With a fully kitted out hero and a half-decent team, Legend just feels like a grind. Playing with pubs, I wipe about 40% of time on a bad day, and most of the time its due to an avoidable player-error. I almost never feel out-played on Legend. For the de-facto end game challenge, its pretty mediocre.
I’d love to see Cataclysm return as a “hardcore” version of Legend. Same loot tables and spawn rates, but with a few changes to make the core gameplay-loop more exciting.
- Give all non-special enemies a health-gate mechanic, so that they can’t be brought below half health from a single instance of damage, with the exception of headshots, bombs and critical hits.
-At the moment “crowd control” just means killing everything in sight before its a threat. If enemies stayed alive beyond the first arrow/fireball/swing-O’-the-hammer, teamwork would be much more important. No more soloing the entire hoard just because its coming through a tunnel.
- Do something about talents. Perhaps limit the number of active talents to 2, or disallow tier 5 talents. No matter what though, remove health-on-kill as an option.
-Talents are a fun idea, they add uniqueness to the careers. Too often though, this comes at the cost of game balance. Generally, though not always, due to their synergy with ranged weapons. Which brings us to…
- Add a stamina mechanic to ranged weapons. When depleted, you deal half-damage with all ranged attacks, or suffer a reduced firing rate. It would regenerate passively, and perhaps faster while in melee, encouraging a more “combined-arms” approach to combat.
-Ranged weapons are fun, but they can be abused to make the game significantly easier. This seems a reasonable way to prevent spam, and spread the carnage out equally among the team.
All in all, make everybody happy by adding a 5th difficulty.