Hi, Ark is a much different game than Diablo, obvious.
But its endgame content would be perfect for Diablo and get us hooked for long long time.
In Ark, in order to get ascensions, for example upgrade your max level from 100 to 105, you have to complete a final boss. But in order to fight this boss you need to complete a number of Caves ( Dungeons ) wich gives you the required trophys.
Imagine in Diablo if to unlock level 105 you have to complete a series of dungeons and then fight a really really, like really really hard boss to complete the ascension. This bosses should be like i said, so so difficult that you need to play in group or cheat the game or whatever.
Plus, in Ark, for example you have posioned caves, and to get the artifact you need a gas mask just to stay alive in the cave. For example in diablo you would need a Magical Ring which gives you the posion resistance needed for such a Dungeon.
Long grinding bosses and ascensions could be a good add to Diablo endgame. At least you will feel that you are grinding for something, not just power up your stats.
Interestimg suggestion. I cant really enjoy current end gane content because i dont like how they designed items. For me in diablo was end game always item finding.
Yeah i wouldnt mind that at all. Have barely started doing nightmare dungeons, hope they do become quite challenging, i want something that really challenges my character. As little i have heard Inferno/infernal Diablo in D3 was quite a feat to beat, so thats what i really want, also cow level. Well game is fresh, so far im having fun, we shall see what happens in future.
So, as a longtime ARK player, I agree the ascension system is interesting (and worth looking at for a Diablo-like game). But I think there’s some problems with how ARK implemented it that you’d want to avoid – or, more specifically, I think you’d want the fight here to be more than just an ascension fight.
To clarify a little for non-ARK folks… how ARK ascension works (on the Island, anyway – it differs on some other maps that have Ascension fights) is that to access a boss fight, you need to meet certain requirements. For instance, to fight Broodmother Lystrix on Gamma difficulty requires you to be level 30 and collect three Artifacts from various “challenge caves” – ARK’s sort-of equivalent to dungeons. (The caves devaser mentions, where they have high level critters and potentially environmental hazards, like being full of poison gas or being so cold you need special food or unusual gear to avoid freezing to death over time.)
In contrast, to fight her on Alpha difficulty requires you to be level 70 and to have those same three artifacts, but also to have trophies from killing various critters – 10 units of titanoboa venom, 10 argentavis claws, etc.
There’s also restrictions on what dinosaurs and such you can take into an arena – no fliers in most, for instance – and how many you can bring, etc. So even once you’ve unlocked a fight you hypothetically can’t just cheese it by bringing overwhelming quantities of high-powered dinos.
(Unless you cheat to bring stuff into the arena that isn’t otherwise allowed, granted.)
To get to the actual ascension fight – the one that raises the level cap – the Tribute includes not only trophies from various dangerous critters, but in place of Artifacts you need a trophy from defeating each of the other bosses at the appropriate difficulty.
So if you want to beat the Alpha Overseer, you need to collect the tribute Artifacts for Broodmother Lystrix, the Megapithicus, and the Dragon. You also need to collect the various critter trophies for the Alpha tier fights, and be at the appropriate level for each of them. Then you must fight and defeat each of those bosses, take their head as a trophy, and use those along with the appropriate critter trophies as tribute to open the Overseer fight.
Then you have to go through what is functionally an extremely long challenge cave (with critters spawned at a difficulty appropriate to the Overseer tier you’ve chosen) in order to even reach the Overseer arena, meaning you may suffer attrition to your dinosaur armada along the way and not be able to engage the Overseer with the full force you brought in.
(Or you may have expended all your ammo, or lost a member of your group along the way and be down a person since if they die they will respawn outside the arena, etc.)
It’s unusual for people to be powerful enough to take on the Alpha Overseer (and get the full 15 level cap increase et al) on the first go unless they’re cheesing things; the intention is that you run the Gamma difficulties, get that gear and those resources (and the 5 level cap bump), and then that helps you run the Beta difficulties (and get another 5 level cap bump and more gear unlocked), which helps equip you for the Alpha difficulties.
