Yeah, the synergies were a huge game design failure. One of the things I liked most about Diablo 2 was the size of the toolkit you could get. Even a fairly simple class like the Barbarian had situationally potent crowd control and mobility abilities like Taunt, Leap (and its pushback) and Grim Ward and some niche attacks useful as a backup regardless of your specialization. But once the synergies arrived, and the enemy buff with them, just maxing out an attack ability wasn’t enough, now you had to also max out two or three other attack abilities that you were unlikely to ever use, just to keep the intended one competitive. That gobbled up so many of your ability points that you could no longer afford to invest enough into the toolkit powers to make them effective.
I realize an awful lot of people play Diablo as if it were a one-button game, but locking everybody into that is a really bad idea. D3’s pruning of ability lists, outright capping you to just 6 at once, really turns me off. Some of the skill modifiers are clearly aimed at recapturing the same kind of situational utility, but you’ll barely be able to use them because, again, you have to spend almost your entire budget on the staples.
Yes and no. Some abilities were really useful (in the right situation) with even just a 1-point investment, and others, the useful ability was itself a synergy. Using your barbarian example, for instance, Taunt was a one-point wonder, and if you maxed out Battle Orders, you could just use Concentration as your primary attack to benefit from it as a synergy. And there were some perfectly viable builds that left room even with the synergies: An enchantress, for instance, could max out Enchant, Warmth, and Fire Mastery (thus making utility the primary build), and still have points left over to also seriously pump something like Frozen Orb for the fire-immunes, and hit the one-point wonders like Static Field, Teleport, Energy Shield, and Frozen Armor.
I get most of your criticisms, but I raise an eyebrow at “ability to play the same class dozens of different ways”.
I’m sure there were a dozen “possible” ways to play each class, but to be “effective” - well, anything went in normal. It narrowed down to 3-4 possible builds for each class in “nightmare”. And it narrowed again to 2-3 for “hell”
Maybe this is just me from coming from a “hardcore” only background, but no. There weren’t dozens of builds. There was only one or two viable ones for each class, and maybe a handful of fun but challenging builds. Let’s not pretend Diablo II was some miracle of endless and open experimentation.
Well, there might actually have been a dozen different viable paladin builds. Off the top of my head, Hammer/Conc, Vengeance/Conviction, Smite/Fanat, Zeal/Holy Frost, and Zeal/Holy Shock were all viable and common in all difficulties, and then there were various mix-and-match combinations like my Zeal/Conviction paladin (not very broadly useful, but filled one specific niche very well), and oddballs like paladins built around Conversion or Holy Bolt. Oh, and Fist of the Heavens might not have been too great for questing, but was somewhat popular for PvP. Granted, paladin was the most varied class, but for, say, sorceresses, there were at least five different main skills, of which most folks chose two.
Maybe they’ll make it so cutscenes only play on your first playthrough. Otherwise that’s going to get annoying really fast to constantly have to skip them.
Skill synergies were a good thing, because up until they added them in order to optimize your character you’d have to save nearly all your points for the lvl 30 skills. You were stuck using spells with a single point in them to play through the game, and while it’s possible to beat normal difficulty like that it was still pretty tedious and not very fun. And if you did pump a lot of points into low lvl spells like Teeth or Charged Bolt, your character will really struggle past normal. I know, I tried wacky builds like that before the skill revamp (No joke-I tried every conceivable character build back when I was a huge D2 fanatic) and trying to kill anything in nightmare difficulty took way too long.
Oh for heavens sake. I have no hope of ever getting my life back. I am just looking towards the end of Skyrim, thinking of a bit of a breathing space between now and Guild Wars 2, and what happens?
I meant under used by Blizzard, not by the players. Synergies were a great opportunity to coax players to put points in what Chronos calls the one-point wonders. But they were grossly underused for that. For example there has never ever been a good reason to place more than one point in any curse. Making some or most curses synergize with some PnB or Summons would have been a good idea. Instead they mostly put synergies into skills you would be somewhat likely to buy together anyway, with a few good exceptions. Similarly they could have been used to really power up some of the skills that were under used to the point of most people probably forgetting they exist such as the poison javelin skills or the assassin’s blade skills.
I also really liked the few synergies where one skill powered up the ability in one way and another one in a different way. I really wish they had played with that idea more. I think there were only a few skills that used it.
I didn’t need my characters to be effective through hell I needed them to be effective until I got bored of them. Half the builds I made I did for the pointed reason of seeing how far I could take a build. It doesn’t matter that my Summoner Druid will never make it through Act5 hell so long as I have fun playing it through normal and nightmare. Some builds are terrible in hell but hilariously fun at lower levels. An Inferno Sorc for example can get a +9 Inferno Leaf staff at level 19. Having plus 9 or more to your primary skill before you’ve hit level 20 is fun even if you know the character will never be useful past nightmare.
