Lets Talk Runewords

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21

Well, at least they’re trying. Only time will tell the result of it. Some made great others need some tweak others not that great, but it’s a work in progress.

That I agree, while I know that they wouldn’t do it, so I tried to toy with the idea around absorb because of it.

Tbh, if they planned to revert, they wouldn’t start with the latest patch. That’s why I’m skeptical that they will ever revert it anyways. While revert could be somewhat easier, 1.09 wasn’t perfect either.

Absorb could be a “somewhat” fine solution without much effort around it. Just add every foe a stactic value of absorb and already would be “somewhat” viable the hp reduction.

I’m trying to suggest things without nerfing what players do neither redo the wheel, but also neither reverting to earlier patch that would need redo several game logic they done on top of their “starting” one.

Well, it’s a fair point. There’s somewhat connection to it, but it’s really complex to explain properly. The strength of the rws enables full specializated builds, that way those builds can ignore some core elements like immunities and by doing it would remove the need of adaptability and ending creating a loophole around the cycle:

Item strength ↔ character skills ↔ impact on monsters. Because they plan to increase the power of the player, it’s natural to consider counter-balancing the improvement on damage by reducing the overall impact of it on foes. That’s why I highlighted the absorb.

Like a sequential steps, that eventually would be needed in some degree:
1- increase the power of underperforming builds, to reach similar or somewhat fine levels
2- reduce the power of the player across the board by changing foes to become more durable
3- expand with other features, items can be the part of expansion by making more “impactful” and more “identity”.

Talking about rws and items without considering the impact on player’s side and foe’s side wouldn’t be entirely “balanced” on long run. While keeping those topics at bay could be useful to gauge stuff. It’s interesting keep the topic in mind when talk about item changes.

By example the mechannic between blue(magic) and yellow(rare) performs quite nicely. They could expand to white and unique/sets. The issue with white are that some gear provides similar benefits from blue/yellow ones, that’s an issue that could be problematic to handle. If you rework the items, but sure shouldn’t be the main topic for sure.

That way sub 13-18 levels, could be easily done by blue/yellow ones and rws, between 18-32 could be entry-level sets and rws, afterwards unique/sets/rws for most of those 4 slots. That can be toyed with the itemization based on the kind of perk the character aims for. Like barbarian keeping spears instead of dual spirit for buffing itself.

Foe’s power (offensive and defensive) are directly related to items, because if they do more damage player’s would need more resistances/defense to it, if they mitigate more damage would mean player’s needing do damage smartly. Even currently most foes are more manageable with sorc 2 elements than actually one on most of part of the game, even if the overall damage got reduced, by using 2 elements you got roughly 60-75% of the damage comparatively a pure element one, if you plan do several content with the same build that could work well.

Also would help you to manage most foes because on hell you covered 2 of 5 possible immunites, while foes only can be immune to 2, with sole exception of one mob who can be immune to 3 elements. By introducing absorb the overall impact could be even greater on single elemental builds making even without “max” synergy somewhat fine. Another step would be reduce the amount of synergy skills impacting each other.

22

The entity of Hell difficulty shouldn’t be based around BIS gear. A person who made a pure fire sorc/druid/pally shouldn’t hit a brick wall as soon as they reach hell because synergies requires you to dump all of your skill points into a single skill to maximize its effectiveness. 60 to 100 skill points and you still can’t tackle 1/3 of the monster in hell… How is that good game design?

23

The game doesn’t force you to invest on every single skill on that element. It’s the player’s choice to do so. The fact that the game tries to punish you by doing so it’s in fact a balance purpose, while folks tries to address with lower resist and conviction aura. No build should excel on everything or be able to do anything if it’s focused in one thing, because otherwise what’s the point of the other builds?

The maximization of effectiveness means lack of something else, it’s a trade-off by choice, folks just tries to bypass it by using BiS and poorly planned patches.

Dual-triple element sorc works fine on hell, isn’t meta for most content because isn’t optimal to do so if comparated to alternatives, but can clear most of the content except the uber summons. So it’s a viable build, just not the fastest out there. Some content lightning sorc would perform amazingly well, others cold and others fire. That kind of diversity it’s what shows that specialization does what exactly says, specializes you in something that something will be strong against something and should be weak or inefective against the rest.

