D4 - Class fantasies ARE more important than Balance

General Discussion
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I saw some guys criticizing the “arsenal” idea of Barb, allowing him to have much more weapons than other classes and honestly, i loved the idea. It brings diversity, cool factor, uniqueness and everything lacking on D3.

D4 is not a PVP focused game. In MP games, you need to sacrifice some things for the balance. For example, Me 262 Aircraft was vastly superior to most allies planes BUT germany was terrible outnumbered on late WW2 stages. War Thunder at least on arcade mode put Me 262 VS cold war era planes. They had to do that or nerf significantly the plane performance.(climb rate, armament penetration on armor, RoF, chance of igniting fuel, stability, acceleration, etc) But in a SP mission or even in a COOP mission, you can have the player having to deal with a outnumbered battle OR against much faster planes and it being interesting, fun and engaging.

That said, balance the game around PvP can be GOOD. Because reduces the power creep and make enemies and the player under the same rule. But too much focus on balance can be bad. Can kill class fantasies and make everything like D3, where every class gears, plays and feels the same

Before someone say that my WT example is bad because Diablo is fantasy and there are no planes, sure. But fantasy things needs to be consistent with the myths that they are based. For example, imagine if a developer puts Chinese Dragons to a game, but they act and have powers more akin to Slavic or Western European Dragons. That would not be bad?

Pick necromancer for example. Diablo 2 IMO has one of the best necromancers ever. Diablo 2 din’t needed Geneforge like minion mechanics, Arcanum like dialogs with the dead, Ultima Online karma and reagents mechanics to have one of the best iterations of necromancers ever. In fact, considering that the proposal of Diablo is to be a very fast phaced game, this features would’t work well on a diablo game.

On Diablo 3, every class is AOE DPS, minions fells more like DoT, curses are very lackluster without iron maiden, attract, etc and everything scales with WD for the “sake of balance” but due the huge multipliers, the difference between a well geared player and a non well geared is hundreds of times stronger, making party gameplay very unbalanced. As one party member will deal less than 1% of the another party member.

That said, make every class and build more unique.

Make druid magic more dependent on the environment and a hurricane dealing less or more damage depending if he is the the coldest area of the world or in a hot dry desert.

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I disagree in the sense that balance is extremely important (not so much between classes, as between specs), also without PvP.
But that is still not an argument against Barbs arsenal.
The goal in any asymmetrical power game is to have as unique and different classes as possible while keeping them balanced.
It would be the easiest thing ever to make a perfectly balanced game, by making everything the same, but how boring would that be.

So basically this indeed

I think there is too much focus on classes in Diablo though.
Imo all classes should be able to make all kinds of builds. So it should be possible to make a Tank Sorceress or a “caster”/ranged Barb. But a tank sorc should play differently from a tank barb, due to the differences in the classes and skills (such as Barbs arsenal feature).

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D4 - Class fantasies ARE more important than Balance

i agree

true

i do not agree;

diversity, in the form of class roles: tank, support, dps, should determine damage and solo-ability outcome.

this is an aRPG series; PvP and competition should be, at most, a seperated part of the main game.

never

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My hope is each class has a gimmick( for lack of a better term since it has a negative connotation these days) like the arsenal system.

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There are TONS of games who have crap PvP and amazing PvE. To mention one, see Neverwinter Nights 1(not confuse with the wow clone mmo)

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Class fantasy shouldn’t need to interfere with balance. I would also say that your War Thunder example doesn’t really apply here primarily because it’s trying to copy an actual thing from real life and it’s trying to be rather realistic about it. Diablo isn’t trying to be either of those things.

I also wouldn’t say something that looks like a Chinese Dragon but acts more like a European one is bad because those dragons aren’t real. There is no actual definition of what a dragon is or isn’t. It’s entirely up to the creator of that fantasy world to decide what a dragon in that world is supposed to be and act like.

In a fantasy world you can more or less make up whatever internal logic you want, you just need to A. explain anything out of the ordinary and B. stick to the internal logic that you have set for the world.

When it comes to fantasy and balance in games it just takes a little creativity. If the game needs AoE, give the Necromancer some undead minions that can AoE. If you don’t like that the Necromancer can almost just afk, then balance them around using spells to empower their minions rather than making their minions temporary.

