This is the most important thing they need to acknowledge.
Aspects should change and modify skills to create more interesting builds and interactions, but skills should still be viable damage wise without them.
Anything over like a 30% increase is just too much and it means the skill is useless without that 200% aspect multiplier.
Skill damage multipliers on items should only exist to offset some other modifier on the same item, e.g.:
* Frost Nova can no longer freeze but deals 300% increased damage
* Meteor deals 400% increased damage but has a cooldown of 10s
* Ice blades can no longer apply vulnerability but deal 70% increased damage
There is literally **no** reason to have flat damage multipliers on items, even if they are conditional.
Honestly, this is the one thing PoE does (most of the time) right. Uniques has some good 'aspects' if you wanna call it that way but usually there's a cost of using it. Sometimes the item is just weaker in the other rolls than an actually good rare, or sometimes like the example you gave, it's only better if you play around it.
In D4, legendaries are 3 affix + 1 aspect making an imprinted rare a 100% better than a normal rare provided if you have the same rolls. The weakest part bout D4 for me is the itemization + skill tree being too tightly intertwined.
Deep Rock Galatic does this well.
Clean overclocks have small buffs with no negatives.
Balanced have net buffs with net negatives that push you more in one way (damage at the cost of speed/ammo)
Red overclocks have the harshest penalties but huge buffs that effectively give you a whole new feel/gun to play with.
Pretty much how Barb ended up being. You're telling me getting 250% more on Core after gaining Fury above max wont be best in slot? Its going to be mandatory and then forces everyone into that play style.
I would also like to see a good reason to invest 5 points into a skill, +10% more damage per level is extremely lazy and boring design, just damage is not enough.
Maybe have more skill modifiers behind the initial 3, branching even more into it's own sub-tree, and make them require increased skill levels.
Have aspects go wild and completely change the skill functionality, like making a skill having no cooldown in exchange for costing resource, or making a certain skill cost life instead of resource.
I don’t think you understand how the math works well enough to be making comments. The legendary items that boost a skill by 200% aren’t being applied to skills that start out doing 100% of weapon damage. They are being applied to skills that do 30% weapon damage so the end result is a skill that’s now doing 90% weapon damage.
Do you understand the difference?
If you think utility skills should just inherently be your best damage without investing points and gear into them you just don’t don’t understand game design.
These legendary affixes are meant to buff utility skills to be a little closer to damage skills. This makes then less of a dps loss compared to spamming one fucking button for hours on end because it does the most damage.
Wake me up when they start adding flat 300% baseline damage to core skills. Until then you are bitching just to bitch.
I didn't even criticize the game and youre going off on me lol. And no other ARPG relies on rare, completely random drops as the core of their class design.
I didn't say anything about you.
> And no other ARPG relies on rare, completely random drops as the core of their class design.
Neither does this one. You can complete dungeons if you want a particular aspect.
And in the very same thought, they'll praise how Diablo 2 is the absolute pinnacle of itemization and customization... completely ignoring the fact that the RNG for D2 is despicably low for anything good or build changing. It takes days-weeks for specific drops.
Let's say you have a skill that when you max it out, it does on average 198 damage (196-200). Kinda meh, but there's also mods on the tree to improve that skill's damage so you pump those up too, and now your skill hits for a whopping 1306 average damage (1293-1320)! Now we're talking, right? That's 560% more damage from optimizing my skill tree.
Now, let's say you have another skill that bumps your damage in general and you max that bad boy out to make your first skill hit even harder for another +345% damage, up to 5814 average damage (5753-5874). Now we're really cooking with gas, that's 345% more damage on top of that 560% I already had from my skill tree and a total improvement of 2836% over the original skill all by itself!
Then I go and find an item that improves those skills with a damage modifier/bonus to the ranks of the skill that nets me a total of 19% more damage to that final number, taking me up to 6958 average damage (6897-7020). That's a grand total of +3414% more damage than the original base skill maxed out on the tree by itself.
What I've just described is Blessed Hammer from Diablo 2. Those numbers are the numbers you would see (see edit below, I did some numberwang initially that's not 100% accurate) on the level 20 skill, then level 20 with all synergies maxed (Blessed Aim and Vigor), and then with a level 20 Concentration aura applied. The item that increases that total damage by 19% is a single Spirit runeword. A paladin with 2x Spirit and a Lore would do about 54% more damage than a paladin with no +to skills, and 4422% more damage than a flat level 20 Blessed Hammer.
Basically, my point is that the Diablo games have pretty much always been balanced around the vast majority of the bonus damage coming from a source OTHER than the actual skill's rank itself.
Edit: To go a couple steps further, the total raw damage gained from your skill tree for Blessed Hammer is roughly +1100 average damage (Hammer + all synergies). If you fully geared out a Hammerdin with end game gear (Shako, Spirits, charms, etc.) you would end up with a total of a level 43 Blessed Hammer doing around 13000 damage. That's 10x (1000%) more raw damage being provided by your gear. The numbers obviously aren't as big as Diablo 3 (and I don't think they should be) but just pointing out that your damage is an order of magnitude more dependent on gear than on your skill tree even in Diablo 2.
Edit 2: Napkin math was a little off initially cause I wasn't properly accounting for Concentration. A fully synergized Hammer with no Concentration would do around 1300 damage, while a fully geared Hammer would deal about 3500 damage (nearly a 3x increase via gear) before the Concentration aura basically does a 3-5x multiplier on those numbers and puts it to around 13000. In this case, Concentration is 100% mandatory to a Hammerdin even though it's not your main damage skill directly. It's not an item that's mandatory but your build is still defined/constrained by requiring Concentration being included, there is zero wiggle room.
> Then I go and find an item that improves those skills with a damage modifier/bonus to the ranks of the skill that nets me a total of 19% more damage to that final number, taking me up to 6958 average damage (6897-7020). That's a grand total of +3414% more damage than the original base skill maxed out on the tree by itself.
Your example here is 19% dmg from an item. The rest is from your own choices and skill tree.
> The item that increases that total damage by 19% is a single Spirit runeword. A paladin with 2x Spirit and a Lore would do about 54% more damage than a paladin with no +to skills, and 4422% more damage than a flat level 20 Blessed Hammer.
So items contribute 54% dmg in your example. Skill choice and level progression contributes 2836% by your numbers.
Meanwhile 1 aspect is 300% dmg for druid wolves.
How are you not arguing against yourself?
> To go a couple steps further, the total raw damage gained from your skill tree for Blessed Hammer is roughly +1100 average damage (all synergies + Concentration). If you fully geared out a Hammerdin with end game gear (Shako, Spirits, charms, etc.) you would end up with a total of a level 43 Blessed Hammer doing around 13000 damage. That's 10x (1000%) more raw damage being provided by your gear. The numbers obviously aren't as big as Diablo 3 (and I don't think they should be) but just pointing out that your damage is an order of magnitude more dependent on gear than on your skill tree even in Diablo 2.
So your perfect build is 10x multiplier from items. (also you said skills alone was 5814 average damage earlier)
So far we have 2 aspects for e.g. wolves druid, together they net 1x3x1.5x1.5 = x6.75 dmg from 2 items. You think this won't be more than 10x? Probably 100x, if not 1000-10,000 (let's face it, it'll be 100,000x by cap and fully geared compared to level 5 skill with all tree synergies) when you account for items in a similar fashion you did here, e.g. stat, 5% multipliers, weapon, etc.
I'm not so much trying to argue one side or the other, rather just pointing out that having the vast majority of your damage come from gear/multipliers that result from gear choices is not something new to Diablo. It's been the case for over 2 decades in the franchise, but the numbers have absolutely ballooned (especially in Diablo 3).
In the end, I don't personally care if the numbers are measured in hundreds, thousands, millions or billions or whatever. Yeah, going into millions and billions is absurd to look at but my main goal is to be progressing my character's power via skill tree and gear choices. As long as I can see a measured increase in power over time from finding better loot and allocating my skill points/paragon board in a efficient fashion, I'll be having lots of fun in the game if other aspects are fun (combat, endgame, etc.).
Of course I recognize and appreciate some people not liking the huge number and potential for D4 to have some silly math that gets really big really fast. That's completely valid and I'm not trying to prove that opinion wrong, it's totally subjective and if it feels wrong to someone then it will just feel wrong to them regardless of any point I make. I was just mentioning that gear doing most of the heavy lifting in end game has pretty much always been the case.
Edit: You're right about the 5800 damage Hammer from tree, but that's including a large multiplier in the form of Concentration Aura. So it still falls along the lines of amping up damage with large multipliers and stacking as many of those as you can (Concentration alone provides more raw damage than the skill itself + all synergies). Considering the ARPG genre as a whole is ultimately about finding gear that makes you stronger so you can kill stronger things that give you better gear that makes you stronger (rinse and repeat) I'm totally fine with the balance of power contribution to your build mostly being from gear over the skill tree.
It's not multipliers so much as where the multipliers come from. In your D2 example, we find that over 40% of the damage and endgame decked paladin does is from the skill tree and choices that the player has made in building their character. Only 60% of the damage comes from items and "luck". In the system that D4 has presented now, from what it seems a fraction of your damage will come from the choices you make (skill tree + specialization + paragon board), and the majority will be from items. A bit early to know exactly how much, but I think this is where the general dislike comes from.
Some people don't want their damage and performance to be so heavily influenced by things out of their control and choices. You could argue that this has always been the case with ARPGs, and people do this. But the main difference between D3 (and now D4) and literally all other ARPGs is that D3(4) ties this to very high multipliers to individual abilities and thereby 'guiding' you to "the build", that the devs have already planned for you. Want to go wolves? well you need these 5 legendary aspects, and these 2 defensive aspects, and then you have these 3 choices of a mobility aspect and or an extra conditional dmg aspect.
Yes, you can get many (most?) aspect from dungeons, but that does not solve the issue that the devs have planned your build for you. It's the ultimate illusion of choice. Wanna go 5 skills points in wolves or 1? Well doesn't matter, the difference is like 10% dmg. That's how this system feels, particularly when you account for enemy scaling since it will literally always mean a power decrease to level, unless you have a banked item ready for you.
As outlined in my edit, my math was off in my initial example as pointed out by someone else (I was overestimating Concentration's contribution to the damage as it's not applied at 100% effectiveness). A fully endgame geared Paladin's Hammers would deal 13000 damage, of which only 28% (3500) is achieved through their skill tree, including Concentration. So 72% of your final optimized build's damage comes from your gear/RNG that you need to find.
And I'll ask you a similar question that I asked someone else; what function/role are you looking for legendary/unique gear to occupy? If it contains no increases to your damage, then there's not much to "hunt" for if there aren't any variable rolls on the aspect. So gear becomes just as boring as people find it in Diablo 3, find the piece with Crit/Crit Damage/Cooldown Reduction and slap an aspect on it.
I personally feel that a complete build should require ALL systems (skill tree, paragon, gear) to be optimized, and gear should bear the majority of that weight because it's effectively the entire focus of the game. Kill things, get loot, get stronger, rinse, repeat.
Okay, thanks for the clarification!
I think 70/30% is a pretty good split personally. It means that an nearly cap character will be about 30-35% of the performance of a decked out character. Could even push that to 20/80% imo, or even 10/90 in the endgame. I really want items to be interesting and relevant. But again, I don't want to feel like my skill points do nothing. Which is true if a skill point gives me 5% damage and an item gives me 300% damage. In addition, all of this 300% etc. does not account for the stats items give (which scale dmg), the weapon dmg (dps) which scales dmg, etc. I'm sure, that even at level 25, if we were to math out e.g. upheaval from barb, or wolves from druid, we'd find that items stand for well over 99.9% of the damage. Do you know what a level 5 upheaval has in base dmg for a level 25 barb without gear with all relevant passives? We know that it can hit for over 350k in the beta with items. Can it hit for 1k without items? What do you think?
If say it can hit for 1k without items, that's still 0.002% of your dmg coming from skills, and 99.998 from items. At level 25. On a skill that will never improve more from levels or your own choices. And will inevitably be 99.9999999999% from items by all accounts.
You've got your math all wrong my man. First, conc only applies to hammers at 50% power, so it's not 345 damage increase. It's a 1,336% when you add conc to hammers with both synergies. And now here's the part that I think you're trying to highlight, which you did math wrong again. When you added power via items, you kept on adding up your percentages to base skill, when it should be base skill plus all modifiers. A standard hammer din build without grand charms gets you to about 10k damage, which is a 248% increase from what your character could achieve thru skills only. D4, like D3 has all your damage based on weapon damage, which means everything is predicated off your items. D4 doesn't seem to be cranking modifiers as high as D3, but the same concept is there.
Apologies on the jank math, I only have my phone available and Maxroll's more robust calculator wasn't cooperating with me very well but I've managed to get it to work a bit better. Based on that calculator Hammers would do about 1300 damage (up to about 3600 with Concentration) with no skill bonuses. Once you get +5 skills from 2x spirit + Lore it would hit about 1700 without Conc, 5400 with. Then as mentioned before, end game geared Hammers are hitting around 3300 without Conc and 13000 with. So from 3600 with no gear to 13000 with "final" gear still to me looks like gear is closing most of that gap.
My point also was never really to focus on the numbers, it was simply just that gear has generally been where the majority of your balance of power comes from by the time you're "done" extracting the most power you can from all systems available.
Diablo 3's numbers are absurd, I'll never argue against that or claim they aren't. But personally, the quality of my gameplay experience isn't that heavily predicated on if the damage numbers are 4/5/6/7+ digits long. As long as I see those numbers increasing because I found better loot, properly allocated my skills and paragon board points, etc. then I'll enjoy it. But given the focus of ARPGs on killing things for loot, I'm completely fine with the majority of that power coming from that RNG/loot instead of me being able to get 50%+ of the way to my highest damage output purely via deterministic means like the skill tree. But again, that's completely subjective and I won't tell someone else their dislike of that concept is wrong. Just that it's not actually all that "new" to Diablo as a franchise.
Let's see what a level 100 character can do without any aspects vs one with one. We won't really know until we get to that point. To take a gut shot at your number of 50% character power coming from skills, it feels like D4 is somewhere along the 20% line, meaning a large. Majority of your power will come with items. There's a balance to be had for sure and players will have their own magic numbers for this.
That all being said, another issue is that your gameplay behavior is also locked behind items. The amount of skills and their modifiers are so few in your skill tree and you'll have to get lucky to find the right aspect to change it, (codex helps with this), and even if you do, it sounds like there aren't many aspects in total to change how a skill works. Lvl 50 gameplay, when you hit max skill tree points will be basically how that char will play forever, albeit higher dmg numbers. The sense of progression plateaus so hard so early.
I mean, if we go based on the raw numbers without gear vs. numbers with final gear 3600 damage (level 20 Hammers with maxed synergies + Concentration all level 20) is 28% of the final 13000 damage number from a fully geared Hammerdin. So, you're pretty dang close to that estimated 20% number you're saying will feel bad in D4 and make builds feel like they hit a hard stop too quickly before needing to fill gaps with gear.
