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This game is getting a fresh coat of paint. That’s fine, updated for modern systems, this is something I’m very happy with of course.
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Auto gold, uh, sure. To be honest, I don’t know anyone who enjoyed picking up 2 - 8 gold stacks all through normal difficulty. I have had people tell me that it’s a waste of time and focus on gold later. Probably helps console players too.
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Altering the formula for dclone but keeping it tied to soj’s… This is half good half bad. The whole point was to remove the flood of duplicated items from the game. They won’t be getting duplicated, so it will just end up being a sacrificial item that barely anyone uses. At least they recognize the amount needs to be altered.
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Shared stash, cleans up mules and games held open for endless hours to facilitate swapping items around. This is nice.
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Larger stash, even if only a little bit, I’d say is healthy. The game has so many items, and it’s hard to collect class sets without stashing them on mules.
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Cutting down ladder time in half, ouch. I agree with most everyone else, without altering drop rates, this will cut down the market in ladder a lot. This can only be mitigated by the player base jumping up and trading being maintained by those players.
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Fixing “unfair” bugs such as invisible poison clouds… but nothing else.
This is where I have to stop and say why? You are already adding quality of life features, you are fixing a few bugs you deem unfair, but intend to leave the rest of the game exactly as it is?
I won’t say it’s lazy as they could do something later, but it feels like avoiding work, and ire from people who want the game to stay the same. I say why not consider the fact that the game has gone without updates for so many years? There are some very fundamentally bad bugs in the game. For the purist crowd I ask, are you truly happy with your game full of bugs? Would it really hurt so much if they fixed them? Just by doing what little they plan on, it’s already an update. This already isn’t “exactly” the Diablo 2 you know and remember. An old game getting an update a decade late, is still getting an update. Updates should absolutely touch on bugs and improve on things the developers feel need attention.
I just saw the bug list posted and I can imagine how some getting fixed would probably require certain monsters or bosses get balance changes to make up for flawed equations in the game. I can also imagine there are many things only certain people will care about. As for myself, I would love for the Trang-Oul’s transformation bugs to be fixed.
Where do you guys stand on the issue? Fix the bugs (including ones that haven’t been declared as unfair), or keep them all?
Also I don’t want this to be an argument thread so, for more conversation, what bugs are you most interested in seeing fixed?
I don’t want to see any bugs/balances fixed until at least a full season of data can be recorded. It would be stupidity to try and fix things when it will be running on what are hopefully much more legit servers
That’s a fair assessment, could even include a seasons run on the alpha test. I imagine the old game doesn’t have the ability to track data and they have the opportunity to do so now. Not a bad idea.
Especially since they will hopefully do something about all the bots which will have a major impact on the item economy. They will need to see how things work without botting and all the other nonsense before knowing how to tweak things
I imagine bot makers will still be attempting to operate but they are fixing duplicating bugs. I just hope attempts to stop bots won’t impact players. I recall being locked out of games for rapidly leaving and joining games while trying to follow Diablo or Baal runs. I’d rather not deal with that again.
I am part of the “purist” crowd generally I suppose but I agree with some of that for sure. “bugs” being fixed I am okay with. It’s only when the scope of bugs being fixed turns into features that aren’t bugs but just stuff people think are unfair/balance issues that I don’t like it changing just yet.
A feature that isn’t a bug but maybe had unintended consequences but that the dev’s left in the game? Keep it not rebalancing some of that stuff was intentional.
An actual bug? Fix it absolutely. But rebalancing stuff isn’t fixing bugs. Fixing bugs is fixing bugs.
Well as an example, the bug list mentioned mana drain monsters doing double the damage. If you fix the bug in the equation, that monster is no longer balanced (as intended) to do enough damage. There are probably a few edge cases like this. I have no issue with the bug being fixed and the monsters in question getting a little damage buff to make the difference. Things of that nature. That should keep the monster in line with how difficult it was intended to be while fixing the faulty equation.
Oh okay, interesting example.
MB actually does 255 times the intended value to your mana pool. You can confirm this is a bug because earlier versions of the game MB acted 1:1 life, mana damage per hit. It was randomly changed without any patch notes or addressing.
On the overall topic I like the approach they are taking now. Address them on a one by one basis and fix what they truly think is a mechanical or numbers bug like MB. While leaving ‘quirks’ like eth socketing in game.
Yeah, if the damage was inflated by a random change, I’d be interested in seeing the fix and subsequent balance change. Would it be more physical or elemental or magic damage? Hard choices for every situation maybe, but worth it. I also think it’s good to keep certain things like you mentioned. I was only aware of that in the last year of regular playtime I had.
I would like the mana burn bug to be fixed. It means sorceresses with energy shield can relax more.
That certainly makes sense. I don’t have a lot of experience with taking damage to mana but I always thought it sounded cool.
You should try! It’s pretty fun the amount of mana regen you can get dumping points into energy instead of vitality, then using frostburn gauntlets and a merc with an insight polearm. I think it helps that my favourite skill is frozen orb and that leaves lots of skill points to spare.
I imagine so. I’ll have to keep my eye out when I get started again.