Let's bring D2R into the modern world

General Discussion
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There are some majorly outdated mechanics in D2 and I was hoping D2R would remedy those. It has in some ways (auto-pickup gold) but has failed in many others. The game has been out long enough now that the #nochanges people should be sated so let’s fix some things.

Revision: With Diablo 4 out and tons of new players being introduced to the Diablo Universe, I think now is the best time to update some QoL features in D2R for players that may venture onto other iterations of Diablo.

First, stamina. It does nothing to add to the game and is only a hindrance. I hated it when I was 15, I hate it now.

My suggestion: Make Running baseline speed. Have stamina be your health/mana regen bar that you lose if you get hit. 10% of the damage you take is dealt to your stamina, as well. If you have full stamina, you recover 1% life and mana every 3 seconds. If it’s empty, you don’t.

Revision: I still think stamina is absolutely pointless. Sure, it becomes obsolete when you get higher Vitality, but I can see it being a major turn-off for new players to the ARPG genre dealing with some stupid mechanic meant to slow you down.

Second, hit chance. This mechanic is especially cumbersome for melee and is very outdated.

My suggestion: Make all attacks 100% hit baseline. Change Dexterity to give bonus damage to ranged and Strength to give bonus damage to melee. Give bosses/elites an Evasive random modifier that reduces their chance to be hit by 25%.

Revision: I still think hit chance needs removed. Missing attacks never feels good. Mobs with shields should still have a ~10% chance to block attacks and maybe implement the evasion modifier to boss mobs.

Third, respecs. We need the ability to respec more than once per difficulty.

My suggestion: Give Deckard Cain the ability to respec your character at the cost of a level. If you’re 99 and respec, you are now 98.

Revision: Respecs need to be available for gold. This is another extremely limiting mechanic that needs fixed.

Fourth, inventory space. We just plain need more.

My suggestion: After killing Diablo, on quest turn in, give players another 2 rows across the bottom of the inventory screen. This will allow more charms for Hell difficulty clears as well as the ability to carry more loot (which is what it’s all about).

Revision: I still think bringing more inventory space would be excellent via the Grim Dawn ‘bag’ system after completing each act.

Fifth, FIX FOLLOWER AI!!

My suggestion: For the love of all that is holy, fix their AI. Just make them constantly teleport to our character if they go off screen. That’s it. They are CONSTANTLY hung up on walls. It is incredibly annoying and frustrating. Please. Do something.

Revision: Follower AI is still just abysmal and needs fine-tuned majorly.

Sixth, (this is a minor gripe) the flying mobs need to either just be land based, target-able in the air, or dive-bomb attack you and stay grounded like PoE flying mobs.

Last, targeting mobs in combat is annoying. You will run past them or click on crap on the ground or click vases/barrels/doors/etc.

Suggestion: give us an option to toggle ‘Legacy’ mode where it’s like it is, and ‘Resurrected’ mode where mobs are always considered priority during targeting. Also, it just needs some fine-tuning in general.

At this point, I feel like D2R is the definitive Diablo game and is honestly just better all around and needs some modern QoL love to bring it back to the mainstream.

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It only matters early on. You just use stamina potions until you have enough vitality until it doesn’t matter. Vitality is super important to not be squishy.

No. It’s fine the way it is. This is unnecessary complexity that doesn’t add to the experience.

I don’t see anything wrong with how attack rating works. Early game, you focus on getting +attack rating gear and it’s not hard to find.

There are already two respec methods. First, you get 1 respec per difficulty by completing the Den of Evil. Then there is a formula you can use to create an item that can respec. This is fine imho. I’ve never felt compelled to keep infinitely respeccing a single char in any ARPG.

Definitely agree with this one. There are single player mods that do this.

Either expand inventory via turning in certain quests (a la add Inventory Bag like Titan Quest) or buy more space up to certain point with gold (D3). I’d also like to add for some unknown reason Blizz seems to like to force inventory Tetris on people. I’d like auto sort. Titan Quest had it.

