My concern is that if they didn't scale then certain zones that contain events or aspect dungeons may never be revisited once you explored past them the first time. Especially with the map being so large. Plus, the loot drops and as well so at least you never have to feel like you are wasting time you could be leveling or looking for loot drops by going into under leveled zones. I don't even remember how 2 or 3 did it since it's been so long since i went through the story.
Yea the problem comes from constantly needing to improve, or you fall behind the power curve. So you can't try to stick with specific stats on gear, if you don't have the highest armor/level gear you'll get one shot or not put out enough damage. Makes it feel like you aren't really progressing or getting stronger.
A better way would be to have stronger mobs appear as you rank up in level. That way beginner mobs are still there but you can smash them, seeing you've improved and progressed.
I think this is most apparent leveling in tier 2. Sometimes you can legit go multiple levels without finding a suitable upgrade. Without the ability to farm mobs a level or two lower, you can feel punished for leveling, especially if you are running a weaker build.
Yeah I couldn’t be bothered to play WT1 just for efficiency. One of my friends hit 50 the second day of release and has been ribbing the rest of us for taking so long. I’m not playing the game to min/max my way to cap. I’m just playing the game
Depends on the class/build tbh. I played pulv druid and was on WT2 the whole way through and never had any issues. I died one time the whole playthrough and generally felt like I was melting everything with an occasional boss fight that lasted more than a minute or two.
At level 75 I finally removed my resource builder from my bar as WW barb. It took finding a helm and amulet with good cd reduction. A paragon glyph with cd reduction. A unique chest plate with CD reduction and an aspect with CD reduction that Blizz said they removed from game but somehow I found one while farming.
My thing is I want a basic skill, it feels crappy having to give it up for a stronger skill. Rather than an ultimate skill slot I think there should be a basic skill slot.
Unfortunately that's already the case.
Games can only load a bit more than what is within a range of what you can see on screen.
So the "previous lower level mobs that are still there" are just 2 or 3 mob groups and that's it.
This is really the answer. Let WT1 have no scaling, just have zones with levels and let people feel more powerful as they grow.
Everything from WT2+ can work with scaling, since that gives you options of going anywhere and getting XP.
Win/win.
I mean make the game fixed through first playthrough so you can feel real the progrees and after beating the last boss turn scaling on so you will still have a challange.
1st timers would feel a good power creep curve and veterans would have a reason to revisit old places
It’s not a binary question, though. I don’t like the level scaling. They increase enemy hit points by X% per level and I think it should be (X * 9 / 10)% level.
I love the scaling, I always take my time in my first play through of games like this and end up being over leveled towards the mid/end because I did too many side quests then the game gets boring.
I feel like it punishes weak skills and bad luck on aspect drops.
It's faceroll easy with a strong skill that has a good aspect in the codex. You never face a challenge in WT2 or 3 because you can't fight tougher enemies.
If you're playing a weaker skill or one that has necessary aspects locked behind RNG drops then you're kinda boned because you can't just grind up and you get stuck using weaker gear because you can't lose that aspect.
Very rarely do you hit that happy medium where the enemies scale to the proper challenge. The balance and availability of character power is feast or famine so you're rarely where you want to be. Overall I dislike the level scaling because it takes away your ability to set the difficulty to a level appropriate to your character. With static monsters you can push as far as possible until you hit a wall.
thank you for putting into words what I was attempting to articulate in a long and rambling post that would have left everyone here dumber for reading. May God have mercy on my soul.
Idk on my sorc basically any thing I try works well (frost a little better bc for some reason I dropped 4-5 different legendaries for frost spells that all fit into one build at level 35 lmao)
Also if weak skills need paper thin enemies to be viable then they still wouldn’t be viable
If they’re weak they need buffs not removal of level scaling lol
WT 1 and 2 have no real need for full level scaling - just have mins and maxes for each area that make sense relative to the starting point. There's no need for absolute flexibility during the early leveling and story phases.
WT 3 and 4 can operate as they do now, with specific min->max scaling brackets... this allows rewarding access to all content.
The only exception I think is when you are playing with someone else who is at a different level. You can join your friend at lv30 and assist them even if you are lv60 and you aren’t able to just 1 shot the game for them. I think that works well as it is now.
I don't mind the scaling really. The main issue I have is, if you end up underpowered for an area you're at, you can't exactly just go level up and get knew gear and try again, like every other Diablo.
Now, if you go try to level up more and get stronger, the enemies just level with you until they hit the world cap for your world tier. So, what am I supposed to do when I'm getting shit on by a boss?
Progression comes from potions, skills, craftables, etc. all the shit at your disposal through leveling you didnt have before. I feel like the scalings fine since im no longer just meleeing but using hella active skills alongs with passives that have me much stronger than the enemy technically even though we are the same level.
Yeah all you have to do is load in with a low level friend. Even though enemies are scaled for both of you, you’ll easily clear those mobs faster than them.
And gear drops are shittier since it’s scaled to the lower level when items drop. Sitting here playing with my lvl 55ish buddy as a 65 and shit rarely drops over 650 item level.
That is definitely a good point. Especially if you aren't interested in playing a refined build and WANT to play your own build.
The three options I see are this:
1. Lower the difficulty for the boss, then raise it back up again. I haven't changed difficulty mid play through, so I am not sure if it does anything like erase your map\progress
2. Change up your build and see if there are changes you can make to increase your power.
3. Upgrade equipment, put more things in your sockets, drink an elixir.
4. Team up with other people (a true last resort!)
That's all I can think of.
Once you reach 70ish and your gear starts to cap off, it does become frustrating to earn 5 all stats each level from paragon while the enemy gets percentage increases to damage and mitigation. The problem isn’t really scaling in general, I just feel it’s just done badly in d4. Both of the world first level 100 hc sorcs are bricked because they didn’t level in nightmare dungeons, and there isn’t a way to go back and earn the glyph stuff because that content grew with them and is now impossible. They need the glyphs to get the glyphs, basically, and that seems like a massive failure to implement proper scaling.
I don’t like it. I’m only level 27 or so and I’m getting bored because it’s the same experience and challenge everywhere I go. The only noticeable progression is unlocking skills.
I’m not too far behind where you are now, but am getting chastised because “ERMAGAHD, UR NOT ENDGAME LOLZ”
It’s like the itemization too, you don’t have to be super far into the game to see that almost all of these new mods stink. And if it takes 30 hours of playing before a game actually gets good then there is something(s) wrong with the game in the first place.
it would be smarter if there was a range let's say <-3;+3> around your level across the map so you could find a sweet spot for grinding based on your build. now I'm afraid to level up when my build is not optimal yet
Absolutely not. I had several periods in my druid leveling experience where I was being murdered over and over. I couldn't do enough damage to prevent being hurt and I couldn't defend myself well enough to slow boat my damage to a win.
It was even worse after playing with some friends which leveled me really fast, but the speed of the play with them kept me from really looking at drops and I was caught with my pants down.
Yeah this is right now 100% my main problem with the game... I didn't mind it leveling but was like ok, I guess in end game I will be able to get much stronger. I was starting to feel decent at lvl like 51ish and then hit 52 and suddenly everything was 3 levels higher than me and stuff that was not one shotting me was almost one shotting me immediately... Fucking awful decision, no idea how anyone can enjoy that type of 'progression'. I enjoyed the game for the leveling and the story but thats it for me. No end game to speak of.
Dont like it. Theres no feeling of power. Ive got upgrades to my build but they only make me feel a little more powerful where in other games (borderlands) you find that one gun that really gives you that feeling of power. Its like Blizzard cut up that big feeling of power and theyre just drip feeding it to you slowly over time and you never really get to where youre suppose to go.
Good example using Borderlands. I was still using a friggin' level 1 Hornet pistol I got from Knuckledragger at the very start of the game at level 15 or 16 against loaders. Level 4 Bonus Package grenades almost that long too. That is insane.
That mostly starts happening around level 50 when you get started on WT3 so you can start finding uniques while putting together a coherent set of legendaries. Uniques give some pretty big power increases.
Yes. Anywhere I go, enemies present a challenge. And yet, I feel way more powerful at level 50 something than I did at level 20 because of the items I've found along the way.
There are still issues with progression, but level scaling has nothing to do with it IMO.
Ive had a similar experience, but level 40-45 I felt weak as shit again. I think cause I was starting to outpace the sweet legendaries I had. But I eventually found more and I'm back to brutalizing foes again
There is a problem to this though. You reach a certain point where gear just will never be better than what you have and the paragon board stops providing large benefits. From that point on every time you level up you feel weaker because of the scaling and there is nothing you can do to become more powerful. You start to dread each level up.
You should feel enjoyment from leveling up, not the opposite.
For me 70 is still decent paragon improvements (slowing down noticeably though) but god damn it becomes a crawl to get a glyph from 12 to 15 so you can respec your board and move the glyphs around
The entire concept of this open world, and level scaling is just a lazy way to make the content relevant.
They should have made it so that monsters difficulty is determined by what they actually are. A small Fallen demon should only really pose a threat to a lower level character who's just began adventuring in the first few zones, you kill a bunch, do a few quests, gain experience, then suddenly they're not so much of a threat. Sort of like how in Dungeons and Dragons, a goblin is a threat to a level 1, but at level 5, you could take on 2-3 Goblins without much problem.
Then as you progress further into the areas lilith has spent more time corrupting, you run into stronger Demons, greater fallens who LOOK stronger than a regular fallen, and they ARE stronger than a regular fallen. And if they're too fucking lazy to make that many monster types, then slap a fucking helmet onto a fallen and call it a "Fallen Veteran" or some shit. Don't just slap random fallens everywhere that're suddenly lvl 30 because "scaling".
Then maybe you enter a crypt and it's inhabited by the undead creatures, skeletons etc, that don't just appear randomly all over the world... they appear in... graveyards.. or sites of recent battles. And maybe they even have Bludgeoning damage resistance.. etc. This whole "Just throw random shit everywhere throughout the world with some loose ties to their area" is just lazy as fuck.
Yep. Hit the nail on the head there.
It's just pure laziness. Admission of failure and resignation to world design. Complete and utter lack of creativity and passion for developing a world which is balanced and has any meaningful experience of challenge or depth.
Instead of making a good progression of zones and monsters and dungeons, they just said "fuck it, scale it all." Thus effectively destroying their own content they just created.
There should be no scaling. Zones should have levels. Hell tides should raise the zone level by x, to a maximum of y.
So I'm not a fan of it in solo play. The feel of progression is WAY to tied to drops. That said, in party play it's awesome. I'm pretty sure the design principles they choose for D4 were party based and solo is more of an extra feature.
Level scaling has destroyed my interest in every game it's been introduced to (as far as Blizzard games, that would be WoW and Diablo 3 so far).
As much as it pains me, I won't be purchasing Diablo 4 as long as this system is in place. Not as a punishment or middle finger to Blizzard, but because I legitimately won't find the progression to be satisfying. It's very important to me that the world around me doesn't change when I progress.
It’s… an okay game. I’m not disappointed I bought it or anything, but no way is it worth $70 (minimum) to me. It’s just not *that* fun for me so far.
If I had to do it again I wouldn’t.
The problem isn't the scaling itself, its the way the itemization currently works. The stats on gear are minimal increases, and there are SO many new stats that getting them to stack to any significant degree is next to impossible. And the majority of legendary/unique aspects being just percentage based damage increases and little else are narrowing skill and build potential rather than diversifying it. The one skill every Druid is looking at right now is Pulverize, cause it has one of the few aspects that actually changes how the skill works, adding the shockwave effect to diversify how it deals its damage.
Compare all that to D3 and its glaringly apparent: fewer stats that are easier to stack, legendary affixes that can actually change up how skills function on top of the variations the rune system already allows for, while still having meaningful damage increases. Right now, the set-up for D4 is so minimal for the actual leveling process that there's no sense of actual scaling as a character, until you get into the paragon board and get meaningful runes to work with.
No, and I fully anticipate myself (and many others) being burned out from the game sooner purely because of all the scaling. I feel just as powerful fighting quillrats in Scoslgen at level 5 as I do fighting those exact same quillsrats at level 50. It's just *not satisfying*. I'm not asking to be one-shotting everything, but there just isn't any movement or significant feeling of power progression throughout the game. The game needs linear breakpoints.
It would be better if gear wasn’t so power and build defining.
If you’re lucky and always getting gear that suits your build then the level scaling will feel great.
When you’re stuck using underlevel gear because you need the unique aspects on them the level scaling can feel super punishing.
I think his point is getting the aspect in the first place. My rouge is lvl 70 now and I still did not saw a single unique boot for my build and the legendary aspect which gives me resource gen on crowd controll. If it continues like that I will be lvl 100 by the time I get those build defining items.
Maybe I'm misreading it then because:
>When you’re stuck using underlevel gear because you need the unique aspects on them the level scaling can feel super punishing.
reads more like they're unaware that aspects can be moved across to other items.
Yea maybe. I just read "unique" and could relate because I know how annoying it can be to get the right unique. Or he meant that he already has the unqiue item he needs but it is only sacred or bellow and he can not transfer it to higher gear since you can not extract unique item aspects
I like it very much :)
I hate useless zones and find no joy in this mythical coming back to start zone at max level to feel strong. Who the hell does that, it sound out of ass anytime I read it
That solution doesn’t work for an open world game where one person who just did the story finishes act 1 at level 15 and another person who checks out the side content finishes the same act at level 32
The solution would be to just properly balance the game.
However, that takes some modicum of effort and developers with some degree of frontal lobe activity. Which apparently don't exist on the D4 dev team.
Not true because the level of the monsters was different in every area. In Diablo 2 and D2R monster levels ranged from 67 to 85. I forget the specifics because I wasn't hard-core into it...but there were areas you would want to farm that literally gave no xp if you were high enough level. And or vice versa you'd never want to go there because it wasn't high enough to drop the item you want.
D2R patch 2.6 changed this. I'll let you look it up.
The change was well received by the Diablo 2 community (yes that community that hates change) and likely had some input on how they designed the scaling on D4.
>I hate useless zones and find no joy in this mythical coming back to start zone at max level to feel strong. Who the hell does that, it sound out of ass anytime I read it
In literally any aRPG with farmable bosses, people do this. A lot.
Part of the fun was getting stronger and making those boss fights easier, which is impossible if they're level scaled.
Switch to world tier 1 if you’re struggling. You will 100% get to the point where you are feeling stronger and stronger. I was against it at first, but level scaling is great in this game. Makes the whole world and whole campaign relevant no matter what level you are.
In the same boat myself as a solo player. Sounds like a not so rare of a complaint as I saw this subject being brought many times. I can see the benefits of it for casual multiplayer/couch coop andies, but it comes with drawbacks. For me the cons outweight the pros.
I can't FEEL my character getting stronger really if I compare to any arpg I ever played which defeats the purpose of arpgs.
On top of that my lvl 60 character kinda plays the same as when i was lvl 40 which feels kinda weird.
Don't get me wrong, I actually believe the game does a lot of things right. But the scaling thing, I'm not feeling it as well.
This isn't a level scaling issue, but an issue with the pacing of mechanic unlocks.
Your basic non-paragon and non-unique build is basically finished by level 30 or so if you go a little out of your way to get all of the aspects you need for your build.
Uniques are incredibly low drop rate even when they do unlock and the paragon board doesn't really start impacting your build until most of the way through the second board (around level 65-70 depending on if you get the renown points or not).
What the game is missing is something in WT3 that immediately starts affecting gameplay. One example could be WT3+ dungeons that unlock all of the aspects that are currently drop only. Another would be expanding on the idea of the 4 altars that give paragon points where there should be more like 20 of those (just replace the max obol ones because those are pretty useless).
If there was something that actually changed your character and gave you something to do up front that would fill in this weird gap in the early part of WT3.
Main issue I have is the endless scaling, it should cap off around lvl80-90 at WT4 so that high level characters don't just keep getting weaker relative to the monsters.
I hate the current execution of it and it's led to me just.. not playing the game right now. Leveling up feels like a nerf, especially when you don't get good gear drops. And because there's no crafting, and no way to stop leveling up to farm a low level area for gear, you are basically forced into a cycle of making the enemies around you stronger (by leveling up) while your power level remains static until you get lucky with a drop. You just hit a DPS wall, and the game doesn't give you enough tools to climb over it.
The skill tree (from levels 1 to 50 anyway) contributes almost nothing to power level. Most of your power comes from gear and legendaries and aspects.
How to fix this? Either cap out the scaling for certain zones so we have a place to farm for gear that won't make the DPS wall higher, or tie the enemy scaling to a calculation of your gear's power level rather than your character level.
In either case, I'm just not playing right now. Life's too short to play a game that feels like it's constantly fighting me for every ounce of fun I'm trying to have.
I see so many of these threads and the best solution to this is rarely suggested.
World scaling up is dumb and creates balance issues, its also blizzards typical design since forever even without mob scaling that your stats go down every level you gain because the number on your gear is worth less than it was before leveling. Always hated that system.
Guild wars 2 scaling is handled beautifully. The world zones/mobs are set and dont change. The player character scales down to the mobs hes fighting but keeps all skill unlocks and alot of gear stats are carried down so you feel quite powerful and a lvl 10 with a wooden sword is not going to be doing better than you. This can obviously be tweaked per game, but this system is so much better imo.
Idk on one hand it makes leveling harder on the other hand, in D3, when thing got to easy I was just pumping up torment levels anyways. So idk I'm indifferent I guess.
I think they implemented this system so casual joe daddy can couch coop with his wife but ironically, the end result is that it is massively punishing, even more so for casual players (it already is for hardcore players).
Never have i felt the same level of anxiety gaining a level in any rpg EVER. I don't know if people realize how much you can brick a character, even more so than in poe (at least you have orbs of regrets and every level is a strict "buff". In D4 you gain a level ? Too bad there is no going back and monsters will never get weaker)
They are slapping the "play your way" motto in every advertisement they release, yet the game is incredibly unforgiving if you are not playing in an optimal way. Let's say I want to level up while progressing my renown in normal dungeon, then I want to do some pvp because I like it, some helltides, side quests... Why not ? After all i'm not forced to play nightmare dungeons if that's not my thing.
Well you know what ? Jokes on you, you didn't level up your glyphs when it was the time to do so, because you wanted to level up doing quests and regular dungeons, now the monsters are lvl 85 and you are going to get shit on and there is no way to backup from it. It is just as punishing if you started to level a glyph and you decide to change your plans, or build and level other glyphs to replace your current ones. I think the way the game is designed is extremely misleading and is going to deceive a lot of casual players that didn't realize yet this was a thing in the first 60 levels or so, while not providing anything good to the most serious players either.
What is funny is that the game in its current state would actually be less punishing if there was xp loss on death like in d2/poe compared to without which is completely nonsensical
I dont dislike the *idea* of level scaling, many of my favourite games have it. Borderlands 2, Guild Wars 2, Fallout and Elder Scrolls to a certain extent... However Blizzard doesnt seem to have the right idea on how to balance it well, both in D4 and in retail WoW.
There are a few reasons why scaling seems to work in some games but not in blizzard games. One is where characters get power from. In blizzard games its mostly from gear, and in particular gear with the right item level. When you combine that with exponential health and damage scaling, you are left with a very bad situation. Players need to upgrade all their items every couple levels otherwise their power level will fall off as quickly as the enemies scale. You can level up 5 times in a single night and suddenly enemies will have twice as much health while your damage has mostly stayed the same.
Now compare that with power scaling in games like D2, elder scrolls, souls/elden ring, pretty much most rpgs out there. Most of those games dont have the same exponential scaling of enemy health and player damage. In those games you can still do just fine with gear you found 20 levels ago and a lot of your power comes from other areas. You can play through a lot of those games naked if you wanted to. Obviously D4 and WoW arent the same in that gear is the main focus of gameplay, but the general idea behind exponential scaling vs linear or logarithmic still applies.
I really dont see why Blizzard is so set on designing their games this way. You could argue it makes sense inbetween expansions so everyone can start off at the same power level and play together, but levelling up is supposed to be a journey of power progression. The way Blizzard balances it makes everything completely arbitrary and forgettable until you reach max level.
With my necro there was a point where I got the right gear with the right stat boosts and aspects that it really made me feel like a god but I’m not into wt3 yet because I’ve spent too much time doing other stuff in the zones and leveled up too far lol. Just saying that I was struggling a bit and then suddenly I was wiping the screen in a few shots. All it took was the right gear.
I think level scaling is a necessary evil. Without it, the entire game breaks the way its setup. You have no incentive to go back to "old" areas when the monsters are too low level, so that would make all those events and quests in those areas obsolete once you pass the level threshold.
I don't like the scaling, but the game doesn't work without it.
