No timers, no farming boring content for anything. Maximize the fun and challenge. Conan the Barbarian never has to farm some low level no challenge Drivel boss till he goes squint eyed and loses IQ from boredom. Why should I? In Diablo one I went into the dungeon and the killing started and did not end for a long time. Next time same thing. Each time no gacha boredom, just fun.
In a real game there would be the same bosses at various tier levels of nightmare difficulty with custom and actually hard dungeons each. There won’t be 5 hp kobolds bravely not stopping you at all from getting to the boss. Doing Varshan and Grigoire would unlock Duriel, a Zir dungeon level hard boss. Fighting the challenging Duriel rewards Uber Unique rewards. After unlocking you can go in anytime to fight them. Their unique drop rate would be rarer, but you would just fight to them and it is difficult and rewarding. Maybe some of them are trivial after your gear improves. Maybe they also gear up just like The Butcher and keep being a challenge. That is how I would design it, they scale in difficulty as you scale in power.
If I was the designer the 5 bosses would all be in the same dungeon and unlock at various times. Let’s say one is the T2 capstone. When you get to T3 you can go fight him anytime, it is an automatic NM dungeon and its loot scales with level. Second one unlocks T4. In T4 you can now fight both of them. Ideally at a scaling NM level. They unlock physically after some quests or something and are at some NM tier level with Duriel at 100+ aka Zir difficulty or something. Each unlock rescales the previous ones to be harder. Maybe Zir is at zir 1 and Duriel at Zir 5 or 10 or whatever. You fight the whole outfit at some high NM level, not the initial low levels. Duriel unlocks each new run when you kill the others, etc.
There would not be automatic drops. Ubers at 2% sounds fine, maybe the other uniques at 10%. Spread the ubers across all of them at NM 100 or zir 1. Increase drop rate and or quality as difficulty increases. Never ever again hand out free 925 loot and then when doing more difficult content your reward is worse garbage. Items need to scale with difficulty. I do like the stepping stone effect of it, but step to 900, leave 925+ for the harder stuff? The Butcher gets an uber drop, by far the best hardest working boss and we should be able to collect his cleaver and apron at the very least. Lillith gets an uber drop. Their ubers should be include in builds good. If I max out a vampire lure I go to some boss. Maybe Zir, maybe another. Difficult and with an uber chance once I do it at a high enough level.
Completing the season journeys reward useful gear. Actual high level uniques. Something other than a bag of blue and yellow vendor trash. There is a level 100 reward. D3 felt so amazing that way. D4 feels like a calous dev is face slapping me at each of those moments and yelling “take your medicine”.
All the uniques have uber versions. I don’t want to know people that got one. I want to be someone that got one and it needs to be difficulty based, not gacha farming rubbish based. Reward me for going into a difficult dungeon and fighting a difficult boss. Please.
All the non uniques have uber versions like the primals in D3 and at higher drop rates and achievable perfect affixes. I don’t care if people can blow through the season in 1 week. That is a good thing. We can be back to pay for the next season 3
months later. Why should your gacha game take up 24/7? It makes no sense. Not even for a streamer.
This leaves clear visible progression to work towards. Add it to the season progression achievements. Tune it so people stall out after Duriel depending on skill level. Maybe there is some farming that can get you a bit farther or better yet all the way because we all pay money for this supposed entertainment. That would finally be a release quality game.
Why is this good? Right now I have spent hours of regrettable time staring at items trying to quickly and accurately detect upgrades. I have farmed helltide against my will and desire. I have farmed the dumb Drivel gacha pyramid scheme of boredom and should I just uninstall already? I farmed Zir for an hour or two after laboriously releveling glyphs. And I mean laborious, you need to clear now to get sigil drops to get dust. Then in an hour or two I was down 10k dust to 55k.
The math was clear. More gacha farming that gates going to zir. I just uninstalled. It is a nice barrier against getting suckered in again. 3rd time lucky at quitting? I don’t want to but this is so rough and unpolished and experimental.
My current quit goal is to check each season to see if it has grown up to be a real game and if the gacha coprolites are finally gone. I hope they go. The actual game is already great except for the terrible gameplay design. I even bought a bunch of cosmetics. The art department is doing a fantastic job. Time for the game design to become AAA as well.
