The game needs to move away from the players 8 'meta'

General Discussion
1

The experience bonus from additional players should be completely removed.

The best way to level to 99 currently is to do baal runs till level ~92/93, then make baal lobbies and teleport people to throne room, while you do the terror zone. It’s a fact, you’re getting the best exp from terror zone by a mile and baal runs or anything else don’t even come close. The problem with this is that you either need a sorceress or an enigma for teleport, otherwise you’d waste significant amounts of time.

Another more important problem is that even if you play a sorceress or have an enigma, it’s really boring to teleport ~1/4 of your entire playtime, it just burns you out. I’ve been playing the new mosaic build and I had a blast up to level 97 and I’m burning out due to the fact that I need to keep teleporting people to baal to leverage that players 8 bonus exp.

Well, you can just play in a 8 player group and everyone should do the terror zone.

Well, that’s not the most optimal strategy since experience is split to a certain degree between close party members. Even if you gloss over that, some people would still want to play solo or maybe they want the entirety of the loot for themselves. Forcing people to play together is not a good experience for everyone.

Well, if you remove p8 bonus, nobody is going to play on p8 and the game will be too easy

Correct. That is why this game could use some actual dev time and be given a legitimate endgame loop. Lots of arpgs extend their content past the acts with stuff like maps (path of exile, some diablo 2 mods) or rifts (diablo 3). Don’t get me wrong, I do not wish for endless type of difficulty that diablo 3 has, the endgame loop should cap somewhere (for example at level 97, terror zones cap at 96 currently) and the content should be significantly harder the ‘deeper’ you go, so it makes up for the lack of p8 increased health.

In fact, you could solve the difficulty problem by making monster health and damage scale with levels, so monsters in a 96 TZ would be similarly tough to anything you can find on a players 8 setting at the moment.

I know this would require quite a lot of effort from the devs, but once diablo 2 has an actual legitimate endgame loop that’s not a 20 y/o loophole crutch it will compete with other arpgs on the market.

What would be the point of players 8 then?

I really don’t know how to answer this question. Maybe people should group together to overcome difficult challenges without expecting some inherent bonus reward for doing so? Multiplayer would be much less prevalent in the endgame if we had something similarly to maps/rifts, but I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing.

A solution would be removing the experience penalty (the split) that happens when party members are close to each other or drastically reduce it. I imagine this would encourage people to make legitimate farming groups.

Also, you’d fix the teleport / enigma meta if you could do zones where you’d fight monsters continuously without having to teleport to certain objectives. Win win?

12 Likes
2

My recent playing of Diablo 3 (oh no) reminded me of how nice killstreak bonuses are. Perhaps something like that could be introduced to D2:R. Baal’s laugh duration would serve as a good streak breaker (or a shorter duration), thus invalidating Baal Runs from getting significant kill streaks… Unless you decide to walk to Baal, then you could reap the killstreak rewards from WSK2/3.

3

That’s a neat idea but the p8 problem still remains.

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4

It wasn’t intended to be a fix for the problem… It was more a thought on ways to detract from Baal running over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over…

Terror Zones were a good addition, but the experience gain isn’t on par until what, level 92ish?

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5

The point wasn’t to make it faster to get to 99, the point was to make it so getting to 99 didn’t mean running baal 8000 times.

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6

That’s not my point, the players 8 issue still remains a problem, whether you farm terror zones or baal.

7

My question is why do you need to tele baal. This is just the easiest way to get people in your game, you could easily do it solo. It’s just better to do it with 8.

Why not just make a split mf game or use the discord servers to do so. You do t zones while they do chaos baals pits whatever for themselves.

8

I can’t convince any of my friends to play because there is no real end game. My friend circle is all big time Poe players and I play both… But I really do wish there was some kind of end game:(

9

That could be a solution, but you need to actually find people who are willing to do other stuff while you do terror zones. Baal runs are just the best way of getting 8 people together without struggling to find them through third party tools.

Even ignoring that, the problem still remains. The game forces you to play with 7 other players in party and if you want to actually compete for the ladder, the other 7 people need to not follow you because experience is split between close party members. It’s just an insanely flawed gameplay concept.

