DII vs. Titan Quest

[Fragbait]

Hi,

Once again, sorry for the wait. [...] And I'm responding separately, both for the sake of organizing my thoughts and for readability.

No problem. And thanks.

Perhaps, but I think my originally grievance was the lack of balance in Diablo II as a whole, not as it compared to Diablo I. I just compare it to Diablo I, because it is the most comparable game I've played, and despite being more primitive, it is better in many respects. It does indeed share many of the same issues.

There isn't really an easy fix to that sort of dichotomy. I think the best I've seen (shameless plug) is once again Guild Wars. Adrenaline was ingenius. Sort of like Warrior mana that allows them to use attack skills at a decent rate, as well as actual spells, but neither is too much or too little (considering Warrior primary).

Well, I haven't played Guild Wars.
It's actually a matter of taste: Who is more of a challenge, melee, ranged or caster? Apart from the last two levels, where triple immunes were quite common, this order exactly applies to DI, what with a >800 point mana shield and what not. In the last two levels, maybe a Rogue is better overall, because nothing is immune or resistant to physical damage.
In DII, the order is ranged, melee and caster, if you ask me. At least most of the time - but then again, builds look so different now without the +skills limit and no golden, maxed attributes.
What DII lacks is the real immunity problems that DI had. The difficulty here is that DII has 6 types of damage compared to 4 in DI. And since the skills per character are limited to 3 skill trees (at least before oskills were introduced), it is quite common that chars can't really dish out more than 2 damage types, maybe 3 with the hireling.
Now if one created 3/4 immunes like in DI, that would be monsters immune to 4 damage types! If one replaced physical immunity by physical resistance from 25% (good for overall hell difficulty?) up to 90% (certain foes like ghosts and act bosses, not frenzytaurs seemingly at random, though!), that would be a good step into beefing melee and ranged vs. caster types. Since it wouldn't really work to have monsters immune to 4 types, I think if all hell monster are immune to at least 1 damage type (apart from physical) - currently they aren't - and about 60% (compared to the ~5% now) are immune against 2 damage types, that could work. Bosses would still be able to get up to 4 immunities, making them harder to kill for caster types.

The problem here is that you can achieve decent defense (though not the ungodly amounts Paladins can hit), damage reduction, and resistances on any caster while doing more damage in an area rather than to one target. AND you're probably ranged, so you tend to take less damage, which is, in my opinion, a major contributing factor to indestructibility. As anyone who's ever cheesed the The Bard's Tale with a bow knows, if the enemies can't hit you, you can't die.

As I had previously stated, I think defense is not the problem. It even has diminishing returns compared to DI. Resists are a problem - too many caster uniques offer skills and resistances (think Occulus). But I don't think that that can be changed now - but if we think of the next installment in the Diablo series, that would be a think to keep in mind. Damage reduction should maybe be capped at 33%, but I can't really think of a caster relying heavily on it, since they tend to get hit less already...

I always like that aspect, but look at druids in comparison to the other classes, power-level-wise. They're more gimmicky than anything else. Not really sure where that thought takes us, but there it is.

Ah, but what if there were no physical immunities anymore, like I proposed above? What if Werebear block and hit recovery speeds were more fitting for a melee fighter? Then Druids would rock, too - huge life, damage and minions. Barbs with huge resists, life and damage and Pallies with huge defense, blocking and damage would represent other parts of the melee spectrum. The resist automod on Pally shields would need a nerf then, too. With +1xx% to all resists, it becomes too easy to reach the higher max resists.

More than an overpowered melee build, I'd like a lack of overpowered caster builds, but I suppose on some level, equity is better than a completely broken game. The problem there is that melee is still restricted to hitting one enemy at a time, while caster AoE skills do MORE damage than each hit (for the most part).

There are only a few AoE skills that are able to do more damage than melee attacks, like Blessed Hammer and a fully synergized Fireball. And there are those melee attacks that come pretty close to / are AoE: Zeal, Whirlwind, Fury, Fend (if it was uninterruptable) and many of the releases of an Assassin, including Dragon Tail itself.
But generally I agree that AoE spells that have the advantage of targeting a whole group of enemies should do less damage then. Maybe not too low, because regeneration of monsters is pretty steep nowadays. But if a skill like Fireball can hit up to 5 monsters, it should only do 45% of the damage a well built melee attack can do, if a skill can hit up to 4 monsters, it should do 50% of the damage, hit 3 monsters do 58% of the damage, hit 2 monsters do 71% of the damage and hit 1 monster do 100% damage (something like [squareroot(number_monsters)]/number_monsters ). But this is wishful thinking again already...:rolleyes:

War Cry should indeed not do anything to physical immunes. That's one of the largest problems with it. The other is that you can stunlock everything but a few superuniques (including act bosses), which means the only threatening enemies are those that release damage passively (elemental enchanted bosses), those that explode on death (Undead Stygian Dolls), and those than can put enough damage potential out there to make you retreat before they die/before you stunlock them (Tomb Vipers). Everything else just charges you and runs into your stun wall. Ranged enemies get taunted.

