[Sept 18] Difficulty and Level Progression

I think the 4º difficulty is necessary because..

1. Diablo3 will have it, if u dont want to play the 4º diff u can choose dont play it

2. In Diablo2 when u finish the game, with good stuff and lvl u get bored because the mobs are very easy and with 4º diff (but moooore harder than 3º) will be a challenge i love hard games and i dont like bored games

3. Currently difficulty is ridiculous i made with a duelist/archer normal,cruel,ruthless and in merciless isnt easy but with patiente i can....with no passive skills, normal diff stuff except bow (i get in cruel)

4. They should increase the difficulty a lot in the three modes and the 4º make a impossible mode to force to u to gear very very good stuff lvl and party with auras and still should be very hard

5. Add immunes resist to the mobs like D2 (physical,cold,etc) to every monster and boss can have 1-3 immune resist, and escort to boss will be fun

these are my suggestions for a competitive and fun game :)
sorry for my english :D

I posted this somewhere else but I think here is a place to repost it for the wider audience.

Two ideas for on lvl areas, and on lvl gear:

1. Personally I would like the first. But not as "slower" but more fiting the number of areas. For example: If you clean all of the main areas, you are on lvl with the zones. If you just run through them you have to do the aditional zones [with diferent monsters loot etc.] And sometimes you have to farm for exp and items, clearing two whole zones to be on a good lvl.

It could take a little longer, but you will have a on lvl gear, and you will be on the area lvl as well. So you will be stronger as for lvl you are but you will be in the earlier area.

2. The other option is to scale the monster a bit, or add more unique, and special monster when you are higher lvl. They will give normal exp, but drop items of your lvl, so you can still enjoy the zones you outlvl.

You will choose your progresion rate. Or you want to go on with weaker gear but do another lvl in another area, or grind for items but still clear areas you must go through.

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If it goes about the 2nd act. I like the idea of two posible ways. You can choose which enemies you take on lvl and which one you skip. Thats nice option for me.
Maby the bandit camps could be all higher, giving you reason to grind some time before going there. Especially if one of the obove options would be implemented.

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On other dificulties there could be as someone said up from me. Boss escorts. Or even another stages and atacks from bosses:
Brute could bring the celing down on our heads by hiting the walls when he is close to death [thats the part when we have to faster our DPS].
Hillock could scream and bring ton of zombies to him by doing that.
Siren could ... no she is good. Maby in daemon form she could teleport and navigate you between her minions. Or make two fake copies of herself and swith places with them.

Resistances is enough the imune is too much.
But other subtell buffs for normal mobs could be nice. Like not making them yelow or blue, but still giving them some aditional power that enchance their style. Spiters could be faster runners. Crabs have hard shiels. Mages could get curses, or teleports. More mechanics instead of jsut stats increases.

I must admit that maybe the most slowly progressing thing in PoE is difficulty. Very long time passed since Beta Manifesto topics are opened, but still we are expecting "a real" difficulty and toughness integrated into game.

Sorry but honestly, I would call this "Deadlock" situation regarding difficulty.

Edit: There are even many people from stress beta testers out there who finds game not challenging, and giving as negative feedbacks. Game should be challenging from start to finish, please take these into account in the first place, and try to give precedence as it is really falling behind.

Unchallenging games die pretty fast, which could be called as the "spine" of the game.

=================================================

I had asked this before, but it was gone unnoticed, so now i want to repeat my question cause been waiting this for ages;

● When should we expect 'Resistances/Immunities' overhaul implemented into PoE ?
- This contains the resistance penalty for each difficulty we should had, monsters getting a higher resistance - higher cap and implementation of immunes for second difficulty, and more of this to be viable for last difficulty.

Thanks.

I didnt read all 19 pages of this thread, I read a good bit.

I wanted to toss my voice to the masses.

I stress tested the game this weekend and it was fun but very easy. I found that killing monsters mostly in 1 hit a few with 2 hits was getting boring after only a few minutes of play.

