Lack of Diversity within the Skill Trees
What does this even mean when there are now tons of new skills in several new skill trees and mostly everything is unlocked? What this means to me is in the 2.0 patches, many skills that were originally one skill were split into two separate skills meaning you must spend twice as many skill points, which limits your actual choices. If you one-point a skill now, it is often not good enough to give you the benefit your toon needs, thus you are forced to divert your points up amongst the skills you need which ends up locking you generally into one specific skill tree. While prior patches were similar, none were so blatant, and it was much easier (and fun) to spec your toon.
Last season, I tried a Cold sorceress and thought it would be fun and unique to throw some points into Moonstrike, Paradigm Shift, and Cold Blooded for a much-coveted boost of -enemy cold resist. The build was a bust because the entire Cold sub-class is designed to be most successful when all the Cold skills are used in unison… thus killing build diversity and discovery. I quickly bored of this rigid and controlled architecture, so I switched to a Melee sorceress to great effect and got many of the available charms only to discover that to complete the rest, I needed *very* specific end-game gear to progress notwithstanding several trophies (more on that later). This season, I tried a Templar paladin since I had not played Holy Melee since Median 1.F9 and thoroughly enjoyed them the last time I did. I could not believe how utterly terrible his skills were at low level… utter garbage! I could not kill any monster without 5+ hits and I was upgrading my weapon to a faster swinging higher damaging one every chance I could get! His skills super suck (at low level anyway) so I respec’d and threw some points into Aspects to raise my damage and increase my survivability only to discover as I had previously with the Cold Sorc that the Templar only does his best (if you can even call it that) when you focus 100% of his skills in his sub-class tree. This was another highly disappointing experience for me, a sign – in my mind anyway – that each sub-class is designed to focus mainly only on the skills within that sub… which is the very definition of restrictive and the antonym of diversity! Combine this with the fact you must now use up more skill points (due to the skills being split into two) to achieve greater success means you really can’t afford to diversify as you used to by placing points into other skill trees… you simply do not have enough skill points to do so!
What is my suggestion to increase diversity and bring the fun back? Since the skill were split up as they are now, I am not entirely sure what can be done to improve diversity other than hand out more skill points, but this will cause over-powered toons for certain. I would like to hear suggestions on what other people think about this.
Lack of Diversity within the End Game Items
Perhaps it’s due to 2.0 trimming out many SU’s and rune words devs felt were replicas, but it is extremely noticeable now that instead of having a wide swath of end-game choices available, you have only one clear path to achieving the ability to complete end-game ubers, and that is with very specific end-game items designed and geared towards all of the sub-class arch-types (i.e. elemental caster, magic caster, melee, wdm/missile, summoner). While there are some pieces that are inevitably interchangeable, to achieve your desired hit recovery, resists, FCR or FPS, Block or Defense, you will absolutely need specific items, and because many of the items have been trimmed away, there are few and “restrictive” items to chose from. This is not what I consider a fun game-play experience, and that restrictive word keeps coming up!
With some classes, this restriction is achieved by only allowing your sub-class to use his/her skill with a specific item type (i.e. a crystal sword, a javelin, a spear, etc.) which makes sense for the sub-class, but ultimately controls exactly what your toon can use. It is also achieved by the narrow pool of end-game items available for your sub-class in general to reach all your necessary breakpoints for survival. Does it feel good knowing your toon is a cookie-cutter clone with no originality? No, it does not. Diversity is the key to discovery, the essence of what it means to explore and wonder how something works. From the small pool of classes I have played, I did not see much item diversity at endgame unfortunately.
What is my suggestion to increase diversity and bring the fun back? Add a shit-ton more items with mixed stats. It’s alright to have several SU armors with +DR%. It’s alright to have several SU weapons with LAEK. It’s alright to have several SU staffs with +Spell Focus. Bring back the diversity, and I am not talking about Relics! And bring reanimate back! For me, if an item has a chance to reanimate, it was very valuable! I don’t believe they increase the strain on our GPUs, I believe they are being phased out because they are targeted by the monsters, which means less attacks on the player, which means less damage and that ultimately equates to a harder time to balance around. Bring back the reanimate on items because they were fun and they were valuable.
