05-06-2004, 01:35 PM
After reading those disastrous forums for about two months, as well as every other article on the net, I have concluded a few things:
1) The difficulty depends on how many monsters you have to fight. As in, two is a guaranteed win barring unlucky resists, three is a guaranteed death. Or other numbers depending on your character class.
2) Rogues and to a degree warriors can try out different skill combos to try and kill the mob faster, and warlocks can use different curses and a different minion. That's about it. As said above, it only makes your guaranteed victory more guaranteed, or damages a mob a bit more before you die. The number of monsters is all that counts.
3) There are many attack spells and skills, but the majority of them are either mutually exclusive [and only the best one gets used] or stack [and all of them get used in sequence]. In fact, the less used ones seem totally worthless.
4) The characters are pretty one-sided. The priest heals. Has a lot of different heal spells too. Direct damage? Nah. This also contributes to the repetitive gameplay. Mind control? Locks your own character in place, gives a damage penalty, and can only be used on monsters below level 30, which is pure genius for a level 30 spell. No improvements are to be hoped for, because this is a priest spell and the priest is supposed to be an one-dimensional healing female dog. There are some staple spells that are absolutely required to get anywhere, such as frost nova and curse of weakness. Ignore them and you stand absolutely no chance.
5) Not enough skills and spells that actually matter in combat. Too many buffs, travel spells, seals, auras, underwater breathing and all that crap. Someone tell me the difference between thorns, retribution and lightning shield and what they are good for besides filling up spell slots and making it LOOK like there are many more diverse spells than there really are.
6) Likewise, there are about 1500 different direct damage spells that do the exact same. Wrath, fire shock, lightning shock, earth shock, fire bolt, lightning bolt, shadow bolt and starfire are identical. So are immolation, corruption, curse of agony, shadow word pain and moonfire. And all of these are click-cast-damage. No aiming whatsoever. The mage has 3 different single target fire spells and I have no idea what the difference is besides damage, mana and spell timer. The shaman has a lot of different weapon enchantments and they don't stack, as well as four different DD spells that do the same as far as I can tell.
7) Resistances. Gives a monster a chance to outright ignore the spell. You could get very unlucky and have everyone resist your frost nova, in which case you die. If they do not, they are now blocks of ice for 10 seconds and you can easily win the fight. Way to balance combat and put it all to a dice roll.
8) Something entirely different, but they took the interesting Warcraft universe and ruined it. Next time I see a screenshot containing a gnome warlock, tauren druid, tauren rogue and undead priest I'm gonna kill someone.
9) Blizzard did not use their common sense. The fact that shaman weapon buffs add a fixed amount of damage forces everyone to get the fastest available weapons, ie. daggers. Likewise, the level 30 limitation of mind control gives me the shivers. Either they don't think about the consequences [100% shamans with daggers, 0% people using mind control] or they just don't care. There are many more of those things, such as the new and totally useless sap, the totally useless blink spell, the totally useless poison resist totem [anyone used cleansing? So there] etc etc.
10) Rest state? *I* paid for this game and *I* decide when I'll play it kthx. Or then again, I probably won't.
11) Hearthstone: metagamey crap put in because some people don't like the 5 minute flight from one place of the world to another, and also to legitimate the HEINOUS rest state system.
1) The difficulty depends on how many monsters you have to fight. As in, two is a guaranteed win barring unlucky resists, three is a guaranteed death. Or other numbers depending on your character class.
2) Rogues and to a degree warriors can try out different skill combos to try and kill the mob faster, and warlocks can use different curses and a different minion. That's about it. As said above, it only makes your guaranteed victory more guaranteed, or damages a mob a bit more before you die. The number of monsters is all that counts.
3) There are many attack spells and skills, but the majority of them are either mutually exclusive [and only the best one gets used] or stack [and all of them get used in sequence]. In fact, the less used ones seem totally worthless.
4) The characters are pretty one-sided. The priest heals. Has a lot of different heal spells too. Direct damage? Nah. This also contributes to the repetitive gameplay. Mind control? Locks your own character in place, gives a damage penalty, and can only be used on monsters below level 30, which is pure genius for a level 30 spell. No improvements are to be hoped for, because this is a priest spell and the priest is supposed to be an one-dimensional healing female dog. There are some staple spells that are absolutely required to get anywhere, such as frost nova and curse of weakness. Ignore them and you stand absolutely no chance.
5) Not enough skills and spells that actually matter in combat. Too many buffs, travel spells, seals, auras, underwater breathing and all that crap. Someone tell me the difference between thorns, retribution and lightning shield and what they are good for besides filling up spell slots and making it LOOK like there are many more diverse spells than there really are.
6) Likewise, there are about 1500 different direct damage spells that do the exact same. Wrath, fire shock, lightning shock, earth shock, fire bolt, lightning bolt, shadow bolt and starfire are identical. So are immolation, corruption, curse of agony, shadow word pain and moonfire. And all of these are click-cast-damage. No aiming whatsoever. The mage has 3 different single target fire spells and I have no idea what the difference is besides damage, mana and spell timer. The shaman has a lot of different weapon enchantments and they don't stack, as well as four different DD spells that do the same as far as I can tell.
7) Resistances. Gives a monster a chance to outright ignore the spell. You could get very unlucky and have everyone resist your frost nova, in which case you die. If they do not, they are now blocks of ice for 10 seconds and you can easily win the fight. Way to balance combat and put it all to a dice roll.
8) Something entirely different, but they took the interesting Warcraft universe and ruined it. Next time I see a screenshot containing a gnome warlock, tauren druid, tauren rogue and undead priest I'm gonna kill someone.
9) Blizzard did not use their common sense. The fact that shaman weapon buffs add a fixed amount of damage forces everyone to get the fastest available weapons, ie. daggers. Likewise, the level 30 limitation of mind control gives me the shivers. Either they don't think about the consequences [100% shamans with daggers, 0% people using mind control] or they just don't care. There are many more of those things, such as the new and totally useless sap, the totally useless blink spell, the totally useless poison resist totem [anyone used cleansing? So there] etc etc.
10) Rest state? *I* paid for this game and *I* decide when I'll play it kthx. Or then again, I probably won't.
11) Hearthstone: metagamey crap put in because some people don't like the 5 minute flight from one place of the world to another, and also to legitimate the HEINOUS rest state system.
Nothing is impossible if you believe in it enough.
Median 2008 mod for Diablo II
<span style="color:gray">New skills, new AIs, new items, new challenges...
06.dec.2006: Median 2008 1.44
Median 2008 mod for Diablo II
<span style="color:gray">New skills, new AIs, new items, new challenges...
06.dec.2006: Median 2008 1.44