Gentlemen,
We currently have a somewhat reasonable endgame for an ARPG look game in scaling GRs based on time. However, the item hunt is somewhat lack luster, as us the uber experience. Any thoughts?
For a PvE-only model with no real trading and impractical PvP, you can’t hope to expand beyond a repetitive time trial or a hamster wheel model for an endgame. When you can target items instead of completely random drops, you can plan things throughly for human interaction.
When you’re stuck with PvE only model there’s not much you can do but try to expand the game’s life span with tricks like that.
You can find infinite amount of items with magic find increased up to eleventh degree, which 99% of them would end up being trash with stat ranges not meeting your expectations.
Even when you have the ultimate amount of magic find (999% or whatever), you will not find that one ultimate item. You know why? Because if anyone could gear up in a whim you’d simply remove the struggle or purpose to play the darn game at the first place.
But what if you can get 1/1000 perfect item every time? That ain’t gonna happen by a bell curve design that would be called upon if this were to apply. When you determine a new norm for item quality, anything below will automatically become trash. Hoping every item to be perfect is just homogenizing it and removing the meaning of smelting items.
If gearing up perfect items were to be easier, then game loses its purpose to teach you something or mess up its own reward mechanism and beats any sense out of itself.
When you create such distinctive qualities between items like ancient and primal, a small amount of playerbase will always struggle to find just one high quality item with its ever growing rarity while trash keeps piling up at their stash and never be contempt with what they have.
Itemization with such scaling and stat growth was a mistake, yet guaranteed primal drop is used as an allure for attending to every season for players out there with gambler’s fallacy. Whenever you grew tired of it or burnt out, you can simply give a break but you’ll be back anyway.
Game doesn’t try to endear itself to become more than what it is, and what it was. By design ARPGs are always about a very limited and destricted design; clicking away at a screen to kill non-player enemies.
When you put it through this narrow description, getting stuck somewhere is inevitable as combat pace grows further with progress and bots push their presence. Layers of randomization only made the game somewhat intriguing but also laid a linear path for progress.
What developers did was trying to curb down bots’ efficiency by making the combat faster to the point of a human eye would require a complex filtering and evaluation of the moment to endure the high tier trials.
This worked, but as a result it made the challenge rather repetitive and tied to randomization because what other obstacle can make this progress growth non-linear? Who can guarantee what bots can and can not do in the future for gathering easy rewards?
Creating good items to answer and adapt different skipped trials? Forget about that. Who in their right mind have time for it? Creating an algorithm to remove each and every skipped GR outlay for players to have comfort? Then where’s the struggle and obstacle in the progress? Where’s the filtering for bots to confront and waste time?
They removed the campaign progress from the game flow already, why take measures to remove 50% of content with dungeon layouts and monsters just because players don’t like it?
Now that my rant is over… Let’s see…
Intentional with already limited item roster with 90-99% of items are useless for the class you’re playing; as each class has their own best items served on a golden platter already. Anything you deem useless becomes salvage material for recycling.
Game supposed to funnel you to Greater Rifts, not enable you to hang around for farming 0.022% chance primals by one shotting every mob on screen easily. You can do both when you hit up GRs anyway as items simply rain when you kill Rift Guardian. You can’t possibly beat the challenge provided of GRs after this hour.
Ubers won’t be any harder nor have any meaningful reason to farm them beyond getting a good hellfire amulet. Getting a perfect HF amulet is not entirely something you can aim for in the game.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1bM1ZcibaPmjqyxVM-ypgIXaimWuGCs1rbKsFND1hpUs/edit
Example: Obtaining a Hellfire Amulet with crit chance, crit damage, a certain elemental damage, a slot and a desired passive (assuming 19 passives for the class, e.g. Barb, DH). … 1/238.71
Meaning that on average, one out of about 17,262 crafted Hellfire Amulets will have two perfect primary affixes from {crit chance, crit damage, element} where element is one specific element you desire and a useful passive.
I’ll go back to my rant with this. You’re struggling with randomization in a game where the biggest challenge would supposed to be killing machine controlled non-player enemies. You go through a power trip just to falter infront of bad randomization that goes layer after layer. That’s not something player has to deal with as it’s just plain bad game design. Itemization and item progress supposed to have some depth, not the randomization behind it.
