Suggestions for upcoming patch

[revolut1oN]

Hey, I was just playing new Dragon/Colloseum/Retaliation Paladin and well, I've never noticed that before but Retaliate doesn't synergize with the Colloseum too well. It basically knocks out of the fire ring all of the mobs and kinda decreases the number of debuffed monsters.

I know its probably impossible to implement now but wouldn't it be a cool idea to create somehow "reversed" retaliate in Sigma? For example you cast debuff that happens around you and then you use melee attack or skill that pulls in all mobs inside its aoe towards you. I think it would create some nice and clever builds possible.

[archon256]

Even if we assume your idea is implementable, it is not very good.

There are quite a few things wrong with it, I agree I've highlighted those reasons in red below.
But let's discuss it, just for the sake of discussion.

- You require every single character in the game to get this new defensive stat on their equipment. Bad design. For example right now in mxl defence is a very important stat but glass cannons like assassins and bowzons/javazons etc can thrive without it. No other stat in the game is necessary in every area. (yes even something as ubiquitous as resistances is not needed in TA for example)

I don't think that's necessarily a bad design. Every gear of a particular type will have it, so it's not going to limit your gear selection. It's more like a new type of item tier.

- Every single existing runeword/unique/set etc. item has to be reworked to include your stat - huge workload.

This is the biggest problem with it outside of technical limitations and balance concerns, I agree.

- No skills have this stat and yet it is of paramount importance. Do you just add it to every passive skill on every build? Won't that make all these skills bland? Maybe just to some or maybe to none? Don't you think this stat makes the gear you have equipped WAY more important to your character performance than the player's skill level? I don't think that's a good thing.

This would definitely not be in any passive skill. The whole point of it is to require players to proceed through some sort of gear progression or penalize them appropriately for trying to skip it. It doesn't eliminate player skill from the equation, any more than having different item tiers removes it.

- You are punishing experienced players by adding unnecessary tediousness based checks. Why am I being forced to do K3K 50 times and then TA 50 times just so I can run fauzt? Is what people will be asking. If you know what to do and how to best achieve it you will progress faster through the game than someone who does not. Your stat runs counter intuitive to good play. It doesn't matter how long you have been playing, or how well you planned your character, or what your APM is - if you don't have 55 Archon points no Fauzt for you!

Well by that logic the game shouldn't have any quests or leveling either, since you can't do ubers in Destruction without going through all that. The whole idea is to extend the progression of your character. Also please don't name them Archon points.

- Limits. Say I need 50 Archon points to have Fauzt monsters be scaled as they are now aka the minimum for it to be doable. Let's say I'm a newbie and I farmed gear from lower ubers or traded for items that give me 100 Archon points - now I can faceroll fauzt without any defence/dr/block or sustain. As a newbie what have I learned about the actual interesting median xl stats? Nothing. Why does this happen? Because your stat reduces ALL damage - the effect is super powerful. And while in theory you could always say "the numbers can be balanced right to prevent this" in practice they cannot.

Yeah, this is a problem, I admit
Ideally it would just make monsters in ubers easier up to a certain level and not beyond that.

- Not to mention that the concept is extremely long winded and will be hard to explain to newer players.

Not really. You can just say "This stat reduces all incoming damage and is necessary to do the more difficult ubers due to how high the monster damage in them scales"

damage divisor is already implemented. I don't see what's the point of using it in your idea though. If you want to make monsters do more damage (2x, 3x) in the uber order you mention, this is already possible.

Yeah this reduction stat really was implemented to expand monster's life without rewriting the old engine from scratch. Basically, if you have a monster with 1,000,000 life, and give it 100 damage division, it effectively simulates 100,000,000 life.

I know. The point isn't just to raise monster damage by huge amounts, it's to also give players a way to raise their hitpoints by huge amounts by gear scaling. It would open up a way to massively scale characters in a new way, outside of the current hp/block/def/dodge/DR etc. defense paradigms. That would truly make higher tier armors more powerful.

Perfect, just pick ranged one or make a suicide char and farm duncraig. Other ubers become useless. Also summons will die instantly without that bonus.

Yeah, I think if this were to be implemented you'd have to scale monster HP too similarly and add another stat for players to reduce that, as I said. That would make it so ranged characters would have a slight edge in farming Duncraig before any other ubers, but realistically would get stomped before they can get very far. Can't think of a way to help summons, unless your summons also inherit this stat from you? IDK.


In the end it's probably too much work and has a lot of problems that you'd have to fix. Better suited for a D2 mod starting from scratch, not a well-established one like MXL. Oh well, hopefully there'll be other ways to encourage progression (aside from just XP grind, which I find tedious).

[PodolskyV]

Well by that logic the game shouldn't have any quests or leveling either, since you can't do ubers in Destruction without going through all that. The whole idea is to extend the progression of your character.
Actualy I think that it would be slowdown progression, but not an extension. IMO MXL has enough stat checks, and we don't need another one.

