D4 Feedback - Bringing Back Organic Difficulty

General Discussion
1

One of the most disappointing aspects of Diablo 3 for me was how the game handled difficulty. Simply toggling a difficulty mode. I realize this was done in response to getting away from the normal, nightmare, hell progression of the previous game, but the difficulty scaling seemed very arbitrary and gamey. This post is designed to give feedback and encourage discussion about how to scale difficulty organically, not only in breadth but depth, in Diablo 4.

Difficulty Scaling
At present we’ve been told the max level is 40. This presents issues with difficulty scaling in my opinion. I agree the sooner we get into endgame the better, but I believe the endgame can be introduced before you get to max level. Suppose you finish the campaign at lvl 40 and that opens up the endgame systems liked keyed dungeons. Your level though still goes up to 100 and you still gain stats and skill points along the way, but the dungeons scale in weird ways at endgame. The shared world is always scaled to your level, but dungeon keys could roll at +1 to +5 the character level with more rewards for completing higher dungeons. This type of level scaling also allows for differentiated itemization and dropping of items. Reaching lvl 40 shouldn’t make every item in the game able to drop, but instead new tiers of items could drop from lvl 50, lvl 60, lvl 70, lvl 80, lvl 90 monsters and so on. This always gives you a reason to keep progressing your level after finishing the campaign.

Bring Back Gearing for Resistances
Gearing for resistances was essentially lost in Diablo 3. Resistances were simply a damage reduction stat and had no real cap. I hardly paid attention to them in D3. With hundreds of dungeons available to us in Diablo 4 I would like to see certain dungeons require the player to gear for resistance. This could be done through keying or in their base forms, but imagine a dungeon that suggests players have at least 75% cold resist (base cap level) and then as your progress in levels maybe you need +max resist because lvl 90 dungeons require 90% resist in one of several areas. Resist types I’d like to see: cold, fire, lightning, poison, shadow all at 75% resist max, with ability to itemize for +15% max resist up to 90% total resists. With the introduction of the armory in Diablo 3, switching between resist sets to take on specific dungeon challenges would be easy to do. This could also fuel the attractiveness of an MTX system that might give players access to more gear load-outs or stash tabs, etc…

Summoning Circles
Occasionally, while running dungeons players will run into summoning rituals. These summoning rituals can be completed by the player by adding in certain consumables. The player can make the boss or event summoned more complex by adding more rare or high level consumables. This would also give a natural way to introduce summonings to alternate realms (whimsyshire, cow-level, etc…) It would also give players a reason to farm areas of the shared world, or a particular dungeon for certain reagents to complete these summons. The summoning events themselves could drop rare items that could lead into an ubers type system.

Taking Cues From Breath of the Wild
As the Diablo 4 pvp system is clearly inspired by Division dark zones, I think the developers should look to Breath of the Wild temples for inspiration. I think there should be really difficult to locate puzzle dungeons in Diablo 4 (developers could really flex their secret finding muscles here and make it take quite some time for the community to find all of them). Finding these statically-located dungeons would feel great, but just because you find them doesn’t mean you can solve them just yet. Finding specific items or gaining specific skills from exploring the world would be needed to conquer these dungeons and these items needed would drop randomly. The reward for completing puzzle dungeons could be special one-time use item augments like imbues from Charsi, or glove/helm enchants from labs in POE.

Monster Traits
Diablo 3 created many awesome monster traits but the way they were implemented in Diablo 3 made them feel either completely unfair (can’t play around them) or something you didn’t really care about. First off, I love what I’ve seen with the small radial buttons below the names for the elites in the D4 footage that tell you what type of affixes the monsters possess. Some affixes I would really like to see retained or brought back.

  • Waller
  • Avenger
  • Electrified
  • Change fast to swarming - changes monster AI to try to surround the player.
  • Fire chains
  • Frozen
  • Jailer - change to bone prison (could have time to destroy the jail)
  • Cursing (casts curses on the player)
  • Resource Draining (drains player resource)
  • Molten
  • Corpse Explosion (love it, fear it, bring it back, make it hurt :slight_smile: )
  • Poison corpse clouds
  • Life leech, mana leech
  • Webbing
  • Stunning
  • Juggernaut
  • Fearing
  • Plagued
  • Reflect Damage (yes, I think there should be a reflect damage modifier for monsters, but it shouldn’t be on all the time and should be easily seen by the player)
  • Vortex
  • Frenzy
  • Modulating - the more you use a particular element the more the enemy becomes resistant to it.
  • Monster immunities - fire immune, lightning immune, cold immune, physical immune, shadow immune, poison immune, etc…