If you want an endgame model after most of the classes capable of reaching GR150 with different builds gradually; you have to turn your head to the PvP model for creating another challenge and ways of making this now obsolete model work. There’s nothing else beyond GR150 scale for PvE and all the upcoming update scope are smaller than you hope it to be.
In stuck up PvE only model, you can not hope to surpass time trials of Greater Rifts be it combat pace or the challenge provided. Because we all known developers will work slow while deciding which build requires and worthy of being elevated up to GR150 like that.
With itemization curtained beyond layers of randomization, there’s little to no sense at seeking perfection from item hunt, neither there’s any point at prolonging it. At least not with the current model where character is deemed worthy with only one layer of equipment with shallow systems.
Because believe it or not, variable combinations won’t work in your favor when you have more magic find by the word of math and any sense of balance. Item hunt is cut abruptly, because any near perfect item is actually fine enough to tackle any challenge ahead and only augments matter after a while.
There’s no point at seeking Primal items or prolonging the item hunt at all. Each character gets their fair share from smart rolls and get their class related item drops only. Handling out primals for free, won’t make players play this game more either to reflect upon quarterly reports.
Itemization has its gaps and they have to keep it for a sense of rewarding and allure. When everything is randomized player can not control anything either
You can’t beat the math unless you’re investing real money in this. Realize you’re playing a restricted genre and that has been this way for years and perhaps years to come. I don’t think they are any willing to change things up after 8 years of development. They’re stuck right here and update scope won’t be further than balance tweaks for bringing new ways of tackling GR150 with different builds.
There ain’t gonna be a PvP model where you can quench your thirst for further challenge while developers are deciding worthy builds for GR150. Sadly, developers are not willing to give you any new item systems or equipment layers to give you any incentive for a meaningful item hunt.
I played Diablo 3 on HC. Reason why I left was because I had to play too cautiously, the risk of losing it all was too high. I think stuff like this needs to be taken care before endgame. They need to look into game itself before endgame, imho.
Yeah. 1 extra life could be what this game needs.
You can’t be for real but whatever… Why are you playing hardcore if you can’t take the idea of losing your character in the end? Second, do you think there’s any challenge in securing your items when your character died once? Perhaps you answered this question a thousand of times but I wanna hear it.
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Diablo 3 didnt have anykind of endgame at launch. I thought to go with HC as it was more exciting and trust me it was. But if they add edngame, they gotta make changes.
And you’re having that excitement. If you were to really not okay with it you’d be playing softcore. Here’s an idea; just play softcore and delete the character after death once you secured your loot. Losing a character is just part of the learning experience, not something you supposed to mourn about.
It will develop way slower for anyone’s taste I believe. They removed the game from Classic Games team for no reason but I still can’t see what they can come up with when player progress is that deep into the GR scales.
Well, ultimately its Blizzard’s call.
Meh.
The timed trial is one thing, but there’s other things to do. Just look at Grim Dawn’s Crucible. Level-based with activation totems, elite fights, nemesis fights, field effects, etc.
Challenge Rifts are also a good concept. It was just implemented very poorly in D3. I’d love a CR where everyone’s build was the same and the goal was too see how far you could push it in an endless setting. And if builds end up having synergies, you could do multiplayer-based combo builds with the same goal.
Then you can just have nutso modes, like starting with an elite pack with a set amount of affixes… then you keep increasing the number of elites and how many affixes they have, either in waves or via an expanded map setting.
Then you can have your simple boss/Uber run as well.
There’s all sorts of things that can happen to keep the experience varied in the endgame. We just got the laziest one in timed trials… and never got anything else.
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At this point in D3’s life, Blizzard would do better off by putting it on Life Support and shift resources to work on a sequel that addresses the current issue. Better yet, make a mobile version to ties us over until the sequel is complete. (Just, don’t announce the mobile game at a PC only gaming crowd)
No thank you. Many of us invested alot in this platform, and hate gaming by phone.
