hmm…
D3 has more than 6 damage types:
Physical, Fire, Cold, Lightning, Poison, Arcane and Holy (7 unless I’ve missed one)
but… D2 has 6 damage types:
Physical, Fire, Cold, Lightning, Poison and Magic (admittedly there might be something obscure that I missed, but a few attacks were just give magic damage)
The only difference between D2 and D3 is the breakdown of magic damage into holy and arcane, to show the difference in origin.
I got several thoughts.
First, I think that is too many damage types. I would go back to D2, phys fire lightning cold poison and MAGIC. Magic damage would get a resistance like all the other types (one craftable shield could get magic resistance in D2). It would cover magic damage from necro bone skills, wizard arcane skills, monk holy skills… you could keep those names in the tooltips for flavor but all would be treated as magic.
Second, I think that this would be way too many affixes to pull from for magic/rare items. I do think that [almost] all of them are good for unique and legendary items.
UNIQUE AND LEGENDARY ITEMS. Let me explain how they would be different. There are magic and rare items that pull 1 and 2-3 prefixes and suffixes… each affix is one stat or rarely two stats… the pool is smaller than what you have. Unique items would be unique - they’d have a preset group of stats that could be pulled from outside the normal magic and rare affix stats. eg. Movement speed on pants when normally only boots can get it or 20% reduced damage below 50% health which is not available in the normal stat pool at all. So basically like D2 up until this point. Now LEGENDARY items… there would be “legendary affixes” that could spawn on “any” item (with restrictions like armor only, melee weapons only). Each legendary affix would be a preset package of stats and the stats would be pulled from the extended pool of stats.
Life steal and life per hit should be gotten rid of - only passive regeneration, x lps and x% lps (one better for high mitigation characters one better for high life).
For the standard affix pool I think it is sufficient to have:
6 resistances,
increased armor,
dodge chance,
critical hit chance,
attack speed,
crushing blow (weapons only),
flat and % life and mana (and regeneration),
hit recovery,
If I counted good, that is 38 affixes… not all are meant to spawn everywhere - critical hit chance is only weapons and gloves, movement speed is only boots, armor bonus is armor only, enhanced damage bonus and flat damage is only weapons. Basically a lot like D2 but adding a few of the unique affixes like magic resistance and %damage reduction to the normal pool. Changing some other things like +15 fire damage on a weapon is increased by the enhanced damage to make getting good weapons easier and making the desired affixes more diversified.
I don’t want to get into my idea about the attribute system but it plays a part in this next idea. I think there should be a stat (mostly weapons) that does x [physical or other] damage over 3 seconds that would work with any kind of skills that is directed at a target… eg. includes magic missile but not blizzard (or just skills that do a % weapon damage) and that this stat be scaled by the magic attribute. This idea is from TL2 that did a real good job with stats (other than vitality but that is for a reason relating to how armor works), you can make strength or focus (caster stat) melee physical builds because of the stat like this. I’d use a stat system very similar but scale ranged weapons and others like swords and daggers partially by dexterity and strength.
Actually, Arcane and Holy are the same damage type, it’s just named differently for class flavouring. It’s really 6 in D3.
But you are right to point out there are 6 damage types in D2 too. It’s just that Physical and Magic work in a special way compared to the 4 others that each have a resistance attached to them.
My point is, itemization gets annoying when too many resistances affixes come into play. In D3 we couldn’t care less because they were all fused into one (all res) but in GD it is quite tedious.
I’m even a bit worried to see a Physical resistance in D4, on top of the 4 others. I wouldn’t have mind if the game had followed the PoE road of 3 elemental resistances + a chaos/poison that is less mandatory. It feels like a good balance.
Why would every stat be equally useful? You can’t exactly achieve that anyway
You can try. And no particular reason you couldn’t succeed, other than it being difficult.
I dont really see anything on cluesos list of affixes where I think it wouldn’t be doable to make it one of the best affixes for some build.
If every affix does not have that potential, to be one the most desired affix for some build, then why bother having that affix. Might as well just remove it and try to achieve it for the affixes that remains.
How is D3 Warhammer and not DnD? Just curious as it just implements ideas and lore from the first two games and don’t really know much about Warhammer. So that would make D2 and D2 Warhammer as well?
Warhammer has a tabletop game as well, DnD has theirs too beyond publishing several books for the series. It’s about the respective games’ directors and lead staff actually. Art style and some mechanics are widely inspired by their favorite tabletop games and fantasy realms.
