Asmongold TV - D͏i͏a͏b͏l͏o͏ 4͏͏͏͏͏͏'s Worst Feature | Asmongold React | Asmongold

Episode Date: July 5, 2025

D͏i͏a͏b͏l͏o͏ 4͏͏͏͏͏͏'s Worst Feature | Asmongold React Subscribe to Asmongold TV on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@AsmonTV Disclaimer: This podcast is an independent project created by a viewer using content from the YouTube channel Asmongold TV. The purpose is to make his content more accessible to those who prefer audio formats, helping more people engage with the ideas presented in his videos. This podcast is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or officially associated with Asmongold. All rights to the original content remain with Asmongold TV. If there are any concerns or requests regarding this podcast, please reach out. ----- Keywords: streaming highlights, gaming community, streamer reactions, streaming moments Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the worst thing about Diablo. It's the worst, worst thing ever. Oh shit. Hi, Zerrin here with another video for D4, and today I want to talk to you about scaling. So, scaling is probably my least favorite thing about Diablo 4, and this might arise some confusion from people watching, especially if you haven't reached level 92 yet. And a lot of people might be thinking, wow, I love scaling because it lets me play with my friends. And while personally, I'm actually against all forms of skill, scaling. I'm actually I do see like a huge amount of benefits of scaling so that like a level 60 or level 7 character can play together with a level 10 or a level 15. There are obviously tangible benefits here that are really, really good.

However, what I'm talking about is the fact that all the content in the game scales up to level 95 and that is really, really bad. Now, there's obviously a lot to talk about here, but effectively this makes it that leveling up is a punishment. in Diablo 4 and I don't think necessarily that's a good thing. But what do I mean? That does kind of happen. It's like you get a new weapon, you do a lot of damage, you're big dicking it, and then like you level up a few times and now you're not doing it anymore. Yeah, it would be nice. Like, it's one of the cool things about classic wow is that you're able to move from one area

to another. I understand why they do scaling, and it's very hard to know what the right choice is. I think that Blizzard is making the right choice by adding scaling into the game. I think that scaling is a good thing overall. And the people that are outspoken about it being negative are the more serious minority. But I am kind of that minority. I think a mix is necessary. Yeah, I think that I definitely agree.

Like there should be some things that aren't scaled. Like, and this is what's good about POE is they have certain things that are not scaled. Like, Shaper, Elder. I've said this 50 fucking times. right so you know what i'm going to say um but other things and other games are scaled and it's okay opt-end scaling i don't really think that would work by that well the number one source of power is obviously getting some skill points somebody says hard to disagree here it's lazy we have not having content all of your arguments immediately go into the garbage whenever you consider the fact

that people that are up at three in the morning watching criticism videos of diablo four are the 1% of the player base. The average player that plays this game doesn't give a fuck about this kind of stuff. They want to play with their friend or their wife or people that they know online, etc. That, oh, 10 a.m.? Oh yeah, I guess we have EU awake now.

These are the people who really matter because they are the majority. I get it, right? Are you going to make something that, like, going to take no scaling and then give that 10% of the players that care about, you know, like not having scaling because it does kind of diminish the sense of reward. I agree. Are you going to give them what they want? Or are you going to make it easier for that 90% of players to play with their friend or their girlfriend or their wife? Which one matters?

You know, it's kind of kind of an easy decision. That's why we have scaling in all these games. And paragon powers. But the major upgrade is gear and if you're not getting anything like substantial like if you're not getting a big upgrade you're actually getting a large nerf the biggest point where we noticed this was level 92 going from like 90 to 92 we noticed a very very large nerve where we went from being super strong even though we hadn't really upgraded that much since like level 70 to 80 at least our power mount powers had been really really getting in but we hadn't obviously Obviously, it's still early days for Diablo 4, and we haven't had a lot of time to min-marks or builds yet.

Yeah, of course. So past level 85 to 90, there wasn't that much important for us to put our Paragon powers in. And that means that instead of getting things like 10% more damage, 10% more damage resistance, we were getting things like 5 int. We didn't really have much to do with our last 10 points. Yeah. And because of that, we started to notice a huge scaling increase on the monsters. And our gear was pretty much as good as it could get for those.

So you see what he's saying, right? Is that because the last 10 points aren't as game breaking and game defining or character defining as like, you know, 70 to 80 or 80 to 90, like 90 to 100 isn't as game defining, his power level didn't scale adequately with the level of the monsters. This levels. Now, obviously, there are a lot of downsides here to us staying in the same dungeon. And if we were doing nightmare cygrials, this would actually be different. because we would then also be leveling up the glyphs, which would in turn give us more power, and it would be less of a problem.

