The game is nowhere near hard enough for this approach/discussion to be prevalent/suitable overall tbh
What’s that discussion gonna look like ?
Hey I can’t 1-shot everything and 5-shot bosses like the other build does…
AS IF, 1-shotting (or 2-shot, or 3-shot, or heck even 5-shot elite/brutes) stuff is the “norm” that should be followed somehow 
Interesting take of course, but I feel your categories are more based on activities and not players. Even if you used a venn diagram it would be per player, not group of players. Sure there’d be some overlap, but I still feel it would be better to just make categories of activities, which you’ve already done.
Much harder to get an accurate reading on what a Progression player would do for example, one type of player may like progression and grinding, another may like progression and difficulty, etc. the possibilities, while limited within these categories, vary from player to player.
Yes you could potentially make a horizontal progression listing the benefits to each category, but if you go off of ‘Players’ it’ll be under a lot of assumptions and personal bias.
Yeah, the idea of removing season resets is silly.
Just make all season content available, at the same time, in both Eternal and Season. Win/win for both.
This however is more like the opposite. All classes need massive nerfs if there is ever going to be any kind of good combat balance for this game.
I probably fall somewhere into this one. Probably why I don’t like leveling/glyph xp boosts. I don’t want that bar filled up artificially. There probably is somewhat a feeling of accomplishment and its getting eroded every season so far.
I recognize there’s a new progression activity with the pit tho.
How the hell can anyone do Horizontal Progression in diablo? With gear? Stats? Goblins?
Horizontal progression is probably one of my favorite ideas in video games. It’s basically a great way to introduce a new ride. If you think of video games as theme parks and each of the games systems is a ride. You have a leveling ride, item ride, cosmetic ride, difficulty ride, etc. With horizontal progression you have an extra ride. You build your toon. Gear, stats, passives, etc. Then you fight the end boss. Then get of the last ride and get back on the first. Rinse/repeat. With horizontal progression you can just keep getting on new rides.
D4 kinda does this but not really. Take the new S4 Iron Wolves Honor for example. The quest line is to be done simultaneously with the leveling process (from my understanding). That’s great for the leveling process but then ppl are upset because they’ve made the leveling process shorter so it almost works against itself.
I think if they would have done a quest line that didn’t start till after lvl 100 than you would of had horizontal progression with that very same mechanic. You’d just have to change up the rewards. Now this has problems. The biggest one being now ppl have to wait to play the new season basically.
But if you had something like that you can do some pretty fun stuff. Iron Wolf Honor give tiers of rewards tailored to a more intense or rewarding experience. Think more stuff like profane mindcage.
We don’t know what the rewards are yet but here is basically an idea for a season that I’d have that focuses on Horizontal progression. I’m just spit balling haven’t really thought a lot about it. Just one idea.
Season 9 Season of Darkness.
Quest giver gives you first quest (to stay in line with current practices) first quest “cleanse the world”. You have a new bar on top or under your xp bar that activates at T4. You can add some quest to start telling the story and lvl up before T4. The bar fills as you slay the new monster type. Shadow Ghosts. They are basically everywhere enemies are now more in helltide even more when your threat meter rises same as other seasons. As you do dungeons, helltide, whispers, etc. the standard game loop you progress that bar. Once you hit 100 you should hit that first bar (basically how this season might be). Once that bar is full you get a new quest. “Ignite your inner light” seasonal paragon board activates and you can have 20 or w.e many seasonal points for that specific board. That board gives certain stats for what is to come. Once you hit level “20” you’re ready for the new dungeon/stronghold that you can only access once you are “ignited”. That paragon board has two routes. hard/easy or w/e. depending how you set it that last stronghold is going to have more monster density or some mini bosses around or w.e. Once you beat it depending on your threshhold of difficulty you get the shiny armor or the normal armor. The end. lol
D4 has a lot of puzzle piece type game systems. Thinking specifically of paragon boards. Why not utilize them more.
Actually, very curious to hear what ppl think when they hear horizontal progression. How does that look to them. And some ideas of that.
Blast, Grind, Progression Player here. Looking forward to Season 4.
I think the “Arcade player” is missing.
It is that type of player who enjoys combat or killing a boss, regardless of difficulty, speed, build or progression.
That’s fair. They are actually categories of activities really but it seems like there are players who want more or less of an activity so that’s why I went with the player route rather than naming it different activity types in D4.
