Basic Math - The Failure of Diablo Melee

[MongoJerry]

That MIGHT be for the best if they gave us back D1 style health potions and let the player burn through healing (limited healing, like the D1 belt, but much less limited than D3 is now) when these crazy boss mobs use their new tricks to prevent ranged toons from maintaining distance gaps.

I passed on your previous comments about unlimited potions, because I really didn't think you wanted to go there. I thought that maybe you just wanted to reduce the cooldown to 20 seconds or something, but if you seriously think that nearly unlimited potions is a good idea, then I have to disagree with you. That's a foolish mechanic that makes only "spike" damage dangerous. Did you know that poison damage actually caused more damage in D2 than other forms of magic damage? But why was poison resistance such an afterthought for most players? Because you could always healing potion through it. Potion cooldowns are a good mechanic. The idea of health globes that you have to move to and strategically use is also a good mechanic. Blizzard made the right choices in this regard.

RedRadical's point about ranged having it just as bad seems valid. Vortex or Teleport, Jailer or Knockback, Fast or Shielded. Most of the D3-new boss abilities they've added seem aimed at defeating the Ember-style gameplay of just maintain distance, you can burn through anything eventually if they can never corner you.

Exactly -- this was another very good choice on Blizzard's part in that they made the game more exciting. What you didn't mention was that Blizzard also gave players defensive skills to counter those abilities. I personally use Diamond Skin and Teleport to counter them. Other possibilities include Frost Nova and various other stuns and slows that Wizards can have if they choose to equip them. Other classes have their defensive abilities as well. So, yes, Ember and many of my special D2 characters would get devasted with the new fight mechanics, but I take that as a sign that Blizzard has learned from the past.

[Roland]

I do want hard, but D1 had the right kinds of hard for me. There was a nice even pace like properly tuned strength resistance training. D3 does not feel properly tuned, is not currently as much fun at higher difficulty, and seems to have a poorly trained strength coach running the show.

I know exactly what you want. The one question I've never been able to answer - for myself, let alone anyone else - is how can we fit what we loved about D1 (the tactics, the pacing, etc.) in to the mechanics of D2? Can we? Or do we just have to adjust our desires to fit the mechanics, while not giving up the core of our desires and enjoyment? CC IS the answer for Melee, I feel, just as it is for Ranged. The question is, how to go about it? Limited CC in some form should be virtually a requirement if you don't want to kite, so in that regard I feel that nerfing CC timers in higher difficulties is a band-aid fix that accomplishes nothing. I've seen Monty pair with me in Act I Inferno with terrible damage simply shred groups of mobs with Seismic Slam, and I honestly feel that is one of the best skills in the Barb's arsenal. I wish, so badly, I got anything even remotely comparable as a DH. Impact - Impale is the only thing that comes close, and it's single-target, high-cost, and only 65% chance to Stun. Seismic Slam - Stagger, or Shattered Ground seem like perfect choices to help you get the tactical gameplay you want within the mechanics of D3. Thin the herd and push them back, giving you breathing room to tank as well as tank on one or two mobs, while your ranged friends whittle them down.

I really don't have "the" answers, Sirian. All I can say is ranged classes - at least the DH - don't have it much better if at all. Our defense is kiting, but they have SO many ways of simply bypassing that, flat-out, that I'd almost rather play melee. At least then if/when I kite, I know I'll be able to take on one or three mobs at a time, and whittle them down, without worrying about being 1- or 2-shotted. Believe me, trying to get a shot off on the boss in an Invulnerable Minions pack is just hell sometimes - and other times simply impossible. At least with a melee you have the chance, eventually, to single him out (especially with your CC skills). I don't have any such luxury. It's all luck of the draw whether I'll have a clear path to shoot or not, and that plain sucks.

I do know one thing: the answer is not "stack all of one thing." It's balance. It may need some tweaking (probably does), but I think the baseline isn't quite as bad as you think right now. I'm not saying it won't get worse - it will - but with the right gear it should become better. Good enough not to lose interest in 2 months? Maybe, maybe not. We'll find out, for better or worse. For right now, though, I have enough faith (me, of all people - odd, isn't it?) that THIS team will not repeat the same mistakes the past has shown us. 6 months from now I may be proven wrong (and become even more cynical than Bolty), but for now that hope combined with still finding enjoyment in the game despite the glaring problems keeps me coming back for more. I hope you can find enough enjoyment to stick it out, too.