I'm still going to cover why this is a problem, no matter of this, but let's talk about why that is a problem anyway. So this means that at some point, you will just, you're not getting that same feeling in an RPG. Like, if I'm playing Path of Exile and I hit, like, certain thresholds, like 80, 85, et cetera, I'm obviously, I'm not getting punished, right? Like, each level is a buff, right? It's always a positive.

It should, in my opinion, leveling up should never be a bad thing. That's not where the difficulty should come in. It should, in fact, come in through nightmare sigils. And you should be encouraged to make your character stronger because you get more rewarded by doing harder content. The Abla Fort doesn't really do that. And that's like a big... No, it doesn't.

And a lot of games don't do that now because they're made for a more mainstream audience. POE isn't made for a mainstream audience. POE is made for ARPG enjoyers. that's the reason this is a mainstream large scale audience that it's developed for and it has scaling

in order to cater to them problem for me so first let's talk a little bit about what we were doing with the the dungeons so because everything scales up with you specifically to 95

you can just do normal dungeons yeah right because they're pretty okay all those way to 100, right? If you just want to hit 100, that's a good way to do it. And now obviously, there's been some drama around resetting dungeons, which is a very normal ARPD feature, right? Sacred, torchlight, path of a... I don't like resetting dungeons. I think it is cringe, contrived gameplay, but I don't think they should change it. I don't want to see them

handicap the entire player base because a 1% of the player base feels like they have to to mend max by playing a certain way. This is what killed Wow. And no, it's like 50 things did. But like this is one of the things that made Wow a worse game. Is Blizzard making the game worse in order to nerf top 0.1% players? Please stop designing the game around what people that play it professionally are going to do. Please fucking stop this. I don't care. Oh, wow. they got more legendaries than me. Oh, my, of course they did. They're playing it all day.

Saw Diablo 2, Diablo 3, everything has resetting dungeons and Diablo 4 is different. Po. Bro, bro, I played POE when the Vol Oversol was the last boss. Okay. Dominus, that's a new content, man. You could do the party thing, which is leave the dungeon and re-invite them. remake the party. Now, a lot of people feel like that is a big issue. However, obviously, if that wasn't the case, I will show you what you could do instead. Now, let's say that there was a dungeon reset cooldown and you had no way of bypassing that cool down.

That's what a lot of people would actually want for some reason. But if that was the case, well, this was the dungeon. What are we doing? Now you just have to run that. That is around a 10 second run, which some people are thinking. What the fuck are we doing worrying about this fucking bullshit? Shit, optimized the fun and the fuck. Some people want to run the same dungeon or they let them fucking do it. Who cares? Thinking, well, you know, now you have some downside between dungeons. Jesus.

You actually don't because one person would just leave the dungeon early, run there, and the other players would instantly teleport. You're still getting effectively the same gameplay loop, making here that the dungeon resetting isn't the problem, it's the scaling. In my opinion, dungeons, actually all content in the game should not scale past level 80. Now, I actually think there's an argument for having Haltides, scaling past level 80 and them being able to go up to 95, specifically in world tier 4. I feel like if you want it to not scale past level 80, I think we need a tier 5. I do because like I like, POE has like Delirium maps, right?

And like even they've got, uh, like, I mean, you've got some lacrum. You've got, fuck. You've got like, uh, influence maps. You've got tier 16 maps. Right, having a cap at level 80 is like having it only go up to tier 12, I would say. You got five ways, yep. World Tier 3, they should scale lower. Some of you might not be thinking, well, they actually do.

That is how they works, is right? Except the elites always scale to the highest level. That means that if you're in world tier 1 and you meet an elite monster, even like the ones that dropped like the pale tongues, the crushed bones, and the demon hearts over here somewhere, they scale to 105 even in world tier 1. So they probably shouldn't do that and World Tier 3 should just go up to like 75 or 80 to everything. Even Helltides, this is important because then you actually have a way to respect characters. You don't at the moment.

We can get into that a little bit later. But yeah, if that was the case and you couldn't farm normal dungeons like this, and now these dungeons are obviously considerably easier than the Nightmare Sigils, and in my opinion shouldn't be the way to level to 100. I'll show you what a... Yeah, I think that you should... Doing harder content, the hardest content should be the best reward.

Whenever the easy content gives better rewards, then it's bad. Like, you know why people, like, why do people care about getting good gear in POE? Is so they can do juiced delirium maps with scarups. Or do Uber bosses. Imagine how cringe it would be if the Uber bosses and POE were not,

not as efficient to farm as the easy versions. Easy versions. That would suck. My nightmare sigil is it is basically the path of Excel equivalent of maps, also similar to rifts in Diablo 3, et cetera. And you basically right click this. Yeah. And if you're in a group, it'll come up.

