Suggestions for upcoming patch

[Fumbles]

Just use affix burn recipe and 2 oil of enhancements

[void]

The Advent of TU Gambling

[Taem]

Well I hope it will still be possible to craft a decent makeshift runeword without oils of renewal.

It just means instead of spending hours crafting, now you will spend hours farming, and then hours crafting... so the process will be literally 10x longer . You should be grateful that the length of the game has now been dramatically increased for your enjoyment !

I'm only kidding, I'm sure Marco has something awesome planned.

[archon256]

Well not really. The problem in skill diversity in median isn't caused by limitations but rather, the low amount of decent skill/missile functions that there are available.

Sure, but now you can have separate cooldowns for different skills, and that alone should add a lot to the design space. Plus you have room for more stats.

Skills will be one of the lowest priorities for the first sigma versions. For the first alpha, the biggest reworks will be seen on the levels, maps, regular monsters, cube recipes, items and uberquests. Several uberquests will be removed (brachy, infernal machine, etc.), several quests will be reworked from scratch (lesser prime evils: Azmodan & Belial), uberquests will be moved outside the main storyline, tiered item count will be reduced to 4, one-of-each sacred unique will be removed or will replace a removed tiered unique (because Jitan's Kamon+deadfall has become unoriginal). There will be new uberquests. Dogmas will be removed because they're not fun. Most forms of item rerolling will be gone because horadric cube is taking way too much time of our lives. I can go on for an hour but my point is, no don't expect a new character tree, at least for a while.

Sounds good, but it'd be nice if every class had at least one skill changed or rebalanced so that we don't have to go through the whole game playing same skill for 1,000th time.

Eg: For Throwsin move Stormcrows to level 1, remove Scorpion Blade from the tree but still keep it as a proc, add a new high-damage throw skill that has its own short cooldown (~4s) at level 1 and goes down to 0 with hard points. So you could either play a standard Throwsin who uses Stormcrows/Wychwind/Maelstrom as her main skill and casts that other skill once every 4s, or maxes that skill and just uses it.
As for what the skill could be... maybe a knife trap like Broadside, but one that rapidly fires knifes only along the 4 cardinal directions (like how Noctule only fires bats along 2)?

As for ubers, I thought of something...
Right now every uber is either a farming zone that may or may not have a boss in it (Duncraig, Fauztinville) or is just a boss battle (Judgment Day, Chyrsaor). What about an uber where you need to kill a tough boss to unlock a farming zone? You could even make it a chain of zones, with a set of elemental-themed guardians that you need to defeat one-by-one before you can access each farming area via a red portal spawned on his death, with the next guardian at the end of it.

[Dude Love]

I would really like to see all forms of signets be removed in Sigma.

Signets of gold and experience are wholly inconsequential.

Signets of skill have already been mentioned as a mechanic to be removed. Perhaps you could gain a skill point with every difficulty clear? It would still result in three extra skillpoints.

Signets of Learning are quite possibly the most tedious thing in the game. Running Nith for roughly 400 sigs and disenchanting all SUs and Sets you can find is a brutal experience and is REQUIRED to finish anything past the 'moderate' Ubers. The only way I can think to logically circumvent this is to distribute the 500 points across all 120 levels of the game, which would add out to about 4 more stat points per level. Alternatively, changing SP level cap to 125 (pretty sure it's already that on TSW? don't remember) would give you exactly 4 more points per level to make up the 500 point difference.

