[D4] How make casters more loot dependent without KILLING the class fantasy

General Discussion
1

Making your golem punches scaling with the size and sharpness of your axe is the worst possible way to make everyone needing loot. Here is some suggestions. Gear obviously should enhance your character and powerful characters should wear powerful gear because they are powerful, not be powerful because they wear powerful gear.

1 - Sacred runic system / D1 tome system

Simple. Mages needs to absorb the rune to increase skill level on sacred 1/2. And on D1, they need to read tomes and meet the required magical power to absorb the tome power.

1.2 - Adapted

Instead of always progressing linearly, why not tomes having different levels and learning fireball lv 8 not necessarily requiring to learn fireball lv 5?

2 - Rune magical system (actual runestones, not the loadout system of D3)

Diablo 3 rune is just a loadout system. The unique good thing that can be said about D3 system is that most runes are sidegrades, not upgrades. However, there are a lot of other games. Dungeon Lords and Gothic 1/2 are examples.

You can make runes with all levels drop from enemies or ingredients to make runes like G2 did. Necromancers on D2 has the bone spear. Necromancers on G2 ret has the spear of darkness. Both spells are the main skill which dark mages uses on both series, however, you just need to allocate the points to get the spell on D2. On G2 ret is different. First, the quest to become a necromancer is pretty hard, then you need to learn the third circle of magic(BTW, bone spear is a 3rh roll spell for necros on D2), then learn how to make the rune, get the ingredients and finally, make the rune.

Something like this

 https://i.imgur.com/mQeBPRi.jpg

3 - mages needing to research their spells

Like project gorgon where to reach certain levels of certain types of magic, you need to research certain spells to evolve on necromancy or fire magic. Some high level spells require ultra expensive reagents like Phoenix Feather…

Not an power gain but - PoE inspired visual microtransactions for spells

Would be cool if you could have auras, transmogs like Trang Oul Set from D2 that transform the necro into a vampire. Having red, or dark purble bone spear would be amazing.

HOW GEAR SHOULD ENHANCE THE POWER

Remember, enhance the power, not determine the power. Gear should be a enhancement for your character capabilities, not the definition of your character.

Jay Wilson at 12 min on GDC criticizied “lots and lots of affixes in a item”, in favor of pure stat stickie gear. Video bellow.

And he mentions that having to worry about FHR, casting speed and other things hurts his “fantasy of a Barbarian”. Well, having to spend every single second looking for a bigger and sharper axe hurts an druid, monk, wizard, warlock, wathever fantasy too.

The main propouse of gear to a caster should be survivability. Enemies like Souls should be able to kill an naked caster extremely fast. And the enhancement to spells can be in faster casting speed, procs, +skill level, and other interesting things.

But please, no more 'your muscle mass and IQ is tied to the fanciness of your boots", magical gear enhancing your character capabilities is OK. Magical gear determining your character capabilities KILLS what is a character in the first place.

5 Likes
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Having a weapon/staves with Spell damage/cast speed solves this. Last Epoch has something like this.

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50% of power should be from skill/talent points, and 50% should be from gear.

Balanced, as all things should be.

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Which is their stated goal for D4.

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They’re already changing it.

Stop mentioning this in EVERY SINGLE THREAD YOU MAKE.

No, everyone needs to do that in D1. The Sorcerer, the Rogue, and the Warrior… by the way, how does that not destroy class fantasy?

You’re always ranting about things not making sense and then you propose this? It’s dumb.

Now, what you should have put as an example there was not needing to learn Firebolt before Fireball.

This is false. Every Rune is an upgrade over the base ability; there is no time you will see anyone using the base ability after they’ve unlocked a couple Runes. Further, some Runes are far more powerful than the others, like Frozen Orb trumping everything else for Arcane Orb, or everybody picking Prophet first for Akarat’s Champion.

I hope they do this without microtransactions, but yeah, it should happen somehow.

You do realize that your complaint doesn’t really happen, right? I mean, yes, the weapon determines power… but endgame Monks and Wizards aren’t using big 2h axes. They’re using their class weapons.

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6

Yeah.
This is easy to solve. Just make casters exactly as gear dependent as other classes. Deriving their power from caster-relevant affixes.

Giving casters tomes, while other classes used weapons etc. would be a bad idea.

Indeed. This should be true for both casters and other classes though.

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I disagree. Too similar to martial stuff. What is the point of having magic if magic mechanic wise is like martial stuff??

I would say that 80% of offensive power should come from the char himself. And that on defensive power, gear should be 80% of the power.

Never said that is necessary. Some games has spells with requirements and some doesn’t…

Why???

Literally every good RPG who has options for arcane and physical combat, has both completely different mechanic wise.

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Diablo is a loot base game, giving 80% from char, then it defeats the purpose of loot.

If you want the character to be most of the power from within, play Marvel avenger or other such games.

The loot base gameplay->fantasy of superhuman power.

The “I should be able to do damage naked” argument is irrelevant to 99.99% of gamers. I have never play a game where I can equip gears but choose not too (for some obituary challenges), I bet 99.999% of gamers are in the same shoes.

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Wrong. Also, gear and loot are not the same thing.

If you need to loot demon hearts, black pearls and other expensive reagents to “develop” an spell on G2 - returning 2.0, you depend on the loot as much as in a game where you need to loot an big and sharp axe to cast powerful spells. In fact, having to “farm” creatures resistant to dark magic can be one huge drawback and interesting thing to necromancers in any game.

The card system of Two Worlds 1/2 is loot based magic progression which also doesn’t fell retarded as D3 progression.

I can bear Diablo 1/2 naked, can beat Fate : Undiscovered realms and tons of other games. Gear should enhance your character, not be your character.

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Ok then. Diablo is a gear based game. People don’t wanna farm demon hearts, they wanna farm burning super death swords or legendary phallic staff of penetration.

You shouldn’t be able to. The classes that can beat D2 naked can only do so due to design issues.

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I didn’t say you did. What I said was it’s a better example of what should happen than yours AND it makes more sense than yours.

Which is arguably unintended. And it IS unnecessary for D4.

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Unfortunately all of the classes can, including hell difficulty.
… for some reason people still consider it a good game…

Personally I liked how Dungeon Seige 2 did the mage gear. most of the mage items had low base stats, but usually had affixes that benefitted mages, providing a distinct difference between mage gear and fighter gear for instance. But mages could also use a tome and insert scrolls into to allow for spell weapon selection. In essence the tome contains the spells a mage can cast, but those spells could be swapped out. Also the spells themselves could differ and level up based on item levels.

It reminded me of a more action based D&D wizard, where you need to prepare spells ahead of time (based on equipment) and then use mana for the casting of them.

Honestly, the idea of enhancing spell damage and cast speed should be basic on caster weapons… why would you physically hit someone with a wand that’s “supposed” to benefit casters? It’s like admitting that whatever is enchanting the items are utter morons and being forced to pay additional cash for useless enchantments would be an insult. Caster weapons should have affixes that benefit casting as standard… otherwise you kill the class fantasy.

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Idk man, I assume it is doable but for most classes it’s a major pain in the booty. And I’ve never managed to do so on hardcore. Only on softcore as a necro, but then again, you can do anything on softcore lol

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Search the following on youtube

Diablo II Nude Challenge: Barbarian, Hell

I haven’t watch them, but I did see him fighting Baal.

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Oh I am aware of that. It’s on softcore though, which makes it much more doable since you can keep trying even if you get killed. And it is indeed a challenge, it’s not something anyone can trivially pull off. I’m fine with that.

What I would not be fine with is being able to completely steamroll the game naked, on hardcore.

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As far as I’m aware of, only classes with caster type builds were able to beat the entire Diablo 2 campaign naked (all 3 difficulties). Classes with builds that were reliant on weapons and gear (in other words non-caster build) weren’t able to completely beat Diablo 2 campaign naked. That said, I could be wrong, but honestly I’ve never seen a non-caster build beat the entire game naked.

Regarding Diablo 4, having the character’s power come from 50% gear and 50% skill is the ideal method imo, one that Diablo 4 seems intent to pursue.

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50% of power should come from talent/skill points, the other 50% from gear.

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Diablo is since the begining a game where gear had little impact on spells. And should remain as such.

And say by yourself. The everything is %WD is one of the most criticized things about D3. Diablo 2 also had organs planned. “Blizzard south was the first to complain about this” (2:06).

That would be so cool and unique… Sad that was removed from D2…

And what is the problem? Dark Souls was not made intented to be beatable with shield only. But there are a guy who beat it under 2 hours with shield only…

Yep. Because skills on D1 acts like skills mechanic and lore wise.

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The problem is you wanting to make it intended. Obviously.

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I’m not necessarily against skill tomes in Diablo 4, as long as they are for all classes. And of course, as long as the skill points are still very limited.
Like, maybe you get 40 skill points from lvls, and then you can get another 40 from skill tomes. With 6-7 skill slots and a max skill lvl of 20 or similar.

All classes should still get approximately the same value from gear however. Otherwise we are diminishing a significant part of the game for some classes.