Leveling 1-70 experience in D3

General Discussion
1

I’ve been pondering a lot about what feedback I could provide for D4, and honestly, there’s one particular thing that I think I would like to express my opinion on, which is the leveling part.

I’m not sure how many people actually enjoy leveling their characters to 70 in D3, but the general impression I get is that for most people, it’s just a grind to get done with. Many probably don’t even start the season on day one and just wait a few hours or a day to find someone to power level them.

As D4 seems to be a game where that early leveling journey will be a more significant part of the game, I’d like to comment on why I, personally, don’t find the early leveling in D3 fun and agree with the general sentiment that the game really starts to be fun when you get a build going on with your character. Bear in mind this is all very subjective and has some bias coming from other ARPGs. My primary reason is that things take too long to kill in the early game.

When you get a set going on at least, you get that extremely satisfying jump in character power when you can actually start zooming through maps and slaughtering everything, a very familiar feeling for ARPG fans. That feeling simply doesn’t come before that, at least in my experience. Even if I set the game to normal difficulty in the early levels (which isn’t the most efficient thing to do experience-wise), depending on what character I’m playing I find myself often getting stuck between mobs or just having to spend way too much time to clear a pack. This usually isn’t the case in most ARPGs I can think of, that I played at least. I guess the most obvious comparison would be other Diablo games. Even in Diablo 1, which is the slowest paced game in the series in the early game (until you get teleport), you mash skeletons in a few hits, even though you lack much AoE capabilities unless you use magic. In D2, unless you’re playing a skellymancer you also find yourself clearing packs consistently fast from level 1 all the way to the end of nightmare, and in hell the speed to kill things doesn’t really go down much, with the only significant barrier being immunities). This isn’t just a “back in the old days” thing though, games like PoE, Grim Dawn or even Hades (not exactly the same genre but analogous enough I think) all have mobs that die quicker.
In D3, the time to kill is frustratingly inconsistent while you’re leveling, when you get a gear upgrade you will get a satisfying moment of power where you’re mowing through packs of enemies, but very quickly does that power become obsolete and you find yourself slugging again.

Now, I’m talking specifically about how long it takes for a pack or monster to die, not the pacing of the combat. I’m all for a slower paced combat if that’s what D4 wants to go for, I love me some tactical combat. Just, in my opinion, don’t make it frustrating. Don’t make the enemies bullet sponges.

2

Tho I could lvl my car in under an hour, I like to take it slow. Lvling up is the most fun for me, then the item hunt. So I don’t like to rush. I like to have fun whit my skills, and items I find along the way.

6 Likes
3

Part of the issue I feel is, with both Diablo 1 & 2, part of what’s considered the end game is actually getting the gear you need. For a few years now, that’s not been the case with Diablo 3. Rather than taking thousands of hours to finally gear your character, you get the gear within 10 hours. And from there, it’s just grinding to get the gear again, but with better stats. The leveling process is actually the closest thing we have to the older Diablo experience.

Now, I will admit I do like speed leveling my character. And that’s because once the carrot on a stick is removed, I find the game boring. Clearing a higher Greater Rift, when the reward is just +3 more main stat for 30 hours of grinding is just not fun to me. But others don’t like the leveling experience. But it’s fine if people like and dislike different things in the game.

5 Likes
4

I’m whit you on this. When there’s no significant reward it’s no fun. It not getting interesting, it’s getting stale, static and boreing.

3 Likes
5

Me too, and in every other game, leveling is one of my favorite parts of the game. D3 is only one that feels to me like it “starts when you’re in the mid game”, and that’s because the early game combat just doesn’t feel satisfying to me, due to the HP pool of enemies.

6

I would say it comes down to that we got seasonal play. When d3 was released alot of ppl enjoyed the lvling part and even running through the story. The game is old and ppl done it so many times so its expected. I dont mind the 1-70 grind. Its pretty fast anyway. Time will make it old and boring for alot of ppl though.

7

It’s still good when you haven’t allready asembled your build, and can swap your skills around. But once you have all the items, it’s just same skills, same tactics, same rotation. And while it feels good when you can suddenly clear maps quickly, it also gets boreing quickly.

8

Last time I heard that Blizzard made a fortune with WoW Lv boost service to the point people who level their character legitimately pissed off with boost players.

So I guess there are many people who love to play the RPG endgame than the process itself to max level, and I think this is the same applied to many Diablo players as well.

I think the journey to max level in ARPG is only fun if there is no endgame content in that game, so the players will take their journey to max level slowly since there is nothing awaiting them at the end of their journey.

