Is the difficulty of the endgame a matter of getting good at playing or is doing higher greater rifts an issue of doing rifts until you have gear good enough to do the higher rifts? Is there much strategy involved with pushing to higher greater rift levels? I raid in WoW and was looking for a solo game with challenging endgame (not necessarily just grind, but something you can “git gud” at) - is D3 good for this?
I wouldn’t call it impossible hard, but rather difficult for casual players to clear GR150 solo.
If you have a static group, clearing GR150 as a group will be easy due to team synergy as long as you are willing to put in some effort.
I think it would better if you go to youtube and search for D3 GR140+solo and GR150 team clear video to see whether it is something you are looking for.
And yes, it requires grinding as you need to level your paragon level to clear higher GR on solo.
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Gear and Paragon will only take you so far. You still have to get good at playing.
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In way D3 is very liberal. If you see the endgame as where you struggle to finish a greater rift in time, the experience is almost about the same whether you struggle in a GR 90, 110, 130 or higher or in between. But there are strategies that you have to use when your hero’s own damage and toughness alone isn’t enough to clear in time and get it done. When you have good gear, with good stats and affixes, augments, gems, the “right” skill and passives and know how to use them going higher and higher in GRs also means “fishing” for good maps, monster types, density, pylon spawns etc. Fishing also ultimately means leaving and restarting games several times.
Some of the content creators for D3 like Raxxanterax, Wudijo and others have youtube videos about that. You’ll usually see players setting new personal records being a good deal behind on the timer in the GR untill they get a group of champions and elites close to a useful pylon and then get the needed progress.
This also.
Even with the best / ultimate gear equipped, GR140+ still can easily 2-4 shots your character if you are not careful or use the mitigation ability in time to increase your survivability.
You can’t really get good at playing Greater Rifts without playing Greater Rifts. So yes. You have to jump that hoop if you want to enjoy endgame as nothing can prepare you for it. Luckily Greater Rifts have separated into tiers so you don’t have to worry about it.
Repeating Nephalem Rifts is just one aspect of the progress, where you optimize your gear to its finest and stock keys while doing so. When low Greater Rifts don’t offer loot drops as much, repeating Nephalem Rifts is a way of acquiring some proper items. But that’s it.
Since Greater Rifts are always random, adaptation required to figure out what sort of venture you’re in for. Builds have different playstyles and get punished at varying depths when failing to juggle their skills properly. Each build have very limited space to include wild card skills and can get countered hard by some elite affixes or at really high tiers, plain monster classes themselves.
At each Greater Rift attempt, you’ll have a random overlay of dungeon tiles which you can easily memorize as it uses procedural generation, and a combination of monsters from different acts. Monster density and weighted types will differ at each gameplay as well as Pylon placement that you need to hit certain progress thresholds to reveal and adapt for once you activated them.
Grinding is part of the process still, while paragon levels offer a way to grow in power for you to clear higher tier content, after a long while of repetition their effect would be considered small enough to only diminish bad randomization.
That doesn’t exactly mean you need tons of Paragon levels to “git gud” but it’s an almost guaranteed way to diminish fishing requirement for layout-monster combos you come across in Greater Rifts. As for skill portion of the game, it’s dependent on the build’s gameflow. Developers always keep statistics and gameplay for average low and highest interaction needed for a build and scale its power according to that.
So if you care for skill play I can tell D3 has skill play. What you won’t like maybe the jarring effect of the builds due efficiency and rinse-and-repeat nature of the gameplay but I guess you’re familiar with this since you play World of Warcraft, another Blizzard title. Their style never really change. Timesinks and ever rising plateaus to keep the player busy.
For further information I suggest you to hit up maxroll dot gg site to see for yourself.
https://maxroll.gg/resources/greater-rift-explained
The strategy to push high GRs isn’t really complex, one needs a few things as already mentioned.
- Proper gear and skills choices, meaning a good build.
- Paragon, it gives more power and survivablity.
- Skill, to efficiently use the build.
- Proper rift conditions, meaning correct monster types, tilesets, pylon locations, etc.
While points 1-3 determine the general GR range which one can achieve and one can control, it’s the point 4 where things get complicated. One can not directly control the conditions he/she gets and those conditions can make huge differences in rift clears. Clear times can easily vary by several minutes depending on the rift conditions.
When people try to really push to the top, they might burn through hundreds of rift keys just to get one single clear, fishing for those absolutely ideal conditions.
D3 is quite challenging in the endgame. But in principle it’s unspeakably boring if you don’t want to play a sports game.
And then D3 is just bad, precisely because it doesn’t serve the game itself.
But you’re welcome to try your hand at the endgame, and it also builds on each other. Better items = better rifts = better items.
It doesn’t take me at all, so I actually gave up on it very quickly.
I thought I was getting a great RPG and I got a tutorial and then they wanted me to hunt numbers.
Whoever likes it will be happy. As an RPGler it is just unspeakably unsatisfying and uninteresting.
