Kinda feels like when I play GD with unlimited devotion and skill points and basically procs all over the place all the time fun for a bit but becomes very boring quickly.
That amount of procs all at once on the screen reminds me of PoE more than GD though. There was a crazy build guide at Youtube…
Guy has a few other crazy builds as well. While I don’t play PoE, the algorithm sometimes suggests his videos.
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[quote=“Venaliter-1813, post:20, topic:53903, full:true”]
Then I would argue that a Thundergod Hammer not procing a Thunderstorm, or a Templar Sword not having a Paladin Aura or a legendary Blade enchanted by a Sorceres not procing a Sorc Spell (or giving a Sorc oSkill) has not concentrated the coolness of its theme into the item.
oSkills in D2 for the most part are fairly niche, but there is a dedicated group of people (Johnny Type players) that love these fantasies of e.g. a Bow that calls down Meteors or Fists of the Heavens, or of the thematically fitting Dragonscale Paladin Shield allowing the Paladin to summon Hydras.
However, I agree that it can go to far, like with things like Enigma or CtA.
I have seen that video a few years ago. It was some some good amusement.
But I agree to your implied point that proc effects can be too much, which is why I think that these procs should mostly be found on Weapons and Off-Hand Items (and some on Chest Armor, but not too many) and that in the other item slots the focus should be more on stats tweaks/improvements and buffs.
This makes the character capable of mix and match three proc effects for massive damage at once because “why not?”. There’s a reason why their use is not widely promoted and only restricted to handful of builds that use LoN/LoD and a few class Sets.
The season ahead promoted the use of procs for opening up new build options but they only introduced one or two proc powers at once per class and they’re skill specifics. Introducing and promoting the use of more procs at a wide variety would cause performance issues and would undermine the class balance based on shifts of effort and stakes.
By design in PoE procs can gain effects from other procs while in Diablo 3 it doesn’t. This has to do with old engine. Diablo 3 was in development hell for around 7 years and we celebrated its 10th year. Diablo 3 uses a modified version of Havok, which is ancient by today’s standards. Path of Exile has its own custom made engine it seems, and I don’t think it had a prolonged development hell phase.
You can create something really impactful but that has pros and cons both. I also hate the restrictive nature of D3 but I try my best to ignore that and enjoy it.
Not every proc is or has to be visually intense, so they don’t have to cause performance issues by default.
This patch we got Meteor Shower for all Meteor runes and the Meteor build that is gonna use it could be very high up in the meta.
However, I would agree that the spell effects of other players should be tuned down, similar to how pets of other players are more transparent. The tech is already there, so it theoretically could also be used for the spell effects of other players.
Though I don’t necessarily see how it could undermine balance.
I agree that procs should not proc procs.
To be fair, the project got rebooted once or twice within that time.
If things like the effects of the Captain Crimson Set or the new Bonuses of the Guardian Set are possible, then they can make a ton more of these.
They basically could put all affixes into a randomizer and let it spit out two of them and make a new effect from it.
e.g. “For each xx Life per Kill you have, gain x Fire Resistance” and put “For each xxx Fire Resistance you have, gain +x Fire Damage to this Weapon” on The Burning Axe of Sankis and give it fire-themed proc as well.
With the leaderboard now days that isn’t going to encourage character customisation all it may do is change the setup to something that offers more damage over what is now available and everyone uses that setup instead
That has to do with tick damage and different effects they offer and cause to occur. In case the effect inflicts its damage in one single or only a few ticks, that shouldn’t be too heavy.
However, if initial damage effect is spreading different (non-homing) projectile entities, it has to check for collision and position of said projectiles and area damage procs. If damaging effects linger for a while to hit several ticks or damage over time to a large crowd, then server has to synchronize them between client and server real time as well.
Because not only server has to synchronize damage ticks now but check for states of monsters and created entities too. All the while it has to check if entity died with each tick or wants to attack and has to check when the projectile impact or following area damage will be animated.
All can be given examples for. There’s a reason why some skills have those super cool multipliers or have thousands of weapon damage percent efficiency at their base. It’s because they’re lighter on the resources and easier to calculate by server.
I always advocated such thing similar to your idea but for skillrunes. Legendary powers can apply with ease though if they had the means ofcourse. They refuse to change main skills unless something really crucial is needed (Demon Hunter’s Strafe now doesn’t require bow with S27 after a decade).
An old Community Manager once said that expressing items in Diablo 3 actually takes more memory space than it seems. I think; total speculation here by the way, this is due to each item having the entire affix pool embed in their hex or code and some flags gets raised when they rolled the potential affix.
That means the affix reroll list you see at Mystic Artisan is active every time behind the scenes for each item. Just most of them are set to null because they have limited amount of affixes allowed to be showcased on the item.
That should be easy for them but they have to test if it induces powercreep, which doesn’t seem likely. BAoS is a zdps or Follower item most of the time. More damage for something really specific like fire resistance doesn’t seem hurting anything because it depends on so many variables.
