Well, the reason of the non-existence of any kind of customization that you can do to your character except via items, it was crystal clear long time ago, RMAH. If you can make your character stronger without requiring items for everything you do, that makes the AH therefore the RMAH less necessary. Less necessary equals less profit.
But stay ontopic, this thread is about how cosmetic are at their core, the pets you have. Right now, you can play without pets, playing WD as a Wizard, but even if you have multiple pets, they just can't be used to output damage, they are not strong enough to actually kill something efficiently. That is what this thread is about. Why can't Blizzard give us, WD's a way to have a build that allows us to use pets as main way of damage output?.
I think, that it has to do with what I explained at the very beginning of this post. Maybe they wanted to at some moment, but then they decided to make them only meat shield (very weak ones at earlier stages of the game) and let "you" do the damage.
I'll only say this, I'd love to have dogs/fetishes/gargantuan that have a damage output comparable to what I do with spells, so I can actually have an army of pets that kill stuff. Even imagine this, that you can pass through your pestilence effect to different type of minions so they inherit that effect, like in the video long time ago. They teased us, and then removed that. That is something that no developer should ever do.
But stay ontopic, this thread is about how cosmetic are at their core, the pets you have. Right now, you can play without pets, playing WD as a Wizard, but even if you have multiple pets, they just can't be used to output damage, they are not strong enough to actually kill something efficiently. That is what this thread is about. Why can't Blizzard give us, WD's a way to have a build that allows us to use pets as main way of damage output?.
I don't outright disagree with this particular point. Let me elaborate, though.
You have six skill slots and three passive slots. Passives don't really matter for this discussion since they are... passive. The six active skill slots, however, do matter.
Right now there are three active summon abilities: Zombie Dogs, Gargantuan, Fetish Army. If you make a build that takes all three then you still have three skill slots left.
Now, if your pets are wrecking shit (which is what buffing their baseline damage would do) that means that you have uber pets and you're probably throwing around hard-hitting Acid Clouds, Zombie Bears, or Firebats. Essentially, you've just received a massive buff with almost no downside at all. It'd make most of the existing builds ridiculous just by throwing a summon or two into it.
I mean I currently run a Plague Bats build that uses Zombie Dogs to minimize my cast-and-recast shit which minimizes the amount of regen I need (and makes it mostly unnecessary to go for 4pc Zunis like so many of the guids recommend). If you just made pets do more damage you've give me a significant buff when all you're really trying to promote is a pet-centric build (or as Maka called it, a "puppetmaster").
So the solution has to be more nuanced. How can you, as a WD, commit to having beastly pets without:
1) unnecessarily buffing other specs
2) making pets mandatory for other specs
3) retaining the personal power of the "master"
4) promoting a playstyle where there's simply no interaction from the player
If you can do all four of those, you'd have a viable pet-centric spec without all the issues that have been discussed in this thread as exact reasons why Blizzard isn't going down that road.
And, I'd like to offer up a solution.
So you've spent three of your active skills on sumons (Zombie Dogs, Gargantuan, Fetish Army). Let's assume you're also using Fetish Syncopants (and maybe even an iLvl 63, re-reworked Gidbinn) so that would put a primary on your LMB for procs. I don't really care which primary, honestly, that's not important. What is important is that you now have two active skills of your choice.
Let's design a Sacrifice rune that replaces one of the existing ones, but instead of making the dogs explode for damage, it kills your current one and provides you with a buff that increases all pet damage by 100%, attack speed by 20%, and movement speed by 50% for 20 seconds (like WotB but for pets). So now your pet damage is influenced by passives like Grave Injustice and items that reduce the CD on Zombie Dogs to give you better uptime on the buff.
Now you have one active skill left which probably will be used on Soul Harvest, or Spirit Walk, or Mass Confusion, or Big Bad Voodoo. What you've achieved is a pet-centric spec that doesn't involve ZERO player interaction but also makes it such that the WD doesn't have tons of power - it's either the WD or the pets, by beefing up one you're choosing to neglect the other. CHOICE aka customization. You don't get both at the same time.
The numbers would obviously have to be tweaked, but the basic gameplay comes down to maintaining the pet damage buff by making sure you can recast Zombie Dogs every 20, or less, seconds, using your primary skill of choice to spawn fetishes via Fetish Syncopants and the Gidbinn, and basically standing out of shit and using Fetish Army when you feel it's appropriate.
