S25 Suggestion - Primal Power (change up the GR game)

General Discussion
1

The overall point of this was to crap on legendary powers and set bonuses and let the skills stand for themselves, as well as change the game slightly as you get into higher GRs. Want to use that one niche skill no one uses cuz there isn’t a set bonus for it? Go nuts. And we’ve already destroyed the meaning of “power creep” so I see no reason to care anymore. :smiley:

  • Primal items now start dropping from the start of the game and scale down to level 1.(1)
  • Items or abilities that remove resource cost instead reduce the base cost by 100%.
  • Primal items drop more often for every 50 GR.(2)
  • Primal items no longer roll with legendary powers.
  • All affixes on a primal item can now be in a small range of values, with both the minimum and maximum value increasing the higher the GR it was dropped from, starting from GR70. (From GR1-70, the range is as it is now – 0 – and from GR71 and up, a small rising range appears.) The range will always be fairly small.
  • Primal items can roll with up to 6 primary and 6 secondary affixes, in addition to always rolling with all sockets.(4)
  • Every 100 GRs, the max allowed affixes increases by 1.
  • Primal items have a new modifier that always appears after completing GR1: Increase all skill damage by X%. This value is highest on jewelry. This does not count against the affix count.(3)
  • Primal items can roll “Increases [Element] Skills Damage” instead of “all skill damage” and can roll up to double the value.(3)
  • Primal jewelry have a new primary affix after completing GR25: Increase the number of charges of skills with cooldowns by 1. This range increases extremely slowly with higher GRs.
  • Primal legs have a new primary affix after completing GR50: Abilities may sometimes take a percentage extra resource cost but do extra damage. This extra damage is, of course, subject to crits. If an ability generates resource, it will regenerate more instead.
  • Primal helms have a new primary affix after completing GR75: Increase the level of all legendary gems (including gloves).
  • Primal shoulders have a new primary affix after completing GR100: Your follower has a % chance of using any of your equipped abilities.
  • Primal wrists have a new primary affix after completing GR125: Your abilities permanently require or generate percentage extra resource and do increased damage.
  • Primal gloves can sometimes roll with a legendary gem power after completing GR150. This cannot be enchanted onto a primal but can be changed if it appears. It can be upgraded like a regular legendary gem. Enchanting to a new gem power reverts it to level 1.
  • Primal items can rarely roll with a random class passive that does not stack after completing GR175. This cannot be enchanted onto a primal but can be changed if it appears.
  • Primal chests have a new primary affix after completing GR200: All of your abilities have the effect of all runes. This cannot be enchanted onto a primal.
  • Primal belts have a new primary affix after completing GR225: Killing an elite pack in normal rifts may sometimes spawn a Prime Evil who may drop a Primal Power Token. Primal Power Tokens spawn with a random ability of your class, and add an affix to a primal item (not subject to cap), adding increased damage to that ability. Applying another token to the same item overwrites the previous one.
  • Primal boots have a new primary affix after completing GR250: Walk between worlds, allowing health orbs collected during GRs to permanently increase your health and damage for the rift’s duration.
  • Primal items do not function with the Legacy of Dreams gem or Legacy of Nightmares set bonus.(5)
  • Primal items roll with greatly increased armor and resistances.(6)
  • Enchanting a primal item no longer locks you into forever re-rolling that single affix.(7)
  • The cost of enchanting a primal item is now a few Flawless Royal gems in addition to just obscene amounts of gold.(7)
  • Wearing a full set of primal gear grants the Primal Power aura: all damage you take is decreased by some crazy number and your follower damage is increased by some even more ludicrous number.(8)
  • Congratulations, we’ve rebalanced all class skills so they’re slightly more even across the board, massively buffing the crappy ones, perhaps slightly nerfing that one skill you love and making skills with cooldowns actually useful in some cases by shortening them.
  • Greater Rifts now cap at 300. We doubled it.(9)

(1) At the same rate as they do now at GR70.

(2) Primals are about 1 in 400. Every 50 GRs could up this by 15 maybe? Making the GR150 drop rate 1 in 8.8.

