Add Campaign new difficulty settings +, ++, +++

[DJSamhein]

@Macknum

And that’s fair but this would need some server changes I guess. People who want to play mode X need their own servers at least so there are no mix ups between difficultys.

Difficulty is simply modifiers applied to the area. Whoever opens the area applies the difficulty.
This has already been done in plenty of games, including D3 where when you joined a party, you joined the difficulty of the party leader.
PoE has area scaling when in a party.
No idea how D4 handles this.

The point is that it’s not hard to implement, whichever method you’d like to use. So you can simply scale the area difficulty to whoever opens the instance or to the party leader’s.

@Macknum

Gimping players = game is harder.

There is a difference between “This game is very easy and I have to go out of my way and inconvenience myself to make it challenging” and “This game has several optional difficulty settings I can choose from”.
With the latter you simply play the game like it’s meant to be played and you use the option that seems better/most fun for you.
With the former you go out of the way to play the game in a way it’s not designed to, just so you can feel a challenge.

Your argument is like saying that D3/D4 are actually very challenging games because you can simply never equip any piece of gear or equip any skill.
Instead, what ends up happening (and we see this in this forum as well) is that players quit or leave soon.

@Macknum

Then again there is what we have right now, while EHG already said they look into it when there is time, and what we have right now makes the game harder for a lot of reasons. So frankly speaking there is a hardmode.

It would have been better to simply add it as a 1x1 idol. That way you could still work on your build as normal and still have a challenge. You could even let it be placed in the center square that is always blocked.
The way we have it now, you can’t have hard mode with any build that requires build defining boots.

I think the biggest difference is that right now we don’t have a hard mode. We have a challenge mode. And most players don’t enjoy challenge modes, even when they enjoy hard modes.

That being said, I do agree that EHG is aware of this and are probably trying to come up with a solution. But I don’t agree that it’s not an important thing to add as soon as they can. Simply because we’ve been seeing these threads over and over again, with more and more people complaining (as the power creep increases) since launch.
It’s something much simpler to add than many of the mechanics they’ve been working on.

[Macknum]

@DJSamhein

Difficulty is simply modifiers applied to the area. Whoever opens the area applies the difficulty.

In D3 you were able to do this to a certain extend yes but you could only carry people in T6 and not on the highest T for example. So it’s not 100%.
PoE scales content on player numbers but there is no difficulty to choose from so it won’t apply at all.
You can’t join people in D4 if you haven’t unlocked the difficulty.
In Grim Dawn you can’t play non veteran with a veteran player for example and this is what people ask for. So you need to divide the playerbase with different rulesets.

@DJSamhein

The point is that it’s not hard to implement, whichever method you’d like to use.

If you look at it this way it’s already implemented with the boots but that’s just a bad bandaid fix and I don’t want another one.

Scaling to the party leaders difficulty would force people to do so as well. If you can change the difficulty whenever you like it you make stuff exploitable most likely. Playing on normal untill you have the stuff to outscale hardmode just to get more drops would be a foolish option to have.

@DJSamhein

There is a difference between… snip

It makes the game harder at the end of the day and people wanted harder. They should’ve said what they realy want so EHG won’t come up with their solution.

@DJSamhein

Your argument is like saying that D3/D4 are actually very challenging games because you can simply never equip any piece of gear or equip any skill.

That’s one way to make a game harder. If you like this kind of limitation go for it. Then again D3/4 are scaling so you need to push your gear already to even have a chance to reach the highest tiers of play.
With LE we have another problem. 300C is a good working build and not endgame anymore. Now you have Uberroth and a crap statement of “if people reach 4 digit C we messed up”. Without clear balancing goals we’ll never be able to tell what hard is and what isn’t because by LE’s logic reaching 1k+C is already far and beyond of what you should be able to accomplish. Without a set in stone goal I can never tell if I play easy mode or if I’m in explotive bugh shit terretory.

@DJSamhein

Instead, what ends up happening (and we see this in this forum as well) is that players quit or leave soon.

There is more to this then just missing difficultys and afaik missing difficultys are not the problem. The main issue is missing difficulty to begin with. A tutorial that reaches from level 1 to 300C is just to stupidly long and that’s on EHG again. EHG is bleeding players intentionaly because there are topics that come back up that were discussed a lot of times. If EHG didn’t get the message by now things will go only downhill.

@DJSamhein

It would have been better to simply add it as a 1x1 idol.

It would’ve been better to make it a checkbox . It would’ve been better to do a lot of things instead of what EHG came up with no matter the few smart solutions they offered.

