it was a "what was I thinking" thing before lod came out. lotta useless skills in the original d2. bunch of broken stuff too, like how static field dropped enemies to 1% even on hell difficulty
Skelly Necro all day, I didn’t think so many people were into it.
I did like the Amazon for pvp, when guided arrow with piercing would go through the same person more than once. I think they nerfed that though.
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RingoHe/Hima distinct lack of substanceRegistered Userregular
Pre-1.12 patch I really only had three heavily run classes in D2:
Skelemancer - so much subsequent tinkering after various nerfs as well as skellys not being viable on later difficulties
Defiant Paladin - Sword and Board, actually Scepter usually, can never be killed, but without the right weapon modifiers couldn't kill anything
Javazon - poison clouds and lightning javelins filling the entire screen
Javazon was probably the most consistently easy to gear and wreck face with but any Boss fight without minions (Duriel, Baal) was an utter nightmare. Paladin was straightforward - hold shift and click things for hours at a time
There's been some gnashing of teeth about some of the D4 items shown from Blizzcon, with one item granting several hundred stats (dexterity, strength, willpower, etc.)
This seems like it's in direct contravention to the most recent quarterly update, where they said the vast majority of your stats would come from level ups rather than from gear.
Most of the discourse talks about this as being a problem with large numbers; people don't like seeing millions and billions of damage flash on the screen. But I think the more important issue is whether or not they're designing for infinite scaling potential from ever larger stat numbers, as they did in Diablo 3.
It seems to me that infinite scaling was introduced because they wanted people to keep playing the same character (and purchasing permanent gear for that character) throughout the game's entire life cycle. That way they could keep introducing new, more powerful gear very simply, giving the most dedicated players a periodic reason to keep playing.
But there are downsides too. Hard caps and breakpoint and diminishing returns were a big part of gearing up in previous games, but it's hard to make those scale infinitely, so gear tends to be less interesting stacks of numbers. And when the content scales infinitely, that puts pressure on the players to play only optimized builds, so you can push ever further, as opposed to being open to off-meta builds that can still clear whatever particular content you aim for.
The item economy, which they've said they want to have in some form, is another avenue that gets influenced by the way gear scales. As the ramp of gear power gets longer and steeper, the distance between the best gear and any random drop gets longer. This distance creates a long ladder to climb, but it also increases the amount of gear that's both worthless to the bleeding edge, and better than anything a casual player would have found at certain points in the progression. This leads to the D3 problem where the auction house is where you find 99% of the gear you actually wear, and the market gets more and more saturated as time passes.
I'd like to know what their design process is for stuff like this.
It did end up working fairly well for seasonal play once the auction house was removed, drop chances were rescaled, and the endgame became about pushing numbers as high as they could go until you decide to start over from scratch.
I can see why launch D3 made D2 players unhappy, but as someone who didn't start playing D3 until after the expansion and never played D2 at all, nothing I hear about D2 makes me want to play it over D3 and any attempt to "fix" D4 by making it closer to D2 just makes me less interested in that game either.
jothki on
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HenroidMexican kicked from Immigration ThreadCentrism is Racism :3Registered Userregular
RE: Diablo 2 Remaster, are they going to preserve the game as it stands, or are they planning to make some balance adjustments / gameplay changes?
RE: Diablo 2 Remaster, are they going to preserve the game as it stands, or are they planning to make some balance adjustments / gameplay changes?
Sounds like they want to launch with zero balance adjustments, and the only "gameplay" changes are basically stash related. There was mentioned something about auto-partying when joining games for whatever that's worth.
If you want Diablo II but somewhat rebalanced, follow the Project Diablo II mod. They already have widescreen and upscaling options. Since they keep it fairly close to vanilla hopefully they can transition their work to the remaster at some point.
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HenroidMexican kicked from Immigration ThreadCentrism is Racism :3Registered Userregular
Ugh I tried using mods on Diablo 2 and they're so fucking picky about having specific versions of Diablo 2 installed. Which means some of them don't cross-over with each other and *fart noise*.
That said for D2R, quality of life changes I don't consider gameplay changes. I mean, QOL changes are fucking necessary - if this remake requires you to click individual gold piles still, I will be the maddest fucking person on the planet.
More what I'm wondering is, if certain spells and abilities are identified as never being used / being extremely lacking in competition with other abilities, will they try to buff them or adjust synergies? Because... I kinda hope they do. Diablo 2 has spells that actually are garbage trash.
Oh also I hope they fix shit like the mana drain trait on bosses. Among other things.
Ugh I tried using mods on Diablo 2 and they're so fucking picky about having specific versions of Diablo 2 installed. Which means some of them don't cross-over with each other and *fart noise*.
That said for D2R, quality of life changes I don't consider gameplay changes. I mean, QOL changes are fucking necessary - if this remake requires you to click individual gold piles still, I will be the maddest fucking person on the planet.
More what I'm wondering is, if certain spells and abilities are identified as never being used / being extremely lacking in competition with other abilities, will they try to buff them or adjust synergies? Because... I kinda hope they do. Diablo 2 has spells that actually are garbage trash.
Oh also I hope they fix shit like the mana drain trait on bosses. Among other things.
Yes and they specifically said they don't want to alter that stuff for launch right now, that they have to make sure they start with something "authentic." Sounds like they don't want to rule out balance passes down the road but they basically are committed to launching with vanilla 1.14.
rahkeesh2000 on
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HenroidMexican kicked from Immigration ThreadCentrism is Racism :3Registered Userregular
I really do hope the major bugs get fixed. The two that stand out to me are the mana drain bug and the fire+lightning problem on Nightmare difficulty.
AND YET
I can't help but know that there are going to be people who LOSE THEIR MINDS in anger if those bugs are fixed. Things they know are bugs, and things that they have adapted to over the years out of frustration, and yet when it gets fixed there will be a crowd like, "I LIKE BEING INCONVENIENCED RAWR"
It's confirmed that D2R will have mod support, so there will no doubt be some really badass mods even if it's not backwards compatible with the existing ones. I'm more excited for that than I am for the vanilla game.
There was at least one video (I think it was the deep dive?) where they talked about threading the needle between keeping an authentic D2 experience and fixing bugs.
If I recall correctly, they mentioned a bug that made Blessed Hammer do more damage than intended as something that they wouldn't want to change, to avoid disappointing players that liked playing their hammerdins back in the day. But they were more open to fixing bugs that were irritating to the player, like invisible projectiles that could kill your player.
That makes me hopeful that they will fix bugs that made skills useless, like assassin kicks or Inferno-type spells.
Man, set dungeons are fucking stupid in the Switch. I don't know about other consoles, but I can't imagine it's much better.
Why they didn't rebalance the requirements for the sheer amount of handicaps is idiotic.
Yes, require me to hit an enemy with certain attacks when I can't choose my targets and the screen is zoomed in so much that I can barely see 10yrds ahead of me. It is fantastic failing something because of something I cannot even see!
EDIT: Apparently the spider queen you summon with corpse spider - spider queen, doesn't count as the "spider queen" that the elites need to be hit by along with the Pirhana's in the Arachyr set dungeon. This is fucking infuriating!
EDIT2: it's just a fucking roll of the dice every time you encounter an elite. Maybe a coin flip at best. Can be in the pirhana's and the only thing attacking is the spider queen and it's just maybe this will fail maybe it won't. It's less about skill and more "can I get heads 5 times in a row?"
Man, set dungeons are fucking stupid in the Switch. I don't know about other consoles, but I can't imagine it's much better.
Why they didn't rebalance the requirements for the sheer amount of handicaps is idiotic.
Yes, require me to hit an enemy with certain attacks when I can't choose my targets and the screen is zoomed in so much that I can barely see 10yrds ahead of me. It is fantastic failing something because of something I cannot even see!
EDIT: Apparently the spider queen you summon with corpse spider - spider queen, doesn't count as the "spider queen" that the elites need to be hit by along with the Pirhana's in the Arachyr set dungeon. This is fucking infuriating!
It may just be my opinion, but set dungeons are pretty stupid even on the PC.