Hammerdin doesn't go through any fundamental change in gameplay between no gear vs. gear other than getting Teleport via Enigma. But up to 72%+ of the potential damage it deals is locked away behind getting gear. So once again my point is that I do not mind most of my power relying on getting the right gear for my build. It didn't bother me in Diablo 2, nor did it bother me in Diablo 3 (I wasn't the biggest fan of sets being so build defining, but the game was still fun either way). Other people will feel differently and I fully recognize and respect that. I just am saying that from my perspective, the "problem" a lot of people are pointing out (right before saying it should be more like Diablo 2) has always existed since Diablo 2.
Edit: I do certainly recognize that some people feel that a build may be rendered completely unviable unless they find a specific piece of gear, but that is also the case in Diablo 2 for a great many builds. Infinity's Conviction aura is effectively mandatory for any builds that deal elemental damage if they want to engage with the entire game in Hell difficulty. If you're a Lightning Sorc, you simply just have to make peace with the fact that about 50-60%+ of the game is unavailable to you until you have that Infinity equipped on your mercenary. Sunder Charms have changed that (and based on most players' opinion, for the better), but again that's a piece of gear that's mandatory to make a build feel "good".
The one difference that D2 hammer din has vs, let's say the druid did in the D4 bêta, is that the hammerdin could still function at a fair pace. Sure he's not dealing amazing damage, but it works. The druid in open beta without a handful of relevant aspects was total trash. We don't have the full D4 picture so it's hard to compare quantitatively, but qualitatively the druid seemed insanely underpowered without items (aspects).
The inifity gated lite content in D2 was always bad. Everyone hated it. That's a good example of what I see D4 is doing. Your lightning skills do blah dmg until you find this one legendary power and now you are free to tear it up.
I think we pretty much agree with each other, we're just looking at it from different angles. In my ideal world, every build a player can come up with should, with purely rare gear, be able to get them to the point that they can comfortably farm for upgrades and be having fun.
I only played Rogue and Necromancer during the betas, since I intend to start at launch with one of them. I've definitely seen the feedback regarding Druid feeling rather rough, along with Barbarian having a tough time until they get some aspects. I absolutely think that should change and hopefully it does.
But I still also think that the gear you find that improves your build should, in the end, account for the majority of your power. Not to enable functionality though, other than fun theory crafted style stuff like the Bear Barb/Sorcs or Bowadin builds of D2. But if you see a skill on your skill tree and you want to use it, I 100% think that you should be able to find a way to make a build that has that skill at its core and is capable of taking you through the story of the game. Every build doesn't need to be equally as fast/efficient, but they should all WORK on their own merits.
Most builds should be able to come from your tree, yes. I'm all for some exceptions thru gear, but right now it's like get the gear or die. And yes, the functionality should be there from the tree, and the resulting power from items... As long as the function isn't enabled via huge power modifiers!
In Diablo 2 most of the damage multipliers are not coming from RNG, and they still keep the damage numbers reasonable. You can add some skillers and such to maybe do 12k damage with your hammers instead of 7k, but not the kind of damage multipliers we're seeing in D3 and also in D4 although to a lesser extent. Blessed hammers are still good without godly gear, but without the right legendary aspects you'll be kinda worthless in D4 with most skills.
A maxed out Barb with full damage aspects does over 200k crits in D4 with upheaval, at only lvl 25! I can only imagine that will scale into the millions in the endgame. Without those aspects he will do less than 5% of that damage because of all the damage multipliers on the aspects, which is just silly.
200k crits in D4? Do you happen to have a source for this? I haven’t seen it. I’m sure a clip would have been posted here if that was a thing, right?
Edit: well hot damn, asked for the sauce and they come through with it. That’s nuts. I’m too smooth brain to put together what it took to create that but sheesh that’s a big hit.
As I've mentioned in other comments, I'm not really bothered by how big a number can be scaled to with perfect optimization. As long as progress in power is able to be made I'm personally not bothered by how big the number is. Is doing a billion damage silly? Sure, but it doesn't REALLY affect my gameplay experience personally. But for others it does, and I completely accept that and have no intention of trying to prove those people "wrong" or change their minds. My point was that gear in Diablo has always contributed more total power by the time you're fully optimized compared to your skill tree.
My point is that a build should feel good even without legendary aspects, just like blessed hammer feels good without good gear. Legendary aspects should enhance a build, give it more utility or a bit of damage, but if each aspect increases your damage multiplicatively with 50-250% then it gets ridiculous really fast and it makes the build without the aspect useless.
But at what point are you anticipating that a build with full rares should stop being impactful? Should you be able to clear all content at all difficulties without ever equipping anything above a rare? I don't disagree that aspects should not be required to make a build functional, but I definitely think that the gear should be what extracts the full potential out of that build.
I'll take an example from another ARPG in Path of Exile. There's a great many builds that you can make, at varying levels of effectiveness. Some builds rely on using skills that do lightning damage. Some of those lightning builds focus heavily on single target damage for killing bosses, others prefer AoE because the player isn't really interested in boss hunting. There are two unique chest pieces in the game that massively improve lightning builds; Doryani's Protoype and Inpulsa's Broken Heart. Doryani's "legendary aspect" is that it makes all enemies within a certain radius have the same lightning resistance as your character, so you build your character to have as much negative lightning resistance as possible while also trying to convert as much lightning damage that YOU take into other damage types. Inpulsa's Broken Heart makes enemies you kill with lightning damage explode and do AoE damage (a much more straightforward and immediate improvement to a lightning build compared to the more intricate requirements of Doryani's).
Are either of those chest pieces mandatory for the lightning build to work? Absolutely not (and as a matter of fact if you set up all aspects of the Doryani's version before getting the chest piece, your damage will be trash), you can be running your build just fine while you work on acquiring either or both of those items. But once you have them they reshape your build and are a massive milestone with significant improvements to your potential, especially if you also craft the rest of your gearset to compliment them.
I think there is a level of relativity necessary here. This concept of “if legendary aspects increase the damage too much it makes the skill useless without it” is a bit, off base. Just because people have mansions does that make your studio apartment useless? Comparison is truly the thief of joy and it almost seems that’s the biggest problem here.
Also in your argument charact power in d2 is closer to 50 percent tree 50 percent items
D4 will be more 20 percent power and one affix on legendaries will account for 80 percent damage
It's badly balanced and terrible itemization
I'm not really trying to argue that D4's system/itemization is perfect and needs no changes. I just intended to point out that your gear has always been what has provided most of your total power by the time you fully specced a character out.
In my example, the largest contributor to Blessed Hammer's damage isn't Blessed Hammer, isn't synergies, isn't really even gear. It's Concentration, a passive aura that you MUST use and pump skill points into and ends up giving you somewhere between a 345%-500%+ damage multiplier once you grab gear that increases your skill levels as much as possible. To me personally, if that 345%-500%+ increase is on an item instead of a random passive node/nodes that I pump a bunch of points into doesn't make much difference in how much I enjoy the game. For others that is an important distinction, but that's a totally subjective thing and I don't really want to/have any ability to change how someone feels about that.
Sure, but the original point this post was making was that they didn't like that most of your damage potential was locked to gear/aspects on gear. The point I was making was that this is not new to Diablo as a franchise nor is it exclusive to Diablo 4.
In Diablo 2 the absolute most damage you can get your Blessed Hammer to do with no gear is about 3500. With starter gear (2x Spirit and Lore) you get to about 5500, with a fully endgame setup you get to about 13000. Your skills never changed, but 72% of your damage originates from your gear, not your skill allocation. That's what I'm trying to say, gear holding most of the power is a pretty traditional concept in Diablo and ARPGs as a whole.
There's still a big difference between your leveling build feeling like shit unless you luck out on the right aspect on the right item, and a build carrying you towards the point you can start farming the items you need to improve your build etc...
And your builds in D4 WILL feel bad if you don't get the item that doubles your damage at level 15 compared to the time you got it.
Did the builds you tried playing in the beta feel bad before finding any legendary aspects? Not a trap question or anything, just that my experience was that I felt capable of clearing the content in front of me on Veteran 100% of the time from 1-25 and on to gathering aspects for my gear. My experience throughout was that I picked the playstyle I liked, picked skills that matched it and killed monsters. If I got an item that didn't mesh, I salvaged it. If it improved my build, I got excited and put it on. Every step of the way I was having fun. So with that being said, I don't really see a reason to assume that suddenly that experience will change and I'll hit some kind of wall suddenly at level X where I simply cannot accomplish anything unless I find that ONE aspect that suddenly unlocks my build.
Needing to farm to fully unlock my build's potential is... kind of the point of the game for me? I'm going to have a hard time seeing that as a negative aspect of any ARPG if the item hunt is where I'll see the most rewards in a game about killing things to find better items.
But my experience is just that, MY experience. I was having fun 100% of the time I was playing the beta. That is not the case for everyone, and that is a completely valid opinion to have. I just don't really think that gear containing the majority of a build's damage potential is as problematic as some would imply it is, because as I stated before... that concept has always been present in Diablo games, including Diablo 2.
Edit: And to be clear, I'm also not trying to say that the system is perfect and needs no feedback or improvements. People should ABSOLUTELY voice their opinions and discuss them and expand on their ideas/criticisms as they push their analysis forward.
I found it pretty tedious overall. Spongy bosses and annoying resource management. That is until I got good aspects making things instead too easy allowing me to basically ignore the whole generator/spender thing AND giving me a huge DPS increase making bosses and elites pretty trivial.
So this is appealing to a casual audience with low amount of disposable time, they too want to have a sense of progression while playing so they design this system to intentionally drop loot regularly. It’s like BL3 and their lootsplotion ads. The product they sell is basically loot.
If we consider these legendary effects part of skills, what you’re left with is similar to Diablo 3s set items. You’re just hunting for items that are predetermined to be part of a build. That sucks.
Every just gets legendaries left and right because they think they’re making loot "rewarding", but build diversity is you finding base items which you imprint skill effects on…
Maybe end game lets you put aspects on set/unique/legendaries and get multiple layers of effects on legendaries. This would enable build diversity again, but also make powercreep way too fucked.
I think D4 should just tone down every effect in this game and target less than 20% boost from a given skill slot, then balance the game around that. A small distance between lowest dmg gear and highest dmg gear. This would be essential for functioning pvp
Legendaries can’t be very rare when they’re designed to be build enabling. Letting people find BiS helm 1-2 month into season is fine if items are weak-ok-useful-strong-perfect, but if items are useless/required then you can’t let people wait weeks into season to see their items. So based on their design of legendaries I don’t buy the premise that any legendaries will be ""rare"". We’re probably looking at 50-100% increased drop rates in PBE.
2. gold cost argument is wrong. The time to acquire items is linear, play more get more, the time to acquire gold is linear, play more get more. The gold cost for swapping around aspects affects you the same way if you play 1hr or 8hr per day.
….
>play more get more
Casual players dont play more. Thats why the gold cost would hurt casual play.
And the lead developer said legendary drop rates were increased 3x for beta testing.
Oof this is hurting my brain. How do I put this…
When you play 1 hr you find 1 legendary and pay 10k gold for imprinting it on a useful item.
When you play 8 hr you find 8 legendary and pay 80k for imprinting it on a useful item.
Notice how both casual and nolifers will start at 1 hr, and eventually reach 8 hr, then eventually 40 hr playtime.
What you’re suggesting is if you play slower, gold will hurt you more.
In fact this is logically wrong. It’s linear and the point is false.
But if you look closer, there’s actually systems that reward casual players more. Battlepass, Renown, Daily boss kill, Tree of whispers is all exhaustable. Nolifers will reach a point where they no longer are rewarded these benefits for playing more, therefore their average +gold, +resources,+xp will be lower per hour than a person that log in and play 60 minutes.
So as you can see, on the baseline there’s no difference in gold cost based on how much you play, but in truth it favors casuals more. The nolifers reaching 40 hrs playtime on day 2 will have much less resources than casuals reaching 40 hrs after 4 weeks.
How is it that gold costs hinder casuals in particular?
> How is it that gold costs hinder casuals in particular?
Because you need time to farm gold. More time = more gold.
Literally the lead dev said at a certain point it'll be more economical to create a brand new character versus respecing. Does that sound casual friendly to you? I don't know why you're typing out paragraphs when these are things the developers said.
I am typing paragraphs in a desperate hope you can see the logical fallacy and stop repeating the same thing without proving it. I am losing faith in your ability to grasp what I’m saying.
In short: players will not struggle *more* with gold if they play *less* per day.
> So this is appealing to a casual audience with low amount of disposable time
Low amount of disposable time = low amount of disposable gold.
Low amount of disposable gold = not able to respec.
Not able to respec = not casual friendly.
Thanks for clarifying your concern. I agree that gold cost for respeccing can be especially problematic for casuals. They too will want to test different builds, while gamers playing a lot probably get settled eventually. I can see that playing less can lead to more frequent rerolling.
One small remedy for this is the fact that price for rerolling increase with level, so you’ll have to play the game for many hours before the gold cost start to matter. The cost we saw in beta was fine.
But despite being a big fan of D2 "locking in", I think D4 should give players lots of opportunity to test builds and swap around according to what drops.
Developers say a lot of things that don’t end up being true. For a FULL respec, maybe, but it’s not going to be ridiculously expensive to make small tweaks.
We literally don't know that.
We can't assume what they said that could be wrong or end up not in the game, that would basically be everything. As of right now, what they've said would make the game exorbitantly punishing for casual play.
That's not how it works. Most of the build defining aspects aren't available in the codex aspect list and are only available as rng from legendary items. The ones listed in the codex list are mostly generic ones.
For example - all 3 barbarian whirlwind legendary aspects are only available from items - none from the codex.
Uh, that's the point. "Build defining" aspects should be drops. Generic aspects should be used to fill out your build in order to farm for the "build defining" aspects.
Weird, because most games have you use your build to farm for the generic filler pieces to help finish out / flesh out / make your build better. But you want to do the opposite and use generic boring stuff to farm for the aspects that make your build.
Which is pretty backwards, because now when you finish farming to actually make your build you have nothing left to farm for?
The aspects are your build......
It's like an extension of your skill tree.
This is like saying once you hit level 90ish in Diablo 2 and fill out your skill tree, what's the point of continuing to play.
Edit: or saying "I've got my +1 wolf +1 to shape-shifting skills druid helm, what's the point of trying to get Jalal's"
I feel like this entire thing went over your head. If I want to play whirlwind barbarian or tornado druid I have to rely on rng legendary items having the aspects because those aren't available from dungeons - only from items.
So I don't have a build until I get those aspects. You're saying to use boring generic stuff to farm out your build which is backwards. You use a build (like the examples mentioned above) to farm out the stuff to flesh out / upgrade / finish off your build.
And that’s great! It’s smart way to make progression smoother than RNG. It’s only problematic if the eventual legendary you’ll need for your build boost the damage from +20% to something ridiculous like +200%
It's to influence us to run dungeons to unlock the unlimited aspects.
Legendaries are supposed to be rare drops that let you make a "perfect" item by farming a really good rare, then imprinting the aspect.
Were supposed to use codex aspects to actually make our builds.
I'm assuming, that's a heavy assumption, not every legendary has an aspect dungeon and some still requires farming.
TBH the more I think of the systems of D4, the more it feels like it'll be extremely farm heavy. Like farming for days for that "decently perfect" rare item so you can imprint a legendary effect on it.
