If you’re someone like me who loves pushing ranged builds like multishot, bone spear, or frozen orb, you’ll tend to notice how often the Waller affix shows up to ruin your otherwise dream rift…
So I’ve always wondered about the probability that an elite pack is a waller. This can be calculated, if we know the probability p that a single affix is waller, and assuming all 4 affixes are independently generated. The probability is then given by:
P ( p ) = p + (1-p) p + (1-p)^2 p + (1-p)^3 p = 1 - (1-p)^4 = 4p - 6p^2 + 4p^3 - p^4
For instance, if p = 0.10, it works out that P ( p ) ~ 0.3439, which approximates how often I’ve observed waller to show up (about a third of packs).
Now I think many of us can agree that this probability is too high!! How can Bliz reduce the frequency of wallers and make pushing ranged builds smoother? Well they can simply decrease p.
The inverse function p ( P ), which tells us what p needs to be if we want P fraction of elites to be waller, has four complex branches, with the valid real solution p ( P ) = 1 - (1-P)^(1/4).
Say we want P = 0.10. Then p ( 0.10 ) ~ 0.026. Therefore, Bliz should decrease p to 0.026 so that only a tenth of elites show up as waller!
Besides decreasing its frequency, Waller should also be nerfed:
by increasing its cooldown
by allowing potions to be drunk at full health. This makes drinking Kulle-Aid a lot easier.
(if you didn’t understand the math, this should be the takeaway)
Back to the days of people crying because shielding on elites were slowing down peoples runs, now it’s wallers are slowing us down ban them
Why not go the whole hog and demand they get rid of all extra abilities elites and highers get because it’s too hard for the players to contend with
Didn’t even need to show the math. As soon as you mentioned waller, I was thinking how projectile based builds are pretty much f’ed. Not a very smart design imo.
Assuming you’re not being sarcastic, you don’t have to go to such drastic lengths to address the problem of wallers. That would actually ruin the game. Just lower their spawn frequency and increase their cooldown like I mentioned.
Well, my goal was to cook up a solution for this problem rather than simply show that it exists.
it’s not as easy as that. While that would be the simplest way to generate elite affixes, that’s not how elite affix generation works in D3. It’s more complicated. There’s groups of affixes that cannot co-occur (to avoid some really unfavourable combinations).
Please just make them breakable, scale it from early to end game by making them crumble after “x” amount of hits. This is my very basic take on the problem, but seems doable for qol improvement to end game pushing.
Double waller + wormhole just absolutely tanks your dps during a run. Group up a few screens of mobs, hit your CoE cycle only to be stuck and or wormholed to the other side of the map. Your nice big pixel stack of mobs then disperses and you lose all your time and dps. Biggly sadface
Thanks for the link, though I’ve already went through that guide several times. I’m also aware that affixes are not actually independently generated (for instance Shielding and Juggernaut cannot both occur), and that while there doesn’t seem to be affixes mutually exclusive with Waller, this still alters the value of p for subsequent rolls.
But incorporating the full model would indeed be really complicated, as you’d have to know the probabilities for every affix to show up. So what I have here is a simplified model (I should have specified that). This is a good approximation, as mutually exclusive affixes are rare enough that they can effectively be neglected.
Yes I had thought of this too. Should also apply to Shielding.
Making walls breakable with reasonable effort would be a great QoL improvement.
The one thing I really hate about wallers is that they can easily box the player into a corner or other obstacle. Without gimmicky methods like relying on Kulle-Aid the other elite affixes can then easily prove deadly. This happens especially often in narrow tunnel maps. The walls tend to really spawn across the narrow passages, completely blocking all movement.
Walls should be breakable. They should normally crumble after 5 hits, just like a super strong door, or have some type of HP based on GR scaling.
There just aren’t any tools that help with walls, but it should really become a trait of certain items/skills/abilities like:
Grenade (that should end up the generator of choice for multishot)
Rain of Vengeance: Stampede
Spike Trap
Cluster Arrow
Sweep Attack
Blessed Hammers
Shield Bash
Phalanx:Shield Charge/Stampede
Bombardment
Bash
Hammer of the Ancients
Ground Stomp (smash the ground, crack the walls)
Leap:Toppling Impact (hello)
Earthquake
Avalanche
Deadly Reach
Dashing Strike
Exploding Palm
Corpse Explosion
Army of the Dead
Command Golem
Firebomb
Zombie Charger
Gargantuan
Plague of Toads:Explosive Toads (lol)
Wave of Force
Frost Nova:Shatter
Explosive Blast
Meteor
Disintegrate
Certain unused items should be modified to also make your attacks break walls. Nutcracker (“Each strike lands with enough force to crush a boulder.”), etc.
