Here are some ideas

General Discussion
1

Do you remember?

I have so few memories left of my first years of Diablo II… Oh sweet summer child… may you never encounter winter…

I remember playing my nova/orb sorceress and not carring about synergies.

I remember enjoying my bowazon in the blood moor and dueling people with equipped items such as shaftstop, windforce, titans and a stormshield. Not giving a crap about most runewords that did not exists yet.

I also remember leveling my first paladin equipped with IK maul and few random items. It was dumb, but I was discovering the game and I had fun doing it. Thats until one of my friend tried to log in into my account and successfully doing so and decided to just stash all of my items to scare me a little bit when I would log back the next time. Jeez. From this day I swore to God I would never use Potato as my password again. Lol.

Sweet memories… But things change…

20ish years later all I see are blizzard sorceress and hammerdins teleporting around and killing stuff.

The game feels dull… empty by times… we’ve been playing for so long… getting a little bit excited by the new seasons, coming in just to stop two weeks later until the next one…

Don’t be mistaken; I still love this game and D2R brought it back to life in some ways. I like everything that is getting added to the game. But… I want more… and I want to see different thinking for the futur of this game.

Enigma was the game changer, but we shouldn’t have to rely on it to play other classes. I think adding this new runeword Hustle is a step in the good direction; giving melees a way to go faster, even if its not gonna compete with the teleport going through walls. Anyways that is a step in a good direction; adding more mobility for the classes who need it. But I want to see more.

I want to see different.

Heres my idea… let me know what y’all think. The good and the bad.

  1. Start by nerfing synergies.

I can’t help but think that Sunder charms are the solution to the problem synergies brought. By playing around synergies we ended up playing classes based on one type of damage. The idea here is not to remove synergies, but to change the way they work.

Lets break synergies. Put one synergy MAX per skill and up a little bit the damage for the last levels of skills so they don’t drop too much in damage. I think it could give opportunities to build around multiple sources of damage and have diversified builds being played. (an example would be maxing say lightning traps and fire traps on an assassin so its able to play two type of elemental damage at the same time while not being punished for not maxing 4 synergies for 1 skill)

When I think of what this game can be I imagine Necros playing around with poison nova and a fire golem melting packs of mobs. Sorceress casting a blizzard to freeze mobs and a meteor to finish them. I see a barb WWing a pack of mobs, leaving some kind of bleed effect on them, and throwing axes through them to swiftly finish them.

  1. Creating skill links.

Thats to add to the synergy context. I want to see mix of skills working together in a perfect harmony.

I want to see a druid casting a fiery tornado in a pack of mobs. Doing heavy physical damage and burning them at the same time leaving flames on the ground. I want to see a paladin zealing through mobs and having holy bolts spawning from every hits he place. I want to see a paladin being able to link charge and fist of heaven together, resulting in playing a FoH on the ground at a specific location, bursting with bolts and the paladin being teleported at the location (idk about you but I think it would be fun and OP). I want to see an amazon mixing her frost arrows and poison javelins; throwing her javelins and seeing a massive frost wave freezing mobs and killing them with the poison.

I want to see hydras casting fire bolt that procs meteors every time it hits. Resulting in a beautiful rain of meteors wrecking havoc on the screen.

I want to see creativity and fun again. I want to see people staying in the game for more than a week trying different skill combos, wrecking stuff and having a blast while doing so.

  1. Competitive endgame content.

I think thats necessary for the health of the game. PVP is a thing, but we need more. We’ve seen what rifts could bring to the table in D3. It wasn’t a bad idea, but maybe something similar in D2R could be also fun and make people stay longer.

Also lets face it; having a leaderboard just to show who hits 99 first is just outdated content and need to be replaced.

Thats my vision. Thats what I see.

What do you see?

2

I totally agree that synergies are too strong and should only be like 10-20% of the power of a skill

But also they need a rework

Instead of being specific skills like “firebolt for fireball”

It should be affinites, like “fire skills synergize with fireball”

That open up other class skills as synergies

So your Trang set necro could have its fireball Oskill buffed by necro fire, projectile and aoe skills as fireball has these 3 properties

3

I don’t think its a bad idea, but it promotes the idea of playing around items. I want to see classes by design have more diversity and be powerful. Not with specific items equipped.

4

??

