1.10+ Had some great ideas, but were implemented poorly.
Synergies: Incentive to level progression skills that would fuel end game skills due to players intentionally gimping themselves to dump all points into high end skills. Great idea, but they added too many synergies, which roped characters into mostly one trick ponies, reducing build diversity and toolkits for party play and being able to answer immune monsters. Encouraged skipping zones to only fight favored monsters. Synergies also favored casters more, due to a better and more set scaling with skills not being based on weapon damage, in turn hurting weapon based skill builds that seen a narrower funnel in weapon choices to be decent. Before synergies, respecs were not needed as you had plenty of skill points to go around and it was harder to screw up a build.
Increased difficulty: They tried to increase difficulty to prevent the game from being exploited/botted (failed). Some difficulty changes were good, such as monster ai improvements and dealing more damage. However, they gave them too much hp which combined with poor synergy balance, hurt physical weapon based skills.
Runewords/Ladder Only: While adding more runeword choices was not a terrible idea, the way implemented was terrible and took away character identity with the massive amount of OSkills. Then restricting not only half of the new runewords, but a good portion of new unique items to ladder only, ruined player choice and long term progression. Most of the new introduced runewords become almost mandatory for most decent builds, and game became a rune hunt as opposed to a loot hunt.
While the current patch is the best place to start, and makes the most sense, I hope to see some improvement down the line to address the issues.
Equip Enigma = Your character yells like it’s turning super saiyan 1.
Pick up this Godfather sword you speak of = You hear a short quip of some italian music.
Arm of King Leoric and Lazarus Spire are two EPIC characters that should have matched the quality of item. Back in pre 1.10 these items should have been what everyone was trading for if they cared about the lore. I know Brevik didn’t pay much attention to it. Arkaines valor also had a nice quest about him in D1 as being an epic warrior and when equipping it, the lore made it feel more impactful. I’m just saying these are more appealing than most of the runewords except for a few that have nice names.
the biggest downside to battle.net over mods atm are really only 2 thing. #1 no item filter #2 cow king still not fixed
the other downside to 1.14a really has nothing to do with the patch and that is the lack of avialablity to spawn the best and most fun fight in the game.
sure u can still probably trade for an anni, if u want to pay an arm and a leg, but they are incredibly rare on ladder now. you most likely wont ever get to “fight” him because there frankly arnt many duped sojs on non-ladder left to sell to walk the ladder game of the same ip…
the people who “dupe” now rarely choose to dupe Soj’s except to spawn dclone for themself, because there are tons of RW’s worth WAY more than soj and by making a rw it creates a “new” items in the code so they instantly become “perm” so they wont even poof. so not only are the vast majority of duped soj’s gone, but the dupers aren’t even duping them
this makes dclone, next to impossible to fight yourself… and while annis is great and all, the best part is the fight.
unfortunately none of the mods i know have implemented a way to spawn dclone without ruining what made the fight fun… (path of diablo) for example completely ruined it making it even WORSE than uber trist.
I liked the changes with 1.10 alot, not such a big fan of unlimited respecs though. IMHO it’s awesome to be able to fix minor mistakes on your build, but switching totally different builds back and forth, meh.
Anyway i really liked 1.09 alot too, and would enjoy experiencing it again with the new graphics alot.
Oh but i hate ladder and that i’m forced to start all over again just to get ladder only drops .
But it’s nice that the rune drops are rebalanced in 1.13, never played it, but before it was brutal. Don’t know why elite uniques / set didn’t get increased too, since most are inferior to runewords anyway.
I like 1.11, not 1.14. Because the most of casual “improvements” happened after 1.11. They removed IM from CK, added respecs and buffed runedrop chances. I consider all these are game downgrades.
They fixed some bugs during the years so better than 1.13, also they finally fixed tmc, far cast and skill bug (swap cast) :DDD, but most mods not working with 1.14 and there were some WW/desync problems iirc, but fixed so as a retail version, I think is much better than 1.10-1.13.
If i had a choice between 1.09/1.10 or 1.14, I think i’d prob still pick 1.14. I do remember the days back in 1.09 (both good and bad parts). The respec option never really bothered me and just basically let me have fun for pretty much the first 24 levels instead of being so weak due to point saving. Wasn’t really fun doing pretty much no damage cause you couldn’t invest any points in early skills as they would be wasted.
Theres still a few things that would be NICE to have fixes like fixing the cow king and such but I wont mind playing on the 1.14 versions. 1.09 is the past and can always just load up vanilla and downgrade the patch.
I disagree somewhat on the synergies thing, while I agree with most of what you said, I think the major issue with synergies, is many skills lacked any good synergies. Great example of great synergies frenzy and berserk. Adding magic damage to a normal physical only was a great Idea. cyclone armor and fissure adding duration to hurricane and Armageddon respectively, changes how these skills can be used.
I like synergies like this and the game needed more of them, like a posion jav skill could have added poison damage to say fend for the amazon. Life tap curse, could maybe add life leach to poison damage dealt by poison dagger giving you percentage health from each tick back. Telekinesis skill could give lighting damage to enchant, chilling shield could give cold damage + slowing to enchant. Maul and feral rage could add slight psychical damage increase to fire claws, maul could get synergy with shockwave giving it some cleave damage (a percentage of damage hits near by targets).
Some skills needed synergy that didn’t get any too, because their damage couldn’t even hope to keep up with the increase in HP of creatures. Example: mind blast and physic hammer, venom and maul just to name a few.
I agree that the balance changes hurt weapon based skills the most, I’d like to see some improvement too.
Resets tokens being unnecessary? I remember times before tokens and so does stats resets and it was nonsene that you literally had to create a new character once you missclicked skill or simply made a big upgrade to your gear. Skill/attrubutes resets are one of the best things that happened to this game and it also enabled more builds cause you can maneuver and adapt your build to the stage of the game. Thanks to this many builds like Fissure Druid are picked for early/mid game and then changed to smthing else, before you had to stick all the way from level 1 to your ultimate build.
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