You'd have a pet-centric spec that didn't necessarily have massive gear requirements, where the AI wasn't completely playing the game for you, and where the gameplay wasn't overwhelmingly complex either.
THAT is something I'd get behind 125%.
There would obviously have to be some flim-flam going around with Zombie Dogs, Gargantuan, and Fetish Army. Maybe the two DPS runes for Zombie Dogs would need to be buffed - Plague Beasts up to 20-25%, Burning Dogs up to 10%. The base damage on the Gargantuan would probably need to go up to 150-175%. There are a lot of re-works that would have to occur for Fetish Army anyway... but you get the point.
Sure, I'm not saying it would be easy to buff them and voila, of course it requires a lot of thinking and attention, I'm saying that I really miss having an army of minions wrecking the screen, like little pets following their master, instead of: "hey you, go take damage for me, I'll kill them no problem".
If well thought and balanced, an army of pets and your zombie dog explosion could be quite similar to a Necro with CE, just at a smaller scale of course.
@shaggy: I came here to present an idea I had during the day, but you pretty much said it all. I was thinking of having skills/runes that buffed the crap out of pets, so you'd still have to be active in battle if you want uber-pets damage-wise (imagine an Acid Cloud rune that reduces damage but buffs pets it hits, for example), BUT you wouldn't have uber-pets by just throwing zombie dogs into your existent build.
Low duration, high power runes, that would buff their tanking capabilties as well as their single target and AoE dps? And that would need refreshing enough times for you to have to be active for the build to work?
I think it could be good. You could have an 'army' of pets like a lot of people would like to have, but without the AFK playstyle that sometimes accompanies said army.
Yep, and if it requires enough active skills, that sacrifices the WDs power. And there would potentially be a legendary (the Gidbinn) that goes hand-in-hand with the build (which is something Travis said they were trying to do as well). It would all come together nicely.
A build like that, which wasn't an AFK crusader, but was pet-centric, would almost surely be widely accepted by the community and we SHOULD give feedback on that particular angle because Blizzard's only major objection to a pet-centric build was that they didn't want us sitting on our hands and doing nothing but clicking on loot.
Also I'd like to point out that Pierce the Veil seems to be custom tailored for pet use. Since pets typically have low mana costs and you're not routinely summoning them, it's basically a 20% damage increase to them with very little downside. This provides further synergy with the fact that PtV also seems to be a highly desirable passive if you're going to spam a primary attack which is exactly what you'd want to do (since you probably can't stack tons of IAS with Zombie Bears) if you're using the Gidbinn or Fetish Syncophants.
Another thing I really dislike about how bad the synergy of items and skills is, is the fact that to actually increase the damage of a certain skill rune by, let say, 50%, you need an entire item build for that.. Not even AH users can buy all that crap, well, maybe they can with dual wield mastercard skill rune.
Another thing I really dislike about how bad the synergy of items and skills is, is the fact that to actually increase the damage of a certain skill rune by, let say, 50%, you need an entire item build for that.. Not even AH users can buy all that crap, well, maybe they can with dual wield mastercard skill rune.
I really don't get this criticism.
1) Please tell me an example spec that needs "an entire item build". It's usually just about 1 or 2 pieces (APoC, -resource cost SoJ for a spell), max 4 pieces if it's something on your class set (legacy Natalya). The only thing I could think of that would require you to switch more items is if you accidentally have IAS on every item and wanna go Tempest Rush - or no IAS and wanna try CMWW.
2) The idea behind this is exactly what many people found to be as so to be so nice in D2 - "oh look, here's an item with this specific stat, maybe I can build a spec around it". If you find a -Disintegrate SoJ, you want to try it out (happened to me). If you find a +Blizzard Oculus, you want to try it out (happened to me).
This thread is about "what I hate about D3 and loved about D2", and this "issue" you describe is something I hated about D2 and love about D3: With minimal effort (nope, not even single-wield Master Card nor lots of millions of gold) you can try all sorts of gear/spec combinations. I can try a skill and if it doesn't work switch back; if I haven't found a particular item yet (I store my self-found legendaries on twinks for these occasions) I can go to the AH. In D2 I had to level a character to 60-70 first which took me always quite a long time (never understood how power levelers could be so fast in D2, maybe they had hundreds of duped high runes, it took me ages), and then I usually had no access to items because I refrained from public trading (for a variety of reasons), and without dupes or offline cheats you never had access to the required high-level items. And if you had a high-level character and said items, and you found out that you didn't like the melee sorc, you could just throw that character away because there was no way of re-spec (only after ~10 years) or re-allocating stats.
