D4 angelic/demonic/ancestral powers, constructive feedback

General Discussion
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So, I’m still pretty new to the forums, but I have been playing the Diablo franchise since I got Diablo one at the young age of 7, and I don’t mean that makes me an expert or my opinion more valid, but I am pretty vested in the franchise and would like to see it continue to succeed.
That being the case, I thought I would try to put together a comprehensive constructive feedback post about the itemization system currently in flux.
I’d like to stress one more time before continuing that I hope this thread will be treated well, and instead of us replying with “no that idea is bad”, we might try more often to say "I’m not so sure about that idea because of this: " or "I like where that’s going, but what if we tweaked it like so: "
Since Blizzard is opening the doors for our feedback to impact the game pre-launch, let’s try to work together to make this a great experience for everyone. Which always means compromise, but we can surely find the best compromises

Stay a while and listen :wink:

Okay, let’s start with the elephant in the room: angelic/demonic/ancestral powers, at a high level first.

Pros:

I like that it calls back to the fact that our heroes are Nephalem, making the lore behind these powers, well, powerful. I love the idea that the stats would be us pulling from our history. Power of the angels and demons that created us, or the power of early nephalem like Uldyssian; super cool!
Adds an interesting dynamic to item affixes, much more so than “I’m a strength based character so i need + strength” etc.
Because the system isn’t strength/dex/int you can potentially do some cool things by introducing affects and affixes that wouldn’t make sense to be tied to these 3, or doesn’t lock you based on your class as the previous point stated

Cons:

Because the powers each are so broadly talented (many angels and demons exist) it doesn’t feel like it would be easy to tie effects and affixes to one over the other very convincingly
Potentially forcing build paths while attempting to create more of them.
One (or more) of the affixes will inevitably be seen as sub-optimal and as a problematic stat to roll on your otherwise perfect gear
Aside from modifying other affixes the impact of which stat you take and the choice of which one seems less involved than I believe we’re all hoping it would be.

I’m sure there’s more for each, but just to kinda set the floor… So from there let’s get into a couple of discussion points on specific parts of the system.

Skill tie-ins

I think that there’s been quite a few commenters saying something to this effect, but this was the most recent one I’ve seen.
But as said above, it would likely make choosing angelic/demonic/ancestral power and how much of it a bit more interesting and choosey if the skills you want to utilize get some sort of added affect based on how much of a power you have.

The biggest potential issue I see is that for my build to work I may want Firebolt to get the demonic affect, but I want teleport to utilize an angelic trait, except times 6 skills.
As most ideas can be explained away this could be said to be a balancing issue. But a suggestion I’d have is that maybe the effects are tiered in some way
instead of 100 of each power for each effect, maybe it takes 35 for tier one unlock, 60 for tier 2, 100 for tier 3. meaning you can probably attain each, but you can also specifically max out a skill effect too if it’s important enough.

Another option would be that the thresholds are just much lower, but you can only choose 1 of the 3 to be active at a time, but that might take away from character identity too much since then it’d be similar to D3 skill runes where everyone can do everything.

Affix Locking

The potential issue I see with this is that you would probably be making the item hunt even more taxing by saying “I want crushing blow, but only the mid-range version because I can’t afford the ancestral power to unlock the high-range version”

I think a less restrictive but still able to min-max fix should be looked at, to appeal more to their “Easy to Learn, Difficult to Master” philosophy.

I’m sure others have brought this idea up before, but I think that it’d be good to have the stat be reduced in effectiveness (where appropriate) instead of it just being straight turned off.
It could either be a “lower tier” unlock or continued power increases as you grow closer to “maxing out” the affix via a scaling unlock of the affix

Example affix with restriction and angelic power results:

+20% cold resist - locked by 50 angelic power

Angelic Power Cold Resist
24 0%
25 8%
49 8%
10 (scaling alternative) 3%
49 (scaling alternative) 15%
500 (scaling or otherwise) 20%

Obvious issues with this would be + to skill rank affixes
+1 to skill rank would have to either not be restricted or be on/off like the current system would run.
but for +2 to skill rank you could have it on/off as 1/2 with a lower threshold to get 1 rank out of it.

I think that this change would help to preserve the active decision making they’re trying to create. There’s still a valid reason to get more angelic power, but we’re not completely ruining an item because it rolled a powerful locked affix that you cant use.

I personally think that the scaling feels more exciting to me from an itemization and power climb standpoint, but it’d be a bit more difficult to implement, particularly with my interest in this next idea:

What if we combatted the build locking issue by setting the affixes to have multiple unlock avenues?

Example:
Some affix adding to Crushing Blow (fan favorite example)
Since this is on-hit related it makes most sense to tie the item to Ancestral Power, so let’s say this affix has a requirement of 35 ancestral power.
But, we’re pretty sure we saw a demon land a crushing blow, at least once; So what if demonic power unlocks the affix at say… 55?

