So my story with Diablo 3 began along time ago, like 2-3 years ago. I bought the game started playing, liked the mood, the graphics but found it to easy. I started looking how i can change difficulty level, and to my astonishement found out i couldnt until i finished the game. What? I buy the game and i cant play it on a difficulty level that doesnt put me to sleep? I just stopped playing. Around 2 months back I came back to play coop with a friend, and together we soldiered on. The fact you could at last change the difficulty 2 levels from start helped a bit, but it was still to easy, a bit boring, but with my friend we could chat and joke so we soldiered through. And finally we reached level 60 and could change diff levels. And boy the game suddenly changed. IT really became fun, you felt you had to do somethign right, to optimize your builds.
So going forward to Diablo 4 a couple of advices from me , my friend and also soem other poeple i talked about.
1- For god’s sake make the difficulty level changeable from start however one wants. IF it somehow unbalances the looting harmonogram, just allow to raise the difficulty without giving better loot , until you finish the game. Because of this, I nearly abandoned D3 and Blizzard nearly lost like 50$ for the expansions I wouldnt have bought.
2- I notice in the design of D3 an idea that seems to shape a lot of mechanics: play it safe, dont risk a higher difficulty. Greater Rifts for example : you are rewarded for playing lower difficulty then you really could handle (meaning that you could do without dying), because to make it in time you must massacre every demon fast. Its fun in a way but I miss the thrill of fighting battles that you nearly die or even die a few times until you win. I miss the challenge.
3-Make death more meaningfull but not ragequitty, at least as an option. Giving 2 choices : one death doesnt matter (repairing costs are a joke), second your character get killed permanantly is really going from extreme to extreme. Everybody i talked to would love some middleground, make death hurt so you want to avoid it, but not so depressing you would just rage quit. So I mean, for example, respawn quite some distance away without teleport or longer respawn times and if your entire party dies, you fail the bounty/mission whatever. Maybe additionaly loose 1 xp level. Something along those lines.
Well thats my experience. I am sure I could go do much higher Greater Rifts , if it wasnt for the time . In fact I did at the start, before i understood the system.
The same goes for cursed chests when you got to kill 100 enemies. The way we set up difficulty with my friend, means its impossible for us to to do it in time. And if we set our diffculty lower, we would be bored, there wouldnt be any danger.
You need to gear your hero with a set plus supporting items. Like the guides on this site:
There are also guides on youtube and on maxroll.gg
Then you can play on high torment levels in rifts and bounties and gradually do higher and higher greater rifts.
I think you are tottaly missing my point. I am not saying D3 is to hard, Im saying it rewards picking safe diffculty levels regarding death because you have to pick a diffculty level you can blitz through to do it in time.
We are with my friend atm doing Torment 7 and 30 for greater rifts, and we dont even have any full sets, some 2 items here and there.
About the cursed chests and events where you get a bonus chest if you do it within certain conditions (time or number of monsters killed) the rewards are bigger if you do them on T10, T13, T16 compared to T7.
If you don’t play hardcore death isn’t a big deal. You can die several times without heavy consequences - unles you’re in danger of failing a greater rift in 15 minutes.
It’s true that many players focus a lot on speed: you must do split bounties to get as many done as fast as possible, you gotta farm rifts for keys as fast as possible and you have to do speed greater rifts at certain levels to maximize, leveling gems, legendary item drops and paragon farming. But unles you run in public multiplayer games it’s really up to yourself how you wanna play. You don’t have to focus on speed and “easy”.
And, finally, when you want to see how high a GR you can do, only the time limit of 15 minutes is of importance.
Thank you for the advices, I also noticed that further boosts to sets concentrate on insane dmg, so maybe it will be easier to boost the diffculty very high compared to our survavilibity and still do on time the challenges.