I’m getting so confused with people saying that D4’s “endgame” only starts after you get around 3 glyphs to lvl 15+ and somewhere around lvl 85+.
I believe the endgame is around lvl 60-65 really. Beyond that, some people are happy to grind repetitevely with one or maybe two characters, but anyone that goes beyond that falls into a pretty small group of players.
I believe that there are at least 3 things that define the endgame in RPGs in general:
- Power: quantitative progress or mild improvements to how you play the game. Mild improvements I’d say are things you already do that subjectively feel pretty good in terms of quality of life, but don’t fundamentally chage your playstyle (e.g, more movement speed, cooldown reduction, crit chance and so on)
- Mechanics: new or significant improvements to how you play or plan to play. Significant improvements would be incorporating stuff like teleporting to a class that doesn’t have the skill inherently, or being able to maintain permanent upkeep of a skill / buff that unlocks other synergies. In previous Diablo games, you’d really experience “endgame” changes in this category. That could happen by finding / completing set items or by putting together runewords, for instance. I still remeber how great it felt to put together a Hammerdin in D2 with Enigma + HOTO + HoZ, which substantially changes your gameplay mechanics and to be honest would realistically happen once you already hit lvl 100.
- Gameplay: general you stuff you do or plan to do when you open the game. Let’s be clear, the latest unlocks to new forms of gameplay in D4 are nightmare dungeons and helltide (Uber Lilith lies more into an “achievement” category than a proper gameplay option). Most people get to that at lvl 50 at the latest. To be frank, the Diablo franchise has never been that great in terms of new gameplay options for endgame. Usually devs just provide players with linear increase in difficulty to the same stuff already in the game.
D4 completely lacks any endgame change to mecahins or gameplay after lvl 60-65.
For those that play Rogue or Pulverize Druid, you’ll barely change the skills in your action bar after lvl 20-25. No substantial change to the mechanics of many builds of multiple classes really happen with legendary Paragon nodes or Unique Items. They only improve the buttons you already press (e.g., with more dmg output or by allowing to press them more often). Even the extremly desirable super rare uniques like Shako or Grandfather provide linear improvement to your power only. There are only very few exceptions to that, like the Tempest Rorar for Werewolf / Storm Druids.
As I have already lvled one char to 100 and another to 80, I really feel that I already experienced everything Diablo has to offer when I was able to hit around lvl 30 with new classes.