One of the greatest fights in the game imo, especially, because you can prevent his healing an then in an ultra long fight get a really nice reward. Love it.
So to keep the randomness of the spawn, I would like the following:
Every day, promote 5 random super unique monsters in the game (1 per act) to a servant of terror. These can drop soulstone shards (similar to keys of terror, hatred and destruction). There is no way to know, which uniques are servants at that day, except for killing all super uniques in the game and finding a soulstone shard from them. (Relatively low drop chance, you can carry as much as you want and trade them)
For the randomness: the community also has to kill each of them like 1000 times (or more, as suggested). If this is achieved (not at one day, but cumulated), a global massage appears (“Diablo walks the earth” ofc) and there is a timespan of 15 minutes or so, in which players can call the DClone in their game, by throwing 5 (different, 1 from each act) soulstone shards in the cube and summon DClone only in their game.
This way:
the time, at which you can summon him is still random
he will walk only on a few games! Only on these games, in which people spent their shards.
you can still hunt for him by trying to figure out, which mobs are super uniques today and farm them.
the devs could control and balance the number of DClones extremely easily and well, because of the 1000 mob kill count, which gives you an easy ratio to calculate a good drop rate, in order for “spawn waves” of the DClone to have on average an optimal number of dclones.
people would now play more of the game later on… it would be so cool, if you just had to farm blood raven or Lord de Seis for a day to get shards and the other day it’s completely different uniques.
Annihilus is super rare because the mechanic is abused. The sell count on the server IP’s are tracked along with the last count that dclone walked. If they don’t know the exact count that dclone last walked, they will estimate based upon the previous times that server IP walked. Those with a hoard of SOJs announce which IP they’re going to dump SOJs on, everyone in the group creates games until they get a game on the IP that they plan on dumping the SOJ’s on. Some are groups that farm them for sale on 3rd party sites, some ask for some form of payment to be included in the group, and there are some that are free and are first come first serve.
To avoid this hoarding problem, the mechanic either needs to be changed and in a way that is not predictable, or another thought is when selling a SOJ, there is a 25% chance of spawning dclone, but only in that game.
No the problem is not hoarding, but that there are no duped SOJs anymore and all games are going to have the same IP on modern BNET afaik. So you better go away from selling SOJs completely, because it was introduced to get rid of dupes. Now that there are no dupes, the initial problem, which was intended to be solved by that, is not even a thing.
So I basically say: then address another issue, namely, that later on in the game, all you do is Boss runs and some really cool super uniques are not farmed at all.
This is one of the few concepts I actually agree with changing. The uber diablo spawn was awesome but I think the SOJ sale system that was put in place shouldn’t be nearly as relevant or feasible.
I think it still has to be pretty random and challenging to keep the magic of it so I don’t have a great idea on how id want to see it done at the moment but I do agree.
Well, I think you need exactly the opposite. You are right, hoarding made annis more valuable. But since so many duped SOJs will not be there, spawning DClone is going to be extremely expensive, if you still have to sell SOJs for it. So the anni price is straight up going through the roof.
If you now only get a spawn every 4th SOJ and in only one game, instead of in every game with the same IP, annis will be worth a lot of HRs.