Please dont increase item power level in expansions!

Vessel of Hatred Discussion
1

i m loving s4/d4 itemization rework.i m hyped for the new expansion with an actual mercenery to keep me less lonely as i tend to prefer playing solo.

As far as i know, blizz’s plan for D4 is to make it a “forever game” where they can keep releasing new expansions.

however i really hope they do not adopt WoW’s concept of borrowed power where every new expansion invalidates all the gear you accrued previously.

I am an ETERNAL ENJOYER. i will play seasonal content, if and only if i see something interestingly unique within the season that i can bring back to STD. or if the season rewards are good enough to warrant me rolling a new character.

I am here for the LONG RUN. i definitely will play seasons but eternal realm will always be my jam. why am i saying all this? how does it relate to the main point? i simply dont enjoy the idea that my gear that i spent tons of effort into would be invalidated when a new expansion drops.

imagine this. i spend 1001 hours farming and getting a “perfect” all GA uber unique and masterwork it so much triple hitting a single mod that i really want.

then when the new expansion drops, if the max item power level is increased from 925 to 1000 or even 1200, my gear that i spent so much time on becomes invalidated.

the power level difference could be so high that a non GA gear could be better than whatever i had.

for sure getting more powerful gear more easily can be fun and can be addictive, but it will set a precedent. “dont spend too much effort on your gear, the next expansion will invalidate it”.

blizz, you guys did a great job of making a loop that kept me engaged and hooked in D4, theres so many things i can do to upgrade my gear. i keep playing to make myself stronger.

but if you tell me each expansion will invalidate my older gear, its a good way to immediately convert D4 into a “play casual” sort of game. my motivation to keep grinding is lost when i know for a fact that in the next expansion all my hard work is going to be invalidated.

i would suggest having “parallel” upgrading options such as how tempering works. for example in the season of the witch, players can intentionally get a witch to curse their items which can bestow very unique bonuses at the same time giving them a penalty that could be bad for certain builds but ignorable by others. and for the season of artificer, players could craft unique upgrades onto their gear akin aspects.

this way, the item level cap can remain 925 but players have ways to be stronger. older gear are not invalidated. in fact blizz could even restrict players by making these unique upgrades as a single choice? you want a cursed buff on your weapon? cool, but now you cant use an artificer buff on it, not until you remove the previous buff.

players would be encouraged to try different gear upgrade paths. all without invalidating their gear base power.

this also can cause players to actually REFARM their items so that they can have the “same” item but with a different expansion buff/craft slapped on them.

thanks for reading.

2

I’m saying this with empathy and sincerity; this right here, means that you do not matter to Blizzard. Their entire focus is seasons, testing new content, and occasionally throwing some of the new onto Eternal so that the vast minority of people that play there don’t feel entirely left out.

With their entire focus on seasons, and basically using Eternal as a trash compactor for old characters, it doesn’t matter in the grand scheme if they raise the item power, because once the new season starts, the majority are going to delete most of that gear, most of those characters, and start fresh, with the new iLvL ceiling being the baseline to search for, so there won’t be any power creep or worry about imbalance (past what’ll already exist).

1 Like
3

I mean no one honestly matters to Blizzard before I came here to see the rubbish; I saw the Google reviews, where it ranked worse than some games with so many bugs the company gave up on them. Definitely not a game for the commoners.

4

I 100% agree. My concerns exactly. If this happens and my end-game gear that I grinded for hours become obsolete, I’m 100% out of the game, peace.

5

to be honest, one reason why i quit d4 when season1 dropped was because they showed a huge lack of concern for eternal players. you get so much player power from seasonal mechanics that its very likely a good geared eternal realmer would be outperformed by a seasonal character with just decent gear due to the seasonal powers.

on top of that seasons didnt give “anything” to eternal players. if you actually played during the season, there are no real season exclusive gear that you can bring back to eternal. so in the end playing eternal just feels bad in comparison.

IF the new seasons gave the same level of power as season 4 it would be justified as the seasonal power came in the form of elixirs and bonus gear. its nothing to obscenely powerful that would outclass eternal realmers.

that said, i can see the amount of focus that theyre putting into seasons. and i do know that they want to sell battlepasses. being on reddit i do see that anytime i ask for eternal realm love, its met with more hate and ridicule rather than sympathy or support. which i m guessing shows that most players are seasonal.

it really is a sad affair as i come from d1/d2 where my game lies in permanency everlasting. even poe is going this direction where in the recent years, they’ve been very reckless with standard players, literally downgrading their items.

its sad but its logical that companies follows the money.

its ironic how the entire genre started with eternal realmers but now we’re the minority.

6

I mean, that’s how most games with a seasonal mechanic work. Games typically don’t just open up day 1 with a season, they start with a base game / story so people can get used to the mechanics, then start the actual gameplay loop a few months later with Seasons. D3 does it with Seasons, D2 does it with Ladder resets, PoE does it… The “eternal” or persistent realm in most every game is either entirely abandoned by all but an incredibly small portion of the player base (people who don’t like restarts, are willing to miss out on all the extra content of seasons, chasing a “grail” like in D2, etc), or it gets a very small trickle of add-in’s from each season. Boss farming came from seasons, Varshan’s rings came from Seasons, stuff like that.

Being totally honest here, if you’re discontent with how D4 is handling seasonal players vs eternal realm, you’re just going to be more and more upset with each passing season, because eternal is only ever going to get the table scraps of a season, and they’ll only get them after the season is over. I know if I felt that way, I’d never buy the expansion, and I’d probably have uninstalled by now.