@DJSamhein

The way we have it now, you can’t have hard mode with any build that requires build defining boots.

Why not? It would be hard to pull of but isn’t this what people want? To me this whole debate is kind of first world problems on one side and a reasonable solution on the other. But it isn’t as easy as people picture it here.

@DJSamhein

And most players don’t enjoy challenge modes, even when they enjoy hard modes.

That’s kind of fair to say then again in my mind challanges are harder to achive then baseline stuff. Beeing harder to achive by nature makes things… well… harder.

@DJSamhein

But I don’t agree that it’s not an important thing to add as soon as they can.

There is more imortant stuff though and I take a guess that most of EHG is working on new content and fixing bugs and I deem both of those things more important then a half backed bandaid difficulty system. But we can agree to disagree it’s only fair to say that people have higher prioritys for X over Y and there is nothing to argue from my point of view.

@DJSamhein

Simply because we’ve been seeing these threads over and over again, with more and more people complaining (as the power creep increases) since launch.

Yeah but for years EHG has been told the game was to easy. Remember Bordman doing bosses “naked” and blindfolded because the difficulty was/is… meh.There needs to be a baseline change and a more linear difficulty increase to begin with before they add a hard mode on top of baby mode.

@DJSamhein

It’s something much simpler to add than many of the mechanics they’ve been working on.

You remember the “reeeeeeeeeeee why can’t we have different mousecoursers?” arguments we had from time to time? Soooooo easy to implement. Afaik we still can’t have this because technical issues. Since I’ve heared this I guess it could be very hard to implement anything to the game because there could be other technical difficultys we don’t know of or never heared of.

Long story short: Without a baseline difficulty that is worthwhile implementing a hard mode would be useless from my point of view. This would be another “Put a system on top of a flawed foundation and pray for the best!” kind of scenario from my point of view.
EHG needs to get the basics right what they were praised for some years ago but now it looks like they lost this ability somehow. I don’t know if they should reduce their seasons to 3 seasons a year untill they get their backlog done or if I’m just to pessimistiv because I thaught I have a fully released game that should work well with some hickups and bugs here and there. Right now LE feels like a never ending hickup with bugs to me but as I said I’ve a bit of a pessimistic view on it because so little is moving in a direction I can understand. Then again I’m not the smartest tool in the shed and I might miss the big picture and I’m prooven wrong at some point… hopefully ^^.

[DJSamhein]

@Macknum

In D3 you were able to do this to a certain extend yes but you could only carry people in T6 and not on the highest T for example. So it’s not 100%.

Only until they reached level 70. After that you could join a T16 party even if you were in T2 or T10.

This, to me, seems to be the simplest solution. Just apply the difficulty from whoever opens the instance.

@Macknum

Scaling to the party leaders difficulty would force people to do so as well. If you can change the difficulty whenever you like it you make stuff exploitable most likely. Playing on normal untill you have the stuff to outscale hardmode just to get more drops would be a foolish option to have.

This would only apply to the campaign, so there’s really not much to exploit.
After the campaign, everything has their own difficulty systems implemented: tiers for dungeons and corruption for monoliths.

@Macknum

It makes the game harder at the end of the day and people wanted harder. They should’ve said what they realy want so EHG won’t come up with their solution.

That’s like saying that people want balance so they cap damage to 1 DPS.
It was a bandaid fix which they knew didn’t really address the problem and that was fine for launch. But we’re already a year and a half past that, it’s time this was addressed.
(Disclaimer: I don’t really care about difficulty settings nor am I likely to use them, but I know that this needs to be done soon).

@Macknum

Now you have Uberroth and a crap statement of “if people reach 4 digit C we messed up”.

They haven’t repeated this in a while and considering where Uby is positioned, I don’t expect this to be true anymore, even among EHG team.

@Macknum

Without clear balancing goals we’ll never be able to tell what hard is and what isn’t because by LE’s logic reaching 1k+C is already far and beyond of what you should be able to accomplish.

This is actually irrelevant. As I said before, monos and dungeons already have their difficulty settings in-built into them.
The new difficulty settings people ask for are only for the campaign.

@Macknum

It would’ve been better to make it a checkbox .

YEs, but that requires changing the server code which was what they were avoiding with this bandaid.
However, doing it as an idol or as boots is programatically the same thing. You’re just applying local modifiers. But one hinders your builds massively and the other doesn’t.

@Macknum

Why not?

