Suggestion to fix leveling issues making players feel weaker over time.

One of the largest criticisms of MCD2 is that the leveling of mobs & gear makes the player feel weaker over time rather than stronger. This suggestion might fix that issue.

Currently, heroes level up by defeating enemies & completing quests. Mobs scale their HP & DMG to match this, & the hero has to find gear of higher level to compensate. This makes it so until the hero level cap is reached, they feel weaker to the same mobs over time. There are also random buffs on gear that increase player stats like DMG, HP, etc. This largely works, but it means harder difficulty just means more trips to the blacksmith.

My suggestion is to remove HP & DMG scaling entirely. Higher leveled gear will do no additional base damage the higher it goes. However, the random buffs it applies will. At lvl 1, a buff could increase artifact damage by 1%, but at lvl 75, by 90%. Higher gear levels also increase the odds of getting rare, special, & unique gear, meaning more buffs per item.

Additionally, mobs would not increase their stats to match the player level. Instead, further areas in the game would spawn harder mobs, & milestones would increase the odds of armored variants of mobs in existing areas. This means that simple enemies from the beginning of the game would be obliterated late-game, armored & soul-corrupted mobs would spawn to increase the difficulty instead. With existing items, buffs would scale to match the power of said item, keeping existing heroes at the same level of progress.

-hllsald