Another skill that needs a mention is Fend. It is broken with the amazon. You are probably aware of the bug associated with it. The problem is that you either invest in the passive skills to get enough survivability, or you skip them and deal with the bug. The bug is that when you are using fend, and the dodge animation triggers, you are stuck doing nothing for the rest of the fend animation. You do no damage. Even with a tiny point investment, it triggers quite often and makes a melee amazon based on fend extremely frustrating to play. The solution is to either not have dodge trigger while the fend animation is going, or to have fend continue even when dodging. The first reduces survivability of the amazon, but at least the meleezons will be playable.
While I am sure that it will be different in many ways, I have confidence that it won't flop. I am basing this on the fact that blizzard vigorously playtests all of their games prior to release the the release "when it is done" philosophy ensures a more quality product than is usually expected from a gaming company. I believe I heard a quote from blizzard that they know a game is complete when they start spending more time playing it than actually working on it. If everyone inside the company enjoys the game, it is a fairly safe bet than people outside will enjoy it as well.
Perhaps I am a little out of date with my information, but do we know anything about the state of party skills in this game? By party skills, I am referring to skills that directly benefit the skills user as well as other players in the party. Examples would be the paladins aura, the necromancers curses and the barbarians warcries from diablo 2. I remember seeing the witch doctors terror, but I can't recall any other form. If it is the case that they aren't there, or at least aren't there in abundance, is this a good or a bad thing? Any suggestions on good "party skills" that could be added? To what class?
I like your ideas, and I never actually knew that blizzard was random, I thought it just procced cold damage in the area of effect every certain amount of frames like hurricane. If it is random, perhaps it is the fact that fissure must take into account "usable" ground for the fissure animation while blizzard needs no such calculation. In general the fire druid is just slow in every way. All other classes are based around fast killing speeds while the fire druid has that taken away. I agree that less, but more effective synergies and/or a second source of damage among the fire path and a reduced or removed casting delay on all fire skills is really the only fix short of changing how the skills work.
An interesting idea for armageddon would be to reduce the area of effect, but have it still have the random aspect. Instead of having it as sort of a damage aura centered around the character, it could be more like inferno or arctic blast. What I mean by that is you have to hold down right click in order for the skill to be active, but have it be a concentrated attack centered around the mouse pointer, not the character. Think of it as blizzard, except the area of effect can be moved by moving the mouse pointer. This removes a lot of the randomness associated with the skill, though admittedly this may result in something overpowered. I also like the idea of it acting as a thunderstorm ability, though I think considering the point investment it takes it should strike more often.
Firestorm is a good skill, but it would be more effective if it were more like diablo's hellfire, taking up many more paths and having a much greater range. Right now, it can easily miss targets and if it doesn't do enough damage, the target will reach you, and as I mentioned the fire druid is terrible at taking damage.
Molten boulder suffers from being so terribly slow and being very directional oriented. I think that the speed of the actual boulder needs to be increased as well as the casting delay shorted or removed. Having a wall of molten boulders rolling over my enemies would be pretty awesome in my opinion. The skill already has a fire and a physical component, but they need to be buffed in some way. Perhaps the other fix I proposed would fix that by having many boulders, but I would need to test to verify.
I am not exactly sure what to do with fissure. Perhaps just a small buff such as each vent that opens up effects a wider area as opposed to the area immediately above.
Volcano is also a baffling one. If you increase the damage too much of the projectiles, then the volcano will be way overpowered for enemies that stand right at the top. If it is left the way that it is, then it is only effective at killing when enemies are at the top. Unfortunately, I feel that this skill needs to be reworked in order to fix that issue.
Any suggestions on top of what me and Phrozen have suggested are welcome, this is a discussion after all.
Good points, I have always wanted a good hydra sorceress and was frustrated with its lack of viability. I also think fire in general gets some of the worst immunity groups in the game. Having all fallen derivatives be immune to fire is a huge obstacle for anyone first entering hell without a secondary damage source as they are not avoidable at all.
