General Thoughts on 1.10

[OniMaster]

Ok, well, I figure I've lurked enough (2 years) and figured I'd make a post.... or maybe two.

This probably will grow Quite long, so stop reading now if its 4 in the morning and you really should be asleep.

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Part 1 - The necro

I've been playing a necro mainly, he is level 70 now, and I have a few thoughts on this. First I'll give a little break down of the char, so you understand where I am coming from.

Att - 120ish Str, 40ish Dex, 200ish Vit, 100ish En
Stats - 20 SM, 20 Skel, 15 Magi, 10 CE, all curses down left channel, and amp, lifetap
Gear - +1 Circlet, +1 Summoning Ammy, Skins of Vipermagi, Arm of Leoric, Nightsmoke, two rare + mana rings, chance guards, Sanders boots, rare head with +2 summoning.

All in all, my skellies are at 30, as is the mastery, and the magi around around 22/23.

Average battle goes - curse. blow up corpses.

First off, the item drop changes are a great relief, the items my char currently uses have all been found by him, or the person he has been partied with. No twinking at all.

The levels are great, he is finishing nm and is level 70. I love this. Leveling at a great speed, and yet, hasn't played any acts purely to level. In fact, he has been steadily going through the acts (on players 8 mind you) with no difficulty.

He is however, IMO, a tad overpowered, clearly CE is too strong, as it was in the early d2 days. Was this a mistake by Blizzard? Maybe. But still, I dont feel that they should nerf CE to the point that it doesn't scale. But instead, lower it so that the chain reaction is not so easy to come by. As things stand, once a corpse drops, 7 out of 10 times it results in a change reactions that - after a series of corpse popping sounds - leaves entire hordes dead. The skill should still scale, but I think that maybe 30-40% would be a bit more realistic, and people still good at using CE will still find it to be an excellent skill, just not an unbalancing skill.

Not really sure about the Magi yet, I use them mainly to cover my back, and they do a good job of that. A few other tidbits, lifetap is once again proving to be (in my books at least) the most underrated skill in the game. Countless is the number of times my buddies in the game have been on the verge of dying, only to be pulled back with 50% leech.

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Part 2 - The game in general

1.10 suffers from a fatal flaw. It is one patch, for two games. It seems so simple in my mind. There are two games released by blizzard. Diablo II Single Player, and Diablo II battle.net version.

Simply put, these games are so different, they need different patches. Good luck to soloing this game. Unless you plan on taking a hopelessly overpowered character through the game (like the CE Necro as things stand) you will have one heck of a time finishing this game. On the other hand, I STILL dont think its hard enough on parties.

So in terms of single player, they will all face some character that is simply impossible to beat. Or if not impossible, very tedious. For some, the infector of souls may simply be near invincible. For others, it may be the ancients. Frankly, the game needs to be toned down for a single player, and immunities need to go. This game came with an advertised single player mode, currently, I dont feel such a game exists.

Back to bnet, which is the only place I play. It's too easy.

I think a key flaw is the linear change in HP as new characters are added to the game.

Take this example :

Party 1 :
Barbarian.

Party 2:
Barbarian, Necro with Amp, Pally with Fantacism.

Lets make some hefty assumptions, that is that all characters do the same amount of damage by themselves, lets call it x.

So basically, in party 1, the damage done is 1x.

Yet in party 2, that damage is 2-2.5x by the barbarian (help from Amp and Fant), 1.5x by the necro (skellies (if that is the build) help from fant), and 2x by the Pally (amp). For a total of, 5.5 - 6x, and yet an increase in monster difficulty of less that 300%. Throw in a CE Necro, or an SF sorc, and the math goes nuts.

The scaling needs to change, its just simply too easy for big parties. I've been in a few 8 player games (in earlier patches), and literally, its just a huge run through acts.

Maybe its because people have grown used to being in hell and beating it, but I remember when DII was still in development, and the promise that no chars would be able to solo hell, yadda yadda. This game needs to be harder. Variants can hang out in Normal and Nightmare (and yes, I usually play variants myself, not the horribly underpowered ones, but I have next to no cookie cutter chars (cept my necro which I used because I really wanted a skellie army :P) But no, I'm happy with that. It is time for titles to mean something.

Personally, I would love to see a group of people team up and design the "perfect" party. Run chars through normal over and over to get all the socketing Quests they need, get every dream item they can. And then set out to be the first hardcore party to run through hell, with possibly none of them making it. Then the titles would mean something. Then the ladder would mean something. Then strategy would again come into play.