I still think that without the mana regeneration rate that is provided by Insight and the option to buy potions, a Singer Barb is not uber anymore. And because he was quite a challenge then, a stun time for his skill was necessary to let him survive. Now if those oskill aurae that we both seem to dislike were gone completely, and skills would be capped at slvl 25 (maybe 30), then I think they wouldn't be so indestructible anymore. Capping the skills at a lower cap is a neat idea, I think. In DI you could get slvl 20 with the perfect items. Now you can get what - slvl 5x-6x? I think that is too much. Let casters have their +3 to all skills on one item if they wish. But restrict the maximum skill level back to 30 like it was in a former patch (pre 1.09?). Slvl 25 would be harsh for casters, but doable. And interestingly physical damage builds are nearly untouched by such a nerf - what you wanted.

The benchmark is only flawed because Blizzard decided to make it so. Look at Diablo I. Aside from Diablo's Apocalypse, neither players nor enemies could really do anything the other couldn't (I guess if you want to count high auto-hit on Blood Knights...). This is why tactical retreating and careful progression were necessary. Perhaps Blizzard thought (correctly?) that players did not like this aspect?

But even in DI did regular monsters have up to 903 hit points, immune to fireghtning/magic, up to 250% cth and up to mlvl 60, 10 levels above the maximum player level. Now DII doesn't seem so bad, does it?
Monsters with up to the double amount of hp the highest player can get? Check.
Monsters immune to fireghtning/cold/poison or only 3 of them? No.
Monster with really really good AR? Not more than 6000-8000, no.
Monster with levels up to 109? No regular monster, no.

It improves killing speed BY improving movement speed. A sorceress out of danger in less than a second can resume killing faster than one who has to retreat via running back to the nearest chokepoint to avoid getting swarmed. Having better mobility will result in more time casting spells and less time getting away if you're geared toward destruction as opposed to survival. In fact, teleport makes this very philosophy possible without slowing one's advance rate to a crawl. Hence, it improves killing speed.

I see your point, but I think that if one character class has access to TP, others should too in one way or another. Also I think that the safety of teleporting is more due to items like Whitstan's which enable the caster to get quite good block rates and thus safety. So if we nerf TP a bit by increasing its casting animation time / implementing a small cast delay, and nerf Whitstan's a bit, I still think that TP is a nice spell that would lack if it wasn't there and that all classes should be able to access somehow.

Ramping life (and experience) was a step in the right direction. What about something like adding more resistance, even to the point of immunity, with each additional player? Keeping it doable for one man and having eight men play the same game does not a balanced game make.
I will agree with you that a lot of my grievances are built into the core of the game and cannot be changed. No, it is not the ideal game for me, but basically everything after the 1.09 patch was built specifically to unbalance the game in favor of the players, especially those who cheat. And even those facets that do not follow this trend (synergy) tend to dumb the game down somewhat. Instead of creating a unique build now, nine out of ten people you see on the realms play the same five skills as every other nine out of ten people (by character class). Not to mention people are now completely dependent on either broken items or their party to solve issues that used to require something as fancy as "plan B".

Sadly that would be the end of many parties that aren't composed of a perfect amount of different chars. People aren't always able to get online, so the party should be able to play, even if the main source of fire damage or the main tank and physical attacker are absent. So I don't think that ramping up resists would be a good idea.
Also after 1.10 I think many deviant builds got playable. Many unused skills received a major boost through synergies, like FoF/CoT/BoI, Fire Claws etc. And I do remember the DII world playing chiefly the same chars pre 1.10, too. At some point Whirlwinders were dominant, at some point nearly every second game was with a Concentration Pally and a Strafe/Multi Bowazon in it. People sadly tend to play the most potent chars. That will always be like that, and it is virtually impossible to balance all of them. And then again, like many Amazon-Basiners would probably agree on, I think that there have to be 'weaker' chars, so that there is a challenge and diversification for the expert players.


PS: Quotes seem to work now, yay!
Greetings, Fragbait