I advocate a synergy reform, or a reduction in synergies.
At the moment, you can’t even partially combine talents in your own skill tree.
If I want to play a Flamewall/Hydra Sorc, I don’t even have enough points in my own tree to accomplish this and skill it out.
Either you reduce the synergies or let the player choose the synergy themselves and then create a change of ability for certain skills.
For example, if I synergize a hydra with fireball and firebolt, the hydra spits more firebolts and at the same time the firebolts have a small AE effect due to fireball.
If I synergize Hydra with Wall of Flame, the Hydra gets a fire-breathing cone that simultaneously burns enemies for x seconds afterwards, but it no longer spits Firebolts.
If I combine the Hydra with Wall of Flames and Inferno, the cone becomes a kind of fire trail, just like Diablo with his Sea of Flames, only in a slightly smaller format, but not as puny as the Druid with his Firestorm.
But also in the same way and as long as the enemies are in the fire, they burn.
It’s just very unsatisfactory at the moment.
This also applies to some other classes and skills.
While there are many thoughts on synergies and what could be done with them, I doubt anything will happen as far as a total rework of all of them. Even removing the synergies would require balancing of the base skills, because a lot of the skills would become trash, that is if they’re not already trash with synergies. One of the things they did to offset the boost that synergies provided was an increase of monster health. (Power creep)
Realistically, the most that will happen is a minor tweak here and there of skill and/or synergies.
I recently tried some modding for myself and made a few changes.
While testing, I removed all synergies from the Trap Assassin and made the skills scale with character level instead.
Initially, I thought balancing would be hard, but it turned out to be quite manageable. I simply took the existing total synergy percentages and spread them across 100 levels (you could also spread them across 80 levels to avoid nerfing some skills).
After some testing, I can’t understand why Blizzard chose the synergy solution. It constricts so many builds and makes a lot of skills just a one-point investment. Without synergies, I find myself investing in “support” skills, and many more fun builds emerge.
So, I agree that synergies ruin the game in ways many have forgotten.
(keep in mind i am just playing around testing diffrent stuff, i am not saying scaling damage with chaaracter level is the way to go, but it works, and lets be honest, it is mostly the way it works to day, only you are forced to put that scaling in do skills you mostly do not use. anyway there are many ways to solve the issue)
The simplest solution is to buff the base damage of skills then reduce the damage increase from synergies but also add more synergies to skills.
This is how the old fire claws worked and why it was better than it is now. Fire claws used to synergize with every fire skill so you could effectively choose which fire skills you wanted to use and synergize fire claws with. Now that they reduced the synergies on fire claws the skill is worse and the build options more limited.
You can argue “well people will just try to max every synergy anyways.” Go ahead. You’ll make a pretty bad glass cannon. And it’s not like ALL synergies need to increase damage.
I explained this back in 2022 but blizz gamers are pretty dense.
I’ve been playing a 1.09 mod for D2R while waiting for D3 and D4 new seasons. Been eyeballing it for awhile now, and decided to take the plunge a week ago. The creator did a pretty good job in recreating the best possible job in bringing D2R back to that state, but some skills were just changed/coded to work different and were not possible (mostly beneficial stuff like new FoH). I also used a combination of some other stuff like double inventory (to simulate charm inventory) and all merc equip.
With that said, it’s been fun, but I can see why they made the changes in 1.10, even if I disagree with the methods used. Playing my fave four (Zeal/Fana, Strafe/GA/LF, FOrb, and Double Swing). Many of the skills lacked impact back then with no direct damage scaling for points invested, mostly either cost reduction or only attack rating:
Zeal only gets attack rating after reaching 5 attacks
Fana caps early at 50% increased damage, with a 1% ias at intervals and AR
Strafe only gets attack rating after max projectiles, with a base +5% damage
Guided Arrow gets a decimal decreased mana cost, no damage scaling
Double Swing only gets more attack rating, and doesn’t reduce mana cost like now (level 9 free mana use current patch).
I remember back in the day, one of the reasons cited for synergies was to give folks something to invest points in while leveling, as players were either saving points or had no useful skills until a certain level to put points into. Personally, I never had too much issue. I always found Sorc to be the most painful to level, with Zon to be the second. Some synergies added were natural progression, like Elemental Bow skills or Elemental Auras on Paladin. Others, like Frozen Orb, were horrible.
The trade off to having a rougher early leveling experience, is that you do get the ability to take another main skill to help navigate immune monsters. My Buriza Zon is 65 in Act 3 Hell, Max Strafe main skill, max Lighting Fury on weapon swap for Ghosts or hearty phys immunes Buriza cold damage + ele charms can’t kill fast, 1 point GA for bosses. Where today on live, it’s harder to keep up with the health pools on monsters with synergies/bigger hp mobs.
Personally, with the retrospect of age, I think the bigger problem here was that many of the skills that get builds based around them, are too high of a level. 24 for Strafe, 30 for Frozen Orb, 30 for Whirlwind, even Fend is 24. By comparison, some of the most fun builds at early level are Double Swing (6), Zeal (12), and even minion Necro gets 3 summon types and two masteries by 12. Even Enchant on Sorc is 18, when it really could be used earlier.
