the closed alpha. The way crowns are used in the closed alpha goes something like this:
- You save the crown buff like an Elixir in Final Fantasy games…so you never use it. In effect, it’s worthless because you’re always waiting to spend it.
- You accidentally hit the button and waste the buff. So even if you were saving it, and an appropriate time to use it applies, then it’s on cooldown.
I think it would be much more compelling if the crown gave a smaller, permanent buff to everyone in the same party as the person with the crown, and the person with the crown always had the same buff. This would make it tremendously attractive to party up with these people. These buffs should also stack with each other, such that a party of 4 Lieutenants / Immortal would have a tremendous advantage. There should be a extremely desirable reward for holding the position of The Immortal and the four Lieutenants. There should also be some pressure to utilize the buff, so if a Lieutenant stops playing the game or goes inactive, that there’s a utility argument to cycle this person out and give the crown to a more active player, instead of the nepotism argument of “well they were here first” since the crown is now a valuable resource. Thus, owning a crown will be a prestigious position, but one with responsibility, and will drive new players to create their own Dark House and go through the entire Cycle of Strife in order to obtain the ultimate advantage in Diablo Immortal.
Immortal Strategy
The Immortal can select three different strategies for The Immortals. They can choose to:
1. Concentrate Power — Focus on gaining Dominance quickly (1.2x Dominance gain)
2. Bolster The Vault — Make it harder for Shadows to raid the Vault (questionable effect, doesn’t seem to work well). It also gives all Shadows 2 extra daily goals per day (Protect the Vault, Defeat a Shadow in the Vault)
3. Reward Loyalty — Increase weekly rewards for all Immortals (Bonus weekly contribution reward: 10% per consecutive day, 50% bonus Essentia earned)
Overall, these seem like reasonable strategies, with Concentrate Power seemingly the best one early on, and Reward Loyalty the best one later on. Bolster The Vault does not seem to function well, and the way it works is somewhat questionable. In closed alpha, it raises the Vault “level” by 1 for every 24 hours you have the strategy active. What raising the level of the Vault actually does is a big question mark — it seems to have almost no impact on the Shadow’s ability to delve into the Vault. Of note, you don’t lose the Vault level when you switch strategies. I think instead, “Bolster The Vault” should allow Immortals to build specific defenses in the Vault by using scrap materials, gold, or Essentia, or similar. (Perhaps this can tie into gameplay improvements in the Vault, as detailed above).
The Wall of Honor
The Wall of Honor is a permanent fixture in Westmarch that details the current rulers, the Founders of the current Reign (the original top Dark House), and also allows you to view previous Reigns and their histories. Thus, when you become the Immortals, you and your Dark House become a permanent part of the history of the server. This feature feels very good and I think it’s a fantastic idea. World of Warcraft has a history of “server firsts” that seems to be buried in the various wikis on the internet, but having it directly as part of the server itself makes it more accessible, and more prestigious. Just imagine if World of Warcraft had a list of all the server first raid kills on the server, their supporting guilds, and the players. It’s a serious honor.
This feature is so prominent that it would be wise for the team to absolutely test the living hell out of how this screen works. If something goes wrong here, or names get deleted, reigns get erased…it might cause drama. The next question that comes to mind here: How will Blizzard handle reigns of players who are found to be cheating? Bots, hacks, and exploits are inevitable in any game, and I think it’s important for Blizzard to get ahead of this one, and set a clear and transparent policy with the community. This also means that Blizzard will need tooling to ensure that players who are found cheating can be elegantly removed from the Wall of Honor.
One extra feature here that would be interesting — if there was a way to propogate this information to a global tool on a website so you could see ALL the different servers, their reigns and so on, that would be pretty fantastic. (Not realistic for a release timeframe, most likely).
One more suggestion: Display the Wall of Honor at BlizzCon each year. I’m not sure how you’d implement this, but I think that would be a fantastic start to the many ways you could celebrate the history of the game and the players in a physical space.
Statue of The Immortal
The Statue of the Immortal in Westmarch seems like a cool feature, but feels incomplete. I would expect that “Inspect the Statue” would show me a full screen of the Statue itself and perhaps some cool stats about the current reign and the Immortal. Ideally this would be something like the Wall of Honor, but more personal for the Immortal.
Immortals Minor Stuff
- It would be nice if the color picker on the Immortal banner was a little easier to use, or simply had a wider variety of swatches available, or simply allowed you to type in a hex code to get the desired color.
- A wider variety of banner designs for the Immortal would be nice.
- Prestige caps out at Prestige 16 / 5850 total Contribution. I am only 2.5 weeks into the current reign and am already Prestige 15. Perhaps this is intended, but I think the ceiling can be raised here a bit.
- I’m not entirely sure what the groups function in the Immortals is supposed to be for, it is almost entirely unused (except for a group we made for testing the feature). I suppose this might be useful for players who need to sub-divide messages based on language, but I think most people will choose to organize in Discord instead. I think this feature can and should be considered for removal.
- The icon to change the Strategy is very small and looks like a refresh symbol. I think this icon should be made bigger and turned into a different symbol. The first time I clicked this icon I was not sure what was going to happen. Perhaps a button that says, “Change Strategy” would be better.
Shadows
Overthrowing The Immortals is a task that the Shadows must accomplish in order to become the new Immortals. The way this is accomplished is by progressing through several stages of the Shadows until you reach the Showdown stage. Then you can challenge the Immortals every week in the Rite of Exile. If the Shadows win 5/10 of the battles, then the top ranked Dark House becomes the new Immortals.
Reckoning
There are several phases that the Shadows go through to be able to kick the Immortals off their throne, but the most important phase is the last one, the Reckoning phase. Reckoning is a hard mechanic that will eventually and inevitably force the Immortals off the throne. Let me be clear: This mechanic is an absolute supermassive black hole. There’s no escaping this mechanic, regardless of how hard the Immortals grind to increase their gear levels, gems, legendary gems, etc. Reckoning is designed to be Thanos — it is inevitable. Reckoning can increase in level (Reckoning 1, Reckoning 2, Reckoning 3, etc) and each level offers a 10% bonus to damage and damage reduction for the Shadows in the Rite of Exile. In other words, this percentage based bonus is the reason why the Shadows will completely overwhelm the Immortals, no contest, if given enough time.
