We need the pre-nerf Inferno difficulty in D4

While it was seriously unbalanced in D3, it was a good idea overall to have a difficult campaign difficulty to progress through. It sure would make a good alternative to spamming greater rifts over and over for endgame.

Edit: I want to make it clear that I want pre-nerf Inferno to exist with other forms of end game content, and not to be the only end game content.

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So far they did not say anything about having GRs in D4.

Zaven : For those of you who have played Greater Rifts in Diablo III, you might know that there is like a timer there; and one of the side effects of doing things like that and we have learned a lot about this, is that it makes you want to rush through, skip things, you start to get very specific about what you want to kill and what you want to do.

So for the Dungeon Key end-game experience we can talk about right now, the plan is that since we have all these various dungeons, and they will all have different objectives, you need to do a different thing to complete each of those dungeons. It is going to mean that the pace of combat, and the exact thing you are valueing in everyone of those dungeons, is going to be very different. Particularly when you add dungeon affixes.

So for example, in Domhainne Tunnels, the objective is: kill all monsters — having the Lightning pulse chase you throughout that dungeon, there is constant pressure. You have to kill everything to complete the objective. Comparing that to Garan Hold, where you have to find the Fallen Idols, you have a bit of more leeway.

So even just that small affix in two different dungeons can yield a very different experience; and on top of that, that short distance evade that Joe mentioned; and what that does is it really helps make a lot of the combat very intensional, particularly at higher levels of play. So you have to be very careful. Very good at timing your combat, and your evade skills when you are doing this stuff. So the plan is to make it a little bit more intense experience.

The only reason Inferno was “difficult” is because you didn’t get ilvl61+ stuff until * after* act 2, in inferno. effectively placing the gear required for the difficulty level beyond the ability of most players to survive to even acquire it.

This is why the best way to gear for inferno was actually to ignore mobs and only do runs with lots of breakables, even after they nerfed the drop rate on that it was still faster to farm pots than it was to try and play that level as intended.

Coupled with the lack of knowledge about how the Whimsey runs from a staff of herding were supposed to be the “half level” in between to help you get gear and you had the majority of the player population feeling locked out due to extremely punishing planning.

On a personal side note: STOP TRYING TO MAKE EVERY DAMN GAME ANOTHER DARK SOULS if that’s your bailiwick, GO PLAY THOSE GAMES. Not everyone enjoys it, nor even wants to intentionally get junked for XX hours straight. I’m glad you enjoy it. Personally I don’t.

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Go play Dark Souls then, I’m sure they’ll have their own RMAH too…

PS: troll harder.

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I’m just asking it to be alongside the other choices at the same difficulty level. You wouldn’t have to play it if you didn’t want to.

On a personal side note: STOP TRYING TO MAKE EVERY DAMN GAME ANOTHER DARK SOULS if

Its not about darks souls. Inferno multiplayer felt just way better than everything else in Diablo 3 EVER. There were no crazy speeds, 1000 mobs per meter (up to the level when you literally can’t find your own char on the screen), combat was intense and tactical, without stupid oneshots from both sides. Actually, it was really cool. Only bad thing was the drop, it was just not balanced with such pace of the game. But gameplaywise Inferno was GREAT.

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If you want a hard game, for starer, remove the ability to heal or use a potion in the harder difficulty mode.

As long as you can replenish your missing HP unlimitedly and monsters were unable to one-shot you, the game will never going to be hard.

I’d rather they move away from that tired difficulty system of redoongnthe campaign on a harder difficulty to progress. It so tired and boring. This is not saying D3 did it right either.

I’d like to see a selectable, possibly chargeable difficulties, with a touch of what WoW does with its scaling with ilvl. As you get better and better gear the enemies become more difficult. Now, I don’t want it hiw WoW has it, but rather as you get better gear more mobs spawn, packs have harder groupings of mobs, elites show up more, have harder or more affixes, and so on.

I feel that way is a more organic way of increasing the difficulty as opposed to beating the last boss, exiting to the menus, upping to the new unlocked difficulty, and doing it all over again.

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I’m sure there will be some timed/speedrun content in endgame. It just won’t be the focus and will probably be similar to the weekly challenge rift. Which is something I wouldn’t mind.

Say it’s a weekly challenge keyed Dungeon. You play the same class and build and you have to kill the same amount of enemies, do all the same bonus objectives, and everything that player did in the same time of faster. Not just zerg through a rift. But if the player explored 90% but you got all the objectives with only 75, you still need to open up the other 15% sort of thing.

Still a timed activity, just once a week.

This is a bad and inaccurate take that puts you in a tiny minority. D3V Inferno was dreck with mustard.

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Nah. Accroding to what majority of people keep saying, they hate D3 and POE speedrunning with crazy ammount of mobs, colorful circus like skill spam, and a shower of rare/legendary drops. Everyone wants D4 to slow down, and in D3 this was pre-paragon Inferno time. So ye, majority of people do want Inferno-like experience in D4. What they do not want is stupid unproportional drop rate it had (and, as a result, inability to start playing on inferno due to “hit the wall” difficulty spike). However, once you ve got at least some gear, Inferno was very exciting to play on.

