It doesn’t matter if skills won’t have runes, you can use different skills.
And if you want your weapon to do different things with each skill, that can be done as with other classes: by associating that effect with the weapon itself.
I think they should remove character classes altogether and let you decide what you want to do with the huge poll of all available skills. Maybe have some skills (the most powerful) that can only be learned via quest or something. That way you can sort of take a path if you feel like it to achieve certain abilities, but aren’t limited by your choices and if you want to mix it up it’s not a problem. This would remove gear limitations as well.
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Different skills are different skills, not the same skill with different type of damage or effect.
Sure, and also can have different legendary affixes but can’t switch between them unless they add a way to switch between different weapons which isn’t that different from my suggestion: and different items would take inventory space which was one of the complains.
I would like that, D1 was much more flexible: sure, it didn’t have enough variety of things but the idea with the spells was good.
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I agree, 250 arrows stack is way too small. But why should a barbarian repair his weapons, and not the amazon? I’m not sure if it’s good to refill.
Though I think various types of arrows would be indeed interesting because it provides time for a time for benchmarking and analysing. Some arrows could be specialized to pierce some resistances.
Also we have to be careful with with elemental damage with physical damage classes, it must remain classy to keep the archetype clean.
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physical ammo?
-no, that would be unneeded complexity.
-we have the resource globe, that’s enough.
Well, in D1 you needed to repair the blow, and in D2 i think you needed to repair to recover the charges (i remember it was like that with javelins but don’t remember with arrows).
Sure, it is an unfinished idea, it has a lot of things to improve and balance.
I agree that it adds complexity, and maybe is uneeded but i think that bring back, in the right way, things like scrolls, throwing potions (bombs), arrows, bolts and other stuffs like that can add interesting things to the game, and different things we can use to build our character.
Ofc, they would need to support those things to make viable builds, perhaps one way to do it could be with the idea of D4 Shared Skills
Hunters in vanilla WOW had a system similar to this, and the penalty for it was steep, much more than mages and warlocks that had to stock mana potions and soul shards.
You lost an entire bag of inventory space to having to carry a quiver. If you wanted to be sure you had enough arrows during a boss fight, you had to carry extras in the rest of your inventory, using up more space that other classes had free. Then you would have to pause during the fight to move the extra arrows into the quiver, which would end up being a big dps loss. You could buy higher damage arrows as you leveled up, but if you had lower damage arrows in your quiver at the time, you would have to destroy them before the game would use the higher damage arrows. If both types of arrows were in the quiver, the game was somewhat… capricious in which arrows it used first.
This was removed because the penalty of this mechanic to hunters was unreasonable compared to other classes. I’m not a software person, but it seems to me that to write a mechanic into the game that would create a seamless switch between different element arrows or ranged to melee, would be very complicated, and very subject to being buggy. Granted, this was old software, so I’m not sure about that.
Edit: I didn’t intend to reply to any individual, sorry! Also, the WOW devs have said many times that hunters were the most complicated to write into the game as far as their mechanics were concerned.
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That doesn’t make your call the right one, no matter how sentimentally attached you are to the idea.
What you’re asking for is for ranged classes to be specifically gimped:
- They have to sacrifice their inventory space to carry ammunition. The more types you include and make beneficial within the game, the greater the burden. That means you carry less loot. You have less space for anything else in the game you might want to carry - and space is always a resource in RPGs.
- They have to pay specific attention to this mechanic that no other class has to. Yes, even if you know your class, you will run out of ammo at some point during a fight and it’ll suck. It happens to even the top players because we don’t want to be thinking about this useless accessory mechanic. We’re thinking about how to play the game best. I still remember loading up the bags with ammo in Vanilla WoW for raids. We’d get a little farther than anticipated and people wanted to try a few more attempts at Raid Boss X. All the hunters ran out of ammo. We shared what we had, but eventually we had to stop the raid, make 39 other people wait, go to town, buy a truckload more of the stuff, and get summoned back. When you’re playing for a long time, you run through the ammo. You can’t just write it off as a “L2P, nub” thing.
- They have to pay a cost no one else has to pay. There’s never been any game with this mechanic that I know of that didn’t make the ammo cost resources. The best stuff cost the most. That’s certainly a meaningful thing and a sensible thing to do, but it’s a cost that only one class has to pay. I complained in WoW about the repair costs of plate as well because it was so much higher for tanks than it was for leather and cloth-wearing classes. Our guild actually farmed specifically to pay the tank’s repair costs on raids because it was so unreasonably high. And if you just make the cost so small as to be trivial, then what’s the point to having it at all?
