Terror zone update needed for next season

General Discussion
1

many people share the same view, whilst terror zones give great exp, the monsters arent that much harder, the massive exp increase should come at a cost.
make the monsters that much harder, make the death penalty a little more severe too, but at the same time, make some poor areas abit more dense, some areas naturally have poor monster density and just have small mobs scattered here and there, for example arreat plateu, burial grounds, and many more other zones, have poor density.

  1. increase strength of tz mobs
  2. make lighter areas more dense when terror zoned (to make them areas more appealing)
  3. make the experience penalty for dying in a tz 10% ontop of the normal exp penalty for dying in a regular area.
  4. freshen up some of the zones, remove some, merge some small ones. for example, tristram, why not merge with stony field, or cows, remove blood moor. remove ‘the hole’ from the blackmarsh and add the forgotton tower to it instead merge ancient tunnels with lost city, merge travincal with durance. by doing some of this a good handful of zones can be free’d up meaning some zones can be hit more frequently, i think atm theres 36 zones (havent counted properly) and only 24 hours in a day.
2

They’d have to be careful on tweaking the monster difficulty in TZ’s… Because if they make them too hard, then the META will shift right back to endless Chaos/Baal runs.

3

yeah i agree, but they should be made abit more difficult than they currently are

4

I think they’re fine like they are now. They were meant to provide an alternative and less monotonous means of acquiring XP and items versus endless Chaos/Baal runs.

Sure, there are “good” and “bad” TZ’s, but keep in mind we are comparing to the previous long standing META of Chaos/Baal runs. The good TZ’s, great, run them… Bad TZ’s, go back to Chaos/Baal until another good TZ shows up… It’s all about variety.

5

eitherway, they still need changing, even if they dont make monsters harder
they still need to change it in a way where you dont sometimes wait 90 hours for a certain terror zone to hit, which is what can sometimes happen, and again when you can have the same terror zone that hits twice in 3 hours. it needs to be abit more consistent

6

Consistency, aka predictable. I think one of the points for TZ’s was for them to be random, unpredictable, a surprise.

7

hmm… when i die, i’m dead. there’s no … exp penalty. maybe try that mode if you need the challenge ?

i think the xp could be toned down a bit too. it’s lightning speed compared to what it was.

just doesn’t make sense how we went from a massive grind to… being able to do it in a couple weeks even with a job.

but i MOSTLY agree with you, haha. but i’d just change how TZ work completely as the one hour slam is the most boring thing ever. there’s already been multiple ideas thrown around here that sound better than what we have.

8

The terror zones have the following meaning for me.

-Find your Sundered Charm there.
-Get good XP everywhere and the chance to get better items.
Finally play the world again and don’t just run like a wind-up doll to Baal, Dia, Meph or any other stand alone bosses. That’s actually the best use of the TZ, you play the game.
But… It’s just a solo game. It would be good for an online version if it were group play… However, there’s one thing that sucks in D2 and that’s the loot distribution. The fact that the items drop is actually nice, but people’s greed is infinite and it degenerates into a competitive grab, which is totally bananas.

For me, the TZ are good because of the charm, but also to play the zones again.

But there are some zones that are really bad. It’s not even because of the zone itself, but because of the space.
I’m just talking about Maggot Lair, or all kinds of narrow passages where you despair at the latest as a minion class without teleport.
But then there are also the zones that are simply too sparsely populated, especially with the mobs that can drop the charms like Act 4 Outer Steppes.
I also find something like Crypt or Mausoleum bad, because it just plays badly there, especially with minion classes as I said.

Which zones are my favorite zones as Tz?

  1. the 3 halls at Nihlathak (are wide enough, lots of mobs and are cool)
  2. all Tal Rasha tombs and Hall of the Dead because it’s full of mobs
  3. cow level, city of the damned/flame river and flayer jungle/spider forest
  4. Underground Passage, Inner Cloister, Tristram, Worldstone Keep (without souls) and a few others that are similarly ok.

The stupidest zones are all the ones that are narrow, twisty, empty, or have piles of souls in them. Depending on the class, this is sometimes even more modest than it already is.

Do Tz have to be heavier?
Not necessarily, they are not competitive scenarios, but farm zones.
Now more penalties when dying… If you’re level 85, that’s different from dying at level 95 and not being able to get to your corpse… Then many hours of exp are gone.

The stupid thing about the competitive principle of making it harder and harder is that you then start to install an endless tower.
We see this with things like immunities, which are then broken again with Sundered Charms, or a ridiculous synergy system integrated into an existing system that was simply not intended for it and now everything has to be increased again and again so that it still works on an element where there were simply reasonable builds before.

Let’s keep building in new difficulties that then require new countermeasures. And so we move away from the meaning and the actual game and in the end we have GRifts, nightmare dungeons, cage boss fights and we increase and increase and the actual game is completely lost.

The Tz were still the best idea to keep the actual game alive, because you play all the maps, although the old map construction was lousy.
Halls of Pain is modern and lets all classes work well, the narrow corners of a Tower of the Countess, Mausoleum, or Maggot, even the small doors or narrow corridors in Sewers Act 2 or Arcane Sanctuary, are a horror when a stupid skeleton knocks on a mob for 3 hours because the rest can’t get to it.

What Diablo 2 Resurrection really needs is the will to give us 2 more acts and at least one more class.
In addition, the skill trees of all classes could be expanded by a few skills, plus more skill points through quests in the new acts up to the new maximum of 150 or so, in order to be able to maximize the new skills at level 36 and 42.
Then reduce a lot of synergies, except for the ones that were designed that way anyway, like masteries for the Sorc, or passive for the Amazon.
New items, runes and expanding the areas here and there in the old zones.

In Act 1, for example, 2 more areas can be created in the monastery next to the barracks, in which you first flip a lever deep inside the 4 levels, so that a secret tunnel then leads down to the sanctuary of the monastery in the inner monastery, where you descend another 2 levels and a boss is waiting.
However, these 3 new sub-areas only become active when you have found a certain cryptic text in Act 6 and give it to the huntress Akara from Act 1, who then tells you the story and how to open the 2 new areas in the monastery garden.

Act 2 can still get an area in the palace cellar that opens hints to an entrance in the City of the Damned Act 4. There is a portal to an old crypt with a special boss.

Act 3 also has possibilities with Kurast and the many temples.
Finally, we get an Act 7 conclusion and epilogue.