When I play the endgame (paragon farming), I don’t get the same feeling I got when I was gaining skill points.
Skill point allocation has a massive determination on how your character grows in power while paragon farming is just small incremental power increases with large ones coming at the legendary nodes and slot nodes.
After paragon 150 ish, the excitement for power seems to slow as experience increases to get to the next paragon level. At 240 ish, gaining a level is tough and the rewards almost seem to come to a stand still.
What I would like to see in the end game is 2 different reward system that keep players engaged into the game.
First one is a rogue-like system. Instead of using experience gain as the currency to gain a “level” in this system, a different consistent resource is gathered instead such as blood from fallen elites and bosses. Once you reach enough, you are presented with 3 choices: random materials/gold, random enhanced key, random enhancement.
Random materials/gold drops level appropriate materials and they can be from any activity such as socketing materials, crafting materials, or uber boss summoning materials.
Random Enhanced Key option gives you a random Nightmare dungeon key with a special affix that increases experience gained in the dungeon by 3x.
Random Enhancement option gives you a random codex power at a random quality or it can give you a Skill Mutation point.
This brings me to the second system and the topic of this post, Skill Mutations.
Think of this as a secondary skill tree but instead of unlocking skills, you use the point to pick the skill, you have already picked in your primary skill tree, to unlock for mutations. Once unlocked, you can apply a new drop/craftable mutation gem. Once inserted into the skill mutation slot, you can pick an effect the skill or passive already possesses and replace it with a new effect.
The new mutation gems can be classified as 4 options: element, damage, defensive, or stats.
The element gems replace the sacrificed effect to either replace the current element or add an additional element depending on the sacrifice.
The damage, defensive, and stat gems work in a similar manner. The defensive gems however can only replace a defensive or stat sacrifice. The damage can only replace damage and defensive sacrifices.
The stat gems can only be used on passive skills in the skill tree and replace its attributes. Say you are building an overpower build and want to replace the critical strike chance and critical strike damage of a passive to Overpower and a damage multiplier. Throw in a stat gem and it keeps the trigger condition but replaces the effect condition to overpower and damage multiplier.
Element gems can replace all sacrifices however when replacing a stat sacrifice from a passive, it keeps the trigger condition and gives you an increase to the element damage for a short duration as its effect.
Only 1 mutation gem can be active and slotted into the mutation tree per skill/passive. Legendary aspects that change element type can be repurposed or removed with this mutation system.
I think this consistent random reward coupled with skill mutation would keep the endgame exciting longer. Especially during the long grinds to the next paragon level after 240 paragon. This would also help give veterans more tuning knobs to create new builds.
While mutations do offer more power or defense, it comes at a sacrifice to the skill’s/passive’s original designed power/defense. Mutations can be considered a side grade in that respect. Average players that just care about the primary skill tree can still get great results while advanced ARPG players can spend a lot longer theory crafting and building out their builds.