The reason is about just as simple and obvious as it can possibly be.
Let’s jump into it.
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What’s the exact dmg increase from 12 425 strength to 15 340 strength? Yeah, the D3 way of scalling dmg is dumb. The dmg increase from 220 attack and 530 attack is simple and it makes sense.
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To what extent does 16 150 strength increases damage mitigation over 13 540 strength? Defense is straight foward, what you see is what you get.
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It’s much easier for devs and players to know exactly what an item’s impact on the meta would be.
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David Kim implied that DMG % is not the direction there are going in right now, so they’re not going to make sets with +33 000% damage. That was a dumb decision on their part to begin with, makes balancing the game much harder without any real benefits.
15 Likes
Simplicity is fine, but not at the cost of depth.
Str etc. was indeed bad in D3, but this mostly seems to repeat it.
Going from 13000 to 13500 str or attack will essentially be the same.
There will still be other stats affecting your dmg, so those numbers cant, luckily, be taken at face value anyway, taking away their intended goal.
13000 attack, +10% ias, +10% fire dmg will be better than 14000 attack etc. If they try to make Attack the number to look for, they end up misleading the players that might actually want/need the simplicity. Just like the calculated dmg in D3 can do (I still think it is worth having that calculated dps in D3 however, as long as it is clear for people what it is and isn’t).
I dont actually mind having an Attack stat, both D2 and D3 had those with other names. Having them spawn on every single item however is silly.
And dont lump multiple, different stats, into one. Attack merely being one stat, different from all the other dmg stats, is perfetly fine though.
9 Likes
From what we’ve seen of Diablo 4, itemization is about as deep as the kiddie pool. It’s not going to feel as exciting to get a new item, as it’ll just be a slight upgrade to the same 2 numbers you’ve been slightly upgrading for ages.
Getting a SoJ in Diablo 2 was exciting not just because of the +1 to all skills, but also because it was a significant increase to your mana to have one equipped.
Now in Diablo 4 it’s going to be “Oh look, all the same numbers went up that did when I got my first blue ring, only they’re higher than the blue ring”.
The solution to things like strength in Diablo 3 shouldn’t be to double down on the over simplification of things.
13 Likes
Getting a SoJ in Diablo 2 was exciting not just because of the +1 to all skills, but also because it was a significant increase to your mana to have one equipped.
The SoJ in D4 has +1 skill and mana cost reduction. It was in the demo
5 Likes
The screenshot I saw only showed +1 to all skills, but that was more of an example rather than my entire point.
Attack/Defense is still an over simplification of things that makes loot feel less exciting.
9 Likes
What prevents them to co-exist together? They can not give character customization at the fear of “breaking the game”?
Nothing, but why add useless stats when Attack and defense pretty much is the only thing you care about when you stack strength?
1 Like
Nice answer but the main point is; why do you allow player to stack immense amount of strength to begin with?
Let’s try again. What prevents them to add 20000% damage amplification Sets when this system is intact?
I like it simple. I don’t look much at those numbers anyway. I like to kill monsters, not do math.
4 Likes
The thing is that if you only care about stacking strength the solution is to make other stats more attractive so that “stack primary stat above all else” isn’t the be all end all solution to gearing.
It’s not to remove everything and boil it down to attack and defense.
They don’t need to make it exactly like Diablo 2, but that game IS a good example of not needing to focus on stacking just 1 primary stat until the end of time.
2 Likes
Nothing prevent them from doing it, but the simplified scalling of dmg could nullify the need for it. The reason why they did it in D3 was because they messed up with the all the difficulty levels, monsters with 900 billion life and up. They were just constantly increasing the life of the monsters and their only way to remedy it was Atk%.
I’ll tell you what. If itemization is shallow. You can bet your sweet butts that trading will be extremely restrictive or meaningless to the point they may remove it entirely just like they did with RoS. We went through shallow itemizaion and trading with D3. It does not work. They have to do something deep, complex and as far away from D3 itemization as possible for it to be amazing.
Bottom line is, itemization in D4 will make or break the game. Just as it did with D3.
3 Likes
Well in D2 you pretty much stacked enough strength for your gear, some dexterity for hit chance and the rest was vitality… all you needed was the exact set of gear you had to farm and +1 skill items/charms. Stats were almost irrelevant.
3 Likes
What if it doesn’t. I still don’t see how separated benefits are superior to the stat system. Main problem wasn’t the stat system in D3, it was allowing player to stack it indefinitely with no repercussions. Same might even apply here once you have enough defense, all will funnel to stacking damage% affixes.
They could’ve give defensive abilities to the monsters to evade that and create diverse builds at the expense of having player insight instead of developers’ hand holding. They wanted to control it, no other reason to add immense damage numbers and quadrillion health damage sponges. Same apply here, they wanted more control on the environment but there’s no promise of “no power creep” from the seams.
Attack/defense reduces multipliers and percentages. That’s a good thing.
Mechanics are fun, numbers are math. Give me one attack number, one multiplier (the skill’s % of attack), and let all other modifications be mechanical in nature.
Take the staff in the demo that gave the sorcerer 3 fireballs instead of one. The only math was a nerf to the fireball skill % modifier (to account for the three fireballs). You have to decide which mechanic better suits you.
Once developers have to account for a variety of multiplicative modifiers it becomes more difficult for them to quickly iterate and add new content.
1 Like
Stats were far from irrelevant, it’s just that the 4 main attributes weren’t super powered stats that stood above all else.
One could argue that maybe strength, dexterity, and energy were a bit underpowered as stats but I did also say it didn’t need to be exactly like Diablo 2. There’s room to buff them without turning it back into Diablo 3’s “stack it until the end of time because it’s miles ahead of anything else”.
There was also a lot more stats on the gear that could be useful. I had an assassin that sought after poison charms, for example.
If you only ever went for items with +1 skills, you really weren’t exploring very many builds.
5 Likes
Str and Dex were needed for half-combat classes to have some sort of back up tool against immune monsters. Nrg was generally preferred by underdog PvP specs to have slight bit of edge to sustain their casts and still stack more defense-offense charms.
Problem is everyone played caster because it fit the highest power level of all class builds.
In D2, stats still mattered but there were additions to the game that made different stats more viable than other the later it went.
Back in the days of hex charms and ith weapons, the hex charms were so powerful as they added your main damage stat as well as vitality. Once those were gone, the addition to more powerful rune words appeared.
In the age of Grief for instance, the damage from that weapon did not need more strength to shine thus, vitality and ar were the ideal stats wanted.
Sorceress could benefit significantly from more mana as it essentially took on the roll of vitality for them via es.
my guess is they’ll do what makes the most sense… every class has specific needs and therefore their main stats will automatically reflect those needs. Doesn’t really make sense to build a sorceress without making sure you have enough mana.
For the most part the stats in D2 only made it possible to screw up your character, because you didnt put enough points in strength to ever equip that item you just found. At the end of the day every build had specific breakpoints to reach and those were determined by your gear. If you needed 75% crushing blow then you had to find the gear for it.
1 Like
In most RPGs you fill out stats at character creation and then slowly as you level, not by putting on a bunch of gear. They are meant to define your archetype for example ranger, warrior, mage and impose limitations based on those archetypes. So you don’t end up with a wizard using an axe three times their size, or a barbarian learning Hydra spell, for example.
As to damage/mitigation multipliers, they are generally lazy design and are way over used in both D3 and PoE imo.
1 Like