Don’t go for cooldowns. Don’t go for cast X to buff Y for 100000% dmg on items. Take D2 skill system, itemisation and dark theme, combine it with D3 smooth combat and you’ll have awesome Diablo 4.
Rifts are not even an issue for me in D3 just how builds work since RoS expansion. Sets forcing to use specific skills and those long cooldowns make the game feel like moba instead of rpg and there’s no hype from loot at all.
Items in D2 buff your character passively and don’t force you to any skills. You create your build from skill tree instead. Loot system gives so much hype for good drop as there’s no rain from the sky of legendary items and most of them are not class specific so are useful for many characters and great to trade.
I don’t mind cooldown (as long as they’re not ridiculous), however I’d like if there were other alternatives to resource cost and cooldown; like for example charge up and such.
You can. It depends on the design of the skill and the resource system it’s contingent on. Prohibitive costs, diminishing returns, and maybe “overclock” effects are perfectly conceivable, with a little imagination. EDIT: Not to mention, enemy design. Devs are free to give monsters all the combat ability to match whatever they ultimately decide that the players can dish out…and I say give 'em some serious teeth, make them truly fearsome.
Personally I prefer “action RPG” to “wait for action RPG”.
Sure you can, but this means there must be hefty drawbacks on resource management. When mobility of player is unrestricted, then mobs have to play it dirty too.
Maybe get rid of potion spam and see how effective “stand and spam” is then?
And you can’t tell me that kiting enemies in between firing our bazookas every 10-20 secs is more “exciting”. Can we get more creativity than this sort of routine? Or is that too tall of an order.
Well look at barbarian’s Seismic Slam. No cooldown, just a rage restriction. And instead of simply waiting, the player is encouraged to replenish rage and maybe they can think of various ways to do that?
I never understood the argument against D3s instanced bosses other than the inability to portal hop and cheese the fights. D3 forced you to learn the mechanics and dodge stuff, untill you seriously over leveled and over geared them back before RoS.
They have designed skills that need to have a cooldown. Ultimate Skills - Too Powerful to be spammed, even with a high resource cost could still end up with almost 100% up time. Rogue Imbuements - Similar to Ultimate Skills, too powerful to keep 100% up time on, though I’m sure these will have a lower cooldown than ultimate skills. Most movement skills - They don’t want you to cheese the game by spamming teleport.
A lot of skills for the most part have zero cooldown or a very small cooldown. D3 had a lot of spammed skills and those were usually the main skill for almost every class build. Even the cooldown abilities used as the main source of damage had ways to reduce the cooldown.
I would rather argue to get rid of “ultimate skills” as these have always felt weird to me. I’d rather have more skills similar to Rogue imbuements in terms of power and cooldown. Instead of skills that have 30+ second cooldowns. They also feel like little effort skill creations, that are just like “Lets give the barbarian a Super Saiyan transformation” just seems silly. Or essentially get out of jail free cards that let you forgo strategy by simply using one skill. They also feel bad in non-timed content. If all I have to do is complete an endgame dungeon without a time limit. My strategy becomes “kill some mobs, wait for ultimate skill to come off CD, Repeat.” I’d rather have more interesting skills added to each classes arsenals that add more options for strategy.
Then why are we having builds now that keep those ultimate skills on 100% uptime and I can’t deal any damage without it. Maybe if they kept to original design it would make sense but it went from one mess to another.
And then we got items that remove this cooldown so we spam teleport anyway
I like D3’s visual and art design. I think its done right. Some might think its over saturated, but after the original D2, D2R, PoE, Grim Dawn, and a few other ARPGs, I think D3 did it right.
Unfortunately, IMO, Blizz/Activision failed at the mobility revamp. Wizard given a hard penalty that has remained since day 1 of D3 while the other classes have near or better than D2 Sorc teleport level of mobility. Barb, Necro, DH, Monk all have better mobility mechanics and CDR/RCR help to improve them even further. They should not repeat this mistake by giving every class crappy mobility or giving some classes the short end of the stick. Yes, I know they removed the cooldown with a mechanic that is part of the Firebird set, but the set requirement is just shifting the penalty to a new place. Its awesome if one is playing FB and the same old crappiness if one is not playing FB.