Sorry, but I think what you describe is something that is actually an advantage of D3 over D2.
I never said that, I said that how items work with skill runes is IMO really bad.
In D2 you had the ability to max your favorite skill, you like to play with skellies?, there u go, assign points here. You like chain lighting?, here you go, add points there.
That doesn't exist in D3, I get that, but you can't even achieve that through items because the +% damage is very low, so, to get something like a +50% damage to X skill rune, you need to change your entire gear, if that is possible to begin with.
So, in the end, the: "I'd like to get this skill stronger because I really like it" is just not possible now. And that, is a bad design IMO. I've loved that aspect of D2, the chance of "leveling" your skills.
But the lack of real customization doesn't end there, just look at how the different characters are. Join a pub. All look the same.
Personalization and mechanics customization is something a game like this must have.
So, in the end, the: "I'd like to get this skill stronger because I really like it" is just not possible now. And that, is a bad design IMO. I've loved that aspect of D2, the chance of "leveling" your skills.
0CD Zombie Dog spec begs to differ that it's "not possible."
if 3 of your actives slots are pet summon abilities your bets get X buffs,
if you have X amount of poison abilities in your bar then poison gets boosted by X damage.
if you have locus with pestilence rune with 2 summon abilities then pets get an automatic plague aura that could spread for X damage over X amount of time.
if you have firebomb with pyrogeist your firebats (except plauge bats) will receive X amount of damage over time or all targets hit with firebats will drop fire columns in their place for 2 seconds for X damage over time
etc...
I think this would address a lot of issues people don't like and add more builds; however the re-working and balance of this approach would be huge and likely an expansion patch.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Playing Diablo since 97. I know nothing and having nothing good to say, I be a troll.
So, in the end, the: "I'd like to get this skill stronger because I really like it" is just not possible now. And that, is a bad design IMO. I've loved that aspect of D2, the chance of "leveling" your skills.
0CD Zombie Dog spec begs to differ that it's "not possible."
How does that build make Sacrifice stronger? It doesn't. You just use it more often.
Are you trolling me or are you just fucking with me?
"Stronger" doesn't have to equate to "bigger numbers." Those items drastically change the power of Sacrifice, and how it can be used. Without them you can't use Sacrifice as a primary source of damage (and Sacrifice is generally used for mana regeneration or the 15% damage buff), with them it becomes a major source of damage in addition to the other effects.
If you think that is not increasing its "power" because it doesn't give +X% damage then all you're doing is maintaining a ridiculously narrow definition of power for no reason but to be argumentative. They're the foundation of a spec that does pretty damn well in MP10 so that seems to be pretty POWERFUL right?
Well, in this one I have to agree with Shaggy. In the case of the skill rune that explodes dogs (not the dogs per-se) having a 0 seconds CD considering that the explosion doesn't cost mana, it is actually an improvement in their final damage indeed.
However, that can be achieved without requiring specific gear probably, just using the the right passives and getting a big pick-up radius, you can get something similar that applies to every single spell by reducing it's CD.
In the same way, we could say that the barbarian gets a.. I don't know, 800% increased damage to WoTB because he can keep it active all the time with the proper items and skill runes.
The conclusion is, we should keep the CD as a separate kind of measure of the final output damage, even if it is related to it.
In the case of Locus Swarm, the skill has no CD, and re-casting it doesn't stack its damage.
So, in the end, the: "I'd like to get this skill stronger because I really like it" is just not possible now. And that, is a bad design IMO. I've loved that aspect of D2, the chance of "leveling" your skills.
Well, I partially agree with what you said there. Yeah, leveling up a skill is not possible (except for if there's a rune that makes it ~20% stronger). However, a significant part of leveling up skills in D2 was done by acquiring +skills gear (that was pretty much a mandatory stat for almost everyone), so there are some similarities.
