Let’s face facts. Diablo 3 in its current state has no longevity. Once you’ve been 60 and cleared through Act 3/4 the game loses its appeal VERY quickly. Find out why D3 sucks, and how Blizzard can fix it.
Problems
Most people who have put in 100+ hours into D3 have likely reached the same conclusion. The game will not keep their interest long term. Here are D3’s biggest problems as I see them in 1.0.3:
- Difficulty scaling/lack of challenge – The game is either frustratingly difficult, or stupid easy. There seems to be no happy middle-ground. And with the insane repair costs making dying prohibitively expensive players are left with really only one viable option: farm really easy content(Act 1 and 2 for most players). Great games are challenging but not frustrating. There is nothing fun about doing the same simple run over and over especially because…
- Loot sucks – Period. Is anyone really excited when they see even legendary and set items? I know I’m not. Because 99 times out of 100 these items are going to have absolute crap stats. And at this point of the game, even if an item is an upgrade, it’s not very exciting – “Woohoo, I gained 1% crit and 12 more dexterity… yaaay.” What happened to unique items with FUN stats? What about swords that summon hydras, or shields that turn enemies into toads?? Which leads into my third point…
- Players are not rewarded for playing. You can play for five hours and gain absolutely nothing useful. You might even lose money if you run into a few terrible packs and die repeatedly.
Solutions
- Challenge Dungeons – Everytime you kill the Act end boss for an Act with five stacks of Nephalem valor you’ll get a token. The Butcher will give you 1 token, Belial will give you 2, Azmodan 3, Diablo 4. Save up 20 tokens and you will be able to open a portal to a challenge dungeon. To add more content to the game Blizzard can just keep churning out different challenge dungeons. In the challenge dungeon there should be 2 mini bosses and one main boss. Not random elite packs, but bosses that have predictable skills and a player can learn to master without the element of randomness ruining their day. The bosses should all have a 10-15% chance of dropping a unique legendary item with stats specific to that boss. For example let’s say Challenge Dungeon A’s main boss has a 15% chance to drop “The Blooddrinker”, a weapon that drinks the blood of your enemy and everytime the weapon has dealt 500,000 damage it produces a vampiric ghoul to fight by your side(with random stats of course so you’ll still be incentivized to hunt for the perfectblooddrinker). Fun items like that, which only drop from specific challenge bosses.
- What this solves: 1) Players will always feel like they’re working toward a goal on their farming runs. Now even if that Belial run didn’t drop anything good you know you’re that much closer to opening up the challenge dungeon with a shot at getting something REALLY amazing. 2) Challenge! Challenge dungeons can be tuned much more easily than the entire game of Diablo 3. Now rather than trying to reduce damage of mobs across the game, developers can focus on a few encounters and really tune them to give players a challenging experience without frustration. The randomized element of elite packs is what causes all of the frustration in D3.
- Challenge dungeon tokens can become a new high-end currency. As we’ve seen the inflation in gold has just absolutely wrecked the economy for most players.
- Endless Dungeons – Like challenge dungeons, endless dungeons aim to solve the issues of loot and challenge. Each level should be filled with 8-10 elite packs and one mini boss that has a chance to drop a unique legendary associated with that boss. Once you’ve cleared the mini boss you can move on to the next level. This can be very easily implemented through simply increasing mob’s health, damage, and item drops by a flat percentage rate per floor. For example floor one can be Act 1 mobs. From there each additional floor mobs gain 1.5% life, 1.5% damage, and drop loot that have 1.5% higher item budgets.
- Hardcore Dungeons – Dungeons should come in a variety of difficulty levels that players can choose from. They again should contain unique mini bosses that drop unique legendaries. But here’s the kicker, if you die in a hardcore dungeon, you have to start-over, and you lose all the loot that you found on that run. Implement this and you can do away with death timers and ridiculous repair costs, neither of which add any depth or fun to the game. Hardcore dungeons should have single-use stashes randomly placed, that will allow you to put only ONE item in before that stash becomes unavailable, so players can have SOME sense of security and save really good loot.
- Unique affix gems – I’m tired of just putting dexterity and vitality in my gem slots. Let bosses/elites have a chance to drop FUN gems. “Gem of The Demon Lord – 10% chance of spawning a demon lord to fight by your side for 4 seconds everytime you strike an enemy”
- Gold sinks – Gold inflation is outrageous. AH campers are making a killing while the other 99% of the player base is suffering because they can’t afford any good upgrades. Let’s implement gold sinks that are FUN and not frustrating(like increased repair costs).
- Reforger – Put in a vendor that will let you put an item in there, and lock one stat while randomly re-rolling the other stats on the weapon. For example say you found an awesome 900 DPS sword with +800 life on hit, but it has intelligence and frost resist or something similarly stupid. Now you go to the reforger, lock in the life on hit, and pay him 100k gold to re-roll the sword. Maybe you get good stats. Maybe they’re terrible. And you re-roll it again. This would be a great gold sink and solve the issue of just the god awful loot system that’s in place.
- Consumable buffs – Why don’t we have these already? 50k gold for a flask that will increase your magic find by 50% for 30 minutes, or until you die. 100k for a flask that increases all of your resistances by 100 for 30 minutes or until you die.