Many people and some llamas claim that runewords destroyed D2. That should be nerfed, that don’t match or add to the game. And they are all extremely wrong:
Runewords expanded the game’s itemization without harming rares, uniques and sets. When you kill baal in hell, you roll a TC87 which can drop any item in the game. If runewords don’t exist, the developers would have to create new unique, sets, or new prefix/suffix for rares and magic. For example, if they created a weapon that was an alternative to Grief, that was unique, the rarity of all items will be increased.
In conclusion, runewords give the chance for new items to appear without causing such a big impact in relation to the rarity of other items.
Runewords power are equivalent to their acquisition cost. If they aren’t, it’s because they are a bandaid for some major problem in the game (lack of movement skills, low base weapon damage and others)
Runewords improve the game’s itemization. Each build may or may not use runewords. It doesn’t necessarily make it mandatory. Provide alternatives. How many times have I beat hell with the barbarian using only rare and magical items. Spent infinite gold gambling rares.
Don’t judge the old diablo 2. Many things in this game are made in a time where everything was very limited. Many choices were made regarding server or client computer performance.
Diablo 2 has one of the best itemizations of any RPG, especially for the time it was designed. You have many rare, magical, sets, uniques, crafted and runewords options. They all have their advantages and disadvantages and the main thing: their cost is equivalent to their obtained power.
Magical items can have many staff mods and you can add facets to them.
Rare items can be more powerful than uniques and runewords.
Yes there runewords like nigma, infi, spirit, but many of them depend of the build.
Well, CTA is a must have in many non barb builds to get an huge life pool.
Anyway runewords added another layer of itemization to the game.
Some weapons Runewords are a bandaid for the low base weapon damage.
Mosaic its not the problem its MA skill tree itself.
Naming random items doesn’t change the fact that the runewords are the most powerful und game changing items in the game. Most of your named items are only viable in combination with runewords or else they lose even more to runewords.
they and the overpowered uniques from LOD removed rares from most slots. They reduced itemization to some cookie cutter items.
Wrong. If they create a new unique for a base item which didn’t have a unique so far, no change of rarity will happen. Before that, if you’d rolled that non-existent unique, a rare with triple durability was dropped instead.
Runewords themselves didn’t ruin the game, I would say certain runewords made itemization take a major hit. Enigma is probably the best example of this. Even without teleport, it is an amazing armor. Significantly better than anything else you can find for the majority of builds. This basically gives you the mindset of why would you use anything else and thus all other armor is discarded. This is the problem certain 1.10+ runewords introduced and what Llama was trying to point out in his video. Saying they “ruined the game” is just clickbait. I mean, when he talked about GG rares being the meta, he showed a rare 405 ed legendary mallet which couldn’t even spawn prior to 1.10. Mistakes were made in his video but that is the point he was trying to get across.
When players who played before LoD was even released talk about runeword ruining the game, it is mostly about the aspect of team play. You can have Teleport, Meditation, Conviction, Battle Orders and many more things on one char. To be in a Baal run with other players makes simply no sense from a certain point onwards.
Of course, even in a patch like 1.09 there were builds who totally destroy certian areas, e.g. Nova-Sorc or Javazon in the Cow level. Difference is that there was plenty to do in the game, mainly leveling up all different characters to a higher level (which was easier in 1.09) because, after all, there were no synergies nor Skill or Stats-Resets in the game.
So if you wanted to farm cows with a Nova-sorc but do pvp with a FO Sorc you literally had to level up two chars and not just use a throw away item (token) to do so.
Now, the later part has not directly to do with runewords, but is just one more example of why having a group of friends who let you leech and rush you and vice versa was important and Diablo 2 was much more of a social game.
You don’t need this anymore because now there is just a single-char bots destroying CS and letting you leech and this powercreep is very much because of runewords that allow you to be everything at the same time.
The 1.10 runewords were originally meant to be gated behind insanely low high rune drop rates for the legitimate player. The vast majority of players weren’t meant to have high runes, let alone multiples of them and the correct ones to create the overpowered runewords. Blizzard intended for the ultra overpowered runewords to only exist in the hands of the few dedicated players who spent a lot of time playing and trading to slowly work up to build the unobtainable.
Botters and dupers of course worked around the problem, sold… err rather “supplied” the community with them and everyone got used to the overpowered 1.10 runewords being “the norm” since Blizzard couldn’t stop the botting… Eventually Blizzard threw in the towel and raised the high rune drop rates by a huge margin with v1.13C. This of course had little effect on the botting, and now it’s significantly easier for the legitimate player to create these overpowered originally intended to be unobtanium runewords.
Botters and dupers pushed the powercreep to the edge by “supplying” the community with botted and duped runes, Blizzard eventually gave up the fight with the bots and gave powercreep the final push over the edge by vastly increasing the rune drop rates.
Sorry bro, but most of the 1.10 runewords in the llama video did, in fact, ruin the game.