Even a pure elemental build with conviction aura and lower resist will deal less damage than actually using an element that foe was weaker to, because with the right element the foe resist should be negative like -100, while if you’re using the wrong element should be about 50-75%. 2k strong element would be 4k, while 6k at weak element would be 1.5k-3k.

The problem lays when folks over specialize on something or focus too much in farming something. The example I said was about a skill with 3 times more damage, received from the synergy system, just reinforces the statement.

While by example, blizzard sorc it’s popular because cold mastery not the element itself or skill, on the scenario above the 50-75% would actually reach negative values sometimes about -20~-100 that value would mean that cold sorc can bypass most of the limitations of foes being resistant to cold.

So yeah, the system somewhat works to make folks address their own weakness but introduced too much powercreep because of runewords themselves, not only runewords but also charged items. If wasn’t lower resist, cold mastery and conviction most folks wouldn’t play a single element if their content are immune to that particular element. While lower resist and conviction can break most of cold immunes, the diferential to make more effective than dual/triple element it’s cold mastery perk, if wasn’t for that no sorc single element would be stronger than hybrid one on general purpose content or just pick lightning/fire because would be easier to beat those immune monsters.

By example, vengeance paladin can’t excel on all 3 elements well for the same reason. Often choses to have average damage on all elements or pick 1-2 to have higher damage on those.

The system it’s working as intended by benefiting those who wants to beat certain stuff while shows the weakness on other contents, while blizzard sorc can beat most of the content without penalty, lightning can reach similar levels but wouldn’t reach similar damage output because of the lack of “lightning mastery” doing what “cold mastery does”. Cold mastery it’s easily one of, if not the, strongest passive on the game in terms of damage potential.

24

That’s a lot of rationalization supporting bad design. You do, however, do a great job explaining why most builds suck. This game is ultimately about efficiency and only the Meta builds can farm Hell or grind to 99 at acceptable speed.

The irony is that the only way to “farm” runes is to increase player count and kill as many monsters as possible as quickly as possible.

25

I don’t support the design, it’s just what it is. While they changed several stuff along the road, the basic concept worked pretty well. The problem was the job done afterwards. If you pick the game CDs of d2 classic you would play somewhat fine with the limitations that were lifted on the later patches. While LoD generated a new life for the game, already changed several stuff some for better and some for worst.

The concept of immunity wasn’t bad, how they worked afterwards it’s what made messy. I not defending the current state by no means, in fact I’m criticizing it by poor planned changes and the impact of it through those years.

The game having the immunity system helped to generate a additional challenge, like they done afterwards with guest monsters. The problem was how they dealt with the system itself and scalability.

Synergy system pretty much destroyed most of hybrid options on efficiency wise, because made one trick builds more efficient but gone too far. Pair it with the 3 things I quoted (cold mastery, conviction aura and lower resist) you see how popular cold sorc are followed by hammerdin(almost none magic immune and huge amount of damage and multipliers) and some other few honorable mentions.

Add that pretty much most 1.10 rw that overperformed in a way that removed the need to play as group to achieve some goals. The game became useless to play as group most of the time if your objective isn’t about exp itself.

The icing on the cake it’s about too much power concentrated on player, making the game be easier than ever making folks get used to players X command or just leech on others games.

That’s what folks got used to do paired with low droprate, that’s what made most folks try to do stuff efficiently not actually play for fun. Also incentivized bots, dups and hacks.

Prior to LoD, at least D2 had less focus on that and more focus on fun. While I get that some folks would try to farm their way through with more eficiency, the flexibility was higher than it is right now.

That pretty much, didn’t changed because that was their goal to make folks play together and kill dozens of demons in their path, the problem it’s everything else they done made that particular benefit pretty much useless. There’s almost none advantage to play as group if your intent it’s to farm something because the improvement isn’t high enough to beat the benefit of 2 folks farming by themselves but also most builds can beat p3-p8 solo without any help, doing it really efficiently btw. Which already beats the purpose of playing as group and getting value from it.

Until they really tackle the elephant on the room, the game pretty much will not be attractive to be played as group if your intent was farm something. Because your odds are marginally increased if the player isn’t in the same map and foes would have more hp than normally do.

