Impressions from Q4 D4 blog

General Discussion
41

Back in D2, we had Str and Dex increasing damage for specific melee or ranged weapons. Besides repeating this scheme what else can they do but reiterate the D3’s model slightly? System is just result oriented when you make class specific items the “best choice” for their respective classes already.

I mean, if you ask me if I’d be contempt with this in a game I’m kind of okay with that yet I’m aware there’s no such thing in tabletop games at all.
This is an ARPG where “content” depends on numbers and difficulty spikes, so I don’t entirely mind that. Endgame already designed as a mash between Greater Rifts of D3 and instance maps of PoE.

Main stat being a thing only means classes won’t see many off-class options. If you think that’s bad, make it known. I’d like to have a bow wielding Paladin or sword-shield wielding Sorceress as well.

42

Create a decent attribute system where each offers something valuable for different builds. Where you might have a str barb, int barb, dex barb etc. (doesnt have to those specific names), All viable, all playing somewhat differently.
Something like what Pillars of Eternity managed, even if the genre is different.

43

That there exists a stat system at all is a corrected path taken by comparison to not having one.

I saw hint of character specific optimization item for class specific utilizing.

I understand the awe of the Critical Strike in any RPG associative, but it is just as easily countered with dodge, parry even backfiring to the effect of, and the ability to even miss critical strikes.

Having offensive capacities overwhelm the defensive capacities? It is never better to stack a single affix amplifier over many? That is part of the fun in designing builds and theory craft playing it up.

This thread got long I’m, going to have to take a break from it!

44

Creating different stat checks for different skill upgrades and diverse stat benefits, these terms could still hold true with the main stat stereotype still intact.
For example, a Barbarian build type investing in dex-wil could run fast to farm low content repeatedly or a dex-int build to become a warcrier to debuff foes and buff allies, another build type investing in wil-int could be an unstoppable tank. But all these Barbarian types have to spare points in str stat to gain damage.
This shouldn’t bother player unless power creep comes in and adds 50 more layers of difficulty scale forcing you to dump the entire stat pool to your main stat.

If that’s not what you think or imagined, then itemization and difficulty scale has to be fine tuned to make Barbarians using quarter staff or bow viable for example. But this would be much harder to balance in an evergrowing difficulty scale for sure.
What type of progress you imagined? Where does the main stat stereotype doesn’t fit?

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45

It certainly bothers me. Then you only end up with str barbs. They dont all have to directly increase damage, but indirectly, it is needed. Dmg is what kills stuff, obviously. But an example could be that int increased aoe radius. rather than aoe dmg. Whirlwind barb, or warcrier etc. might go for int. Meteor wizard might go for int. But if str then increases single target dmg, a frezy barb might go for str, and a firebolt wizard might go str as well.

While I think it would be cool to see a bow barb, neither bows or staves should be related to which attributes you use.

Progress has nothing to do with main stats though. You will progress the exact same way without main stats. By increasing the stats you decided fits your build.
The game just shouldn’t make the decision for you, telling you which stat is the main one for your class. You should decide it, based on what kind of build you want.

46

Thinking what sorta answer I would get, I expected this. I agree with you here. Some classes really need to lay off direct damage increase so they wouldn’t be polarized with zdps and dps like in D3. I think it’s fine for some classes to receive direct damage bonus from stats, so I guess we split views here.

There could be passives that when throughly trained by hitting stat thresholds, apply mace weapon mastery bonus to the staves, or throw mastery to the bows. While it wouldn’t be all about the attributes, thresholds must be used to gate it I believe.

That’s possible but remember that you may get stuck at some difficulty level when you sacrifice too much just to play off-class. Tweaks and respecs may consume more time then you’d like when you make a mistake or skip a stat you needed to target.

47

I think that is quite fine too. Just saying it might be okay if some of the bonuses only indirectly increase dmg. Like, lower resource cost/higher regen indirectly increases dmg.

I guess my point is that an int barb or a str sorc shouldnt even be considered off-class. An int barb should be just as much a barb as a str one. They would just focus on different stuff, and play differently. Sacrifices are great. That is what a character build is all about (strengths and weaknesses). An int barb shouldn’t sacrifice more than a Dex or Str barb however.

48

But there are other things you could do with Crits :
Tie additionnal Crit Chance to a skill with a Modifier or Legendary Power.
Get interesting effects per Crit (Life regen, Knockback, Bleed…)
Create Runewords triggered by Crits, etc.

But yes, Proc look interesting too and should be promoted by Attributes (it could be a nice Offensive effect for Sorceress STR).

100% agree, this is mandatory imo.

You’re right but I don’t understand how making all 4 Attributes useful for every class would lead to this issue. Crits and Energy regen can become OP if they get out of hand but that depends on how it is balanced with other systems (items, talents, mods…)

IMO main stat should always be useful overall while the other 3 can get better in combo with other systems for some specific builds. I don’t think it’s bad to create a character that triggers a bonus often or even permanently, as long as it is not OP (-> balance) and costs something (like additional Damage from Main stat because I’ve invested points in DEX instead).

49

an intelligent barbarian would likely be more capable of learning the arsenal system of sorts, or perhaps just be more proficient with weaponry, and the skills associated with using certain weapon types as objects those types of ways.

Sure but at what point do you draw the line with how the damage is being done is more aesthetics than thrill of the input output. Where is an intelligent barbarian suppose to make up the difference in the brute power of what makes a brute a brute? The stat combinations will likely link certain pairings that can be split with items conducive for class stat combo characters.

You could literally make the build by stat allocation selection as strict as you’d like. It primarily ties into itemization.

There could literally be skill unlocks for every single combination of stat point that a person spent. The variance would be rather vast for a range that diversity such as that creates.

That is not really the point of playing archetype predetermined roles though.

If all the stats had an identically equal appeal to them, that did not only amount to mere damage increase or damage reduction, is the general consensus is that it would play out better in the long run?

Wouldn’t it be better if all stats then revolved around an equal increase in damage out put, damage mitigation , etcetera?

At what point do you understand the extreme survivability of the game and perhaps need those token utility abilities in order just to survive any progress?

Sure, there is always farming in the tutorial area for guaranteed steady slow accumulation…

How many times a class needs to spend generating resources is still a bit of a stretch for determining which stat will be most suitable to selections…

Does spending an attribute mistakenly bother so much? Save the point. Perhaps it will be a genius move later and justify the hardships for not spending any stat points.

The point here is that giving the player the option to choose how their character trains or becomes more experienced at is so much better than not having the choice.

For that, all should be grateful. !

50

From the sound of that previous statement, it left the impression on me that you want to topple most of the possible power to the character stats only. 4 attributes being useful is fine, each of them increasing damage or being part of offense is not.
When you allow this, you may not foresee what player may have come up with the break the balance of the game. Controlled variables are better than allowing player to create more than a dozen cookie cutter builds that trivialize your difficulty scale from the start.

51

You have the same limited amount of skill points.
Whether you place 400 points into 1 stat that gives you avg 100% dmg increase, or 100 points into 4 stats each, also giving you a total of avg 100% dmg increase, wont make a difference. Especially, if you make sure that the different dmg bonuses are not multiplicative (once again not having crit in there would help with that).
Nor would 400 points in int somehow break the game compared to 400 points in strength.

Having balanced stats will not lead to a broken game. Quite the contrary.

Balancing attributes is the simplest task in the world, compared to the difficulty of balancing items.

52

Yeah, that. However if they are NOT multiplicative then how are you planning to distinguish them from each other. You could automatically grant damage increase per level instead…
If each stat were to grant additive damage increase, then we could pretty much go with ADA system with +atk%/+def% itemization instead of diverse benefits from stat system as well.

53

Str: Single target dmg
Int: AoE radius (or even AoE dmg)

They are not multiplicative. Nor are they additive. Since they have no interaction with each other.

If you then add
Dex: attack speed (and/or proc chance, but lets go with attack speed first)
and
Will: resource regen
Yeah, attack speed is multiplicative with the previous two, but comes with its own balancing through increased resource cost over time. Tying into Willpower as its counterbalance.
Or if dex is proc chance, yeah, once again, kinda multiplicative with str and int. But since procs will only be a part of your dmg (just like single target and AoE themselves might only be part of your dmg), and likely not the majority of your dmg, with many of the procs being about CC, debuffs etc., it wont scale that much with each other, and should be easy to keep in check. Splitting it between attack speed and proc chance could be a way to add in more resource cost balance (increased attack speed itself also gives more procs per minute, so the two fits together well): Or if we dont want attack speed from attributes, be totally lazy and make it: Dex: Increase proc chance, and increase resource cost of your skills.

No, since there is no character build choice in that.