At least the only rewards from them are cosmetic AFAIK. Makes me feel a little better about ignoring them completely.
Man, set dungeons are fucking stupid in the Switch. I don't know about other consoles, but I can't imagine it's much better.
Why they didn't rebalance the requirements for the sheer amount of handicaps is idiotic.
Yes, require me to hit an enemy with certain attacks when I can't choose my targets and the screen is zoomed in so much that I can barely see 10yrds ahead of me. It is fantastic failing something because of something I cannot even see!
EDIT: Apparently the spider queen you summon with corpse spider - spider queen, doesn't count as the "spider queen" that the elites need to be hit by along with the Pirhana's in the Arachyr set dungeon. This is fucking infuriating!
It may just be my opinion, but set dungeons are pretty stupid even on the PC.
At least the only rewards from them are cosmetic AFAIK. Makes me feel a little better about ignoring them completely.
Set dungeons on PC are excruciating. Granted, some of them are relatively simple, but it's always an anxiety-inducing experience, and they always require you to hobble yourself: dismiss the follower, possibly take off some items, remove some paragon points, etc.
I think there is one set dungeon that is easy (or easier) for all the classes. At least that's what I have been told since I have not done a different class set dungeon in a long, long time. DH easy one is the Marauder set. That thing is laughable and the only one I do these days for the season journey.
Fortunately it was only the Helltooth dungeon that was god awful. The others I did first or second try, on Witch Doctor. I'm going to aim to do Crusader too, I don't even recall what their set dungeons even were.
I did all of the set dungeons a season or two ago on PC, just to clean up all the achievements. A couple were pretty gnarly, for sure, but simply having the ability to actually select your target makes even the rough ones substantially easier than they are on the Switch at least. The Zunimassa one, I just did, due to how much less of the map you can see at any given time, and the inability to target your spells at your cursor, made getting the 150 hits with Grasp ultra tight, as in I got it on the very last one. Your legion of pets can see and aggro enemies further than you can actually see due to the zoomed in perspective, so there's an awful lot of spamming Grasp and hoping you hit most of the guys before they get murdered by your fetishes and such.
At least Crusader doesn't have that many targetable abilities? We will see I guess!
Hard pass on Rathma until/unless some enterprising necro expert figures out a way to make it fun. Jumped into a T16 and Bone Spirit one shots whatever, Army of the Dead one shots an area and refreshes rather quickly, but otherwise there is nothing happening. The pets, as expected, do absolutely no damage at all.
Edit: apparently I don’t actually own 6pc Firebird... but 4FB/6Tal is R U D E. You could probably do whatever with it, but etched sigil twisters seems easiest for the free damage.
There's been some gnashing of teeth about some of the D4 items shown from Blizzcon, with one item granting several hundred stats (dexterity, strength, willpower, etc.)
This seems like it's in direct contravention to the most recent quarterly update, where they said the vast majority of your stats would come from level ups rather than from gear.
Most of the discourse talks about this as being a problem with large numbers; people don't like seeing millions and billions of damage flash on the screen. But I think the more important issue is whether or not they're designing for infinite scaling potential from ever larger stat numbers, as they did in Diablo 3.
It seems to me that infinite scaling was introduced because they wanted people to keep playing the same character (and purchasing permanent gear for that character) throughout the game's entire life cycle. That way they could keep introducing new, more powerful gear very simply, giving the most dedicated players a periodic reason to keep playing.
But there are downsides too. Hard caps and breakpoint and diminishing returns were a big part of gearing up in previous games, but it's hard to make those scale infinitely, so gear tends to be less interesting stacks of numbers. And when the content scales infinitely, that puts pressure on the players to play only optimized builds, so you can push ever further, as opposed to being open to off-meta builds that can still clear whatever particular content you aim for.
The item economy, which they've said they want to have in some form, is another avenue that gets influenced by the way gear scales. As the ramp of gear power gets longer and steeper, the distance between the best gear and any random drop gets longer. This distance creates a long ladder to climb, but it also increases the amount of gear that's both worthless to the bleeding edge, and better than anything a casual player would have found at certain points in the progression. This leads to the D3 problem where the auction house is where you find 99% of the gear you actually wear, and the market gets more and more saturated as time passes.
I'd like to know what their design process is for stuff like this.
It did end up working fairly well for seasonal play once the auction house was removed, drop chances were rescaled, and the endgame became about pushing numbers as high as they could go until you decide to start over from scratch.
I can see why launch D3 made D2 players unhappy, but as someone who didn't start playing D3 until after the expansion and never played D2 at all, nothing I hear about D2 makes me want to play it over D3 and any attempt to "fix" D4 by making it closer to D2 just makes me less interested in that game either.
I don't say this to criticize your enjoyment of Diablo 3; I understand where you're coming from and I'm not even trying to sell Diablo 2 (or its other successors) to you.
I say this as someone who enjoys Diablo 3 (mostly after Reaper of Souls after I had time to process what the heck launch D3 was), but enjoys Diablo 2 more (and yes also Path of Exile the game that worships Diablo 2 but I think makes lots of smart and cool changes), and wants to explain my personal feelings as to why:
There's something about Diablo 3 that just feels mechanical in relation to Diablo 2. It definitely has something do with the itemization, and the way they tied DPS for everyone to their weapon and to their primary stat absolutely played into that. That, specifically, also made classes and builds feel....more homogenous. I know it sounds weird to some people, but having two builds that approach gearing entirely differently makes them feel more different to me, and I think to a lot of other people too.
In Diablo 2 (carried over into PoE), gearing two different builds can be a completely different experience. A skeleton necromancer really doesn't give a shit about stats (strength, dex, int, whatever) for damage in Diablo 2. They don't care about 99% of the stats/skills you can get on items either! You want str to use equipment, probably dex for blocking, and shittons of vitality for health. Itemizing their damage is specific to skeleton necromancers, and you're looking for lots of +skills that come from certain items but are also randomized onto others. Weapon DPS doesn't matter, weapon stats barely matter; +skills on weapons? Oh hell yeah give me ALLLL of that.
That's one build. There are many many other builds; yes some of them are very well known and quite meta (skellymancers, whirlwind barbs, lots of others), but the various ways you build and craft them are different and definitely feel different. I can't apply my knowledge of skeleton necromancers to making an Amazon. I have no fucking idea how to play Amazons! I played them around launch when I was like 12 and they've changed and I dunno, but I do know that if I try to play them and gear them like a skelly Necromancer I'm going to get rocked.
In Diablo 3, I can make a damn good character of any skill and any class by chasing the numbers. The numbers are everywhere! Nope, we're not going to make summoners weird: they use intelligence for damage, and their weapon DPS makes their minions better too. I thought that was a good idea when I first saw it! Hell, you can largely ignore the stats (not in all instances, I know) -- just look at the green + numbers and the red - numbers and I can cruise through the game with my brain off.
The end game is mostly just "bigger numbers" versions of the stuff you can do at level 1. Dodge the glowey stuff, yeah I get fancier attacks as I level up (it feels a bit clinical because I can just switch to whatever has the biggest aoe and is resource efficient for 99% of my gameplay before set items), there's more stuff on the screen and more glowey stuff to dodge....but a whole hell of a lot of it is just doing the same stuff again but with bigger numbers. And oh man the game lets you know the numbers are bigger! You thought your bat doing 1000 damage was cool? Nah man, that same bat now does 90 million damage and you can clear GR 200! Remember when you were struggling with GR10? Didn't it feel different? Well....kind of. But okay, I cleared GR 200, I'ma go to GR 250......shit, this now feels a lot like GR 10 except the numbers say eleventy billion and not 1000. Time to upgrade the items again!
They added sets to change it up, that was cool! It made for weirder interactions, and I liked it. But ahh...not a lot of them, you know? You read the set bonuses; ok cool, I have a simple to understand quirk in addition to "pump the primary stat and the weapon DPS". Everyone learned them, icyveins crunched the shit out of the meta (it was easy to do because Blizzard laid out the paths very plainly in the set descriptions), aaaand ok cool that's kind of it. Every build is viable if you want to look at it that way! Just one build is killing it with smaller numbers at their gear cap in a lower greater rift level, while the super meta builds are killing it with way bigger numbers in a higher greater rift. I don't think it's the same as every build being viable, but I do think that it leaves you with almost no builds that feel completely broken (except, of course, when compared to your friend over there rocking a super meta build. damn brain).