Agreed. This is easy to deal with as a sorc because teleport moves the merc with you. You can use that to help with survival because you can keep backing them away from enemies. It also dislodges them from being stuck. But for other classes you’d need Enigma to do that. There should also be a way to tell the merc where to go and also dispositions for the merc (Attack everything, Defense, etc.) That would be a really nice QoL. This existed in Titan Quest and Dungeon Siege I believe. It’s not a far-fetched ask for an older game.

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Keep in mind, D2R is a cosmetic redo of D2LoD. That was the entire intention. They did add a few new things and correct a few others.

Inventory spae … well … with D2R we have a lot more than we did with D2LoD. We went from a single pane to 4 panes. That’s a big increase.

As far as teleporting, they changed something with D2R because the pathing has gone totally awry. And yes, it is very annoying, to say the least.

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How about no.

But you might be happy with D3 or soon D4.

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How about no just no :smiley:

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Let’s be honest here, the Diablo “community” can’t agree on anything. The best thing that could happen is for the devs to give full access and free hands to modders.

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How about just removing the things that punish people who wanna play? Wanna respec, sorry, you’ve used them all so farm something rare or start over. Wanna play this build? Sorry, those runewords are super expensive. GL!

Just make the game rewarding and people will play it, but I guess we don’t want that…

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If you complain about stamina then you are a nooooooooooooooob

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Just this.

Don’t get why people always want to change the uniqueness of D2 to something that already exist 1000s of times.

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It’s only an issue for the first few levels and your suggestion adds power creep, so I’m not super opposed to it, but I don’t think it’s really necessary.

As someone who plays mostly melee builds, I agree they should make this less punishing to the player somehow.

This could work, but may be more extreme than needed. A lot of gear is useful for the AR bonus it provides, so if we remove AR completely it might cascade in needing to rework a lot of gear. A simple change to the equation that doubles the effectiveness of AR right now might be enough without making such a sweeping change.

Interesting idea. I still try not to use any respecs just because I played so much D1 and D2 before they were added, but at the higher levels the cost is pretty high, and at the lower levels when you might need it more (Barb mastery I’m looking at you) it’s more palatable, so neat idea.

I’m all for more stash space and stacking currency, but I don’t think they should mess with the inventory in ways that allow more power creep (more charms). Originally I was against charm only inventory, but I do agree it’s pretty silly that entire inventory is full of charms with either 4x2 space + cube or just cube for picking up loot, so I might be open to that. Straight up more space for charms though I’m not sure I can back.

Yes this for sure. Not only is it silly they will try to follow where you went if you went down a dead end and they will go down it as well vs. just taking the shortest distance to you, but often I’ll see they will walk just out of BC/BO/Shout range upon entering a WP, even if they aren’t going to engage something, which is maddening.

I think he’s referring to inventory as in what you carry around under your equipped gear, so D2R didn’t change that. Stash space, yes it’s technically an increase with the larger 10x10 stash and 3x shared stash tabs, but legacy D2LoD let you create as many accounts as you were willing to manage off of a single CD key, so you could have effectively limitless mules and therefore limitless stash space, so it’s actually a space downgrade.

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Don’t forget asking for a tactical nuke or even better a slay screen aura.
Actually needing to kill things is so bothersome.

Agree on those, but not only Follower AI needs a fix, all summons and enemies do as well.
However they won’t fix these, to difficult for them.

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Go play diablo 4 you have that game to change now

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You’re missing the point. D2R has a lot of good elements, probably the majority of the best elements of any of the Diablo games. I certainly don’t want D2R to be like D3 or D4. I spun up D3 yesterday and was like “now I remember why I stopped playing this.” D3 is awful. D3 should have been D2R with some polish. I think that’s what people want is D2R with some polish, new campaigns, more areas, maybe more difficulty levels but essentially most of the mechanics to stay the same. I mean c’mon, inventory Tetris? Who likes playing inventory Tetris?

