When will any zone beyond Mines 2 become relevant?

I personally really like the way A4M is set up right now. Maybe it's the fact that I play SC and not HC so deaths don't bother me too much. Daresso and Kaom and their areas seem to me to be pretty good litmus sticks to see how your build stacks up in terms of tankiness and damage. No need to waste maps when you can just see how many Triskeriaki pokes you can take!

I've also found The Harvest quite ridiculous in terms of exp gain. May just be changes in my playstyle and or improvements to my game knowledge and skill but the squishy new tentacle floppies and Revenants aren't even a quarter as scary as bubble bros and leaping frog douche were back when A3X was released.

I'm pretty sure I once took a character from 85 to 86 farming only the harvest. Lower exp penalty is amazing, you get easy clears, and if your build is suited to take on at least one of the 3 guardians, you get a ton more loot than Docks, Caracombs, or Library ever did before.

Also I've gotten 1 exalt and I'm 11/12 for my 2nd or 3rd from The Hoarder. It's amazing way to farm exalts if you don't like trade. But then what would you use them for? Mastercraft I guess, lol.

@OP

I disagree with those suggestions, currently low tier maps runs are unpopular due to dry lakes, if you are increasing those area levels, you are gonna make even more map unpopular.

I prefer something like these.

1. Remove Merciless difficulty for Act 1-4.

2. All Maps is still Merciless difficulty

3. The game have 2 difficulties now, Normal + Cruel then Map is merciless.

4. Bump Cruel harvest to lvl 67 with resistant penalty to -30% And Re-scale all other area level below that, changes like these will make drylake(lvl 60) much lower level than map tier 1. Low tier maps are more popular now.

5. Merciless Bandit reward become Cruel bandit reward. Cruel bandit reward are gone.(most of us take skill point anyway, the cruel bandit reward are meh)

6. Since we remove 1 difficulty, we have 8 skill points(quest reward + bandit) + several reset points. Assign all these equally to all the Act final bosses as reward for beating them.(Merveil,vaal, Dominous, Malachai). now players will actually feel rewarded for beating the 4 major boss than receive nothing.

7. Move Zana Eternal laboratory behind the new act 4 cruel(If you play torchlight 2 b4, it is basically you beat the game, then you do maps)

Now the game will feels like a "more natural" progression. You clear the main content ONLY twice(Normal, cruel) then you beat the final Malachai, you get a map as quest reward, you take the map to Eternal laboratory, do the map and meet zana, then ascend yourself to get into higher map until you are level 100.

This solve 2 problems with 1, it remove the tiring process of doing the main content 3 times + it solves the meaningless Act4 problem you meantioned.

@Darkrows

Those are some pretty drastic, difficult-to-implement suggestions.

I hope that someday the Eternal Laboratory is located early in Cruel, ideally Act 1. If players have gone through the story once I scarcely see a good reason to force them through it again. But then - what to do about quest rewards? It becomes real complicated really fast. At a certain point it becomes request to just accept this game as it is and hope suggestions could be carried forward to a new title.

Every zone is relevant , it's just that you chose the path of least resistance and you ruined the game for yourself .