TL:DR ~ Basically to grind from 50 to 100 will need perhaps 1000 - 2000 high tier nightmare dungeon runs.
The main issue is the forced aspect of grinding dungeons as nothing else outside of exploits yields any meaningful experience points, and thus is what is holding back the entire game and basically making the game entirely unfun to play.
Levelling from 1 to 50
- Main story line takes you very close to 50, a few whisper runs or dungeons and you’re guaranteed to hit 50
Levelling from 50 to 70
- Nightmare Dungeons
- Helltides
- World Bosses
- Questing
The issue here is that helltides don’t give really amazing exp and the world boss doesn’t either, assuming you’re online when it pops which is a feat in itself and questing yields pathetic experience rewards that don’t scale with world tiers so you are left with running nightmare dungeons.
Food for thought, running NMDs from 50 to 70 AT, repeat AT max tier which is 20 for WT3 you are looking at 6+10% runs per level, assuming you are geared enough to run at T20 on WT3 that is.
So, 6 x 20 = 120+ dungeon runs as being the minimum for the solo player, running in a full group with elixirs you can pretty much negate the 10%+ exp but basically, 60 runs or so from 50 to 60, and most likely 70 runs from 60 to 70.
Levelling from 70 - 100
- Nightmare dungeons only
70 to 80 mostly requires a similar amount of runs, so your looking at least another 70 - 90 runs, then everyone knows the exp requirements after 80 start to get worse and worse, so you are looking at 80 to 90 possibly requiring 150 - 200 runs and then possibly another 250 - 300+ from 90 to 100.
So you are looking at hundreds, if not more than a thousand or more depending if you are solo or running with a static levelling party, and this is assuming you are running WT4 NMDs at the highest tiers too, this is why Diablo 4 is failing right now and expecting players to repeat this each season? Nah mate, its not going to work.
A major philosophy change is needed, if this is to be expected each season, every season then even the most hardcore of players will not stick around for long before burning out, and will shed players fast, come Season 1 we’ll see how it’ll play out and setting the standard for the future but consider this, look at every single major aRPG since Diablo 1, each games levelling had ways to bypass the monotony or at least disguise the fact you were grinding out experience by giving the player the outward appearance of progression, if you are currently able to grind out WT3 and WT4 at very high tiers, then gearwise you have to be fairly well equipped meaning that highly likely you’ll be avoiding all drops because you know, chances are nothing will be an upgrade so the focus shifts from min/maxing to just outright experience farming, how many will keep on doing this each season if nothing changes?
Possible Solutions
- Massive XP increase for solo players
- Campaign needs to be made repeatable in different world tiers
- Nightmare dungeon exp needs to be significant increased
- Quest exp for different world tiers needs to be increased
- More methods to earn significant exp such as daily/weekly quests
- LFG system to allow easy joining of dungeon groups for exp farming
Right now, I’d be looking very closely at Season 1 - that needs to come out swinging hard and be exceptional for the majority of the playerbase to stick around, the first season has to hit hard, be well balanced for all play styles - with major content updates, better progression because if its not - people will not stay, and highly likely will not return for later seasons which means, less and less money for battle passes and considering live service which means server fees, if Blizzard starts to lose money then absolutely they’ll terminate the game regardless of the 10 year plan, that is the price of a live service unlike previous games which had just simple bnet integration outside of single player.
