Ok, I get it. It’s a business decision. You want to sell copies to the people that didn’t like D2 up to now and expand the playerbase. Like we didn’t know this world yet.
But addressed to the designers, from a game-philosophy-point-of-view:
What are you trying to achieve?
Let me elaborate:
I play this game for 20+ years, on and off, hardcore-ladder or singleplayer (with qol-mods) exclusively. I like the fact that gear means something in hardcore. You have to think holisticly about your equipment, and there is always a trade off of safety vs. power.
What keeps me motivated each ladder is the fact, that I can’t do everything with one character. I have to think about what I want to do, do I farm ubers, get to 99, hunt for runes or rare uniques, etc… I enjoy creating characters for different tasks, trying to achieve the goal of equipping one character to be able to “beat the game” aka clear everything.
My current endgame character is a nova-sorceress that clears the Chaos Sanctuarium (or any content) on players 8 with ridiculous speed. Still De Seis sometimes is light-immune (with sunder she would clear even faster and De Seis would never be immune again, but that is not even the point here). The point is: it took me nearly all ladder to get to this point! It kept me motivated, it was the reason why I wanted to find things, urged me to create different characters to “unlock” other areas of the game.
And you know what? As soon as you have such a character, it doesn’t take long until it gets boring. Yes, your character can now farm evey area of the game, but what for? There is nothing more to accomplish, except maybe going for 99. For this exact reason I never played a hammerdin in 20+ years. Because a character that can clear everything on his first playthrough is boring. With a little gear it gets even worse, you just tele into everything and hold lmb, you don’t even have to pay attention, watch the game or make decisions accordingly. It is boring.
The difference always was, that it meant a lot of effort to enable any character to do the things, that a hammerdin already did effortlessly. You now take that away. Imagine I find a cold-sunder-charm at lvl 75 on day two of the ladder. Or within the first week. Congrats, my ladder-start-char is now also my endgame char that can clear everything. It will get boring very soon after that.
The second thing that I think is bad game-philosophy is, that the charms discourage group play.
Group play is already pretty dead in my opinion, when I remember the times of 1.09 or 1.10 it was different. If the terror zones would be challenging, with immunities, there would be a great motivation to play as a group again, since not even a hammerdin can clear 'em all. Instead you do the opposite. Now every char will be able to clear every terror zone by itself.
Before there were three Monsters in the game at level 94+, each one difficult to access. Now that we can farm level 94+ monsters like candy, a lot of people will want to farm the terror zones for magic finding, preferably in a full game, but also preferably without loot-competition. So instead of bringing the players together, you create rivalry between them. They will have to fight for chunks of a terror zone, fastest clearing char wins. I am also sceptical about the inflation of tc87 items.
If the changes go live as they are now, I will maybe play classic next season. A shared stash would be nice, please. Or I go back playing singleplayer, old versions with mods, as I don’t feel challenged by the online version anymore.
Everything above is pretty reasonable I think. I still would like to express my anger and disappointment in one short unreasonable statement:
Old school rules!
New school is weak!
Yea, take a deep breath from your vanilla-coconut flavoured e-cig on that one!
hhaien