[archon256]

The stat check is just the first thing I thought of when thinking of ways to implement what aerial was asking for - namely that right now the optimal thing to do for veterans of the game when they do late game is just to farm certain areas after they've gotten all the uber charms from other areas. By adding the mechanic I described all players would have more of a reason to farm zones in a particular order or face penalties in damage/survivability.

A more extreme way to do this would be to make it so that each zone drops some reagent with a low chance and you need enough of them to cube together to make a charm, and without that charm you can't enter the next level of ubers at all (like an actual lock on the door that you need to fire a spell at). I don't think this a good solution, and I don't think I need to go into why.

Maybe there are other ways to encourage players to farm ubers in some order that are more elegant and easier to implement.

[Pseudorandom]

The stat check is just the first thing I thought of when thinking of ways to implement...

Haven't not ever played for huge amounts of time, I feel like Learning Signets are very similar to this stat. As a "newer" player (played D2 a lot, but not Median), they are incredibly powerful and rather tedious to get 100 or whatever the cap is. At times I really feel like there is a bit of the "Have you eaten enough signets?" in some of the ubers.

However, I believe I saw somewhere they were getting worked on? Maybe I'm wrong and it was just the charm overhaul ^.^

[Scalewinged]

Want a Solar flare buff duration doubled on Hadriel set like it done on Malthael.

[PodolskyV]

The stat check is just the first thing I thought of when thinking of ways to implement...

Haven't not ever played for huge amounts of time, I feel like Learning Signets are very similar to this stat. As a "newer" player (played D2 a lot, but not Median), they are incredibly powerful and rather tedious to get 100 or whatever the cap is. At times I really feel like there is a bit of the "Have you eaten enough signets?" in some of the ubers.

However, I believe I saw somewhere they were getting worked on? Maybe I'm wrong and it was just the charm overhaul ^.^

Exactly that thing. Sometimes I hate that signets. Why we need to force player to grind something? I thinq that ubers should be more player's skill check than stat check. I mean skill isn't only perfect timing in using skills or dodge lethal projectiles, it's also skill to optimize your build for current uber. But skill isn't farm 500 sigs or grinding some archon damage divisor points.

[archon256]

Well let me put it another way, imagine if there were different tiers of the ubers we already have. So you have K3kBA 1, 2, 3, etc. Fauzt 1, 2, 3, etc. and each tier drops different tier of endgame equipment. It doesn't have to just vary with ARCHON POINTS, it could be any powerful stat. I just mentioned the damage divisor as an example that would be obviously powerful and already implemented into Sigma.

That way you would still be able to pick whatever uber your build is good at, player skill in adjusting your build to that uber would still be a factor, etc. and you'd still have that feeling of progressing from Uber Tier 1 to Uber Tier 5.

The main thing is the feeling of progression, how it is implemented doesn't matter. The problem with this suggestion however is that it's even harder to implement than the one I suggested before, since now you'd have to somehow scale every single uber as well as the drops, and I don't even think that's possible.

Edit:
Oh wait, I forgot to mention that I don't actually want the time taken to find the rarest of items to become rarer
I'm not saying people should be forced to spend 50 hours in K3kBA before they can move on to more difficult uber.
If anybody knows how I play MXL you know that I spend very little time farming the endgame. I mostly just level different of characters (usually weird builds) to end game, spend some time grabbing as many ubercharms as I can before making a new character or going off to play something else.

What I'm saying is that there should be a reason for veteran players to spend a few hours in ubers of each difficulty type (doesn't have to be all of them) after a ladder reset or when playing untwinked, aside from just having to get the charm. In that time lots of low-level uniques/set items should drop so you can get the ones you want to progress to the next tier. Instead of just having low drop rates everywhere and players just going straight to whatever uber is the best farming spot for their character and spending dozens of hours there.

[ChuckNoRis]

Hey, I was just playing new Dragon/Colloseum/Retaliation Paladin and well, I've never noticed that before but Retaliate doesn't synergize with the Colloseum too well. It basically knocks out of the fire ring all of the mobs and kinda decreases the number of debuffed monsters.

use hammerstrike inside Colloseum and retaliate outside

[PodolskyV]

That way you would still be able to pick whatever uber your build is good at, player skill in adjusting your build to that uber would still be a factor, etc. and you'd still have that feeling of progressing from Uber Tier 1 to Uber Tier 5.
But we already have some progression from uber to uber. I can't do for example Creature of Flame and then immediately do the Void or Laz. Some time before I coudn't even survive in Unformed Land, But since I got some SUs, i feel ok there. Maybe it's because I'm not so experienced in mod like you, but that means that for newbies that progression is quite extended.

And why ubers blanced for lvl cap? It's to make it like some skill check. As I mentonied before it isn't only reaction training, but it's also a skill to castomizing your character in correct way for different ubers. You can't just overlevel ubers and then faceroll them. But your suggestions with some stat, that we grinding, or whatever thing, that slows progession, is similar to leveling on limited list of locations. So I think your suggestion contradicts the concept of ubers.