Well, druids can (and hopefully will have) skills and passives that directly boost the hybrid playstyle, like your next spell gets stronger if switching from bear to cast it, or your wolf deals more damage if fighting inside a tornado you have casted.
So the druid would not suffer the usual jack of all trades penalty, of being mediocre at everything.
Whereas the Hunter would need to split their skill points into two different directions with no, or very few, synergies between them.
It is just a matter of design of course. You could very well design a Hunter with a similar hybrid system, of ranged attacks boosting its melee and vice versa.
Imo a combat mage should not be that kind of hybrid on the other hand. If you focus on going into melee with a sword. Your magic should be centered around defense, and your dmg come from hitting things with a sword. So not really a hybrid either.
It is not only skill points. Trying to split your gear affixes between multiple things will also lead to each one being weaker.
+ranged dmg will be less useful for your hunter if you are 50/50 on ranged and melee attacks.
i think it always feels a bit forced when âranged attack boosts melee attackâ just for the sake of forcing hybrid gameplay, just like they are trying to force the swip swap transform druid
you would have to be a bit more subtile and create skills like a stab that cripples enemies and then a shot that deals 100% critical damage to movement impaired targets, etc.
No, itâs the better perspective actually since most players have no clue about Diablo lore and how it supports the meme build variations thus I am not biased to memes wearing black glasses.
It should not be forced. Just one more build option. Druid should have 4 broad directions to take the class; full bear, full wolf, full caster, or hybrid (which could be mixing just 2 of the previous, or all 3).
If you force the hybrid option, then you create the aforementioned narrow classes of course.
Sure.
I wasnât saying a hunter should be hybrid either. Just that it surely could be if designed that way.
A hunter should definitely be able to go either ranged or melee however. Whether it can effectively do both at the same time is another matter.
Same for combat mages. They should not really be hybrids where attacking with a sword boost your magic power imo. Then they are still just spell casters who happens to be standing in melee.
The combat mage fantasy imo, is more about using magic to boost your defense, so you can survive while dealing physical dmg with a sword (a sword that might of course also be magically enhanced).
If you, and any number of other folks, want to ignore the lore, then thatâs fine; however thankfully Blizzard isnât necessarily going to do that and instead uses it as a soft guideline when it comes to deciding things like classes and said classes capabilities.
No spoiling here as no one here even asked to see a Barbarian to cast such spells. In fact, no one said anything about having the classes able to learn and/or use each other skills. But nice try.
This will be present in D4. Youâll have shared skills.
I support it too. Just not for every class.
I was trying to explain to Shadout why making a hybrid class from every class is wrong. He still canât get it or doesnât want to acknowledge it, which is fine. I donât have a problem with it.
while class fantasy and identity is important, games should be fairly balanced and having a lot of âhybridâ classes while one class is completely narrow, just throws off people and the class would be less popular
but i think thats about the definition of âhybridâ
i just think that a battlemage skillline is simply cool and fun and i dont see a single argument why it shouldnt work since these arguments would also work against any other hybrid class that have always existed without any problem
With the exception of perhaps some legendary and unique items, the classes wonât share skills with one another.
Meaning that a barbarian isnât going to be able to learn a skill from the Sorceress or Druidâs skill tree as his own, and the same would go for the other classes.
Oddly enough, you first say that Barbarian wonât be able to cast meteors or corpse explosion, which btw could be considered as sharing skills (something that no one even asked for that), and now youâre saying that they will share skills. Youâre contradicting yourself at this point.
When you design a class, you first theorize its relation to lore, characteristics, strengths, weaknesses aka what makes it UNIQUE to other classes.
Once you have all the details, you apply skills to it, which are in the class context and you discard such that arenât.
This means youâll have classes that âwonât touchâ a melee weapon and youâll have players that would enjoy such classes for exactly this characteristic. This brings more variety to the game.
Although you probably arenât into HS, you can see this for reference on how the Blizzard HS team is approaching classes:
When defining a classâs identity, weâre primarily concerned with staying true to the following three guidelines: adhere to a classâs âfantasyâ, define the things the class should excel at, and establish where the class should struggle.
Yes. This means strong class identity not broken by the shared pool of skills.
Also, damn, talk about breaking down the class identities, if it did happen.
Letâs hope not.
Every. Single. Class. Should have multiple directions to go in. Every single class should have some options for melee, ranged and âspellsâ (yes, barbs shouts, ancestor summons etc. are spells).
You do realize that HS uses what is basically a classless system?
From your own link:
Neutral: Neutral cards allow classes to extend their strengths to reach a specific goal with their deck or to make up for some of their weaknesses. For example, a Paladin can add Neutral Murlocs to help them round out their deck, or a Hunter may use a Neutral card that gives them a small amount of healing so they can stay in the fight longer. These cards are generally lower in power level so a class can never completely overcome their weaknesses.
They likely do that, because they know how sad their class design would be otherwise.
Other than that, HS âclassesâ are exactly how you do not design RPG classes (luckily for HS it is a card game). It is basically the DotA design style, with each build getting its own class. Like fire sorc, frost sorc and lightning sorc becoming 3 different heroes.
It is a bit like set items vs. legendaries in D3. Predetermined builds vs. choosing on our own.
They talk about strengths and weaknesses in HS. Your build is what should define those. The class should merely be the frame, or identity, around it.
I have no idea what a barbarian background is in Diablo, however I am sure we wonât see these below (Nihlathakâs skills) as part of his D4 builds: Summon Minion, Minion Frenzy, Corpse Explosion, Arctic Blast, Teleport
I am also against shared skills and potions as mechanics. I want to see as much class identity as possible in Diablo 4 with each class having its own ways to heal.
Playing meme (out of character) builds should of course be possible, but not profitable aka the main class design should punish the player if he goes against the identity of the class.