Jay Wilson who directed D3 has an obsession over WH realm and lead developer team of D2 (Brevik, Schaeffer brothers…) played long nights of DnD and perhaps White Wolf.
I under stand the basics. I just don’t see much WH inspiration unless the original story of how Sanctuary was created, powerful angels and demons making nephalem on their own piece of reality. Multiple realms of existence, powerful spells and abilities. All exist in D&D and all existed in Diablo lore prior to D3 is all I’m saying.
Thought there was maybe something specific that I didn’t understand that had a direct influence.
Small details of mechanic also artstyle is distinguishingly different between D2 and D3 if you pay abit of attention to the armor design. To go deeper, attack rating mechanic in D2 was inspired from to-hit chance of DnD; while Warhammer tabletop don’t have such thing and it’s non-existent in D3.
They took those realms as inspiration and expanded upon them without cutting bonds from the previous installment.
I didn’t mean anything about lore if it isn’t clear. Warcraft series took more or less inspiration from Warhammer’s lore, not Diablo.
I thought Sacred 1 was better than S2. I never got into it, but I can’t remember why. It is so long ago.
Indeed, the only thing that I would be worried abou would be if increased buff duration also effects things like Wrath of the Berserker, especially in combination with cooldown reduction and some skills /like WotB) not starting their CD first after their effects expired, because it again can lead to the “ultimate” skills to have 100% uptime.
High resistances, yes, but not immunities.
High res still counter one-elemental builds to a certain degree, but they don’t really shut them down (or require them to have highly expensive items, or use cheesy mechanics).
To be fair, Holy is a sub-element of arcane, at least in regards to resistances.
Your holy resistance is equivalent to your arcane resistance, or at least it benefits from arcane resistance as well.
Ind D3, Holy is a sub type of Arcane, at least in regards to resistances, where Holy resistance benefits from Arcane resistance,
I would build up on that idea, so that your bleeding resistance also get xx% of your base physical resistance and from single physical resistance affixes from items (but not from physical res that got increased by All Res or Material Res).
Same for Shadow and Holy. Let Shadow and Holy Resistance also benefit from xx% of your base Arcane resistance and Arcane resistance you get from single elemental Arcane resistance (but not from All Res or Occult Res).
So basically you still only have 6 damage types like in D2.
Just like in D2 and D3, some affixes would be more rare than others, and you probably also would be able to craft items with specific affixes at some sort of artisan.
I don’t know exactly what you mean here, because as far as I know, ATTACK in D4 will also get influenced by things like crit damage and crit chance and the damage multipliers from passive skills, so I don’t really see too much of a difference there, or at least I do not understand you correctly.
I agree with 9 elements and 9 resistances being too much, which is why I think that Bleeding should be either a sub-element/sub-resistance to physical or at least Bleeding resistance should inherit some amount of your physical resistance.
Same for Shadow and Holy being sub-resistances/sub-elements of Arcane.
I think 6 resistances are still relatively manageable.
I don’t think it does anymore.
Last december, David Kim said they limited Attack to weapons only. In the Blizzcon demo, armor pieces and rings featured a +Attack when they had an offensive affix, but in the last update they don’t, even with a +10% Crit Damage.
What the affixes change is Abilities’ damage, and they do it independently from Attack. It differs deeply from D3 DPS which aggregated all offensive affixes. In D4 the player is freed from this burden of having to increase one single stat and every affixes (+Crit, Crushing Blow, +Damage on Stunned enemy…) work on their own.
That being said, it doesn’t change the fact that Attack seems like a very stable number. With a simple formula like Attack x Life Steal / Monster lvl, a level 40 character with 16 000 Attack (as seen in the February Update) and 20% Life Steal would get +80 Health per second.
So you mean the calculation is different?
Like that in D4 it is:
A Skills Average Total Damage = Skills Base Damage x crit chance x crit damage x etc + Attack
While if Attack would be an affix in D3, it would be more like:
A Skills Average Total Damage = (Weapon Damage + Attack) x Skill Damage Multiplier x crit chance x crit damage x etc
===========
Until now I have not seen how the total weapon damage gets calculated and how Attack gets factored into that.
From the information that I have seen, ATTACK could basically just be another word for “Weapon Damage”, or it could be a flat number that translates to a percentual multiplier, very much like mainstat, just without the defensive bonus.