Because, if they’re build defining boots, then by definition the build can’t exist without them. So if you’re not wearing those build defining boots, you’re not playing that build, you’re playing a different one.

@Macknum

That’s kind of fair to say then again in my mind challanges are harder to achive then baseline stuff. Beeing harder to achive by nature makes things… well… harder.

It’s like you running a half marathon or running a marathon. These are difficulty modes. Progressing from one to the other feels great and is a sense of progress.
The boots are like trying to run the half marathon (easy mode) with high heels. It’s something a few might do for fun or for the challenge of it, but it’s not something most people would want or enjoy. Even the people that would enjoy being able to progress to a full marathon.

And that is the basic idea here. People want modes for half marathon and full marathon. They don’t want modes for half marathon in high heels, or carrying a sack of cement.

@Macknum

There is more imortant stuff though and I take a guess that most of EHG is working on new content and fixing bugs and I deem both of those things more important then a half backed bandaid difficulty system.

People aren’t asking for a bandaid difficulty system, though. That’s what we have now. They’re asking for a real one.

@Macknum

You remember the “reeeeeeeeeeee why can’t we have different mousecoursers?” arguments we had from time to time? Soooooo easy to implement.

This is a totally different thing though. Because we don’t have this not because “technical issues” but because Unity doesn’t let you do that.
It’s not hard. It’s impossible until Unity changes it. This is something that EHG can’t control in any way. Much like they couldn’t add DLSS until they upgraded the Unity version, because previous versions didn’t have that option.

Whereas difficulty modes, like any other in-game system, is completely controllable by EHG.
And, I’ll remind you again, it’s only for the campaign. It doesn’t affect anything else other than that. It simply allows people that are doing the campaign for the 100th time to be able to feel a challenge, rather than the mindnumbing slog it is now.

[Macknum]

@DJSamhein

This would only apply to the campaign, so there’s really not much to exploit.
After the campaign, everything has their own difficulty systems implemented: tiers for dungeons and corruption for monoliths.

Wait you want them to do all the work just for campaing content? That makes even less sense to me. Either you have a hardmode you need to pick without the option to remove it or you stay basic fromf my point of view.

@DJSamhein

That’s like saying that people want balance so they cap damage to 1 DPS.

No it’s not. Why do you make this up just to have a weak argument?

@DJSamhein

I know that this needs to be done soon

Where do you know this from? There have been difficulty topics yes but none of them got much tracktion and most of the time it was beating a dead horse in a dialogue of the same people.
So how do you know this needs to be done? What data do you have on this topic I fail to find?

@DJSamhein

They haven’t repeated this in a while and considering where Uby is positioned, I don’t expect this to be true anymore, even among EHG team.

They never changed what they say about it so it’s the last official info I can work with. If they have a different view right now they should say so. Then again EHG is just like other studios and keep their answers vague to move goalposts.

@DJSamhein

This is actually irrelevant

This is very much relevant to because as I said above: If you don’t want a full fledged hard mode then it’s stupid to implement it. Either it’s hard and you have to life with it all game long on you keep the basic difficulty that scales on it’s own at a given time. I want them to change the baseline difficulty of the game for sure but adding a hardmode for a certain part of the game is silly to me.

@DJSamhein

Because, if they’re build defining boots, then by definition the build can’t exist without them.

Why not? You can still play the build but it would be ass and give you an awefull hard time ^^.

@DJSamhein

And that is the basic idea here.

Yeah if you translate it to a RL example like this your point of view makes sense. When I just look into the game systems at hand the boots make things harder or an awefull lot harder while having the most stuip “QoL” ever implemented into a game to make it harder.

@DJSamhein

People aren’t asking for a bandaid difficulty system, though.

Yeah but if there is preassure you know what we get. On year radiosilence to fix some issues or bandaid fixes. We rarely got anything else from EHG to write home about it.

@DJSamhein

This is a totally different thing though. Because we don’t have this not because “technical issues” but because Unity doesn’t let you do that.

And I can’t tell if there are problems with implementing a hard mode as well because in theory giving the people some changed numeric values should’nt be hard.
Now we don’t see a implementation of it so there has some kind of issue. If there is no technical issue I don’t know why we don’t have a hard mode.

@DJSamhein

And, I’ll remind you again, it’s only for the campaign.

To make it short: I’m against diffculty modes only for the campaign because I personaly think this is stupid af.

[DJSamhein]

@Macknum

Wait you want them to do all the work just for campaing content? That makes even less sense to me. Either you have a hardmode you need to pick without the option to remove it or you stay basic fromf my point of view.