[Chesspiece_face]

I rejected one skill.

Melee may seem to you like a "very limited" build, but it was one third of the game in the original iteration of this franchise. That's the game I enjoyed more, by far, and I believe it is perfectly fair game to desire more of that type of experience from the franchise.
- Sirian

I think my issue with this is more a semantic one. You go to this word "melee" and the Monk and Barbarian are the designated "melee" classes in this game. But your definition of "melee" is much more limited than the definition that the game inherantly uses. Your definition is much more limited than the scope of the characters overall. Now, Blizzard does offer options for a player with your defintions to succeed. How the skill "feels" is completely dependent on the user. How the skill "feels" also has no relation on if it is effective. People have stated in this thread that it is, in fact, effective. Thus (at least into Inferno where things break down for many classes) the math seems fine.

My second thought when reading your posts is that you are taking a very MMO/WoW group mentality to playing Diablo. You seem to come into your group play with the idea that you will be the tank and that you will hold aggro and take the hits while your partners Dps things down. In WoW if a player wanted to play that roll they had to spec for it. Not to use too many metaphors but you wouldn't see fury Warriors complaining that they couldn't tank as effectively as a protection Warrior.

It's also not simply an issue of the skills you use as you are playing in a group. Your effectiveness is also highly dependent on the skills your partners are using and if they aren't using support skills that are benefiting your playstyle that is going to be highly detrimental.

[Roland]

Act I Inferno Gear Farming

Barbarian build that can safely farm Inferno Act I - specifically the Warden and the Butcher. It may not be the ideal skill choice for you, but at least it should give you an idea of some of the options, as well as a bit of an insight into Inferno.

[Elric of Grans]

After the session I just played, I feel much like Sirian does, albeit with a ranged class. I have been playing my Demon Hunter through Act I/Hell. My build is heavily built around slowing enemies and kiting; my equipment is heavily defence oriented. Since us Aussies have awful lag issues playing the game, I need to be able to survive a few seconds of desync, and I do. As such, 99% of the Act has been a cake walk so far. Elites swing heavily, however. Sometimes they add some good challenge, but all it takes is the wrong combination of attributes on the wrong class of enemy and you have a truly tedious battle. As an example, I have had two Extra Health/Reflects Damage groups (yay!), and it seems Waller/Invulnerable Minions makes for a long and tedious battle.

My last dungeon crawl made me rage-quit the game. Scavenger's Cave, hoping to get some decent loot. Now, Scavengers are hard enough as normal enemies. Because of the weirdness of how enemies who start an attack animation always hit you, no matter how far away you are, Scavengers cannot be kited and even regular ones have proven more difficult than most Champion packs. On the first floor, I scored Teleporting/Illusionist/Fire Chain Scavengers. Yup, they teleport on top of you, the Fire Chains all hit at once, and 15 Scavengers (three originals cloned out to 15) attack all at once, with you unable to kite. Amazingly, I only died once, but it was a long and tedious battle only possible by separating them from each other. I barely take the stairs down to the second floor and I scored a Rare group: Vortex/Waller/Arcane Scavengers. I think the effect of this is pretty obvious. I was one-shotted so many times I literally lost count. I killed them, and finished the cave, but I then quit the game and threw my arms up asking myself ``what was the point?''

In this play session, I found three fundamental issues:

1) Imbalanced risk-reward. Elite groups can (but do not always) take a lot of time and effort to kill. The reward from them, however, tends to be pretty lame. One, maybe two, enchanted items; usually magic, sometimes Rare. The probability of the item being borderline decent: slim. In fact, in Act I/Hell they are not even useful for crafting, as most items as such low-level that they still only break down to Nightmare Difficulty crafting components. The Reward for taking out these guys is the cash from selling the item to the vendor, which is far less than you could generate from 30 seconds of blasting away at normal mobs. Some of the Elite groups I just faced took 10 minutes to kill, only generate pittance in cash. A lot of effort, a lot of risk, no real reward.

