Act 4 and Difficulties (Normal, Cruel and Merciless)

Yes: 3 x 4 acts is too much.

In CB: 4 x 2 acts.
So I bet: 2 x 4 acts.

And since merciless does not grant any achievements, merc will go out. Cruel might get revamped.

It's all about defining the level of zones vs. the tiers of gear. And if act 4 introduces higher level zones than 67, the map system needs redefining too.

But I would really like to se 2 difficulties.

I'm still for 3 difficulties even with 5 acts.
It's just about making it so that if you follow some rules, you are not going to die during leveling. The problem with Invasion is that many builds simply can't be easily leveled anymore due to invasion bosses killing them before they are really ready. In the Nemesis league this was about the right level of difficulty during leveling.

As speculated in the post above, Act 4 is probably going to introduce higher level zones. However the zones certainly won't suddenly jump from 68 max to 75 max, as that would be crazy.

Having three difficulties makes it easier to storm through content because the progression is flattened. Having each next zone approximately 1 level higher makes the game a breeze to complete, but introduces repetitiveness. Repetitiveness induces boredom.

Having two difficulties would make storming through content harder by steeping up the progression. If each next zone is on average only half a level higher, it adds up to the difficulty increase, but decreases repetitiveness.

So if we limit the highest level zones to, say, 70, and remove one difficulty, the first zone of Normal starts at level 1, and the last zone of Cruel ends at 70. Four acts times two, eight acts, each act having around 10 zones equals up to around 80 non-map zones, yet with three difficulties that ramps up to 120 different non-map zones. If you split 80 zones on 70 levels, progression is an average of 0.875 levels per zone, but in 120 zones it would be 0.58 levels per zone. The first option gives a streamlined difficulty increase with an illusion of having to spend less time going over the whole story over and over again. What is really happening is you're still spending the same amount of time to level up, but the time distribution is different. And I think this should result in increasing the fun factor, but lowering the boredom factor.

Im all for them removing one of the playthroughs when a new act comes. I despised repeating the same content four times in closed beta, and even now, by the time I get to act3 merciless, im usually a bit burned out and have to put the game down for at least a few days.

Another area that needs looked at is act2. Its open endedness is kind of nice, but if you dont run a marathon session on either the left branch or right branch from town, there is a fuckton of backtracking.

I know it's cool to hate on D3 but removing the different difficulties was a great move and one I'd like to see happen in POE as soon as possible - playing through the same content over & over just to level is really dull. Personally I'd make a lot more characters and try more builds if levelling wasn't so repetitive.

You are overleveling the zones very fast in the beginning while being underleveled by cruel act 2 and later which forces you to grind docks up to level 37-38 in normal so you dont fall behind when you reach docks in cruel.

at least thats how it is for me.

edit: i hope that with the new act they will take the opportunity to change the level of the zones to fix the leveling or make it more smooth.

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DemonScarf a écrit :

I miss ruthless.

But yeah there will be less eventually, but since there is 10 planed acts i don't think the 4th will remove another difficulty already.

youre probably the one person that misses ruthless

god i hated that difficulty...