Design some enemies that are smart and understand “Kill the person controlling all these skeletons” and go after the Necromancer instead of letting the minions tank everything. Maybe the skeletons themselves are weak to blunt weapons and a demon with a large hammer that does wide swings can break multiple skeletons of yours in one go.

No class fantasy worth including should mean having zero weaknesses anyway, so make some design in the game that forces the player to have to combat their weaknesses. That will act as a natural counter-balance to unique class design being too powerful.

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Actually was a example to why even games who focus on realism needs to abandon this for the sake of gameplay. And that i don’t wanna fully realism in a fantasy game. Only that the game respects the class fantasies.

Millions of people believed, feared, cultued and wrote tales about those beings. Only because they don’t exist, doesn’t means that they should’t be portraited in a more “believable” way in your setting.

Imagine if in your setting Poseidon can create and manipulate fire, forge weapons but has no relation to water. That would be silly.

Create your fictional being instead of picking something and not representing his “fantasy”. For example, if Hexer on DS2 was called “necromancer”, would be awful because he can’t create and control the dead… Tokyo Ghoul created a fantasy parasitical race but nobody claims that they are vampires, that is the difference between tokio ghoul and twilight. twilight “”“vampires”“” are not true vampires…

Strongly agree. Would only change “gimmick” to “uniqueness thing” because gimmick remembers me of awful bosses like Bed of Chaos(that tormented me for four hours IRL)

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Well it’s more that games which specifically aim for real world realism are a bit of a special case in this argument.

If you have a hyper realistic flight sim and you give me a F-22 Raptor, I generally expect it to behave like I have been led to believe a real world F-22 Raptor does because that’s a very real plane and the game was marketed to me on the idea that getting as close to the real thing as it could.

Diablo doesn’t really have to worry about any of that, though.

From our other discussions you should already know where I stand on the notion that we need to follow very specific ideas simply because “that’s what we’ve been doing” =P

Sure it’d seem strange at first if Poseidon was basically just swapped with Hephaestus but if that’s the depiction the game wants to go with, I can roll with it.

I guess unless the game is making a big point about how closely it followed Greek mythology. In which case: If your game makes a big point about its portrayal of Chinese mythology then yeah, the dragons should act like they do in that mythology.

On the other hand if you just want a dragon and think that Asian styled dragons look cool, I’m not gonna find a problem with it.

Which basically runs us into a “No true Scotsman” fallacy, and clearly it’s not just about “create and control the dead” because you have hated on the D3 Necromancer at every chance you get despite the fact that they can do that.

The only thing Necromancy really should stick to is something to do with the dead and that’s primarily because translated from Greek literally, the two parts of that word mean “Divination by way of the dead”.

I’m saying they can make up their own mythology, not that they should just start redefining what words mean.

Once you start saying “But that’s not a true…” you begin to stifle creativity.

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Diablo 1 had a D&D style armor mechanics and a dark atmosphere and graphics. I an not expecting a “Kingdom come with magic”, only a game like D1/2.

I an pretty sure that if Overwatch 1 and 2 are a cartoonish shooter and overwatch 3 becomes a ArmA 3 like milsim, people will not like. Even going to CS:GO artstyle would be bad among the Overwatch fanbase.

That said, Diablo 4 should be more akin to D1/2 in this aspect(class fantasy). If D4 becomes Mount & Blade or Kingdom Come with or without magic, it would be silly too.

Necromancy is more like speaking with the dead. Sure BUT Pyromancy is also fire divination in most cases. But in most games is more akin to “Pyrokinesis”. When i say “the game A allows you to play as a pyromancer”, people expect to see a “psychokinetic” class.

That said, i only know arcanum who allows you to use necromancy to speak with the dead and this mechanics will not exist on mainstream modern games due the fact that people expect fully voice acting, nobody will fully voice act something that less than 5% of the players will experience. The unique exception is if a game focus ONLY on it. Like “Thief” focus only about the thief archetype in RPG’s and have a lot of depth.

And since diablo is a much more action fast phaced game, spend hours searching corpses to cast “conjure spirit” would’t work.