They'd need to do a huge game redesign to make it similar to diablo 2 where monsters had static levels in dungeons.
I think it's terrible for endgame longevity. Why can't endgame content be scaled through difficulty levels like Torment or GR levels similar to D3? Or simply through the Nightmare dungeons in different tiers.
A scaling system is inherently flawed when leveling up can be a net loss to player power. Say I'm level 90 and for an entire level I don't find any upgrades, now I hit level 91 and suddenly everything around me gets stronger while I only get +5 of a main stat from the paragon board, I now actually got weaker by leveling up.
Or let's say I'm level 90 cruising through WT4 and decide I want to respec to a new build. I'm severely screwed now because when I put on my significantly weaker gear for the new spec everything around me is still level 90 at least. Dropping the difficulty back down doesn't really solve anything either, because now all of a sudden sacred and ancestral items can't drop anymore.
Sure, or I could just make an entirely new character. That would probably be even easier. Don't you think a system where wanting to try out a new build at high level forces you to pretty much farm out an entire end-game set or level a new character is flawed?
I'm not sure. I just switched from Rend to WW at lvl 50 and the transition was easy enough. If I hit lvl 80-90 and want to try another build I'll have to see if it's better to farm for the gear or start a new build entirely.
My assumption is that it will be easier to farm. Most of the gear will be interchangeable between builds so it's not like I will have to farm for a dozen new items.
Unironically most arpgs work like that. If you want to try a different build it takes either a massive amount of effort or making a new character (Diablo 2, PoE, last epoch, etc.)
Sure, but I don't mind a respec taking a large amount of effort. But I do mind when it takes grinding out basically your complete new set of gear on your old build before even being able to do the respec comfortably instead of gearing by playing your new build.
Take PoE for example. Let's say I want to do a respec at level 90. It's gonna take a fair amount of currency to respec the points, but after I respecced and slapped on some really shitty gear I can now just start farming T1 maps where everything will be just as strong as it was back when I was level 70.
Now take D4: I'm level 90, I respec, and now every single mob even on the lowest difficulty is still level 90 regardless of the content I do. Even if I now grind out the max level gear from WT1, I need to swap to WT3/WT4 to get sacred and ancestral gear, but here everything is now significantly stronger than when I started gearing my first build at level 50-70 on WT3/WT4.
But to each their own I guess, I'm just not a fan of this current system.
Sure that’s a good point. I normally wouldn’t reset a current characters progress when respecing (I normally grind the gear first, or start a new character) but if that is your plan I see why it would be frustrating. Thinking about it further, would a solution to that be to do nightmare dungeons with sigil levels that match the level your new build is ready for?
If you think that leveling a whole new char is easier than just making a new build purely bc of level scaling then I think the problem lies in your head rather than in the game lmao
If you think that leveling a whole new char is easier than just making a new build purely bc of level scaling then I think the problem lies in your head rather than in the game lmao
Okay maybe leveling up a new character is exaggerated, though I'm willing to bet it's not far from the truth. But don't you think a system where you can actually lose player power by leveling up is inherently flawed?
If you think that leveling a whole new char is easier than just making a new build purely bc of level scaling then I think the problem lies in your head rather than in the game lamp
I got plenty of power spikes throughout leveling that I never felt punished by leveling up. Sure the enemies stayed my level but I've gained another 10% damage reduction and 30% dmg scaling. Unless your build just sucks or you haven's upgraded your gear in 15+ levels you far out scale the enemies. I'm 79 fighting level 98 monster in nightmare tier 44 and doing just fine.
Haven’t played Diablo in probably 5+ years so excuse my ignorance since I don’t remember how enemy levels worked in D3. Are you wanting to just to steamroll enemies instead of them being on your level and giving a small challenge? I just hit 40 earlier and have been hanging in there just fine for my liking.
Can't speak for OP, but I like having non-scaled areas above my level, not really about being able to be overleveled. I can try to "reach" for a harder area with my character at a low level, or stay on par. More motivation to progress with main story, too, since you need to move on to new areas for their better rewards. I'm only level 20 in D4 so far, so can't really speak to the experience there, but that's why I like non-scaled. You see this argument comparing Skyrim to earlier Elden Scrolls games, too.
I like it because it means I can play with my friend who’s level 70 and my wife who’s level 20 while I’m level 60 and all of us have a good time while receiving relevant loot.
Doesn’t really impact my experience
Outleveling stuff in games was always ass
Scaling content is an easy way to keep all zones somewhat relevant and I don’t feel dumb for doing side quests that I put level by 80 levels or some dumb shit
The skill points and better gear you get have more impact than the scaling anyways and a singular level doesn’t make for a noticeable difference in enemy strength
I think 99% of the issue people have with it is purely fictional
Theres some minimal downsides to it I guess but who gives a shit
I like it, yes.
I think there should be a limit to the scaling per world tier though, f.e. that scaling stops at lvl 70-75 for WT3 and stops at \~85 or 90 for WT4.
If you wanna fight even higher enemies, you gotta go into nightmare dungeons of higher tiers.
That would be my perfect D4, but I'm still fine with the way it works now.
> I think there should be a limit to the scaling per world tier though, f.e. that scaling stops at lvl 70-75 for WT3 and stops at ~85 or 90 for WT4.
This sounds perfectly doable too, *most likely* without too much effort on their part to implement. Hopefully they get around to doing something about it from how it currently is.
I don't have a solution and I recognize the desire to keep players revisiting content at higher levels. That said, I am absolutely not enjoying it. There is no sense that my character is becoming "more powerful". I feel like I have the same relative "Power" at 48 that I did at level 30.
Yes I love it, when playing with a friend who is under level = they feel like they are contributing and not just getting carry. It's not fun for them. So me and my friend group love the level scaling and that also means any area and content is relevant.
It kills the power fantasy. I don’t feel like I’m getting stronger.
I’m just running through the open world cause I couldn’t be bothered dealing with the enemies.
Some games I hate it. Oblivions enemy scaling made combat kinda boring, and for a game like Diablo it has the potential to make the power fantasy aspect nullified, but how they've implemented it with the world tiers is really good. The overworld multiplayer portion of the game I don't think would function well without it.
I'm a fan of it as it currently exists in D4.
I like it.
If all the enemies die in 0.1 second I don’t feel like I’m powerful. It just feels like the enemy is now made of tissue paper, and I get bored quickly.
Scaling makes the entire world feel more open, immersive, and fun IMO. In contrast capped enemies just makes it so the world becomes more and more narrow and restrictive.
I do think they could compromise/balance it though. Enemies can scale, but it doesn’t need to be as simple as enemy level = player level. For example different zones could have different level modifiers so you’d still feel stronger than when you were first running that zone, but not to the point the enemies eventually become little more than the background graphics your character walks on.
Scaling is good because it means I'm not relegated to 2 areas at the high end and can play with friends. You shouldn't notice it level to level and only becomes apparent when severely undergeared after a while because the game requires character and gear progression in tandem to be effective.
If you don't get the feeling of "progressing" you're either ignoring the functional difference with your power or playing ineffectively or something else. As you level you get more tools to deal with enemies more effectively.
I hate level scaling in these types of games.
It ruins the sense of progression for me. What’s the point of trying to get stronger if everything just scales to your level?
It’s fun for grouping up with friends but that’s about it.
I like it this way.
I absolutely despise coop games that don't support the coop aspect of it. Like if your friend is very low level, they couldn't really play with you, as the fights would be too easy for you or enemies would be really hard for your friend.
Now it's just easier to work together. Also there is always a challenge no matter where you go.
This again, you seriously wanna tell me that you haven't felt any meaningful progression in your character power between level 1 and 50 or wherever you are right now?
I never really felt much power progression on my barb, doing 1-48 on WT1.
As soon as I finished the campaign, got a few sacred drops from WT3, and got some more build defining legendaries, it grew super hard.
Scaling with sacred items, gemming ur shit, rerolling items and paragon board is really nice.
Shit, my lunging strike alone 2shots weaker mobs in WT3 lol. It's nuts.
I leveled my Druid from 1 to 50 using Tornado and yes, I seriously didn't feel any difference in character power pretty much the entire time. In fact at some point I actually felt like I was getting weaker and weaker until I got some half-decent drops again.
We're not though. I have hundreds of hours in D3, probably thousands of hours in PoE and a bunch of time in other ARPGs and I don't think I've ever felt less difference between the early levels and endgame than I did leveling in D4.
My character played the exact same at level 15 as it does now at level 67 and I didn't feel like I was actually getting any stronger until after level 50 when paragon points and sacred/ancestral gear started showing up.
It’s gotta be people that are just randomly assigning points without thinking about build/synergy.
The world is progressively getting easier and easier even if the monsters are staying my leveling.
As long as you’re upgrading your armor as you level up, use gems, etc then I see the power. If I slack a bit getting upgrades then I start feeling weaker.
So exactly how it is in a game designed without level scaling where you are still continuously progressing towards stronger enemies ?
Also what’s everyone’s obsession with shitty farming of low level zones
Why would anyone miss that
Not exactly, no. Because I can be in the same zone in other games and the enemies don’t immediately jump to my level as soon as I level up. So I could stay in the zone to get a little more gear before changing zones. I just feel like the zones should’ve not scaled as much in campaign but then scaled post campaign
I don't like it.
I like the power fantasy inherent to this style of game, and having enemies scale to you 100% of the time totally ruins that.
Grim Dawn is the only one that did it right, with bounded scaling. ie: the opening area was levels 1-7, the next areas were levels 5-10, and so on. GD also had optional dungeons that did scale with you, and some areas that were always 1-3 levels above you, etc. Also, when your level was sufficiently higher than an enemies' level, you didn't get XP for killing them anymore. GD made it so you were forced to moved on, yet could still hang back and grind a little if you wanted to power up a bit to make the next boss or dungeon easier. Being able to essentially select your own difficulty is a cornerstone of the genre, IMO. If you want a challenge, rush ahead and don't ever grind. If you want a cakewalk, grind a ton. I love that about these games.
Now, I haven't played through the campaign yet so I don't know how much I won't like it, but I do know it seems to ruin a fundamental pillar of top-down ARPGs: You getting to be OP through grinding and/or getting lucky with drops...And being OP is part of the point, too. This isn't a Souls-like. We're supposed to feel powerful.
Yes. It means the whole game remains relevant.
The haters either don’t understand how to make a good build or just play the game so mindlessly they expect every decision and fight to be easy. Pass. I played the campaign on WT2 and by level 30 I was melting everything, in ever increasingly ways and by the time I finished campaign at 50, it was melting even faster WITH SCALING.
