This seems like a radical change at first. But imagine you start a new character and be able to immediately level paragon and find maximum item level (ilvl) loot. Yes, this would mean the skill tree needs to have a different source for skill points, but such a replacement is very easy to find.
What are we missing out on in Diablo 4ās current state? Comment if you can think of something that speaks against removing the leveling phase.
Item levels are a problem in Diablo 4
Leveling a character from 1 to 60 feels like a waste of timeclick to expand
Diablo 4ās leveling phase lets players collect equipment with ilvls ranging from 1 to 750. These numbers depend on your current character level from 1 up to 60, after which they essentially lose all meaning for the rest of the game.
The problem that most players encounter:
Because the leveling speed and loot drops are high you almost cant keep up with ilvls and re-equipping slots. Differences in stats are small, so some players dont even bother to check. Season 8 attempts to alleviate this problem with changes to drop rates and difficulty.
But that is by far not enough to make pre-max-level loot feel valuable. This feeling sets in with level 60, where your items arent automatically outleveled by gaining experience, by playing the game. As a result, it doesnt make sense for players to invest time in maintaining early equipment, which ultimately undermines the leveling progression as a whole.
Point 2 conflicts with point 1 and with Blizzardās solution of extending what is essentially a leveling phase without progression. While this approach may work in other games, it is not a perfect fit with the current structure of Diablo 4. Diablo 4 is trimmed to be all about max ilvls. And if the game wants to have a rewarding leveling phase, then it has to get ilvls under control first. They are just too powerful right now and either need to be squished a lot or dealt with in other ways. Hence this suggestion.
A few things to clarify:
Are 8 difficulties necessary?click to expand
This is just a reminder of what happens for Torment 1-4 anyways. Difficulties increase chances for ancestral items and better loot in general. This would not change with the suggested removal, quite the opposite. I have prepared this simple image for illustration:
https://imgur.com/d8LsNZD
But since 1-60 is removed I have to question the point of the leveling difficulties, Normal to Penitent. We could very well get rid of them. The necessity for 8 tiers was never there anyway, in my opinion.
If this is done alongside removing the leveling phase, then common, magic & rare items would be cut out as well. Two birds with one stone. Read my other suggestion to see a solution for bringing these colors back.
Characters are now able to find max ilvl right from the startclick to expand
Now imagine that all loot drops you find are basically max ilvl from the very first enemy onwards. This means, in theory, that your fresh character can find unique or mythic items before visiting Kyovashad for the first time. I am talking about items that could be useful up until Torment 4.
So this suggestion helps with a common criticism. What a different journey would that be for new and seasoned players, if every minute of play counted towards character progression.
Concern: This would reduce played time even furtherclick to expand
Ultimately, the game needs to provide players with content that is meaningful and engaging. That responsibility lies with the developers.
If the suggested change would have gone live with Season 7, players would have naturally finished the season sooner and leave the game earlier - perhaps by a few days. Not good ā¦for whom exactly? Personally, I would like to invest a bit more time than usual in the game but it depends on the content.
Ask yourself: What am I missing out on by not finding common, magic, or rare equipment, with insignificant low affix values? Does this ācontentā still fit into D4, and is it worth to maintain a leveling phase without progression just for the sake of having it?
no offense there really. tastes differ in these things. Sadly it pretty much display the d4 identity crises in a way ^^
Its fine for me either way as i said. I wont ever āhateā d4. It might be a game i play for a few days every few months, but thats fine.
When it comes to making the journey slower, id also hope for more seasonal questline for that matter. Ideally the season quest carries you to lvl 40ish. The rest you get done in helltides etc.
I disagree. A slower leveling system SHOULD be the norm. Otherwise, just make Diablo a pure action game and eliminate levels, loot, and progression altogether.
The 1-60 experience is supposed to teach a player to play and build their character. Instead, players shortcut this by looking up an end-game guide - then complain about lack of game. A slower leveling pace makes that 1-60 journey meaningful. Otherwise, 1-60 becomes a 2 hour jaunt that becomes the self-fulfilling prohpecy of meaningless. And we get threads like this asking to simply eliminate it.
thats how i see it as well mostly. Heck, if we take poe2 as an example, id say they overdo it a little by having you replay thatā¦ awesomeā¦ campagin.
thats not a thing in d4 luckily. I mean, yea, blasting is fun! - but the way to get to this point is also fun, if the game supports it of course.
And then, what happens??? Start at 300 paragon??? Start an ancestral item pack in every slot?
-What you need to understand is that the climb is necessary, whether you like it or not. Look at other games, you need to do the campaign every season, no matter what the cost.
-I particularly love the climb when we are not all included and dissolving everything. What we need is more ways to leave important. Like fortresses.
There was a person at a company I worked for that wrote emails like that. Took like 5-10 minutes a pop. Still wondered why they couldnāt meet productivity goalsā¦
Decision making should matter. Should I recycle an item or should I print it? Should I temper it or stick with my item? Should I make a dungeon or a fortress?
I said something to this effect a week ago or soā¦
āWe play 1-60 not because itās fun but because weāre forced toā
The scaling of items from 1-50 feels OK but those last 10 levels is a jokeā¦ you jump from iLvl 350 to 750 in an hourās play time. Basically everything you find massively outperforms whatever youāve currently got equipped. And all of those will all be completely tossed in the recycle bin at the forge once you unlock the legendary tempers.