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Don’t think I’ve ever played an ARPG where the focus wasn’t on the “Action”.
I have seen some of GR150 videos. And I can say this: I won’t be able to do those moves, not even to save my life. Yes, the players in those videos have uber gears, 5k or even 7k paragon. Still, the way they play, man… a casual player like me will never be able to duplicate that.
That is why some build guides should be taken with a grain of salt, because they require a lot of hand-eye coordination to be successful, e.g., any build with Convention of Elements.
I wouldn’t say any build with CoE. In most builds one can ignore CoE cycles in general gameplay, it’s only when maximizing the build’s potential the timing becomes important.
Of course there are and have been builds that really require exact timing of skills, CoE rotations and others. One of the more infamous examples must be the Bazooka Wizard, one really needed to time everything correctly or it didn’t work. Timing was so crucial that it was borderline mandatory to use macros which is of course cheating. Playing without macros was certainly possible but really skill demanding due to extremely precise timing requirements.
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It’s not really that hard, just take a bit of time trying to get used to it at the cost of maybe not completing a few GR’s/taking longer to complete and you should get it. I used to not play around it at all until this time last year. You start getting a feel for how long the rotation takes and how it works in conjunction with your spells. And you don’t need to memorize the whole rotation of elements, I just remember which one is before the one I need.
Some builds are quite easy to do it with. If it isn’t reliant on some big CD spell for it’s damage window it is basically just pull monsters, start getting into position when you see the element before yours coming around and right before it does cast some defensive spell you might have (if it isn’t up all the time anyway) and make sure to pew pew for those few seconds then do it all again. Don’t worry about hitting every single rotation or about doing it all perfect, it comes as you get used to your build.
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Its as hard or easy as you want it to be. Every season there are a few overpowered builds. Stick with those and its easy peasy.
It depends on your goals too. Solo, multi.
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Depends what you mean by end game. If getting to GR 150 is that, there are only so many builds that can do it before X paragon (where X exceeds 2k). So, by necessity then, any other build is either much harder to do or virtually impossible.
If you mean farming T16 and GR100, many more options are available with some builds being much easier than others - rending whirlwind, for example, is easier than bone armor poison (Inarius.)
Completing a season is a fairly mindless thing. So, if that is end game, you should be able to do it under 4 days, even if you only play 3-4 hours each day. Less if you use certain abuses.
I would say GR 150 is end game. Solo you need years of paragon points. A good build (most all have been nurfed to hell. In group you can do it if you find a good group and you play something like Z-DH. Good luck to find that group.
Probably saying “any build with CoE” is an overgeneralization. Still, I haven’t been able to utilize CoE to the level advertised by the build guides. So, yeah. I keep CoE in some of my builds but it’s more like “a big damage bonus once every 16 or so seconds,” and not as a core mechanic of the build.
Well, my attitude with every game I play is “I’ll take what I can get.” So, if I enjoy a build, I wouldn’t worry about it not getting past GR100, for example. I have a PoJ-monk and a GoD-DH to play at higher tiers. Boring but efficient killers. And then there’s the Captain America-Sader, who is not very strong but very enjoyable to farm T16 bounties. In short, I play builds that I find enjoyable, at the difficulty level that I find enjoyable.
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Yes, of course, aRPGs are designed much more for constant combat than any other type of role-playing game.
That’s also the meaning of the aRPG genre.
But that doesn’t mean that this fight has to be particularly action-packed.
That’s exactly the big problem today. Everything has been overdone, weakening the game itself and not making it better or keeping a solid standard.
D1 is also an aRPG because the focus is on sustained combat, not a point and click adventure.
However, D1 had an absolute atmospheric presence, but was reduced in terms of action, pacing and overload.
It beat almost all other Diablo sequels in terms of atmosphere.
So you have to differentiate here what you mean by action in an action RPG.
I understand an aRPG only as a greater focus combat, less adventure game style, conversations and single player role-playing elements.
The a in aRPG does not mean that the action of the fight itself is totally exaggerated and overdone and made faster.
In truth, this is a mistake and does the game no good as an RPG and comprehensively weakens it in the end.
Just not to simply skip everything, but to experience the moment more, by throttling the excessive speed, action and more hardness and to convey each mob more present for the SPieler, than to overload the screen with enemies that have no return value, makes after the aRPG so much better and more valuable.
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I think that is the best way. I have been rotating between every class for a while now, deciding around season end which one I am going for next and not thinking about the strength. Just so happened that 3 of the last 4 seasons I coincidentally decided on the one with the strongest/one of the strongest solo push builds of the patch.
Just because you raid doesn’t mean you are good at it. Are you at the top of the DPS list? Are you main tank? Are you healing main tank group? Or are you a zergling?
End game is as challenging as you want it to be. If by end game you mean climb the leaderboard to the top, then its very difficult. I guess you just have to decide what endgame is for you. For me, its completing a build that I am happy with and enjoy playing. Of course I try to complete the highest GR level I can, but ffs, its a game. If I am having fun, that is the endgame for me.