The concept idea of the 3 new stat types Angelic, Demonic and Ancestral are a bad design for numerous reasons. They are heavily uneven, creates more frustration than they fix and offer no real reward.
To break it down we can look at the core these are merely a new system of prerequisites which is just as well served by using the original system of Strength Dexterity and Intelligence. It’s the same system, just new names. Add to that the effects granted by each stat is far from even, or in any way balanced.
This is further imposed by the fact that having random affixes on items appear to reach these thresholds to gain these added powers, will cause the player to forego otherwise good gear, and the need to save and stash potential items will be far too large to be reasonable. If at all the player should be able to choose whether or not to increase Ancestral, Demonic or the Angelic side of the character. Thus we are back at the base attribute system again and we might as well call it Strength, Dexterity and Intelligence again.
Who and what your character are shouldn’t be determined by randomness or items, but by the choices the player makes, the building of the character. Whether to be Demonic or Angelic is a choice you make in doing certain things, and thus should be rewarded through quests or the like. Or it should come from your choices of talents and skills.
Items are extensions of your character, they are what you character use to solidify who they are and how they fight. They don’t make the character, choices do that. So building a character and what and how that character is and interacts with the world should be done outside items.
With the system they have it’ll still be determined by build, because if I’m not using a lot of healing or self-buffs then I naturally wont care much about going for items with Angelic Power on it. I’m not going to find an item and go “Oh well guess I should change everything around” just because it has some nice stats other than the Angelic Power.
What it creates are stats that your build cares more about and ones that it cares less about, which is not a bad thing.
The problem with Strength/Dexterity/Intellect is the baggage that comes with it of using those words. Thematically, strength is never going to be valuable to a Sorceress unless you do something weird mechanically and make strength increase magic damage dealt or something.
I’d argue that every stat should be good for every class depending on your build, but every stat doesn’t need to be good for every build.
the problem is, when you think like, man i wanna play an ice sorc, but all the ice is locked in angelic power
this system says: “bad luck my dude you will stuck with fire”
All the ice abilities being locked in Angelic Power is not a fundamental flaw of this system but would be an implementation failure if Demonic and Ancestral Power were 100% useless for it.
That said if Angelic Power is the best stat for the build my Frost Sorceress is using, why would I not just build for Angelic Power?
And this is the same as main stat. The whole issue is that these 3 new stats are just new main stats, where you’d really only want to build 2 of them for the inherent powers. Yet the freedom for you as a play to choose whether or not to build up in them are determined by the RNG of your loot drops. Furthermore that RNG loot also dictates what additional bonuses you will gain for achieving said amount.
Let’s say that Angelic power is best for your Ice sorc, but then an item drops with a bonus ice damage if you have 55 Demonic power. Would you switch? would you scrap and just search for an item with bonus ice damage if you have 55 angelic power? It just becomes a new “main stat” scenario that prohibits you from building the character you want to, because drops won’t allow for it.
That’s the bonus, all RPG players knows these and what they directly refer to, compared to some new made up words that does close to the same thing.
I disagree with OP. A conditional threshold system gives more depth.
And it’s already what D2 offers already in a different way.
Instead of throwing away your gear like in d3 everytime you find something new: you will keep some items in your chest because they can potentially serve again in the future.
That being said, the system will change anyway, because the items still need another conditional system to prevent to wear the best gear at low level.
Because it shouldn’t be: Demonic = Fire Builds
Angelic = Cold Builds
Ancestral = Lightning Builds
That’s extremely limiting and extremely arbitrary when you start talking 100s of affixes.
It’s ironically more complex and less new player friendly than strength, dex, or intelligence ever was. Everyones going to be running for websites for lists of affixes that are arbitrarily locked behind unfamiliar categorizations.
I disagree. The concept is solid. Perhaps the association may need to be re-worked.
Characters choose the items they wear, so I disagree with that aspect. A wise character knows the choices available to them and chooses accordingly, depending on how they desire to define themselves. I don’t like the idea of giving players authority over the RNG for items. It exacerbates chance.
There isn’t a system you can really make that wont result in this sort of design. Mathematically, there will always be one or two stats superior to all others depending on the choices of your build.
It does at least have the advantage that all 3 stats can be useful to me depending on my choices, as opposed to a traditional stat system where only 1 stat is useful to me.
You can argue that even without mainstat your scenario happens. What happens if I get an item with +15% Cold damage but the other stats aren’t good for my build? What happens if I find an item with +2 to Frozen Orb, but it adds +15% Fire damage instead?
The only way around that scenario is a system where every stat is useful to everybody, which creates very generic stats.
and I don’t see it as a bad thing that certain builds favour certain stats. Like I said: Every stat should be useful to every class, but not every stat needs to be useful to every build within those classes.
It’s also a negative because it results in only 1 stat ever being useful for me as a Sorceress and you might as well adopt Diablo 3’s mainstat system again because it’s functionally the same thing.
If the “choice” is between +0% damage and +10% damage, then that’s not much of a choice now is it?
RIght, but I also only have 2 items to look at, and I’m giving feedback about the concern if they choose such a direction. No one knows specifically. I’m letting it be known how bad of a system that would be if they do that.
