What would bring you back to Median XL?

For me, it would be drop rates and adjusting some crazy punish mechanics. I just don't have the gigantic amount of time to drop just one shard of a crystal that requires 5 of those shards which is then required by a recipe that needs 5 of other incredibly rare things and only has 30% chance of improving my gear while otherwise destroys it. Or I don't have the time to grind 50 different versions of Bone Chimes, Corrupted Wormhole or Umbaru Treasure for best cases.

This is just insane to me sadly

Increasing drop rates for:

Been a player of Median since 2009 (Laz times) with a love-hate relationship and I could never ever reach a proper "end" or something similar where you exhaust all content and just grind stuff. I get that Sigma is much much more about the grind but regardless, my answer to the question doesn't change.

I would return fast, if I start seeing items I mentioned daily/weekly and can safely cube stuff without worrying too much about RNG gods.

I am just coming back. Just installed my original diablo ( Thank God for my sisters external dvd rom ) This game looks a lot different that when I use to play ( stopped playing around just before sigma ) I am more a casual gamer. I play single player or lan with my brothers. I started my own company so there is days that I work 14-15h a day. That is why I am a casual player. I am IT/Server engineer web dev and busy learning game dev so I am packed. So Will try to play early morning or even in the afternoon.

Reason why I play offline is that, I do not want to combat lag. I am from South Africa and anywhere I play, it's with 280-400+ms. My Brother just play some games with me once a month when Him and his wife come visits my mother. First time we played Median xl was where you got that spinning thing at the start. He got upset cause he died like 5 times in 10 sec :mrgreen:

I told him nab I play Medianxl on players x 8 wtf you talking about being hard. That is the one thing that is luring me back after taking 3-4 years break ( can't remember how long ) Is the challenge of medianxl. All my games I play has a difficulty mod as vanilla games is meh at best. I never really played hardcore as it just is not meant for me as I take diablo chilled rather than rush and get OMG big.

I will most prob give feedback later once I played a few hours. I did open my skill tree and I did not know my head from my ass but that is what I like is to experiment with different builds. I will try a few builds and then pick one that I go with till late game. I am usually a tank class like barb/druid or pally but I am thinking to maybe try a sorc for a change. I did play her on the old medianxl but not as much as my tanky classes. Well I am taking half day to test sigma out. I am not the best gamer but man you can teach me nothing about running away. :bounce:

I'd come back if there was less interest in having everything balanced.

What I mean is that I wish there was more room for discovering OP builds and theorycrafting original and distinct ones. There's such an effort going into balancing everything that IMO it really narrows the realm of possibilities, both gearing and skill-wise. There's a ton of really niche items and skills/oskills, but they are rendered useless because everything is balanced to avoid meta builds from being too OP.

I get that balance is usually considered a good thing, but in this case and in my personal opinion, it really neuters what is for me the most fun part of the game: taking advantage of the amazing variety and flexibility of Median to craft interesting and/or unexpected builds.

I'd rather have some builds that can steamroll all content but have a wider variety of possibilities and playstyles than strive for complete balance and be forced to a relatively small pool of builds in order to see most of the content. I'd even be ok with more gimmicks , OHKO, and gotcha mechanics to counterbalance raw dmg opness.

tl;dr: plz unbalance the game

Diaco wrote:I'd rather have some builds that can steamroll all content but have a wider variety of possibilities and playstyles than strive for complete balance and be forced to a relatively small pool of builds in order to see most of the content

Do you even know what balance means? It means that all builds are equally viable. The game is so very not balanced precisely because only a small pool of biilds can complete the hardest content.

Istaryu wrote:
Diaco wrote:I'd rather have some builds that can steamroll all content but have a wider variety of possibilities and playstyles than strive for complete balance and be forced to a relatively small pool of builds in order to see most of the content

Do you even know what balance means? It means that all builds are equally viable. The game is so very not balanced precisely because only a small pool of biilds can complete the hardest content.

Game is hard balanced.... just lack of skill create a small pool of chars who can do hardest content.

