PENALTIES FOR LEVELING UP

author=Liberty
I'm pretty sure I beat him a few times without extra levelling. Might just have been my strategy though. It's been a long time since I played the game, so maybe I'm misremembering. Okay, better example then - Chrono Trigger where the story is the 'level' and beating Lavos at an earlier 'level' nets you different endings.


It's surprisingly hard to think of a game where underlevelling was encouraged. There are those games that encourage speed runs, but for the most part they aren't RPGs and you don't really get extra for them.

Oh, FF9 and the sword Excalibur II. You had to be lower levelled to get there in time, and the pay-off was the best weapon in the game. And Suikoden II where if you sped through the story (thus not spending as much time on levelling) you could reach a cut-scene between two characters that is time based. Most other RPGs try to get you to play them more, instead of getting you to do so less.

Beating Lavos early generally required you to be overlevelled for that point in the game though. In fact, in his first plot appearance in a non New Game+, Lavos is actually stronger than he is during when fought under most other circumstances, to prevent players who're playing normally from cutting the plot short at that point.

This is actually one of the ways I think you can satisfy players who both enjoy grinding and enjoy being challenged; present the player with enemies who can be beaten at certain points in the game, with difficulty, if your party is strong enough, but aren't expected to be beaten in the course of ordinary gameplay.

Rewarding the player for speed running isn't quite the same as rewarding the player for being underlevelled, but I do think that the examples you gave from Final Fantasy IX and Suikoden II were pretty terrible ideas in their own right. When you make a long game full of rewards for exploration, incentivizing the player to skip it is downright perverse. The sort of games where I think it makes sense to reward speedruns are games where obstacle navigation and sequence breaking are major elements of the gameplay, like the Metroid games.

Which one is it that you're supposed to lose again?

I think I've heard references to that, but I honestly don't remember ever actually having lost a fight to any golem.

You can lose to the first Golem fight in CT without penalty. Either way you get captured as dictated by the plot. He doesn't have anything special going for him, he has the same AI as the Golem Twins except he's solo. If you win iirc you just get a small pile of cash which is kinda handy since the next shop is the only time I remember running out of money to upgrade everybody's stuff.

author=UPRC
SERIOUSLY!? They honestly did something that dumb? Wow, Blizzard. You guys are nothing but bad ideas these days.

Also for clarity here's how D3's changes when you level up your character with loot 2.0:
- Enemy level increases to match your current character level. This in turn increases enemy stats slightly, increases the amount of gold they drop, and the item level of what they drop. A higher item level means better base items drop, the quality of their affixes is higher, and legendaries can start dropping once the dropped ilvl is higher than their minimum ilvl. Legendary affixes also scale to their dropped ilvl too so a legendary with a min ilvl of 30 can drop at level 60 and have its stats scaled as a level 60 item instead of 30.

- You get a small boost in stats. 3 main stat, 2 vit, 1 of the other two, and +4 to base HP. This is pretty minor all things considered (e: At level 60 you can get items with +100-500 in a stat), its +3% base damage and a bit to your base HP depending on...

- The base HP you get from vitality starts to increase. At level <35 each point of vitality gives +10 HP. After that each level increases the HP you get from vitality by one ending at 35 HP per vitality at level 60. I think this scales again in the expansion so at level 70 you get 80 HP per vitality but I haven't looked into it.

- You unlock additional skills and runes (aka modifiers) you can apply to these skills. Runes on a skill are always an upgrade compared to not using a rune but comparing runes against each other is meant to be sidegrades: Changing a skill's function so it has a chance to stun enemies or just doing more damage for example. There's no guarantee that the skills + runes that you want to use or are best for your equipment + build are the end-level runes and your skill loadout doesn't have to be made up of level 60 runes to be effective.

- You unlock passive skills and passive skill slots. iirc you unlock your third passive skill slot at level 30 and passive skill at 60. The expansion gives a 4th slot at level 70 and three your passive skills between 62 and 68 or so.


I'm not interested in a D3 or Blizzard slapfight, just wanted to post the full effects of levelling up in D3 to the best of my knowledge and reflecting the current state of the game.


e2: Forgot Paragon Levels which you can get once you hit max (60) level. These are account-wide levels that affect all characters. Each paragon level gets you +1 paragon points which is automatically placed in one of four categories that cycles per level (offense -> defense -> something -> utility -> offense -> etc.). There are four places in each category you can allocate your paragon point which gives a minor boost in that stat (stuff like +0.50% movement speed or +0.1 crit chance or +5 all-resist or +10 primary stat). You can reallocate your paragon points at any time and the max you can have allocated to any stat is 50, 200 for each category, so the max paragon level is 800. The old paragon level giving you the base level stat boost + some magic and gold find is gone.

