Diablo (series)

3.5 on PC now. 3.3 on PS5 as well, and hovering around 5 on the other platforms (but with much fewer reviews)

I mean, I know user review numbers aren't necessarily the most reliable metric, but damn.

I think it's a bit of a series hangover, you can easily use a trigger to switch to another palette of skills, either temporarily or as a toggle. FFXIV makes very good use of this - albeit the action is a little slower. If this was applied to Diablo then most would learn to keep all the emergency skills available at all times on the same button while cycling or toggling through others.

It's a game with a rhythm, it would be easy to tweak it in terms of the controls to accommodate a few more skills.

Anyone rolled a season character yet?

I'll get in once the update downloads. For whatever reason things on Battle.Net download reeeeaaaally slowly for me, as compared to Steam or basically anything else.

It’s not live on EU yet. Probably won’t be until US time.

Appears to be 7pm tonight in EU sadly

Yeah, battle.net launcher suggested it launches at 18:00 bst.

I'll definitely be waiting for feedback. It's kind of nice not having a live service game in my life in fairness though. Variety is the spice of life, but if I've got one of these on the go it's typically all I'll play.

I played a few hours last night, both to just do a log in and globalise my progress but also to test stuff and adjust back from the grim dawn keybinds.

My sorc is feeling the CDR changes for sure. I've subconsciousky got used to the timings as part of my rotations and i just kept getting locked out as my skills were all on cooldown. Kinda numbing really as very thing I did was tweaking for fast play and this was forcing me to slow down between packs.

Completed some challenges as well, got the endangered species one. Had to Google that cos I'd never have found that 'oss. I also checked off the world boss one as ashava finally showed up. I still don't have this bloody challenge for whispers with an amulet. I've opened loads of caches but never had an amulet option or an amulet drop from the chaos cache. It's a fix I tells ya

It's not always been the case; in D2, by default, you could use the F keys up to 8 to select abilities to be assigned to your mouse buttons (so, you might have F1-4 for skills to go on your left mouse and F5-8 for skills on your right mouse). If that wasn't enough for you, you could assign additional hotkeys to have the same function.

I expect the move to a controller encouraged them to restrict the number of spells available to you at a given time (I assume D3 is the same as D4 - I've not played it). There are ways around it to allow more, but they likely won't be very elegant or require slowdown as you are switching or things like that, which might change the flow that the devs are going for.

As I say though, D2 also encouraged you to specialise by allowing you to pump as many points as you wanted into an individual skill. You could end up with a dozen skills available to you (which could all be being used), but you likely aren't going to be a very effective character. It was far better way of getting the player to specialise, but without removing the option of having a big pool of abilities if they want.

PoE on console (has a load of other UI problems which I'm ignoring here) has palette based skills cos you can have a lot of them. 4 face buttons for skills but hold a trigger and you have 4 more more slots available.

It actually works quite well and you get used to it very quickly. A follow up to that is they have some skills that are permanent that are toggled on or off that reserve resource from your pool so you put those in the secondary and tertiary palettes as you don't need use them as often, sadly D4 is not setup like that (yet).

I really don't get the uproar at the extra two seconds? I mainly just teleport off to somewhere to hand in quests or whatever so it's not as though I'm in a rush to get there?

Equally I don't know what the extra two seconds are there for? Do they have analytics that say people suddenly go "Oh, shit! Didn't mean to do that!" and traipse back to the dungeon? It's an odd one.

You can't get three seconds of space from the bastard

My guess is some kind of exploit prevention or just to consolidate something behind the scenes.

The uproar over the whole patch is just bizarre to me, people are frothing at the mouth, never seen anything like it

You can still complete it when it comes back up on eternal. Do that first and then start seasonal so you can jump in and skip campaign (assuming that's what you want obvs)