Other people have to accept it. And you see that there's downsides like death poles, monster cold damage, monster vulnerable resist. And these do not scale at all. These are things you have to drop or craft and you can like disembark. and you can disenchant or salvage the ones you don't want to do, but these do not scale at all. So regardless of I'm level 100 or if I'm level 30,

this tier 13, I think is 82 or 85 or something, and they actually go all the way up to level 100. So I could technically craft a level 91 to 100 now, which is 150. This would absolutely destroy my character right now. But, you know, I can't remember exactly what tier is around level 100, but that's what I could be farming right now. and in regards of scaling, this is, well, this is perfect. This is how it should be.

And I think most people, from what I'm hearing, agree, this should be the way to hit level 100. Now, a big issue right now is that my character is sort of soft-bricked. And some people will say, well, this is because you farm the same dungeon over and over again, but this is actually going to happen to everybody that wants to do a re-spec. One thing that's going to be hard about this for re-specking is that you're not able to, like, change your build and go in slightly lower content and then try to do the respec, right? You have to find the perfect gear,

make sure everything is set up for you to do the full respect and change over completely at once. Yeah, because you have to respec and then be at the performance level of a level 100 with the other spec. That's stupid. If you're slightly weaker, you're no longer able to fight the monsters.

So that means respecting in that sense is completely out of the way. window. You could get carried by friends. It's, uh, that's fun. Especially important, you can get carried by low level friends because a little 30 to 70 character ends up being a lot stronger than a little 92 plus character. That's cute. We saw that a lot of people were doing things like this, but it's basically easier to create a new character. Yeah, I really, really, really am not a fan of create a new character instead of respect your existing character. I, I, I think, I think that's sucks. I don't want to have to level a whole new character just because I want to

respect. Like imagine like if in Wow, like I had to, I have to make another warrior if I want to play arms. Like I hated that. Like I actually played Classic Wow in BC a lot less because of the respect costs. And even though I could just get viewers to pay for it, like it just like I just couldn't fucking, I couldn't stomach the idea of paying 50 gold to respect every time I wanted to play a different type of the game. It's just not fun. Like it like what the fuck are you doing? They should definitely tone down the scaling of the respects. Maybe a level 70, 80 character being the carry because you're still getting huge power updates at that point

or you might be the peak of your build compared to the monsters at that point. And while they're killing level 80 monsters, you might think, while surely the dungeon is the same level as the host. And we saw this during the race where people are saying you should have Carn make the group. He's one level higher.

Well, that doesn't actually matter. Because while Karin was level 98 and he was fighting level 95 monsters, if I was level 90, I would be fighting level 90 monsters. So that is the big difference there. Where everybody's seeing a monster equivalent to their level, this is why you'll- They have this in Wow, too. Have a reverse carry situation at some points. So that's pretty much how I feel about scaling. I love to hear your thoughts.

I do think and see the benefits of scaling, especially at a low level, somebody like being level 70 or 80. being able to play with their lower level friends and obviously things like boosting etc. is really, really loved by a lot of people. I just don't think scaling should happen past level 80 and Nightmare Syndrome should be the way to level your characters through the end game. That being said, let me know

what you guys think would love to hear your thoughts and how you've been enjoying scaling especially at the low level so far. Thanks for watching. So if you like the video, but more importantly, try to die less than I do. I think that you know, if you contextualize not having scaling past level

80, but instead having a higher difficulty of the game that you can play that is above that, because I think if you take away scaling past level 80, you do have to add in some form of content that is like a capstone level of challenge. So yeah, I agree with that. Definitely. There's the video right there. I'll link it to you guys again. Rush on under, you fuck up, personal criticism playing the game. That way go out the window. I like this. Don't go, don't get me wrong. So you think that he played the game wrong by playing the game

and doing the most efficient thing to level up? So wait a second. So like, what you're saying is that if you give somebody a fork and there's nothing else in the room except for a light socket and they don't know what's going to happen and they put the fork in the light socket

that's their fault? No, it's not. You created a situation that will cause people to take the path of least resistance. You should not have the game that has traps. There should not be traps in the game. Like, oops, I accidentally did this. Now my character is broken. I hate that. This is, like, there's no value to this. These resistance. Yeah, you should, like, you should expect players. Listen, you've got to remember, water flows downstream. And people are going to take the path of least resistance, regardless of what that is.