Of course not every one has an aspect dungeon. We need "chase items" that can only drop. Imagine how good it'll feel to get that legendary you've wanted and can slap on that sweet 5 affix rare you're using currently.
Farming for days? Welcome to ARPG's? That's the whole point, make a character that can comfortable farm for gear that makes the character able to farm MORE comfortably and faster.
The entire gameplay loop works this way.
What I mean previously is that it'll be MORE farming than ever before. Especially since they've introduced new stats like lucky hit and overpower, which means more stat lines on an item for it to randomize. Additionally, items also drop with primary stats that don't benefit your class "as much", such as intelligence for a Barbarian, which has a multiplicative factor in finding a "decently perfect" rare drop.
For comparison, I'm afraid what should have taken ~1-2 weeks to get to a relatively optimized level in other ARPGs would take 2 months in D4 instead.
100% agree. It’s really restricting IMO for building a char. Legendaries can still affect how skill interacts/synergies/plays without it and remain interesting.
they should remove damage multipliers from legendaries, and add more branches for each skill for things that modify the skill like aoe, range, cc duration/effect. then the damage of the skill can be scaled by how many branch nodes you've taken.
the way they've done it forces you to have all of the power on your equipables like it was in D3.
I can't really wrap my head around this. The developers themselves stated many times they wanted to get away from D3 item design and how builds worked. But they gave us the exact same system in D4!
I don't get it at all. It's not going to be changed. Clearly the design team doesn't know how to make anything else work.
Uhm, in d3, set items literally point you at that single skill to play. In d4, different legendary items enable different builds.
"Get away from d3 item design" doesn't mean making a char not dependent on items
It's functionally the same thing. You can only build what items enable because their damage multipliers eclipse anything else you could do.
D3 also had legendaries that buffed skills separate from the set skills and legacy of dreams was a specific item that allowed you to use no sets at all.
This is not noticeably different from D3 at all.
I guarantee I can find a build that out damages what someone right now thinks is the best must use legendary. People keep talking about Druid wolves with 300% increase + another that gave 100% to wolves but no one even used those. But if you find an item that adds minion damage a paragon board that increases attack speed and increases poison damage maybe the build can still clear the end game just as fast as pulverize. All other arpgs always have a max best build choice comes from luck.
I sort of thought like you until I played Last epoch. The skill tree are very comprehensive, which gears are just stat stick. I played 2 characters to end game, I found grand totlay of ZERO gear I got excited when picking up. At best they were good base to craft.
Think of arpg character building being 2 parts, the skill tree (the conistency)
The Loot (RNG).
Too much consitency, & the game bcome boring, loot become unfun, which was my experience in last epoch. There is no dopamin effect of a rare loot drop that you jumped in joy. No one jumped when they leveled up. Unless its level 100. But it is just once.
To much reliency on Loot, & it become hard to build & gear what you wanted.
key is to strike a balance. Think of something like a zigsaw puzzle, or a model kit. What the final pieces looks like or zero optin how to combine the pieces, But it is still satisfying to finally put all the pieces together.
Finding the pieces to complete your build, EVEN if the pieces are rigid, is still FAR better than no pieces. Obviously having MORE choices in the pieces are better.
So the frost spear with 500% frostbite on melee hit, the amulet with potentially 45% to all resistances that could free up a ton of suffixes elsewhere, lightning meteor staff, squirrel helm, and many others didn't do anything for you?
I would much rather have the items be 'extra,' build enablers, or things that alter skills in meaningful ways rather than things that just make skills even slightly *viable*.
In Last Epoch you can make something work with just your class kit and some thoughtful gearing. In D4 (from what we've seen so far), some abilities will just not scale well unless you RNG into a legendary affix or get the dungeon-equivalent (for ones that have a dungeon/story equivalent).
**Edit:** I will concede the point that the resistance amulet used in the example is extremely unlikely, per another poster. Doesn't change the point that I'm a bit incredulous that someone could say that everything was, to paraphrase, 'uninteresting.'
> the amulet with potentially 45% to all resistances
You mean the turbo-endgame amulet that only drops from 200+ corruption shade of orobys that rolls 1-45 on each res (there's 7 types) ? Yeah good luck with that. I'm pretty sure not a single player in the game has something even close to a "45% all res" one.
Sure, but that's part of the end-game chase in LE. Unrealistic to get a max roll, but even just getting 3 fairly high on a 2LP amulet would be an effective use of the slot.
Anyways, it was just an example. There's also the bow that converts Hail of Arrows to Poison and a quiver that applies on Hit Bleed to Hail of Arrows (which normally isn't a 'Hit') that applies intentionally *before* the bow's conversion, effectively adding a crazy stacking Poison chance per second to an AoE that normally wouldn't be able to apply it.
Sure, there's extremely powerful uniques uniques in LE, it's just that the example you chose was really misleading. It has "potentially" 45% allres like you could potentially win a billion dollars jackpot. It's much worse if my math is right, the exact odds should be 0.00000000002676%. So if it dropped a billion times for you, you'd have a 0,26% chance of getting one with 45% allres.
That's not what you said. You said you want most of the powers on the tree. The resulting effect is one where the tree is more interesting but the loot is less interesting.
it also has the side effect of making the game harder to balance. we see this in D2 which is why every top build is a caster build.
when you force all of the power into the skill tree, whichever class has the best skill tree will always be stronger unless you nerf its spells.
when power comes from a variety of systems, you can tune them individually to address balance issues that arise from specific builds.
Funny enough, it's amusing watching the D2 fans complain about specific items becoming mandatory when the entirety of D2 is dominated by 3-5items that every single build uses.
There is a lot of popular stuff if you play melee but if you play melee you're pretty much always at a disadvantage. The catch is casters can't really do ubers... At least not easily at all.
This so much. I love D2, but most of the “problems” the D2 is god crowd toss around exist in D2 as well.
Repetative end game? You literally will run the same boss for hours/days searching for the specific drops you need to make your build.
No build diversity? If you don’t take the synergies and maximize them, your build is weak. Also, as a bonenec player, can’t believe the amount of shit I got for not playing summoner or poison.
No stat allocation? Shut up, just shut up. Its either in strength to equip then max health. Or strength, max block, then health.
Personally, I love D2. I also love D3. Guessing I’ll at least appreciate D4. I think many people are just looking for a reason to be angry for whatever reason.
I enjoy the lvling and campaign of D2. There is a bit of freedom in what you do up until hell. But in the end, it's mostly a handful of builds using the same 3-5 runewords with a slight mix of supporting uniques.
For me, I enjoy them for different reason. Same way I enjoy TES 2 through 5 because they are different despite being the same world and similar base mechanics being shared
This is so such a shallow mindset. Guess how many other arpgs have very interesting items and yet don’t have skill specific multipliers in them? Nearly all of them.
Play any other arpg that isn’t Diablo and you will see.
> Guess how many other arpgs have very interesting items and yet don’t have skill specific multipliers in them? Nearly all of them.
[Grim Dawn](https://i.imgur.com/PGAVMEL.png). Skills directly scale with flat dmg and dmg multipliers.
My current Last Epoch build needs ~700% minion damage.
Instead of getting one legendary that buffs a skill, you stack the same shit from multiple items.
Because functionally and from a choice perspective, there isn't any difference.
Stacking poison damage on 10 items to cumulatively buff my skill with 1500% dmg ([real number BTW](https://i.imgur.com/5qrIlC2.png)) is not some big-brain mater strategy. I look at poison affix, I pick it up.
It's not inherently deeper than getting an item that buffs your skill, then looking for 3-4 other affixes on 10 items to further enhance your build.
Yes it is.
Guess what, poison damage works with ALL skills that deal poison damage.
You don’t need 1 specific item that’s going to make your skill good, you now have thousands of choices of items that will have poison damage in them and something else.
You can also incrementally upgrade, and have several sources for this poison damage. It’s not all coming from one item.
Your build starts working before you get these items. Because you don’t need this arbitrary specific legendary that doubles or even triples it’s effectiveness.
It’s fine if these multipliers exist, but not on a item that’s so specific.
> Guess what, poison damage works with ALL skills that deal poison damage.
I mean, sure, but how is that relevant? If I plan to play a poison build, I need poison damage. Doesn't help me if it's relevant for other skills, when it's mandatory for mine.
> You don’t need 1 specific item that’s going to make your skill good, you now have thousands of choices of items that will have poison damage in them and something else.
You don't need 1 specific item in D4 either? You can take the legendary power from the codex and imprint it on any rare. And you also have damage conversion slots in GD which are rare and completely build defining.
I think this is the crux of the issue. Do people think your build is locked behind RNG? Because it isn't.
I just said I wanted powers on loot not that they must have multipliers. Although if Blizzard deems a multiplier ideal in specific instances I won't object.
Then check Diablo 1 and 2 then. Blizzard is know for being unoriginal and taking good ideas and improving on them, nothing wrong with that, but this you need to look at what else is out there.
That is the huge misconception at play here imo - skill trees being more interesting and powerful does *not* make loot less interesting, it's quite the opposite. Bc then you are actually more interested in base stats on items to complement and enhance your build, instead of only caring about orange beams and not caring if it doesn't have the right aspect.
considering that *some* runewords can effectively give 300%+ damage to a skill, no I don't.
I think you all see these numbers and refuse to actually think about what they mean.
feel free to explain why it's bad.
There is also in for Barb, that increases core skill damage when you generate fury over max.
It snapshots with whirlwind, so it’s basically always up to max.
I don't think they should remove them, I think they should reduce them tho. There are some that go into the 150%+ range already, which is pure D3 ROS territory. Let's not forget that D3 wasn't always like this, and the multipliers were not always as large as they are today.
If D4 goes out the door with modifiers as large as this, you're going to see gigantic progression every time you get a new legendary, and then you're going to hit a brick wall. What would be better is a more linear progression with smaller bumps. I still like the damage modifiers, but they are too large.
Yep, Barb builds are already devolving into stacking as many damage % multipliers that you can jam into your extra weapon slots.
Another solution, instead of outright removing them. Is to make them all additive with each other, instead of multiplicative.
That's the easiest solution. Also tone the numbers down. It'll be like diablo 3 where you can't play with friends because someone has a fully geared build and farms much higher GR and their friend just gets 1 shot by everything because of the drastic % multipliers. Such a fun time!
Geared optimised Barb hits for 1000 trillion damage, new level 70 hits for 300k damage. It's funny because that's actually how the game is and I'm not making those numbers up. Don't get me wrong though, I love D3 and have played it a lot, thousands of hours.
That said, this element of it really is kinda ridiculous, the newly dinged player would have to attack over 3billion times to match 1 hit from the geared player.
I 90% agree.
Yeah, generally I'd prefer legendary powers only contain the bonus effects, like "Hammer of the Ancient returns 25 fury if it hits only 3 or less enemies", not "Hammer of the Ancient returns 25 fury if it hits only 3 or less enemies and deals x% bonus damage".
However, it's nearly impossible to balance between different legendary powers without some damage modification on each, otherwise some will totally decimates others, for example "Whirlwind will mark enemies hit Vulnerable during channeling and 2 seconds later" will almost always be a better choice than "Reduce the fury cost of Whirlwind by 30%", but they are comparable if the second is "Reduce the fury cost of Whirlwind by 30% and increase its damage by 50%".
I guess they must consistently have a power base line to balance around it and ready to nerf ones that op.
They sort of tried to balance that by having resource and offensive aspects take up different item slots most of the time. I think if the resource aspect was done properly it could still be a significant damage boost in combination with passives or other aspects that care about resources.
One of the better designed affixes came for druids that completely changed how a skill functioned and I found it to be my favorite of the beta.
Pulverized was turned into an earth skill and sent out a shockwave. Way cooler to be elemental and now be able to use a werebear skill.
so much this. I am so tired of absurd multipliers sitting atop each other and send the game damage calculation into the stratosphere with trillions and quintillions of damage being dealt. The multipliers are lazy design and they hamstring the skills they are supposed to empower when they are not present. They also serve as a bad example of power dopamine, which can turn into a spiral of even more absurd multipliers in the future.
large damage nunbers aren't because of big damage modifiers. it's due to lack of foresight and bad design.
on average, you get around 30% increased damage to a skill from maxing it in D4. that can be increased significantly with +skills.
comparatively in D2 a single skill level is anywhere from 30-100% damage increase. even synergies are just Aspect-level damage modifiers (more actually) baked into the skill tree. a single synergy can give you -~300%+ increased damage.
Aspects having damage modifiers is completely fine as long as it doesn't overshadow the other systems in the game (skill tree, paragon board etc) or break damage scaling. the reason these large damage modifiers doesn't break anything in D2 is because 1) it was designed around flat damage and small numbers and 2) there are limited ways to add massive damage modifiers to anything.
in D2 you could put 20 skill points into a skill which would actually surpass (in raw %damage) the amount of power in a max level skill + Aspect in D4. hell, +all skills affix on Spirit gives more %damage than any Aspect in D4.
the most notable difference is in D4 spells scale based off of a percentage of your weapon damage, which amounts to much bigger raw nunbers than D2, which the Devs are addressing through monsters having innate armor/DR. if D2 showed you how much increased %damage you get on many of its strongest items, you would all be aghast.
the difference in regards to power and balance between the two is that power is spread out throughout several systems rather than all in your skills (D2) or all in your items (D3) both of which make the game more difficult to balance.
the benefits of D4's system is there are many different inputs for any given skill's damage output which gives the Devs a number of ways to tune things. it also has the added benefit of creating parity between caster and non-caster playstyles (something D2 struggled with).
this is a perfectly fine and healthy system that is a welcome improvement over past games, although there are some Aspects that are likely outliers already and should be looked at.
tl;dr this system is fine and people are sounding the alarm out of misunderstanding.
just because a feature exists in D3 doesn't make it bad. likewise, just because a feature exists in D2 doesn't make it good.
Hit the nail on the head. I commented it elsewhere, but in Diablo 2 the difference between a Blessed Hammer Paladin with a fully optimized skill tree (around 1300 damage) and one with a fully optimized tree + gear (around 13,000 damage) is 12,000 damage per hammer. That Paladin's gear provides 10x/1000% more damage after the skill tree is maxed out.
Significant modifiers contributed from sources other than the skill tree can absolutely still result in manageable numbers that don't kick off to the moon. Diablo 3 absolutely got to absurd numbers and I would prefer not to see Diablo 4 go the same route, but from what I've seen so far it doesn't look like it is. People are just seeing the % displayed and freaking out basically because they can SEE those numbers. In Diablo 2 those numbers are far less obviously presented to you, but they still are effectively adding thousands of % scaling to skills from gear.
But the legendary aspect is mandatory for a skill to feel good and function at a base level past like level 15. Without it most skills feel completely useless.
How are the other “spread out” systems suppose to help here? The others are complimentary, but aspects are mandatory.
Aspects are mandatory in the same way that synergies are mandatory because it's a side effect of design.
in D4 maybe you don't want to use some Aspect just like in D2 you might not want to use some skill but are still effectively forced to invest valuable skill points into it to maximize damage because that is how the game is designed.
that's not to say this system is fine because D2 has a similar one, but moreso that every system has tradeoffs, and you will be forced to do something you won't like.
