It only really applies if you're relying on weapons for your killing. If you happen to be a Sorcerer with Fireball or Chain Lightning, you just liquefy everything on the screen instantly. Chain lightning especially even puts the Diablo 2 AoE to shame - there's so much lightning it breaks the engine and screws you out of lightning sprites you earned and deserved.Quote from italofocaImo D2 failed too capture D1's feel when you're fightning a high density mob of monsters. In D1 you never looked very powerful cause you were allways struggling to cotain that huge crowd of monsters.
Also, maybe the grid based system just lends itself better to "tactical" play..
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Might as well save the puppies and birds for future Druid/Ranger classes, right?
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It is kind of impressive they have three classes mostly finished... I guess.
Think of the colossal arguments they indulge in about everything. That four player thing? You could see everyone on that panel tense up and look massively uncomfortable when asked about it. It's probable that a majority of people on the team prefers five or six. People whose opinions don't really matter.
You'll see people in the lead position take most questions at a panel no matter what its for, partly because the underlings are always terrified of pissing off god.
Re: Release date, the hype machine is geared to release next year. Starcraft 2 overshot its date and paid for it. They very very badly want it out next year. If that's any comfort at all.
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The rest of the crossbows are bigger and supposedly equivalent to bows. It'd be like asking "why would a barbarian use swords when he can use maces."
They have not yet told us if the burrito cannon will be making a reappearance.
Hey. Hey! Guys that are there - are the Witchdoctor masks really their class specific item? .. cause that'd be kind of cool with a k. Kewl whip.
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Maybe they can finish it off in a year tho - would definitely be nice.
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Also, maybe the grid based system just lends itself better to "tactical" play..
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Assassin + Bow was the more boring way to go about it, but I guess they wanted the Witch Doctor to be the only pet class, and also desired the full blown dominatrix look.
I hope the progression artwork on the official page rings true - that her glowy eyes are dependent on the helm she wears.
Diablo hasn't been remotely realistic past Diablo 1. The snake men of Diablo 3 are a thousand times more realistic than the cartoon goobers in 2...... heck, look at how goofy spirit wolves really are zoomed up close. High resolution ftw..
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A reminder: Those of you out of the loop can watch Blizzcon live here. The announcement was at the end of the hour.
Man the jabber jawing in the opening ceremony is brutal, I'd totally be in the free play area for it instead..
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You'd drive a single hero character, buy some underlings/cannon fodder, and uh man that would be pretty lame in many ways.
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I know 20/19/1 points in a tree is psychologically ugly, but nothing is perfect.
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But there is one thing I believe that we can come to a general consensus: the passive skill bonuses introduced in Diablo 2 are not an ideal solution.
In my limited understanding, the purpose of the synergy system was twofold:
* To make low level characters feel okay about investing into bad skills like firebolt.
* To give a sense of progression after you've already maxed the skills you care about.
In a tangible way, both these goals succeeded in some ways, and failed in others. Bad skills are still bad because they aren't fun to use (or they left the awful numbers), and the upper bound on synergy points varies skill by skill. Which is itself a mixed blessing - with Fireclaws or Bonemancer builds, for example, you're constantly adding damage all the way to the level cap... but you have no real freedom to pick other skills you'd like to have.
Synergies are very much identical to the Sorceress's Fire and Lightning Mastery skills in function. Therefore, I believe it is obvious that the original design was the correct one: masteries should be limited to a 20 skill point sink. If synergies were capped in a similar way, you would then be free to select any 2 skills at maximum power, and have a third one in a weakened state (or from the same branch of one of the maxed two).
This wall of text will detail one method in which this may be accomplished, as well as improve willingness to spread out on build variety a bit.
As a footnote I will be using the term "active mastery" from time to time - it is a better term to describe how "synergies" really work. They are passive masteries, but attached to a skill that actually does something by itself.
Necromancer
I'll start with Necromancer, as his skill selection is perhaps the most varied.
I personally believe that active masteries should be reserved for active skills. Skills like zeal, bone spear, essentially anything you use to smash things. When you're spamming zeal or bone spear, you are not spamming vengeance or bone spirit. Passive skills, that are force multipliers, such as your Skeletons, Traps, Curses, should have passive masteries such as Skeleton Mastery or Summon Grizzly.
Teeth
+X% damage from Bone Wall, Prison, Spear or Spirit (max 20)
+x/4% damage from points placed in any other skill
So if for some reason you wanted to max teeth, you would max it, and one of the other bone skills. As the passive bonus for the other bone skill you pick is capped to a maximum of 20x%, you are under no obligation or siren song to place more points into bone spells. Note that the second bonus (+x/4%) counts the other bone skills as well, so a pure bone build would not be gimped. This second, lesser, bonus has two purposes:
* To give you a sense of some progression with every skill point.
* So that if you don't invest in the active mastery, that skill doesn't feel hopelessly gimped. If teeth did 100 damage, and synergy gave +10% a level:
If you had 20/20 Teeth/Bone Spirit, it would do 350 damage.
If you had 20/80 Teeth/Non Bone spells, it would do 300 damage.
If you had 20/20/60 Teeth/Bone Spirit/Non Bone spells, it would do 500 damage
The idea is a high level character maxing something without its synergy, should get something about half way usable for the trouble.
Now, back to teeth specifically:
Teeth can only hit one target at a time, unlike charged bolt or frozen orb. The damage needs to be shifted upward whether they make it possible to hit multiple times or not. Personally, I would prefer they just upped the damage significantly, up into the thousands, and left it able to only hit one target. Teeth is kind of a unique skill in a way, and it would be awesome if it gave bone necromancers a new vector shape for him to hit enemies in - a fan for wide mobs of monsters.
Secondly, is the mana issue. Mana regenerates too slowly. It's balanced at high levels, because you can find items to fix it, but it's always in one of three states: you're starved for it always, drinking blue syurp then porting back to town for more. Or you have juuuust enough to live off the blue syurp that the land provides. Or mana means nothing to you.
Being mana starved as a lowbie isn't fun. It's miserable, and the least amount of fun you can have in Diablo 2. Ideally, mana regen would take around 30 seconds for starting characters, and slow back down to the two minutes as you approach level 50.
A starting Necromancer has 25 mana. This pool will regenerate at about .21 points a second. Level 1 teeth costs a whopping 3 mana. It will take ~14.29 seconds to recover enough mana to cast a single level 1 teeth spell. For a whopping 2-4 damage, to 0 to 2 monsters. You can see how just smacking things with a stick and/or a skeleton is vastly more desirable.
If mana regen remains locked at 2 minutes for every level as it is now, at the least the mana cost for the lower skill ranks of spells, especially early spells like Teeth, needs to be brought down dramatically. I won't mention it for things like Charged Bolt Sentry or Fireball - but the first ten points in those should be cheaper to cast as well.
Teeth itself? It should cost 1 mana to cast at level 1. Not three. Not two. One. You'd still have to wait five seconds to recover from a cast.
Bone Spirit/Wall/Prison/Spear
Would be identical to teeth's synergies, except that Teeth is used as Prime Synergy instead of itself, obviously.
Poison Dagger/Explosion/Nova
+X% damage from the other skills in this set (max 20)
+x/4% damage from points placed in any other skill
Skeletons
They already have one synergy: Skeleton mastery. Synergy system working perfectly as of right now.
Skeleton warriors can use a nerf - their health regen seems vastly too high, and puts mercenaries to shame. The upper end of their damage could be pulled down a bit as well, perhaps about 20% at 20/20.
Skeleton magi can use more life, and some of that nutso health regen the warriors get. Their damage, contrary to popular opinion, is just fine.... if every monster in Hell didn't have massive resistance and immunities. And if the buffing the warriors wasn't as easy as Might mercenary (I believe might+holy freeze mercenaries should use different auras altogether, but, that's a tangent...), while you have crummy lower resist and maybe a duped conviction polearm (not spears, god forbid a spear could use a runeword) to get an almost but no where near equivalent effect for the mages.
So I'm saying maybe their spell level could be Skeleton Magi + Skeleton Mastery, instead of Skeleton Magi / 2 + Skeleton Mastery without any harm.