Anyways, playing this version of the game for the first time since 2003 (before 1.10 patch) has given me a greater appreciation for what the game became in terms of giving the skills more impact. I do think however, that monster HP being balanced more in line with elemental synergies and leaving weapon skill builds pretty far behind was a mistake, though the trade off is that there are more phys immunes in 1.09 (though largely are not as much of an issue with elemental damage on weapons and charms). Synergies should have been a lesser part of the overall damage of skills, and mostly as a bonus to have a skill to use while leveling for the elemental builds, and the physical builds should have been balanced to directly scale without synergies. The skills themselves should have been more impactful than the synergies, which disproportionately benefit from +skills bonuses.
I also feel that adding respec eliminated the issue of leveling through normal, and would have been a proper solution to the issue with adding some proper damage scaling to most skills, then balancing monster health accordingly.
Anyways, typed more than I meant to, but seen the post and thought I’d add my thoughts since I’ve found a way to time travel with D2R through mods, as well as give myself a little seasonal theme.
I think it’s simply because they wanted to avoid players keeping their points for only the tier 24 or 30 skills. By implementing synergies, players have an incentive to spend points on other skills early on.
The question is : how do you make sure that players spend their points on low level skills without feeling penalized for doing so?
All this set aside, it’s important to keep in mind that there won’t be a lot of development made for the game anymore. Any suggested change should be reasonably easy to implement.
I do wonder though. There was a job posting for a senior Diablo Legacy engineer, which someone recently posted has been removed. It was announced Friday that D3 will have a PTR shortly with the next theme, with a patch primarily aimed at improved Mac support. I wonder if the job did get filled, and we will see some more interesting stuff for D2R in the future.
Yeah, but with the talks from the D4 Spiritborn showcase with the streamers of Blizzard doing an itemization rebalance, along with that application and removal of it, and now a PTR for a game that was officially announced to just be recycling themes, you have to wonder.
You have to ensure that the progression is natural. IE like the Fire and Cold Bow skills on Zon, or Paladin’s Offensive Elemental auras pairing with Resist Auras and Salvation. And the damage for maxing synergies shouldn’t be a massive part of a skills damage.
Yeah, but it’s just to test making the game Apple silicon compatible on a wide range of hardware. Game companies don’t really hire game testers anymore, they let their player bases beta test for free, or in this case, a PTR. I doubt Blizzard wants to drop the money on Apples overpriced hardware with various hardware configurations just to test in house. If it was a deviation from recycling themes, I’d understand.
I am not saying absolutely nothing will ever be made for the game again, but the suggestion to have different skill-changing synergies for every skill are clearly out of the realm of reasonable expectations.
Generally speaking, it’s been a year since the Blizzard acquisition, and no new content has been added, so I think it’s more reasonable to expect almost exclusively bug patches in the future. Even if they do start making actual changes again, they aren’t going to make massive changes.
All synergie system makes sense if synergie % dmg scalling with char lvl (very ez to implement and balance cuz of 98lvls), so all chance to cast skills and skills from RWs would scalling with char lvl to be trong and usefull again,
but effects (freeze time, flame time, additional projectiles and etc) should synergize between skills.
Like i said, buff the base damage of skills and lower the damage of synergy scaling while adding more that either add damage as well or add additional effects to skills.
For example Barb bash: give it natural grief damage per point that it also adds a smaller amount as a synergy for stun and concentrate. Have concentrate give a synergy to stun and bash that adds deadly strike or crit chance. Have stun give crushing blow. Say while stun has 100% cb it gives concentrate 20% at 20 points, 40% for bash (as an example).
Have battle cry give bash and stun a % damage increase. Make iron skin give concentrate a massive attack rating boost with 20 points essentially making concentrate always hit (like smite).
Synergies aren’t bad. They are just bland. What they should do is have more interesting synergies to give good bonuses even if the skill isn’t all too important to your build.
Which is why im arguing that you can add more to every skill that isnt just damage. People are under the assumption that if synergies exist then you need to have all of them maxed. Im saying add a ton and then you get to pick and choose what fits your build.
If all synergies are similar in power, we go back to the issue where players will simply optimize by going for the higher level skills, completely foregoing low level skills. If they aren’t, players are going to feel pushed towards the optimal builds, back to square 1.
Making that many synergies, especially with different effects, would require a lot of coding. It’s an unrealistic expectation to want them to make such heavy changes.
All in all, the issue lies in the very bases of the skill system. A lot of skills are rendered obsolete as the character progresses, so either you end up making them mandatory for other skill optimization, or you have players purposefully skip them to only use top skills.
The actual solution is in the very basis of skill design, where you make sure that early skills won’t become obsolete later on, whether it’s by giving each of them unique utility, or by making sure it’s possible to scale them at sufficiently powerful levels to keep them relevant the whole game.
But that ship has sailed, as it should have been done from the very design of the classes. So we are stuck with a system where we have to choose between players skipping weaker skills altogether, or forcing them to spend points in those skills to optimize better skills.
