When I casually level in D3, like it takes me 4-6 hours over 4-5 days, I’m only really replacing gear around every 10 levels. If I strictly went for green damage increases it would be all the time. But for all the complaints about D3, you’re really not replacing gear super fast unless you are rushing to 70.
That’s now, unless you were always shopping the AHs in vD3, gear upgrades were even more sparse. I’m not really concerned about power acquisition rates for D4.
Replacing gear every 10 lvls is reasonable. Every 5 lvls would also sound very reasonable to me.
Except, 10 lvls in Diablo 3 is like 20-30 minutes at most. If lvling took 10+ times as long, and you replaced your gear about every hour, that would seem much more interesting.
Not that there is anything wrong in replacing gear. The wrongness comes from replacing it with something that makes your previous gear and progression feel completely irrelevant, because your power just increased 10-fold.
If your power increased 5%? Great. That also means if you got unlucky and didnt find that upgrade, you wont feel like the RNG screwed you over.
As much as I dont like AHs in vD3, at least people who did that would be looking at small upgrades all the time. Which is how the endgame gear progression should be tbh.
Lots of smaller upgrades along the way. 1% upgrades here and there, that slowly accumulates to something that is really significant (like the aforementioned 3-4X dmg from early endgame to late endgame).
If an item is +600% dmg, then you either must have that item, or you might as well have nothing at all. No progression in that, just a binary 0 or 1.
Remember that 600% increase isn’t overall damage just how much more than the item replaces. So over 12-13 slots that roughly equates to a 48% increase overall. Not necessarily a must have if the defensive properties cause you to die faster than you can kill. Sure in sub torment D3 I’ll gladly take 600% more dmg on a weapon. But if the other two dropped like 40% and I was 70, I’d think differently.
Also 600% is huge and would easily equate to 20 or more levels.
You mean it’s multiplied by 100. Because the scaling between 3000 and 300,000 is +10,000%.
Now I agree that PoE has reached a point where its scaling is, well, off the scale. BUT :
In the end it’s almost certain D4 will reach insane numbers too, no matter what, because that’s the nature of damage scaling. But if it already begins with damage even higher than D3 2012, it’s going to happen very quickly and may even surpass RoS hysteria.
The 333,000 Damage in the video is from Rogue level 50 with 0 paragon. Hard to imagine how much the level 100 does, with 200 paragon and probably higher level items…
They haven’t said anything on this matter since 2019, so we should assume it’s still on the table.
Sets are another gearing and customisation option, just because D3 screwed it up hard doesn’t invalidate the concept. But it could wait for an expansion pack.
Exactly !
Though the number should be way over a meagre +5% that the player won’t even notice ! +15% is a bare minimum for an upgrade to feel meaningful. Which is why it shouldn’t happen 3 times per hours while leveling like in D3. One for every 10 levels average does feel like a good balance.
ah yes indeed I worded myself badly 
In fact, my goal was not to make a simple comparison of the damage scaling of D4 vs PoE. But to remind PoE lovers that this problem also exists in their game while they prefer to deny it just to make us believe that their game is better. For me it’s just a matter of fairness. Of course this doesn’t excuse the scaling of damage on Diablo.
It is quite possible. And that’s why we’re talking, to warn the D4 devs to be aware of this problem and fix it as soon as possible.
I’d say that isn’t true. I had a monk doing 9k sheet dps pushing act 2 inferno before the nerf. Toward the end of vanilla D3 I had over 100k sheet dps. There is just so much scaling built into D3 from the get go. Its not even a matter of crit damage and crit hit chance like a lot of people try to point to. The raw weapon damage numbers scale too much. The weapon damage affix numbers scale too much (and are raw values instead of enhanced damage % which I think is an issue). Primary stat can be stacked and stacked sky high. There is nothing exciting about these aspects of the itemization and nothing about them is necessary.
I’m fine with seeing a lot less gear. Sure you don’;t want to find the best weapon at level 5 and never replace it but you don’t have to scale the base weapon damage so ridiculously. The affixes themselves scale, you start to get more of them, you don’t have to scale base weapon damage so much.
9k and 100k are a far cry from a quadrillion. 100k in the original endgame is fine.
When the dmg is always multiplicative then it sadly is overall damage.
If you mean 15% total power increase I disagree. Even 5% isn’t needed there. Nor do you have to be able to easily feel each upgrade in power. Sometimes you might need multiple new items before the difference is really felt.
Nor does every single skill point or paragon point need to give a big power increase. Totally fine if it takes multiple steps of upgrades to see the what you were building toward come to fruition.
If you mean that single item should be 15% better than the previous item, which might only translate to a few % total power increase at most, then it sounds better to me.
Like going from 2% crit to 3% crit, or 10% to 15% fire resist, on an item might easily be a 15% increase of power in that item slot, but only a very small increase in total power.