I think the last one needs a bit more explanation. Having monsters with immunities necessitates smart character building from players and I think in dungeons only (never the shared world) monster packs should have immunity types. This could be on the dungeon description so players can properly prepare, but each dungeon you explore at higher levels should be a challenge players have to mentally prepare for. An intentional consequence of this design decision would be to have players invest skill points in a skill or two (that maybe they don’t always keep on their bar, but could swap in) that they could use to defeat such packs. It would also make items with borrowed skills very highly sought after.

Lairs
Lairs are a merging of two ideas - player housing and wave-based siege defense. Imagine there are various areas of sanctuary that are instanced which can be cleared out by the player. These lairs can be cleared and claimed by the player as the player’s base of operations. POE has a similar system, but the twist here is that not only does the player need to claim their lair, but once claimed the player’s lair can be sieged by the monsters trying to get it back. These monster sieges would not trigger randomly, but rather the player would trigger them and control their difficulty - from within their home base. Similar to the summoning circle idea above, players could use certain consumables to trigger siege events. The higher the level of the consumables used and the more elaborate the level of the player’s lair, the more ferocious the siege on the player’s lair. This should be a very high risk / reward activity. You get one life - die and you lose the siege - and you have to pay a significant gold cost to repair your lair. But succeed and you can earn lair points toward outfitting your lair. Obviously trophies from the main world and MTX options could be used to fill out these spaces as well.

Just some ideas for creating more organic difficulty into D4. Thanks for reading.

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2

I never want to see permanent monster immunities in a Diablo game ever again. It was honestly a terrible experience and I’m glad that it is one of several mechanics that all the modern aRPG’s have avoided bringing back into the game.
I also hope they don’t bring back reflect, it’s never done right and it’s never a super engaging thing.

I am also really not a fan of gear swapping as a mechanic. The idea of having to swap stuff out just to handle a specific area works well for some games but it’s really not what I am hoping for from a Diablo game.

I also hope they can get out of the pattern of every character needs capped resists so that getting a capped resist might actually have a meaningful impact on how you play rather than being something that you just have to do or you simply die.

With all that being said though, I am also fairly critical of D3’s difficulty select. It too quickly turned from a way to select how difficult you want the game to be into a progression system where even the highest difficulty became “easy” as you progressed.

I hope there is a proper sit down and figure out how to do difficulty well, challenge key dungeons are certainly a part of a solution but I hope they can figure it out for the campaign more holistically. Blizzard likes to make all ‘content’ accessible to all players so this would indicate to me that they need to provide some good difficulty options to also hit the mark for Diablo vets.

3

If all you have to do is swap a gear set around via the Armory, how is that an improvement? It’s just more gear you need to acquire, but in the end doesn’t it from being just a damage reduction stat again.

Eh. Might be a bit too involved, depending on how many consumables, but we’ll see.

We do need some sort of world events though. As disappointed as I was by Magic: Legends, the one thing I felt it did right were the overworld skirmishes.

Diablo isn’t a platformer with a lot of world interaction. No thanks.

4

I get the hesitancy to go back to some monsters having immunity, but unlike in DII when you could just randomly run into a champion pack that had one of these traits and you weren’t prepared, with the way D4 is shaping up to be designed you can prepare ahead of time. I get having to have multiple sets of gear is not appealing to everyone, but there are better UI options these days for dealing with gear swapping.

Also, character resists being a thing that is super important to have capped is also something I think should be revisited. The main reason for this is to keep from having one shot mechanics be the only threat to player survival. We need the ability to have player health get chipped away more easily, players get potentially overwhelmed by being swarmed or CC’d. I think the D4 devs have moved in this direction also since I’m seeing limited means of life recovery so far. There needs to be a very careful consideration of life leech, defensive stat-ing and monster difficulty relative to gearing choices. Otherwise we end up with the POE/D3 difficulty curve of nothing can kill me, unless it one shots me. That is terrible from a gameplay perspective. It’s a tall task for the development team, but something they should absolutely be aware of.

5

I have a lot of issues with some of the suggestions here.