By moving these effects completely to items and getting rid of it on the skill tree (and the skill tree itself), Blizzard hoped to create this feeling that so many people describe about finding an item in D2 and saying "let me create a build around it". Sure, 0CD Zombie Dogs might be difficult or close to impossible to acquire as self-found in D3, but so was acquiring high runes or many elite unique items in D2.
Anyways, I still understand what you're saying and I agree that certain things are not possible anymore the way they were implemented in D2, and I'm sorry that you don't like it. But in my personal opinion it's not bad design. Actually, I prefer this new design; as I said before, I never leveled a handful of characters to ~70 just to try out lots of different builds, so I can say that in 1 year of D3 I had the opportunity to try out more builds than I did in 10 years of D2. And to me that's a good thing, and I'm okay that I can't buff one particular spell that I really like.
i think one of the skills you can really look at to get the stark contrast between daiblo 2 skills progression and diablo 3 is charged bolt. when you first get charged bolt it produces 2-3 bolts when you get it to level 20 it produces like 20 bolts and when you combined this with FC or IAS as its generalised to now you got something that was pretty epic.
i know in diablo 3 they wanted your hero to feel powerful right from the start but now you dont get very much feeling of progression when your character levels up at all. Your skills dont look any more powerful when their damage increases because their effects dont change, you get a slight change in appearance and effect by switching runes but that's all.
basically i would like to see them add another layer of depth to the skill system, synergy's between skills have been poorly implemented and the majority of passive are pointless because they dont synergise in a stackable way with items and active skils, which is why(Travis day has mentioned this i think) alott of builds are centred around Critical hits. because its by far the main way to achieve synergy
But stay ontopic, this thread is about how cosmetic are at their core, the pets you have. Right now, you can play without pets, playing WD as a Wizard, but even if you have multiple pets, they just can't be used to output damage, they are not strong enough to actually kill something efficiently. That is what this thread is about. Why can't Blizzard give us, WD's a way to have a build that allows us to use pets as main way of damage output?.
I think, that it has to do with what I explained at the very beginning of this post. Maybe they wanted to at some moment, but then they decided to make them only meat shield (very weak ones at earlier stages of the game) and let "you" do the damage.
I'll only say this, I'd love to have dogs/fetishes/gargantuan that have a damage output comparable to what I do with spells, so I can actually have an army of pets that kill stuff. Even imagine this, that you can pass through your pestilence effect to different type of minions so they inherit that effect, like in the video long time ago. They teased us, and then removed that. That is something that no developer should ever do.
I don't outright disagree with this particular point. Let me elaborate, though.
You have six skill slots and three passive slots. Passives don't really matter for this discussion since they are... passive. The six active skill slots, however, do matter.
Right now there are three active summon abilities: Zombie Dogs, Gargantuan, Fetish Army. If you make a build that takes all three then you still have three skill slots left.
Now, if your pets are wrecking shit (which is what buffing their baseline damage would do) that means that you have uber pets and you're probably throwing around hard-hitting Acid Clouds, Zombie Bears, or Firebats. Essentially, you've just received a massive buff with almost no downside at all. It'd make most of the existing builds ridiculous just by throwing a summon or two into it.
I mean I currently run a Plague Bats build that uses Zombie Dogs to minimize my cast-and-recast shit which minimizes the amount of regen I need (and makes it mostly unnecessary to go for 4pc Zunis like so many of the guids recommend). If you just made pets do more damage you've give me a significant buff when all you're really trying to promote is a pet-centric build (or as Maka called it, a "puppetmaster").
So the solution has to be more nuanced. How can you, as a WD, commit to having beastly pets without:
1) unnecessarily buffing other specs
2) making pets mandatory for other specs
3) retaining the personal power of the "master"
4) promoting a playstyle where there's simply no interaction from the player
If you can do all four of those, you'd have a viable pet-centric spec without all the issues that have been discussed in this thread as exact reasons why Blizzard isn't going down that road.
And, I'd like to offer up a solution.
So you've spent three of your active skills on sumons (Zombie Dogs, Gargantuan, Fetish Army). Let's assume you're also using Fetish Syncopants (and maybe even an iLvl 63, re-reworked Gidbinn) so that would put a primary on your LMB for procs. I don't really care which primary, honestly, that's not important. What is important is that you now have two active skills of your choice.