The problem of PoE ( and D3) power creep is what I call the “dragon ball effect”
Where promise of More power as a carrot to keep gamers coming back. They think each new skill gimmick /gears/ stats must be better( aka more punch) than before to keep gamers coming back.
So we have over the top stuff like awakened gems, double influence items. Etc.
The same way that the dragon ball artist think each new enemy must be stronger than the previous one for reader to keep reading.
The opposite of dragon ball effect is what I called spider-man effect. Spider-man isn’t the most powerful superhero. Never grow in power, yet he is vastly more popular than over the top superhero’s like Superman. Look how well spider-man does at box office compare to Elternals who are demigods.
What makes spider-man popular is ( other than he is relatable) is he use ingenuity to overcome the challenges and the villains are not just powerful bad people but each with their unique story.
The point I am making is, you can make an arpg keep engaging without induce power creep. Something like seaonal only gimmick like soul shard or ethereals are actually pretty good as long as they do not carry over like what happened to PoE.
Have a unique story every season that play over the course of a season. Something like fortnite where the world evolve over a season, so image the loot.
The DB effect is a thing devs have been dealing with for nearly 20 years. An upgrade needs to feel impactful for players to care. Something WoW devs ran into with raiding and why new tiers are so far apart from one another. Most would rather have new gear that felt more powerful than something similar that did something different.
As for Spiderman, he is one of the strongest Marvel Heroes. He just happens to be very smart
iron logic players coming back to play a game for bigger numbers
The MCU de-powered the heck out of Spiderman 
He’s actually a really OP hero.
In any case, I love him for the reasons you listed, not his power. Massive up-vote for power coming from ingenuity and creativity.
You’re right of course, but I remember that when I stopped PoE several years ago, my best char never even reached 60k DPS. He wasn’t optimised obviously but as I recall the good ones where around 250k at that time.
So I guess there’s been a lot of powercreep in-between, which is bad but not what one may remember about the game at first.
Also, I agree with you that hiding the damage numbers helps a lot. ^^ To be honest I can’t stand them in D3, even for crits, so much useless visual noise…
Actually I was thinking of weapons mostly, as they are the main source of damage, but I did mean +15% global increase. For other items I agree it can be less, like 3-4 times.
It also depends at what point we are on leveling. Between 1-15, it can be around +50%, 16-35 +25%, 36-50 +15% and beyond just +5%. As long as we don’t need to upgrade our weapon every 5 levels of course…
That’s good for those who like seasons/leagues, but for the others there needs to be something exciting too when a new expansion drops.
It doesn’t need to imply really huge increases in damage though, just an alternate system that brings useful new mechanics.
Yeah, I am talking about endgame. While scaling during lvling also matters, it doesnt matter as much tbh. If we go from 10 dmg at lvl 1 to 2000 dmg at lvl 45 (if we for arguments sake assume endgame start at lvl 45) or if we go from 10 dmg to 6000 dmg, eh, not really important (within limits of course, if we go from 10 dmg to 100,000 dmg at lvl 45, then it is still silly).
When you start from nearly zero, the very first points in skills, or picking up gear on a naked character etc. will of course have huge power jumps in %, so getting a 50% dmg jump from your very first weapon is not a problem.
But then, lets say we start at 10 dmg from your weapon, and then say we upgrade weapons at lvl 5, lvl 15, lvl 25, lvl 30, lvl 35, lvl 40, lvl 45, lvl 50, with some of the % increases you mentioned. So in the eexample you change weapon 8 times during lvling, for dmg gains (might change more than that for non-dmg gains too, like a weapon with a nice defensive affix or whatever)
10x1,5x1,5x1,35x1,35x1,15x1,15x1,15x1,15 = 71.7 dmg on the weapon at lvl 50. Even with those % gains between upgrades, the dmg does not get ridiculous. A lvl 50 weapon does not exactly have to deal 4000 dmg to offer even 15-50% dmg upgrades each time.
Please no! 
most optimal for weapon base dps is lvl x 0,5%-1% lets say lvl 1 mob/npc drops 1 handed hammer with 1-6 base dps so at lvl 50 mob/npc drops 50-300 ± and all happy in pvp and pve
What happens to a level 15 character fighting a max level character in such a scenario…?
In an ideal world, 6-7 lower level characters should stand at least a small chance against a max level character, with good balance.
Max level character, 100, should clean the floor with a level 15.
…actually, no.
Too small numbers make the game excessively hard, because difficulty is the sole difference between early game and late game, if numbers don’t scale much.
Yet, I prefer this over the alternative.
If we deal 5 damage at level 1 and 50 at level 50, with chance to hit, dodge, block, weapon block, feint (bypass block chance), block speed, attack speed, armor piercing, resistances, physical damage reduction…
it’s more than enough to make a significant and meaningful scaling experience.
It’d be perfectly viable for an RPG.