On that note the fire druid suffers from a lot of the same problems. Excruciating casting delays coupled with significant point investment for viability cripples the build. Lets go through the skills.
Firestorm: While this is the first skill you get in the druid fire path, it is also potentially one of the most viable for dealing consistent damage. It is actually usable in part because it has a short (but not nonexistent) casting delay. Unfortunately it is not easy to aim, and the range is fairly short. An elemental druid is usually pretty weak because a lot of life and damage reduction gear is sacrificed for more skills. I think that theoretically, this is also the most damaging skill for the druid if fully synergized (assuming all 3 snakes hit a single target).
Molten Boulder: And now the casting delay begins to rear its ugly head. It isn't entirely unbearable on molten bolder, but it certainly hinders the skill. The very nature of the skill is also rather discouraging. The damage is split up into physical and fire which is a plus, but the fire damage isn't very effective. The boulder knocks the opponent back when it hits them, but it is also leaving a trail of fire behind it. This fire is occasionally useful, but because the opponent is being knocked away from the boulder, it rarely does anything. And again, I will mention that the small fast hoarding enemies such as fallen and some of the flayers that would be likely to get past the boulder and run into this trail of fire, are almost always fire immune. I am also of the opinion that fire/physical immunes are far more common that one would think in this game.
Fissure: Probably the favorite skill of most fire druids because it can attain high damage and is not a slow moving missile like the previous skills. It instead randomly opens vents around the area that you cast the spell, which is really quite baffling. You can actually cast this skill on a stationary opponent several times and not hit them once. Also you can get lucky and it may open several vents under the person at the same time. The point is that it is not consistent. It is best used when enemies are running across, and again I will mention that most of the hoarding enemies are fire immune (you can tell I am a little upset by that hehe).
Volcano: Without a casting delay, this could be a pretty amazing skill. Unfortunately, the casting delay is makes it very difficult to use. It has a physical and a fire component and can rack up quite a hefty damage count if the enemy decided to stay in one spot on top of the volcano. If the enemy is not on top of the volcano however, damage is slow and the fire druid must herd the monsters into a group and continuously run circles around them to keep them near the cinder cone. It takes a long time because the damage is again random within a certain area.
Armageddon: This is probably the most disappointing skill of all. The casting delay is 6 seconds (what makes this unbearable is that it shares it with all the other fire skills, leaving you essentially worthless for 6 whole seconds). The damage is another random area damage which means monsters could run up and hit you without taking any damage at all. Another problem is that this skill lasts a maximum of 30 seconds. With a casting delay of 6 seconds, you are worthless 20% of the time... If you were to try to use this skill without maxing the fissure synergy you would spend almost all of your time in the casting delay, and would have to recast the spell every 12 seconds. The only seemingly effective way to use this skill is to run away from enemies and hope the meteors hit them as they chase you. This is only marginally effective, and is not all that fun to play.
So lets do a summary of all the things wrong with the fire druid.
1: The shared casting delays make a lot of the skills unusable with other fire skills and makes faster cast rate a worthless trait.
2: The random mechanics of most of the skills is a huge weakness which seriously reduces damage output except in the most ideal circumstances.
3: The type of monsters that these skills are ideally suited for (the hoarding monsters such as fallen and most of the flayer derivatives) are almost all fire immune, further reducing the usefulness of all of the skills.
4: The way the synergies are set up, it takes a huge skill investment to receive an OK amount of damage. The fire druid will likely not have a second source of damage other than the physical on some of the skills(which never gets all that high).
5: The fire druid is forced to use lots of +skills equipment to output enough damage, which significantly reduces the defensive abilities of the build such as life and damage mitigation. The way the skills are set up also makes it far more difficult for the fire druid to fight at a distance like all other casters, exposing him to a lot more damage than other casters. On top of this, the druid also has no physical damage reduction skills that the other casters do. Cyclone armor helps against elemental damage, which almost always come from ranged attacks and do not help the druid against the physical problem. This is also made EVEN WORSE by the fact that a lot of the swarming, large group, fast enemies like fallen, flayers and doom knights are fire immune.
