I play the story every season, I know, Why do I do this? Why don’t I just skip it? I’d level up faster through the season, am I stupid? But I really want to discuss what that might look like to a new player.
Last night I had reached Elias and he was summoning Andariel outside the cabin. My friend I was playing with (Who is level 51 while I am 31 and hates me for replaying the story again) was going AFK because he had to attend to his son. I was super bored and couldn’t smoke anymore dabs while I waited so I just initiated the fight and went in with him idling.
I thought to myself, “Hey, this is going to add another layer of challenge!” Monsters are harder with 2 and I set the personal goal of my rogue drawing enough aggro to keep him alive throughout the fight. About 2 minutes in I realized my friend wasn’t in any danger, in fact he was taking no damage at all that I could see. Then I simply stopped moving and Andariel hit me and did no damage. I watched her hit my friend’s idle body until it bounced into the wind storm and he was alive for a full 3 minutes while Andariel held him off screen.
Ignoring how personally offended I am that Blizzard chose to dishonor such a prolific character from the series with some killer lore by making her a stupid joke, how is that fun? If I didn’t love Diablo the way I do (On my nightstand sits my original Diablo 2 box set every night) I would put this game down and never play it again. That’s not low stakes that is the absence of anything resembling a stake. There are literal low level mobs that are more of a danger on tier 2 than the actual maiden of anguish. If I was a new player who knew nothing about Diablo and I got to that part I would put the game down and play something else.
Chess has been around for 1500 years, and professionally and privately its still regularly played to this day. The reason for that is because its easy to learn and hard to master. A child could play it badly and grow up to play it well, or could focus enough to master it, but you’d have to be good at it to win. The word game is defined as “a form of play or sport, especially a competitive one played according to rules and decided by skill, strength, or luck” and by this definition D4 tier 1 and 2 isn’t a game. It takes no skill, luck isn’t a factor, and the only strength you need is the strength you use to suspend your disbelief enough to have a good time. How does Blizzard expect someone to sit through this long enough to get to the “good part” like everyone wants them to do?
In closing, I am not hating on D4, I like D4, the art and music and animations and everything are really top tier. But I don’t see how this does anything but turn new players away.
This is my thing. From a design perspective they’ve changed what makes Diablo, Diablo. Normal Andariel is not the same as Hell Andariel, and there was a progression there that made the bosses feel progressively more dangerous. I would argue that, solution wise, there’s only 2 ways they can go.
A: We make the story (optionally) start at level 100, this way everything is scaled to what we would refer to as “Hell” . This would still work from a story perspective as your MC would be a warrior combatting the forces of hell before being infected by Lilith’s petals.
or
B: We scale back the level 1-100 (because what’s the point anyway) so level 100 is automatic and displayed as level 1 with all those benefits and make the grind go from 100-200
As it stands, only the most casual among us will enjoy the story, and most players will likely not even revisit it until D5 comes out.
Base game is not supposed to be difficult. We are playing Diablo, not some From Software Dark Souls/Demon Souls game. Difficulty should ramp up in higher tiers, not at WT1 or 2.
And wouldn’t be surprised if balance is a little on the easy side this season. They messed with a lot of systems. Probably will need some adjustments to fine tune the difficulty.
Not many are asking for difficult, just not so mind numbingly easy that entire mechanics are skipped. WT2 is so easy now that there isn’t a reason for WT1.
WT1 is probably now still intended for people who are brand new, haven’t done altars yet, don’t have the bonus skill points, etc. someone who JUST purchased the game.
that being said, now that players enter WT4 at level 45-50, i think they really need to bring in WT5 and you ideally enter it around maybe level 80-90, with like level 120-130ish mobs. it should be easy but currently even the hellborne and blood maidens die in 1 shot lol.
