Some thoughts for adjustments to make early season play a bit better

General Discussion
1

So most of us play seasonal characters most if not all seasons. We know the drill by now: start a new character, grab your bounty cache, and use materials to level quickly to 70. Over the course of this game, Blizz has done various things to make the very first part of the “endgame” more accessible to fresh level 70 players: the introduction of Haedrig’s Gift with a set reward for completing season journey chapters 2-4. They also gave to players the Sages set for free, which gives double DBs and allows us to craft up to 4 legendary items right away to use. From this it seems that there is a trajectory aimed at softening the curve for players not in the very elite range and/or those who are able to find a coordinated group to play in via clan or discord, etc.

As a solo player, I find that even while I feel I am adopting a very efficient experience farming strategy to 70, once I get to 70 is when I really see a huge gap emerging between those who are playing in coordinated groups and the most elite players on one hand, and more mediocre players like myself on the other. Assuming I am playing from season start until like 3 in the morning (about 7 hours of playtime) I will end up at maybe 200 paragon with my HG set complete or nearly so. After this comes a farming grind to get gear, materials, gems, and keys. Playing hardcore after completing my SC seasonal journey it reminded me how unrewarding it can feel to farm anywhere except t16, and how much time it can take especially for a single player character to get the gear necessary to get to this level in sub-t16 content.

I am in no way saying that a single player character with mediocre skill can or should ever rival those with truly excellent skill and coordinated group play. I am saying that the curve should be flattened a bit more to make farming into t16 just a bit more accessible. What is necessary to do this is basically improved ability to farm lower content with greater effect (i.e. more rewards/drops per rift/GR) assuming players are utilizing elements available to them. The re-introduction of double bounties reminds me how much easier it can be when the yield of your farming is so greatly enhanced - not suggesting that double bounties need to be a permanent thing, but maybe on opening weekend of a season would be nice!

With that in mind, I want to suggest a few things that could make this early stage of level 70 grinding, prior to t16 farming with relative ease, a bit more rewarding and fruitful for those who find themselves unable to progress as quickly by skill or group benefits.

First, re-examine and up-scale the current table for difficulty levels in terms of the following:

  • DB drops
  • Key drops
  • bounty materials per cache
  • legendaries per bounty cache
  • infernal machines
  • organ drops from Ubers

I cannot link the table, but d3resource has a difficulty overview table that breaks down the current scaled values of different torment levels according to different items.

I would adjust the existing table roughly as follows:

  • DB: Normal, 50%; Hard 90%; Expert 100%; Master 150% chance (100 for 1, 50% for 2) - T1, 200%, scale to T6 @ 300% - T7 through T14 scales to 400%, capped through T16 @ 400%
  • Key drops: keys are crucial throughout the season for obvious reasons, and the current scaling does not give 200% chance (100% x 2 keys) until T11(!!). While T11 is generally easily accessible with the HG set, not all these sets are easily optimizable even for this content without certain gear choices. I propose: 2 keys @ T6, 3 keys at T10, 4 keys at T13, and perhaps give up to 450% chance at t16 (chance for a 5th key) - this would help long term the keyfarming grind.
  • bounty materials per cache: begin materials at 6 (starting at normal), add 1 material for each torment level up to t16 (which will remain at 22). This makes the curve more linear and I think more reasonable given the current state of the game and the rate of how far/fast players progress in early season. My t11 cache will yield me 17 materials, about a 50% increase from the current, and wouldnt break the game. Side note: I’d also like to see bounty materials RARELY drop from monsters in adventure mode. I mean like maybe 1-3 per t16 run just farming monsters in the course of bounties, this gives just a little extra something for your effort, and maybe an incentive to farm certain bounty zones instead of others which could make bounty farming more interesting to players.
  • legendaries per bounty cache: normal through master should be 25, 50, 75, 100%, t1 throgh t4 scales to 200% (100% x 2 legendaries), t5-t10 scales to 300%, t11 - t16 scales to 400%. The current balance gives 50% chance for 4 legendaries per cache at t16, so again this just flattens the curve, and makes late game farming for some of these legendaries much more rewarding at t16, with or without double caches.
  • Infernal machines and organ drops: Ideally I’d like to just get this number down to scaling to 1 machine dropping per keywarden past say t6 (scale t1-t6 to 100% chance) and then the uber encounter itself drop more organ parts. this would change nothing as far as normal-master for droprates, then I could see something as simple as an incremental 100%, 150%, 200%, etc. scaling up from t1-16 - so t16 would drop 8 organs guaranteed. Hellfire amulet crafting is mostly a thing of the past except for some niche builds and this would make early season gearing and late game optimization for any builds using this to do it easier. Ubers can be a tedious process and no one really does them often, but this doesnt mean they cant be improved - also by a reset button for the portals, please.

