by Whitney "Neinball" Fairchild - 11 years ago     show comments

Earlier today developer Travis Day descended onto the forums to share some insight into upcoming paragon system change dubbed Paragon 2.0.  Some of the changes they have coming up we’ve known about since Gamescom.

Paragon levels will be limitless, there will be a ‘soft limit’ at level 800 but I’ll talk about that more later.

All of your total paragon experience will be totaled together to give your account wide paragon level.  This will be tallied up by your experience not your levels, so having two lvl 100 characters might only get you to around lvl 110 or so.

The idea behind these two changes is to continue to reward people who play the game.  Paragon levels were added so that players would feel rewarded while grinding for items, so even though you might not have found any good loot you still got some benefit from the time you played.  Taking the limit off the paragon system further enforces this concept so that players will be rewarded for months and months to come.  Combining the experience across all characters will make it so player don’t feel that they need to play the same character in order to be the most efficient.

Some of the new information Travis talked about clarified some details on the mechanics behind the new system.  Current paragon levels give your character the regular level stat increases as well as +3% to magic find and gold find.  In Paragon 2.0 you’ll get rewarded with a paragon point for every level instead.  These paragon points can be used to increase your core stats, move speed, magic find, critical hit chance and practically every other stat in the game.  You’ll be able to fully customize your character exactly how you want, well almost.

The paragon points you earn are tied to one of  four categories; Core Stats, Offensive Stats, Defensive Stats and Utility (Adventure) Stats.  The points must be spent in the category they’re rewarded for, so you can’t spend defensive points on offensive stats.  There are also hardcaps for all stats other then your core stats, thus the soft limit I mentioned earlier.  You will have reached the cap for every stat in the game by the time you reach paragon 800 and all further points from here on out will only be able to be used on core stats.

Check out the full quote below.

I’ve seen a lot of assorted questions floating about so I wanted to take a little time explaining some of the current details of the system. As always this is not completely final and is subject to change.

First, let me start with the intent of the system so everyone has a bit of context. The initial implementation of the Paragon system was meant to help provide players a form of end game progression. The primary end game progression is items; Diablo is all about finding awesome items, and using them to murder the hordes of evil. Sometimes, though, you may go for a while and not find a new exciting item, the primary goal of the Paragon system is provide you with some form of tangible benefit for killing lots of monsters even if you didn’t find new items.

The initial system accomplishes what it set out to do, but unfortunately there comes a time when you have maxed out that progression and suddenly you start losing out on part of your reward for killing monsters (experience). The first change to the Paragon 2.0, removing the cap, is intended to ensure that, no matter how much or how little you play, you will always be earning that experience.

The next thing that we wanted to address with Paragon 2.0 is that, since Paragon experience was associated with a specific character, it had the unfortunate side-effect of making players feel more tied to a specific character than we wanted them to be. If you have a Paragon 50 Wizard it makes it that much harder to convince yourself to try a new character because some people would feel like they are “wasting experience,” either on the Wizard or on the new character they wanted to try out. We want players to feel that they are being rewarded for their time investment, regardless of what character they are in the mood to play or experiment with. This is the primary reason we are changing Paragon levels to be account-wide instead of character specific. We want people who have invested time earning Paragon experience to be able to enjoy all the changes and new content the expansion introduces without having a sense of loss for “wasting Paragon levels” on a character, especially since the Crusader is so awesome I expect 200% of players to just re-roll 😉

Lastly, spendable points. Anyone who has played Diablo games in the past has some fond memories (or not, if you ever misclicked the wrong stat) of picking how they wanted to spend their points whenever they leveled. While giving players more character customization options isn’t the core intent of the system, it did present itself as a good place to introduce the mechanic. Players already earn bonus stats, Magic Find, and Gold Find when they earn a Paragon level, but we thought giving players more options and letting them choose what they wanted their bonus to be was just better all around. When you gain a Paragon level in the new system, you will receive a Paragon point to spend. What category that point can be spent in is determined by what Paragon level you earn. Paragon level 1 gives you a point to spend in a Core Stat, Paragon 2 gives you a point in the Offensive category, 3 is Defensive, and 4 is Utility (Adventure). Each Paragon level past that follows the same pattern. At present all categories other than Core Stats (Str, Int, Dex, Vit) have a cap on the number of points that can be allocated to them, which also means there is a cap to the total number of points that 3 of the 4 categories can have. If you reach Paragon 800, you will have maxed the number of points that can be allocated to the Offensive, Defensive, and Utility categories and all future Paragon levels will grant you a point in the Core Stat category instead.

Hopefully this covers the majority of questions that people have. While I am incredibly busy working on the expansion at present, I’ll do my best to answer whatever remaining questions people have about Paragon 2.0.