Dubious design choices - share your thoughts

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Im_a_ninja
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Specially regards 1+2+3 : yes, agreed
2cat
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Totally agreed
Sigma is great but can improve much more for better gaming experience

TBH
The purify ubers stage are so dumb and make no sense
what u need is to equip ur char as tank as possible and keep spamming that 5 second cd weird hitbox spell
U farm hard for Strength Beyond Strength .. bad mood ring .. etc
And these expensive rare SSU are just totally useless for many end game ubers

LOL.
Cheno
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I would like to see some charm craft that could be used by low level characters for %experience. For example upgraded judgement day charm + kabraxis charm = leveling charm with 80% experience or something like that. Leveling takes long enough as it is, without really focused farming techniques that not everybody should be encouraged to do. It would help SP too, but I know that a lot of people consider SP to be a meme full of cheaters.
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Skeptic_Zero
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2cat wrote:Totally agreed
Sigma is great but can improve much more for better gaming experience

TBH
The purify ubers stage are so dumb and make no sense
what u need is to equip ur char as tank as possible and keep spamming that 5 second cd weird hitbox spell
U farm hard for Strength Beyond Strength .. bad mood ring .. etc
And these expensive rare SSU are just totally useless for many end game ubers

LOL.


I agree. Rpg means playing a role and progressing through gaining gear. If both of those are negated, what's the point? Might as well just give all specs one attack skill and call it good.
ensgnblack
Dark Huntress
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I could go for some of the upper areas being quicker to get to. Getting to K3K, for instance, is a lot more tedious than it used to be.
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HechtHeftig
I paid 10$ for this.
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One thing I forgot to add to my comment concerning punishing game philosophy:

Timered early game skills that can be unlocked from their timer. There is nothing more disturbing than having a skill that you need to spam be locked behind either a cooldown or high mana costs. This adds nothing to the game and again punishes the player for no reason at all. You might say: "It's not punishing. You have to choose!" but that's wrong. There is no choice. There is only the illusion of choice when it comes to this counter-fun game mechanic, because having the cooldown removed is always needed. I get why they implemented it - they want to take away the ability for you to spam your stuff and they want you to waste important skillpoints. And both is, again, punishing, restricting, call it whatever you like. It's not a good game mechanic that aims at rewarding the player and only underlines the devs inability to balance the game (which is nothing new since bringing balance to a game that had many overpowered game mechanics is extremely hard to do)

Rewarding the player would be something like: "Adds 1 Nova every 5 Base levels" for Carnage for example.

The skill that was hit the most with this anti-fun mechanic is Maelstrom from assa. You need base level 8 to completely unlock it. 12 + 6*6= 48
So you're level 48 when you finally get access to your only way to reliably kill approaching monsters. This is just so ridiculous especially when you take into consideration that it's an assassin that we're talking about here.

To sum it up: Give us motivation to put points into skills, not a half-assed means to drain skillpoints for no reason.
Omesh
Dark Huntress
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We waited years for sigma and I myself was going to wait for plugy features and new waypoints maybe, but seeing this feedback I think I'll be back next year. Seriously even p8 is removed?
Gregz
Prowler
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I agree with the punitive and limiting design philosophies being a real problem.

I tried sigma for a week, and went back to 1.E9

Laz was a singular genius, he knew how to design a complex game while keeping it fun.
haemoneptra
Pit Knight
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The Sigma MXL version was my first playing this mod. As such i am a newbie at this itteration of D2.

I simply love it. Classic D2lod and PoD lost my attention due to having been played “vanilla” for over 10 years. This felt and still feels fresh, different yet familiar.
For me, some mechanics are weird, but enjoyable:

1) the walk/run mechanic doesnt bother me at all. D2 runspeed is walkspeed here, so thats fine imho.

2) grinding: i dont mind at this point. This is a bias, as i am new, and still enjoy picking up Uniques/sets and trying stuff out. I find gear for a different class, giving me the inscentive to go play and mess around with that class. Now for the veterans here, i can believe this gets boring, as “you have seen it all”.

3) uber level design: having to do one uber to get to the next is enjoyable on one side (zomg im making progress POG) and frustrating on the other (lol corpseruns!!!!)
But in general, i like the design of most Pre-125 ubers and Some 125’s. I also like the uldy path build-up, some of the void bosses and the maze for the visjery set. That being said: i agree that purify sucks. The uldy fight, laz, void, zorun tsin, witch, and the visjery set itself can all go suck it. Also, hard hitting mobs that you cant hit back (im talking about you, freaking zombie scum) are just bad design imho.

4) crafting/ssu sssu farming: again, im new, so im not biased towards previous mechanics. I like the way it is now. Ok, builds tend to be evolve to specific BIS items, but what aRPG doesnt have this? D3 is trying to move away from this, but people Will ALLWAYS find BIS builds and gear. I think this is inherent to these type of games. Can improvements still be Made? Yes of course, time Will tell and i have full faith in the dev team.

5) build diversity, skill use and tweaking: i like to mess around. I try out most things, so diversity is no problem for me. I starter to min/max my 3 endgame builds just recently, and then i can agree that a lot of skills become pointless. But this is more of a veteran-pet peeve, as more experienced players Will automatically go minmax and never use the “non-effitient” skills. Same point as with gear.


Conclusion, its hard to keep a game refreshing and innovative in all stages and for all people. But i think a good job is being done!!!

My two cents! Newbie out ;)

Ps: Edit: for those bitching about P8 on SP being removed: there have been multiple threads about TCP-IP co-op for SP, and i have been doing this for the past few weeks now. I get a half lvl Or more of exp per dunc run on 120 -125 with 6 players in a game on SP. Same goes for fautz/bremm runs at 130-140! This is without exp gear on. I currently dont see any inscentive to grind to 150, but hopefully that Will change in the near future :)
Edited by haemoneptra 4 years.
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Primarch
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HechtHeftig wrote: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 agree with pretty much all of it.

One thing I hope to see in the future: a shift away from “you need to respec to do this Uber” to “you need to switch gear to do this Uber.” You’re totally right about how people “just want to play their build” and that the belladonna recession, as you so-cleverly worded, has a major damper effect.

I don’t know how many former Vanilla-WoW players play Median but their itemization for certain raids was actually pretty cool. “Farm/craft frost resist gear for this raid boss in this dungeon”. I’d much rather keep a set of resistance gear for my chosen spec to kill a certain Uber than have to respec my class entirely from one Uber to the next.

Another option might be to overhaul the O-Skill suffix/affix list on a lot of class-specific gear. (I.e. non-skill-locked Fortress on amazon helms so that Amazons can actually attempt lategame ubers as a spearzon).