Ele druid isn’t very good sure wind is fine, sorta still get stuck on physical immunes, hurricane does meh damage, if arctic blast did more damage I might agree. Though I guess enigma builds will just skip those. Fire is around 5/10 to 4/10 in effectiveness. Dual element druids have a slog to go through hell unless you like running enigma which I do not.
Lol frenzy barb and shout barb are a pain, same with whirlwind. I’d honestly say fury druid or even rabies are easier. Which bowazon build ? The equipment needed for one is slog to get. Paladins have a lot of viable builds, not just holy frost, but holy lightning, heck holy fire is possible not the best but vengeance and zeal are so good.
Minor Buffs to some under preforming high skill tree skills wouldn’t make them meta, but would make them more viable. I suggest doing most of the buffs through tweaking or giving more synergies. Then if your really have alter the function very slightly. It also goes without saying some builds are really held back by age old bugs.
They’re tough to gear, but whirlwind vastly outperforms vengeance and zeal, while frenzy is a fun build that is comparable or exceeds both pally builds.
I used to always love double swing Barbs back in the day. Pretty much don’t like Barb anymore past Nightmare, but I did try a full Ik WW Barb last year that worked ok. Only started to struggle towards Act 5 Hell. Never liked frenzy. Give WW a synergy, and Double Swing a direct damage buff/increased synergy, Barbs would be in a very great place for melee.
Play barb more ? I’ve played all those builds beat hell baal, in fact got a double throw build to the hell ancients but got a little stuck with that one. I found Paladin zeal and vengeance easier, then whirlwind and frenzy. But out of the builds frenzy was my favorite once you got magic damage from berserk.
The double standard doesnt apply to him, obviously…
Frenzy Barb done right is one of the most lethal in the game, also alot of fun!
Agree on WW, used to love that but its become tougher in the latest gen
As a Glacial Spike sorceress player, and a Hydra sorceress player, dual nova sorceress that uses Frost Nova as her primary, and a physical claw assassin player without traps, magezon, Double Swing barbarian, and someone who wants to play a wolf summons druid, I could not disagree more.
Skills don’t need to be the best or even comparable to the best to be fun to play – and it’s so easy to fix ALL the skills without breaking them.
EASY.
You only have to use a skill planner or a spreadsheet.
Set all fire skills to level 20 and look at them, with 0 bonuses to all skills, and then with +20 to all skills. https://www.d2anya.com/article-35-diablo-2-items-skill-planner
Take context into account, and it’s clear that:
Fireball > Firebolt
Meteor is less comparable, but as a synergy to meteor, you’re never going to use Firebolt alongside Meteor, because Fireball both does more damage and has area of effect.
How to solve effectively? Give Firebolt a non-damage bonus. Let it pierce enemies from investment into fire mastery. That makes it different, and harder to dismiss despite the lower damage.
Fire Wall isn’t absolutely horrible, but obviously didn’t work out as intended.
It could be like Blaze except you draw it with the mouse or controller, as an active “hold the button” skill.
Blaze should just be reworked, or could get a massive damage boost.
Inferno is both bugged, and requires you to stand still, and deals half the damage per second of Fire Wall, one quarter because of the bug, while Fire Wall is a a simple cast fire and forget skill.
It deals 6000 damage per second, by it’s own metric of working over time, at max level max synergies max mastery and +20 to all skills – while Fireball deals 50 000 damage per second to a similar area of effect.
To be similar to Fireball in effect, it’d need to deal at least 30 000 damage per second at that skill and gear completion level, and it’d still be far worse than Fireball – even if the bug is fixed in D2R.
…but it would not be absolutely gut-wrenchingly miserable to use.
…and thanks to D2 not having skills scaling mathematically, and skills that have unique stats every level, developers can literally choose to have skills that are good without skill bonuses, but lose the battle against other skills by receieving less bonuses past level 20, and vice versa, skills that are bad when playing the game normally, but start to scale when you get skill charms and get past skill levels 25-30 and into the 30s, twinked gear and endgame gear.
There’s no need to balance them 100% so that they’re all equal.
I love my niche builds, but I mostly just play my nigma hurdurdin, because he can do andariel, countess, summoner, see the correct tomb symbol, duriel, council, mephisto, diablo, nihlatak, shenk, and Baal, cows, switch weapons and do ubers – all while I’m half asleep in front of the computer.