Let’s just say, we took your route:
- Make it huge stacks of 1000, even 10,000. You buy 40,000 of the things and start your run. You don’t think about it because you already bought 40,000. Then you run out because you thought you still had plenty. You can’t ignore it no matter how high you make it.
- Make it super cheap. Now I’m just obliged to remember to click the button on the vendor that no one else has to. Is this meaningful in any way? It’s just an extra click I’m required to make that no one else has to, in place for a role-play that has lost all it’s value.
- And the value of the variants in elemental damage, etc could all easily be built into the skills of the archer class directly. It worked in D3. That’s the DH. They’ve solved this problem already. They made a class that is fun to play and has plenty of options.
If you reduce this to its endpoint, it’s a meaningless complexity that penalizes only ranged classes that fire projectiles. Mages won’t have to deal with it. It’s extra itemization. It’s extra balancing. It’s extra art. It’s extra development time for a mechanic that’s only annoying to players. Games aren’t perfect simulations of real-life. They’re supposed to be fun. D3 got this part right by getting rid of the arrows, and baking that concept into the quivers.
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i actually did like this in D2! i think it helped to keep me on my toes and really i never ran out and hardly had to go into town to buy more as arrows dropped fairly frequently. love my Bowmazon! 
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hmm, if they do that, perhaps it would be like D2 where you could equip 2 weapons but had to press 1 or 2 to switch between them?
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Ok, but like i said, that can be solve with bigger stacks, a lot bigger. I agree that one type of arrow shouldn’t take more than 1 slot.
I didn’t thought of something like that. The arrows would have an effect but no damage.
Well, if they can’t do it right then i agree that it shouldn’t be like that.
All classes will have different mechanics.
I not trying to convince anybodoy. People post things and if i have an idea of how it could be solve, i post it. I don’t say the idea doesn’t have problems but i think that most (if not all) could be solve with the right idea.
Sorry if you had a bad experiense in a game with something like this, but that is not my fault. That is the fault of the devs that put things in the game they don’t know how properly balance.
Well, that would be a way in which could be done. Another one could be something like:
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Have a class skill (like the one we get by default in D1) that alow to switch between weapons. This skill would take one slot in the skill bar (if we decide to use it) but the benefit would be that when switch, it would be like switch skill bars and weapon. This means that this class could have 10 skills equiped vs the 6 of other classes.
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Ofc, if that idea don’t like bcs, well, we don’t know if the skills we will have are limited or if we will unlock them all like in D3, then they could also add a key to switch items and skill bar.
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Maybe a thing they could do is to have some skills that can be used with both types of weapons? Don’t know, i was thinking in something like the daggers: you can throw them if have a ranged weapon equiped but if change to a melee weapon they are used with a melee attack.
This are just a few ideas. Don’t know which is best, to have a key to switch weapons is the simplest one and the one that could work best, plus they could use this for other classes too while the other ideas are more class specific.
Which pre-D2 games have arrows as a resource?
I think never said anything about pre-D2 but Nox was around the same time (year 2000, according to mr google) and had arrows like the ones i am suggesting, and in fact i had the idea bcs of that game:
- The class that could use bows/xbows and arrows/bolts, could also cast magic and summon pets, but the main weapon was the ranged one. One could carry as many arrows as they wanted but the big bag (similar to the one of D4) allow it with not much trouble and the arrows drop often enough too.
I love and also suggested the idea to have a bow/dagger class, that can switch like the barbarian 
About the arrows, im not sure about finite arrows xD
But having the elements in the arrow items is a cool idea and also to switch between them 
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So, there were no games for the Devs to reference for “proper game design” when they decided to try something different. Correct?
Yes, and if the finite arrows is too big of a problem (for the devs i mean) then i guess it is ok to have something different. Maybe can even have the arrows but be unlimited, don’t know, some games have that option too, for the ones that don’t like to switch between them.
I think the biggest problem i found is to be able to switch between the arrows on top of switch between the weapons. In other games can be solve easily but D4 has a very limited skill bar.
The image of a D4 Hunter had a bow, Quiver, holder for quiver, and… a dagger.
Ikr? Its hyping me a lot <3
Well i guess, there can just be a switch button like switching weapons, to switch between 3-4 arrow types
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I suspect it would operate like the barbarian. The “weapon swap” happens based on the skill used.
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Well yea an other possibility for elemental arrows is just the skillsystem
See D2: fire arrow, ice arrow, exploding arrow etc.
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