Lastly, make the Templar’s Onslaught or Charge attacks are appropriate for breaking down the walls too.
WALL BREAKING MECHANICAL CONCEPTS
1. Simple Approach Use any of these wall crumbling skills to instantly break down a wall.
2. Walls have Health and Certain Attacks are Stronger then Others
It takes 20 normal attacks to take down a wall.
Make each skill count for a different amounts:
**Grenade** = 11 dmg to walls (2 hits to break)
**Plague of Toads** = 6 dmg to walls (4 hits to break)
**Exploding Palm** = 25 dmg to walls (1 hit to break)
Rift Guardian walls take 30 normal attacks to destroy, but they now take 3 Grenades to break etc. You get the idea – it gives groups an advantage, unless the wall hp scales.
Hey maybe that’s how you can balance groups vs solo? Wall HP scales by 200% per additional player in party, enjoy those 180/270 hp walls. .
Given that most affixes screw over melee builds far more than ranged builds, I’m not in favor of removing one of the rare affixes that screws over ranged builds (not that it doesn’t affect melee too).
Just make the game so easy that no one needs to do anything. Buff everything on the hero and remove anything that is difficult to deal with, that is the manta of some.
Yeah , the problem isnt waller, it is Grifts as a concept.
As for breakable walls, shielding etc. Could be okay, as long as it is not based on your dmg dealt. If if it is, the whole idea becomes pretty pointless, as it just encourage the same as was already encouraged; more dmg.
But maybe some affixes might help against different monster defensive affixes.
D3 is lacking affixes to use here, but like Effect on Hit Stun or Knockback could help break waller. Bleed over X could help reduce the duration of shielding. Etc.
Or in Diablo 4, you could have 4 different monster defenses. Like
Waller; your characters strength is used for dmging walls.
Shielding; your characters Int is used for reducing its duration each time you attack the shield. Such as the shield lasts 10 seconds, but each attack you do*Int/500 = X sec reduced shield duration, so a Int character will get get rid of the shield in some hits, while a Str character will just have to kill other mobs, wait while the duration runs, or use another strategy (like having specific skill counters/runewords etc.).
Blocking; your characters dex is used for breaking the block effect.
Slow movement/attack aura; your characters willpower allows you to resist some of this effect.
Can you elaborate which affixes you think screw over melee builds more? Methinks there are roughly equal numbers of affixes bad for melee and ranged builds.
Wow what a thoughful and well-informed post.
No the problem is just waller. Some RNG in Grifts is healthy and motivates the player. But Waller exacerbates the RNG to unfair levels, especially for ranged builds, as there is no good solution for the player no matter the skill level.
Problem is not Wallers, the problem is lack of answers to Wallers from generic builds. Wallers supposed to block the scattered ranged attacks while also keeping melee combatants at bay, however they are not meant to block homing missiles or phasing mobility skills.
Although, Not every build has high blow homing missiles or ranged attacks that ignore collision but every character has one that fits the bill. Your damage output maybe highly efficient with your main skillrune of choice but a skillrune change would allow you to wade through Waller champs.
For sure, game will have you stop somewhere as a drawback to a very efficient skill build and will force you to tweak it unless you’re stuck on internet guides. However I doubt all classes have that sorta tweak options. Without offering different ways to tackle obstacles, game has no meaning or incentive to offer an experience. Thinking a removal would be a solution is just nonsense; once happened you will move to the next high annoyance and demand it to be removed as well.
In short though, if you consider removing Waller then you might as well consider removing Juggernaut too later on, considering how many players skip those packs in high tier GR runs. Same can apply to the other elite affixes but that is completely against the dynamic combat pillars of the game. Don’t get your hopes high, see if you can tweak your build around to be more effective against Wallers if they annoy you then give feedback.
Care to give an example? AFAIK it is never worth it to take an inferior skill rune just to bypass the waller problem. There are no real “options” here.
Did you read my OP? I never said to remove Waller entirely, just decrease its spawn frequency.
Lemme guess, you’ve never seriously pushed higher GRs?
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