All of that just combines to make me feel like my brain can be pretty much turned off the entire time. I don't hate Diablo 3! There are times I really enjoy it. But every time I revisit it (I don't have a ridiculous amount of hours -- I'm not end game grind forever guy), it increasingly feels like I'm turning my brain off and doing the same numbers building thing for every class and every build I play, for 95% of my interactions with the game. I didn't give a shit about PoE when D3 launched, I was super comfortable with Blizzard making sensible QoL changes to D3(like tying all damage of all types to weapon DPS).....but I was wrong. It's all lizard brain stuff, but I just feel a sense of "eh who cares" to all of it that I don't to games that didn't streamline everything as much. Not everyone's going to feel the same way, but I've spoken to enough PoE/D2 nerds (lots of whom who also enjoy some D3) enough to know that I'm not totally alone with my feelings.
With PoE (which I'm shifting to because D2 builds have stagnated due to no real meta changes in 15 years and D4 is definitely looking at some stuff PoE did), builds really are unique! No, not completely, yes there's always someone doing something kind of like you, but you'd be really surprised! You can look at my weird diatribes about Melee Skeletons in the PoE threads (don't, though) -- lots of really smart people around here have awesome ideas on how to make melee skeletons awesome, but their solutions don't quite feel like my melee skeletons build that I'm used to. It's actually kind of cool! We can all play the game in just radically different ways, and even play two builds that use the exact same primary skill in radically different (very viable!) ways. I still don't even understand the language that our resident high end PoE players use sometimes, but they can enjoy their really fucking crazy mechanically complex builds, their expensive builds that are completely terrible until you are the richest man on the planet upon which they become godlike, and I can enjoy my poverty tier builds that make me feel happy annihilating lower hanging fruit for cheap. It...makes you feel a bit unique! This is already entirely too long, so here's a spoilered anecdote:
My old coworker and I started playing Path of Exile at the same time a few years ago. We each have about 2000 hours played. I still have never killed the "final boss" of whatever phase the game has been on, and I rarely get particularly close really. I roll lots of alts, and I always reroll when a new season hits every few months. Playing non-season (standard) is insane to me. The economy is hilariously inflated and the population is way lower, and I'm just not the type to play 1 build for more than 3 months. My friend is the opposite. He was incredibly focused on one character for 2000 hours. All he wanted was to make that one build, his build, the most ridiculously overpowered thing he possibly could. I messed with him about it in a friendly way -- "You work a white collar job and have a family, you're never getting to level 100! It's not for normal humans! Play league with meeee!". Well I was wrong. After 2 freaking years of playing, he got to 100. He played the markets (accounting/finance nerd) and had more currency than I could even possibly fathom. His build, to me, was fucking stupid! It was a janky mess (HIS RESISTANCES AREN'T EVEN CAPPED!) that would take me thousands of hours to make work. Well uhh, he did that. He made that build stronger than anything I'd ever played, or ever will play. I think he's crazy, he fucking loves it. This league, he FINALLY made a second character. So we were finally rolling up fresh level 1s at the same time again. Most of the knowledge I had acquired in 2000 hours, he had no fucking idea (and definitely vice versa)! I gave him a build suggestion because I know how to make cheap league starters, but it was like "yo man you play this completely differently, so you may hate it!". He took it, liked it, but yeah got to end game and decided he wanted to change absolutely everything about it and uhh...yeah kind of recreate his old build but with a different class and do it in different weird ways. He did it! He's level 99 in league now, and will hit 100. He had some random dude find him on poe.ninja, a website that shows builds for the highest performing characters (because he's killing it!), message him, and ask him how the hell his build works. "How did you do this, teach me these items interactions, show me your build in action, okay cool I'm going to go spend ridiculous amounts of currency recreating your build (this dude was also a meta pro in other aspects and was a veteran player)". And damnit that's kind of awesome. We've each been playing this game, barely even understand how the other derives enjoyment from the game because of how differently we play it, but we're both buddies who love PoE and it's great. My stories aren't his stories -- his stories aren't my stories, and I like it.
if you gear a javazon like a skellymancer.. you'd do pretty well, actually since you are stacking + to skills either way. there's little quirks to each class but they all gear pretty similar outside of barbarian, who doesn't need + to skills that much.
variety always dies the more you try to maximize things. diablo 2 wasn't an exception to this. just look at how everyone allocated their stats- minimum dex/str, no energy, the rest vit. pretty much universal.
I haven't played every class' dungeons but of the ones I've done in-season so far, all have had at least one 'easy' one that I knocked out within a couple tries
but I also don't really care about completing all of them, so if a particular one seems annoying I just don't do it
it was the smallest on the list but
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
There's been some gnashing of teeth about some of the D4 items shown from Blizzcon, with one item granting several hundred stats (dexterity, strength, willpower, etc.)
This seems like it's in direct contravention to the most recent quarterly update, where they said the vast majority of your stats would come from level ups rather than from gear.
Most of the discourse talks about this as being a problem with large numbers; people don't like seeing millions and billions of damage flash on the screen. But I think the more important issue is whether or not they're designing for infinite scaling potential from ever larger stat numbers, as they did in Diablo 3.
It seems to me that infinite scaling was introduced because they wanted people to keep playing the same character (and purchasing permanent gear for that character) throughout the game's entire life cycle. That way they could keep introducing new, more powerful gear very simply, giving the most dedicated players a periodic reason to keep playing.
But there are downsides too. Hard caps and breakpoint and diminishing returns were a big part of gearing up in previous games, but it's hard to make those scale infinitely, so gear tends to be less interesting stacks of numbers. And when the content scales infinitely, that puts pressure on the players to play only optimized builds, so you can push ever further, as opposed to being open to off-meta builds that can still clear whatever particular content you aim for.
The item economy, which they've said they want to have in some form, is another avenue that gets influenced by the way gear scales. As the ramp of gear power gets longer and steeper, the distance between the best gear and any random drop gets longer. This distance creates a long ladder to climb, but it also increases the amount of gear that's both worthless to the bleeding edge, and better than anything a casual player would have found at certain points in the progression. This leads to the D3 problem where the auction house is where you find 99% of the gear you actually wear, and the market gets more and more saturated as time passes.
I'd like to know what their design process is for stuff like this.
It did end up working fairly well for seasonal play once the auction house was removed, drop chances were rescaled, and the endgame became about pushing numbers as high as they could go until you decide to start over from scratch.
I can see why launch D3 made D2 players unhappy, but as someone who didn't start playing D3 until after the expansion and never played D2 at all, nothing I hear about D2 makes me want to play it over D3 and any attempt to "fix" D4 by making it closer to D2 just makes me less interested in that game either.
I don't say this to criticize your enjoyment of Diablo 3; I understand where you're coming from and I'm not even trying to sell Diablo 2 (or its other successors) to you.
I say this as someone who enjoys Diablo 3 (mostly after Reaper of Souls after I had time to process what the heck launch D3 was), but enjoys Diablo 2 more (and yes also Path of Exile the game that worships Diablo 2 but I think makes lots of smart and cool changes), and wants to explain my personal feelings as to why:
There's something about Diablo 3 that just feels mechanical in relation to Diablo 2. It definitely has something do with the itemization, and the way they tied DPS for everyone to their weapon and to their primary stat absolutely played into that. That, specifically, also made classes and builds feel....more homogenous. I know it sounds weird to some people, but having two builds that approach gearing entirely differently makes them feel more different to me, and I think to a lot of other people too.