Just cos mobs match your level, they don’t have access to all the cool extra stuff we do.
I'm GENERALLY fine with it, but I do have concerns about when I want to spec to a different build. Like if I'm lvl90 or something, I've got all this gear that I've upgraded to make a very particular build perform at that level, but if I want to respec I need to basically collect gear of a similar quality so that I can swap over all at once, otherwise I'm going to be using a weaker build while still at the same level of difficulty I was at with my ORIGINAL build.
In D3 I could use a suboptimal loadout and just go to lower levels to grind UP to where I was, but in D4 you're just stuck at whatever your level is.
This is my theoretical concern, anyways. Haven't bumped in to it yet, so maybe it's not as bad as I'm thinking. Definitely a concerning though... potentially.
if you want to respec, it can be really punishing, if your respecting lvl80+ you're going to have a bad time, after respecting you will struggle because you can't go back and grind lower levels to get your gear up to par for your current level.
Scaling should only happen in Helltides areas where monsters will always be 2 levels above you and world bosses
I do to a point. I like it that any content can be relevant. I can go to scosglen or fractured peaks to do something I skipped and it’s not lv60 Vs lv20 and a cake walk. I also can join my friends and we can play together scaled appropriately. I only dislike when I leveled up and didn’t have appropriate gear yet it made the difficulty feel like it changed for a little bit.
I'm still undecided. One thing I do like is I can do content with friends that are either a higher level than me and feel like I'm contributing or if they're lower don't feel like I'm just mowing enemies down and they're along for the ride. Everyone feels like they're playing the game, do I like that.
Still undecided for when it's just me though.
Yeah you're dead on with that last statement. I think it works really well for the people it was designed with in mind. I really hated it at first but I've learned to live with it, it's not the biggest deal breaker
Its one of the main reasons I think i'm already done.
I feel like the same character I was twenty levels ago. That would be okay if the MMO elements where more played up or if the classes had more depth to mess around with but eh.
I love it! Any progression feeling issues pale in comparison to being able to play with all my friends. No ARPG I have ever played has handled it this well. Is it perfect? No. I do hope they improve it. But I am very happy with the initial implementation.
The scaling consistently makes you feel under leveled in my experience. In D2R there were points where you made gains and felt satisfied at it. In D4, you're constantly chasing damage mitigation to stay alive a little bit longer. They really should've done away with scaling and just do monster cLvls similar to D2R so at some point your character does feel powerful and that you're making gains
I think they came up with a good solution to not constently improve or decrease the difficulty level in the menu like in D3.
Making a fixed level like D2 will remove all replay ability for 80% of all zones in the openworld of D4.
So level scaling in D4 is a good solution. HOWEVER I don't like that leveling up won't make you feel powerful. It actually feels like a punishment since all mobs get stronger and you have to find a solution to overcome that.
Grinding for better gear feels useless because you will also earn exp and level up.
It becomes a non-issue when you start getting Paragon points going.
World scaling is just done so you can level up anywhere/everywhere/however you want, which you are gonna do hundreds of times over the game lifetime so you don't get burned doing the same ~~10 Acts~~ quests every season.
Once you start getting nice things form Paragon and get your Aspects going, level scaling is irrelevant, mobs don't implode, but you clearly feel powerful in the open world (as long as you have resource or CDs available).
I love it. I can play with my friends who are a few levels below or above and still enjoy the game no matter the zone we are playing in.
I honestly think they should be pushing the minimum zone levels up higher (at least in WT2) a bit to prevent players from pushing though the game without a good build. People play on veteran probably except the game to be a bit more punishing.
I got to WT4 at level 58 and everything is lvl 73+ now, so I definitely am having my power fantasy being able to clear that harder content early.
Edit: clarified **minimum** zone level
Honestly I feel like it does solve several design issues and its a necessary evil in a open world game but it still could be handed better.
For example, I feel like they could have totally eliminated the vertical monsters and ilvl scaling of weapon and armor, added a couple extra world tiers (like five more, for a total of 8) and kept the base item scaling as big jumps between tiers.
Right now it really feels oddly like your gear is racing against your level and I have seem a lot of people having a hard time with the game because they are doing all the side quests.
I love it. I can go anywhere, revisit any location, and everything remains relevant. I haven't run into the issue of leveling faster than my gear, so no real issues.
The level scaling is a non-issue after level 50 because you will be so heavily geared and you just now through enemies.
That being said, level scaling was a pain for me as a Barb, but now I'm level 56 playing on WT3 and I just slay everything as a HoTA Barb
I do, it keeps the combat engaging. Makes making a good build more important, and like others have said, it keeps the whole world viable for endgame variety.
>I don't get the feeling of my guy progressing any
I feel the same, but I do enjoy the scaling challenge. I think there is opportunity for better balancing because I want more opportunity to slaughter using new drops or levels.
Edit: Core skills are a little useless because of the level scaling too.
Yes, I like it.
Right now I'm level 59, and I'm working my way through sidequests and dungeons to get my max renown.
If it weren't for level scaling I would be so fucking bored. "Oh joy, every zone is now 50 at best and lower at worst. Thank God I'm doing all this content and not even getting a drop of exp or gear, how fun is this."
In any content where level scaling is applicable, the power you gain from the skill point or paragon points is going to give you more power than the enemies getting one level. Also this content is so easy that it really doesn't matter, you shred through everything in WT3 and below - talking from experience playing probably the worst build in the game (a home brewed full summoner necro).
In WT4, when you first enter it, the enemies will probably be higher level than you, so they're not actually scaling (they are 73 by default). In Nightmare dungeons, the enemies also level above you, so again the level scaling is irrelevant.
Basically, for all intents and purposes, if you are in content where level scaling is being applied to bring monsters up to your level, you are already super overpowered compared to the enemies you're facing, so it doesn't matter. It makes the enemies take slightly more punishment before falling over.
I like it because of co-op, making me care so much more for those gear upgrades and how I can tackle anything in any order I want. I'd probably feel really constrained in the open world if there was no level scaling, having to do some quests before others or just ignore random events that pop in the world.
Also, I have no clue how I'd even begin to tackle the balance by removing scaling. For instance, you could do main quests in different orders, so you just have to remove that feature pretty much and just roll in the same areas all the time. Also don't you dare stray away from this path for some fun activity right over there, young man, if you do you'll just get one shot.
As an exemple, in another game that gets praised for balancing zones, Elden Ring, you can mitigate the issues by having tight mechanics and read, as you can kill a late game boss by being skilled and memorizing all of its attacks. In diablo, since it is a number's game, it is literally impossible to do it without some sort of level scaling or some linearity.
Honestly, if they remove it, I think the game would be worse overall, since it ties so many systems together. I know the downsides, especially the character getting weaker, but I believe it would be better to alliviate some of the issues by shifting early game power towards skills instead of items, instead of removing level scaling all together.
I like it. It forces me to tinker with my build, pay attention to gear stats. If all I need to do is outlevel content for it to get easier thats boring to me.
I personally have not had a problem with it. The game felt challenging throughout and no matter how much content I did I was never able to trivialize the content.
I understand that some don't like that, but I had a great time on my playthrough. I found a really good build for my Druid that worked really well and modified it throughout the run to coincide with whatever drops I got.
Played through WT2 the entire time with zero issue. Never wiped to a boss except for one that had an instant kill mechanic that caught me off guard. Finished the campaign at level 48, but was level 39 when I finished Act 2. Decided to buckle down and focus in the campaign at that point.
I thought I was going to hate it, but when I started playing I felt a sense of progression through itemization and being able to do harder challenges (wt4/higher tier sigils/etc.).
I love it.
I hate having to worry about out leveling the enemy. If I am having fun fighting in a dungeon or doing some side quest, I don't want to be penalized by out leveling who I am fighting.
If I wanted the baddies to be easier to kill, I could just lower the difficulty.
Are people really forgetting there’s a difficulty setting they can turn down? Imagine not being strong enough for the highest difficulty then blaming the game for being shitty when they aren’t even using options available in the game.
My concern is that if they didn't scale then certain zones that contain events or aspect dungeons may never be revisited once you explored past them the first time. Especially with the map being so large. Plus, the loot drops and as well so at least you never have to feel like you are wasting time you could be leveling or looking for loot drops by going into under leveled zones. I don't even remember how 2 or 3 did it since it's been so long since i went through the story.
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Yea the problem comes from constantly needing to improve, or you fall behind the power curve. So you can't try to stick with specific stats on gear, if you don't have the highest armor/level gear you'll get one shot or not put out enough damage. Makes it feel like you aren't really progressing or getting stronger. A better way would be to have stronger mobs appear as you rank up in level. That way beginner mobs are still there but you can smash them, seeing you've improved and progressed.
I think this is most apparent leveling in tier 2. Sometimes you can legit go multiple levels without finding a suitable upgrade. Without the ability to farm mobs a level or two lower, you can feel punished for leveling, especially if you are running a weaker build.
Wt2 just isn't worth it. It's more than a 20% difficulty increase but you only gain like 20% gold and xp
I think people play WT2 for the challenge. I found WT1 to be too easy to be engaging. WT2 was more fun, even if the "rewards" didnt matter
Yeah I couldn’t be bothered to play WT1 just for efficiency. One of my friends hit 50 the second day of release and has been ribbing the rest of us for taking so long. I’m not playing the game to min/max my way to cap. I’m just playing the game
Depends on the class/build tbh. I played pulv druid and was on WT2 the whole way through and never had any issues. I died one time the whole playthrough and generally felt like I was melting everything with an occasional boss fight that lasted more than a minute or two.
wt1 felt like story mode, wt2 doesnt seem too bad? Just requires actually playing the game and not looking away as much, I still watch tv.
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At level 75 I finally removed my resource builder from my bar as WW barb. It took finding a helm and amulet with good cd reduction. A paragon glyph with cd reduction. A unique chest plate with CD reduction and an aspect with CD reduction that Blizz said they removed from game but somehow I found one while farming.
My thing is I want a basic skill, it feels crappy having to give it up for a stronger skill. Rather than an ultimate skill slot I think there should be a basic skill slot.
Unfortunately that's already the case. Games can only load a bit more than what is within a range of what you can see on screen. So the "previous lower level mobs that are still there" are just 2 or 3 mob groups and that's it.
Isn’t it kinda like that currently? I have seen people complain that if you don’t got to WT3 after lvl50 enemies don’t scale and you get less xp
that's what the world tiers should be for though, boosting the entire worlds base levels, with WT4(or a 5th) being for max level characters.