Let's design a Sacrifice rune that replaces one of the existing ones, but instead of making the dogs explode for damage, it kills your current one and provides you with a buff that increases all pet damage by 100%, attack speed by 20%, and movement speed by 50% for 20 seconds (like WotB but for pets). So now your pet damage is influenced by passives like Grave Injustice and items that reduce the CD on Zombie Dogs to give you better uptime on the buff.
Now you have one active skill left which probably will be used on Soul Harvest, or Spirit Walk, or Mass Confusion, or Big Bad Voodoo. What you've achieved is a pet-centric spec that doesn't involve ZERO player interaction but also makes it such that the WD doesn't have tons of power - it's either the WD or the pets, by beefing up one you're choosing to neglect the other. CHOICE aka customization. You don't get both at the same time.
The numbers would obviously have to be tweaked, but the basic gameplay comes down to maintaining the pet damage buff by making sure you can recast Zombie Dogs every 20, or less, seconds, using your primary skill of choice to spawn fetishes via Fetish Syncopants and the Gidbinn, and basically standing out of shit and using Fetish Army when you feel it's appropriate.
You'd have a pet-centric spec that didn't necessarily have massive gear requirements, where the AI wasn't completely playing the game for you, and where the gameplay wasn't overwhelmingly complex either.
THAT is something I'd get behind 125%.
There would obviously have to be some flim-flam going around with Zombie Dogs, Gargantuan, and Fetish Army. Maybe the two DPS runes for Zombie Dogs would need to be buffed - Plague Beasts up to 20-25%, Burning Dogs up to 10%. The base damage on the Gargantuan would probably need to go up to 150-175%. There are a lot of re-works that would have to occur for Fetish Army anyway... but you get the point.
If well thought and balanced, an army of pets and your zombie dog explosion could be quite similar to a Necro with CE, just at a smaller scale of course.
Count me in.
Too much to ask thou, maybe in an expansion patch.
Yep, and if it requires enough active skills, that sacrifices the WDs power. And there would potentially be a legendary (the Gidbinn) that goes hand-in-hand with the build (which is something Travis said they were trying to do as well). It would all come together nicely.
A build like that, which wasn't an AFK crusader, but was pet-centric, would almost surely be widely accepted by the community and we SHOULD give feedback on that particular angle because Blizzard's only major objection to a pet-centric build was that they didn't want us sitting on our hands and doing nothing but clicking on loot.
Also I'd like to point out that Pierce the Veil seems to be custom tailored for pet use. Since pets typically have low mana costs and you're not routinely summoning them, it's basically a 20% damage increase to them with very little downside. This provides further synergy with the fact that PtV also seems to be a highly desirable passive if you're going to spam a primary attack which is exactly what you'd want to do (since you probably can't stack tons of IAS with Zombie Bears) if you're using the Gidbinn or Fetish Syncophants.
I really don't get this criticism.
1) Please tell me an example spec that needs "an entire item build". It's usually just about 1 or 2 pieces (APoC, -resource cost SoJ for a spell), max 4 pieces if it's something on your class set (legacy Natalya). The only thing I could think of that would require you to switch more items is if you accidentally have IAS on every item and wanna go Tempest Rush - or no IAS and wanna try CMWW.
2) The idea behind this is exactly what many people found to be as so to be so nice in D2 - "oh look, here's an item with this specific stat, maybe I can build a spec around it". If you find a -Disintegrate SoJ, you want to try it out (happened to me). If you find a +Blizzard Oculus, you want to try it out (happened to me).
This thread is about "what I hate about D3 and loved about D2", and this "issue" you describe is something I hated about D2 and love about D3: With minimal effort (nope, not even single-wield Master Card nor lots of millions of gold) you can try all sorts of gear/spec combinations. I can try a skill and if it doesn't work switch back; if I haven't found a particular item yet (I store my self-found legendaries on twinks for these occasions) I can go to the AH. In D2 I had to level a character to 60-70 first which took me always quite a long time (never understood how power levelers could be so fast in D2, maybe they had hundreds of duped high runes, it took me ages), and then I usually had no access to items because I refrained from public trading (for a variety of reasons), and without dupes or offline cheats you never had access to the required high-level items. And if you had a high-level character and said items, and you found out that you didn't like the melee sorc, you could just throw that character away because there was no way of re-spec (only after ~10 years) or re-allocating stats.
