What kind of silliness is that ?

[Obi2Kenobi]

Tai, in Hell, the 50% physical resists has been removed, effectively doubling the power of leech.

[Arutha]

As long as the increased range of values is uniformly applied

Aye, but there's the rub. ;)

Will it be uniformly applied? That's what I don't believe.

Also, consider that for instance, maxed Holy Shock and maxed Resist Lightning can be achieved around lvl 45.

At lvl 45 you can be in normal act 5, or anywhere in nightmare.

You can be in a 1 player game or in an 8-player game.

What are they going to balanced the game for? For single players with both skills maxed at the early stages of nightmare? For multi-player games at the end of nightmare?

20 skill ranks was already the hell of hard job to balance.

Now, that's effectively 40+ skill ranks.

[Occhidiangela]

4) The only good way a paladin can deliver the full damage of Holy Shock is to be in melee range and Zeal away, something that will be more dangerous than usual due to the fact he don't got fanat to boost his physical damage to life leech enough to make him survive, meaning a lot more investment on life/defensive equiqment.

Did I miss something? Holy shock also works with missile weapons. Get a fast bow, and move around a bit, and presto, lower risk and plenty of HS damage.

[Ignatz]

Davcol is right; adding a digit to everything doesn't change anything. So long as things are proportionally the same, you're just changing scale.

The bottom line is that yes, synergies inherently widen the gap. However, increased DAMAGE doesn't do anything at all.

The way to take care of the 'gap' is to make those skills scale correctly so that if you dump points into them as soon as you're able, you're a bit ahead of the curve. But, with so many skills you need to pump synergistically, you can't "max out" until lvl 60, say, instead of 40. At least, that's one way to do it. Pumping a couple useless skills is no fun, so the rewards must be great. So long as you can't kill everything even with one super skill, that works out nicely. Let's say you specialized in Holy Shock, and pump everything to get eccentrically high levels of damage from synergies, etc. You still can't handle lightning immunes and you're 20-40 points less able to have a solid secondary attack that will.

Basically it CAN work, it's just a matter of how the numbers come out. There's nothing inherently wrong with the synergies system. But it will take some more careful balancing to get it right. The upside is that if done right, it could be a fantastic way of doing things that drastically increases your trade-offs and therefore the decisions you need to make that define your character.

[WarBlade]

3129.5 average damage of both the elemental splash and the added damage to weapon, at first it looks way overpowered, but lets look at the factors:

1) The monsters' life are being doubled, making this 3129.5 average damage to like 1564.75 damage in the current patch.

The first time I saw this assertion, it was the product of dii.net speculation. And the time after that and the time after that and suddenly it's public lore. One source I have never seen any mention of monster life being doubled is from Blizzard. If you know of such a source, can you link it please?

2) The paladin gives up a speed AND damage boosting aura which could give his life-leeching items a lot more impact on the survivability of the paladin

Fanaticism? :huh: Err Zeal and Holy Shock is quite competitive with Fanaticism as it stands now, so saying he's "giving up" anything is a stretch. By the same token could say that Fanaticism/Zeal forfeits any ability to deal with Physical Immunities.

3) I believe Blizzard said there will be more elemental resistances and less physical resists, so in order to compensate for more monsters with resists and/or immunities to lightning they got to make it look good.

:huh: I'm trying to make sense of this. Really I am. :huh:

4) The only good way a paladin can deliver the full damage of Holy Shock is to be in melee range and Zeal away, something that will be more dangerous than usual due to the fact he don't got fanat to boost his physical damage to life leech enough to make him survive, meaning a lot more investment on life/defensive equiqment.

More dangerous than usual? Are you saying that "Usual = Fanaticism + whatever else"? That's just nuts.

[WarBlade]

Let's say you specialized in Holy Shock, and pump everything to get eccentrically high levels of damage from synergies, etc. You still can't handle lightning immunes and you're 20-40 points less able to have a solid secondary attack that will.

In order to get "eccentrically high levels of damage" using Holy Shock and it's synergies, most people will inevitably buy an attack skill to channel it through. Often that will be Zeal, but regardless, you'll still be doing a Physical Attack. Hence Lightning Immunes only mean your character's damage will be cut down, not that you can't handle them.

After 1.10, Zeal with its Sacrifice synergy will be doing more Physical Damage too.

[Brista]

It's ironic that shortly after AK's rant about how much Paladins suck compared to Bowazons in a game where offense is so much the most important thing people here are so uncomfortable with these new stats

Does anyone think that Multishot with a high end Bow is now going to be worse than plinking away with Holy Shock and normal attack? OK, you can dump 60 skill points in for a really high powered Holy Shock but those same points would give a Zon maxxed Multi as well as pretty much everything she needs from the Passives tree

Now if they make Multishot get synergy bonuses to damage from maxxing Strafe then that would be silly

But boosting Paladin's offence is actually a much needed balance fix

[Arutha]

But boosting Paladin's offence is actually a much needed balance fix

You'll get no contradiction from me when you say that paladins' offensive power pales in comparison to an amazon's.
But...
...I find nothing wrong with paladins' offensive power.
The class could be improved a lot . It suffers from internal unbalances (Holy Fire useless, Cleansing a 1 point wonder skill, the various resistance auras useless, etc...).
But the class itself isn't unbalanced in the game environment. It takes uber gear to allow paladins to cruise through the game like some other builds can. The fault resides with the gear, not the class.