This mechanic is absolutely critical for Blizzard to get right. It’s important to balance this mechanic so that the Cycle of Strife isn’t too long or too short. I suspect that even after Diablo Immortal’s release, we will see some fine tuning to this mechanic specifically.
- Reckoning *could* also apply to the Vault — One way Shadows can hamstring the Immortals is to steal their Essentia, but this task becomes very difficult if the Immortals can just dominate the Vault all day. If reckoning also applies to the Vault, then the Shadows with a Reckoning 5 buff could stroll in, take everything, and leave the Immortals penniless. It would be a great way to bring the reign of the Immortals to a crushing halt. Perhaps though, this is too strong for the Vault, and will leave a poor taste to the end of an Immortal reign.
More Incentive for the top 2–10 Dark Houses
Right now, when the Cycle Turns, the *top* Dark House becomes the Immortals. But what happens to the top 2–10 Dark Houses? Didn’t they help overthrow the Immortals and win the Rite of Exile?
Well they get nothing. And that’s a problem. I’m not sure what needs to be done here, but I’d recommend that Dark Houses 2–5 at least get some partial right to become Immortals. Maybe the top 10 players in Dark Houses 2–5 become Immortals as well? I’m not sure how to solve this problem. Currently what this means is that everyone zerg-joins the top Dark House in hopes that they can piggy-back off the win of the top Dark House in the Rite of Exile and become Immortals, while every other Dark House is left out to rot. It’s a dynamic that needs some work.
The Cycle Turns
When you win the Rite of Exile against the currently reigning Immortals, a few things happen. First, the leader of the top Dark House gains a 4-hour special buff (+100% magic find, 30% increased attack speed, and 30% movement speed as of closed alpha). Each member of the top ranked Dark House also gets a special buff (+50% magic find as of closed alpha). At the end of the four hours, the buffs disappear forever. Interestingly, these buffs stack with each other, and we were able to attain 250% magic find in group. Even more interestingly, the buffs have an extremely short range. You can see the precise range of the buff between our characters in the screenshot below.
I don’t think the short range of these buffs, or the stacking behavior is intended. These may be bugs that Blizzard needs to investigate.
One major problem with the Rite of Exile and these buffs is that the Rite of Exile currently happens at 8:00pm server time on Sunday. This isn’t the best time, as most folks are preparing for the work week and may go to bed early on this night. A bit earlier in the day (say, 4:00pm server time Sunday) would be a much better time. I personally like the time of 10:00am Sunday, as that would coincide with all of the folks in the United States who are going to church (particularly in the deep South). That way, there would be a glorious juxtaposition of people playing Diablo Immortal in the pews. But that’s just my personal sense of humor.
The poor timing of the Rite of Exile is made worse if you happen to win and become the new Immortals, because the 4 hour buff means that you would likely play until around 1:00am server time in order to take advantage of the huge amount of magic find that you receive.
The in-game effect of the new Immortal Reign is fantastic. Banners fill Westmarch and a flurry of activity, including Server announcements makes it a momentous occasion. I was impressed with the number of different things happening and the attention to detail.
The Cycle Turns — Shadow Ranking
One of the things that happens is that you receive a ranking for your activities as a Shadow. You also receive a temporary buff and honor rewards based on your ranking. However, the ranking itself is very unfair. I personally contributed every-single-day to the Shadows, did every single Contract since anyone could join on the server, did every single Vault raid to absolute completion, participated in both Rites of Exile, made floor 95 in the Path of Blood, obtained the highest rank Shadow (Whisper 4), and somehow still did not get a perfect Rank. Other players who only occasionally logged in were able to obtain a rank almost the same as mine. Overall this didn’t feel great, and the representation below was mysterious, as I discovered the lowest rank is a “C”, which fills up part of the bar. Shouldn’t the lowest rank be “F”, with no bar filled and no reward? I think this system needs a deeper look.
In comparison, this screen felt very similar to a rank screen in a rhythm game. Compare how useful the information on this IIDX score screen is in comparison to the Diablo Immortal Cycle Ranking screen.
Some of the other minor activities around the cycle turning felt good. Like the Chest you receive, or the daily reward you get from The Historian.
Contracts
Contracts are the best new feature added to Diablo Immortal’s closed alpha testing cycle. They are essentially faction specific bounties with a Shadow flavor to them. They’re also a bit more work than one bounty, making them feel like three-bounties-in-one. Each Contract is a unique mission, and there are enough Contracts in the pool to make it seem fresh. Each Contract even gets a custom map detailing each step. I was able to experience (I think) every Contract over 3 weeks. At the beginning of each week, you receive 3 contracts, and each day thereafter, you receive one. Each time you accept a contract you can choose between two options, and the option that you do not choose will remain there for the next day.
Contracts are really fantastic and there are a variety of them to experience, including stealth-like missions (like Clarity’s Bane), and other missions where you rescue some member of the Shadows. Each mission typically has you complete a dungeon and also complete a unique quest.
Each contract gives you a key to raid the Vault. You can spent these keys anytime the Vault is available (currently 10:00am — 10:00pm server time). One note is that the game currently rewards you more for spending these keys each day rather than spending them all at once. I think this should be addressed by Blizzard such that spending a key will net you the same rewards regardless of when you spend it.
Path of Blood
The Path of Blood is a Challenge Rift in a box. It’s essentially one room of a Challenge Rift that allows you to gain Marks to progress yourself through the ranks of the Shadows. Every 5 floors is a boss that can be really challenging. It’s really fun and in my top 10 favorite things about Diablo Immortal. There’s a few problems with the Path of Blood that need to be addressed, but mostly limiting the Path of Blood based on Shadow progression (instead of personal player capability) feels pretty lame.
Shadows Minor Stuff
- Leaving The Shadows — Why can’t players leave the Shadows? I understand wanting to prevent hypothetical situations where the Immortals make deals with the top Dark House leader, but I think a system could solve this by having a 48–72 hour cooldown after leaving the Shadows to become an Immortal.
