S26 Trag'Oul's Avatar + Pestilence + Ricochet + Blood Lance

General Discussion
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4K Poster

https://i.ibb.co/HBfFryP/trag-oul-s-avatar-life-lost.jpg

Trag’Oul’s Avatar

2 pieces bonus: Corpse skills hits reduce the cooldown of Reanimation skills by 0.25 second per hit
4 pieces bonus: Consumed corpses increase maximum life by 4% for 15 seconds up to 400%
6 pieces bonus: Enemies hit by Corpse skills have a 50% chance to lose 2% of their maximum life

Dragon’s Vambraces

Legendary Bracers - Requires Level 70
Hits have a 3% chance to equip you with Pestilence 2 pieces bonus and equip the Blood Lance rune with the Ricochet rune for 5 seconds (Necromancer Only) [1-5]%
The One Who is Forever stays above all

Eye of Saphir

Legendary Amulet - Requires Level 70
Hits have a 5% chance to increase your attack speed and reduce your damage by 75% for 3 seconds
(Necromancer Only) [50-100]%
An avalanche of blows strikes the enemies

Summary

  • Very scalable
  • Rift Guardian Killer
  • Life rather than damage
  • Corpse Skills Hits Per Second
  • Pestilence Blood Lance Ricochet

Equipment

  • Trag’Oul’s Avatar (CDR)
  • Dragon’s Vambraces (IHS)
  • Eye of Saphir (IAS)
  • Razeth’s Volition (Defense)
  • Molten Widelbeest’s Gizzard (Life)
  • Skeletons + Grisly + Amethyst (Life)
  • Skeletons + Obsidian (CDR)
  • Captain Crimson (CDR)
  • Flavor of Time (CDR on Follower)
  • Blood is Power (CDR)
  • In-Geom (CDR)
  • Messerschidt’s Reaver (CDR)
  • Gogok of Swiftness (CDR + IAS)
  • Pain Enhancer (IAS on Crit)
  • Broken Promises (Crit chance)

Precisions

  • New: Set dealing life lost
  • New: Item referring a set power
  • New: Item adding a rune to another
  • Numlock 2,3,4, cast Blood Lance until Dragon’s Vambrace triggers then Blood Rush to the next Elite
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:joy::man_facepalming:

#MissingCharacters

1 Like
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In the absence of software auto-cast functionality implemented in the game, this is how these skills are meant to be played

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Any build that relies on automation of skill(s) is a bad build by design.

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It is not a requirement.

You can do it manually.

Doing it manually will simply overuse your fingers like any Devour build in the game, which easily accounts for 75% of Necromancers builds.

It should look like this but with Blood Lance + Ricochet + Life lost for enemies

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQuIG2D1_KI

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First, I’m glad you’re being creative and trying to come up with ideas. I don’t agree with most of these ideas, but I don’t want to discourage you from being creative and enjoying the game the way you like it.

In the context of D4 being actively in development, I want to list a few core principles in this suggestion that I think are wrong in hopes that the devs will take a different direction in their design in upcoming games.

  • Absolute reliance on sets - D3’s sets are overpowered and thus become highly restrictive pillars of any viable build. In order to get build diversity, you need to have viable alternatives. Players don’t want to play gimped builds, so they’ll feel forced into whatever mechanic you make most powerful. Sets should be designed with adequate power to reward collecting them, but not so powerful that nothing else is viable. Further, set bonuses should be broadly applicable to a wide range of skills/spells in order to allow the player room for creativity and build diversity.

  • Purpose-built legendaries - D3 introduced the concept of build-defining or game-play changing affixes on weapons - an interesting idea. This was implemented by giving massive bonuses to a single skill as an incentive to use the skill. In practice, this created a system where these purpose-built legendaries were so strong, players were forced to use only skills with a curated set of set and legendary bonuses to compete. Legendary affixes should be strong, but 1) not overpowered, and 2) broadly applicable to a wide range of skills/spells in order to allow the player room for creativity and build diversity.

  • Stacking mechanics - These are mechanics which are designed to reward the player for kill streaks - an interesting idea. In practice, they end up being punishments for players when they hit low monster density and their stacks drop off. This particular suggestion using stacking mechanics both for survivability and damage. Starting every dungeon weak to the point of being a one-shot kill until you can ramp up stacks is unnecessarily frustrating. And its worse if you’re dependent on stacks or some sort of combo to even get that offense rolling. These mechanics should be strenuously avoided. Player power needs to be much more reliable and far less variable than what these mechanics create. If you intend for the player to have power, just give it without ridiculous hoops to jump through.

  • Perma-uptime “Ultimate” Skills - D3:RoS introduced a number of ultra-long cd, high power skills to various classes - an interesting idea. In practice, players figured out how to stack multiple CD-reduction effects to get ultra-high, if not permanent uptime on those skills. The power boost was so extreme that these became effectively mandatory play styles if you ever chose the skill. Perma-uptime self-buffs Vengeance for DHs and Epiphany for Monks are bad. Necros using LotD for a perma-AoE stun was a bigger problem, and putting long-cd nukes like AotD in this state gives much too large of a power boost. “Ultimate” skills should be given cds appropriate for the fast pace of ARPG game play, and cds on these skills should not start until the skill’s effect completes so that CDR cannot be exploited to give permanent uptime on skills intended to be temporary power boosts.