I also would make another change to the Sage’s set: instead of double DB only, make it double all dropped materials - veiled crystals, reusable parts, dust, and forgotten souls. This would NOT affect salvage values at all, only for dropped materials. Many players include Sages set not just in early game but in all stages of farming rifts, the goal being to continue to keep crafting gear via Kanai’s recipe #3, and this brings more parity for drops of resources in the game. I also think that generally these resource drops can be increased, except on those from goblins, and could be auto-picked up like gold. This would greatly enhance Sage’s even while in its current form it is still a decent addition to a farming build. Personally, I think that a nice 1000 to all stats would be nice instead of the negligible 250 it currently has, or even higher perhaps up to 2000 - though this might be too crazy?

Those are my thoughts, I’d love to hear your suggestions on other ways early season farming outside t16 can be more rewarding for players behind the curve.

Edit: it might be fruitful to examine the blood shard amounts from caches and rift guardians in nephalem rifts for each level too, but this could be a different post.

1 Like
2

All I want to say is how damn quickly do you want to get to the “good versions of all 13 BiS” gear that this is a problem? Seriously it doesn’t take much time at all, and I am not talking about a good player or grinder. We need some kind of thing to aim for other than grind grind grind

3

I can see your point but i see a different solution to it and that is buffing some existing under performing legendaries and adding new legendary powers to existing items that have none. You’re bound to get some unless extremely unlucky while leveling up and some of them will keep being good even in higher torments.

For example this season I started as a Necro and used the corpse explosion gloves (on me then in the cube) up until t16. I know necro is OP at this but most classes already have good multipliers while leveling up and my feeling is we’re going to see a lot more coming in 2.7 hence you’ll go thru the lesser torments faster.

4

Alternatively, really wish they would make a legendary gem that increases materials drop up to 2x at lvl 100. Maybe with a homing pads type shield as the second perk.

Imo LoD gem is one of the best things they ever did for the game, and to this day I think its vastly underappreciated how many options you can open up with just a gem slot. Hell, make one for extra keys even. Plebs and grinders will be happy to have more of anything.

As someone who has been mostly a recurring casual player*, hitting the crafting materials wall is typically where the season would wind down for me. I know there’s tricks to farm these, but my point is that casuals don’t. Nor do they want to grind basic materials.

Sage’s set fills a nice niche and i’m happy fitting the set into builds feels so rewarding. You could argue that bounty mat quantity is fine, though wish i wouldn’t be so punished for preferring a solo player experience.

*as in i play for wings/pets/seasonal rewards

5

And yet here we are and this is what the game is. I agree that the grind is all there is in a game like this, but the grind isn’t for gear, even if we want it to be, but mainly for GRs. I’m not taking optimized for just gear to make a functioning build, where there currently exists too large a gap early season for sub t16 farming. This would make it easier to complete a basic build and get to t16, which may cut a few hours or days for some folks, which only leaves 2 months and 29 days of just GR grind… so not really changing the game greatly, and in case it wasn’t clear earlier, I would like this to be a bit more rewarding so that we can get to the real part of the game - which just is what it is.

This is valid but I didn’t address it here since it is really a different issue that specific drop rates for items by difficulty as affects early season grinding for basic gear. Next patch is a rebalance which I think will affect this somewhat.

