Suggestions, which should be considered as a totality:
Have specific bounty-exclusive areas.
Have the monsters in these areas level-scale indefinitely.
Don’t give experience however, except maybe a little for the bounty monster itself.
Currently, it’s too easy to end up doing bounties that are a total bore because they’re so low level.
Of course, you can’t make the already existing areas scale, because it’d spoil the sense of progression etc. So you need new areas, specific to bounty related tasks.
But you also can’t make these new areas simply scale and leave it at that: they’d become grinding arenas that bring infinite amounts of xp and imbalance the whole game. Simple solution: monsters in these areas don’t give you xp despite being the same level as the player character.
IMO, these changes, would make the bounty system more interesting, and as a side effect also provide some extra end-game content. (And if you want to get creative with this thing: some bounty areas could always be like five levels higher than the player character, just to add some spice and sweat to the whole thing.)
So, you want to be able to hit level 85 in Normal. Got it.
Besides, this wouldn’t add anything to end-game content because enemies in Ultimate are all pretty much around level 85. Even back in Lower Crossing, enemies in my game are level 83. Bounties are just for grinding out extra reputation.
What do you mean? Didn’t I say that monsters in these bounty-exclusive areas wouldn’t give you xp?
I guess I’ll have to wait until Ultimate before bothering with the bounties then. But what if I just want to play Normal-Veteran?
Which has been a huge bore currently - how many low-level quests would you have patience for with a high level character? Given that doing bounties is pretty much the only way to acquire reputation, and that there are so damned many of them, you’d think the developers would want to make them interesting rather than a bore.
You did say that the one bounty monster would give you exp which would scale with you indefinitely. This means you could grind out bounties until you hit the level cap.
Why would you wait? You get the same amount of reputation regardless of the difficulty. The only time I found myself doing bounties were in Veteran and Elite and the sole purpose was to reach Revered/Nemesis.
Bounties is not the only way to acquire reputation. In fact, in some instances, it’s much slower than running Arkovian, SoT, BoC, Cronely, Warden, etc. They are just something extra to do which gives you reputation and sometimes a decent item. The bad part is that for the really good items (rare crafting materials), you usually have to craft a relic which uses up more crafting components than you receive.
I don’t know, I much prefer the bounty system the way it is setup now, where it has you go out into the world. Making some special infinite spawn area feels really gamey and gimmicky.
Because I don’t want to be bored to tears, like I said.
So you think the bounty system is pretty much not interesting regardless of whether it’s level scaled or not. That’s fine. I just happen to think it has potential to be interesting and potential to provide a lot of content to the game. Currently though, it’s a bore.
Yes, you get reputation from quests, but so far - I’ve beaten Aether Amalgamation - I still don’t have anywhere close to Honored. Obviously, I’m supposed to do a lot of bounties if I want to get anywhere with the reputation system. So why not make the bounties interesting/challenging? Why not make some of them much higher level than you? It would provide tons of added interest to the game and the current system just seems like a stupid waste of potential.
Beating up hordes of monsters like you’re some sort of terminator is itself the most gamey thing possible. A real human would try to avoid monsters or run away from them.
Now if you can make that beating up thing more interesting, you should. I wish there was a way to improve on the current bounty system without creating bounty specific areas, but I can’t think of any. Perhaps someone else can.
GD doesn’t even promote killing hordes that much compared to some other games out there, you need a rather specific build to be a “terminator”. Sorry, if you seriously can’t see the difference between how SoT was designed and integrated into the lore and arbitrarily creating a dungeon that never ends ala TL2 I can’t help you.
Infinite dungeons detract from the lore of the game, are hard to balance, and can lead to becoming the purpose of the game instead of the developers adding more areas or making current areas more appealing for farming. Or even plain old random generation. I consider infinite dungeons to be extremely lazy design.
I’d much rather prefer something closer to PoE’s maps, generating some areas you could visit.
What does this have to do with bounties? Why do bounties need to be present in bounty specific areas? Your suggestions don’t make sense. The whole thing about bounties is that you do your job and you are done, infinite areas seem to be directly against that.
Bounties are currently simply placed onto areas that already exist in the game. If you added more areas to the game, bounties could spawn in those other areas in the game. If they decided to add infinite dungeons to the game, then bounties could spawn there.
I haven’t said a word about infinite dungeons. I said there should be a couple of bounty-exclusive areas that could be LEVEL-SCALED indefinitely to keep bounties interesting if you don’t happen to do them at the exact right moment in the game for them to be on your level without level-scaling being present.
The bounty-exclusive areas would be there SO YOU WOULDN’T HAVE TO LEVEL SCALE THE WHOLE FREAKING GAME. You’d just have a couple of special areas that would level-scale with your character, and the bounties would all occur there. These areas wouldn’t even have to be new: you could transform a couple of existing areas into level-scaling ones, but yeah, they’d have to be areas that don’t provide you with xp, so they’d have to be off-the-beaten-path (maybe they shouldn’t provide you with good loot either, I dunno).
Whatever you think about my solution, it just baffles me you can see the current bounty system as anything except utterly broken.