Below I am going to describe a key negative aspect of the Paragon system, which will make it clear why any similar infinite power mechanic must NOT exist in D4.
Paragon farming is the single long-term end game in Diablo 3. All roads ultimately lead to it. No matter what your short-term objectives are, if you don’t quit the game you will eventually end up in an endless pursuit of incremental power through paragon. Now, why is that bad? The answer is actually quite simple: as soon as you’re down that path, the time you spend in the game becomes all about efficiency.
Efficiency is expressed in the amount of experience you get per hour. End that’s it. Nothing else is important beyond that point. Any other activity in the game that yields you less experience per hour becomes waste of time, as you’re losing out on paragon progression compared to competition.
A few quick examples:
Experimenting with builds, playing non-meta builds that you might like = stupid and pointless due to low xp efficiency
Playing in non-meta groups = stupid and pointless due to low xp efficiency
Exploring the Campaign and the world = stupid and pointless due to low xp efficiency
… you get the point
Your “success formula” becomes: lookup (online) a class & build that provides you with the highest output of experience per hour (rat runs, for example), and just do that over and over again. The runs won’t necessarily be your preferred style of playing the game and will very quickly become utterly boring due to low challenge and high repetitiveness. But… you will still consciously be keeping yourself in that stupid hamster wheel, because it is efficient. Because it gives you paragon, albeit at a progressively slower rate which is adding further frustration… At some point you will likely burn out and rage quit the game (the smarter you are - the faster you’ll do so), but by then you will have wasted significant amounts of time, hating every second of the process. Next time you see an angry post from an ex-fan quitting - you’ll know exactly why that happened and how they got there.
An important point: the game is not forcing you to play the meta or select few builds despite many people claiming it is doing so. You are forcing yourselves to do so driven by xp farming efficiency considerations.
Conclusion: in the long run paragon system is directly responsible for disincentivizing players to do anything outside of experience farming (which completely negates any minor pros which the system may have), and thus represents an extremely primitive and toxic end-game mechanic which has no place in future Diablo games.
Agreed. There is no sense in accomplishment, only something to always look up to, but the end is never in sight.
The myth of Sisyphus comes to mind. For those who don’t know, Sisyphus was a man punished to forever roll a boulder to the top of a steep hill. Whenever he reaches the top, the boulder would fall to the bottom and he would do it all over again. Here is the analogy to the Paragon system:
Boulder = Current Progress of Experience
Top of the Hill = Required Experience for the Next Level
Falling to the Bottom = We the Players doing it all over again
If it were like, 100 mountains, then it would have been an epic myth, but what we have is a punishment of infinity.
Going back to Diablo II, you could finish the hardest difficulty at about level 80 something. Only the most dedicated players could reach level 99, but you don’t have to nor is anyone forcing you to.
So the best thing is for there to be a soft level cap like level 90 in Diablo II, and a hard level cap at level 99 (it’s harder to reach lvl 99 starting at lvl 90 than reaching lvl 90 from lvl 1).
With how the system worked in D2, you gain a skill point each level up. It made skill point allocation meaningful because you are limited by level so you had to choose carefully which skills to max.
You guys’s shouldn’t talk about infinite paragon where most people can’t even reach 2k paragon.
Blizzard can easily make an lv99 paragon in D4 that equivalent to leveling to D3 10,000 paragon and most people will not even going reach lv20 paragon in D4 at that time.
Those so-called Infinite or finite is just a number game. If the D3 developers want, they can even tweak the GR exp so everyone can reach 10k in 2 days.
D2 has respec. Also, there is nothing meaningful about skill point allocation unless you want to create a brick character ala lv20 amplify damage necromancer. If you are actually want to kill something faster in Hell Mode, you must dump all your points into the main skill and its synergies or else you will have a half-baked character that excel at nothing.
You can finish D3 hardest difficulty, T16 under 800 paragon level too. Only the most dedicated players can play the highest GR, but you don’t have to do it or anyone forcing you to do so.