I couldn't wait for gold (elite) monsters or bosses to come up.

I'm not sure if there is an option to play in a harder mode, I know you can group up with parties and pretty much makes it slightly harder monsters but not much with the extra players.

I would like to see maybe some rewards and choices to play in a harder mode or areas.

I also found that if I were to fight higher level monsters it got harder very hard at some points not because of the 1 or 2 hits, but because of how often I would miss.

I believe to make it a bit harder would be to have more things pop out on players. When you are swarmed by monsters it made the game a lot more fun. I saw a few times where spiders would pop out from the walls or monkeys from the trees. This could happen faster.

The speed at which you level wasn't a problem for me. I did find myself not really caring if I leveled much or not. Spell/Skill levels were sorta weak upgrades. Mostly I was looking at getting a few stats up to get a better weapon. It seems like weapons rule the game. Upgrading to a the next weapon can double your damage. That's pretty hefty when you could have leveled up 3 to 7 times between weapons and not really seen much of an effect.

That is also what I experienced during the weekend: As soon as you get a cool weapon you start to own them all!
At first it really is motivating and a lot of fun putting on this weapon and seeing the dps skyrocketing. But after I spent some minutes one-hitting everything in my path it got rather boring.
So I just ran through the end of act 2 normal without caring about the enemys. Although all in all the game was great fun, this issue is not a good thing!

But thinking about how to make it more difficult I don't think it is enough to simply throw more monsters at the player. If the dps is high enough you can just get rid of them as easy as you could do with fewer ones.
Immunities like in Diablo 2 would probably work better as it makes monsters more difficult to kill, but I don't like this system.
A simple increase in monster hp and/or a decrease in player damage would definately be a step into the right direction.
It would also be cool to give different monsters different skills, for example i could imagine spiders using webs to slow down (or completely freeze) players or pulling them closer. Or those shambling stonepiles could get an ability to though stones at the player or stunning them etc.
These are just some quick ideas that came to me as I wrote this, but I think it would make fighting standard enemys more challenging.

Leveling was also quite fine for me, I never had any problems there. Making my way through this huge skilltree was really fun. In fact leveling my char up felt better than in most other games of this kind. I always felt an improvement after level-up and that is how it's supposed to be, isn't it?

Wow. I read the first few pages of this thread and
gave up the rest to skip to the last couple pages
of posts.

People seem all over the map.

Here is my story / take .

First, I've only played since the recent
open beta weekend.

I have several characters to Cruel (some in HC)
One just made it to the 3rd tier difficulty act1.

I'm a old long time Diablo1/ 2 fan player.


In my opinion the game as it stands now has
far too fast of a xp curve especially for Cruel.

I'm NOT the kind of player that wants to skip
vast areas of playable map just to rush to end so
I probably earn a lot more xp just by trying
to enjoy the game that is there. I enjoy huntng
for new items to use. I don't dwaddle overly much.
My recent character taht went thru act1 and 2 cruel
was 42 by time she (a ice witch) made it to act 1
Ruthless.

By that time, everything is too bloody easy.
The game is easy already, even if you do things at level.
There are no very challanging boss fights to speak of, other than the one boss in act1 (I'll have to edit to recall the name /loc) that is in a cave and is a caster (some female boss) That was challanging for my witch though nothing like Andariel or Duriel and others could be in D2 (pre expansion versions)

Occasionaly I ran into champion class mobs that could
be a challange but due to the nature of the xp curve
one again level so fast that they become more mundane.

By the time I reach the 2nd tier difficulty I expect
a slow down. I expect to have time to bother searching for gear and actually have time to find it useful rather than blasting thru 'level's just to find the gear I find is now all the sudden far less worthy of use.


May I suggest this for the developers:

A method in either user interface or something you sell
that will toggle SLOWER xp curve or alter it for those of us that dont' want to rush to the end game.

