I’ve been a customer since D1 and this is absolutely horrible. If I can’t play the entire game ALONE, this is a deal-breaker for me. I don’t want to see another player in Diablo EVER. Diablo isn’t an MMO! Immersion says I am the hero of Sanctuary, seeing everyone else that’s the same thing just ruins it. I won’t buy the game like that.
2 Likes
you see, the cooldown mechanic is one of the points that make diablo 3 seem like half an mmo. you like that? i don’t. i have never been a fan of that and i do not know what you mean with “finesse”. kiting mobs and waiting until the cooldown ended to finally be able to activate the skill again? let the wow players do that. why do arpg-players get forced to mechanics of another genre? because it is established? well, may i remind you that the critics with diablo 3 were very very poor for a long time (not only because of error 37 and others) and many turned their back to diablo and went to torchlight or path of exile… it was a disaster. only with the new OP-feeling that reaper of souls and the paragon levels and the new setboni etc. established, they got back (many?) players.
i wouldn’t even call diablo 2 as the iconic one, instead the first part. the potions took effect immediately, it was scary, you were vulnerable, it was dark, you could not really skill yourself wrongly and had to create a new character because of that, the stash was big enough, the 1 item/character per square gave good overview, there was no instand damage, you could avoid everything if your awareness was good enough… so the feeling was the best at part 1. kinda the resident evil of dungeon crawlers. no other company and no other part of diablo ever again managed to create such tense athmosphere in this genre.
but back to cooldowns.
to carry lots of potions with you might not be your thing, well, waiting for cooldowns is not my thing. and i did and do not tend to carry exceptionally many potions with me in general. i also have never been a speedrunner. i would accept if potions would need a special inventory space apart from the other loot or even if there were no manapotions at all. not being able to run threw the maps and dungeons like a marathon-sprinting-longjumping superman? no problem with that. but i can not understand why i, if i were a sorcerer/whatever, should not be able to cast whatever spell i know as often as my mental energy would allow me to, just because i have to accept the rule of cooldown.
It would be easy to think of cooldowns as part of your mental energy. Just a different part than the mana pool.
Too me, it doesn’t make much sense
Take stamina as an other example for a physical character
If I am full of energy I can probably sprint for a few 100 meters or do as many roundhouse kicks as I want until I am exhausted
And then if I did like 50 kicks in a row and an really exhausted, I can NOT just sprint a few 100 meters because sprinting is not on cooldown for me^^
Energy is energy and everything that costs energy will be possible to do until your energy is gone
That’s how resources work
Now if you have a dual resource system, you are free to cast fireballs while your stamina is empty aka “on cooldown”
But things that are powered by the same energy are sharing that energy
Just like our electricity at home
1 Like
Depends on the resource I guess.
Like, a lizard shedding its tail, it can still do other stuff afterward. But it cant lose its tail again, at least not until it is regrown 
I think that’s a very special example
If you have sacrifice resources, that makes sense
But we are taking about chars with a single resource here
Do jump, do earthquake, do spin to win
There is no losing your arms or legs to do that stuff
I know 
I just dont think it matters whether a resource system makes logical sense. We theoretically could come up with “losing your tail” explanations for why a Wizard cant teleport more than once every 20 seconds. Just doesn’t matter.
It does for a lot of people
Just like different item sizes matter to people, a logical resource system matters to others
Immersion
You can come up with things
Like a sorc, having a fire power, ice power and lighting power that are spent individually
But just going “aaah let’s place a 20sec block, I just don’t care” is lazy
Seeing as how you’re all welcoming comments and suggestions, I thought I’d offer some of my thoughts and hopes for the play mechanics we might see in D4!
Itemization alone isn’t exciting. Sure, it’s fun to get new things that help you fulfill your goals, but that fun only exists in the reflection of goal progression itself. By extension, an item (or level, or other form of power gain) isn’t worth getting excited about if it doesn’t allow for meaningful furtherance of one of your aims. Gradual damage increases, in particular, are easy and boring ways to dole out player power.
Though one could pull out a calculator and say, “Well, over the course of four hours my monster kill speed has increased by 12.1%”, that sort of player progress can only be meaningfully measured in retrospect. But measuring in retrospect doesn’t feel like furthering your goals. It feels like rationalizing how your goals were furthered.