First, level scaling is THE mechanic that breaks organic difficulty, because your character is weakened by its levels instead of strengthened by them, making it entirely dependent on its items. If you have good luck with items, you’ll find the game temporarily very easy, and may have to manually increase its difficulty. If you have bad luck, you will need to lower it (and if it’s not possible, that’s basically game over, uninstall).
The advantage of non-scaling monster level is that you will find yourself advancing fast if the game is too easy until you find yourself at an area at your power, and slowly if the game is getting hard. A much more organic difficulty.

The idea of taking puzzle dungeons from BotW isn’t something that would go well with the ARPG system. First, because you absolutely cannot count on players having specific skills or items, as it goes contrary to the whole concept of making your own character. Second because you can’t have those temples giving anything worth the hassle as a one-off (because then if you don’t use properly, you’ve basically bricked something that will require you to make a new character to get again, even worse if you need multiples). There’s a reason why you get to do PoE’s labyrinth as many times as you want.

A lot of D3’s monster traits heavily take away from the game by making it more video-gamy rather than more immersive. Monster traits need to be reworked to make them not break immersion, or very little.

As for immunities, they can be put back, as long as the game doesn’t push players to specialize towards a single element (or, more precisely, as long as it doesn’t push players to specialize towards a numbre of elements lower or equal to the number of different immunities a monster can have). If the game does push towards such specialization, then it absolutely must not punish players for following the game’s incentives, so it mustn’t have immunities.

6

Monster immunities are terrible.
High resistances should definitely return however. ~80% single resistance on enemies in end-game would be fine. ~50% when double resistant.
Will be a big mistake if resistances dont return at all, they can help a lot to make multi-dmg type builds more viable. And make stuff like Rogues Imbue ability more significant.

As for difficulty scaling, please god no. At least make it brackets, so things dont scale to you all the time.

I very much agree that % resistances for players should return. It has its own issues, but it just works better than the alternative.
I might however cap resistances a bit lower. 90% is a lot. So still 70-75% cap normally, but only able to get to 80% with special gear, and maybe 85% in very rare cases (with significant loses in dmg potential).

The armory should never ever return tbh.

7

Summoning sounds fun to me. You could summon Acid Rain at Towns, or Storm etc. In Conan Exiles you can summon some Monsters what start destroying stuff.

This is cool stuff. Not that I know Diablo series so well, but if you could summon Angels and they start doing dmg to the mosnters?

8

To clarify, they are terrible when the game pushes you to specialize heavily.
Typically, if your character is expected to dish out 200 DPS to kill a mob, and you have the ability to either dish out 400 DPS fire or 20 (or even less) DPS cold, then immunities are terrible. If you have the ability to either dish out 300 DPS fire or 100 cold, then single immunities are okay. It’s a matter of not punishing a player for building his character the way the game incentivizes him to.

9

You are limiting build diversity. A single dmg type build is no longer an option.

10

I guess I can understand this point, but I’m left wondering what role itemization plays in keeping you alive if there isn’t some layered nuance to gearing for both survival and damage?

Furthermore, I’d love to hear player’s opinions on whether or not difficulty should come from gearing requirements, monster behaviors/affixes, combinations of both, or something else. Is your preferred play at endgame a war of attrition where you need enough defense/offense/resource to outlast the monsters, an arms race between player and monster where you have to keep them cc’d and controlled or they kill you, or blow them up instantly before they kill you, i.e. screen clearing as fast as you can?

What do you think about having penetration stats that reduce monster resists (even if immune) so you can be more effective with that single damage type if you prefer to play that way.

I don’t think I was asking for monster levels to scale to the player (except I think you’d probably have to do that in the shared world), but in ENDGAME dungeons I’d love to see them randomly generated at levels above the player +1-+5. That way some are much harder than others difficulty wise. I was more or less looking at how the difficulty scales in the game and laying out some options for scaling it that aren’t just pick a higher rift or pick a higher difficulty setting, i.e. very gameified system imo.

I’m not really in favor of level scaling to the player level either, but if the decision they’ve made is for the game to have a shared world with a nonlinear campaign, I don’t see any way around it, so I was trying to give suggestions while working within that reality. I’d love to hear suggestions for avoiding it altogether given the game design.

Fair enough. The reward idea is probably not a great one - you are right, but I still think there is room for puzzles in an ARPG.

