I guess what it needs is like Diablo3 legendary's orange text. But in D3 you sort of just set it up and forget about it which isn't really that meaningful. I don't want things to end up being a screen of AOE explosions, which is how Diablo games always seem to end up. But if it's too conditional and requires too much concentration from the player they become overwhelming.
Diablo 3 has great progression from level 1 to 70. There is no other game in this space that gives you 1 or MORE entirely new ACTIVE skills every single level from start to 60 (and a few beyond that) - but once you realise the overall design paradigm, which you can't really feel until you're max level, it's quite underwhelming.
What it does is that it gives you a ton of toys that are fun to play around with - and it takes a while until you realise that skill configurations aren't meaningful in terms of one being particularly better than the other.
Path of Exile has a lot of active skills too, but they're vastly inferior in terms of personality and the freeform class system makes the power fantasy much less compelling, at least to me.
Obviously, in D3, the legendary skill change design helps a little - but not much, because it doesn't take a genius to figure out that if a weapon compliments a particular skill, then you should probably go with that skill in your build if you intend to use that weapon.
Beyond that, they've utterly ruined the end-game loot hunt by enforcing the sets - because nothing else makes any sense. It more or less normalizes everything and nullifies any impact your skill setup choices might have had.
This is moron-level game design - and completely ruins experimentation and replayability once you've exhausted content.
Another terrible design in Diablo 3 is the loot design. It's a big step back from, say, Hellgate London - which was made largely by the team that invented Diablo.
It's here that it's particularly clear that Diablo 3 was designed by the lead StarCraft guy and not Blizzard North.
What Hellgate London more or less invented was the incredibly rich nature of weapon personality and giving them a character in and of themselves.
Dark Souls is a good example of a game that does a similar thing, only to a much lesser extent. In Dark Souls, weapons behave diferently - and they derive differently from your stats.
As in, they have a personality which makes them that much more attractive to find.
Borderlands aped Hellgate in this way - but somehow managed to make it less involved.
Destiny 2 and Warframe also have weapons with actual personality - and the Exotics in Destiny 2 is one of its best features.
So, Diablo 3 is inferior in a variety of ways.
However, it's utterly unmatched when it comes to the power arsenal. I mean, each character has between 16-24 (or something like that) active skills - and each of those have 6 SIGNIFICANT variations.
That means a single character has an average of 120 active skills to play around with.
That's a ridiculously HUGE number - and they all look great, and they all feel great.
So, in that way, Diablo 3 can get away with its terrible loot design.
I like roguelikes more than RPGs, I think. And RLs are pretty much Diablo. I like action games with progression. I know you like the looter-shooters. There's not really much progression in Destiny 2, for example. It's just the base weapon types. You get a yellow weapon and you're hyped but you'd be fine with a purple. How much does that illusion of progression really add?
Roguelikes is just a genre. It's all about implementation. All games have good and bad aspects. There's no single game that combines all the best aspects into one formula.
However, there are games that combine a bunch of our favorite features in a satisfying way - and those end up being our favorite games.
Not that much of a mystery, really
Destiny 2 progression sucks, frankly. But Destiny 2 has fantastic moment-to-moment gameplay and it has a very decent amount of visually distinct content. So, I can live without the progression and deep mechanics to a certain extent.
As for yellow versus purple, it sounds like you don't know or understand how Exotics work in Destiny 2.
But it's not my favorite game or looter shooter by a long shot.
I mean, even in a plain FPS game without an inventory, like Half-life, you still explore through the levels, find more powerful weapons, fight progressively harder enemies. That's progression. You don't like Dark Souls because you think it's a grind, but what you don't know is that the bosses do damage based on % of players max hitpoints. It's all an illusion again. Other than the linear increase you get from +1, +2, etc on your weapons it's just the base weapon types again!
There are several reasons I don't like Dark Souls. The fact that you're too arrogant to understand how much experience I actually have with game design - and how much I think about games before I decide whether I like them or not, is besides the point.
If Dark Souls had a good cooperative implementation, I would probably like it as much as the average Diablo game - maybe even more.
I almost never play strictly progression-oriented games alone - I find that too boring. But I like the shared experience - and Dark Souls has just enough environment variety to make it a fun game in that way.
In other words, I can live with the ridiculously weak time versus reward ratio of the game if I could share it, because overcoming mob patterns can be satisfying when you're sharing it with friends.
I don't need a strong narrative or a compelling arsenal of powers in that situation.
I think you're eventually going to get to the same realisation.
Well, I don't think we're the same person - so that's probably not likely.
You seem reasonably informed about games and you have your preferences.
That said, I think we have fundamentally different things we enjoy about games - and we have fundamentally different perspectives when it comes to game design.
You have this obsession with competition and you think it, somehow, can apply to two people - in terms of who's the "best designer" or who knows more about the "true way of progression".
Nothing wrong with that.
But there's no one way that's "the best" in terms of game design. It all comes down to personal preferences and past experiences.
If, say, Diablo was your first love - then chances are you're going to be looking for a similar experience for the rest of your life.
Dark Souls clearly did something for you - and given your ego-driven nature - I'm sure overcoming its "obstacles" helped as well. I understand the game design - and I simply don't think the overall experience is worth my time.
But it's certainly a great game if you're into that sort of thing. Just like Monster Hunter World is a great game if you're into that sort of thing.
I haven't actually played Monster Hunter World, so I can't say for sure it's not for me - but there's nothing about it I find particularly appealing. I also happen to despise the asian over-the-top aesthetic.