individually…not by skills, idea is great, but implementation is terribly bad, current mechanic is boring and outated.
Change this cookie cutter BS and false diversity.
Honestly I think the best way to make synergies is by affinities
Fire skills synergize fire skills, cold skills synergize cold skills, melee synergize melee
If you have a skill like hydra that is fire and Projectile then it’s synergies are all fire skill and all projectile skills
That way you can use different skills from different tree and even classes
Ie: dragonscale hydra Paladin synergize with holy fire, holy bolt, vengeance, fire resist, salvation
But yeah I also though of a system where there are no synergies but the stats are boosters
Str boosts melee and fire skills
Dexterity boosts range attack, cold skills
Energy boosts lightning, magic, summon
This diversity stat distribution
Similar to that awesome MMo I played as a kid
“the 4th coming” a Diablo 1 inspired MmO where you had 5 attributes
- endurance: determine your ability to wear armor and your life
- str: determine your ability to use melee weapons and your damage with them
- agility: determine you ability to use bows and your damage with them
- intel: determine your ability to use robe, battlemage weapons, your fire/cold/lightning/necro damage, your mana
- wisdom: determine your ability to wear robes, Paladin weapons, your light and earth damage, your buffs power and mana
Or just separate skill points for skills points and synergie points, synergie would benefit only from synergie points.
Synergies are the exact opposite of diversity, it forces you to invest points into something you actually not need/want, instead of playing around with real build diversity, and put points into something you actually use.
4 Likes
Amen!
Spoken like a true Brain owner
Not really. Synergies just requires more investment to get the things you really want to be more powerful. Frost bolt synergy is like a “tax” you must pay if you want the strongest Frozen Orb, for example. No one is saying you need to invest in the synergy. You can get by with unsynergized frozen orb just fine. But the option(s) are there if you want them. Another example Hydra, as a pure fire sorc I wanted the strongest hydra I could get so that took 80 skill points. Were the synergies necessary? Nope. But I wanted it to be as powerful as possible. Synergies provide choices that make sense. Not the other way around
Not exactly, if you dont invest in synergies your dmg will be teribly bad, thats why I said false choice cuz no1 will waste time with terrible unsynergized skills. It would be a choice if synergies got 1-2% max dmg bonus per lvl or 3% per 5lvls, but not 10-20% per lvl.
The “tax” is already the points you need to get to orb through the skill tree.
Synergies are nothing else then taking your points away you could put into other skills you really want, without improving gameplay at all.
Having multiple skills to switch and use according to the situation improves gameplay depth. Synergies just increase stats without changing gameplay at all.
You could simply just remove synergies all together and increase the hard limit of points you can put into a skill to 30 or 40 and the result is basically the same. More points crammed into one skill so less points over to diversify your built. Synergies only kinda “hide” this as you technically put points into multiple skills, but in most cases you actually do not wanna use this skills, but effectively only put more points into your main skill.
There are some exceptions for example the new static-field into nova. You probably want to use both skills anyway, and they make kinda sense to be used together.
But still it takes away freedom from the player, you might wanna combine nova with another skill, but through the synergy you are basically forced to use it with static. I know you can technically put the points somewhere else, but it makes no sense as your nova then becomes weak.
On the other hand for example the fire synergies make no sense at all. Why do you wanna invest points into fire bolt when you wanna play fire ball? Fireball is pretty much the same but bigger and better, there is no use in firebolt if you have fireball.
This is absolutely wrong
On 1.10 they buffed monsters tankiness by 5
And added synergies which on average boosts skills by x3
This not only left skills less effective against monsters but made unsynergized skills garbage
An effective nerf of 80%
So yeah… pretty much forces you to invest in order to be as competitive as 1.09 unsynergize skills
Ah this kinda explains why I do not remember that synergy nonsense from 20 years ago.
I think it was around 1.09 I stopped playing the original D2.
Good decision.
Btw they rem… resurrected D2 what we all remember and love, but… most ppl remeber only ~1.00-02 then LoD 1.07-09, most ppl probably stopped with CL and first patches.