Few remarks on 2.0

Discuss Median XL!
BrecMadak
Sasquatch
65 | 2
Hey fellas,

I’ve some remarks for 2.0 to discuss, and I want to express them before moving to the next ladder.

However, the ultimate argument still lies: I’m curious why there is no incentive in playing together? Do the developers aim for everyone to solo the game? If yes, I’d like to hear their motives by doing so. Make charm drops to scale with the number of players in a game, just like quest item drops.

The same argument was questioned here.

Feature suggestions

1. The party tab is useless at the moment. We should be able to whisper directly to the player’s account name. It shouldn’t be separated per character the account has as it’s currently implemented with 2.0

2. Filler affixes, aka why we still have them:
Gold find ─ I don’t believe anyone merely needs ‘gold find’ on their equipment. The gold drops are already in hefty chunks that you won’t ask for it. On top of it, we already have rifts yielding heaps of gold. If you don’t want to remove it, at least merge it with ‘magic find’.

Random Movement Speed Bonus ─ another affix with 0 impacts on the gameplay and nothing interesting mechanically to have a varied speed bonus after a random amount of time.

Durability ─ Why do we still have durability? It serves no value to the gameplay. Just a tedious, repetitive task that takes away from your levelling. Consider leaving the stat for ethereal equipment.

Balance:
Barbarian class charm:
+2 to Barbarian Skills
+25% Bonus to Summoned Minion Life
+1% to Runemaster Defense Bonus


Not every barbarian is a summoner. It is useless for a non-summoner build. Also, the 1% defense stat is only being applied if the player has Runemaster.

The same goes for the Dragon Claw upgrade bonuses; not all Necromancers are summoners, or why Assassins get a mere +250 to mana.


Visual feedback
Earthquake animation: It’d make more sense if the visual would be similar to the Fissure spell of Druid.


Let me know what you think in the comments.

Thanks for reading.
Diaco
Void Archon
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Durability is a very relevant stat in WDM builds (and UHM paladin). Especially in labs, where you can't just exit and come back.

Random movement speed bonus is used as a drawback in a couple of very specific items that would be extremely powerful otherwise.

Gold find I'd say is only useful for the SU flail that converts gold find to lightning spell dmg. The other affixes do have their uses, although some of them are for niche builds. You do need some mediocre affixes to dilute the pool though, otherwise you'd be able to craft OP items with very little shrines
megametalman
Cultist
21 | 0
I have some personal opinions about your remarks:

1. No comment

2. Regarding filler affixes in general: they are there to prevent players from acquiring excellent items in minimal time. Especially in the cases of crafted gears and jewels, filler affixes are there to lower the chance of you having "all the relevant, useful affixes" for your character after few crafts. For example, right now, it may take hundreds to thousands of crafts to get the affixes you need one on a single weapon. But if filler affixes are eliminated, it may only take tens of crafts. Whether the attempt to make the game into a grindfest is for better or worse, I will not discuss in this reply.

Movement speed: stamina and movement speed are not trivial matters anymore. We used to have high movement speed and practically unlimited stamina in previous Median version. Now that this is not the situation in Sigma anymore, it affect gameplay greatly. Progression is more slow.

Durability: a good excuse to make you grind for Yshari Sanctum set.

There is deeper meaning to all the hindrances to the players. They are there to make the game more challenging, make good charms harder to obtain. And in turn, make people want to buy them instead of farming themselves. This will stimulate the flow of Trade Gold (TG).
felix0808
Pit Knight
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BrecMadak wrote:Hey fellas,
2. Filler affixes, aka why we still have them:
Gold find ─ I don’t believe anyone merely needs ‘gold find’ on their equipment...

Gold actually pretty balanced before lvl 110. I used it to buy mystic orbs and often i don't have enough to MO my gear. I think shops should have something pretty expensive to balance it further. I.e. UMO for 2 million gold or something like that.


Agree about durability. My claw assasin with 5 fpa attack just forced to go in town and use repair every 5 minutes. Not a big problem ofc, but it really adds nothing to gameplay. I see only one reason for this - eth items and the neccessity to use indestructible jewels to use them.

About playing together - fully agree. Seems MXL - solo game. In this season i tried to play with people at act1 Hell, and enemies was a LOT tougher. We just can't go through them to Andariel :D. But when i go solo, i easily kill her. And the second complain - loot ofc. When we play together i always think "how we divide the loot from Andy?", sorry i am a greedy guy :(. After that experience i don't even try to play with another guys. So problems preventing to play together are
* Increased difficulty (should be eliminated completely, why playing in group of 4 is much harder than solo?)
* loot (seems there is no solution here, because separate loot is impossible)
* uberquests (absolutely no reason to play together, +difficulty, only one charm, rofl. Pls give more charms, if we play in party)

But after all MXL Sigma 2.0 is a cool game. It goes much better than i played 3 years ago. The difficulty of uberlvls increases smoothly and they are quite interesting to conquer. There are really a lot of different builds even for one class. Most of the skills have it's uses in all playthrough (hello D2LoD firebolt :D). So i bow down to developers for this excellent project :)
Edited by felix0808 2 years.
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Scalewinged
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Diaco wrote:Random movement speed bonus is used as a drawback in a couple of very specific items that would be extremely powerful otherwise.

