Act 4 and Difficulties (Normal, Cruel and Merciless)

If they remove a difficulty level, how will they handle the bandit rewards, etc?

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DirkAustin a écrit :

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pickpocket293 a écrit :

If they remove a difficulty level, how will they handle the bandit rewards, etc?

They find a way. How did they do it when there were 4 difficulties and only 2 acts?

You tell me?

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DirkAustin a écrit :

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pickpocket293 a écrit :

If they remove a difficulty level, how will they handle the bandit rewards, etc?

They find a way. How did they do it when there were 4 difficulties and only 2 acts?

Well it was the transition from closed to open beta, so all the characters were wiped anyway.

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pickpocket293 a écrit :

If they remove a difficulty level, how will they handle the bandit rewards, etc?

They would add the same rewards to act IV quests.

In act4 there will be a quest rewards for shavronne's, crowns or aegis because the content will be too difficult without.

There will be at least two obstacles to switch to 2 difficulties from 3 difficulties, one is the Bandits rewards, and the other is base Elemental resists value in each difficulties.


IMO the reward of Bandits quest for Normal difficulty should have be rebalanced before, since there are not many players who opt Alira for mana. If there were only 2 acts, this Normal difficulty rewards would be eliminated without significant problems.


As for the base Elemental resists between 2 difficulties, sudden -60% resi might be too much.


But these things are the task GGG should consider, and what we need to do is to clarify whether we want 4 act * 3 difficulties or not.


The biggest problem here is GGG would not be enough bold to re-balance stats of all mobs in quest areas to reduce number of difficulties, unless we demand and push it hard. We know re-balancing would be quite time consuming and difficult.

The less time I spend in act 3 the better

I think GGG is trying to please several different kinds of people with the difficulty gating:

-Core gamers who just want to get to the endgame content.
-Core gamers who care about the story and/or want multiple acts with a linear progression.
-Players who don't have experience with action RPGs that need the story to introduce them to game mechanics.

When players have experienced the linear story content enough, eventually they'll want to get new characters to the endgame content more quickly, and making it hard enough for players to reach an endgame can create player burnout. A lot of games have tried to solve this problem, some more successfully than others.

I don't think Diablo 2 is perfect, but I think it satisfied almost everyone in this one area very well, accidentally or because of genius, by making it somewhat easy to rush a character through its three difficulty tiers and reach the early endgame content, without advertising the fact that you can do this to the first-time player or forcing any player to do it. I think that right now, it's a little too hard for experienced players to get a new alt to 'early' engame. These are some things I would do, if I were Chris Wilson:

-Make it easier to "rush" characters through the story, if that's what players want to do.
-Make a procedural system like mapping that players can opt into as a substitute for the ordinary story progression, and don't advertise that either (maybe require a special one-time consumable item that drops in endgame and you can buy somewhat cheaply due to its abundance, to opt in? Again, you don't want to expose first time players to this stuff and confuse them).
-Make it possible to create a monster level 66 (or whatever level you consider endgame without obsoleting mapping) version of most overworld instances on your highest difficulty tier. Basically Diablo 3's "inferno", but without having to do all the content again.

My main concern is that I think Chris and the designers have done a lot to ensure players can't just get to endgame and then trivialize that content, kudos to them for preventing that form of player burnout, but they underestimate the amount of burnout that is caused by forcing players to grind through multiple difficulties to reach the endgame with a new character.

Another upside of making it easier to get an alt to early endgame is that it indirectly eases "I facerolled the endgame" burnout by encouraging players to make alts and start the endgame again rather than finish the existing endgame content. The trick is just to make it possible for experienced players to replace, skip or swap out content they've seen ten times in ways that don't cost you a ton of developer hours to implement, without making these options obvious to your new players, so you don't alienate the casual audience or first time players.

but if they make it 2 difficulties at 4 acts then at which point do you make it 1 difficulty only?

It makes more sense to have 3x4 but be able to level even higher then is now possible (zones that go up to 70-71).

And maybe for act 5 drop it to 2 difficulties.



edit. It is definitely not fast to level a new alt but a lot of players can get to 60 in 12-15 hours which while a bit annoying is definitely not the end of the world