This is what many are currently doing while waiting for Reaper of Souls to be released. With the better experience rewards given for quests/events, it isn’t very surprising to see players trying to find the fastest runs to maximize those gains. The Halls of Agony Level 3 Cursed Chest event was lucrative because of the unbalanced experience provided by the spawned mobs.
The thing is that this applies to many other quest/events in the game. And nerfing the experience given is not the way to go. Before, the experience rewarded from quests were pathetically low for max level characters. Now, they actually feel rewarding and makes re-running quests, a viable thing to do (more so if one utilizes the reset quest option, which provides the higher first time experience/gold bonuses sans initial legendary drops). In 1.0.8, Defiled Crypts (co-op MP10) was mainly what most were using to grind out Paragon levels. But that required initial prep time to basically get the most out of those runs.
With the new Paragon experience curve and changes to experience given by quests/events/monsters, leveling from 0-100 Paragon, is now fairly trivial. As of this posting, ever since patch 2.0.1 went live, I’ve gone from P88-104 (softcore) in less than 10 hours. For comparison, it took what seemed like nearly 2 hours, to go from 81 to 82 on live when I stopped (solo MP7 in Act II). I’ve put in less than 14 hours since the patch went live; rest of the time was leveling a new character to 60. I’ll need to put in around 20 hours on this character to hopefully get it decently equipped with all level 60 items; currently, only four items I have equipped (weapon, chest, amulet, and belt), were found at level 60. The following again is why I wanted to level from scratch; it’s easier to get the kind of eHP needed to do higher level Torment (toughness will be over a million once every slot is level 60).
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| New patch 2.0.1 character as of March 1 |
Some folks are back to running Mira Eamon again in Act I, others are running Crypts of the Ancient, while others are running Khasim Outpost in Act II. Basically, almost any mob heavy area or easy to get to quest/event, is going to be run over and over again. CotA runs are one of the best non-quest rewarding ones because the checkpoint gives a portal directly into the area. One of the best quest events though is the Khasim Outpost (Road to Alcarus quest for Lieutenant Vachem) because it is easy to get to and do (kill first bunch of deceivers in the cellar and then the rest in the outpost). On Torment VI, total experience from both the quest and killing those mobs can yield nearly 15 million XP/run (solo). At Paragon 100-200, this can yield around 1 Paragon level each 15 minutes (less if max/min and with far better gear and in co-op). The test runs I did during PTR/beta of just playing the game (not doing the above sort of runs), gave me a Paragon level at around 45 minutes. By comparison, running the Khasim Outpost (that one small Vachem quest) yielded me on average around 14 million XP each run (which can take around 60-80 seconds to complete).
Are these exploits? Of course not. It’s just an outcome of Campaign modes linear design. I’ve tested almost all of these runs and if players want to run these things over and over again, I have no problems with it (it’s just mindnumbingly boring to do). All this does however is highlight the larger core problem. The rest of the game, gives little incentives or rewards to just playing it the way it should be played. Thus it isn’t surprising that a larger subset of players, end up focusing on just finding those smaller sub-parts of the game, to run over and over again, in order to accomplish one of very few tasks; that being leveling (for Paragon) and potentially for legendary/set drops.
When I tested the reset quest option (during the tail end of PTR), and killed the Butcher, all he dropped was blues; repeat that for all bosses. That isn’t any kind of a carrot at all. What if Diablo is made to provide a guaranteed legendary drop IF players utilize the quest reset option? That would be an improvement, but it could be better; like potential/chance for the other bosses, to also drop a legendary. Also, how does the game determine what is a “full playthrough”? Previously, one could just have the Prime Evil quest opened, and all the player needed to do was to defeat Diablo on that particular difficulty, to have been considered as clearing that difficulty. Which leads to the larger question, how does co-op play work in this regards; where one person resets their quest, but plays with other players who have those other quests unlocked (leading to the above where it’s a simple matter of just quickly having those quests unlocked).
The point I’m getting at is that if Diablo is simply made to give a guaranteed drop using the reset quest option, there will be players looking to get to that end point as quickly as possible (and the games design, lends itself to such loop holes, without nerfing the fun out of the rest of the game – which is exactly what led to lot of the fun being nerfed out of the vanilla game).
