diablo 4 has a resource generation problem

it's not fun to cast filler spells

Diablo is my favorite game franchise of all time. Basically, you pick a hero of one of 5-7 classes and blow up the minions of hell. Monsters drop items, and you mix and match items to power up your character. It’s fast, mindless, and fun.

But the newest installment, Diablo 4, has a gameplay loop problem: you have to cast boring spells a lot to get to cast the fun spells. The basic gameplay loop is like this: your character has a resource, usually called mana. One of your spells is special and generates mana (“generator”), while the other 5 spells use mana (“spenders”). You start with 100 mana, a generator may generate 3 or 4 mana, and a spender may use 30 or 40 mana. You can see the problem already—you have to cast the generator 10 times to cast the spender.

In general, the generators are very tiny boring spells that hit a single target and don’t have many other effects, and the spenders are the fun spells you want to cast to blow stuff up or protect yourself. If you try to build a combo of 3 spenders, that’s your entire mana pool for one combo. So the gameplay loop goes like

1. Cast your 3 combo spells

2. You now have zero mana

3. Spam your generator until your mana fills up again

4. Repeat

Step 3 takes much longer than step 1, which is a problem. Most of your time is spent furiously left clicking to cast a spell that does little damage just to get mana to cast your actual spells again. Practically, you have to cast your generator ~5 times per big spell (because other factors often generate a little mana). So step 1 involves casting 3 spells and step 3 involves casting 15 spells. 5 fillers for every 1 good spell. Not great.

When you get late into the game, this changes. After putting 10-15 hours into a character, you get powerful enough where you only have to occasionally cast your generator. But, who cares! That’s 10-15 hours going plink plink plink waiting for your mana orb to fill up.

what you want is different than what you got

The weird setup of Diablo currently is that you are most powerful at the beginning of a fight and get less powerful as it goes on. You have all of your resources at the beginning, and then you don’t. So you often finish big boss fights by going plink plink plink rather than boom.

What the devs seem to want is a gameplay loop where you build up power during fights. It’s definitely true that when you get deep into the endgame, this dynamic is there. But again, you have to play a character for a dozen or more hours before that point, and I’ll bet that a large fraction of players never actually get to the endgame.

So before you become uber-powerful in the late game, the dynamic should change. Characters should actually build up power as fights go on. But to do that, you have to rethink the resource system and not force people to cast a single boring spell over and over.

the design space here is large

The good news is that the Diablo team has a large design space here to play with. The simplest answer is just make the generators give you more mana. Make them give you 20 mana so you only need to cast 5 to fill up. That’s a little uninspired though, you’re still casting fillers.

You could make generators better which would give filling your mana pool up a purpose, which would be nice.

You could make generators higher skill by adding a small area-of-effect to all generators and giving you more mana for the number of enemies you hit.

You could make bigger spells higher skill and generators by putting a “bonus” condition on them where they generate mana if you use them particularly well. For instance, there is a skill called Frozen Orb which shoots a floating frozen ball and the ball shoots ice shards. If you hit more than like 8 enemies with this spell, maybe you get the mana back or something.

You could get more creative, adding mana for interplay between spells. For instance, if you cast frozen orb and then you also lightning bolt the enemy you could get a thundersnow bonus that gives you resources back.

I’m sure there’s a million things I’m not thinking of. But the Diablo team has to do something because 5x rinky-dink spells to cast one of your fun spells is too much. You can even shoot your generators into a wall to get mana, it doesn’t matter if you hit anything. That seems bad too!

thank you for reading my short rant on game design

I don’t know anything about designing games, but I do not know that asking people to hit the A-button repeatedly to fill up a ball is not the most enjoyable activity in the world. I think with some iteration, Diablo 4 can be a much more fun game.