Unfortunately, short of a huge reworking of the fire skills on the druid, he will forever be a misfit among diablo builds.
I stumbled across one of these today in act 3 and I thought to myself, should I really be afraid? How hard is it to become a champion of drowned carcasses. Did this particular carcass drown better than any other carcass? Thoughts.
Dont judge it till you try it? It's like food. Ewwww it looks gross. *takes a bite* hey, this is delicious. Maybe it works for the game, judge the game as a whole not a clip of it. Eat your peas children.
I am sure that they will be back, and even if unchanged from diablo 2, I think it will work very well, here is why. In diablo 2, the reason the runewords were so overused was because they were incredibly easy to obtain due to the duplication methods that did, and do still exist. If those are capped, runewords will be very hard to obtain... How many people legitimately found a single high rune in their time playing diablo 2? So if you are able to put a runeword together such as this, I say that you deserve everyone to gawk at your teleporting barbarian or whatever. I played diablo 2 for many years and the highest I ever found was a vex rune. Basically, I hope they return in a similar form that they were in diablo 2, because I feel that given a hack/dupe free environment, they will be successful.
People are pretty adamant about the graphics so I don't know if a truce is possible until maybe more screenshots are released, but I am glad they finally commented about it. I feel like it will probably stop the petition thing at least because as a fan... I have to admit that I was really embarassed when that happened. Though I also have a fear that this will spur a new frenzy of signers. I kind of get the feeling that the 52,000 was a bloated number because if people are adamant enough, which a lot of them seem to be, it is not hard to have multiple emails and to sign the petition many times per person.
And Slaynoq, thank you for commenting, that was really insightful and made me think.
Just thought I would post to admit that this whole petition fiasco is rather embarassing... while I was astonished by the number of people that held the same opinion as me, I didn't outright advocate an e-riot and hatemail as this petition seems to be. So I apologize for posting.
Dont judge it till you try it? It's like food. Ewwww it looks gross. *takes a bite* hey, this is delicious. Maybe it works for the game, judge the game as a whole not a clip of it. Eat your peas children.
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An interesting idea for armageddon would be to reduce the area of effect, but have it still have the random aspect. Instead of having it as sort of a damage aura centered around the character, it could be more like inferno or arctic blast. What I mean by that is you have to hold down right click in order for the skill to be active, but have it be a concentrated attack centered around the mouse pointer, not the character. Think of it as blizzard, except the area of effect can be moved by moving the mouse pointer. This removes a lot of the randomness associated with the skill, though admittedly this may result in something overpowered. I also like the idea of it acting as a thunderstorm ability, though I think considering the point investment it takes it should strike more often.
Firestorm is a good skill, but it would be more effective if it were more like diablo's hellfire, taking up many more paths and having a much greater range. Right now, it can easily miss targets and if it doesn't do enough damage, the target will reach you, and as I mentioned the fire druid is terrible at taking damage.
Molten boulder suffers from being so terribly slow and being very directional oriented. I think that the speed of the actual boulder needs to be increased as well as the casting delay shorted or removed. Having a wall of molten boulders rolling over my enemies would be pretty awesome in my opinion. The skill already has a fire and a physical component, but they need to be buffed in some way. Perhaps the other fix I proposed would fix that by having many boulders, but I would need to test to verify.
I am not exactly sure what to do with fissure. Perhaps just a small buff such as each vent that opens up effects a wider area as opposed to the area immediately above.
Volcano is also a baffling one. If you increase the damage too much of the projectiles, then the volcano will be way overpowered for enemies that stand right at the top. If it is left the way that it is, then it is only effective at killing when enemies are at the top. Unfortunately, I feel that this skill needs to be reworked in order to fix that issue.
Any suggestions on top of what me and Phrozen have suggested are welcome, this is a discussion after all.
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On that note the fire druid suffers from a lot of the same problems. Excruciating casting delays coupled with significant point investment for viability cripples the build. Lets go through the skills.
