[Sept 18] Difficulty and Level Progression

Path of Exile is going to become a lot harder in some places. We understand that new players want to be able to play through at least the first difficulty level with relative ease, but we also feel that our higher difficulty levels are not challenging enough. We will ensure that side areas are difficult (especially so on higher difficulties), so that there are optional challenges for players with well-built characters.

We will remove the fourth difficulty level around the same time that we add Act Three. The total number of act-difficulty combinations available will increase from 2*4=8 to 3*3=9. We feel that repeating the game content four times is unnecessary and that there should be more interesting end-game stuff available by that point. After rebalancing, the new third difficulty level may be more challenging than our current fourth difficulty level.

We're going to make sure that our subsequent difficulty levels are spread over more levels than they are currently. For example, Cruel difficulty in 0.9.6 only has nine monster levels allocated to it - which means that it's possible to basically run through and still be able to kill monsters at the end. We'll make sure that this is tuned appropriately.

Edit (Sept 18): This information is still correct and represents our view of the issue.

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DoctorOne wrote:

Three acts isn't all you intend to implement is it?
I find running through the same content only times a little tiresome. Unless Act 3 has quite a lot to offer.

There will be more. We want to finish Act Three before doing others though.