In Diablo 2 (carried over into PoE), gearing two different builds can be a completely different experience. A skeleton necromancer really doesn't give a shit about stats (strength, dex, int, whatever) for damage in Diablo 2. They don't care about 99% of the stats/skills you can get on items either! You want str to use equipment, probably dex for blocking, and shittons of vitality for health. Itemizing their damage is specific to skeleton necromancers, and you're looking for lots of +skills that come from certain items but are also randomized onto others. Weapon DPS doesn't matter, weapon stats barely matter; +skills on weapons? Oh hell yeah give me ALLLL of that.
That's one build. There are many many other builds; yes some of them are very well known and quite meta (skellymancers, whirlwind barbs, lots of others), but the various ways you build and craft them are different and definitely feel different. I can't apply my knowledge of skeleton necromancers to making an Amazon. I have no fucking idea how to play Amazons! I played them around launch when I was like 12 and they've changed and I dunno, but I do know that if I try to play them and gear them like a skelly Necromancer I'm going to get rocked.
In Diablo 3, I can make a damn good character of any skill and any class by chasing the numbers. The numbers are everywhere! Nope, we're not going to make summoners weird: they use intelligence for damage, and their weapon DPS makes their minions better too. I thought that was a good idea when I first saw it! Hell, you can largely ignore the stats (not in all instances, I know) -- just look at the green + numbers and the red - numbers and I can cruise through the game with my brain off.
The end game is mostly just "bigger numbers" versions of the stuff you can do at level 1. Dodge the glowey stuff, yeah I get fancier attacks as I level up (it feels a bit clinical because I can just switch to whatever has the biggest aoe and is resource efficient for 99% of my gameplay before set items), there's more stuff on the screen and more glowey stuff to dodge....but a whole hell of a lot of it is just doing the same stuff again but with bigger numbers. And oh man the game lets you know the numbers are bigger! You thought your bat doing 1000 damage was cool? Nah man, that same bat now does 90 million damage and you can clear GR 200! Remember when you were struggling with GR10? Didn't it feel different? Well....kind of. But okay, I cleared GR 200, I'ma go to GR 250......shit, this now feels a lot like GR 10 except the numbers say eleventy billion and not 1000. Time to upgrade the items again!
They added sets to change it up, that was cool! It made for weirder interactions, and I liked it. But ahh...not a lot of them, you know? You read the set bonuses; ok cool, I have a simple to understand quirk in addition to "pump the primary stat and the weapon DPS". Everyone learned them, icyveins crunched the shit out of the meta (it was easy to do because Blizzard laid out the paths very plainly in the set descriptions), aaaand ok cool that's kind of it. Every build is viable if you want to look at it that way! Just one build is killing it with smaller numbers at their gear cap in a lower greater rift level, while the super meta builds are killing it with way bigger numbers in a higher greater rift. I don't think it's the same as every build being viable, but I do think that it leaves you with almost no builds that feel completely broken (except, of course, when compared to your friend over there rocking a super meta build. damn brain).
All of that just combines to make me feel like my brain can be pretty much turned off the entire time. I don't hate Diablo 3! There are times I really enjoy it. But every time I revisit it (I don't have a ridiculous amount of hours -- I'm not end game grind forever guy), it increasingly feels like I'm turning my brain off and doing the same numbers building thing for every class and every build I play, for 95% of my interactions with the game. I didn't give a shit about PoE when D3 launched, I was super comfortable with Blizzard making sensible QoL changes to D3(like tying all damage of all types to weapon DPS).....but I was wrong. It's all lizard brain stuff, but I just feel a sense of "eh who cares" to all of it that I don't to games that didn't streamline everything as much. Not everyone's going to feel the same way, but I've spoken to enough PoE/D2 nerds (lots of whom who also enjoy some D3) enough to know that I'm not totally alone with my feelings.
With PoE (which I'm shifting to because D2 builds have stagnated due to no real meta changes in 15 years and D4 is definitely looking at some stuff PoE did), builds really are unique! No, not completely, yes there's always someone doing something kind of like you, but you'd be really surprised! You can look at my weird diatribes about Melee Skeletons in the PoE threads (don't, though) -- lots of really smart people around here have awesome ideas on how to make melee skeletons awesome, but their solutions don't quite feel like my melee skeletons build that I'm used to. It's actually kind of cool! We can all play the game in just radically different ways, and even play two builds that use the exact same primary skill in radically different (very viable!) ways. I still don't even understand the language that our resident high end PoE players use sometimes, but they can enjoy their really fucking crazy mechanically complex builds, their expensive builds that are completely terrible until you are the richest man on the planet upon which they become godlike, and I can enjoy my poverty tier builds that make me feel happy annihilating lower hanging fruit for cheap. It...makes you feel a bit unique! This is already entirely too long, so here's a spoilered anecdote:
My old coworker and I started playing Path of Exile at the same time a few years ago. We each have about 2000 hours played. I still have never killed the "final boss" of whatever phase the game has been on, and I rarely get particularly close really. I roll lots of alts, and I always reroll when a new season hits every few months. Playing non-season (standard) is insane to me. The economy is hilariously inflated and the population is way lower, and I'm just not the type to play 1 build for more than 3 months. My friend is the opposite. He was incredibly focused on one character for 2000 hours. All he wanted was to make that one build, his build, the most ridiculously overpowered thing he possibly could. I messed with him about it in a friendly way -- "You work a white collar job and have a family, you're never getting to level 100! It's not for normal humans! Play league with meeee!". Well I was wrong. After 2 freaking years of playing, he got to 100. He played the markets (accounting/finance nerd) and had more currency than I could even possibly fathom. His build, to me, was fucking stupid! It was a janky mess (HIS RESISTANCES AREN'T EVEN CAPPED!) that would take me thousands of hours to make work. Well uhh, he did that. He made that build stronger than anything I'd ever played, or ever will play. I think he's crazy, he fucking loves it. This league, he FINALLY made a second character. So we were finally rolling up fresh level 1s at the same time again. Most of the knowledge I had acquired in 2000 hours, he had no fucking idea (and definitely vice versa)! I gave him a build suggestion because I know how to make cheap league starters, but it was like "yo man you play this completely differently, so you may hate it!". He took it, liked it, but yeah got to end game and decided he wanted to change absolutely everything about it and uhh...yeah kind of recreate his old build but with a different class and do it in different weird ways. He did it! He's level 99 in league now, and will hit 100. He had some random dude find him on poe.ninja, a website that shows builds for the highest performing characters (because he's killing it!), message him, and ask him how the hell his build works. "How did you do this, teach me these items interactions, show me your build in action, okay cool I'm going to go spend ridiculous amounts of currency recreating your build (this dude was also a meta pro in other aspects and was a veteran player)". And damnit that's kind of awesome. We've each been playing this game, barely even understand how the other derives enjoyment from the game because of how differently we play it, but we're both buddies who love PoE and it's great. My stories aren't his stories -- his stories aren't my stories, and I like it.
I mean, a lot of this is just because the information about diablo 3 is way better; it's not like the endgame of D2 wasn't 'just bigger numbers,' it was just that none of the content people regularly did was hard enough that the numbers mattered much. People had lots of different builds, but in large part that's because information sharing wasn't good enough for a real meta to emerge (or to the extent that it did, it was fairly easy to just not be aware of it)
this is true with lots of old games; lots of people said similar stuff about WoW Classic, but when it actually released and ancient mechanics collided with modern analysis things degenerated extremely quickly
there's actually also tons of support for 'weird' gameplay in diablo 3; there's lots of oddball legendaries and many sets that support non-meta builds... people largely just don't use them because independently figuring out how to optimize say, a ray of frost wizard is a lot of work for something that you know ultimately won't be all that good
it was the smallest on the list but
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
if you gear a javazon like a skellymancer.. you'd do pretty well, actually since you are stacking + to skills either way. there's little quirks to each class but they all gear pretty similar outside of barbarian, who doesn't need + to skills that much.
variety always dies the more you try to maximize things. diablo 2 wasn't an exception to this. just look at how everyone allocated their stats- minimum dex/str, no energy, the rest vit. pretty much universal.
