I have been in a fun ARPG loop over the last couple of months and surprisingly season 8 of D4 has been holding my attention more than Dawn of the Hunt and the new Last Epoch patch.
I have been enjoying the grind of trying to do advance my build and its hard to ignore how good diablo feels to play over others. We all know more endgame systems is needed and I hope for some creative ideas here. However, I feel there is a “low hanging fruit” opportunity to create more depth / play your way with systems that Diablo already has. I’m not sure this is a good idea but I can’t help thinking about is so sharing anyways.
So far every season has loved their factions and power systems. Therefore, I feel like this wouldn’t be a large leap to implement a “faction” for each end game system: Infernal Horde, Undercity, Nightmare Dungeons, Pits, and Boss Lair (Maybe it even results in a tree or an end game system “paragon board”. I have found myself engaging and having fun in each of these but what I want is a way to further juice all of these experiences as a reward for playing them more. I feel like a faction system / paragon board that also provides agency to alter these runs could be a solution? We grind rep all the time so why not for each end game activity grind a faction that gives me additional rewards. I think this is the bare minimum that could be done.
Ideally, I could further juice difficulty, randomness, and rewards, similar to what the tributes can do for an Undercity run, but let me do it for any end game activity and potentially have multiple routes for what I am chasing after.
I am really liking the boss ladder and just can’t understand how this isn’t more expansive than it is today. There are a lot of campaign and seasonal bosses that we could have involved in this ladder. I also find myself wishing I had a UI like the graphic they shared that shows the ladder / material progression. I feel like there could be something about visually seeing which bosses you have defeated and on what difficulty. Why not steal some D3 machines or Infernal Council chaos were we could juice our boss ladders further by adding another boss, give bosses additional powers, or whatever more brilliant ideas the developers could come up with.
Finally, what about more with PvP? Specifically, what about something more creative like a PvPvE match. Something like Destiny did where you are fighting monsters but can sometimes go over to try to disrupt the enemy team. Or something like a Starcraft 2 custom game like Tower Defense except we are the towers and we can choose to send monsters or certain bosses over to the opposing players / teams to try to overwhelm them?
Love the game and these are some random musings from an extreme casual ARPG player. How would the community make these ideas better or what other suggestions do people have?