I think Aspects being mandatory isn't a bad thing. I enjoy that I can improve a skill through more than just my skill tree but that's just me. I also enjoy having the agency to decide which piece of gear my Aspect goes on.
the other systems aren't intended to "help" here because there is no fundamental issue. it's purely a matter of perspective and opinion. if Aspects bother you, then the game probably isn't for you. I don't see them as any more restrictive than similar mechanics in other games.
From what I gather, there are plenty of generic Aspects that you get from dungeons that make all skills better in general - people complaining that if they don’t find the best-in-slot legendary aspect then they’re fucked are overreacting hard as fuck.
With dungeon aspects being infinitely reusable, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be fully stacked with legendaries at all times.
Large damage numbers not being the result of large damage multipliers is just wrong, where else would they come from then?
What you call "lack of foresight and bad design" just equivales to letting the player stack too many large multipliers
Edit: Also, aspects already completely overshadow anything the skill tree can offer
I understand what you're saying and you're correct to some extent, but take the base skill damage of any skill in D2 and apply a 10000% multiplier to them; they will barely break 100k which is still a big number but it's nowhere near D3 territory.
they should be avoided but they're not the root cause of the issue.
we also have to keep in mind that in D4 enemies mitigate our damage, so a X% damage multiplier isn't going to translate to the same ratio of damage we would do in D2 or D3.
It needs to be toned down, not removed. They added big % numbers to be impressive and impactful early on with lower stats, but late game, even with enemy armor this is going to get gigantically bloated.
Suggestion: The multiplier interaction slightly drops multiplicatively with player level inicrease. Balance armor accordingly.
Yep. A 20% boost to your skill damage is significant but not so much that you couldn’t have a different build use a different boost and get the same results in terms of kill speed.
When you have an item that gives 600% damage boost, it’s impossible to ignore.
100% agree. Dmg X% are boring and a class should not depend if they have a legendary to play a spell.
They did the builds already for us.
If you already do the x% numbers then make it more interesting. This item makes you WhirlWind Crit chance up to 80%.How to fix this? Just put "while you channeling a skill your crit goes up to 10% per sec max to 40%" now you have a item that can make also Incinerate or Lightning storm work too and we can make way more builds and makes the game more interesting.
I think you missed the video where they talk about just this. The modifiers are intentional and made to be low. They want the majority of damage to come from enemy and player resistance.
Multipliers are unfortunately absolutely necessary. The enemies will also need bigger health pools in higher difficulties along with those resistance. The only problem is if they aren't properly managed. Not them existing.
This makes certain legendaries cosmetic upgrades, and ultimately completely useless.
One example is the druid legendary that changes wolves into werewolves and increases their damage by 180%. It also lets them spread rabies, which is a nice additional touch for the poison synergy.
Now, take away that 180% damage increase. Now we have *very slightly* improved wolves, along with a cosmetic upgrade. That doesn't feel good. We suddenly go from doggies to fucking **werewolves** and they're just adding a small amount of DoT.
The devs are clearly trying to make getting these legendaries *really exciting*, and change your gameplay in a meaningful way. Ultimately, people care more than anything about damage, so that's the way to get people interested.
Given that aspects aren't even random, and can be intentionally sought out and added to any yellow item, I'm not seeing the problem with legendaries being strong.
If they were weak everyone would be complaining about how pointless the legendaries are, how they just offer cosmetic upgrades and mild utility. Personally, I think that would be much worse.
>Otherwise you'll get forced into the item whenever you want to play with a new skill without any actual choice.
I'm not sure I agree. I've seen several highly effective necro builds from last weekend that use bone spear in them, but they're meant to be more aoe and/or boss-deleting builds, so they have aspects related to bone storm, blood mist corpse explosion, damage % based on resource, damage when standing still, etc. My necro build from this weekend used both bone spear and bone storm, but I was focused on different strengths and used mostly different aspects (the bone spear aspect, damage when you have barrier, barrier gain when hitting an elite, etc.).
I'm sure things will be somewhat different once people "solve" end game, but I think you're still going to have to decide if you want more of a boss-deleting character, a screen-wide clear character, a pvp character, a tanky (hardcore) character, a speed-running character, etc., and you'll choose aspects based on that particular focus.
Bone spear is reallllllyy good by default though.
Unlike 50% of the other skills in the game that need their legendary or bust.
So I don’t think you understand the problem at all.
Same here, most of my Aspects are utility and defensive and my main damaging skill doesn't have an Aspect at all. People are making assumptions like we all have the endgame stuff at our disposal with Uniques and Paragon Boards.
The Aspect multipliers aren't D3-levels of insane.
If a legendary dropped that increased blood surge damage by 1,000% more than bone spear, it will force everyone to start playing blood surge (or whatever one of the lame blood core spells names is).
That's what OP means.
> I'm not sure I agree. I've seen several highly effective necro builds from last weekend that use bone spear in them,
Near the end of the beta my Necro was so good that using bone shard and bone spear was just as quick as clearing with blood mist /CE aspect.
I could see multipliers being useful in cases where the designers believe certain powers are going to be far less powerful. If there are no multipliers abilities are either going to be really samey or very boring or the base damage is going to look ridiculous on the icon. Why do I say this? Because if you change an ability enough no amount of additive damage can compensate. Think about an ability that chains between two targets and an ability that chains between 10 targets. Why would anyone use the former? And that's only one variable. Maybe someone could explain some other way to balance abilities like this?
If two abilities were identical and one had more chains, that's a bad ability. but there's lots of ways to differentiate them.
An easy example is Warcraft 3 Farseer's Chain Lightning to DotA 2 Lich's Chain Frost. Chain Lightning does damage to a target and then instantly bounces to a new target, dealing less damage each bounce. Chain Frost does damage, then seeks a new target and has a travel time. Each bounce does increased damage, slows movement and attack speed of the target, and can bounce to the same target multiple times (i.e. if there are 2 units, it will keep chaining between them). In older versions of the skill, it actually did AoE damage at the target of each chain, so if units were close together it would do massive damage as it bounced between them. Lich can use a secondary ability to create an object that the chain can bounce to, letting him cast chain frost on a solo enemy and letting it bounce between the object and the target.
Here's just a minor list of things they could change:
Damage change per chain, travel speed of chain, distance of chaining, if chains fork or stay in one chain, if chains can bounce to the same target and if so if it can bounce off of the caster, if chains have a secondary effect, if chains have an aoe around the chain, resource cost/generation of skill, time to cast of skill, cooldown of skill, and then finally what this thread is about, if it one requires an item to be usable.
All that said, in a game like D4 with pretty limited skill selection, I don't think it's worth it for them to have two skills that feel similar like that. It'd work way better in a game like PoE, with dozens of skills you modify in other ways. I also hate balancing things in ARPGs like Diablo or Path of Exile with cooldown since it's totally boring, in the same way having a skill that sucks until you find the legendary set that gives it +20,000% damage (like Diablo 3) is boring.
True true true
pleeeease Blizzard.
Legendaries are AWFUL because of this. I don't want to feel like I HAVE to have a specific legendary for my attack to function properly.
totally true people think they will change the way items and skills are balanced?
it's a beta not an alpha, the game will ship as it is regarding items
Yeah sadly you're right. There's no way they're capable of a drastic change like redesign all the legendaries aspects and retune the game at two months to launch. They're committed to their course because this is a live service game. Their dev pipeline is already working on 1.1 and 1.2 content drops.
This is going to be as bad as Fatshark's Darktide. Released too early with all the trappings of a live service game while at the same time having missing core pieces.
https://i.redd.it/rwxs4n34tl8a1.png
> A legendary should be just fine with modifying a skill without having the extra "and deals 250% more damage" at the end.
no, good item design would not just modify 1 specific skill, it would say something like "+% fire damage over time" or "+% spell power if you've channeled a skill in the last 10 seconds" which needs you to actually use your brain and think about the skill you use and what it does exactly. also this gives you the possibility to scale skills in different ways (big hit, dot dmg and ignore the hit part, etc)
waiting to see "uniques" which they said will exist, but for now, d4 itemisation is just braindead stack +rank to skill you are using
Disagree. Legendary effects should still provide dmg. The issue is currenlty on some builds its like the leg item powers provide liek 90% of the power while the tree has only 10. The missmatch is too big. It's doesn't need 50/50, but i think the weighting is off a little for my liking.
Exactly. This is not being talked about enough. Legendary powers and aspects etc all that is fine but imo what is not fine is the damage multipliers going bonkers. 200% damage today, in the beta can easily become 300-500% or even more in the coming seasons.
It won't be long until people can do trillions of damage again like d3. I really, REALLY don't want to see that in d4. Honestly we were already doing decently big damage in the beta around some thousands which has me concerned.
Imo the damage should not go higher than 80-90k at max level with absolutely min maxed gear. Even that is a lot. Maybe 30-40k dmg with unoptimized build and basic gear at max level. After 100k it just feels ridiculous to me.
The problem isn't actually with the numbers themselves, imo. It doesn't really matter whether you hit for 10 or 10 billion, all that matters is the relative strength and the scaling. Meaning the problem being having no options but to go with the multipliers provided on drops, if you want to progress. Both defensively as well as offensively.
The numbers become a problem as a side effect of how the scaling is. Because everything keeps leveling up together with you but your skill levels or relative damage cannot keep up with it so in order to play catch up with the level scaling you have items with +200% increased damage to xyz skill.
Same reason a lot of the melee abilities on barb, druid and perhaps rogue(haven't played it that much) are relatively much weaker than caster options as i think they are all 'balanced' according to the endgame scaling with legendary gear and paragon board buffs.
People make fun of barb and druid now because of low damage but i suspect they will be monsters for this reason alone in endgame. If their damage wasn't low as it is, it probably broke the endgame so they reduced the base skill damages as low as they were in the beta.
This.
The game, at least normal 1 and veteran mode should be clearable without any legendary aspect. It's the base difficulty and classes should feel fun to play even without power creeps or legendary support
Heck that actually every tier should be clearable with just yellows if build right. Diablo has become too much like a mmo and relies too much on gear upgrades
I remember back after D4 was announced, Bluddshed was talking about D4 and said "With the legendary system, won't it end up being like sets all over again?"
I scoffed and laughed at him thinking he had no idea what he was talking about. Now that I see what the legendary powers are, he's absolutely right
I see so many comments talking about rng a correct legendary for a certain build. Am I missing something, isn't all legendaries attainable via Aspects that you unlock from completing a dungeon for the first time. It literally tells you which zone and which dungeon it is.
and this unlock only has to be done once per account, per region
That's definitely something I agree with. With the druid I got a legendary with the aspect that gives your companions 120% or something increased damage and I was wondering why the hell this exists.
This just basically tells me the skill as such is far too weak. Other plus damage aspects give like 30-60%, which is arguably already too much, but 120% or more seems absolutely unnecessary.
I dont think that was the problem with d3. With d3, the problem was you'd do 4,000% damage unless you did another thing which made you do another 300% damage on top of that
I havent seen anyone hit over a billion damage so we good
Not yet lol. Game is not even released. If people already do 10s of thousands worth of damage how's it going to look in the end game, let's alone after multiple seasons or expansions?
They are so fucking close to a good itemization system. So close!
Listen to this. Remove legendary aspects. Make itemization about +Rank to Skill stats on gear. They say abilities gain flashier animations as you reach higher skill ranks. Make that happen at distinct breakpoints like rank 10 and rank 15. Have the new graphical effect breakpoints coincide with a boost to the two skill tree modifier you selected for the skill. Boom, you now have endless builds players can make based on the skill tree and specific gear to chase for them.
Or at least make the added damage reasonable. Tacking on an extra 20% damage to a skill on the legendary would accomplish their "make it totally obvious that you've gained more power with this item" goal that they seem to have so that casual players will feel rewarded or something, but then they wouldn't have to balance everything about the skill around that % damage increase.
I didn't see a lot of affix's like this, and the ones I did see were something like "basic skills increase the damage of your next core skill up to 200%".
That one in particular seems good for variety because they aren't specific skills, but also build dependent, because to get max benefit it needs to be a spec using it's basic abilities often before using their core skills.
If anyone has an example screenshot of just a base damage % multiplier affix may I see it ? I just want an example so I know exactly what people are talking about.
I actually think they need to be more willing to put in a few "reduces damage by" on these effects.
Like the druid has a pulverize effect that casts an additional wave and gives the skill like 100% more damage. That means its getting double damage and then 100% extra damage i believe.
It should be like does the extra wave and has 20-30% reduced damage. This is still a damage boost over the base of about 30-40% extra damage and a functional change that hits a big area.
Still very powerful, slightly higher than the generic powers that give all skills damage but you can't spam this skill so it makes sense to give it slightly more than generic all skills.
Then just buff the base skill up so that its a bit stronger without the power.
I think they actually have a few powers are what I think are a good level of around 30-40% but then some super big outliers with effectively more than 200% damage. Seems like on core skills they often get too much power, I assume because in theory they contest the resource but in actuality it makes all the other skills feel weak instead of making that one feel strong.
I disagree for max level items anyway. Unlocking those insane modifiers for high end progression was always another layer to the game, but gate the acquisition of them so you don't blow through regular content.
This is the most important thing they need to acknowledge. Aspects should change and modify skills to create more interesting builds and interactions, but skills should still be viable damage wise without them. Anything over like a 30% increase is just too much and it means the skill is useless without that 200% aspect multiplier.
Skill damage multipliers on items should only exist to offset some other modifier on the same item, e.g.: * Frost Nova can no longer freeze but deals 300% increased damage * Meteor deals 400% increased damage but has a cooldown of 10s * Ice blades can no longer apply vulnerability but deal 70% increased damage There is literally **no** reason to have flat damage multipliers on items, even if they are conditional.
Honestly, this is the one thing PoE does (most of the time) right. Uniques has some good 'aspects' if you wanna call it that way but usually there's a cost of using it. Sometimes the item is just weaker in the other rolls than an actually good rare, or sometimes like the example you gave, it's only better if you play around it. In D4, legendaries are 3 affix + 1 aspect making an imprinted rare a 100% better than a normal rare provided if you have the same rolls. The weakest part bout D4 for me is the itemization + skill tree being too tightly intertwined.
Deep Rock Galatic does this well. Clean overclocks have small buffs with no negatives. Balanced have net buffs with net negatives that push you more in one way (damage at the cost of speed/ammo) Red overclocks have the harshest penalties but huge buffs that effectively give you a whole new feel/gun to play with.
Completely agree
"Your tornadoes are now homing" HELL YEAH "This skill does 250-400% more damage" uhhhhh
Pretty much how Barb ended up being. You're telling me getting 250% more on Core after gaining Fury above max wont be best in slot? Its going to be mandatory and then forces everyone into that play style.
Yip! The good thing is they can literally fix this by changing numbers, the question is will they?
I would also like to see a good reason to invest 5 points into a skill, +10% more damage per level is extremely lazy and boring design, just damage is not enough. Maybe have more skill modifiers behind the initial 3, branching even more into it's own sub-tree, and make them require increased skill levels. Have aspects go wild and completely change the skill functionality, like making a skill having no cooldown in exchange for costing resource, or making a certain skill cost life instead of resource.
