Blizzard reason for this; So caster classes actually need a good weapon.
I partially agree with this. I have often thought that caster's should gain bonuses from weapons. I.e a wizard with a staff should be able to channel more magic and do more damage etc.
However, this also results imo more boring gameplay.
Builds and classes need to be diversified, and one of the main differences between mages and warriors is not the fact that one is ranged, and other melee, but because mages do not scale of weapons. That is what sets them apart.
Mages should have pre-set damage based on skill level, so to make them different.
The trade off is; mages scale worse with gear,but better with level
Warriors scale better with gear but worse with levels.
And this difference should be kept
I have to disagree with the lore/realism. There are plenty of fantasy "realms" where staves/wands/orbs are huge driving factors in the wizard's power/skill. It's not unrealistic to say that the weapon being used drives the damage being done.
Two of the most popular ones are easy examples, but I'm sure there are many more:
Lord of the Rings
Harry Potter
Relax. The games still in beta testing. In the original beta some skills not based on weapon damage were useless. So they tried to rectifying this by making all skills based on weapon damage. Lets just wait and see where this latest patch takes us.
I believe that if they changed it, it's probably because it was becoming an issue and they're changing it for the better.
Personally, I don't like the feeling of "spells" in an rpg-like game not dealing fixed damage. It's kinda strange having Meteor not be powerful on it's own but have its damage based off a 1-handed Axe I'm holding, makes no sense even from a "fantasy" standpoint. But I guess it's a change I'll have to live with.
The only thing I'm worried about is casting times on Wands.
In theory wands should be faster casting but I'm seeing all wands being 1.2 (and in the latest notes changed to 1.4) compared to 1-H weapons which have a speed of 1.3
WTF? Wands are supposed to be faster casting according to Blizzard, but we're not seeing this. Of course it could be that all the info on the website is wrong.
Also... as a player, 1.2 vs 1.4 doesn't seem all that much faster or slower.
I actually really liked how it was in D2 with the weapon skills being based off weapon damage and the spell skills having independent damage, because playing a caster class felt a lot different than playing a melee/range class. You had to look for different items and the way you built your character was really different. With weapon damage, a caster class is basically a ranged class with fancier effects.
I think that in the end Blizzard will find a way to make it work and incentivize magical weapons like wands so that casters will still want to use them over halberds or whatever. I think that a big plus of this kind of system (for me anyway, I know some people would prefer to have a calculator out while playing) is that it simplifies comparing skills, especially between classes. This system also seems like it would prevent future balancing issues, because as classes reach higher levels and get better weapons, their damage will scale accordingly. The less Blizzard needs to tamper with the system in the future, the easier it is to get a grip on how skills work and how effective they are in different situations, and the less people will complain about this or that being nerfed. I don't like the idea of a skill being awesome one day and terrible the next after a patch (remember when everyone used corpse explosion and then all of a sudden it sucked and no one used it?).
I prefer the weapon damage to set damage because it balances the game in a lot of ways. THat being said I think that there is something to be said for the approach that League of Legends uses which is that you can have damage boost on items for physical attacks, magic attacks, or both.
Imagine having all weapons with a 'physical' DPS and a 'magical' DPS. Then you're skills can key off of one, or both as described in the skill description. Attack would modify both in some way. This could be used to make the Barb/DH nearly pure 'physical', the Monk/Doc partial hybrid with a strong focus in one direction, and the Wizard nearly pure 'magical' (or some other spread, just an example.) And Class specific items would cater to the class they are for while normal weapons tend to be fine either way, but can favor one or the other with random properties.
This would be a major change, and it might be too late in the Dev cycle to try it, but I think it could have potential to ensure that items are key for all classes, and everyone is not looking for the same few top tier items.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
If that made sense to you, Bravo! I think I even confused myself...
It's really a necessary change. They had two options: 1) They could give every caster weapon essentially a +spell damage effect or 2) They could base the spells off weapon damage.
Option 1 would mean that casters couldn't EVER use non-caster weapons, which would really limit itemization. So option 2 is the natural choice.
To the person who said LotR worked like this... Please... please. Read the books. Please. Like... Please.