9

There’s also nothing that awaits me at the end in D3, only repetative boredom. For ME.

1 Like
10

I think the new paragon system is supposed to help with all this. Leveling and building your character over time with continuous improvement is the goal.

11

Mixed bag for me, namely in that it feels like it takes forever to get to 70 and then, its like 2 hours to get to Paragon 200. Part of this is that the item quality drop to 70 is pretty much garbage and you have to hope you get something, unless you’re magic and can run T6 (I’m not that good so I’m usually on Expert or even lower).

What has dropped, I have used. It even forced me to Kanai a “Stalgard’s Decimator” which was a weapon I have usually just instantly salvaged (and when not, it was sold.) However, as my barbarian went from cleave to frenzy (with the acquisition of The Undisputed Champion), this weapon has proven to be extremely helpful giving the character a slight range attack and is almost exactly what I’d hoped for with weapon throw.

So, anyway, short answer: the level process is fun because it can give you new tricks to play with, new skill combinations, and such… but is highly dependent on the RNG which can be an absolute nightmare.

12

Slow leveling can be fun once or twice, I’ve however leveled what, 60-70 times in D3? It would be excruciating if it was a slow process.

3 Likes
13

I think that’s the thing.

I find a ton of enjoyment from leveling up in a game the first couple of times or with each new class I play.

Once I’ve don that a few times, speed leveling becomes the way to go for me.

14

I don’t mind the existence of powerleveling in ARPGs. At all. People get rushed in D2 too, people speedrun the crap out of PoE, etc. I do think level boosting in wow also came from the leveling experience being absolutely terrible though. There isn’t a cohesive storyline, or any rime or reason for your character to exist or to be there, and the whole game just seems geared towards ignoring everything that was released prior to current expansion. Leveling experience, especially for the first character (alts are another thing altogether), would be a lot more meaningful if wow had a streamlined process that gave your character a reason to care about the world and the stuff he’s doing, like many good mmos like ESO, GW2 and FF14 do. Getting rid of things like ghost running and making quests quicker and more rewarding would help too.

But again, my post is less about whether or not powerleveling should be a thing and more about why the combat experience in low levels feels so bad. It has nothing to do with how much time it takes to level either. It’s just about how long it takes for things to die and how frustrating the early combat is in D3.

1 Like
15

Is it? Lvl1 char on normal can kill anything whit 3-4 shots (a bit more for bosses). Ofcourse it’s slower when you don’t have big aoe skills, a bunch of multipliers from items and have no paragon points to spend right away. And that’s the best part. It’s not fun to faceroll every difficulty from nomarl to T16 and then up to GR whatever.

16

The problem is the inconsistency. Yes, you start killing stuff quickly. Then you level up, the game adjusts the HP of the mobs, and everything is a bullet sponge. Then you get a gear upgrade and suddenly you’re smiting them again, but that too is short lived. And when things like wallers start to appear, it starts to become annoying to deal with. Not hard, not challenging, just annoying. In something like D2 there is a consistent increase in difficulty during leveling, but it usually doesn’t come from the meatyness of enemies, but from the fact that more types of damage and modifiers start to appear, they start to be able to curse you, hit you from a range, increased pack density, etc. Difficulty does not need to imply frustration.

1 Like
17

Never encountered those every time I start my seasonal journey for D3. What difficulty you are playing for a pre-level 70 character? T6?

I mean, the best thing about D3 pre-level 70, at least for me, is every time you reached a certain level to unlock a new crafting yellow gear, you can feel so powerful using those new crafted yellow gear. It is even better when you can slot ruby gem on them.

There are plenty of things that await me at the end of D3 though. :sunglasses:

18

Even on normal. The inconsistency due to the way the game scales the mob’s health every time you level up is almost OCD triggering to me.

I wish I felt the same way, I really did, but it just doesn’t happen. The only upgrade that seems to happen is that I, for a very short ammount of time, am able to kill things quicker. Which is good, considering my complaint, but not only the upgrade is extremely short lived, but also doesn’t really impact the playstyle in any significant way. Unlocking skills does, but they don’t really start sinergizing well until, say, level 50.

19

I have never encoutered this, or yeah in a way. There are certain points when you have to linger on a difficulty level more. But if you’re getting a hard time, you can always go back a level.

20

For me, even Normal is insufferable. It might be because I’m too used to other games to adapt to the D3 style of low level combat. Which is why I specified at the beginning of my post that this is a very subjective thing and I honestly expect a lot of people to actually like the way D3 leveling is.