by JR Cook - 11 years ago     show comments

Hello, guys,  I’m Dannie “Invisible” Ray  and today I’ll share with you one of many wild thoughts that fill my head at nights.

You see, I have a lot of Diablo 3 characters and it’s not just because I’m an altoholic. If we were going to extremes it could be said that I’m a theorycrafter first and a player second, but besides theorizing about my out-of-the-box ideas and interesting thoughts I also like to put them to the test. That’s why I’ve found myself with the need to have all classes at max level. But since builds can be pretty different from each other even within the same class and with inventory/stash space being at a premium, sometimes I need both the male and female version of a class at max level.

Right now I have a Level 70 of each class except Crusader, I also have a second 70 Monk and a Barbarian in the 60’s, both my Crusader and second WD are on the 40’s. I also have a level 70 Hardcore Monk.

As you might imagine, I’ve done quite a share of leveling. Some characters I’ve leveled up alone, others I’ve took to help friends that were new to the game and play along with them, and I even got a few rushes to get some of my guys up to speed.

But no matter how I leveled up a character, they all had one thing in common: The leveling process wasn’t very fun. Except for my very first character when I was just getting to know the game, all my leveling experiences were me just wishing I hit max level already so I had all the skills and could start collecting the precious loot that would enable myself to put a cool build together.

The Causes:

This problem isn’t just a random occurrence or present-day gamers having less patience than in days past. There are certain design decisions on Diablo 3 that have led to this issue. Now, before you start thinking that I hate the D3 Dev Team let me state that I agree with most of these design choices they’ve made and I’ll be explaining why shortly.

Itemization:

I find the Itemization in D3 vastly superior to its predecesors because it allows for better character growth and makes regulating balance easy, main stats make it that very good items are kind of bound to your class and you can’t just use the same set of armor for all your character. This way, every new character you make can have a sense of progression right of the bat. But the problem is that in Diablo 3 the stats were streamlined to the point that lower level items become virtually useless as you hit the max level. This is not like Diablo 2 were you could find awesome items at various different levels. Now you need an item to be max level for it to be worth something.

A Clearly Defined End Game:

Clearly defining the end game is a step on the right direction, it immediately tells the player when they are ready to tackle the different challenges this game brings us. Likely basing themselves on WoW’s success, D3 decided to divide it’s experience into leveling and end game. Orginally you had to first level up your character to max level and then start gearing up so you could clear Inferno. The problem is, we still haven’t gotten those end game challenges. WoW has new raids and content every so often but in Diablo we are doomed to repeat the same story over and over again, adventure mode was a monumental upgrade to the playing experience but as of right now we are still collecting gear so we can be stronger and collect more gear faster.

Paragon Levels:

Blizzard immedately detected how the lack of end game was affecting the player base, they implemented Paragon Levels to give the player a sense of reward once they had hit max level. Paragon leveling brought a experience more reminicesnt of Diablo 2 where you could raise the stats you wanted when you leveled up, this coupled with the fact that at max level you were getting items that were worth your salt made it so that Diablo 3’s “end game” was at least tolerable as a game of endless repetition.

The Consequences:

So what is the benefit of going through the non-paragon levels? Sure, you start unlocking new skills and gain a few miserable stat points but that doesn’t feel rewarding at all. It definately doesn’t balance out the feeling of loss when you get that perfectly rolled item you’ve been trying to get for the past few weeks and it is useless because it is just level 53.

That is the main problem with leveling up in Diablo 3, there is no big reward from leveling up. The game basically starts at max level and there isn’t much content to explore in Diablo compared to a game like WoW were you could at least level up in different areas and get a relatively fun experience with a few more characters until you felt like you knew everything.

Also, with only 6 skills at the same time you don’t have that WoW problem that if you start playing a max level character you don’t know and aren’t familiar with your entire skill pool then you are probably going to suck. In Diablo you can likely just read a guide, equip up the cookie cutter build of choice and within a few hours of play you should have a pretty decent idea of what to do on each situation.

The first 69 levels of your character are just an overextended tutorial on how to play your class, and one that IMO it isn’t really needed.

Conclusions:

Blizzard has artificially separated the leveling up experience from the end game instating an easy to reach level cap and an item system that makes lower level items obsolete.

But if you look at it coldly you will realize that aside from your first character, leveling up ends up being the exact same thing as your end game except that there’s no reward for leveling up. Both leveling up and end game are nothing but endless repetition of the same story, the same bounties and the same rifts. We can’t do much complaining about it because repetition is the nature of this game, the problem lies not in the repetition but the fact that we are forced to waste our time leveling up a character just to reach a point where the same activity starts being productive.

Diablo 3 would be much better served to start your character at max level so you could actually progress through the difficulties as you gear up. If you really need to ease up the players into their skills, then you could tie skill acquisition to your story mode progress. Going through the story mode one with each character wouldn’t be so bad as you can at least enjoy the different dialogs each class-gender combination brings to the table. And it’d likely feel better to earn a batch of new skills when you beat a powerful boss, than to get them randomly just because you have amassed an arbitrary amount of experience.

So down with leveling, and lets hope we can get a legit end game soon.

IAmDiR23