Angelic, Demonic and Ancestral stats are a bad design choice

Totally agree. I think they should at least de-couple resistances from the angelic/demonic/ancestral mix as its a fairly critical component to all classes/builds. Its makes the system less worrisome. They can then let the remaining affixes that can help define builds remain influenced by it.

I mean, It’s not subjective, I am talking about the numeric and mechanical gain in player power by increasing stats. 20 points in dex has never been the diffrerence betwern viable and not. The amount of attack rating you would get from that is tiny. You are behing dishonest in your examples. You could put angelic set ring and amulets on and have an insane amount of attack rating, triviializng dexterity for that purpose, and they were easily acquired sub level 15 items that basically all melee builds used early ladder.

BO and all the items i mentioned, on top of a cheap infinity. No player who knows what they are doing would put a point into energy for 1 mana instead of adding more vitality. The gain would be negligible. Please consider the meaning of the word negligible. Yiur splitting hairs to try and make a point, but you haven’t made a point. The fact is, except for a couple builds, none used a single point in energy. If you put a point there, it was wasted.

I had angelic set and still wasn’t hitting enough my atk rating was about 6k my percent to hit was like 65 percent somewhere around there. Your right tho 20 wouldn’t be enough I’m wrong there I’m pretty sure I had just enough to use a phase blade for grief and reset points so that it went up to around 75 percent. I think PB is like 137 dex and I actually think I upped it to 220 which was enough to do it. My fault. That did however give me the edge I needed to do the Uber.

As far as the gain being trivial I mean yeah its a trivial amount of number gain but the gain of me getting the torch wasn’t trivial by any means. I see your point but I just don’t see it the same way you do.

I think I did make my point and I stated I’m splitting hairs but your correct if your basing it off the numerical gain. In that case it would be a wasted point by definition. However I’ve seen people do random builds for doing specific things where they had stats into ones they would never otherwise put them in. Is that optimal no. Is that wasted. If your looking at it the way you are then yes your right. I’ll just admit defeat here I don’t think were gunna see eye to eye on this point.

It still limits the usefulness of Demonic Power to only being worthwhile against things I couldn’t kill in the normal duration of a debuff or DoT.

If my fire spell deals X damage over 4 seconds before Demonic Power then anything I can kill in 4 second or less means my Demonic Power didn’t help.

Proc chance and self buff duration however, will pretty much never not be useful.

Simply removing Demonic Power would not be a preferable thing given that they seem to want these stats to be a bigger deal with the affix requirements on them.

Also, why wait until it’s too late and they have to remove it when we can provide feedback on it right now and they can simply change it so it’s more useful?

I can only speak for myself so I don’t much care what the other people are saying, but I’m trying to figure out why you seemed to be so opposed to giving feedback about the finer details of the system presented to us.

The whole “it’s still early, just wait until beta/release/patch/expansion” thing has basically never worked out well for anybody.

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Even in builds where you aren’t in the best gear that’s still how you should be setting your stats.

Sorry to say but you putting points into Energy on your Barb is just you making your Barb inferior to somebody who didn’t and is just chugging mana potions as needed.

It was badly implemented and badly balanced. If they were running over time and over budget it might have been the right call to leave it that way, but the excuse doesn’t negate the fact that it was still badly implemented(and they had plenty of time to try to fix some of the balance post-launch but never even attempted it).

If we can’t trust Blizzard to make a new system I wouldn’t trust them to use Diablo 2 as a blueprint for a good game either. Simply taking features from another game because “it was popular, so it should work in our game right?” is not how you get a good game.

I’m not opposed to giving feedback about the finer details as we understand them at all. I was trying to understand what was considered fundamentally flawed with the proposed concept of the system as we understand it. Having 1 route being less effective than another for a specific type of build as I understand it is a matter of fine tuning the details, which aren’t completely finalized and are subject to being reworked. My argument is for the concept, not the finer details.

