Here's my thoughts on the matter(not that anyone asked for them!)
I like OP's idea, but I think to do such a change you'd probably first need to change a bigger core problem with the game before making any adjustments to the ladder/grifts...and that is the item hunt..but much more on that later. For now I'm going to warn you guys that the rest of this post is a tldr; rant on item hunting so if you want to ignore the rest be my guest.
Here's my sort of disorganized thoughts on some D3(and PoE) mechanics before getting into this:
1) I like the idea that Blizzard pitched originally about legendaries changing your spec on the fly when you get a certain legendary. I thought it was a good way to validate why they let you adjust your skills in the first place(and not be set skills like in other arpg's). Unfortunately, in practice with the lack of tuning/meta most legendaries are basically deemed useless so this mechanic is currently greatly flawed.
2) I dislike paragon grinding/key farming being the current gauge of your character progression(said everyone who plays/played D3)
3) I dislike the lack of build diversity especially in relation to my first point. Build diversity is going to never be a won battle in arpg's though. It wasn't really in D2(though better than D3), and it's also far from perfect in PoE as well(though I'd argue balance isn't as "hindering" to your enjoyment in PoE compared to D3).
4) I like not having an AH, and loot/progression being mostly personal/group based. I could probably rant for this one a bit...but I don't think trading has ever worked optimally in any arpg/mmorpg..so I don't get why arpg devs keep going back to it. For example I personally believe in PoE with its current level of popularity and poe.trade being its most efficient way of trading...it's basically devolved into vanilla d3's format of AH sniping(if I underprice I instantly see 5 vulture whispers to swoop in and take it..and consequently if I want to buy something fairly priced I never make it in time). I don't find that aspect fun in the slightest.
5) PoE has grown on me as D3 declined - I always liked PoE don't get me wrong, but in terms of hours dedicated to PoE vs D3... D3 definitely used to dominate my time and PoE would be basically a week or two commitment, and ironically I think the two have basically swapped and PoE has grown to the point that I can't stop. That said, I also wanted to make clear that I personally don't ever think PoE has the potential to be a D2 level of popularity in the history of gaming. The game just requires a level of dedication and research that is going to put off most players(though not me obviously). D3 is by far behind PoE now though in quality/evolution, but I really want D3 to to be on PoE's level(and I also believe in theory it could've been if I didn't feel like it was basically in maintenance mode at this point...maybe the necromancer patch will be more than just a necromancer though and I'll be proven wrong).
So how would Blizzard fix the current progression system in theory?
1) Keep trying the balance the sets - Duh, I guess...but I'm mentioning this because I(like many I assume that still play or moved on) feel frustrated because they go season after season while doing no changes to sets of any consequence. I wish I understood why they're afraid to try adjusting the sets until they're all within 5 grifts of eachother. I feel like a sloppy/rapid machine gun pace of balancing is better than doing nothing at all.
2) Short term loot fixes - The first iteration of Primal Ancients was actually closer to a bandaid fix than the current version(30% more stats vs perfect rolled ancient stats). The problem is they thought too small. Basically I'm saying...if the stats difference between legendary(baseline), ancient, and primal ancient is high enough to outweigh the legendary/set perk(so you always equip the primal ancient>ancient>legendary)..then build diversity will increase dramatically. Doing this would probably require an item squish I imagine or scaling would get ridiculous in its current format. Currently, I think primal ancients arguably going to make the game have even less longevity.
Long Term Game Mechanic changes
This is basically an expansion level of content(and frankly will probably never happen..but it's fun to think about!). After the short term loot changes...you'd basically need to do the following things:
1) Introduce a linear endless progression system - Simply put, both the gear scaling...and difficulty would never stop(or at least stop much later than 2 weeks into the season). You will always log on and grind out upgrades to your character...and you will always keep pushing yourself to higher levels of difficulty. A few fail safes would need to be implemented for this to work.
2) The Devs would need to take the data they get from the most "committed" grinders and formulate the rate/ilvl of gear that drops so that with all of the effort the players put in...they still either never hit the cap, or hit it with about 2-4 weeks of the season ending(assuming a 3 month cycle).
3) Gearing fail safes probably need to be put in - Obviously this is to counter the rut you'd get stuck in Vanilla D3(unless you were gifted at playing the AH). Personally, I think if they removed the arbitrary primary stats in the first tab of paragon system, and replaced it with drop rate modifiers(or drop "quality" modifiers so that your odds of getting the higher tier of loot in your current difficulty increase). It would help you be able to move to the next difficulty steadily.
