Melee class Attack Rating System Core Problem

PTR Feedback
1

Let me lay this out in a straightforward way.

The Attack Rating vs Defense formula in Diablo II hasn’t changed since release, and at this point it’s pretty clear that Blizzard Entertainment isn’t going to touch it. It’s too deeply tied into everything. So instead of talking about redesigning it, the only realistic approach is working around it. Now, the core issue is simple.

Casters effectively play with 100% hit chance, while melee is capped at 95%—and in practice, you don’t even get close to that without heavy investment. Even on a geared character, you’re usually sitting somewhere around 5000 AR with only a few charms. You can stack %AR from skills, but it barely moves your actual hit rate. The return just isn’t there. This feels even worse early on. If you start as a physical character, you’re constantly missing. That slows your clear speed, but more importantly, it just feels bad to play. So what do players do? They lean on flat AR. The best example is Angelic Wings with Angelic rings.

The level-based AR scaling is strong enough to actually fix the problem. But then you run into another issue—you’re locking both your amulet and ring slots just to function. That’s not really a choice, it’s a forced setup. At higher levels, this turns into a trade-off. You either keep Angelic for consistency, or you switch to Highlord’s Wrath for IAS and Deadly Strike. In reality, almost everyone takes Highlord’s, because the damage gain is too big to ignore. Which means the AR issue never really goes away—you just accept it.

The reason this keeps happening comes down to scaling. %AR doesn’t do much because it’s tied to your existing value, and the formula itself limits how much impact it has. Flat AR, on the other hand, directly increases your base and then benefits from % multipliers on top of that. That’s why things like Angelic or Fool’s mods feel so much stronger. The system ends up favoring flat AR heavily. And this isn’t just a PvE issue. In PvP, %AR actually widens the gap—players who already have high AR benefit more.

Flat AR is much more stable. If you add the same amount to everyone, the relative difference barely changes. For example, going from 13,000 to 17,000 AR versus 23,000 to 27,000 AR against a target with 30,000 Defense only results in about a 1–1.5% difference in hit chance. So lower AR players get some help, but you’re not suddenly breaking balance at the top end. There’s also the itemization problem. Physical builds are already locked into a fixed BIS setup: Grief for weapon, Highlord’s Wrath, Guillaume’s Face, and Gore Rider. Those slots aren’t really flexible.

The only places you can realistically adjust are rings, belts, and gloves. So if you want a practical solution without touching the core formula, it’s pretty straightforward: add more flat AR, especially “+AR per level,” to those flexible slots. That way, players can solve AR without giving up their core damage pieces, and you’re not forcing everyone into Angelic just to make their build function. At the end of the day, this isn’t just a numbers issue. It’s a scaling problem combined with rigid itemization.

If the system can’t be changed, then at least give players enough tools to work around it without locking their entire build

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I’ve realized the same thing.

A VERY simple and efficient way to buff all weapon-based classes/builds would be to give every weapon-damage based skill (jab, zeal, whirlwind, multishot, fury) a simple scaling. For every hard point in these skills give them, IN ADDITION to their current % AR/Damage, +2 damage and +10 attack rating (both flat) per skill level. So a level 20 jab would have “adds 40 damage” and “+200 attack rating” in addition to its current bonuses.

This REALLY helps these classes during a play through (at +40 damage and +200 AR is a huge boost), but as you get great gear these bonuses diminish. It also pushes more of the damage into the skill level (less dependency on the weapon itself).

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An another way is boost the affect of giving one point investing in DEX. RN, dex is not useful for AR.
People put the minimum requirement for equip and then dump in vitality (specially in HC). Energy is only used by ES sorceress or singer barb. If dex had another values than blocking rate, it would be used more often for melee class.

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Great description of a problem woth attack rating. Maybe it could work but..

You forgot about even bigger problem in a chance to hit formula which is level. It is the level part that hurts playthrough character the most. Monster will have much higher level than your character always since act 5 normal. And I mean… always always. Grinding to match them is an insane amount of time.

And the best example. When you are about to finish hell you are most of the time around level 75, max 80. If you fight hell Baal at this time whose level is 99 and chance to block is 55% you can have 5millions of attack rating. It doesnt matter you are going to miss him most of the time.

I do not see any other solution for chance to hit than completely changing a formula. Its just not possible to fix that. I dont care it has been like this for 26 years. IT DOES NOT WORK.

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That goes without saying

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I would add maybe, the minimum AR should start at 40/50 %. Missing 50 % of your shot is already super punishing with block chance. When you reach 95 %, you should ignore the block chance.
5 % as a minimum is just ridiculous.

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Dex is only really useful for amazons and assassins as it gives of weapon ed to claws, bows, daggers. The AR portion is 5 per point. You could double that to 10 and it would actually reward using claws/daggers which have much less base damage than other weapons and still be balanced.

Other weapons would still have issue like big 2hers because str for most builds isn’t useful enough compared to dex/vit. Buffing dex would only exacerbate the str problem.

The str problem can be mediated by introducing better strength scaling to weapons which already exists for maces (hammers like thunder maul have 1.1% str scaling). You can increase that to 1.4-1.5 for 2h hammers, 1.4 for 2h axes, 1.3 for 2h swords/spears/polearms (scaling dependent on bases ideally).

What this means is that at 1.5 you’re essentially getting 50% extra ed from 100 str. This could incentivize pure str builds.

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Or even better: have crushing blows bypass block. Mechanically this would mean an attack that follows a crushing blow bypasses block.

