I have been thinking about this for a while and feel this point in beta is probably still a bit early but I can share my thoughts if nothing else.
At this point in the game I feel like the game play lacks a defined increase in challenge. By that, what I mean is I feel like my characters are completely overpowered until they are getting 1-shot. The only time I find a noticeable challenge is when there are a lot of soul cages around and I need to avoid necrotic breath and when there are multiple siege golems that are all going to pop off their AoE around the same time. Aside from that I just run quickly, stop for gear I currently need (e.g. looking for rings and relics right now) or uniques/set pieces until something finally 1-shots me.
To be honest I am not sure how to remedy this without adding a lot of mob mechanics based on the way end game currently works.
I don’t want to detract from the current state of the game. I do enjoy the game and look forward to future developments; nevertheless, I find the best part of the game is during the story line around levels 35-45 when my character is finally starting to really flesh out a build but lacks really good gear to make it trivial… then 1-shot.
I reckon its pretty linear until the beginning of act 7-level 39-40 (fire area) , that’s where there’s a big jump of difficulty, the mobs start doing OP fire dmg and explosions, many times my characters wasn’t ready for it and rather than spend time in gambling and crafting I prefer run through the area avoiding everything
In the ice caverns, mob that are channeling ice spell are somehow op if you are not careful, 2s in is enough to be deleted
Act 8 i actually not too bad, the damage taken seems ok from the elite and bosses but the HP are over the roof that’s make it somehow difficult
But overall I think the damage taken can be extreme only because its kinda ‘‘hard’’ to min max all the resistances in this game, or we just don’t want to bother craft gear with only resistances on it
I think pre-end game content is fine. New act 8 is tough for a few of my builds due to their lack of defenses at lvl 4x but not horrid.
What I am speaking about is MoF mostly. I run these and they are completely trivial until MoF 50ish, after that depending on the modifiers I have the game goes from never worrying about death to knowing that at any point I am going to be 1-shot and there is nothing I can do about it.
So, what I would like to see is either mechanics being changed to add more challenge beyond a gear check or some way to fine tune the damage numbers so that there are things that I actually need to be aware of. To that end, I am not sure if this is a focus during the games development yet but I hope its something thats on the radar.