They're always going to do that. That's just how it is. And so if you program in and if taking that path of least resistance punishes your character in a way that you would not intuitively understand this would be the case for, that is a bad game design decision. That's just bad design. And I can't see why anybody would defend that. You play one build, then there's everything, combines at level 100 about scaling.

well so like what if somebody else just doesn't get good gear what if they're not playing a really good build zizrain is probably playing a very good optimized build because he's an experienced arpg player so what about a person who's not an experienced arpg player it's just such a like any any argument that you have would just get immediately dismantled because as soon as you apply it to any other situation it doesn't make any sense normies will suffer from this the most exactly and this is the point that I'm making is that the problems like zizurane karn all these guys they are the mining canaries the problems that they have now we will have in a few weeks we might already be running into them now because they started running

into them like earlier this week if we play a lot this is exactly what happened with New World is that all the things that I complained about people said oh no that's fine it's totally okay it's good shut up, that's just the way the game is and then once they played the game once they got leveled up they were like wait a minute, you were right so you should listen to what these people are saying they literally played this game as a fucking job

of course they're going to understand it when your argument is get good the sad fact is the game probably needs to get good exactly that's actually a really good way to say it yeah the player doesn't need to get good the game does respect costs suck but you'd always be able to farm enough gold to respect in five or ten minutes if you break the bill

Should definitely add dual spec and loadouts, though. Yeah, that'll be cool. For sure. This is a contradiction of your period of you have. Don't listen to the top 1%. No, it's not a contradiction at all. It's just you failing to understand what the context is behind it. So you think that it's a contradiction because you probably don't understand the metaphor of a mining canary.

Mining canaries were used whenever people would go down, you know, they were mining, right? and they would have a canary down there, and canaries could detect different fumes and vapors before the humans could. So if the canary died, where the canary was acting up, that means that the fumes were out there, but the humans were not able to detect it yet. But if they kept going, they would as well. And the metaphor for that is that the people that are playing the game hardcore right now are running into the same problems that everybody else is going to. to run into whenever they reach the same point in the game. The Canary will tweet. Yes, the canary will tweet in Caps Lock.

Exactly. That's it. So the point that I, like, you understand now, like, how it's not a contradiction in any way? And it's completely in line with what I said. You're on a call-out, no hate-only love? I just, it's very annoying to me whenever I have people that constantly try to call me out for contradictions because they misunderstand what I'm saying. very annoying

so yeah professional players find something that will affect everybody they're okay to listen to yeah exactly values opinions even more because they they used to be way more hardcore content and issues yes 100% people think if you don't play the game the way they do that you're cheating

yeah exactly previous point was to not emulate purchase decisions from a pop 1% personal gamer versus taking insight from them because they play the game yeah of course Bad analogy, the way the top 1% play the game is not the same as regular players in this case? No, that's actually not true because, so there's a lot of instances that will effectively create the same outcome. So you can assume that not every single person is going to try to play a hyper-optimized build.

So effectively, they're going to run into the same problem that Zizarin is running into because he didn't upgrade his gear ever since like level 80. Because they will also have not upgraded their gear since level 80 effectively because they won't know the right stats or they won't have the right gear or they'll be playing a bad build. It'll be worse, actually. Because he can play, it's fine, but it's not going to be as bad. So a new player is going to have this problem even worse. The canary is the top 1%. The mining canary will spend their budget,

designing anti-fume masks for the canary so it can survive in the mine. But all the miners die. Yeah, there you go. It affects everyone because the meta is running the exact same dungeon at Venture mode the same. No, that doesn't affect everybody because this isn't a competitive. of game, there's no point where you have to play the game that way. It's in the same way that Dark Souls having the Black Knights, the Black, uh, is it Black Knights? Whatever, the Black Knight Talibird doesn't ruin the game because you don't have to use that weapon. You think it's too late?

The casual player base will reach that point soon. I don't think a big change like this can happen fast enough. No, it's actually very easy to make a change like this. It's literally a probably some percentage modifier. Like, you've got to understand, like, behind the coding, there's probably some multiplier to a base health pool and all they have to do is change that number. It's not like this is impossible for Blizzard to do, but I think this is a good video and I'm very glad to see it.

Casuals won't reach level 80 plus. I think the people that are semi-hardcore, like, you're right. I think people that are just average, like they're decent at the game, but they don't play all the time. I think that they will. I've seen casuals at 60 already.

Yeah, I haven't played that much, that much myself. Definitely, this is easy to change, but requires a lot of testing to see if I won't break the game completely, though, no? Yeah, it does. Hopefully they'll do it now before season one starts. So, yeah, that's what I think.