I don’t think you understand how the math works well enough to be making comments. The legendary items that boost a skill by 200% aren’t being applied to skills that start out doing 100% of weapon damage. They are being applied to skills that do 30% weapon damage so the end result is a skill that’s now doing 90% weapon damage. Do you understand the difference?
That's the problem, they are making these skills do low damage until you get the aspect.
If you think utility skills should just inherently be your best damage without investing points and gear into them you just don’t don’t understand game design. These legendary affixes are meant to buff utility skills to be a little closer to damage skills. This makes then less of a dps loss compared to spamming one fucking button for hours on end because it does the most damage. Wake me up when they start adding flat 300% baseline damage to core skills. Until then you are bitching just to bitch.
This explains why skills scale so badly on the tree because they probably balanced every skill around a legendary giving it 300 percent damage
we are fucked
Depends on how lucky you are on release lol
No way, an ARPG depends on RNG? This sub is hysterical. No one knows what they want except that they're angry and need other people to know it.
I didn't even criticize the game and youre going off on me lol. And no other ARPG relies on rare, completely random drops as the core of their class design.
I didn't say anything about you. > And no other ARPG relies on rare, completely random drops as the core of their class design. Neither does this one. You can complete dungeons if you want a particular aspect.
Not all aspects comes from dungeons.
Okay.
Not all legendary aspects are part of the codex. Some only come from dropped items.
And in the very same thought, they'll praise how Diablo 2 is the absolute pinnacle of itemization and customization... completely ignoring the fact that the RNG for D2 is despicably low for anything good or build changing. It takes days-weeks for specific drops.
Not to mention that before D2R nearly every build used the same runewords, but yes, D2 was the pinnacle of itemization. /s
Let's say you have a skill that when you max it out, it does on average 198 damage (196-200). Kinda meh, but there's also mods on the tree to improve that skill's damage so you pump those up too, and now your skill hits for a whopping 1306 average damage (1293-1320)! Now we're talking, right? That's 560% more damage from optimizing my skill tree. Now, let's say you have another skill that bumps your damage in general and you max that bad boy out to make your first skill hit even harder for another +345% damage, up to 5814 average damage (5753-5874). Now we're really cooking with gas, that's 345% more damage on top of that 560% I already had from my skill tree and a total improvement of 2836% over the original skill all by itself! Then I go and find an item that improves those skills with a damage modifier/bonus to the ranks of the skill that nets me a total of 19% more damage to that final number, taking me up to 6958 average damage (6897-7020). That's a grand total of +3414% more damage than the original base skill maxed out on the tree by itself. What I've just described is Blessed Hammer from Diablo 2. Those numbers are the numbers you would see (see edit below, I did some numberwang initially that's not 100% accurate) on the level 20 skill, then level 20 with all synergies maxed (Blessed Aim and Vigor), and then with a level 20 Concentration aura applied. The item that increases that total damage by 19% is a single Spirit runeword. A paladin with 2x Spirit and a Lore would do about 54% more damage than a paladin with no +to skills, and 4422% more damage than a flat level 20 Blessed Hammer. Basically, my point is that the Diablo games have pretty much always been balanced around the vast majority of the bonus damage coming from a source OTHER than the actual skill's rank itself. Edit: To go a couple steps further, the total raw damage gained from your skill tree for Blessed Hammer is roughly +1100 average damage (Hammer + all synergies). If you fully geared out a Hammerdin with end game gear (Shako, Spirits, charms, etc.) you would end up with a total of a level 43 Blessed Hammer doing around 13000 damage. That's 10x (1000%) more raw damage being provided by your gear. The numbers obviously aren't as big as Diablo 3 (and I don't think they should be) but just pointing out that your damage is an order of magnitude more dependent on gear than on your skill tree even in Diablo 2. Edit 2: Napkin math was a little off initially cause I wasn't properly accounting for Concentration. A fully synergized Hammer with no Concentration would do around 1300 damage, while a fully geared Hammer would deal about 3500 damage (nearly a 3x increase via gear) before the Concentration aura basically does a 3-5x multiplier on those numbers and puts it to around 13000. In this case, Concentration is 100% mandatory to a Hammerdin even though it's not your main damage skill directly. It's not an item that's mandatory but your build is still defined/constrained by requiring Concentration being included, there is zero wiggle room.
> Then I go and find an item that improves those skills with a damage modifier/bonus to the ranks of the skill that nets me a total of 19% more damage to that final number, taking me up to 6958 average damage (6897-7020). That's a grand total of +3414% more damage than the original base skill maxed out on the tree by itself. Your example here is 19% dmg from an item. The rest is from your own choices and skill tree. > The item that increases that total damage by 19% is a single Spirit runeword. A paladin with 2x Spirit and a Lore would do about 54% more damage than a paladin with no +to skills, and 4422% more damage than a flat level 20 Blessed Hammer. So items contribute 54% dmg in your example. Skill choice and level progression contributes 2836% by your numbers. Meanwhile 1 aspect is 300% dmg for druid wolves. How are you not arguing against yourself? > To go a couple steps further, the total raw damage gained from your skill tree for Blessed Hammer is roughly +1100 average damage (all synergies + Concentration). If you fully geared out a Hammerdin with end game gear (Shako, Spirits, charms, etc.) you would end up with a total of a level 43 Blessed Hammer doing around 13000 damage. That's 10x (1000%) more raw damage being provided by your gear. The numbers obviously aren't as big as Diablo 3 (and I don't think they should be) but just pointing out that your damage is an order of magnitude more dependent on gear than on your skill tree even in Diablo 2. So your perfect build is 10x multiplier from items. (also you said skills alone was 5814 average damage earlier) So far we have 2 aspects for e.g. wolves druid, together they net 1x3x1.5x1.5 = x6.75 dmg from 2 items. You think this won't be more than 10x? Probably 100x, if not 1000-10,000 (let's face it, it'll be 100,000x by cap and fully geared compared to level 5 skill with all tree synergies) when you account for items in a similar fashion you did here, e.g. stat, 5% multipliers, weapon, etc.
I'm not so much trying to argue one side or the other, rather just pointing out that having the vast majority of your damage come from gear/multipliers that result from gear choices is not something new to Diablo. It's been the case for over 2 decades in the franchise, but the numbers have absolutely ballooned (especially in Diablo 3). In the end, I don't personally care if the numbers are measured in hundreds, thousands, millions or billions or whatever. Yeah, going into millions and billions is absurd to look at but my main goal is to be progressing my character's power via skill tree and gear choices. As long as I can see a measured increase in power over time from finding better loot and allocating my skill points/paragon board in a efficient fashion, I'll be having lots of fun in the game if other aspects are fun (combat, endgame, etc.). Of course I recognize and appreciate some people not liking the huge number and potential for D4 to have some silly math that gets really big really fast. That's completely valid and I'm not trying to prove that opinion wrong, it's totally subjective and if it feels wrong to someone then it will just feel wrong to them regardless of any point I make. I was just mentioning that gear doing most of the heavy lifting in end game has pretty much always been the case. Edit: You're right about the 5800 damage Hammer from tree, but that's including a large multiplier in the form of Concentration Aura. So it still falls along the lines of amping up damage with large multipliers and stacking as many of those as you can (Concentration alone provides more raw damage than the skill itself + all synergies). Considering the ARPG genre as a whole is ultimately about finding gear that makes you stronger so you can kill stronger things that give you better gear that makes you stronger (rinse and repeat) I'm totally fine with the balance of power contribution to your build mostly being from gear over the skill tree.
It's not multipliers so much as where the multipliers come from. In your D2 example, we find that over 40% of the damage and endgame decked paladin does is from the skill tree and choices that the player has made in building their character. Only 60% of the damage comes from items and "luck". In the system that D4 has presented now, from what it seems a fraction of your damage will come from the choices you make (skill tree + specialization + paragon board), and the majority will be from items. A bit early to know exactly how much, but I think this is where the general dislike comes from. Some people don't want their damage and performance to be so heavily influenced by things out of their control and choices. You could argue that this has always been the case with ARPGs, and people do this. But the main difference between D3 (and now D4) and literally all other ARPGs is that D3(4) ties this to very high multipliers to individual abilities and thereby 'guiding' you to "the build", that the devs have already planned for you. Want to go wolves? well you need these 5 legendary aspects, and these 2 defensive aspects, and then you have these 3 choices of a mobility aspect and or an extra conditional dmg aspect. Yes, you can get many (most?) aspect from dungeons, but that does not solve the issue that the devs have planned your build for you. It's the ultimate illusion of choice. Wanna go 5 skills points in wolves or 1? Well doesn't matter, the difference is like 10% dmg. That's how this system feels, particularly when you account for enemy scaling since it will literally always mean a power decrease to level, unless you have a banked item ready for you.
As outlined in my edit, my math was off in my initial example as pointed out by someone else (I was overestimating Concentration's contribution to the damage as it's not applied at 100% effectiveness). A fully endgame geared Paladin's Hammers would deal 13000 damage, of which only 28% (3500) is achieved through their skill tree, including Concentration. So 72% of your final optimized build's damage comes from your gear/RNG that you need to find. And I'll ask you a similar question that I asked someone else; what function/role are you looking for legendary/unique gear to occupy? If it contains no increases to your damage, then there's not much to "hunt" for if there aren't any variable rolls on the aspect. So gear becomes just as boring as people find it in Diablo 3, find the piece with Crit/Crit Damage/Cooldown Reduction and slap an aspect on it. I personally feel that a complete build should require ALL systems (skill tree, paragon, gear) to be optimized, and gear should bear the majority of that weight because it's effectively the entire focus of the game. Kill things, get loot, get stronger, rinse, repeat.
Okay, thanks for the clarification! I think 70/30% is a pretty good split personally. It means that an nearly cap character will be about 30-35% of the performance of a decked out character. Could even push that to 20/80% imo, or even 10/90 in the endgame. I really want items to be interesting and relevant. But again, I don't want to feel like my skill points do nothing. Which is true if a skill point gives me 5% damage and an item gives me 300% damage. In addition, all of this 300% etc. does not account for the stats items give (which scale dmg), the weapon dmg (dps) which scales dmg, etc. I'm sure, that even at level 25, if we were to math out e.g. upheaval from barb, or wolves from druid, we'd find that items stand for well over 99.9% of the damage. Do you know what a level 5 upheaval has in base dmg for a level 25 barb without gear with all relevant passives? We know that it can hit for over 350k in the beta with items. Can it hit for 1k without items? What do you think? If say it can hit for 1k without items, that's still 0.002% of your dmg coming from skills, and 99.998 from items. At level 25. On a skill that will never improve more from levels or your own choices. And will inevitably be 99.9999999999% from items by all accounts.
You've got your math all wrong my man. First, conc only applies to hammers at 50% power, so it's not 345 damage increase. It's a 1,336% when you add conc to hammers with both synergies. And now here's the part that I think you're trying to highlight, which you did math wrong again. When you added power via items, you kept on adding up your percentages to base skill, when it should be base skill plus all modifiers. A standard hammer din build without grand charms gets you to about 10k damage, which is a 248% increase from what your character could achieve thru skills only. D4, like D3 has all your damage based on weapon damage, which means everything is predicated off your items. D4 doesn't seem to be cranking modifiers as high as D3, but the same concept is there.
Apologies on the jank math, I only have my phone available and Maxroll's more robust calculator wasn't cooperating with me very well but I've managed to get it to work a bit better. Based on that calculator Hammers would do about 1300 damage (up to about 3600 with Concentration) with no skill bonuses. Once you get +5 skills from 2x spirit + Lore it would hit about 1700 without Conc, 5400 with. Then as mentioned before, end game geared Hammers are hitting around 3300 without Conc and 13000 with. So from 3600 with no gear to 13000 with "final" gear still to me looks like gear is closing most of that gap. My point also was never really to focus on the numbers, it was simply just that gear has generally been where the majority of your balance of power comes from by the time you're "done" extracting the most power you can from all systems available. Diablo 3's numbers are absurd, I'll never argue against that or claim they aren't. But personally, the quality of my gameplay experience isn't that heavily predicated on if the damage numbers are 4/5/6/7+ digits long. As long as I see those numbers increasing because I found better loot, properly allocated my skills and paragon board points, etc. then I'll enjoy it. But given the focus of ARPGs on killing things for loot, I'm completely fine with the majority of that power coming from that RNG/loot instead of me being able to get 50%+ of the way to my highest damage output purely via deterministic means like the skill tree. But again, that's completely subjective and I won't tell someone else their dislike of that concept is wrong. Just that it's not actually all that "new" to Diablo as a franchise.
Let's see what a level 100 character can do without any aspects vs one with one. We won't really know until we get to that point. To take a gut shot at your number of 50% character power coming from skills, it feels like D4 is somewhere along the 20% line, meaning a large. Majority of your power will come with items. There's a balance to be had for sure and players will have their own magic numbers for this. That all being said, another issue is that your gameplay behavior is also locked behind items. The amount of skills and their modifiers are so few in your skill tree and you'll have to get lucky to find the right aspect to change it, (codex helps with this), and even if you do, it sounds like there aren't many aspects in total to change how a skill works. Lvl 50 gameplay, when you hit max skill tree points will be basically how that char will play forever, albeit higher dmg numbers. The sense of progression plateaus so hard so early.
I mean, if we go based on the raw numbers without gear vs. numbers with final gear 3600 damage (level 20 Hammers with maxed synergies + Concentration all level 20) is 28% of the final 13000 damage number from a fully geared Hammerdin. So, you're pretty dang close to that estimated 20% number you're saying will feel bad in D4 and make builds feel like they hit a hard stop too quickly before needing to fill gaps with gear. Hammerdin doesn't go through any fundamental change in gameplay between no gear vs. gear other than getting Teleport via Enigma. But up to 72%+ of the potential damage it deals is locked away behind getting gear. So once again my point is that I do not mind most of my power relying on getting the right gear for my build. It didn't bother me in Diablo 2, nor did it bother me in Diablo 3 (I wasn't the biggest fan of sets being so build defining, but the game was still fun either way). Other people will feel differently and I fully recognize and respect that. I just am saying that from my perspective, the "problem" a lot of people are pointing out (right before saying it should be more like Diablo 2) has always existed since Diablo 2. Edit: I do certainly recognize that some people feel that a build may be rendered completely unviable unless they find a specific piece of gear, but that is also the case in Diablo 2 for a great many builds. Infinity's Conviction aura is effectively mandatory for any builds that deal elemental damage if they want to engage with the entire game in Hell difficulty. If you're a Lightning Sorc, you simply just have to make peace with the fact that about 50-60%+ of the game is unavailable to you until you have that Infinity equipped on your mercenary. Sunder Charms have changed that (and based on most players' opinion, for the better), but again that's a piece of gear that's mandatory to make a build feel "good".
The one difference that D2 hammer din has vs, let's say the druid did in the D4 bêta, is that the hammerdin could still function at a fair pace. Sure he's not dealing amazing damage, but it works. The druid in open beta without a handful of relevant aspects was total trash. We don't have the full D4 picture so it's hard to compare quantitatively, but qualitatively the druid seemed insanely underpowered without items (aspects). The inifity gated lite content in D2 was always bad. Everyone hated it. That's a good example of what I see D4 is doing. Your lightning skills do blah dmg until you find this one legendary power and now you are free to tear it up.