Instead of dii.net reporting the daily stories of the german team barb racing to level 99 by mindlessly killing diablo, they can log the current parties making hell runs, and the chance of success for each. I think the entire community would benefit.

Right now, this patch is in no man's land. Its not Diablo II multiplayer, and its not Diablo II single player.

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So while, this patch has several huge flaws, I still have had a blast with it, my favorite patch to date. There were several other things I wanted to address, but I fear this post has grown to long allready, w/o mentioning UniQue drop rates, synergies, or the changes to several classes. I highly doubt any of this, seperate patch talk will ever come to fruitation, but I really feel that it would finally elevate Diablo II from a click fest with strategy interspered to a completely immersive strategy game, with a very competitive ladder, and give Diablo II the legacy I feel it deserves.

Finally, sorry about the capital Q's that seem to pop up in the posting for no reason, my computer doesn't seem to recognize the small letter Q and wont put it in the postings (I have no idea why, but if anyone has any ideas I'd love to hear em, this grows very tedious).

Any feedback would be great, thanks, sorry for the length.

[Brista]

Very good first post, welcome to the Lounge :)

I would take issue with you on the issue of whether it is wrong that partying reduces difficulty

Firstly the game is playable single player. I am half way through Hell with a similar Necro to yours which hasn't died yet (single player since the end of Normal). Someone over at the Basin has already finished hardcore in single player with a hydra/blizzard sorc. It is difficult, I think it should be. I don't think it's a great loss that the game is now to difficult to solo with under-powered builds. (Although I suspect that some players may even achieve that in due course)

I do think that the game has slightly missed an opportunity. It would have been nice to see some of the weaker skills close up on the stronger. However BO (for instance) which was already one of the strongest skills in the game now grants synergy bonuses to 3 other skills while Grim Ward has not been changed. An opportunity missed

Nevertheless there is certainly an enjoyable single player game here, arguably more enjoyable, certainly less repetitive

As for partying, softcore is the path to uberness. If there are three or more of you and you have diverse characters then everything will fall to you given time

But in hardcore games, even with an optimised party a careless or poorly played encounter can bring the team to a crashing halt. That keeps the interest level going, despite the relative easiness of most encounters

I don't think it's too easy for hardcore partying, I think it's actually a nice balance. Bit early to tell still

[Tsunami]

I do agree on the party-makes-the-game-too-easy point. However, it can also be incredibly hard at some points. Sirian used to call this game breakers.

In D2C, it was heal-a-port bosses with endless healing. You could work around those (Durance lvl III used to be quite a parking lot (pun intended)), but this was poor game design. Some classes had zero difficulties while it was really impossible to others; I remember Sirian's story about clearing the whole Act III just to fill his inventory with mana pots. He used them all up (30+ IIrc) to summon hydras and it still was not enough to kill a heal-a-port council member.
Other things were similar, like Duriel. Zap your speed with holy freeze, offer no place to run or hide and toss you into the box with a one-hit-killing machine. Your character had to be able to pass this extreme situation to continue the game. Often it meant collecting equipment or spending many skill points just to overcome this one battle (as often as not; my first sorceress died 18 times to nm Duriel for not having teleport).

Some of this has changed, some not.
It all adds to the "two different games" point of view since even half a party makes this

BUT: All this is only half true.

Different classes offer different possibilities; strengths and weaknesses.
Take BO. I will not go into overpowered-whining, but this skill makes life for barbarians really easy. Or rather: Used to. That it no longer affects certain hp boni helps a lot. A lvl 60 Barb at the start of hell had a nice ride most of the time.

I have a lvl 62 spearazon in act I hell. She is dead meat when she has to confront more than two zombies at once. Her life drops faster than I can drink rejuvs; almost every boss is able to one-hit-kill her. Being a higher level would definetely help, but this was as high as I could get in 1.09 NM without dying of boredom caused by endlessly repeating areas.


The above paragraphs are only semi-connected, but they aim at making a final point:

Blizzard will not make different patches for single/LAN and BattleNet. That's up to the mod makers. Some things considered game breakers in single player are not even noticable in multiplayer. But with 1.10, they offered a great deal of new tools. I cannot recall who used to say "You cannot achieve balance by adding a new variable." (in spirit this was what he said). He is quite right, but balance could not really be achieved with only the old variables, and not even for a given value of "balance". :)

Hopefully, Blizzard will offer a new server, clean of dupes. After a ladder season, the ladder characters get tranfered to a new realm; it should be this clear one. The reason why blance-by-rarity did not work was in the system, since everything will be found sooner or later, but dupes extremely shortened the time frame.

This feels like washing old clothes, since most of it is nearly as old as D2 itself. It just never changed.