I get the direction ya’ll want to go in, less blasting, more time to level and gear up and that’s cool. I might be annoyed but if that’s the direction the ship is sailing I suggest 1 last major rework for the game.
What you should focus the rework around imo is damage.
Multiplicative damage is a curse for balance because it means the best of the best builds will focus on stacking as many sources of this as possible. And this means you have to in turn knock down those min-maxing builds to a realistic level - often times at the expense of funsies builds too.
It’s also forcing you into things like the cap on the Wither node and the upcoming cap on ultimate damage. Both of which are highly unintuitive and kind of big nono’s imo from a user accessibility/documentation angle. Ideally, if an items or node or whatever says it does something, it should do that something without exception. Exceptions mean there’s a problem that’s not being addressed within this context.
So please, do one more pass over Diablo 4. Ditch multiplicative outside of crits and vulnerable completely and balance everything around that baseline.
We’ll all be better off for it. Especially you since you’re no longer going to have to kill funsies builds to stop min-maxers from doing silly things lol.
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Agree agree agree!!! Player damage has got to be reduced.
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Won’t be just as easy as removing our damage. Because you know they’ll decrease enemy HP to compensate. Balance is more than just damage numbers.
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I don’t understand the concept that changing from multiplicative damage to additive will fix anything if the math is done wrong still. Could just make the multiplied damage balanced along with the game… Do y’all think it’s easier for a cpu to calculate addition problems over multiplication ones or something?
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Only additive damage will be slightly easier to balance. But only slightly. Calculations have to be done either way and it’s not like the devs are doing these by hand with pen and paper.
They’ve capped just about everything, which is boring. If they remove multipliers it’ll kill a lot more of the theory crafting fun.
This game is already too simple and limiting!
Additive damage is terrible. In high numbers it is negligible. If you have 2000 critical and increase it to 2100, it is a 5% increase. The numbers need to decrease a lot, both additive and multiplicative.
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This will mean that you’d only want to stack crit and vulnerable, period. Literally nothing else would do any sort of dmg.
For your suggestion to have a functional outcome, you’d have to remove multiplicative dmg in its entirety. No exceptions.
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Someone could… obviously not this team.
Obviously it will still be broken if the math continues to be done wrong. The premise is that addition is easier than multiplication… that’s why schools teach us addition first and work up to multiplication. The team clearly can’t manage multipliers… so what else is there but to remove the “complicated” math and hope against hope that they can manage the most basic math function?
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Exactly, just add different additive buckets and actual effects instead of multiplicative buffs.
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Totally agree with you!! Im sick of having no choice to force stacking multipliers, they should get rid of that. Diablo 4 is all about stacking multipliers and many glyphs are useless because of this, using glyphs that boosts magic and rare nodes by 300% is always better, because of all the multipliers on the paragonboards and this makes some glyphs completly useless, like Warrior, Mage and Golem glyphs for Necromancers…
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Yes. That should be the number 1 rule. I was preaching this since day 1. Just throwing %modifiers in a bucket is a quick way to kill build diversity and balance.
Honestly you start with a char that does 5-6 dmg and you end up 2 days later with 439875693487569347856934 Dmg.
That is not a reasonable progrssion path. Jeez that is utter nonsense.
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I see the posts with concern around multiplicative damage.
Elsewhere I’ve commented on approaches for Blizz to be in control of build balance.
My feeling is the objectives are the same, just a debate around paths to get there. The objective being to be in control of build balance.
Im not sure multiplicative damage is the root cause, but equally I dont have the basis to say that it’s not at this point.
Either way, I do think it’s pretty clear Blizz needs to get in control of player v env in a more predictable fashion
Theoretically Blizz is in the best position to assess the pathway to that, since they’ve got all the source and the data.
Ps, please rework stash code.
It is one of the pillars of the problems. The other pillar is bloating %boost through to much stuff.
Main stat could work differetly. With certain thrshholds to achieve stuff. Like a Barb 2with 200 strengh can wield 2 handed swords in 1 hand. Stuff like that. Instead we get theveral thousand mainstat and each one offers a %dmg buff. that is v ery unecessary and just bloating the game. Same goes for paragon, just bloating unecessary numbers.
Well yeah I’ve seen some theories around it. Ultimately I think it comes down to concerns of is Blizz able to be on control of outcomes when they tweak capabilities.
What both theories seem to have in common is the answer is no.
Stepping back from the means, what matters is the end. Over to you Blizz.
For me, I just don’t understand how hard it is to ensure all builds end up in relatively the same spot. The fact that one build does trillions of damage and one does millions, drives me nuts. All builds should have access to the same number of multiplicative sources.
And if the Devs want the FOTM feel, maybe those builds just have an easier path to all those sources and that’s what makes them more attractive for the season. But, if you want to rock an off-meta build, you can and can still achieve the same result with maybe a harder path to get there.
People told them this before D4 alpha.
It was one of the biggest complaints about D3.
They did not care.
Additive makes the system easier to navigate for devs. They can simple remove all multipiers from the game and base the new game on these lower numbers making all balance way easier and opening up new design space for aspects and items to just change the gameplay up in interesting ways. They can do this because player damage can be based more on ranks in skills, paragon, additive damage, and other ways. So now all those aspects you needed to become relevant stacking numbers can now be other things. All skills start to become relevant because they dont need 5 aspects and 4 uniques to be good. See how this works!? Its all numbers. We can make it work without multipliers.
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