This is interesting, though at first I read it as double materials drop past GR 100, not gem level 100. I’m not sure a gem is the best fit since some builds need certain legendary gems to optimize farm builds, which usually include boon of the hoarder for starters, and sages is already in the rotation but could be stronger.

1 Like
6

Here ya go:
https://d3resource.com/difficulties/

1 Like
7

Part of why I like the idea of it being a gem is that it would scale up as your power and material farming needs scale as well.

Though I very much like boon and its interactions, wouldn’t mind if it had some competition. Once builds get to their final form they’ll still likely one shot mobs T16 even without gems anyway, so just think of it as more decisions to make until that point.
Also I think its good that builds give up some power for their speedfarming version. Likely when you’re already sitting on a nice stockpile, you’ll probably socket your preferred gem back in

oh and sage’s set is stupid good let’s not undersell it :wink:

8

It is viable in the current game as it stands, that’s as far as I’d go. Players can and do include it in farming builds though it depends on how much a player wants to do cube upgrades for optimized gear across how many toons to see just how vital it is. I think it could be better according to its current form, along with the modified table I suggested. If there were a gem AND the sages set… that would be a lot.

Thank you!

9

Well the funny thing about the double bounties is how quickly they tap out.

“Whee double bounties!”

Now, my bounty mats are no longer a blocker. Couple quick runs and I have 100 of the things. Enough for 20 Leg reforgings.

Know what I DON’T have? I don’t have the 1000 FS to go along with the bounty mats.

I need to do 30-40 80+ GRs to get enough FS to get commensurate materials for a couple of bounty runs.

A bounty run gets you mats for, what, 8 reforges. But not enough FS for even one.

So, it’s nice to have one more minor bottleneck eased, but it wasn’t even the big one in the first place. Spend an evening doing bounty runs and you’ll be set for life. In the end all it does is obsolete another content path.

And, as for the main meme of the OP, I disagree.

There needs to be value of being able to get to T16. That value is the extra mats. Getting a farm toon at T16 is actually a bit of work, because you need good enough gear to run it with all the speed options and farm stuff (BoH, Avarice, Broken Crown, Sages set, etc. etc.) that folks like to put on their toons.

So, it’s an ACCOMPLISHMENT to have a T16 farm toon.

And the reward is more mats. More mats to fuel the reforges to try and eek out another percent of DPS, or that One Last Affix, etc. This is one of those plateau moments.

You level to 70 (which is straightforward, even for novices), you perform the 4 chapters (also straight forward, even for novices – we’re talking, what, 10 hours of game play? 15?).

Level 70 in plateau 1…you stagnate a bit plugging in any rare or legendary with green bonuses on it, because at this point, that’s all the matters.

You work through the chapter, and leverage the 2pc gift, and 4pc gift to finish chapter 4 and get the 6pc. This really isn’t that much of a grind. It’s just slower progress than 1-70. This is stepped progress as you get bumped up with the 2pc and then the 4pc.

Then you have your 6 piece set, and WHAM, welcome to T7.

Plateau 2. The grind begins to fill out the rest of the set, getting the specific belts or rings or weapons that synergize with your 6pc.

This is mostly done through runs and gambling. You’re just looking for ANY piece, that SPECIFIC legendary, a horribly rolled leg is better than nothing.

But once you have your build, you’re likely at about T12, or higher.

This is plateau 3, and now it’s slower and slower incremental progress.

The legendary gems start gaining power, you find those ancient pieces, you get gems in your weapons, you find better affixes for existing gear and swap it out.

Flush this out and you get to T16. For your “main”. You really need to be here for a bit before you can afford to lose the bracers for Nemesis, or swap out a DPS Leg Gem for BoH.

At a minimum, though, you’re getting more capable of finishing the season journey.

I did the journey in probably less than 50 hours this season. And I switched builds in the middle of it. That’s really fast. I think the journey should take 100 hours. Why? Because 100 hours of steady progress to an actual conclusion, that’s “good value”. Lots of folks would love to have 100 hours of decent game play from their brand new AAA game they bought. Much less being able to have a bunch a replayability. 100 hours is a good number for any game.

So, IMHO, this game is fast enough.