4) The leaderboards/progression - If you get a solid foundation of loot/build progression, then I honestly think they can do whatever they feel like at this point. You can either do @OP's vision, or you could just keep the current Grift leaderboards, or heck you could even just make people progress by beating the story mode(boss enrages would probably need to be applied to make sure you beat the gear requirements), and using rifts/bounties to grind the gear to progress. If I had my choices, I'd definitely not do Grifts, but it's mostly because Grift bosses by themselves are kind of boring compared to vanilla end act bosses(or at least doing Grift bosses with new extra gimmicks like stuff to dodge or elite packs spawning mid fight randomly). Beating a new difficulty will in turn unlock new levels of rift difficulties/loot drops to grind out and endlessly progress until the 3 months are up.
5) Group scaling - Admittedly this is probably the part that needs to be carefully tuned a bit, They'd either need to give a better reason for you to play with your friends on a lower difficulty, or make the monsters calculate the relative power level of the each person in the group(like it would know if your toughness is higher so it hits you harder..similar situation for dps requirements).
Other random(and unrelated to the topic) ideas
What if your character's gearing process became a personal choice on what type of gear you'd wear, and paragon points rather than give arbitrary stats...would instead help these 4 modes of gearing in different ways. Here's 4 types of gearing I'd like to see.
A) Rune words - Similar to d2, they would drop out in the world, and combine certain combos in kanai's cube then to formulate a new type of armor/jewelry/weapons, Differing from D2 though...the idea would be the gear would have only primary stats(scaling on the ilvl of how far you're progressed since obviously you need the defensive perks from the two)...meaning you won't have attack speed/crit/etc..Instead the rune word would create certain effects that EXTREMELY buff the flat damage of a certain skill on your bar, and the rune word would also generate a similar perk like legendaries in d3(or they can simply add a big buff to its cooldown, crit chance, attack speed etc). The idea would be to collect runes, vendor certain runes for other runes, then formulate the combo to achieve the rune words affect the skill that you specifically want so you can always use a set skills that you particularly like for your class.
Spending Paragon points would increase the odds of the "rare" runes dropping in each difficulty bracket.
B ) Crafting - This is going to now be the counter to rune words. You're still going to grind and collect the crafting reagents, but unlike its current iteration(and rune words), it's going to focus on building up the stats on the gear to ridiculous levels rather than focus on skills. This path is going to be for people who just really want to have a lot of attack speed/crit/cooldown reduction..basically whatever they want... and don't necessarily care what skill they use.
Paragon points would increase the amount of crafting mats dropping.
C) "Magic Find" - This would be the third option in theory, and is basically what the current iteration of D3. You keep grinding and you get your set optimal set items(hopefully ancient), and wear the optimal set.
The Paragon points would basically increase the odds of rolling ancient/primal ancient(making the assumption that the rarity of the item always outweighs the legendary/set bonus for the record).
D) The gamble option/jack of all trades option - You would still collect bloods while grinding, then just gamble them away. I'm going to either presume you literally just keep spending them and it gives something completely random between crafting mats, runes, and gear. Or they could let you gamble a certain slot, and it also has a chance at giving your crafting or runes while gambling that slot at the same time. Increasing paragon points would drop more bloods. This option is just for those weird people who thrive on chaos(and hopefully would be tuned close enough so where the dumb lucky people come out ahead with it...and not not lucky fall behind). Obviously, this is a not a route for all.
The ways/combos could be balanced could be endless...like if you spend your paragon points evenly between the 4 categories...you see a fair balance of all slots of gear, but you don't see the rarest tier of stuff often. They could also either create every slot of gear for these 4 routes, and you would basically see none of the other 3 categories that you don't invest in, or they could have you see a baseline drop of all three, but the route you choose is going to only cover a few of the slots of gear, so the uncovered slots would be much weaker in comparison. For example, let's say rune words covered armor, but not jewelry. If you spent all your points into rune words..then you'd have amazing top tier of those slots, but the jewelry would basically be yellow or legendary quality stat sticks.
Sorry if it feels like I went extremely off topic, but yeah as mentioned previously in this thread(and in my post)...the odds of expecting major changes is probably improbable at this point. It's always fun to imagine though.
