i have played d2 since i was 12, so take what i am saying with a biased grain of salt.
leveling in d4 is good. recently i played spiritborn, and it is a really well designed class. but then i hit paragon ~220s and it sucked. my gear was maxed. i didnt follow a guide, i played what felt comfortable. my glyphs were maxed (this part was not fun either). things are not fun after you advance past level 60 + paragon ~100 or so.
so recently i made a new class… the sorceress. so far so good. i am level 50. it is fun to feel an advacement in power. fun to tinker with skills i never tried before. i am enjoying the conjuration tree immensely.
the problem i am seeing currently is that end game = feels like work. it sucks. i dont want to grind out paragon 220+ - 300 if there is literally no advancement in power and if the ITEMIZATION SUCKS. d2 had the possibility of getting a shako, a vipermagi, heck even a frostburn was worth some celebration. the items in D4 are not exciting. i got shako on my spiritborn by endlessly griding duriel… not fun. i have not even equipped it yet. d2 was fun because when you got a GG item and equipped it, you legit felt like you had advanced and were now super godly. D4 does not achieve this. it is not a bad game!! i really enjoy leveling. but just keep this in mind. end game needs work.
I’m at paragon 220 and I was pretty much feeling this. For me, the pit has got to be one of the most fun sucking ideas that has ever been implemented in a video game.
You really hit a hard brick wall of progression if you continue playing for any length of time. You started a new class right at the sweet spot.
Once your gear is all 1 GA and you’re ~240 paragon, you gain almost nothing even if you play another 200-300 hours after that. It’s real bad.
This is a problem because most players will reach that point in a week or two each season. Blizzard needs to make endgame progression fun or every season will be over in a blink for the vast majority of players. Quitting your character and making an alt should not be the only viable option to continue having fun two weeks in.
Oh, even at this point, you can still gain plenty of upgrades but you will need to shift your strategy a bit. With how terrible the ancestral drop rate is you will need to engage with trading (selling and buying) rather than getting an upgrade from a drop.
Yep. Paragon 220 is pretty much where you hit the progression wall. A lot of systems cap out around there and all you can do is grind pits and hope you’ll get lucky and get a better Ancestral drop.
And after watching the campfire, this appears to be intentional design and the dev team is OK with it right now. Hopefully will see change in season 7!
really when i played D2R i had to make a sorc because of teleport and tal rashas (easy 400% magic find) being broken then i ran the same activities over and over and over, many cases were on small maps that take less than 5min to start game, clear map, and remake, like the act 2 cellar (forget the name) or mephisto or sanctuary/baal runs. then you get the gear and realize all you can do is… thousands more of the same runs.
cool in early 2000’s as laying the foundation of ARPG’s but is actually objectively terrible lol. wake up!!
Yeah, leveling and quests are done really well in this game. Every class is fun during that part of your experience.
However, not every class is fun during end game, and end game itself is decent for a distraction occasionally, but i agree that it becomes more like a job with no truly fun drops to look forward to. Everything seems to just make you slightly better at what you do.
It would feel a lot better if upgrades were always upgrades and doing the crafting upgrades was more purposeful and less RNG based. Then at least your end game ‘job’ would always feel like progress.
Levels 1–60 are fun because of the stat squish—simple numbers, easy-to-follow combat. I’ll give Blizzard credit for that. But once you hit the endgame, your power skyrockets to ridiculous levels, even worse than in previous seasons. The power gap becomes massive. This is what happens when Blizzard tries to cater to both casual players and streamers—two completely opposite extremes with nothing in between.
OP, i know what you mean. I was stuck several days on T2, only bad loot , no useful glyphs and so on. Today i finally got two mythics from Duriel, one of them a acestral grandfather. This was a big step forward and leveling was much better. It feels good, but I don‘t think that leveling and loot should be a problem at this point. Hope they will adjust it for S7.
Getting a Shako in D2 is very, very hard and very, very uncomfortably rare.
One thing I’ve noticed though is that people really talk about the loot and the process of loot but have counterintuitive positioning. Farming in D2 is horrible. It’s a slog. But I think that psychologically knowing it is horrible and a slog somehow makes it okay. In D4 farming is far less of a slog; if I want a unique to test out I just show up at some bosses door, run him thrice, and he’s given it to me.
Uniques are common in D4. Very. So I wonder if that’s what is wrong. You are willing to be bored by Shako from Duriel but running Mephisto hundreds of times for a Shako when you were 12 was somehow peak entertainment? I just wonder if the psychological profile of the gamer has changed entirely;
It’s not that people miss D2. It’s that people miss who they were when they were playing D2.
I would love to see better rewards for side quests, there are tons in this game, and some of these quest lines are interesting. Just give us more interesting and worthwhile rewards from these quests. I know there used to be rewards that gave you items with different affixes than you could get normally on gear, but not anymore. I feel like could help out more things to do end game that would be fun, and would give a good way to give interesting drops