Play Median xl since 4 seasons, and what i dont like here is NERFING to the ground some rly well designed builds, instead of little bit nerf they remove buld from the game XD. And for place of this builds comming NEW META builds whom gonna be nerfed on next ladder and this way we have a several shitty builds which nobody wanna even touch. Really i doubt of beta pre ladder testing on MXL.

Istaryu wrote:
Diaco wrote:I'd rather have some builds that can steamroll all content but have a wider variety of possibilities and playstyles than strive for complete balance and be forced to a relatively small pool of builds in order to see most of the content

Do you even know what balance means? It means that all builds are equally viable. The game is so very not balanced precisely because only a small pool of biilds can complete the hardest content.

What balance means depends on context. In my post, I refer to the fact that endgame content is balanced to be challenging for very specific builds with very specific gear, and in consequence, nigh impossible for most others. My point is that I'd rather see certain builds steamroll endgame content if it allows for the viability of less orthodox ones. Complete balance between all possible builds in a game like Median is a completely unattainable goal to the point that honestly you shouldn't even try, there's too many moving and interconnected parts.

I feel like the philosophy of the endgame is to be a puzzle with only one solution, and only a handful of builds can realiably solve that puzzle. That's what I don't like. What's the point of trying to make interesting builds if none of them will be able to go past barely clearing scosglen? For high labs, even the "meta builds" don't come even close to being able to clear it unless you have VERY specific gear.

I'd even suggest that this would lengthen season life, since once you get bored of your character you can experiment and try to get as far as possible with other builds. As it stands now, playability ends either when you clear all content with a meta build, or get as far as the game will let you on a non-meta one. Whats's the point of starting new chars if you already know beforehand that there's a brick wall you'll never be able to pass?

Anyways, I'm not saying this is a mistake on part of the developers, it's just what I'd want to see. There's many people out there that would rather see the opposite

- A potion called "Veteran's Potion": Give experienced players the opportunity to skip all the meaningless quests (fully unlocked) boosting level to 105 , with maybe even some Arcane Crystals to upgrade gear to Tier 4, increase the XP scaling. Less grind, and noobs still can have their hand held thru norm-hell. Some people might complain this will "shorten ladder season". Maybe so, but it's better than doing the same areas a million times every time you wanna make a new character and try out different builds. XP is the most meaningless metric, turning it into a race to who can get the most XP fastest rewards cookie cutter builds and discourages players from diversifying into something more interesting.

- All trophy bosses should have waypoints or be easily accessible, giving higher QoL for the player for rerunning these areas. Also, trophy RNG should be higher, if not across the board then for certain fights which eat up your time (for example, Yshari Sanctum). The way you can open a portal by disenchanting the sleep charm to Atanna is a huge QoL, it should exist for all of the major bosses that don't have easy access.

- Unlimited Respecs -- Stop punishing the player for experimenting by creating a pointless artificial scarcity. "Build promiscuity" is not a bad thing. We should have plenty of different builds. So what if someone can respec to kill a boss easier? Give them the choice and stop punishing the player by limiting their choices
Chances are, the player will figure out a way to cheese strat a boss anyway. Belladonna potions do not drop frequently enough if you make the unfortunate mistake of respeccing into a terrible build (punishing the player for experimentation).

- More runewords, more sacred unique items, more oskills, skill reworks in general
Progression into endgame requires highly specific itemization and many hours of farming if playing SSF. More options on these fronts would help people branch out into different builds and make progression less of a chore

- More (active) skill variety. Just to use some examples: throwbarb benefited from the rework in terms of replayability, although it still suffers from a limited choice of active skills to choose from. Either you use Stampede, Snake Bite, Overkill as for throwing skills (excluding fortress and guard tower). With Bowzon, you have Wyrmshot, Barrage, and Trinity Arrow. On the list it goes, just about every class suffers from a lack of variety of active skills. What this amounts to is many builds are rewarded for mindlessly spamming the same single skill over and over. This isn't problem unique to Sigma, as we probably are aware many ARPGs are known as cookie clickers for this reason.

