That type of campaign skip is whag will drive me away from this game. And alot pf other players as well
What EHG needs to do is build on the dungeon skip machine they have already started building
On last weeks dev stream mike was asked about getting idol slots and passives when doing a dungeon skip.
His answer was the team has talked about it. Building on this dungeon skip ystem is the better way to go.
Not ever diablo like NEEDS a full blown d3 and d4 like campaign skip
Diablo 4 [not played myself] looked more fun to me, purely for same reason grimdawn is. You get upgrades constantly. I find that in LE, most of the loot is useless to me. Not just affixes but also the base items.
You can even see it in my streams, i mention how i was tilted i not gotten a single usable weapon in 40 levels of the campaign. What we need is a complete rework of the drop distrubution like i wrote before.
Had you hidden all weapons in your item filter? Or did you want a weapon with 4xt7 affixes to drop? 'Cause those are about the only reasons to not see any upgrades to weapons (which are relatively simple & donât need to be balanced against other slots vis-a-vis resists/etc).
Tbh I think youâre right. Reading the comments in this thread I agree that a straight campaign skip is not the best approach. They should build on the alternate levelling path they already have instead.
Some changes I think they need to make to the alternate levelling path: make it award passive points and idol slots, adjust the difficulty so you can actually beat the dungeons when you first get to them (soulfire for example is extremely hard/impossible if you go there as soon as you can).
He also said that they were working on dungeons (probably making it so you can actually do the first one at low level), even though thatâs been the case since before 1.0.
And he also said they were working on alternative methods to get the side quests and one of the things he said heâd like to see is to get them when you finish each normal monolith quest.
My feedback
I like the D3/D4 âAdventureâ system much better than forcing me through the campaign again and again.
LE actually has zones that Iâm not sure that Iâve ever been in. I think that an adventure system that gave me an objective in little/rarely visited zones would be cool and a better use of content than current.
I also like D2âs (dammit, I forget the name) system where a particular zone has an event and drop chances are increased there (D4âs is a bit more fleshed out, there itâs called a Helltide). So basically location specific random events.
I never played D4 past the free weekends they allow us sometimes, so couldnât say anything about that. But in Diablo 3, there was no âAdventure Modeâ up until the Reaper of Souls expansion, that came out in 2014, roughly 2 years after D3âs official release.
Not saying this to compare both games and try to alleviate things for EHGâŚ
Itâs just that we are only 6 months in, and they really shouldnât have no reasons to implement any kind of campaign skip, nor an alternative mode, if the campaign itself isnât even finished in the first placeâŚ
But Iâm sure theyâre always discussing how they gonna do this to accommodate players needs to their intents with the game.
If they do this now, specially if it is how people are often suggesting in this forum (i.e. pay something, go straight to monoliths, empowered even⌠wth), they would have much more work when they finally introduce the final chapters in the campaign and start actually thinking about alternative modes and this kinds of stuff.
Youâre talking about terror zones. But those were created solely for endgame, so youâd have a decent place to farm XP after a certain level. Theyâre only active after you killed Baal in that difficulty.
Also, they donât have an event. Those zones just have stronger mobs and better loot (including exclusive unique charms).
So it doesnât really apply to the âskip campaignâ issue.
How about they just let you skip once you completed it? So many little things like this in an otherwise great game are baffling.
The âskip campaignâ issue has two parts; 1) some people hate having to do the campaign again and again, 2) what do we offer instead of the campaign?
Also, my D2 comment also included D4 Helltides. Both are map specific temporary events. So, imo, it does apply from a âthings to do besides campaignâ perspective.
Campaign, again in my opinion, is largely wasted content. Ask yourself, âCurrently, is anyone doing the campaign maps at all after they are done campaign?â*
*letâs ignore CoFâs prophecies for now, although if we add, âis anyone enjoying doing campaign maps after the campaignâ, I think the answer is still, âlargely noâ.