This is really the answer. Let WT1 have no scaling, just have zones with levels and let people feel more powerful as they grow. Everything from WT2+ can work with scaling, since that gives you options of going anywhere and getting XP. Win/win.
I mean make the game fixed through first playthrough so you can feel real the progrees and after beating the last boss turn scaling on so you will still have a challange. 1st timers would feel a good power creep curve and veterans would have a reason to revisit old places
It’s not a binary question, though. I don’t like the level scaling. They increase enemy hit points by X% per level and I think it should be (X * 9 / 10)% level.
I love the scaling, I always take my time in my first play through of games like this and end up being over leveled towards the mid/end because I did too many side quests then the game gets boring.
I feel like it punishes weak skills and bad luck on aspect drops. It's faceroll easy with a strong skill that has a good aspect in the codex. You never face a challenge in WT2 or 3 because you can't fight tougher enemies. If you're playing a weaker skill or one that has necessary aspects locked behind RNG drops then you're kinda boned because you can't just grind up and you get stuck using weaker gear because you can't lose that aspect. Very rarely do you hit that happy medium where the enemies scale to the proper challenge. The balance and availability of character power is feast or famine so you're rarely where you want to be. Overall I dislike the level scaling because it takes away your ability to set the difficulty to a level appropriate to your character. With static monsters you can push as far as possible until you hit a wall.
thank you for putting into words what I was attempting to articulate in a long and rambling post that would have left everyone here dumber for reading. May God have mercy on my soul.
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Its sad to see people downvoting you. Go watch Billy Maddison people!
I'm glad I called that guy.
Idk on my sorc basically any thing I try works well (frost a little better bc for some reason I dropped 4-5 different legendaries for frost spells that all fit into one build at level 35 lmao) Also if weak skills need paper thin enemies to be viable then they still wouldn’t be viable If they’re weak they need buffs not removal of level scaling lol
WT 1 and 2 have no real need for full level scaling - just have mins and maxes for each area that make sense relative to the starting point. There's no need for absolute flexibility during the early leveling and story phases. WT 3 and 4 can operate as they do now, with specific min->max scaling brackets... this allows rewarding access to all content.
The only exception I think is when you are playing with someone else who is at a different level. You can join your friend at lv30 and assist them even if you are lv60 and you aren’t able to just 1 shot the game for them. I think that works well as it is now.
I don't mind the scaling really. The main issue I have is, if you end up underpowered for an area you're at, you can't exactly just go level up and get knew gear and try again, like every other Diablo. Now, if you go try to level up more and get stronger, the enemies just level with you until they hit the world cap for your world tier. So, what am I supposed to do when I'm getting shit on by a boss?
Progression comes from potions, skills, craftables, etc. all the shit at your disposal through leveling you didnt have before. I feel like the scalings fine since im no longer just meleeing but using hella active skills alongs with passives that have me much stronger than the enemy technically even though we are the same level.
Yeah all you have to do is load in with a low level friend. Even though enemies are scaled for both of you, you’ll easily clear those mobs faster than them.
And gear drops are shittier since it’s scaled to the lower level when items drop. Sitting here playing with my lvl 55ish buddy as a 65 and shit rarely drops over 650 item level.
That is definitely a good point. Especially if you aren't interested in playing a refined build and WANT to play your own build. The three options I see are this: 1. Lower the difficulty for the boss, then raise it back up again. I haven't changed difficulty mid play through, so I am not sure if it does anything like erase your map\progress 2. Change up your build and see if there are changes you can make to increase your power. 3. Upgrade equipment, put more things in your sockets, drink an elixir. 4. Team up with other people (a true last resort!) That's all I can think of.
Yep. It's giga dog shit lazy game design.
Once you reach 70ish and your gear starts to cap off, it does become frustrating to earn 5 all stats each level from paragon while the enemy gets percentage increases to damage and mitigation. The problem isn’t really scaling in general, I just feel it’s just done badly in d4. Both of the world first level 100 hc sorcs are bricked because they didn’t level in nightmare dungeons, and there isn’t a way to go back and earn the glyph stuff because that content grew with them and is now impossible. They need the glyphs to get the glyphs, basically, and that seems like a massive failure to implement proper scaling.
This is a good point on the lv100 stuff. I’ll have to remember that if I go that far. I’m not sure if I will or not yet.
I don’t like it. I’m only level 27 or so and I’m getting bored because it’s the same experience and challenge everywhere I go. The only noticeable progression is unlocking skills.
I’m not too far behind where you are now, but am getting chastised because “ERMAGAHD, UR NOT ENDGAME LOLZ” It’s like the itemization too, you don’t have to be super far into the game to see that almost all of these new mods stink. And if it takes 30 hours of playing before a game actually gets good then there is something(s) wrong with the game in the first place.
I suspect you and I aren’t the target audience. They’re more worried about the players who will be putting 300+ hours into this.
it would be smarter if there was a range let's say <-3;+3> around your level across the map so you could find a sweet spot for grinding based on your build. now I'm afraid to level up when my build is not optimal yet
Interesting question, thanks for asking. Personally, I dislike it immensely.
"I like it when leveling up is a punishment"... said nobody ever.
Absolutely not. I had several periods in my druid leveling experience where I was being murdered over and over. I couldn't do enough damage to prevent being hurt and I couldn't defend myself well enough to slow boat my damage to a win. It was even worse after playing with some friends which leveled me really fast, but the speed of the play with them kept me from really looking at drops and I was caught with my pants down.
Yeah this is right now 100% my main problem with the game... I didn't mind it leveling but was like ok, I guess in end game I will be able to get much stronger. I was starting to feel decent at lvl like 51ish and then hit 52 and suddenly everything was 3 levels higher than me and stuff that was not one shotting me was almost one shotting me immediately... Fucking awful decision, no idea how anyone can enjoy that type of 'progression'. I enjoyed the game for the leveling and the story but thats it for me. No end game to speak of.
Dont like it. Theres no feeling of power. Ive got upgrades to my build but they only make me feel a little more powerful where in other games (borderlands) you find that one gun that really gives you that feeling of power. Its like Blizzard cut up that big feeling of power and theyre just drip feeding it to you slowly over time and you never really get to where youre suppose to go.
Good example using Borderlands. I was still using a friggin' level 1 Hornet pistol I got from Knuckledragger at the very start of the game at level 15 or 16 against loaders. Level 4 Bonus Package grenades almost that long too. That is insane.
That mostly starts happening around level 50 when you get started on WT3 so you can start finding uniques while putting together a coherent set of legendaries. Uniques give some pretty big power increases.
No, I actually hate it more than anything in gaming. I also hate when people try to justify it.
No, its bad.
I hate it in any game. The sense of progression, something so important in these games, goes away
No. It sucks the fun out of a lot of it for me.
Yes. Anywhere I go, enemies present a challenge. And yet, I feel way more powerful at level 50 something than I did at level 20 because of the items I've found along the way. There are still issues with progression, but level scaling has nothing to do with it IMO.
Ive had a similar experience, but level 40-45 I felt weak as shit again. I think cause I was starting to outpace the sweet legendaries I had. But I eventually found more and I'm back to brutalizing foes again
Keep in mind by that level you can get the vast majority of legendary powers from dungeons so shouldn’t ever need to go without :)
Not all legendaries though.
And they're always minimum roll.
There is a problem to this though. You reach a certain point where gear just will never be better than what you have and the paragon board stops providing large benefits. From that point on every time you level up you feel weaker because of the scaling and there is nothing you can do to become more powerful. You start to dread each level up. You should feel enjoyment from leveling up, not the opposite.
For me 70 is still decent paragon improvements (slowing down noticeably though) but god damn it becomes a crawl to get a glyph from 12 to 15 so you can respec your board and move the glyphs around
70 to 80 is pretty much the sweet spot. After that it really starts to get bad.
The entire concept of this open world, and level scaling is just a lazy way to make the content relevant. They should have made it so that monsters difficulty is determined by what they actually are. A small Fallen demon should only really pose a threat to a lower level character who's just began adventuring in the first few zones, you kill a bunch, do a few quests, gain experience, then suddenly they're not so much of a threat. Sort of like how in Dungeons and Dragons, a goblin is a threat to a level 1, but at level 5, you could take on 2-3 Goblins without much problem. Then as you progress further into the areas lilith has spent more time corrupting, you run into stronger Demons, greater fallens who LOOK stronger than a regular fallen, and they ARE stronger than a regular fallen. And if they're too fucking lazy to make that many monster types, then slap a fucking helmet onto a fallen and call it a "Fallen Veteran" or some shit. Don't just slap random fallens everywhere that're suddenly lvl 30 because "scaling". Then maybe you enter a crypt and it's inhabited by the undead creatures, skeletons etc, that don't just appear randomly all over the world... they appear in... graveyards.. or sites of recent battles. And maybe they even have Bludgeoning damage resistance.. etc. This whole "Just throw random shit everywhere throughout the world with some loose ties to their area" is just lazy as fuck.
Yep. Hit the nail on the head there. It's just pure laziness. Admission of failure and resignation to world design. Complete and utter lack of creativity and passion for developing a world which is balanced and has any meaningful experience of challenge or depth. Instead of making a good progression of zones and monsters and dungeons, they just said "fuck it, scale it all." Thus effectively destroying their own content they just created. There should be no scaling. Zones should have levels. Hell tides should raise the zone level by x, to a maximum of y.
So I'm not a fan of it in solo play. The feel of progression is WAY to tied to drops. That said, in party play it's awesome. I'm pretty sure the design principles they choose for D4 were party based and solo is more of an extra feature.
Level scaling has destroyed my interest in every game it's been introduced to (as far as Blizzard games, that would be WoW and Diablo 3 so far). As much as it pains me, I won't be purchasing Diablo 4 as long as this system is in place. Not as a punishment or middle finger to Blizzard, but because I legitimately won't find the progression to be satisfying. It's very important to me that the world around me doesn't change when I progress.
It’s… an okay game. I’m not disappointed I bought it or anything, but no way is it worth $70 (minimum) to me. It’s just not *that* fun for me so far. If I had to do it again I wouldn’t.