2) Poorly designed Elite attributes, or awful combinations. These remind me of Fire/Ice/Lightning immunes in Diablo II: they made the Sorceress cry, and were just unfair. I do not think you will find a player who disagrees that Invulnerable Minions was an awful idea. Most players also seem to despise Reflects Damage and Vampiric. Certain enemies (eg ones that naturally Teleport) tend to make ugly, ugly opponents with practically any combination of attributes. Certain attributes combine in ways that are just unfair (eg Vampiric with Plague and/or Lightning Enchanted). Sometimes, the game throws the whole hog at you. The other day, I faced a group of those casters from Act IV (the ones that Teleport and cast Meteor) with Vampiric/Lightning Enchanted. The two companions, of cause, stand in the AoE of the Meteor and stand in the line of the Charged Sparks, ensuring the members of this group were essentially immortal, assuming you can even target them with all the teleporting. I can only imagine what those guys would have been like with another attribute or two (ever had teleporting enemies with Molten? Not fun).

3) Tedious gameplay. The one word that should never come up when discussing entertainment: tedious. When you get an Elite with a non-fun attribute, or a combination that takes away the fun, then provide a snarky golf clap of a reward for actually defeating them, you can only describe it as tedious. I am certainly not saying that all Elite groups are this bad. I faced a dozen or so Elite groups in that play session, and happened to score two immediately next to each other that were non-fun. The rest were great and led to interesting strategies.

I think I just had a little taste of what everyone is complaining about in Inferno. Blizzard needs to fix this spikiness and they need to do so quickly.

[Sirian]

I passed on your previous comments about unlimited potions, because I really didn't think you wanted to go there.

Of course I want to go there. That is literally the ONLY reason I started this thread: to go EXACTLY to there.

But your phrasing is not a fair assessment. You say "unlimited potions" and that isn't what I said. I didn't get in to numbers because I don't know enough yet to know exactly what the numbers ought to be. I do know that the current numbers are unbalanced, however, and that is a good enough place from which to start.

I thought that maybe you just wanted to reduce the cooldown to 20 seconds or something...

33% reduction in the "Run Away Little Girl, Run Away" experience? Not nearly enough, for sure.


The entire concept of these mad-crazy boss packs is off the rails.

Whatever is the hardest content to beat in a given act must be made reasonably beatable. The proper thing, then, is to get away from these uber packs that, by comparison, render the regular mobs "too easy" and nothing but cannon fodder.

Kiting packs to some backwater and stranding them there, then ignoring them thereafter and carefully avoiding re-aggroing them, is not my idea of proper strategy. Nor is easy mode interspersed with one-shot-kill land my notion of game balance. Blizzard has their head in the sand on this one, and it undermines the best parts of their generally good design. They should have chucked this aspect of Diablo 2 in the history bin and moved on to engineering a more evenly paced game. The notion of worthless trash mobs and overtuned boss encounters is an MMO concept that this franchise could do without.

Is that going to happen at this point? Seems impossible. They've made their bed. Nevertheless, Diablo 1 did not have boss encounters that were ridiculously stronger than normal mobs. Quite the contrary: the bosses always showed up on specific floors, and were predictably present if their mob type had been selected on that floor. They'd have one quality that was tougher (or at least different) than their regular counterparts, such as Plaguewrath's maintain-range trait, or the fire clan pack that would shoot Succubus missiles.

There is some strategic novelty to overcoming the D2/D3 boss packs with the multiple, random abilities. However, it is fairly narrow, and it comes at the cost of rendering the rest of the game worthless by comparison. That is not a successful or worthwhile tradeoff.


In D1, fighting the regular mobs was GREAT fun, and the bosses would be a little bit extra edge to deal with on occasion. In D3, fighting the regular mobs is ONCE AGAIN good fun, more so than in Diablo 2. Yet we have this terrible burden of overtuned boss packs, which are then too lethal to be much fun -- or if your gear, ability selection, internet connection, computer quality and player skill are all strong enough, the bosses are fine but the rest of the game is a waste of your time.