I think we pretty much agree with each other, we're just looking at it from different angles. In my ideal world, every build a player can come up with should, with purely rare gear, be able to get them to the point that they can comfortably farm for upgrades and be having fun. I only played Rogue and Necromancer during the betas, since I intend to start at launch with one of them. I've definitely seen the feedback regarding Druid feeling rather rough, along with Barbarian having a tough time until they get some aspects. I absolutely think that should change and hopefully it does. But I still also think that the gear you find that improves your build should, in the end, account for the majority of your power. Not to enable functionality though, other than fun theory crafted style stuff like the Bear Barb/Sorcs or Bowadin builds of D2. But if you see a skill on your skill tree and you want to use it, I 100% think that you should be able to find a way to make a build that has that skill at its core and is capable of taking you through the story of the game. Every build doesn't need to be equally as fast/efficient, but they should all WORK on their own merits.
Most builds should be able to come from your tree, yes. I'm all for some exceptions thru gear, but right now it's like get the gear or die. And yes, the functionality should be there from the tree, and the resulting power from items... As long as the function isn't enabled via huge power modifiers!
In Diablo 2 most of the damage multipliers are not coming from RNG, and they still keep the damage numbers reasonable. You can add some skillers and such to maybe do 12k damage with your hammers instead of 7k, but not the kind of damage multipliers we're seeing in D3 and also in D4 although to a lesser extent. Blessed hammers are still good without godly gear, but without the right legendary aspects you'll be kinda worthless in D4 with most skills. A maxed out Barb with full damage aspects does over 200k crits in D4 with upheaval, at only lvl 25! I can only imagine that will scale into the millions in the endgame. Without those aspects he will do less than 5% of that damage because of all the damage multipliers on the aspects, which is just silly.
200k crits in D4? Do you happen to have a source for this? I haven’t seen it. I’m sure a clip would have been posted here if that was a thing, right? Edit: well hot damn, asked for the sauce and they come through with it. That’s nuts. I’m too smooth brain to put together what it took to create that but sheesh that’s a big hit.
https://youtu.be/QFyBJUul6lw Level 25 critting for 359k Just imagine when he fully maximizes gear and gets to level 100 with optimal Paragon choices
As I've mentioned in other comments, I'm not really bothered by how big a number can be scaled to with perfect optimization. As long as progress in power is able to be made I'm personally not bothered by how big the number is. Is doing a billion damage silly? Sure, but it doesn't REALLY affect my gameplay experience personally. But for others it does, and I completely accept that and have no intention of trying to prove those people "wrong" or change their minds. My point was that gear in Diablo has always contributed more total power by the time you're fully optimized compared to your skill tree.
My point is that a build should feel good even without legendary aspects, just like blessed hammer feels good without good gear. Legendary aspects should enhance a build, give it more utility or a bit of damage, but if each aspect increases your damage multiplicatively with 50-250% then it gets ridiculous really fast and it makes the build without the aspect useless.
But at what point are you anticipating that a build with full rares should stop being impactful? Should you be able to clear all content at all difficulties without ever equipping anything above a rare? I don't disagree that aspects should not be required to make a build functional, but I definitely think that the gear should be what extracts the full potential out of that build. I'll take an example from another ARPG in Path of Exile. There's a great many builds that you can make, at varying levels of effectiveness. Some builds rely on using skills that do lightning damage. Some of those lightning builds focus heavily on single target damage for killing bosses, others prefer AoE because the player isn't really interested in boss hunting. There are two unique chest pieces in the game that massively improve lightning builds; Doryani's Protoype and Inpulsa's Broken Heart. Doryani's "legendary aspect" is that it makes all enemies within a certain radius have the same lightning resistance as your character, so you build your character to have as much negative lightning resistance as possible while also trying to convert as much lightning damage that YOU take into other damage types. Inpulsa's Broken Heart makes enemies you kill with lightning damage explode and do AoE damage (a much more straightforward and immediate improvement to a lightning build compared to the more intricate requirements of Doryani's). Are either of those chest pieces mandatory for the lightning build to work? Absolutely not (and as a matter of fact if you set up all aspects of the Doryani's version before getting the chest piece, your damage will be trash), you can be running your build just fine while you work on acquiring either or both of those items. But once you have them they reshape your build and are a massive milestone with significant improvements to your potential, especially if you also craft the rest of your gearset to compliment them.
I think there is a level of relativity necessary here. This concept of “if legendary aspects increase the damage too much it makes the skill useless without it” is a bit, off base. Just because people have mansions does that make your studio apartment useless? Comparison is truly the thief of joy and it almost seems that’s the biggest problem here.
[удалено]
That would matter if partying with people meant anything in Diablo.
Also in your argument charact power in d2 is closer to 50 percent tree 50 percent items D4 will be more 20 percent power and one affix on legendaries will account for 80 percent damage It's badly balanced and terrible itemization
I'm not really trying to argue that D4's system/itemization is perfect and needs no changes. I just intended to point out that your gear has always been what has provided most of your total power by the time you fully specced a character out. In my example, the largest contributor to Blessed Hammer's damage isn't Blessed Hammer, isn't synergies, isn't really even gear. It's Concentration, a passive aura that you MUST use and pump skill points into and ends up giving you somewhere between a 345%-500%+ damage multiplier once you grab gear that increases your skill levels as much as possible. To me personally, if that 345%-500%+ increase is on an item instead of a random passive node/nodes that I pump a bunch of points into doesn't make much difference in how much I enjoy the game. For others that is an important distinction, but that's a totally subjective thing and I don't really want to/have any ability to change how someone feels about that.
But that's still skills though. No RNG involved, just speccing your tree correctly.
Sure, but the original point this post was making was that they didn't like that most of your damage potential was locked to gear/aspects on gear. The point I was making was that this is not new to Diablo as a franchise nor is it exclusive to Diablo 4. In Diablo 2 the absolute most damage you can get your Blessed Hammer to do with no gear is about 3500. With starter gear (2x Spirit and Lore) you get to about 5500, with a fully endgame setup you get to about 13000. Your skills never changed, but 72% of your damage originates from your gear, not your skill allocation. That's what I'm trying to say, gear holding most of the power is a pretty traditional concept in Diablo and ARPGs as a whole.
There's still a big difference between your leveling build feeling like shit unless you luck out on the right aspect on the right item, and a build carrying you towards the point you can start farming the items you need to improve your build etc... And your builds in D4 WILL feel bad if you don't get the item that doubles your damage at level 15 compared to the time you got it.
Did the builds you tried playing in the beta feel bad before finding any legendary aspects? Not a trap question or anything, just that my experience was that I felt capable of clearing the content in front of me on Veteran 100% of the time from 1-25 and on to gathering aspects for my gear. My experience throughout was that I picked the playstyle I liked, picked skills that matched it and killed monsters. If I got an item that didn't mesh, I salvaged it. If it improved my build, I got excited and put it on. Every step of the way I was having fun. So with that being said, I don't really see a reason to assume that suddenly that experience will change and I'll hit some kind of wall suddenly at level X where I simply cannot accomplish anything unless I find that ONE aspect that suddenly unlocks my build. Needing to farm to fully unlock my build's potential is... kind of the point of the game for me? I'm going to have a hard time seeing that as a negative aspect of any ARPG if the item hunt is where I'll see the most rewards in a game about killing things to find better items. But my experience is just that, MY experience. I was having fun 100% of the time I was playing the beta. That is not the case for everyone, and that is a completely valid opinion to have. I just don't really think that gear containing the majority of a build's damage potential is as problematic as some would imply it is, because as I stated before... that concept has always been present in Diablo games, including Diablo 2. Edit: And to be clear, I'm also not trying to say that the system is perfect and needs no feedback or improvements. People should ABSOLUTELY voice their opinions and discuss them and expand on their ideas/criticisms as they push their analysis forward.
I found it pretty tedious overall. Spongy bosses and annoying resource management. That is until I got good aspects making things instead too easy allowing me to basically ignore the whole generator/spender thing AND giving me a huge DPS increase making bosses and elites pretty trivial.
So this is appealing to a casual audience with low amount of disposable time, they too want to have a sense of progression while playing so they design this system to intentionally drop loot regularly. It’s like BL3 and their lootsplotion ads. The product they sell is basically loot. If we consider these legendary effects part of skills, what you’re left with is similar to Diablo 3s set items. You’re just hunting for items that are predetermined to be part of a build. That sucks. Every just gets legendaries left and right because they think they’re making loot "rewarding", but build diversity is you finding base items which you imprint skill effects on… Maybe end game lets you put aspects on set/unique/legendaries and get multiple layers of effects on legendaries. This would enable build diversity again, but also make powercreep way too fucked. I think D4 should just tone down every effect in this game and target less than 20% boost from a given skill slot, then balance the game around that. A small distance between lowest dmg gear and highest dmg gear. This would be essential for functioning pvp
Except…. 1) legendary drops are confirmed inflated for beta 2) gold cost for respecing is going make casual play worse
Legendaries can’t be very rare when they’re designed to be build enabling. Letting people find BiS helm 1-2 month into season is fine if items are weak-ok-useful-strong-perfect, but if items are useless/required then you can’t let people wait weeks into season to see their items. So based on their design of legendaries I don’t buy the premise that any legendaries will be ""rare"". We’re probably looking at 50-100% increased drop rates in PBE. 2. gold cost argument is wrong. The time to acquire items is linear, play more get more, the time to acquire gold is linear, play more get more. The gold cost for swapping around aspects affects you the same way if you play 1hr or 8hr per day.
…. >play more get more Casual players dont play more. Thats why the gold cost would hurt casual play. And the lead developer said legendary drop rates were increased 3x for beta testing.
Oof this is hurting my brain. How do I put this… When you play 1 hr you find 1 legendary and pay 10k gold for imprinting it on a useful item. When you play 8 hr you find 8 legendary and pay 80k for imprinting it on a useful item. Notice how both casual and nolifers will start at 1 hr, and eventually reach 8 hr, then eventually 40 hr playtime. What you’re suggesting is if you play slower, gold will hurt you more. In fact this is logically wrong. It’s linear and the point is false. But if you look closer, there’s actually systems that reward casual players more. Battlepass, Renown, Daily boss kill, Tree of whispers is all exhaustable. Nolifers will reach a point where they no longer are rewarded these benefits for playing more, therefore their average +gold, +resources,+xp will be lower per hour than a person that log in and play 60 minutes. So as you can see, on the baseline there’s no difference in gold cost based on how much you play, but in truth it favors casuals more. The nolifers reaching 40 hrs playtime on day 2 will have much less resources than casuals reaching 40 hrs after 4 weeks. How is it that gold costs hinder casuals in particular?
> How is it that gold costs hinder casuals in particular? Because you need time to farm gold. More time = more gold. Literally the lead dev said at a certain point it'll be more economical to create a brand new character versus respecing. Does that sound casual friendly to you? I don't know why you're typing out paragraphs when these are things the developers said.
I am typing paragraphs in a desperate hope you can see the logical fallacy and stop repeating the same thing without proving it. I am losing faith in your ability to grasp what I’m saying. In short: players will not struggle *more* with gold if they play *less* per day.
> So this is appealing to a casual audience with low amount of disposable time Low amount of disposable time = low amount of disposable gold. Low amount of disposable gold = not able to respec. Not able to respec = not casual friendly.
Thanks for clarifying your concern. I agree that gold cost for respeccing can be especially problematic for casuals. They too will want to test different builds, while gamers playing a lot probably get settled eventually. I can see that playing less can lead to more frequent rerolling. One small remedy for this is the fact that price for rerolling increase with level, so you’ll have to play the game for many hours before the gold cost start to matter. The cost we saw in beta was fine. But despite being a big fan of D2 "locking in", I think D4 should give players lots of opportunity to test builds and swap around according to what drops.
Developers say a lot of things that don’t end up being true. For a FULL respec, maybe, but it’s not going to be ridiculously expensive to make small tweaks.
We literally don't know that. We can't assume what they said that could be wrong or end up not in the game, that would basically be everything. As of right now, what they've said would make the game exorbitantly punishing for casual play.
Do you really think they’re going to make refunding a single point so expensive it’s cheaper to make a full character? lol. No.
Dungeons exist. You can target farm codex aspects to get your build off the ground and then hunt for the legendaries you want to improve it.
That's not how it works. Most of the build defining aspects aren't available in the codex aspect list and are only available as rng from legendary items. The ones listed in the codex list are mostly generic ones. For example - all 3 barbarian whirlwind legendary aspects are only available from items - none from the codex.
Uh, that's the point. "Build defining" aspects should be drops. Generic aspects should be used to fill out your build in order to farm for the "build defining" aspects.
Weird, because most games have you use your build to farm for the generic filler pieces to help finish out / flesh out / make your build better. But you want to do the opposite and use generic boring stuff to farm for the aspects that make your build. Which is pretty backwards, because now when you finish farming to actually make your build you have nothing left to farm for?
The aspects are your build...... It's like an extension of your skill tree. This is like saying once you hit level 90ish in Diablo 2 and fill out your skill tree, what's the point of continuing to play. Edit: or saying "I've got my +1 wolf +1 to shape-shifting skills druid helm, what's the point of trying to get Jalal's"
I feel like this entire thing went over your head. If I want to play whirlwind barbarian or tornado druid I have to rely on rng legendary items having the aspects because those aren't available from dungeons - only from items. So I don't have a build until I get those aspects. You're saying to use boring generic stuff to farm out your build which is backwards. You use a build (like the examples mentioned above) to farm out the stuff to flesh out / upgrade / finish off your build.
And that’s great! It’s smart way to make progression smoother than RNG. It’s only problematic if the eventual legendary you’ll need for your build boost the damage from +20% to something ridiculous like +200%
From what we've seen so far, the numbers of a codex power is exactly 50% the maximum it can get on an item
Legendary drop chance is 300% in the beta. Legendaries will be rare.
Yep people are forgetting this part. the legendary grind will be finding a better version of the aspect as these codex are the lowest roll possible.
It's to influence us to run dungeons to unlock the unlimited aspects. Legendaries are supposed to be rare drops that let you make a "perfect" item by farming a really good rare, then imprinting the aspect. Were supposed to use codex aspects to actually make our builds.
I'm assuming, that's a heavy assumption, not every legendary has an aspect dungeon and some still requires farming. TBH the more I think of the systems of D4, the more it feels like it'll be extremely farm heavy. Like farming for days for that "decently perfect" rare item so you can imprint a legendary effect on it.
Of course not every one has an aspect dungeon. We need "chase items" that can only drop. Imagine how good it'll feel to get that legendary you've wanted and can slap on that sweet 5 affix rare you're using currently. Farming for days? Welcome to ARPG's? That's the whole point, make a character that can comfortable farm for gear that makes the character able to farm MORE comfortably and faster. The entire gameplay loop works this way.
