Zantai spoke to this being like a ‘Veteran’ checkbox in Ultimate and not a new difficulty, but I see that being a pain. Just my opinion here, not sure it’s a widely shared one:
I like to play through campaign for my builds, at 100 I like to just go explore dungeons and bosses etc to drop better gear. That all happens during Ultimate, taking some time generally to find all the gear.
My concern is that I’ll be most of the way through ultimate when I am ‘ready’ to go to Ascendant mode, which I would want to ideally start at the beginning of Ultimate (i.e. as NG+). Would it be possible to reset Ultimate progress? I’m aware that with the extra act there will be a lot more to do, but I think it’ll feel odd to substantially change difficulty near the end (and without twinking/GDStash I would think it impossible to take on SR65/75+ level content just levelling to 100 and not decked out) of the campaign.
It sounds like in Elite we won’t be able to farm all the top tier gear (fair enough), but that also means I can’t use Elite to gear up before hitting Ascendant Ultimate.
In saying all that, I love the idea of the ‘SR65/75+ Campaign’ to hit challenge dungeons and take on nemesis, bosses etc. HC gonna be fun…
Sounds like veteran mode to me, so once I feel like it I just pop the “ultimate veteran” toggle (yes I’ll keep calling it that) and have all my unlocked quests / waypoints available.
I think it’s a bit different to Veteran, which is tuned to still work for a slap-dash character early on, if slower. Ascendant is endgame, tuned for (subject to change…) SR75+ capable characters, which is certainly not ‘easy’ without a good developed setup. There is a substantial jump in difficulty between Ult campaign and SR75.
You’re going to be crushing Ultimate for a while before you can switch, so you’ll be playing through all the content you want to do with Ascendant because you have to to get the gear for it…
Of course, with the new class and content the difficulty might change around anyway and that gap won’t be so big in the end, but it’s a concern for now.
i was there for most of the stream too so I know Z called it a toggle like veteran. of course the question remains when it will be toggleable, but I expect it at the diff start.
@Boromonokli I don’t think the point is about the toggle itself(cause it’s mentioned in the fist topic), but rather the Balancing / Intention of the Difficulty itself, if it’s legit to go into Ultimate Ascendant right from the beginning of the playthrough with a fresh level 100 Character (or potentially even a level 1 via skip token), or if you have to gear up first, which if you grind on ultimate for gear would mean, you can’t start out on Ascendant at the very beginning but toggle it on midway when you are ready.
It’s alway interesting to see how different people are - for me i would be one of the folks who would wish for either an separate Adventure mode where you doN#t have to deal with the campaign at all, but pure Sandbox with free exploration, no Main Quest etc (which we kidna do have with skip merits and going back to Normal / Elite) - or all the difficulty playthrough removed completly… only one per character total and everything from Vet up to Elite and Ultimate (and now also ascendant) is a toggleable difficulty like veteran already is. So i’m personally happy that Ascendant is an toggleable thing.
here’s a novel thought: build your character to be ready for Ascendant Ultimate “when you switch to Ultimate” ? (regardless of elite max legends)
without knowing exactly how hard Ascendant is gonna impact things, ie if it’s truly just a “slight” veteran scaling increase or something more significant ala endgame necessary, - since the request for years have been to add a Veteran mod Ultimate “so people could have harder Ultimate off the get go” i’d assume it would be in that spirit?,
ie possible to make your “non endgame farmed/minmaxed char” capable of using it as a campaign and levelling scaling increase ?
Zantai said in the stream that Ascendant will feel like Ultimate SR 75-76 difficulty. And don’t forget the expansion will also bring the ability to improve Epic items.
So we don’t know how that’s going to affect builds in future yet.
Yeah. I’m sure it’ll be tuned and Crate will find a good balance in the end, but if I need the end-game gear in Ultimate to play the end-game mode of ultimate, that makes it…difficult if I want Ascendant
Ultimate to be fresh…