Dubious design choices - share your thoughts

Much like the previous feedback I made, this is another one which I hope could help improve the gameplay experience, so no matter how it may seem, don't think of it as a "this sucks, I'm outta here" kind of thread, but more like "Hey, these things could be improved and the game would be even better than it is right now".

1) Drop restrictions STRONGLY favoring certain builds

Anyone with half a brain has no other choice when picking a char/build than to make a decision based on the consideration that certain items can practically (taking into account the most reasonable farming places) only be found in Duncraig, and some of them only in Bremmtown/Fauztinville. Unlike in the olden days of Laz's MXL, where you could, with enough luck, find great sacred uniques in K3KBA or TA, which were places most builds could farm at a reasonable pace, SIGMA now severly punishes you for not choosing an OP/imba builds that can steamroll Dunc/Fauztinville, which didn't use to be the case - if you played some oddball/non-OP kind of build, you could still farm for great gear with pretty much NO RESTRICTIONS.

I know the reason for making this area/SU level distinction was to provide incentive for players to take on the more difficult ubers, but I think it brings more downsides than upsides.

2) Access to Fauztinville

This is very simple - the access to an uberlevel where core items like Great Runes can drop should not be dependant on another uber - ESPECIALLY if that another uber is frigging Banisher of Light. What I'd already explained in paragraph 1) makes the situation even worse - the access is even more important because Fauzt is one of the very few sensibly farmable spots where lvl 125 items can drop.

3) Area exlcusive items/Toraja sucks

Without any scruples, I will go on to say that to me, is is one of the least entertaining uberlevels in the game, and it has been that way since its introduction years ago. That wouldn't be so bad per se - IF ONLY it wasn't the only area where another set of Great Runes can be found.

This place is all about spamming Edyrems and the luck of the draw - if too many archers spawn next to each other, your progress is going to be slow because of Edyrems popping like baloons and their weird AI which simply means you have to spam them until they somehow clear off enough immunity shields for you to progress. It's not difficult, just mind-numbingly boring and slow.

And yeah, you might say this uber was made for summoners, and you know what - that's fine, but then it either:
a) shouldn't drop exclusive items
b) should be reworked in a way that even other characters can reasonably farm the place without taking the risk of falling asleep or dying of boredom.

The current logic behind all this is flawed - in my view, item restrictions don't work as an "incentive" for players to visit certain places, they pretty much force you to make certain char/builds choices. Wanna farm Toraja? Roll a speicifc build or go F yourself. This is all because of the B/W approach - I think if all these areas had an improved bias for certain (currently exclusive) items to drop, it would be OK.

4) Reanimates/craft nerfs
Before the change, I think it already took buring quite a few shrines to roll a decent craft, but now, you aim pretty much only for godly crafts, because mediocre crafts are easily surpassed by T4 uniques/lower lvl RWs because of the removal of the doubled MO effect. A completely unnecessary change, IMHO.

With reanimates, it's almost the same situation - for example, I always found it fun to farm BPR in search of a charm with reanimates that complemented my build (melee Elites for ranged builds, ele boosters for casters/proccers etc.). Perhaps some monsters were too powerful (Void Archods?), but couldn't they simply be removed from the pool?

The lowered chance (1-2%) to reanimate on most items (and I won't even mention the ludicrousness of the 2% chance on the goddamn Kabraxis TROPHY) makes them virtually useless now - either your killspeed is low, in which case you make pretty much no use of the rarely reanimated monsters, or so high that you no longer need them because most of the stuff has already been killed by the time a few reanimated guys show up.

5) Long and awkward Purify fights
This has already been discussed in other threads and apparently, there is a rework in the works, so I'll just leave it as "listed" here.

Agreed

1.) lol no. the game makes rarer ssu's and sssu's more valuable, not only accessible to op builds. they require harder areas to farm better items. seems pretty logical I think.

2.) you don't need to kill kab to get to fauzt. just the ultra gems outside his arena.

3.) you can find great runes in yshari if you hate toraja that badly, but good luck spending forever for a chance at that drop. toraja wasn't made for summoners, it's just a lot more manageable since edyrem will die less due to summons taking more hits. just stop trying to steamroll shit and step back and try to understand what's needed to progress. I've farmed toraja on a zero defense castersin before. you don't need anything special besides positioning and understanding how it works and what you can handle.

