Median XL 2016 Announced

cowking wrote:That way we wouldn't have 27+ useless oskills that nobody ever uses.

Excluding Apocalypse, Psicrown, Devouring Cloud, Lightning Wall, Cataclysm, Hailstorm. Ice Bolt Nova as well.

Yeah, what IS the deal with the oskills that.. basically do nothing when it comes to creep clear, EVEN compared to level 1 skills? Is it cheese? Like, for real, why not just straight out remove them? I've tried a few of them in SP, with various gear and whatnot. They just.. don't scale, like at all. Well, they do, but it's so MINISCULE, compared to other stuff, and I'm not even talking about OP shit. Shouldn't early access oskills be at least near as viable as a level 6 spell?
I know it sounds like a meepy rant, considering that (as I understand it) this is being fixed in sigma, but, I'd like to remind that some things we are just better off without (even tho that spell that looks like a grave shooting out ice banshees looks kinda cool).

Rustmonster wrote:Yeah, what IS the deal with the oskills that.. basically do nothing when it comes to creep clear, EVEN compared to level 1 skills? Is it cheese? Like, for real, why not just straight out remove them? I've tried a few of them in SP, with various gear and whatnot. They just.. don't scale, like at all. Well, they do, but it's so MINISCULE, compared to other stuff, and I'm not even talking about OP shit. Shouldn't early access oskills be at least near as viable as a level 6 spell?
I know it sounds like a meepy rant, considering that (as I understand it) this is being fixed in sigma, but, I'd like to remind that some things we are just better off without (even tho that spell that looks like a grave shooting out ice banshees looks kinda cool).

It's actually something that Laz has talked about for some length. The thing about oskills is that they don't need you to spend skill points to use, which is huge. That means that when you have an oskill that is of comparable power to a character skill you see players all lining up to use it and ditching the character skills entirely. That's why oskills have to be weaker, or put on weaker/rarer items to balance them out.

In an ideal world the strength of oskills would be balanced such that they wouldn't dominate and all of them would still be useful in some build or other. But that's hard to achieve, and Laz and Marco seem to have just left a lot of them in a pretty useless state.

I agree though, may as well remove all the lame ones and just leave some strong ones that are associated with rare items or high-level runewords.

archon256 wrote:
Rustmonster wrote:Yeah, what IS the deal with the oskills that.. basically do nothing when it comes to creep clear, EVEN compared to level 1 skills? Is it cheese? Like, for real, why not just straight out remove them? I've tried a few of them in SP, with various gear and whatnot. They just.. don't scale, like at all. Well, they do, but it's so MINISCULE, compared to other stuff, and I'm not even talking about OP shit. Shouldn't early access oskills be at least near as viable as a level 6 spell?
I know it sounds like a meepy rant, considering that (as I understand it) this is being fixed in sigma, but, I'd like to remind that some things we are just better off without (even tho that spell that looks like a grave shooting out ice banshees looks kinda cool).

It's actually something that Laz has talked about for some length. The thing about oskills is that they don't need you to spend skill points to use, which is huge. That means that when you have an oskill that is of comparable power to a character skill you see players all lining up to use it and ditching the character skills entirely. That's why oskills have to be weaker, or put on weaker/rarer items to balance them out.

In an ideal world the strength of oskills would be balanced such that they wouldn't dominate and all of them would still be useful in some build or other. But that's hard to achieve, and Laz and Marco seem to have just left a lot of them in a pretty useless state.

I agree though, may as well remove all the lame ones and just leave some strong ones that are associated with rare items or high-level runewords.

Exactly my point. I don't say that Oskills should be on par with character skills either, but some of them are way stronger, and some are just bottom trash, which creates a disparity that bugs me, and I believe many others, out. At the very least, I'd like to see oskills trimmed, reduced to a handful and room opened up for improvement on the items/runewords that had them. Sure, it would be cool if there would be a bit of tiered solution to the oskills, but I think Sigma has enough on it's plate.

Wotan wrote:
SpamBomb wrote:Gieb sigma

Begoner.

Nou

Question regarding Sigma vs. MXL2016. I have not seen this addressed anywhere, if it is please disregard and point me in a direction.
Say that the two patches will be released within a similar(ish) time of each other (possibly within 6 months of each other), how will this be supported online from a multiplayer perspective? Will both be available via TSWII? I assume that if someone wants to play each of the different patches online, we will need to level different characters in each patch (eg. I like to have a 120 of all 7 chars, so 7 chars in each patch/ladder reset). Is there any worries about taking a community of players and separating them into two different mods from a multiplayer perspective? Looking forward to it when they come out!

Sigma is intended to be a sequel of 2016 patch. A lot of people still like to think it as a complete new mod, because that's how it was first introduced. As I've mentioned before, due to the delayed coding of sigma's core (which luckily is being worked on now) - a lot of the implemented features and changes are intended to stay in sigma. This basically means sigma will be a sequel of 2016 patch, and thus is intended to be the main mod version.

Version 2016 mainly exists to speed up some of the balance and rework changes intended to be implemented in sigma. This means, once the sigma core is finished, there will be less work required to adapt the patch to the new hardcoded features.

How will this affect realm play? First of all, sigma's core patch will have much more interaction with PvPGN realms. In-game trading of forum TG plus other features that will add more multiplayer functionalities will require some testing to ensure it's safe to do a ladder reset. It is possible that there will be two simultaneous ladders for a little while, but the sigma ladder will be exclusive for beta testers. Once everything is set and working, it will be restarted and become the only ladder for all public.

Thanks for the response, personally I am glad that once everything is set and done, it will be the only ladder for public. I was unaware that Sigma is intended to be a sequel to 2016, something I am also happy to hear as I would like to play both. Alot of time goes into each patch for individuals, it would have been difficult for some people to split time between two simultaneous ladders and achieve the typical goals they do.
Looking forward to the resets, as it always seems to bring more traffic (existing and new members) back to the mod!

So there will be... Sigma Beta?

i rly do hope we get median xl 2016 soonish. last 5 years i have only play d2 just because of this mod