Golems
All inter-golem syngergies should be removed. They already have a mastery: Golem Mastery
It isn't fun to spend 80 points in one thing, especially something as lame as the golems are in their current state.
The problem with golems, is it has to be almost as attractive as 20/20 skeletons, to have a 20/20 golem. There are two ways to go about this:
Give them good damage - a maxed clay golem is weaker than one single skeleton for crying out loud. They also must have some kind of "swipe" attack that can hit two or three monsters at once - they're competeing with a boney beast with 10 or more heads after all. They should have a tiny bit of pack control.
Make them into generals for the army. Fire golem "enchanting" your skeletons to do additional fire damage, for example.
The general idea might look ideal, but that would be looking at what golems are through the lens of 1.10. There is no reason they can't be good fighters, if only they were willing to up the numbers on them. Personally, I believe they should be both:
Clay Golem
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Now increases the maximum life and defense of your skeletons by xLv% while he is alive.
His slow effect should be removed, it's thematically weird, and mechanically absusive on bosses. At least make them spring for a woestave or something to get the helpless boss effect.
Blood Golem
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Now grants your skeletons xLv% life leech.
The iron and fire golem could then have a sweeping Cleave attack and ~50 to 100% more attack damage than the other golems.
Golem Mastery
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Should increase the damage of golems as well.
A really cool effect would be to allow summoning more than one golem at a time. Place 20 skill points into Golem mastery, get the ability to summon an additional golem.
Curses
Curses have the benefit of not requiring any skill points for full effect. Making Amp damage scale like +20%+2x damage per level might be more fair, but does anyone really want to play a dedicated Cursemancer build?
Well if they do, they should have an iron maiden that doesn't suck. Monster life was dramatically increased in 1.10, Iron Maiden needs a boost to the top end. Otherwise, I feel this tree should be left alone. There are already a lot of prerequisites that gobble up a lot skill points, if you don't want to use wand swapping to use those skills.
Sorceress
The Sorceress was the one who got screwed by far the most with the synergy system. By far the most of any class, she needs to branch out more than anyone. Being able to kill immunes and resistant monsters is helpful, but maxing skills from two trees is in general impossible. Hence: nearly freaking everyone uses Frozen Orb, because it has such a low ceiling to be maxed out.
Also of note: if you currently try to upgrade two spells from two trees equally at the same time, they will both be trash. If you try to build the other one up after the other is pseudo maxed, the new one you're trying to build up to "help" will be of not much help.
And of course, these skills already have a mastery and don't need anymore dedicated ones. Either remove the masteries, or remove the dedicated synergies.
So the suggestion would be "This skill does +x/4% damage per points place into any other non-mastery skill".
But this still leaves the cold tree. Cold Mastery is not like the other bears - its effectiveness is capped, and be reached by gear alone. So it really isn't doing its job as a point dump like the masteries are supposed to be. So, cold mastery either needs to have +damage instead like the other two trees, or the skills in this tree alone need a "This skill does +x% damage per point (max 20x) placed into other Cold Spells non-mastery skills.
It would be really nice if Hydra behaved more like traps - that it just had a cap on the number of hydras instead of a timer. The timer is the #1 most hated thing about this spell for me personally, as it locks me out of casting a (mandatory) Frozen Orb. It would also be kind of cool if the max number at a time went up with skill points, like from 1..5.
Firebolt and Icebolt should cost only 1 mana to start. Charged Bolt, 1.5 because Charged Bolt is awesome. It would also be okay to make the bolts actually almost kind of powerful maxed out. We won't hate you for this.
Paladin
Smite
Smite already has the Mastery Holy Shield, and is doing pretty well on its own.
Holy Bolt / Blessed Hammer / Fist of the Heavens
Should be a branch. +x% for other skills in the branch to a max of 20, +x/4% for nonbranch skills, yadda yadda..
Holy Bolt should retain its healing synergy with Prayer. The cleric build is goofy but Something Different that should be encouraged
It might be okay to change the holy bolts on Fist of the Heavens to lightning damage, seeing how it's a timered skill and all.
