Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen, I hope I find you enlightened by yesterday’s mini Diablo 3 RMAH Guide (information posted in Diablo 3 RMAH Mini Guide) or at least amused by my design ‘skills’ illustrated by that guide… Remember to get your hands on that guide, just sign up on the right of this post! It’s a fine, sunny day here in Ireland. Normally the even of the sun appearing in this isle of rain would be news worthy in itself but today there is better, more important information to digest! Information relating to Diablo 3 Difficulty Levels and Loot Quality. Bashiok posted this information within the past 24 hours in the official forums
This is may be a good a time as any to REVEAL TEH SEKRITS! that Inferno monster levels aren’t linear any longer. They get progressively more difficult. This was really a reaction to Inferno playtesting. Our original intent was to have a flat difficulty level where you could go wherever you want, farm for items, and it’d be no more or less difficult than any other area in Inferno. This caused a few inherent issues for us, though:
It just felt wrong. It didn’t feel right to be progressing through the game and have it stay pretty much the same difficulty the whole time. It felt like a letdown to get to the final boss of the game and it be no more difficult than the first.
There’s a wide variety of players out there and we wanted to make sure everybody had something to sink their teeth into. We expect that anybody with enough time and dedication will reach level 60. But the jump in difficulty to Inferno needed to be different amounts for different people. For the crazy people they need a HUGE ramp in difficulty, for a more “casual but still hardcore†audience you want an obvious but milder increase in difficulty. So for the crazy people who play non-stop they’ll hit Act I and get a challenge, but 1 month later they’ll still have something to work on (Acts II, III and IV). For the “hardcore-casual†they will reach level 60 later and not get brick walled when they reach Inferno. They can experience some “small victories†working on Act I with the dream of maybe someday reaching the later acts.
