Hear me out. In Diablo II, hell difficulty there were monsters that were “immune”. Technically speaking they just had over 100% resistance to a specific damage type. So despite the name “immune” and contrary to what most people believed, you could theoretically still get enough “-x% to enemy resistance” to bring them under that 100% value and still kill them.
While hated by those that pumped all their damage into 1 damage type, I would say this actually added some important depth to the game.
You could be highly effective at farming some areas with not too much investment in items if you focused on one damage type, while being ineffective farming in other areas. You could then either create another character to handle the other areas OR you could make a timely/costly investment in rare affixes and items that would lower the resistances below 100% so you could still technically farm all areas although some areas much slower, OR of course change to a hybrid build using multiple damage types and do all areas at a moderate pace.
If you stack 1 damage type, bosses/monsters/players should be able to stack 1 resistance type. We should be able to make ourselves essentially immune to a specific monster/player by sacrificing defense in other important categories and making ourselves completely open to guaranteed death to other types. Or of course balance ourselves.
There is a real risk/reward trade off here that to me just makes logical sense. If everything can be killed by every damage type equally then what is the points in resistances and damage type choices?
In D3 there was diminishing returns on stacking a resistance so there was no point in having resistances at all, you just got them all to 5-7k range and called it good. It appears blizzard understands the pointlessness to it as they have just "defense’’ and “attack” now.
EDIT: To those that keep pointing out the flaws in D2, you aren’t wrong, but there could have been easy fixes. Fixes that Blizzard clearly learned from and can do right in D4. Just because a cold sorce couldn’t effectively handle cold immunes as well as a lightning sorc, doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea. It just means they needed more affixes/items to help them handle it better. Perhaps to better understand the concept think of the monsters as being “high resistance” monsters not “immune”.
EDIT2: I am convinced people don’t understand what “build diversity” even means in an ARPG anymore lol. People, if you aren’t forced to make a choice or given incentives (pros/cons) for making a specific choice then there isn’t diversity.
High resistances on mobs isn’t unpopular, most people agree to resistances playing a major role in the game.
This is where you get a spell / armor penetration mechanic, which allows you to reduce the resistances of the mob through spells of that “elemental” type and deal increased damage / damage at all to that mob so you can reduce their damage reduction from 100% down to a minimum of 0% reduction.
Armor / spell penetration would roll on less items (weapons / jewellery), but provide a unique point of difference, and would roll against doing more damage for not having the stat or better damage against mobs with higher resistance.
Typically a later game affix, most of everything else I agree with you.
Interesting cause in my experience it has been the exact opposite lol. Diablo II wasn’t perfect in the sense I know a lot of people that got to hell and couldn’t progress because of immune monsters and no way to respec (pre 1.12). Instead of just staritng over and losing dozens of hours they just up and quit. D2’s failure was not providing enough armor penetrating affixes or -x% enemy resistance affixes to items mid game to mitigate the immunes. That is something D4 can easily address. But yeah, over at reddit they hate the idea of immunes or high resistance mobs.
Resistant enemies I could tolerate, but the only reason I would want to see immune enemies make a return is if players had passive abilities that granted their skills piercing effects so they could lower said enemies resistance and break their immunities; otherwise I’d rather immunities don’t make a comeback.
So, you don’t understand penetration? There’s no reason to skip, but there is reason to give mobs ways of combating power creep, while continuing to add more power and ability / tools to the player.
Except all penetration wasn’t effective against immunes: cold sorc mastery couldn’t pierce it, even if over 100%. And let’s be real: for high end players, d2 mono element builds work just fine because of rune words.
So no, this is just something that will punish casuals. And D3 does have a cold immune mob in a side dungeon in Act 5.
I’m okay with there being situations where some skills are far more effective than others to promote build diversity, but complete immunities aren’t anything i want to see. It’s boring and just punishes you for building your character a certain way, which is the opposite of build diversity.
Yet, that’s really easy to change… It has no reason to punish casuals, it would be a progressive affix like it is in many other games in different forms.
Again, it would be resistance, not immunity - which you could work around, yes this might make some fights more difficult, but if you have the tools to deal with it, it’s not an issue.
It wouldn’t be something that’s in the game at the start, it would be progressive - simple to learn hard to master. Mostly harder mechanics are introduced well past when a game has gone past the casual stage.
In a game of counters, you ought to be punished for limiting your versatility.
Casuals getting their feelings hurt over their lack of diversity in their build being in fact not the greatest idea (a humbling learning experience to the unarrogant) ever conjured, I’d much rather have a game where players who specialize in only ONE style can be countered by someone who specializes in only ONE style.
This whole idea of wanting to not have to put any thought into the game because it can be overly complex is absurd to players who invite the idea of contemplating strengths, weaknesses, and the choices thereof. I get it though. There are more of the former than the latter, and marketing appeals to the masses.
But restricting everyone to dual elemental builds is inherently undiverse. It literally cuts out swaths of available builds. My point about casuals was i could foresee something similar to piercing being implemented but only at the high end, so they would be the only ones punished.
This is the main issue I find in the controversy in philosophies between players on the forum.
A lot of people apparently really think they don’t want depth in the game. What I have surmised from arguing and reading too much on this forums is that some people really just want to " be able to just kill monsters because that’s what the game is about" and end up as powerful as anybody else.
Except you led with immunities. It would be easy enough to cap at 95% and have -resist stats lower to compensate. Why the complete immune?
The other question is what does this accomplish? So what you’re saying, will still allow mono element builds that require an extra stat investment? That sounds too much like builds could swing either direction, either mono or non mono as being “optimal” which i wouldn’t consider diversity. It’s just a question of which one requires more support stats: if dual elemental builds require more other stats than just the -resist required for mono builds then they’re suboptimal. If not, then they’re optimal and you won’t see many people running multiple skills of the same element. Single element sorcs only worked because static field was a lot of damage and not a high skill point investment.
How does to restrict?! It creates more builds, and gives you counter options / affixes to a greater variance of situations, while still creating character identity and fantasy…
It’s undiverse because it punishes you for focusing on more than one skill for each element for example, and then makes it inherently suboptimal. All builds that can do that become “bad”
It’s undiverse?! If you specialise you get punished, but have the tools to deal with it, where as if you use all elements you can’t deal as much “pure” damage, but don’t get punished as hard with higher resistances - which is risk / reward.
You just pretty much proved my point. You’re required to have 2 skills from different element. On sorcs specifically, because of masteries, you didn’t really have the points to invest into more than 2 skills and the masteries. Sometimes it was better to throw points at synergies instead but even the synergy skills were not usually as effective as your main attack.
And my point is there is going to be an obvious answer as to which of those is better in the long run so people won’t bother with doing the other approach.