Using your example I could come up with scenarios where you would want to apply a dot and run(from) to mobs that otherwise die in 4 seconds or less. Take the stygian dolls in d2 for example. You better run!

There is a presumption that a sorc will be able to get away with just using fire, or just use ice, or just use lightning. While that may be true, and arguably preferred, that may not even be the case. You may have all 3 elementals at your disposal, and just pick and choose which ones you increase the “whatever” of. From my understanding they aren’t separating the classes within the classes but allowing them to fulfill the roles of each class in their entirety. See: Druid that seamlessly transforms from werewolf to werebear. See: Barbarian swinging dual weapons and mid swing shifting into a two handed whirl wind. It is possible that the sorc arsenal won’t exclude lightning & cold just because she wants to be exclusively fire.

the problem lies in the concept tho

its not about elements also

there are just basic affixes of all kinds, locked into 3 pools, completely randomly
and if you happen to make your build with affixes of all 3 pools, you will have a hard time, farming the perfect gear
and if you happen to just want affixes of 1 pool, you will have it way easier
and thats the inbalanced thing about it

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We can’t know whether focusing on one power as opposed to spreading it about all three is greater than or less than in terms of character capabilities. If the only gripe about the concept of the system is that it will be easier to farm gear for 1 build than a build that seemingly should be stronger due to the versatility of obtaining power from multiple sources, I can live with that. That is not fundamentally flawed to me. That is rock solid for allowing me a spectrum of easy to play, difficult to master :wink:

It’s still a problem in the way the stat itself works.

Even if you want to apply a DoT and run away then again: If it dies to my DoT in 4 seconds or less then my Demonic Power wasn’t helpful because my baseline DoT would have killed it anyway.

and given that we’ve seen how fast mobs in Diablo 4 can die to attacks, if DoTs are taking more than 4 seconds to kill those mobs then DoTs must deal some terrible damage and I doubt they’d be worth using on tougher mobs.

The whole “Fire damage to a Lightning Sorceress” was just an example, so I wouldn’t bother reading too much into that. I literally only used it because it was the first example that came to mind of a stat that wasn’t useful for a build.

I could just as easily have picked “+X% damage against slowed targets” to a build that doesn’t use slows or +X to a skill that a build doesn’t use.

It was more a point to illustrate a point to somebody that not every stat needs to be useful to every build(but that it should still be useful for at least 1 build your class can do).

Also admittedly I’m not a huge fan of affixes requiring those stats, unless they’re going to make the locked affixes always be extensions of those stats as otherwise it feels restricting.

and we already know the affixes currently aren’t planned to be extensions of those stats because we’ve seen examples where that isn’t the case.

I should add rather than just complaining about this I think that what they should do is make affixes that scale off the 3 power stats, but don’t actually require them.

So instead of:

  • 10% Crushing Blow Chance(Requires 55 Ancestral Power)

It would be:

  • 1-10% Crushing Blow Chance(Affected by Ancestral Power up to 55)

This makes the whole thing not binary for the affix applying or not. The affix is still useful to you no matter what, but you’re also still rewarded for having Ancestral Power with it.

It means having 54 Ancestral Power doesn’t make that affix 100% useless to you until you get more.

Sure, but if you had a set of gear you wore that was built on killing stuff really fast then you might focus more on the other powers, whereas if you are doing hard content with higher TTK, demonic might be useful.

Even then, its easy to imagine a build that can freeze enemies solid for 2 seconds every 10, and stacking demonic power allows you to keep them frozen for the entite TTK.

Like you’re saying, not every build needs every stat and its fine of someone has no use for demonic power in their gear, but just because someone doesn’t need it doesnt mean nobody does.

Yes demonic power is limited in usefulness, but if you play a build that doesnt have any procs, so is ancestral. If you play a build that doesn’t have buffs that need duration extending, so is Angelic.

None of that is a problem.

Making a choice more difficult for the player, becomes harder to do, the more choices you provide the player to make. While insisting that all choices be equally difficult & equally effective across the board. That’s asking for a lot this early in conceptual development. The concept is a good place to start in my humble opinion. I don’t see a problem with it, or at-least I don’t share in the opposition against it for the reasons that have been given thus far.