I think that could be pretty interesting as well. Gaining points based on how you do the campaign etc. Do you draw on demonic power to defeat the big evils, or maybe ancestral etc.
The three Powers could also affect skills, like if they were skill runes.
I dont mind the 3 stats unlocking affixes on gear. They just need to make it so you are not pushing people into specific specs because of that choice. Which it currently seems like the system will do (locking you into whatever affixes are tied to the Power you focus on - making things pre-determined a bit like D3 sets)
All affixes should be accessible without the Power stats, but through the Power stats you might get slightly higher versions of those affixes.
I like the system, it’s a better “stat requirement” system than Diablo 2 had.
-Of course certain builds are going to prefer one stat over another. The important thing is, are you going to want to stack 100 angelic power and have 80% cold resist + extra ice damage? Or are you going to want some demonic power so that you don’t get 1 shot by fire and maybe have some decent fire spells at your disposal? We also don’t really know the limits of the stats that are locked to these requirements. It’s possible that demonic power could buff ice spells in a different way.
And fire can ignite a damage over time effect, and physical attack can be envenomed and add a poison effect, and there are abilities that can render % of health vulnerable, and that can be increased. To simplify it for the sake of speculation and provisions of feedback which are hypothetical in nature, we should just start considering angelic defensive, demonic offensive, and ancestral - a mixture of both.
Here’s the thing. There are no average enemies in the game yet. There is no game yet… The absolute worst thing that can be done in the intention to provide constructive feedback is to base assertions off of previous installments of how things have been. We want to start thinking outside of the box - and are limiting ourselves in doing so when we constantly refer to how the game will be based off of our experience with any game other than the one we haven’t played yet.
It’s not simplifying it. It’s saying that regardless of the affixes that yes, Demonic Power will affect cold builds that apply slow/freeze to a target.
That is unless Demonic Power does not do the thing that Blizzard has told us Demonic Power does.
There is a game, people have played it, and we have gameplay footage of it.
Naturally everything is subject to change because the game is not finished yet but to claim that there is no game is 100% wrong.
We haven’t played the set in stone version of the game yet. As you say, everything is subject to change. Taking this into consideration debating the associations of the system is not as conducive to debating the concept of the system. The real enemy here is the RNG and you know what the proposed solution to that is? Static and guess what? Rejected.
I couldn’t disagree more. Unless of-course we’re using previous diablo implementation or lack thereof as the basis. Making every stat useful to every class equally doesn’t create a generic stat system it creates useful opportunities for builds to emerge which mind you are simply extensions of classes. For example. Vitality increases health. Everyone needs health. How do you make it otherwise? Instead of vitality increasing the health pool for every point, you embrace the RNG and make it something like the higher your vitality, the higher the min/max range of health point gain every level. Things like that. What sayeth you?
We need to get into the details of the system now though before they start setting things in stone and it becomes a lot harder to change things that are fundamentally flawed.
Debating the concept of the system will only get you so far. The finer details need to be hammered out at some point, and with a game that is in a playable state then I say it’s a pretty good time to start given that we have several hours of gameplay footage to see what the main gameplay loops are in the game and how they work and how systems interact with each other.
Vitality is fine as is because there is a difference between “This stat is useful for everybody” and “EVERY stat is useful for everybody”.
The problem with the second one is what do you do about +X% Fire Damage? In a system where every stat needs to be useful to every build, that stat shouldn’t exist because it’s useless to my Lightning Sorceress.
and to re-iterate: I’ve been saying every stat should be useful to every class, but not to every build.
There is a very important distinction there that should not be confused with each other. Fire Damage is useful to a Sorceress, but it is not necessarily useful to a Sorceress that built towards Lightning spells.
Stats that are designed to be useful for every build are what I’m saying becomes generic when a good stat system needs a mix of both generic and unique stats. Vitality is generic and that’s fine when it’s offset by other more unique stats that are littered here and there.
It’s a problem when every stat is generic so that it can be useful to every single build, though.
Just so that we’re on the same page. By stat I am referring to attributes. We are in agreement here somewhat then. Every class should have access to every type of damage output then, in order to render all affixes available and thus equalize the opportunity among the totality of itemization.
Back to attributes for the moment. I see a system in place where the class-specific attributes needs to have usefulness to every other class, although not in as predominance sort of way. We could always have stats subject to rng as well. You know, level cap is 40, so at 20% of that, say level 8 your character gets an RNG set of the attributes. Granted, this will result in a lot of “re-rolling” fortunately it doesn’t take very long to reach that initial level 8. So strength makes barbarians hit harder, and sure will make other classes hit harder to, but a sorc is not going to be clubbing things unless they have to right so they may not necessarily care about that as much. What they will care about from strength though is that it also enables the wearing of say, a more durable, heavier piece of gear. You could even throw in inventory space capacity, and surely they’ll appreciate that. Not an exhaustive response, but I’ll get back to you in a bit with a more detail oriented matter if you’d like to continue to brainstorm on the good, the bad, and the ugly. P.s. I don’t mind being the bad guy (or wrong for that matter)