fair point.
it seems like you agree that resistance is a good thing, 50 percent, anything, anything but 0 like im assuming? it is in diablo 3.
the point im making about immunities is it’s a big needed hell mode late game “change up” so that your nightmare build doesnt coast hell. Yea sorcs can kinda do that. But, you have to find like really good gear, to beat hell. Its a huge hurdle to overcome. You can’t really skip immunes in diablo 2 hell, like, i guess you can and have a horrible time not killing anything on a lot of maps, they designed the game that way, for example idk the farming ability has you hitting varied immunities so you can’t just stick to one ele, that’s why sorc was the work around.
What most ppl did was have a higher up level them through (or bot) to get higher gear by following bots, its super lame, but that’s what most and myself at one point did in d2. Or go sorc. Or, get gifted or via bot leech get hdin gear to magic through the ele immunes.
The point is, wouldnt you agree, that a big ‘final difficulty’ gear check should be there to force thinking, rethinking, and not just like half way paying attention to the game in the final difficulty? It’s almost like hell w immunites (assuming no bots no leeching from higher up chars) is a separate game, and that’s a very, very needed thing in an arpg.
Unless it throws away static difficulties.
Do you see my angle that a late game ‘game changer’ is super like mandatory to shake it up to make the item hunt way necessary at that point and that’s the whole point of the game? i agree immunities are a super simple and cheese way to do it, but without that i mean every NM build would coast hell and the game would be boring at the higher end. Cheese is better than not paying attention to your build and how it approaches hell mode.
I honestly want to see a linear difficulty increase.
IMO they should section out the world. Similarly to Diablo 2 and Vanilla WOW.
The main questline should take you from lvl 1-to-MAX and this should only compromise of say 25% of the total world. The remaining 75% should be all end game, max level content that constantly gear checks you.
Personally I am absolutely tired of ARPGs not gear checking anyone anymore. It is pathetic. Developers want the game to never be too difficult for casuals so its constantly scaling well below your gear. Get stuck in Diablo III? Why farm gear? just bump the difficulty down.
This is what im saying you need new barriers to overcome / gear to find / way to play. as you go. especially at the end.
D3 is like totally not that its just find big weap, rings, go, get gifted set, then like yea craft ancient weapon that part is a gear check.
D2 its like gear checking you each new act and such the scaling is sooo much more ‘this item can help me now’.
D3 it’s ‘wheres a new 2h axe’ or w/e.
whats the point of a loot game if there’s no or little or like 1-2 gear checks in the whole game. Its not fun cruising through the content when you havent even found really rare gear. The balance is way off in d3.
Increase enemy HP/damage is necessary as a way to require you to have better gear and higher levels (and skill). But it shouldn’t be all there is, unless we want a game that is purely about the grind for better items and higher levels.
Different enemies, smarter, new attacks etc from previously known enemies. I hope that these new group types have somethin cool with their combat. So for instance in the lower levels you can kind of brute force it, if there is a magic user/range unit/summoner you can run right up to them and kill first just by ignoring the rest. But later on they would be more dangerous and their large melee friends actively try to stop you, they could literally block your path, have stun attacks, taunts. Whatever it takes to make it so that you can’t just spend all game focusing summoners/glass cannons without a drawback.
I like the new or added attacks mechanism. Similar to WoWs mythic raids that have entirely new phases. Archers can shoot one are lower levels, mid range they can fire two or fire them faster. High levels they have elemental damage, cluster arrows, exploding, or what not.
Give it to me organically. The old repeat the campaign on a higher difficulty is boring, just increasing it like in D3, served it’s purpose, but wasn’t better. I have yet to see it done organically beyond level scaling. Which I don’t mind, I would just ask for certain dangerous areas with high level enemies. No matter what level you are that area will be 3-5 levels stronger.
Heck, give me wandering max level enemies(or boss powered at or neal level cap) in zones too. I just remember in EQ, there was this level 16 enemy in a level 6-9 area. Or Hogger, an elite level 11 and a level 8ish spot of the map.
Yeah, that is always nice. Encountering enemies you know you will need to come back for later. Makes the world feel more interesting.
