Are you also doing all the rogue zones? I know those can be good for a couple levels every time I run them in Veteran.
Well of course.
I actually just started a new build, so I’ll see where this one takes me.
Well, if you want to keep your sanity, you might want to hold off on those until Ultimate. You might want to stream line a lot of things, because as you said, the game fell too long now. You do have some control over that.
I do pretty much everything and it’s 68 for Veteran and 89 for Elite. Then Ultimate for the rest.
Using the Xp potion, it’s at least 73 for veteran…
Making Elite a pain in the ass
There’s a side quest that takes us into the first three levels for SoT and another side quest that takes us into every rogue dungeon. I don’t like the idea of leaving side-quests unfinished.
Besides, the rogue dungeons are actually fun to do whereas certain areas of the main game are a drag (looking at you rotting croplands).
I’m sure I can streamline a lot of things and skip some chunks that are just mindless clearing. Maybe I’m just getting burnt out or maybe I just need to change my build around. I always playing AoE casters and I recently tried my hand at theory-crafting a vitality melee build, but that fell apart really fast.
Elite has it’s uses I’d be sad to see gone. Aside from extra XP, it’s supposed to ease your transition into the highest difficulty by giving you access to transitional gear that is too powerful for the lowest difficulty setting, but barely viable for the hardest difficulty setting.
It also helps players get a feel of the game on a higher difficulty without getting shell-shocked all at once. God knows, I was pretty unprepared setting foot in Ultimate on my first non-tank character.
This aspect of the game is important for HC players. We kinda like being over-leveled at all times.
Thread Rant:
[SPOILER]Come on guys, you can easily power level toons from lvl 1-50 (full Vanilla) in 3-4 hours with self found gear: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADsbCyDQQco (and yes if you look at this guy’s vids he has other ones for power leveling other profs, which you can respec out of to play the build you want later on)
3-4 hours for 1 difficulty speed clear??!! And you guys are complaining about a 2nd difficulty setting? Come on, grow some backbone. Unless you have 1,000 hours + into the game, you shouldn’t even be complaining. And for the people that do, while I do share your pain of wanting to speed rush lots of builds to Ultimate, it’s a necessary sacrifice (time-wise). If you really want, there’s defiler, you know? Since the Multiplayer in this game is virtually absent, might as well. After you 20th Ultimate run, you have nothing left to prove, so by all means use it if you actually want to skip Elite.
In comparison to most ARPGs, GD is probably the least grindiest already. I’m not even self-fulfilled getting 100 on my Warder, because the time it took to cap with all the Quest XP and crucible farming was laughably small in comparison to my 11-day gameplay time on Titan Quest for lvl 75 on a modded game that increased the number of mobs and bosses, or 9-18 day game time maxing toons in Sacred 2, or the insane amount of time spent maxing toons in D2 single player w/o editing the number of players.
This has been an old ARPG mechanic, it works so leave it alone. No one cares if you are overlevelled, that is controllable with the amount of quests you do.
This new-gen gamer mentality (we want everything without having to put in the time and grind for it) has got to go… Recent game release from various genres continue getting dumbed-down to the point of stupidity just to accommodate casuals. Leave ARPG alone and go back to your consoles and play f%#$ing CoD and Sports games. Play ARPG only if you can live with the fact that you’ll have to spend 4 days gameplay time per toon at minimum (twinking included, longer if playing self-found playthroughs).[/spoiler]
Back to my peaceful self…
I will be 100% honest right here. I’m NEVER doing Elite again in the future and I’m gonna use a tool to just jump from Normal to Ultimate.
I have 12 character that did reach Ultimate in the Vanilla Game.
I was reaching Elite between 34 (Warder) and 53 (First Char) most of them somewhere around 38.
I was reaching Ultimate at level 67-68 (Point having 2 character currently in DC Ultimate at level 68 having only done the Reanimator quest). Now I have friend that bought the game (and expension and they are hitting ELITE around level 65 and just running through everything in there (I saw Malmouth Elite at 84 the guy was rushing throught the difficulty). That mean you start Ultimate around 86-88 which is OVER the previous Max level (which I quite often had to farm a bit after killing Log cause I was 83-84).