Battlegrounds
Battlegrounds are an 8v8, PvP feature similar to battlegrounds in World of Warcraft. In the closed alpha, there is only one battleground, and it’s the same map and objectives as the Rite of Exile. It’s a multi-objective battleground that pits two teams of eight in either the attacking or defending positions. As attackers, you must kill 3 NPC mini-bosses, then push a payload, and then kill a core. As defenders, you must either kill attackers 80 times, or run out the clock before they can kill the core. You can queue for battlegrounds twice a day, once at 12:30pm server time, and once at 6:30pm server time. Initially during closed alpha you could queue anytime you wanted, but because few people were actually queuing, it became impossible to actually play with enough people, so Blizzard changed it to the current times. This means the time restriction is unlikely to stay for future updates.
Overall, Battlegrounds is fun. It’s fun even though PvP is a one-shot fest and vastly unbalanced in the closed alpha. (It may be more accurate to say that PvP has not undergone ANY balance so far — Blizzard is at the stage of just seeing if the thing even works.) I think the first thing many people will focus on here is the lack of balance, but I think that’s counterproductive, as right now there are some glaring problems that need to be addressed before balance changes can even be considered.
- Add Matchmaking — There needs to be some kind of matchmaking in place. The server population of our test server was nowhere near enough to allow matchmaking to be fair, but some kind of selection based on MMR, or even something as simple as stat-based team assignment would make things far more fair and fun.
- Increase Death Timers — Currently the death timers are far too short. This makes death fairly meaningless. So the best strategy is to simply charge in, pop all cooldowns, and kill as many players as you can before getting stomped. I think the death timers could be increased tremendously. If increased, they could also introduce a one-time-per-battleground instant resurrect (I recommend reusing the idea of a Resurrection Stone here).
- Remove Red Dots — The minimap is basically cheating. You can see everyone (even if they are invisible) because there are red dots showing exactly where players are. These should be removed entirely.
- Dramatically Increase Survivability — The biggest issue by far in PvP in general right now is a massive need for extra survivability. It’s far too easy to one-shot lowbies and 3–5 shot anyone else at your level. I’d start with 500% more survivability and go from there.
- Fix spawn camping — You can easily camp certain spawns and teleport points in the battleground, allowing you to instantly kill other players as they load in, with no chance for them to even get control of their character to move.
- Either revamp spawn locations and/or add a teleport-to-base mechanic for defenders — There are several situations where as a defender you can be put far, far ahead in the battlefield while attackers are spawning closer to objectives than you currently are. There needs to be a way to get back to base quickly.
- Increase life of objectives dramatically — Certain objectives have life (statues / core) and they die very easily. It’s far too easy for attackers to simply ignore defenders and blitz to the objective (even with the current one-shot fest!)
- Allow defenders to spawn at the first teleport point — Attackers are ALWAYS able to kill the first statue by zerging it down before defenders can even arrive in time. Make the first engagement more strategic by ensuring that defenders and attackers have the same chance to reach the first objective.
- Pre-load characters and auto-resurrect characters on death — World of Warcraft battlegrounds does this flawlessly. Instead of making players spam the resurrect button on death, go ahead and just load them in as a “ghost” at the spawn point, and count down the time until they automatically resurrect. This avoids load-screen death problems and lets players begin to strategize how they are going to make their next move.
- Lower the impact of movement speed abilities — The way the game is implemented makes extremely fast movement speed abilities (teleport/draw and quarter/etc) far too impactful for players on the attack. Attackers can blitz an entire group of opponents and dump every cooldown into them (killing many in the process) and opponents have little chance to react because of the sheer speed that some abilities have. This is not a call to reduce movement speed per se, as it is more a warning to investigate the way players perceive the receiving end of a fast attack. Do these players even get a fair chance to try to escape or react in time? Is this a client/server issue where players aren’t seeing the same thing?
Magic Find, Triple Stat Legendaries, and Loot
Magic Find in Diablo Immortal currently behaves somewhat like Magic Find does in Diablo 2. However, confirming this behavior will require a ton of research and possibly data mining of the game to understand precise drop rates. So we don’t have a concrete understanding of Magic Find today. However, I can say that Magic Find does not feel impactful enough based on the sources that you acquire it from. Presently you can increase the difficulty of the monsters (Hell 1, Hell 2, and Hell 3), which increases your gold find and magic find on these difficulties by 10% per difficultly level. These bonuses are so minor that almost all players grind content on Hell 1, because it’s much more advantageous to simply kill the bosses over and over again, rather than hoping for a higher legendary drop rate. More than anything else, I think there needs to be a compelling reason to do higher difficulties in the game. This is important because each difficulty level is its own instance in the game. For example, Hell 1 Ashwold Cemetary and Hell 2 Ashwold Cemetary are identical maps, but have two separate instances, such that certain resources, like Lairs, Events, and monsters, can be spawned separately on each difficulty. If everyone wants to play Hell 1 because it’s the fastest difficulty to grind, this becomes problematic for separating out players. It is probably important for server population purposes to spread certain players out, at least a little bit. In the closed alpha, on the North American server, the server population is so low that we can actually use this to our advantage to grind multiple difficulties at the same time, so we can hunt the same resources over and over. (See later: Power Hour)
The closed alpha made a significant change in the drop tables, such that triple stat legendaries are either non-existent, or so rare that we haven’t caught a single one on screenshot or video yet. The technical alpha, in contrast, had some extremely rare triple stat legendary drops, perhaps in the 1/400 drop rate chance. The working theory is that triple stat legendaries were removed from (almost) all drop tables in order to make them only available through the Immortal’s Vault. But as previously discussed, these triple stat legendaries are so rare in the Immortal’s Vault that they might as well not exist. There are reports of some people finding triple stat legendaries from a few other sources, such as Shadow Contracts or the True Immortal questline, but these are likely to be loot table bugs and not an intended mechanic. I think it’s important that Blizzard make a clear stance on where these extremely rare items can drop from. Do they only drop from the Immortal’s Vault? Are they droppable from the world, but at an extremely rare drop chance (1/1,000,000+)? In general, I’m OK with this being an endgame-only (Immortal’s Vault only) available mechanic, and I think that would drive more players to want to be an Immortal.
Item Family Bonuses
You can get addition bonuses on your gear at ranks 6, 11, and 16. Each of these bonuses is quite impactful (especially if you orient them to OR/DR), but you can also get another bonus if all three of these bonuses are from the same family. Note that these bonuses are additive with each piece of gear, so each percent chance will add together. The family bonuses are as follows:
Wildfire — You have 2% chance when you kill an enemy to summon a fireball-spitting Hydra
Tremor — Your Primary Attacks have a 2% chance to inflict (number) damage and Stun nearby enemies for 1.5 seconds.