One group of players want more progression so with the new lvling they are upset. Others want to Blast faster so they are happy. They both are speaking of activities but each are pulling for more of their personal favorites.
Football players and Soccer players. Each want more of their sport. Football is an activity, but you get what I mean.
But I don’t disagree. What I am actually talking about here is the activities not necessarily the players. But it’s the players that are upset because they want more of their favorite activity.
Could this be a subcategory of blast player?
Maybe… I would say the difference is how casual the player is, but yes, it could be.
To be clear, the arcade would be more casual. He doesn’t necessarily follow the news, research powerful builds or play on high difficulties… he just enjoys the quality of the game and not necessarily the type of game.
New skills. New modifications to skills.
New items and affixes.
Then there is one of the most obvious ones. One that Blizzard kinda “promised” before release, and then never delivered on; new Paragon boards.
You could also have different defenses, like have gear for the fire boss, frost boss etc. But that would take a bit more rework for Blizzard I guess.
Likewise, if Blizzard added monster resistances, your dmg types could become more of a horizontal system.
And so on.
And that is just focusing on characters and gear.
Instead of having freaking 200 vertical lvls in the pit, if the game had more sensible scaling, and more ways to challenge the player than “oneshot or be oneshot” it would also be easier to make horizontal challenges, not based on increasing numbers.
Blizzard kinda talked about that before release as well, with monster families representing different combat challenges.
Of course, that collides with the Blaster playstyle…
I’m curious. How would you make a season to be horizontal progression? Taking into consideration the framework from past seasons.
As much as I agree with this in its entirety I don’t think we’re ever going to see it happen. The amount of backlash from ‘The Patch’ that did a blanket damage reduction (in theory not practice) that wasn’t all that big of a deal anyway makes me think this line of thinking him is a pipe dream. Maybe if they handled that patch better, like had a PTR back then, maybe it wouldn’t have gone over so poorly. Sadly we’ll probably never know.
Haven’t played S3, so cant speak about that, but both S1 and S2 were partly horizontal, you unlocked more gems, or more whatever the vampire stuff was called. But could only equip 3 of them. That already is horizontal progression. And also vertical of course, as those systems increased your power.
But adding new paragon boards in each season (or some of the seasons) would seem like one of the easier ways. You could also add new Glyphs.
New gems?
Adding new uniques and aspects already are existing horizontal progression (well, if Blizzard would stop power creeping anyway).
New skills and skill modifications. But I guess those are preserved for expansions.
But then I also consider the current season gimmicks to be fairly bad overall, would be much better to add exactly the stuff above, permanent additions to the base game.
Season themes themselves would probably always need to be both some vertical progression (unlocking the system) and horizontal (whatever stuff you could do in the system).
As for horizontal combat progression; well, adding different bosses/dungeons that challenge different aspects of characters. AoE, single target, generator/spender, healing, and so on. Since I dont like the idea of respeccing, it cant exactly be content that required you to do that, but might be content that made you change gear for each encounter for example. Where the horizontal progression would be gathering gear appropriate for each of the challenges.
I’ve always been curious as to why they don’t even seem to consider unlocking hubs as possible horizontal progression. Right now it’s get the waypoint and ignore the rest if you’ve completed the story.
A long time back I shared an idea about having a more quest-ing feel to unlocking various parts of the map. We go to Margrave (sp?) and it’s like here’s a tiny side or parallel quest about my buddy getting roped in to bandits. That’s kind of fun to experience something happening. They should’ve tied that kind of stuff into renown and maybe people wouldn’t be so bored with the trophy hunting.
It seems like they kind of have some intent with the iron wolves reputation but on the other hand that could just rehash the simplistic lunar mechanics for all we know.
To me, at the very least adding actual plot to waypoints and other POI would help satisfy the progression people some as there’s something to do but also get rid of the more tedious renown aspects like waiting to get that random item drop. You’d know exactly what to do because you’d be guided to areas.
Anyway, those are far fetched dreams that I should probably shut up about.
Hm, yeah, one interesting horizontal progression system could be the overworld.
The overworld is severely lacking as an endgame system. So what if you could unlock harder and harder tiers of different areas of the overworld by doing such quests? Could be neat. Slowly building up your own map of endgame content to do.
Of course, some people would instantly demand that it became a permanently upgraded system, like Renown did.