  • Spammed skills and NumLock - D3 embraced the idea of asking players to combine various skills together to get a power boost. This occurred via combos or short-cd buffs which required rotating skills and casting some as “maintenance” from time to time. Encouraging players to do more than spam one skill is a good thing. In practice, this meant that some skills had to be auto-cast as soon as they were on cd for maximum power. Players exploited the NumLock hidden mechanic to automate what was supposed to be an active player choice, requiring skill to execute. Players will always find these type of QoL adjustments. If a skill is not meant to be cast like this, then do not make it possible via hidden mechanics. If the developers intend spells to be used in this way, auto-cast needs to be built into the standard UI and as a QoL measure, automatically disabled when in town (or even out of combat).

2 Likes
7

Good analysis!

One thing I would add, not sure you agree or not, would be to avoid area damage as it is in d3.

That is also an intresting idea, unfortunatly it changed the game play and became a way to beat the game. It also removed the importance of some AoE spells and made them obsolete. Now a single target spell thaat triggers AD will become more powerfull by gathering a lot of enemies as close to each other as possible.

2 Likes
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Interesting thoughts overall, I support all of these principles in the context of developping an ARPG from scratch (like D4) which would lead to make a tabula rasa from all the D3 items history. :grinning:

Agree ! :+1:
Like “Cast me this every X seconds or if this or that condition”.
I think this is the purpose of D4 runes, but last time I checked it did not applied to skills but rather to a curated group of effects (same problem as you described with sets and legendaries)

So true ! :smiley:

All current ARPGs are sensitive to this default.

In my opinion there are 2 viable options to break the curated / manual orientation of sets and legendaries

Option 1: Exalted items: Full RNG: Roll Random buff on random skills
https://i.ibb.co/7bv8ScR/exalted-items-4.png
https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/d3/t/s26-season-of-exalted-items-violet-items/47126

Option 2: Granular composable powers using Gems and slots / links
Each Gem has 1 description line of a tiny power, and it can level up
A sort of Final Fantasy 7 materias system, slighly different.

About Option 2, they explore it for Path of Exile 2:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHA3cYpkMYA&t=161s
Each power can be equipped with support gems that will modify the power (more projectiles, skill replicated on a nearby target, …etc)

While I like the idea of granular gems, they also have defaults

  • it can lacks creativity if you plan for a big scheme (unless you carefully plan the combo or chain reaction)
  • conditions do not seem granular and are merged inside powers description to avoid power creep
  • modifiers gems can only apply to some skill gems (projectile modifier is useless on an infight skill)
  • power creep or infinite loops can be hard to balance
  • If you want to switch build you have to level up the other gems or remount another character
  • Characters traits might appear meaningless if anyone can have any skill, unless characters traits boost some type of gems ?

ARPG also invented skill trees. Skill trees are similar to the materia system, without gems, a main skill with multiple modifiers (runes) but only one can be selected, with a restriction implying some skills cannot be selected without spending points into another skill (which feels weird, I prefer level lock)

Skills tree can lead to very bad UI like the ones of Path of Exile or Wolcen, you go into one direction and it is impossible to into the other direction, which kills build diversity.

Dungeon Siege 1 had an interesting point of view: A single one character that specializes in whatever you play. The more you play skill X or weapon type Y, the more it becomes efficient.

Look at “Melee / Level 0”
https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/dungeonsiege/images/2/2f/Skills.png/revision/latest/scale-to-width-down/165?cb=20160113111039

But it wasn’t as complex in terms of mechanics as current ARPG are, so I’m not sure it really compares.

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I’d absolutely agree with this, and the reason is simple math. My goal as a player to maximize how much damage my character can do in as little time as possible. Put another way MMO-RPG players might recognize: “DPS wins all fights” or “Dead things don’t hit back.”

When designing a skill, a designer chooses between single-target or multiple-target. Single target skills are made more powerful because you can only hit the one target. An AoE cleave which might hit 4-5 targets in front of the player simply can’t be given the same amount of damage because it’d be 4-5x more powerful in practice. Typically, the designer assumes the average cast of the skill will catch a certain number of enemies, say 3, and gives it damage that’s 1/3 of what the single target skill does. If the player can group 4-5 monsters up, he is rewarded for skillful play, and if he uses it against 1-2, he is penalized for not choosing a more appropriate single-target skill. Regardless of the size and shape of the AoE area, this is how you balance them.

What D3’s Area Damage affix did was break that entire scheme. D3 is a game about slaughtering whole screens worth of enemies by the hundreds. It naturally favors AoE skills just by design. The only real niche for single-target skills was as a sniper who killed elites and the rift guardian efficiently while running past “trash” monsters. Area Damage converted all of that to AoE, so we were right back to where AoE damage was once again the one and only option because of it’s ability to multiply the damage with monster density.

Incidentally, this is also why over the years, we’ve heard so many complaints about “spaghetti maps” and low monster density rifts. We hate them because every other aspect of the game has been tuned to get huge groups of monsters together and AoE them all down. We adjusted our builds to efficiently handle this type of threat. We removed the niche for single-target skills to be viable.

Ideally, we want a design that gives single target skills a specific and important role and the tools to execute it. Things like critical hits (x2 dmg), deadly strike (D2’s x3 dmg), and the like promote this. It might also mean separating crits away from AoE skills due to their inherent ability to get “extra” damage in the right circumstances, and supplementing them with their own affixes that make them interesting. Adding AoE cc (like a meteor stun or a blizzard slow/chill effect) or adding damage over time (like burn or poison effects) is a way to do this as well as just reshaping or expanding the area of effect. Regardless, the two concepts need to be balanced mathematically so the player has a reason to want both.

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Made a new proposal on D4 given your comments :slight_smile: