…okay.
Game LOOKS amazing.
Bravo.
But mechanically, you got to go far away from D3.
Apart from cooldowns, my last worry is that they’re going to miss the design of damage types, and prostitute the damage types out to all classes with frivilous switching between elements for classes and skills, like D3.
…that killed a major part of what differenciated between classes.
Physical characters had to deal with dodge, block and the rare physical resistance.
You knew that incorporeal undead were going to be either resistant or immune to physical – by the design of the monsters alone.
The same applies to many of the demons and fire resistance, and the abominable snowmen and cold resistance.
Zombies and undead in general and poison resistance.
It meaningfully made playing a sorceress vastly different than a bowazon, despite both being ranged attackers, because they interact differently with different monsters.
…
That, and how magic users don’t rely on a weapon for dealing damage, but get a amajor boost from them, were two of the class and role defining things Diablo 1 and 2 got right, and Diablo 3 completely failed at.
Those and the lack of cooldowns made Diablo 2 one of the best roleplaying games – not just action game.
Cooldowns and having all sources of magic cost resources that physical attacks don’t rely on defines class skills and separates magic users from physical fighters.
Two different sorceress builds played vastly different because of it.
A Fire + Cold sorceress played different than a Cold + Fire sorceress, and those play different than a Lightning + Cold sorceress.
Fire sorceresses generally have problems with melee attackers.
Cold sorceresses generally have problems with spellcasters.
Lightning sorceresses have problems with stealthy monsters.
Bone necromancer feels completely and utterly different from the Poison Nova necromancer, because they have different monsters that challenge them.
Physical bowazon feels completely different from an amazon that uses the two area of effect elemental arrows.
…balancing the game is as easy as creating a spreadsheet and working out number of hits you want monsters to survive – and giving them health, resistances and damage reductions specifically to create the experience you want.
0 resistances 0 damage reduction makes the monster generic.
Elemental resistance makes the monster hard for elemental magic users, obviously.
Point damage reduction makes a monster hard for fast physical attackers.
Block chance and block rate makes a monster hard for slow physical attackers.
That way, a boss can be tough for a bow user, tough for a rogue that relies of fast attacks, tough for cold and fire users, and less tough for strong melee characters, if it is heavily armored and resists fire and cold.
Similarily, a different boss can have a high chance to block, 75% that is lowered each hit with whatever block rate the monster has, before the chance regenerates.
75%, 50%, 25%, 0% if you attack fast and get blocked.
75%… 65%…55% if you attack slower.
75%… 70%… 75% if you attack slow.
Dodge should work in a similar fashion.
50% chance to dodge and 50% chance to block = 75% chance to not take damage, where the one that kicks in goes into regeneration mode.
…and then there’s the ghost, that hardly takes damage from physical attacks, cannot bleed, and may be heavily resistant to poison and cold.
Diablo 3 tossed all that out of the window, and became and felt like an action game – not an roleplaying game – because of it, simplified back to the point where all enemies are punching bags and elements are meaningless as an ice cream shop selling only one type of vanilla ice cream without real vanilla, but with 10 different food colorings.
Red, blue, violet, green, yellow, grey, white, brown, cyan and orange.
Each damage type should be meaningful in it’s own right.
Cold chills.
Lightning drains mana.
Fire burns.
Poison works over time.
Sharp physical causes bleeding. But not all monsters can bleed.
Blunt physical causes crushing blows that potentially could slow melee attacks instead of reducing max health, and can potentially cause lesser damage through a blocked attack.
Pointy physical pierces armor.
Magic is hardly resisted by anything and can’t be blocked.
Holy blinds demons and undead, and is resisted by natural monsters and possibly the darkest of souls.
Unholy may heal undead, be resisted heavily by demons, but curse natural creatures.
…and that’s why damage types shouldn’t be tossed around to different classes without actual thought – and monsters should have hand-picked resistances and abilities.
You get a guaranteed ten or fifteen game of the year rewards if you balance elements, monster resistances and mechanics good enough to make each class AND MONSTER feel meaningfully different.
It’s all so ‘easy’, makes so much sense – when a fantasy game is built from the ground up properly.
Immunities aren’t necessary – even 50 / 75 / 90% resistances causes meaningfully different experiences, especially if they’re revealed in the lore and monster descriptions.
A fire sorceress that faces a 75% resistant monster or boss is going to feel the heat far more than a sorceress that focuses on cold.
Just please continue to make the game better than D3 – and even try to make it better than D2 in the process.
Like.
A physical warrior surrounded by ghosts is in a helpless life threatening situation.
I experienced that in Diablo 2 just a couple of weeks ago, when my bowazon reached the Flayer Dungeon, and a pack of extra fast ghosts flanked her from a gateway I passed, and drove her deeper into the dungeons because I couldn’t effectively fight them – activating more monsters, causing a real life and death threat as I had to fend off the non-immunes in order to find space to circle back to the entrance.
Incorporeal monsters could be further enhanced to defeat and threaten tanky characters by ignoring armor – except token legendary holy armors specifically created to ward off ghosts – ignoring block chance, except holy shields.
