Which way? Getting to max level? It only takes a few hours…normally, without rushing. It’s stupid fast…going slow. And that is just step 1 for Seasons. Getting to 70 is literally still the very beginning of the game. You’ll spend 99% of the time collecting resources by completing quests and pushing greater rifts to gear up!
I never got to max level in Diablo 2. It was never the point, and it also took entire ages in comparison to Diablo 3 which again…mere hours.
They could fix the divide between those that like respec and those that don’t by having a midcore difficulty where midcore characters can’t respec and normal characters can. Because really, respec is about making it easy for players to ‘try out’ or ‘fix’ characters and not having it means living with your decisions and having to spend all that time rebuilding a different character.
Having them slot the characters off into another area like hardcore characters would make everyone feel they are playing their version of the game.
If you wanna critique the levelling experience in D3, that’s fine, but just to reiterate - it’s got nuttin’ to do with free respec.
I won’t agree L70 is ‘max level’ in D3, not even close to it. If I had to draw a line somewhere, it’d be Paragon 800 (i.e. the point where you can no longer make meaningful decisions in the paragon skill tree).
Maybe not for you and I, but it certainly was for some people. Personally, I never got close to it because for me D2’s ‘endgame’ was interminably dull and I usually bailed shortly after finishing up Hell difficulty. Either kill the exact same boss over and over or kill the exact same cows over and over. Neither of which got more challenging or interesting after the first time. I’d rather create an alt than do that! ☜(⌒▽⌒)☞
My D2R Assassin is L85, which is as far as I’ve ever got in that game, I think.
I did beat Diablo on Hell difficulty with one character in Diablo 2. We were all incredibly proud of that. It took us years and thousands of hours of playing together to finally do it. We really thought we could beat Baal too, but Nihlathak wiped half of us out. (We only played hardcore). I thought getting to “finish” the game was a pretty good endgame. It kept us busy and yearning for all those thousands of hours, even though we never actually got there. I think my highest level character was 82 when he died to Nihlathak.
You can keep coming into these threads with your high tales of hardcore derring-do but you are not going to impress me. At all. Ever. maybe a little
I had 3 characters who had “retired” - they beat Act 5 Hell Hardcore (they were in the low 90’s, maybe 94 was my highest?) Mount Arreat was the real heartbreaker, as you and some other randoms would try to beat that boss, and 1/2 or more of the players would lose their character. It felt like a success if anyone made it through.
Apparently I had infinite free time 20+ years ago.
The fun thing was twinking your low level characters out and speedrunning hardcore. You could get to the start of the game (Act 1 Hell) in 2 days of play.
Paragon…yeah. I don’t care about Paragon levels at all. The mechanics… +N% increments to X and Y or Z. Nope. I’m out!
Hardcore isn’t for everyone, and no, it’s not any badge of honor or anything, just a way to play that some of us find rewarding.
Like tonight, playing D3, on my Firebird Sorc. Tooling along in a GR 50 and it’s one of those demon-underworld maps with the organic looking landscape and the belching maws of fire. Well, got caught in a fire stream as I was fighting two packs of blues and first death proc goes off (Guardian). TP over to a corner that seems safe, going to portal out, when pop! spike from somewhere procs the meteor revive. Now I’ve got both of those guaranteed revives on cooldown, so getting the hell out of Dodge is critical. Finally manage to get to a spot I can portal out. Whew. But it’s stuff like that that makes it fun.
What’s GR?
Greater Rift.
My hot take on Hard Core - being a total pussy, running away from any conceivable threat, and farming low level enemies for countless hours to level up. Only engage in boss fights when you’re sure you’ve trivialized it.
Yeah, sounds “fun.”
Nothing new in the Hardcore argument for 20 years it seems. Just as much as people want to play with cheats or follow an online guide slavishly instead of playing the actual game, hardcore is just one way to play.
Hard Core is just playing with the traditions of Diablo’s Angband roots.
Diablo 2 Hard Core was most viable in groups. Specifically having a team. Your mates could loot your body if you died to recover the gear…
I didn’t really play Diablo 3 Hard Core for any meaningful length and only solo. I don’t think you can loot bodies.
That’s one way of looking at it for sure :). Again, it’s not a value thing, just a fun thing–I find hardcore much more fun, others feel the opposite. I’m happy the game gives us those options.
But I have to say, with due respect, your description of HC play s not very accurate, at least, not for most folks who have been doing it for a while. Passive play isn’t good in HC; caution, yes, but aggressive caution. You have to kill faster than they can build up on you, and you have to keep moving. No one farms low-level enemies, because D3 makes leveling trivial. Boss fights, with a very few exceptions, are already trivialized, and if you are playing the campaign for the first time your progress is pretty well gated by the bosses, so you’re rarely overmatched.
Adventure Mode, where the vast majority of your gameplay will be, is all about getting into the Torment levels as fast as possible to farm the gear you need to do Greater Rifts to get the gems you need to do, well, higher GRs. Wash, rinse, repeat. Oh, and bounties, your bread-and-butter leveling and grinding/resource runs. The only difference between softcore and hardcore play there is I don’t do Malthiel on HC if I can possibly help it (Belial can be a PITA too). But that’s about it.