11

I highly disagree with this. The Journey is half the fun. End-game is great, but if the journey is not fun, replaying the game is not fun, then you are left with end-game grinds for years. While I loved finding the best loot in D2, I also loved starting over, even if it was my 1000th sorceress.

Difficulty I think could be two settings through the main campaign. Easy for people who don’t want a challenge and want to have fun. Hard for people who know how to play these games and/or want a challenge. Could be a difference of scaling enemies lower instead of higher as I am sure we will see at least some scaling, given the open world design. The difficulty differences should correlate to loot you find. You should not be able to find higher end loot in easy. I am not saying don’t have any uniques on Easy, I am saying higher item level uniques simply should not be possible to find, and the same goes for any other high end items. Players can still find good items and uniques, just not as rare/powerful of items.

Once you beat the game, there could be an optional third and highest difficulty that makes the whole world much harder and all feel like end-game, though the toughest challenges reside in the keyed dungeons that offer the best chance at the rarest rewards, which should be fairly rare.

Something along these lines would be nice. You must reward harder difficulties and/or tougher challenges. Not with just 1 more unique drop, but with higher end items that cannot be found on easier difficulties/easy areas.

12

This is why I suggested that they not have lvl 40 be the highest level because it forces endgame to be earlier. I do think being able to start working on endgame systems like the keyed dungeons is fine starting at lvl 40, I’d still like to see the leveling journey and exploration of the world continue beyond lvl 40 (I suggested all the way up to lvl 100, with staggered drop tiers beyond level 40). I agree with you basically that the journey is super important and should be incorporated into the endgame system they design somehow.

13

It’s almost the same thing; D2 creates space by penalizing you at each difficulty and D3 doesn’t cap it because difficulty scales so high. In D3 it might feel lost somewhat, because int characters hardly stack it but that’s part of their optimization routine thanks to abundant inteligence they got via power creep. Back in D3 classic, previous of Reaper of Souls, Intelligence characters were stacking resistances as much as Strength characters because main stat weren’t widely available at high ranges per piece in itemization.
No matter the installment if you neglect resistances, you can get one shot at Hell or even at T16 if you’re not paying attention. I think you’re complaining about power creep here instead of resistance stacking in particular.

14

I think you are correct in saying power creep is the ultimate culprit here. The thing I’m wrestling with coming out of D3 and going into D4 is how a player should approach gear given the challenges the game presents. In D3 the answer was almost always main stat, crit, crit dmg, attack speed, with optional stats depending on item slot. This was only the case though as the game pushed you toward extremism at end game where your only viable answer for pushing higher GRs was finding more ways to pump damage. There was no balance here. Only one way to itemize was viable. In D4 my hope is that the game is difficult enough, slowly paced enough, and does not have power creep, so that there is a mixture of itemizing for stat-ing, utility, defense, and offense that is needed. This is my #1 most requested feature for the developers to get right for D4 because without it the game becomes very stale for me.

15

PvP will give them a limit to restrict the player power, no one can promise if they ain’t gonna break it later on though. Brawl on D3 was an after thought, and treated as such because that’s what you get when you water down the whole genre; a treadmill.
No one can be sure if developers gonna cave in later down the road or not to turn D4 into another treadmill. Indicators are positive, as in PvP will force them to keep things mild enough. I still wouldn’t keep my hopes high when endgame is about a Greater Rift wannabe system and they can put it on a pedestal easily by neglecting everything else.

Some fans think themselves as the authority to decide what fits in the genre and what doesn’t. These same fans talk about “competitiveness” in ARPG but when you mention PvP, they start hissing or claiming it’s not competitive because it doesn’t have any leaderboard, like it can’t apply; MMORPGs have PvP leaderboards. To add; fun you have from the game doesn’t have to be competitive.
I trust PvP balance to keep things limited and easier but again no one can promise anything, if developers tend to not keep their stance on the design. Looking at the audience they got their statistics from, I think it’s a miracle they aren’t keen on copying D3 from bit to bit to repackage it as D4.

16

I don’t think it should exist. It somewhat defeats the purpose of having the resistances in the first place; as in, encouraging builds with multiple dmg types.
Reasonably balanced resistance numbers means single dmg and multi dmg builds can both be viable.

17

Ok, so what I’m hearing from people so far on the topic of resists.

