AK Mouths Off Yet Again

[Brother Laz]

In D1, vitality was almost useless: you would easily end up in stun lock, and die anyway. Acid dog boss packs and their fast spit were a terror, as were azure drakes and their charge attack and very fast attack speed. The way to survive for warriors was defense and a lot of it, and happy feet to prevent swarming. Mages (not counting the min/maxed mage with hacked godly full plate and duped zodiac rings to wear it) would usually die if caught in stunlock.

In D2, defense is worthless because of all the ITD attacks. And most importantly: character hit recovery is much faster, so you can just shrug off everything that does not one-hit kill you. THAT is why D2 is much easier, especially for ranged characters. :angry: Who cares if you get hit by a few bloodstars or LEB sparks? In D1 you would not die in less than about 8 blood stars anyway (unless all of them happened to do max damage, etc), about the same as in D2. But in D2, you are basically not affected by the blood stars, and can just teleport in their face and orb them off the level. Try that in D1, you'd get stunlocked in about half a second, and stuck stunlocked until death, no matter how much life you had or how many potions you used in your panic.

Vampires are the D2 equivalent of advocates, but not nearly as tough. Reason: when the fireballs are hitting you, just blast off a multishot and leech all that life back. In D1, get hit by two fireballs in succession, you'd get stuck in place and the next 50 fireballs would kill you.

So how to kill those enemies in D1? Happy feet. String them out, hide behind corners, to face only a few at a time. Teleport past waves of charged bolts, hide behind obstacles to make the succubus come to you and stop running away, stand in doors... all unneeded in D2, because as long as the damage rate is not so high that you die instantly, you can still fight, run, leech and everything else, and easily survive. And if it is, it is practically a one-hit kill. :(

All that needs to be done is getting rid of the pointlessly ITD attacks (minion of destruction's ram attack is ITD... fire and lightning arrows are ITD... tiger javelins are ITD... imp fire missiles are ITD... most special attacks are not ITD but carry a massive AR bonus...) and making defense rating matter more than like 10% (which would require a serious nerf of Defiance and IS/Shout to make builds without these viable...), and upping the hit recovery length.

[Wiz]

The character imbalances come (IMHO) from some fundamental issues that aren't going to be fixed just by tweaking skills or items.

The defensive abilities( resists, defense, shield/claw block, 'zon D/A/E, and high vit) all require an investment, either from skill/stat points, or equipment builds. And the melee chars get better skills & stats to enhance those, as they should. However, the best defensive ability is don't get hit in the first place! If you do that you don't need all the other stuff. Thus you can take a bowazon or sorceress and do hell with no defense, no shield and 0 or even negative resists( albeit with caution). That's just not possible for a melee character. Advantage: ranged chars.

On the offensive side you need multi-target attacks in at least two elements -- counting physical damage as an element -- to do well. This is where the problems occur. The paladin has effectively one multi-target attack in zeal. The others just aren't effective. The sorceress has a number in three elements( I believe at least 2 in each element). For the bowazon, with pierce, 9 of her 10 bow skills are multi-target. She has 5 end-game capable bow skills( 6 if you count fire arrow), 4 of which are inherently mult-target, in 3 different elements.

The paladin has great killing skills for killing one critter at a time. That's not how the game is built, alas for him. You have to do your slaughter wholesale in D2, and he just doesn't have the skills, and it would take some major skill changes to give them to him.

So the most successful offensive characters are those which can put all their resources towards offense, neglecting defensive abilities, and who have multi-target skills to kill crowds quick. That describes the bowazon and sorceress quite well.

The amazon benefits from being a hybrid melee/ranged char by design and thus having some of the very best defensicve skills in the game in Dodge/Evade. As the first char Blizzard did in D2, she also has two of the best-designed skill trees in the game, with 5 of 10 bow skills being end-game useful, and 9 of 10 passives being end-game useful. The spear tree, alas, is the buggiest skill tree in the game.

My $0.02 to "balance" the character classes: make sure the melee chars have at least 2 multi-target attack skills; add decent ranged attacks to the monsters and get them to target ranged characters; and give them more offense so you need to be more concerned. I don't see that happening, however.

[Hammerskjold]

>The way to survive for warriors was defense and a lot of it,

Do you mean defense in general, or Armor Class specifically? Because I agree with the first, but not the second. Low armor class warriors (or any other characters) can do just fine in D1 H\Hell.

> In D1, get hit by two fireballs in succession, you'd get stuck in place and the next 50 fireballs would kill you.