7

remember how it was like in diablo 1? no such thing as seasons. diablo 2 started having ladder resets which was the closest thing to a season back then.

that is the baseline of arpgs and all diablo clones. everything started with permanency/standard. when talking about seasons in d-clones, the first to start was actually poe. many have forgotten that poe started with being a game that focused on standard (poe eternal), temp leagues (seasons for poe) were practically a way to beta test new mechanics to implement into standard/core. the devs felt not enough people were participating so every temp league they kept increasing incentives for players to go for league content. slowly leagues gained traction and more players played poe temp leagues. even standard players jumped into leagues coz they wanted the gear that could be obtained in the temp leagues. i am one of those persons, where i joined a buttload of temp leagues, just to obtain some specific temp league gear to bring back to standard. i wouldnt have touched the temp leagues otherwise.

using poe’s handling of leagues is what i would say is almost the gold standard. both standard AND temp league players can enjoy the league, and standard players who played in the league are rewarded with powerful gear to bring back to standard. that is a very conscious design choice made by the devs to make standard players not feel too left out.

d3 on the other hand did a different approach where seasons are inconsequential. if you played a season in d3, you might have some small funky mechanic that you knew was temporary but was not so OP to the point that you would feel like your eternal character was weaker than a season character.

as for other games, d-clones the nearest other direct competitor would be TLI. even TLI has a similar to POE approach, TLI markets itself as a seasoned based ARPG. but the devs are very considerate on how they implement seasonal content. you dont get any seasonal buff that makes your character numerically stronger “just for playing in the season”. the gear that you obtain in seasons can be brought back to eternal. and most importantly, the gear that you obtain in new seasons dont automatically invalidate older gear.

this is true with most of POE’s lifecycle too. in blight league, they introduced anoints. it made gear more powerful, but it was quickly added to standard so that your old gear that had no anoint could be anointed. syndicate introduced 28-30% quality crafting. it did not invalidate old gear. the one major time they did invalidate old gear was in crucible, which i can tell you many standard players were very salty about, BUT the caveat was you still could obtain crucible gear if you played in the league or bought crucible weapons from other players.

then there Last epoch, they’re a VERY INNOVATIVE bunch. their solution to trading vs SSF players was so damn good. their take on seasons is cycles which is also very innovative. every new season, BOTH permanent realm and temp realmers get access to the seasonal content at the same time. IIRC end game content (seasonal bosses) are locked to eternal realmers until people have actually killed the boss in the temp realm. it doesnt matter who, but if anyone kills the boss in the temp realm, that seasonal boss is unlocked for all eternal realmers. brilliant and fantastic with much respect towards players who prefer playing eternal.

i dont understand the notion behind “this game is a seasonal game and permanent realms are trash” mentality.

why do people have such a narrow mindset? more people playing the game is always a win no? in fact i would argue, if someone has played the same one character over 1-2 years, they would have more attachment than that of a temp seasoned player. they would have a high chance of actually buying mtx. more mtx sold means more revenue for the devs. more money for the devs then the devs make more content for us.

we all win no?

the fact that blizzard actually announced that for s5 they will introduce a new story line that will carry on into eternal realm gives me some hope that they’re accommodating eternal realm more now.

how far will they go, we have yet to know.

and to your last statements, i actually uninstalled the game before s1 hit. i was disgusted by how much power you are given in a season and how eternal players like me are not rewarded for playing in seasons as everything seasonal is poofed at the end of the season.

i m now back in d4 for this season, not exactly because of the seasonal content, but to try their rework. the seasonal content in s4 is not significant enough to make eternal realmers feel salty. which is good.

i really want to just give blizz my money and buy their expansion but i m holding back.

i dont have 1000000 hours to play. i dont want to spend a long time farming gold, buy a 10 billion 3/4 ga item, spend few billions getting 2 or 3 critical masterwork hits then having all my hardwork go down the drain when the next expansion hits.

also even if i somehow do some mental gymnastics to excuse the expansion increasing to max power level to 950-1000, then the looming idea is that this will be the new norm. blizz WILL release a new expansion. and every expansion players would expect a new powerlevel.

and for that. i will sadly say you are right. diablo is not that type of game (that i wanted), and because of that i would do exactly as what you say. i would uninstall the game and never consider buying the expansion.

in fact it goes further than that. i would not even consider checking out any diablo content going forward.

the devs have so many competitors now and they dont need to look far to see how other people are implementing things. they can also see the reaction of how their fanbase reacts to such things.

i will say this. before season 4, you are absolutely right without any doubt. d4 isnt the type of game i want to be playing. also, before season 4, diablo was memed on as d4 bad.

d4 is no longer bad. its good. it can be better. i want it to be better. the devs are making it better.

wouldnt you prefer if d4 was better rather than just accepting “it is what it is”?

8

This happens in WoW also (I’m sure you’re aware of that), Diablo is no exception with item level (gear score for WoW) increase due to new expansions. To keep 925 base would be irrelevant going into the expansion. The only thing I can probably see is if they raise the item level in VoH to (as examples):

WT2 = 925 (and I’m sure Season 5 items will be considered “Legacy” as well.)
WT3 = 950
WT4 = 975
WT5 = 1000 (granted if WT5 is going to be a thing within VoH xpac)

We still have Season 5 releasing in Aug while VoH is being released in October. That’s still plenty of time from now till October to obtain more 3GA and near perfect 925 affixes to include new legendary and unique items for builds in S5.

You can also argue the point that our item level 925 gear from S3 are “legacy” items due to the new crafting systems, Tempering and Masterworking for S4 which kept the item level at max 925, although you have to obtain newer versions of gear within the current season to be able to Temper or Masterwork.

I still stand on not keeping current items locked at 925 going into VoH. I’m all for increasing item level in VoH however the dev’s do so.