4.) I don't remember seeing any confirmed rework pending. where did you see that

in the end though, feedback is good. i don't agree with most things you said, but feedback is valuable.

i agree that instead of encouraging a more build variety you are now pushed to play the best build , if you want to get most of the charms without feeling much pain , and somewhat forces twinking/grinding/buying specific items just to make those "non meta" builds behave /have results just as good as you can have with the best builds .

if you want to get all charms , you have to respec anyway because some of the ubers require specific stats to be done, but that also happend in the patches before Sigma .

i also dislike the fact that you are forced to stay and grind for xp just to get to the next set of ubers , even if your character may aswell be able to farm those next level ubers with just crafts on ( which you can get from mid-late Nightmare )

if my build can facetank and deal good enough damage at let's say level 110 , i'd like to go straight to farming Duncraig instead of wasting time leveling in cows (to 115) /tran athula or k3kba from 115 to 120 .if my build is not strong enough to do that at 110 , i will sure stick to tran athula/k3kba untill it gets strong enough , i don't need a level restriction to tell me that . but again , this whole progression/level restriction seams to be designed towards new players so my point is not generaly vaild . it's just my 2 cents

i'm a half disappointed and half "hype'd" about Sigma so far . it still needs a lot of work , and there will be a day when it will shine brighter than any other patch we had untill now , but until then we should be happy with what we got so far .

Playing different builds / chars is pain cause of the low ep gain 110-125. Realy "killed" the mod for me. Median was all about testing, trying different chars / builds.
But now you need to grind to 120+ to get some charms in so you dont have to put 300 points in str to wear your ssu of coice.
I mean, ep after 125 is really good. But getting to 125....

1) I think drop progression in general is good, but I don't like how the variety suffers. Beyond a certain point it's dunc/fauzt only for unique farming, omitting all the beautiful zones before, disregarding drop bias. If you could somehow get the ability to raise the alvl for level like K3K or TA late in the game, endgame farming would have much more variety.

3) My Proposal: Toraja Charm could have way more impact on Edyrems' tankiness. It's fine to slog through once, it's fine that summoners are way better in Toraja, but it would ease the pain after getting Lilith once.

4) I somewhat agree on Shrinecrafting, it feels underwhelming in many cases. I don't mind the reanimate changes myself.

6) Teganze streamlining: I don't like the recent changes to teganze at all, it makes the place feel like every other uber where you simply want to take the fotm available and run through. Assassins, Manasorcs and Summoners were gutted in their ability to shine here.

What annoys me personally is a really weird game philosophy. It's as if the focus is more on a punishing game design rather than a rewarding game design.

Example 1) You're punished with a slow movement speed. Instead of keeping "run" as the standard, every single player who played D2 or Median before will wonder: Hey, why am I stuck with this slow progression? Why not just keep run as a standard and improve it by removing Stamina& the punishing mechanics of TCD=0 and Block=1/3 effective. This is imho punishing for no reason when it could've been improved a lot. And no, I don't mind that the maximum run speed was capped. That's fine by me. It's just that the extent of how annoying the sprint mechanic is, is unspeakable. I as the player want to run, not be stuck in a lame, boredom-causing animation that completely takes out every little tension from the game. See that muscular, ripped barb? He can run for 5 seconds *insert trollface here with the caption: Game logic*

Example 2) Creative builds are punished/testing things out has become really annoying because of multiple reasons:
1. Respec is limited to how many Belladonnas you can find so if you can't respec back to your original spec, there's a chance the new spec is completely garbage and you just ruined your character that way. This can be solved by simply adding a drop bias for belladonnas to Torajan Jungles, since this place is a traversing stage anyway. It's easy, gives stats points, gold, can drop some sets, drops many potions etc. It doesn't excel at anything, so farming Torajan Jungles is always an option for progress to a certain point.A drop bias for belladonnas would perfectly fit to that stage.
2. The leveling process takes too long. Rolling a new character isn't fun that way, especially since normal & NM have become a lot more boring. This can be solved by just letting the farm levels give about 20-30% more exp for SP. Then it would already be fine. (I don‘t know how it is in MP)

Example 3) The whole Fauztinville behind Kabraxis-lockout discussion. I don't mind if there's an uberlevel behind a weaker uberlevel as long as the easier one is managable by every spec. Fauztinville being stuck behind the Kabraxis stones is such a punishing mechanic for many many builds, especially when you take the Belladonna recession into consideration. This is a game design that punishes the player for no reason at all. And again, I don't care that for example judgement day is locked behind a level filled with Khalimgrad enemies. Khalimgrad is a farmable place, so of course nearly every spec is able to do it. So the access to judgement day is completely fine even if it takes long. But locking the uberlevels vice versa is just a really bad design.