I don’t know… I like infinite or almost infinite elements. But I think the character’s level at 100 is good. But we can unlock an eternal paragon at 100 during the seasons, even if it requires 1 more dexterity every 10 levels, I feel lack of this progression. Like the 200 level Glypho. Elements like a bag of gold at level 30, a cosmetic at 50, an item at 3 GA 80. It would be fun. Even if I don’t have time to complete it, I want to look and talk " Wow, this season I played a lot, I managed to reach level 123 of the infinite paragon."
-D4 lacks this feeling. For example D2 had dozens of runes and items that I have never seen. D3 had infinite paragon and unique jewels that were difficult to reach 150.
-D4 now gains some of this in itemization, you have an ideal GA plus the perfect Masterwork gives a 250% increase, a very big difference 10% attack speed becomes 25%. 800 life would become 2000. These are very big differences. So having A good GA will be a great achievement, which will be rare.
It would be smarter to tie the boss ladder to something like that instead of mats like now, in my opinion anyway. They’re doing tiered bosses already anyway. Instead of farming content where you may or may not get materials do a short quest that ends in that boss fight. I’m not saying do a 4 hour quest per fight of course, just something you do that you can repeat, 10-15 minutes of play sounds fair to me with my napkin math. The quest gets harder and the boss gets harder as you go higher. Instead of 2 tiers like S4 will bring they could do 5-ish. The quest could change as you progress to get to “the real baddie”. I don’t know, I’m spitballing.
Interesting. I consider myself all those above except for the Blast Player. Now it makes sense that I do not like D3 or Torchlight Infinite heh heh.
New socket types
- When Crit vs Elite or Overpower get CDR
- When more than X enemies are affected by Overtime, gain DR bubble
- When target/s CC-ed longer than X, daze for X
- When target/s impaired longer than X, silence for X
- While having a Barrier: damage is increased by Life per hit, Life on kill, and Thorns amount
- Gain 7% DR for every Legendary node unlocked
- Gain 10% CDR for every board that doesn’t have a Glyph equipped
- Common nodes that give Str give double the amount
- All common nodes give +2 additional stats
- Magic nodes that give Str/Dex/Int/WP now give tripple the amount
- Magic nodes are doubled in power. These bonuses are doubled if not having a Legendary node unlocked
- All Magic nodes unlocked now also give +1 to AllStats
- All offensive/defensive glyphs gain 2 additional levels
- Glyphs that affect CC duration also grant 10% CCR
- Glyph (Ambush) gains 5 additional levels
- Target skill gains 500% WD in addition to it’s damage but gains additional 3 sec. CD
- Target skill activates unstoppable for 1.5 sec but it’s CD is increased by 6 sec
- Target skill gains 10% CDR for every Basic skill equipped
- Target skill has 35% chance to cast twice (multicast)
- Target skill has it’s LH chance increased by 10% (baseline)
- (Legendary) Target AoE skill becomes Ultimate. Gains additional 1200% WD on cast and double the Area. You’re also able to equip one additional skill Orb inside this one but the equipped skill gains 30 sec CD
- (Legendary) Target skill becomes Basic skill. It has no cost and no cast delay, however it’s AoE is not greater than 1/4 of it’s initial size and WD% is reduced to 150%. You can equip another Basic-skill altering Skill Orb inside this one
e.t.c.
But the real key/catch IMO isn’t really in what players get, it’s what mobs get (i.e. mob evolution), as right now there is NONE. Actually there is some of it, but all of it incentivizing even more damage piling up i.e. wrong types:
Will see how it goes, but personally think they have the wrong approach, they want to provide an “equal endgame footing” for everyone and turn the game into “DPS races” as much as possible, rather than individualize performance (much like in manners I showed just above)
That’s why we don’t have loot/drops as limited-assets, and everything is “equal” and “unlocked” via a certain challenge or activity or whatever. That’s why I assume also Temper manuals are a collection to unlock & have
I also think that’s bad because all those “permanently unlockable powers” ruin early game even further (just look at Renown)
So doubt they like “horizontal progression”, in fact think they’ll do the exact opposite at all times. Sadly I also think that’s how early game and leveling (and progression in general) becomes trivialized more and more and everything “new” becomes exclusive lvl100 stuff (or at least best-utilized at lvl100)
This could work also 
BUT ? - They’re preferring blasters over everyone and are ruining the game (early game, progression, individualization of performance, specialization against certain mobs/types, all that) as a result
They’ll try to remove every single bit of “individualization of performance” away and put everyone on equal footing so there’s a “shred-off competition” at lvl100. Again - the wrong approach to have