Endgame vs. levelling

Orbs of regret should be more common to increase your ability to modify your build while levelling.
Cruel difficulty will be gone when act 5 will be released, right? I hope normal difficulty will become harder. It needs to be hard enough to capture your attention and not making you yawn.

Ahh...my old, self indulgent armchair videogame designer post.

I love what GGG did with the second part. I don't think it was because of my post, but rather because of the collective whining that they did that.

Still, some issues remain; people will see leveling as an obstacle to the endgame because of mechanical differences (and because your build gets together at that point), and while the world is used to good effect in part II, it kind of gets canned at the epilogue.

The build part is impossible to solve (although some builds can be made work earlier), some people may still ask for streamlined leveling once the ten acts get old.

About the world, thing is that returning to it once you get to maps is akward to say the least. You go there for prophecies and maybe sacrifice fragment farming. Some prophecies will make you go to part I, and the difficulty (and sometime the rewards) make it feel more like filler than something apropiate for the endgame.

I say prophecies have a good potential to become a mechanic that bridges both parts (I wonder if this was a deliberate decision by GGG, doing something that changes a lot how you level and that fuzzies the boundaries of endgame and leveling). But for it to work, the difficulty should scale apropiately (the monsters scale up to 70, at least they should be hard even if they don't have greater alvls) and the epilogue should give you access to all the world areas (including those that are exclusive to part I). Maybe the areas should get tougher if there is a prophecy to fulfill there.

It's a lot of work though. GGG may just change prophecies to be map only and ignore this completely (and it would be fine, leveling is streamlined). To justify this GGG should keep adding stuff to do to the world, but I'm not sure how much faith they have on that (and it may be better to just keep adding stuff to maps).

I'm happy as it is.

PS: The pantheon system was an attempt to add some mid to endgame progression, with little power creep, so it's almost horizontal (as it should be). I personally like the system but we got spoiled by stuff like ascendancies that eclipse the whole thing. Shame.