As development is underway and looking at the great visual effects and beautiful environment, I implore Blizzard to completely avoid insane damage numbers when designing weapons and class skills. Dishing out billions and even trillions of damage to monsters in Diablo 3 is completely absurd and ultimately meaningless when the numbers rival the national debt. As a core design philosophy, please look at Diablo 2 or even Dungeons & Dragons for the relative damage scaling for weapons and skills.
Furthermore, do not to introduce health or power globes. The inclusion of globes not only makes the game easier, it puts a major drawback on the implementation of the potion system. One of the more damaging aspects is it transforms the game by making it feel childish and gives it a cartoonish atmosphere. A better design approach is having healing skills strengthen class identity (aka each class having unique ways to heal).
I think the numbers bloat happens to any game after a certain amount of time. As expansions release, level caps increase, paragon numbers increase, and equipment is updated, there must be parallel damage scaling. World of Warcraft has gone through a few of these stat squishes to remedy the problem, but I don’t see how they can avoid it should the game be out and active for a long while.
Even when D4 comes out with an expansion, it doesn’t mean there has to be a level cap increase. With LoD it was tons of new content without increasing the level cap to something like 110 and it worked just fine. So case in point, an expansion does not have to mean increasing leveling but can still deliver content.
Anyways, this topic has been discussed a lot, most people do seem to be against the huge numbers from observing past discussions.
Last Q update this was discussed, and it seems that general consesus is, that dmg numbers are always going to be relative to monsters toughness (armor, vit, all res, DR). So if a monster has millions of toughness you’ll need millions of dmg.
The problem with power creep is that everything is not scaled. One build was buffed to compete with another build, got over-buffed, then a 3rd build was buffed to compete with that and on and on and on. In the end, a small handful of builds were buffed to infinity and beyond, leaving the majority gear and skills utterly useless.
This is the problem with massive power creep. Itemization is ruined. There is no smooth leveling curve. It becomes use trash until you find the BIS pieces, then skip 30 difficulties to reach god status.
Hopefully in D4, they get it right and find a sweet spot between monster power and player power, then balance around the sweet spot and not try to balance around the FOTM build. Believe it or not, nerfing is actually beneficial if it is done right.
Add progress orbs to that list too. If I want to play Sonic the Hedgehog, I will play that. There are more interesting ways to restore health than collecting power pellets. Health regen, potions, life on hit/kill, hell, I would even be fine with the old school chicken leg or apple on the ground over the orbs. As far as progress orbs, the goal should be collecting loot, not orbs.
Health globes are fine. The D3 implementation was just bad (or became bad over time).
Imo it would be great to have health globes as a build option, that some builds might choose to go for.
As alternative (or addition) to using healing skills, life steal (careful!), life regen, life per resource, life per X (especially with the runeword system).
It just shouldn’t be a general thing that all builds use. None of the healing sources should.
Much more important; make healing very limited, from all sources. Losing health should be a big deal. Getting lost health back should take time and resources. Adding more risk to combat. Adding more excitement to combat. Health globes can fit perfectly fine in that.
Power scaling through numbers is stupid, because if you simply scale all number, you could just leave all numbers the same and there would be no difference.
I want to see numbers but I want to see 2512 instead of 25000012000010230. It’s easier to process in my meager grey matter and it’s easier to compare builds/weapons etc, as I progress through the game.
I know that initially they won’t have high dps numbers. But in time with power creep that seems inevitable in games like Diablo we probably will see big numbers. Bigger than at launch. Will they be in the trillions like D3 within a short period of time. Only time can answer that one.
As far as health globes I see them as walking over an instant potion. Much how Last Epoch handles things. Where if you have taken damage, if you walk over a health potion you use it instead of it being picked up if you are under the max amount of potions.
