New Skill Development - Part 1

At the end of the day the following issues are damaging to build diversity:

OP uniques
Ranged characters being as or usually more powerful than melee characters
Using certain tactics to avoid reflect damage that are not punished with a lower clear speed ie totems, traps

However these problems are very hard to balance in a game where you need to be as strong on your own as you are in a group.

As soon as you start making it so people can build tanky but low dps, crit caster but squishy etc etc then you force people to play in groups to get a mixture of characters. Then you have an mmo sort of style which this is not meant to be.

The main thing to do in my opinion is to separate reflect damage into reflect spells and reflect bow attacks and do away with general phys reflect. Then make huge penalties for those people using totems in terms of damage outputs or whatever, i dont know, just desentivise it. Also reduce methods of completely mitigating reflect at high damage outputs for spell casters and bow users.

Then melee would have the buff they need.

Then you have the following

Crit bow or spell builds (highest damage in game but very susceptible to reflect)
Melee (middle damage, risky, but not to reflect)
Non crit caster or bow user (fairly low damage, but safe)
Totem or trap user (Lowest damage but super safe)

Reduce many of the melee crit nodes and balance around the above principle? I dunno... to be honest i like the game no matter what they do ill just choose a nice build and do that dependent on what i fancy or is strong at the time

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Charanjaydemyr wrote:

The Plummeting Ursa and subsequently the Koala pet for the Australia Day sale. :)

(I had much more interesting designs but they were too ambitious.)

Cheers for that then. I was so excited to see the dropbears when I started playing, and I was more than happy to pick up the pet. Little STD-filled buggers need all the love they can get.

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DexDeus wrote:

Some good points

At the end of the day the following issues are damaging to build diversity:

OP uniques
Ranged characters being as or usually more powerful than melee characters
Using certain tactics to avoid reflect damage that are not punished with a lower clear speed ie totems, traps

However these problems are very hard to balance in a game where you need to be as strong on your own as you are in a group.

As soon as you start making it so people can build tanky but low dps, crit caster but squishy etc etc then you force people to play in groups to get a mixture of characters. Then you have an mmo sort of style which this is not meant to be.

The main thing to do in my opinion is to separate reflect damage into reflect spells and reflect bow attacks and do away with general phys reflect. Then make huge penalties for those people using totems in terms of damage outputs or whatever, i dont know, just desentivise it. Also reduce methods of completely mitigating reflect at high damage outputs for spell casters and bow users.

Then melee would have the buff they need.

Then you have the following

Crit bow or spell builds (highest damage in game but very susceptible to reflect)
Melee (middle damage, risky, but not to reflect)
Non crit caster or bow user (fairly low damage, but safe)
Totem or trap user (Lowest damage but super safe)

Reduce many of the melee crit nodes and balance around the above principle? I dunno... to be honest i like the game no matter what they do ill just choose a nice build and do that dependent on what i fancy or is strong at the time

Details aside, I agree with the heart of this post.

Interesting build diversity comes when choosing A means compromising B.
At the moment you can choose A, B, C & D all at range.

the dmg increase definitely gotta be melee physical, else it would just enhance ranged some more. Or maybe you'll gain like a close range buff around you and only attacks and/or spells in it deal the extra dmg, so that it's really good for melee but also point blank and it won't make people just abuse it with slightly ranged skills like groundslam...

Awesome! Sounds like a great concept.

Great!

Seems like another skill that is designed for melee but equally good on ranged characters...

Nice idea!!

Can you upload some Screenshot from Act4 ? =)),.. Or is Act4 like summer release? to early to show something?

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Rufus82 wrote:

Interesting build diversity comes when choosing A means compromising B.
At the moment you can choose A, B, C & D all at range.

And usually all at the same time. >_>

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Marquoz wrote:

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CliveHowlitzer wrote:

Sounds great until you realize the game has CWDT. Whoops. Check brain at door, please.

Hopefully it is a skill and not a spell so it won't work with CwDT.

skill gems can be currently separated as attack, spell and cast
so what you're saying doesn't make sense.

replace "skill" by "cast" or "attack" and it works


Anyway, I think they should make it a cast that reserve mana (like the heralds) and give the buff & AOE taunt on melee attacks. A stacking buff could be nice and fun.