Should it scale like D3; mobs get damage and hp increases only?
Should the AI become smarter; more skills added to their repertoire?
Attack modifiers? Like a fireball adds burning dot, etc.
Increase in champion enemies?
Combination of things?
Etc.
What would you want?
For me,
Just scaling mob damage/hp only is a very lazy and boring way to increase difficulty. Ideally, probably the most engaging way to do it for the players is to couple mob damage/hp increases with smarter AI and more skilled monsters.
Along with difficulty scaling, they need to come up with more interesting ways to challenge builds. They can do this with different end games types that incorporate different types of difficulty in different proportions. Some end game activities should test your builds raw power, others how you adapt to changes in enemy behavior, and other activities that have a mix of these.
D3 end game is GRâs. Farm gear/paragon to get more gear/paragon to farm more. If this was part of the game, it would be fine, but since this is the vast majority of the game, it gets boring incredibly fast. Set dungeons and challenge rifts were created to offset this and give players a more skill challenge, but, because of terrible implementation of them and lackluster rewards, they are for the most part ignored.
Hopefully in D4 they get it right. If they want a long term engaging game, they cannot simply dumb the game down to damage/defense. They need to create a robust selection of viable end games that challenge the player by using multiple ways of making the game difficult.
You should have to beat a difficulty to advance, just like D2.
the mobs should get a combination of AI, skills and attack modifier improvements so that it doesnât feel so linear and stale like it does now. Playing inferno lvl 1 feels exactly like lvl 69 or whatever number its at now.
When questioning, first look at diablo 2, and see if what diablo 2 did makes the most sense / is the most replayable.
This is why blizz gets so much crit bc they dont do step 1, or talk about it, they just do, and it seems to turn out like diablo 3 as if they are choosing the wrong game to mold after.
So in D2, i certainly donât know all, or near, but obviously monsters get hp, dmg, and gain modifiers or affixes or however you want to call it as difficulty increases. This is because the game has static difficulties, a huge yes, for games replayability / benchmarking if a build is âmetaâ or âgood enoughâ or not to âwinâ.
Notice how normal monsters in diablo 2 have like (i forget the exact rules) but like 1, 2 âthingsâ going on with them? âFire enchantedâ f/e. Then in NM, itâs upped, same with hell? Thatâs difficulty scaling. Adding a cold AoE that CCâs you, instead of like D3âs âgrand ideaâ of having exploding dot fireballs as this universal thing that doesnât even cc youâŚ
Immunities are this brick wall that in one way are terrible bc they force a gear check to overcome, but amazing bc they force A check in general instead of just afking hell bc your nightmare youtube videoâd build is so perfected via info share that it can handle half of hell on itâs own.
This is why a hard check is super big to âcreate a new gameâ in the final difficulty, to give it longevity the leveling process to give it depth, even if itâs âhunt for convictionâ or âplay sorcâ or âfind charges on weapsâ or w/e. Itâs something besdies âcontinue on with your build, not facing a new challengeâ.
So, im all for immunities, just not how they were done in diablo 2 as far as the pole vault to overcome it, there should of been more options but not too many more.
Obviously getting a higher up char into the game like a bot to delete the screen for you totally should not of been a way to âbeat the gameâ but it was 1999.
Adding affixes both offensively and defensively (like diablo 2 did it both ways) is critical.
For example, immunities (hard, not soft) are an offensive-defensive all in one thing. Bc that countess canât die to idk your blizzsorc or w/e sheâs immune to, you can die, bc, she is now more offensive for having such a good defense.
If that immunity was soft, it wouldnt be a offense, or a very weak offense giving her a few more seconds or a minute to survive to attack you. I think d2 upped the number of packs and such per difficulty, its been a few years since iâve played since life and 2020.
I do not like the idea of adding visual effects or adding new attacks to higher difficulties. D2 did not do that at all, and it seems cheesy that the monsters gain offensive abilities at higher difficulties, which takes away from the experience that the first difficulty is the same playstyle as the later ones, just with way more defense (which is offense).
Like monster count and better monster defense and better damage is the way, but not adding new attacks and such. Thatâs my personal opinion ofc, based off how D2 did it.
What would be really cool tho an exception is if in hell mode if they actually did static difficulties would be to have a cell phone pop up and be like the new ability, so like the countess gets an iphone 12 and takes selfies that shoot lazers behind her head that can kill you like the camera flash. That would be the weapon. Then you have to find a âblock buttonâ weapon to block her from texting you so that you can get in for the kill.
Like we need tech as weapons, and block buttons as defense, to get d4 up with the times of 2020. Lol.
For starter, remove the difficulty condition (normal, nightmare, hell, inferno) to finish the game multiple times to reach the endgame level.
Instead of simply increasing monsters stat, mob quantities, and add more affixes to the elite monsters, the game can add some restriction on the players as well.
For example:
Town portal is disabled in this Torment difficult dungeon.
The number potion you can consume/carry reduce to 4 instead of 16 or the cooldown of potion duration increase from 30s to 45s or 60s
Recovery item effectiveness reduce by 33%
Boss/elite/monsterâs attack telegraph indicator marker executing faster or their telegraph attack indicator marker will disappear after a second
If your character died two times, your equipment destroyed so render you helpless until you went back to town to repair.
And etcâŚ
Do you realise pretty much no ARPGs after D2 has immunities? And for a good reason. People just skip them in D2. Same with BS like thorns.
Even with game with resistance, people just spam longer to get the job done. Adding another skill to deal with resistance is almost often gimping your build.
I play all the big name arpg & never find resistance, let alone immunity in mobs meaningful in any way for gameplay. Its cool on paper only IMO.