Jolt — You have a 2% chance when attacked to Immobilize your attacker.
Vengeance — Your Primary Attacks have a 2% chance to increase all damage you deal by 100% for 1 second.
Barrier — You have a 2% chance when attacked to gain an absorption shield for 6 seconds.
Ravager — You have a 2% chance when you kill an enemy to make the corpse explode, damage all nearby enemies.
I rank the family bonuses as follows:
S Tier: Vengeance, Tremor
A Tier: Wildfire
B Tier: Ravager
D Tier: Barrier, Jolt
Vengeance is possibly the best family bonus, as it increases the damage for ALL of your attacks for 1 second when you attack with your Primary attack. There are many situations where you blow all your cooldowns and fill the time with your Primary attack, meaning that your abilities are already hitting the enemy when suddenly they will receive a massive bonus in damage output. Demon Hunter in particular has the best Primary in the game (as of closed alpha) Crossbow Shot, which can trigger this family bonus quite easily at range. This ability is also quite good for Crusader, which might sound surprising because Crusader has the worst Primaries in the game. However, Vengeance and Tremor both work with the auto-attack Primary while Crusader is mounted.
Tremor is also quite good, and it’s unclear if Vengeance or Tremor will be the clear winner in a later release of the game. Tremor has one negative quality in that the Tremor “attack” is actually cast on your character and not at the point where the Primary attack hits the enemy. This could be considered an intended mechanic, however the tooltip says nothing about this interaction.
Wildfire is quite good because the Hydra it spawns is very tanky and also does decent damage. This is quite handy in challenge rifts, but the utility of this family bonus falls off when doing Bounties, PvP, or other farming activities. What’s more is the trigger for Hydra is on death of an enemy, making this almost exclusively for challenge rifts.
Ravager is poor ability primarily because the range of the explosion is quite small. To put insult to injury, the effect only triggers on death, making this family bonus almost exclusively useful to challenge rifts.
Barrier and Jolt are both not worth taking in any situation. They both only trigger when you get hit, automatically making them a poor choice for anyone. Jolt’s effect only triggers an immobilize (and why would you want this over a stun, with Tremor?) and Barrier’s ability only lasts 6 seconds, and while your character has the absorption shield, the ability cannot trigger again. Meanwhile, other abilities such as Tremor have a chance to trigger on every hit.
Overall, I think it’s fine for some family bonuses to be stronger than others, but Barrier and Jolt are so bad that they deserve at least a small buff, particularly around how their mechanics work, and not necessarily how they work on paper.
Minor Loot Points
- At the high end of gear, the loot recommendation arrow (The green arrow) does not function correctly. In particular, it seems to have trouble when an item it is comparing against has a lower base stat, but higher total OR/DR. In the closed alpha, Offense and Defense Rating are king, and at least with this balance, the arrow is often incorrect. This leads to a situation where any player has to always manually inspect certain kinds of loot. This might not be a bad thing, as almost every aRPG has this same phenomenon, where the highest tier loot must almost always be manually inspected and the player must use some sort of external third party calculator or webapp in order to most perfectly optimize their character. The fact that Immortal does not (currently) need such a calculator and it’s easy enough to do manually in the game through looking at the stats is a welcome relief.
- It is a small advantage to farm bosses that drop a belt, ring, amulet, etc, as their guaranteed drop because these items only take one slot in the inventory. This reduces the frequency of your trips to town, increasing your overall farming capability.
- In my opinion, the rarest resources for salvaging should always be the bottleneck when it comes to leveling your items. This should make sense because the rarest items (legendaries) are the hardest to find, and it should feel more rewarding when you find one. One possible way to ensure this balance, is to include a feature that allows a player to down-convert materials from rarer materials, but never convert back up.
- I don’t understand the point of Bags of Scarp Materials. These bags are frustrating to open. I forgot to open mine for about a week and had to spend many minutes simply tapping “Use” to open them all. Why not just award the scrap directly? Many players are also surprised because this item is buried deep in their inventory, where you typically don’t access. So these items can hide for a while.
Closed Alpha Metas — Pizza, Power Hour, Mad King 1st Boss, 5+1, Joining and Leaving Immortals
I think it might be interesting to talk about closed alpha metas briefly in order to analyze and fix some problems that we see forming in the game. First, let’s talk about Power Hour. But before that, let’s introduce a bit of Diablo Immortal jargon.
Big Guy — The zone event in Mount Zavain (The Ancient Nightmare)
Pizza — The zone event in Ashwold Cemetary (The Carriage)
Power Hour is the idea that the server can band together and organize in such a way to do Big Guy and Pizza for every difficulty possible. This results in the following route:
Hell 1 Big Guy → Normal Big Guy → Hell 2 Big Guy → Hell 2 Pizza → Hell 3 Big Guy → Hell 3 Pizza
Additionally, it is possible to add the Zoltun Kulle Library bosses to this rotation, so long as someone is willing to open books and share the boss spawn with the server.
As a result of this rotation, it’s possible to get 36 (sometimes more) Enchanted Dust in as little as 15 minutes. This makes the grind for Enchanted Dust quite trivial, and also results in some glaring problems when large amounts of people try to do the same events together.
- Most importantly, it’s obvious that 6 Enchanted Dust for a zone event is far too rewarding every hour and half hour. I would suggest setting a limit to the number of zone events a player can do per day, perhaps 10 events total.
- Big Guy is quite laggy, perhaps because of the shield mechanic, many players simply spam their abilities, and the zone can’t handle that.
- Big Guy can be quick-killed using the emblems from Little Guy (The Zakarum Paladin), making it difficult for other players to get a hit in, and therefore those players not getting credit for the kill, even though they were in the vicinity.
- Pizza auto-navigates to the final destination as long as a player is in the zone. This means that players can game the pizza carriage and do other activities while they wait for it to finish. Instead, it should probably function as a “push the payload” style event, where players can push the carriage faster if there are many on it at once.
