I agree totally with you that scaling is importend.
I made the example of borderlands earlier, i remember playing the first one and next to to first town there was an enemy 10 levels above my own.
It took me more than a few hours but it worth it in gear. ( same now left of the map in bèta)
In short, i think the level scaling in diablo isnt perfect and they could change a few things, that said it isnt bad and a very decent midle choice.
I don’t see why scaling things is important at all. Nothing stops you from going back and obliterating old creatures, if there’s value there. The act of doing so is effort enough.
There seems to be a great fear of putting agency in the hands of the player. You have all risk v reward taken completely out of your hands, because fighting something slightly too hard for you (or significantly weaker) might break itemization, or cost you content exposure.
If you have a good system for itemization, and quality (over quantity) content, there is reason for players to reach outside the tiny space you’ve provided for them. Otherwise, you’re just railroading people while pretending its open-world and free.
A game like WoW or Everquest can be open world, allow you to do whichever quests you want (see: are capable of, by your own determination), without level scaling. The idea of level scaling being necessary is false, and makes it actually feel like it doesn’t matter what you do, or when. You just wander around until you’re max level.
If the only reason you’re killing mobs is because they give EXP, then the game is poorly designed.
I was level 25 and fighting mobs that were level 22 but that was open world
Yes, this holds value at end game. But leveling you should ‘feel’ that power by being overpowered when you travel through the same road for the 3rd or 4th time. I don’t need to feel challenged on basic area traversal.
I’ll admit, open world does justify some level of scaling, but what about when you first enter an area, and then reset those ‘remembered’ areas when you change world level.
Did you play Diablo2 during the early 2000’s? or more recently? because I would say that D2 doesn’t hold up well to other titles with modern iterations of design and game mechanics. I wouldn’t call it a turd though, that suggest to me that you are a younger person and didn’t grow up with D2 like some others. It won’t mean the same to either of us for that reason.
To make an argument for scaling.
WoW didnt use to have it, and you would often end outleveling zones before you could finish the storylines, everything grey to you.
Rewards for the effort for staying wouldnt be useful by that point.
They can just enable the mob level scaling after you beat the campaign. And until that just have lower-level mob areas as in the previous games.
Wont work, its a feature that you can go anywhere to take the story in the order you decide. Hence scaling is needed.
Ye unfortunately that’s by design. Don’t understand what forced them to take such an approach. Just for the sake of saying “our game is open world”…
Its good for the long term health of the game when you can go anywhere and areas isnt worthless to you.
Theoretically, your strength is defined by itemization. If you don’t scale, it means 90% of the zones are useless to higher levels and doing endgame content is basically just walking around the map to an instance. That’s one of the worst things about classic MMOs having dungeons in lower level zones. The zones are never used and are irrelevant.
I dislike the MMO elements they’ve added, but static zone levels would be an even worse idea. It’s not like it’s hard, even on II. Or that you’ll be underleveled very long. Took what…4 hours to get to 25, and I dicked around quite a bit early on.
The level scaling is concerning.
There was a point where I leveled up and my damage just dropped mid dungeon. That felt bad. A level 10 character should not be able to carry my lvl 20 on events either.
Yeah I really don’t like monster scaling. It means when you ding a new level, you effectively lose power. Let me have mini goals to get to new areas! 
This has been one of the main complaints so far for me. They make it a point not to make items overtuned at least in the early leveling so no matter what legendary you get the effects feel minimal you cant ever go back to an area and see how much progress youve actually made.
– Now I’m not saying they should remove it entirely, but it certainly doesnt need to be dynamically scaled with your current level each time you level up or have that be with certain zones… If you cannot tell you’re getting more powerful then it really isn’t much of an aRPG… The battle should be you’re having trouble at the new difficulty, until you faceroll, then you bump it up and you need to find another item again and again until you dominate, but there’s got to be a point where you dominate before youre ready for the next difficulty.
Hit max level, then you will scale with the gear you get.
No thanks… Scaling is the solution to turning 99% of the map dead because you are way too overlevelled for it.
Not a good idea. This is not an mmo and even then it can be horrible. I want the things I kill to have a chance to drop items based on their difficulty and level.
it’s never going to happen at this point, it’s a core element of the game. They aren’t going to divide it into leveled zones.
Being open world doesn’t force them to level scale the monsters though? There’s tons of open world games and MMOs that have weak zones and strong zones…