It’s all the more fun when you occasionally stumble onto a build that can in fact work all through hell. Like an assassin with maxed Blade Shield and Dragon Claw. Put dual 'tucs on your main and an Obedience on your swap cast blade shield and kill a few weaklings 'till the Obedience procs Enchant for the attack rating as Blade Shield uses your AR to see if it hits. Swap back to the 'tucs and use nothing but Dragon Claw. It’s a build that is effective all through hell, if not competitive with the standard uber builds, and better yet I’ve never seen anyone else use it. I love using unique, or nearly so, builds it’s just much more fun even if it’s not a god of death like a hammerdin.
Drop a Dream hat, and possibly shield if you want to go for overkill, on that and max Holy Shock’s synergies and it becomes one of the most powerful builds I’ve ever played. In fact probably the only build I’ve come up with that is competitive with most of the standard uber builds. Reasonably cheap too since Dream only needs one HR and the best weapon is either Crescent Moon, so cheap it’s basically free, or the Phase Blade Azurewrath which is a touch pricey but ultimately affordable.
Hopefully they’ll do something the current system is terrible. It works like this:
Player A tries to go through a door that will trigger a cutscene he will then see a window pop up that says something like “Waiting for players…”. All other players in the game will see a window pop up that tells them said player is trying to go through and gives them a choice to join Player A, teleporting them to the cutscene’s location, or they can just close the window and ignore it. Once all players have made their choice, or a one minute countdown timer has expired the players that accepted the cutscene invite all start watching it and the player that clicked on the cutscene door first gets the option to skip by hitting esc and having to confirm on a dialogue box.
Ooh, that never occurred to me, since it’s pretty much at the opposite end from what I used that build for. For me, it was a budget boss-killer: The first time I made it, I soloed Über Diablo at level 50, using no elites and nothing but what dropped while I was leveling the character up (so, zero high runes). On the flip side, the same character would die horribly if he tried to fight three Fallen at once.
And I once made a character whose endgame plan never even involved leaving Normal: She was an explorer sorceress. One of the things I liked to do was figure out the pattern behind the random maps. There were (and actually, are) still a few patterns I never completely figured out, and so I’d start a new game, teleport around like crazy to get the map, and then start over. Since the map generation worked the same way on all difficulties, I never needed to enter NM or Hell.
Oh, I remember that sorc, never seen anyone max teleport like that before. But, it was so useful, still useful, I’m to this point using the information you gave us from your explorations…
Speaking of which… I got tired of waiting for DIII, so, I’ve started playing D2 again. I have some characters on USEast Ladder, my account is *hirka. If you get tired of waiting, join me. When I play private I’m in sdmb////cecil, or you can send me a message /msg *hirka
Hope to see some of y’all there… otherwise… I’ll see you all once Diablo 3 hits the stores!
i… had farmed Mephisto so much with my Sorceress that i could make 5min(?) Hell runs teleporting straight to him, even though i wouldn’t be able to tell you how. i just knew from all the experience. maybe i should cancel my pre-order..
I could tell you how-- Duance 2 was one of the areas I did figure out the pattern for (most underground areas, actually). The patterns I know of but don’t know what they are are A2 Sewers 1, Outer Steppes, and the A2 above-ground areas, and I don’t know if there are any exploitable patterns to Catacombs 3, WSK 3, or other above-ground areas.
When I tried out the beta when it first came out, I too was disappointed by the new skill system. Everything I read made it sound like the skill runes were going to be the saving grace of customization. If they’re really not all that, then I too am worried.
Oh, hey, a question I’ve been wondering about: Are mules still needed? Hirka and I were talking the other day, and agreed that a bottomless stash, shared between all characters on the same account, would be a good feature, but we have no idea whether something like that has actually been implemented.
It’s not bottomless but it is huge, and shared between your characters. It starts off fairly small but you can buy the first few upgrades really cheap(although the price was changing semi-frequently throughout the beta so who knows where they’ll settle it by release) which makes it larger than I’d think anyone but a major packrat would need and can still be upgraded further after that. I’m not sure what the limit is. And the inventory itself is much, much, larger while the items take up fewer blocks of space. I very rarely needed to head back to town to sell my vendor trash before having to head back for a quest anyway.
I remember that we had some mules that we all had access to (as if it was our guild bank), usually to store green armor sets for future or new characters. I don’t remember whose account that was, or if it’s even possible to do in D3. But we had mules for everything possible…weapons, armor, gems, runes, etc. Is that still possible?
Not really directly. You can only have one account per purchase and, I think, ten characters per account. So if you wanted a guild mule account someone would have to buy an extra copy just for that I think.
I have no idea if there will be any sort of built in guild bank. It wouldn’t surprise me if though.
Other than fun, what are the advantages of playing co-op?
Apparently magic find gets averaged across the group. So if you have a high magic find, you are ripping yourself off playing with others.
How does experience work in groups?
What about mismatches between levels? If I have a level 10 and you have a level 25, are the monsters that come at us up to your level or down to mine? Or is it area based?
I don’t think there are any direct benefits to co-op.
As far as I could tell experience is simply shared across group. I never played with a wide enough level range to see if it is weighted by level but the way the match making system works it would likely be rare to play with people widely outside of your level range other than in private games.
There are item enchantments that do “Monster kills grant +X experience” that is not shared and is only granted if the person with that item does the killing blow.
The monsters don’t scale to your level, they’re area based.
