Diablo IV - Page 36

On October 13 2022 06:51 andrewlt wrote:
D2 was also much easier than vanilla D3's inferno, where they made the asinine decision to have MMO raid style progression. The gearing requirements were much higher, unless you play a class like DH that can dodge everything. And even then, you have to play perfectly because some overtuned crap like Belial will just 1-shot you. And you have to save your tumbling move for emergencies because with bad RNG, you can't dodge all the projectiles and stuff being thrown at you without it.

Having rifts as the endgame doesn't help either. It made the game competitive and people would whine if one class can do level 50 rifts and another class can only do level 40 rifts. Once you get higher, almost everything is a one-shot so you have to dodge everything or spam skills that make you temporarily invulnerable or skills that would stop enemies from doing anything. It forced Blizzard to have to attempt to kinda balance D3, which they never had to do with D2 absent very edge cases like vanilla Barb WW and Necro CE.

From what I remember of D2, armor was pretty useless for the squishier chars like sorc and necro. It was all about resists and block rate/speed. Stuff like magefist or frostburn were BiS because almost nothing that spawned on that slot was really useful for a sorc. Int was mostly a newb trap that didn't really do much either. And life/mana steal were incredibly OP on the physical damage builds. Did they ever buff elemental damage? I remember it being weak and you only want it because of a lack of alternatives.

MF was a mistake. Since endgame in any ARPG is an item hunt, you never want to incentivize your player base to equip weaker gear with more MF over stronger gear with less MF. That's a terrible dilemma to give players.

On October 14 2022 06:35 andrewlt wrote:
I think that people cared about balance in D2, just nowhere near what it is today. Blizzard only had to take care of clear outliers. In D3, they had to balance the chars more closely to each other. And they did it by constantly buffing the weaker sets of the underperforming characters. And that of course resulted in pretty ridiculous levels of power creep every season. Hitting certain set bonuses in D3 just jumped your power by ridiculous levels.

On October 13 2022 23:09 Archeon wrote:


Armor was mainly low prio on ranged chars because the majority of ranged attacks that actually hit you weren't physical and you were often running anyways (if you weren't teleporting). Energy is imo still a good thing to level early on and then get rid off later via reset when you have gear that adds mana. The problem with it is more that there's a ton of it on later gear imo and stuff like insight just replaces it.

I don't have a problem with stats being weaker or stronger, it still creates dilemmas like "do I want 20 all res or 500 armor more on my chest? Do I still want all-res if I'm close to the cap in fire res anyways or is there some item I could swap my fire res boots to?". Similarly I don't mind MF at all, because it really makes you question your build and how much you can get away with until your killspeed and survivability suffer. I think it's a good way to reward players that can get further with less tbh.

I also don't think grifts was what made balance discussions, it's just fairly normal nowadays. They didn't have to balance d2 because at the time nobody really cared about PvE balance.

Don't get me wrong, D2's itemization definitely has it's flaws, among others how strong runewords are in comparison to uniques and sets and that there are some huge outliers that a lot of builds revolve around (insight, infinity, enigma to name a few). Overall I really don't like how item dependent physical chars in comparison to magic/elemental chars are. But it's still miles ahead of pretty much any other ARPG I've played and I've played a lot of them.