LockeZ, I'm not sure where you getting your information from. D3 only has two stats that scale with level--armor and resistance. Both penalties are very minor and offset by the vitality scaling bonus and/or new skills. New and higher tier affixes shouldn't be glossed over either.

Additionally in vanilla D3 you would never backtrack pre-60 anyways so you'd always be fighting things your own level.

The only real "punishment" could possibly be that champions get additional powers, but this more to keep them threatening and not letting the hero stomp over everything effortlessly.

For armor and resistance it's like 1% per level. It does not make a difference unless you haven't upgraded your gear for like 10 levels which with the new loot system is practically impossible.

having enemies level up with the player makes sense in games like FFT where the opponents are characters with classes that give them the same or similar skills as the player has access to, in this regard it keeps the playing field more or less even between player and cpu. In fact, it helps the player to learn more about how the game works by allowing them the chance to observe how the ai uses those classes and skills. More powerful enemies also make skills that charm, confuse or outright recruit opponents more effective.

Where FFT fails in this is that non-human monsters gain literally NOTHING from leveling up except beefier stats, but those stat gains are beefy enough that if you are behind in the equipment curve (which is mostly based on plot progression, the only way to skip ahead is by stealing gear from the few random encounters that have human opponents) that your more gear-dependent physical attacker classes can become outclassed by random encounters (and 1 particular plot encounter, Finath River, aka. Chocobo Hell).

SAGA Frontier is a good example of scaling because the monsters don't scale, just the encounters, so you always face monster groups of an appropriate strength for your party (more-or-less). As encounters scale up, the monsters also become more and more visually threatening, helping enforce the feeling that the party has become more powerful.

A poor example of scaling would be something like FF8, where each area has the same 2-4 groups of monsters, forever (I think maybe some new monsters show up after the Lunatic Pandora event, but It's been a long time since I played it). They may have higher tier magic to draw out, or better item drops, but neither of those things make them any more interesting to fight at level 99 then they were at level 1.

author=LockeZ
Uh, the thing that scales with level in D3 is enemy level

Though the way armor/resistances become less effective as you level up ALSO pisses me off.

A clarification, armor and resistance becomes less effective as you level up is a consequence of the enemies getting a level as well. Armor and resistance is based on enemy level, not your level. I guess now that enemies scales with your level those two are the same. An exception may be if two characters of different level party up.

The SaGa chat reminds me of the first time I played one with RS3. I knew very little about the series besides it looked sharp and was made by the RPG God-Kings of the day. Lil'me went in with the FF mentality that has served me well in grinding to power up. Unfortunately killing a bunch of goblins won't spark new techs and without completing quests you won't find or get the cash to purchase new equipment. The boss of the Robin quest went from difficult to impossible when it upgraded into some demon or other after a pile of piddling character improvements from goblin grinding. My SF experience wasn't much better, I decided to start with Riki

As for scaling enemies, Legend of Cao Cao is a SRPG that used it. The enemy levels were a modifier applied to the average of the party you brought to battle, +4 for generals and -3 for generic troops iirc. Enemy level also influenced the tier and level of gear they would have while your non-treasure gear available was based on story progression. Enemy class tier was also based on enemy level, if they were level 15/30 they would be their tier 2/3 class. All of that pales in comparison to what the enemy gets at level... 23 or so: Transport. Transport is a move Geomancers (read: Healers+Buffers but the AI never uses (de)buffs) learn at that level which is a high powered healing move with infinite range. Enemy geomancers half a stage away can heal their frontliners. Don't expect them to run out of MP either, they can start of MP-regenerating tiles and in the late game when you fight Kongming he can use Advice to transfer MP to Geomancers (but thanks to Kongming's hat the MP cost of this move is reduced so he spends something like 16 MP to regenerate 24 of somebody else's. This can be casted on yourself too with obvious consequences).

Oh yeah, treasure equipment doesn't gain as much stats as generic equipment too. The difference is small at level 1 but at level 9 the gap will be even wider. Can't rely on those!

The reason why this is used is because you get experience in LoCC by hitting and killing dudes. Now there is a lot of optional dudes to hit and lots of your dudes to do the hitting and there's never a guarantee of what the character level is. My first complete playthrough ended at level 26-32 while a buddy's ended at the mid-40's. Entire maps are optional and victory requirements rarely involve hitting all the dudes. For example the 4th map, Pursuit of Dong Zhuo, is entire optional and you can clear it by retreating (which usually happens, it's a rough level at that point in the game), beating everybody up (which never happens, you're at a disadvantage and fighting Lu Bu with no good means of hurting him), or eluding Lu Bu's ambush and hitting Li Ru enough that he retreats. The amount of experience you can get here can be zilch to a level or two. Then there's the first Siege of Xuzhou where after hitting eight dudes or so you can end the mission or continue trying to hit the remaining twelve dudes and generals. You don't even get a treasure for hitting all the dudes except the extra experience.

Ultimately being high level becomes regular Hard Mode unless you take advantage of the level scaling and bring your high level Xiahou Dun with some level 3 Cao Hong and watch the enemies end up at half the level if your Xiahou Dun. There's the self-imposed low level challenge which is interesting more because of how you can manipulate the triggers for completing a stage. Want to clear Recapture Pu Yang pt. 1? Send in the strategists and archers, lose eight, and that will trigger the retreat victory condition. Move Cao Cao one tile and you win with minimal exp!
(Alternatively you can hit all the dudes until there's one left, retreat, and start Pu Yang pt. 2 for more exp!)

My fix attempt would be to create two sources of EXP: Army EXP and Character EXP. Army EXP is gained by completing a stage and applied to all units. The amount gained depends on the stage and how victory was reached, The Pursuit of Dong Zhuo being optional would give a small amount (the real reward is the treasure if you defeat Li Ru). The Pu Yang Campaign would be scaled so when you complete it you end up with about the same Army EXP no matter what pt. 1-3 you do so on. Jian Ye on the other hand would be a full +1 level due to it being a final act stage (and Red Jian Ye is a contender for being the hardest). Character EXP is a character's personal EXP applied on top of their Army EXP and gained by taking actions as usual. The curve would be exponential, increasing as a character got farther away from the Army EXP level. Once a sufficient number of characters gained enough Character EXP to gain a level all characters lose a level of Character EXP and Army EXP jumps up a level, bringing up the stragglers and letting the guys on top gain more EXP again. Ideally this would give the player a more steady level so the enemy scaling doesn't need to happen. Dunno if it would work though or if it would ruin the game or not.

He already explained all that in another comment. But it still amounts to the fact that leveling up by itself leaves you worse off.

Your character could outlevel the monsters, yes. But if you didn't chose to find/buy/craft new items the monster will kill you pretty soon. It's not a penalty it's just how Diablo 3 goes.

That is penalizing you for leveling up. All those things were previously accomplishable in the Diablo series, without needing to be gated according to level. In the earlier games, leveling up left you better off, and allowed you to seek new challenges accordingly. In Diablo 3, leveling up leaves you worse off, and requires you to seek new advantages accordingly.

In Diablo 1 and 2, lot of the main character's effectiveness might have been determined by their equipment, yeah, but the characters clearly made progress relative to the enemies they were facing at that point in the game as they trained. You could go back to an earlier point in the game, exchange your equipment for random drops from that point, and slaughter previously challenging enemies like cockroaches. And finding better equipment wasn't contingent on your level, but on what places you're exploring or what enemies you're fighting. If you head to a place you're not strong enough to navigate normally, sneak and dodge past your enemies, and open up some kind of treasure chest, you could be rewarded with treasure far ahead of your level curve. And why not? It makes sense both in terms of in-world logic (this is where the more powerful enemies who use more powerful items are actually located,) and in terms of rewarding alternate playstyles.

Sometimes you'd find stuff that your character couldn't wield yet; ability to wear equipment was tied to your core stats. But equipment access wasn't just arbitrarily tied to your level; a huge double-headed axe was obviously going to be harder to wield than a dinky little short sword (and bigger equipment tended to start becoming available later on when you'd more likely be able to use it,) but you'd still be able to use a comparable but better enchanted weapon than you had before.

Diablo 3 sacrifices both in-world logic and the sense of progression. It might still effectively force you to raise your level to navigate the game, but leveling up becomes something less representative of the growth of your character relative to the challenges they're facing than of the backwards spin of a treadmill, forcing you to keep running to simply stay in place.