It’s a hot debate topic. But Teleport doesn’t need to be nerfed or given to every class to make the game balanced. Instead, fix the reason why Teleport is so strong. Clearing distance in every scenario the game offers greatly improves every objective people have in the game.
First, let’s break down why some of the popular suggestions to modifying Teleport don’t work:
Give it a cooldown.
Why? This doesn’t solve the core issue. Just makes the game more tedious to play.
Nerf Teleport in some way by lowering effective distance covered or increasing resource consumed.
Doesn’t solve the core issue. Depending on the resource consumed, you end up making Teleport better on some characters than others in ways that creates significant class disparity (like it was back in the day when only Sorceress could use Teleport).
Let only Sorceress use Teleport.
You probably didn’t play back in the day. You know how 90% of Ladder character starters are Sorceress? Imagine that for the entire season.
Delete Teleport.
Sorceress gains a lot of survivability by kiting with Teleport. She is a glassy character. She would be in a much worse place without Teleport, and it is part of her class identity. Imagine if we removed Battle Orders from Call to Arms and from Barbarian. Of course, that’s unfathomable since Barbarian is generally in a worse spot than Sorceress is. But the concept still stands.
Give every class Teleport.
Ruins class identity. Generally a lazy fix. Requires other classes to take another 1pt skill. Giving other classes unique teleport abilities is also bad, because unless it’s as good as Teleport, then the issue is unchanged.
The Suggestions
We simply need to make Teleport not required in all the scenarios it currently is BiS in. There won’t be a perfect balance. Teleport will still be very good. But some things should be stronger than others in certain scenarios. Teleport is just currently stronger in all scenarios.
The most important part is making content distant from town not so overwhelmingly advantageous. Act Bosses drop too well. I’m not saying nerf Act Boss drops into oblivion. They don’t even need to be “equal” to density farming. Just put Act Boss drop odds slightly above average density farming for the areas leading up to it. This change grants the benefit: density clearing can be viable or as advantageous as boss farming. It won’t be the best. But who cares about the best 100% of the time? Travincal and Terrorized Andariel have the best drop pools for all the items people need in the game, yet we still farm other things. Perfect balance isn’t needed, just bring it closer. Imagine the following hypothetical solution: give all monsters in the Tower a bias towards runes. Their bias towards runes should be roughly proportionate to how many runes you can farm in a certain time window by skipping all the monsters and going to Countess. That way if you kill only Countess for 10 minutes or you clear the entirety of the Tower for 10 minutes, you end up with roughly the same amount of runes.
Return the concept that Act Boss drop pools are not as wide as basic monster drop pools are. Terrorized Zones gave Superuniques and Act Bosses insane drop odds to those really rare items that before they couldn’t drop at all (or had terrible odds for). Undo this. The advantage of farming Superuniques and Act Bosses should be that they always drop more than 1 item. You get guaranteed items from them in volume. But their drop pool should not compete with regular monster drop pools. I don’t want to hear no arguments about the fantasy of “but warren, this nameless monster can drop this item but a lord of hell cant?”. Who cares? Why does Diablo drop weapons? He doesn’t use any. None of the Act Bosses do. Game balance shouldn’t 100% reflect fantasy.
With the above two changes, now density farming is worthwhile. However, this doesn’t solve everything. At the game’s current balance, I would imagine Teleport users are still going to be better than non-Teleport users at density farming too. Thus, increase density by making more packs spawn in a map (rather than increasing pack size). Also buff melee. Increasing density doesn’t negatively impact casters. However, it can negatively impact the current state of melee builds. The effective solution this change brings is that now there is less distance between monsters to farm, so significant distance clearing is not as advantageous even when density clearing.
Finally, at least improve more areas closer to town. Travincal is a great example, though it’s only the Council itself. Make all of Travincal great to farm. Chaos and Cows are also good (they’re not directly next to town, but Chaos is close enough and Cows is large enough and dense enough to justify the distance of running to Tristram). They could be made even better. Most areas could be made better.
With these changes, Teleport should be significantly less required to be competitive in the endgame. Of course, you can still run it. It still functions the same. If you enjoy the fantasy of blinking around the map like a mad man, it’ll still be there. It just won’t give you as much of an advantage as it did before.
