A realist approach to the future of Diablo 2

General Discussion
1

Let me start by saying by no means do I speak on behalf of the entire community, I’ve been playing D2 off and on since the early 2000’s and this is a compilation of ideas and concepts I personally feel would make a positive contribution to the landscape of the game and current players.

Not everyone will be happy, and that is okay. Now let’s get in to what I personally think could be a great move for both Blizzard and the community and go from there.

My Suggestions (Concepts)
PvP Arena: I know, this sounds like a fever dream but hear me out. A large majority of players would appreciate this as it provides an actual “end game” for what a good portion of the community enjoys doing.
At the moment, most duels outside of Melee (which occurs in the Inner Cloister usually) happen in the Blood Moor where everyone goes for the bridge map. The bridge map offers the largest area for multiple 1v1s, TvT (2v2, 3v3,4v4), and offers the least amount of puddles (iirc). With that being said you also have to clear all the monsters on the map and hope none of them drop anything in the primary PvP area, it doesn’t make a huge difference as /nopickup is usually enabled but it would make a lot of the end users happy with a place to officially/actually duel.

The PvP arena could be unlocked by simply completed the Baal Quest in each difficulty, then select the game mode as PvP (imagine a dropdown next to difficulty for this once unlocked, or similar to how console players create games). It’s a stretch, but I feel this could work and if we wanted to just go pure concept without adding into the UI, it could be a red portal that takes you to the arena from a wirts leg, standard of heroes, and maybe a tome of ID (lol). This would add a direct utility to the SOH and excite a lot of the core user base if done right; while making it exciting for other communities such as LLD, MLD, and so fourth so they are able to create games within their respective difficulty.

QOL Changes

  • Allow “Repair all Equipment” to work for Arrows/Bolts similar to how item charges work

  • Load characters into the game in different locations so players loading in do not slow down runs (You can lose upwards of 7 minutes in a fast paced terror zone game waiting for 10 seconds each load in for characters to move)

  • Channel/Lobby changes: It seems small, but a big portion of us enjoyed the LOD channel system where you could easily type in “Op Hangout” and go into a designated channel with your friends/clan mates/etc. This provided a cool way to interact and show off that Tal armor you found farming Mephisto in early Ladder! The current channel system feels foreign to most of us, and it feels unfamiliar to us all.

Character renaming: When you released this in 2018 for LOD it was a game changer. The simple command /rename-character confirm let us old school players get away from the “XxXColdSorcXxX” names we made in grade school and gave us a fresh start! I know it sounds crazy, but I think there is a good group of people who would even pay to do this especially with those ÿcNames still popping up on the server. With new D2R downloads around $13 USD at the time of typing this, having a player at least have the option to pay $5-$10 to rename something would provide value to the bottomline, while giving us the options of flexibility. Ideally, none of us would want to pay for this - but seeing an exes name on a 99 character would make most people pull out their wallets before deleting the character!

Runeword updates: Mosaic sins are awesome, but let’s open it up to some more classes! Barbarians and Necromancers are the most tedious to level due to the DPS/kill speed provided compared to the other meta classes (Javazon, Nova Sorc, Mosaic Sin, Hammerdin). While it’s doable and each build has their own things, it could be cool to open up this cool speed to more support classes so ladders are not pigeon holed into one build. Grief Bows would also give us all that old school wind force feeling and it would make things interesting to say the least!

Item Changes: As an item collector, I love old D2 stuff that is not as good as the modern versions but its retro cool. Something as tiny as adding light radius to a Tal Helm or giving % extra gold find back to War Travelers could be awesome. This is very minor of course, but historically many D2 patches in the past did this and left us with some cool items. It would be awesome to relive this on D2R.

Additional Stash Tabs: Similar to what I suggested above, I think many users would pay money for an additional tab, rather than buy another key. I’m unsure what the cap would be, but this is something that would enable you to profit off of the same players on one account, rather than buy multiple keys (You make nearly 2-3x more off of each key which could generate much more than selling those keys).

Edit: I knew I missed something!
08 Runewords - This could be a really cool way to dabble into modern nostalgia and allow us to make runewords out of certain passed things. Rather than calculating and changing the entire stats of certain modern items - we could simply add in a “08 valk” type runeword for helmets through 2 socketed Valkyrie style helmets. Little things like this would go a far way and pay homage to the early D2 days without breaking builds. A lot of these items were used for breakpoint and style purposes, so I think it could be a cool future patch now that the D4 release has maybe allowed to allocate more resources!

I’m typing this as I prepare for my morning coffee and workout at 5am EST time, so please excuse any typos of formatting errors. I love Diablo and I appreciate the time each of you took to read and consider this. Please offer any feedback below and I may have missed something; but this feels good for now!

Have a great week everyone and I hope to see some responses soon.

2 Likes
2

Love it, would definitely prefer it as a UI option but would take the SoH idea over nothing.

QOL Changes

  • Allow “Repair all Equipment” to work for Arrows/Bolts similar to how item charges work
  • Load characters into the game in different locations so players loading in do not slow down runs (You can lose upwards of 7 minutes in a fast paced terror zone game waiting for 10 seconds each load in for characters to move)
  • Channel/Lobby changes: It seems small, but a big portion of us enjoyed the LOD channel system where you could easily type in “Op Hangout” and go into a designated channel with your friends/clan mates/etc. This provided a cool way to interact and show off that Tal armor you found farming Mephisto in early Ladder! The current channel system feels foreign to most of us, and it feels unfamiliar to us all.