It seems like it’s just Greater Rifts with a determined algorithm to make challenge really grow in difficulty instead of tossing you up to a random wall. In Greater Rifts you can find ever growing tiers just like levels and increased hitpoints and damage per tier. Just they’ll be at a total random layout on things that mattered with no way of janitoring the bad RNG out.
I don’t think adding more gimmicks to Greater Rifts, would make it something else other than Greater Rifts though. All of those features are there to curb down bad randomization. If they wanted to curb down randomization they had plenty of ways other than adding more modifiers and gimmicks along this 8 years.
Sorry, too much work for developers or to tell you their favorite way of down-playing your enthusiasm; “it’s too complicated for new players”.
They don’t care how poor it is. Game pace is made for casual time sinks; it’s built upon it. Entire game’s flow is 15 mins of farming sequence and rinse and repeat. Any demand of some challenge or team work is just asking to “waste” time which would drive away casual player base.
D3 team shown small glimpses of what they can do but main farming gameflow never climbed above time sinks.
CR system is currently picking one of the successful runs from the system for you to replicate with the same equipment and layout setup. You’re talking about creating pre-determined setups for 4 players by developers’ hand and unleashing them upon a seemingly random environment.
You can’t really playtest or create a static environment if it’s ever growing further up to 150-200 floors with complex dungeon seeds. This would take months to release one of these dungeons with playtesting. You ought to create an algorithm or add modifiers just like in Grim Dawn and PoE, so players wouldn’t feel ripped off or unlucky compared to others.
That’s completely changing how system worked and there’s this issue of rewarding this task if we’re talking about an evergrowing dungeon.
As far as the “synergy” goes either you’re talking about a total overhaul or debuffs of increasing the damage incurred by target else mass crowd controls. Also mind you, there’s a huge “if” at the start as classes may need gameplay or be pre-determined to create certain synergy loops.
You won’t find any synergy beyond debuffs and zdps just like in an MMO game. Sadly game engine of D3 is not that good to handle projectile collisions like Diablo Immortal. That’s abit beyond of creating a whole different matchmaking system for PvP due to power gaps. Actually, you know, I think they’re equal in priority list…
Perhaps, but this also may halted short because of elite effects filling the entire screen after a while. As your progress would be nor eye catching, neither fun to play as you encounter 6 or more elite groups at once.
Because itemization is linear, you shouldn’t hope to get rewarded any better. Ubers are easy to rinse and repeat because as I quoted a huge google document above, the chance of you getting a almost perfect HF amulet is very slim and you ought to get a lesson in avarice.
If you can find other possible rewards offered by Ubers without making them high motives, turning them into challenging enemies would have a point. Otherwise, you’re just making people throw themselves at quadrillion health double bosses for crafting a single amulet.
A personal view but I think in my own humble opinion the backlash wasn’t entirely about showing a mobile game after gathering PC players to a convention miles away from their home.
U.S was rather questioning and banning Chinese mobile phone companies at that time as NASDAQ was having a bad time. So, not only timing was slightly off, the intended showcase was simply catering to the wrong crowd.
Already implemented:
Unstable Anomaly, Firebird’s Finery Set (Wizard)
Awareness, Beckon Sail (Demon Hunter)
Spirit Vessel (Witch Doctor)
Near Death Experience (Monk)
Indestructible, Prophet (Crusader)
Nerves of Steel (Barbarian)
Final Service, Self Sacrifice (Necromancer)
Ancestors’ Grace (All Classes, Hardcore only)
Pauldrons of the Skeleton King (All Classes)
GRs are regular Rifts with a timer. Crucible is not regular Grim Dawn with a timer. It’s a fixed arena where combinations of hero enemies come out. If you make it far enough, more of them come out and they have more modifiers. The Nemesis monsters can even come out - multiples of them, even. Plus there are various totems that have effects. There might even be more stuff now. It’s been awhile since I did it.
But the way you’re describing it… clearly you have zero experience with it, which means you should be listening and learning instead of judging before you know anything.
In D3? No, they don’t care about how bad Challenge Rifts are. But we’re talking about D4’s endgame potential here, so there’s a chance they can do better with it.
Considering the highest triumphs in D3 have always been done through 4 person groups using teamwork, this is silly talk.
