(WARNING: this is my OPINION, not a statement of facts, and it may not alone with yours)
stacking multiple damage over time, or dot plus consistant hits:
things like sweeping wind and then attacking with punches
or things like POE’s coldsnap/vortex
having enemies with a large amount of hp but dont have a significant chance to 1 shot you that can be dont with any build.
example: dclone
Example: groups of playing cant run ahead and solo clear enemies before u can get attack off
example of failures to this: rifts and maps when you runing behjind somsone who oneshots everything and u can barely keep up let alone pick up loot.
being able to level up skills with skill points and reset them freely and + to skill items
Failure: d3’s having damage be based on raw stats and the damage of your weapon
being able to use the skills i find most fun and have them be balanced:
Failure: forcing people to play with X skill because items give it massive +damage
example: see “d3 sets”
having skills be used as intended designed.
failure: turning things like dashing strike into a damaging skill
Playing as an animal for long periods of time:
failure: having the skill turn you into an animal for the attack animation and not you maintaing animal form
success: D2 werewolf, Stray, perfect world’s barbarian and venomancer
failure: w/e that thing we save in the d4 trailer was a year ago
Honestly D2’s biggest failure… was 1.10. It created a system with exponential power increases that scaled too hard with +skills. This lead to casters outscaling melee.
A lot of skills have synergies that end up adding 300-400% damage or more to a skill. This just ends up with skills that scale 4-5x as harder as they did in 1.09. Then add in the gear creep of runewords, Torch/Anni, and then all of the D2R changes on top of that… and the only things that can compete are high + skills AoE builds.
Honestly the easiest fix of all… would be to massively reduce the damage of every large AoE skill in the game. To bring single target back into the realm of playable, if still not optimal.
TBH a good rule of thumb for game design should always be that AoE only outperforms single target when there are 4 or more targets involved. With “cleave” like abilities that outperform single target when hitting 2 or 3 targets.
Frankly skills like Double Swing should hit 2 targets, Maul should hit 3, Zeal should hit 5 targets very quickly, but do less well single target, Concentrate/Sacrifice should hit like a damn truck for all it’s penalties. Things like Blizzard should be doing numbers closer to a multishot Zon. Foh should do medium Lightning damage single target, and the holy bolts only be “decent” aoe for massed enemies. Hammers should have numbers based on the fact almost nothing resists them.
This isn’t to say I think all classes/builds should perform equally. It’s fine, and even preferable to have rather large differences in power. Even a factor of 3-4x the power is fine. Currently though, that gap is closer to 20x. The S tier builds make a joke of the game, and only the weaker builds maintain any notable difficulty.
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1.10 is an obvious pvp oriented patch. Before Botd and Grief, melee was very underwhelming. Those items even out the game for pvp anyway. True sorcs and amazons greatly out damage melee, but elemental dmg can be mostly negated, but physical cannot.
If melee was made any stronger then you would need to yet again up the damage for casters to compete.
The game needs a solution to vengeance and amazon elemental bow skills and poison dagger.
Before 1.10 PvP and PvM was pretty balanced.
1.10 with it’s synergy and monster buffs killed the balance
Nah, one of the best changes to come out past 1.10 is my barb not suddenly exploding cause a Oblivion knight cast Iron Maiden on me during WW
yeah but now your barb takes forever to clear any amount bigger than 1 mob, while caster got buffed to kill whole screens with mediocre gear.
yeah removal of iron maiden and lower resist was 1.13… although they added lower resist back in in d2:R for some reason. iron maiden sound effect still causes ptsd when some necro casts it XD
I agree but at the same time the balance doesn’t really change anything outside of farm time. At the end of the day you will get your gear if you really want it.
You’re telling me… Friends played D2R only for the story a few months back and one of them built a Necro with Iron Maiden my PTSD fired immediately the first time he cast it.
There is no balance since 1.10, that is the whole point. They created a massive gap between classes/builds with synergies and messed up character:mob balance with their adjustments. They nerfed rewards in areas where melee/phys builds had easy access and could compete with sorcs.
1.10 was a mess overall. PvM and PvP.