Balancing in Diablo

[Kevin]

Finally, the game should be balanced in terms of the character versus the monsters.  Achieving high level should be difficult because the monsters are difficult even for an optimal character with ideal gear played by an excellent player.  Even better would be to have the monsters be difficult for a party of such characters.  And that is a balance that Buzzard has consistently failed to achieve.

--Pete

I agree with this statement and I am just going to ramble off some stuff on it, and propose some thoughts about fixing it, that may or may not work since I haven't thought about it enough. Your statement raises the question of what is hard, what is tedious, and what is annoying? Since this is a game, things need to be hard yet still be fun. There are lots of ways that game could be made very hard, but would it still be fun to play?

I'm going to use some of the cliche examples, that most of us know about, but they still illustrate the point. Izual has (or had) the most hitpoints in the game. He was never considered hard, just tedious to whack away at though in terms of time, it was hard to kill him since it took a lot of time. Monsters that can one hit kill you are generally not considered hard, even though if you are dead it is hard to kill them, they are considered annoying because with some classes, namely meleers, there aren't a lot of built in ways to deal with them. Sure everyone can use a bow and stand back and plink, but then you are going into the realm of tedious as well, many consider this not viable. It has been shown that pretty much any variant can beat the game on Hell difficulty if you do this or this or this but to most that isn't really a fun way to play. Sure having a 30 minute battle with a monster every once in awhile can be quite enjoying, but for most that isn't. The game is designed to be fast paced, to many that is where the fun is it. If you remove too much of that, you lose the game.

LE's are another that you have to carry around specific gear just to deal with in many cases. I want to believe that the FE/CE damage carrying on the bolts is a bug and will be removed because no other elemental enchanted boss has that, and that makes them annoying. MSLE's are the same way. They are hard for most people, but they aren't fun.

Now, Hephasto in pre-LOD D2, was about a 50/50 split on hard and still fun. For me at least half of the time he would have mods that made him dangerous, but not to the point where he would one hit kill you, or you couldn't defeat him. But half the time he had mods that just made him close to impossible to deal with, so you avoided him. He was close, and I still miss the strong version of him.

But things need to be done so that you aren't just whacking away at a monster that can't hurt you and so that you aren't constantly running away from a monster that can kill you just by looking at you funny. You need to be in danger of dieing but you need to be able to do something about it besides "just don't ever get hit", you need some reaction time. Now, a zero vitality, no +life gear build or similar should have to worry about one hit kills. If you designed your char to only have 250 HP in Hell then you should die a lot, and even in one hit.

So, that to me seems to say that monsters should deliver smaller amounts of damage in fairly rapid blows as opposed to huge amounts of damage in a single blow. This would make mobs harder, if you are getting hit rapidly for smaller chunks you have to worry about getting stunned and not being able to get away. Block lock and such aren't annoying with such an easy weapon switch to turn them off so you can take some hits and run. Some monsters need to be able to actually chase you, so you can't just run from everything. But you still need to be able to run from some stuff so you can seperate and conquer. Monster level curve has to have something done with it so that defence and AR mean something again. This would also give you a choice between walking away from an engagement so you still have defence and blocking, or running with 0 defence and 1/3 blocking. That puts another strategic element back in the game that is largely ignored now.

If you up the power of minions and lower the power of a boss I think you are going in the right direction as well. This makes seperation more critical and lowers the one hit kill probability.

Not sure what should be done about ranged attackers. I don't think ranged magic is currently too out of whack packs of ranged attackers that do elemental damage genearlly don't kill you on that first burst, but they do mess you up. You still generally have time to retreat and deal, and while you can slip up a little you still have to use some strategy to deal with them. Maybe I just play the wrong character types though and they could be out of whack. But ranged physical attacks seem weak. Since you have the ability to avoid them, I am not sure that whole high speed lower damage really works. But you don't want to turn them into one hit killers either. Faster projectile speed for some of them maybe?

I don't know I would like to see general ideas on how to balance out the player vs monster issues. I know equipment comes into this as well, but I think you can still have the discussion without it focusing on equipment. Maybe assume that in hell it is feasable to get 40% to all resists without too much sacrificing, but you will have to lose something to get to 75%. I knew that would be a problem when I starting the ramblings, the equipment is so tied into how hard the game is. I mean getting a zon to L70 and Act III NM without placing a single skill point pretty much shows that equipment is more important than skills for some of the classes.

Eh, I just felt like rambling on it. I'm sure there are problems with what I wrote, and I welcome discussion and criticism.