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I've always loved this series. The problem, as I see it, is that the focus is always on tweaking the "endgame." I just find this to be silly. Once you get to t

I've always loved this series. The problem, as I see it, is that the focus is always on tweaking the "endgame." I just find this to be silly. Once you get to the endgame it's pointless, and people basically blaze through the base game on purpose. And once you get there it really is no more than a slot machine that caters to people with serious gambling addictions. You run the same dungeons over and over again, sometimes thousands or even tens of thousands of times, all for an item with slightly different numbers. In Diablo 1 and 2 the item often doesn't even look different. But I've always found the base game to be excellent. Fun, exciting, and a blast with 4 people. I feel like, particularly with the new Diablo 4 they could make the leveling curve on the base game last MUCH, MUCH longer and it would actually be far more enjoyable for far more people. It would piss off the endgame crowd though, because all they want to do is get to max level as fast as possible so they can start farming.

nonethewiser 3y ago
> I feel like, particularly with the new Diablo 4 they could make the leveling curve on the base game last MUCH, MUCH longer and it would actually be far more enjoyable for far more people. It would piss off the endgame crowd though, because all they want to do is get to max level as fast as possible so they can start farming. Didn’t all of this literally just happen?
- themagician 3y ago
  Sort of, but not really. The real grind kicks in around level 50… so again, after you've already beat the game. I don't really care about the "endgame". I think this game would be much more fun if it was a bit more like am MMO, where you are maybe looking for a group to do a dungeon. Below 50 is, IMO, the best part of the game, especially because respecs are essentially unlimited.
butlike 3y ago
I agree that's what it's evolved into for the most part, but also consider the point of Diablo is to "defeat Diablo." Simple as that. The endgame of min/maxing came because people continued to play after the main objective was done.
dleslie 3y ago
> I feel like, particularly with the new Diablo 4 they could make the leveling curve on the base game last MUCH, MUCH longer and it would actually be far more enjoyable for far more people. It would piss off the endgame crowd though, because all they want to do is get to max level as fast as possible so they can start farming. They just did this, and made the game much more of a slow grind. Diablo 4's greatest flaw, IMHO, is that they apply difficulty scaling across all areas. At level 1 it can take two or three single hits to kill a goat man, and at level 60+ it can take two or three hits to kill a goat man; because the mobs scale to your power level. If they'd simply allowed some areas to be level-restricted with difficult mobs, then there would always be a sense of reward and victory. A player tired of the grind need only hop over to a slightly easier zone to feel like a god among mortals. But you can't do that in Diablo 4, so it just remains a slog.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- aprdm 3y ago
  yes I totally agree.
- jerf 3y ago
  After ~25 years of playing this sort of game, I am increasingly sympathetic to the idea that exponential-power leveling is just a busted mechanic. There's a variety of good ways to use it, but there isn't a great way. You can lean into it, like Disgaea, which just embraces the brokenness and writes them into its mechanics. You can just sort of write a standard game, but then, in the end, the solution to all problems is grinding. You can scale the challenges with the level, but then, what's the point of leveling? In fact all you're doing is running the risk of showing just how busted the mechanic is when you have a hard time matching the levels correctly because of the exponential power gains; see Oblivion, for instance. And even after such a mismatch, the solution to all problems is still grinding. Obviously many fine games have used this and I still play some to this day, so I'm not saying it's never ever fun. I'm just saying, the ways in which it's kinda broken seem fundamental and there seems to be only so much you can do with them. Were I designing a game today, rather than treating it as a default as so many designers still seem to, I'd want to take a careful look at the disadvantages and be sure I'm comfortable with them before proceeding. And as a gamer I do have to say more and more I'm starting to mark a game using level-based mechanics down a point when I'm figuring out what to play.