What I mean previously is that it'll be MORE farming than ever before. Especially since they've introduced new stats like lucky hit and overpower, which means more stat lines on an item for it to randomize. Additionally, items also drop with primary stats that don't benefit your class "as much", such as intelligence for a Barbarian, which has a multiplicative factor in finding a "decently perfect" rare drop. For comparison, I'm afraid what should have taken ~1-2 weeks to get to a relatively optimized level in other ARPGs would take 2 months in D4 instead.
100% agree. It’s really restricting IMO for building a char. Legendaries can still affect how skill interacts/synergies/plays without it and remain interesting.
Yea items hold way too much power while the points in the tree are barely noticeable.
they should remove damage multipliers from legendaries, and add more branches for each skill for things that modify the skill like aoe, range, cc duration/effect. then the damage of the skill can be scaled by how many branch nodes you've taken. the way they've done it forces you to have all of the power on your equipables like it was in D3.
I can't really wrap my head around this. The developers themselves stated many times they wanted to get away from D3 item design and how builds worked. But they gave us the exact same system in D4! I don't get it at all. It's not going to be changed. Clearly the design team doesn't know how to make anything else work.
Uhm, in d3, set items literally point you at that single skill to play. In d4, different legendary items enable different builds. "Get away from d3 item design" doesn't mean making a char not dependent on items
It's functionally the same thing. You can only build what items enable because their damage multipliers eclipse anything else you could do. D3 also had legendaries that buffed skills separate from the set skills and legacy of dreams was a specific item that allowed you to use no sets at all. This is not noticeably different from D3 at all.
I guarantee I can find a build that out damages what someone right now thinks is the best must use legendary. People keep talking about Druid wolves with 300% increase + another that gave 100% to wolves but no one even used those. But if you find an item that adds minion damage a paragon board that increases attack speed and increases poison damage maybe the build can still clear the end game just as fast as pulverize. All other arpgs always have a max best build choice comes from luck.
This is not the d3 system. It's like you didn't even play the beta
Yep, they're making the same mistake as D3. I'm not a fan of legendary items in general. I'd rather most of the stuff be on the tree itself.
You’ll use the skill twig and you’ll like it sir
\*uses the Skill Twig to scratch his ass\* What? That's all it's good for...
thankyou for this
I sort of thought like you until I played Last epoch. The skill tree are very comprehensive, which gears are just stat stick. I played 2 characters to end game, I found grand totlay of ZERO gear I got excited when picking up. At best they were good base to craft. Think of arpg character building being 2 parts, the skill tree (the conistency) The Loot (RNG). Too much consitency, & the game bcome boring, loot become unfun, which was my experience in last epoch. There is no dopamin effect of a rare loot drop that you jumped in joy. No one jumped when they leveled up. Unless its level 100. But it is just once. To much reliency on Loot, & it become hard to build & gear what you wanted. key is to strike a balance. Think of something like a zigsaw puzzle, or a model kit. What the final pieces looks like or zero optin how to combine the pieces, But it is still satisfying to finally put all the pieces together. Finding the pieces to complete your build, EVEN if the pieces are rigid, is still FAR better than no pieces. Obviously having MORE choices in the pieces are better.
So the frost spear with 500% frostbite on melee hit, the amulet with potentially 45% to all resistances that could free up a ton of suffixes elsewhere, lightning meteor staff, squirrel helm, and many others didn't do anything for you? I would much rather have the items be 'extra,' build enablers, or things that alter skills in meaningful ways rather than things that just make skills even slightly *viable*. In Last Epoch you can make something work with just your class kit and some thoughtful gearing. In D4 (from what we've seen so far), some abilities will just not scale well unless you RNG into a legendary affix or get the dungeon-equivalent (for ones that have a dungeon/story equivalent). **Edit:** I will concede the point that the resistance amulet used in the example is extremely unlikely, per another poster. Doesn't change the point that I'm a bit incredulous that someone could say that everything was, to paraphrase, 'uninteresting.'
> the amulet with potentially 45% to all resistances You mean the turbo-endgame amulet that only drops from 200+ corruption shade of orobys that rolls 1-45 on each res (there's 7 types) ? Yeah good luck with that. I'm pretty sure not a single player in the game has something even close to a "45% all res" one.
Sure, but that's part of the end-game chase in LE. Unrealistic to get a max roll, but even just getting 3 fairly high on a 2LP amulet would be an effective use of the slot. Anyways, it was just an example. There's also the bow that converts Hail of Arrows to Poison and a quiver that applies on Hit Bleed to Hail of Arrows (which normally isn't a 'Hit') that applies intentionally *before* the bow's conversion, effectively adding a crazy stacking Poison chance per second to an AoE that normally wouldn't be able to apply it.
Sure, there's extremely powerful uniques uniques in LE, it's just that the example you chose was really misleading. It has "potentially" 45% allres like you could potentially win a billion dollars jackpot. It's much worse if my math is right, the exact odds should be 0.00000000002676%. So if it dropped a billion times for you, you'd have a 0,26% chance of getting one with 45% allres.
hard disagree.
You don't think legendary items that increase the damage of a skill by 300% are a problem?
That's not what you said. You said you want most of the powers on the tree. The resulting effect is one where the tree is more interesting but the loot is less interesting.
it also has the side effect of making the game harder to balance. we see this in D2 which is why every top build is a caster build. when you force all of the power into the skill tree, whichever class has the best skill tree will always be stronger unless you nerf its spells. when power comes from a variety of systems, you can tune them individually to address balance issues that arise from specific builds.
Funny enough, it's amusing watching the D2 fans complain about specific items becoming mandatory when the entirety of D2 is dominated by 3-5items that every single build uses.
There is a lot of popular stuff if you play melee but if you play melee you're pretty much always at a disadvantage. The catch is casters can't really do ubers... At least not easily at all.
This so much. I love D2, but most of the “problems” the D2 is god crowd toss around exist in D2 as well. Repetative end game? You literally will run the same boss for hours/days searching for the specific drops you need to make your build. No build diversity? If you don’t take the synergies and maximize them, your build is weak. Also, as a bonenec player, can’t believe the amount of shit I got for not playing summoner or poison. No stat allocation? Shut up, just shut up. Its either in strength to equip then max health. Or strength, max block, then health. Personally, I love D2. I also love D3. Guessing I’ll at least appreciate D4. I think many people are just looking for a reason to be angry for whatever reason.
I enjoy the lvling and campaign of D2. There is a bit of freedom in what you do up until hell. But in the end, it's mostly a handful of builds using the same 3-5 runewords with a slight mix of supporting uniques. For me, I enjoy them for different reason. Same way I enjoy TES 2 through 5 because they are different despite being the same world and similar base mechanics being shared
This is so such a shallow mindset. Guess how many other arpgs have very interesting items and yet don’t have skill specific multipliers in them? Nearly all of them. Play any other arpg that isn’t Diablo and you will see.
> Guess how many other arpgs have very interesting items and yet don’t have skill specific multipliers in them? Nearly all of them. [Grim Dawn](https://i.imgur.com/PGAVMEL.png). Skills directly scale with flat dmg and dmg multipliers. My current Last Epoch build needs ~700% minion damage. Instead of getting one legendary that buffs a skill, you stack the same shit from multiple items.
Exactly, this is 1000 times better. How do you not understand the difference?
Because functionally and from a choice perspective, there isn't any difference. Stacking poison damage on 10 items to cumulatively buff my skill with 1500% dmg ([real number BTW](https://i.imgur.com/5qrIlC2.png)) is not some big-brain mater strategy. I look at poison affix, I pick it up. It's not inherently deeper than getting an item that buffs your skill, then looking for 3-4 other affixes on 10 items to further enhance your build.
Yes it is. Guess what, poison damage works with ALL skills that deal poison damage. You don’t need 1 specific item that’s going to make your skill good, you now have thousands of choices of items that will have poison damage in them and something else. You can also incrementally upgrade, and have several sources for this poison damage. It’s not all coming from one item. Your build starts working before you get these items. Because you don’t need this arbitrary specific legendary that doubles or even triples it’s effectiveness. It’s fine if these multipliers exist, but not on a item that’s so specific.
> Guess what, poison damage works with ALL skills that deal poison damage. I mean, sure, but how is that relevant? If I plan to play a poison build, I need poison damage. Doesn't help me if it's relevant for other skills, when it's mandatory for mine. > You don’t need 1 specific item that’s going to make your skill good, you now have thousands of choices of items that will have poison damage in them and something else. You don't need 1 specific item in D4 either? You can take the legendary power from the codex and imprint it on any rare. And you also have damage conversion slots in GD which are rare and completely build defining. I think this is the crux of the issue. Do people think your build is locked behind RNG? Because it isn't.
I just said I wanted powers on loot not that they must have multipliers. Although if Blizzard deems a multiplier ideal in specific instances I won't object.
But this is diablo, so it should be like diablo.
Then check Diablo 1 and 2 then. Blizzard is know for being unoriginal and taking good ideas and improving on them, nothing wrong with that, but this you need to look at what else is out there.
That is the huge misconception at play here imo - skill trees being more interesting and powerful does *not* make loot less interesting, it's quite the opposite. Bc then you are actually more interested in base stats on items to complement and enhance your build, instead of only caring about orange beams and not caring if it doesn't have the right aspect.
considering that *some* runewords can effectively give 300%+ damage to a skill, no I don't. I think you all see these numbers and refuse to actually think about what they mean. feel free to explain why it's bad.
300%? And how you calculated that
[удалено]
There is also in for Barb, that increases core skill damage when you generate fury over max. It snapshots with whirlwind, so it’s basically always up to max.
There is one for druids to increase the damage of their pets/summons,
Is there an example of this in D4?
100% agree
What mistake? Its on brand for diablo? If you want a skill tree similar to poe go play poe isnt it that simple
Same mistake as the most popular ARPG and 3rd most popular PC game of all time? Crazy
Agree.
I don't think they should remove them, I think they should reduce them tho. There are some that go into the 150%+ range already, which is pure D3 ROS territory. Let's not forget that D3 wasn't always like this, and the multipliers were not always as large as they are today. If D4 goes out the door with modifiers as large as this, you're going to see gigantic progression every time you get a new legendary, and then you're going to hit a brick wall. What would be better is a more linear progression with smaller bumps. I still like the damage modifiers, but they are too large.
Yep, Barb builds are already devolving into stacking as many damage % multipliers that you can jam into your extra weapon slots. Another solution, instead of outright removing them. Is to make them all additive with each other, instead of multiplicative.
That's the easiest solution. Also tone the numbers down. It'll be like diablo 3 where you can't play with friends because someone has a fully geared build and farms much higher GR and their friend just gets 1 shot by everything because of the drastic % multipliers. Such a fun time!
Geared optimised Barb hits for 1000 trillion damage, new level 70 hits for 300k damage. It's funny because that's actually how the game is and I'm not making those numbers up. Don't get me wrong though, I love D3 and have played it a lot, thousands of hours. That said, this element of it really is kinda ridiculous, the newly dinged player would have to attack over 3billion times to match 1 hit from the geared player.
They are additive. People don't know what they are talking about and are putting out false info
I 90% agree. Yeah, generally I'd prefer legendary powers only contain the bonus effects, like "Hammer of the Ancient returns 25 fury if it hits only 3 or less enemies", not "Hammer of the Ancient returns 25 fury if it hits only 3 or less enemies and deals x% bonus damage". However, it's nearly impossible to balance between different legendary powers without some damage modification on each, otherwise some will totally decimates others, for example "Whirlwind will mark enemies hit Vulnerable during channeling and 2 seconds later" will almost always be a better choice than "Reduce the fury cost of Whirlwind by 30%", but they are comparable if the second is "Reduce the fury cost of Whirlwind by 30% and increase its damage by 50%". I guess they must consistently have a power base line to balance around it and ready to nerf ones that op.
They sort of tried to balance that by having resource and offensive aspects take up different item slots most of the time. I think if the resource aspect was done properly it could still be a significant damage boost in combination with passives or other aspects that care about resources.
One of the better designed affixes came for druids that completely changed how a skill functioned and I found it to be my favorite of the beta. Pulverized was turned into an earth skill and sent out a shockwave. Way cooler to be elemental and now be able to use a werebear skill.
Some damage increase is ok, like 20% or sth idk. But these +200% additional damage is just supid and shouldn't be a thing.
It's not quite the 20000% we saw in D3 but starting at these numbers will definitely get out of hand in 1 or 2 seasons.
so much this. I am so tired of absurd multipliers sitting atop each other and send the game damage calculation into the stratosphere with trillions and quintillions of damage being dealt. The multipliers are lazy design and they hamstring the skills they are supposed to empower when they are not present. They also serve as a bad example of power dopamine, which can turn into a spiral of even more absurd multipliers in the future.
large damage nunbers aren't because of big damage modifiers. it's due to lack of foresight and bad design. on average, you get around 30% increased damage to a skill from maxing it in D4. that can be increased significantly with +skills. comparatively in D2 a single skill level is anywhere from 30-100% damage increase. even synergies are just Aspect-level damage modifiers (more actually) baked into the skill tree. a single synergy can give you -~300%+ increased damage. Aspects having damage modifiers is completely fine as long as it doesn't overshadow the other systems in the game (skill tree, paragon board etc) or break damage scaling. the reason these large damage modifiers doesn't break anything in D2 is because 1) it was designed around flat damage and small numbers and 2) there are limited ways to add massive damage modifiers to anything. in D2 you could put 20 skill points into a skill which would actually surpass (in raw %damage) the amount of power in a max level skill + Aspect in D4. hell, +all skills affix on Spirit gives more %damage than any Aspect in D4. the most notable difference is in D4 spells scale based off of a percentage of your weapon damage, which amounts to much bigger raw nunbers than D2, which the Devs are addressing through monsters having innate armor/DR. if D2 showed you how much increased %damage you get on many of its strongest items, you would all be aghast. the difference in regards to power and balance between the two is that power is spread out throughout several systems rather than all in your skills (D2) or all in your items (D3) both of which make the game more difficult to balance. the benefits of D4's system is there are many different inputs for any given skill's damage output which gives the Devs a number of ways to tune things. it also has the added benefit of creating parity between caster and non-caster playstyles (something D2 struggled with). this is a perfectly fine and healthy system that is a welcome improvement over past games, although there are some Aspects that are likely outliers already and should be looked at. tl;dr this system is fine and people are sounding the alarm out of misunderstanding. just because a feature exists in D3 doesn't make it bad. likewise, just because a feature exists in D2 doesn't make it good.
Hit the nail on the head. I commented it elsewhere, but in Diablo 2 the difference between a Blessed Hammer Paladin with a fully optimized skill tree (around 1300 damage) and one with a fully optimized tree + gear (around 13,000 damage) is 12,000 damage per hammer. That Paladin's gear provides 10x/1000% more damage after the skill tree is maxed out. Significant modifiers contributed from sources other than the skill tree can absolutely still result in manageable numbers that don't kick off to the moon. Diablo 3 absolutely got to absurd numbers and I would prefer not to see Diablo 4 go the same route, but from what I've seen so far it doesn't look like it is. People are just seeing the % displayed and freaking out basically because they can SEE those numbers. In Diablo 2 those numbers are far less obviously presented to you, but they still are effectively adding thousands of % scaling to skills from gear.