And the highest rank among the Priests of Rathma is Deathspeaker

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I was more referring to the actual roots of the two parts of the word Necromancer suggesting that the word itself has to do with death and corpses in a magical or supernatural manner.

They can make up their own mythology as far as I’m concerned but words still have meaning. If you tell me something is a pyro that word means fire, so I expect something to do with fire in that class.

I am not however going to say “That’s not a true pyromancer because it can’t cast Fireball”. That’s just silly and and a little more than a good example of the no true Scotsman fallacy.

Likewise a necromancer should involve using the dead but they don’t have to follow very specific rules about how that works. They’re still a necromancer.

As for the internal logic that Diablo has set, like it or not Diablo 3 is now part of that internal logic and there isn’t any Diablo lore that contradicts being able to have 2 different styles of Necromancer like we see in D2 and D3.

Sure Diablo should have a dark atmosphere and graphics, but there isn’t any set in stone rules about how a necromancer has to work beyond that it should summon the undead, use curses, and have bone magic.

Which are all traits that the D3 Necromancer have.

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Limiting builds to environmental factors is exactly how you kill them.

We’ve been over this before, man, with the subject regarding characters who gain strength from the night time. This goes on to include factors like the hours of night in the game, how fast those hours pass, possible weaknesses during the day, and any possible viability to overcome that. For someone so adamantly butthurt over cooldowns, it also turns out something like this is very similar. And the moment you push items that guarantee Night time status or whatever, you both defeat the point of the mechanic, make them mandatory, and start depriving equipment of better, more generalized affixes.

Now, let’s shift gears a bit and say you do have some kind of Pyromancer that’s super strong in fire areas… only the best area in the game for farming happens to be a water dungeon. Too bad, so sad, right? Or do we simply just demand exponentially increased areas for whatever niche quirk you can cook up so they can have their time to shine? What about the leveling process and dead zones of progression? We can’t really pretend things like this weren’t a problem in D2 when it came to immunities, though you’d also have other quirky builds like a Holy Bolt Paladin being garbage against everything but undead. Fantasy and functionality needn’t be mutually exclusive factors, and much like the respec issue, some are grossly perverting the concept of roleplay to push what amounts to inconvenience for an intangible sense of identity.

And yes, media has pretty much been recycling fictional and religious concepts since forever. Tokyo Ghoul not calling Ghouls vampires doesn’t mean anything since they weren’t vampires to begin with. The Walking Dead always just called zombies Walkers instead of zombies. Sometimes things are done in an attempt to be edgy or to shake off some tropes, but that doesn’t automatically make them better. To that end, just because a Necromancer doesn’t have dozen+ skeletons and other minions doesn’t mean it’s not a Necromancer, or that poison skills not linked to a dagger suddenly don’t count. Artists need to be afforded a certain degree of creative license in order to create the worlds they want. If it’s not your thing, oh well. If it turns out the same artist, or group of, consistently puts out things you don’t like, then you’re better off walking away instead of hoping you can somehow change them. But again, this is an old hat suggestion because you’ve convinced yourself that labeling yourself a fan of Diablo means you should be listened to when we’ve got years of you bellyaching that only succeeds in making you look the part of a petulant child.

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My point is that the name itself can give to the people a lot of “expectations”. Nobody purchases werewolf the apocalypse and expect to play as a vampire. People see Diablo and automatically associate with a dark gothic fast paced dungeon crawling and streamlined RPG elements. Same applies to monsters and class fantasies.

If for example Dragon Age Origins “”“”“necromancer”“”" was called anything else, it would’t be the worst iteration of necromancer that i saw in my life.

There are tons of games that you can’t use skills for external factories or that external factories are a huge drawback. But my idea is that the druid is affected by the environment AND affects the environment. Eg - a skill that causes rain will also makes lightning based spells stronger.

Diablo 2 necro is heavily impacted by how many corpses he have and the amount of hit points. With a high amount of corpses with high hit points, he can nuke the entire screen and be the highest DPS on the game. Relying on Bone Spear/Bone Spirit/Attract/Iron Maiden, he is the weakest DPS in the game.

A Druid more dependent on the environment would be extremely cool, unique and innovative.

