Ashava/difficulty doesn't need to change, the skill system does
I beat Ashava, fought the beast multiple times, and learned a lot from the fight. The problem is that the entire time I spent tweaking loadouts and learning things I was wrestling with a terribly designed skill tree system.
First off the UI is horrible, unless they are adding a ton of skills between levels there is no reason for that much space between nodes. In addition you can’t even zoom out all the way to see the entire tree. The skill tree even has artwork on its border that you can’t see fully because you can’t zoom out.
Secondly the spending gold to respec and the way you have to either completely wipe out your skills or undo up to a point individually in order to make a change is just horrible. It supports getting stuck in a niche that works well for situation A and possibly brute forces situation B but always fails on situation C (Ashava). By the end of the playthrough I had a completely different build for regular fights and missions compared to Worldboss killing mode. And every time I had to swap between the two builds I had to go through memory and just respec from scratch and click everything in a specific order. It was a pain to even try to test something else out like swapping between different trees of a skill because you need to unlearn an entire tier before you remove a skill from the tier before.
I think people would have had a lot easier time in this beta if they felt like they had the ability to change things on the fly like in D3 rather than being set in a path that they had to build on. RIP to the necros that were trying to go skeleton build against Ashava, I fought Ashava on my necro with a spec that focused on blood spear overpower that actually did some really nice damage... because I brute forced my way through a horrible UI system.
I know Blizzard is an indie studio, but really they need to add a skill tree loadout system for quick saving your builds and then let you change things on the fly. A warning system that says "You are unable to finalize this build because you didn't put a skill point on tier #" is so much better than having to swap all the way down just to swap blood spear to a different ability.
TL:DR: D4 needs to remove the gold cost to respec, make the UI easier to navigate, make it possible to tweak things at any level, and give you skill loadouts so that you can swap between different playstyles depending upon the situation.
Posted May 16, 2023, 9:52 PM UTC
Hard disagree on removing respec costs and adding skill loadouts.
Everyone would always change to the most optimal build available to them for the task they are planning to tackle next and therefore making all builds meaningless and each class a jack of all trades.
I can imagine skill loadouts without removing the respec costs tho. This would allow players who want to switch builds to do so more conveniently without taking away the biggest downside of it.