i honestly think it would be amazing if they buffed ALL of the unused skills. Like half the skills in D2 aren’t used because of either their mechanic or super weak damage. However, based on their stance towards changes, we definitely won’t see any skill balancing pre-launch. Post-launch is another story though, hopefully they get a tidal wave of people wanting those skills buffed after people start using them.
Yeah man, thats it. Tired of all this old Convos… im not a forum dweller, i came here to make sure MY favorite game of ALL TIME doesnt get ruined my simple minded people who dont take ANYTHING into consideration. Ive made my points and drew my line in the sand, and im good with that. i support those in favor of no changes and it would be impossible to convince me that THIS blizzard is capable of “balancing” D2… LOL i hope you all see the irony in that… sheesh… have a wonderful day and many many more my friends!
On my nightly rant on what defines an unused skill: many ‘unused’ skills are misunderstood, are perfectly good skills but ignored, or truly bad skills. Lets look at a few necy skills tonight
I’m skipping summons because those are summed up with - golems are weak and people don’t think mages do enough damage.
Curses
Dim Vison - I’ve seen this on the list of bad/unused skills…this is just because people don’t understand how amazing it is. It shuts down ranged attackers. Two of the most deadly groups of monsters are ranged in HC and for some reason people don’t think Dim (or slow missiles or cloak of shadows) are ‘good’ skills. I’ve watched Uber groups where players are constantly dying to ranged monsters while the necy sits back and only casts amp…Cast Dim and watch everyone live…
Weaken - It lowers the physical damage done by those effected. This is an interesting one as it has virtually no use in PvE and none to my knowledge in PvP. It is overshadowed by decrep for controlling strong monsters, but it is a curse commonly case on us. In this side it is a great skill as it offers a ‘safe’ curse that can be used on us by the AI, it effectively slows melee players down. All in all I do think some of these ‘skills’ should exist for the AI to use. Look what happened when they gave the AI IM…
Terror - honestly not useful as there are better options for crowd control. Causing a group of monsters to run away and thus not be a threat for a while is great in theory, but it’s overshadowed by attract or confuse. Useful as a trigger on attack thing…
Confuse - Great crowd control but not used as most groups steamroll things. It would have some very good use in Uber runs if people ever used it. It’s useful when you are facing a lot of strong enemies. This doesn’t happen a lot.
Life tap - in theory a great skill a necy can cast it real quick to fill his skelly’s life back up. In practice it’s just a good ‘trigger on attack’ skill for other classes.
Attract - godly if used with IM. Unfortunately not many necy’s think about this. it’s one of the best ways to get through the arcane sanctuary or the maggot layer. I enjoyed using this on the cow level, you don’t need to summon at all just attract, IM and CE, pure fun. In fact I have seen other players run only cursing necy’s and attract/IM is a main killer.
That satisfied me for the night…
Bone wall/Prison - I just saw some video of Duriel completely bone prisoned and hacking away at the prison. Just think if the necy had IM’ed Duriel instead of whatever he was doing. Bone wall/prison and IM is another amazing way to isolate melee monsters and IM them so they kill themselves.
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you can balance any thing you want right now by hero editing.
hopefully as I said before you cannot hack the game this way in d2r
Im here to make sure simply minded people dont turn the game in to a dead game in first 6 months and be taken over by bots and rmt and hackers when every one quits once they made a few characters, honestly you #nochanges crew will destroy the online portion of this game.
the game was patched all the way up to devs stop working on it, 9 years of patches, i dont see why they stop now tbh
If you dont like change just download a mod to remove the changes, right?
I’ve used solar creep all the way to hell and yes its useless eventually base mana regen is just way faster then the amount you gain. But I haven’t a clue what they could do with it, other then just making it a % mana and health restore like rejuv potions or something.
Spirit barbs is even more awkward of a change either you rename it and give a new aura or you make it a full a golem like pet.
Immolation Arrow , Freezing Arrow, Fend, Mind Blast, Venom, Shadow Warrior(needs resistances), Fist of the Heavens,Blade Fury( all blade trap skills need a bit more), Hydra, Armageddon,Volcano, Maul, Fire Claws, Double Throw, Dragon Claw, Poison Dagger/ Poison Nova, Skeletal Mage. These are most of the skills I’d like to see some buffs to.
They could make new skill instead. I will be home in like two hours so i will create topic with some skill suggestions just for fun 
and we can discuss it there.
Btw fist of heavens is used for pvp. It should stay.
Yes but giving it say a bit of physical damage or making holy bolts hit for nerfed damage demons too wouldn’t Overpower it in PVP.
I made a suggestion of removing some skills cooldowns on a different thread like they use to be in previous patches
ill post some of the key comments instead of repeating it:
you mentioned hydra, if you remove hydra CD like it used to be, it might be somewhat viable without too much tinkering
It’s also one of the best support chars early season, and a terrific solo MFer.
I don’t know why everyone wants to change skills, just learn the basics of the game first.
There is nothing wrong with changing skills as a lot of them is useless or have terrible design so there is not even reason to level up to have different build.
Some doesnt even work properly so they are unused.
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The problem is it seems many players cannot differentiate good skills vs useless ones.
I will agree some are less desired than others, but FOH? BERSERK? so many skills used all the time and people want them changed.
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I know I had a cleric paladin , heals every were. It was mostly only good versus undead tbh. I just want minor changes to FOH. Like allowing holy bolts from FOH to hit demons for minor damage, blessed hammer would still be better in AOE.
I don’t think the changes to skills like that are worth the cost in nostalgic value of a remaster, but to each their own. I do increasingly hope there are two realms so people who prefer more changes than less can have them.
Well yeah i do agree with this, deep knowledge of game is required for skill changes.
Since necy is my area of discussion today…
PNova is a great skill PNova necy’s do great, there is a pit farming Nova necy you can check out on youtube if your curious.
PDagger on the other hand is ‘weaker’. PNova/PExplosion get 1K damage per second while Pdagger is at 500 damage per second (they probably assumed the physical damage/other mods in it.) If dagger were to change I’d up the damage per second and lower duration.
Mages - could use a slight damage boost but you can’t go too far…A big reason people don’t consider the mages is because they always amp, which helps the base skellys leaving the mages to ‘not do much’. Most are not LR’ing.
Lower resists works great for all the skills listed above. If you boost the damage on all the listed skills too much they get OP when you start LR’ing with poison/mages.
Poison necro is the #1 rune pitfarmer and the #2 pit MFer.
Has anyone even used the skills in this game?
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Oh I know, poison nova certainly isn’t the most terrible skill on the list, I just want some more gear related to poison damage to help it.
I agree with Pdagger change lower the duration for sure.
I was just talking minor buffs for mages.
Lower resists does certainly help, and should be taken into account for any change.
maybe just fixing poison in general would be better mind you, take assassin for example, you can’t wear any poison charm on her while using venom because they way the calculation works makes it useless to use
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Venom for sure needs this though the way poison stacks has always been odd, I just want a few more lower level rune-words or unique items to help running say poison dagger+ poison nova earlier levels.
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