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D2R is just a new paint on a 30yo turd. D2 never really was good, and it’s certainly not a timeless classic like for example Zelda 1 or Super Mario Bros. It’s full of bugs, that are of course still in the game because they can’t be fixed without reprogramming everything.

People keep putting it up on that pedestal where it really doesn’t belong, because the game is just not good enough. In modern rating it’d get maybe a score of 60%. D2 in the 2000s had the novelty of internet play and that it was released in a time where the Super Nintendo was still somewhat relevant, meh, not hard to compete vs. a kids console on a PC platform. But today it’s just bad.

The things that D2(R) would need:

Gender selection (Body Types for you woke, whatever crowd)
Completely revised Ladder system
Completely revised Stats system
Another Act and some sort of deep dungeon/infinite progression dungeon
Another difficulty mode after hell
Completely revised PvP system
Completely revised Sets & Uniques
Huge balancing after all of the above is in place

No, it won’t happen.

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Yeah, people talk about D2 (especially in regards to D3/D4) as if it were some golden standard. But when D2 came out it was a huge disappointment to many Diablo 1 fans. The dark atmosphere was lacking (if you can believe that). Graphics felt ugly/unfinished with many bright colors, artstyle was crap and farcry to its predecesor. Many game mechanics were often dud ideas. The features that were promised during development like guild houses and arenas were never implemented. All that we got was the stash with a size of about half the char’s inventory. The game really started to come together with the release of LoD.

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No, TY. Have a good and excellent day!

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“My suggestion: For the love of all that is holy, fix their AI. Just make them constantly teleport to our character if they go off screen. That’s it. They are CONSTANTLY hung up on walls. It is incredibly annoying and frustrating. Please. Do something.” I fully concur. When I’m playing in the ice caves my act 2 merc loves to stop and plant his face into the ice. Possibly some form of merc mediation? :upside_down_face: Plus, I know if my sorc wants to attack to the left merc will find monsters off to the right to attack unless I teleport and tactically place him.

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i do not like your ideas.

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:+1:

Honestly, I am way more bothered by the notion that running removes 100% of your armor than with the notion that you need to slow down a moment if you run for too long.

I’d have running remove 50% or 75% of your armor instead of the current 100%. I’d also add some life and/or mana regeneration to the Increased Stamina skill, in order to give it an actual use. And finally, I’d reduce the frequency of stamina affixes for magic and rare items, and of Endurance Shrines so that this content wastes RNG a lot less.

As for the mechanic itself, it’s not a big issue. It’s going to bother you a little at low level, then become progressively less relevant as you level up.
Significantly reworking it would probably cause a lot more problems than it would solve.

Actually, I don’t think that the issues you have come from attack rating. It works decently well and is easy to keep at very reasonable thresholds. The main issue with melee is the amount of dodge/block that many monsters have.

I am really not a fan of full respecs, though your way of approaching the subject is far from being the worse.

I’d rather have the devs look into ways of giving frequent access to small partial respecs, a little similar to Path of exile’s respec points. You could have all the quests that are usually skipped give a partial respec of 5 skill points and 25 stat points, for example, spent point per point like in PoE. This makes correcting the build even easier, while not offering the ability to just pick an entirely new build out of the blue.

We definitely don’t need more charm space.
I’d be down for some form of charm bag, that is either a space or character slots entirely dedicated to charms or a space that can be used either for charms or for inventory, as long as charms don’t work out of it.
Please keep in mind that if you just give more inventory space without making sure that charms can’t get in it, most players are just going to fully use it as power creep, which misses the point of giving extra inventory space (making loot more comfortable).

Yep, AI is busted and improvements to it would be greatly appreciated.

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Really sounds like you’d prefer playing Diablo 3 instead be my guest

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