Kripparrian’s Thoughts on Diablo IV

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Foreverhappychan wrote:

I mean I always knew he was that good. I just didn't need to hear it about PoE because I played PoE my own way, and D3 only interested me after Adventure Mode. I remember Kripp's first real build for PoE abused Ground Slam, which made sense given it was an early PoE skill that had good AOE and scaled from weapon damage. It was also by far the most boring playstyle I had ever seen in an ARPG so while I respected the breaking, it didn't personally interest me. I have RL friends who break tabletop games all the time and it's amusing to watch but kinda ruins the fun for those of us just playing for fun.

Whether or not the DIV devs take his hydra and barb feedback will be dependent on how worried they are about that breaking -- or if they are going to be content to have their game be a 50-100 hour experience. Since it's not f2p, that would be more than acceptable a duration for a b2p, since they dont REALLY have to hook players for support the way a f2l does buuit if they want to eat that sweet, sweet GaaS cake, they are going to need to avoid a one build meta. Obviously. As I said, Wolcen had one (bleeding edge was horrifically OP) and everyone used it -- and then quit when the dumbasses who let it through finally nerfed it. Of course they did.

But unlike Wolcen, DIV is promising a huge world with plenty to do for we casual fucks so an easily broken meta might be less of an issue. We will see.

I just hope they don't start balancing as aggressively and reactively as GGG did and do. There is a huge appeal in stability and not having to read patch novels just to play one's favourite kill shit bliss-out pastime. Once PoE started 3 month chunks of hefty additions I was like well that's nice but I can't justify this level of attention and devotion for a fucking arpg. For those that can and do find joy in PoE's demands, I am so glad GGG exist and do their thing for you. I won't say I have better things to do but I do have more enjoyable ones.

DIV is almost certainly one of them.

I think I will forever associate PoE with old ground slam+ frostwall tech. Something about it just blew my mind even though it has none of the gymnastics that is in today's POE

About barb feedback- imo it will be hard to fix. I think barb can be a monster - and I did look through datamined uniques, all affixes and paragon board, and theres definitely a zero cooldown leap possible, and a geared barb will be quite good either way...but its really that the melee is dogwater with all the mechanics they put in - which I like (the mechanics, not melee being punished) ! For first time in Diablo games boss design is pretty damn good.


Melee being bad in poe for a while is what actually interested me the most in D4. Because at start of d3 barb was actually really fun to play and tapered off into act 2 inferno (pre-nerf). I was itching for some melee that wouldn't feel gimped. And it's even worse in D4. OMG lol.


I know it's a bit offtopic here, but I feel like last epoch melee is probably the best among the newer arpgs. Grim Dawn too, but it's not a new one anymore.


If you watched Asmon's take, his take was simple - barb needs to be fun from the beginning. And I agree, in a game like D4 which is a casual approach and not the nerdy PoE, you just wanna blast. I can wait for my boneshatter build to come online in PoE for 80 levels. Not in D4, I want to be able to be roughly as powerful as ranged from early levels

I like the idea of the traditional meathead being a late bloomer via extra items but yeah early barb just sounded reeaaally discouraging. We have enough ranged spam supremacy with PoE thanks.

Fun fact re Frost Wall: my original Grandmaster used to spam it very annoyingly. I was very proud of her. Then GGG nerfed it as a player skill and for whatever reason they also nerfed my grandmaster when really it should have been treated like a snapshot. She was the only reason I bought that pack so when they were like yeah so her frost wall has a cooldown now I was like well that completely renders her pointless thanks enjoy the $500. Really pissed me off given how much I worked on her and how often people were laughing at weak or easy to beat grandmasters. I have to wonder how mwmy others were nerfed into the dirt but made by supporters who couldn't complain as directly as I did (they let me submit another one and of course I didn't have any ready to go so somewhere in there is a lame as fuck fireball templar).

Worst part about the nerf was I named my masterpiece Elsa because if you are going to be trolled by a frost wall knockback spammer it might as well be someone almost universally hated.

...anyway Asmongold is a mere clout chaser compared to Kripp's rock solid rep as far as game skill goes. His claims that PoE "2" stole shit from WoW and DIV were ludicrous.

As a side note, it's crazy how full circle things run over an entire decade, with regards to this genre.

Kripp was the reason I found PoE in 2012, and now here we are in 2023 discussing D4, and his excellent video on it. It's wild, it's nostalgic, and it's just overwhelming positive in terms of vibes.