Please do not turn D4 in a Dark Souls wanna be, or a Dark Souls wanna-be with trade and/or loot box circumvention mechanisms. The game should be fun, engaging, and challenging to a degree but not to the point of masochistic torture. The game should be play to win, and not pay to win or trade to win.
Cool downs are important but excess number of cooldowns to juggle, excessively long cooldowns, and excessively short skill durations become real annoying really fast. D3 Necro started out as good ideas but once one plays at level cap for 10 to 25 hours, the cooldowns become a very annoying chore. As of right now I’m still on cooldown when it comes to playing Necro. See what I did right there?
Lastly, please no endless kiting and slow killing of mobs. I hated this in the vanilla D3 at launch. Spam blizzard and hydra and run from mobs, while you slowly killed them, but they enraged before being killed and murdered your character instead. The circumvention was play in a party or insert your money at the auction house. Those were not epic battles those were epic failed escape attempts.
Cooldown is good for certain skills. Serenity is a prime example. I think its a great skill and it simply did not and could not exist Diablo 2. Sorceress armor spells are good. Druid cyclone armor is good. Amazon fade is mechanically the same as sorceress armor just with different stat boosts- that isn’t AWFUL but Serenity is good too - its mechanically different and there is room for all those spells.
Cooldown is also fine - or even GOOD - for movement skills. Diablo 2 could have had a way better class balance and item balance in the torso location if teleport had had a cooldown. Instead of a cooldown, I think having “charges” (in the Diablo 3 sense of the term) is better than cooldown. You can use it a few times in rapid succession but only on average once per whatever time is appropriate.
There is no reason to not include some cooldowns if it facilitates unique skill design and usage. Cooldown should not be universal, and the 30-120 second cooldowns I think do not have any place.
We can certain agree on that part. There should be no buffs of 1000s% at all. Cast x to buff y in general is not that great but something like +20% damage to burning enemies could have potential.
is kinda crappy. I like skill points but huge amount of prerequisites is not good. The low level skills being outmatched by high level skills isn’t good. Syngergies was not good. Torchlight 2 skill system wasn’t perfect but it had a lot going for it. No prereqs, the second skill point in a level 30 skill couldn’t be spent until level 35 or whatever.
D2 itemization was really pretty good, I’d make some changes to it like introducing more +fire skills, + buff skills, + buff duration etc. Something generally applicable to most classes instead of a bunch of + class or + class tree. Deadly strike and such on regular weapons. Changing the way elemental damage on weapons scaled (or rather didn’t scale) with skills and enhanced damage. And then just the way items were generated kinda sucked. Roll good base item, roll good affix, roll good affix value. In the end it made it way too hard to get even decent rare items compared to getting uniques or runewords. I’d honestly just get rid of the base weapon qualities (normal and elite) leaving just the exceptional versions and doing something to raise the floor for affix values as monster level is increasing… and then drop fewer items to reduce clutter.
There was great dynamic between rarity tiers, normal had uses, magic could be really good, rare was rare and hard to find, uniques were unique and added a puzzle aspect to getting all your resistances and breakpoints. There was a lot of good there. Room to improve also.
I agree Diablo has always had it right. People always mention other games and it’s frustrating. They tried bringing other games into it and it didn’t work. I also get that it’s taking ages to get things right. D3 is awesome but it still has it’s flaws. Just like ALL games.
I’m mentioning how D3 did the art and visuals right as compared to other games within the franchise and others in the genre. Its a fair comparison. Saying “Diablo is Diablo” is like saying water is wet with no further context or point being made. Again comparisons within the franchise and within the genre are fair comparisons. Comparisons outside the franchise and genre can be fair as long as they are apples to apples comparisons.
