Ok, so you did just use whirlwind as your attack skill. I think you would gain a lot for a pvm build if you pumped death sentry too. But it sounds like this is a specialized build built to excel in pvp.
Your sorc is a specialized build as well.
These really aren’t beat everything in the game comfortably builds but I’m sure you can beat everything in the game with them. I’m sure you can come up with plenty of examples of using one attack that applies several types of damage. However, I would argue that that’s not the norm for D2 and it’s probably not optimal against many packs. Even your blizz sorc uses blizz, glacial spike, and ice blast; teleport, telekinesis and static are sort of your alternate attack since you can use them offensively to drop your merc on a target, stun, do lit and physical damage. This build won’t excel everywhere though since it is specialized.
Which is why they should be considered passives, in D3 passives aren’t able to add effects like the choice of rune. However in the skill setup of D4 they can, and thus you can still select Magic Weapon and choose between Force Weapon or Deflection, it just becomes a character trait that is activated all the time.
No I consider abilities you activate strategical or timed or in combination to active skills. Skills you just activate to gain a prolonged effect is not active skills. Archon is an active skill as you plan how and when to use it. Black Hole is an active skill as you choose where to place it. Familiar is not an active skill.
Hammerdin uses Blessed Hammer and Teleport. Whirlwind barbarian uses Whirlwind and Berserk. Wind Druid uses Hurricane and Tornado. Trapsin uses Lightning Sentry and Mind Blast.
Do you really want me to continue? The rest of the skills are merely fillers that aren’t active skills.
Wow you must be some kind of god then, or if Diablo was in anyway a MMO, however it is NOT. And those you can’t handle 20 abilities. I think your knowledge and experience in the ARPG genre is too limited to fully understand it. I suggest you go look more into that genre and leave the other nonsense out.
No, in an action game they really don’t. They are merely clutter that you shouldn’t be dealing with. What adds flavour in Diablo is how the skills work and look visually, as you can clear see a distinction between classes based on how they deal their damage and how it looks on the screen.
When there’s a monster in front of you, you hit it with a Fire Ball, you don’t stand around the casting setups, preparations, buffs and debuffs while trying to get another target in between and spur around. No you put Fire Ball straight in their face and find the next monster to put a Fire Ball in the face of, or a Meteor to add some flavour.
ARPGs are about the fun of seeing your enemies being crushed under your abilities while you feel like a god and smashes more stuff up. There’s no utility spells or situational buffs and preparations. The only utility you need is movement.
I highly suggest you stick to WoW and other MMO’s because clearly you are more advanced in that and more inclined with that type of game. I will stick to ARPG which I personally enjoy far more and know better. I really don’t care for the slow team play of WoW, and D3 had more than enough of WoW in it, we don’t need more of that in D4, we need WAY less.
My Assassin was specialized for PvP yes, though the nature of the build meant I could pretty easily handle everything in the game at the time. Things with poison immunity were noticeably slower because that was the majority of my damage, but they weren’t that bad.
You could roll characters so quickly in Diablo 2 I didn’t see much of a reason to have a generalist build.
It may or may not have been the norm. All we’re both going to have here is anecdotal evidence, as in my experience most people I played with used highly specialized builds. The ones who didn’t simply just didn’t perform as well as we did because we had builds specifically designed to excel in the content we were doing.
Also no, my cold Sorceress didn’t need to use anything except spamming Frozen Orb as an attack. I did try Blizzard at one point but found it wasn’t really making things faster for me.
Calling Teleport “sort of an attack” is just straight up reaching at this point =P
Skyrim also uses the same inventory Elder Scrolls has always used even back when it was only on PC. The UI in general in that game is bad, but the inventory system specifically isn’t designed for consoles.
Also if you want to go with aRPGs that don’t have tetris inventory(not specifically grid, but just not tetris):
The Witcher
Dragons Dogma
Dark Souls
Mass Effect
Fallout/Elder Scrolls
Borderlands(and pretty much any “looter shooter” which are considered a type of aRPG).