I’m more worried about Demonic Power being limited in useful even to builds where it should be really good.

It’d be like a build built around a ton of self buffs, but it’s more effective just to ignore Angelic Power and stack raw damage. That’s a problem because that’s supposed to be Angelic Power’s good point. That’s the ideal environment for the stat.

In the case of debuffs CC is great, but the best CC is a dead mob.

What I think would help would be if it increased the duration of not only effects, but just damaging spells in general with a duration.

For example Firewall does X damage over 8 seconds but it’s not a debuff. Demonic Power should still increase its duration, because even if a mob dies Firewall is useful to kill other mobs in the area.

Like I’ve been saying, I have more of a problem with the finer details rather than the high level concept of “3 stats that are more important that you’ll be building characters around”.

Though with the requirements, it feels needlessly restrictive due to the fact that the affixes being locked appear to be pretty arbitrary. +25% Fire Resistance has nothing to do with increasing the duration of negative effects, but in the given example it’s still locked behind Demonic Power.

I’d prefer to have a system like I noted above where there isn’t a binary on/off requirement for these affixes, but instead they’re stuff that scales with how much of the corresponding power you have.

The current proposed system creates breakpoints with very large differences in power. 1-54 Ancestral Power means the item has 0% Crushing Blow, while 55+ means 10%.

It’s going to result in a very messy power curve for those stats that has a bunch of power spikes based on very specific breakpoints.

Okay, but people still make zdps/control/cc builds in D3, because not every builds needs to be max dps, and CC can activate damage, like in the case of Krysbins Sentence (necro ring with 300% more damage against hard CCed targets).

I’m going to choose to have faith in the team because I’m not jaded or cynical. They are working hard at making a good game, and they will implement these rough sketch affixes in a way that fits well into the game - maybe not for every build … and I hope not. I want builds that don’t care about these affixes, and some that rely on one or all of them heavily.

I’m not jaded, but they DID ask for feedback and this is my concern for Demonic Power. The effect as it has been described feels like it’s going to be limited in its power, even among builds where it should thrive.

If I had zero faith in the D4 team I wouldn’t be here, but that doesn’t mean I’m not going to criticize points as I see them.

That way you dumb down the game as people will easily learn which tree they might “skip” or take less

IMO (again) they need to make it CLEARLY which tree opens which possible buffs at which power amount… Things like this (gonna list only 2 for you to get the idea)

Demonic Power possible unlocks:

10 DP

  • 10% chance for skill to hit 30% crit
  • 5% chance to multicast for 50%
  • 5% chance to lower resist of opponent by [10-20] for [10-20] sec

15 DP

  • +1 to tier 1 damage skill
  • 40% to proc vulnerability for 2 sec
  • +25% increased duration of every bleeding or DoT effect
  • 10% to cast Weaken for [5-10] sec

20DP

  • 20% chance for skill to hit 40% additional damage crit
  • 10% chance to multicast for 50% 2nd strike
  • 5-10% chance to reduce damage of target hit by 50% for next [10-20] sec
  • 10% chance to reduce target’s defense by [20-30]%

30DP

  • +2 to tier 1 damage skill
  • +1 to tier 2 damage skill
  • 20% to proc vulnerability for [10-20] sec. Stacks up to twice
  • +25% increased damage proc of every bleeding or DoT effect
  • 10% to cast 50% Iron Maiden for [5-10] sec
  • 15% chance to cast weaken for [10-15] sec

40DP

  • 20% chance for skill damage to spread to all nearby targets
  • 25% chance to multicast 50% extra damage
  • 10% chance to multicast for 150% extra damage
  • +2 to tier 2 damage skill
  • Bleeding and DoT effects now also slow the target for your proc-rate of Bleeding/DoT for [5-10] sec