Pretty hard to do that with lvl scaling of course.
Like in WoW raid bosses are always max level +3 or 5. Thise areas or wandering mobs could be max level or +3-5 to the player. Once max level all those would flip to +3-5 of the player.
But that would be a nice change other than champions and elites.
I really like that idea. You wander around comfortably killing things and all of the sudden this big beefy boi shows up who you not only can’t kill but you need to actively avoid and run away otherwise you die.
Difficulty scale and power creep depend each other.
The old D2 Itemization and associated char power scales much better compared to d3.
Reason is that D2 offers a combination of
skillable character talents and character stats
Items that support various aspects of the character
I would love to see such a concept in D4 with item power being capped and not increasing base stats at all, as this gives each char some boundary condition.
And having item damage being limited to something like 150 or 200%.
Hence I coul image that normal, nightmare and hell difficulty could be sufficient.
Mechanisms to manage Difficulty
Number of affixes for elites
Resistance: e.g. set one resistence to 95% (please no full resistences again) to force a more flexible gameplay
Option: Own Damage Penality for improved drop rate
Agreed. While I didn’t mind the power creep in D3, it’s a total blast seeing billions, trillions, and quadrillions of damage, that’s not what D4 is going for. I liked Shadout’s suggestion of capping the keyed dungeons at a certain point and no gear can go higher than what is dropped from there. I know they mentioned no cap, so my hope is that the gear drops are only a small enough increase that if you are on a +50 key the gear isn’t 50% better or more.
While you will still have an endgame power creep, capping the difficulty should provide relief fro that aspect. The D4 devs have stated they understand this problem, especially with the huge modifiers on sets. That is why we will see a 50/50 power split between gear and skills. This is a second tool to help.
Less gear slots is another way along with only having ATK on weapons. I think they understand the problems and have taken action to curb this by a lot.
One big issue is players. Seen in WoW, if a reward for doing harder content is not significantly better players don’t engage or rabidly complain. I’d like to think the mentality for ARPGs is different and can handle smaller increases as difficulty increases. Hopefully they don’t fall into that trap.
It is the job of the devs to not listen to players when they ask unreasonable things (Yeah, you can turn that sentence on me if you want… ^^)
Sure, people would complain if Key Dungeon 20 does not give better rewards than Key Dungeon 10, and only serve a bragging rights/leaderboard purpose. But if it results in a more enjoyable game, then Blizzard need to ignore those complaints.
As for WoW, afaik, WoW does exactly this with Mythic dungeons. The gear rewards stop at Mythic +15, even though you can keep going after that for leaderboards.
Haven’t noticed much complaining about that.
Also not a problem if people dont participate, since the content is optional. And since it is not unique content, but just scaled up content, very little development time was spent on something too few people experience (unlike early WoW raids etc.).
Well, considering that D2 is still quite popular it makes you wonder why nobody else has even attempted immunities.
I don’t always like to be smashing everything on the screen in two seconds like PoE or D3 in arpgs. At least in D2, you need one of 1-2 specific builds and high level gear and character to obliterate the screen instantly (or be in Nightmare with certain casters).
I would like D4 to have a normal, nightmare, hell mode that repeats the acts, more content like Diablo 2. Diablo 3 was more fun when nobody had legendary drops and people got their butts kicked in A2 inferno.
The type of difficulty that inferno had (straight up bigger numbers) and the lack of ways to progress (no path to gear that would enable a player to progress since the gear you needed to progress was only dropped in the areas you couldn’t complete without that gear) were a problem though. There wasn’t a spot like “The Pit” or “Ancient Tunnels” to run in Diablo 3 where people could farm, you pretty much had to go to the AH since there weren’t good options to farm some gear.
All of the gear just came off as rares that were all resist, damage, main stat, vit, armor then slightly higher numbers of those stats over and over. Itemization was a major problem in that it was frustratingly simple and arcade like as were the lack of skill or stat points (hence why the game is hardly an rpg). There were never times when you would think do I want to get this or that, it was just find rares with a combo of these affixes.
Furthermore, selecting just 6 skills and not having any monsters that need any certain tactics further contributed to the game being an arcade game. Too simple.