Now, to be fair, when D3 launched, I did play HC like you describe. For a short period, until I realized that was exactly how to lose HC characters!
Yeah, I imagine D3 Hardcore is a cake walk compared to D2 Hardcore. The furthest I got was to Diablo’s sanctum with those fucking hell knights that cast curses on you.
D2 was an order of magnitude or two harder, for sure.
My brain has been addled by playing Survivors, which have a lot of the fun and none of the drudgery of an ARPG, but I went back to D3, because I wanted the satisfaction of blasting whole screens full of monsters again, but holy hell the leveling is slow.
And it is not a rewarding part of the game/season. I’ve done it a bunch of times already, so it has all the excitement of filling out paperwork to me, until I get to level 70, and I get greater rifts, and drops and build actually start to matter.
It’s the sort of thing where you pretty much need a podcast to listen to just to get through it.
Of course what a lot of people do is get boosts from higher level players, but I think that also serves to establish it as a not very valuable part of the experience.
But you have a shared stash, so it’s less necessary to group to ensure you start with something next time.
This was mostly my experience in D2, but D3 smoothed the spikes and gave you ways to avoid death from single moments of bad luck, which makes the experience overall better. Still, I ended up abandoning because I went through a stretch of really sketchy internet at my house and just didn’t want to risk the character against any interesting opponents.
Hmm, I didn’t run into any of these, just the borders out of the zone we were allowed in, which you could run past but then it would warn you to return to the other zone. I can’t say for sure, but it seemed like the consensus from a lot of the commentary I’ve seen is that you will have access to the other zones right away (at least the ones bordering fractured peaks). You will certainly have far more space to play in at the start than you did in D2 or in D3 prior to adventure mode.
Which is exactly my point about the levelling in D3 always being the same because you aren’t crafting a character, you are going through the motions to get to the endgame.
Well again, this is because leveling to max level is trivial in D3 so there’s no point in doing anything at all along the way except being out there killing stuff to earn XP as fast as possible.
Of course you don’t want to level two D3 rogues in the same season, because you would be doing literally the same things with the same skills and getting loot that meant nothing to the “real” game, which starts at lvl 70. What I’m arguing is that I want the game to be built in a way that (a) makes getting to max level a significant part of the achievement of a season (not the whole thing, but more than half), (b) makes leveling an alt fun whether you change classes or not, and (c) produces unique characters at the end of the journey.
With completely free respecs, D4 characters would only be distinguished by the appearance choices you made when you rolled them up (and the name). With obscenely expensive respecs, each point you spent would feel like a massive decision that you had to delay and allocate only when you were sure you needed it (or else follow a build guide). It seems like a happy medium between the two makes it hard to completely change your skills on a whim but easy to correct mistakes or optimize a few points that have become obsolete.
To go back to our earlier example, if you wanted to be able to play as a stabber or an archer at the drop of a hat, then you’d need to maintain two rogues. But you wouldn’t have to level both in the same season - there’s no season journey reason why you have to be able to switch all your skills on a whim. If you like your archer from season 1, they will still be around when you’re playing your season 6 stabber and you can just swap back to them for all your archer gameplay needs. And when you are done with each season, you’ll have a unique character you might actually care about.
Players can both easily try out and fix characters in D4 as well as having to commit to a build by the late game. All the skills are available once you have 34 skill points to spend (which might be possible at level 25 with alts), when respecs are still quite cheap. So the only kind of “try out” you can’t easily do is swapping from one max-level build to another to see if it lets you defeat the top tier content. But of course, that would be true because of gear anyway. So really, all the system they have is doing is asking you to level two characters if you want to swap back and forth between two different playstyles.
The important thing is that the content needs to be balanced against what players can do. If it is balanced against free respecs, that has consequences that make for a worse game for players who avoid respeccing. So it isn’t as simple as just saying, “choose not to!” Maybe what you want is a creative mode where you can swap your character around to try out whatever, so that normal mode characters can have some uniqueness.
I can’t tell if we are agreeing or not. To be clear, I don’t use respec and don’t care if it’s there or not. But I do believe that respec does make the game easier as you go. If something isn’t working out, you switch up the skills on that character and dive back in. There is no way anyone can say that isn’t easier than having to live with your character development choices.
So, for those that want the easier gameplay, the devs could just shunt away any ‘I need respec’ characters to another difficulty level so that everyone in there has the same option available, and make it free for everyone on that difficulty level.
Although, frankly, I don’t think it matters to the non-respec crowd at all unless it has to do with PvP, like what’s part of endgame. I mean, everyone optimizing their build makes it so they might as well just make cookie-cutter characters that are identical and test those twitch skills against other players. It’s bad enough that people think they have to follow build guides to get the most out of the game when really just play the damn thing and have some fun.
I’m with Tom Verlaine, (may he rest in peace):
There needs to be some friction. Just like resistance to entropy equals life, resistance to frictionless gamespaces equals the persistence of satisfaction.