People like me means people who like videogames and really enjoy ARPG looters like Diablo but who aren't interested in doing research in order to have a perfect build and dominate the video game universe with their excellence. I have said before that I have no desire to get a masters degree in Diablo, I just want to have fun.
I have discovered in the last week a few things that can help make progress in the game a bit more fun and/or easy, and would like to pass that experience on to other players.
Endgame is actually really easy to get to in D4. In fact, once you have already completed the game they give you the option of skipping it entirely and instead just auto-leveling you up to level 50 (max is 60) and they also kit you out with a bunch of gear that is decent and also pre-choose your skills. You can change these of course, but while I do think the story in D4 is incredible, it's not like you want to watch it all all over again. In the 2nd playthru I ended up skipping most of the dialogue and stopped only to watch some really awesome cutsenes that I could have just looked at on Youtube so there wasn't really much reason for me to be doing this.
On my 3rd time through I skipped the story altogether. This however introduces some other issues, one of which is map exploration that you obviously haven't done because you didn't travel around for the story.
The map is relatively huge, and wandering around on a horse seems like fun at first but it becomes a chore. At the point that I was on with my 3rd toon I had the game set at Torment 2 (a relatively difficult setting) and I found out later something that seems so obvious once I was struggling to get through various dungeons to open up the map for the map rewards.
Doing this for each of the 5 regions can be really time consuming if you don't change one simple thing about how you are doing it: The difficulty.
you see, when you step the game up to a higher difficulty there are meant to be better loot drops and this is great and all, but it has been my experience that the loot drops are not really relevant in regular gameplay such as map exploration. It also makes things take significantly longer and makes the game a drag, which is something I always prefer to void.
Therefore, it occurred to me as I was opening up the rewards for just one portion of the map "what would happen if I stepped the difficulty down a few notches for this?"
And that is exactly what I did.
At any point in time you can go to this tree in the main city and change the overall difficulty of the game.... just anytime you feel like it.
I stepped it down to Torment 1 from Torment 2 and the difference was absolutely wild. I was cutting down almost all foes like they weren't even there and while this did definitely cut down on the amount of XP and gold I was getting, once you have reached max level this isn't really that big of a deal. My primary objective at this point was to open up the map and reap the rewards from having done so and in the process I cut the amount of time necessary to make this happen down by a A TON.
The reward drops were not good of course, but honestly, they weren't good in Torment 2 difficulty either. It appears as though the difficulty you select only has a real impact on item drops in certain endgame aspects such as "the Pit", "Nightmare Dungeons", and "Boss power fights." This is where the real loot is and you should perform these at the highest level of difficulty that you can handle.
As for exploration is concerned and even world events with dozens of other strangers fighting alongside you, it doesn't really seem to have much of an impact on what sort of drops you are getting.
So save yourself some frustration and just step the difficulty down a bit of your only objective is to run the map. you can always step it back up later when you are done.