Everything else already has hard mode built in. Echoes have corruption and dungeons have tiers. They don’t need a hard mode.

@Macknum

Where do you know this from? There have been difficulty topics yes but none of them got much tracktion and most of the time it was beating a dead horse in a dialogue of the same people.
So how do you know this needs to be done? What data do you have on this topic I fail to find?

Not only have there been more posts about this lately, there have also been many posts on reddit and on EHG’s discord and it’s gotten to the point where even oldtime fans of the game have become increasingly vocal about their dissatisfaction about this.

Lots of people have already said that the reason they don’t play more is because they can’t stomach having to go through the campaign once again when it’s mind-numbingly boringly easy. So they don’t make new characters and keep playing, they just leave.

Things that are relatively easy to fix and that chase players away are things that should be fixed with relative urgency.
Much like boring endgame was an issue that was driving players away and they started to address it.

@Macknum

If you don’t want a full fledged hard mode then it’s stupid to implement it. Either it’s hard and you have to life with it all game long on you keep the basic difficulty that scales on it’s own at a given time.

Firstly, it’s not likely they would add difficulty modes and not allow you to change them later. Especially when they even let you leave SSF.
Secondly, what does hard mode even mean on monoliths? Corruption is already hard mode. You increase it to however much you want.

Players aren’t unhappy about endgame difficulty (barring a few exceptions). Players are unhappy because they can’t muster the energy to play the campaign one more time when it has absolutely no challenge and you do it while watching a movie. So that is the part that needs to be addressed.
Sure, if you want you can keep on applying the global modifiers when you’re in monoliths and dungeons. I just think it’s redundant at that point.

@Macknum

Why not? You can still play the build but it would be ass and give you an awefull hard time ^^.

Not if the boots enable your build, like Fiery Dragon Shoes creating a fire trail. If you want to make a build around Fire Trail, you can’t.

@Macknum

And I can’t tell if there are problems with implementing a hard mode as well because in theory giving the people some changed numeric values should’nt be hard.
Now we don’t see a implementation of it so there has some kind of issue. If there is no technical issue I don’t know why we don’t have a hard mode.

Because they haven’t deemed it a priority yet. Because the dissatisfaction around this before wasn’t enough to act on it.
But it’s increasing and I believe it’s time to act on it now. Even if, like I said before, I personally don’t care about it and will likely always play in the easy difficulty anyway. But I firmly believe it’s good for the game.

[ExSea]

@DJSamhein

In D2 you had builds that could finish the game naked and builds that could barely finish the game at all.

yeap. but back then we were in a way shielded from this information. i used to be a normie with limited internet access and never realized how OP sorc could just blaze thru the maps in no time.

and a big factor to consider is, even the devs did not balance the game around OP builds. the game was more or less balanced around “normal” difficulty. harder difficulties just made the game harder by nudging numbers.

i was such a normie back then i didnt even play past normal and always stuck to normal. so i failed to recognize how badly balanced d2 was. from a normal campaign perspective it was fine.

but such is the way exponential growth works. when multipliers stack. numbers go up sharp.

it reminds me of poe where some gigachad took down uber elder/shaper using a character under level 30. on one hand its really impressive that the player figured out a build that can achieve it AND have the skill to pull it off. but on the flipside it shows how badly the game is balanced.

can a melee striker do that in poe? no fucking way. as a trumelee enjoyer, it saddens me as the build disparity is too apparent.

@DJSamhein

This is tricky

yeap it indeed is. i’ve had friends who quit poe outright because their build got nerfed. to me, for poe its a ship that already sailed. one thing i need to point out is d3 actually was quick to push out one of the harshest nerfs in the history of my d-like “career” which was a 50% attack speed nerf. also all attack speed rolls were retroactively nerfed by 50%.

game devs need to nerf hard and nerf fast before players get attached to the power. ironically d3 turned into one of the most power crept games that i know of.

@DJSamhein

I understand what you mean in that your build used to do 90% of the content, because it did everything except the pinnacle boss (for example), and now it can only do 75% of the content because of all the new stuff added that you can’t complete either.