But damage increases are obviously an important part of character evolution. So what we’re really talking about is the difference between linear and stairstep power progression. And, in my mind, stairsteps are the absolute way to go.
The whole point of getting things and leveling things is for the fun to happen at the time the DING or RING sound happens. D1 could have skill books drop that might change your whole character’s trajectory-- and, until that time came, would compel you to play tactically until you got the nourishment you needed. D2 had skill trees that, while badly balanced, felt important and gave real weight to leveling that could be felt immediately after assigning the skill.
D3 drops were just baked into the game loop: they were too measured in timing and power gain to feel special or meaningful-- they were just another form of XP by a different name. And the skill unlocks, while fun to experiment with when you first got them, were either incorporated into a character or filed away and forever forgotten-- reinforcing a build meta to a greater extent than either of its predecessors and therefore becoming little more than another gradual power augmentation OR, in the case of some builds, a massive single power stair.
I’m highly encouraged by the team’s aim to make a character’s power come from a multitude of different sources and I’m timidly hopeful for the future of the project. Good luck!
I didn’t think D2 dropped too much junk. It only became “junk” for 90% of the items once it got old enough of a game to become saturated with non legit items and Better runewords became available.
I loved the runewords and utilizes then for sure, but I also used legendaries, rares, and magic items that runewords couldn’t compete with.
To me finding items (loot) is an essential part of diablo games and if it went away, so would I.
D2 dropped huge numbers of white items. If you picked up and sold everything you’d found in D2 you wouldn’t be able to clear a single outdoor area without returning to town three times.
I also feel I should note that, if you were indeed responding to me, I didn’t advocate for removing item drops from Diablo.
Though I don’t think that seeing other players is a deal breaker alone, I do think that a game should either have a “The One” or nobody should be The One at all. Still, I may just have to deal. I don’t think they’re walking it back.
Yes it was in response to your post right above me so I didn’t bother hitting the respond. I know you didn’t advocate for no items being dropped but seemed like you were wanting less to do with items and more to do with other things.
I was just saying I, as well as a lot of others, loves the loot chase in Diablo and to make it less rewarding wouldn’t be cool with us.
As for the huge amounts of regular items, these not only became important for runewords, but they could also be ignored. Didn’t have to pick them up. In D3 they made white items actually rarer to find in high difficulty yet there was a use for them as well in materials.
One thought is:
Please make the windows that pop up in dead center of screen when a map starts is much smaller or completely transparent so we see the map first and foremost and don’t get killed by monsters because of the giant window telling us what we already know:
That something has begun.
2 Likes
If it seemed that way to you, I may need to be more explicit!
If you haven’t tried D1, I’d encourage you to play it in its purest form: in Single Player without restarting the world midway.
Some of it won’t have aged well: the attack angles on things can be a little wonky and the constant walk speed can be hard to readjust to. But from a play philosophy standpoint it’s a head and shoulders above most anything else.
The notion here isn’t to remove item relevance. It’s to make items more relevant.
Yeah I played it long ago and a few times after. Compared to say D2 I didn’t like the spell set up with books. Doors were also over powered in D1. The atmosphere was top notch specially for it’s time.
I was just defending the loot hunt part of diablo as this is what I’ve always enjoyed in diablo over other games. Part of the reason games like boarderlands became so popular is the mass amount of different loot you could find. Many people talk about that part.
Thought I’d offer a PVP idea: a Hardcore Race with fresh characters.
It might be through the whole campaign, or through a single act, or single random dungeon. But the idea is it’d be a PvP test of “who is the best at the actual game”-- which is a question that an ARPG has yet to pose.
D4 Idea:
just thinking, what about maybe some kind of Appraising system as part of trading? like players would have to talk to an NPC in town to have a hard-to-find legendary item Appraised in order to unlock the ability to trade that rare item to other players, or something.
Well I don’t see the differences between your proposal and free trade, since just talk to an npc or spending a small amount of gold is basically free.
Now, if those “trade-enabled” items had their stats reduced by 30% or similar, then it could have some potential.
1 Like