So level 50 to about paragon 100 is mostly spent farming for tempers and cursing at the bad RNG involved in tempering.
Finding a way to avoid that should be the goal. Other then getting a few levels of weapon skills on Barbarian I canāt think of any reason why playing 1-50 (or 60) is still a thing.
1-60 is not really an issue. Whether it takes longer or not many will find a way to get power leveled through it. This is what you get when they use cheap delay tactics rather than engaging gameplay.
What needs to change is the quality of loot drops (not more of them) being more relevant to the character. The useless affixes and weighting towards them has to go. For many it gets pointless and too difficult to gear a character reasonably and they move on. It should take some effort but not a weeks long grind for something usable to come along.
There is much more about the game that needs fixed first. The 1-60 leveling experience is the least of my concerns. i suspect I am not alone.
Itās a matter of taste, and I respect other peopleās opinions. However, I do think certain game genres require some foundational elements, and for me, this is one of those foundations.
Maybe Iām wrong, but since I was young, Iāve always preferred these kinds of games because they offer a magical experience during the journey.
There are different ways to level up here. For those who want to just destroy everything right away, they can easily jump into Helltides. For people like me, who love to savor the journey by doing quests and listening to the stories, even from the most pointless NPCs ( honestly, Iād even love to see more added! ), thatās totally possible too.
In the meantime, in both cases, you can take advantage of this ( unfortunately short ) period to understand the skills in your tree and, as you drop items and aspects, tried to see what happens, youād start understanding your character a lot better. I donāt get why people wouldnāt want to experience that magic and prefer to just copy builds right away. The system isnāt so complex. The real problem lies in the bugs and things that donāt work like they should, but when youāre leveling, it weighs a lot less, and you can enjoy the journey and savor the new season.
Itās true that by this point the skill tree feels a bit limited, and yeah, things can start to feel repetitive, but season after season, things tend to change a bit, especially if new items and aspects are added that shake things up.
How quickly this all ends, unfortunately, depends on the content and the personality of the player. Iām not saying itās all sunshine and rainbows. Iām just saying that removing a component that should be enriched would be a huge mistake, in my opinion!
They need to do something radical in early levels with gear. Like only yellows up to level 50 and then 50-60 you can apply Dungeon Aspects and then T1 opens all Aspects and T4 open s Ancestral gear. Something so that gearing for each specific phase is different.
Right now itās just a race to Torment and then easymode whenever you get whatever drop makes your build. Gear isnāt really important until you start to hit Torments.
I admit that while reading through it you can get the impression that it boils down to starting with level 60 and T1 endgame farming. Thats only half right and not really what I wanted to express with this post.
The progression we have from 1-60 and from paragon 1-300 is like playing two different realms. Everything the devs have done over the last 2 years and seasons resulted in making the 1-60 part weaker and weaker. There is seemingly no idea how to design a rewarding leveling phase. It is a cheap experience one might say.
It started around Season 2, where boss enemies guaranteed max ilvl items, leading everyone to feel that engaging in any other content was a waste of time. With Season 4, the developers downgraded ārareā items to junk tier and seemingly no longer care about how this affects the RPG feel of the game. I donāt like this either.
From my perspective, the 1-60 experience feels so loosely connected to the āother realmā by now that we are at a point where it is time to look for a replacement rather than trying to salvage the ruins. I believe the current system can be replaced with adjustments to difficulty tiers and itemisation, but overall without much compromise. What I wish for is that item levels would be taken care off in particular, as I view them as root problem in all of this.
I didnt want to mix this post with too many suggestions. But to give an example, the easiest (though not necessarily the best) way I can imagine is to integrate skill points into Paragon leveling. Either by having Paragon 1-60 give a point each, or via nodes.
I know what you mean. Takes a lot of energy. Thats why I hide the less important stuff in expandable sections.
Yesā¦but the time of the climb is to unlock aspects of the dungeon. If it doesnāt rain legendaries, this will still be important. I think that legendaries should drop later in the game. There could be ways to transform common items into Ancient items. Of course, at a high cost. This would give them more function.
-But I think that if the fortresses were dominated, generating weekly resources. It would be a good function to unlock during the climb. So I think we should have some achievements. Maybe missions to unlock blacksmiths and occultists, etc.
Well, either Blizzard needs to decide that we do have a meaningful early leveling game and upgrading yellows and all that makes sense before we find orange stuff etc or just skip the whole thing and just go max level stuff right away.
Either direction will make them lose 50% of their player base and maybe that is for the best ultimately. Just decide on one direction the game should go and stick with it. At least the player can stop wasting their time on a product that will never suit them and find another game that works for them.
Or split up the servers or something, one server/play style that has 200 hoursā worth of early game before end game starts and another server/play style that has 2 hours of early game before end game (or just skip it) and then the devs will have paying consumers from either end, but geeshhā¦ they gotta do somethingā¦ the whole thing is getting retarded.
Pick a direction and stick with it for the love of God already lol.
They need to get rid of level scaling, make low lvl and high lvl areas, get rid of the difficulties, make meaningful low level uniques that have end game implications and make all content not a snore fest.
letās be honest, they should just remove scaling and not reinvent the wheel.
But actually what you wrote make sense, cuz there is no point in everything in the game before you lvl 60. Scaling wcyd?
The dumbest thing from D3.
Actually is there anything good from D3? LOL