Kingdom Come Deliverance
Monster Hunter
I’m sure I could find more if I looked harder, but all of these series have entries that came out in the last 10 years with a non-tetris inventory. Some have a weight system, others don’t.
The only modern games I can think of that use tetris inventory is the Diablo clones, and Deus Ex. I guess sort of Resident Evil? It’s not an aRPG, but a few weapons take up 2 slots instead of 1.
Hammerdin uses Blessed Hammer and Teleport. Whirlwind barbarian uses Whirlwind and Berserk. Wind Druid uses Hurricane and Tornado. Trapsin uses Lightning Sentry and Mind Blast.
Do you really want me to continue? The rest of the skills are merely fillers that aren’t active skills.
I need the trump meme here: wrong, wrong, wrong. All of these use several more skills than two unless you are very bad at D2.
Well I used to beat the bots down to Baal so it was more them following me ^^
However you have proven extensively that you don’t have a grasp of what an active ability is and what a passive ability is, so your argument still fails. If you want to use Smite on Baal with your Hammerdin, then go ahead.
You’re funny. I’m not the one that thinks curses and cloak of shadow are passive. You know that skill warp time by the wizard (almost identical to slow missiles in fact), same thing but you call that active (because there is a visual bubble showing the AOE I guess? Haha). You have proven several times that you will rationalize whatever you want however you want to back your beliefs; you obfuscate, spin and reframe.
Also, on passives vs actives, I don’t care if the skill is passive. It’s still a skill in the skill bar. The whole point of this thread is that 6 total skills are not enough and it implies to me that the game will be too simple again. Only 6 skills says a lot about leveling, items and monsters and they’re all negative implications imo.
I’d argue this is what easy difficulty should be for, not the game as a whole.
Harder modes in the game should challenge the player in both their knowledge of building a character, and their skill in actually playing it.
Which is something I don’t feel like Diablo 1, 2 or 3 did terribly well, for different reasons for each game.
If we’re going to bring passives into this, it’s worth noting that Diablo 3 has 6 active skills and 4 passive skills allowed for a total of 10. True passives and not the “fire and forget” actives that are right next door to being a passive.
Not that it’s actually a good thing, just pointing it out for correct numbers.
The talents in Diablo 4 is a welcome addition in my opinion, and I wish it’d actually be a bit more fleshed out with even more passives. The Sorceress talents at least feel less like a proper talent tree with choice and more “pick one of 3 branches based on which element you want to specialize in”.
I’d also prefer it if our active skills in Diablo 4 were a bit more active. My WW Assassin was a lot of fun, but a good number of my abilities were just maintenance buffs. Reapplying Venom once every ~5 minutes didn’t really add anything interesting to the gameplay.
Likewise for D3: An ability I hit every 30 seconds to give me 10% more damage isn’t engaging as far as skills go. It’s on such a short cooldown it’s not even really a tactical decision, and I don’t want to see D4 going into WoW’s style of 5+ minute cooldowns just to make it more strategic in when you use it.
In the context of D4, an ability like Venom should probably just be a passive talent.
I never looked at it this way before. This is very true though. Just because they are not on your bar but they are skills that are very important to builds.
Four passives is good and helps, but I think 6 skills that you use in combat is a bit low still. Even though it’s not really that important to actually cast the venom skill as opposed to getting it through a passive, I kind of enjoy the choice to grab a weak venom, a few points, etc.
Personally I prefer some immunities in hell too and with 6 skills on the bar there will very likely not be those.
Has it been determined if you pump skills or if you just acquire them as you level again and they’re maxed? If it’s the latter again, I’m not a fan of that system but a system like that probably would require restricting the amount of skills.
The game should go back to skill points of some kind and get rid of interchangeable skills that are maxed as soon as you get them. It’s not fun to just swap skills on the fly and have them all available all the time.