So far I have no idea how it works…
Yes, no one knows how it really works ^^ though there are some theories about it : https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/d3/t/clarificationthoughts-about-the-atkdef-system-in-d4/18778
In my opinion it could very well be a simple relationship between Attack and Defence, where your Attack is divided by the target’s Defence. That way, if your Attack is higher, your ability get a bonus damage, if it is lower you loose some. For example, 3 600 Attack vs 3 000 Defence = +20% damage.
Kind of like D2 Attack/Armor rating but with higher/lower damage instead of chance to hit.
I hope Blizzard clarifies the matter in the next quaterly update because I see people still mistake Attack/Defence for D3 DPS/Thoughness.
I don’t know if anyone has already suggested this, but here it goes:
Differentiate real elements from magic elements.
For example: real fire must be defended only by real means of defense and must be more difficult to obtain, magic fire must be defended by real and magical means and must be more accessible.
The nomenclatures can change, they can add new elements such as Hell Fire (against fire), Heavenly Lightning (against lightning), Sanctified Water (against water), the Holy Earth (against earth), the Spark of Light (as opposed to the Sacred Light), Vacuum (as opposed to magical darkness).
Thus, we would have the following affixes:
Fire
Fire Resist
Magic Fire
Magic Fire Resist
And that same mold for all the other elements.
As for physical damage, the damage classification according to the type of weapon would be cool (crush damage, perforation damage, cut damage), and not just the effect on being hit (such as bleeding, open wound, deadly strike).
Thus, we would have specific armor for certain types of damage:
Cutting Damage
Defense Against Cuts
Perforation Damage
Perforation Defense
Crush Damage
Crush Defense
All armor would provide a certain defense against all types of damage, but they would be better in one type and worse in another type.
This may contribute a little to the discussion
DO NOT add bonus skill damage or crit chance/damage to ANY item in the game. This will be a guaranteed game breaking failure weather you believe it or not.
In the end fire is still fire, whether it is conjured by magic means or physical ones. I don’t see the point in this, it just adds more damage types.
D2 had both and I don’t remember it failing. 
Though it is true that crit damage needs to be carefully monitored.
In Naruto this works very well. haha
Thanks for sharing, I will have a look at that after writing this post, as this is a topic I am interested in.
oh, yeah, that certainly could be, but it does not sound impactful enough for something so mayor tbh, but at least it is better than how it worked in D2 (I hated when I regularly missed attacks).
I always thought of Attack and Defense the way they have been presented as being a part of Toughness and DPS, but not being Toughness and DPS themself…
Nevertheless, I think they are quite boring tbh.
I would prefer it the PoE way, where cloth armor has something like Energy Shield (since it having armor would not make sense), or Life, while leather has all res and dodge, and plate armor has armor (which can do something like giving % damage reduction + and additional x% physical damage reduction).
That kinda would strike a middle ground between RPG realism and gameplay convenience.
I can see your point in regards to skill damage, as it got terribly out of hand in D3, but if it does not go above 12-15% it should be alright. Also, I would only let this affix roll on rare and magic items, not on legendaries or legendary affixes.
However, I very much agree with Critical Hit Damage.
Crit Chance is fine imo, but when it gets combined with Crit Damage, then either CHC or CHD are useless on their own, or when you combine them, the synergistic effect is overpowered.
But if Crit Chance on its own is good enough and balanced, then it is not really problematic. Even D2 had Deadly Strike, which is basically Crit Chance with 100% damage.
I would be okay with Critical Hit DAMAGE being on some very few legendaries or talents, but it should not be something that is commonly available.
The same can also be said about Crushing Blow Chance + Crushing Blow Damage and ADA Power + some affixes being gated behind ADA Power.
I guess +%skill dmg might be a bit redundant in a game with +skill affixes. Should be possible to balance it though.
Like +skill affixes, +skill dmg should not be for individual skills imo, but for groups of skills (and most importantly, groups of skills that goes across classes)
From the few examples we’ve seen, numbers can go very high (1800-2200 level 20, 16 000 level 40), so if I don’t change my weapon for 15 levels and get a 2000 Attack vs 8000 Defence, the result will be pretty impactful. ^^
I agree, these stats doesn’t look very interesting right now, they are just numbers that go up… but, well, so did Damage and Armor in D2.
I like the Armor/Evading/Energy Shield mechanics of PoE too, but I think it’s better to start the game with a shared, easy to understand system for every class. Later we can have talents/affixes/runes that add ES or Physical resistance based on Defence stats.