Dear D4 Team,
i hope you´ll find the time to read this. I really like D4 and i had fun playing season 3 so far.
This week i spent multiple hours playing the gauntlet so far. Here is what i think and noticed.
On the first day i had a score around 500k with my sorc.
After a couple more tries on the second day, i have improved up to 800k.
And after some thoughts, i just hit 1m points with my sorc and i still can improve my route and strategy.
Fair to say that i enjoy the gauntelt so far.
Figuring out a fast and optimal route, competing against other players is a great piece of endgame to add for me.
I admit the gauntlet is made for me, i play multiple hours a day.
The current problem is: it´s the only piece of endgame yet. And a lot of people may not like this way of optimizing a route. I also think that the gauntelt doesn´t help to improve a not fully build character. The following points show just that:
- Not enough rewards for a run (only 3 items, not even decent itempower)
- We have to wait for our rewards for an entire week.
- No uniques/ uber uniques have dropped for me yet (by just completing a run)
→ How can i improve my character with the gauntlet if it isn´t fully build already?
My idea:
A milestone system for bonus loot would encourage players to improve their score.
So how about for example every 100k points (next cache at 200k, next at 300,…), give us a big cache. After the week is over, give us a minor reward for our rank instead of the big one combined into one.
For people who enjoy competition, ranking high is the biggest reward anyway. So splitting the loot down to reaching milestones is just more fair and balanced.
Other rewards we could use are forgotten souls, boss summoning materials and gold. I leave it up to you how you´d balance the ammount of it.
Again, the biggest problems of d4 aren´t solved just with the gauntlet.
In my eyes, those problems are the following:
- Itemasation ( Items are not exciting, neither are uniques or uber uniques which i can´t even do anything with except upgrading them five times.)
- Improving the codex of power and aspects.
- Give us more options to craft and improve our gear/loot.
- More engaging endgame systems: what do i mean with that? Replayable systems, which lead to better gear and character progression.
- The boss ladder is by this point absolutly boring and needs to be adressed too, farming duriel isn´t fun. It´s as fun as going into a cave, click a chest and hope for the best, for around 500 times until you found something. Do we really need summoning materials? I have to do helltides for forgotten souls and fiend roses, i have to farm bounties for gold. So i ask again: Why do we need summoning materials? It wouldn´t break the ladder if we didn´t had to get the summoning materials first.
- Add a group finder for duriel runs / any boss runs / dungeon runs.
All in all the gauntlet is a step forward, it alone just can´t fix d4s current problems. Maybe many players expected the gauntet to fix everything they wanted, but that is not what the gauntlet was supposed to be. I think as far as leaderboards go, it is a decent system. Can it be improved? Of course, is it bad? I don´t think so.