I’m not going to argue that 6 skills is too low even with the passives since I agree that 6 is too low a number.
With talents you can do something like Venom and just have it go up to 20 points so there’s still that choice about having a few points for a weaker poison or making it a keystone of your build like my WW Assassin did.
Unfortunately right now I think most talents are between 1-5 points, which hurts that choice.
As far as I know right now you’ll get skill points and have to assign them so you can choose to pump up skills. However you’ll earn more skill points though tomes that drop, and you will eventually max out every skill anyway. They’ve suggested it’ll take a while, but no timeframe has been given for just how long to max everything, but I suspect they’ll want most people to be able to max everything at endgame so it’ll probably be pretty quick.
Especially since aRPGs these days tend to be shifting towards seasonal play so that you reset your progress every ~3-4 months.
Talents on the other hand, you wont be able to max out everything but you will be able to respec. We don’t fully know how respecs will work, but I hope it’s at least limited enough that you can’t be respeccing 15 times a day.
Notice I said swap between and activate 10+. I don’t see skill swapping. I only see individual skill activation, which was my point. With the D2 design where the majority of skill activation is funneled through LMB/RMB, the player is forced to swap skills as needed. This means all trained skills are accessible but must be swapped into LMB/RMB to be activated. In D3 we get 6 skill activation buttons but no skill swapping on the fly. We are locked into the 6 selected. This means all of the other skills and passives learned during the adventure to 70 are unavailable.
You are right about 14 inputs. Let’s consider a D2 Level 30 MeteOrb Sorc build. She has 19 skills learned from the skill tree (I took frozen armor). I’m going through this slowly to show that something has to give in the UI to allow transfer of the game to console.
Key/Button Layout Assumptions
we map LMB/RMB to left and right trigger (lower bumpers)
movement is with 1 joystick and targeting with the other
the A key (XBox) or X key (PS/4) is our modifier key
we now have 11 unmodified keys and 11 modified keys available for assignment (22 total)
The above represents a layered approach to key mapping. The 2 joysticks allow for moving north while firing east, for example.
Button assignments
19 Sorc skills
4 belt potion slots for Sorc consumption
4 belt potion slots to feed to the merc (shift + click on PC)
weapon swap
melee attack
throw item attack (ex: choking gas/javelin)
map toggle
run/walk toggle
character attributes toggle
character inventory toggle
merc inventory toggle
force stand still
show item toggle
swap to previous skill
swap to next skill
…etc.
The list above is already beyond 35 skills which is well above the 22 buttons available for assignment, and the list is not complete. I really do not see a means by which controllers are going to have full parity with PC keyboard and mouse with respect to functionality (skill/command to button assignment) and application (use of skills/commands through buttons). When one considers all of the functionality and application interaction at high speed in a typical D2 speed run, from level 1 solo, there are so many instances where accuracy is demanded, while on the move, and in and out of combat. For example, while in and out of combat and on the move one will at some point need to do the following:
feeding the merc potion(s)
managing belt and inventory
managing merc equipment
assigning stat points
assigning skill points
I know @beefhammer and @Gilthas assume that I’m trolling but look at the math of 22 available buttons with a modifier key employed when the number of skills/commands is > 35. The demand for accuracy, for which controllers can not overcome, is needed all over the place, including mundane stuff such as belt and inventory management. This simply is not doable from a pure math perspective and exceedingly clumsy from an speed/accuracy perspective so, something has to give or change in the UI to allow the game to have parity or near parity with between console and PC. This is why the D3 game was dumbed-down for console.
Look at the potion belt to inventory dump trick that is employed in town where all the precise mouse movements are employed between vendor window and character inventory. I don’t see how the controller boys are going to have parity with mouse users at the mouse users’ speed and accuracy. This is while standing still in town. For those who haven’t touched D2-LoD in 8-10 years, here are two speed run examples (multiple parts):
The UI change from D2-LoD to D3 was so drastic that it forced a complete redesign away from D2.