Sorry, but I think what you describe is something that is actually an advantage of D3 over D2.
In D2 you had the ability to max your favorite skill, you like to play with skellies?, there u go, assign points here. You like chain lighting?, here you go, add points there.
That doesn't exist in D3, I get that, but you can't even achieve that through items because the +% damage is very low, so, to get something like a +50% damage to X skill rune, you need to change your entire gear, if that is possible to begin with.
So, in the end, the: "I'd like to get this skill stronger because I really like it" is just not possible now. And that, is a bad design IMO. I've loved that aspect of D2, the chance of "leveling" your skills.
But the lack of real customization doesn't end there, just look at how the different characters are. Join a pub. All look the same.
Personalization and mechanics customization is something a game like this must have.
0CD Zombie Dog spec begs to differ that it's "not possible."
if 3 of your actives slots are pet summon abilities your bets get X buffs,
if you have X amount of poison abilities in your bar then poison gets boosted by X damage.
if you have locus with pestilence rune with 2 summon abilities then pets get an automatic plague aura that could spread for X damage over X amount of time.
if you have firebomb with pyrogeist your firebats (except plauge bats) will receive X amount of damage over time or all targets hit with firebats will drop fire columns in their place for 2 seconds for X damage over time
etc...
I think this would address a lot of issues people don't like and add more builds; however the re-working and balance of this approach would be huge and likely an expansion patch.
Are you trolling me or are you just fucking with me?
"Stronger" doesn't have to equate to "bigger numbers." Those items drastically change the power of Sacrifice, and how it can be used. Without them you can't use Sacrifice as a primary source of damage (and Sacrifice is generally used for mana regeneration or the 15% damage buff), with them it becomes a major source of damage in addition to the other effects.
If you think that is not increasing its "power" because it doesn't give +X% damage then all you're doing is maintaining a ridiculously narrow definition of power for no reason but to be argumentative. They're the foundation of a spec that does pretty damn well in MP10 so that seems to be pretty POWERFUL right?
However, that can be achieved without requiring specific gear probably, just using the the right passives and getting a big pick-up radius, you can get something similar that applies to every single spell by reducing it's CD.
In the same way, we could say that the barbarian gets a.. I don't know, 800% increased damage to WoTB because he can keep it active all the time with the proper items and skill runes.
The conclusion is, we should keep the CD as a separate kind of measure of the final output damage, even if it is related to it.
In the case of Locus Swarm, the skill has no CD, and re-casting it doesn't stack its damage.
Well, I partially agree with what you said there. Yeah, leveling up a skill is not possible (except for if there's a rune that makes it ~20% stronger). However, a significant part of leveling up skills in D2 was done by acquiring +skills gear (that was pretty much a mandatory stat for almost everyone), so there are some similarities.
By moving these effects completely to items and getting rid of it on the skill tree (and the skill tree itself), Blizzard hoped to create this feeling that so many people describe about finding an item in D2 and saying "let me create a build around it". Sure, 0CD Zombie Dogs might be difficult or close to impossible to acquire as self-found in D3, but so was acquiring high runes or many elite unique items in D2.
Anyways, I still understand what you're saying and I agree that certain things are not possible anymore the way they were implemented in D2, and I'm sorry that you don't like it. But in my personal opinion it's not bad design. Actually, I prefer this new design; as I said before, I never leveled a handful of characters to ~70 just to try out lots of different builds, so I can say that in 1 year of D3 I had the opportunity to try out more builds than I did in 10 years of D2. And to me that's a good thing, and I'm okay that I can't buff one particular spell that I really like.
i know in diablo 3 they wanted your hero to feel powerful right from the start but now you dont get very much feeling of progression when your character levels up at all. Your skills dont look any more powerful when their damage increases because their effects dont change, you get a slight change in appearance and effect by switching runes but that's all.
basically i would like to see them add another layer of depth to the skill system, synergy's between skills have been poorly implemented and the majority of passive are pointless because they dont synergise in a stackable way with items and active skils, which is why(Travis day has mentioned this i think) alott of builds are centred around Critical hits. because its by far the main way to achieve synergy
Leading nowhere... is what he said upon the discovery of the most useful smiley ever to be found on this board. YARRRR!