This is a design blunder of the first order -- and frankly, something that should not be repeated in D3 after stepping in it in D2. They should have learned better.

Did you know that poison damage actually caused more damage in D2 than other forms of magic damage? But why was poison resistance such an afterthought for most players? Because you could always healing potion through it.

Have you ever read my D2 spot reports? My D2 site is back up now, after being offline for the last couple of years.

sirian.warpcore.org

My run with Wussie girl would have been quite different if I had neglected her poison resistance.

Potion cooldowns are a good mechanic. The idea of health globes that you have to move to and strategically use is also a good mechanic.

I agree, but they are not properly tuned to the incoming damage counts. The potions more so than the globes.

The player needs the ability to survive. Death, by definition, is "losing" that given encounter. There should be no unwinnable encounters.

CC is part of the solution, but it cannot be the only solution. All the CC options have cooldowns, while the threats include things like champion packs where four different mobs can chain-CC your toon. Four mobs executing Jailer in sequence, or a Horde boss pack of a hard-hitting creature type able to chain Vortex you or chain Teleport to you. There are some mobs encountered in sardine cans, such as waiting for you as the first encounter in the sewers or caves, events that are traps, and so on, where there isn't room to kite or even maneuver.

So, yes, Ember and many of my special D2 characters would get devasted with the new fight mechanics, but I take that as a sign that Blizzard has learned from the past.

Blizzard has reacted to the past. That is not the same as learning. If all they've done is shut down kiting with a smirk and a laugh, expecting us to rely on these new defensive and CC skills but giving them too long of cooldowns to be able to deal with specific packs that can chain their abilities enough to overwhelm your defensive ability options, then they are far from having learned anything. They've "closed" what they see as a "loophole" in the D2 design. "You WILL die! Ahahaha!" Um... yeah. Gee, thanks. But is the more narrow design of their making as fun to play as D1 with its instant potions or D2 with its endless kiting? Not at the moment.

I passed on your previous comments about unlimited potions, because I really didn't think you wanted to go there.

Here's why we need to go back there.

Your point about spike damage being the only damage that is dangerous is true regardless of healing options. If you get in over your head (whatever that means to your toon in its current gear, ability set, companions, and content phase) you should be in danger. If not, you should not be in danger of dying. You may ought to be going up against enough resistance that ineptitude could soon put you in to danger, and that resistance should be robust enough to be entertaining, but you should NOT be constantly in a "Run Away Little Girl, Run Away" adrenalin rush, or the game will be too stressful, too tedious, and ultimately too one dimensional.

Whether you can full-heal instantly several times in a row without restriction, or heal only a small fraction of your health globe and wait 30 seconds before you can do it again, or something in between, spike damage is and remains the only threat of death. (Attrition could be a threat, as well, but only if you are trapped -- sardine cans, ambushes, positioning mistakes, etc). So that line attack is-- well, it's feeble. Sorry, but it doesn't even matter to the core issue. You can run away to town, fire off your CCs or armor abilities or whatever, but whatever your reaction, you MUST stop taking that kind of damage and fast, or you are dead.

I don't think there's a player on this planet who can lecture me about Diablo kiting. I've been there and done that, under a number of the most extreme conditions. Heck, I've even pulled off some epic kiting on this barbarian toon already -- and the ratio at which I'm having to do that is part of the problem here.

A more robust healing option allows players to engage more and run around kiting less. YOU may enjoy hardcore-only Diablo, stacking your toons with the most survivable gear possible; diminishing, avoiding, and managing your risks to where you never die; but that does not mean it's my cup of tea nor should that be imposed on me arbitrarily. Let ME choose a game plan, and let that be something other than endlessly kiting mobs because I lack for healing options and can't afford to take a hit. Nor do I want to be force fed a game balance where I must play like it's Hardcore, running around like a tank with the most possible health and damage mitigation I can stack.

You can play Diablo 1 by pulling one mob at a time, most of the time. You can play it by shooting offscreen, measuring every step, always retreating to the choke point, and so forth. That may even be fun, if that's the most your toon can handle under variant conditions. That style of play should be on the menu, but if that's the only flavor, this restaurant sucks! There's also something to be said for pulling faster, killing faster, and risking pulling too much for your gear, level and player skill. Even with the instant potions, you could readily die in D1 if you jumped in over your head.