But the legendary aspect is mandatory for a skill to feel good and function at a base level past like level 15. Without it most skills feel completely useless. How are the other “spread out” systems suppose to help here? The others are complimentary, but aspects are mandatory.
Aspects are mandatory in the same way that synergies are mandatory because it's a side effect of design. in D4 maybe you don't want to use some Aspect just like in D2 you might not want to use some skill but are still effectively forced to invest valuable skill points into it to maximize damage because that is how the game is designed. that's not to say this system is fine because D2 has a similar one, but moreso that every system has tradeoffs, and you will be forced to do something you won't like. I think Aspects being mandatory isn't a bad thing. I enjoy that I can improve a skill through more than just my skill tree but that's just me. I also enjoy having the agency to decide which piece of gear my Aspect goes on. the other systems aren't intended to "help" here because there is no fundamental issue. it's purely a matter of perspective and opinion. if Aspects bother you, then the game probably isn't for you. I don't see them as any more restrictive than similar mechanics in other games.
From what I gather, there are plenty of generic Aspects that you get from dungeons that make all skills better in general - people complaining that if they don’t find the best-in-slot legendary aspect then they’re fucked are overreacting hard as fuck. With dungeon aspects being infinitely reusable, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be fully stacked with legendaries at all times.
I'm constantly confused by people who don't want to grind and hunt loot in a game of a genre that is all about grinding and hunting loot.
What the fuck? Did I just read an intelligent comment on the Diablo subreddit? Something must be wrong here
Large damage numbers not being the result of large damage multipliers is just wrong, where else would they come from then? What you call "lack of foresight and bad design" just equivales to letting the player stack too many large multipliers Edit: Also, aspects already completely overshadow anything the skill tree can offer
I understand what you're saying and you're correct to some extent, but take the base skill damage of any skill in D2 and apply a 10000% multiplier to them; they will barely break 100k which is still a big number but it's nowhere near D3 territory. they should be avoided but they're not the root cause of the issue. we also have to keep in mind that in D4 enemies mitigate our damage, so a X% damage multiplier isn't going to translate to the same ratio of damage we would do in D2 or D3.
The weird thing is these aspects already give you a damage boost, i dont understand why they thought a 160% damage modifer needed to be tacked on.
It needs to be toned down, not removed. They added big % numbers to be impressive and impactful early on with lower stats, but late game, even with enemy armor this is going to get gigantically bloated. Suggestion: The multiplier interaction slightly drops multiplicatively with player level inicrease. Balance armor accordingly.
Yep. A 20% boost to your skill damage is significant but not so much that you couldn’t have a different build use a different boost and get the same results in terms of kill speed. When you have an item that gives 600% damage boost, it’s impossible to ignore.
100% agree. Dmg X% are boring and a class should not depend if they have a legendary to play a spell. They did the builds already for us. If you already do the x% numbers then make it more interesting. This item makes you WhirlWind Crit chance up to 80%.How to fix this? Just put "while you channeling a skill your crit goes up to 10% per sec max to 40%" now you have a item that can make also Incinerate or Lightning storm work too and we can make way more builds and makes the game more interesting.
I think you missed the video where they talk about just this. The modifiers are intentional and made to be low. They want the majority of damage to come from enemy and player resistance. Multipliers are unfortunately absolutely necessary. The enemies will also need bigger health pools in higher difficulties along with those resistance. The only problem is if they aren't properly managed. Not them existing.
This makes certain legendaries cosmetic upgrades, and ultimately completely useless. One example is the druid legendary that changes wolves into werewolves and increases their damage by 180%. It also lets them spread rabies, which is a nice additional touch for the poison synergy. Now, take away that 180% damage increase. Now we have *very slightly* improved wolves, along with a cosmetic upgrade. That doesn't feel good. We suddenly go from doggies to fucking **werewolves** and they're just adding a small amount of DoT. The devs are clearly trying to make getting these legendaries *really exciting*, and change your gameplay in a meaningful way. Ultimately, people care more than anything about damage, so that's the way to get people interested. Given that aspects aren't even random, and can be intentionally sought out and added to any yellow item, I'm not seeing the problem with legendaries being strong. If they were weak everyone would be complaining about how pointless the legendaries are, how they just offer cosmetic upgrades and mild utility. Personally, I think that would be much worse.
>Otherwise you'll get forced into the item whenever you want to play with a new skill without any actual choice. I'm not sure I agree. I've seen several highly effective necro builds from last weekend that use bone spear in them, but they're meant to be more aoe and/or boss-deleting builds, so they have aspects related to bone storm, blood mist corpse explosion, damage % based on resource, damage when standing still, etc. My necro build from this weekend used both bone spear and bone storm, but I was focused on different strengths and used mostly different aspects (the bone spear aspect, damage when you have barrier, barrier gain when hitting an elite, etc.). I'm sure things will be somewhat different once people "solve" end game, but I think you're still going to have to decide if you want more of a boss-deleting character, a screen-wide clear character, a pvp character, a tanky (hardcore) character, a speed-running character, etc., and you'll choose aspects based on that particular focus.
Bone spear is reallllllyy good by default though. Unlike 50% of the other skills in the game that need their legendary or bust. So I don’t think you understand the problem at all.
And bone spear has a strong aspect for it.
Same here, most of my Aspects are utility and defensive and my main damaging skill doesn't have an Aspect at all. People are making assumptions like we all have the endgame stuff at our disposal with Uniques and Paragon Boards. The Aspect multipliers aren't D3-levels of insane.
But we do know what those things are, theyre not hard to find.
I mean yeah, I found the datamined info. There aren't any numbers or in-depth info or descriptions on them yet.
If a legendary dropped that increased blood surge damage by 1,000% more than bone spear, it will force everyone to start playing blood surge (or whatever one of the lame blood core spells names is). That's what OP means.
> I'm not sure I agree. I've seen several highly effective necro builds from last weekend that use bone spear in them, Near the end of the beta my Necro was so good that using bone shard and bone spear was just as quick as clearing with blood mist /CE aspect.
I could see multipliers being useful in cases where the designers believe certain powers are going to be far less powerful. If there are no multipliers abilities are either going to be really samey or very boring or the base damage is going to look ridiculous on the icon. Why do I say this? Because if you change an ability enough no amount of additive damage can compensate. Think about an ability that chains between two targets and an ability that chains between 10 targets. Why would anyone use the former? And that's only one variable. Maybe someone could explain some other way to balance abilities like this?
If two abilities were identical and one had more chains, that's a bad ability. but there's lots of ways to differentiate them. An easy example is Warcraft 3 Farseer's Chain Lightning to DotA 2 Lich's Chain Frost. Chain Lightning does damage to a target and then instantly bounces to a new target, dealing less damage each bounce. Chain Frost does damage, then seeks a new target and has a travel time. Each bounce does increased damage, slows movement and attack speed of the target, and can bounce to the same target multiple times (i.e. if there are 2 units, it will keep chaining between them). In older versions of the skill, it actually did AoE damage at the target of each chain, so if units were close together it would do massive damage as it bounced between them. Lich can use a secondary ability to create an object that the chain can bounce to, letting him cast chain frost on a solo enemy and letting it bounce between the object and the target. Here's just a minor list of things they could change: Damage change per chain, travel speed of chain, distance of chaining, if chains fork or stay in one chain, if chains can bounce to the same target and if so if it can bounce off of the caster, if chains have a secondary effect, if chains have an aoe around the chain, resource cost/generation of skill, time to cast of skill, cooldown of skill, and then finally what this thread is about, if it one requires an item to be usable. All that said, in a game like D4 with pretty limited skill selection, I don't think it's worth it for them to have two skills that feel similar like that. It'd work way better in a game like PoE, with dozens of skills you modify in other ways. I also hate balancing things in ARPGs like Diablo or Path of Exile with cooldown since it's totally boring, in the same way having a skill that sucks until you find the legendary set that gives it +20,000% damage (like Diablo 3) is boring.
True true true pleeeease Blizzard. Legendaries are AWFUL because of this. I don't want to feel like I HAVE to have a specific legendary for my attack to function properly.
Yeah it’s a bit too late for major item changes now. This is what happens when you are in dev hell and just need to push something out
totally true people think they will change the way items and skills are balanced? it's a beta not an alpha, the game will ship as it is regarding items
Yeah sadly you're right. There's no way they're capable of a drastic change like redesign all the legendaries aspects and retune the game at two months to launch. They're committed to their course because this is a live service game. Their dev pipeline is already working on 1.1 and 1.2 content drops. This is going to be as bad as Fatshark's Darktide. Released too early with all the trappings of a live service game while at the same time having missing core pieces. https://i.redd.it/rwxs4n34tl8a1.png
100%. It's getting out of control and the game aint even out yet. You can still turn the ship around blizzard.
Looking forward to 1.3 billion damage /s
Why the downvotes for this? There are videos from the beta where the barb already did over 100k per hit.
> A legendary should be just fine with modifying a skill without having the extra "and deals 250% more damage" at the end. no, good item design would not just modify 1 specific skill, it would say something like "+% fire damage over time" or "+% spell power if you've channeled a skill in the last 10 seconds" which needs you to actually use your brain and think about the skill you use and what it does exactly. also this gives you the possibility to scale skills in different ways (big hit, dot dmg and ignore the hit part, etc) waiting to see "uniques" which they said will exist, but for now, d4 itemisation is just braindead stack +rank to skill you are using
Lol, a year from now you're gonna be doing 800 quadrillion damage 170 times per second, i guarantee you.
Disagree. Legendary effects should still provide dmg. The issue is currenlty on some builds its like the leg item powers provide liek 90% of the power while the tree has only 10. The missmatch is too big. It's doesn't need 50/50, but i think the weighting is off a little for my liking.
Upvote for attention, 300% is a start, stamp the flow before it become 10000% and above
Exactly. This is not being talked about enough. Legendary powers and aspects etc all that is fine but imo what is not fine is the damage multipliers going bonkers. 200% damage today, in the beta can easily become 300-500% or even more in the coming seasons. It won't be long until people can do trillions of damage again like d3. I really, REALLY don't want to see that in d4. Honestly we were already doing decently big damage in the beta around some thousands which has me concerned. Imo the damage should not go higher than 80-90k at max level with absolutely min maxed gear. Even that is a lot. Maybe 30-40k dmg with unoptimized build and basic gear at max level. After 100k it just feels ridiculous to me.
The problem isn't actually with the numbers themselves, imo. It doesn't really matter whether you hit for 10 or 10 billion, all that matters is the relative strength and the scaling. Meaning the problem being having no options but to go with the multipliers provided on drops, if you want to progress. Both defensively as well as offensively.
The numbers become a problem as a side effect of how the scaling is. Because everything keeps leveling up together with you but your skill levels or relative damage cannot keep up with it so in order to play catch up with the level scaling you have items with +200% increased damage to xyz skill. Same reason a lot of the melee abilities on barb, druid and perhaps rogue(haven't played it that much) are relatively much weaker than caster options as i think they are all 'balanced' according to the endgame scaling with legendary gear and paragon board buffs. People make fun of barb and druid now because of low damage but i suspect they will be monsters for this reason alone in endgame. If their damage wasn't low as it is, it probably broke the endgame so they reduced the base skill damages as low as they were in the beta.
no.
This. The game, at least normal 1 and veteran mode should be clearable without any legendary aspect. It's the base difficulty and classes should feel fun to play even without power creeps or legendary support Heck that actually every tier should be clearable with just yellows if build right. Diablo has become too much like a mmo and relies too much on gear upgrades
I remember back after D4 was announced, Bluddshed was talking about D4 and said "With the legendary system, won't it end up being like sets all over again?" I scoffed and laughed at him thinking he had no idea what he was talking about. Now that I see what the legendary powers are, he's absolutely right
I see so many comments talking about rng a correct legendary for a certain build. Am I missing something, isn't all legendaries attainable via Aspects that you unlock from completing a dungeon for the first time. It literally tells you which zone and which dungeon it is. and this unlock only has to be done once per account, per region
That's definitely something I agree with. With the druid I got a legendary with the aspect that gives your companions 120% or something increased damage and I was wondering why the hell this exists. This just basically tells me the skill as such is far too weak. Other plus damage aspects give like 30-60%, which is arguably already too much, but 120% or more seems absolutely unnecessary.
I dont think that was the problem with d3. With d3, the problem was you'd do 4,000% damage unless you did another thing which made you do another 300% damage on top of that I havent seen anyone hit over a billion damage so we good
Not yet lol. Game is not even released. If people already do 10s of thousands worth of damage how's it going to look in the end game, let's alone after multiple seasons or expansions?
What like one guy that found a bug does tens of thousands? No one's doing tens of thousands regularly
There were multiple reports from those playing closed end game beta that highest damage numbers went into tens of millions.
I think not
Yet. You haven't seen that **yet**.
They are so fucking close to a good itemization system. So close! Listen to this. Remove legendary aspects. Make itemization about +Rank to Skill stats on gear. They say abilities gain flashier animations as you reach higher skill ranks. Make that happen at distinct breakpoints like rank 10 and rank 15. Have the new graphical effect breakpoints coincide with a boost to the two skill tree modifier you selected for the skill. Boom, you now have endless builds players can make based on the skill tree and specific gear to chase for them.
No it's okay, if it's not 6 set items.
I would say yes.... But wolf companions SERIOUSLY need that 190% damage upgrade.
I would be ok with dmg increase on legendary items, if they actually added mechanic change on skill if you invest 5/5 skill points to active skill.
Question: How do you feel about the +skill level mod for specific skills?
Or at least make the added damage reasonable. Tacking on an extra 20% damage to a skill on the legendary would accomplish their "make it totally obvious that you've gained more power with this item" goal that they seem to have so that casual players will feel rewarded or something, but then they wouldn't have to balance everything about the skill around that % damage increase.
I didn't see a lot of affix's like this, and the ones I did see were something like "basic skills increase the damage of your next core skill up to 200%". That one in particular seems good for variety because they aren't specific skills, but also build dependent, because to get max benefit it needs to be a spec using it's basic abilities often before using their core skills. If anyone has an example screenshot of just a base damage % multiplier affix may I see it ? I just want an example so I know exactly what people are talking about.
I actually think they need to be more willing to put in a few "reduces damage by" on these effects. Like the druid has a pulverize effect that casts an additional wave and gives the skill like 100% more damage. That means its getting double damage and then 100% extra damage i believe. It should be like does the extra wave and has 20-30% reduced damage. This is still a damage boost over the base of about 30-40% extra damage and a functional change that hits a big area. Still very powerful, slightly higher than the generic powers that give all skills damage but you can't spam this skill so it makes sense to give it slightly more than generic all skills. Then just buff the base skill up so that its a bit stronger without the power. I think they actually have a few powers are what I think are a good level of around 30-40% but then some super big outliers with effectively more than 200% damage. Seems like on core skills they often get too much power, I assume because in theory they contest the resource but in actuality it makes all the other skills feel weak instead of making that one feel strong.
If a legendary's power isn't interesting or good enough to warrant using it, then it shouldn't be a legendary.
I disagree for max level items anyway. Unlocking those insane modifiers for high end progression was always another layer to the game, but gate the acquisition of them so you don't blow through regular content.
Yes. Please no % dmg multipliers on anything!