Forget what ever you were thinking about Final Fantasy. The argument is dead. PoE is an improvement to D2 but even that game is much closer to D3 in UI design making it easier to get on a console. However, consider this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2XjA5giwsYA
I know you reference code vein. The game is designed around bat-wing controller therefore it is heavily simplified in comparison to PC keyboard and mouse. This is the argument from long time PC gamers. We don’t want a dumbed-down UI system, and by extension dumbed-down game. We want PC game not console game.
@beefhammer, @Gilthas:
Go lookup DiEoxidE’s stutter stepping videos where he demonstrates the techniques on a PC in D3 vanilla with a DH. Next, find us 1 or more videos where a DH on console can do what DiEoxidE does, with the speed pylon active while fighting large packs of ranged attackers in GR110+ using multishot. We are talking 2-3 actions per second or more, which is leaning in the direction of SC-2 APM. Make sure there are no cheats employed such as using controllers with extra programmable buttons; only the standard XBox and Playstation controllers. Post links to the console DH performance videos. I don’t have claim that you guys are trolling and/or spreading misinformation, its the other PC gamers who think you are trolling and spreading misinformation.
So explain to me how having every skill at your use is meaningful, but having to choose 6(10 with passives) is not. That has been the mantra for a while by many. It seems being able to choose a lot of skills so you will have all situations covered is less meaningful that locking yourself into 6(10).
Is the above an acknowledgement that I am not trolling? Is this an acknowledgement of the simple math of 22 is less than 35+?
The argument by me is not limited to 6-10 skills/passives. Its about the entire game being redesigned in a dumbed-down fashion away from D2, PC, keyboard and mouse, in order to cater to console gamers and allow Acti-Blizz to try to win over the console gaming market ($$$$). The management and devs never focused on making a PC game. Console gaming has always been Activision’s priority focus. They started out with the Pitfall game back in the 1980s on Atari and they have never ever moved away from console gaming. Blizzard was primarily a PC gaming company. This argument didn’t start with the D4 announcement, it goes back to D3 vanilla release.
Diablo 3 is actually pretty cool for a console game. For a pc game and a sequel to D2 I think it is the opposite end of the spectrum.
So explain to me how having every skill at your use is meaningful, but having to choose 6(10 with passives) is not. That has been the mantra for a while by many. It seems being able to choose a lot of skills so you will have all situations covered is less meaningful that locking yourself into 6(10).
Easy; since you have a skill tree where you attribute skill points, not every skill is maxed so you don’t take every skill. Instead, you choose which skills (except now your restriction is total skill points instead of number of skills), just like 6 skills but more options - now you can focus as much as you want on being a summoner, fire, cold, etc. just like D2. You take as many as you want with the points you have, you’re not going to map plenty of skills cause you can’t max them all.
Um no? Why would I ignore a game where each class has more abilities that are actually used in a single fight than any D2 build?
Just look at your list of “skills”. Anything to do with opening menus has no need for a key. Why would you even need a “swap to next skill button” when you can activate the skill directly?
You’re basically arguing from ignorance because you have no idea how a good controller UI works.
Do you not read man. Almost every combat skill is funneled through the left and right mouse button in D2. There is no accessing the skill directly. The inventory window is not a menu, nor is the character attributes window. In the early game one is forced into repeated potion chugging because of the lack of good regen. This means grabbing potions off the ground in many cases and chugging it while in combat and on the move.
Go look at the speed running videos and see how they are constantly on the move. Nearly everything is done on the move. Stuff like inventory and belt management, stat point spending, talent point spending, changing armor pieces. Or you can just look at the math 22 is < 35+? Again, I’m not drinking the Final Fantasy bat-wing controller kool-aid. You are 2000 and late to the convo. Go to the way back machine and dig up the old forum threads on this.