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True, this plus the minimum should around 40 or 50 %. if you have 40 % chance to hit, you will struggle anyway. I don’t hate the AR and chance to hit, but the system needs tweak. I hate the always hit + splash on d3/d4.

On d2r, you have trade-off. Magic always hit, but there are immunes (except magic immune)
Melee have less immune, but chance to hit. Both need balances (more magic immune, less contraints on melee builds).

Edit : but knowing blizzard, there will fix the game by adding splashing and always hit. The current devs don’t know their games. Just look at d4, instead of balancing, they add difficulties, it is just sad.

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ZweiDiablo a reply to That could also be a good approach, but it would likely disrupt the balance too much. It would devalue small, grand, and large charms, as well as some stat-related items. Also, if AR increases too much, high-defense builds would lose their purpose. A balanced compromise seems necessary.

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Yup, there are no real easy solutions, but something has to be done, that’s for sure.

  • Maybe, like JPRG74 said, crushing blows bypasses block. So, already, you don’t have to fight against two mechanisms.
  • Maybe, you gain some basic AR every levels.
  • -Some skills like jab and double swing definitely need more AR. Maybe, sacrifice could have a huge buff of AR, since you already have a huge trade-off (your health). But again, the notion of balance is important.
    -In some games, adding strength increase your armor for a warrior. Maybe, it could increases slightly your AR (not as dex, but like half : 5 AR for each pts in strengh, 10 pts for dex). I just feel since D2 classic, the stats are that useful anymore.
    Before, having a plus +5 stats was a huge change. Now, with a lot of skillers and strong gear, your basic stats has less value on the overall scheme.
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I read your take, and I get where you’re coming from. But if the damage gained per point of Strength gets changed, then Grief just ends up getting stronger too. That basically forces people to keep using Grief, which is already overused and kind of stale. Nerfing Grief right now would just make it weaker than it used to be, so instead of a straight nerf, I think it’s better to buff other weapons. If you want items that can actually compete with Grief, a good approach would be to improve the effectiveness of off-weapon enhanced damage by increasing base weapon damage. Grief’s biggest advantage is that +400 flat damage—combined with a super fast base, it turns even low base weapons into monsters. A Phase Blade with +400 damage is insane. Honestly, I’m just tired of using this damn icicle-looking sword

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Not really. Phase blades are 136dex bases and most builds pump vit afterwards. Grief is so popular because the phaseblade base’s downside is nonexistent with grief’s flat damage, so you can hit the min stat requirements and focus on vit.

Almost no build focuses on str because the benefits are outweighed by simply using fortitude and/or a phoenix.

Plus and this is important, my suggestions are to modify the str scaling based on weapon base, meaning a phase blade would remain at what it already is. I’m only recommending two-handed bases have their strength scaling modified so they are more useful. At worst it just incentivizes barbs to run colossus blades/swords for more damage but for barbs the meta should be with those weapon types over puny phase blades.

I also have other suggestions for the barb’s weapon masteries I made over in the barb forum that will because i really think these are good ideas and the math shows that it is nowhere near op, makes leveling barb easier, while providing a decent endgame boost.

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Grief has to be nerfed anyway. You buff bases - grief is buffed too.

In my opinion flat damage on Grief should be tuned down by an average number added to elite bases damage.

Lets say. If phase blade gets additional 50 damage then max roll on grief should be 350 not 400

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Its already been done by mods. You can nerf the flat damage to 250-300 and it becomes top tier but not the only choice.

Griefs flat damage isnt the only reason its good.

It has ignore target defense, -defense%, deadly strike, and even damage to demons. All of these mods make it way better than anything else especially on a phase blade base.

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Butchercat reply to

First, it’s true that if the weapon’s base damage increases, Grief also gets buffed accordingly. However, the increase is very small.

For example, if a Phase Blade’s base damage is increased from 35–40 to 50–55, the actual damage gain from Grief is only around 15–20.

But when base weapon damage increases, %ED (on-weapon enhanced damage) scales multiplicatively. Let’s say a Phase Blade with 35–40 base damage has 300% ED. That results in about 140–160 damage. Now, if the base damage is increased to 50–55, the result becomes 200–220. The increase grows exponentially.

On top of that, if the weapon is ethereal, the base damage is multiplied by 1.5. Because of this huge scaling effect, runewords, rares, or uniques with high %ED can benefit far more than Grief from base damage increases

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One idea I’ve thought would be an interesting way to get more flat AR is to have attack skills also grant some amount of flat AR per level. Testing/math could determine the appropriate amount, but say you also gained 200 flat AR from lvl 20 WW in addition to the 145% AR, it would help get you flat AR increases for the %AR from skills and items to scale off of better, while also not blocking existing item slots.

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I think it would be great if melee skills had this built in by default, but the problem is that it could seriously disrupt balance for PvP players. So if it were added, it would definitely need careful tuning. Still, getting it from skills would be really nice.

I’m kind of wishfully thinking here, but whether Blizzard will actually do it is another question. I just hope they make some changes to this situation where melee characters are basically high risk with little to no return.

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I think there are ways to solve this with gear. Its just that good ar gear and charms are stupidly rare. Metalgrid should be buffed, they could make an ar belt with fools mod for example.

I always made the suggestion they should make a unique grandcharm that rolls fools mod on it but with a penalty to your defense (after calculations) like 50-75% less defense.

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Hey, if you reduce defense by 50–75%, it basically makes defense stats and defense skills meaningless. I don’t think anyone would use that. The penalty is way too big compared to the benefit—you’d be losing around 4–5% hit chance and 20–30% chance to avoid attacks. That’s a penalty charm that increases the difficulty simply by taking up inventory space.