2 Likes
10

I agree with this, there aren’t nearly enough substantial achievements to the season journey to justify its completion, and is really like more to do in this area.

I still think lower torment levels bottleneck players unnecessarily when you’re stuck in t7 but can’t get enough from your bounties, rifts, and greater rifts to build up a decent momentum. Plus your movement speed, resource cost and cooldown are all so bad that it’s just tortuous for a long time on many builds which need certain items to do things really well. So you can be stuck in this range for a long time - not long over the course of the season, but early season when everyone is beginning it really feels slow - and I think this could be a big benefit to some mediocre players, not as big a deal for the elites and the groups who can farm bounties and rifts with greater speed. This change won’t make people like me into a godly player but it’ll feel less like a fat guy running a marathon. I play D3 a decent enough amount to be able to say that I know what I’m doing for season start, it’s just such a steep climb for that portion into t16. This is accentuated even more for hardcore when you can’t risk dying, especially this early on. Being at the mercy of RNG for drops and insufficient drop rates sucks is what I’m saying. Some people feel it doesn’t suck that bad but I’ve noticed that those people also seem to think the game gets boring after you’ve gotten your gear for your build that season. I don’t think so, and after I’ve gotten a decent set/build on a character I feel I can really begin in earnest. I can’t change how the game feels post grind, but it can and should be better by some margin in this interval.

11

Well part of that is when you jump from your turbo charge speed boosted and gear farming toon from the end of Season XX to the no gear, no speed, “twang twang twang” Level Blah n00b toon in Season XX+1, yea, it’s radical shift. Heck, I whine when I have to walk from the teleport bubble to the Rift guy (since my stacks have fallen and I’m all slow).

Speed corrupts. Absolute speed corrupts absolutely.

I abandoned my Hammer barb last season, for a spinny barb, and I abandoned my Impale DH for the GoD DH this season because of the gogogogo factor of both of them. It’s infectious and addictive to be sure.

(Truly the main reason I abandoned my Hammer bard was that when he died to, say, an RG, getting him spooled back up just took way too long, especially if the cooldowns were out of sync. But who doesn’t like a spinny barb! whoo hooo! DIE!)

Where the real problem happens, though, is when you’re on Slow Toon and your party mates are on Speedy Toon. The worst place to be in D3 is the back of the back. Nothing to kill, nothing to do but run after your party mates…slowly.

Whee.

But in isolation, they don’t have to be that bad.

RNG is RNG, and has been forever. That’s what makes the game playable, though, is that only later do you need “perfect” gear. Early on, you want “any” gear. It’s part and parcel to the power curve growing. More deterministic stuff is nice, but, honestly, I think it would only be good as filler. Some way to get That Last Piece that vexes you.

In WoW, especially in the past, you would farm currency (tokens or what not) and you could pretty much buy your entire set. And that was nice, for what it was, but boy once you got that last piece. The “ok now what” comes hard and fast. “This is as good as it gets.” Nice to be complete but, what do you do next?

So, there’s a balance between pure RNG and actual, deterministic progress. In WoW today, you can “buy” select pieces, and they can be expensive, because they’re essentially there as bad luck protection. The dropped gear in the content is better, but this stuff is “OK”, and better than nothing to the point that if by the time you earn enough currency to buy it, and you still have a piece of junk in that slot, well, heck, pony up the tokens and fill out the slot.

So, it would be nice to build up a currency to get something. An extra slot re-roll at the enchanter, convert a Leg to an Ancient, soemthing like that.

The only thing we have now (which is helpful, to be sure) is Augments.

And that’s where I lose my will to live. When I’ve got everything else done, my gear is “ok”, and I’m staring down the abyss of 300 GRs to level gems. Yea, enthusiasm wains, and this has (almost) nothing to do with RNG. It’s just flat out labor.

12

Let me rephrase my opinion.

With grind I should have said “All you have is the hours of time of grinding for small improvements”. Would you rather spend even more of the season constantly playing rift after rift for hours on end for a 2% increase in damage or toughness? Isn’t it great to have a time after reaching 70 where you get excited for a legendary drop because you only have like 3 and still need a build defining drop? Having a set item drop and see it is the one for the build you are going for and knowing you can actually play the real “end” version of your build? Identifying the item that dropped and seeing o damn this is like a 20% damage increase and o damn I can roll of the Vit on this weapon and get AD and then it is even more?

