Recently posted a longer post with “guidelines” to what should be the general attitude be when doing some reworks, and yes it may have been a bit arrogant/hypocritical on my side, but here I’ll just do “my suggestion” part of the whole
And I’ll start from the first step as usually (Identification of the problem/s)
I’ve grown to believe that there are these 3 (IMO biggest) problems with the game… Keep in mind, I’m not saying other things can’t get better, BUT, I think it’s worthy pointing them out:
1 = Masterwork “blankets” everything in the game. It muddies individual decisions for improvement, it makes everything impossible to gauge, it is biggest source of imbalance, and on top of it all it’s a “mandatory” chore
2 - There’s no incrementalism, nor sense or opportunity for incrementalism in the “endgame”. A player unlocks T4 on P190 and voila, nothing to do other than hard XP grind for 30 more levels until filing up last Paragon, doing a few more MW rounds and attempting to fight a boss
3 - Pit. This has always aggravated me cause of the way it works so I won’t repeat myself
But, here’s a link in which I suggest a set of steps to fix all those:
No true end game. The current “end game” is the same stuff I use to level with. It’s just the same boring Pits. And we don’t even have official leaderboard for that lol. Also there is like only 1 or 2 at best end game builds per class, lowest of any ARPG.
Korean MMO Cooldown Spam Piano Rotations for most (but not all) end game builds, making the gameplay very clunky. Most top unofficial leaderboard players just use macros due to this lol…
Trading system sucks. It is using dated mechanics from 1999. All while also not having a SSF advantage mode like LE. POE also suffers this
No what the problem is with itemization is the lack of it. MS/Vit/other was boring in D3 and its boring in D4.
MW is fine. Its an “easy” system the community can understand. However this season it has felt like a chore because 2-3gas rain from the sky. So the only thing to do 1-2 days after getting to 60 is MW.
No exiting drops. Everything is either just useless or just useful for your build, which doesn’t result in dopamine but relief. “Finally got the unique for my build.”
Build should be mostly separate from gear, freeing up a lot of design space for fun, game altering items.
I have no problem with MW, it being the only end-game progression is a problem. It lacks items to interact with, like shards, including gems or runes in the paragon board, etc.
I completely agree with the pit and the end game. Lifeless activities. The game quickly becomes extremely easy and unchallenging. The pit should be the perfect pit for you to progress, this is boring.
Yes, the RNG system could be implemented with choice, and with choice there would be a very high cost, such as runes, gems and a special material from breaking 3 GA items. This material could be used from 8 to 12 in MW, for example. This would prevent everyone from reaching 12 in a few hours.
So you still want to retain MW as mandatory feature but just want a mechanism to “upgrade” it based on a rare material
I could see why you wanna just “deal with the poison”
BUT I kinda want to point out that MW is the main reason why the game goes out of control in terms of balance, and it’s also a mandatory chore… Just my 50 cents on the matter
“End Game” is something everyone is going to argue over & I doubt there will ever be any real consensus on it. I am beginning to believe that the constant focus on it is a waste of time & mental energy.
The Pit, however, is hot mess garbage. I’d be just as happy if it were deleted entirely, as IMO it serves no good purpose. But if it’s to be kept, it desperately needs a wholecloth re-work, which I’ve no confidence Blizz will even attempt, much less get right.
The imbalance isn’t due to MW, but when you combine a single item with MW, it gets out of control. Look at Hydra: 12 heads in MW deal 1200% more damage per hydra. But the problem isn’t MW, it’s the item’s value, which will be reduced to 5 to 25% per head next season. Want to bet?
But I believe this was intentional… Just like d3, they want to control the meta.
I mean what Pit level does Hydra clean after the bug fix, 120 ?
Sure, they will nerf Hydra number and it will still end up at Pit 100
The problem is they can’t keep nerfing every single number separately to “gauge” endgame all the time, they have to do something more drastic and sudden that affects everything to make things more manageable (in this case divorce from tempering and limit mandatory MW)
That way even if something does 4x, will end up doing 4x, not 20x or 500x (if some Passive/Node multiplier is relatively high also)
MW is the “knot” that ties everything together and makes every single decision sky-rocket out of control (on top of everything, every single piece of gear being mandatory for 12x MW)
It is but I think it’s coming to an end, the gain is very little, the loss is always bigger, and frustration has piled up a lot
The game started with multipliers of 10 to 30%, in s0 I got to use the Edgemaster’s aspect on the two-handed weapon, which does more damage the more resources we have. Today we have many aspects with 50% … 100% … 120% … Meteor with 360% have become common. These multipliers should be much smaller. We also have a lot of additives reaching 2000% critical 1000% Ice etc.