Yeah, I know what it is, thanks.
First of all, I suggested both single player and multiplayer. The single player would be much as it is now, except the builds would be actual complete builds. Or at least be something that works together.
Second, they don’t necessarily have to be by the developers’ hands. There will be plenty of resources out there created by players that document all this stuff even if the devs don’t. So all they would have to do is glance at some player setups, load the characters, and voila.
You know, overall it just seems like you don’t want anything to happen. I guess you’d be happy with just lazy GRs again in D4, huh?
Yes, however I don’t like the air around you; re-read your quoted piece.
I clearly said all those features you described are for curbing the bad randomization, while GR doesn’t give you any chance at it let along littering the unwanted combinations out. 8 years and they had all the time in the world to come up with solutions to bad randomization or write scripts or algorithms to not frustrate or burn out players. All we got was Pylons in the name of modifiers.
GR system is using gradual tier growth and time trial as a pivotal point to make combat faster already and it’s pretty plain with Pylon placement. Grim Dawn system adds modifiers for combat to be faster also diminishes randomized effects without catering to cheap time restrictions.
They may seem different but in the end it all boiled down to faster combat pace. Don’t tell me that I’m wrong here, why else would you be playing a high reward content, if combat is not any challenging or demanding?
4-man clears GR150 about 3-5 minutes now compared to the past with barely 15mins. Go check the off-seasonal leaderboards, don’t tell me it doesn’t count or something. Do you call this a triumph or time sink?
Any challenge seeking always met with the question of efficiency. I even brought up, bringing some new light to campaign mode and people were against it. They claimed it would be unnecessary clog at seasonal journey now that they have to play it too.
Clearing GRs don’t even take half the effort or sustainability way it was before thanks to power creep. Same applies to farming sequences of the game where you get a speedfarm build.
You can’t hope to find any challenge in a game with broken power scales. And let’s say you added a new challenge, how on earth you supposed to justify the rewards compared to a time trial with no modifiers other than Pylons?
I just thought of ways to implement a challenge similar to those you mentioned and failed to come up with a solution.
Sad truth is, game developers are not getting paid to copycat other game developers on their creations. So you won’t get the exact copy of what Grim Dawn had with Crucible in Diablo 3 to rival GRs while GRs already offer you the highest rewards with no way of true comparison.
Diablo 4? I guess they already got similar to Grim Dawn’s Crucible, or more like PoE’s instanced dungeons so fret not. We have no idea how they will handle diminishing randomization though.
You mean player side modding? Good luck with that.
Do those players play in endless dungeons or… That’s what I’m missing. So you could get any and all successful runs with gazillion damage per second output characters and willing to give it to other players’ control? Also, you plan on putting them on 150 floors dungeon floor, just because you can? Alright…
You can’t give players high end characters to control, because you can’t even reward them experience for their task. Second, even if it’s 150 floors of nonsense, you need modifiers like Grim Dawn did to curb down some of the randomization. That requires a huge reward and you can’t even reward them experience bonus because they’re controlling someone else’s character.
I even double checked… The context have to shift to something else other than CR, if we ought to talk about proper rewarding and challenge. You can mess up with artificial difficulty with weird builds but again rewarding won’t be satisfying to begin with. You’re skipping my post but I simply touched the important subjects as I at least tried to understand your enthusiasm for another game’s copy of ever growing dungeon floors.
Nope, I’d rather be happy with trading and PvP with human interaction; like any other MMORPG has. Thank you. When I look at any PvE endgame I’ll just see GRs at the underlying design and nothing beyond it. That’s my point. It can has hundreds of gimmicks on the surface, but it’s a trial nonetheless and it won’t go any better or worse than that.
Anything you offer are not entirely different than GRs, and similar in a way while not made lazily.
I’m telling you not even GRs had a way of diminishing randomization along this 8 years, you’re accusing me of being against new things. I’m telling you about the design notions of each model by comparison, you’re telling me that I need to listen.
For me, your context is all over the place from my view. Tell me, what do I exactly need to hear? How 150 tier Greater Rift end game separate from 150 floor Crucible endgame beyond a time trial and how it fails to up the tempo of combat? I’d really like to talk about it.
