I think in d4 a goal should be to move away from builds where only 1 or 2 skills is contributing meaningful damage. It would be much cooler if I could use abilities and deal damage with them without a 50000% damage multiplier. Legendary bonuses contributes way too much to your DPS in Diablo 3 meaning without a supporting legendary with a gigantic damage boost the skill is unusable above master difficulty
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100% agreed.
1 skill builds (dmg wise) should basically not exist. 2 dmg skill builds might exist, but should be very hard to gear for, and be more of an odd thing you could go for in super-late endgame, not because the builds were better, just because they were different.
With most builds having at least 3 skills that all had a significant share of your overall dmg.
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You can do what you want. You want to build a 1 skill build you certainly can and there is nothing wrong with it.
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Yeah, I don’t see anything wrong with it either. It’s only a problem imo, if we bring in Diablo 3 type of legendary/set items where you’re expected to use one skill as a primary damage dealer.
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It sounds nice in theory, but we shouldn’t be spending much time on mobs once geared up. We should be steamrolling it. I can understand if you want to get away from the gameplay of steamrolling content, then this might be a way to do it. But it’s the same side of the same coin.
Skill in Diablo should be based on how quickly and efficiently you can get something done. Not about tactically engaging in combat. That is more of a WoW thing. If we are adding more buttons, thus a rotation, to killing enemies efficiently, that means the fights have to last long enough where those buttons can be pressed – for the most part anyway.
I’m not saying that a Diablo game that played like WoW would be awful, but it would eliminate the gameplay style that a lot of people do like in favor of one that’s already available in a Blizzard game. So I don’t think it’s a good route.
That said, the game already has plenty of builds where you’re pressing six buttons to play efficiently (or even a 7th if you count the potion, since you pretty much use it every cooldown to buff yourself). I’m rarely neglecting any buttons when I’m playing zBarb. If that is your preferred style, it will always be available to you.
It’ll be 6 skills of which 2-3 will be used while waiting for the actual ones to be available again.
Because pushing three to six buttons in a given sequence repeatedly is harder than pushing one repeatedly./sarcasm/
Does anyone really think players are going to abandon button mashing? It’s wack-a-mole just hand me the masher and stand back while I flail wildly.
Yeah, fight should definitely last longer than the blink of an eye.
But more skills is not the same as necessarily having a rotation. Can also be a priority list, context dependent etc.
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Well, I agree as far as the leveling experience, and before you have GG gear. Fights should have some depth to them then, of course. I’m more talking about the game though after you have about or near the best gear available to you. You should feel powerful and steamroll at least the trash. Challenge should come from other points of interest like efficiency and speed.
unless the game forces you to use multiple skills (with cooldowns or needing multiple damagetype because of immunities or so), why would anyone ever use more than one or two damage skills?
i can understand a singletarget and AOE skill, but if not necessary, why would one use more than that?
what would be the point to use three skills that more or less do the same in a different color? that would just spread your affixes thinner if you had to boost different stats.
You use your skill of choice and build around that with utility skills, buffs, debuffs and auras etc, thats how it is in pretty much every ARPG unless the aforementioned forced variety.
ARPGs will never have meaningful combat against anything but the bosses, you can’t really put skill rotations in fights against trash that dies in one to maybe a few hits, more than a quick one - two will feel tedious if you have to cycle multiple skill for hundreds of enemies.
Can’t give the trash meaningful mechanics either since you’d have to reduce the amount of them since multiple overlapping difficult mechanics would be impossible, and then you’d end up with a kinda boss-only style game.
the way i see it, it will always end up with 1 or 2 main skills and the rest supporting skills, thats just the way those games are built.
Looking through your previous posts…
This means nothing, and it quite comical
My frustration is that you basically CAN’T make a build for multiple skills at once in Diablo 3… At least the vast majority of the time.
PoJ monk for instance supports sweeping winds as a damage dealing tool, but investing items to buff sweeping winds isn’t efficient and you’re better off putting all your eggs in the basket of tempest rush.
It’s incredibly inefficient for wastes barb to invest in buffing ww. You just buff rend because it’s better supported by gear and that’s 90+% of your damage.
