Despite the official launch date of D4 being 6/6 I've been granted early access from buying the super mega ultra version for "$100" (WOW gold from 2016). It appears as though this was a really good idea, as not only did the beta test go shockingly well (which isn't typical of Blizzard games), but also allowing early access like this eases the load on the servers and lets all the most hardcore players get in there and burnout a bit before the next wave hits. Now everyone won't be all in the same zone at the same time, which has always been a problem on high-anticipation games like this. The bottlenecks are real.
Opening strategy guide.
This game has a shocking amount of content, and every time I write a post on it I seem to write a 3000 word post. To avoid the same outcome here I'll be focusing on my personal strategy for the game and what to focus on in order to not get sidetracked by the million options available.
Level 1
When the game starts it's unsurprisingly pretty easy. Blizzard devs pride themselves on the "easy to learn hard to master" mantra (and it does start getting quite difficult). Personally I had to rebind all my keys because I use my computer left-handed (have been for decades) due to a chronic shoulder injury. For the most part in the start of the game all you have to do is play without any kind of worry about what you should be doing. It takes quite a few levels before you even have the max 6 skills to worry about.
DEATH
Dying in the regular (non-hardcore) version of the game is not even a slap on the wrist. You get teleported back to a nearby checkpoint and your gear loses 10% durability. Spoiler alert: you can replace your gear with better gear in the early game before you ever need to repair it from dying. Even in the event that repairs are needed gold is very easy to come by (just sell loot instead of disenchating it).
Easy way to waste time:
There are some big time wasters in the game. The biggest one I've noticed is simply dealing with all the items that drop and figuring out if you actually want to use/save it. For the most part all items will either be sold for gold or disenchanted for parts used to make your current gear better.
Another way to "waste time" is talking to all the NPCs, reading all the flavor text, and watching all the cutscenes etc. Of course I do all these things anyway because I'm not trying to speedrun the game just yet. Eventually the story will get boring and tedious and when that happens there are options to skip cutscenes or speed up NPCs talking to their next scripted line.
Level 30: WEAPONS
It is very easy to get from level 1 to level 30. Of course it will still take around 10 hours to get done. Ultimately you can level up a character so fast in the early stages that only one item matters: your weapon. Selling or disenchanting an item you should have used instead isn't a big deal unless it cuts into your overall DPS.
This didn't always used to be the case in Blizzard games, but they finally figured out that balancing everything using weapon damage was the way to go. Used to be if you were playing a wizard/mage/sorcerer your damage would be determined by your main stat INTellect, which would be added up across all your items. Weapons usually had a bit more int than other items but a good dagger on a rogue was often game-breaking which was impossible on the spellcasters and threw the games off balance. Now all skill damage is inherently connected to weapon DPS, with the main stat being a bonus multiplier across the board. It's a much more modular way to do business and it comes up many times throughout trying to figure out a build.
My build
Unfortunately I still know very little about the game in terms of what kinds of builds and options there are for other classes. So far I've only played the Sorceress seriously. Brings me back to the good ol' D2 days, although this game is looking like their best one by leaps and bounds (especially with the decentralized node tech trees; very cryptoish).
All I can say is that the build I came up with during the beta works really well. I'm already level 42 which is obviously pretty ridiculous... and I am getting kind of bored with this build and want to try new things... but at the same time it works so well I feel locked in until it stops crushing it.
Frost Mage
So what I've done here is basically picked up every skill, ability, and bonus that makes frost nova and ice shards better. Adding ice-shards to the "enchantment" tab at the bottom is particularly noteworthy, as this makes ice shards get automatically conjured and launched at frozen enemies like once every second.
This wouldn't be that great by itself but there are other synergies as well that stack on top of this. The first upgrade for ice shards in the node tree allows shards that hit frozen targets to ricochet to other targets. The ice shard ability itself does +25% damage to frozen enemies, and there is a frost nova upgrade that makes enemies "vulnerable" for 4 seconds which adds another 20% damage multiplier. Then when I reached level 33 my "key passive" ability adds another 25% damage total on top of everything else.
The end result of all these synergies is that I cast frost nova in a big group and everything basically dies for free. This is incredibly satisfying as an ice mage because in both WOW and D2 frost nova is a purely defensive skill that's basically only used for crowd control, so the ability to kill 20 baddies at the same time is quite nice.
I was also EXTREMELY LUCKY in finding the gear linked below. It allows frost nova to stack twice at the cost of increased cooldown. This is great because everything about my build somewhat revolves around the ability to do heavy bursts of damage. There are plenty of periods in time in which we are just running around not attacking anything, and during those times I get an extra cast of my best ability.
