In an interesting reddit post today, fullmetalretard666 brought up a very interesting topic. With Diablo 4’s items getting more and more powerful, with multiple effects of skills and even separate power procs becoming more and more plentiful, is it perhaps time that we get the option to turn other players’ spell effects off?
The Spells Mess
Readability in Diablo 4 can be a pretty big issue. The highly upvoted post calls the situation “unplayable”. That may be hyperbole, but as anyone that’s played an even slightly crowded Helltide Blood Maiden boss encounter can attest, it gets pretty loud on that screen. The example image in the post is very much Sorcerer-focused, but pretty much any spell class makes things cluttered very fast.
Not that non-casters are much better, with Barbarian’s Dust Devils having been a particular terror in the past. There are a few of other Diablo-like ARPGs out there that have this option, like Lost Ark (although that one’s more on the MMO side of things), so the feature is definitely doable in general. And even Diablo 4 already did something similar! Necromancer pets are almost invisible to other players, specifically for visibility’s sake.
Despite that, this seems like a fairly complicated thing to enable. Considering just how much Blizzard already change season to season, this is definitely the expansion feature type of request. Luckily there’s an expansion coming soon! Vessel of Hatred is coming on October 8th, so it may be a little too late for such late requests, but who knows, Blizzard may have already been working on it.
Who Wants This?
Well, aside from just people who enjoy seeing what’s actually happening on their screen, there’s many people playing Diablo 4 solo. And by solo, we mean in the same way you could play the previous Diablo entries. These players generally don’t enjoy having other players around period, and then adding a gigantic clutter of visuals just makes things much worse.
What do you think? Is this feature absolutely necessary? Do you perhaps actually enjoy when things get that crazy on screen?