Sacrifice / Zeal / Conversion
Should be a branch. Conversion really ought to do some bonus damage, as it is currently outright inferior to Mind Blast in a massive way. It's chance to convert could stand a bit of a boost as well.
Vengeance
Should use any defensive aura as a prime synergy. It's thematically cool linking it to the elemental resistence auras (though it'd be even cooler linking it to the elemental damage auras), however investing in this skill already has Conviction as a mastery, of sorts. A little more freedom in choice would be nice.
Holy Fire / Freeze / Shock
Linked to each other (max 20!) instead of the defense auras.
I get that they'd really, really like you to dump points into the Resist X skills every now and again, but I personally don't like pumping points into them. I really liked the +10 to max lightning resist Resist Lightning passively provided, as lightning is the bane of every melee characters existence, but otherwise they just feel like everything they could be, could be wrapped up into Salvation.
Linking the elemental auras together would also let you have a build with a way to deal damage to immunes, instead of having mandatory +x max resist on your chosen element.
Also, Holy Fire needs to be comparable to Shock in average damage at high end skill levels.
Amazon
To fully understand the Amazon, an understanding of the history of Pierce is needed. Some time, in the old days, skills like Freezing Arrow and Lightning Fury, they would only trigger when an arrow terminates. That made pierce very undesirable:
* You'd want to kill the enemies closest to you first generally, not the ones in the back
* If it pierced, it would often fly off to never never land, never to unleash its explosion
So in one patch they made it trigger every time it hits a monster. This showed they did not have a binary flag attached these projectiles to only trigger the special attack on the first hit. They might have had the option of making pierce just simply not work with the elemental attacks (though I have my extreme doubts their source is flexible enough to make that a reasonable option), but they went with triggering on every hit instead (which is visually pretty awesome). So that's why elemental Amazons today are cow shreddin' machines, but are kind of cruddy on single targets and rely on crushing blow and such.
I don't really think I had much of a point to that, except that it would be really cool if they took the timer off of Immolation Arrow and by fixing the arrow to trigger once per hit - that can't be more taxing on their pentium 2 servers than immolation arrow dropping the 3 or 5 pyres on top of cows a shot like it does now.
Jab / Impale / Fend
Should be a branch. I know nobody plays this character, but it might as well get synergies too..
Impale doesn't have to trash your durability at all. As it's basically "use this skill and get your attack interrupted".. if they want to make this skill used by the super duper masochists, they should make it uninterruptable like Concentrate.
Poison / Plague Javelin
Should be a branch. This is very tight on options, but I like the effect it has of making poison appear to be a very niche, closed off art for the amazon in the lolore.
Lightning skills
Should be a branch
Plain bow attacks
be a branch
Fire skills
branch
ice sk
branch
The Valkyrie perhaps does not really need all those passive benefits she gets, though it would be nice if she could deal some damage if you dump them into those passive with diminishing returns for you.
The starting mana cost of starter stuff should be tuned down.
Assassin
The assassin's melee tree is defective as a concept. With the elemental attacks, you'll want the fastest attack possible. However, you're prone to over shoot or undershoot your charges attacking at more than twice a second, with the uncertainty that the attack will land or not. This really bites for a Meteor striker, as just getting one of them out is a small miracle on its own.
If a system was added to somehow automatically release the desired charge, that would be neat.
Additionally, it would be nice if the charge up attacks themselves had added damage. +fire damage for Fists of Fire, +% damage for Tiger Strike, etc. The charge ups, as has been said many times, are only released 1/2 to 1/4th of the time, so in a perfect world their real world numbers are much lower than comparable attacks that Amazons can do at range. Further:
* Perhaps the idea that the "finishing moves" themselves would make a huge amount of damage. The problem is these aren't really finishing moves - just ordinary attacks you might find hidden in the corner of the Amazon tree. Adding in functionality to make finishing moves multiply their damage based on your total charges (such as having 3 charges of tiger and 3 of cobra would make your Dragon Claws do say time ten damage for that one release) seems extraordinarily unlikely, adding some dps to the charge ups only seems fair if the released charges aren't going to compare well to a sorceress's spell.
* Perhaps the idea was the assassin has all these crazy traps going off while she ninjas things with her fists. The real world reality is that this does not happen.