I guess from the fantasy point, an ice golem should have cool resist & a lava hound should have fire resist, but if its me, the resistance wouldnât be anything more than 50%
Iâd prefer a combination of all 4
COUPLED WITH
lower-level versions of EVERY legendary in the game. Iâm sick to death of gating drops behind toon level.
The monster immunity and resistance only work on turn-based RPG game where your character can access to all elementals and can use them at will. For game like Diablo where the monsters spawn randomly with random affixes, it is really hard for Diablo character to cover all the grounds. This made that solo play is even difficult because you canât branched out your elementals too much or else, your character will be weak or mediocre in long run.
Elite packs in D3 used to have more affixes at higher difficulty, back when Infernal was the highest difficulty. In D4, I think additional elite affixes at higher difficulties would be a min.
Also, I would prefer to see an open world game in d4 with difficulty that scaled to your character level and instances (dungeons) where you could select the difficulty.
NPCâs that can die and respawn on a timer. This way packs of mobs can attack towns and not in the silly way where the town is immune to defeat.
Yes, even player guilds could mount attacks on towns and render such places their own (in terms of you eat dirt if you arenât part of the hostile group)
Iâd like to see more compelling combat than clickity click.
Tactical combat. We can start with strategic positioning. You have impassable terrain, that barbarians can leap over, sorceress can teleport over, perhaps druid can morph into something that flies. Thatâs a good start provided there is not a class that can simply auto-shoot arrows that ignore such terrain inequities.
If the âdifficultyâ part of the game is simply clicking, and an increased difficulty equates to simply clicking more often. Well.
Iâd probably lose interest in the game after the first run through of the campaign with each class available. I donât think even the most outstanding lore would be able to salvage that.
YES x 1000 - more densilty, more elites, more!
This. Weâre in the 2020s, not in the '90s. Simple skill rotation is not enough.
The could even make the AI self-improving. Imagine the following scenario:
Fallen shaman fires a fireball at the player. It is aimed at playerâs initial position, so one easily dodges that. After a few such misses, the AI will predict the playerâs movement and aim slightly ahead, forcing the player to perform more complex maneuvers or to change the tactic completely.
Also, make the AI work together against the player. HotS has proven it is possible.
Add some randomization on top of that and each battle would be unique, opposed to D3âs mindless grind.
All actions will be server-side, so I assume such complex behavior is possible to implement.
There should be some HP scaling, but not a whole lot.
Like maybe The highest tier of Key dungeons (10, 20 or whatever it is) have 100% more HP on monsters than tier 1 key dungeons.
Additional difficulty can be added through; having more monster affixes on enemies. Like maybe on tier 1 key dungeons an elite got 2 affixes. in a mid-tier they have 3 affixes, and in max tier they have 4.
New monster affixes could also be added. Bosses could likewise have more types of attacks. Though it should not be much. Dont hide the gameplay behind higher difficulties (same as with the AI stuff further down)
Monsters should definitely have resistances, to encourage multi-dmg builds. But never immuneties, as they only limit build options. On higher difficulties max enemy resistances could increase a little bit though. Like maybe on tier 1 dungeons, max resistance is 60%, but on highest tier, it might be 80% (the actual % should depend on how much dmg advantage a single dmg-type build has over multi-dmg builds of course, the goal is to make them equal)
As for better AI, monsters working together etc. It is great of course, but if it exists in the game, it should honestly be active in all difficulties.
One thing that should NOT happen on higher difficulties is increased density. That will only lead to dumped down combat. Make each enemy matter!
Infamous D3 Vanilla inferno had a nice feature to increase the difficulty: it added 1 more affix to elite group of monsters (from 3 on Hell to 4), a smart way to increase the difficulty, because you have to deal with one more dangerous obstacle and together they made a varied combat situation. It played great until mmo-ish âsupâ builds made it into the game to simply stand on place and overcome all these affixes instead of actually try to deal with them. The very direction was right, though.
Combination of things. More mobs per square yard but not needlessly insane numbers like D3 can get.
More groups.
Groups with increased variety so you have more than one thing to pay attention to and some thought put into which one dies first.
Increasing frequency of elites/champions. Increased amounts or increased effects(I like this one) on affixes.
I would add a nemesis like system.as you slay cannibals for example, you reach a threshold where they send an elite named after you. If you continue to do so the named enemies get more and more difficult.
But definately stay away from straight HP and damage increases alone. They should be there, again, not to the extremes D3 went.
See, I agree with no immunities, but disagree with needing the game to tell you how to play. If I want an ice Sorc, I shouldnât have to take any arcane or fire skills just because. People who want to play multi damage types will. But any notion that takes me away from building hiw I want to build should be avoided. Of course immunities are really the only thing that do that
I have no problem taking 3x longer to kill the ice king because he has 75% ice dmg resistance. Especially since keyed dungeons wonât be timed.
Agreed, you really shouldnât. That is not the purpose of resistances. Resistances is there to make it just as viable to play an ice/fire sorc as an ice sorc. => more viable options.
Gotcha. Think I just got hung up on the wording.
I got the impression that they were aiming along the direction of that there would be no highest tier. That there would always be a higher key, which awarded a better version of an identical item, and that would go on ad infinitum. Essentially paragon as it is now (conceptually) except transferred to itemization.
It is a grim omen. Alas, I digress.
Quality > Quantity. Yes! Nobody needs that eye sore lag inducing nonsense. 
Yeah, they claimed at Blizzcon that is how it would be.
Would be awful. Game-breakingly bad tbh.
It should definitely have a cap, and a fairly low one (no more 150 pointless difficulty levels).
With the exact same items available in all tiers, just different droprates imo.