Your comment reminded me of Grim Dawn’s Arena. I really like that model. The difficulty scales appreciably as you go on so you’re not trapped there for an eternity. (LE going to wave 200+ is… daunting.) There’s a boss fight every few waves (is it 5?) and the boss fights become tough - they’re good difficulty checks. Every 5 waves you have a choice of taking your loot or continuing. If you die, you get less & worse loot than if you’d chosen to end it on the previous check. There’s a real risk/reward tradeoff. I also like that you don’t have to focus on the loot until the very end when you go open the reward chests. The only thing the mobs drop is pots.
Essentially, I wish the LE arena was like GD’s. That one felt really good. I’m sure it’s not perfect, but it’s a lot more manageable and has much more interesting choices.
This sounds nice. I am curious what EHGs plans are for arena. It’s only a quick and dirty build in system they implemented to give players something to do after playing through the (yet incomplete) story. But it now has its place. Some people really would go mad if they’d take it out, I guess.
But it definitely has to be altered. It’s too repetitive and boring, even for a horde mode. And its definitely not scaling well. It eats too much time. The limits of what is possible should be reached way earlier than after hours of playing.
I like the idea of dropping rewards only every X waves and losing the complete reward if you die. Maybe also lvl progress should get lost on death. So its really a thrill if you go for 5 additional waves. Warframe has the same mechanics on different modes.
The “good enough XP” in MoF will really start to drop off around level 70. At least that’s what I’ve noticed. And for me experientially Arena didn’t feel like THE next step but ONE of the next steps. It is a Beta and if I’m not mistaken I think I’ve read there are still one or two other endgame components in development? So my guess is that closer to release there will probably be something that better defines the various aspects of endgame when they’re all in place.
That’s right - I forgot about that. TBH, I’ve only dabbled a bit with GD’s Arena. It was a nice alternate leveling & gearing mechanism so I didn’t have to redo Chapter 1 of the story again. I think you miss out on the constellation points, though - similar to how you miss out on idol spaces in LE.
Incidentally, I also wish the Monolith and Arena only opened up after a player has completed the story mode once. I don’t mind it for subsequent characters, but a player should have to play through the story once.
You can purchase devotion points in the Crucible via tributes that you accumulate after successfully completing 10 waves of enemies (with further tributes gained upon not continuing further and entering the loot room).
What you do miss out on, however, are the bonus Skill and Attribute points you gain from doing certain story quests through the 3 difficulties. Even this can be offset a bit if you own all the DLC’s and purchase the Savior’s Merit on Ultimate difficulty and give it to any newly created character. This specific merit allows newly created characters to skip both Normal and Elite difficulties while also granting them all Skill and Attribute rewards from those difficulties. Now you need only complete Ultimate difficulty for the remaining Skill and Attribute rewards. So the only caveat of this is you need at least one character that has already reached Ultimate difficulty and completed Act 1 to reach the Forgotten God’s portion of the story content.
The game has certainly become much more streamlined for players wanting to create more than one character.
Yes, but it gets incrementally MUCH more expensive. I don’t think I’ve ever used Crucible to get more than 5 devotion points. I know there are a few people who level using it but it is way easier to get those devotion points in campaign.
That said, being able to restart Arena after ‘checkpoints’ on a particular character would be awesome.
I certainly didn’t mean to imply that this was the best option, or even a good option, for accumulating devotion points the fastest but it is ‘an option’. Using the Savior’s Merit and rifting throughout Normal and Elite difficulties would be a significantly faster option.
But yes, checkpoints in Arena would be a nice addition as well as having a boss challenge at some point during these waves (maybe every ‘x’ amount of waves…like 25 perhaps). Would certainly make it a bit more interesting.
Absolutely. Just thought I’d point out that it is ‘doable’ just big diminishing returns on it. I always felt like Crate really didn’t want people fully leveling in Crucible but hell, I don’t know. I couldn’t design a game if called it Diablo II and said here, you can use this.
I do know I’m looking forward to seeing what 11th Hour has in store for the extra end game stuff they’ve hinted at here and there. I can’t find the post that was out a few days ago that was sort of a roadmap for the next phases, but it was very enticing!
I’m especially excited about Epoch’s Call and Lost Memories. And I had forgotten all about the Eternity Caches. I remember that way back in Alpha and was really curious to see how that would unfold.
I actually think this is a good thing, at least until we get a more expansive endgame content (phase 4?). This enables build diversity as there are characters that excel at farming monoliths quickly (speedrunners or fast clear speed) and characters that excel at surviving the Arena (high dps and survivability). The rewards are different (loot vs exp/ladder), so it encourages people to experiment with different builds.
If the Arena’s rewards are too good, there is very little reason to run Monoliths other than just farming Arena keys.