....And instead it made these items extremely useless :D

PS: Also purely agree that crafting systems is meh as for now. many of affixes spawned are simply useless in theory so why don't at least replace them with something more viable?. once again, some too pointless affixes can roll on items with range like 20-to-90 item level. in total: crafting is a really shit now esp with fact of shrine drops heavily nerfed and it may take months to craft single piece with specific shrines thru SSF playing (esp if it's WDM weapon that MUst have max damage and ED in significant amounts to outclass even simple TUs... or longstory caster crafting.. getting IAs and flat ele damage on staff? Yes please - most useful affix for these items always wanted to make WDM-build with staff!). You'd rather find viable SSUs then will be able to craft a early-midgame placeholder. That's totally wrong IMO.
All in all - those shit (random ms, pointless affixes) are just virtually makes boringness longer and nothing more. Like "you could go farm Dunc at level 125 but you simply have sucky luck and have no proper gear for it so go suck cows for shrines" (random example with what happening... mostly it's according to higher level wall, like when i stuck at level 134-135 in Dunc with manasorc just because she wasn't able to do Fauzt in simple runewords/TU/honorifics and had impossibly sick luck on crafting and drops.
Marrt
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there were comments from the devs about making the crafting process better, but it sounded a lot more complicated than the RW rework, so we gotta wait and see
Captcha
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I wrote a post about the grouping issue a couple of patches ago in the Feedback thread but no devs responded.

The problem seems to be that grouping is almost exclusively by people who already know each other in rl or make an effort to get a group together in advance of a new patch. There's almost no way to find a party to do a specific thing for a short time - and most d2 games are either short for a specific purpose (e.g. duncraig run) or they are levelling, in which case it's very unlikely that people will be at the same point in the process.

That's why your suggestion of better drops if more people are playing doesn't really work - it rewards those who already have a rl group even more than the current systems which makes it less likely that people will play online. It's one of the reasons I play SP mostly.

I realise that there's a limit to what can be done with the game code itself (to implement something like guilds), so if the game code can't be changed then I've suggested in the past that the web site (or discord) could be used to organise guilds. That way people can join up outside of the game and arrange to play in guild games (the usual thing: Sign up for guild Duncraig runs at 7pm GMT Thursday - and on the day they tell you "first game name Hobbitses1 password Fred").

There's already some channels for group play in discord, but no realistic way (that I can see) for people to arrange in advance to be there at the same time to do the same things.
felix0808
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You said that "There's almost no way to find a party to do a specific thing for a short time"
But i remember 8 ppl Baal and Cow runs at D2LoD. They happens constantly, people don't know each other, there were no guilds and they was pretty fun to do.

Why this is doesn't happen in MXL?
1) Because most of late game content is solo (Dungeons for charms) or just too hard because of x ppl difficulty (rifts)
2) Common playthrough is easier solo, than in party. Which is strange, because in real world 4 vs 1 fight always much easier than 1 vs 1 :D
Captcha
Mangler
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Yes and I analysed the reason for that in my previous (longer) post - I didn't want to repeat it all again. I may dig it out if I can find it and edit in a link.

Basically, the old d2lod game had very little end game. The runs were predictable as either cows or baal runs. It was easy to make a game and then a series of games.

In MXL, there's lot more variety in the end game options, so it's harder to team up. In theory, we could see a lot of game names saying "DuncRun11" but I rarely see it in practice - maybe because when I do see those, they usually have ppl with very different gear levels to mine so someone is dying all the time - often because they don't know which of the 6 TPs to take to get to where the action is - or there's 6 ppl playing in different places, some not even in Duncraig at all. If you make a Dunc game, someone will come and join it to run Fauzt on their own in an 8 player game, someone else is doing the same in Torajan Jungles and so on.

In an MMO, you'd make an instance of one area, such as one dungeon etc, but in d2 the instance is the whole game, which causes this problem. We can restrict a game by level, but not by area.
BrecMadak
Sasquatch
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I don’t believe the aim of the mod should revolve around generating more TG flow. There are core elements that should be prioritised when implementing a system. And partying is undoubtedly one of them since clod was released. SSF is Hobson's choice for many people because of the crippled features in party-play that Captcha and I’ve emphasised before.

Diluting the item pool with unsought choices and stretching the grind is hardly a favourable game design. And because of the long-windedness, SSF becomes the scapegoat. I can already imagine why players don't get character-centric/specific drops more often than other classes — the same answer; to inflate the TG flow. I can't put my finger on if this is the route the mod should head into.

Admittedly, SSF takes a long time to build your avatar and suffers from some of the mentioned design choices the most. I wish we had an SSF league system with tweaked rulesets to shorten the gap between the trade life mindset.
Edited by BrecMadak 2 years.