Merc Durability
I love playing Median with a mercenary by my side as I traverse through the game, but not when he/she is constantly dying! At first, I thought the devs had intentionally made it so that mercs now had to be properly geared to survive, thus increasing the games longevity because now if you wanted your merc to survive, you must farm for two toons, not just yourself! However, I soon learned that only some mercs could survive ubers and most just constantly died! It did not seem to matter how well the merc was geared, how well you planed for his/her survival, maxed their resists to 85-90%, 50% DR, max IAS… they died much faster than in any previous patch, and many people noticed it and posted about it on the forums and complained on realms. This is when I realized that somewhere along the way, the decision must have been made that the mercenaries were too difficult to balance the game around – such as when a merc could clear Fautz solo – so the choice was made to reduce mercs to canon-fodder. Only the already meme-ly overpowered mercs are now able to stick it out. I cried foul, as did many others asking for a return of the mercs survivability only to discover in 2.1 they had their HP reduced even further. To me, this was the ultimate slap in the face, the “we think the game should be played our way or the highway” mentality and I did not take it well at all. Instead of raising the mercs health and defense (and perhaps lowering their damage to compensate for this), mercs had no change for 2.1 except to lower their health in Normal and Nightmare. I am not advocating for a naked merc to be a killing machine, but I think that *any* fully geared merc (not just the same old meme ones who almost never die) should be fully capable of surviving in most ubers that don’t one-shot you.
What is my suggestion to increase diversity and bring the fun back? Buff their health and defense, and lower their damage to compensate, simple.
Multiplayer Teamwork
Those are the main issues I see plaguing the 2.0 release. In general, Median Sigma has always suffered from a lack of players teaming up in games to complete quests. Why is that? Many posters have explained thoughts and ideas they’ve had for increasing player cooperativity in games, from guilds to multi-player instances, to returning PVP, but obviously most if not all of these things would require significant code edits to achieve if done in game. So this brings me back to my question, because in it lies the answer and solution to the problem… Why do most players choose to play solo? For the most part, this seems to be most endemic to Hell difficulty, although it has become more common in lower difficulties as well in recent patches. Regarding Hell, part of the obvious problem is that when a uber boss is killed, they only drop one charm. That absolutely rewards individual play. I would suggest instead to drop ‘x’ amount of charms per player on screen during the deathblow. I would also suggest, to encourage teamplay, to give charms the lowest possible stat, and increase its effective power per player in the game rather they are there for the deathblow or not. For example, if a charm had +4% max resists, it could be for 1-2 players = 1% max resists, 3-4 players, 2% max resists, 5-6 players, 3% max resists, and 7-8 players, 4% max resists. This would encourage full games without having to made insane code edits by instead having the boss drop charm version 1-8 depending on how many players are currently in the game.
Another problem is completed quests. It would be so nice if, globally, all quests remained open, and were only closed to the individual toon that completed the quest. This would also encourage players to join games because nothing is quite so frustrating as finding out everyone is in A3 and you can’t kill Duriel to join them. So how would this work? I imagine if it were possible, to do individual instances for quests, thus if player 1 and 2 who killed Duriel goes into Duriels chamber it is empty, but if player 3 who did not kill Duriel goes in, he is alive for him (and other players who have not killed him yet who can join in the battle), so the quest can still be completed in the game. This would greatly improve the multiplayer aspect of the game, and further encourage players to join and fill games.
Specifically regarding improving multiplayer cooperation, other ideas I have seen but are most likely impossible to implement are drops only being able to be picked up by the killer for a short amount of time, the ability to join guilds (a tag next to your toons name) that somehow increase your power when you play together, and arenas and pvp.