Fists o Fire / Ice / Lightning / Phoenix should be a branch. I heard somewhere that the synergy bonuses for Phoenix Strike is bugged and don't apply?
Tiger gets along just fine with Dragon Tail. Remember the correct name to call your Dragon Tail assassin is "Dagon Tales". This is because it is a double-triple pun.
Dragon finishers might as well be linked too. Dragon Tail should probably get the Lightning Fury "lame synergy" treatment.
Fire Traps should be a group, lightning another. Wake of Inferno, I hear is like the inferno spell itself, only able to hit one or two guys at once?
The blade traps should be upped to not be such a big joke. The shield can't apply crushing blow or even open wounds, so what is it's tiny damage any good for?
Druid
It would be nice if Firestorm didn't have a timer, so Fire Druids would have a spam skill.
Ice Inferno + Wind Skills are a set
Fire skills another
Cyclone Armor
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ought also to be able to be cast in wereform. If folks want to take the time to use a defensive skill while punching things in melee, they should have it as an option.
I believe the time limit on forms should be eliminated or raised to a point where it never matters from level one. The big draw of Lycanthropy is the bonus life - that it makes life bearable and livable is just gravy. As with the blue syurp monster, people will put up with a lot but not really enjoy it, but just accept it as "that's the way it just is".
The attack speed on Werewolf is usually meaningless - during most of the game it will net you -0 frames. (fyi, Fire Claw attacks are faster as a Bear). Popularity of the wolf is based off his appearance and Fury - the bear itself is effective enough.
A problem here is that the form itself, and Lycanthropy, act as masteries. We know that a point sink of 40 points is too much. But, these skills are in the tree and they aren't going anywhere. Myself, I would just move the benefits of Lycanthropy to the wereforms themselves, and remove Lycanthropy from the tree, full stop. It's really not helping anything, dangling in the wind like that..
Feral Rage and Fury could then be a branch, and shockwave and maul another. Fire Claws linked to fire skills, including Armageddon. Rabies and poison creeper because no matter what, it's still cute.
The druid battle beasts can still be passives since you can only have one type out at a time. Wolves + Bear a branch, with identical synergy bonuses, none of this +attack rating only nonsense. A really nice little bonus would be if you spent a lot of points into this tree, say 60 or 80, you would gain the ability to summon two of fighter animals at once - both types of wolves or a wolf pack and the bear. To truly make "zookeepers", zookeepers...
Ravens
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Aren't as useless as a lot of people think, but in PvE, damage they just don't do. It would be nice if they triggered a lot more hits at least before they needed to be refreshed - a hundred or more when 20/20'd at the least. The raven should get any other summoning skill as a prime synergy; mechanically they share a lot with the vines and spirits in a sense.
Barbarian
The various types of masteries are silly and annoying. Why must spears and polearms and leprechauns be all that different? They really should be consolidated into "Single Handed Mastery" and "Double Handed Mastery". I would be fully comfortable with blank spots in the trees - padding is padding no matter how you try to look at it.
Combat Skills should be a shared synergy group. They're all active skills, they all (almost) just enhance physical damage, you might as well be allowed to pick and choose your attacks. There's already a ton of mastery-style bonuses in the shouts and mastery tabs, it's easier to "lock" a player into skills in this situation. Is it really reasonable to ask a player to dump 20 points into Double Swing for Frenzy at the expense of any one of the shouts or passives?
Stun should keep the stun length bonus it gets from War Cry.
Double Throw might as well pierce targets. If there is no way to implement this without letting him pierce with any projectile, so what? So he can hit a few guys auto attacking with a bow?
Mid-level AoE skills don't exist for him. A cleave-like attack at level 12 would be splendid while waiting on Whirlwind... On the same type of logic, the paladin could use an alternative to zeal, maybe tape some AoE damage onto vengeance or sacrifice..
Anyway, these were just a couple thoughts I had here and there on the subject.
Please append this to my "charm container" idea, where charms only give a bonus when inserted into a charm bag, or the obvious "account wide Rune + Perfect Gem" thing that stores runes as a list of bytes (stack of runes) on the server, that everyone wants.
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