Elite doesn’t provide unique benefits for farming better “stats” outside of having higher level cap compared to Normal. There will be 0 (ZERO) difference if Normal capped out on on the same level as Elite, outside of new players needing to do 1 “prep run” to ultimate instead of 2.
It is broken. Brother Laz was saying that one of the problems of D3 is people aren’t willing to replay the same game just to get to the endgame anymore. And in his D2 mod he tried to spice the “middle” difficulty up with unique challenges, but ultimately turned it into a difficulty in which you cap your character level.
GGG went out their way to rework the game just to get rid of 3 difficulties system, and PoE was a bigger D2 nostalgia bait than GD ever will be.
Even Zantai himself posted stats in which less than 10% of players reached Ultimate on pre-AoM version. I wonder why. It’s definitely NOT a real problem.
But sure, there is ABSOLUTELY nothing wrong with the current system, especially after AoM expanded it to ~40% more running.
It’s already set up like this. Normal AoM caps out on the level pretty close to old Ultimate entry level. It won’t solve the basic problem though.
I’m also thinking that Diablo III has defined the next standard by opening difficulties (if i understood correctly, i don’t play game which required permanent connexion). i already debated with other people and i know that many disagree though.
that way you choose the pace you want to level up and even the places you want to do so. with good gear you could even get to Ultimate quite fast, which means re-roll a char is much less tedious.
i’m pretty sure Crate is aware of that problem at least (don’t say they like my solution either) as those who did the super secret quest knows (won’t say more ofc).
They are aware as there was a thread some time ago regards the tedium of levelling chars with replies from Crate, not sure I can find the thread but will have a quick hunt.
Well, you’re welcome to keep pushing this idea all you want, because I’m merely repeating what Crate said about this ad nauseam…
I wouldn’t mind if they decide to remove Elite, or even make so that the whole game requires a single playthough (frankly speaking, I’d prefer this approach), but it would require a lot of work, tweaks to quests, balance passes, etc… We already have people that struggles with Elite; some even think that Normal is hard (Zantai mentioned this in a thread not too long ago), and currently there is even a thread going around about people discussing how the new content is hard, so yeah, game balancing is not so simple as some of you might think it is… There is no way that Crate, being a small developer team as they are, can just grab all the work they’ve put in their game, then just throw it out of the window and start from scratch.
With that being said, if someday, Crate decide to go back on their decison and gut a difficulty or two, I’ll be down for it, but considering their position on this matter, that’s very unlikely… at least with this game.
All this talk about “screwing up the leveling curve and difficulty and balance and blah…”
What do you think the expansion content pushing you to near 70 does? They have to adjust all this stuff when they add a new act anyway. The opportunity came and went, though, will need to wait until the next full act expansion to see if they become open to the idea.
Moving to a one-playthrough system doesn’t necessitate one difficulty level. You could manage it a number of ways, like the D3 Torment levels to give per-session changes.
Or still have “Normal” that scales to level 50 at end game which would be good enough for 90% of players. And then have “Ultimate” that scales to 100 or whatever it ends up being for those who want the full experience.
But you could do so at a difficulty of your choosing. So people with large, well stocked stashes can quickly move to the appropriate difficulties. Also lets crucible levelling enter a given difficulty.
I’ve just finished normal including the expac on a new character and I’m level 64 already, had I a stock of good kit elite would be a literal waste of time for me. As it is, I don’t have that stash, but I get the frustration. Doubly so for crucible guys.
Instead of removing, they could make it so that Ultimate is like Veteran for Elite. The progress will be same in Elite/Ultimate but the player can freely switch in-between. It will make sure that the balancing factor is out of the question as they only need to balance 1 attribute point & 1 skill point. Devotion shrines can be increased in Elite/Ultimate to adjust the lack of separate Elite difficulty.
The problem with most advocating for elite to be removed is they forget about newer players. Any player on a first run through is not going to have the gear and components to go from normal to ultimate. AoM isn’t a good reason to get rid of elite even if they’re of comparable difficulty (in some ways AoM can be harder since it introduces new areas and enemies), not everyone gets the DLCs for a game so they may not have Ashes or the Crucible. Elite also lets players not heavily invested in theory crafting on forums refine their builds too. My hp regen based Warder that made it through normal just fine, but elite gave me the hint that it wasn’t going to work long term.
I played Diablo II for more than 12 years (and besides Grim Dawn, it is my favorite Action RPG). It also had 3 separate difficulties (Normal, NM, and Hell), but I’m a big fan in the direction that Diablo III and Path of Exile went in terms of either dynamic difficulty or one difficulty. After watching the Diablo III and Path of Exile development in relation to this one playthrough change, and also Chris Wilson’s interview where he spoke about the reasons this was done, I believe this will be one of the ideas that will be adopted in the Action RPG genre. With the amount of content Grim Dawn has, the complexity and combination of the system, and just general time that a person has during their day/lives, I feel that Grim Dawn should definitely go in the direction of one difficulty/one playthrough. Obviously this will be a pretty massive change considering the entire game will need to be re-balanced in order to take this stuff into account. Since it will take a long time, I wouldn’t have any problem if the devs decided to incorporate this massive change and rebalance in the second Grim Dawn expansion. However, if the developers want to do it before the second expansion, I’ll gladly take the change.
EDIT: Another thing I just remembered was when I played Torchlight and Torchlight II, they also both ask you what difficulty you want to play on when you start the game, after you beat the game you could do “New Game +” and “New Game ++”. Depending on how the system is implemented you could look at that as “Normal” , “Nightmare”, “Hell”. However, I feel in this situation it might be more of a “Normal - Veteran” type of situation. But you could see how this might be structured. I personally wouldn’t have any “New Game+”, just one difficulty that the person can either pick when they start the game, or just one difficulty for everyone in general that progresses in difficulty as the player plays the game. Basically “more difficulties isn’t a good thing”.
Dark Souls, Dragon Age, and Witcher III also have similar systems (With or without the New Game+ or initial selection of difficulty).
There was an interview on October 18, 2017 that the folks at diabloii had with PoE’s Chris Wilson where in around minute 4 they start speaking about this difficulty topic (And how the PoE community felt they were playing through the same content multiple times in order to actually start playing the game and also that they wanted the PoE devs to remove 1 difficulty and keep it at two) : Interview/Podcast on Youtube.
Imo the 3 way mechanic of difficulty (Normal, Nightmare, Hell) since Diablo 1 is outdated nowadays.
The future in this genre is exactly what POE have done. It would be so nice if they could adapt that for GD.
In any long game you own, take a look through the global steam achievement stats, and you’ll see that any achievements which take 60+ hours of playing to get to are generally around 5% or less. Personally, I’m impressed by 10%.