Its defense buff is more or less related to fire damage. Because Molten Elite affix has so many tick damage on the fire trail, it has the best chance to trigger this buff when encountered. If you read the lore bit blurp at the item’s tooltip, I think it hints that also.
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I think I have shifted my opinion from previously “rework Area Damage” to “remove Area Damage”. In its current form it causes so much lag when combined with a lot of AoE Effects and it isn’t really clear if a rework would actually solve this issue efficiently.
Yeah, I guess that was also the reason for why Mammoth Hydra was (indirectly) not buffed by the Typhoon set, or at least the use of the other Hydra options is much more incentivised by that set.
Mammoth Hydra’s Firewall would just proc so often.
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At least some skills maybe should not be able to proc Area Damage. That is the least that can / should be done.
Regardless of them being on skill runes or legendaries (or maybe even sets), they certainly would spice up itemization. Also having these effects both on items and skills/skill runes is not mutually exclusive.
This at least shows that they are willing.
I would be really interested what their reasoning is behind not changing skills. Maybe a CM can tell or has already said something about that.
A skill like Teleport would benefit tremendously from having its Cooldown reduced to 8, 6 or even 4 seconds (and maybe even have 2 Charges on top of that), which would spare them all these shenanigans with Teleport on Firebird and now also the Tal Rasha set. I’ll probably make a thread about that later.
Nevalistis made a post about items and stash space, but the specific thing you talk about, I have not heard yet.
You seem so know more about this coding stuff and the coding language and tools than me, so maybe you know if other ARPG’s or MMO’s have a solution to this issue.
I am currently listening to an interview with John Carmack, one of the creators of DOOM and founders of id Software, and he talks about how they found solutions and workarounds to things that were previously not possible, like porting side-scrolling games from consoles to the PC, which was not possible back then due to a lack of memory, but with a trick/workaround it suddenly was.
^^ timestamp 19:30
So maybe a trick like this - if it exists and is known - could solve or improve the issue of too many affixes having “to be active/loaded at once” in D3.
Do you know of anything like that?
Yeah, but affixes like these would replace stuff like “Skill X deals xxx% increased Damage”, which is the premise of this thread.
I read up on the history of the item many months ago. Something with Dwarven Fortress and a user having a meltdown or something like that iirc.
But that was just an example as the Burning Axe of Sankis was the first Fire-themed legendary that came to my mind and I do not always want to use a Lightning-themed Hammer with a Thunderstorm proc and a “+Lightning Damage based on Lightning Resistance” Effect as an example to illustrate a concept.
To save you reading my long post… In short; you can do that, but honestly I have no idea how big of a burden this can be. Also there are so many different elements you have to consider when making that shift. Replacing everything might not be the answer at all.
After this point I don’t think you can do either. Paragon system v2.0 suggested by a few people from this forums and reddit, then they went ahead and exactly did what they ask. Even if you remove area damage% proc, the area damage will be the best way to deal with time trials regardless. Also please note that not only area damage is problematic for server performance, damage over time effects and lingering damage ticks are usually part of the issue.
Removing area damage actually puts build diversity at risk and creates a gap between specs that can utilize large radius of effect skills and those that do not. This is why area damage exist, even though it is problematic on group play.
All effects that cause desynchronization like area damage, lingering damage ticks or damage over time effects have no issues in solo play unless you topple a huge aggro. Which you shouldn’t waste time as a solo player as you won’t be tough enough to endure the attacks for long.
However, group play is all about huge crowds of aggro at high pushes. This is why zdps specs exist; to gather monsters in one spot so you can envelope as many monsters, as you can when your dps dealers at their peak for a big sweeping clear.
When they’re so silent you have all the time in the world to think and come up with an excuse for them. Apparently less variables are always easier to control.
I mean it’s great that player seeks freedom but when you attend one skillrune for Set Dungeon, one for speedfarm and one or two for pushing in groups or solo; you’ll have less headaches at the long run.
When you tweak a skill for testing the dedication of players, they usually surprise you and you end up tweaking the whole power scale of the Set on the Greater Rifts, accordingly.
I tried quite a few times for them to change main skills to make obsolete looking ones (usually ones meant for Set Dungeons) somewhat useful for pushes or groups, they didn’t budge or acknowledge.
Mine is just pure speculation as I said on top of what I’ve read here:
https://www.diablowiki.net/Stash#Previous_Development
Diablo III has both the benefit and disadvantage of having completely random items. Pretty much everything can roll up different affixes, if not a range of its benefits. That’s obviously great because the item hunt is what it’s all about, more randomization means you can keep chasing that perfect item, but that means the amount of data needed to describe an item is much, much larger than say, a World of Warcraft item, which is static and only needs a unique number to identify it.