The reason I suggest it is because I know there is a legion of hot heads out there that want a super fast xp curve or play the game far differntly.
Iif you offer a adjustable xp curve mechanism that can slow it for people like me, I'd be very happy.
I would prefer a switch over a sale item but your choice.

by the time I reach the third teir difficulty I expect
a VERY seriuos challange.

SO far, in cruel and now my first char in RUTHLESS I see no great challange at all. Yes, my ice witch has zombies and is 42 in ruthless but the first fireball
meteor champion boss out of town should have been a serious kick ass encounter. I stood without fear in his fireball storm.
My witches resist gear is nothing fancy and the easibly achieved 60 percent resist was more than enough .



Bottom line. The game is far too easy in cruel and above as it stands now.
The xp curve in Cruel is far too fast as it stands now.
THe lack of VERY serious boss's in the acts is something that needs addressing by release.
Champion class mobs in ruthless should be quite
frightning and dangerous.
They lack oomph. I think the fact the player
is not debuffed as per resists in each level
of difficulty is a simple fix. Why should I bother
finding more gear if my resists stay near maxed by end of act2 normal?


This is a fun game. I'm glad to support it but
to be honest, at present after playing to Ruthless, i'm not all that enthused with the idea of LONG time play due to lack of challange.

This has to be addressed an you have to act soon as the
fat man is coming. (you know who I mean)

Aside from the idea of a harder difficulty, and considering the fact that I only played the game for the open weekend stress test, it seemed like a lot of new players had a lot of the same questions with really simple or obvious answers. To get to the point, will there in any way be some sort of an in-game tutorial or a help menu? I'm sure it would clear up the chat of a lot of identical and unnecessary questions.

It's probably been said many times elsewhere, but I would like to see a D2-like progression in terms of difficult. Simply increasing mob HP and damage isn't challenging enough, although I love the quantity of them as you progress through difficulties. Player resistances should be reduced too, simply to give monsters that edge.

Ideally, monsters should be much more resistant to damage (including physical, if they can't resist it already), and have some immunities. Right now, you literally can make almost any build and stomp with impunity. It's so easy to do multiple kinds of damage that the net effect of this would basically halve your damage output.

I like the quantity that bosses show up in (are there plans to have a unique boss for every area?) ... is it possible for them to spawn with two auras? If not, this would be another challenging thing to add on higher difficulties.

Related to this, what exactly would yield the best results for a leveling character, both item and exp wise? Going solo on the highest available zone, one of your own level or below ? Leveling with a party? How big a party?
Well, another option would be to have someone in a party at the beginning of the instance. Naturally, for this you would use a lower lvl zone so you can still kill the mobs in appropriate time.
Thanks

as one of u posted, an algorithm based scaling (slider from a min to max, but that isn't selectable by the player) sounds most enjoyable to me.

Rating system that would tell how good are you (as well as the difficulty modifier) would also modify the hp/dps/number of mobs (lets say a modifier from 0.8 to 2).

For party based: the average rating of the whole party
Loot is the same for everyone on the same difficulty (first, second, third will have different loot).

This way the game will keep the challenge for every player (depending on their play style and build), economy will not be affected (same loot), and there is a minimum required (making the bad players evolve into better) and max for the elite guys that want to be the best.

As a special reward for reaching the top, make some cosmetical rewards or titles.

example: beat an instance solo in first difficulty with the best rating would give u a: bronze "Shadow Killer" title, second would go silver and third Gold. If u see a player with a gold title you would respect that player since the difficulty is something that can not be achieved by everyone (even thou everyone that level has similar equipment).

Then u can have titles based on how much titles u posses, making a general rating for that toon.

edit - maybe change the color of the player's name - from white to dark gold (like items, from ordinary to unique) based on the rating for that difficulty (to make the title free for other stuff).

WoT (World of Tanks) made similar system with medals for players who achieved more then 80,90,95% of the average exp per battle for that tank (thou you cant view that in the battle).