I know too many people that don’t care about efficiency, tho I do.
I’ve learned to accept their slow nature in town and how they play IF I want to play with this friend.
Yes, there has to be a cap, achievable with a reasonable amount of effort and dedication. Continuing with the Paragon example - in my opinion - that kind of hard cap would have been somewhere between 2500 and 3000 (non-season), and the end game would need to be about something else entirely. And definitely no account-wide Paragon.
Since there’s no other end game in D3 but xp farming (purely due to how the devs chose to design it), your friends will either end up quitting, or begin farming paragon. It’s just a matter of time - you’ll see.
You’re missing the point of Sisyphus, I’ll help you understand:
Yes, Sisyphus spends days rolling the large boulder up to the top of the hill.
He turns around, and laughs loudly as he gives the boulder a bump and it rolls back down to the bottom.
Pushing the boulder up the hill is a metaphor for life and all we do that is ultimately a waste of time.
Allowing the boulder to roll back down the hill, is what always happens to man chasing pleasure all the live long day.
Sisyphus’s laughing made the town folk believe he was mad.
But the truth was he was fully enlightened living in bliss.
This is someone else’s account that I’m using just to post here. I stated this in some of my prior posts, I think earlier this / last year. The account belongs to my friend who plays Overwatch and doesn’t care about D3 (he quit it a long time ago).
This is completely irrelevant to the topic I created, but in case you want to know more about my experience with the game here it goes: I used to have a different account back from the game release. I was doing non-seasonal only (seasons had never made any sense to me, though I still had done a few just for the stash tabs), and had been through all of the major changes that had happened to the game. Played all the metas that existed up until late 2017. Reached paragon 3k and then sold my account as there was not point in continuing the dumb paragon grind.
All I can add to this is Blizzard should make a better game next time so people won’t have to resort to such measures. The original post I made is aiming to help the devs in that effort.
Leveling should have limits. Think of this in a PvP setting, who do you think would win, a level 800 character, or a lvl 2000? It’s easy to guess who has the advantage.
Levels are tied to the psychology of progression. What’s the use of each level increase if the gain is too subtle to notice any difference. It feels like the monsters are keeping up with the player’s level.
Now say you increase 20 levels more, the transition period to reach this level has a minimal buildup that the power increase feels normalized and doesn’t have a noticeable impact on your performance.
It would take about ~50 levels for it to be impactful, but since your attention would be at a reference level that’s a few levels prior, it feels underwhelming.
Now having an infinite paragon system with impactful power increase with each level gain would lead to power creep.
Of course. That’s the point of having skill points in the first place. It’s to advance your character by maximizing the power of your selected skill.
The Necromancer has many builds besides this. It takes careful consideration on which skill to allocate points. If you choose a build centered on amplify damage, why not have other contingency plans? Like say investing in bone armor for survivability, dim vision or bone prison to hinder ranged and other deadly monsters, and corpse explosion which is bolstered by amplify damage.
there’s no negative aspect imo.
you go as high or stay low…at will.
in D3, T10 is enough to enjoy the whole game.
just play solo, is the easiest way to escape from frustrations.
nope
you want to have a reachable end and most people will aim for that
being in the top tier of power
even if they are no pros and they cant compete with the top 10%
if you just end up like 100 times weaker than those, who give in to the endless power creep farming, the game has no meaning anymore, besides just…clicking some buttons and see monsters explode
theres a different between not being in the top 10
and being a bug, in comparison
i am a noob in LOL i could probably never go over gold
but even a challenger player could not just run into my base at the start of the game
and thats what paragon system is doing
if you dont give in to it, you will eventually feel lost and meaningless
you would have no reason to even try pvp or anything else
there needs to be a point where ppl can try to compete
about, who made up the best build or did the most farming for the last 1-2% of power through their items
but not about who invested more years of farming infinite power creep