Pestilence was supposed to be a build where you bone spear mobs then clean up with corpse skills but that didn’t work either, because you don’t have enough slots to make both bone spear AND corpse skills deal high damage. You basically have to pick one of the other.
There has to be a middle ground between press 1 button to blow up the screen like d3 and having a 20 skill rotation like wow
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Man… if only you werent speculating and didnt know anything…
Lol
Every class is played the way it was meant to be played in D4. Depending on the way you build it. Which is still the way it was meant to be played. However you decide. That’s the way. You. Matter. <3
Okay I’ll bite. For a Whirlwind Barbarian you interactively use Whirlwind and invest in Rend for initiating the combat. For PoJ Monk, you still actively keep your Sweeping Wind for initiate but invest in Tempest Rush. For Uliana Monk, you actively use Seven Sided Strike and your primaries but invest in Exploding Palm for initiate thanks to Mythic Rhythm. Sunwuko uses WoL, TR or LTK but invests in their clones and Sweeping Wind always. For Zunimassa Doc, you invest in Fetishes but use Poison Darts to initiate. LoD Meteor Wizard initiate with Archon and primary attacks but invests and interactively uses Meteor. Examples can be improved further, when you look at how builds initiate the combat or which skill they invests in for optimizing their outputs and durability.
That doesn’t mean those builds are 1-skill builds. Next to their sustainability (be it a resource battery, life recovery or crowd control debuff), toughness buffs and damage dealer skills, each build have something called utility for whatever reason to deliver their devastating blows or a gain slight advantage for positioning.
That still doesn’t mean they’re “1-skill builds”; in high Greater Rifts, you use every piece of that puzzle to survive and prevail the challenge. Just because you use a single skill deliver your burst damage or snooze while farming T16, doesn’t mean there are no other variables in the play.
Go into GR130+ and count how many buttons you actually press for your survival and positioning at the face of inbound elite abilities. Even better if you happen to fight multiple, after slipping abit or getting flushed from your position to get their aggro.
For huge multipliers you see on those Legendary and Set items; those create power surges between the moments and offer a very steep, vertical progress in terms of leaps in endurance. Even though I don’t like them myself, these multipliers also offer developers an easier way to “gauge” the effort requirements and skill ceiling to scale them for balancing the classes. It’s already hard to do that even when you rely on multiple parameters each time; widening this gap helps the developer, even though it hurts the immersion.
Yet all things considered, we all get the impression that the combat will be slower in Diablo 4 and there won’t be a need for all those. Classes will have distinctive endurances akin to Diablo 2, and lose their main stat inflation that is paragon so their gameplay will be evaluated on their own class identity standards instead of global thresholds like Diablo 3 development team had to consider.
So developers are less likely to sing the same symphony for Diablo 4 gameplay as it was back in Diablo 3. Diablo 4 won’t be a Diablo 3 clone, as underlying progress gave huge clues that it won’t be same, yet somewhat similar to not alienate player bases. If you complain about that and fear that D4 gonna be another D3 clone, then perhaps just don’t buy it?
I hope D4 is not a micromanagement, hand cramping, carpal tunnel creating, button mash-fest either. I hate having to piano key all buttons constantly just so I can keep damage buffs and damage mitigation up every 4-8 seconds.
It doesn’t have to be an either/or. Both can coexist. Sometimes I want a more complicated build, sometimes I want a lazy farm build I can play while eating a sandwich.
The Blizz philosophy of pressing buttons = fun, so pressing more buttons = more fun isn’t always true.
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Back in time before S28 I used to craft full set of level 70 yellows for my character after getting to max level and increased difficulty to T1 if I wasn’t there already. All classes can easily do upto T4 without any legendary item (excluding legendary gems).
I mean I made a necro with inly 2 active skills not counting minion summons, and the rest were all pasives. Then I made a sorc with like 12 active skills. There is freedom with this system. Could that sorc or necro clear a ND100 or keep up with PvP? Have no clue. It was fun being able to do what I want.
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You can do that in D3 too.
Hint: LoD/LoN
Oh no 
What exactly do you want to spend time on if i may ask? Salvaging items?
I kinda feel like not being rude or anything you are a perfect example of a victim of the unhealthy direction arpgs have moved towards over the years.
What exactly do you consider fun?
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