(3) Intended to mimic Diablo 2’s +skill/element affix, with the overall goal to allow all abilities to be useful. Generally, the total +skill% damage for a full set of primals would need to be in the 90,000 range to make sure it’s superior to all sets, especially since you could get a set bonus far faster than completing a primal set. Keep in mind Legacy of Dreams/Nightmares caps at 9,750 so this is a little less than 10x more.

(4) To increase the chances that a primal is useful and significantly boost their power.

(5) A full set of primal items should be stronger than any full set or LoD set.

(6) To offset the need to add a specific damage reduction modifier.

(7) You can make the one you have work but it’ll cost you a lot.

(8) I’m imagining the 80,000% increased damage will not match the damage reduction, especially if you can get to GR170.

(9) This puts the Primal drop rate at 1 in 4.4 for GR300.

Feel free to crap on the suggested numbers. The overall point of this was to crap on legendary powers and set bonuses and let the skills stand for themselves. Want to use that one niche skill no one uses cuz there isn’t a set bonus for it? Go nuts. The successive primal powers will probably totally break the game but that is also kinda the point, and increasing GRs to 300 probably means you probably still won’t pass it.

I had a vague idea for reusing the concept of Angelic and Demonic power from an older version of Diablo 4, where a primal would roll as Angelic or Demonic with a specific boost to defensive or offensive affixes but meh. I have a feeling they’re gonna release S25 and it’s just gonna be a rehash of an old season.

1 Like
2

revise all legendaries to have a bonus plus a vessel to carry an extra gem balance out the gr theory

3

An extra regular gem or a legendary gem? If it’s a legendary gem, I don’t see how that’d balance out the GR theory over just buffing the damage. This effectively gives you 4 legendary gems. Having extra regular gem slots would be mildly entertaining, I guess.

4

yeah 4 legendary gems instead of 3

1 Like
5

Okay so Primal items would “just” be super buffed items, but no particular combination is needed to get this feel of power.

While this proposal greatly simplifies the gameplay, it removes an important feature of any card / deck system: The combination of cards, represented in Diablo by the items synergies. The combination is supposed to be more powerful than just aligning items individually. By removing legendary powers you remove that aspect. I’m not saying this is good or bad, but it is removed. Nothing is binding a Primal to another. They are now completely separated, distinct pieces from each other.

6

Are you talking about set bonuses? Because those still massively buff single skills, which is not the point of any of these changes.

Diablo 2 and 3 both make “niches” of items, which sort of has you look for a bonus on a particular item slot. Helm and chest had sockets. Jewelery had easiest +skills. Belt had pot slots. Shield had block. Weapon did bulk of the damage for physical classes. Etc. (Diablo 3 does this as well, somewhat even more pronouncedly.)

I made a quarter-hearted attempt at this item niche thing by stuffing legendary gem affixes on gloves, and adding the new affixes to some primals but honestly this is pretty unlikely to ever be done with the amount of work I imagine they’d have to do to make some of these things function.

Making more niches on items would be nice but the primary target of this is to make crap skills like Chakra or Arcane Orb actually viable as a build option.

1 Like
7

I get the idea, and this is a good reason.

8

I added some additional item niches. They now appear every 25 GRs, up to GR250.

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9

So… never?

Highest GR is 150.

10

Thomas had never seen this much nonsense.

11

You missed the part where I suggested also increasing the GR cap to 300, since I expect many of these changes to come with some heavy power creep.

12

No, that will never happen, so back to the “so, never?” Sphere spank all you want - it ain’t going anywhere.

13

Most of the changes people suggest on this forum will never happen. Does that mean they should stop making suggestions or personal wishlists? Isn’t “it doesn’t exist currently” the entire point of a post like this? Why would you insist that “it will never happen” in the first place on this kind of post?

And besides, if I crunched down all the changes to a GR cap of 150, you’d wind up being so powerful by 150 that you could one-shot everything by just looking at it. But the absurd power jump is partially the point, so that you have time to get used to the power of the extra absurd affixes during the time it takes you to the next GR requirement. Can you imagine what it would look like if all your abilities had all of their runes? (I doubt the game would even support this now.) Not to mention the amount of damage an enemy would be doing at GR200.

