Will there be any actual penalty for death in D4?

I personally feel like its necessary to have some sort of relevant penalty for your character dying. Otherwise the gameplay always lends towards pure glass cannon builds and I find it to be a bit less dynamic and interesting. If there is actually incentive to survive or if the gameplay leads towards that being more of a necessity it creates more interesting choices.

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Hardcore Mode is what thats exactly designed for

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Rumour is that Blizzard Is developing a device that attaches directly to your brain that has a chance to cause real life death when your in game charachter dies

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Most ARPGs have this mechanic, I am all for it. It makes you playing more carefully and not just try to take chances for the sake of it. The game should feel like we are actually in a dangerous place and that doing stupid things will Hace consequences. Even borderlands 3 (aRpg again) have some sort of consequence if you die repeatedly

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Taking things away from the player teaches nothing. If someone dies, it needs to be fairly obvious why. Did they take on too many mobs? Should they have dodged that telegraphed attack? Could they have positioned better? Not engaged with resources so depleted? So on and so forth. Merely adding an exponential time sink does nothing to this end, only teaching people to fear death when it does eventually happen while otherwise learning the game, and further finding ways to cheese it like taking your gold out of your stash in D2 and leaving it on the ground.

As for glass builds, to an extent this is where you guarantee monsters will have hard to dodge or even unavoidable attacks. Assuming you don’t have HP ping pong going on with leech mechanics and potion chugging, you can then balance around an expected defensive level for the more key encounters you’d be facing throughout the story or subsequent boss events. For instanced encounters, you obviously can’t zombie kill foes if they’re resetting each time you die. If it’s such a major concern for the open world, you can instead implement a timed weakness system where your damage output is diminished by 10% for 2 minutes if you revive, 30% for another 2m if you die during that period, and then 95% for another 2m if you die again during that. In party play, this affords a bit of wiggle room for making a mistake, but everyone will effectively become useless if they just keep dying to an encounter they’re not ready for. And again, why they’re not ready for it should be something the player can figure out, even if the eventual answer is to grind another couple levels.

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Bring back the D2 (Hell) death penalty, where you lose XP when you die if you are a softcore player

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That, exactly that, just like PoE.

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POE ripped it off directly from D2. Just for your information.

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Really depends on how they are going to handle leveling, if you can safely get to max lvl a xp hit won’t really matter on death.

I had forgotten how brutal was dying on D2 and dropping all your stuff (restarted playing after D2 announcement, thanks Duriel), and I think it’s a bit too punishing for casual players, pushing them away.

If they keep the idea of having a attainable max lvl + paragons (I hope paragons are limited, harder to obtain and mostly just a number if they exist) I think they could make so that you lose an paragon lvl or something like that.

Since you guys like to get punished so much, how about this? If your character died, you can’t login to it for the next 3 hours. Talk about 3 hours of exp loss.

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Will there be any actual penalty for death in D4?

if you want it, play HC…
if they add it to normal gameplay, i’ll have to see it before i buy.

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During the Q&A they said there will be a penalty, and that you can regain a bit of the loss by reclaiming your body. The only thing the mentioned you’d lose was gold however.

Blizzards niche is a more casual approach, I doubt they would make a stiff death penalty.

I don’t think casual or not is particularly relevant. Both groups benefit from the same quality of gameplay. One just has more time.

Death penalties makes combat more interesting and engaging. Consequences of decisions in a game is important.

The goal is not to severely punish people for dying. That is what HC is for.
XP loss is not a good penalty for the same reason. If someone is struggling then taking away earned xp is just making it worse.

I think Sacred 2 have done it best so far.
It had a survival bonus, slowly building up during combat as long as you did not die. It took a lot of hours to max it - which wasn’t necessarily the goal.
It gave various bonuses; MF, higher lvl drops, various other stats.
But it came with a twist. Monster lvls increases with the bonus, so there was a risk/reward element to it.
So if you died, sure you lost some very nice bonuses, but enemies also got weaker again.
The bonus also increased faster early on, then slower and slower, again not to be too punishing.

I know something like that is likely to complicated for the kind of design Blizzard usually aims for.

However something simpler can work too.
D3’s yellow xp pools kinda were a simple survival bonus. It was just way too small, way too short duration to have even the slightest impact.

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Someone comes to your house and punches you in the face, and then they steal your Lillith plushie.

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The problem with debuffs on deaths imo is that it encourages waiting out the debuff - which is not fun gameplay.
Something that you earn back through combat, encourages you to, literally in D4’s case, to get back on the horse.

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Bovie, I know that - most people understand PoE better on these forums these days though…Which is a sign of the times…

Don’t joke. I bet money there would be at least a few people that signed up for that.

It depends on how they handle reviving, I suppose. If it’s like D3, I’d say something along those lines is appropriate. If it’s more like you have to WP and party members can’t toss up TPs while in combat, then I’d argue you probably don’t need it at all.

From the sounds of it, though, there’s gonna be corpse runs, which is pretty bleh to me. If something killed you at full strength, it’ll have an easier time of it when you’re naked.

“You Have Died”

Game Over

Roll Credits

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