  • Monsters shouldn’t have immunity, but it’s ok if some monster packs are more resistant to a certain element type than others. For example, a monster trait of freezing, where the monsters have a higher chance to apply chill and freeze to the player and in turn have up to 75% resistance against cold attacks might be ok?
  • Players having to meet certain resistance thresholds for content is ok, but not if becomes a chore to have to constantly switch gear.

How would we feel about an ice cavern as a keyed dungeon that has a persistent cold damage effect while players are inside the dungeon. Or about an end game zone in hell that requires a decently high level of fire resistance (~75%-90%) to mitigate persistent fire damage. In other words, make the environments be more threatening to necessitate resistance (since it can be known and prepared for ahead of time). Whereas to negate monster attacks you need a lower level (~60%) of all around resistance that you wouldn’t be forced to swap out gear for when you encounter them. Just trying to feel out ways for making how you stat resistances matter in the game.

18

I would say all end-game should be balanced around having more or less normal resistance soft caps (~70% or whatever it is). Going somewhat above that soft cap should be possible, but not needed. Going above the soft cap should be a significant tradeoff between DPS and survival for your build.

As for frost or fire themed dungeons etc. I think it would be better of such challenges more directly affected gameplay. Maybe you take more and more frost dmg over time, and need to find safespots (bonfire etc.) to reset the dmg increase. Most safespot might be heavily guarded so if you just rush toward one, you might get destroyed by all the mobs you gathered. The cold dmg could maybe be unaffected by resistances, if the goal is to enforce the gameplay change regardless of gear.
Or a “the floor is lava” dungeon, where you take more dmg if you stand still.

In general, Blizzard should just go all in crazy with key dungeon modifiers tbh. Create a lot of diverse challenges.
Also, do something like:
Key dungeon has 3 modifiers; 1 is visible on the key, the other 2 are only shown after you entered the dungeon. So you can prepare somewhat, but still got RNG that you need to respond to.
And enemies should still be diverse and random enough that you will encounter fire dmging, and fire resistant enemies in a frost cavern etc.

Might also split the modifiers in categories. Each dungeon has one from each category.
1 modifier changes the “theme” of the dungeon. Like the frost cavern, or the floor is lava examples (which are just examples, no need to nitpick them endlessly :P).
Another modifier changes the “goal” of the dungeon. Like, kill 3 enemy leaders. Save 2 hostages and escort them out. Fight off increasingly difficult waves of enemies. Find 3 secret areas in the dungeon. Find the broken heater in the frost caverns. Or whatever.
And the last modifier is enemy related. Like all enemies in the dungeon have more fire resist, a speed bonus, reflect, a slowing aura etc.
Only the “theme” modifier is revealed before entering. Then make sure that you cant easily farm keys, and that the dungeons are rewarding enough, so you will still want to do the ones you are not optimized for. Maybe add some short term penalty debuff if you leave a key dungeon unfinished.

19

Resistances should definitely be important for us and enemies. The only major problem I had with D2 resistances is the insane level of immunities in Hell. That doesn’t mean you couldn’t have some very high resistances, but you should always be able to deal damage to them, even if minimal. Then if you have the right gear/build you can lower that so you can actually do decent damage.

It was too much have 2-3 immunity monsters that you were nearly helpless against. But having enemies be 90% immune and being able to bring them down to 50 give or take depending on gear/skills, that seems good to me.

20

I think immunities would be fine if they don’t limit the ways of breaking them to simple debuffs. An immunity effect could be ignored for a fraction of time when monster staggered in a certain way or recovering from multiple hits.
If a Hellcat ate duo shot fireballs mid air while jumping, then its fire immunity for the second damage source could be ignored as its hit recovery animation will be canceled mid-air. If some Gargantuan got frozen encased in ice, staggered by some spell like stacked Frost Nova, then max health damage will ignore its cold immunity.

I think immunities should be broken for a single target if player knows how to; such as hit stacking and synchronizing their attacks. The only exception to this immunity breaking might be bosses as they aren’t supposed to get broke down easily and might be immune to such stagger or hit recovery.

Also immunities in D2 weren’t as bad as people make it so. It just a matter of weapon swap and your one elemental caster can be a semi-combat with mace and shield or at least lay out a Lower Resist curse with a charged wand. It’s natural your power trip will get halted somewhere, limited difficulty scale only gives so much space to improve it; being shaken out of comfort zone keeps the player going. That tickles their challenging nature.