Suggested changes to Half Freeze, Charges

General Discussion
1

First, I noticed no one has commented on my suggestions to improve the chance to hit of base items:
Suggested Changes to Base Weapons for 2.5 - General Discussion - Diablo 2 Resurrected Forums (blizzard.com)

I thought that at the least the proposal to make the plus AR on Superior Weapons be from 100 to 300, instead of the current laughable 1 to 3, would be universally supported. Maybe it’s a bit of a boring topic, but really if you support increasing the ways to gain chance to hit of non-caster builds could you comment and support it?

Half Freeze Duration:

There are a lot of items that give Half Freeze Duration, but that aspect of the item is essentially useless and discounted when evaluating them because you need Cannot Be Frozen.

One solution would be to replace all Half Freeze Duration with Cannot Be Frozen.

But I think the better solution would be to make it so Half Freeze Duration stacks. That way if you have 2 items equipped with Half Freeze Duration, it’s the same as having Cannot Be Frozen equipped.

That would suddenly make different equipment choices more viable.

Charges

On the subject of charges, first of all, I think most items need the number of charges drastically increase. Usually at least by a full order of magnitude. If using charges is going to be viable, then you need to be able to not need to recharge before you’ve finished a goal. Although I suppose that might need to be assessed item by item.

A more general problem is the cost of recharging those items. Simply increasing the number of charges will help, because it makes the cube recipe more viable.

However, something I’ve noticed - maybe I’m wrong and feel free to correct me if I am, but it seems that the cost of recharging items and item rarity is intertwined.

Basically, it costs more to repair a rare or unique compared to repairing a plain white item. Which is fine, that makes sense. But then from what I can tell recharging charges on a simple magic item with charges as the only affix costs less than recharging the same charges on a unique. At least that seems to be how it is when using teleport charges on Naj’s Puzzler vs a simple Teleport Staff.

Can the cost of recharging be broken out of the “rarity” surcharge so that recharging costs are only based on the number of charges?

And finally, the level of the charges and/or type of spells needs to be reviewed. Because while lvl 1 Amp Damage charges are very useful, as are Teleport Charges, things like lvl 4 Charged Bolt are definitely not.

2 Likes
2

Seems like good changes

3

I assume you want more teleport charges on amulets and staffs? Both contain more than enough charges to quickly get to Chaos, Throne, Nilh and Summoner. As for repair cost it’s easily mitigated by selling items from kills and using the Cube with Ort rune and a chipped gem. I think it’s 80K to repair a 25 charge amulet. That’s 2 necro wands and the gold picked up at kill sites. If tele charges are you biggest concern, I suggest conservation by including running where you can.

Damage skill charges are silly, and curse charges certainly have enough, with Gavel of Pain being the only exception, but even then, it works.

Not gonna lie though, I’d love a dagger with 80 lvl 5 amp damage charges. Whoooo doggy, that’d make melee characters king of Sanctuary!

4

Umm… I’m not particularly focused on teleport charges. I mentioned them because I figured it’s the charges that people have the most experience with. And what I was using that example to point out is that recharging the same number of charges costs more on unique or rare items compared to an item that only has charges and no other affixes.

This is because repair costs are determined by an equation that makes repairs to rare items cost more. I was suggesting that the cost of recharging an item be pulled out of that equation and added later so that recharging a charge costs the same regardless of the rarity of the item the charges are attached too. This would potentially benefit things like Metalgrid and Wisp Projector.

Teleport charges (and to a lesser extent Lower Resist and Life Tap charges) are used because they have enough value to justify using only a few of them in any run.

I was actually thinking more about things like the Runeword Nadir, which gives 9 Cloak of Shadow charges. Since Cloak of Shadows doesn’t effect bosses, that means you’d be using it on mobs, but 9 charges before needing to recharge basically means you can’t use it on every group of monsters. It’s something that ought to be giving you significant utility, but doesn’t really hold up because you have to recharge too often.

Sort of like how it used to be with depending on throwing weapons and having to constantly go back to town to repair them so you could replenish them and then go back to killing. That was just a huge fun killer for throwing builds. Similarly, charges need to be of sufficient number that you don’t spend half your time running back to town to refill them.

Teleport charges are okay because you have 52 charges and Teleport can be used at key points to get around obstacles providing a huge benefit for the use of only 3 to 4 charges during a magic find run. Even when used when playing through a game, you’ll probably use maybe one or two dozen in a playing session. You don’t have to constantly go back to town to refill.

Most other types of charges need a lot more to be usable. Consider for example Zeal, which is typically lvl 4 with 30 charges. Lvl 4 is actually high enough to give you the max number of 5 hits, but not high enough to give you significant AR or ED. But if you already have a source of AR and damage (like say, an Enchant Sorceress), then lvl 4 Zeal would work great for you.

Except 30 charges is much much too little. That would allow dealing with one, maybe two groups of monsters. 300 charges would probably be enough for one short magic find run. 3000 charges would be enough to get you through a play session or two and thus at that point reach viability to build something around.

That’s the kind of thing I’m getting at. There are some builds that could be made using charges that just struggle because the charges are too few.

Of course there are other charges that need a much deeper reassessment. Things like lvl 4 Fireball, or lvl 4 Bash. None of which are going to be used currently, because those are only useful at low lvls, when you are not finding enough money to support recharging at all.

