Mission Statement:
To make the core Diablo 3 experience better, not build a new game. For that reason, doing things like adding new acts is out of scope. This will focus on game play mechanics like Paragon, Itemization and skill balance. We’re not reinventing the wheel, we’re tinkering.
Short Term Goals:
Patching high priority / low effort systems that have been left to rot or been long standing game play health issues.
Itemization:
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Add new stats: The goal here is to add some additional stats that could pull builds away from crit chance + crit damage if the build jumps through the right hoops. Stuff like hit rating, and additional access to things like elite damage and elemental damage in order to take up stat real estate. Also new stats like:
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- Multistrike: Chance on hit to attack again for 50% damage, multistrikes can not critically hit. Aim to support on hit builds through Multistrike.
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- Momentum: While attacking build a “momentum” buff that increases damage dealt by a percentage and falls off when not taking action.
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Stat work: Buff attack speed to a level where it can reasonably compete as a gear stat (systemic attack speed from skills and passives will need to be reigned in as a result). On hit effects buffed across the board but can no longer crit to encourage Multistrike synergy. Stat rolls will also be mixed up on gear so that there is less clear “BIS” rolls.
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Paragon: More stats added to each Paragon page and Paragon capped at 800. Goal is to force players to stop players from being able to fill out the entire Paragon system and force them to make actual decisions in the Paragon system. For example, each page would have 6 potential stats to fill out and in 800 Paragon levels you can only max out 4. Experience gain rebalanced such that getting Paragon 800 is a meaningful but achievable grind.
New Items / Item Changes:
Adding some powerful items and making some changes to complement our other changes:
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Broken Promise: reworked to prevent all critical hits but increase damage by an amount that allows builds that can make use of stats other than crit chance to use it well without crowding out builds for whom crit remains top dog.
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LoN: No longer a 2 set, now a unique ring. Damage buffed slightly (perfect BIS LoN should almost always trump a 6 set).
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Unity: Melee have long been balanced around the Unity trick which holds them back in teams. The unity trick will be outright removed and melee will be balanced around having a role in teams. The new new Melee Durability bonus should help and additional tuning can be done on the passive and skill section.
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New Elemental support items added intended to be on par with Cindercoat in terms of power and build encouragement. * * New Physical Shoulders: Physical skills have double the chance to trigger area damage.
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- New Rimeheart: Chance to deal 10,000% cold damage on crit.
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- New Gloves: Your multistrikes with lightning skills can critically hit.
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- New Holy Helmet: Holy skills can not miss. (Reminder: Hit rating was added as a stat)
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Adding additional Legendary items with the intent to expand the number of skills with viable LoN / LoD builds.
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- New Fist Weapon: Your generators have a chance on hit to deal additional damage equal to a percentage of the damage over time of Exploding Palm.
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Gem Touch Up: (Goes hand in hand with changes from “Long Term Goals, Legendary Gem Rework” but fits nicely into the plan to nerf crit chance + crit damage and would not be prohibitive for early releases) Remove crit damage and flat damage from weapon slot gems and replace them with more conditional stats.
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Skill Balance Pass: I’ll be reworking most of the “obviously way better than alternative runes”. Things like Exploding Palm - Impending Doom. This won’t be a deep dive as I’ll need to see how skills land with new skill items and new elemental items in the mix.
Melee Balance: Baseline melee durability buff now includes 50% resistance to melee attacks. Melee characters are uniquely vulnerable to melee damage. Ranged characters are simply never in range of these attacks / effects and the extra damage caused to melee has long held melee back outside of ZDPS roles. Keeping the melee damage reduction specific to melee damage keeps heavy damage one shot effects working as intended between melee and ranged characters, while still giving melee a meaningful (much needed) toughness boost.
Rare and elite balance: Rare and Elite mobs have their health increased by 30-50%. Intent is to slow down combat overall and make screen clearing builds less dominant.
Long term goals:
These are larger systemic changes which will require more work and be beyond the scope of initial patches, likely released as full system updates:
Legendary Gem Update:
Two major changes here:
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- Legendary gems no longer socket into jewelry, instead they socket into weapons. Two handed weapons double the effects of any socketed legendary gem giving two handed weapons and dual wield unique angles of customization.
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- Legendary gems reworked such that they ask more of your build than they do at present. Less generic power => more specific power. For example: Bane of the Trapped no longer self triggers with a slow aura. If you want to unlock this bonus you must include a slow in your build. Some gems will need to be more heavily reworked because they are too general (Looking at you Bane of the Stricken). Some gems will be reworked to fit our overall mission statements a little better, for example:
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- Iceblink: No longer increases crit chance. Instead sets crit chance up to a value of 50% at rank 110. What this means that your crit chance for cold skills is whatever the gem says, independent of any crit chance on gear. Cold skills could use this to free up stat real estate for stats other than crit. Two handed builds could forego another legendary gem to achieve the fabled 100% crit chance build.
Passive Skill Rework:
Moving passive skills away from generic bonuses and toward specific bonuses. There should be less universally good passives and more conditionally good passives. (Less Seize the Initiative, more Mythic Rhythm). Generally will be trying to create more interactive game play patterns which will require players to have more than 1 damage dealing skill on their bar to get the most of their damage. Likely looking to shift a significant amount of power into conditional passives.
Example: Mixed Martial Arts: Your kick skills have a chance on hit to cause your next Exploding Palm to Explode instantly for 100% additional damage. (Kick skills are skills which use a kick in the animation: Deadly Reach, Lashing Tail Kick, etc…).
Deeper Skill Function Pass: After seeing the balance shake out from our initial and passive changes we’ll do a deeper dive on skill balance with heavier rework in mind. Aim to add active portions to most skills that are currently used only as passive stat buffs. The Wizard is a big offender here. Will make bigger functional changes to skills in this pass.
As part of this skill function pass there will be a mandate to reduce the amount of passive team damage boosts and reduce the effectiveness of ZDPS roles including reducing the availability of enemy grouping abilities. In exchange the goal will be to make all classes feel more interactive and powerful in exchange.
Deeper Item Pass: Another section where our mandate will be to reduce generic power and require builds to jump through more hoops to access very powerful uniques. A good example of an item that wouldn’t make the cut is Squirt’s Necklace: It’s too much bonus for no real cost.
