I’ll start off by saying I am having a blast and I keep enjoying the game for each season, including the very start. There have been hiccups but none that have made me angry or frustrated to the point of doubting whether or not I’ll continue playing. In other words, I love the game, and I have some thoughts and suggestions. My suggestions are mostly brainstorming and not meant to be taken too literally, but more to simply open the door for discussion!
I’ll try and provide a TL;DR at the end.
World Tiers and Loot.
I have no issues with the start of each season, in fact I enjoy starting fresh and working my way up. There are however moments in this journey that I find disruptive and counter-intuitive. I think the concept was nice and it was fine during the very first season but I think it’s become more disruptive lately.
What I speak of is Normal, Sacred and Ancestral gear, or more specifically; Sacred. Personally I really enjoy the feeling of gearing up early on with loot I know I will be replacing later on when I advance to the next World Tier but what I don’t like is the awkward phase that is World Tier 3. As of right now, I don’t quite understand the point of Sacred gear. It simply disrupts the gameplay and I’ve not felt any sense of enjoyment going through it since the very first time I experienced it (as it was new then, new things are always more exciting after all).
I think it’d make much more sense if Sacred was removed and focus went entirely into Normal and Ancestral gear instead.
This would however leave World Tier 3 in an even more awkward spot of course, so I would suggest restructuring the World Tiers entirely, starting by removing the awkward middle-point that is World Tier 3, and having World Tier 4 take its place (and rename it of course).
World Tier 1: I believe this could serve a much better purpose if it was more focused on being a “narrative” focused mode, meaning remove anything that isn’t essential to the core narrative experience. Gear progression can be simpler and helltides and whatnot would not be needed here whatsoever. I would even argue that it’d be worth considering having WT1 be a single player or cooperative experience only, where no players other than you and your party would appear, only for the purpose of playing the story of course so you’d still not be able to go here for anything other than that.
World Tier 2: This I think would be better suited to act as a more complete experience for those who have already experienced the game the story, or for those who are simply not interested in the story at all and just wish to ignore it. I would say up the difficulty further, not to an insane level necessarily but as of right now I would say it’s too tame. Feature-wise could stay the same as it is right now however. This is basically the “New Season start” tier.
I think the World Bosses here could be fairly basic as they are currently and on an entry-level difficulty level as currently.
World Tier 3: And this would become what World Tier 4 is today. No awkward mid-phase where you speed-run and gather completely irrelevant, useless items. Finding uniques feels awful when it’s a sacred roll because you can’t exactly make a build at this point because it’ll break in just a short moment when you enter World Tier 4 anyway. I do believe there’d need to be some work rebalancing stat progression and such because Sacred does give you a chance to do anything at all in World Tier 4, but I think that just proves my point that it’s a problem. I think that’s what you should be able to accomplish with Normal Gear instead.
I think that flow of progression would feel far better and more rewarding overall, but would require some tweaking and rebalancing of the current state of the game - which is easy for me to say but I imagine harder for a developer to execute, but hey, that’s what the feedback is for. The problem remains; it’s awkward in its current state.
(In addition to that, I think World Bosses should come with a far greater level of difficulty now, with more restrictions on reviving to incentivise players to revive others and to try and stay alive instead, and potentially even add more attacks and mechanics to each boss. These should not be easy to sneeze at any longer!)
And speaking of awkwardness:
Rare loot. As of right now, rare loot has lost its meaning in its entirety because Legendary gear is simply objectively better. They can have greater affixes, they have a legendary effect, and they have an additional stat, they can be tempered, and they can be masterworked. There is simply no reason to even look at rare loot. Instead, I think rare loot should be able to drop with just as many attributes as a legendary drop, perhaps even more but the difference being they can not drop with greater affixes. This way, if you find a really well rolled Rare item with say 5 stats instead of 4, it might be worth considering keeping and applying a legendary affix to, with the trade-off that it’ll never have any greater affixes. In addition, legendary gear could potentially have a higher minimum and maximum stat-range than Rares, albeit 1 fewer stat rolled on them.
Rare and Legendary drops should exist but I don’t want one to be objectively better than the other.
TL;DR
- Reduce the World Tiers down to three tiers in total.
- World Tier 1 refocused to be a narrative mode with only basic world features, possibly single player/coop only.
- World Tier 2 to be the seasonal start mode with most features enabled as it is currently.
- World Tier 3 merged with 4, removal of Sacred gear and go straight to Ancestral, with a need for some rebalancing of the power difference between WT2 and WT3.
- Overhaul Rare and Legendary loot rarity attributes.
- Rare loot could have 5 stats instead of 4, but no means for greater affixes on them.
- Legendary loot can roll with greater affixes and higher minimum and maximum ranges of stats.
- Overhaul World Bosses and differentiate them between World Tiers, with the later world tier adding additional mechanics and incentive to stay alive and revive others instead.
| World Tier 1 | World Tier 2 | World Tier 3 |
|---|---|---|
| Story mode (Single Player / Co-operative only) | Helltides (Limited) | Helltides (All features) |
| No PvP | World bosses (Limited) | World Bosses (Extended challenges) |
| No world bosses | Legions | Nightmare Dungeons |
| No legions | Some pinnacle bosses | The Pit |
| No helltides | Tree of Whispers | Infernal Hordes |
| All pinnacle bosses | ||
| Uber Bosses | ||
| Weekly trials | ||
| Ancestral gear | ||
| PvP |
(Note: I added PvP to the “WT3” only because I think it would make more sense to keep PvP focused on where most players end up at, rather than enable people to go back with ancestral gear into a lower tier to just mess other players up. Not cool.)
I may have forgotten a few things but I’ll leave it at that. Thanks for reading.