When a friend asked if I was going to buy Diablo 3 at release I reluctantly told him probably not. I'm not really sure why I wasn't very excited for it as I put more time into Diablo 2 than most MMOs I have played but it didn't. I did give the demo a try though and it convinced me to buy it. The gameplay was top notch for an ARPG and I figured it would be a good game to lose hours into with friends. I put over 200 hours into that game, and while they were fun the 'endgame' so to speak was a complete and total let down for many reasons. That is my Diablo 3 story, and I'm sure it is pretty similar to many others just like my buddy. Blizzard is not happy to hear that though it seems, and they are going to great lengths to get people playing again, and that brings us patch 1.04.
Before I begin the bashing, I would like to go over what Diablo 3 does do very well. The game engine is rock solid, the combat flow is amazing until end game, the classes are interesting and the skill system works very well even if it does need a balance pass. The environments are well designed and have tons of interesting goodies contained inside them. The first few difficulties are very enjoyable even if made a bit too easy especially because of the auction house. It strikes a similar cord games like God of War did, even if not the same exact genre. And those are the reasons it gained such praise from reviewers and even most players who honestly don't care about an 'endgame' from this type of game.
And many of the endgame flaws are being fixed with this patch. They are making it so grouping is more beneficial, balancing skills, making inferno difficulty monsters a bit closer in difficulty to each other, along with a bunch of other minor, inconsequential changes that will do very little, if not nothing, to expand the player count. While those who are still playing will benefit from these changes the endgame still has a flawed foundation that cannot be repaired in such a simply manner.
Diablo endgame is supposed to be about finding awesome items. But, thanks to the character and item system design this will not happen. Simply put each item can have up to 6! bonuses and several bonuses can only appear on specific item slots. In addition the characters all want the same things on their items with few exceptions. You want your defensive stats (vitality, resist all, etc), your primary stat (strength for a barbarian) and then whatever good stat that can appear on the item (+crit chance, socket, etc). The only version of an item upgrade is when it either has 'more' of the bonuses you want than the item you have, or a higher amount of what you want. In addition there is very little in the way of customization, you don't have to choose which offensive bonus you want from your helm as the only one it can even have, +crit chance.
To compare it to 3.5 Dungeons and Dragons let us assume your a fighter running around with a +1 magic sword (adds +1 to attack rolls and damage rolls). You rescue the princess and the king is about to give you your reward. Which one of these would you be more excited about being given a +3 sword that is the same as your old sword but adds a 3 instead of a 1! Or a +1 Flaming Burst sword that still grants the boring passive bonus, but also adds extra fire damage on each hit AND even more fire damage on a critical hit!
The prize needs to be interesting, exciting, different. A +3 sword is just a +3 sword, but a +1 flaming burst sword seems special. The name is special, its effect is special. It adds depth as it will not work against something immune to fire, but will hurt something immune to normal melee damage.
You cannot bring those types of items into Diablo 3. The core design of the game requires that you have enough survivability by stacking armor, resist, vitality, life on hit, etc along with enough damage from your primary attribute, attack speed, critical chance and critical damage. And those are all just things that for the most part have no flair or flavor.
In addition, because of the crazy way things stack diablo 3 has a tendency to get out of control. Both armor and resist lower the damage you take by a %, dodge has a chance to completely avoid damage, and block has a chance to reduce the damage by a flat amount that normally negates it. Life on hit provides life for each hit you make. So lets just say you reduce damage by 10% from both armor and resist, and gain 100 life on each hit and make one attack per second. That means monsters must deal [100*1.1*1.1] 121 damage a second to even make your health pool go down. So you get some gear and double those to 20% from armor and resist, 200 life on each hit and say 3 attacks per 2 seconds. [200*1.2*1.2*1.5] 432 damage a second would then be required and that is not counting dodge, life per second, lifesteal, block, or character skills. Damage scales even worse, you enter inferno at level 60 dealing 14k dps roughly. In the end you can get over 200k. This makes the gameplay either laughably easy when my barbarian can just stand there taking hits without any risk of death from one encounter, to the next monster five minutes later that kills him in 5 seconds.
The only way to fix that problem is a complete redesign of pretty much everything. Items, formulas, monsters, etc. And that is just not feasible.
And then you have that sense of 'progression' issue. That is why things scale like that in RPGs, so that you get that sense of progression. The problem is with diablo 3 the only way to get that progression is from either an item drop completely based on a random number generator that has 10 opportunities to not be nice, or to buy it from an auction house and you have yet another major problem.
So what should blizzard do? What would make me interested in a Diablo 3 endgame? That is really not the important question, instead what would make blizzard money and what does the majority of those who purchased the game want? They should play to the game's strengths while trying to fix the foundation. Fact of the matter is many people who purchased Diablo 3 were satisfied with it and had no intention of playing any type of 'endgame' with it. Still, this would be my rough plan if asked:
Release an expansion DLC ASAP. A single act about the length of the first 3. Two important things should be done with this expansion to help fix the foundation. This would be the 'dark' expansion.
1) Introduce a form of alternate advancement. This could work with the craftsmen system they already introduced. Add a new item slot and have a 'soulstone shard' item to go in it. This item would have several (6-10) sockets that new craftsmen recipies could fill. The soulstone shard itself could have various bonuses that should be interesting but the items you place inside it should be awesome. Exception based design style awesome. Say one will gain a charge each time you block, once you reach 10 charges it releases an AOE that debuffs all enemies. Another item that reduces the number of charges need to 6 and deals a large amount of damage if socketed with the first. Cool things.
2) Remove hell difficulty. No one wants to play the same content 3 times before they can hit endgame just stretch normal/nightmare to get you to 60. At the same time though have an option you can select that will increase the difficulty while also increasing your exp gain rate for those who want more challenging lower level play or to rush.
Release a second expansion with an expanded endgame. Add more events to the world, more random dungeons, possibly endless dungeons and those sort of things. Possibly even another act. This would be the 'light' expansion.
1) Add some form of 'prestige' class that you can gain another 20 or unlimited levels in. The prestige class would be one of the angel aspects your character chooses to align with. These classes could have a set of skills you can mix and match with those of your main classes along with possible passive bonuses or talents you could select. Just imagine the number of 'build' combinations they could then claim lol.
2) Redo the math. Reduce the number of potential bonuses on items, force meaningful choices in what you want out of your items. Put caps on some of the bonuses or just change how they work.
In the end what it comes down to is most people just want to play the game and the content. Once, maybe twice. If one wants to 'grind' for a +5 instead of a +4 they will play an MMO. Granted I also think that is one of the big problems most MMOs who are hemorrhaging players are ignoring as well. A simple small increase in numbers just isn't that exciting.
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