…
…
…

100DP

  • 40% chance for skill damage to spread to all nearby targets for 50% additional damage
  • 50% chance to multicast 100% extra damage
  • 10% chance to multicast for 400% extra damage
  • +4 to tier 2 damage skill
  • +3 to tier 3 damage skill
  • +1 to two tier 4 damage skills
  • Bleeding and DoT effects now also slow the target for your proc-rate of Bleeding/DoT for 4-10 sec
  • 10% to gain 25% frenzy for 5-10 sec (stackable up to 3 times)
  • 10% chance to cast decripify for 10 sec
  • 25% chance to cast Dim Vision for 10 sec

You get the idea… Basically the WHOLE TREE is based around either empowering your attacking skills or debuffing opponents (just as they described them)

Same/similar would be for Ancestral (different kinds of procs per hit - Bleeding procs, DoT procs, temporary summons of Golem taunting attcked target, corpse explosion procs, meteor procs, mirror image procs, empowering skills that do a summon, empowering secondary effect of skills that have a secondary effect, + to mobility skills, proccing CD reduction per crit, proccing summoning of an assistant [could be valkyrie, could be a barb type of ancient, could be a revive on a slain corpse if need be even]… you name it)

And same/similar would be for Angelic (+ to skills that empower defensive stats, + chance to knockback, + chance to cast a shield, + lifesteal %, + manasteal %, + defense gain, + movement or attack speed gain buffs, + chance to make self-heal do AoE nearby as well…) you name it

Thing is (again) remove Resistances from the A/D/A power trees and then put things like procs/perks or skill upgrades (depending of type of skill whether it’s a self-buff, whether it’s a damage cast, or if it’s a summon proc or anything else that isn’t a damage skill or self-buff for Ancestral)

THAT WAY, I think would be reasonable for players to know what they might be getting over-time as things progress further (regardless if they go a full 1-route commit or a hybrid build) as well as what they would give up by not speccing into other power/s… The BENEFIT of such division of progression is making sure that characters that have same builds and/or similar gear would end up with a VASTLY DIFFERENT playstyle/impact

The locking aspect seems to be a recurring concern of the counter-argument with the conceptualization. The statement that each power will have a list attuned to the power appears to be the culprit behind this. How does any resistance have anything to do with any of the three powers and their associated base effect? Why are we to presume that fire resistance will only have a demonic power prerequisite? The list of affix attuned to each power doesn’t necessarily require that they put something with usefulness to all builds such as a particular resistance on only 1 of the items. Whereas they can still have powers attuned to each power separately.

I’m not sure how to address the concern of the proposed breakpoint creation with very large differences in power. The idea of 1 piece of gear making or breaking the synergy has an appeal to me for the potential combinations of items resulting in various styles of play. I don’t see myself being only 1 point of power shy but rather 1 item slot shy, which to me adds to the game rather than detracts from it. Anyhow I appreciate your effort in providing feedback. It is great to bring forth concerns with a system so that instead of backtracking a year later by completely revamping the system then, they get it right the first time and we then have the release that much sooner.

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The system I described would still have a list of possible buffs. There’s always going to be a limited list of those that wont be clearly defined in game but on a wiki somewhere. Your system doesn’t really change that.

What your system does however is create breakpoints for the stat where you have gaps of the stat not being very useful for you followed by a huge spike of it being immensely useful.

31 to 39 Demonic Power has very limited benefits in your system but then 40 is a huge spike in power assuming that I have some effects from that tier. Additionally if an item only has a 40 DP stat, then that stat is 100% worthless to me if I have 39 DP.

My idea was a way to smooth out that power curve while getting rid of binary requirements that add no value to the itemization of the game without also removing getting more of the stat being valuable.

That may be the case but then again you won’t need procs at all then… You could gain 10% of every 100 power requirement just by speccing 10 into such power (meaning somewhere minimal)

And sure, you migth end up adding stuff “middle way” but personally prefer the 5/10 (i.e. round numbers) threshold marks to make things easier to notice/remember…