Ultimates are relatively bad idea (but can be nuanced), CD on potions is a good one… Otherwise what’s the point ?
TP, buy stuff, come again… , and then the only way you can die is the monster is considerably disbalanced (double attack speed/rate/movement and basically immune to your effects/spell and whatnot)
It’s really bad… The ideal situation (IMO) is soft counters with strategic options to “extract” extra value from stuff, not have them at disposal near-unlimited…
Otherwise the ONLY way for the game to stop you win is practically cheating, which (sometimes) can be fun (survival/arena waves/runs) but it’s really not a good formula (in general) to base upon the gameplay…
I acknowledge that all of this to a large degree boils down to personal preference, including for me. I am not denying that.
I assume you are talking about the Land of the Dead + Corpse Lance Necro, right?
imo LotD is most problematic skill in the game, since it leads to such a terrible playstyle.
Also that build is also the only build (or at least one of he very few ones) where you actually turn from a potato (LotD not being active) into Superman (LotD being active).
Most other builds do not have this issue. Sure, they might be 50% weaker or so, but they that would not make them a potato if that skill (like Wrath of the Berserker or Vengeance) would not be active. The only other builds that I could think about where this is the case are IK builds and Akarat set builds, but only because you gain a 2000% damage bonus while WotB (+CotA) or Akarat’s Champion is active.
I would redesign LotD so that while it is active enemies take 30-40% more damage from your skills and when they die they get resurrect and fight for you for the rest of the duration.
Now, the thing with the other “Ultimate” skills like WotB, Vengeance, Akarat’s Champion or Epiphany is that on their onw, they do not turn you from a potato into Superman, like increasing your powerlevel from 12 to 780 or whatever, but rather they turn your powerlevel from e.g. 350 to 500 or maybe 550 for a while, so it is not like your build is useless while the skill is not active.
Currently in D3 it is easy to gain large amounts of Cooldown Reduction, which allows you to have a lot of these very powerful skills active a 100% of the time.
Imo it should not be possible to gain large amounts of Cooldown Reduction even when you invest a lot in CDR.
You can simulate what the game would be and how it would play if you - on purpose - restrict yourself from using too much CDR on a LoD build and also do not use items like the Obsidian Ring of the Zodiac or the Dawn Crossbow or Passive like Boon of Bul’ Katho and then make a build that uses e.g. Wrath of the Berserker-
I often play these builds (because I have a strong dislike for the majority of set builds) and in these builds my WotB has a downtime of ~1+ minute, and it still feels good to play.
Here is a video with such a build. Maybe that is enough of a gameplay example for you:
i think the necro build i’m referring to was also using land of the dead, but it was making use of the skeletal mage rune that makes it get extra damage for each point of essence used to summon the mage… so the idea was to max out the essence pool, land of the dead has a rune that makes that pool twice as large for as long as the skill is active.
But yeah i’m also a bit annoyed at the “ultimate” skills. When they came out they were meant to be used sparingly due to their cooldowns, but later down the line we received sets and items tailored to further enhance them if not make them 100% up time. That’s effectively going back and against the original implementation.
In the case of 100% uptime, which is the case for demon hunter (10 hatered/s + 40% damage) there is no competing option. Like you say i could try to not use it on purpose but it’s too good. You’d be limiting yourself… but do you have to not limit yourself? no, like i said people can and will do what they do.
but D3 does have an incentive with the leaderboards for ppl to pick the highest damage option and disregard all else (well within reason, highest dmg does nothing if any mob can 1 shot you, but yeah) . If that wasn’t a thing maybe ppl wouldn’t be so concerned about these things.
also another thing ultimate skills do which some ppl don’t pay heed to, but i care.
they all change your model or put a shader on your character obscuring your appearance.
What’s the point of the transmog system if what look you customized is obscured almost always. (only while idling in town can you see it).
that’s just bad design to have systems butt heads or be undermined inside your game.
I like these long cooldown “ultimate skills”, but not in the way they currently work in the meta game / endgame where you can easily achieve a 100% uptime on them, which is one of the reasons for why I don#t like most set builds.
I like them when they can only be used occasionally, but not all or even most of the time.
There is a rune on LotD that makes your skills not cost Essence while LotD is active, but there is a rune on Simulacrum that doubles your Essence pool, so I guess you are referring to some sort of Rathma build (Singularity Mage + Rathma set).
Necro is not my main and I don’t even know if I played that build, but I am aware that this build exists.
What I would do to fix this is to redesign the “Reservoir” rune of Simulacrum if it is really so powerful, or I would replace the Singularity Mage with something else.
Since they often create a weird playstyle, I personally do not like to have these “Consume all remaining Resource” effects on skills that do not have a cooldown, like Seismic Slam (Rumble), Meteor (Star Pact) or also the Singularity Mages.
I always thought that Meteor would be better with a cooldown, then it could keep the Resource Consuming Effect…
…or maybe have another effect that is basically the complete opposite of it…
… and for the Singularity Rune of the Skeletal Mages I would have replaced it with different effect that does not consume all resource, since it is just OP with all the other synergies.
Yes, I agree and I understand, but my points was to not enable the option of coming remotely near a 100% uptime in the first place, which in the case of Vengeance would be that the Dawn crossbow would have a completely different effect and Vengeance would first start its cooldown until after its effects have expired.
Then you maybe had a 20-30% uptime on Vengeance, so it would by far not be mandatory, especially if the Visage of Gunes helm also would have a different effect.
Yeah, I also feel that way.
Vengeance, WotB and Epiphany do not really look good.
If they only would make you start to glow (orange-red for WotB, golden for Epiphany and dark/blood-red for Vengeance) or give you some sort of aura around you (like sets in D2, just different, like a burning in a red flame-like aura), instead of completely make you look different, then it would great.
WotB also could make your char bigger I guess.
Archon and Akarat’s Champion are fine imo, but even if all of these skills would look better, they still shound not come close to be near anywhere a 100% uptime.
The only reason drops got easy was the perpetual cycle of increased difficulties and higher GRs - and increased drop rates being linked to those things. Before GRs were introduced we spent over a year in Reaper of Souls. The drop rates were bad, but then they were fixed when the anniversary buff was kept permanent. At that point, drops felt fine.
No, I meant RPGs.
An item of equal value for another item of equal value is a 1 to 1 trade.
It’s not the cooldown that made it useless, it’s the evolved circumstances of the game. D3 has very little use for tactical abilities like Condemn because fights aren’t tactical any longer. Fights are nuclear. You hit the enemies with the biggest and most powerful thing you’ve got and hope they die before you do.
Overall I’d agree so far, but this… not every ability has to deal damage, nor have the option of being a main damage dealer. After all, if we’re judging D2’s abilities as being good or bad based on their ability to be a “main damage dealer,” then D2 has a lot of bad skills.
Wait a sec, did you just state that “find gear” in a loot hunting game is an unfun activity?
Weird. First, you are saying you are playing at other accounts, and now you are showing the account that you are using posting in the forum. What happened to your “brother” account? (assuming it exists )
And considering how that your necro has 43 hours, there is no accurate way that determine whether you managed to reach to T16 with your DH within 17 hours unless you have a way to prove that your DH reached T16 without relying on necromancer help. I mean, I can create 1 new wizard now and after the next hour, she will be farming at T16 in non-seasonal.
The best way to determine that is to use your seasonal character to do so, and that assuming you didn’t have someone to hard carry you.
Either way, it doesn’t matter. The point is one can reach D2 endgame and D3 endgame reasonably fast if they wanted to do so.
You didn’t answer my question on why do you bought 2 accounts if you hate D3 so much? Is giving Blizzard money is how you showing your hatred to them?
What ???
I previously said that me and my brother bought the game when it launch, but for his account. And then, next to the end of the previous season I bought the game for MY account. What part of it can you not understand?
I’m starting to believe that you are just making fun.
Yeah yeah, I dont need to prove nothing. If you dont believe thats not my problem, sorry.
You know, probably the only way to you to believe, is to watching me personally playing the game. I’m done.
Funny, that you cant believe that I beat t16 in 17h, like its a hard game lol.
Like I said, believe you or not, its super EASY game, without any challenge.
It’s more dynamic. Cooldowns vs. mana cost is like, having a metronome vs. having a piano keyboard that you can play however you want. Also you can specialize in high mana/resource, and even if fully-stacked CDR allows you to halve your cooldowns, you’ve still got a “metronome”, just a faster one.
I’m not in the D:I technical alpha, but I’m noticing that the skills with >8 sec cooldown, are constantly on cooldown (except when there’s no targets). Naturally, why wouldn’t you mash them at every opportunity? They are probably extremely powerful to warrant the cooldown and you’d be playing inefficiently otherwise. (Though in the case of D:I, it’s probably not a deal-breaker to lack an elaborate cost:reward dynamic that flexes one’s brain so hard. Smashy smashy.)
Ok gotcha. You are using your brother account to play D3 and then you bought another D3 account for yourself in the last season…So it doesn’t change the fact that you gave your money to Blizzard knowing that D3 was a mess.
Oh, by the way, I think account sharing is illegal according to Blizzard ToS.
I didn’t say that reaching the D3 endgame is hard. I just didn’t trust your words and claims.
You don’t need a cooldown to punish players for that. I would reserve cooldowns as a last resort when nothing else can bring a spell in line (but would be a shame to not have such a cool spell in the game).
A stun might need a cooldown to prevent permanent stunlocks. Something like monks serenity would need a cooldown to prevent perma immunity.
(whether Serenity should exist at all is another matter)
You put in the right words what I want to mean.
It feels like cooldowns, even with CDR, you still HAVE to wait, without any option to make a sacrifice to be able to use the skill, you just dont have choices.
With another resource, like mana, you have many ways to prevent people of spamming skills, and yet you have options to use the skill, even when you could not, like using a potion.
I’m not a fan of stuns/cc in PvP in general. But yea, a huge cost for a stun wouldn’t be so hot, but giving stun resistance to elites/bosses would work nicely. Baking-in diminished returns into the ability itself might be interesting (eg. the stun duration in the tooltip counts up from 0 secs after each use), albeit unintuitive, perhaps.
“Divine Shield” could cost a huge chunk (~50%) of your mana pool or something, “Lay on Hands” style.
, and then the only way you can die is the monster is considerably disbalanced (double attack speed/rate/movement and basically immune to your effects/spell and whatnot)
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