I could go into specifics and details, but others have already said those things in this thread.
Maybe just take some solace in knowing you’re wrong, and D2/LOD was a much more social game before Brevik and Co. “fixed” a bunch of problems that didn’t exist.
I love Brevik as much as the next D2 fan, but he really messed up with a large portion of the 1.10 patch. Even when the patch was new, quite a few people either went back to Classic (non expansion) or quit playing completely.
The game population never recovered completely after 1.10 dropped, based on anecdotal evidence of the lobbies across USEast and USWest over a couple of years of maintaining characters.
Those of us who had played prior to 1.10 didn’t even realize the value of something like Enigma. I had a friend gift one to me for all the GG rares and uniques I’d given him over the previous year. I threw it on the ground in rogue’s encampment, and he expressed horror and dismay before taking it back.
I’d kill for a Jah right about now, now that I know just how powerful Enigma truly is.
You can dispute facts all you want, but prior to 1.10, rares, sets, and uniques were “endgame”. Try doing endgame with a windhammer or the IK set nowadays, you’ll get laughed at 10 out of 10 times.
Same with a hellslayer or for 1handers, using something like Baranar’s Star.
In a simple way, when the game draws which item will drop, it looks at a table of items. The more items there are in it, the lower the chances of getting a certain item.
The same would apply with new rare and magical properties. It would become something similar to D4 rares.
I’ve been playing since 1.08. Diablo 2 with each patch that was released, the game changed drastically. You can state that there are multiple diablos one for each patch version.
But runewords are the best or only the option in the weapon and armor slots.
Shields and helms currently have other better alternatives, such as rare tiaras, shako, griff, monarch of deflecting with facets, magic tiaras with facets, stormshield and many others.
I don’t understand why they always complained so much that runewords ruined the game when there are alternatives for them and they are often superior. The problem is not runewords but the lack of good alternatives, low base weapon damage, unique armors obsolete and other problems.
Anyway, Diablo 2 currently has several versions, remakes, mods. You can choose which one is your favorite.
There are still private servers that run old versions, a few years ago I played 1.10.
Ornicus has it right. The game engine picks the base items first: Dagger, Phase Blade, Demonhide Sash, Scroll of Identify, etc. Then if it’s an item that can have different rarities (like Magic, Rare, Unique, Set, etc), it then checks for that. Therefore if you add a new Unique (or Set) version of an item that currently doesn’t have one, it doesn’t dilute the loot pool at all.
For example if you added a new Unique Conquest Sword (there is currently no Unique Conquest Sword), it wouldn’t decrease the chances of any other items dropping, except for a triple durability Rare Conquest Sword. On the other hand, if you added a new Unique Cryptic Sword, the only drop chance effect it would have is making Frostwind harder to find, but it wouldn’t effect any other item’s drop chances.
However, if you did add additional magic item affixes, it would somewhat dilute the chances of the current affixes being rolled. Likewise, if you added new base items like a new extra set of dagger class weapons more powerful than Kris daggers, that would also dilute the loot pool, even if there were no Unique or Set versions of those items.
All of which require as much luck as winning millions in a lottery (literally - just use a drop calculator to check how rare such items with good rolls are).
On the other hand, you just need low-mid runes, such as Dol, Io, Tal, Thul, Ort and Amn and you have a decent wand and shield for a necro.
And, as TheDarkJedi wrote, even ultra rare HRs became common because of cheating.
The problem with runewords is their power and acessibility.
If the new affixes were better than the currently available ones, that’d be a beneficial change, in terms of making magic/rare items usable again. And to compensate that dilution, some unwanted affixes could be removed (such as stamina, ele damage on wands and staves, knockback on melee weapons).
Well you are both right/wrong kind of. Yes runewords expanded itemization, the issue is that certain uniques/set/rare are just way too bad and some runewords are overpowered too much. So its the combination of both. But its not issue of runewords not expanding itemization. Its issue of balance.
I dont think many people would be even playing D2 if there was no lod with changes it came with later like 1.10. Lool how many people play lod and how many classic.
1.10 ≠ LoD. LoD was released with the patch 1.08 (technically 1.07, but 1.08 was released right away). In pre-1.10 LoD runewords were not that OP.
And since LoD has more content, no surprise that players prefer LoD over Classic.
Up until 1.10 a lot of people preferred classic over LOD. Act 5 is trash, druid and sin were some of the least played classes and the overpowered itemization made the game a joke.
LOD was great for casuals that struggled to beat the game in classic. 1.10 made classic so undesireable that everybody I played with either stopped or moved on to LOD.
Just look at the uniques they introduced with LOD. They are already crazy overpowered. Arreats face had more skills than an entire classic barb.
The classic playerbase would have been a lot bigger if they just stopped with the LOD patches for classic after 1.06 or at least 1.09.
Classic wasn’t perfect, but it was a lot more balanced than LOD ever was.