14

Are you also going to add god knows how many difficulty levels to keep up with the GR 300 or is this purely about GR and the rest of the game is completely pointless and will need to make a 2nd D3 where all there is is no difficulty levels and nothing but GR that are opened for free
Whats the point of all this GR building if the rest of the game becomes even more pointless than what it already is

15

Just GRs. You can already easily cap T16.

Fixing up the difficulty levels wasn’t the point of the thread. That is a completely separate issue.

Pointless? It already is, and you don’t get anything about of regular rifts except keys to run more GRs, since like 90% your progression will be in GRs anyway.

16

And thats the biggest problem the GR are already that far ahead of T16 and you want to overpower the characters even more for higher GR and GR are just a dick measuring device because they are automatically put on the LB

Not really because making the characters even more ridicuously overpowered than what they already are
When D3 game was first released there was just campaign, when RoS came out they added an extra act and rifts
And then the kiddies had to have it made that you can play the game blindfolded and had to make the characters that stupidly OP that even GR 150 is turning into a joke and all you want to do is add more GR levels and make the characters even more stupidly OP then what they already are

What they should of done was kept the damage so that the current T16 was a struggle to complete and any GR you can complete above that as a bonus

All you are doing is making the characters even more ridiculously OP then what they already are and then 6 months tops after getting your wish and GR 300 is turned into a joke you will be back again wanting more OP items added and the GR extended to 500 and so the vicious cycle begins

17

Sure. You’ve figured me out. Let’s just cut out the time in between and raise the GR cap to 1000 now, shall we?

No. Should I have instead stated in my post:

  • We have removed all GRs after 75 and lowered numbers on items so that GR75 is as difficult as GR150 is now.

Or:

  • We have re-balanced Torment levels such that T16 is equal to GR150

Or:

  • We have capped GRs to 100, lowering the numbers on items such that GR100 is as hard as GR150 is now.

Or whatever other suggestion comes up? I’d have someone else yelling at my original post that the idea is terrible for another reason. “I don’t want an item squish!” “They’re going to mess the balance up! You know this isn’t possible!” “You’ve ruined the game, the economy and my Friday night! You suck!”

I did not mention GRs, Torment or massive item squishes, as I didn’t want to bring up all the issues they entail and so instead focused entirely on GRs, but congratulations, you’ve made it an issue. I might as well have brought up the drop rates of legendaries and tried to rebalance those, no? Heck, why don’t I modify the OP and put every single issue any player has with the game in it. That’ll satisfy 'em! We’ll even tackle the problem of Diablo 3 not being Diablo 2! That’ll get us real sales!

The power difference between being able to complete GR150 and GR75 is as infinite as the difference would be between GR50,000 and GR75. You can one-shot everything, or near enough, in either case, with a 0.0 chance of being killed.

The reason why I didn’t use a much smaller difference between the new item affixes? Because you can get to GR100 with current items. Because you can jump to T50 pretty quickly with Legacy of Dreams. Because if I started the new affixes at 25 and went with only 5 GRs between new affixes, you’d get the final affix at 75 but you’d probably jump from 25 to 50 with like 3 of these items. If I went with 10 GRs betwen affixes, you’d finish at GR135 and again, the power boost with these new affixes is probably such that you’d jump even faster than you do now.

The point was to extend the gameplay of GRs by adding new elements of gameplay such that the jump from GR75 to 100 isn’t as monotonus as the jump from GR50 to 75, not to mess with a thousand other gameplay systems. You would be forced to use the new items, which have the new gameplay, and since current items can get you to GR150 (with difficulty) it would be against the point to keep the cap at GR150.

Please enjoy the post for what it is. Thank you. Please make room for the next customer. Sir, this is a Wendy’s.

18

It will never happen because it is impossible. I can’t remember the exact reason but something about the damage numbers and coding or whatnot makes it impossible.

19

They use 64-bit numbers for damage right now, which have an unsigned max of 18,446,744,073,709,551,616. I can’t even count that high. Granted, they might need to move to 128-bit numbers, which get a bit slow, at GR300.

Not the point! (They would def. need to do a number squish.)

20

Meh, I’ve managed to get only a few primals over the many seasons and they have all been crap. Most often they are vanilla or crap legendaries that I would never use. I hold out on getting something impressive but so far RNG is hating on me.