Dear Blizzard,
Please listen to the PvP Community - keep the game as good as it was for 20 years.
Listen to players that played D2 Lod that far and just ask to do the same with D2R.
PvP in Diablo II is a masterpiece, fast paced and extremely fun. Even after 15 years i still enjoy pvp with this remaster.
But with this new patch, the future of PvP is compromised because of this change :
Developer Comments: We want to fix some of the awkward lockouts that reject player input from casting skills. For PVP, we added a way to reduce hit recovery spam to prevent edge cases of characters being locked out for too long.
Note : This change is a PvP only change and doesnāt affect PvM at all.
Some background, Stun is one of the key feature and mechanic that makes pvp fun. Stun works with fast hit recovery (fhr), basicly the more fhr you get the less affected by stun you will be.
However, there is some deadly combo (but very hard to do for some of them - here come the skilled part of PvP) that could lead to instant kill like :
- for smiters : āsmite (give swirlies to opponent) then Fist of Heaven (Foh)ā ā opponent stunned
- for hammerdin itās even harder and deadly : smite then Foh (opponent stunned) then teleport + hammers = kill or at least 1-2 hits.
- for elemental druid (tornado) itās even harder but very efficient if done well : close to opponent turn into bear form then use shockwave to give swirlies then turn off bear form uses volcano (opponent stunned) then teleport and tornado = deadly.
To counter stuns, in D2 Lod we had a feature called āWSGā based on Weapon Swith that broke your fhr for a very short time (by pressing Swith hotkey multiples times in row) and helped you to escape deadly situation and even sometimes (with very good timing) to counter attack. However, WSG was not easy to do and requires practice and timing - it even became an art on some characters such as amazon and necromancer.
But WSG was removed with D2R - sadly.
In D2R you still can walk in south and avoid partially deadly situation after being stunned.
However, the problem was with mindblast with multiples traps (lightning and fire), sometimes the players could not escape at all. And it was even worst in Team vs Team with multiple stuns added to mindblast like leap for example. But that occurs in very few situations.
Patch 2.4 āFHR fixā was made in order to fix this issue - but honestly itās a disaster for all others characters and duels in this game.
After the first hit, you get a stun immunity now.
- All combos listed above are now useless
- Fhr is now an useless stat basicly
- Trapsin is indeed not broken anymore but itās now an useless PvP character
- Team vs Team becomes stupid, there is no tactical gameplay, offensive and defensive part since stun is inefficient
- Being an offensive and āskilledā player is just frustrating and unrewarding, there is no reason to put pressure on opponents since they can escape and even counter attack you (while in this stun immunity)
Players can just teleport around and spam random skills without being interrupted/stunned. The game will end in a defensive fest with random shooting and randomly kill opponents - kinda sad when you know how intense and skilled can be D2 PvP.
How to fix this ? I see only this solution for now :
-
Revert back to 2.3 Fast hit recovery and stun system
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Or revert back to 2.3 FHR mecanic and add a similar feature as WSG in D2 lod that could be a new hotkey for example that players have to press multiples times (like 3-4) to shortly break FHR and escape stun.
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Or revert back to 2.3 FHR mecanic and touch only Mindblast but in a smart way.
For example, after 4 or 5 mindblast you have that stun immunity. That would balance duels against trapsin without touching all other characters and mechanics.
Please consider this solution and let us enjoy the game we like so much.
There is a problem, you canāt just ignore it :
Listen to us, PvP is a key feature of Diablo II.
Thank you.
DHA
