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12/16/2025 2:36:23 PM
5
The Difficulty Problem in D2
I'll try to keep this brief, as I have a bad habit of being overly long-winded with these kind of posts. tl;dr at bottom.
Difficulty is a highly subjective topic. With the right skill, know-how, and practice, anything can become much easier. D2 is no different. If one wants to "get gud," one just has to learn the game and practice and that's literally all it takes. I personally don't find 95% of the game to be "too hard."
The biggest problem that I see with the game is that the difficulty feels forced, or mandatory to fully participate. There's little to no "casual" gameplay that also rewards meaningful progress once you hit about 500+. Because of this, Bungie has had to reduce the difficulty of the basic high-end, which has created an odd situation. Those who want a challenge are let down because they can't crank up the challenge higher, and those who are less experienced and don't want to play at higher difficulties are let down because they now are forced to play at higher difficulties to make any progress.
This problem is compounded when we take into account Bungie losing their ability to discern the difference between "good" and "bad" difficulty design. The majority of players left playing are veterans who know the ins and outs of the game and usually know how to power game, dominating anything Bungie throws at us. This causes Bungie to feel the need to overtune the difficulty to compensate, but this often just ends up with bullet sponges and annoying enemy design.
My suggested solution is to simply make all difficulties allow meaningful progress. Drastically increase the difficulty and rewards of the higher tiers of gameplay. If players want a challenge, give them a challenge. If players want to just kick back and unwind with a bit of a power trip, allow them to have fun while still making meaningful progress (albeit at a slower pace compared to harder content). Allow players to play at their desired level for their current mood.
tl;dr All players are eventually funneled into the highest difficulty modes as they increase in power, which creates an odd situation where Bungie has to balance one difficulty to suit everyone which ends up suiting no one.
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Edited by Ketogenic_Guardian: 12/17/2025 11:24:37 PMThe problem is not the hard challenge the problem is the rewards there needs to be more rewards from harder content and better quality rewards. Example if you're doing equilibrium and you have the hardest modifiers equipped you should begin more than one drop from each encounter final chest you should be getting a 5% chance to get a tier 5. Players should never have the experience doing something like equilibrium with hard modifiers they get less rewards less quality rewards and they feel like they wasted their entire time. Frankly the only people that likes this kind of content are streamers and professional gamers because it allows them to stream what they want, which is harder content because that's all they care about they don't care about quality they don't care about the rewards they own care about the content being harder and harder so they can increase their stream numbers and their followers. This community is so idiotic they can't see that streamers and artificial difficulty with awful rewards is what killed this game. Just like how players don't think about the player data back in 2019 we had over 1 million active players as of today it is below 28000 think about it between 2019 and 2020 is when artificial difficulty was introduced.