I echo what Mr. Chan said about enjoying how genuinely happy Kripp seemed in the opening just discussing his history on Diablo, his start into streaming and content creation due the Diablo franchise, and how it shaped his life. D4 aside, that was just great.

It made me miss Total Biscuit, since he was my main pre-key PoE source. I hear later on he went a bit off the deep end but no one can take from him the fact that he, not Kripp, put PoE on the map by asking one simple question: WTF is...Path of Exile?

Kripp brought the masses months later, a much more conscious draw on GGG's behalf. Twitch integration was one of their top priorities not after release but well before it. For 2012 this was a very unusual move for an indie f2p but oh it paid off. I will never like streamer culture or influencing as a profession but early adoption of it was the key to PoE's success. If I had my way it would have stayed a niche hardcore ARPG supported by the top of the pyramid rather than the bottom, and very likely would have died long ago in a blaze of if only more people had known how amazing it was.

...something I say about a lot of my favourite games, all the while quietly thankful said games aren't made *for* streaming. It's a necessary evil if a game wants to last now. It'll be a dark day for quality gaming when people stop buying games altogether and devs rely entirely on selling not products but enhancements to experiences.

Yeah, I know. My Xennial is showing. Don't care. No idea how the entertainment industry survived our proclivity for pirating everything, which we easily transitioned from analogue to digital, but I am glad it did. I am glad it is now more economical for us to buy/support what we like than just steal it -- it is our weird way of giving back I suppose. But the unspoken part of that pact is we expect quality if we are to pay for it. Low-effort product deserves low-effort stealing.

F2P and soft subs (eg QoL upgrades that arent really optional) occupy a strange space for the Xennial. On one hand, free shit cool. On the other, if it isn't free because we went to the effort to pirate it to circumvent the built-in costs, what's the catch? So we knew from the start that F2P was a trap.

PoE may well be the best f2p game ever made, but that doesn't negate its function as a trap. DIV might be a 6/10 with genuinely optional QoL in the form of a cosmetic battle pass, but that doesn't negate its function as a product. Blizzard may change that by pivoting deeper into murky QoL territory but for now, there is no real indication that it, as a product, is a trap. I have far less sympathy for regretful preorder stories than I do tales of how this f2p or that sucked someone in way too deep. DIV does what it says on the box.

Oh countdown done. Laters.

I'm gonna pass on D4 at least until the expansion comes out. Every Diablo game improved significantly with the first expansion. I even got a hot take that Diablo Hellfire was an improvement over standard Diablo 1 - come at me.

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MrSmiley21 wrote:

I'm gonna pass on D4 at least until the expansion comes out. Every Diablo game improved significantly with the first expansion. I even got a hot take that Diablo Hellfire was an improvement over standard Diablo 1 - come at me.

to me, D2 is a lot better than LOD

Im one of the few people who dislikes runewords homogenizing items so for a lot of gear in LOD you are looking for bases with sockets (actually - Kripp does too :))

There is no bs with everybody getting enigma. Gearing is way more interesting. No grush to leech xp and powerlevel fast af.

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Foreverhappychan wrote:

I like the idea of the traditional meathead being a late bloomer via extra items but yeah early barb just sounded reeaaally discouraging. We have enough ranged spam supremacy with PoE thanks.

Fun fact re Frost Wall: my original Grandmaster used to spam it very annoyingly. I was very proud of her. Then GGG nerfed it as a player skill and for whatever reason they also nerfed my grandmaster when really it should have been treated like a snapshot. She was the only reason I bought that pack so when they were like yeah so her frost wall has a cooldown now I was like well that completely renders her pointless thanks enjoy the $500. Really pissed me off given how much I worked on her and how often people were laughing at weak or easy to beat grandmasters. I have to wonder how mwmy others were nerfed into the dirt but made by supporters who couldn't complain as directly as I did (they let me submit another one and of course I didn't have any ready to go so somewhere in there is a lame as fuck fireball templar).

Worst part about the nerf was I named my masterpiece Elsa because if you are going to be trolled by a frost wall knockback spammer it might as well be someone almost universally hated.

...anyway Asmongold is a mere clout chaser compared to Kripp's rock solid rep as far as game skill goes. His claims that PoE "2" stole shit from WoW and DIV were ludicrous.

hotgm and div cards, supporter uniques...all ephemeral in a game as a service model.

since it's a diablo thread, the first I played D2R I was nostalgic. The items, skills, everything was in a similar state I left the game a few years back.

then, they started doing significant changes and I was torn. what was better - to preserve the state like a mummy, or evolve ? I have no real answer there.