My hope is for Diablo 4 to find a middle ground. As much as I love Path of Exile's skill grid, it's impossible to effectively navigate without lots of preparation, and I've come to completely rely on a third-party app to POE currency trade  help me design my builds. The good news is that it might be heading in that direction. The WIP skill trees that we've seen are a lot easier to digest than PoE's, but Blizzard is also experimenting with a passive skill tree that sits below the active one, letting you give your character general upgrades that aren't specifically tied to your class.

Set aside set bonuses

(Image credit: Blizzard)
Set bonuses dominate Diablo 3. Though it's undeniably more accessible, pushing players to specific gear sets erodes a lot of the joy that comes from hunting down great loot. I often find myself dumping items I'd otherwise be excited to get my hands on, just because I don't want to sacrifice the bonus. The cost of the convenience is the sense that you're following a script rather than making your own character.

Path of Exile, meanwhile, lets you figure out what gear to use yourself, depending on what build you've settled on. A single item can turn a middling build into a killer, so it's all about finding the right incredibly powerful items for you. It's definitely harder to figure out what you need to stick in your gear slots, but the bevy of options and their impressive upgrade potential means you have so many opportunities to improve your character throughout the game.

Getting rid of set bonuses entirely would be an extreme solution, however, as they're still attractive goals to POE currency buy work towards; it would be a shame to lose the accessibility they provide, too. If they were an alternative rather than a necessity, we could have the best of both worlds. Thankfully, Blizzard already seems to agree. Gear sets will be less prominent, it says, with individual items becoming the things that make your build special. With development still ongoing, we'll have to wait to see if it finds the right balance, but it's reassuring to see Blizzard identifying the problems the old system posed.