jorvi 3y ago
With Diablo 3 they added so much QoL and grind protection and then people flipped their shit. So for Diablo 4 they discarded everything good from Diablo 3. By and large, Diablo players want to be flagellated by the RNG.
- dleslie 3y ago
  You can be god-tier in Diablo 3 with a simple autohotkey script. At least with Diablo 4 you have to _sometimes_ evade. ;)
tstrimple 3y ago
> Once you get to the endgame it's pointless, and people basically blaze through the base game on purpose. And once you get there it really is no more than a slot machine that caters to people with serious gambling addictions. Feels like you're missing the point of end-game players. It's not the slot machine. It's pushing further and further into end-game content. It's a race to see who can dive deeper into dungeons and what builds are necessary to push to the true "end game". Diablo, the campaign, is and has always been trivially easy. Super high levels of these dungeons stack up so many resistance penalties and the level difference adds so much damage reduction (for enemies) and increase (for you) that it becomes much more of a skill based game. This is what I play these games for. Not the campaign that you can sleep through. For my wife, the game ends when we kill the big baddie together on normal difficulties. For me that's when the content just starts getting interesting. There is a lot of grinding involved, but you're having to pay so much more attention to what abilities / upgrades / paragon selections you make none of which are important at all for the main campaign.
- themagician 3y ago
  I don't know how you do it, but I'm actually fascinated by it. I like watching Diablo players rant on YouTube, but for me the game pretty much ends after the campaign too. I wish it didn't because I find the campaigns great. Even just exploring the map and all the different atmospheric elements. It just feels too short. I don't want to optimize my character. One thing I loved about D3 was that the entire skill tree was accessible to you. In D4 that's true right up until around 50 when it becomes cost prohibitive to respec.
  - tstrimple 3y ago
    One way I look at it is by the time you beat the game for the first time unless you've done quite a bit of side content, you still may not be a high enough level to unlock all of the abilities. You've only seen a fraction of the unique items floating around since most don't even drop until World Tier 3 or 4. You've likely only gotten the chance to play one or two themed builds based around the items which have dropped. You've probably not touched the paragon board or glyphs which can change things up quite significantly and enable a number of other builds that aren't really viable without the boost. I'm "only" level 78 on my main and I'm still upgrading glyphs and working my way through the paragon board. Or I was before the season started, and now I'm playing a fresh barb instead of sorc. I wouldn't mind more free respec opportunities, but I don't think it's exceptionally expensive. Just verified on my 78 sorc that it would cost just over $1MM gold to reset all of my points. That's maybe 3-4 dungeon runs. However to reroll an attribute at the enchanter, it's now costing me above $1.5MM for a single role, it also requires forgotten souls. Refunding skill points is much cheaper than upgrading end game gear! It also took me an embarrassing amount of time to realize you don't have to reset all skill points. If you right click on a skill it'll remove it one point at a time for under $20k / point.
standardUser 3y ago
Forget the endgame, how many hours of my life can I spend comparing one piece of equipment to one very-barley-sort-of-slightly-better piece of equipment until I've cycled through literally hundreds of pieces of equipment, each promising an imperceptible improvement to my ability to kill another thousand samey bad guys? I don't know how many hours exactly, but I know I hit that limit sometimes in my early 20's.