Firestorm: While this is the first skill you get in the druid fire path, it is also potentially one of the most viable for dealing consistent damage. It is actually usable in part because it has a short (but not nonexistent) casting delay. Unfortunately it is not easy to aim, and the range is fairly short. An elemental druid is usually pretty weak because a lot of life and damage reduction gear is sacrificed for more skills. I think that theoretically, this is also the most damaging skill for the druid if fully synergized (assuming all 3 snakes hit a single target).
Molten Boulder: And now the casting delay begins to rear its ugly head. It isn't entirely unbearable on molten bolder, but it certainly hinders the skill. The very nature of the skill is also rather discouraging. The damage is split up into physical and fire which is a plus, but the fire damage isn't very effective. The boulder knocks the opponent back when it hits them, but it is also leaving a trail of fire behind it. This fire is occasionally useful, but because the opponent is being knocked away from the boulder, it rarely does anything. And again, I will mention that the small fast hoarding enemies such as fallen and some of the flayers that would be likely to get past the boulder and run into this trail of fire, are almost always fire immune. I am also of the opinion that fire/physical immunes are far more common that one would think in this game.
Fissure: Probably the favorite skill of most fire druids because it can attain high damage and is not a slow moving missile like the previous skills. It instead randomly opens vents around the area that you cast the spell, which is really quite baffling. You can actually cast this skill on a stationary opponent several times and not hit them once. Also you can get lucky and it may open several vents under the person at the same time. The point is that it is not consistent. It is best used when enemies are running across, and again I will mention that most of the hoarding enemies are fire immune (you can tell I am a little upset by that hehe).
Volcano: Without a casting delay, this could be a pretty amazing skill. Unfortunately, the casting delay is makes it very difficult to use. It has a physical and a fire component and can rack up quite a hefty damage count if the enemy decided to stay in one spot on top of the volcano. If the enemy is not on top of the volcano however, damage is slow and the fire druid must herd the monsters into a group and continuously run circles around them to keep them near the cinder cone. It takes a long time because the damage is again random within a certain area.
Armageddon: This is probably the most disappointing skill of all. The casting delay is 6 seconds (what makes this unbearable is that it shares it with all the other fire skills, leaving you essentially worthless for 6 whole seconds). The damage is another random area damage which means monsters could run up and hit you without taking any damage at all. Another problem is that this skill lasts a maximum of 30 seconds. With a casting delay of 6 seconds, you are worthless 20% of the time... If you were to try to use this skill without maxing the fissure synergy you would spend almost all of your time in the casting delay, and would have to recast the spell every 12 seconds. The only seemingly effective way to use this skill is to run away from enemies and hope the meteors hit them as they chase you. This is only marginally effective, and is not all that fun to play.
So lets do a summary of all the things wrong with the fire druid.
1: The shared casting delays make a lot of the skills unusable with other fire skills and makes faster cast rate a worthless trait.
2: The random mechanics of most of the skills is a huge weakness which seriously reduces damage output except in the most ideal circumstances.
3: The type of monsters that these skills are ideally suited for (the hoarding monsters such as fallen and most of the flayer derivatives) are almost all fire immune, further reducing the usefulness of all of the skills.
4: The way the synergies are set up, it takes a huge skill investment to receive an OK amount of damage. The fire druid will likely not have a second source of damage other than the physical on some of the skills(which never gets all that high).
5: The fire druid is forced to use lots of +skills equipment to output enough damage, which significantly reduces the defensive abilities of the build such as life and damage mitigation. The way the skills are set up also makes it far more difficult for the fire druid to fight at a distance like all other casters, exposing him to a lot more damage than other casters. On top of this, the druid also has no physical damage reduction skills that the other casters do. Cyclone armor helps against elemental damage, which almost always come from ranged attacks and do not help the druid against the physical problem. This is also made EVEN WORSE by the fact that a lot of the swarming, large group, fast enemies like fallen, flayers and doom knights are fire immune.
Unfortunately, short of a huge reworking of the fire skills on the druid, he will forever be a misfit among diablo builds.
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And Slaynoq, thank you for commenting, that was really insightful and made me think.
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