D3 wouldn't require monks and barbs to carry specific healing skills or go home crying, if potions were once again a primary form of health recovery. The orbs ARE a good option, a fun addition, but are too luck-based to be the only answer.


Nearly endless instant potions would be too much, but 30 seconds until the next mini-potion that will only heal a third of your health globe anyway, that is definitely way too little.

A belt with four potions on it, which has a 30 second refill cooldown, sounds like a reasonable place to start. The potions are more expensive than dying, at least where I'm at in the game, so it's not like it will be economically feasible to drink them like a fish.

Let players opt for a smaller belt if they like, with some minor buff and a few achievements available if they do. Then YOU could still have your one potion every 30 seconds, without imposing on me the need to disengage from melee with a ridiculous frequency.

Do I expect Blizzard to do this? No. I've seen no sign that they even comprehend the math errors in Diablo2 and Diablo3 game pacing, and that would have to occur before any solution of this type could be considered. But I have the notions rolling around in my head and needed to express them so I could move on myself.

Nor do I think this would be enough by itself to fix the problems here, but I also do not believe that nerfing mob damage alone will be enough. The two sides of the equation both need to migrate toward better balance, and then perhaps we will have a game with a reasonable shelf life to it.


- Sirian

[Sirian]

Act I Inferno Gear Farming

Barbarian build that can safely farm Inferno Act I - specifically the Warden and the Butcher. It may not be the ideal skill choice for you, but at least it should give you an idea of some of the options, as well as a bit of an insight into Inferno.

I switched out most of my skills for the Butcher in Hell. I chose WW with the fast movement glyph (dropping Slam), a different glyph for Bash than I normally use, tried Rend but gave up on it as too slow in its attack animation, and went back to Earthquake for my heavy hitting long cooldown spell, which I used mostly when he charged and got himself stuck for a bit.

I'm not refusing to switch skills for specific scripted bosses. It's the "regular game" where a single subset of six skills must be chosen, where swapping out skills during combat is painful and discouraged, that is the subject of my attention.

If Blizzard has designed the upper difficulties in such a way that any single skill is must-have for an entire class, or only a limited number of skill sets are viable, then they have failed to deliver what they promised. Can they fix it? Maybe. Will they? I expect them to try.


- Sirian

[ViralSpiral]

You know, looking at the champ abilities I'm seeing here, with the exception of the idiotic invulnerable minions, a lot of these abilities are the type seen in the original Roguelike games from which Diablo originally hatched. Diablo was actually going to be basically a graphical Roguelike, originally. Turn-based and everything. Its current incarnation arose because at some point, someone turned off the "pause between turns" function, making the game real-time, and liked what they saw. But the game wasn't developed for real-time originally, and from what I've seen of 2 and 3, maybe that's why D1 was so much more tactical - because it was designed for turn-based play at first, so tactics were built into the play from the first, with the adrenaline-pumping constant movement added later.

It shows, too, because a lot of the same Roguelike tactics (doorway jams, et cetera), worked well in D1. The series being what it is now - famed for fast-paced gameplay and phat lewt, I don't think it could return to its Roguelike roots, but I wonder if several of us wouldn't be happier with a game that did. I wonder if there's a market for turn-based strategy/fantasy combat. I imagine the closest thing we have is games like Final Fantasy Tactics. That did do well, though, as I recall. Although it probably had a lot, lot more text than some old Rogue players would like. Heh.

[Kylearan]

Hi,

I wonder if there's a market for turn-based strategy/fantasy combat.

There are new commercial, turn-based rogue-like games from time to time, like Dungeons of Dredmore, but they come from small, indie developers. Fun for some time, but not really comparable to bigger, more polished games companies like Blizzard can produce.

I agree that the fun many of us had with Diablo 1 came from game mechanics that can be tracked back to the old roguelikes and which got trashed with Diablo 2, but I disagree it's the real-time aspect. The main difference, which made doorway jams etc. possible, was that Diablo 1 was tile-based.