nonethewiser 3y ago

themagician 3y ago
Sort of, but not really. The real grind kicks in around level 50… so again, after you've already beat the game. I don't really care about the "endgame". I think this game would be much more fun if it was a bit more like am MMO, where you are maybe looking for a group to do a dungeon. Below 50 is, IMO, the best part of the game, especially because respecs are essentially unlimited.

butlike 3y ago

I agree that's what it's evolved into for the most part, but also consider the point of Diablo is to "defeat Diablo." Simple as that. The endgame of min/maxing came because people continued to play after the main objective was done.

dleslie 3y ago

> I feel like, particularly with the new Diablo 4 they could make the leveling curve on the base game last MUCH, MUCH longer and it would actually be far more enjoyable for far more people. It would piss off the endgame crowd though, because all they want to do is get to max level as fast as possible so they can start farming. They just did this, and made the game much more of a slow grind. Diablo 4's greatest flaw, IMHO, is that they apply difficulty scaling across all areas. At level 1 it can take two or three single hits to kill a goat man, and at level 60+ it can take two or three hits to kill a goat man; because the mobs scale to your power level. If they'd simply allowed some areas to be level-restricted with difficult mobs, then there would always be a sense of reward and victory. A player tired of the grind need only hop over to a slightly easier zone to feel like a god among mortals. But you can't do that in Diablo 4, so it just remains a slog.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
aprdm 3y ago
yes I totally agree.
jerf 3y ago
After ~25 years of playing this sort of game, I am increasingly sympathetic to the idea that exponential-power leveling is just a busted mechanic. There's a variety of good ways to use it, but there isn't a great way. You can lean into it, like Disgaea, which just embraces the brokenness and writes them into its mechanics. You can just sort of write a standard game, but then, in the end, the solution to all problems is grinding. You can scale the challenges with the level, but then, what's the point of leveling? In fact all you're doing is running the risk of showing just how busted the mechanic is when you have a hard time matching the levels correctly because of the exponential power gains; see Oblivion, for instance. And even after such a mismatch, the solution to all problems is still grinding. Obviously many fine games have used this and I still play some to this day, so I'm not saying it's never ever fun. I'm just saying, the ways in which it's kinda broken seem fundamental and there seems to be only so much you can do with them. Were I designing a game today, rather than treating it as a default as so many designers still seem to, I'd want to take a careful look at the disadvantages and be sure I'm comfortable with them before proceeding. And as a gamer I do have to say more and more I'm starting to mark a game using level-based mechanics down a point when I'm figuring out what to play.

jorvi 3y ago

With Diablo 3 they added so much QoL and grind protection and then people flipped their shit. So for Diablo 4 they discarded everything good from Diablo 3. By and large, Diablo players want to be flagellated by the RNG.

dleslie 3y ago
You can be god-tier in Diablo 3 with a simple autohotkey script. At least with Diablo 4 you have to _sometimes_ evade. ;)

tstrimple 3y ago

> Once you get to the endgame it's pointless, and people basically blaze through the base game on purpose. And once you get there it really is no more than a slot machine that caters to people with serious gambling addictions. Feels like you're missing the point of end-game players. It's not the slot machine. It's pushing further and further into end-game content. It's a race to see who can dive deeper into dungeons and what builds are necessary to push to the true "end game". Diablo, the campaign, is and has always been trivially easy. Super high levels of these dungeons stack up so many resistance penalties and the level difference adds so much damage reduction (for enemies) and increase (for you) that it becomes much more of a skill based game. This is what I play these games for. Not the campaign that you can sleep through. For my wife, the game ends when we kill the big baddie together on normal difficulties. For me that's when the content just starts getting interesting. There is a lot of grinding involved, but you're having to pay so much more attention to what abilities / upgrades / paragon selections you make none of which are important at all for the main campaign.

themagician 3y ago
I don't know how you do it, but I'm actually fascinated by it. I like watching Diablo players rant on YouTube, but for me the game pretty much ends after the campaign too. I wish it didn't because I find the campaigns great. Even just exploring the map and all the different atmospheric elements. It just feels too short. I don't want to optimize my character. One thing I loved about D3 was that the entire skill tree was accessible to you. In D4 that's true right up until around 50 when it becomes cost prohibitive to respec.
- tstrimple 3y ago
  One way I look at it is by the time you beat the game for the first time unless you've done quite a bit of side content, you still may not be a high enough level to unlock all of the abilities. You've only seen a fraction of the unique items floating around since most don't even drop until World Tier 3 or 4. You've likely only gotten the chance to play one or two themed builds based around the items which have dropped. You've probably not touched the paragon board or glyphs which can change things up quite significantly and enable a number of other builds that aren't really viable without the boost. I'm "only" level 78 on my main and I'm still upgrading glyphs and working my way through the paragon board. Or I was before the season started, and now I'm playing a fresh barb instead of sorc. I wouldn't mind more free respec opportunities, but I don't think it's exceptionally expensive. Just verified on my 78 sorc that it would cost just over $1MM gold to reset all of my points. That's maybe 3-4 dungeon runs. However to reroll an attribute at the enchanter, it's now costing me above $1.5MM for a single role, it also requires forgotten souls. Refunding skill points is much cheaper than upgrading end game gear! It also took me an embarrassing amount of time to realize you don't have to reset all skill points. If you right click on a skill it'll remove it one point at a time for under $20k / point.

standardUser 3y ago

Forget the endgame, how many hours of my life can I spend comparing one piece of equipment to one very-barley-sort-of-slightly-better piece of equipment until I've cycled through literally hundreds of pieces of equipment, each promising an imperceptible improvement to my ability to kill another thousand samey bad guys? I don't know how many hours exactly, but I know I hit that limit sometimes in my early 20's.