Sure, sounds good. I really wish the whole Bnet 2.0 integration in D2R were better, currently it’s a major downgrade from original D2 because the lobby is just stripped down of so many features and full of spambots that haven’t been dealt with at all and it’s seemingly unlikely to ever get changed (the lobby looks the same as it did during the Beta).

Character renaming: When you released this in 2018 for LOD it was a game changer. The simple command /rename-character confirm let us old school players get away from the “XxXColdSorcXxX” names we made in grade school and gave us a fresh start! I know it sounds crazy, but I think there is a good group of people who would even pay to do this especially with those ÿcNames still popping up on the server. With new D2R downloads around $13 USD at the time of typing this, having a player at least have the option to pay $5-$10 to rename something would provide value to the bottomline, while giving us the options of flexibility. Ideally, none of us would want to pay for this - but seeing an exes name on a 99 character would make most people pull out their wallets before deleting the character!

This would be a nice feature, no thanks to monetizing any sort of QoL stuff like that though.

Runeword updates: Mosaic sins are awesome, but let’s open it up to some more classes! Barbarians and Necromancers are the most tedious to level due to the DPS/kill speed provided compared to the other meta classes (Javazon, Nova Sorc, Mosaic Sin, Hammerdin). While it’s doable and each build has their own things, it could be cool to open up this cool speed to more support classes so ladders are not pigeon holed into one build. Grief Bows would also give us all that old school wind force feeling and it would make things interesting to say the least!

I don’t want any more Mosaic like stuff that cements itself as the best item/build, I’d rather not see any more items that change skill mechanics in general really. Strongly opposed to Grief in bows too, a potential 430+ average damage is just ridiculous and I’d rather not see Grief become BiS for yet another build.

Item Changes: As an item collector, I love old D2 stuff that is not as good as the modern versions but its retro cool. Something as tiny as adding light radius to a Tal Helm or giving % extra gold find back to War Travelers could be awesome. This is very minor of course, but historically many D2 patches in the past did this and left us with some cool items. It would be awesome to relive this on D2R.

I think it’d be cool to bring back some of the old stats on certain uniques, stuff like 1.08 Arkaine’s or Valk Wing. Just as long as they don’t nerf them again because I’d rather not have a repeat of original D2 with stronger “legacy items” that newer players are strongly disadvantaged to acquiring.

Additional Stash Tabs: Similar to what I suggested above, I think many users would pay money for an additional tab, rather than buy another key. I’m unsure what the cap would be, but this is something that would enable you to profit off of the same players on one account, rather than buy multiple keys (You make nearly 2-3x more off of each key which could generate much more than selling those keys).

Again, would be nice but wouldn’t want it monetized.

3 Likes
3

soory, there is no pvp in D2. Never was and never will be … the noobs cant handle the old code enough to add that kind of stuff.

They would have to totally remake and totally recode D2 for that type of endeavor.

You could actually go play a real pvp game instead of hiding in d2 pretending to be a real pvper.

2 Likes
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Even though I’m not huge into ear collecting, I can get behind all these ideas.

I think they all have a place in D2, outside of maybe more uber powerful runewords. Maybe some new uniques? Mods have proven it can be done…

5

personally don´t care about pvp, so skipped that part, but the rest is good.
the rename option has totally eluded me, really? i do want that back.

1 Like
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Not trying to Debbie down anyones dreams for D2:R, but Blizzard lacks the drive/desire to make D2:R a better game. I mean, it’s already a good game for the most part, as it is for the most part a remaster of the original game. We wouldn’t be here if the original game wasn’t good enough to deserve being remastered.

1: They’ve already seen how long players will keep playing the game without any updates… Look at the original game.

2: D2:R doesn’t make them money anymore. Those that are interested in it have already bough it. (Not counting bots rebuying the game after the oh so too infrequent banwaves.)

Is D2:R perfect? Of course not, what game is?
Could D2:R use improvements? Of course, what game couldn’t?

Don’t expect your dreams to become a reality. I’m just a realist trying to keep it real.

Hope for the best, prepare for the worst.

2 Likes
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Well, for me it is very simple. Blizzard brings small team to manage few/several community driven mods. We pay expansion price one single time for the privilege to play d2r mods and have everlasting happiness.

rly ez blizz

1 Like
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ok but how about reality, where they aren’t going to do any of that. and you’ve just wasted your morning coffee time writing out a bunch of stuff no one important is going to read.

9

Exactly, it’s All D2R need, open the code to Mods online.

2 Likes
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IKR, when you watch a ‘pvp video’ of D2 and all it is is 2 idiots spamming 1-2 spells randomly while teleporting around pretending that theres skill in that.

Honestly, there’s more skill in playing 10s bracket in world of warcraft.

6 Likes
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Hahahaha xD :rofl: :joy_cat: agree 100 %

1 Like
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Well said, I’ve added in an edit to my original post regarding 08 runewords. I completely forgot to include that, thank you!

13

Disable Teleport in PvP (or nerf it heavily).

Actually it applies to PvM as well:

Remove Teleport from the entire game.

14

Oh, I dunno, what about adding a cooldown based on points in the skill, kind of like how other skills get better with a deeper investment?

1 Like
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Don’t remove teleport from the game entirely, but to make it more fair as by not overly nerfing it, make it a gold sink. Costing charges of teleport and gold to repair the charges will make it balanced. This is a positive change because it then makes gold more valuable and creates a demand for gold trading.

1 Like