Instead of making every class “different animation generators”, each class and character should feel unique. Barbarians not only should have a arsenal but also should have a secondary resource “rage” mechanic, demon hunters special ammo(the basic ammo could be unlimited), necro should have corpses, druids the environment, paladins IDK maybe bonus VS undead, Warlocks a kind of soul gem from wow(if they come), assassin → backstab damage bonus and faster running speed(…)

Shine of Aman is a pain in the **** for pyromancers on DS2 but any build can pass the area. I saw a soul level 1 speedrunner with only a club passing in the first try.

ARPG’s(isometric, first or third person) aren’t tab targeted theme-park mmos. On WoW, if there are a mob capable of OHK you with Red Lightning Hose, you can’t defeat the mob(unless you can OHK him first). On Diablo 1/2, as longs you can avoid being hit, you are fine.

The Holy Bolt could be different. Could for eg, heal the living and damage the undead like in other RPG’s. Or could deal increased damage vs undead.

As for immunities, again. D2 exaggerated on hell.

having a fire salamander or a Efreet immune to fire is OK. Having near 40% of your bestiary is not OK.

Of course make. Doesn’t create wrong expectations among the fan base.

The artist can call their new creations anything else. Much backlash that “gothic 4” was receiving stopped when they changed to “ArcaniA”. I had marketing lessons in the college. Name can have a huge impact in any product or service.

WoW is another example. Blizzard din’t called the game “Warcraft 4”, they called World of Warcraft to make it clear to the fan base that the game propose is completely different than a RTS. This example was used by my professor and i still remember. Believe or not.

Other example is Dirge of Cerberus. If Square Enix had called the game "final fantasy “Z2” ", fans would hate the game till this day.

When someone say “necromancer”, the first image that comes to my mind is Xardas from Gothic 1/2/3.

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“It’s not my interpretation so it suuuucks!”

About sums it all up, right?

Look, I’m going to impose a creative challenge on you that I know you’ll chicken out on, but am going to do it all the same. Draw a picture. Write a short story. Make a short browser game. I don’t care what, just do something artistic and put it out there for people to critique. I can pretty much guarantee that no matter what you produce, someone somewhere is going to have issue with it. It’s the curse of art and subjectivity.

Nonetheless, I can’t help but shake the feeling you don’t realize how much of a blithering fool you’re being because you’ve never taken the creative process seriously. It’s easy as hell to steal ideas. It’s harder to make your own. No one cares about your first necromancer crush and your backhanded attempt to disclude D3 from the series did not go unnoticed.

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My point is that you don’t really get to define the very specific traits of what something is though.

Sure if you buy a game that says you can be a werewolf you expect to be able to become a werewolf, but that doesn’t mean you automatically need a weakness to silver weapons and need to be transformed by a full moon.

It was Inquisition with Necromancer and you can dislike it all you want, but it doesn’t make it any less a specialization that involved using the dead.

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I don’t know why we are talking only about necromancies. I mentioned a lot of classes and believe that each class and build should feel more unique. That is the point of the thread.

Yep. You are right. BUT if i an hired to make a continuation to one of the most acclaimed games, i wanna hear the opinion of the costumer.

You see art as something above criticism. And it not. People criticize everything and everyone. You also criticized D2 and other games. I din’t created this thread to criticize D3, only to say that more uniqueness can make the game better IMO.

Imagine if a image editor 1 had a feature “X”, the sequel “image editor 2” din’t and a costumer said that he prefer to use the feature X over the new feature and believes that a feature “Z” could also be a good addition. Why this is a problem? Every novel, every movie, every game, every book, every software(…) is criticized in this world.

Is not only i who disliked. In the RPG community is almost unanimous that DA:I has one of the worst and Diablo 2 has one of the best. Even people who hate “diablo clones” agrees that D2 did a amazing job.

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But again. This is not just about necromancer and i don’t think that D3’s necro is bad. Is AVERAGE IMO. Better than most modern games by far but still worse than “classics”.