54

But each class gonna have those? So… If I dump my stats into Str as a Sorceress I’ll put out higher damage glacial spikes? If I shoot a fireball with high int but low str, initial target on a direct shot won’t be affected from the inflicted blast to incur damage from my str stat? This doesn’t make sense how damage is calculated in most of the ARPGs. They’re multiplicative in a level; if you’re not seeing how, then I have no idea how to explain this to you but you can’t create an exception when calculating area damage.
How is that any different damage increasing stat system that you were against then? How are you planning to calculate this nonsense?

55

Yeah, your glacial spike will scale with Str. If fireball is an AoE spell (dont know if it is in D4), it will scale from int. It is not about initial target or not. It is about whether a skill can hit 1 or multiple targets. So it is not D3 area dmg.
(as for what counts a single target, one could broaden it a bit. Like a melee attack that hits the two closest targets might still count as “single target”, or whatever name fits. Doesn’t particularly matter, as long as each skill clearly states what kind it is).
Part of the goal here, and why AoE radius is the better bonus, than AoE dmg, is to adress the eternal balance issue in A-RPGs between single target and AoE. By making single target skills scale better than AoE in pure dmg, we might avoid the AoE hellscape that many A-RPGs turn into over time.

It offers meaningful choices to players. Having a main stat that increases your dmg more or less automatically, do not.

The same way you calculate +melee dmg, +ranged dmg, +fire dmg and so on. There is absolutely no issue here. A-RPGs have done this for many decades.

And for those people who care about immersion. If you dont like the idea of a Sorceress getting Glacial spike dmg from strengt, then give it another name. The names are completely unimportant.
Call it Focus, Power, Midichlorians, or whatever.

56

If my attack or emerging projectile creates an area damage of effect then this means that single projectile attacks with splashing blasts are only area damage and unable to benefit from single target damage stat. They should be very distinctively classified as area damage directly.
Otherwise, like you described, position checks and exceptions will be required and that’s a lot of work. True way to handle this would be allowing such area damage creating attacks to benefit from directly the related area damage bonus.

Also yes, area damage is the better bonus of the two. What you’re describing here is a rather generic version of D2 system with melee for str and ranged damage from dex. I’m not sure if I get it but may work. Just it really depends on the difficulty scale.

57

Yes, indeed.
A skill is either single target (or whatever name), or AoE. Cant be both.
Similar to fire, cold etc. attacks in D3.

They are different in one important aspect.
Melee and ranged dmg are very class dependent. Barb skews heavily toward melee, sorc skews heavily toward ranged. Then you have just managed to recreate class-based main stats.
Whereas all classes have single target and AoE skills. And all classes/builds can find use from single target (boss killing) and AoE skills (trash killing). Within a single build.
Likewise, all classes can benefit from attack speed/proc chance and resource generation (or lower resource cost, both are fine I guess)

58

That would be a bad move you’re right, if every Attribute added the same flat +Damage. But that’s not what I’m advocating for : I want 1 main Attribute that’s good all the time and 3 secondary Attributes that work in combo with main, which is exactly what DEX and WILL already do at the moment.

Point retention should never be encouraged. That’s why they have respec, so we won’t need to.

That’s already the case for DEX and WILL : +Crit Chance and Energy Regen both increase damage (and mitigation). So why is there only one Attribute that doesn’t ? It just looks like something you don’t want to spend a point into.

Of course we may speculate there will be very powerful Talents and Legendary Powers that rebalance things so an INT Barb can become as efficient as a STR Barb with the right choices and items. That would just be a little bit contrived but it would work.

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59

Maybe someone already said that. If so, I apologize. D1, D2 and D3 are always the same and this is very boring. Yes, each new Diablo is a new story, but basically they are the same: kill, kill, kill. Diablo is all about kill. And there is no logic in this. Only kill new enemies, always more powerful. And it is a stupid thing. After the main story is complete there are no more true challenges. I think that there is the moment to change the core of Diablo. I mean. If I have to kill the main boss, I have to follow a short adventure. For example: 1) go in town and 2) help to build a potion 3) its help to wake up a man that own a key of a secret room 4) where there is an ancient papyrus 5) it need to be translated 6) so it start a travel to find a 5 magic stone that…
What I mean kill monsters is a boring stuff after 3 versions (+ expansions) of Diablo. I think the game need a new lifeblood.

P.S. sorry for my english

60

Every attribute should enhance a specific playstyle.
The same way archetypes change how you play.
All attributes should be equally powerful.

That’s how true game balance works.

Example:

  1. Dagger : 50 Damage : Speed 2x
  2. Sword : 100 Damage : Speed 1x

They are both equal, but change how you play.
They both have their own upsides and downsides.
How you use them to build a character matters.

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