Eh, I'll give you the first point for the most part. The building of spellcasting characters is fairly homogenous in D2, and they're a lot of the more powerful builds. My point was that it's still less homogenous than "every class and build uses weapon damage and primary stat" as it is in D3, and there's something about the sameyness of doing that over and over and over again that hurts my brain and makes me burn out quicker than games with more complexity. I think you're being a bit too nitpickey with my example -- yeah javazons gear the same, but not all Amazons do (which was my claim), and not all barbarians....they're not all chasing "weapon DPS and primary stat" in D2 like in D3, even if the variety isn't drastically better in D2.
The better example was PoE (which is why I specifically mentioned that Diablo 2 builds have stagnated in my post due to lack of meta changes in 15 years, and pivoted to PoE which clearly wants to be D2+ and took that game's ideas and ran with them). Diablo 3 looked at D2 and said "There's a lot of customization that winds up kind of meta-ized and homogenized. Why don't we just get rid of those?" (stat points, skill points, differences in gearing between classes that uses spells and classes that "use their weapon"). That removed any nuance there was to them in D3 (which probably made sense if the only other option is keeping it exactly the same), but they didn't need to keep it exactly the same or remove it for simplicity. They could have tried to have gearing decisions have more variety and impact, like PoE did. I guess it needs to be said: there are shittons of downsides to the way PoE handled it that drives lots of casual players away, but that large parts of the D2 crowd loved and attracted them to that game. I'm not advocating for Diablo 4 to be PoE; I'm providing an example of games that have done things better where D3 just chose to jettison the "D2-ey" mechanic entirely. The discussion I was responding to is about "Why would anyone want D4 to be more D2-ey at all?", and the ideas that PoE cribbed from D2 and ran with are great examples to me. I don't want a literal Diablo 2 clone in anything, from D3 to PoE to D4.
A lot of those decisions where PoE took what D2 did and went the other way with, were in service of build variety. They're super offputting to some players, and maybe there are other ways to do them! I don't want a PoE clone in D4 either. But they illustrate what I'm really trying to hit on, which you said in your second line.
"Variety always dies the more you try to maximize things" isn't wrong, but it's not an absolute as you've presented it. Meta does kill variety -- people want to play strong builds, and the meta finds them and pushes people to them. But it's not some binary thing. PoE has drastically more build variety than Diablo 3, for real build variety not just counting thousands of minor permutations of completely broken useless builds, because it handled the questions that Diablo 2 raised in very different ways than Diablo 3 handled those same questions. All of the talk is that Blizzard is re-examining those same decisions, and some of their switches look more like PoE (skill treeeeee), PoE often gets criticized for hewing too close to D2, so yeah I feel like it's okay to use that as a bit of "What if Diablo 3/4 was more like Diablo 2?" sort of deal in absence of other examples. And that game has shown that if you make different decisions, "variety always dies the more you try to maximize things" can mean anything from "each class has 3 really effective builds" "each class has 50 really effective builds", and that's a huge difference to me. And yeah all of the stuff about 2 builds feeling much more different in other games just because they itemize differently as opposed to D3; it feels super different to me! You may not feel the same, and that's cool. Diablo 3 offers a lot of things to a lot of people, and I have no issues with people having a blast with it.
I mean, a lot of this is just because the information about diablo 3 is way better; it's not like the endgame of D2 wasn't 'just bigger numbers,' it was just that none of the content people regularly did was hard enough that the numbers mattered much. People had lots of different builds, but in large part that's because information sharing wasn't good enough for a real meta to emerge (or to the extent that it did, it was fairly easy to just not be aware of it)
this is true with lots of old games; lots of people said similar stuff about WoW Classic, but when it actually released and ancient mechanics collided with modern analysis things degenerated extremely quickly
there's actually also tons of support for 'weird' gameplay in diablo 3; there's lots of oddball legendaries and many sets that support non-meta builds... people largely just don't use them because independently figuring out how to optimize say, a ray of frost wizard is a lot of work for something that you know ultimately won't be all that good
I'm not asking Diablo 3 or 4 or 5 to become Diablo 2 when we had less information and couldn't just go to icyveins to check the meta. I understand that. It's not a WoW Classic thing. I'm saying that there are modern examples of games that took Diablo 2's ideas, took them the opposite direction as Diablo 3 did, and had aspects of that game be much healthier as a result (build variety). All games suffer from meta crunch. PoE suffers less and has more build variety than Diablo 3 because of some of the decisions it made when it looked at Diablo 2 that were different. I don't want Diablo 4 to clone those ideas; ARPGs can continue to evolve and should. I'm hopeful that Blizzard also seems to get that they can make it be more varied than D3, but more accessible than PoE or D2, and I'm hoping they can do something cool.
I haven't played every class' dungeons but of the ones I've done in-season so far, all have had at least one 'easy' one that I knocked out within a couple tries
but I also don't really care about completing all of them, so if a particular one seems annoying I just don't do it
tbh I dunno enough about PoE's meta to be able to comment on it, but when I happen to stumble across discussion of it on streams or whatever it definitely sounds like there are fairly defined builds that people shoot for each season
and tbh, there's lots more builds in diablo 3 than people want to admit; chakram dh? Sure, you can do that with UE. Tornado wizard? yeah, there's good support for it. We have a pretty good proving ground for builds in D3 and those don't cut the mustard on the leaderboard so people mostly don't discuss them, but if that's what you wanna use to do grifts you can
it was the smallest on the list but
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
The rift stuff is all siloed into explorable mode. You need to switch out of Campaign mode first. (You might have to finish a normal diff campaign once to do so.)
Spent all day and a bit of last night working on my HC Necro to get the 3rd conquest (65+ gems) because I really didn't want to do the set dungeons; going fantastic.
Game locks up, dead.
When I fuck up, I can deal with losing a HC character. When the god damned game crashes and makes me lose it, it's infuriating.
EDIT: I guess I don't have to do the set dungeons, I can just do the 55 GR on my Crusader and Monk I guess, though I'm not sure if the monk even has a complete set of anything.
EDIT2: that was way faster; I don't know what the hell was going on in my brain when I decided to do the HC thing for the other conquest. I like HC, but it was not a time saver. I guess if I hadn't had 2 classes leveled to 70 and some gear already on the second one, it might have been? I dunno.
tbh I dunno enough about PoE's meta to be able to comment on it, but when I happen to stumble across discussion of it on streams or whatever it definitely sounds like there are fairly defined builds that people shoot for each season
and tbh, there's lots more builds in diablo 3 than people want to admit; chakram dh? Sure, you can do that with UE. Tornado wizard? yeah, there's good support for it. We have a pretty good proving ground for builds in D3 and those don't cut the mustard on the leaderboard so people mostly don't discuss them, but if that's what you wanna use to do grifts you can
there are stable "good" builds people do as league starters or brainless build-following but have done literally a different build every single time over possibly thousands of characters and a good 50% could clown endgame content with the right setup
For the D2 remaster they're against quality of life changes, and I haven't seen anything saying they'll add a single item to the game and the anti-QoL stance makes it seem like they're not touching the game outside of graphics just about.
Buried in interviews there's mention that the personal stash is also larger (10x10?), and that there are options to view heaps of stats and information on items and in the character screen. (Infamously called the Lying Character Screen back in the day, hopefully its bit more accurate.) But that seems to be it.
There's a screenshot of the shared stash and shows 3 shared tabs, I've seen it on several websites, and it seems like it's from a media package:
On the D2:R website, though, it only shows one shared tab. Dunno! Multiple tabs would be ideal, given that people could have a dozen mules, easily...even 3 is cutting it pretty tight.
There's also the toggle option for auto gold pickup, they said they are putting in. One thing they outright said they considered but ultimately said no to, was any sort of mini-map. I can somewhat understand their justification, however it is pretty flimsy, in the end. As they said themselves, many players just play with the map up all the time, which isn't ideal, but is reality. Why go through the trouble of prettying up all the graphics only to have it perpetually covered by a tinted map? Or, worse (for blizzard), is people just mod in a mini-map, and then they have to deal with the headache of banning players for using external tools, when they could have just put the option in and not worry about arbitrary purity. I think the minimap choice was the wrong one, obviously, but regardless, they're clearly not completely against QOL changes.