You don’t seem to realize that this is just a demo showing it can expend to other classes but primarily makes classes not stuck investing in the same predetermined skill in the same exact skill tree branch

5

You mean something similar to what PoE did in some way? Having given skills and some others to support it (that synergize with it) to increase its damage and adding an effect while also having points in the tree that boosts X or Y type of damage, whatever be the source of the damage dealer? If so, I understand your point. Its not a bad idea but I don’t think it would be good for the game. It would require massive balance check in regards to every skill and items in the game.

As for my idea I was just proposing something that would most likely be easy to do that would add builds diversity while also fixing the immunities problem without the use of a sunder charm. Having 1 synergy at most per skill. It would force people into playing up to two or three different skills.

6

There are no synergies in POe…

Also, the affinity system isn’t something complicate to do lol

I did it myself as somebody who never modded Diablo2 before

It literally took 1hour to divide all the skills into their categories and then applied those groups in the Synergy column

This system does exactly what you claim when you say you want people to use multiple type of skills

Take fireball again

You aren’t forced to invest in firebolt like currently

Being fire/aoe/projectile allows you to invest in other skills that share these traits

So you could make a fireball sorceress with:

  • 20fireball (fire/proj/aoe)
  • 20 thunderstorm (lite/aoe)
  • 20 glacial spike (cold/proj/aoe)
  • 20 fire mastery (fire)
  • 20 shiver armor (cold/ proj)

Each valid synergies for fireball

7

What I meant by “it synergyze with it” is a skill that adds damage to another. Of course its different from D2R. Support gems aren’t skill, but they still occupy a gem slot in an equipped item. Its a gem that boosts another.

I also never said your idea wasn’t difficult to do; I said it would be bad for the game as it would require an entire overhaul of every skills (classes skills and skills presents on items) and items that adds to any type of damage.

You are proposing an interesting idea but that would require lots of testing. I am proposing an idea that takes less time to implement and add diversity by forcing players to choose more than one skill to play with which would end up removing the need for sunder charms while adding diversity.

1 Like
8

Changing all synergies or reducing all synergies to 1 requires exactly the same time and testing lol

A change is a change

9

Of course any change demand testing. I am not saying otherwise.

As for the time it takes I assume it takes less time tweaking numbers in an already existing scheme than it would take to implement a new one. Also I am talking about synergies only. My proposal doesn’t imply items skills/stats changes.

10

neither is mine

you dont seem to understand that reducing 3-4 syneriges to 1 on every skill is a bigger test change than just replacing a fix synergy skill with a family of skill

in both situation you have some value balancing work to do

but in ur case you still force people to invest in a skill they most likely dont want

11

Yes your plan requires testing items since you plan to add stats that influence the damage output of your equiped items (trang set in your given example). How many items exists in the game with chance to proc certain skills or items with charges? Did you take these into consideration?

As for removing synergies its quite simple. Take any given skill; meteor for instance. Have it recieve damage bonus only from fireball and nothing else. It reduces the damage of the skill and open an opportunity to use another skill (when you start gearing properly damages in this game it goes through the roof so I don’t think an overall damage nerf would sound so bad since the game is already too easy to clear).

Anyways, I think we can both agree that a change is needed regarding synergies. I just think my way would be faster and easier to implement and thats where our opinions differ.

12

yes i did … because thats the main goal of this system

Synergy ruined Charge, proc and Oskill…

99% of them are garbage because when used on other classes, they cannot benefit from synergies

Oh yeah the legendary Dragonscale Hydra paladin build… yeah no its bad

Oh yeah the legendary Trang Fire build… yeah no its bad

Oh the legendary 2x Flamebellow double swing barb build… yeah no its bad

Unless you rework the Synergy system to make them viable mechanics

Something your Dimmed vision 1 synergy system cant accomplish

13

I didn’t come here to throw insults at you sir. Neither did I came to your post to post my own thread. I am debating. I simply ask questions. If you cannot do that in a proper manner then don’t.

I’ve read your post and comments people made and I understand you want changes.

I propose something easy. Something small but impactful.

You want to dream bigger? Thats great! We just have different opinions. I think my idea is better, you think yours is the best. The only thing we can agree on is that synergy system require a change.

Don’t you go thinking “my dimmer vision can’t accomplish anything”. Small changes always make a difference.

Now you can go ahead and do other posts about whatever changes you want to make in the game since thats all you seem to be doing. I’ll be on my way and get on with my life.

You have a great day sir :slight_smile: