F.e. Pit 200 being (almost) unbeatable and the best players compete somewhere between 170-180.
Content that let us min/max our character further for many hours, even with very good gear.
Content that let us grind for the 1 item that gives 1% more Crit Chance and a bit higher damage rolls, so maybe we can beat Pit 181.
Maybe 200 would be beatable, but only with perfect rolled gear + very good game knowledge + player skill.
If we can beat all the content in the game after a few days and without any effort gear & player skill vise the game loses one of the biggest endgame motivation factor in ARPGs…Min/Maxing the own char.
Hope with the S4 release the Pits will be buffed to the point that it’s not possible to beat Pit 200, so theres always room for improvements and the endgame always offers a challange at this phase of the game.
Edit: Thanks 4 dev team for listening to all the feedback from the D4 community, S4 is a very good start in the right direction and it’s very fun to push the own limits in the pits.
Hope to see more very challanging activities in future seasons.
I am strongly against unbeatable content. I am also strongly against too easy content.
It’s a game. It’s meant to be fun. But if you alienate the majority of players from beating your content, you’ll have disgruntled customers who won’t be happy to pay for more of your services. I don’t think Blizz is ok with having 5-10k players instead of the masses, but that’s my opinion.
/e difficult? good
too difficult? nope
lessons should have been learned from infinite grifts
Clearing pit 100+ very easily was quite anticlimactic. Then again, everything felt undertuned on the ptr. I’m sure there’ll be a tuning pass before S4 launches.
Think I’ll wait for the actual patch to drop and see which builds are still ‘broken’ and able to one-shot level 200 bosses before I make any assumptions just yet. Clearly there needed to be balance changes all around, Barb, Necro, Druid were easily dominating in the Pit, not sure about Rogue or Sorc though. We’ll just have to wait and see what comes out.
Sadly too many whiners have made Blizzard go the D3 route and now we’re just going to get insane power creep, leveling to 100 in a few hours, and trivialized content.
Exactly, if in 3 days streamers are doing PIT 200 with some good equipment, everyone will complain:
-has no content
-We want PIT 250
-Diablo 4 is dead.
Firstly, PIT1 and PIT 200 were identical. Just more life for the monsters, which is a bad mechanic.
PIT 200 should be a great challenge, with meteors falling from the sky, greater density of enemies, add even 3 blood, special enemies that cause you some debuff, etc. Or will it be like the bigger rifts where you do 140 in 3 minutes and can’t do the 144.
It needs to be challenging, in all elements. Only those who have excellent equipment, excellent gameplay and an excellent build can complete.
Let’s just say that the game caters too much towards damage and offensive increases in general
Need some corrupted mobs here and there that lower defenses in one way or another so that defense is also taken into consideration
If that’s done in a proper way, then no content (even from those that already exist) will be too easy or 2-shot material
Would probably go even further but let’s just start from there:
Drastically reduce “Increased Health” mob numbers (so “more damage” is not always the required solution)
Reduce DR of Champions aura to say 40-50% (instead of current 75%, so that drastic damage increase is no longer needed)
Add some corrupted mobs instead (individually, much like the “Increased Health” ones) that reduce armor/res/CDR/something (but make these intuitive enough though)
P.S. I’d also vouch for “Marauder class” mobs (like the Butcher and Hellbournes) to the OW (some of them exist but not scaling enough: Trembling Mass, Sir Jonna, Venomspike (the tree that launches spiders, not sure if name is correct) e.t.c), but not as hard as these two
In fact think they better rebalance those, Butcher for ex. is too strong in early and quite weak late game in return, kinda same with the others too
i agree that difficult content is a must. very few people were able to clear aoz25, it was near unbeatable, but the journey was fun. and that was just for leveling a temporary glyph and bragging rights. they need more content with that level of difficulty
That was more dependent on your class, your build and whether you ran content in a group or solo than anything. Every single person who insists on saying that the hardest content is “too easy” played by choice some broken OP meta build like DD in the PTR.
Difficulty shouldn’t be the same mobs only with bigger bullet sponge.
Difficulty should be something that give us the need to think outside the box to improve our character even further…becasue mobs that are able to influence our character.
difficult content in ARPGs is always just a gearcheck or basically a timecheck until you get said gear.
so the question becomes: how long should one have play to beat it, and i feel like everyone has a different answer to that. too short, and people complain about no content, too long and people quit because of no progress.
if all the different Tiers do is just add 5% more HP/DMG to the enemies, nothing changes gameplay-wise. difficulty though raw numbers is pretty boring imo.
also why are we getting 200floors again, that was already boring in D3.
having to do the same thing for 200 floors sounds horrible. just make the steps larger and reduce the amount of floors, expecially if all thats different is just bigger numbers.
The problem is (again) they focused on “more dps” as a single viable solution
The “time to kill” is the only thing that matters (until the very VERY late game and very late floors of say Pit 60), THAT is the issue
If they make mobs check anything other than DPS, it can work. But again, be careful of amount of those (say about every 5th “Increased Health” should be sometehing else), here are some examples:
Corrupts cooldowns
Corrupts armor
Corrupts resistances (or Corrupts X resistance)
Corrupts barriers (this includes Fortify also)
Applies bleeding
People would know exactly which/what mob to engage (and how), right now the only augmentation we have is DR aura and HP increase (which both strongly drive the whole gameplay to just more and more damage increase)
Difficult content should not remain so. Typically more gear and/or levels should make all content farmable. The point of ARPGs is to drop gear, not be eternally challenged. The same content should get easier as you progress. I agree that previous seasons of D4 became too easy, too quickly and left many feeling like there was nothing to do. But the answer is not to make unbeatable challenges, imo. The answer is to provide more items that only drop in high level areas that people will seek.
That is what D2 and D3 did that kept people playing. D2 especially. You can beat that whole game and not have even scratched the surface of what is available to find. Nothing is particularly hard to beat past a certain level and gear point but getting there requires things to drop that you have no control over. That’s the challenge. Uber uniques and class uniques should number in the hundreds and some be much harder to find. Not season 1 hard to find, but harder than 50 Duriel runs.
People ran bosses in the 1000s in D2 to get those items. People in D4 complain the didn’t get what they want in <100 Duriel runs. You can tell who just bought their stuff in D2 pretty easily. There are no “hell yeah!” moments in D4 while farming. Uniques are expected from bosses, so no surprise. More variety needs to drop organically in the wild. Getting something at unexpected times is the fun part of what made Diablo great.
While I agree with the rest of your post, farming equipment to beat more difficult content is one of the genres main points. We are certainly talking here about the top above top content that will put players on an imaginary leaderboard if they manage to beat it. Let them get their unique rewards and podiums. It is part of the magic and personally I would argue if there is nothing to gear for the magic is gone in an RPG.
What I fear is that the devs are too focused on the 3 month cycle of seasons going forward. They should not nerf old content or make items easier to get in order to squeeze the games whole content in reach for this time frame. Because this way the player will even sooner feel like playing a repetitive system and finally get bored from the game for good.