I even reduced hammer damage to 9000 through min-maxing to have a higher level holy bolt for Achmel the Cursed and Tal Rasha’s Tomb.
…fixing skills is also the fastest and cheapest way to introduce new content.
Fixed Inferno would be new content
Frost Nova that didn’t feel like a wet kiss for the mobs in hell would be new content.
Fixed Arcane Blast would be new content.
Fixed Immolation arrow and Magic Arrow would be new content.
Reworking Bash and/or Stun for the Barbarian to actually have worthwile effects would be new content.
Fixing Psychic Hammer would be new content.
Making Telekinesis behave differently would be new content.
Making Revive create a permanent summon and rather limiting the number of revives you can have to a rational number that isn’t exactly the skill level, and have the revives survive getting stuck, would be new content.
Making wolves worth summoning would be new content.
Allowing all animal summons to be summoned at once would be new content.
Fixing Ravens and creepers would be new content.
…
So you play non metas builds successfully in the current game. I’m happy you do, no need to buff them, play what you like! You’re the prime example of someone who likes non meta builds and made them work for you in the current game.
A key element of the skill tree (and most games skills trees) is that earlier spells should be getting outclassed by later spells. Firebolt and inferno shouldn’t compete with fireball and meteor.
That’s why synergies were made, to give those earlier skills an end game purpose.
The devs made the right call in not buffing all spells to match eachother (I.e. D3 balance).
Yes it would increase diversity of non meta end game builds, but it is too significant of a change at the end of the day, in my opinion and the developers opinion.
Everyone is aware you can play non-meta builds and complete act5 with them. It stops being fun playing these builds when you either have to have the best gear possible to even come close to comparing to one of the meta builds (in average gear), or spend 5 hours running Baal if you didn’t spend 100 hours already farming for the best possible gear.
Except they do not work.
They reach late nightmare, and fizzle. Then after killing Baal, hell hits like a truck.
…
My Glacial Spike sorceress has
Perfect Deaths Fathom with Facet
Ormus Robes +3 glacial spike and Facet
Snowclash
7 cold skill charms
Torch and anni
Perfect Nightwings with Facet
Perfect spirit
3 cold skills amulet
2 SoJ
…can’t remember the gear she had at levels 60+ when entering Hell, but I remember clearing the path to Andariel, Maggot Lair, Claw Viper Temple, Tal Rasha’s Tomb, Flayer Dungeon, Sewers, Spider Cavern, part of the council, checked the correct path to Mephisto, cleared a path to Izual, cleared river of flame and seal guardians, and cleared Frozen River…
…with my hammerdin, after bashing my Glacial Spike Sorceress’ head against early hell minions with no way in sight to improve her primary skill or secondary, a 1200 damage Glacial Spike and an even worse secondary.
Worse damage than my untwinked Amazon’s multishot and strafe and Frozen Arrow with Buriza, even after cold mastery near doubling that sorc cold damage vs 0 resistance monsters.
Now, with that endgame gear, she’s still worse than a sorceress 15 levels under using Frozen Orb and Fireball with 400 magic find gear and no skillers, and has no purpose as she can’t MF and couldn’t beat Hell comfortably. She’s my Hell mule.
But I wouldn’t go so far as to say its the the most lethal, I’ve made plenty of more lethal paladin melee builds, I will say in pvp frenzy is scary with the amount of movement speed you can get. But PvE I still think paladins are better in melee, because it takes less grind and there just is more gear chooses to make a good melee paladin. As well as with certian builds having bad 1hander doesn’t gimp you as much as frenzy barb and they need two.
I wouldn’t even compare melee barb to casters, and ranged builds like sorcerer, Javazon and blessed hammer. They are on whole other level of deadly, and don’t have to be quite as tough or have as much resists.
Although I disagree and know that glacial spike does do a lot of damage and provides utility (it can be the primary in blizzard builds), the point is that you aren’t supposed to use low level spells forever. It’s like complaining about ice bolt not working in hell.
It’s not intended to by design. You shouldn’t balance low levels skills to match the high levels skills. The end of the skill tree shouldn’t be as powerful as the start of the tree. This is by design and core to the game, they won’t change it.