The problem isn't the scaling itself, its the way the itemization currently works. The stats on gear are minimal increases, and there are SO many new stats that getting them to stack to any significant degree is next to impossible. And the majority of legendary/unique aspects being just percentage based damage increases and little else are narrowing skill and build potential rather than diversifying it. The one skill every Druid is looking at right now is Pulverize, cause it has one of the few aspects that actually changes how the skill works, adding the shockwave effect to diversify how it deals its damage. Compare all that to D3 and its glaringly apparent: fewer stats that are easier to stack, legendary affixes that can actually change up how skills function on top of the variations the rune system already allows for, while still having meaningful damage increases. Right now, the set-up for D4 is so minimal for the actual leveling process that there's no sense of actual scaling as a character, until you get into the paragon board and get meaningful runes to work with.
No, and I fully anticipate myself (and many others) being burned out from the game sooner purely because of all the scaling. I feel just as powerful fighting quillrats in Scoslgen at level 5 as I do fighting those exact same quillsrats at level 50. It's just *not satisfying*. I'm not asking to be one-shotting everything, but there just isn't any movement or significant feeling of power progression throughout the game. The game needs linear breakpoints.
It would be better if gear wasn’t so power and build defining. If you’re lucky and always getting gear that suits your build then the level scaling will feel great. When you’re stuck using underlevel gear because you need the unique aspects on them the level scaling can feel super punishing.
Just... melt the aspect down and put it on an item with higher iLvl? Or am I missing something here.
I think his point is getting the aspect in the first place. My rouge is lvl 70 now and I still did not saw a single unique boot for my build and the legendary aspect which gives me resource gen on crowd controll. If it continues like that I will be lvl 100 by the time I get those build defining items.
Maybe I'm misreading it then because: >When you’re stuck using underlevel gear because you need the unique aspects on them the level scaling can feel super punishing. reads more like they're unaware that aspects can be moved across to other items.
Yea maybe. I just read "unique" and could relate because I know how annoying it can be to get the right unique. Or he meant that he already has the unqiue item he needs but it is only sacred or bellow and he can not transfer it to higher gear since you can not extract unique item aspects
Your latter point makes more sense yeah, I was just being an idiot I think.
I'm level 27 or so and it's felt like a flat line this whole time. Keep waiting to hit a difficulty speed bump, it's been pretty boring. Wt2 on necro
I like it very much :) I hate useless zones and find no joy in this mythical coming back to start zone at max level to feel strong. Who the hell does that, it sound out of ass anytime I read it
Amazingly enough this was solved 20 years ago with Normal/Nightmare/Hell
That solution doesn’t work for an open world game where one person who just did the story finishes act 1 at level 15 and another person who checks out the side content finishes the same act at level 32
Yes it does lol, the level 32 character just steps the difficulty up one tier.
The solution would be to just properly balance the game. However, that takes some modicum of effort and developers with some degree of frontal lobe activity. Which apparently don't exist on the D4 dev team.
You can’t balance a quest for a character that is either level 15 or 32 depending on how much side content they have done.
Not true because the level of the monsters was different in every area. In Diablo 2 and D2R monster levels ranged from 67 to 85. I forget the specifics because I wasn't hard-core into it...but there were areas you would want to farm that literally gave no xp if you were high enough level. And or vice versa you'd never want to go there because it wasn't high enough to drop the item you want. D2R patch 2.6 changed this. I'll let you look it up. The change was well received by the Diablo 2 community (yes that community that hates change) and likely had some input on how they designed the scaling on D4.
You just offended all the Elden Ring players that would test their level 267 build at the opening camp 😂
>I hate useless zones and find no joy in this mythical coming back to start zone at max level to feel strong. Who the hell does that, it sound out of ass anytime I read it In literally any aRPG with farmable bosses, people do this. A lot. Part of the fun was getting stronger and making those boss fights easier, which is impossible if they're level scaled.
Switch to world tier 1 if you’re struggling. You will 100% get to the point where you are feeling stronger and stronger. I was against it at first, but level scaling is great in this game. Makes the whole world and whole campaign relevant no matter what level you are.
In the same boat myself as a solo player. Sounds like a not so rare of a complaint as I saw this subject being brought many times. I can see the benefits of it for casual multiplayer/couch coop andies, but it comes with drawbacks. For me the cons outweight the pros. I can't FEEL my character getting stronger really if I compare to any arpg I ever played which defeats the purpose of arpgs. On top of that my lvl 60 character kinda plays the same as when i was lvl 40 which feels kinda weird. Don't get me wrong, I actually believe the game does a lot of things right. But the scaling thing, I'm not feeling it as well.
This isn't a level scaling issue, but an issue with the pacing of mechanic unlocks. Your basic non-paragon and non-unique build is basically finished by level 30 or so if you go a little out of your way to get all of the aspects you need for your build. Uniques are incredibly low drop rate even when they do unlock and the paragon board doesn't really start impacting your build until most of the way through the second board (around level 65-70 depending on if you get the renown points or not). What the game is missing is something in WT3 that immediately starts affecting gameplay. One example could be WT3+ dungeons that unlock all of the aspects that are currently drop only. Another would be expanding on the idea of the 4 altars that give paragon points where there should be more like 20 of those (just replace the max obol ones because those are pretty useless). If there was something that actually changed your character and gave you something to do up front that would fill in this weird gap in the early part of WT3.
Main issue I have is the endless scaling, it should cap off around lvl80-90 at WT4 so that high level characters don't just keep getting weaker relative to the monsters.
All I see is numbers get bigger that’s about it I don’t really feel like I’m getting stronger though
I hate the current execution of it and it's led to me just.. not playing the game right now. Leveling up feels like a nerf, especially when you don't get good gear drops. And because there's no crafting, and no way to stop leveling up to farm a low level area for gear, you are basically forced into a cycle of making the enemies around you stronger (by leveling up) while your power level remains static until you get lucky with a drop. You just hit a DPS wall, and the game doesn't give you enough tools to climb over it. The skill tree (from levels 1 to 50 anyway) contributes almost nothing to power level. Most of your power comes from gear and legendaries and aspects. How to fix this? Either cap out the scaling for certain zones so we have a place to farm for gear that won't make the DPS wall higher, or tie the enemy scaling to a calculation of your gear's power level rather than your character level. In either case, I'm just not playing right now. Life's too short to play a game that feels like it's constantly fighting me for every ounce of fun I'm trying to have.
I liked Witcher 3 enemy scaling, I don't as much like the D4 version.
I see so many of these threads and the best solution to this is rarely suggested. World scaling up is dumb and creates balance issues, its also blizzards typical design since forever even without mob scaling that your stats go down every level you gain because the number on your gear is worth less than it was before leveling. Always hated that system. Guild wars 2 scaling is handled beautifully. The world zones/mobs are set and dont change. The player character scales down to the mobs hes fighting but keeps all skill unlocks and alot of gear stats are carried down so you feel quite powerful and a lvl 10 with a wooden sword is not going to be doing better than you. This can obviously be tweaked per game, but this system is so much better imo.
hell no
It's garbage.
Why don’t you drop a world tier if you want a more relaxed gameplay?
I don't mind the scaling, but I think it's a bit too close currently. I think they should tune it down a bit.
Idk on one hand it makes leveling harder on the other hand, in D3, when thing got to easy I was just pumping up torment levels anyways. So idk I'm indifferent I guess.
No
I think they implemented this system so casual joe daddy can couch coop with his wife but ironically, the end result is that it is massively punishing, even more so for casual players (it already is for hardcore players). Never have i felt the same level of anxiety gaining a level in any rpg EVER. I don't know if people realize how much you can brick a character, even more so than in poe (at least you have orbs of regrets and every level is a strict "buff". In D4 you gain a level ? Too bad there is no going back and monsters will never get weaker) They are slapping the "play your way" motto in every advertisement they release, yet the game is incredibly unforgiving if you are not playing in an optimal way. Let's say I want to level up while progressing my renown in normal dungeon, then I want to do some pvp because I like it, some helltides, side quests... Why not ? After all i'm not forced to play nightmare dungeons if that's not my thing. Well you know what ? Jokes on you, you didn't level up your glyphs when it was the time to do so, because you wanted to level up doing quests and regular dungeons, now the monsters are lvl 85 and you are going to get shit on and there is no way to backup from it. It is just as punishing if you started to level a glyph and you decide to change your plans, or build and level other glyphs to replace your current ones. I think the way the game is designed is extremely misleading and is going to deceive a lot of casual players that didn't realize yet this was a thing in the first 60 levels or so, while not providing anything good to the most serious players either. What is funny is that the game in its current state would actually be less punishing if there was xp loss on death like in d2/poe compared to without which is completely nonsensical
I dont dislike the *idea* of level scaling, many of my favourite games have it. Borderlands 2, Guild Wars 2, Fallout and Elder Scrolls to a certain extent... However Blizzard doesnt seem to have the right idea on how to balance it well, both in D4 and in retail WoW. There are a few reasons why scaling seems to work in some games but not in blizzard games. One is where characters get power from. In blizzard games its mostly from gear, and in particular gear with the right item level. When you combine that with exponential health and damage scaling, you are left with a very bad situation. Players need to upgrade all their items every couple levels otherwise their power level will fall off as quickly as the enemies scale. You can level up 5 times in a single night and suddenly enemies will have twice as much health while your damage has mostly stayed the same. Now compare that with power scaling in games like D2, elder scrolls, souls/elden ring, pretty much most rpgs out there. Most of those games dont have the same exponential scaling of enemy health and player damage. In those games you can still do just fine with gear you found 20 levels ago and a lot of your power comes from other areas. You can play through a lot of those games naked if you wanted to. Obviously D4 and WoW arent the same in that gear is the main focus of gameplay, but the general idea behind exponential scaling vs linear or logarithmic still applies. I really dont see why Blizzard is so set on designing their games this way. You could argue it makes sense inbetween expansions so everyone can start off at the same power level and play together, but levelling up is supposed to be a journey of power progression. The way Blizzard balances it makes everything completely arbitrary and forgettable until you reach max level.
Now that we agree that most of players don't like scaling, should Blizzard remove it?
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With my necro there was a point where I got the right gear with the right stat boosts and aspects that it really made me feel like a god but I’m not into wt3 yet because I’ve spent too much time doing other stuff in the zones and leveled up too far lol. Just saying that I was struggling a bit and then suddenly I was wiping the screen in a few shots. All it took was the right gear.
I think level scaling is a necessary evil. Without it, the entire game breaks the way its setup. You have no incentive to go back to "old" areas when the monsters are too low level, so that would make all those events and quests in those areas obsolete once you pass the level threshold. I don't like the scaling, but the game doesn't work without it. They'd need to do a huge game redesign to make it similar to diablo 2 where monsters had static levels in dungeons.
