Unsurprising that one of the recent experience runs (Mira Eamon) was nerfed into oblivion. All this does is set the stage for nerfing the experience/gold rewards for any other quest (which again, will make them feel unrewarding again). And unfortunately, this doesn’t address the root problem; where the regular game play does not incentivize players enough to where they would just play the game for experience/rewards (instead, the focus is on re-running certain quests/events over and over again). The solution isn’t to continually nerf these as all that means at a macro level, is making the game play itself unrewarding again.
I mentioned quite awhile ago during beta (with the removal of Nephalem Valor) that there was no longer any incentive for dealing with elite packs especially as the difficulty setting is increased. This doesn’t mean that I’m advocating the return of that mechanic (I’m glad that it is gone); but there needs to be better incentives for doing elites (right now, they drop crap for all of that effort). Also, the key phrase used was “getting epic loot from killing monsters”. Yet it seems that many are getting more of their loot from destructibles, chests, and corpses. I’m also not advocating these be nerfed either.
During 1.0.x, it was a famine situation where it got to the point that it was no longer worth wasting time. The fact that there is now the potential again for such loot to come from these, means many are opening every chest, hitting every destructible, and therefore increasing the overall chances of those drops actually happening.
Relative to this however is balancing the rewards from monsters. Again, there isn’t that much incentive to engage elite packs now. They are by definition, more
challenging. Bolded for emphasis because challenges, should yield a higher probability of being given an appropriate reward outside of just a bit more experience and a higher chance to drop legendaries (that chance needs to scale appropriately).
Furthermore, the legendary drop chance is the same across all difficulty settings (the only exception are the few Torment specific legendary items). Thus doing high Torment for the time being is basically for experience/gold, personal challenge since I suppose they are sticking with the “it’s optional but not mandatory” line of thought they had with Monster Power (not exactly 100% true because they ended up performing another conflicting design when they tied key and organ drop rate percentages to MP settings).
Trash mobs are essentially cannon fodder for XP, but don’t yield that great loot either (relatively speaking even though they also have a lower chance of dropping legendary items). Taking all of this together, it isn’t surprising the data will end up looking skewed towards chest and destructibles farming.
As I mentioned in my prior post, these “issues” are a direct outcome of the linear design of the campaign mode (with it’s quest based objectives and associated rewards), and also the fact that I noted much earlier; that this development team is clueless when it comes to the whole issue of balancing the rewards, with the challenges/difficulties/risks. Their design of what constitutes a challenge/difficulty (primarily quantitative over qualitative ones) exemplifies a binary way of thinking (one or the other; nothing in between). The whole ubers system exemplifies how the reward (Hellfire Ring), is not that much of a reward for all that effort that one has to go through (low percentage drop rates for keys, low percentage drop rates of the actual parts, and then crafting that is subject to a high amount of RNG). Quests and events are supposed to offer rewards relative to challenges. In 1.0.x, the initial reward was okay, but after that, they were extremely unrewarding and laughably trivial. 2.0.x brought some meaning back to them.
But we’re only one week into the new patch, and the solution again is to nerf the hell out of those areas that were being run over and over again. Again, the developers don’t seem to have a grasp on their own design decisions, and how one can actually script out test scenarios of running simulations of various quest runs, that will show these kind of general numbers (in order to hit more appropriate experience numbers that are more in-line with playing the game normally; and once RoS is released, adventure mode). Guess what though, players are just going to move to the next best quest for the next two weeks before Reaper of Souls is released. Once adventure mode is available, this issue with campaign mode experience farming, is going to go away. But at what cost? Nerfs and more nerfs? There basically isn’t going to be any further incentive for many expansion players to revisit campaign mode if the rewards ends up becoming, unrewarding again in the campaign.
Oh, and I can guarantee they did not really think through the whole “guaranteed legendary drop for Diablo” with the reset quest option. Why? Because there are many ways to potentially short cut getting to that end point. Again, it is an issue of the linear design of the campaign. Just how many checks are they going to program into place for example to make sure, that clearing each quest, was actually done by playing through the quest? So how does playing co-op impact this? See what I’m getting at? There needs to be a check for each quest to make sure that it wasn’t short circuited by co-op play where someone else can open up each quest in rapid succession (get the checkpoint, move on to next one, kill key bosses in each act). Like I’m sure there will be a basic check to make sure that someone just doesn’t get invited to the Pinnacle of Heaven waypoint to short cut everything else in between (if that actually does end up working, I’m going to be shaking my head – because each quest before it, should be fully completed in order for the guaranteed legendary to take place).
Note: I’ve already tested the above a long time ago (like 1.5 years ago), and the way 1.0.x handled it, all I needed to do was open up the waypoint to Diablo, kill Diablo on that particular difficulty, and it would consider my entire progress for that difficulty, as being complete (didn’t matter if I hadn’t actually killed each end boss of each act). Likewise, opening up each quest and checkpointing/completing it, doesn’t take that long either. Which is why I’m wondering what checks they are going to put in place to prevent rapid quest reset/Diablo runs.