- The Pizza Delivery Guy (The Tax Collector) requires you to hit him in order to receive the Pizza (the yellow items) and therefore is killed so fast that you often don’t even see him on the screen. Allowing players to only deal 1 point of damage for the first 3 seconds of combat with the Pizza Delivery Guy would be a great way to solve this issue.
- Note that hitting the shield of the Pizza Delivery Guy does not count as a “hit” for the purposes of getting loot. This might leave certain players without the loot they deserve.
Mad King 1st Boss — or “Gregg” runs (named after the player who discovered them) are the highest salvage per hour in the game. This enables players to get nearly 900 salvage per hour, and when combined with Power Hour, enables players to level up their equipment extremely rapidly. What’s interesting about this is that it also allows players to gain salvage per XP at a roughly efficient rate, avoiding some of the worst problems of the XP Cap. Similarly, you can do the first 3 bosses in Tomb of Fahir for a massive amount of XP per hour (the best XP per hour in the game), but the salvage per hour in this case is not worth considering. I think that for all bosses in dungeons, the loot should only drop from a chest at the end of the dungeon after you have defeated the dungeon’s final boss. This will prevent shananigans where players farm only one particular boss in ALL cases, even undiscovered optimizations. A much harder alternative may be to simply design dungeons (like Caverns of Echoes) where backwards progress is simply not possible once each boss has been defeated, particularly the first boss.
5+1 — This refers to doing 5 (full) Mad King runs and 1 Caverns of Echoes run. Essentially the reason for doing this is two-fold, Mad King offers the best XP/hour/scrap in the game and the first boss of Caverns of Echoes invokes a mechanic that I’ll refer to as the “Pity Mechanic”. Essentially in the closed alpha, there is a ~30 minute timer where you will automatically receive a legendary from certain bosses when you kill them. It takes a well organized group about 2 minutes and 30 seconds to do a Mad King run, so 5 runs, plus 1 Caverns of Echoes run allows you to pretty precisely hit that 30 minute window without too much lag time. The Pity Mechanic is a newer discovery in the closed alpha and it is not widely and well understood yet. I think if the Pity Mechanic really works as described here that it should be removed from the game entirely. I think these sorts of mechanics in gameplay are very unhealthy for the game and for optimization metas, as you’re essentially just rewarding people for going and killing a particular boss on a cycle every 30 minutes or so forever. I personally have not done a ton of research into the Pity Mechanic, but I have gotten it to work at least 30 times in a row, and I can say it’s strongly plausible that it functions as described. The Pity Mechanic essentially makes Magic Find as a stat completely worthless, and because Magic Find in Diablo 2 is such a beloved stat, I think removing the Pity Mechanic and buffing Magic Find mechanics could be a stronger experience for players.
Joining and Leaving Immortals — Currently players are joining and leaving the Immortals so that they can maximize their Scoria gains as an Adventurer. Similar to the exploit where bots can join the Immortals to offer infinite progression and Raw Essentia, adding an Essentia cost to joining the Immortals would prevent this bad behavior to some extent.
Honor Vendor
General
- Legendary Crest (Monthly Purchase Limit 1/1), 3000 Honor — Allowing players to buy a Legendary Crest feels good for the cost of Honor. I think 3000 Honor is quite expensive, but for something as valuable as a Legendary Crest, could make sense if Blizzard wants to balance it that way. The 1 per month keeps things very limited. I’m unsure if that’s how they want to balance it and I feel like this could be increased to 2 or 3 per month safely.
- Mystery Legendary Item (Monthly Purchase Limit 1/1), 3000 Honor — This is a complete waste of honor. It should be removed from the Vendor, as this is just a noob trap. It also feels bad to buy Legendary items for honor.
- Ca’arsen’s Invigoration (Monthly Purchase Limit 1/1), 3000 Honor — This feels like a decent investment, especially for new players. If you already have quite a few legendary gems, you might decide to pass this one up. Or, you might burn 3000 honor on this gem as a way to power up your other gems. Either way, I like this one.
- Rare Crest (Weekly Purchase Limit 1/1), 500 Honor — This is possibly the best thing you can buy from the Honor Merchant. It gives you Faded Embers, Runes, and a chance at a Legendary Gem. Even if you buy 5 in a month, it only costs you 2500 Honor per month, making it well worth the spend.
- Choice of Gems (Weekly Purchase Limit 10/10), 200 Honor each — This is the other best choice at the Honor Merchant. It’s simply fantastic to be able to get 10 gems of your choice (hint: Pick Tourmaline). This is roughly equivalent to doing 60 Lairs (6 gems x 10) for the gem that you care about the most. Still, it’s a bit pricy at 2000 Honor per week, so save your pennies.
- Scoria (Daily Purchase Limit 6/6), 50 Honor each, Adventurer only —This is extremely overpowered in the closed alpha. The fact that you can buy 6 Scoria per day for a total of 300 Honor singlehandedly makes all of the rewards of the Immortals look lame in comparison. This needs to be removed and replaced with some other reward, like a random choice of gem / charm / reforge stone. Capping the level of the Helliquary could similarly nerf this interaction as well.
- Reforge Stone (Weekly Purchase Limit 8/8), 200 Honor each — Reforge Stones are a healthy choice in the options the honor merchant has available. However most players will likely skip this stones until they are much stronger, have rank 16+ gear, or simply have a cache of Honor so large that they have no idea what to do with it. This has more to do with the random mechanics of rolling family bonuses than anything about Honor cost from the vendor.
- Charm (Weekly Purchase Limit 20/20), 100 Honor each — The charms system is simply not complete, so evaluating this makes no sense.
Immortals
- Raw Essentia (Daily Purchase Limit 2/2), 50 Honor each — Purchasing Essentia feels incorrect. One of the greatest rewards from being an Immortal is the Honor gains. So spending Honor (a personal, non-farmable, limited resource) in order to progress the Immortals feels counter-intuitive. I think at Release, the Immortal leadership will likely enact a policy to require the maximum amount of Essentia contribution from all Immortals each day, or else you get booted. So by having this available at the Honor Merchant, you may be enabling a somewhat toxic meta, where players are forced to save / spend a personal resource for the Immortals. I think removing this is a good idea.
- Rare Crest (Weekly Purchase Limit 1/1), 500 Honor — One of the best benefits of being an Immortal is when you unlock this. It’s an automatic purchase.
