You should consider cookie clicker or vampire survivors. Much better games for that.
Increase health of regular enemies across the board. Maybe increased mob density too.
Increase low to mid range of enemy damage output without affecting the top end. This would increase damage taken without increasing one-shot potential.
This would make enemies feel like they have more meat and put up more of a fight, so your damage and defenses feel more important, but without increasing likelihood of getting one-shot or boss difficulty, those aspects of difficulty seem fine where they’re at.
So, I tried that to see how it went. Two things:
- It is REALLY rough, because you are so much under levelled. You find a lot of items, but you can’t equip them because your level is too low. An enormous step up from normal campaign. Even with a few levelling uniques, doing one dungeon is challenging but ok-ish, doing them all in a row is proper hard. Which is cool, in a way, but you need a solid stash to get through. You level super fast inside the dungeons though, that’s good.
- What I really hated, and the reason why I won’t do it again, it messes up the story and quest log entirely. Some quests stay open forever, others appear for no apparent reason when you enter a zone. Doesn’t make any kind of sense. I am sure some people don’t mind but for me it is a no-go. Would need at least a little cutscene or text before and after each dungeon to explain what’s going on.
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Not even close to these corruption levels, I think.
Diablo 3 was quite good (campaign-difficulty wise) when it came out, then it was made pathetically easy later on. Probably the only ARPG (that I know of) with an easier campaign than LE.
I would say expert as a minimum to get a bit of occasional challenge, like corruption 50.
But yes, having many difficulty levels to chose from is good.
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my guess is that people complained about it being too hard.
some people come from super mario and then jump into D3 and are like WT*… that sh** needs nerfing, because they can 1 shot enemies in super mario, they should be able to in every other game. 
But actually they do!
A player leans to those guides if it doesn’t seem reasonable to achieve their goal through their own means.
That will guaranteed lead to several people looking up build guides since the extra difficulty is out of their personal skill-range.
If that’s a bad thing though? That’s another topic, would reduce the casual player-base a bit and reduce the amount of asks for making later game mechanics easier.
On the other hand it will also reduce the overall count of players since the lower spectrum of skill is the one which most people simply have.
Yes, and often nowadays you won’t even finish the campaign with your self-made build.
And then when you look into it you realize you got no means to change that anymore.
That feels like crap.
LE is much more forgiving there, so the chances for less impact from it is definitely there, still… people even leaning into build guides instead of finding it out on their own can be seen as a inherent negative as well when it comes to anything else but ‘I wanna make a strong character and not ‘some’ character’
Yes, that’s the sensible solution. Simply an option to make it harder for the beginning. That’s all that’s needed to solve it.
Yes, and it is missing the finished campaign (3 acts not there yet) and a properly fleshed out release-worthy end-game system. Torchlight Inifnite provided that with 1.0.
So I don’t see how the argumentation for that is viable, LE simply is not yet a ‘release candidate’ but shouldn’t have left beta yet.
If something is released I expect it to have the finished story and a properly handled progression from start to finish which feels good, as well as a decent balance between the classes provided.
So I’ll see overall content for a 1.0 ‘suffices’.
End-game is ‘miniscule’
Balance and story are ‘shoddy’ currently.
Same as D4.
Less then Grim Dawn actually. Grim Dawn end-game is surprisingly huge if you know it in-depth.
And the example of PoE is outdated, that game is over a decade old and we can expect more from a freshly released game back then.
Yes, and that suffices. You have more fun then otherwise. How much more reward do you need?
Why not? Don’t tell people how to play a game.
I can do that for hours in Path of Exile… and that game has a myriad of difficulty available as well.
It just offers the variety, you can lazily play and just rush maps… or you can tackle high difficulty content where you need to think and react quick. You could also go crafting and not play maps at all for hours at times.
It offers variety to pick how you wanna play the game hence: player agency which is very important.
So talking against that argument generally is nonsensical.
Neither.
It’s actually neither.
It’s how different people perceive different stages of the game and for what sort of feeling the people are here.
The campaign is piss-easy for those who wanna push into hard content.
The end-game content is hard for people who enjoy the campaign difficulty.
It’s as simple as that, hence there’s a disparity in perception and the way the game is created, which in itself is an issue. The game fails to either provide the respective variety to cater to those playstyles form start to finish or it fails to cater to the intended audience for it… or lacks a knowledge of what audience it actually wants to cater towards.
Yes, a person can do that.
That’s the jobs of the devs to provide it mechanically though, not the inherent one for the player since that’s a lot harder mentally to do.
Plays very much into game-design basics.
That statement is a failure to understand what a game is in itself.
Campaing should always be easy cause its the introduction to the game.
It should progressively get harder.
Thats video game 101
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I’m always baffled by people who want a difficult campaign in ARPGs. 99% of the time spent playing an ARPG is not spent playing the campaign. If people play an ARPG just for the campaign and then end up disappointed because this ARPG has a fairly easy campaign… confuse me. Would you not be happier playing JRPGs? Typically last a lot longer than most ARPG campaigns. With a lot more options to make it just as hard on yourself as you want.
Fair enough.
Some things confuse me too.
Namely: why do people want a boring campaign, levelling items and overpowered skills to make the game a cakewalk until 500 corruption or more? That’s an awful lot of time before things become interesting.
I much prefer a fresh start, and a bit of challenge in the campaign and low corruption, this way all my playtime feels interesting instead of the first 30 hours or more being completely dull.
We are not talking soul-like campaign, just not complete sleepwalking.
To me, Diablo 4’s campaign is absolutely great. Interesting, not very hard but you still have to be a bit careful. Undecember is pretty good as well (although probably far too long and hard for most people in this thread). Van Helsing is quite fun. Wolcen is lovely.
All pure ARPGs, but they don’t completely ignore the campaign side.
For a start, Japanese graphics put me off, I don’t know why, so I cannot enjoy JRPGs. 
My favourite games are CRPGs, I am completely in love with BG3 and feel like I will never get enough.
But the thing is, I like to play different games, in different styles. A quick LE character or two between two more involved story-heavy BG3 runs is fun. That’s why I only started 1.0 at the end of March, I was finishing a BG3 run. And I will be back in Faerun probably by next week.
Change is good sometimes.
TBF, it does, it’s just that the starting base difficulty is too low.
And the sudden difficulty spike at Lagon too steep for many. Nothing prepared them for mechanics that have to be avoided at all costs.
Not much. The difficulty handling of the campaign isn’t good. It’s easily seen by Lagon, a fight which is heavily about positioning and provides no preparation beforehand to do that.
The game fails in that aspect simply, can’t talk around it. To allow such a boss to happen at this stage usually weaker bosses introducing that concept and ‘easing you in’ to become proficient in the mechanical aspect of it when reaching Lagon would be the proper way.
But that’s not the case, hence yeah… the progression aspect for that is ‘off’.
Lagon is fine, the rest of the game is too easy.
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I agree. It’s the sudden spike that some people struggle with, because the rest is too easy.
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That would be nice, but with no auto-pick for keys/shards/runes/glyphs this will quickly become frustrating (not least because attack skills won’t activate while mouse hovers those items, which cannot be hidden).
Basically, more mobs means more chances those things drop means more chances you get KIA simply because your mouse cursor was in the wrong place at the wrong time.