I enjoyed the storeline for D4, some of the cinematics later in the storeline were absolutely fire. That said there are some quirks I don't really care for. Such as leaving a town immediately deletes a town portal from existence. So you can use a portal to return to town and sell real quick, or upgrade your potion, or enchant armor, but you have to return using the portal or it disappears. So you can't just portal out go help a friend real quick and then return to where you were.
Also, when you leave a dungeon via portal if you're gone too long the entire dungeon resets forcing you to start over on it. So you can't take your time in the town, which means I often return to town, throw everything in the stash and then go back through the portal quickly to avoid having to redo the entire dungeon.
They've tried to create an "open world" online environment, but you don't often see people out in the wild, and there are a TON of areas where people will be running next to you and just disappear because you're either on a different stage of the storyline, or simply because the "open world" portion doesn't apply to that area for some reason.
But they also have some cooler features, like world bosses with special chances at loot you can't get elsewhere.
You can still party with friends and the portion where people disappear doesn't apply to you, as they are just "there" regardless where you go if they choose to run around with you.
Gear ranges from common, magic, rare, legendary, unique, and ascended.
You have paragon starting at level 50, for every 4 paragon points you gain a level.
Paragon trees are different - Not sure how I feel about this. You start with a "card" where there are various paragon options available to choose from and you have to select connecting nodes to upgrade things. So you can't just dump all your points into intelligence and just get straight damage on your sorcerer. You have to kinda draw a path through the available card. At the edges of the card there can be a "gate" node, which allows you to attach to another card of your choosing, there is a predefined list of cards to choose from, and each of them have a "legendary" node to unlock to do something special. Which is kinda a change from just the basic things.
You can get bonuses to some nodes by having a stat over a certain value. Such as 10% non-physical dmg node on a sorc that gets an additional +10% non-physical dmg boost by having more than 200 intelligence.
You can unlock T3 (Nightmare) tier game at 50, and it unlocks new things in the world, such as certain areas being "helltide" which makes the enemies strong, but also gives an opportunity at better loot drops. T3 also allows for Unique items to drop.
There are areas in the world that are PVP, you can completely avoid these in the storyline and are not forced on you, however if you want renown you'll eventually end up going into them if only to remove the fog of war there so you "unlocked all portions of the map in the region"
PVP grants you a drop that can then be brought to a location where you then fight a couple of waves of relatively easy enemies which then locks the seeds to your character. Another character can kill you and take your seeds until you do that. Getting killed by an enemy will delete your seeds I'm told.
The resulting item from the waves making the seeds permanent only grants you access to appearance gear. So no real advantage is given to players for fighting in the PVP areas. It's meant to just be fun if PVP is your thing.
That said I've just arrived at "end game" portion of things and more time will be needed to determine if it's worth it. Some features for end game are tied to the story and I've opted to leave them out.