- Mystery Legendary Item (Weekly Purchase Limit 1/1), 3000 Honor — This is a joke, please remove this entirely from the Honor Vendor. As stated above, this is far too expensive, and it’s dumb to receive Legendary items from a vendor.
- Ca’arsen’s Invigatorion (Monthly Purchase Limit 1/1), 3000 Honor — This feels like a good option as on the General tab.
- Legendary Crest (Monthly Purchase Limit 1/1), 3000 Honor — An expensive but very good purchase and a fantastic reward for those Immortal reigns that are willing to get all the way to Gold 3.
Limited Time
Limited Time is a tab that offers new items twice a day. You can get a Choice of Gems (1/1), Reforge Stone (1/1), and sometimes a Rare Crest (?). These all feel very good and I’ve almost always purchased them. You can also purchase stacks of 10 scrap materials (20 Honor) and 1 Enchanted Dust (15 Honor). These are a complete waste, as Honor is not a farmable resource, while Scrap Materials and Enchanted Dust are. I would never, ever, ever, ever buy scrap materials and enchanted dust with Honor.
Legendary Gems
The closed alpha introduced a new legendary gem system called “gem power” that allows you to level up your legendary gems using the trash-tier legendary gems you have. This system even allows you to use previous gems you’ve invested in, making it quite comfortable to make early choices in trash tier gems for leveling purposes, only to use them as a powerup for the gems you actually care about later on. There are a few issues with legendary gems I want to call out in particular (enumerating every legendary gem would be quite the task all by itself!).
- Autofill needs a review step — When using the auto fill feature, it’s very easy for players to use gems that they did NOT intend to use for powering up their gems (and thus destroying gems they actually care about). Instead, the Auto Fill button should bring up the detail prompt with the gems already selected, and then require the player to manually click OK to continue. Currently, the Gem Power detail prompt is very hard to find (you have to click the gem power icon) and confirm things separately.
- Platinum Costs Ruin Excitement over Rune drops — The closed alpha added SIGNIFICANT platinum costs on top of the already expensive rune costs for Legendary Gem Crafting. In practice, this means that my inventory fills up with rare drops that are completely useless because platinum will always be limited. It also means that players who desire to play F2P are at a big disadvantage, as Rare Crests will be their main way into getting Legendary Gems. I don’t understand these costs at all because Runes can actually be sold at the Marketplace themselves, making them their own currency already. (Reminder: The Marketplace eats 10% of every platinum transaction as a cost, so when someone sells Runes, it diminishes the amount of Platinum available in the economy anyway). Even if these costs are a necessary evil for some reason beyond my understanding, they are at least 10x too high. 3000 Platinum just for the privilege to burn 60 Ati Runes on a random Legendary Gem is a slap in the face. Even 300 Platinum would still be a high cost! (300 is several days worth of bounties alone). So, I present to you, my rune inventory of shame. Runes that, as one of the most powerful characters in the game (I am literally The Immortal) are completely unusable!
- Phoenix Ashes is bugged— The Legendary Gem reads: “Prevents fatal damage, and then grants a shield for 6 seconds that absorbs 100% (200%) of your Life in damage. When the shield expires, heal for 25% of the remaining value. Cannot occur more often than once every 300 seconds.” — but in practice, it gives you a shield for ~10% of your health, after which point you usually immediately die. (Because something that’s strong enough to kill you probably does more damage than that). It’s already likely the worst out of the 5 star Legendary Gems, but this bug makes it more-or-less just a stat stick.
- Seeping Bile and Howler’s Call need a balance pass — Both of these are currently the most desirable Legendary Gems in the game, and would still be so even with a significant nerf. These gems need a balance pass to ensure that they aren’t the only option at endgame.
- Make more gems like Blessing of the Worthy — This gem has a mechanic that scales a damage effect (limited by a long internal cooldown) via your Life. The effect is further limited by only occuring in a small AoE around your character, and only when you get hit, making it completely avoidable by ranged classes. This gem is actually very powerful, but the specific mechanics for it make you think ALOT about changing your entire build, including paragon levels, gems, items, etc, to go for Life wherever possible to maximize the impact of the gem. It’s a very well designed Legendary Gem that’s integrated well into the systems that make Diablo Immortal tick, and I wish we had more of these.
Regular Gems
The closed alpha made significant nerfs to regular gems (they used to offer stats, and thus offense / defense rating), and this nerf feels far too punishing. In general, this leaves some gems much more desirable (Tourmaline, Sapphire) thans others (Citrine, Topaz). In general, this is because Offense / Defense Rating is quite strong in comparison to regular stats (something that I think is a good thing), and that Potency and Resistence are quite useless except at the very top of PvP (something I think is a bad thing). Perhaps Potency and Resistence need a rework, as I think for most players these are throwaway stats.
Weekly Experience Pool Empty
The closed alpha added an “XP Cap” to the game. Our group (Raxxanterax, Rob, Facefoot, and myself) extensively tested this feature in particular, as we were the highest paragon players in the world during the closed alpha. You may have heard about this but don’t quite understand what it is — it’s time to explain.
Imagine if each week you played Diablo Immortal you automatically received a 120M (million) Rested XP. Rested XP as in World of Warcraft style XP. That’s close to what’s going on here, but that’s not the entire story. Once you run out of “rested xp” you earn 20% of the XP you once earned. It’s important to understand that this does NOT reduce XP from all sources. Very specifically, it reduces the XP gained from killing monsters to 20% of the original value. In practice, this means you’re earning about 50%-60% of the raw XP you were previously earning. XP gained from any other sources are completely unaffected. Still, there’s many problems to highlight with this system, so it’s time to hit the bullet points.
- The Weekly Experience Pool is a hidden mechanic — This should absolutely not be a hidden mechanic. If you need to hide it, then display the remaining Weekly Experience Pool on the tooltip popup when you tap on your XP to next level on the character sheet. This is sufficientcly hidden from players who will never spend the pool in the first place.