There’d be a lot of toying around with this idea too, but what if the affixes are tied favorably to one power over the others, but not necessarily Locked to it. The biggest fear i have for this type of system would be illustrated nicely by this:

If I pour into demonic power and have it almost as high as it can go, I’d effectively get rid of the stat requirements for everything and have access to any angelic/ancestral affixes just because. To combat this I’d think you would want to only ever link an affix to 2/3 powers, forced not randomized.
I think this would allow the system to encourage more build diversity than I fear it currently will, but there may be significant downfalls with this idea as well.

To sum things up, I think that a system like the angelic/ancestral/demonic powers has some potential, but I fear that it will make the game exceedingly hard to balance, creating fake choices similar to the stats in D2, I’d like to see a system like this only if it could be balanced properly. If the options are could but shouldn’t then the could might as well not be present.

I intended to go further into other subjects with itemization, but I think it might be better to stop here in the effort to keep this post a little bit more parseable.
Let me know what you guys think! I’m excited to have a great brainstorming session with the community :grinning:

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I think that we should get a % with no power, that way the stat isn’t completely useless on the item if we don’t have that power.

In the example there was an item with different powers: what if we don’t have one or two of them? that item will have less affixes.

The solution would be to give a bonus without that power and bigger effects with that power.

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So you mean with the example above, at 0 power give the 8% cold resist? Instead of having to unlock it at all? But not scale it up just two tiers of it?

I’m pretty okay with that. I could also see a hybrid system of base 8% but more power slowly climbs it up to like 16% with a 4% jump at the end when you finally unlock it

Not sure which way is really best though ofc or if there’s other ways to run it we’re not thinking about

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Yes, i think that, for example 5% resistance without no power and then go up from there could be a good thing. It doesn’t remove the cool thing of get the needed amount of power to unlock the full potential but at the same time it doesn’t punish the player that has no points of that type of power.

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I actually like the hard-lock kind of thing BUT what is important is we should be given a couple of power points to appoint into a skill every level therefore as we progress we can IMPACT the gear itself (which frankly think should’ve been obvious/intuitive to everyone the intent of the devs, especially those that compared the A/D/A powers to Str/Dex/Int lol)

Some people would go 100%, some would go Hybrid (and I usually tend to go hybrid lots of times), IF we get a couple or few points every level as we progress THAT is enough to know what you’re doing… It’s just that (AGAIN) wish there was a potential tree triangle-wise (again that same image https://imgur.com/a/BPvMROo

Would be kinda cool to have a visual of “what’s potentially next” with the build we went for I’d say… Let’s say you start from the middle and branch off toward either of the ends (could be the other way as well but kinda like the idea to have your unlocks spread toward the ends) :slight_smile:

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Glad my post struck a chord! Personally, I just think it’s a artificial hindrance on build diversity and will like said, pigeon hole people into specific “build bundles that blizzard set” which will actually kill diversity even more so than game balance does now. What does locking stats that to my knowledge, ARE NOT LOCKED LIKE THIS IN ANY OTHER GAME, going to increase build diversity? I don’t think it’s going to in any shape or form. Yet alone relying on balance to get it done.

Even if you have absurd things like, get 300 demonic power and you will have a 25% chance on hit to rain Armageddon around you! This doesn’t add diversity, because you put it behind 300 demonic power, anyone who gets 300 demonic power to rain Armageddon, is probably using the same set of other skills/affixes that demonic unlocked along the way. Especially since I doubt people are going to be ok with such a powerful affix being available while still getting anything meaningful out of angelic or ancestral, and if you can, then whats the point?

They would literally be better off leaving all affixes free to be picked up off any item they can equip, then creating a unique item or legendary consumable that allows Armageddon to rain on a 25% chance per hit, but hilariously, just having it require level 90 or something. This way, atleast those raining Armageddon, can use anything else and it’s their CHOICE of what to build along with raining Armageddon. At the end of the day, there’s only so many items and so many affixes I can stack. Limited space alone is enough to solve this. I can’t stack 1000 affixes unless the devs let me.

At that point, the only problem is if raining Armageddon is just flat out better than everything else.

Of course, this is all hypothetical.

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Yeah, again though, I think the concept of the stats is interesting and I’d like to see it manifested in a form that either prevents or mitigates the build forcing you’re talking about. But the only thing I’ve been able to come up with was the multiple powers lock the same attribute idea, so you have multiple paths to take to unlock the affix limiting the “well I already have demonic power so I have to keep just getting demonic power affixes”

That aside I don’t like the idea that this makes it much harder to replace old items because you can easily get stuck where you can’t replace one item slot you have to save items until you have a full new set to equip. Which I think is mitigated by having it function like Dunstan said

But like I said in the first post, I think it’s more helpful to try and find solutions to the proposed changes when we don’t think they’re good instead of saying they have to be bad, let’s exhaust the possibilities to improve them before ruling them out

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Personally I like the direction that they seem to be taking with the angelic, demonic, and ancestral power affixes. I only wish that they would expand upon it a bit. Instead of making each of those affixes give a single bonus (angel = buff duration, demon = debuff duration, anc = proc chance) I wish each skill and class had a angelic talent tree, demonic talent tree, and ancestral talent tree. These trees could have a variety of themed perks in them and the way you get points to spend in each tree is from items that give +x angel/demon/anc power.