You’d have different weapons for different situations, and different armors for different content, swapping weapons for their damage types or attack speed before a quest…
Dungeons and Dragons grants a +5-10% chance to hit opponents per level, for warriors – while each armor tier reduces the chance to hit by 5% per tier, balancing it out.
As an action RPG, small numbers is less viable.
We’re more dependent on using different skills, not different gear, between areas and quests.
Easy solutions is having tiers, that have different level requirements for each tier, and/or different amounts of skillpoints required to unlock the next tier. You can grant partial bonuses for each point invested to make it matter somewhat.
…
People are missing that small, and large, numbers both are invalidated by monster scaling.
The core difference is how fast you can progress.
Going from 10 to 100 damage with monsters that go from 50 to 500 health is the same as going from 10 to 12 damage versus monsters that go from 50 to 60 health, for that character.
The experience is identical.
The sole difference is that the character could tackle that content earlier in the second scenario.
However…
Add combat skills…
Attack rating vs. defense rating…
10 damage and 75% chance to hit, and monsters have 30% chance to block versus the 50 health monsters…
And the player character has a defense rating that gives the monsters a 20% chance to hit and the character a 70% chance to block…
10 damage and 40% chance to hit, and monsters have 60% chance to block, versus the 60 health monsters…
And the player character has a defense rating that gives the monsters a 60% chance to hit and the character a 40% chance to block.
…combat is stacked against the player character.
All projectile spells should give monsters a chance to avoid the attack.
Based on their general dexterity.
Lower odds of dodging than melee attacks, but an odds, none the less.
Monsters dodging fireballs should be a thing.
And blocking a percentage of the blast.
AI should, ideally, make monsters avoid damage over time spells, and higher level spells be harder to escape.
Stuns based on damage dealt, or a form of skill rating – similar to saving throws – is ideal.
There’s so many bonuses for having tight damage numbers:
You can have 4 vs 1 PvP, with 4 low level characters versus one high level character – without the high level character one-shotting the low level characters.
You can allow speedrunning with excessive skilled players to play later content earlier, and actually struggle – because spells do not always hit, but player skill being able to outsmart the AI.
With high numbers and poor mechanics, like Diablo 3, you just get one-shot by always hit mechanics.
A compromise between mechanical hell and mindless grinding is probably necessary – but that compromise should be in the form of basic combat abilities being automatically assigned each class on level ups, and players supplementing these with their assignment of attribute points.
Like, a bonus to defense rating and attack rating and health and mana each level, and some attributes to further enhance the mechanics the players wants to specialize.
…
If you look at a list of the best RPGs ever made, it’s clear that – apart from JRPGs – they’re defined by low changes in numbers but meaningful mechanics to determine the outcome of combat.
D&D games like Baldur’s Gate II. ARPG games like Diablo 1, and Diablo 2 in Normal difficulty.
Never forget that Nightmare is the original New Game+ in Diablo 2, and it’s clear from the lack of scaling exploding and poison potions, lack of shrines and gems scaled for the content.
Nightmare and Hell are there because the game is too short.
Like Path of Exile, before the later expansions that got rid of the difficulties.
Going from 5000 to 5400 damage is exactly as ‘bad’ as going from 50 to 54 damage.
Going from 500 000 to 540 000 damage, the same.
Except, going from 50 to 54 is still far better than from 5000 to 5400, because the numbers are more relatable and ‘realistic’.
The core difference is that you’re leaving so much opportunity behind through excessive scaling.
You can never make early content interesting again, without also completely screwing over low level characters.
You can never add a new boss to an early area, that is possible for low level characters, but excessively hard, and still a challenge for high level characters.
Like, a hidden tomb in an early act with a boss that uses armor-piercing attacks, low attack speed, and low damage.
If you scale too hard, you drop a lot of content and return opportunities, or make them laughable.
Like, an early dungeon full of one-hit-killed monsters at medium character levels, followed by challenging content, that one-hit-kills low level characters.
…
Some mechanics are great for high+low level content.
Creatures with armor-piercing that have excessive attack ratings can deal stable damage to low and mid level characters just the same, and not be easy for high level characters.
Armor-piercing attacks or -100% resistance attacks or magical attacks that cannot be resisted can make bosses that are any-level-friendly, in a tighter damage/health system.
…
Tight and balanced mechanical systems with low scaling are simply superior to power creep systems.
You misinterpreted what I meant. I mean the relative difference in context of leveling, not exact number.
Also I greatly disagree with 2 digit as better. It’s just absolutely worse. To get 2 digit end value, you need to deal with decimals, as the 3rd and 4th position matters. It always matters. In any game at least the 1st 3 digit matters. 50.1 and 50.9 is 1.6% difference
The 3rd digit can represent up to 10% difference!
Any value after 4th is rounding off insignificant.
5045 is far more readable than 50.45.
No , very small numbers ( 2 digits) are terrible