Monoâs get boring. If we can add an Adventure mode that is also something alternative to do to monoâs, and makes more use of the campaign maps, I donât know how that would be a bad thing.
I think this largely depends on the type of player. For example, I like doing the campaign each time on a new character. I like the feeling of having an objective that keeps pushing me forward.
This is true for both LE and PoE.
When I make a new character, I usually follow the campaign until Iâm 25-ish-30-ish, jump to monos to level faster and then go back to finish the campaign every single time. Even though all I get is a +1 to all attributes.
Having an area like Terror Zones/Helltide doesnât appeal to me because there is no objective inherent to it. Itâs just a âgo clear that zone for better lootâ. Itâs not really any different from clearing echoes and raising corruption.
But I can understand that some players do get bored with campaign and just want to skip. Itâs just that the whole âI want to start doing endgame at level 1â doesnât really appeal to me.
Adventure mode works in D3 because area difficulty scales. It canât really apply to LE campaign because it has static difficulty.
You can only skip the campaign entirely if you have a reliable way to level up from level 1. Which requires some sort of scaling system (which many players hate). Otherwise youâre still forced to do campaign maps just the same except that now you have no other objective other than getting XPs.
I donât think weâll ever get a campaign skip button. Weâll have adjustments made to dungeons to let us skip large parts of it (meaning it needs rebalance so you can do them at lower levels more easily) and maybe a way to do it without a key (or getting a guaranteed key) while at low levels.
And weâll eventually have alternative ways to get the idols slots and passives, like getting them on completing each normal mono.
But I donât think weâll ever have a full campaign skip like D3/D4.
Also, as a sidenote, I personally disliked leveling in adventure mode. This is mostly because I donât like scaling areas. But since the campaign took so much longer to complete than leveling with adventure mode did, I felt like I had to use it, even though I didnât like it.
In that run i was running necro so i needed a lot of for minion items which i never got. Warlock was a bit better as i could just use any fire or poison. But on my physical bloodsplat mage nuker i found 0 gear even in monolith that i could use until around lvl 90.
Which is lame as there should be a way to ensure gear drops
Second-playthrough skip is a viable option overall. Though only viable if the content for end-game substantially outpaces the content in the campaign.
Thatâll take a chunk of time to achieve still.
The automated idol/passive part is one thing that could definitely help, as well as âleveling monolithsâ for example. Given that enough content becomes available to allow people diverse mechanics so they donât burn themselves out easily, which is the case for most players outside of the min-maxing group which gets enough motivation from that alone uncaring of the given content.
Why not? Thatâs no issue itself, because Monoliths are nothing else then campaign maps repurposed to a decently large degree even. Just a bit more open to move around.
With a proper implementation to re-trace campaign areas after finishing them it would pose no problem I would imagine, itâs more of a design question there.
Or specifically designed content introducing end-game mechanics at a heightened pace compared to the campaign. Not a while since we reach that though.
You misunderstood me/I wasnât clear enough. Hereâs what I meant;
After a player has completed the campaign, is there any compelling reason for the player to return to any of the campaign maps?
What Iâm suggesting without actually saying it (until now) is this;
This basically makes adventure mode an alternative to monoâs if the adventure mode quest rewards are sufficient. It also seems like a way to introduce targeted farming.
After thinking about it, Iâd be really worried if they implemented this adventure mode.
My worry is : at what point does adventure mode become mandatory if itâs more efficient than playing the campaign normally? More specifically, there is a high risk of playing with level scaling becoming mandatory instead of just an option for people that donât like the campaign.
Leveling is interesting because you become stronger in comparison to your environment, your character actually progresses. But with level scaling, the world scales more than the character, and you need extra equipment to compensate. You become progressively weaker as you gain levels.
As long as both modes remain very comparable, I donât think the issue would be noticeable, but the more efficient adventure becomes, the more players will feel forced to play it, at the expense of a proper leveling experience.
Ok, so weâll add this to adventure mode.