- Don’t display the Weekly Experience Pool Empty as an error — For god’s sake! This feels awful. You reach the “end of your rested xp” and you’re presented with … an error that’s forever burned onto your screen. Instead the theming should be entirely the opposite! “Holy shit you fucking badass motherfucker, you grinded for 50 hours this week and spent your pool that’s goddamn impressive you son of a bitch!” should be the feeling. I suggest instead — display the XP bar as GOLDEN instead of blue— you’re a goddamn Super Saiyan and you deserve some recognition for being a badass player. Finally, when a player reaches the “XP Cap” for the first time, display a full window pop-over explaining what just happened and the specific mechanics. Give them an unlocked achievement too, perhaps. They’re in a new world now.
- Reduce Magic Find instead of entirely eliminating Magic / Rare item drops — By far the worst part of hitting the XP cap is losing your ability to gain new Blue/Yellow materials. They are very important for salvage upgrades, but some yellows are also important for potential itemization upgrades on secondary armor. Alternative suggestion: Turn all Blue and Yellow items to “stackable white junk” items instead of white items. In other words, Blue and Yellow items are less lucrative but they stack in the inventory as junk. They still give 1 salvage each at the Blacksmith, but at least you don’t have to deal with the increased tedium for less reward. Additionally, this suggestion still values Magic Find too, as stackable junk is far more useful than non-stackable junk.
- Do not eliminate gold drops — The tooltip on the screenshot above does not include this hidden mechanic, but hitting the XP cap also dramatically reduces your gold drops from almost every source. Gold is already fairly easy to spend in the game and already includes built in bumpers at the various vendors (such as the limited per day purchases at Rarities & Antiquities) and there’s hardly a need to reduce the impact of farming gold.
- The system can be completely ignored by having “XP alts” as the cap is character specific, not account-wide— Players who truly intend to hit the paragon XP cap as fast as humanly possible can currently make XP alts to exploit the fact that paragon levels are shared at maximum level. I think the fix here is as simple as it is difficult — remove shared paragon XP from the game.
Specific Family Reforge Stones
It seems odd that the specific reforge stones are only available via Eternal Orbs. These should be (rarely) available for purchase from the Honor Vendor, similar in frequency to Legendary Crests, and also allow you to pick which one(s) you will receive. If we’re going off Legendary Crests as a balance point, I would recommend 3 per month (your choice) available from the honor vendor.
New Features for Post Release
There are a few features I would love to see in the game post release.
Weekly Treasure Chest
- Replaces the daily item mail system
- Similar idea and UX to the Hearthstone Monthly Reset Chest / Hearthstone Arena Chest
- Gives you all dropped items as salvage components and divides the amount by 50%. It should always be more rewarding to pick up items and salvage them directly, as this takes time and effort.
- Gives you the first 5 legendary items that you missed drop, the rest become salvage materials. You should pick up legendary items, and not just ignore them as a convenient way to save inventory space during runs.
Wardrobe
- Minimum 3 different wardrobe builds, no more than 5
- Include wardrobe during prep phase in Rite of Exile and Battlegrounds so players can queue up and grind while waiting for the queue to pop in their PvE spec.
Polish and Everything Else
- An icon on a legendary item that indicates that you have already extracted the legendary power would be nice.
- Bags of scrap…but why? — Large and small bags of scrap have a 2 second global cooldown when you open each one, meaning it can take minutes to open all your bags of scrap. This is annoying. Ideally, just give the player the scrap directly. Otherwise, a way to “open all” would be nice.
- Adventure Summary — This feature is new to the closed alpha and seems geared towards more casual players. I’m not sure I understand the point of this feature, as it was more of a giant nag screen to me — I had to go to my notifications to dismiss this the few times that it popped up. In general, I think this feature could be removed and no one would even notice.
- Emotes — I wish there was a simple emote system (something like hearthstone?) to talk to people, especially when you meet them in the world.
- Bugs, strings, and error messages, consistent names of things — There’s a large number of translation errors and “dev speak” error messages that need work. I did my best to report many of these, and some of them were even fixed already! But there’s many more to look at.
- Tutorials off option — There needs to be an option to turn off all tutorials in the settings. It’s quite annoying on the second playthrough!
- Delivering items is quite tedious — Make sure delivering items is always its own separate dialog.
- Management of clans, dark houses, and immortals is cumbersome — These buttons are quite small click targets, and you can’t further analyze an invite, such as looking at a character’s gear or status. You only can accept or turn down someone based on their name and character level alone.
- Funny voice lines suggestion — Talking to vendors many times in a row should trigger some funny voice lines where they get annoyed (like clicking on units in Starcraft).
- Notifications don’t have enough actionable information — At present I don’t know why I’d use any notifications. These seem useless from the lack of information present in them.
- Guild Achievements — They… exist, I guess? I honestly didn’t know what to do with guild achievements yet. We mostly got these while doing other things. I’m a bit of a completionist gamer but didn’t feel the need during alpha to hit these at any time. These could be removed from the game and I wouldn’t feel too bad about it.
- Services button — The “Services” button on vendors needs to be bigger. Pretty much the only thing I want to do when I talk to a vendor is hit that button and it’s really easy to miss, then you got to talk to the vendor again on a mis-click.
- Diablo Streamer/Community Manager/Developer elite named mobs — Thank you for continuing to include folks and recognizing the community in this way.
- The icon (little treasure chest) for collecting your daily challenge rift rewards is far too small. I’ve never been able to quite hit it on the first try.
- The click target for buffs below the player portrait is quite difficult to hit. Move this to the player portrait sub-menu instead.
Egonomics
The controls and ergonomics of playing many long hours on a mobile device have been dramatically improved from technical alpha to Closed Alpha. There are many, many small (but significant) changes here that increase the usability of the on-screen joystick and player abilities (too many to go into detail), but my play was FAR easier this test cycle than last due to these small changes. Blizzard should continue to be vigilant about these kinds of changes as they have a large impact for players.
Additionally, the meta around controllers and grips evolved from the player side of things during the closed alpha as well. I am now playing with a $14 controller grip which dramatically increases my ability the play the game comfortably, and I also rest my hands and arms on a small throw pillow on my desk while streaming. Other players have discovered “overlay” controller solutions that work quite well, even without official controller support.