I had a similar thread about a week or so back about this whole thing. Apparently they plan to balance it out by having wands/staffs give a plus % damage to Wizard damage.
Example:
Ume's Lament
165.0 Damage Per Second
97–178 Damage
1.20 Attacks Per Second
Adds 51-111% more damage to Wizards only
+20-25% Casting Speed
25-29% Better Chance of Finding Magical Items
+13-15 Arcane Power (Wizard Only)
+1 Random Property
51% Modifier:
146 - 268 damage
Meteor would do 657 - 1206 damage
111% Modifier:
204 - 375 damage
Meteor would do 918 - 1687 damage
Making Physical and Magic damage scale different presents a few problems even though it’s viable if done properly. Actually *having* these two separate types of damage scales are what causes the problem.
So you have one pool of statistics to support character progression and this pool of statistics has to support multiple damage scales. There are two ways to support multiple damage scales within the pool of modifiers. The first way is to make concessions on modifiers to ensure they function and scale properly for every damage scale you are supporting. The downside to this is that you are limited in what you can do with each damage affecting modifier because said modifier has to properly support the balance of multiple damage scales. The second method of supporting multiple damage scales is creating specific modifiers for each damage scale. This allows you a lot more freedom with each damage modifier because it only has to maintain balance with a single damage scale. The downside to this is that you have multiple modifiers that are literally useless to half of the player base.
Using the same damage scale for all characters makes it a lot easier to balance and also ensures all damage affecting modifiers are relevant to every single person. For this reason (despite it maybe not being the best lore fit), I support the decision.
With all of that said, I have the same concern with 5 different resource scales. That is unless each class’s resource isn’t affected by item modifiers, because If it is, I’m kind of worried about how it will be handled due to the above issues I’ve outlined :/
Making Physical and Magic damage scale different presents a few problems even though it’s viable if done properly. Actually *having* these two separate types of damage scales are what causes the problem.
So you have one pool of statistics to support character progression and this pool of statistics has to support multiple damage scales. There are two ways to support multiple damage scales within the pool of modifiers. The first way is to make concessions on modifiers to ensure they function and scale properly for every damage scale you are supporting. The downside to this is that you are limited in what you can do with each damage affecting modifier because said modifier has to properly support the balance of multiple damage scales. The second method of supporting multiple damage scales is creating specific modifiers for each damage scale. This allows you a lot more freedom with each damage modifier because it only has to maintain balance with a single damage scale. The downside to this is that you have multiple modifiers that are literally useless to half of the player base.
Using the same damage scale for all characters makes it a lot easier to balance and also ensures all damage affecting modifiers are relevant to every single person. For this reason (despite it maybe not being the best lore fit), I support the decision.
they don't scale differently now, so why would they scale differently if you split the modifier? currently a staff and a maul at top tier ought to each have 500 dps (random number). If you chnge it so the maul has 500 physical dps and the staff has 500 magical dps then you have not changed these weapons at all except to make them less desirable for a class who wouldn't reasonably use it in the first place. The trick is when you start working on hybrid gear weather it be Daibo, ceremonial knife, or sword. For this you may want to use the higher of the two from any given item (and making the number identical for the items that are hybrid by design) and exact numbers would have to be found through testing.
As for mods that are useless to some characters, those already exist in abundance; from resource mods to damage mods (% bonus to X only) and even attribute mods as characters specialize in how they want to build. sure some of these mods tend to show up on class specific items, but they can show up on many things, and this happened in D2 as well (ex +1 to Druid skills) but you don't even have to deal with that as you could make it a bonus to attack which would increase both, or a bonus to untyped damage.
The idea is not to produce different damage scales, but to make weapons more divers. For example of generic items; maces and axes could be more physical oriented while swords and spears could fall anywhere and daggers are more magical. But this doesn't have to be a hard rule, just trends.
I know it would be a challenge to pull off but they have already approached some pretty ambitious stuff in the game and I think if they had the time they could do this right as well.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
If that made sense to you, Bravo! I think I even confused myself...
they don't scale differently now, so why would they scale differently if you split the modifier?
Not sure exactly what you are talking about. They did scale differently in D2 (one was based on Weapon Damage, the other was based on skill damage) and they also scaled differently pre-weapon damage change in D3 since the Barb, Monk and Demon hunter’s damage all scaled based on weapons. Having one class scale on weapons while the other doesn’t are different damage scales.
currently a staff and a maul at top tier ought to each have 500 dps (random number). If you chnge it so the maul has 500 physical dps and the staff has 500 magical dps then you have not changed these weapons at all except to make them less desirable for a class who wouldn't reasonably use it in the first place.
I don’t understand what you mean by Physical DPS and Magic DPS. Do you mean +500 Physical DPS vs +500 spell DPS? If so isn’t that basically the same as just using a weapons damage to increase a characters DPS output no matter what type?
The trick is when you start working on hybrid gear weather it be Daibo, ceremonial knife, or sword. For this you may want to use the higher of the two from any given item (and making the number identical for the items that are hybrid by design) and exact numbers would have to be found through testing.
I also don’t know what you’re trying to say here
As for mods that are useless to some characters, those already exist in abundance; from resource mods to damage mods (% bonus to X only)
They exist in abundance? Like what? The only thing I could think of for D3 would be resource mods and to those I’m already concerned about. Everything else is useful to all characters. Sure there are a bunch of useless D2 mods like+ damage to demons or +light radius, but that was a problem with D2.
and even attribute mods as characters specialize in how they want to build.
No attributes are useless. Damage, HP, damage mitigation and Critical Strike chance are all very useful stats to all people. Sure some specs or builds we favor certain statistics and mods, but that doesn’t mean they are useless mods for that class.
sure some of these mods tend to show up on class specific items, but they can show up on many things, and this happened in D2 as well (ex +1 to Druid skills) but you don't even have to deal with that as you could make it a bonus to attack which would increase both, or a bonus to untyped damage.
What? How can you make a +1 to druid skills a bonus to attack with say a barb? Yes there were some class specific mods (just like there are some class specific items in D3), and having *some* class specific stuff is okay, having an entire damage scale and everything associated with it being literally useless to a group of classes isn’t.
The idea is not to produce different damage scales, but to make weapons more divers. For example of generic items; maces and axes could be more physical oriented while swords and spears could fall anywhere and daggers are more magical. But this doesn't have to be a hard rule, just trends.
I’m not sure if that’s entirely the idea but I’m still inclined to believe my reasoning is correct for why they aligned damage scaling.
What is a wizard without his wand? And doesn't a more powerful wand yield a more powerful wizard? So really from a lore and balancing perspective this change was needed.
THink of it like this, if you just found some kick-ass wizard weapon that only drops 1 in a million times dont you want it to increase your damage? Otherwise, if your skills just scaled, whats the point between the uber-rare weapon and some artisan crafted magic item?
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Blizzard used to care about releasing Diablo III, then they all took an arrow in the knee...
Making Physical and Magic damage scale different presents a few problems even though it’s viable if done properly. Actually *having* these two separate types of damage scales are what causes the problem.
So you have one pool of statistics to support character progression and this pool of statistics has to support multiple damage scales. There are two ways to support multiple damage scales within the pool of modifiers. The first way is to make concessions on modifiers to ensure they function and scale properly for every damage scale you are supporting. The downside to this is that you are limited in what you can do with each damage affecting modifier because said modifier has to properly support the balance of multiple damage scales. The second method of supporting multiple damage scales is creating specific modifiers for each damage scale. This allows you a lot more freedom with each damage modifier because it only has to maintain balance with a single damage scale. The downside to this is that you have multiple modifiers that are literally useless to half of the player base.
Using the same damage scale for all characters makes it a lot easier to balance and also ensures all damage affecting modifiers are relevant to every single person. For this reason (despite it maybe not being the best lore fit), I support the decision.
they don't scale differently now, so why would they scale differently if you split the modifier? currently a staff and a maul at top tier ought to each have 500 dps (random number). If you chnge it so the maul has 500 physical dps and the staff has 500 magical dps then you have not changed these weapons at all except to make them less desirable for a class who wouldn't reasonably use it in the first place. The trick is when you start working on hybrid gear weather it be Daibo, ceremonial knife, or sword. For this you may want to use the higher of the two from any given item (and making the number identical for the items that are hybrid by design) and exact numbers would have to be found through testing.