The way to balance the class with other classes like barbs, zons and sorcs isn't to boost its power to match that of the other classes.
Nerfing those other classes would achieve the same result... and be a lot less dangerous for the overall game balance.

There are even at least two paladin skills which deserve a "nerf": Fanaticism (best damage enhancement, speed, and AR to boot? Talk about having your cake and eating it!) and Conviction (negate both enemy defense and elemental resists? Pick one, but not both).

[Taem]

Well, I believe most paladins use Zeal and Fanaticism, so now Paladins using both will be even more powerful. I assume Blizzard did this to bring up the paladins damage to "par" with the rest of the classes and their new synergy enhanced damage. Does this balance anything? Doesn’t seem like it, but we do have information stating that the monsters have been "enhanced" and have more hit points - however without physical resistance in nightmare and hell, leeching with the amount of damage you will be doing now will be ridiculous. The only way blizzard will be able to off-set this is to reduce leech to a useless amount or make a lot of monsters one-hit killers (take a guess at which one will be implemented).

Even with the added "enhancements", zeal and fanaticism still seem like the ideal combo, doing FAR more damage over 10 seconds than any other combo, easily hitting 4 FPS. Now you'll have more variants, but less usefulness - the cookie cutters live on! Tsk tsk.

[Walkiry]

Davcol is right; adding a digit to everything doesn't change anything. So long as things are proportionally the same, you're just changing scale.

Sure.

Care to tell me how am I going to be able to kill ANYTHING with my Amazon that uses Vidala's Set or my melee Sorceress in hell difficulty?

Right now they manage.

Add another digit to monster's life and they won't.

So you want everyone to jump in the mill and go the cookie-cutter version or die? No thanks.

[whereagles]

1. High damage from skills is not a problem. That's easy to balance with monster life/resists. High damage from WEAPONS is a completely different story because high damage weapons are very hard to find. There are two ways out of this. One is to beef up everything and make damaging weapons easy to find. That's what Blizzo are doing because the second way out would be to nerf everything so that 50-100% enhanced damage weapons are viable throughout hell 8-ppl. But they can't nerf stuff because 99% of Blizzo customers are too dumb to understand that bigger is *not* better.

2. Prayer as it is royally sux. It takes like 2 mins to fill an whole life orb. 350 life per pulse is more like it.

3. Harder D2 is better. The ppl playing it now are die-hards and those can use the extra difficulty.

[WarBlade]

2. Prayer as it is royally sux. It takes like 2 mins to fill an whole life orb. 350 life per pulse is more like it.

Ack! At that rate no one would ever use it because all the mercenaries would be running Prayer. :blink: No thanks.

[Hammerskjold]

I agree with your first and second point. Hopefully 1.1 will satisfy both the die hard and the casual players.

I respectfully disagree with your third point however.

>3. Harder D2 is better. The ppl playing it now are die-hards and those can use the extra difficulty.

Well I still play D2C. And I occasionally play LoD. I play the majority of my games in single mode using "players 8". And I gotta tell ya, I don't exactly want or even like the original idea of making this game so hard in Hell mode, that solo 8 Hell is impossible. Ditto with the planned clvl 70+ experience penalty. If people enjoy playing your game that much, why are you (bliz) risking it by confusing tedium for longevity?

Challenge is one thing. But where does it reach a point of tedium or even absurdity? And where would anyone start to measure how difficult things should be? Should the yardstick begins and ends with a lvl 99 Amazon armed with the best toys? Screw the people who play solo or no twink, or god forbid single player?
I'd only be half surprised if the the next STSI for 1.1 was a Hell mode Wraith boss, with inherent Physical Immunity, tri-elemental immunities, magic immunity, and immune to poison. I guess now we'll see who can embarass the monster to death by typing curse words at it. We'd all be in real trouble if monsters are illiterate.

If I want to seek out extra difficulties, I can always try out a mod, or play with a self imposed restriction. And this is just my opinion. I have yet to see any character nerfs by blizzard bring about more variety. If anything those nerfs usually narrows buildstyles even more.

And while I'm on a rant. Here's another crazy crazy idea. In D1 most unrestricted characters who are above clvl 35-40+ don't really need any help clearing Hell\Hell. Yet multi player games did NOT die out. People for some odd reason still played together even though they can tackle things solo by that age. By Dog. Is it possible that people just like playing together?! I don't see the benefit of nerfing things so that players have an incentive to play together. I don't choose my playing partners on their choice of characters or abilities. I mostly base it on whether or not I can stand to be in the same game with them for 5 minutes or not.

ps.

Warblade:
>Ack! At that rate no one would ever use it because all the mercenaries would be running Prayer. No thanks.