All that would be true, if a character has zero resistance. Otherwise stunlock via magical ranged attacks will not occur if you have resists.

[ak404]

So the most successful offensive characters are those which can put all their resources towards offense, neglecting defensive abilities, and who have multi-target skills to kill crowds quick. That describes the bowazon and sorceress quite well.

Note that also describes the barbarian quite well, as well as the werewolf and assassin. Why the last two? Because they both have skills that hit a good amount of enemies and both have skills that leech back a substantial amount of life, thus negating the need for defense: the werewolf's bonus is that he can hit a ton of enemies while leeching a buttload of life back, but his drawback is that it's all physical; the assassin's bonus is that she can leech even more life back, but her physical damage is comparatively weak when placed aside her elemental damage, but hey, Dragon's Tail is awesome defense.

I could apply the same to the necromancer as well, as he has all those nice minions, but until LOD, his offensive possibilities were actually slim (though not anymore). The elemental druid might've become the next v1.03 bowazon, but even he's too weak compared to the bowazon at that time.

And to reprint something I typed up in the AB:

Oh, and let's talk defense. Defense Rating, to be more precise; has anyone noticed that DR does absolutely nothing at the upper levels? The barbarian, sorceress, paladin, and druid - all have these autoskills that garner massive bonuses to DR, but in the end, what classes really, really need them? Paladin and druid, that's who. Why? Because the barbarian and sorceress subscribe to the "US pre-emptive defense" rule: Kill everything before it can even reach your front door. OK, so the two classes who really need defense also have crap offense...uh-oh. How much damage are characters supposed to do in v1.1 again, and how are the monsters going to scale up to face this new threat? Defense Ratings don't lower the damage your characters are supposed to take - that would make too much sense - they merely make your character a bit harder to hit, but if monsters have higher damage and higher AR to battle the characters, that only means that when your character does get hit, he's only going to take more damage, and if he's a wimp like the paladin who isn't lucky enough to get a massive leech skill or anything that even resembles damage, then he's screwed harder than your dad's retirement plans. Gee, I guess we really need to make that physical resistance equipment mandatory for anybody stupid enough to get in the front lines, huh? (No, I haven't forgotten blocking, but that's another story altogether: block is a supplemental defense, not The Defense, and if you're depending on that more than your armor, then something's wrong.)

[Wiz]

It doesn't describe any melee class well, because none of them can neglect resists and at least one of the other defensive abilities. I haven't personally seen any zero resist, two-handed, low defense barbs that don't use BO in hell. At least not live ones. Barbs do have excellent, narrowly focused skill trees and the best multi-target physical damage melee attack in the game, plus a very good PI killer skill. Bloody foothills, with all the PI critters, isn't where you see them hanging out, though, because they don't have a good elemental multi-target attack skill.

Life leech does indeed cover a great many defensive sins, but not all. Spearazons, for example, do well against non-PIs by using a very good multi-target attack that is uninterruptible, combined with massive leech. [ And dodge, the best defensive skill in the game.] Their lack of a good elemental attack presents problems, but in the current version you know what areas to avoid. If the monster distribution is changed as promised in 1.10, and the melee classes that don't have good multi-target elemental attacks don't get them, the grunts are going to be in a world of hurt.

The main problem with defense rating is that the investment is too high for the returns, when there are other ways available that are cheaper. 75% shield block is a lot easier to get than the equivalent amount of DR -- which also explains why you see few melee chars using twp-handed weapons: because the melee chars are using shields as a necessary defensive ability. Which makes sense: much more efficient to have a small heavy shield and put it where you need it than to cover your whole body in armor plate.

[ak404]

Ah, resists. Yeah, forgot about that.

Damn. <_<

[Oomph-aak]

[QUOTE]a late 70's punk hit "Go!" (Chorus lyrics are "Hey, ho, let's go!!" with a pile driving punk beat behind it.)

That's the Ramones, daddy-o, "Blitzkrieg Bop".

The Ramones took the essence of fifties style rock & roll ( nonsense lyrics & simple repeating chord patterns ) stripped it down, sped it up and are considered forefathers of the whole punk-rock movement.


na na na na na na na na na I wanna be sedated B)


The Who are also great. If you get a chance read "Moon", the Keith Moon Bio. It is an excellent story although the authors prose style is a little pretentious.


Oomph-aak

[Occhidiangela]

The Ramones! Well, that goes back a ways, contemporaries with The New York Dolls, IIRC. :)