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    Diablo Just in case you forgot, or missed it!

    November 11, 2019

    Diablo Just in case you forgot, or missed it!

    Just in case you forgot, or missed it!

    Posted: 11 Nov 2019 10:44 AM PST

    Diablo 1 in Diablo 2

    Posted: 11 Nov 2019 08:47 AM PST

    Play Diablo 1 in web browser

    Posted: 11 Nov 2019 12:36 PM PST

    https://d07riv.github.io/diabloweb/ <-- link to run diablo1 in browser

    ​

    You do need to come up with the DiabDAT.mpq from the D1 CD(can play w/o it but just the shareware version), can do this with a cd img + emulator, GOG digital download or an old CD. Doesn't support multiplayer but it runs very well with modern OS, if you F11 to fullscreen can't even tell you're usin browser :P

    submitted by /u/itam2
    [link] [comments]

    Diablo is an RPG, what that means and why it matters for D4 (long)

    Posted: 11 Nov 2019 04:20 PM PST

    Intro

    The most important section of this post is regarding D3 itemization which I have put at the end if you wish to skip to it.

    My background: I've played D1, D2, D3, PoE, and Grim Dawn extensively as well as other hack-and-slash ARPGs to a lesser degree. I've also played numerous RPGs of all varieties from JRPGs to D&D to MMOs. Diablo is my favorite franchise of all-time and D2 my most-played game of all time with the exception of WoW's combined expansions.

    D3 is an RPG, more specifically an ARPG, more specifically a hack-and-slash game. I'm not going to go into depth as to what an RPG is because I don't think there's a real consensus on that, but I would say that an RPG is a game where you make decisions that change the course of the game. This could mean social encounters with NPCs, skill encounters with multiple potential paths to success, non-cosmetic customization choices, and combat encounters. An ARPG is simply an RPG with a major focus on action aka combat. Hack-and-slash means that story and non-combat decisions are less important and combat is the primary focus, meaning your gameplay time should be predominately killing stuff.

    So how does a hack-and-slash game remain an ARPG and not become merely an action game? They reward you for combat. You might level up, you might find gear, you might acquire new skills, these are examples but none are required. What's important is that you are given choices. Choices are the core of an RPG, what it means to play the role. So let's look at each of the 3 Diablo entries and discuss what choices you make and why they matter.

    Diablo 1

    In D1 you choose a class, and to my knowledge this really only changes your stats and your animation speed for attacking and casting spells. You could play the same "build" with all 3 classes and each would be viable to some degree with different strengths and weaknesses. My friend often played a melee rogue for example and we did fine. We have the ability to make choices and importantly we have the ability to make wrong choices. The rewards you get for combat are experience, gold, and items. Gold can buy skills and items in town.

    Now that the choices are established, what's good and bad about them? While intended to be a limited resource, gold was so easily duped that it's not really worth discussing since you don't have to consider spending an infinite resource. To my knowledge skills were mostly utility for warriors and rogues but the core power of a sorcerer in most cases. I didn't play sorcerer a ton but I believe it was also common to use items with charges of a skill over your own skills since I believe charges used no mana. So the game is really all about equipment. I don't remember there being rare items, only magic and unique. The best items I remember were Obsidian X of the Whale or Obsidian X of the Zodiac, which were magic items that gave resists, attributes, and life. The gear itself is very simple and the choices come from scarcity and imperfection. You'd probably find a bunch of Obsidian items that aren't of the whale or zodiac, and vice versa. The gear is interesting because you're given imperfect options and have to decide which is most valuable to you and what you can afford to neglect.

    Summary 1: Diablo 1 does not have a lot of content, but it gives you meaningful decisions throughout to supplement the mundane and difficult combat.

    Diablo 2

    Moving on to Diablo 2, class matters a lot more, gear has many more varieties, and content is greater and more varied. You still have attributes, but you now have skill points as well. There's enough to discuss here that I will break each into its own section.

