Difficulty Levels in 3.0.0

So, acts 1 through 4 give 8 skill points, resulting in 24 skill points now.

This means that act 5 has the potential to give 4 skill points to keep that the same, or 5 skill points to give us a new cap of 125 (for non-scions), or skill points can be redistributed in other acts. I wonder what they'll do for existing characters in Standard. Does anyone remember what they did when they introduced act 3?

As for ascending, I imagine it'll be 3-3-2 for normal-merc-uber, rather than 2-2-4, but it could be 2-3-3, or if they want to be super nice to scions and no one else, it'll be 3-3-3.

Resists tanking from 0 to -60 between normal and merc is some tough shit. Balancing that will either make content too easy for softcore or be a punch in the face to hardcore players. An alternative would probably be for the adjustments to happen between acts within difficulties; probably -20 at act 5 in normal and -60 in act 3 in merc. Not sure how easy this would be in their system to implement; quite frankly, some of the arcane bullshit I've heard from Mark makes me think it could be impossible, hahahah.

Anyway, this is a surprisingly content-free development manifesto.

I have a suggestion for difficulty progression:

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Instead of repeating the game over and over through the 3 difficulties, why don't we get a progression system like this:

Act I ~ Act III = Normal Difficulty

Act IV ~ Act VI = Cruel Difficulty

Act VII ~ Act X = Merciless Difficulty

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Then, instead of removing a difficulty, we can have all the 3 and make it naturally progressive through the gameplay.

• Of course the Skill Points gained through Quests should be adjusted to fit the new system properly.

• Some repeated Quests would need to be remade to 'repeat' through the 10 acts (1 quest each 3 acts) but respecting the old rewards, and this even increases the number of Quests of the game, making it more interesting.

Awesome! New act! WOOOOHOOO! HYPE!

Removing cruel may be obvious, but they never said that is what they were doing. A lot of people like to assume, you know where that leads.

"

RelativeParadox wrote:

Removing cruel may be obvious, but they never said that is what they were doing. A lot of people like to assume, you know where that leads.

you know where that leads, right?

I would approach this a little differently:

you could make normal: act 1, 2, 3
cruel: act 1, 2 , 3, 4
merciless: act 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
people would be more excited to finish the game 3 times if they have new content in each difficulty

just saying....

Finally, this will make it much more tolerable making multiple characters and doing multiple playthroughs as we only haveto play the core twice. I hope you intend to somehow keep all those passive points we would essentially lose from our 3rd play-through though? Malachai can definitely net 2-3 passive points and Act 5 boss should also net 2-3 so that covers a lot of them.

Well I think the purpose of this "Manifesto" is working. It's literally the heads up they plan to do this 3 months early so in 3 months from now when they change stuff, people will already be used to the idea and complain about everything.

For things like bandits... That is the reason at Act 4 they didn't go from 3 down to 2 levels of difficulty. It was literally stated that bandit rewards and etc would need to be reworked. and Achievements as that hear every piece of lore on one character isn't even possible with this change.

They've had a lot fo time since then to work through those things and probably already have solutions to how bandits and etc will work.

Remember the final end goal I believe is going to be 10 acts in a straight line without multiple difficulties. Of course stuff like resistance modifiers and stuff will be in there, so truly there will still be the multiple difficulties, they just wont' be based on redoing the storyline...

I'm all for that, honestly repeating the storyline to get to endgame is annoying to me. Having to play that much content and have different looks and challenges as I work my way through though. Very fun.

Goodbye cruel world.

I like how Torchlight 2 handles this.

After one time playing acts, you get "maps".
Or you start a NewGame+. After that, NewGame++, etc.


Once we have enough Acts, I'd like to have Maps after Normal difficulty.
There would still be Cruel and Merciless difficulties, but all quest rewards should be items that actually help to get adequate gear.
Merciless could have the same level for all areas, equivalent to a Tier 16 Map.

This would be my perfect world.