To Blizzard Devs, I’m sure that you have noticed that literally nobody plays this mode any longer.
Does it not bother you that this alternative feature is not even being played and utilized?
Ask yourself this question…what would it take for people to actually want to play D2R Classic?
The answer is very simple. Return the Pre-Expansion game mode to patch 1.09.
(As an alternative…patch 1.06, or even better, a hybrid of both patches 1.06 & 1.09 combined)
Classic was very alive back at that time, and the game mode was surprisingly well balanced at the time. Now, melee characters are completely unplayable, and playing this mode completely sucks in the post-1.10 patch era.
Of all the balancing corrections that could possibly be made to this remastered game, restoring Pre-Expansion to it’s former glory would easily be the most well deserved.
The simple fact that people refuse to play it as-is, is the undisputable proof.
So yes, I expect them to care about the product that they just recently created.
At first, I didn’t have much hope that any balancing fixes would be implemented, but here we are, hearing talk of a new 2.4 patch with balancing updates.
But you’re talking about Classic non-expansion right?
Expansion came out in June of 2001…so you’re talking about a game mode that is over 20 years old. D2R is a remaster of expansion LOD 1.14, not a remaster of classic.
Shared stash would be a nice QOL addition to classic. As it stands we have to create perm games and use mules to xfer in classic and on singleplayer offline you cannot xfer at all . At least on expansion offline the shared stash allows you to give a useful item to another character.
I actually like this idea. Patch 1.10 is very polarizing for some people. This would give the anti-enigma crowd a place to go play.
I think classic would get a decent boost in playerbase population if this happened. I would probably make a character just to check it out. Been a long time since I’ve played on that.
Only problem is some 1.09 items were very OP and were nerfed, and shouldn’t be able to be passed to expansion.
Ppl generally just prefer LoD over Classic. There’s just more to do on LoD than there is in classic and not to mention they’re 2 different games, whether or not you believe that.
In general, Classic imo, is a lot harder than LoD because you don’t have all these God tier items and builds like you do in LoD. You’re more dependant on team cooperation and players doing their job. And because of this, I think you end up with this situation where ppl aren’t playing it because ppl aren’t playing it if that makes sense?
Having the option to play 1.09 would be awesome, although it should also be possible for LoD.
While post 1.09 did bring some positive changes, I guess, 1.09 is just the best patch overall.
If you didn’t play Pre-Expansion back in 1.09, you couldn’t understand how enjoyable it was.
1.10+ killed melee characters ability to play Hell difficulty in Pre-Expansion game mode.
So the addition of skill synergies had the opposite affect in Classic, it made it so that you can only viably play 3 or 4 character builds. (The developers were trying to expand build availability, and it did work for Expansion mode)
It should be easy to understand why that would kill the fun of playing. 1.10+ introduced many new runewords to help melee characters. Obviously nothing like that was introduced afterwards into Classic. It was a gross oversight at the time, and still to this day it hasn’t been rectified.
Sure, but one could make an argument that nobody plays classic because when the D2:R came out ppl just jumped on LoD because they had the option straight from the get-go.
Back in the days, ppl had to wait an entire yr before playing LoD and so ppl had a chance to make a decision whether they liked LoD or not and if you didn’t, you stayed on classic. It’s possible that these players left the scene a long time ago and the remaster didn’t create an itch for them to scratch.
When they introduced the Remaster, you had a chance to jump in to LoD right away and skip classic and without that introduction, it’s hard for players to want to go back to the roots of the game because so much was added between classic and LoD. Where one had issues with beating normal mode, the other got through Nightmare mode because you had runewords like Smoke and Obedience to get you through and make it in to hell mode with relative ease.
I don’t know if you’re wrong or right, but I do think without having players playing Classic first, it’s going to be relatively difficult to attract ppl to play a much harder game where you’re far more dependant on RNG than you are with LoD that has a lot less choice and because of this, ppl typically will veer away from classic to LoD unless they’re looking for an extra challenge.
What I am talking about, is 1.09 which lasted at least 1 or 2 years, and if I am not mistaken, I think it was when Set Item bonuses were first introduced into D2 Non-Expansion. (I may be wrong about that)
I am talking about a time period when people had the choice to play Expansion or Non-Expansion, and many choose Classic at the time. I actually moved from LoD to Classic after a friend convinced me to make the move in early 1.09.
Many of us have waited 18 long years to play the Non-Expansion game in that condition again.
I agree in general. Classic has a bunch of problems, most of which come down to 1.10+ features that are half implemented because part of what it took to make the new idea work is LoD only. Vicarious Visions said that they didn’t give classic a shared stash because they think it’s mostly purists that play it, but nothing else about the mode says purist. Running 1.09 with some QoL upgrades like a shared stash would be one possible solution.