D1: Find book, use book, use skill, get more books, skill stronger.
D2: Get skill, use skill, other skill benefits first skill, equipment makes skill stronger.
D3: Get skill, use skill, equipment makes skill do neat new things like stay active all the time or triple number of minions.
D4: Get skill, read skill:
“Skill does 3.2% extra damage if enemy is in a bad mood or if one of its coworkers said “morning” instead of “good morning”, Skill will cast an additional 0.1-1.7 times if enemy was tickled recently. Skill has a 45.2 second cooldown which may be reduced by 6.5% if you read the itunes user agreement in its entirety (Knowledge check test required). Skill has 1/2 of an 11.3% chance to deal 48.25% extra damage if your PC’s microphone has heard your smoke detector battery beep recently. If you change the smoke detector battery, this bonus is doubled. This skill can be redeemed at hot topic for 15% off non-clearance or sale merchandise.”
The fact that they all share the same dmg bucket is a big problem here. Theres no room to try and spread multipliers across your gear. Maybe sacrifice crit dmg or vuln to get an additional affix to bump your close dmg… etc
It’s required for the scaling factor… They would have to completely change the formula of how you interact with mobs…
Not saying it’s a perfect formula…
Just that it’s how many ARPG’s work now the modern formula. Diablo 1 and to a greater degree Diablo 2 had a totally unique method for interacting with mobs. David Brevik was just talking about that the other day in a interview…
D3 used a more similar technique but it’s more of a AoE approach. But I totally agree that itemization needs a overhaul and gear needs to change.
That is pretty spot on LOL. I don’t understand whose bright IDEA was to introduce an encyclopedia of all these damage types, it needs to be addressed. They gave us skill tree somewhat back into Diablo 4, skill points matter in the skill as it does boost the damage slightly.
But OP is correct its like you need the perfect blue moon out in the sky while playing to get a 4.5% damage increased to enemies affected by emote of a nearby player saying hello if no damage has been dealt in the 3 seconds of an enemy being effected by a nearby player using the hello emote, the enemies around become vulnerable, but take 50% less damage if no blue moon present on Taco Tuesday.
Heck yea! I change my smoke detector batteries every single time.
I’m afraid of getting shocked by it though!
Speaking of spells, how about Sorcerer?
Diablo 1 had variety and excitement in spellcasting. You could do things like tactically open doors from a distance, randomly teleport if you were in serious danger and summon help,
Diablo 2, neat builds, lots of excitement from hype feeling skills like frozen orb, super fast glass cannons popping around making fun.
Diablo 3 might have mixed reception but there were all kinds of neat modifiers for your spells and cool things like the time bubble! Wizard had a lot of mechanical variety.
Diablo 4 Sorcerer has like… It’s almost all just attacks except most of them are kind of viscerally inferior copies of old skills and they all lose to like 2 specific ice skills anyways. Where did the creativity go?
I’ve felt for awhile that D4 itemization was basically the worst, laziest parts of the D2 system, mixed with the worst, laziest parts of the D3 system, then expecting the outcome to be not bad or lazy.
I feel like the d4 sorcerer is such a downgrade from the d3 wizard. There’s no way to change your skills elements in this game, once you pick one you are bound into 2-3 skills at best with every build taking up 4 defensives to even have a chance of being playable… So far, d4 only got me excited about the next new season of d3 honestly.
In relation, I was reading an article today about Malignant gems:
“… Both of these powers seem strangely situational … Focused Rage gives a bonus … where it increases the Critical Strike Chance of the next non-Basic Skill by 34% if the character spends at least 68 Fury within two seconds.”
I decided to dump a ton of crackling energy affixes into my build for a laugh, they buffed it so it must do something, right? I still have absolutely zero idea what the baseline damage was, never mind what the new damage is. As far as I can tell they never bothered giving us that info.
I sucked before with other stuff, and I still suck. Conclusion… it all seems much of a muchness tbh!
Let’s not forget the utterly ridiculous and stupid lucky hit system: 45.7% chance to score a lucky hit, which gets you a 2% chance at restoring 2 mana if you have not been hit within the last 3 seconds, after having been standing still for 4.325 seconds.