I hope they take it to the next level. When 1 extra life system is there, its much easier to make good and more exciting endgame.
I remember Spirit Vessel. I was WD in Diablo 3. It helped me alot.
This has nothing to do with my thread topic…
You know you posted this in general discussion forum? Not ideas or suggestion forums.
There’s no ideas or suggestion forums. You can post any suggestion or ideas you want here in General Discussions so CMs would pick it up for developers to consider. However, our suggestion that you would stop playing Hardcore and stop trying to derail or scatter the subject. If you have any endgame model suggestion, please say so if not please consider going back to softcore.
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Sounds like you need to work harder to overcome your own bias, then.
- Key dungeons. Randomized dungeons in the style of PoE maps basically (as presented by Blizzard). No hard timer!
- Boss mode/“ubers”. Something that is entirely focused on boss battles, like D2 end-game. Maybe an arena where you fight bosses that gets harder and harder the further you go (preferably not just by increasing their HP). You can then leave at any point and get your rewards, or push higher for even more rewards (at the risk of dying and losing them)
- Exploration. Go out in the world and kill stuff. Have random events spawn while doing so. Maybe a portal appear at the end of some normal dungeon that takes you to something similar to Greeds Realm in D3. Maybe you encounter an event/mini quest somewhere. D3s events were honestly fine as a basic concept, but event spawns need to be completely randomized to reward exploration, and the events need to be both harder and more engaging, and of course also actually rewarding. Maybe you encounter a random Uber boss that decides to hunt you down. The D4 World bosses is of course also part of this style of end-game.
Also, you should be able to reset the campaign, and replay it at these higher difficulty levels, while doing your exploration content. - Challenge dungeons. D3s idea here is not that bad, though I would envision it somewhat differently. Like every other month or so, Blizzard release 2-3 new “handmade” dungeons (they can still use a randomly generated map etc. as the foundation of course). Not randomized, but crafted to offer specific challenges to overcome. Adding specific enemies etc. Giving the exact same combat challenge each time you ran one of these dungeons (until they are replaced by new dungeons), unlikely all other content in the game, the purpose would be to finetune your strategy to improve your completion timer. The real speed-run challenge heir to GRifts, without the RNG.
- Maybe a Horde mode. Similar to boss mode, but just with randomized enemies that keeps coming at you while increasing in power. Also kinda similar to Grim Dawns Crucible.
All these modes, except the challenge dungeons, should offer similar rewards (in both quality and quantity) over the same amount of time spent. And similar difficulty (all should have the same difficulty scaling system; +1, +2 whatever). The difficulty scaling should be slow and limited. Since gear should also have very limited scaling. Like maybe highest difficulty is 200% more difficult (HP, enemy skills and whatever) than the lowest difficulty. And not 2 billion %…
Challenge dungeons would be its own thing, with very little rewards, as its non-random nature automatically makes it easier than the other content. It exists as a leaderboard competition, rather than something you do for loot. It could just have like a weekly reward the first time you do it, like D3 challenge dungeons.
It can probably be a good idea if different activities offer more of a certain reward type than others however, as long as everything is available from all of them.
Like if you want crafting materials, maybe exploration is the “optimal” way, but the others also give that reward, while if you want runes, maybe key dungeons have a better droprate. To reward people who do multiple end-game activities, and have builds that can handle multiple activities well.
Then, not exactly a game mode, but season journey/conquests could be expanded a fair bit. You could have a season journey with actual challenges. Just a hundred of them. With leaderboards of course, for who gets most of them, and how fast. Stuff like; clear all 25 key dungeon themes without dying (if you die anywhere, even outside the dungeons, the counter resets), clear a max difficulty key dungeon without any legendaries/uniques, etc. etc. Some would be easier, some harder, of course. One might just be: clear your first key dungeon, and so on.
In regard to that updated “season journey”, you could turn it into a new “paragon” system as well. 100 challenges in a season; each gives 1 point you can spend on character improvements (or 1-5 points based on the difficulty). Limited paragon power progression that is not bound to something as boring as an XP grind.
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