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.