I also can’t stand the idea of low lvl dueling being forever destroyed by the remaster team.
LLD has been a massive part of the game since the early 2000s. There are items that some of you would probably end up selling to Charsi, that to the right buyer would be worth the equivalent of hundreds of HRs. Don’t touch low level skills, please.
Tell me, why shouldn’t every skill work at higher difficulties? I bet one of your complaints about D3 is lack of build diversity and having skills be useless at higher difficulties does the same thing. So what that you aren’t shoehorned into a set when you’re shoehorned into a meta build.
That said I don’t agree with nerfs, but I’m for buffs.
While I am for balance changes, I am going to play devil’s advocate here for a moment. There are many reasons for players NOT wanting them, but among some of the most prevalent is fear of screwing up the game. Making all skills viable is not the correct answer, nor is how Diablo 2 is supposed to work.
Many of the skills in Diablo 2 (especially elemental ones) have a tiered progression. Let us take Cold Arrow for instance. The progression is Cold Arrow - Ice Arrow - Freezing Arrow. Cold Arrow is not meant to be an end game skill, but a skill to use and level as you progress through the game and upgrade to Ice Arrow at the appropriate time. Originally, D2 had plenty of skill points to go around, so you had enough of them to level both progression skills and end game skills. You could level both Ice Arrow and Fire Arrow for instance, and not screw up having enough points for Freezing Arrow at end game. However, players were gimping themselves through the progression process, to dump their points into all the high end skills, so synergies came to be.
Synergies served as the incentive to continue leveling progression skills. Now synergies caused many issues, some skills only had one, many had multiple, and some had none at all. Hybrid builds took a major hit due to the many having too many, and some builds took major hits by not having any at all (physical bow, WW for instance). After 1.10, there were glaring issues caused by the synergies not being well thought out and balanced enough. Hammerdin being one on the extreme side for being OP, and the obvious skills that were meant to be used endgame not being powerful enough due to having no synergies. Then of course, you have useless skills that were quite frankly, always fairly lackluster, such as Conversion (especially for a level 24 skill). The leftover team after Blizzard North dissolved applied some bandaids to improve the balance, but I don’t believe they really had much understanding of what needed done.
VV has two choices when/if they touch the balance. They can either apply some minor bandaids to give synergies to those skills without while giving small buffs to other skills (mainly weapon based skills, but other skills that get weak synergies such as Frozen Orb), and nerfing a few things (hammerdin being one, I’ve seen Holy Shield as another choice in these forums).
Or, they can rebalance by rescaling the synergies (and direct buffing skills if need) and rescaling monster hitpoints, as monster hp has a pretty direct effect on why weapon based skill builds are narrow on gear choices. If they rescale the synergies, they can offer end game skills a second synergy for only 1% increased damage to give players a choice of hybrid builds, or targeted single mainskill builds.
None of this will be done at launch, and while disappointing, it is the correct choice. But if they do a proper rescale, then those skill rebinds that they are giving us, will really do some justice to improve the gameplay.
Some people in here want to buff viability of low level spells.
Ok, sounds neat.
Some people in here want to clear Hell with said low level skills.
No.
If you make lower level skills viable in the highest difficulty you will inevitably shift the meta. If you can’t understand how this is possible or a problem then please don’t respond.
Yup. Agreed. The only low-mid level skills that should be used to clear Hell are those that are meant to be, such as Zeal, Strafe, Multiarrow, Guided Arrow, I would argue Double Throw, etc. While I’d love a complete rebalance/rescale, I’d settle on the bandaid fix. D2 would be easy to properly balance, really. It would just be a fairly tedious endeavor. D3 on the other hand…was originally meant to be any skill is perfectly valid. However, hard to balance due to to not just the amount of skills, but the rune alterations for each skill, no skill points, etc means the variation of skill interactions is too high, where D2 is much more linear in skill progression.
Compare to Glacial Spike, Level 18 skill, 770 damage for a 80 point investment (3 synergies at 5%).
You can’t make early skills more viable in Hell, due to the simple fact you would have to drastically increase the base damage of the skill itself, which destroys any semblance of balance in the lower progression difficulties. Not to mention having the end game skills be a synergy to the starting skills is sort of silly, but I guess depending on how you pvp, it could matter, though for lld, you wouldn’t be at a level with enough skill points anyways.