1 Like
10

Yeah and no

The game should embrace the Playercount bonus and add mechanic that use it

https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/d2r/t/half-baked-terror-zone-and-mediocre-won’t-help-player-retention…-game-needs-real-endgame-activities/154331

Terror zone should have never been a mlvl increase…

Should have been mlvl up to 85 and then playercount like %

11

What if you changed absolutely nothing except… it doesn’t matter how many players are in game, it only matters how many are together. If there is a feature to split experience based on players being close together, that same condition could be used to determine if they give more experience/have more health. It seems incongruent to use the players in game for one decision and the players in the vicinity for the other. Just a thought and a way to potentially make a simple change that would accomplish what you’re talking about.

12

How long you been playing this game?

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D2 is fun for a while, but face the facts: it is a fundamentally flawed game. There is no end game and it’s just worse with more people in a game, yet you need more people in a game for loot and experience.

4 Likes
14

Add player count like single player to ladder. So you can p8 solo.

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Cool. Find me a game that isn’t fundamentally flawed by sheer design from inception.

Tell me you don’t play video games without telling me.

Alt accounts are bad for your health.

You can make all the fake buzz you want with 1 post alt accounts on the same thread. No one is actually believing it.

16

I think this post and idea have the solution completely backwards from what is actually needed to solve the problem expressed. If you want people to stop running Baal over and over again, particularly if you want people to stop creating Baal games where 1 person runs a TZ and the rest run Baal, then you have to provide proper incentives that cause people to behave differently. Here is a concept that we all encounter, but few people truly understand: People do not respond to rules/laws, they respond to incentives.

Here are a couple ideas to solve the problems you propose that I believe will be better:

  1. Make EXP and Loot drop dependent on the number of players within 3 screens 100% of the time, regardless of the number of people in the game or party. This would eliminate the problems of people going off to farm by themselves for EXP or items, people leaving the party to hog Baal EXP, and game types like “I TZ you don’t” and “I cow you don’t”

  2. Increase the difficulty and density of monsters within Terror Zones progressively above level 85, such that the difficulty and intensity are very significant in the 90s and down right hard at 99. Increase the rewards (both EXP and loot dropped) in accordance with the increased difficulty. This will incentivize players to run Terrorized Zones once they reach level 85 and provide challenge and the “endgame” people claim doesn’t exist in D2.

In more of a complete overhaul idea, I think the power level & difficulty of the game should be adjusted such that no build is able to do P3-P8 solo. Using player count to determine difficulty is a very bad metric for measuring power because it inherently says that “At this difficulty, you should need X number of players to kill the monsters in a reasonable time without dying.” which directly implies multiplayer. However, that isn’t what the builds have output over time and with the /playersX command in offline single player, this has only furthered the confusion that the difficulty scaler adds. There are builds that can solo P8 (or max difficulty) and now everyone thinks that soloing max difficulty in a multiplayer setting should be the normal, achievable goal for all builds. However, it should take 8 players, working together defeat players 8. Players should be terrified out of their minds to walk out of town alone in a P8 game, instead Baal runs from characters with no gear on. Sadly though, this level of changes will not occur, so the power creep level of builds will trend up over time.

17

i think the issue could be fixed just by rebalancing nodrop. what p3 nodrop is now, make that p1 nodrop. let it scale to where p9 nodrop now would be the new p8 nodrop. p1 gets around double the items they noramlly would (normal monsters), and p8 would only get a very very slight increase (like < 0.5%). then make nodrop ONLY scale with nearby partied players, rather than half for players in the game and half for partied players. p8 still gets more items so its not completely determinental to play in parties with others. powercreeping builds into solo p8 to make it a competitive farmer would no longer need to be a thing. adjust singleplayer so that it stays as is OR the /player count adjusts partied player count and not non-partied player count (/p8 in singleplayer is equivalent to 4 player party online)

18

How about, instead of that nerfing S-tier characters so nobody can do P8 solo?

Solving 2 problems with 1 fix

2 Likes
19

If you have a group of 7 friends who will consistently play ladder you can casually hit 99 within like 2 months? Of ladder.

You dont have to play the game sweaty. Ladder is like 4-5 months long.

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There are a couple of flaws with your suggestion. If you make the game so hard on higher player count, it will be way too hard for the regular folk. A player with endgame gear, infinity and such, will always stomp p8 and will kinda have to because if it was too hard for him, then imagine that a regular p8 party will stand no chance.

As for your first point, the problem still remains. People will still be forced to play in party of 8 and some (probably most) people that ever played an arpg just enjoy playing it solo due to the nature of the genre. Even with the exp split, the discrepancy will be too big between a p8 party and a solo player. Hell, the current iteration is better than that (where one person splits from the others).