I played the main game 30+ Times. I played the Expension 2 times in Ultimate. My future character will see the Expension as I want more content…not just doing the same content as before even if new stuff is available *just so I don’t overlevel".
i actually love elite, you can lvl until 82+ and then start ultimate with the possibility of dropping good stuff while lvling. I’d leave things how they are.
“Good stuff” is subjective, but if you’re talking about high level legendary gear, that can drop from any enemy of the appropriate level. Since most bosses qualify for that prerequisite, you don’t even need to dip into Ultimate to get high-end gear anymore. Not only that, but with Writs and Warrants, you can easily start farming most Nemesis bosses in the middle of Elite which would give you a shot at some decent MIs.
There’s pros and cons to having Elite and I’m definitely not saying Crate should remove the difficulty altogether because that would require a boat-load of rebalancing just to placate a handful of people. I understand Elite is necessary, but if they do give us another amazing expansion, they will definitely need to take another glance at character progression.
Ok i will explicitate a bit more : By good stuff i mean late game legendaries (mythical and non mythical 82+) and yeah of course you can drop em in elite too cause they drop scaling on mob lvl but starting elite at 82+ just feel great cause you have good (better than elite) stuff while you lvl your character. I just feel progression ( using xp pots) to be in a right place.
Of course you will probably get to level 82+ in a similar amount of time either way you play. You are just further along in the game if you explore less. You might actually get there is less time if you push through, as you get a lot of experience finishing quests vs. killing mobs, and pushing through allows you to get more quests done in the same amount of time.
Why not just unlock both Elite and Ultimate after beating normal? This way difficulty curve stays largely the same, but now you have a choice where to go.
After all, Elite is like a safe haven without much challenge or a good legendary drop rate.
this would be a good solution
+1
I think the easiest solution is to unlock both once you finish normal, as stated above. any other idea would take a ton of re-balancing, dev time that could easily go into something else (like new content!).
Actually, I am a fan of what PoE did though, and if they added another expansion on top of this one (or multiple DLC’s, im totally cool with either), this concept becomes far more viable. reduce the difficulty of early Ultimate down a bit, the difficulty of late normal up a bit, and presto!
they’d have to add in more shrines to counter the loss of Elite, but with multiple expansions eventually, reducing or eliminating difficulties becomes far more a need then an interesting idea.
The only downside is the game design here doesn’t necessarily have an open end game like Poe Does, so content between lvl 1 and level cap is more important. But who’s to say they don’t add random rogue dungeons in another expansion? lots of options and opportunity here.
Seems a simple, straight forward solution, esp being basically a single player game thus purely down to player choice…and it might well get more people playing Ultimate and trying to find the quests/areas not accessible in the first 2 difficulties, the ultimate only bits are something I’d like to try.
As it is, you only have to beat Log to continue. The only reason I do, is because I can’t start gaining faction points with the new factions. If they unlocked the new factions once you beat log and talk to the woman in Fort Ikon, I’d just skip it and move up to the next level as we did before.
This. Giving the players the choice is the perfect solution. Of course, there’s going to be the obligatory “I get ROFLstomped on Ultimate! Crate FIX YOUR GAME!” thread but then we can just sticky this thread and drop an Ayn Rand quote about consequences.
Honestly I’d argue that they should just unlock elite/ultimate account wide when you have one char that unlocked it, just to fix the other issue of people leveling through Crucible to 50 and then having to do the whole normal stuff in a row for no real reason. It doesn’t take that long at all, but it’s still super pointless.
Just have a warning popup if you try to enter elite under 40 or ultimate under 70(or whatever the min lvl is), and let people do what they want. It’s not like you can’t do it by ticking a box in many of the 3rd party programs available either.
Not a bad idea at all. give you allot more flexibility in choosing your path. In a way it’s like how AoM is now…it’s unlocked once you finish Logg in that difficulty (gotta do intro quest, but thats it), but you don’t have to do it, you can just go to the next difficulty level.
just expand that, and make it account wide. once I unlock on one toon, they’re all unlocked. I can do elite, or skip it and do ultimate. Obviously for newer players having elite really will help with the gear (3/4 of our toon is gear based), but those with large pools of gear available can fast track themselves and not have to over-repeat content.