It provided players with options to either generalise - which usually meant being able to handle monsters with different immunities - or to specialise by increasing DPS output for monsters not immune to your attacks. Whether or not people want to get nit picky about the implementation, this does the job of exactly what’s described above.
The primary purpose for the synergies was to get players to level progression skills for the bonus to the end game skills. However, systems that tend to have these bonus damage systems, are flawed in the fact that balancing is done with the bonus damages in mind, hence it’s not truly bonus damage, but true damage. Meaning that if the implementation was done poorly, and not on an equal level across the board, you create a huge disparity in balance which is exactly what happened.
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regardless, they need to do a few more patches that don’t start out with truly horrific idea, before i will trust them to make this kind of sweeping change.
and i say that even though as a feral fury wolf druid who basically has no synergies to start with, it really wont affect me much if they do.
they need to work their way up to earnings the trust to make changes this big, by consistently performing good… You aren’t going to teach someone to drive on a Rolls Royce.
for now they aren’t at that point yet…
not for me anyways.
Oh I’m sure they’re no where close to being done “resurrecting” the game. Buckle up, we might be in for a bumpy ride.
Feedback is important, so do be sure to share it.
if i see them all a loot filter, add another 4x10 of inventory space that charms wont work in… give us some bug fixes. fix fury being interruptible, fix feral rage. fix cain placement in act 5. change firewall back to d2:R launch before they “fixed” it… rework spirit of the barbs to have - physical resist aura. get rid of the duration scaling on rabies. make it so the character screen properly displayed grief type +to damage
do all that, (or at least most of it), and dont break something massive along the way, and i’ll trust them enough to remove synergies and change the skill damage.
but we arn’t there yet
I’d say tone down the amount of synergies needed. For deep investments it shouldn’t require more than 2 other skills. For hybrid skills 1 other skill should be standard. Also give a small tree wide buff for any points spent on skills in that tree to give incentive for people to go single element rather than just picking the best spells from each tree.
Weaker skills should be given more utility (cc, character buff, monster debuff) than powerful skills so there is a reason synergize them over strong spells. The reason why synergies were created was because there were so many bad skills that no one wanted to used, everyone just specced into the most powerful skills of each tree.
I think its bad idea, synergies are good to balancing skills well across the 99 character levels. Its a way to not have too weak or strong skills.
d2 was rekt in patch 1.10, nothing can be done about it.
Very strong statement. I’ll admit, it’s definitely true without change.
Immunties were not added in 1.10 they already were in the game since, I think 1.07 maybe earlier.
I don’t think we should completely remove synergies, but maybe reduce the amount of needed synergy points. I think Nova and forb are good examples of synergy amounts.
It would reduce the amount per skill and allow more secondary options.
If you further allow different skill pathways you could further reduce wasted points and allow more decisions.
You would have to rebalance skill damage and could allow new synergy options for skills that have none.
On second thought… The absence of fire, or rather heat leads to the freezing of water… So there’s that connection. 
I think the bigger issue is not synergies, but firstly the skills used as synergies being so bad you’d never use them.
And secondly the fact that synergies are often to dominant, although this concept might become less important with the Sunder Charms.
With immunities you often would like a second skill to deal a different type of damage, but because of synergies you would often not be able to pump that skill enough always being a few points short.
With these charms a second skill will no longer be needed and gear should be focused on reducing resistance if you want to make your build as optimized as possible, so a different element would not really help here anymore.
This point could have been solved with a limiting the number of synergy skills to 1 or having synergy power per skill reduced to a very low amount for example if talking damage, no more than 1% increased damage, likely even as little as 0,5% per point and give every skill at least 5 synergies.
First option will limit the number of points spend to 20.
The second would make it feel less impactful to skip a synergy to take a secondary attack skill.
However not sure if it really matters anymore with those stupid charms as now focusing on 1 element with gear and skills is basically the only effective way.
Making all skills useful would also be a way to make synergies feel like less of a burden and more like a secondary skill.
What I mean is something like, why would you use Firebolt ever again after getting Fireball at a decent level, you could make Firebolt have superior single target damage or have them become guided, piercing or both (yeah weird stuff, just examples of what could be useful).
Change the synergies, say Hydra has Firebolt and Fireball, 2 direct damage spells, you might change Fireball into Enchant so the Sorc could still fling Firebolts if wanting to up the damage, but could use enchant on her merc.
What we want to do, it seems clear to me that any change that can become a good one would start with acquiring new dev’s, as long as these dev’s are here any fix, change or whatever will end up in disaster.
I mean I fully expect something like this by now; “We fixed the shapeshift attack speed by requiring less IAS to reach maximum APS possible, we achieved this by halving the max APS possible. To compensate for the loss of damage we doubled the damage dealt by Blizzard!”
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Even with synergies you have so many bad skills… How many Sorceresses do you see use Firebolt? Charged Bolt? How about Assassin’s using Shadow Warrior? Shock Web? Charged Bolt Sentry??
Just because you don’t understand the game fully, doesn’t mean something is bad. There are plenty of reasons why synergies are a good thing. It also allows for more unique builds and play styles. This rant from the op sounds more like you just don’t want to properly learn the game.
It also makes sense from a story telling/logic aspect. As you get stronger with 1 spell/skill it opens up new ones and the training then in turn makes the weaker skill stronger as well. So it makes sense that they would synergize with one another making each more powerful.
Replace synergies with immunities. Oh look at that, same argument, and Blizzard did take out immunities with sundering 
Nothing you said holds any relevance to the points I made. It’s simple you don’t understand the game and are complaining about a non issue and in fact one that makes the game more unique and dynamic as it enables more play styles.
Instead of forcing players that want to play Fireball to max out Firebolt, Fire Mastery, and Meteor as synergies, removing synergies will open up more doors so you can go Fireball + Frozen Orb + Lightning for example. Or Fireball + Glacial Spike + Energy Shield. Right now thanks to synergies, it punishes variety rather than enforces variety.
… Which would utterly ruin the balancing of the game as it stands. That is why synergies are in place. It allows you to make multiple play styles, but doesn’t allow one character to be too overpowered as certain characters would have huge advantages over others. and actually create real meta’s where everyone is running around with 2-3 builds because none of the others can compete. And then you would just be complaining about that.
You are absolutly right. But thats result of poor game balance and bad skill design. These skills arent bad because of synergy mechanism.
For example ice bolt has terrible dmg scalling. And other issues like being slow and single target.