Madness early game is now beyond unfair and close to impossible in 1.6. The first hard moment on madness as always been the first ranbosses but you used to be quite ok because you usually met them at around level 12 with good equipement from drowning and also from the tons of money we used to get on madness. Not to forget you could by tier3 weapons/ammo/armor. In 1.6 you meet your first ranbosses at L10 with close to nothing from drops and almost no money to equip yourself in the stores and you don't even have access to tier3 stuff. Also, just getting to L10 is now harder then it was to get characters to L20 in 1.6
I'm not the kind of person who just underlines problems without giving solutions. I don't think bringing drowning back is a good idea as it was very very tedious, but I think giving the 500 gold only for madness would be fair.
Tbh i don't see much difference. Ofc you have to keep in mind that in 1.6 T1 bosses require a bit of preparation but that's it. If your character has low armor you don't want to do for example bill when he is lv 18+, you have to do him early when he has no acc. Same with the withering thing, norgos. Spell casters doesn't seem to scale well so you can do them later. After a few dungeons you should have enough gold to fill all slots with useful stuff.
Main issue with 1.6 madness is that many classes where nerfed (again) so hard that there is no point in playing them. Doomed, stone warden, temporal warden lost so much dps due to how clones work that it is super hard to kill anything dangerous with a few k hp in early game. Imho it doesn't matter if early dungeons are hard or not as long as pool of classes that can reach lv50 is relatively big. We got some defence buffs (instant resonance field for most race/class combinations, easy access to vim pool for masochism, adept prodigy etc) but we dont need defence. It's not an issue. You need system where it is mathematically possible to kill any class combination you encounter. There is simply no point in having mobs that can be touched by only a few classes (paradox mage is still amazing).
A few years ago dwarf starting area was absolute nightmare (undead starting area was also rough). You often were one shoot in literally first turn by some orc wyrmics but it was possible to survive it and then you had good chance to reach dreadfell, maybe even kill master. Now It's extremely (everything is relative) easy to reach lv 20 or 30 but then you hit dps wall and game is over. Not because you were unlucky with drops but because numbers doesn't make much sense (ie shadow that deals in best case scenario a few hundred damage to bosses is a joke). Before HP inflation a few major versions ago you had illusion you can win. Now you stare at character creation screen and you KNOW which character has basically 0% chance to kill master.
ZyZ wrote: Doomed, stone warden, temporal warden lost so much dps due to how clones work
What changed about clones?
In short "clones" talents are no longer affected by difficulty level multiplier. Prior to 1.6 your paradox mage / temporal warden clone(s), shadows, stone warden halves etc were basically as useful on normal as on madness difficulty because they scaled like everything else around you (ie instead of max talent level 5 they would go to around 15 at madness difficulty).
Right now they act more like summons. Max talent level 5 means level 5 no matter what difficulty you choose and as you can expect summons are more or less insignificant at insane+.
Zeyphor wrote:i thought madness was a difficulty where, if a class could win it, then its a broken class
that is, wasn't madness intended to be unbeatable?
True I guess, but it used to be playable, it was possible to beat tier 1s with any class in 1.5 on madness.
After some more playing, my conclusion is that strong mage classes still have a playable early game as you just need to float some points in a low CD spell to be dealing enough damage to handle the 3x life (such as Dust to Dust for PM for exemple).
For melee or ranged classes, the new physical power capping at 30 for the damage skill is a problem for the early game. You need some serious gimmick to get a melee/ranged class passed the early game to around level 15.