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Here's my thoughts on the matter(not that anyone asked for them!)
I like OP's idea, but I think to do such a change you'd probably first need to change a bigger core problem with the game before making any adjustments to the ladder/grifts...and that is the item hunt..but much more on that later. For now I'm going to warn you guys that the rest of this post is a tldr; rant on item hunting so if you want to ignore the rest be my guest.
Here's my sort of disorganized thoughts on some D3(and PoE) mechanics before getting into this:
1) I like the idea that Blizzard pitched originally about legendaries changing your spec on the fly when you get a certain legendary. I thought it was a good way to validate why they let you adjust your skills in the first place(and not be set skills like in other arpg's). Unfortunately, in practice with the lack of tuning/meta most legendaries are basically deemed useless so this mechanic is currently greatly flawed.
2) I dislike paragon grinding/key farming being the current gauge of your character progression(said everyone who plays/played D3)
3) I dislike the lack of build diversity especially in relation to my first point. Build diversity is going to never be a won battle in arpg's though. It wasn't really in D2(though better than D3), and it's also far from perfect in PoE as well(though I'd argue balance isn't as "hindering" to your enjoyment in PoE compared to D3).
4) I like not having an AH, and loot/progression being mostly personal/group based. I could probably rant for this one a bit...but I don't think trading has ever worked optimally in any arpg/mmorpg..so I don't get why arpg devs keep going back to it. For example I personally believe in PoE with its current level of popularity and poe.trade being its most efficient way of trading...it's basically devolved into vanilla d3's format of AH sniping(if I underprice I instantly see 5 vulture whispers to swoop in and take it..and consequently if I want to buy something fairly priced I never make it in time). I don't find that aspect fun in the slightest.
5) PoE has grown on me as D3 declined - I always liked PoE don't get me wrong, but in terms of hours dedicated to PoE vs D3... D3 definitely used to dominate my time and PoE would be basically a week or two commitment, and ironically I think the two have basically swapped and PoE has grown to the point that I can't stop. That said, I also wanted to make clear that I personally don't ever think PoE has the potential to be a D2 level of popularity in the history of gaming. The game just requires a level of dedication and research that is going to put off most players(though not me obviously). D3 is by far behind PoE now though in quality/evolution, but I really want D3 to to be on PoE's level(and I also believe in theory it could've been if I didn't feel like it was basically in maintenance mode at this point...maybe the necromancer patch will be more than just a necromancer though and I'll be proven wrong).
So how would Blizzard fix the current progression system in theory?
1) Keep trying the balance the sets - Duh, I guess...but I'm mentioning this because I(like many I assume that still play or moved on) feel frustrated because they go season after season while doing no changes to sets of any consequence. I wish I understood why they're afraid to try adjusting the sets until they're all within 5 grifts of eachother. I feel like a sloppy/rapid machine gun pace of balancing is better than doing nothing at all.
2) Short term loot fixes - The first iteration of Primal Ancients was actually closer to a bandaid fix than the current version(30% more stats vs perfect rolled ancient stats). The problem is they thought too small. Basically I'm saying...if the stats difference between legendary(baseline), ancient, and primal ancient is high enough to outweigh the legendary/set perk(so you always equip the primal ancient>ancient>legendary)..then build diversity will increase dramatically. Doing this would probably require an item squish I imagine or scaling would get ridiculous in its current format. Currently, I think primal ancients arguably going to make the game have even less longevity.
Long Term Game Mechanic changes
This is basically an expansion level of content(and frankly will probably never happen..but it's fun to think about!). After the short term loot changes...you'd basically need to do the following things:
1) Introduce a linear endless progression system - Simply put, both the gear scaling...and difficulty would never stop(or at least stop much later than 2 weeks into the season). You will always log on and grind out upgrades to your character...and you will always keep pushing yourself to higher levels of difficulty. A few fail safes would need to be implemented for this to work.
2) The Devs would need to take the data they get from the most "committed" grinders and formulate the rate/ilvl of gear that drops so that with all of the effort the players put in...they still either never hit the cap, or hit it with about 2-4 weeks of the season ending(assuming a 3 month cycle).
3) Gearing fail safes probably need to be put in - Obviously this is to counter the rut you'd get stuck in Vanilla D3(unless you were gifted at playing the AH). Personally, I think if they removed the arbitrary primary stats in the first tab of paragon system, and replaced it with drop rate modifiers(or drop "quality" modifiers so that your odds of getting the higher tier of loot in your current difficulty increase). It would help you be able to move to the next difficulty steadily.