Just...maybe not super consistent in their application.
Anyway, has anyone dorked around on the PTR? I've seen some analysis of the Firebird/Rathma change (both seem great, though Rathma is far more appealing to me, Wizard is a class that has never clicked with me), but not really anyone talking about the Follower changes, and what kind of difference they can make in quality of life stuff. I'm curious if their damage actually scales in a meaningful way now, to be considered an actual damage buff, or if they're just going to end up being legendary suitcases. Just having the "free" nemesis, Flavor, and Avarice alone would make so many things feel a lot better (though the latter has no bearing on GR's, and a lot of streamers treat them as the only thing any notes are concerned with at all). Weird that they put in Avarice, Goldskin, etc, but left out Goldwrap. Maybe because it's a direct character buff, instead of just a quality of life thing? But Krede's flame is, situationally, a potential buff for resource using builds. (EDIT: I don't think anything in the list of carried over buffs is going to replace Oculus and Unity for the ring slots. Flavor of Time is an easy replacement for Ess of Johan that usually goes in the amulet slot. I don't think there are any builds that rely on the follower slow for dps, though it's a nice extra...just not as nice as double duration pylons EDIT2: derp, Avarice...if you're not pushing it can go in the Oculus slot, since you don't really need that buff for bounty/NR farming anyway) I dunno, maybe there's not much to test, just knowing you have those abilities means double DB's, more keys, longer Pylons, faster rifts, and all the gold pickup range outside of GR's. And Diamonds for daaaaaaaaaaaaaays.
Watching some gameplay videos of D2:R and D4 earlier, after playing a lot of D3 the past few days, made me feel like D4 is still going to feel a lot more like D3 in its fluidity and general movement. D4 is definitely more D2-ish in the aesthetics and visuals, but even with the nice coat of paint in D2:R, movement (EDIT: In D2:R; D4 is much more fluid and actiony. I actually felt a bit of Hades (which I know isn't the first to do that sort of action/dodgey/isometric gameplay)) is very clearly tile based and (IMO obviously) janky relative to D3/D4. Heck, if anything, the nicer graphics make the stilted movement of enemies and player characters that much more obvious than when it was sorta masked behind the low rez and pixels.
I dunno, I'm feeling pretty torn on D2:R. It isn't like I didn't love D2 and spend a lot of time with it, I'm just not sure after watching some gameplay of the remaster, if I really want to go back to it, and pay $40 for it. It's ok, it doesn't have to be for me, and I hope people really dig it. It's just hard to not feel like any sort of remaster like this (or FFVII, etc) is kind of a monkey paw situation. Then again, I also thought (and still do, honestly) that WoW Classic was a really bad idea, because you simply can't ever recreate the moments that make people nostalgic for that stuff in the first place. It'll never be what you remember it being.
But, on the other hand, there's always a chance of making new memories, as long as you come at it with the right attitude, so that's worth something; right?
The D3 wings from the preorder are pretty rad, though.
Only semi-related, the pet for next season in D3 is very clearly just the same as the green serpent pet from WoW in Mists. Kinda disappointing.
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The ol' Blood-Golem + Iron Maiden trick for massive life-leech.
I enjoyed waiting for that one demon to fall and then BOOM! - Corpse-explosion chain reaction and they all go down like dominoes.
Corpse explosion truly was the best skill in the game.
I think poison-dagger Necro was definitely more of a PvP-focused thing.
I did like the Amazon for pvp, when guided arrow with piercing would go through the same person more than once. I think they nerfed that though.
Skelemancer - so much subsequent tinkering after various nerfs as well as skellys not being viable on later difficulties
Defiant Paladin - Sword and Board, actually Scepter usually, can never be killed, but without the right weapon modifiers couldn't kill anything
Javazon - poison clouds and lightning javelins filling the entire screen
Javazon was probably the most consistently easy to gear and wreck face with but any Boss fight without minions (Duriel, Baal) was an utter nightmare. Paladin was straightforward - hold shift and click things for hours at a time
Click Duriel, hit cold field and watch my charger slow to a crawl, go get some food and wait for my attack to hit
It did end up working fairly well for seasonal play once the auction house was removed, drop chances were rescaled, and the endgame became about pushing numbers as high as they could go until you decide to start over from scratch.
I can see why launch D3 made D2 players unhappy, but as someone who didn't start playing D3 until after the expansion and never played D2 at all, nothing I hear about D2 makes me want to play it over D3 and any attempt to "fix" D4 by making it closer to D2 just makes me less interested in that game either.
Sounds like they want to launch with zero balance adjustments, and the only "gameplay" changes are basically stash related. There was mentioned something about auto-partying when joining games for whatever that's worth.
If you want Diablo II but somewhat rebalanced, follow the Project Diablo II mod. They already have widescreen and upscaling options. Since they keep it fairly close to vanilla hopefully they can transition their work to the remaster at some point.
That said for D2R, quality of life changes I don't consider gameplay changes. I mean, QOL changes are fucking necessary - if this remake requires you to click individual gold piles still, I will be the maddest fucking person on the planet.
More what I'm wondering is, if certain spells and abilities are identified as never being used / being extremely lacking in competition with other abilities, will they try to buff them or adjust synergies? Because... I kinda hope they do. Diablo 2 has spells that actually are garbage trash.
Oh also I hope they fix shit like the mana drain trait on bosses. Among other things.
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
So it's an accessibility issue now. And I don't even have it as bad as other people do.
Yes and they specifically said they don't want to alter that stuff for launch right now, that they have to make sure they start with something "authentic." Sounds like they don't want to rule out balance passes down the road but they basically are committed to launching with vanilla 1.14.
AND YET
I can't help but know that there are going to be people who LOSE THEIR MINDS in anger if those bugs are fixed. Things they know are bugs, and things that they have adapted to over the years out of frustration, and yet when it gets fixed there will be a crowd like, "I LIKE BEING INCONVENIENCED RAWR"
If I recall correctly, they mentioned a bug that made Blessed Hammer do more damage than intended as something that they wouldn't want to change, to avoid disappointing players that liked playing their hammerdins back in the day. But they were more open to fixing bugs that were irritating to the player, like invisible projectiles that could kill your player.
That makes me hopeful that they will fix bugs that made skills useless, like assassin kicks or Inferno-type spells.
Maybe because that’s what I wanted to hear, but even so, they did not rule it out.
Why they didn't rebalance the requirements for the sheer amount of handicaps is idiotic.
Yes, require me to hit an enemy with certain attacks when I can't choose my targets and the screen is zoomed in so much that I can barely see 10yrds ahead of me. It is fantastic failing something because of something I cannot even see!
EDIT: Apparently the spider queen you summon with corpse spider - spider queen, doesn't count as the "spider queen" that the elites need to be hit by along with the Pirhana's in the Arachyr set dungeon. This is fucking infuriating!
EDIT2: it's just a fucking roll of the dice every time you encounter an elite. Maybe a coin flip at best. Can be in the pirhana's and the only thing attacking is the spider queen and it's just maybe this will fail maybe it won't. It's less about skill and more "can I get heads 5 times in a row?"
Origin: Galedrid - Nintendo: Galedrid/3222-6858-1045
Blizzard: Galedrid#1367 - FFXIV: Galedrid Kingshand
It may just be my opinion, but set dungeons are pretty stupid even on the PC.
At least the only rewards from them are cosmetic AFAIK. Makes me feel a little better about ignoring them completely.
Steam: betsuni7
I did all of the set dungeons a season or two ago on PC, just to clean up all the achievements. A couple were pretty gnarly, for sure, but simply having the ability to actually select your target makes even the rough ones substantially easier than they are on the Switch at least. The Zunimassa one, I just did, due to how much less of the map you can see at any given time, and the inability to target your spells at your cursor, made getting the 150 hits with Grasp ultra tight, as in I got it on the very last one. Your legion of pets can see and aggro enemies further than you can actually see due to the zoomed in perspective, so there's an awful lot of spamming Grasp and hoping you hit most of the guys before they get murdered by your fetishes and such.