- More party buffs or other things which benefit the entire group for group play like farming and grinding XP

- Shared drops

- AI improvements -- most difficulty with end game areas amounts to kiting HP sponge mobs and widdling down their bloated health bars. After a certain amount of repetitions, the novelty of this wears off and it becomes clear there isn't an intelligent/challenging response to the player's behavior (I am excluding bosses here, talking more about general mobs).

Many of these suggestions have been suggested before by others, but I felt like putting everything I could remember into a list. Hopefully it benefits someone.

I disagree about increasing trophy drop rates or making waypoints to bosses. People did 1 hour uldy runs back in the days and 300 laz runs to obtain a trophy, these felt like a real achievement. Then fragments were introduced, now people want it easier and easier every time. I will again suggest what I suggested X seasons ago, which is to make 2 versions of a boss: one which has a X% to drop a trophy fragment, and another one which is 5x harder with a X% to drop a trophy. Then I'll agree about having a waypoint to the harder version. The trophy is not meant to be obtained by everyone. You either spend the same time as everyone else to do it in multiplayer, buy it, or play singleplayer where you can have it 60 times easier to obtain.

I also disagree about having higher drop rates on MP. Drop rates are high enough at the moment. If anything, they need to be decreased instead to make progression slower. There is no reason to use transition SU's if you can obtain BIS items at the 2nd day of the ladder. If you want something to feel rewarding when obtained, then it needs to be a rare item. When it drops for everyone, it decreases its value over time, to the point where noone wants to buy it. In my opinion, removing the increased nodrop rates for SP was a big mistake. People who play SP fairly really need these drop rates to not waste their times. People in MP need the opposite - a lengthened ladder that doesn't end in 1 week.

One more thing I'm very annoyed about is the removal of EXP from multiplayer games. This was done in order to make the ladder more competitive, but now you can only be competitive if you play alone and ignore your friends, as they just slow you down and require you to run multiple runs of the same bosses. Also, leveling in rifts has become much more boring as there is no way to improve your exp gain. Holding right click in fauzt from 125 to 140 at ladder start literally makes me go asleep. Other lvl 130 areas which are promoted as "alternative" do not have high enough density to justify leveling in them. I really want to see some incentive to play with friends, and the only thing I can think of is to make a boss drop as many charms as the number of players it was started with, which would also improve the trophy farming everyone is searching for.

Most of what I wrote doesn't seem to apply to you or anyone who has thousands upon thousands of TG and is able to buy every item in the game. It is written for those who mostly farm their own gear solo, hence why I mentioned the part about SSF. I sold an item once this season, and haven't spent any TG at all. Not technically SSF, but I didn't rush off to buy anything either. I suppose however your point about Multiplayer vs Singleplayer has some merits. I would be content with a decreased nodrop on singleplayer, and would leave the people who want to be forced to trade to get their gear on multiplayer to this angle.

As for re-running charms, I have played many iterations of MXL, including Ultimative, and even pre-Ultimative days, and have never enjoyed re-running charms. To me it seems like a weird hill to die on that you want to call an achievement running the same area hundreds of times or glorify the old purify fight. Once you learn the mechanics for Uldy, I find it to be a chore to run it multiple times, the purify version was beyond tedious so I find it strange you seem to feel some nostalgia for this. And if you see it as an achievement, that's okay. But not everyone else sees it this way.

As for the XP part, we agree there. I don't care about competition on the ladder and frankly will probably play singleplayer because there's very little incentive at this point for me to play on multiplayer other than chat. Most people play in their own passworded games anyway, and I have no interest in trade. Some kind of incentive to play with friends is important, charm drops with player count seems like a good idea to me

Marrt wrote:In my opinion, removing the increased nodrop rates for SP was a big mistake. People who play SP fairly really need these drop rates to not waste their times.

Holding right click in fauzt from 125 to 140 at ladder start literally makes me go asleep. Other lvl 130 areas which are promoted as "alternative" do not have high enough density to justify leveling in them.

The 2 points that resonate with my previous frustration.

Things changed with multiplayer maybe explain why they remove /players setting for extra difficulty for better exp & loots in SP. It allowed you to steamroll all 3 difficulties, assuming you know what you are doing (yes, it does make the game imbalance, but i want something to save time). It also reduce nodrop iirc.