A Diablo III item first has to say the base item, then each individual affix that it rolled up, then the ranges of each variable, and if it has any sockets. And we have to think about everywhere an item can be, an item on the ground is still an item, and so is an item on the auction house.
Knowing that previous system, Loot v1.0 at D3 classic pretty much allowed every item to be able to roll anything before primary and secondary classification; I thought underlying systems are still similar and went with some assumptions.
I assure you, what I know about coding is pretty much at the entry level. There are people on forums who are much knowledgable than I am. You can get my knowledge if you fiddle around some coding courses or read some game design documents. That’s it.
If I were to have a solution to that, I believe, Blizzard, ValVE, Riot or id Software would hire me. I admit perhaps I kind of exaggerated the issue. What I meant was each item in the game seemingly has the same burden on the resources regardless of how complex or simple they look. Some items only can reroll for certain skill bonus affixes for example but each class can reroll something different from the pool.
It’s possible that they can afford to introduce new Legendary/Set powers because they only depend on some flags raised on the character sheet. This is seemingly how Kanai’s Cube works, it raises flags on character from a null value to active, independent of the item equipped.
However adding a new blue affix (on wear) could be too far. That’s what I get from their words at least and looking at how they didn’t add any new blue affix to the affix pool. It’s not just like adding another legendary power to Mempo or introducing a Set like Captain Crimson’s.
I am trying to imagine this.
A rework to every legendary item? Or only those currently with mods that increase damage? What happens to legendary items which provide increased damage AND special effects?
I look at current Yang’s Recurve and see 2 things that make it extraordinary:
- 50% RCR
- Increased attack speed on Multishot
200% Multishot Damage
Then I look at your updated version and it allows Multishot to trigger on Archery skills.
Completely different, also extraordinary in its own way, if played with Cluster Arrow, but nothing from the previous item was preserved. Like a total reset.
At this stage of the game, I feel it is wisest to replace obsolete legendary effects with the likes of those on your list. Remember, the few good mechanics used today pretty much define D3.
As for shrinking damage, it can be achieved by overhauling Set Bonuses, tweaking overly strong Legendary effects and redoing Paragon so it’s not a main stat sink. Expect complaints when players lose the ability to raise legendary gems to 150, so reworking the gem caps and scaling is likely a requirement too.
If I’m skipped as a beta tester for the D4 beta, it’d be cool to occupy myself in D3 by trying new builds via game changing effects. ‘Hey, while waiting for the launch of D4, play patch 3.0.0 with completely revamped items, paragon system, legendary gems and other QoL.
This comes from acknowledging the amount of weak items. I didn’t run through the whole list but I’d wager that 20-25% of non-set legendary items are not part of competitive builds.
To rehash what I said above, I’d prefer to see NEW effects overwriting lousy items, as opposed to the replacement good ones. I know it’ll be more fascinated finding The Zweihander with some versatile effect, over a redone Blade of Prophecy.
If we could bring the loot pool to being to contain 50-60% desirable items, there’d be a few more projects for us to work and builds to explore until D4 releases.
They should really make area damage a clearly defined trait of a skill or effect. For instance, Ball Lightning… shouldn’t have area damage. A skill with area damage should have an indicator in its description, either an icon showing a 
splash damage or words stating it deals area damage.
Multishot
Fire a massive volley of arrows dealing 360% weapon damage to all enemies in the area. This skill can produce area damage.
I have found with certain skills’ area damage is worth +10GRs. Area damage makes me happy, I wouldn’t discard it completely.
That is right, Area Damage is only a part of the issue of server lag.
The purpose of removing Area Damage would not be to disincentivice the use of Area of Effect skills, but just to remove one layer of server lag.
The simple “solution” to the issue of ticks is to let them tick less often but to del more damage. Or let them tick even less often and let them apply a debuff on enemies so they take xx% more damage from your attacks or from all attacks (including from your party). That can work both for DoT’s and Lingering Ground Effects.
I heard different things about if the large damage numbers have an effect on the serverlag or to which degree. Some people say that the amount of calculations that take place at the same time is much more significant than the largeness of the numbers and I remember some even saying that it requires the same amount of processing power to calculate large numbers as it takes to calculate small numbers.
Not sure if it would be a satisfying tradeoff, but if pulling mechanics like the one from Ancient Spear would either be removed or massively nerfed, the role of zdps might change. The intent behind that being to reduce server lag.
Possibly. It still would be nice to have some clarity about what exactly is going on. Eventually management also has a say in what information is allowed to get out though.
Ah, interesting.
Primarily to those that provide a damage increase to a specific skill (also those that give massive reduction of resource costs, large increases in toughness and large amounts of cooldown reduction). Existing special effects that don’t increase skill damage, etc could be decided on a case by case basis.
But I am not suggesting it should be done, but rather that if itemization is overhauled in one way or another, this would be one of the most easiest and simplest ways to do so.
Yeah, definitely.
Or the +10GR Levels could come in ways other than Area Damage.