As for mods that are useless to some characters, those already exist in abundance; from resource mods to damage mods (% bonus to X only) and even attribute mods as characters specialize in how they want to build. sure some of these mods tend to show up on class specific items, but they can show up on many things, and this happened in D2 as well (ex +1 to Druid skills) but you don't even have to deal with that as you could make it a bonus to attack which would increase both, or a bonus to untyped damage.
The idea is not to produce different damage scales, but to make weapons more divers. For example of generic items; maces and axes could be more physical oriented while swords and spears could fall anywhere and daggers are more magical. But this doesn't have to be a hard rule, just trends.
I know it would be a challenge to pull off but they have already approached some pretty ambitious stuff in the game and I think if they had the time they could do this right as well.
Which is actually 100% the OPPOSITE of what Blizzard wants for Diablo. Blizzard wants to encourage people to try odd-ball setups, not make them impossible.
I'm fine with magic user scaling with weapons. Makes sense a wizard need a powerful item to channel his magic from... but should it really be any weapon only based on dps and dmg ?
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Blizzard reason for this; So caster classes actually need a good weapon.
I partially agree with this. I have often thought that caster's should gain bonuses from weapons. I.e a wizard with a staff should be able to channel more magic and do more damage etc.
However, this also results imo more boring gameplay.
Builds and classes need to be diversified, and one of the main differences between mages and warriors is not the fact that one is ranged, and other melee, but because mages do not scale of weapons. That is what sets them apart.
Mages should have pre-set damage based on skill level, so to make them different.
The trade off is; mages scale worse with gear,but better with level
Warriors scale better with gear but worse with levels.
And this difference should be kept
Two of the most popular ones are easy examples, but I'm sure there are many more:
Lord of the Rings
Harry Potter
I believe that if they changed it, it's probably because it was becoming an issue and they're changing it for the better.
Personally, I don't like the feeling of "spells" in an rpg-like game not dealing fixed damage. It's kinda strange having Meteor not be powerful on it's own but have its damage based off a 1-handed Axe I'm holding, makes no sense even from a "fantasy" standpoint. But I guess it's a change I'll have to live with.
In theory wands should be faster casting but I'm seeing all wands being 1.2 (and in the latest notes changed to 1.4) compared to 1-H weapons which have a speed of 1.3
WTF? Wands are supposed to be faster casting according to Blizzard, but we're not seeing this. Of course it could be that all the info on the website is wrong.
Also... as a player, 1.2 vs 1.4 doesn't seem all that much faster or slower.
I think that in the end Blizzard will find a way to make it work and incentivize magical weapons like wands so that casters will still want to use them over halberds or whatever. I think that a big plus of this kind of system (for me anyway, I know some people would prefer to have a calculator out while playing) is that it simplifies comparing skills, especially between classes. This system also seems like it would prevent future balancing issues, because as classes reach higher levels and get better weapons, their damage will scale accordingly. The less Blizzard needs to tamper with the system in the future, the easier it is to get a grip on how skills work and how effective they are in different situations, and the less people will complain about this or that being nerfed. I don't like the idea of a skill being awesome one day and terrible the next after a patch (remember when everyone used corpse explosion and then all of a sudden it sucked and no one used it?).
Imagine having all weapons with a 'physical' DPS and a 'magical' DPS. Then you're skills can key off of one, or both as described in the skill description. Attack would modify both in some way. This could be used to make the Barb/DH nearly pure 'physical', the Monk/Doc partial hybrid with a strong focus in one direction, and the Wizard nearly pure 'magical' (or some other spread, just an example.) And Class specific items would cater to the class they are for while normal weapons tend to be fine either way, but can favor one or the other with random properties.
This would be a major change, and it might be too late in the Dev cycle to try it, but I think it could have potential to ensure that items are key for all classes, and everyone is not looking for the same few top tier items.
Option 1 would mean that casters couldn't EVER use non-caster weapons, which would really limit itemization. So option 2 is the natural choice.
To the person who said LotR worked like this... Please... please. Read the books. Please. Like... Please.
Example:
Ume's Lament
165.0 Damage Per Second
97–178 Damage
1.20 Attacks Per Second
51% Modifier:
146 - 268 damage
Meteor would do 657 - 1206 damage
111% Modifier:
204 - 375 damage
Meteor would do 918 - 1687 damage
So you have one pool of statistics to support character progression and this pool of statistics has to support multiple damage scales. There are two ways to support multiple damage scales within the pool of modifiers. The first way is to make concessions on modifiers to ensure they function and scale properly for every damage scale you are supporting. The downside to this is that you are limited in what you can do with each damage affecting modifier because said modifier has to properly support the balance of multiple damage scales. The second method of supporting multiple damage scales is creating specific modifiers for each damage scale. This allows you a lot more freedom with each damage modifier because it only has to maintain balance with a single damage scale. The downside to this is that you have multiple modifiers that are literally useless to half of the player base.
Using the same damage scale for all characters makes it a lot easier to balance and also ensures all damage affecting modifiers are relevant to every single person. For this reason (despite it maybe not being the best lore fit), I support the decision.
With all of that said, I have the same concern with 5 different resource scales. That is unless each class’s resource isn’t affected by item modifiers, because If it is, I’m kind of worried about how it will be handled due to the above issues I’ve outlined :/
they don't scale differently now, so why would they scale differently if you split the modifier? currently a staff and a maul at top tier ought to each have 500 dps (random number). If you chnge it so the maul has 500 physical dps and the staff has 500 magical dps then you have not changed these weapons at all except to make them less desirable for a class who wouldn't reasonably use it in the first place. The trick is when you start working on hybrid gear weather it be Daibo, ceremonial knife, or sword. For this you may want to use the higher of the two from any given item (and making the number identical for the items that are hybrid by design) and exact numbers would have to be found through testing.
As for mods that are useless to some characters, those already exist in abundance; from resource mods to damage mods (% bonus to X only) and even attribute mods as characters specialize in how they want to build. sure some of these mods tend to show up on class specific items, but they can show up on many things, and this happened in D2 as well (ex +1 to Druid skills) but you don't even have to deal with that as you could make it a bonus to attack which would increase both, or a bonus to untyped damage.
The idea is not to produce different damage scales, but to make weapons more divers. For example of generic items; maces and axes could be more physical oriented while swords and spears could fall anywhere and daggers are more magical. But this doesn't have to be a hard rule, just trends.
I know it would be a challenge to pull off but they have already approached some pretty ambitious stuff in the game and I think if they had the time they could do this right as well.
Not sure exactly what you are talking about. They did scale differently in D2 (one was based on Weapon Damage, the other was based on skill damage) and they also scaled differently pre-weapon damage change in D3 since the Barb, Monk and Demon hunter’s damage all scaled based on weapons. Having one class scale on weapons while the other doesn’t are different damage scales.
I don’t understand what you mean by Physical DPS and Magic DPS. Do you mean +500 Physical DPS vs +500 spell DPS? If so isn’t that basically the same as just using a weapons damage to increase a characters DPS output no matter what type?
I also don’t know what you’re trying to say here
They exist in abundance? Like what? The only thing I could think of for D3 would be resource mods and to those I’m already concerned about. Everything else is useful to all characters. Sure there are a bunch of useless D2 mods like+ damage to demons or +light radius, but that was a problem with D2.
No attributes are useless. Damage, HP, damage mitigation and Critical Strike chance are all very useful stats to all people. Sure some specs or builds we favor certain statistics and mods, but that doesn’t mean they are useless mods for that class.
What? How can you make a +1 to druid skills a bonus to attack with say a barb? Yes there were some class specific mods (just like there are some class specific items in D3), and having *some* class specific stuff is okay, having an entire damage scale and everything associated with it being literally useless to a group of classes isn’t.
I’m not sure if that’s entirely the idea but I’m still inclined to believe my reasoning is correct for why they aligned damage scaling.
THink of it like this, if you just found some kick-ass wizard weapon that only drops 1 in a million times dont you want it to increase your damage? Otherwise, if your skills just scaled, whats the point between the uber-rare weapon and some artisan crafted magic item?
Which is actually 100% the OPPOSITE of what Blizzard wants for Diablo. Blizzard wants to encourage people to try odd-ball setups, not make them impossible.