4) The leaderboards/progression - If you get a solid foundation of loot/build progression, then I honestly think they can do whatever they feel like at this point. You can either do @OP's vision, or you could just keep the current Grift leaderboards, or heck you could even just make people progress by beating the story mode(boss enrages would probably need to be applied to make sure you beat the gear requirements), and using rifts/bounties to grind the gear to progress. If I had my choices, I'd definitely not do Grifts, but it's mostly because Grift bosses by themselves are kind of boring compared to vanilla end act bosses(or at least doing Grift bosses with new extra gimmicks like stuff to dodge or elite packs spawning mid fight randomly). Beating a new difficulty will in turn unlock new levels of rift difficulties/loot drops to grind out and endlessly progress until the 3 months are up.
5) Group scaling - Admittedly this is probably the part that needs to be carefully tuned a bit, They'd either need to give a better reason for you to play with your friends on a lower difficulty, or make the monsters calculate the relative power level of the each person in the group(like it would know if your toughness is higher so it hits you harder..similar situation for dps requirements).
Other random(and unrelated to the topic) ideas
What if your character's gearing process became a personal choice on what type of gear you'd wear, and paragon points rather than give arbitrary stats...would instead help these 4 modes of gearing in different ways. Here's 4 types of gearing I'd like to see.
A) Rune words - Similar to d2, they would drop out in the world, and combine certain combos in kanai's cube then to formulate a new type of armor/jewelry/weapons, Differing from D2 though...the idea would be the gear would have only primary stats(scaling on the ilvl of how far you're progressed since obviously you need the defensive perks from the two)...meaning you won't have attack speed/crit/etc..Instead the rune word would create certain effects that EXTREMELY buff the flat damage of a certain skill on your bar, and the rune word would also generate a similar perk like legendaries in d3(or they can simply add a big buff to its cooldown, crit chance, attack speed etc). The idea would be to collect runes, vendor certain runes for other runes, then formulate the combo to achieve the rune words affect the skill that you specifically want so you can always use a set skills that you particularly like for your class.
Spending Paragon points would increase the odds of the "rare" runes dropping in each difficulty bracket.
B ) Crafting - This is going to now be the counter to rune words. You're still going to grind and collect the crafting reagents, but unlike its current iteration(and rune words), it's going to focus on building up the stats on the gear to ridiculous levels rather than focus on skills. This path is going to be for people who just really want to have a lot of attack speed/crit/cooldown reduction..basically whatever they want... and don't necessarily care what skill they use.
Paragon points would increase the amount of crafting mats dropping.
C) "Magic Find" - This would be the third option in theory, and is basically what the current iteration of D3. You keep grinding and you get your set optimal set items(hopefully ancient), and wear the optimal set.
The Paragon points would basically increase the odds of rolling ancient/primal ancient(making the assumption that the rarity of the item always outweighs the legendary/set bonus for the record).
D) The gamble option/jack of all trades option - You would still collect bloods while grinding, then just gamble them away. I'm going to either presume you literally just keep spending them and it gives something completely random between crafting mats, runes, and gear. Or they could let you gamble a certain slot, and it also has a chance at giving your crafting or runes while gambling that slot at the same time. Increasing paragon points would drop more bloods. This option is just for those weird people who thrive on chaos(and hopefully would be tuned close enough so where the dumb lucky people come out ahead with it...and not not lucky fall behind). Obviously, this is a not a route for all.
The ways/combos could be balanced could be endless...like if you spend your paragon points evenly between the 4 categories...you see a fair balance of all slots of gear, but you don't see the rarest tier of stuff often. They could also either create every slot of gear for these 4 routes, and you would basically see none of the other 3 categories that you don't invest in, or they could have you see a baseline drop of all three, but the route you choose is going to only cover a few of the slots of gear, so the uncovered slots would be much weaker in comparison. For example, let's say rune words covered armor, but not jewelry. If you spent all your points into rune words..then you'd have amazing top tier of those slots, but the jewelry would basically be yellow or legendary quality stat sticks.
Sorry if it feels like I went extremely off topic, but yeah as mentioned previously in this thread(and in my post)...the odds of expecting major changes is probably improbable at this point. It's always fun to imagine though.