Diablo Immortal’s World Paragon system is a catch-up mechanism aimed at keeping keep friends playing together

It’s a joke that goes back years. You and a friend start playing a new MMO together, but while you like the game and play when you can, your friend immediately gets obsessed and plays it every waking moment — and soon said friend is so far ahead of you that they’re covered head to toe in the armor of a dead god and riding around on a dragon while your character is still wearing whatever clown suit you could find. All MMOs have to grapple with the problem of reducing barriers to friends playing the game together, and now Diablo Immortal is making this scenario a little less likely with the World Paragon system that will help players catch up.

The Paragon system in Diablo Immortal works very much like the Paragon system in Diablo 3, letting players earn Paragon levels and get more powerful after hitting max level, which will be 60 in Immortal. It can be easy to fall behind: in Diablo 3 there’s no cap on Paragon levels, though you’ll have maxed everything out by Paragon 800. In Diablo 3 that’s not a big concern because the game only allows you to play co-op in small groups of up to four players – it’s not a shared, persistent world with competitive content. But Immortal is a different thing entirely: the game designed from the ground up as an MMO with PVP and raids. That seems to mean we’re seeing more attention being paid to player power.

In Diablo Immortal, the World Paragon system acts as a catchup mechanism, boosting players who have fallen behind so they can keep up with the crowd, while slowing players who get too far ahead.

What is the World Paragon system in Diablo Immortal?

The Diablo Immortal servers will have a World Paragon level that goes up by 2 every day. If your character’s Paragon level is at or slightly above the World Paragon level, you’ll earn 100% XP and advance as normal. But if your Paragon level is below the World Paragon level, you’ll earn 200% XP to help you catch up — so if you don’t have as much playtime as others and fall behind on Paragon levels, it will only take you half as long to get up to that World Paragon average.

Similarly, once you get far enough ahead of the World Paragon level — the dev team’s current design is 5 levels — your XP gain drops to 25%, so you’ll advance far more slowly, giving your friends who don’t play as much as you a chance to keep within a reasonable margin of you. The goal seems to be for everyone to be able to easily stay around the current World Paragon level.

This likely means that it will take a little longer to earn Paragon levels at launch, since it will be easy to outstrip the World Paragon level. But over time, as the World Paragon level keeps advancing, it become easier for lower-level players to catch up, allowing everyone to be stay of a certain range of each other. That should make grouping and doing competitive content easier, even if you don’t have a huge amount of time to play.

Previously in the beta, World Paragon levels also affected how much salvage dropped for players. Salvage is used to improve gear in Diablo Immortal, and the developers lowered drop rates for players ahead of the World Paragon level to keep players from getting too far ahead on gear, either. But this system led to players not wanting to earn XP, because getting more Paragon levels would make it harder to upgrade their gear. Now the system won’t impact the amount of salvage drops, but the costs for higher levels of gear will increase, naturally limiting how quickly players can upgrade. Overall, everything is designed so that playing the game still rewards you, but doesn’t catapult you to riding a giant cat while surrounded by falling stars because you are partially fused with infinity.

This is all aimed at avoiding the problem we’ve seen in MMO’s since the beginning — how some players can just streak ahead of their friends and make playing together difficult. Since Paragon levels provide an essentially unlimited leveling curve, without these changes it would be very easy for one player in your group to hit 1000 Paragon or more while everyone who couldn’t play as much was sitting around 10 or 20. We all know that one person who finds time to play more than the rest of us, but Diablo Immortal is committed to keeping friends close enough together that it shouldn’t be an issue. We’ll see if it works once the game goes live some time this year.