Lairs — Still my favorite feature
Lairs have undergone some changes in the closed alpha, and not all of them good. In general, there’s several brand new lair tilesets, which increases replayability dramatically. Some of these tilesets render differently than others, giving a unique playstyle depending where you encounter the lair. Additionally, a bunch of new lair tasks were added to the game, almost all of them of the “kill something”-type, which addresses a big complaint I had during the technical alpha about boring progress-bar-only style tasks. However, there’s a few problems left to address and changes I’d suggest:
- Increase the number of lair spawn points and distribution of lair spawn points in the overworld — There are some areas in the overworld that have absolutely no lair spawn points, which means exploring these areas is useless for encountering this very rewarding world resource. (Note that I’ve provided these maps to Blizzard directly pointing out these locations — I am working on a Lair maps that will be quite complete in a different publication, so you can view those soon).
- Allow tasks to drop gems (rarely) again — One of the negative changes made in the closed alpha was removing gem drop rewards from tasks. I’d recommend a 1–3% drop rate from tasks, as gems are quite valuable and this gives the player a strong incentive to *explore* the Lair fully. Currently, tasks are simply a way to get a blue item or two, although these are valuable for salvage (at least until you hit rank 20 on all your items), it still feels lackluster compared to the chance of getting a gem.
- Allow third, fourth, and fifth floor Lairs — One of the most intriguing parts of Lairs is the 2nd floor. Currently (we believe) there is a 50% chance a boss at the end of the Lair will spawn a blue portal that will allow you to do a “2nd floor” of a Lair. Not only do you get twice the rewards for one Lair, but you get a blacksmith to salvage to boot! I’d recommend allowing a third, fourth, and fifth (final) floors, with decreasing chance each time. This would create some really exciting moments for players as they get more and more lucky throughout their exploration of the Lair.
- Fix Lair XP — This is a big one. Lairs currently give significantly less XP than Dungeons or even overworld XP. This has to simply be a bug. Furthermore, Lairs don’t give a 150% XP bonus even though they are forced to 4 player difficulty on Hell 2 and Hell 3 difficulties. This feels unnecessarily punishing, especially to solo players (Lairs are most often found solo, unlike dungeons. And they aren’t economical to farm in a group due to spawning mechanics).
Events
Events are mini-quests that pop up in pre-defined spots. When you complete an event, you get a chest that drop 3 yellow salvage materials. Events feel good in the closed alpha because yellow drops are rare enough that exploring the open world for event spawns is significantly faster than dungeons or other content for farming yellow salvage materials (except for zone events, which is a bad meta trend that I think hampers events that I address in the metas section above). There are a few different types of events:
- A purple monster spawn
- An NPC with a blue exclamation mark above their head, with a mini-quest — the most common event in the closed alpha (different from the technical alpha where purple monsters were the most common)
- A cursed-chest (which rewards 2, or 5 yellow materials if you kill the monsters under the time limit).
Because Events are so rewarding, I set out to discover the exact spawn mechanics behind how they work. What I found was fascinating, and the details here are why event hunting and exploration is so fun in Diablo Immortal.
We now have a precision experiment to test this mechanic (which I originally discovered in the technical alpha) that pegs that internal cooldown to 4 minutes exactly. This means you can’t ever get back-to-back events, and your time in-between event spawns is best done doing something else besides event hunting.
This keeps players hunting the open map for that next event spawn, hitting all known locations in a sort of travelling-salesman-problem-best-fit route.
Zone Events
Zone events are continuously available events that are globally available in each zone. Completing the event gives 6(!) yellow salvage materials, making them extremely valuable. Instead of enumerating each event, I want to cover the problems that plague zone events currently, and my suggestions to fix them.
- Zone events are too rewarding — I suggest setting a cap to the number of zone events (Bilefen arena NOT included) you can receive rewards from to 6-12 per day. This seems like a reasonable limit as currently they are far too rewarding, but also dictating a random spawn, or requiring players to warp around the world to frantically look for events doesn’t seem like a good solution either. Putting a cap on Zone event rewards fixes a large number of too-fast progression problems in the game, and should have healthy cascading effects for the meta.
- Dark Wood event is simply bugged — It does not offer any yellow materials for a reward and needs to be fixed. (I heard a rumor it was going to be reworked and that this is why it’s currently bugged? I’d agree with reworking it as it’s currently very boring.)
- Ashwold Carriage needs a push-the-payload mechanic — Currently it’s far too easy to simply show up at the end of the pizza carriage and get a hit in to receive a reward. Instead, allow players to push the pizza like the payload in Overwatch. More players=faster moving carriage. On top of all that, if you push the carriage for more than 10 seconds, you’re entitled to rewards at the end, no hitting the tax collector required.
- Shazzar mysterious scroll pickup— The mysterious scroll still does not auto-pickup. Make this auto-pickup.
Dungeons
Dungeons are small, instanced areas of the game that are typically story-oriented. Towards the end of the technical alpha we realized that these are some of the best XP in the game, because they’re easy to speedrun, and also because monsters inside have inflated XP values. In the closed alpha, we perfected these runs and took spreadsheets of data quantifying which dungeons are the best (and which ones are horrific). We provided this data to Blizzard directly. I’ll review some of the problems with various dungeons here so they’re documented.
- Countess — We discovered it is possible to 1-phase kill the Countess, which feels quite rewarding. But this is entirely due to her animations. Make this 1-phase kill more consistent and this will reward powerful players with a skillful kill of the boss.
- Mad King — We discovered the best salvage in the game is to kill the first boss and simply exit the dungeon over and over again. I recommend moving all boss loot for every dungeon to the final boss chest to prevent these kind of shananigans anywhere.
- Temple of Namari / Kukuri Rapids / Fahir— Both of these dungeons are dreadful due to the long, unavoidable dialog / raft ride. It’s clear that a non-story mode for dungeons (these in particular) is necessary. Other dungeons could benefit from them as well.
- Destruction’s End — There’s many reported bugs here that are very frustrating to encounter due to the nature of this dungeon. Also waiting on ZK is still annoying as ever.
Thank You
I want to thank Blizzard and the Diablo team for considering me for the closed alpha for Diablo Immortal. I hope this extensive feedback is helpful. I want to thank my community for their support on Twitch, and the wider Diablo community.
Additional contributors
Thank you for your ideas and engagement while we worked on this extensive feedback together. Working together with you in game and on this feedback has been a pleasure.
mersinaryranisrem, Dred_Scythe, quazy888, MissCapriKell, Aristotelian, MrTeacherman, Raxxanterax, Neinball, Rob, Facefoot, Lexyu, wudijo
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