Yes Crash, I know you don't need to kill Kabraxis but that's not the point. Even "just" doing 5 different types of damage is neither easy to pull off with only 1 build, nor something a newbie wants to be stuck at. I want to play my build. Not be forced into playing something different that may has some really boring or annoying gameplay.

How to solve that problem: I would be perfectly fine if you had to go through farming areas to get to the Boss ubers, but vice versa is simply a bad design choice. Even locking a farming uber behind a different farming uber is a bad design.

Example 4: It's not fun walking through a level 110 area (Torajan Jungles) only to see: Oh damn for this uber I need to wait 15 more levels (Astrogah). So you already know that at one point you have to farm a farming area that gives you nothing at all at this point. You're stuck with a boring uber that neither gives exp, nor adds more to your already capped gold or capped eaten sigs. It's just a huge time of waste at that point and punishes the player again for no reason at all. How to solve that problem? The general idea as I said previously is good, but the farming areas should always give you some reward. What I mean by that is that the farming area should only give you access to ubers of the same required level. That way you can farm while walking to uber 1, kill the boss (who could potentially give you a nice exp boost), walk further through the farming uber, kill boss 2, who gives you again some nice Exp so that at the end of the run you killed 4 different bosses, who gave you a level worth of experience in total while farming an area that still gives you exp and whatever else the drop bias is there.

Of course, that also has its own problems since that way you only need 1 farming area every 5 levels and in addition to that you're stuck if you can't manage the farming uber.

To sum up example 3 and 4:
Good design:
Farming uber--> Boss uber
Boss uber --> Boss uber
Bad design:
Boss uber --> Farming uber
Farming uber --> Farming uber

i haven't reached the stage a lot of players have, and i'm certainly on the newer side of things. But the game to me seems taylored similar to how d3 and wow have done theirs. It's trying to get you to spend as much time online and on one character as possible. Almost every decision I've seen so far is just to slow people down and remove builds that would have a solid farming speed.

Their philosophy seems entirely aimed at punishing players for every single thing they can get away with just to slow them down and increase this playtime. To me the 2 changes i've seen from playing old mxl that really frustrate me are belladonna drops without a biased location, and the run/walk toggle removal. If I'm farming something so much bellow me that the punishment of 0 defense is bearable for the movespeed/clearspeed then I'd like that option. cause god forbid people actually like to do something with relative speed rather than be a complete slug.

you have what a 2% drop chance on a trophy give or take? why would i want to clear something slowly when I'm going to need an average of 50 runs for the trophy. or several hundred runs of the upper farm locations. I can see uberbosses being on the somewhat slower side of things, but you still need to kill them 50ish times each for the trophy. And if you look at the difference in levels that's what 150-200ish clears of torajan? (the 110's later 115's and then the future kill there). who in gods name wants to do that slowly with so many needing done.

ChuckNoRis wrote:i agree that instead of encouraging a more build variety you are now pushed to play the best build , if you want to get most of the charms without feeling much pain , and somewhat forces twinking/grinding/buying specific items just to make those "non meta" builds behave /have results just as good as you can have with the best builds .

if you want to get all charms , you have to respec anyway because some of the ubers require specific stats to be done, but that also happend in the patches before Sigma .

i also dislike the fact that you are forced to stay and grind for xp just to get to the next set of ubers , even if your character may aswell be able to farm those next level ubers with just crafts on ( which you can get from mid-late Nightmare )

if my build can facetank and deal good enough damage at let's say level 110 , i'd like to go straight to farming Duncraig instead of wasting time leveling in cows (to 115) /tran athula or k3kba from 115 to 120 .if my build is not strong enough to do that at 110 , i will sure stick to tran athula/k3kba untill it gets strong enough , i don't need a level restriction to tell me that . but again , this whole progression/level restriction seams to be designed towards new players so my point is not generaly vaild . it's just my 2 cents

i'm a half disappointed and half "hype'd" about Sigma so far . it still needs a lot of work , and there will be a day when it will shine brighter than any other patch we had untill now , but until then we should be happy with what we got so far .

That´s the issue with cookie cutter builds. Ever since bremm was placed behind fautz, you could tell that this was coming. Chaining ubers/quests in a specific way only helps certain builds that can do the progression in that way. I personally used to keep dunc for last on my caster characters for instance because it is an unfavorable match rather often. I used to be able to farm fautz before dunc. Now however, the level lock is used to force you to progress in a certain way on top of the required uber chaining.