Also, on the topic of skill trees -- dual barb needs some serious love. At the very least, get rid of the sword/axe restrictions because they're strange and unneccessary and just make everything in that tree require two melee weapons. What I would then do is move Daedalus somewhere else (maybe combine with Ancient's Blood and make AB only give +1 max all skill levels once), either rework Windform entirely since it's garbage or replace it with something else, buff Cautious Strike to character skill levels and put it in place of Iron Spiral and move Iron Spiral up to where Daedalus was (and maybe boost Iron Spiral's damage a bit along with that? idk)

[archon256]

Signets of Learning are quite possibly the most tedious thing in the game. Running Nith for roughly 400 sigs and disenchanting all SUs and Sets you can find is a brutal experience and is REQUIRED to finish anything past the 'moderate' Ubers. The only way I can think to logically circumvent this is to distribute the 500 points across all 120 levels of the game, which would add out to about 4 more stat points per level. Alternatively, changing SP level cap to 125 (pretty sure it's already that on TSW? don't remember) would give you exactly 4 more points per level to make up the 500 point difference.

I believe Signets of Learning were added so players had something to do with any extra Set or SU items they found. Laz never intended for players to farm 500 sigs and balance the difficulty around that.


If it really is a problem then they should be done away with entirely as you suggest, but there should still be something you can disenchant sets and SUs into.
Maybe it can have a random output where you can get any Shrine Vessel with random number of shrines in it?

[PodolskyV]

I'm sorry but Oil of Renewal doesn't add any depth to crafting.

In my opinion runeword crafting as is Ok, you don't need to get best possible stats from runeword and oil of luck. Some decent, higher than average stats are enough for farming most areas. The most problem with crafting is shrines. You can spent hours and tons of shrines to get Oskill that you need and at least decent stat boost / elem damage boost. The key is simple, as I see. You can add some ingredients to rcipe, that affects the result somehow.

And if you remowe oil of renewal, you take out possibility to use rare item rolls as alternative to expensive shrine crafts.

[Dude Love]

I'm absolutely talking out of my ass when I talk about spritework but can either Necromancer get less ass-ugly minions in Sigma (BRIGHT PURPLE GIANT GUMMY BEARS AND LITTLE MUTANT ICE CREAM SHITHEADS) or this little dude:


get used less? (he's the ennead necromancers, brother laz, zorun tzuin, quov tzuin, malic, grey, and dorian)

Infinitum still has a hell of a lot of sprites that are not in Median that wouldn't look horribly out of place

[kikinak]

I'd really like the ability to name my equipment to really make it mine. You have no idea how dissapointed I was when Anya told me I'd be able to personalize a piece of equipment only to have my character's name slapped on. Is it nice? It's alright, but it seems about equal in worth to the two tp scrolls they make you waste to give her the thawing potion, to say nothing of actually doing that whole side-area. What I want is the ability to name my equipment whatever I want (possibly for a gold fee, so we have something else to dump gold into, as after you get out of hatred gold stops being a real concern 99% of the time). For example, I'm playing a lazydin and just rolled my Ring of Light; it generated the name dire aegis, which is cool, but not really that fitting since it didn't even get any enhanced defense; nah, I want to call it "firebreather" or maybe "Mt Wanahawkaloogi"

It's 100% meaningless but (and I have no experience with what this is coded in) it seems like it'd take all of 15 minutes to implement and would be cool to have

[Food]

First of all, I gave you a negative cookie by mistake
If somebody could rectify this it would be great.

Second, I was going to say never assume something's gonna be easy or fast in programming, too often modifying a seemingly simple piece of code can change a program behaviour in far-reaching ways.

Also remember that the code is closed, so the only way to modify it is by reverse engineering it, which is always time consuming.

And there will need to be GUI work to enable the user to enter a name of his choice. And input validation.

Also, the feasibility of it depends on the way the data structure for an item is laid out. What if instead of a simple "item_name" string record that gets modified when personalizing it, D2 developers decided that it would be more appropriate to have an "item_name" string record, an "personalized" boolean record and a "personalizer_name" string record, and calculate the full item name based on those three?

In that case to provide the behaviour you propose you would need to work around this. Maybe by having personalization not set the boolean, but that would mean that a personalized item can be personalized again, which may be not desirable.

If it is not desirable the you need to find another way, that will have its own considerations etc.

That's to say, almost everything is doable, but even the most apparently simple changes may bring serious architectural challenges or considerations.