Heh yeah, I think a large part of why the Paladin seems "weaker" in LoD is the competition he has to face with all those features. What with all those act2 mercs sporting all those nifty auras. I'm no game designer, so it might be cliched but one possible way of doing it would be to ensure that the player's aura\skills are always better\stronger\smells more minty than the mercenaries. The players are suppose to be the heroes after all. No need for nerfing the mercs (since they are a big selling point albeit an optional one in LoD), just boost a bit of the characters skills.

[whereagles]

Huh... you're confusing tedium with difficulty. Tedium is what it is now. Monsters are extremely dumb, but have many hits. This makes killing them easy but excruciatingly tedius. What I mean by difficult is monsters that are smart and hit hard but die with a few whacks. I think we all prefer monsters like that, no?

[Hammerskjold]

>Huh... you're confusing tedium with difficulty. Tedium is what it is now.

I am? Maybe I should've wrote it clearer when I wrote this : "I'd only be half surprised if the the next STSI for 1.1 was a Hell mode Wraith boss, with inherent Physical Immunity, tri-elemental immunities, magic immunity, and immune to poison." But basically I never advocated tedium for difficulty. You might want to tell that to the person who originally thought up of Izual's stats though.

>Monsters are extremely dumb, but have many hits. This makes killing them easy but excruciatingly tedius. What I mean by difficult is monsters that are smart and hit hard but die with a few whacks. I think we all prefer monsters like that, no?

Yes, as I said before, I never disagreed with that part. If anything, I quite agree. That was exactly what I DON'T want when bliz mentions the goal of making solo 8 in Hell impossibly tough to do. Because usually that translates into the following: Smart = teleport away and insta-heal when life bar hits a quarter bar. Hit hard = one hit kills. Tough = just give 'em more hp. Die with a few whacks?= only with the bestests itamz that the average players will only see as a screenshot at the Arreat Summit.

It would be great if more variable difficulties under players controls is in 1.1, but I doubt it. The best I can hope for is they make do with what they have, and not introduce more problems with their changes. Maybe a marked difference in AI and not in HP will be in Diablo 3 difficulty modes, but I don't see it in for 1.1. I'd be happy if I was proven wrong in this case though.

[Dagni]

>3. Harder D2 is better. The ppl playing it now are die-hards and those can use the extra difficulty.

  Well I still play D2C.  And I occasionally play LoD.  I play the majority of my games in single mode using "players 8".

Why play "players 8" then? To me that IS extra tedium.

Maybe you only do it because of the experience/item rewards, but if so, I highly recommend either "players 4" or "players 5". After that, the monsters still get plenty more hits, but only a tiny bit more exp.

- Dagni

[Hammerskjold]

>Why play "players 8" then? To me that IS extra tedium.

Believe it or not, for the most part I do enjoy having most monsters with more HP, giving out more XP, and staying alive longer to pose a greater risk, to a degree. Key words being, to a degree. The difference between what is fun to me and tedious, is battling a group of monsters for a long time, (my time that I am freely spending) and battling a group of monsters that can go on indefinitely. Ie: the earlier versions of some council members in Durance of Hate.

But the biggest pleasure I derive from putting on players 8 is I don't have to do it at every game. I can when I want to, I won't if I don't feel like it. And when I get tired of the butt ugly color scheme of Act 3, I have no qualms on rushing through player 1.

>Maybe you only do it because of the experience/item rewards

I'm not 100% sure if it's different in LoD, but iirc the item rewards are not that much better with players 8 on. If I read right, the chances of regular monsters doing a no-drop are reduced, so you will get something more often. Boss drops are not affected iirc. That being said, from what I have played in 1.09 so far, this looks little to negligible in single player.

Here is a sample of my total uber gear so far with players 8 on all 3 difficulties, found by various characters in D2C sp:

- 3 six socketed bows, 1 LWB and 2 LBB.
- 2 Six socketed bows, 2 Gothics.
- 1 4 socketed composite bow.
- 2 six socketed gothic axes.
- 1 four socketed Martels.
- 2 Hand of Brocs.
- 2 nagelrings.
- 1 manald heal.
- 3 Snakecords.
- 1 Deathsash.
- Too many damn Isenharts case.

Maybe it reads like a king's ransom in bizarro world, but I'm not exactly raking in the itamz here. I'm not complaining either, but the rewards for me playing on players 8 as you can see, isn't in the item department.

>I highly recommend either "players 4" or "players 5". After that, the monsters still get plenty more hits, but only a tiny bit more exp.

As I said, I do enjoy some degree of risk by them staying around longer. As much as I like the idea of smarter AI's, I also sometimes happen to enjoy beating on dumb digital monsters without it becoming a mental showdown. But what I would enjoy even more, is if there is an option given to the player to control such things.

[Obi2Kenobi]

...making solo 8 in Hell impossibly tough to do.

It SHOULD be impossible to do, because it is meant for 8 players. How about making it so players 2-3 would make it hard enough for "die hard gamers" and the regular game for people who aren't... then when there are 8 people in the game, it is still hard. :rolleyes: