Going the Slow Route

I had a mad idea tonight.

Lately, I've been playing a whole lot of Diablo 3, Reaper of Souls. The gear and difficulty revamps have made the game far, far more enjoyable than it was two years ago, not to mention that the Crusader largely fills my demands for a cool class, with its combined indestructibility and magic damage sources.

One of the ways that the difficulty system changed is that all difficulties became available from the start, with the exception of Torment, though this becomes available to all characters once any of yours reaches level 70. Originally, one had to progress through the various difficulties, earning the next one when you beat Act IV, and sending you back to the beginning. Thus, you'd actually finish the game somewhere around level 30, with an additional 30 levels dedicated to just replaying things. Now, granted, this is a Blizzard game, where replay value is perhaps their core value.

RoS changed it so that instead, you could choose any difficulty ranging from Normal, Hard, Expert, and Master, each giving certain bonuses like extra XP, Gold, more Blood Shards (a currency relevant to the new Adventure Mode, which allows you to jump around from act to act without having to play through the whole story again.) But once one hits level 70 on any character, you unlock Torment. Torment is the highest difficulty, but more accurately, it's the highest six difficulties, as Torment 1-VI gives progressively greater rewards.

The bonus at Torment VI is absurd - 1600% extra XP and Gold (Torment also allows you to get new legendary items, though as far as I know I haven't seen any.)

But the bonus is earned. Torment is really tough, and sliding the bar all the way to the right makes it really, really hard.

So I decided to start a new character (female Crusader) and try my luck.

It's hard.

Really, really hard.

In fact, it might be a little masochistic. To give you an idea, I died to the second pack of zombies on encounters before you even get into town in Act I. Every single fight is a struggle, requiring deft kiting, hit and run attacks, and copious drinking of health potions.

Certainly, part of this is that a new character does not have much of a toolset. When your only attacks are to slam your shield into something or slam your shield into it harder, it's not exactly easy to stay out of range of your foes.

But it makes every enemy a fairly interesting encounter. Elites are like difficult boss fights.

But man, do you level up "quickly."

I say quickly, in that I have literally only killed that Wretched Mother mini boss in Old Tristram and I am already level 13. On normal mode I'd probably have to finish Act I to be at that level, whereas here, I'm still far, far away from fighting even the Skeleton King, Act I's first "boss' boss. At this rate, even Act II and Caldeum are a distant goal, far away. Frankly, I wouldn't be all that surprised if I were level 70 before I even got to Magda.

But it's not really quick. That very first real quest objective took me about an hour to complete. Partially this is because death comes very easily. Playing my main Crusader, even on Torment I, most non-elite enemies out in the world die in droves, "like chaff before the wind," as he is fond of saying when he gets a Mighty Blow. Playing at low level on Torment VI, however, makes you weaker than even the zombies and quill fiends that would normally be basically fodder. Even with a shield, my lowbie Crusader couldn't really stand toe-to-toe with anything until she was level ten, and even then, she has to use crowd-control effects as frequently as possible, and I've been working steadily through my backlog of health potions in the bank.

Still, there's something oddly appealing to this head-against-a-brick-wall approach. One of the things that video games do is that they automate the kind of random events that take so long in tabletop games. If you want to kill a zombie in Dungeons and Dragons, you have to roll all kinds of dice to see if the attack lands and how much damage it does. When these things are slowed down, it makes every fight a true event, and makes every move strategic.

Don't get me wrong, I love blowing through a hundred scarabs in a row with a single Fist of the Heavens, but this slowed-down pace both demands a lot of you and also effectively extends the lifetime of the game. For someone who grew up on Squaresoft RPGs (though oddly I didn't play a single Final Fantasy until college. Go figure,) I sort of miss the kinds of games that would take you weeks or months to get through.

But all of this would be a total slog if it weren't for the bonuses that the difficulty granted. Yes, it'll take you two full minutes to kill a single freaking zombie, but you'll get about a quarter of the way to the next level for your efforts. Really, the only downside is that you'll have to hoof it back to town to craft new gear for yourself when you reach the required level until you get the Town Portal spell, which at this rate, probably won't happen until I'm level 45.