-Kylearan

[ViralSpiral]

Well, it was largely tile-based because it had been developed under the intent of being turn-based. But I can see your point. I can also see why they moved away from it, though. The movement feels clunky that way, slow, jointed. Like you're playing a game with marionettes. It feels more natural to move in a D2/D3 way, where you can circle or jag at a moment's notice. It's a different set of tactics, but yeah.

I've seen a few videos of D3 and everything I see is wide open spaces or large hallways. I don't see tactically useful terrain hardly anywhere - narrow halls, doorways, differing elevations. Very little of any use for splitting enemy forces or even fighting with a rock or tree at one's back to cut down missile fire from 60 degrees or so. I'm not sure if I'm just seeing videos like that because they're more exciting, or because there's very little tactical terrain to go around. If the latter, was that a design oversight, or does Blizzard not want people using tactics other than what skills Blizzard themselves give us?

Between online only play, their statistic gathering, the way the AH has pretty much total control over trade...D3 has a very Big Brother feel to it. Is that just me?

[kandrathe]

You rather missed the point, though. My post isn't a statement about CC at all. It's an analysis on the failure to produce a viable melee game, yet again. And on this score, can there even be any argument?

I shouldn't have brought up Inferno. My point was that CC isn't the proper style of play here, even in Nightmare/Hell modes. Melee is quite viable from Normal to Nightmare to Hell difficulties. I ran into the same brick wall you did, and asked for help. It made a big difference, so I'm suggesting that to you as well. The simple fact was, I was Doing It Wrong.™

I'm not as far with my Barbarian (level 32) -- but I took that advice too. My solo style (and the way I want to play) is to mostly, heedlessly wade through trash mobs. This build, which has most emphasis on damage reduction and health recovery, allows me to mostly do that. I was struggling a bit yesterday so I decided to swap in Weapons Master, and crafted a rare sword that then improves my damage by 15%, but my reason was since a % of my damage per hit returns to me as health. In swarms of melee my Revenge is almost always lit, and I spam the hell out of it. Where I'm at now, the biggest trouble I face are mobs with non-physical damage (fire, cold, poison) since I don't have any resistance yet. My play style is Frenzy, and periodically rend, and spam Revenge whenever I can. I use Leap to jump in and out as needed, with the temporary Armor buff for now. My CC is to kill them, or make them mad at me then jump away to draw them off my team. For champion packs, I burn Earthquake then retreat to pull the most into it. Under Tactics, the best I have now is Threatening Shout, which reduces damage for 15 seconds, and I apply it also as needed. I don't have to rely on health orbs, or potions -- but I do need to use them now and then especially with non-physical damage mobs.

I do die when I'm being stupid, and I can live with that. I will need to see if this set up is viable through Nightmare. I do need better gear, with more armor, vitality and resistances. And, I'm AH buying averse, but I funnel in to sell as many unusable rares as I can for reasonable prices. I've only spent about 3000 gold on the AH for affordable upgrades. I don't like to spend my game time doing Item accounting.

[Athenau]

I've seen a few videos of D3 and everything I see is wide open spaces or large hallways. I don't see tactically useful terrain hardly anywhere - narrow halls, doorways, differing elevations. Very little of any use for splitting enemy forces or even fighting with a rock or tree at one's back to cut down missile fire from 60 degrees or so. I'm not sure if I'm just seeing videos like that because they're more exciting, or because there's very little tactical terrain to go around. If the latter, was that a design oversight, or does Blizzard not want people using tactics other than what skills Blizzard themselves give us?

Terrain is still useful in D3. I used it a lot, especially in Act IV, where bottlenecking enemies on stairways or ambushing boss packs around corners comes in handy.

[Tal]

Diablo 2 had zero melee classes, because melee itself was not viable. The mobs hit too hard, compared to the health recovery options. You could not stay in toe to toe. As Barbarian you would whirl whirl whirl your way through them. Paladins would throw a lot of hammers. Etc. You stayed at range or you died. This was Epic Fail on behalf of the designers -- the worst shortcoming of the game, bar none.

This statement still confuses me even after reading and re-reading it. I played a jabazon, barbarian, assassin, two different flavors of zealot (sword and board/two hander) through all of Hell LoD. I sometimes had to kite but for the most part, I was toe to toe and didn't struggle.

