Off-the-Wall Mobility Skill Ideas

I realize the likelihood of the developers creating any new mobility skills for D2R is exceedingly low. Just throwing these out there as wild ideas.

Intent is not for each of these ideas to be as good at pure mobility as Teleport. There really isn’t design space for skills that are just as good as Teleport on mobility while still being meaningfully different. So instead these trade a bit of the mobility/speed for other benefits.

  • Assassin:
    • Rework Dragon Flight
      • Allow Dragon Flight’s animation speed to scale with IAS instead of being fixed. Make it so that with enough IAS it’s actually better to use Dragon Flight than to Teleport + use a different Finishing Move.
      • Remove the target requirement. If there is no enemy targeted, you move but don’t perform the attack component. The movement can be a bit slower than Teleport since Teleport doesn’t have an attack component built in, to differentiate the two.
  • Necromancer: Rebirth (Poison and Bone Spells Tab)
    • Consume a corpse to disappear and reappear at its location, healing a percent of your maximum life in the process.
      • Mana cost decreases with skill level.
      • % of maximum life healed starts at 10% at skill level 1 and increases by 0.5% per skill level
      • Animation would be Necromancer’s regular Teleport animation combined with the corpse explosion animation.
  • Druid: Spirit Walk (Summoning Tab)
    • In addition to a small mana cost, consume a % of your maximum Stamina to become a spirit wolf for a couple seconds with dramatically increased movement speed that can pass through enemies and cannot be targeted. “Casting” the skill again while it is active requires no cast time and ends the effect.
      • Mana cost stays the same at all levels.
      • 100% skill FRW during duration
      • % of maximum Stamina consumed to cast starts at 70% at skill level 1 and decreases by 1% per skill level.
      • Duration starts at 1 second at skill level 1 and increases by 0.04 seconds per skill level (1 frame per skill level).
      • Animation would be the existing wereform “morph” blur plus the existing spirit wolf asset.
  • Amazon: Missile’s Path (Passive and Magic Skills Tab)
    • Fire a bow or throw a javelin. If you your arrow or javelin doesn’t collide with an enemy after a number of yards, you appear in its location. If you throw a javelin and it does collide with an enemy, you appear next to that enemy. If you fire an arrow/bolt and it does collide with an enemy, you appear two yards away from the first enemy hit this way (along the path your arrow/bolt traveled) with a weaker version of Decoy between you and the enemy (not as much life as the regular Decoy skill).
      • Attack animation speed would increase with skill level as skill IAS.
      • Animation would be existing shoot/throw plus Teleport and Decoy animations.
  • Barbarian:
    • Just allow Leap’s movement speed to scale with run/walk speed. (Not everything has to be super complicated. :slight_smile: )
  • Paladin: Holy Surge (Combat Skills Tab)
    • Become a mote of holy energy (like Holy Bolt), appearing where the ‘Holy Bolt’ travel distance expires. You pass through all targets - undead included. (You get shunted to the closest vacant space if your travel distance ends inside an enemy.) You don’t actually deal the Holy Bolt skill damage. Instead, casting the skill causes each of your auras - including ones you don’t have active - to pulse, but with only partial effect.
      • Significant mana cost because of the effect.
      • Start with 25% of each of your pulsing auras’ effects at skill level 1, increasing by 1% per skill level.
      • This includes Holy Fire/Freeze/Shock, Sanctuary, Prayer, Cleansing, and Redemption.
      • Animation is just the Holy Bolt animation, plus the aura pulse animations.
4 Likes

I think the concept of TZs was meant to balance the mobility issues for the people complaining about it. Instead of teleporting to traditional grind spots, you take the waypoint, and you’re supposed to just kill everything. TZs needs a lot of work, but it’s a better concept to make more of the game worth farming than to try and create parity with teleport. Teleport is both very broken but impossible to remove from the sorc without making that class extremely bad.

1 Like

Stop those excuses. While being a bit of a glass cannon, the sorceress does pretty solid damage and would be viable even without Teleport.

It would break the class, making it unplayable without top end gear.

The trifecta of balance:

  • Mobility
  • Damage
  • Survivability

In Softcore, the last pillar doesn’t matter.

To illuminate the problem, take the barb: Boy’s main thing is his beefiness (4hp per Vit + BO + Natural Resistances). In order to not create an unstoppable OP murder machine, he must be limited somewhere between Damage and Mobility.
So if you give him Fast Froggy Leap™ his mobility goes up and therefore his damage must go f itself.

That’s why Sorceress, with the best mobility skill in the game, has such terrible damage. Wait…

(I mainly play a Sorceress, this is not a call to nerf Sorceress, just pointing out what you’re claiming is not how the game actually works today.)

If I want zoom zoom diablo I play diablo 3.

Sorc be squishy yo

Dont ever question the Lord again

My sorceress facetanked Dclone 10 times yesterday. (Thank you to the touchdown SoJ seller. Go birds!)

And my barb has enigma

I’m really curious what build-defining item or o-skill granting item you think allowed my Sorceress to be tanky.

Because the answer is just Energy Shield, a plain old Sorceress skill.

1 Like

With mid tier items ES sorc is not tanky at all. Though, it’s much better now with the mana burn fix.

Please take this last sentence into consideration.

You said survivability doesn’t matter and that mobility and damage have to trade off. I showed where mobility and damage do not trade off.

You then brought up survivability. I gave a counterexample of how my sorceress did just fine facetanking Dclone with ES. Now you say nevermind, ignore survivability. That brings us back to the other horn of the argument where sorceress gets both mobility and damage.

You can have the last word because this is going in circles.