All of this, in combination with the completely butchered oskill list makes for a handful of viable cookie-cutter builds based on native skills which strips the game of any theory-crafting possibility and hence reduced variety. Which is why my comment to Marco yesterday was that Purify is a symptom pointing to the bigger problem. Fixing the skill/oskill/gear list is the solution to median´s problems. Which in turn would produce build variety and there wont be any need for exp lock or Purify to begin with.

Side note: the rationalization "exp lock is geared toward new players" might sound reasonable but the fact of the matter is: player experience is not a factor. The build is what matters. Generic progression lock based on exp means fuck all since some builds can do dunc at level 90 with access to some decent crafts regardless of how new/experienced the player is.

cyborgtemplar wrote:i haven't reached the stage a lot of players have, and i'm certainly on the newer side of things. But the game to me seems taylored similar to how d3 and wow have done theirs. It's trying to get you to spend as much time online and on one character as possible. Almost every decision I've seen so far is just to slow people down and remove builds that would have a solid farming speed.

Their philosophy seems entirely aimed at punishing players for every single thing they can get away with just to slow them down and increase this playtime. To me the 2 changes i've seen from playing old mxl that really frustrate me are belladonna drops without a biased location, and the run/walk toggle removal. If I'm farming something so much bellow me that the punishment of 0 defense is bearable for the movespeed/clearspeed then I'd like that option. cause god forbid people actually like to do something with relative speed rather than be a complete slug.

you have what a 2% drop chance on a trophy give or take? why would i want to clear something slowly when I'm going to need an average of 50 runs for the trophy. or several hundred runs of the upper farm locations. I can see uberbosses being on the somewhat slower side of things, but you still need to kill them 50ish times each for the trophy. And if you look at the difference in levels that's what 150-200ish clears of torajan? (the 110's later 115's and then the future kill there). who in gods name wants to do that slowly with so many needing done.

The push toward multiplayer is obvious and borderline _insert any generic bad word_ imo. Removal of p8 on single player was the worst thing this patch introduced followed by the exp lock and bellas drop rate.

As for the trophy drop chance. Lets assume that´s fine. What´s the justification for 1/6 or 1/10 drop rate for charms?!?! FFS Terul had 1/4 in previous patches to drop the trader´s chest. I had to clear Teganze dozens of times for trader´s chest. Any person who remotely understand odds and probability/distribution could tell you that this is beyond horrible choice. 1/10 ffs... It boggles my mind how little people understand drop rate odds especially considering how random D2 truly is compared to say PRNG of other RPGs. similarly and as an example I suspect that this was the reason this was introduced:

* The variance of pierce rolls on shrines has been reduced

Yet we keep seeing fractional RNG drop rates for charms and trophies that could equal that of winning a freaking small lottery. But all of that aside, There are more pressing problems than this.

1.sprint,- the mechanic itself feels refreshing to me, just the base recharge rate seems too low. need to wait like 10 sec to be able to run 5 sec (or so it feels) It doesn't matter much in the late game but while leveling up it's often quite annoying.

2.Kabraxis,- I like pretty much everything about this fight, just the "pushback" he often does when teleporting on you feels unnecessary (not sure if it's intended)
3. Lucion,- I like most things about this fight aswell, but it can be a real pain in the butt sometimes. I have done it before in around 15min, but other times I gave up after a while, because i couldn't lure Lucion close to Malic reliably for some reason and/or he wouldn't take dmg from Malics attacks.
I also don't like that chain-teleporting me all over the place. Idk there is a chance im just bad at this fight but it feels pretty random to me and could use some tweaking.

4.Fautz I agree to what others already said about the lock behind the gems. imo either make that "challenge" easier or lock it behind some other content that has a lower level of difficulty.
5.crafting seems fine to me, maybe im a bit lucky but I don't mind if it takes 5 shrines (50 charges) for a decent craft and maybe 10 times as much for something really good, especially since shrines drop so much. Just think about how much u need to craft to get a half decent amulet in vanilla and how long it takes to gather the resources for those.
6.plugy is still missing sadly, think I heard that they are going to add it though and the other option we have for now is decent, so no biggie.
7.pathing seems to be bad sometimes for me. Maybe it's not a problem for others but i feel like my character gets stuck a lot more on random objects like bushes/stones/pathways etc. (in vanilla he would go around more often/easily)
8.d2stats is really great but I miss the old stat overview which we used to have ingame.
9.Portals seem to disappear sometimes? I had it happen to me before and saw it once on lamas stream.

a couple more things that have either already been mentioned or are not really worth doing so. thanks to the developers for their time and effort.