The drop rate it’s too low and the benefit of playing as group marginally increases a bit but not the same amount of making useful to play in group instead of those folks soloing. Because the drops would increase at most like 60-70% of “non-drop” table with about 7-8 players in screen if they splitted and farmed solo on their own games would be about 2-5 times more drops overall, meaning better odds to find the right item on the end. The players X beats it because can be done individually but would lose on overall against partied players on the same screen range.

The problem it’s having that amount of players at same spot while their individual power would be enough to kill the foes, it’s not optimal way to play meaning they often would split and the performance and benefits starts to drop. Some content can be a bit better but the problem it’s even with less odds folks playing p1 would have overall more chances if you account 8 players playing p1 instead of 1 player playing with randoms who has the same goal as him.

26

We agree that it’s bad game design but you still want to maintain the status quo… :upside_down_face:

Also, we are way off topic. This topic was all about bad design for runewords and how the most common socket types have the least utilization. Or how most low and mid level words are usable without going into nm/hell or using Larzuk quest to obtain a base.

27

This is incorrect. In 1.09 immunities existed and were unbreakable.

I read carefully through the thread and I think this is a very elegant solution to curb the power creep of certain builds and thus reduce the health pools of certain monsters. In essence - regardless of any debuffs - a monster with X% absorb would always shave of 2X% of damage from a given element. In such a system -% resist gear could work at full force at any point - thus reducing the cost of entry for a single-element sorceress ( or any other class ) while still making it viable to dual/triple tree, because single-tree would be very inefficient against high absorb enemies and ‘other element’ would swoop monsters away much faster.

In essential essence - this creates two health pools - the regular, and “absorb protected” from one element. In conjunction with regular resistance, this would be an interesting dynamic.

Such change would require careful buffing of elemental skills that currently underperform ( such as skeletal mages ) and some sort of feedback to the user that a given monster class is highly absorbing, but overall - this is a good concept.

1 Like
28

There is a difference between universal immunities and periodically unique immunities based on monster mods…

29

Either way - in 1.09 whatever immunity a monster gained, it was permanent and just about any hell monster was immune to something. Single tree sorceresses were not a thing.

30

1.09 monster immunities were rare. They usually accompanied packs that had either the magic resistance or one of the elemental enchanted mods. As such, their resistance was higher than what conviction or LR could break. This is still true to today as element enchantments add 75% resistance to said specific element type and magic resistant adds +40% to fire, cold, and lightning resistant types (stone skin adds +50% physical resist, spectral hit adds 20% fire/cold/light)

1.10 is when you ended up with every monster in hell having some innate immunity. It is also when synergies were added and monster HPs were increased…

As for single trees not being viable, 1.09 nova or meteor sorc is case in point of your lack of understanding of patch history

31

U wot mate? In 1.09 the most famous example of immunity were the tentacle monsters were physical immune and there was no way around it. I think this was in nightmare, and surely in hell. All ghost monsters were immune to physical as well. Other then that - just about every monster in hell had some sort of immunity.

Single element sorceresses were not a thing because immunities and with no synergies there was no incentive to make a single tree sorceress. Novas were cows-only build.

32

Yeah the tentacles in throne room that were hard coded to be such. That’s your rebuttal?

Melee ignored them and casters had no problems with em… :rofl: :rofl: :rofl:

Mac Static and Nova with max Warmth and Frozen Armor was actually a very viable build for HC… With Lightning Mastery, that’s a 100 point build

33

No sir. ‘Death Maulers’ in Bloody Foothills - one of the popular leveling spots.

34

Your response is again just one class of monsters in act 5 whereas everything now has immunities? It isn’t even remotely the same thing.

Melee always had the shaft in this game. Iron Maiden and Fire Enchanted prior to 1.13 is case in point.

Also, who levels in Bloody Foothills? It was always Baal runs for A5 :rofl::rofl::rofl:

35

In 1.09, you silly goose. You leveled in bloody foothills in normal, because that was the difficulty bump. Otherwise it was cows or cows. Nobody did throne for levels.

I already told you of at least several - Ghosts were physical immune, a type of frenzytaurs was as well. Gloams were always lightning immune, skeletons tended to be poison immune, and so on. Just about every monster had some sort of immunity - solely to curb sorceresses. It was introduced in 1.06, i think.

36

We just leveled in hell cows to roughly 80 then did Baal to 99 :rofl:

Took a couple of hours to rebuild a downed character in HC. Gotta love server instability