At least Crusader doesn't have that many targetable abilities? We will see I guess!
Origin: Galedrid - Nintendo: Galedrid/3222-6858-1045
Blizzard: Galedrid#1367 - FFXIV: Galedrid Kingshand
Hard pass on Rathma until/unless some enterprising necro expert figures out a way to make it fun. Jumped into a T16 and Bone Spirit one shots whatever, Army of the Dead one shots an area and refreshes rather quickly, but otherwise there is nothing happening. The pets, as expected, do absolutely no damage at all.
Edit: apparently I don’t actually own 6pc Firebird... but 4FB/6Tal is R U D E. You could probably do whatever with it, but etched sigil twisters seems easiest for the free damage.
I don't say this to criticize your enjoyment of Diablo 3; I understand where you're coming from and I'm not even trying to sell Diablo 2 (or its other successors) to you.
I say this as someone who enjoys Diablo 3 (mostly after Reaper of Souls after I had time to process what the heck launch D3 was), but enjoys Diablo 2 more (and yes also Path of Exile the game that worships Diablo 2 but I think makes lots of smart and cool changes), and wants to explain my personal feelings as to why:
There's something about Diablo 3 that just feels mechanical in relation to Diablo 2. It definitely has something do with the itemization, and the way they tied DPS for everyone to their weapon and to their primary stat absolutely played into that. That, specifically, also made classes and builds feel....more homogenous. I know it sounds weird to some people, but having two builds that approach gearing entirely differently makes them feel more different to me, and I think to a lot of other people too.
In Diablo 2 (carried over into PoE), gearing two different builds can be a completely different experience. A skeleton necromancer really doesn't give a shit about stats (strength, dex, int, whatever) for damage in Diablo 2. They don't care about 99% of the stats/skills you can get on items either! You want str to use equipment, probably dex for blocking, and shittons of vitality for health. Itemizing their damage is specific to skeleton necromancers, and you're looking for lots of +skills that come from certain items but are also randomized onto others. Weapon DPS doesn't matter, weapon stats barely matter; +skills on weapons? Oh hell yeah give me ALLLL of that.
That's one build. There are many many other builds; yes some of them are very well known and quite meta (skellymancers, whirlwind barbs, lots of others), but the various ways you build and craft them are different and definitely feel different. I can't apply my knowledge of skeleton necromancers to making an Amazon. I have no fucking idea how to play Amazons! I played them around launch when I was like 12 and they've changed and I dunno, but I do know that if I try to play them and gear them like a skelly Necromancer I'm going to get rocked.
In Diablo 3, I can make a damn good character of any skill and any class by chasing the numbers. The numbers are everywhere! Nope, we're not going to make summoners weird: they use intelligence for damage, and their weapon DPS makes their minions better too. I thought that was a good idea when I first saw it! Hell, you can largely ignore the stats (not in all instances, I know) -- just look at the green + numbers and the red - numbers and I can cruise through the game with my brain off.
The end game is mostly just "bigger numbers" versions of the stuff you can do at level 1. Dodge the glowey stuff, yeah I get fancier attacks as I level up (it feels a bit clinical because I can just switch to whatever has the biggest aoe and is resource efficient for 99% of my gameplay before set items), there's more stuff on the screen and more glowey stuff to dodge....but a whole hell of a lot of it is just doing the same stuff again but with bigger numbers. And oh man the game lets you know the numbers are bigger! You thought your bat doing 1000 damage was cool? Nah man, that same bat now does 90 million damage and you can clear GR 200! Remember when you were struggling with GR10? Didn't it feel different? Well....kind of. But okay, I cleared GR 200, I'ma go to GR 250......shit, this now feels a lot like GR 10 except the numbers say eleventy billion and not 1000. Time to upgrade the items again!
They added sets to change it up, that was cool! It made for weirder interactions, and I liked it. But ahh...not a lot of them, you know? You read the set bonuses; ok cool, I have a simple to understand quirk in addition to "pump the primary stat and the weapon DPS". Everyone learned them, icyveins crunched the shit out of the meta (it was easy to do because Blizzard laid out the paths very plainly in the set descriptions), aaaand ok cool that's kind of it. Every build is viable if you want to look at it that way! Just one build is killing it with smaller numbers at their gear cap in a lower greater rift level, while the super meta builds are killing it with way bigger numbers in a higher greater rift. I don't think it's the same as every build being viable, but I do think that it leaves you with almost no builds that feel completely broken (except, of course, when compared to your friend over there rocking a super meta build. damn brain).
All of that just combines to make me feel like my brain can be pretty much turned off the entire time. I don't hate Diablo 3! There are times I really enjoy it. But every time I revisit it (I don't have a ridiculous amount of hours -- I'm not end game grind forever guy), it increasingly feels like I'm turning my brain off and doing the same numbers building thing for every class and every build I play, for 95% of my interactions with the game. I didn't give a shit about PoE when D3 launched, I was super comfortable with Blizzard making sensible QoL changes to D3(like tying all damage of all types to weapon DPS).....but I was wrong. It's all lizard brain stuff, but I just feel a sense of "eh who cares" to all of it that I don't to games that didn't streamline everything as much. Not everyone's going to feel the same way, but I've spoken to enough PoE/D2 nerds (lots of whom who also enjoy some D3) enough to know that I'm not totally alone with my feelings.
With PoE (which I'm shifting to because D2 builds have stagnated due to no real meta changes in 15 years and D4 is definitely looking at some stuff PoE did), builds really are unique! No, not completely, yes there's always someone doing something kind of like you, but you'd be really surprised! You can look at my weird diatribes about Melee Skeletons in the PoE threads (don't, though) -- lots of really smart people around here have awesome ideas on how to make melee skeletons awesome, but their solutions don't quite feel like my melee skeletons build that I'm used to. It's actually kind of cool! We can all play the game in just radically different ways, and even play two builds that use the exact same primary skill in radically different (very viable!) ways. I still don't even understand the language that our resident high end PoE players use sometimes, but they can enjoy their really fucking crazy mechanically complex builds, their expensive builds that are completely terrible until you are the richest man on the planet upon which they become godlike, and I can enjoy my poverty tier builds that make me feel happy annihilating lower hanging fruit for cheap. It...makes you feel a bit unique! This is already entirely too long, so here's a spoilered anecdote:
variety always dies the more you try to maximize things. diablo 2 wasn't an exception to this. just look at how everyone allocated their stats- minimum dex/str, no energy, the rest vit. pretty much universal.
but I also don't really care about completing all of them, so if a particular one seems annoying I just don't do it
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
I mean, a lot of this is just because the information about diablo 3 is way better; it's not like the endgame of D2 wasn't 'just bigger numbers,' it was just that none of the content people regularly did was hard enough that the numbers mattered much. People had lots of different builds, but in large part that's because information sharing wasn't good enough for a real meta to emerge (or to the extent that it did, it was fairly easy to just not be aware of it)
this is true with lots of old games; lots of people said similar stuff about WoW Classic, but when it actually released and ancient mechanics collided with modern analysis things degenerated extremely quickly
there's actually also tons of support for 'weird' gameplay in diablo 3; there's lots of oddball legendaries and many sets that support non-meta builds... people largely just don't use them because independently figuring out how to optimize say, a ray of frost wizard is a lot of work for something that you know ultimately won't be all that good
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
Eh, I'll give you the first point for the most part. The building of spellcasting characters is fairly homogenous in D2, and they're a lot of the more powerful builds. My point was that it's still less homogenous than "every class and build uses weapon damage and primary stat" as it is in D3, and there's something about the sameyness of doing that over and over and over again that hurts my brain and makes me burn out quicker than games with more complexity. I think you're being a bit too nitpickey with my example -- yeah javazons gear the same, but not all Amazons do (which was my claim), and not all barbarians....they're not all chasing "weapon DPS and primary stat" in D2 like in D3, even if the variety isn't drastically better in D2.
