Not sure I’d want that in the main/vanilla game, but it would be fun to see in a mod, though only if coupled together with something like mapping/rifts or extra difficult endgame content to make the extra leveling useful.
No Thank You! Sounds too much like D3/D4. D2 is about the item grind and trying out new builds. No need for paragon levels imho.
Try an off meta build for a big challenge. Or rares only, uniques only, etc. Lots of ways to challenge yourself with the currently in game items and mechanics.
That would certainly harm Diablo2. Besides, it would again degenerate into a direct compulsion to torture lvl 99 and then enter another endgame tower that ruins the games again and again and again.
This endgame spiral into nothingness is exactly one of the reasons why these games have become so bad.
If then there is no need to build number towers and item towers, but to expand what RPGs are all about and that is the world, character development of talents, story and depth.
These sports games at the end are no good in RPGs, except to make them completely pointless and irrelevant, see Diablo 3/4, all MMORPGs and other examples.
Diablo2 is good precisely because it emphasizes the game itself and doesn’t offer an endgame tower.
Everything that was brought in is already borderline. It’s taken the game far enough into a just-so game. If so, then the game itself needs to be expanded.
All these idiotic towers in any endgame are to be rigorously rejected, they only achieve shallow games that have no soul.
Maybe a paragon system for non-ladder characters. New endgame ranking system with new content. Use ladders to collect items and runes and to upgrade non-ladders. At the end of the ladder, ladder characters can either give their XP to the non-ladder or become non-ladders themselves.
No. Roll a new character and get to 99. Or play a new game until the next ladder season if you don’t want to do that. One single game doesn’t need to occupy 100% of your time, and if you choose to have it occupy 100% of your time, one single game doesn’t owe you endless content. The whole industry is grindfest chores slop because of this moronic attitude. There are more hours of quality games available to play than any one person could ever complete. Stop insisting that this or that game ruins a good formula to cater to your inability to find something else to do.
Tell me you don’t know what power creep is without telling me you don’t know what power creep is. The suggestion you’ve offered is the epitome of power creep and has field-tested examples of how that is a terrible model that the majority of gamers hate. Starting to feel this post is absolutely trolling.