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I dont mind hard like it was in inferno. But what I didnt like is what is already said. You needed items to survive, and they just didnt drop untill you got passed the part that was already killing you. I mean I got one shotted by a sandwasp in act 2 inferno, while having no problems with the act1 endboss… Makes no sense…

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Agreed. Pretty much all A-RPGs seems to be moving away from that. For good reasons.

Anyway, yeah I agree with OP. Combat and difficulty in Diablo 3 at release was kinda fun. I mean, the game was broken, the gearing process was turned on its head and all that. So not talking about the game as it was. But the specific style of slower, more tactical and challenging combat, that was nice.
What D4 should learn there is not the actual “difficulty” of vanilla inferno with its crap itemization. It is the pace and feel of the combat imo.

And I also agree that it would be nice if the campaign itself had such difficulty. Not in the “must replay 3 times while lvling” sense, as mentioned above. Instead make replaying the campaign on a higher difficulty one of the end-game options. Alongside key dungeons etc. Add in more random events etc. in those later playthroughs to spice it up (so replaying campaign + endgame adventure mode in one package)

Yes. Well, healing should be available of course, otherwise you just create a game experience of going back to town repeatedly. But it is extremely important that healing is fairly slow and/or infrequent. Incoming dmg also needs to be slow. Challenge is not the same as getting oneshot. Quite the contrary.
In most A-RPGs, monster dmg and player healing turns into an arms race, that leads to the only thing that can challenge players is stuff that oneshots us. We really need to get away from that.
Danger in combat should come from taking dmg multiple times, your HP going below 50% etc, while you frantically fight monsters to get your health back.
For the same reason, the idea behind health globes was also great, although the implementation was not as much.

Also, yeah, timed runs has no place in Diablo 4, or any other A-RPGs imo. By its nature, people will try to do the content as fast as possible, because efficiency is king in A-RPGs. There is no need for a timer. The timer only places a hard cap on the content, limiting player builds unnecessarily. Dont penalize people for clearing content slowly, the fact they are clearing it slowly is already penalizing the build enough.
(of course, you can still have achievements, cosmetic stuff etc. for doing things within a timer)

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I’m certainly not against more difficulty in the game, especially in contents like the Campaign (assuming that the campaign is repeatable). Also having the game (or at least the option to make the game) more difficult overall would make exploration a fun task as well.

That said, it would need to be done properly. I would like to avoid difficult simply meaning monsters either has more life or damage (to the point they could one shot you). Instead I think it would be better if Monsters had a greater variety of abilities, both elite affixes and racial ability. For example, the succubus in Diablo 3 used to be able to lower player’s armor by a percentage, and the corrupted angels used to be able to create a shield that reduced their damage to a certain element, also how there were elite affixes like vampiric (which gave the elite monsters lifesteal). I’d like to see more abilities like that in Diablo 4.

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Yea, I don’t think anyone is asking for cheap difficulty spikes. It only got worse with the absurd repair bill on level 60 gear they added out of nowhere that seriously limited your attempts progressing in Inferno before you had to farm gold back. I didn’t even see Act 2 but heard it was where the game became beyond cheap and unfair with overtuning. The main reason is I straight up quit after they added the insane repair bill.

That’s why I suggested more mobs, denser packs, more variety within packs as it gets difficult.

Say a viewable area has 3 skeleton warriors and a pack of 3 SWs. The next level of difficulty would see maybe 2 SW, a 2 packs of 3 SW and a skeletal mage each. Next would see maybe 3 SW with shields, 2 packs with a mix of 5 SWs and SMs, and a pack of elites.

Something like that isn’t just HP and damage, you have more, different mob types to deal with, elites with affixes, and so on.

It was fine and most of us who played it the complaint was the itemization. Many felt the need to use the AH just to get by.

No, they don’t. You cite to nothing. My point is supported by math. People buy a game based on the popularity of the last installment. D3 vanilla sold incredibly well on the back of D2LoD. RoS underperformed because D3V sucked. They scrapped the second expansion even though the game and player base recovered after the D3V debacle.

Nobody liked Vanilla Inferno. Nobody. Dying trying to get basic gear repeatedly sucks.

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It was so fine that the game tanked.

I’m not against that. Say you have some club bearing skeletons who have the chance of stunning you when they strike. Ordinarily they wouldn’t be much of an issue for some classes, especially if you keep your distance. However add into the mix some skeleton archers who can lace their arrows with either poison or ice frost.

Now you need to be careful, because if you get hit with their cold arrows, you’ll probably be slowed enough for the club bearing skeletons to hit and possibly stun you, which in turn would leave you wide open for the poison archer skeletons to hit and poison you. In short a bit of a lethal situation that would require careful actions instead of just thoughtlessly charging in.

Also, it’d be nice if elemental attacks can have secondary effects again (for both us and the enemy), or at least do so without the need of a passive or item effect. I think cold is the only one that does have a secondary effect without the need of an external ability of sorts.

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