Further I watched Gnollguy's Tankazon easily handle everything we pulled.

Could you explain what you mean by viable?

[MMAgCh]

Seems sort of like if you were to have posted back in D2 that you wanted to play an Inferno Sorc and then complained that Inferno wasn't a fun skill so it's Blizzards fault.

Inferno actually always was broken in D2 and dealt only half damage (same for the druid's Arctic Blast, incidentally), so if the skill wasn't fun to use, that would have been, in no small part, Blizzard's fault.

[Sirian]

I played a jabazon, barbarian, assassin, two different flavors of zealot (sword and board/two hander) through all of Hell LoD.

Perhaps that is where your confusion comes in. I only enjoyed D2 before its expansion, and in that phase melee was not happening.

If Blizzard waits over a year to improve melee in D3, and those changes don't occur until an expansion and some further patches after that, it will be the same story: too late for me to care. This is something they should have done better with out of the box.


- Sirian

[Treesh]

I played a jabazon, barbarian, assassin, two different flavors of zealot (sword and board/two hander) through all of Hell LoD.

Perhaps that is where your confusion comes in. I only enjoyed D2 before its expansion, and in that phase melee was not happening.

If Blizzard waits over a year to improve melee in D3, and those changes don't occur until an expansion and some further patches after that, it will be the same story: too late for me to care. This is something they should have done better with out of the box.


- Sirian

The only one that tal mentioned that was only after the expansion was the assassin. Before that, the other builds he listed were STILL viable.

[ViralSpiral]

I played a jabazon, barbarian, assassin, two different flavors of zealot (sword and board/two hander) through all of Hell LoD.

Perhaps that is where your confusion comes in. I only enjoyed D2 before its expansion, and in that phase melee was not happening.

If Blizzard waits over a year to improve melee in D3, and those changes don't occur until an expansion and some further patches after that, it will be the same story: too late for me to care. This is something they should have done better with out of the box.


- Sirian

The only one that tal mentioned that was only after the expansion was the assassin. Before that, the other builds he listed were STILL viable.

Not true - Zeal was unplayable crap prior to expansion, before it was capped to 5 hits (and didn't cause the entire series of attacks to miss as soon as any of them missed.) WW was basically the only playable Barb build. I don't personally call a class with exactly one playable build viable, myself. Concentrate, Frenzy, and Berserk were ALL bugged pre-expansion. And Double Throw didn't have a synergy to boost its damage, so basically it was just a place to dump skill points you wanted to forever waste. How rosy the shades of nostalgia are. I wouldn't even call WW a melee build, considering it was basically a ranged attack for all purposes except Iron Maiden - you sure didn't wait to get in melee range to start whirling. Now Smiters were still playable pre-expansion, but that's about the only actual melee build I recall pre-LoD that was viable. And even that got by via ignoring target defence.

[Mavfin]

I played a jabazon, barbarian, assassin, two different flavors of zealot (sword and board/two hander) through all of Hell LoD.

Perhaps that is where your confusion comes in. I only enjoyed D2 before its expansion, and in that phase melee was not happening.

If Blizzard waits over a year to improve melee in D3, and those changes don't occur until an expansion and some further patches after that, it will be the same story: too late for me to care. This is something they should have done better with out of the box.


- Sirian

The only one that tal mentioned that was only after the expansion was the assassin. Before that, the other builds he listed were STILL viable.

Yeah, the D2 he's recalling is not the one I remember, pre or post-LOD. Also, the D3 he seems to want...back to potion spamming? No thanks.

[Elric of Grans]

I do agree that the running away waiting for your potion cool down to finish is dull and poor design. Potion spamming is not fun either, but the current implementation needs more work. Probably if alternative forms of healing were made more viable (eg life leech) then this would not be half as much of an issue.

[Tal]

Not true - Zeal was unplayable crap prior to expansion, before it was capped to 5 hits (and didn't cause the entire series of attacks to miss as soon as any of them missed.)

And yet I defeated Hell Diablo...on Hardcore with a sword and board zealot. Tell me again how it was crap and unplayable?

IIRC the Javazon was prior to LoD too.