When you gain points to spend, you make choices on the trees on what to unlock. The points you have are shared across all talent trees so you have to choose whether to invest your power into specific skills or your general class powers. Once you allocate points to unlock nodes on the different trees, those unlocks are fixed. If you change your items and therefore reduce your available points, the appropriate amount of points are reversed from your choices causing you to lose the benefit of the last few perks you chose. However if you then regain those lost points, the perks you chose are restored and any excess new points you gain can be allocated how you wish.

This system would be in addition to the idea that certain affixes require a certain amount of angel/demon/anc power to benefit from. It would allow multiple types of effects to be thematically tied to the different power sources and allow for more varied builds with more player choices in how the character develops. To further expand on this, the skill centric talent trees for the different power sources could open up angelic, demonic, and ancestral rune slots for the respective skill. This could allow for angelic, demonic, and ancestral runes to drop in the game that provide modifiers to how skills function. In order to use them, you have to have sufficient angel/demon/anc power to unlock the rune slot on the skill’s talent tree and slot them into the unlocked slot. The runes could have different effects and different quality tiers that influence those effects.

Finally, choices on where to spend your angel/demon/anc power should be difficult to undo. These should be build defining characteristics so undoing them should take significant effort. Simply changing gear should not undo any choices you have made, it should just disable any choices you can no longer afford from functioning. Actually undoing choices you have made should require the use of some either rare consumable or expensive crafted consumable.

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Here is what I saw with the powers that could go towards a very bad design…

SO instead of sets like we have on D3 (and we have 4, soon 5 sets for the classes) it will go to 3 “directions”/builds only

Like… Instead of doing a Tal rasha wiz, I’d be a Angelic Wiz. Instead of doing a Immortal kind Barbarian, I’d be a ancestral barbarian.

It must NOT go to that direction. It would be THE SAME MISTAKE of D3.
All things that act like a funnel on itemization are bad. It must always be the other way. All things work, some work a little better.

I think the best design is all itens are like 2% better from each other, and if I construct it all together, with anything, it doesn’t fluctuate on power a lot… (something like changing a item from “the build” affects only 2% of it’s power)

With d3 is like… with 90% of your set you do GR40, but with 100% of your set you could go GR120+. It’s a LONG gap.
And I see that the same thing could go with this kind of system. Like: with 59 of ancestral power you didn’t unlock some special power that might be the difference in 50% of your total damage.

You guys must WATCH OUT for that kind of thing, because D3 wasn’t made with the bad set system from the start. It changed towards this set only game with it’s time.

And I also miss A LOT of those stats that were removed from D3 that existed on D2. Like… I know stamina is a WAY OLD system, but was something Diablo exclusive that helped on game immersion.

Hope my toughts help you guys. I want a very better diablo game.

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Hmmm, I wonder if something like this would better be integrated into the existing talent trees they’re implementing?
Maybe we could even have assignable character based powers and the items augment them? This would allow for more item fluidity while still making it important to continue to choose items that lean into the talents you’re going towards.

I fear that with them tying into a talent tree it may lead too much to a single stat point allocation being seen as all around better and limiting the choices? it’s pretty hard to properly balance something like that imo

definitely a cool idea though!

Agreed, it’d be nice to avoid this, but ultimately without very very precise balancing of the skills i feel like diversity drops off significantly anyways, because with the growing visibility of the top players in games (through streaming, leaderboards, analytic sites, etc.) it’s much harder to feel like you’re not wasting your time when you run a “viable” build instead of “THE build”, the difference between S and A tier has to be very small to prevent community pressure from limiting you to just S tier in the first place.

I think it seems like they’re aiming to be similar to this. Although the sorceress legendary from the demo split your fireball into 3 that dealth ~50% damage, that’s still a single target damage buff, but it makes you only able to deal the extra damage when you’re up close to the enemies, doing reduced damage but more aoe styled otherwise. And most of what they’ve said so far is that they’ll be trying to make legendary affixes less about power (though inevitably power gains will exist with them) but more about how the skills function.

That along with the goal of having power come from many aspects of your character should mean that overall itemization shouldn’t feel as necessary to min-max because it won’t be the difference of GR40-120 it will be the difference of GR40->41 hopefully

Much agreed, though, it’d be nice to avoid 1 extra point of ancestral (or any of them obv.) meaning a terribly significant difference. +1 rank to a skill is as much as i’d like to see a single point jump you haha.

As a final side-thought, I am very excited at the prospect of + to skill affixes returning, but I’m currently afraid that with how many new affixes they’re talking about adding, and the prospect of this angelic/demonic/ancestral system on top of that, AND the probably significantly lower drop rates since rares are supposed to be end game viable now… it feels like the itemization might be as hard to get a good item as d3 launch was. Which I suppose might be fine depending on how far they go with trading. But it’s definitely a worry