Aspects
In this game the only thing that separates a piece of "rare" gear (yellow) from "legendary" gear (orange) is the aspect that is displayed with an orange star on the loot. A very cool mechanic of D4 is that we can disenchant these pieces and rip the aspect from it, transferring it to another piece with crafting mechanics. One of the aspects in particular makes my ice build stupidly good.
Codex of Power!
These codex are pretty easy to get: all you have to do is clear the corresponding dungeon and the ability will unlock. This is one of the first things I did in the game when it was available to me: farm Aspect of Piercing Cold. On the tooltip we see that it says pierce 3 times with 25% diminishing returns, but if you put these things on a 2-handed weapon (like a mage staff) it ends up being twice as good (pierce 7 times with 13% diminishing returns).
Getting this aspect on to a 2H weapon in the early game completely changes the game and turns ice shards into line-damage, allowing it to do a ton more damage. Unfortunately weapons are the most important item slot and this particular upgrade was somewhat expensive so I ended up re-enchanting all the weapons I found and burning all the crafting material I was farming in the process, but it was still worth it.
Unfortunately this process gets even more expensive as we level up. When the item-level required is under 30 it only takes 20 of these "veiled crystals" which can be acquired by DE the rare (yellow) items. You might have to DisEnchant 30 rares to get the 20 crystals, which was fine. Now I need these higher level crafting materials that you can only get from disenchanting legendary items... and they seem to be much much harder to get at this stage of the game. Hopefully it gets a bit easier and legendary items drop more frequently.
At level 42 I'm finally approaching the phase of the game where I might have to change my build depending on what kind of gear I can find. Some of the loot says "account bound" and some doesn't... but I've yet to see any kind of auction house or even other players trying to buy or sell items. I'm not quite sure how much of an economy this game will have because the D3 economy and real-money-auction-house (RMAH) was an abysmal failure and Sybil attacked into the dirt.
Gems
Meh, don't worry about gems... if you find them keep them and put them into gear that has sockets... but honestly fiddling with stuff like this in the early game is just a waste of time (unless you're playing Hardcore mode in which case you should do everything you can to stay alive).
Hardcore mode
I'm very much a hardcore player at heart and would love to start a hardcore character... but I've already died 4 times on my sorc (one or 2 of those times were because the game bugged out) so I feel like I need to learn more about the game mechanics before I even make such an attempt. Out of all 5 classes... I think Necromancer is going to be my least favorite (I don't like npc pets), which is annoying because that will likely need to be my first class in a hardcore game because pets soak up all the damage for you and keep you out of harms way a lot of the time.
Other skills
Every build has 6 skills, with the first "basic" skill being required. The next node are the "core" skills, and while not technically required (could just level up the basic skill) it's expected that you'd get one because they are the main way to actually spend your characters resources (like mana).
- Frostbolt
- Ice Shards
- Frost Nova
- Ice barrier
- Blizzard
- Deep Freeze
Deep freeze is very much an "oh shit" button that allows me to go invulnerable once every minute for 6 seconds, damaging and freezing everything around me... however ice barrier is a shield I can use a lot more often and helps with all the damage one takes fighting the hordes of hell. In the beta I as using hydra because even though it's a fire spell there's an aspect that lets you cast two at once that is pretty overpowered. There's also the enchantment on frost-nova that:
I might be missing out on some crazy synergy here because a hydra could proc frost nova 30% of the time on hit according to this tooltip... I guess I should try that out and see if it's worth it. Tried to test it out just now but the game bugged out again and now I'm in a 12 minute queue. Again that bug came back that doesn't let me cast any spells (but I can use a healing potion)... showing that hardcore mode is going to be very enraging this early in the game. Best to steer clear.
The other enchantment I am using is frostbolt's because it just adds chill affects to every ability. If you chill a mob enough time it freezes, and once my blizzards start freezing everything on the screen (because I'm out of frost nova) everything starts dying very quickly.
Oh yeah buy some Whispering keys...
There are locked chests throughout the realm that can't be opened without spending resources at the "curiosities" vendor. Make sure to get some (you farm the resource from doing random world events). That same currency is also used for the "gambling" mechanic that used to exist in D2 with gold... except now that it's not gold being spent the items that get generated are much better.
Conclusion
Ug 2100 words and I was trying to keep it short... what a fail. Long story short D4 is a very fun game and I'm hearing many reports that the endgame is done even better than the early game, which is quite impressive if true. As much as I'd like to be playing a crypto game right now there is still a lot to learn from the legacy devs. I'm particularly interested to see how they've done the economy on this one... but I expect that it will very much be quarantined and fractured to prevent bots from ruining everything like they always do. I wonder if such a strategy is even possible in crypto... and how it would be done if so.