How monsters/rules should differ on higher difficulties.

[:1]Hi all, we know that D3 will follow the same Diablo formula in terms of handling difficulty progression from Normal to Nightmare and Hell (with some differences in regard of skill caps and progression) .. but my main topic here is the monsters and how their progression should be handled through the different difficulties ... and about the game-rules and how could they change from one difficulty to the next.

In D2 it was mostly adding more health and damage to monsters to outdo the player increasing performance ... but IMO that's the most lazy way to do it (and it sadly is the case with most games out there regardless of genre or platform), personally i liked how Titan Quest added completely new bosses with each new difficulty .. it isn't much as they are only a couple of new monsters but it did add to each difficulty mode .. now i will list some ideas/suggestions on that regard.

1-Completely new monsters types (mostly uniques) in each difficulty mode.

2-New modifiers combos for monster packs and champions, maybe even completely new and unseen before modifiers (my top fav so far is linked Health .. where an entire pack of monster champions have a shared health pool so you can't kill them one by one, now in Nightmare or Hell add vampire aura or teleport to that pack of champions and i'm sure it will send many players running for their lives).

3-Changed monster behaviors, like seen in the Crafting Sanctuary panel, they can control how aggressive the monsters are .. in Nightmare and Hell monsters need to be way more aggressive than in Normal.

4-Environmental Hazards, even more hazards should be there in dungeons and existing ones do way more damage ... in Demon's Souls (the RPG on the PS3) there is an entire chapter/level in which you have to walk into a poisonous swamp that keeps poisoning you, slows you down and prevents you from rolling (rolling is a very important maneuver in the game) while all the demonic monsters there can run and wade through it with ease .. now that's one hell of a hostile environment that puts constant pressure on the player.

5-Death Penalty, while it is ok to only have Durability reduction on Normal as the only penalty i don't think it will be enough to instill "fear of death" on Nightmare and Hell difficulties, there needs to be something more (and not frustrating like corpse fetching) ... re-spawning all the monsters upon dying could be a good way to do it (but that can also happen easily by existing and re-entering the game) .. so it isn't enough .. maybe even EXP loss could be needed (although it will never drop the player a level .. which reminds me .. damn you Demon's Souls boss King Allant and your Soul Drain .. he literally steals an entire C.lv with one of his special attacks if it hits you).

That's all i could come up with for now, any more ideas/discussion is welcome (note that this is all apart from HC which doesn't need any of that with its severe death penalty of permanent death)|||As unpopular as these might be, seeing as these are ideas from MMORPGs

DPS Wall - Either the boss has insane regen, or it becomes a DPS race between you and the boss. Although maybe not ideal for Diablo 3, since all this'll do is encourage uber oriented DPS builds.

Survival Battles - Basically you can't kill the boss, you just need to survive the battle for a certain amount of time.

X number of hits to kill - Example, if X=10, the boss will require 10 hits to kill it will die in 10 hits no matter if each hit dealt 1 or 1 million damage.

And a little something from 'shmups

Bullet Hell - Boss shoots a crazy amount of projectiles that require your character to weave in between, lights up panels on the ground, has hundreds of traps that require the player to react properly. Of course there are patterns, but at least some kind of randomness would be good though so it won't be the exact same thing.

Just for giggles bosses have different phases where the first part is Bullet Hell with X number of hits to "kill" then Survival then killing the boss normally then Survival except this time you're running out of the area before the boss explodes and kills you anyway (forcing a respawn if you fail)|||good idea there knight_wolf to use demon souls as a inspiration

i have some ideas borrowed from others games too.

1 a certain % of the monster population gets a Critical hit % chance that it will hit the player and make much more damage then normal for that monster type(needs to be balanced to avoid 1 hit kills of course)

2 monsters with better ai that makes use of their combined powers to pose a bigger threat.

3 monsters gain new abilities when taken to half their max life|||Enemies which use player skills as attacks could have skill-runed versions of them in later difficulties.