The campaign is not difficult. The campaign is painfully easy. The issue with making the campaign more difficult is that the game simply cannot reasonably guarantee that the player doesnât suck, and worse, that the gear that drops is good for the build the player is aiming for. The campaign needs to be easy. But that makes it boring.
A long easy campaign that is the same exact thing every time results in ;
When you say,
what is actually happening is that the game is choosing your difficulty for you based upon the lowest common denominator of gear and player ability and the zone you are currently in. So, I get what you are saying, I really do. Zones that scale to the player give the player no opportunity to face an initially challenging obstacle that they gradually overcome and then dominate based upon gear and player progression.
And if the combat was good enough (hello Unity engine, so unhappy to see you) and the campaign had random elements I probably wouldnât feel so strong about not running it again and again. But itâs not, and there is nothing novel in the campaign at all.
I think the biggest issue is that level scaling gives you no choice (and you become more dependent on drops). Whereas a static content like a campaign does give you a choice:
-Do you want harder content? Just rush every zone until youâre struggling.
-Do you want easier content? Just clear most stuff and youâre overleveled.
And everything in between. It lets us set up our own difficulty curve.
True, currently the campaign is too easy. Even using the lowest threshold, it should be harder. And this only has a tendency to become more pronounced as new stuff keeps getting added and power levels keep rising, like what happened with Nemesis this cycle.
But that just needs that the campaign needs some fine tuning (like I think happened with 1.0 and mob density).
The most important part, though, if you do add something like this to the game, is maintaining both contents balanced, which is almost impossible to do.
Like I said, I hated adventure mode in D3 for leveling but I felt like I was forced to use it because it was just way way way more efficient.
Couldnât you have crafted them?
That makes me wonder what you call âuseableâ gear.
Currently: no 
We know that much in general.
Iâm also against scaling mechanics. Rather having specifically created content for the side like more linear monoliths for example would do the game well. A âalternative routeâ
Completion of the campaign definitely is a must-have, true.
And you should be able to choose several âlevelsâ of difficulty increase for the campaign, optimally with bosses having special rewards to incentivize re-running them, similar to how D2 handled it, more because bosses had the highest rarity modifiers though. In our case a special itemization mechanic which can only be farmed through campaign bosses for example.
Even more optimal if you can display the position of campaign bosses on the map.
It wouldnât for example if itâs both a side-mechanic and a difficulty option. Base difficulty leaves the campaign where it is, after completion of an act you can increase the level of enemies there to the current actâs difficulty, allowing re-running content.
Especially with unique incentives to re-farm those places it would allow to spread out what players can focus on and how to progress through the game. Variety is direly missing currently and that would be a relatively low-effort method to do since it just adjusts the zones and loot tables but leaves assets and layout the same.
So it would only become a thing after progressing through the specific areas, a extra unlock which is actually worthwhile, and includes for secondary characters that waypoints are unlocked for example, difficulty level can be chosen freely but quests are not finished. So you even donât need to dungeon skips but instead can advance faster and always limit your character depending on build stage.
The increased amount of content to run would also cause replayability to go up and not necessitate to start out âslowâ while also directly implementing the long-term mechanic there to keep players interested despite the faster pace since theyâve done it already⌠and also as a added bonus would not let the effort put into designing the campaign go to waste.
Basically a alternative method to the 3 difficulties which D2 had where you ran through normal/nightmare/hell but adjusted with the methods in mind that game devs have thought up in the meanwhile.
ARPG campaigns can be fun once or twice but get very dull after that for many. The dull and long mandatory campaigns are the biggest reason why I have zero interest in returning to POE or Undecember. LEâs story isnât at that level of tedious but they are adding acts that hopefully wonât be mandatory for idols or skill slots.
The massive majority of people that play ARPGs season after season are those that love endgame. Boring them with mandatory campaigns on every character is just stupid imo. Give people choices to level in the way that is most fun for them.