Point being, there is a lot of joy and excitement in the period of the game where you are still building up to the end and coming back to town knowing that you might just jump up a few levels just as there is in the period of playing for hours hoping for the drop or gamble for that small increase in your current weapon that you know might give you 1 more GR level.

13

Sure I get this, it’s just that it feels extremely imbalanced for those who have exceptional skill and/or play in groups to farm truly awesome gear in a matter of hours or days that it takes me weeks to get close to. And this isn’t counting paragon grinding and all that then catapults those players further ahead, though obviously not part of the discussion here. It is that some of us are stuck in a part of the game for longer than we’d like in comparison to other players, the advantages of which become increased over the course of say the first 4-6 weeks - right when the numbers drop off precipitously for seasonal play usually. I’m not saying the drop off happens solely due to this, because if you want to play you’ll play. At some point though it becomes just easier and more entertaining to watch a streamer farm their perfect gear and do their insane pushes because there is no way you can catch up to them. The advantages are set in stone in such a way that they become unbreakable, and I think this is a problem. If all players have relatively reasonable access to doing these things at a more parallel time, the competitive draw remains intact, but the ability of some to race ahead while others are slogging through not ideal content, this feels like a no-win scenario. If we wanted to adjust the whole game to progress more slowly as a matter of fact, fine with me. The reality is that player skill (and hours played) with the dynamics of group play will catapult some into ideal t16 farming with relative ease in far less time, and this content itself is exponentially more rewarding to players in terms of materials, gear, experience, gold, and all things relevant to the grind of the game.

The difference is not that players do not move at the same speed basically once at this level, much the same way that in the highway all cars drive the same fast speed. The difference is that in order to get into the highway, some have the company president’s parking space and some have to take the slow shuttle ride to satellite parking just to get in their car. If I play the same amount of hours day 1 of season 1 and I have yet to reach t16 or just barely get there, and others already have 1k paragon speed farming GR 105+ this makes any competitive and meaningful aspect of season progression trivial. Assuming you cannot play for multiple hours a day and cannot get access to high level group play, you are left with solo grinding and for this to be so unrewarding seems a big disincentive to me.

14

I guess you make sense.

Or let me rather say I can see how many people feel this way. I don’t get it at anything other than a level of “many people say this so probably true for most”.

Since I really couldn’t care less how my progression compares to the top guys or anyone for that matter I really don’t care that group play etc makes such a huge difference. Not that I am not into competition in games, when I still played Dota I absolutely loved seeing myself improve over time and being better than people who used to be my equals. But I see this similar to how I can’t compare myself to the person who has 8 hours a day to play Dota or CS or whatever cause they will naturally be better, it is just natural that more time invested leads to reaching higher levels.

And sure in Diablo the time spent leading to extra skill isn’t that significant vs the grind leading to being more powerful but I still don’t care that some person who plays 8 hours vs my amount or who spams groups vs my solo can reach 140 solo GR while I got my first 120 this weekend. My enjoyment isn’t lower because I will never get close to leader boards or because I see a streamer having tip top perfect gear and me not. Sure it would be nice but investment equals improvement and I think that is how it should be.

And even more so because even someone like me who has as far as I remember maybe 100 hours on this character (and second one contributed barely anything) has gear that is is pretty damn cool and matches the guide’s stats and augmented etc etc while playing 100% solo. So it is not like you are sitting there still looking for that 1 or 2 BiS items or having horrendous stats everywhere.

Point being personally I don’t see the problem with seeing someone who invests tons of time being far ahead since us normal people still go pretty far into the game. But to each his own.

15

Of course competition is one aspect here. The more important is a better scaling of difficulty level and rewards to get some closer parity for those who find themselves stuck in lower content for longer . Wouldn’t affect those who are able to blast so quickly to t16, just makes lower torments more viable for those who are there.