The better example was PoE (which is why I specifically mentioned that Diablo 2 builds have stagnated in my post due to lack of meta changes in 15 years, and pivoted to PoE which clearly wants to be D2+ and took that game's ideas and ran with them). Diablo 3 looked at D2 and said "There's a lot of customization that winds up kind of meta-ized and homogenized. Why don't we just get rid of those?" (stat points, skill points, differences in gearing between classes that uses spells and classes that "use their weapon"). That removed any nuance there was to them in D3 (which probably made sense if the only other option is keeping it exactly the same), but they didn't need to keep it exactly the same or remove it for simplicity. They could have tried to have gearing decisions have more variety and impact, like PoE did. I guess it needs to be said: there are shittons of downsides to the way PoE handled it that drives lots of casual players away, but that large parts of the D2 crowd loved and attracted them to that game. I'm not advocating for Diablo 4 to be PoE; I'm providing an example of games that have done things better where D3 just chose to jettison the "D2-ey" mechanic entirely. The discussion I was responding to is about "Why would anyone want D4 to be more D2-ey at all?", and the ideas that PoE cribbed from D2 and ran with are great examples to me. I don't want a literal Diablo 2 clone in anything, from D3 to PoE to D4.
A lot of those decisions where PoE took what D2 did and went the other way with, were in service of build variety. They're super offputting to some players, and maybe there are other ways to do them! I don't want a PoE clone in D4 either. But they illustrate what I'm really trying to hit on, which you said in your second line.
"Variety always dies the more you try to maximize things" isn't wrong, but it's not an absolute as you've presented it. Meta does kill variety -- people want to play strong builds, and the meta finds them and pushes people to them. But it's not some binary thing. PoE has drastically more build variety than Diablo 3, for real build variety not just counting thousands of minor permutations of completely broken useless builds, because it handled the questions that Diablo 2 raised in very different ways than Diablo 3 handled those same questions. All of the talk is that Blizzard is re-examining those same decisions, and some of their switches look more like PoE (skill treeeeee), PoE often gets criticized for hewing too close to D2, so yeah I feel like it's okay to use that as a bit of "What if Diablo 3/4 was more like Diablo 2?" sort of deal in absence of other examples. And that game has shown that if you make different decisions, "variety always dies the more you try to maximize things" can mean anything from "each class has 3 really effective builds" "each class has 50 really effective builds", and that's a huge difference to me. And yeah all of the stuff about 2 builds feeling much more different in other games just because they itemize differently as opposed to D3; it feels super different to me! You may not feel the same, and that's cool. Diablo 3 offers a lot of things to a lot of people, and I have no issues with people having a blast with it.
I'm not asking Diablo 3 or 4 or 5 to become Diablo 2 when we had less information and couldn't just go to icyveins to check the meta. I understand that. It's not a WoW Classic thing. I'm saying that there are modern examples of games that took Diablo 2's ideas, took them the opposite direction as Diablo 3 did, and had aspects of that game be much healthier as a result (build variety). All games suffer from meta crunch. PoE suffers less and has more build variety than Diablo 3 because of some of the decisions it made when it looked at Diablo 2 that were different. I don't want Diablo 4 to clone those ideas; ARPGs can continue to evolve and should. I'm hopeful that Blizzard also seems to get that they can make it be more varied than D3, but more accessible than PoE or D2, and I'm hoping they can do something cool.
iirc all of the necro ones are stupid easy
and tbh, there's lots more builds in diablo 3 than people want to admit; chakram dh? Sure, you can do that with UE. Tornado wizard? yeah, there's good support for it. We have a pretty good proving ground for builds in D3 and those don't cut the mustard on the leaderboard so people mostly don't discuss them, but if that's what you wanna use to do grifts you can
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
Remind me - you unlock rifts after beating the main quest, right ? It's been a few years since I played it on pc.
Just unlocked disintegrate in my sorcerer - God, that's fun on lower difficulties, I remember loving the way it melts packs of mobs...
Spent all day and a bit of last night working on my HC Necro to get the 3rd conquest (65+ gems) because I really didn't want to do the set dungeons; going fantastic.
Game locks up, dead.
When I fuck up, I can deal with losing a HC character. When the god damned game crashes and makes me lose it, it's infuriating.
EDIT: I guess I don't have to do the set dungeons, I can just do the 55 GR on my Crusader and Monk I guess, though I'm not sure if the monk even has a complete set of anything.
EDIT2: that was way faster; I don't know what the hell was going on in my brain when I decided to do the HC thing for the other conquest. I like HC, but it was not a time saver. I guess if I hadn't had 2 classes leveled to 70 and some gear already on the second one, it might have been? I dunno.
Either way, journey done on Switch and PC again.
Origin: Galedrid - Nintendo: Galedrid/3222-6858-1045
Blizzard: Galedrid#1367 - FFXIV: Galedrid Kingshand
there are stable "good" builds people do as league starters or brainless build-following but have done literally a different build every single time over possibly thousands of characters and a good 50% could clown endgame content with the right setup
game is just dummy thicc
Put those people on D4! We have D2 already!
On the D2:R website, though, it only shows one shared tab. Dunno! Multiple tabs would be ideal, given that people could have a dozen mules, easily...even 3 is cutting it pretty tight.
There's also the toggle option for auto gold pickup, they said they are putting in. One thing they outright said they considered but ultimately said no to, was any sort of mini-map. I can somewhat understand their justification, however it is pretty flimsy, in the end. As they said themselves, many players just play with the map up all the time, which isn't ideal, but is reality. Why go through the trouble of prettying up all the graphics only to have it perpetually covered by a tinted map? Or, worse (for blizzard), is people just mod in a mini-map, and then they have to deal with the headache of banning players for using external tools, when they could have just put the option in and not worry about arbitrary purity. I think the minimap choice was the wrong one, obviously, but regardless, they're clearly not completely against QOL changes.
Just...maybe not super consistent in their application.
Anyway, has anyone dorked around on the PTR? I've seen some analysis of the Firebird/Rathma change (both seem great, though Rathma is far more appealing to me, Wizard is a class that has never clicked with me), but not really anyone talking about the Follower changes, and what kind of difference they can make in quality of life stuff. I'm curious if their damage actually scales in a meaningful way now, to be considered an actual damage buff, or if they're just going to end up being legendary suitcases. Just having the "free" nemesis, Flavor, and Avarice alone would make so many things feel a lot better (though the latter has no bearing on GR's, and a lot of streamers treat them as the only thing any notes are concerned with at all). Weird that they put in Avarice, Goldskin, etc, but left out Goldwrap. Maybe because it's a direct character buff, instead of just a quality of life thing? But Krede's flame is, situationally, a potential buff for resource using builds. (EDIT: I don't think anything in the list of carried over buffs is going to replace Oculus and Unity for the ring slots. Flavor of Time is an easy replacement for Ess of Johan that usually goes in the amulet slot. I don't think there are any builds that rely on the follower slow for dps, though it's a nice extra...just not as nice as double duration pylons EDIT2: derp, Avarice...if you're not pushing it can go in the Oculus slot, since you don't really need that buff for bounty/NR farming anyway) I dunno, maybe there's not much to test, just knowing you have those abilities means double DB's, more keys, longer Pylons, faster rifts, and all the gold pickup range outside of GR's. And Diamonds for daaaaaaaaaaaaaays.
Origin: Galedrid - Nintendo: Galedrid/3222-6858-1045
Blizzard: Galedrid#1367 - FFXIV: Galedrid Kingshand
maybe at some point we'll get some non gameplay related improvements, like a glamor system
I dunno, I'm feeling pretty torn on D2:R. It isn't like I didn't love D2 and spend a lot of time with it, I'm just not sure after watching some gameplay of the remaster, if I really want to go back to it, and pay $40 for it.
But, on the other hand, there's always a chance of making new memories, as long as you come at it with the right attitude, so that's worth something; right?
The D3 wings from the preorder are pretty rad, though.
Only semi-related, the pet for next season in D3 is very clearly just the same as the green serpent pet from WoW in Mists. Kinda disappointing.
Origin: Galedrid - Nintendo: Galedrid/3222-6858-1045
Blizzard: Galedrid#1367 - FFXIV: Galedrid Kingshand