But the road you did before (like campaign, maps, etc) you can still do now. And to me that is still fun.

to me there needs to be a limit. you can add new content that has parallel/horizontal difficulty. imagine if in the next poe patch they introduced a new uber uber uber pinnacle which is magnitudes harder but then have it have very powerful uniques or special atlas passives that cannot be obtained anywhere else.

how many players would the game retain? i personally will recognize this infinite climb which also translates to needing to hyper optimize. i ll simply not play the game. hence why i dont play poe/tli anymore.

poe used to center their content around horizontal difficulty. if you’ve played poe over the years, you would realize a pattern where all the end game content actually started at t14 maps. you can get beastiary bosses from t14s. you can get sanctum final boss at t14. getting them at t16 is better but not necessary. it feels optional.

i would even argue that poe’s new league content are also centered around horizontal difficulty. but GGG always introduces new aspirational content. ravaged blighted maps, and simulacrum at higher difficulties. etc.

on one hand it gives “better players” more to do. but on another it just tells me that this game funnels hyperoptimization too much. its not for me.

[Macknum]

@DJSamhein

vocal about their dissatisfaction about this.

I don’t know if I knew any oldtimers who say “The difficulty is awesome!”. Everyone told EHG once or twice how messed up the difficulty of the game is and they did almost nothing over the years outside of nerfing oneshot enemys.

This is old news but I still think:

Fix the games difficulty > Implement a hard mode based on them essed up difficulty we have.

That’s just another bandaid fix that would be terrible in my book.

@DJSamhein

Secondly, what does hard mode even mean on monoliths?

You can’t push very far because enemys scale much harder… like in playing a harder difficulty.

@DJSamhein

Especially when they even let you leave SSF.

Never played SSF but if it is like you mention it here I better not tell how little I think about this possibility because I have nothing good to say about it and ask myself how high they were when they implement this.

@DJSamhein

Not if the boots enable your build, like Fiery Dragon Shoes creating a fire trail. If you want to make a build around Fire Trail, you can’t.

Yeah if you are a crybaby who can’t work arround problems with a toddler tantrum personality you will have issues with this for sure. It’s the same when people complained back in the day why they can’t play a rebuke only skill because they want to build arround it and get their butts kicked.

If you can’t do A do B. Yes that’s not a greate solution but if people are that narrowminded they can’t be helped no matter how many item slots they have.

@DJSamhein

Because they haven’t deemed it a priority yet. Because the dissatisfaction around this before wasn’t enough to act on it.

If you are tolf “X is bad please do something about it!” again and again for yers and from a lot of people won’t you think it’s important to do something about X? As I said many times EHG has their prioryties wrong starting from the day the published the game in an underbaked messy state up untill today.

Yeah sure EHG is between a rock and a hard place but I lost so much faith in them… I don’t care anymore… took me some time to get this. I’m just dissapointed right now but I’m still against bandaid fixes.

[DJSamhein]

@ExSea

and a big factor to consider is, even the devs did not balance the game around OP builds. the game was more or less balanced around “normal” difficulty. harder difficulties just made the game harder by nudging numbers.

Actually, they ended up balancing the game more around PvP, where it was reasonably good. It was in PvE that this lack of balance was more noticeable, especially because of the prevalence of double and triple immunes, which meant that most single element builds struggled to advance.
But even then it wasn’t as bad as that. Pretty much all builds could still complete all content, with the exception of Uber Tristram, which was meant to be a group thing.

@ExSea

can a melee striker do that in poe? no fucking way. as a trumelee enjoyer, it saddens me as the build disparity is too apparent.

Melee has always been at a disadvantage in d-likes. It can’t clear as fast and needs to get close to mobs to kill them.
PoE “fixed” this by making melee skills have large AoE effects that clear screens, to the point where it no longer feels like a melee skill.

But there really is no easy fix for a true melee skill in these types of games. They will always feel bad compared to ranged/minion skills. It’s one of the reasons why I never liked melee (also because I’m a digital coward and would rather snipe stuff from afar or hide behind meat shields ).

@ExSea

imagine if in the next poe patch they introduced a new uber uber uber pinnacle which is magnitudes harder but then have it have very powerful uniques or special atlas passives that cannot be obtained anywhere else.

how many players would the game retain?

Honestly, I feel like the vast majority would stay. Because the vast majority doesn’t do the current pinnacle content anyway. And that is because PoE does have lots of “horizontal” mechanics that keep players entertained without them feeling like they need to push harder.

Most players don’t even do T17 maps. They just find a mechanic they enjoy (or 2 or 3 at once) and farm them and use that currency to buy the stuff from other mechanics/pinnacle.

Only 2.5% of the players have ever killed Maven (not uber Maven, just regular Maven). So adding triple uber wouldn’t affect 97.5% of the playerbase.