By the way, where can I find a dagger with any lvl 5 amp damage charges? From what I can tell, daggers can’t spawn with that.

5

Charges costs are for sure determined by 2 things.

  1. What the charged skill is.
  2. How many charges the item has.

later I’m going to test your theory that items with skills are going to increase repair costs of charges. Generally speaking, less number of charges the more the cost of the charge to repair.

Examples

Angel’s Amulet of Twister (Magic): 25 charges of level 2 Twister. Each charge costs $12,337 to repair.
Death Talisman Amulet (Rare): 22 charges of level 1 Twister. Each charge costs $7124 to repair.

Andariel’s Visage: 20 charges of level 3 Venom. Each charge cost $9740 to repair.
Arachnid’s Mesh: 11 charges of level 3 Venom. Each charge costs $17710 to repair.

Rune word Bramble: 33 charges of level 13 Spirit of Barbs. Each charge costs $8564 to repair.
Wisp Projector ring: 11 charges of level 7 Spirit of Barbs. Each charge cost $21,738 repair.

Rune word Smoke: 18 charges of level 6 Weaken. Each charges costs $2236 to repair.
Rare dagger: 112 charges of level 7 Weaken. Each charge costs $393 to repair.

Side note: I wish Spirit charges were a timed charge, because as they are they are useless.

Cloak of Shadow’s defense bonus to the characters and defense reduction on monsters still works on uniques, champions and bosses. Which is where the helm is most often used by speed runners and barbarian nerds like me. I use it sometimes for normal Duriel then I sell it after making a crafted helm or Lore/Radiance. I’ve seen speed runners using it on Ancients.

6

Interesting, thank you for testing some of these things. (Right now I can’t test anything because the game crashes for me as soon as I get to the character selection screen - which is probably why I’m posting, only way to get my D2 fix.)

At least one thing ought to change then about charges, the cost of recharging 1 charge shouldn’t be different for charges that have the same level but different number of charges.

Although that seems strange then that Wisp Projector Spirit of Barbs costs so much more to recharge. Is that a property of being on a ring? And why do Smoke charges for Weaken cost more to repair than charges on a dagger?

Seems to me that if the developers want charges to be something people actually use (outside of extremely useful things like Teleport) they need some standardized cost for using those charges.

What do you mean by a “timed charge,” do you mean that charges should recharge over time?

Also, are you sure about the defense reduction from Cloak of Shadows working on bosses? That’s what I thought too, but just last week an Assassin kicker told me that it doesn’t anymore. Or at least that it doesn’t work on Ubers, and I extrapolated that to mean bosses and maybe super uniques in general.

I don’t play Assassin often enough to know if things changed or not.

I’ve never had any problem killing normal Duriel with a Barb without Cloak of Shadows. But then I can’t recall ever having problems with chance to hit in normal difficulty unless I fail to upgrade my equipment in Act 2. Maybe because I’m not a speed runner and so I have better equipment by Duriel?

7

I have no idea why they did it the way they did it. Maybe it had something to do with what they were smoking in the early 2000s.

Some charges to some characters certainly provide a great benefit, while other charges seem to be there just to inspire new players to explore other characters.

Druid spirits on Wisp and Bramble are useless to melee characters as they instantly die, even with 40 BO and Shout. So I think it would be better if the charged spirits were timed like battle orders and shout naturally are. Cast the spirit and it stays alive for two minutes say, then it needs to be recasted, but it can’t die from monster damage.

I actually don’t know for D2R, however Ubers are not bosses, they are event monsters.

The skill just allows you to kill him faster while slowed by his Holy Freeze.

8

Half Freeze Duration could also reduce chill+slow effects (like Holy freeze aura slow) by 50% down.

Another Half freeze duration gives another 50% slow effect down stacking by multiplication.
So 2 Half freezes on gear gives you 75% slow resistance.
So 3 Half freezes on gear gives you 87,5% slow resistance.

This way there is no absolute need for Cannot be Frozen all the time. And Half freeze will be distinctive by still chilling you by small amount, but giving you Holy freeze aura counter.

9

half freeze duration could reduced the chance of losing durability on items. or reduce the chance of spending charges on Charged Items

10

Did you actually test this theory?

I’ve been playing a bunch of melee chars recently with a variety of basic gear without CBF, and I have to disagree. Most cold durations become really small with Half Freeze. And as a fighter class you are also incentivised to passively and actively avoid attacks (block, defence, amazon evasion skills; crowd control abilities like conversion, war cry, grim ward…)

Of course, CBF is the ultimate goal. It makes your character better against cold monsters, but IMO it’s not “required” (as in, characters are perfectly playable without it) and half freeze duration is basically half as good as CBF, unless you’re fighting the uber mephisto or smth, where you’re risking to be cold all the time for a long time.

All that said, Half Freeze stacking is not the worst idea, but instead of providing “Cannot Be frozen”, i’d rather have them stack multiplicatively, i.e. 2 pieces give you 1/4, 3 pieces give 1/8 the duration.

11

all casting animations reduced by frozen. teleport sorc teleporting at highly reduced speed from frozen unless freeze duration reduction gear is equipped.