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And again, you’re pushing your own preferred stereotype. Why are we supposed to believe that barbarians are suddenly masters of multiple weapons so some kind of “arsenal” whatever is for the better of their image? The term has never been a historically glamorous one and often they were just slightly better armed than the farmers they pillaged. Or you just so happen to be taken by their Diablo presentation, which is okay to an extent, but I think we could do better than medieval Rambo. Like it or not, a culture has been established in Sanctuary, and while being a warrior people may imply a certain mastery of martial prowess, you may want to be careful in arguing for a jack-of-all-trades sort when gamers very frequently want specialists at their disposal.

But hey, I’m also one of those people that’d argue that rigid classes are an antiquated concept that need to be shown the door.

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DISAGREE, the main problem is “adhering to” class fantasy that screws up balance in the first place

That’s the same problem that forces range DPS to be overbuffed just in order to prevent getting surrounded or crowded, and the same problem that forces melee classes to be Surrounded all the time but only die when under effects of (chained) CC

I’d much rather have them “reinvent the wheel” in this regard more or less so to speak, otherwise we’ll end up with the same problem all over again = overcrowded dungeons and no other form of challenge/s in the lategame

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The RPG community can’t unanimously agree on just about anything, not even what the actual definition of a RPG is. This sounds a lot more like “an internet forum full of like-minded people agree with me”.

but who does and doesn’t like it really wasn’t my point. It’s that it’s still a necromancer by virtue of the fact that it uses magic and and the dead.

I’m also not really saying there’s anything wrong with thinking Diablo 2 was a great portrayal of necromancers.

The point I’ve been trying to make, and the point I’ve tried to make to you in numerous other threads, is that if something is actually a good design in a video game then there should be reasons why that thing is actually good.

It shouldn’t need to hide behind appeals to tradition or claims of “but everybody agrees with me”.

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I agree with Lord victor. It’s an important topic.

The classes don’t need to be exactly balanced at every given level and for each given amount of spell points invested. Some spells can be stronger on the long term investment, some on the short term investment.
Some cars accelerate faster in the first 5 seconds, then faster in the 20-30 sec range. Some cars are more manoeuvrable at a given speed than others.

Otherwise, we get a game like in d3: where classes are like changing the hull of your phone. Or changing the wordpress template of a website. There is no tremendous change in mechanics. Because each class has it’s new power spell at the same level. D3’s progression template is always the same.

It feels the same as playing in dota Slardar/Centaur, Windrunner/Traxex: all heroes have the similar progression and are suddenly all stronger at level 6.
Whereas Geomancer is stronger at level4, and Invoker has its own progression system, like stats are swapped with spells in the talent tree.

Each class should have uniques features, regardless of the spell/talent tree.
And the barbarian being able to wear more weapons is a great example.

It’s also why monsters need to have behaviours, features and resistances/immunities to break to give meaning to the player spell selection, so that spells are not just visual skins.

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And there I was thinking that D2 and their skill system was just the way you like it and I don’t see where you get the streamlined RPG or where you get the fast paced part in D1 or D2 or in D3 for that matter until RoS turned up and GR

By that logic that means that if we see the name Diablo we must only be able to play the part of Diablo

And the real question is that while the level 1 speedrunner may have done it in the first try, how many times did he try and fail before he got through on the first try and how experienced was the player to pull it off?

And when someone says necromancer to me I think of someone that summons and talks to the dead, much like what whoopi goldgerg does in Ghost, and is what some people were believed to be able to do in ancient times

But, but it was written in a work of fiction like that centuries ago so all werewolves no matter what fictional land they live on have to be like that. This IS Victor we are talking about here

And that in itself is a criticism of D3
and then there is

another criticism of D3 and what myths do they have to base their FANTASY land on it’s not like Sanctuary is earth so what is myth on earth has no bearing on what is true or otherwise in Sanctuary

Why would it be bad?
What part of fantasy world don’t you understand
And it’s the creators world and he can have whatever he likes in his fantasy world

And imagine if in the setting Poseidon wasn’t a god of any kind but because of your bias you are one-eyed and can only relate to things earth based and nothing is allowed to change that
I swear you must hate every fantasy game every created because none of them fully conform to what earth is like and what earth’s myths, beliefs and legends are based and that you are incapable of wrapping your head around what a fantasy setting is
All your arguments are but on earth it’s like this so the fantasy land has to be like that, well I say in your reality all you need is a game called earth where everything is based on earth and have absolutely no fantasy settings at all