It is, needless to say, a process. And in that sense, it’s a system that would work well for Diablo conceptually, I agree – it gives you a long-term goal to aspire to, with a concrete and guaranteed reward (a level cap increase) at the end.
However, despite all that, the capstone fights of ARK are basically one-and-done. There’s basically zero reason to fight the Overseer again after you’ve done it on Alpha difficulty; you’ve got all the unlocks and the level cap increase, so the only reason to go back in there is if you’re helping someone else through.
On ARK, this is tolerable because – let’s be honest – most of us who play ARK do so either because PvP, or because we treat it like a Pokemon game… albeit one where sometimes you go try to catch a Pokemon and instead it eats you. So the ascension fights are a thing you do to unlock some extra gear to stomp your rivals, or to make yourself a little bit harder to chew when the giant angry lizard Pokemon try to eat you. And once you have achieved this, you then go back to PvP or Pokemon (as suits your personal taste).
And I feel like given how much of Diablo is centered around not just grind but also the necessity for repeatable content – and the fact that the repeatable content kind of needs to be combat-centric as the game has no demonic Pokemon to collect (though believe me I would play that game) – that, like I said, you’d want a fight like that to be something more than just an ascension fight. I feel like you’d want a reason to come back to it, to go grind the necessary stuff to access the fight again.
You can’t really just do it with gear easily, because given the nature of drops in this game, people would probably just farm something that’s less time-consuming, unless you made it gear that only drops in this particular fight. (You also can’t offer additional level cap increases each time you run it, because then people would just farm it endlessly and end up being level 1000 or whatever.)
I guess it could function akin to a capstone dungeon? Something you can do at cap for a given world tier, where you’d do the capstone dungeon right now? It wouldn’t be super repeatable, but it would give you a reason to go back and do it again each time you bumped your world tier, at least…
Anyway, it feels to me like you’d need to solve that issue, somehow. But I otherwise agree entirely that it wouldn’t be a bad fit for Diablo.
Yea, i think they could adapt that to Diablo so easily and have an endgame purpose. Not exactly like Ark, but with Diablo stuff, improve your equipment to beat the bosses or get the objects so you can fight the top bosses and get your ascension.
I find a lot of players that reach level 70 and say, now what?
The game was fun till endgame. Doing chaos dungeons every day SUCKED. It wasn’t fun. It was a repetitive grind that didn’t even have a slot machine where you get a chance at cool loot. It was just the same garbage stuff you wear and were upgrading.
Play Lost Ark if you want to grind a Korean MMO.
The only time in endgame it was fun was when you got to some breakpoint so could do a new dungeon every week.
Also timed dungeons suck. I hate them. Let me play what I want when I want.
Lost Ark endgame is why I quit Lost Ark.
The boss fights/dungeon designs were cool and you can’t even do them most the time you spend most your time doing boring unchallenging unrewarding dailies that are like a 2nd job. Screw that.
I mean, the point of ARK (not Lost Ark; different games) ascension fights is conceptually not a lot different than D4’s capstone dungeons: it’s a gateway to a higher power level. (In ARK’s case, raising your level cap. In D4’s case, raising the world difficulty.)
It’s a process, yes, but it’s not a grind in the sense you mean where you must endlessly repeat it. It’s a semi-lengthy process in the same way getting to the world tier 2 capstone dungeon on a new character is a process.
The suggestion is more that it might be worth having an endgame challenge that might take a while but gives you a guaranteed reward that can buff your power. Even if the buff is a one-off, like how you only get the level cap increase the first time you do an ascension fight in ARK.
The main reason I think there should be some incentive to replay a capstone power-increasing fight like that is because it means you have a reason to be willing to go back and help others with it even after you’ve done it.
I don’t think the reward should necessarily incentivize grinding the fight, any more than there should be some reward to endlessly re-running the current capstone dungeons.