07-15-2003, 01:52 AM
This is turning into a damn good thread, by the way.
The Sorceress is my bag, and has always been my favorite character class. A lot of the discussion in this thread has been on the Paladin, which I have so little experience on.
Skill synergies with the Sorceress were quite a challenge for Blizzard, as a character for which 100% of their offense comes from skills alone, how do you "balance" their synergies so as not to turn the Sorc into an uber-god? Their method was to take the uber-skills of previous versions and "nerf" their synergies (Nova, Frozen Orb, Thunderstorm, etc) so as to discourage their use.
I can't really think of any way to get synergies to work on this character class. The current method Blizzard uses in 1.10 heavily encourages players to stick to one tree and one tree only. People have been putting up big numbers, especially in the Fire Tree, to show off how stacked synergies can lead to devastating results. That's great, but now you have a one-trick pony. You can clean house - until you run into a fire immune. Then what?
Multiplayer changes everything - if you're in multiplayer, you just co-op with someone who can take out the fire immunes. But then, if you play singleplayer (as the majority of D2 players do), what then? Either you go the one-tree route and have no options against immune creatures, or you split out to more trees and have an underpowered character, because you NEED those synergies in order to effectively damage your targets. You are 100% skill dependent; there is no way to make up for your deficiencies with, say, a fantastic weapon. And because of the way synergies build up and stack, even if you had +15 to all skills with items, you still could have a rough time unless you've dumped your skill points into one tree.
Cross-tree synergies might work, except that once again you'd be forcing Sorceresses to use the more powerful level 24 and 30 skills all the time (dude, use orb).
This post isn't of much use; I'm not offering a fix for a correct method of handling synergies on a Sorceress. I'm just pointing out rather lamely that I can't think of a decent way to do it. How can you discourage one-tree Sorceresses in a way that makes sense? All I can come up with is this idea (one which Blizzard will never implement, but which I humbly offer as a "what if"):
What if we GOT RID of the masteries entirely, letting synergy be, in effect, the mastery? Bump up the synergy effects, and have fewer skills link together. In other words, don't have a skill where 4 others synergize and boost it. Maybe 2 max. So, in order to get the mega-most out of any one skill in one tree, you would use 60 points. This would free up enough points to build up a decent amount of power in another tree - not uber-power, but enough to "handle" those that are immune to your primary attack.
The problem right now is that with certain skills it can take 80 to 100 skill points to maximize their power - leaving nothing for another tree, and if you decide to build another tree your attack can't keep up with the other character classes.
-Bolty
The Sorceress is my bag, and has always been my favorite character class. A lot of the discussion in this thread has been on the Paladin, which I have so little experience on.
Skill synergies with the Sorceress were quite a challenge for Blizzard, as a character for which 100% of their offense comes from skills alone, how do you "balance" their synergies so as not to turn the Sorc into an uber-god? Their method was to take the uber-skills of previous versions and "nerf" their synergies (Nova, Frozen Orb, Thunderstorm, etc) so as to discourage their use.
I can't really think of any way to get synergies to work on this character class. The current method Blizzard uses in 1.10 heavily encourages players to stick to one tree and one tree only. People have been putting up big numbers, especially in the Fire Tree, to show off how stacked synergies can lead to devastating results. That's great, but now you have a one-trick pony. You can clean house - until you run into a fire immune. Then what?
Multiplayer changes everything - if you're in multiplayer, you just co-op with someone who can take out the fire immunes. But then, if you play singleplayer (as the majority of D2 players do), what then? Either you go the one-tree route and have no options against immune creatures, or you split out to more trees and have an underpowered character, because you NEED those synergies in order to effectively damage your targets. You are 100% skill dependent; there is no way to make up for your deficiencies with, say, a fantastic weapon. And because of the way synergies build up and stack, even if you had +15 to all skills with items, you still could have a rough time unless you've dumped your skill points into one tree.
Cross-tree synergies might work, except that once again you'd be forcing Sorceresses to use the more powerful level 24 and 30 skills all the time (dude, use orb).
This post isn't of much use; I'm not offering a fix for a correct method of handling synergies on a Sorceress. I'm just pointing out rather lamely that I can't think of a decent way to do it. How can you discourage one-tree Sorceresses in a way that makes sense? All I can come up with is this idea (one which Blizzard will never implement, but which I humbly offer as a "what if"):
What if we GOT RID of the masteries entirely, letting synergy be, in effect, the mastery? Bump up the synergy effects, and have fewer skills link together. In other words, don't have a skill where 4 others synergize and boost it. Maybe 2 max. So, in order to get the mega-most out of any one skill in one tree, you would use 60 points. This would free up enough points to build up a decent amount of power in another tree - not uber-power, but enough to "handle" those that are immune to your primary attack.
The problem right now is that with certain skills it can take 80 to 100 skill points to maximize their power - leaving nothing for another tree, and if you decide to build another tree your attack can't keep up with the other character classes.
-Bolty
Quote:Considering the mods here are generally liberals who seem to have a soft spot for fascism and white supremacy (despite them saying otherwise), me being perma-banned at some point is probably not out of the question.