The new experimental experience penalty values are 3% in Cruel and 8% in Merciless (down from 7.5% and 15% respectively). These can and will change in the future based on feedback and analysis of play patterns.



The main reason for having a death penalty is so that players aren't able to attrition their way through every fight. We're okay with the strategy of throwing yourself at a boss several times if it's a little too hard for you (which allows us to have pretty challenging mandatory boss fights), but there needs to be a penalty so that this doesn't become a dominant strategy.



We (and many of our more hardcore players) are worried that a lower death penalty may reduce the importance of building characters correctly and playing carefully. However, there are hardcore leagues for players who want deaths to be extremely meaningful. The new values do still strongly discourage dying.



At this stage we're expecting to deploy 0.11.3 next week. Another change it includes is that six socket items are now included in the set of allocated items (like four-link items were). YouTube |

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Posted by

Chris

on Grinding Gear Games on