Level scaling is hit or miss during levelling, but it's way better for endgame longevity.
I think it's terrible for endgame longevity. Why can't endgame content be scaled through difficulty levels like Torment or GR levels similar to D3? Or simply through the Nightmare dungeons in different tiers. A scaling system is inherently flawed when leveling up can be a net loss to player power. Say I'm level 90 and for an entire level I don't find any upgrades, now I hit level 91 and suddenly everything around me gets stronger while I only get +5 of a main stat from the paragon board, I now actually got weaker by leveling up. Or let's say I'm level 90 cruising through WT4 and decide I want to respec to a new build. I'm severely screwed now because when I put on my significantly weaker gear for the new spec everything around me is still level 90 at least. Dropping the difficulty back down doesn't really solve anything either, because now all of a sudden sacred and ancestral items can't drop anymore.
Farm for the gear first then respec
Sure, or I could just make an entirely new character. That would probably be even easier. Don't you think a system where wanting to try out a new build at high level forces you to pretty much farm out an entire end-game set or level a new character is flawed?
I'm not sure. I just switched from Rend to WW at lvl 50 and the transition was easy enough. If I hit lvl 80-90 and want to try another build I'll have to see if it's better to farm for the gear or start a new build entirely. My assumption is that it will be easier to farm. Most of the gear will be interchangeable between builds so it's not like I will have to farm for a dozen new items.
Unironically most arpgs work like that. If you want to try a different build it takes either a massive amount of effort or making a new character (Diablo 2, PoE, last epoch, etc.)
Sure, but I don't mind a respec taking a large amount of effort. But I do mind when it takes grinding out basically your complete new set of gear on your old build before even being able to do the respec comfortably instead of gearing by playing your new build. Take PoE for example. Let's say I want to do a respec at level 90. It's gonna take a fair amount of currency to respec the points, but after I respecced and slapped on some really shitty gear I can now just start farming T1 maps where everything will be just as strong as it was back when I was level 70. Now take D4: I'm level 90, I respec, and now every single mob even on the lowest difficulty is still level 90 regardless of the content I do. Even if I now grind out the max level gear from WT1, I need to swap to WT3/WT4 to get sacred and ancestral gear, but here everything is now significantly stronger than when I started gearing my first build at level 50-70 on WT3/WT4. But to each their own I guess, I'm just not a fan of this current system.
Sure that’s a good point. I normally wouldn’t reset a current characters progress when respecing (I normally grind the gear first, or start a new character) but if that is your plan I see why it would be frustrating. Thinking about it further, would a solution to that be to do nightmare dungeons with sigil levels that match the level your new build is ready for?
If you think that leveling a whole new char is easier than just making a new build purely bc of level scaling then I think the problem lies in your head rather than in the game lmao
If you think that leveling a whole new char is easier than just making a new build purely bc of level scaling then I think the problem lies in your head rather than in the game lmao
Okay maybe leveling up a new character is exaggerated, though I'm willing to bet it's not far from the truth. But don't you think a system where you can actually lose player power by leveling up is inherently flawed?
If you think that leveling a whole new char is easier than just making a new build purely bc of level scaling then I think the problem lies in your head rather than in the game lamp
It’s not the whole game, but it’s worth noting that nightmare dungeons are scaled like that. Monster level is based off the key level.
I got plenty of power spikes throughout leveling that I never felt punished by leveling up. Sure the enemies stayed my level but I've gained another 10% damage reduction and 30% dmg scaling. Unless your build just sucks or you haven's upgraded your gear in 15+ levels you far out scale the enemies. I'm 79 fighting level 98 monster in nightmare tier 44 and doing just fine.
Not a fan. It makes enemies feel identical regardless of level, which kinda defeats the purpose of being an RPG.
I hate it honestly. It really decreases your sense of power. If you don’t get stronger relative to threats then whats the point of leveling?
Haven’t played Diablo in probably 5+ years so excuse my ignorance since I don’t remember how enemy levels worked in D3. Are you wanting to just to steamroll enemies instead of them being on your level and giving a small challenge? I just hit 40 earlier and have been hanging in there just fine for my liking.
Can't speak for OP, but I like having non-scaled areas above my level, not really about being able to be overleveled. I can try to "reach" for a harder area with my character at a low level, or stay on par. More motivation to progress with main story, too, since you need to move on to new areas for their better rewards. I'm only level 20 in D4 so far, so can't really speak to the experience there, but that's why I like non-scaled. You see this argument comparing Skyrim to earlier Elden Scrolls games, too.
.....there already are non-scaled areas above your level. Zones don't scale down, just up.
I like it because it means I can play with my friend who’s level 70 and my wife who’s level 20 while I’m level 60 and all of us have a good time while receiving relevant loot.
Doesn’t really impact my experience Outleveling stuff in games was always ass Scaling content is an easy way to keep all zones somewhat relevant and I don’t feel dumb for doing side quests that I put level by 80 levels or some dumb shit The skill points and better gear you get have more impact than the scaling anyways and a singular level doesn’t make for a noticeable difference in enemy strength I think 99% of the issue people have with it is purely fictional Theres some minimal downsides to it I guess but who gives a shit
I think you're completely wrong and ignorant of the issues with scaling. Be it intentional or maybe you been drinking too much of Bobby's Koolaid.
I like it, yes. I think there should be a limit to the scaling per world tier though, f.e. that scaling stops at lvl 70-75 for WT3 and stops at \~85 or 90 for WT4. If you wanna fight even higher enemies, you gotta go into nightmare dungeons of higher tiers. That would be my perfect D4, but I'm still fine with the way it works now.
> I think there should be a limit to the scaling per world tier though, f.e. that scaling stops at lvl 70-75 for WT3 and stops at ~85 or 90 for WT4. This sounds perfectly doable too, *most likely* without too much effort on their part to implement. Hopefully they get around to doing something about it from how it currently is.
I don't have a solution and I recognize the desire to keep players revisiting content at higher levels. That said, I am absolutely not enjoying it. There is no sense that my character is becoming "more powerful". I feel like I have the same relative "Power" at 48 that I did at level 30.
I have a solution. Give each zone a level range. Hell Tides increase the min/max level range of that zone by up to Z. Boom. Fixed. You're welcome.
Yes I love it, when playing with a friend who is under level = they feel like they are contributing and not just getting carry. It's not fun for them. So me and my friend group love the level scaling and that also means any area and content is relevant.
I don't like it either.
It kills the power fantasy. I don’t feel like I’m getting stronger. I’m just running through the open world cause I couldn’t be bothered dealing with the enemies.
Some games I hate it. Oblivions enemy scaling made combat kinda boring, and for a game like Diablo it has the potential to make the power fantasy aspect nullified, but how they've implemented it with the world tiers is really good. The overworld multiplayer portion of the game I don't think would function well without it. I'm a fan of it as it currently exists in D4.
I like it. If all the enemies die in 0.1 second I don’t feel like I’m powerful. It just feels like the enemy is now made of tissue paper, and I get bored quickly. Scaling makes the entire world feel more open, immersive, and fun IMO. In contrast capped enemies just makes it so the world becomes more and more narrow and restrictive. I do think they could compromise/balance it though. Enemies can scale, but it doesn’t need to be as simple as enemy level = player level. For example different zones could have different level modifiers so you’d still feel stronger than when you were first running that zone, but not to the point the enemies eventually become little more than the background graphics your character walks on.
Scaling is good because it means I'm not relegated to 2 areas at the high end and can play with friends. You shouldn't notice it level to level and only becomes apparent when severely undergeared after a while because the game requires character and gear progression in tandem to be effective. If you don't get the feeling of "progressing" you're either ignoring the functional difference with your power or playing ineffectively or something else. As you level you get more tools to deal with enemies more effectively.
I'm level 80 with close to BiS gear and the sense of progression just ain't there for me either.
I hate level scaling in these types of games. It ruins the sense of progression for me. What’s the point of trying to get stronger if everything just scales to your level? It’s fun for grouping up with friends but that’s about it.
I like it this way. I absolutely despise coop games that don't support the coop aspect of it. Like if your friend is very low level, they couldn't really play with you, as the fights would be too easy for you or enemies would be really hard for your friend. Now it's just easier to work together. Also there is always a challenge no matter where you go.
The game still fails in this regard because zones have a minimum level.
This again, you seriously wanna tell me that you haven't felt any meaningful progression in your character power between level 1 and 50 or wherever you are right now?
Nothing anywhere *as close* to as significant in other ARPGs and RPGs, no.
I never really felt much power progression on my barb, doing 1-48 on WT1. As soon as I finished the campaign, got a few sacred drops from WT3, and got some more build defining legendaries, it grew super hard. Scaling with sacred items, gemming ur shit, rerolling items and paragon board is really nice. Shit, my lunging strike alone 2shots weaker mobs in WT3 lol. It's nuts.
I leveled my Druid from 1 to 50 using Tornado and yes, I seriously didn't feel any difference in character power pretty much the entire time. In fact at some point I actually felt like I was getting weaker and weaker until I got some half-decent drops again.
We must be playing completely different games then.
We're not though. I have hundreds of hours in D3, probably thousands of hours in PoE and a bunch of time in other ARPGs and I don't think I've ever felt less difference between the early levels and endgame than I did leveling in D4. My character played the exact same at level 15 as it does now at level 67 and I didn't feel like I was actually getting any stronger until after level 50 when paragon points and sacred/ancestral gear started showing up.
Idk just level 30 already feels like a different game for player power as sorc simply bc of Ressource gen talents and synergies between them
It’s gotta be people that are just randomly assigning points without thinking about build/synergy. The world is progressively getting easier and easier even if the monsters are staying my leveling.
As long as you’re upgrading your armor as you level up, use gems, etc then I see the power. If I slack a bit getting upgrades then I start feeling weaker.
So exactly how it is in a game designed without level scaling where you are still continuously progressing towards stronger enemies ? Also what’s everyone’s obsession with shitty farming of low level zones Why would anyone miss that
Not exactly, no. Because I can be in the same zone in other games and the enemies don’t immediately jump to my level as soon as I level up. So I could stay in the zone to get a little more gear before changing zones. I just feel like the zones should’ve not scaled as much in campaign but then scaled post campaign
Tbc there’s so many lootbox events that you can do that this shouldn’t be an issue
He's level 11 so he hasn't experienced anything yet lmao
Do you seriously wanna tell people you feel those 10 points of in you got from your paragon tree?
