Wonder what people think on this (setting aside the completely reasonable discussion that higher hp/damage do not make a satisfyingly interesting difficulty curve.)
What I mean is, is that reflective in pits, changes between world tiers are abrupt, even in an environment that otherwise has little difference between adjacent levels.
When playing outside pits, it makes sense, (to me at least,) as I think the aim of having players feel the change makes sense from a challenge and satisfaction standpoint. Inside pits though, it seems to me it would make more sense to smooth it out, closer to how D3’s grifts felt.
I think part of it may come down to the tiers including defense penalties; personally I think this is a clunky way to add difficulty, but was probably kept to justify the fact that the masterworking and gem system in their current iterations allows (and even forces) overcapping on these stats. But I would argue based on what I’ve seen and experienced myself, that most of the increasing “challenge” is not an increasing threat of death, but rather longer fights due to increasing HP sponginess.
I prefer smooth difficulty psychologically but realize that hard breakpoints are superior mechanically.
Breakpoints are superior because they work as real skill checks so you can’t overcome them through sheer luck. If, in a smooth curve, the difficulty increases by 2% (exponentially) you would still be able to go from point-to-point relatively speaking through sheer luck but with breakpoints and cliff-style gaming you either can or cannot.
MH actually has this breakpoint system where your Jaggi armor won’t work and you need Jaggi+ in the next level of difficulty in the game showing the clear difference between the two states numerically and allowing you really understand the stakes of the combat more clearly. It’s jarring because Jaggi+ is better than the toughest armor you could have gotten in the prior difficulty but it’s also transparent.
It’s probably necessary if you don’t want a lot of tiers yet want to accommodate a wider range of difficulty. A lot of players in D3 at one time were asking for torment difficulties there to be consolidated.
I’m not a fan of the big jumps in difficulty between torment levels. You need to absolutely faceroll a torment level before you can move up to the next on efficiently. It’s mostly because bosses are so much more difficult tuan the trash.
I would rather have like 10 T levels with smaller steps between them.
I am not sure I understand your thread, the difficulty in Pit is not affected by world tier. You can play the most difficult Pit 150 even you are in Torment 1. The difficulty increase gradually follow the pit level.
Except when moving to a new pit level representative of the new tier, at which point you get the full defense penalty. So pit level 19 to pit level 20 is a much bigger step up than pit level 18 to 19, or 20 to 21.
It almost has to work this way, because they want you to feel the difference between world tiers, and the pit is the arbiter and measure for which you can gauge your readiness for the transition.
Personally, I feel like it has worked well this season. You certainly can feel the difference between the tiers, and sometimes you have to hang back in a previous tier and work on your gear/build/etc (even after you unlock the next one) before moving on.
Also, defense and resist penalties are just The Diablo Way, so I don’t see that going away any time soon.
Yes and no. I mean you’re right, in general, but from the perspective of a HC player, sometimes it amounts to the same thing. I say that because, in order to get enough DPS for T4, I had to sacrifice a good chunk of my survivability options, leaving me much more vulnerable (to the point where it actually was a bit dicey at first in T4, until I managed to sort it all out).
The pit also use as a dungeon to unlock new difficulty tier. From tier 19 to 20 you ascend to torment 1 and the defense penalty will apply. It is used to test whether your character is ready for the challenge in Torment 1 when you walk out of the Pit. The increase of difficulty is same as from Hard to Torment 1 when you play other content outside of the pit.
Pit difficulty and torment defense penalty are different mechanic, the former apply on the enemy and the later apply to your character. You only experience the difficult spike when you jump to the first pit level use to unlock the new torment tier like Pit 20, 35, 50 & 65.