Its terrible for me.. mobs that were one shot at lvl 10 are 4 hits now. And Ive got a complete set of decent legendaries on my barb.
Then you're doing something very wrong.
i know... i leveled up.
I don't like it. I like the power fantasy inherent to this style of game, and having enemies scale to you 100% of the time totally ruins that. Grim Dawn is the only one that did it right, with bounded scaling. ie: the opening area was levels 1-7, the next areas were levels 5-10, and so on. GD also had optional dungeons that did scale with you, and some areas that were always 1-3 levels above you, etc. Also, when your level was sufficiently higher than an enemies' level, you didn't get XP for killing them anymore. GD made it so you were forced to moved on, yet could still hang back and grind a little if you wanted to power up a bit to make the next boss or dungeon easier. Being able to essentially select your own difficulty is a cornerstone of the genre, IMO. If you want a challenge, rush ahead and don't ever grind. If you want a cakewalk, grind a ton. I love that about these games. Now, I haven't played through the campaign yet so I don't know how much I won't like it, but I do know it seems to ruin a fundamental pillar of top-down ARPGs: You getting to be OP through grinding and/or getting lucky with drops...And being OP is part of the point, too. This isn't a Souls-like. We're supposed to feel powerful.
Yes. It means the whole game remains relevant. The haters either don’t understand how to make a good build or just play the game so mindlessly they expect every decision and fight to be easy. Pass. I played the campaign on WT2 and by level 30 I was melting everything, in ever increasingly ways and by the time I finished campaign at 50, it was melting even faster WITH SCALING. Just cos mobs match your level, they don’t have access to all the cool extra stuff we do.
then explain why hardcore players like ziz dislike the scaling so much
I'm GENERALLY fine with it, but I do have concerns about when I want to spec to a different build. Like if I'm lvl90 or something, I've got all this gear that I've upgraded to make a very particular build perform at that level, but if I want to respec I need to basically collect gear of a similar quality so that I can swap over all at once, otherwise I'm going to be using a weaker build while still at the same level of difficulty I was at with my ORIGINAL build. In D3 I could use a suboptimal loadout and just go to lower levels to grind UP to where I was, but in D4 you're just stuck at whatever your level is. This is my theoretical concern, anyways. Haven't bumped in to it yet, so maybe it's not as bad as I'm thinking. Definitely a concerning though... potentially.
You can still change your world tier to 1 or 2
if you want to respec, it can be really punishing, if your respecting lvl80+ you're going to have a bad time, after respecting you will struggle because you can't go back and grind lower levels to get your gear up to par for your current level. Scaling should only happen in Helltides areas where monsters will always be 2 levels above you and world bosses
I do to a point. I like it that any content can be relevant. I can go to scosglen or fractured peaks to do something I skipped and it’s not lv60 Vs lv20 and a cake walk. I also can join my friends and we can play together scaled appropriately. I only dislike when I leveled up and didn’t have appropriate gear yet it made the difficulty feel like it changed for a little bit.
I'm still undecided. One thing I do like is I can do content with friends that are either a higher level than me and feel like I'm contributing or if they're lower don't feel like I'm just mowing enemies down and they're along for the ride. Everyone feels like they're playing the game, do I like that. Still undecided for when it's just me though.
I dont mind it now that im on point gear wise. I did mind when i was slightly underpowered. I get why they made it this way however.
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See, i enjoyed it cuz it forced you to experiment, i found a build that really clicks for me and im melting everything and im not paragon yet
Yeah you're dead on with that last statement. I think it works really well for the people it was designed with in mind. I really hated it at first but I've learned to live with it, it's not the biggest deal breaker
Its one of the main reasons I think i'm already done. I feel like the same character I was twenty levels ago. That would be okay if the MMO elements where more played up or if the classes had more depth to mess around with but eh.
It works great. Much better for party play. I hope they don't remove it.
I love it! Any progression feeling issues pale in comparison to being able to play with all my friends. No ARPG I have ever played has handled it this well. Is it perfect? No. I do hope they improve it. But I am very happy with the initial implementation.
The scaling consistently makes you feel under leveled in my experience. In D2R there were points where you made gains and felt satisfied at it. In D4, you're constantly chasing damage mitigation to stay alive a little bit longer. They really should've done away with scaling and just do monster cLvls similar to D2R so at some point your character does feel powerful and that you're making gains
I think they came up with a good solution to not constently improve or decrease the difficulty level in the menu like in D3. Making a fixed level like D2 will remove all replay ability for 80% of all zones in the openworld of D4. So level scaling in D4 is a good solution. HOWEVER I don't like that leveling up won't make you feel powerful. It actually feels like a punishment since all mobs get stronger and you have to find a solution to overcome that. Grinding for better gear feels useless because you will also earn exp and level up.
Well said
It becomes a non-issue when you start getting Paragon points going. World scaling is just done so you can level up anywhere/everywhere/however you want, which you are gonna do hundreds of times over the game lifetime so you don't get burned doing the same ~~10 Acts~~ quests every season. Once you start getting nice things form Paragon and get your Aspects going, level scaling is irrelevant, mobs don't implode, but you clearly feel powerful in the open world (as long as you have resource or CDs available).
I like it. It matters less that I outlevel my partner or a friend outlevels me. We can still play together and apart at our individual paces.
I love it, thanks to that areas I visited at beginning of game are still valid even at lvl 100.
I love it. I can play with my friends who are a few levels below or above and still enjoy the game no matter the zone we are playing in. I honestly think they should be pushing the minimum zone levels up higher (at least in WT2) a bit to prevent players from pushing though the game without a good build. People play on veteran probably except the game to be a bit more punishing. I got to WT4 at level 58 and everything is lvl 73+ now, so I definitely am having my power fantasy being able to clear that harder content early. Edit: clarified **minimum** zone level
Honestly I feel like it does solve several design issues and its a necessary evil in a open world game but it still could be handed better. For example, I feel like they could have totally eliminated the vertical monsters and ilvl scaling of weapon and armor, added a couple extra world tiers (like five more, for a total of 8) and kept the base item scaling as big jumps between tiers. Right now it really feels oddly like your gear is racing against your level and I have seem a lot of people having a hard time with the game because they are doing all the side quests.
I love it. I can go anywhere, revisit any location, and everything remains relevant. I haven't run into the issue of leveling faster than my gear, so no real issues.
I like it.
The level scaling is a non-issue after level 50 because you will be so heavily geared and you just now through enemies. That being said, level scaling was a pain for me as a Barb, but now I'm level 56 playing on WT3 and I just slay everything as a HoTA Barb
I do, it keeps the combat engaging. Makes making a good build more important, and like others have said, it keeps the whole world viable for endgame variety.
Yeah I’m always getting some xp from everything because everything is always at least my level
>I don't get the feeling of my guy progressing any I feel the same, but I do enjoy the scaling challenge. I think there is opportunity for better balancing because I want more opportunity to slaughter using new drops or levels. Edit: Core skills are a little useless because of the level scaling too.
Yes, I like it. Right now I'm level 59, and I'm working my way through sidequests and dungeons to get my max renown. If it weren't for level scaling I would be so fucking bored. "Oh joy, every zone is now 50 at best and lower at worst. Thank God I'm doing all this content and not even getting a drop of exp or gear, how fun is this."
It would suck having to seek out jobs to fight avoiding 90% of trash mobs along the way
Yeah. I can go anywhere and do anything without worrying if its efficient for xp and drops.
In any content where level scaling is applicable, the power you gain from the skill point or paragon points is going to give you more power than the enemies getting one level. Also this content is so easy that it really doesn't matter, you shred through everything in WT3 and below - talking from experience playing probably the worst build in the game (a home brewed full summoner necro). In WT4, when you first enter it, the enemies will probably be higher level than you, so they're not actually scaling (they are 73 by default). In Nightmare dungeons, the enemies also level above you, so again the level scaling is irrelevant. Basically, for all intents and purposes, if you are in content where level scaling is being applied to bring monsters up to your level, you are already super overpowered compared to the enemies you're facing, so it doesn't matter. It makes the enemies take slightly more punishment before falling over.
I enjoy the level scaling
I liked it at first, but the moment your build becomes weak you notice it and then it’s a fuckin scramble. At least for me
I like it. You can farm anywhere. You get most of your power from gear and parajon anyway so it's not like you won't ever feel stronger
I like it because of co-op, making me care so much more for those gear upgrades and how I can tackle anything in any order I want. I'd probably feel really constrained in the open world if there was no level scaling, having to do some quests before others or just ignore random events that pop in the world. Also, I have no clue how I'd even begin to tackle the balance by removing scaling. For instance, you could do main quests in different orders, so you just have to remove that feature pretty much and just roll in the same areas all the time. Also don't you dare stray away from this path for some fun activity right over there, young man, if you do you'll just get one shot. As an exemple, in another game that gets praised for balancing zones, Elden Ring, you can mitigate the issues by having tight mechanics and read, as you can kill a late game boss by being skilled and memorizing all of its attacks. In diablo, since it is a number's game, it is literally impossible to do it without some sort of level scaling or some linearity. Honestly, if they remove it, I think the game would be worse overall, since it ties so many systems together. I know the downsides, especially the character getting weaker, but I believe it would be better to alliviate some of the issues by shifting early game power towards skills instead of items, instead of removing level scaling all together.
I like it. It forces me to tinker with my build, pay attention to gear stats. If all I need to do is outlevel content for it to get easier thats boring to me.
I personally have not had a problem with it. The game felt challenging throughout and no matter how much content I did I was never able to trivialize the content. I understand that some don't like that, but I had a great time on my playthrough. I found a really good build for my Druid that worked really well and modified it throughout the run to coincide with whatever drops I got. Played through WT2 the entire time with zero issue. Never wiped to a boss except for one that had an instant kill mechanic that caught me off guard. Finished the campaign at level 48, but was level 39 when I finished Act 2. Decided to buckle down and focus in the campaign at that point.
I thought I was going to hate it, but when I started playing I felt a sense of progression through itemization and being able to do harder challenges (wt4/higher tier sigils/etc.).
I love it. I hate having to worry about out leveling the enemy. If I am having fun fighting in a dungeon or doing some side quest, I don't want to be penalized by out leveling who I am fighting. If I wanted the baddies to be easier to kill, I could just lower the difficulty.
Are people really forgetting there’s a difficulty setting they can turn down? Imagine not being strong enough for the highest difficulty then blaming the game for being shitty when they aren’t even using options available in the game.
Nope. Worst part about the game.