    Skill points give you 4 types of choices: unlocking skills, fulfilling prerequisites for other skills, ranking up skills, and synergy bonuses (added late into D2:LoD). If you want to play a Frozen Orb sorceress, you're going to put points into the skills that lead up to it as that's a hard requirement, and you're going to put 20 points into the skill for max damage, so here the only choice you've made is that you want to use Frozen Orb and you've already spent 25 of your 110 points. You don't need a 2nd skill to enable Frozen Orb, so you have a lot of options for those remaining 85 points. You can max cold mastery or ice bolt (synergy) to increase damage, but that's it. At most you can spend 64 points to max Frozen Orb. Since a significant number of enemies in D2 are immune to cold damage, most sorcs will opt to use a 2nd skill of a 2nd element, such as Fire Wall, Meteor, Lightning, or Nova. There are also defensive and utility skills that you may want such as Static Field, Teleport, ice armors, Energy Shield, etc.

    Diablo 2 Skills

    There are several aspects of skills that work very well. Having limited skill points and skills go from rank 1 to 20 (and higher with synergies) means that you have to invest in skills to get the most out of them. You can choose to specialize in 1 skill or 2, you can choose to neglect utility for power or vice versa. You can use a rank 14 fire wall and have it still be good enough to kill cold-immune enemies. It also means you can't have everything. Yes you could put 1 point in every skill, but most skills aren't very effective without additional investment; however, they aren't useless and that's important. Static Field and Teleport are good examples of skills that you would like to have at max rank, but you leave them at 1 because those skill points are better used elsewhere.

    There are downsides as well. Having your choices matter is dependent on permanence. If you could freely swap your skill points, then you no longer have a reason to be a Frozen Orb / Meteor sorc. You could simply use Frozen Orb for content that's immune to fire and swap to Meteor for content that's immune to cold. You no longer have to choose to invest in defenses, utility, or a 2nd element, and all the remains is a mathematical equation for your 1 skill. The permanence is crucial to your choices having meaning. It's possible to achieve this same success in other ways, but I'm not sure it's easy to do so. For the most part I think people playing an Assassin don't want to start over at level 1 just to try different Assassin skills, but that doesn't mean we should throw away skill point permanence. The ability to respec is good so long as it does not completely remove permanence, and if you do want to remove this permanence you need to replace it with permanence somewhere else.

    Diablo 2 Items

    Gear in D2 can be normal, broken, superior, socketed, ethereal, or some combination. It can also be magic, rare, unique, or set-unique. There are also crafted items and runewords but items do not drop this way. Broken items aren't really worth considering and only used at low level. Normal and Superior gear are a step up from broken items but also don't really matter outside of wanting a superior item for runewords or crafting. Magic and rare items are the majority of what you will encounter and use until end-game. They are incredibly varied much like the magic items of D1 with rares having more affixes than magics. Uniques and set-uniques have affixes that do not appear on other items and can be incredibly powerful, and set bonuses provided a number of extra free and powerful stats if you wear all the other pieces. Sockets are supported by both gems and runes having a large variety of effects that varies based on the equipment slot in which they are socketed. Lastly ethereal items have higher base stats but cannot be repaired.

    Character power was limited but also varied. For weapon-based characters, weapon base + enhanced damage was most significant with attack speed and to a lesser extent Strength or Dexterity supplementing your damage. For spell and minion-based characters, increased skill rank for all skills or a skill category were most significant. Most gear affixes were focused on defenses and utility.

    One positive of this system is that every item type has a purpose outside of broken gear which is useless after level 10 or so. Magic items are viable throughout the game with examples like Cruel X of Quickness weapons seeing heavy use in end-game and pvp. They are common drops so you have a much greater chance of getting 2 good affixes on a magic than those same 2 affixes being on a rare. Rare items have potential to be the best in the game and even saw nerfs with dual-leech rings being deprecated. Uniques have a low variance and therefore each has an expected power level with little deviation. They form a deterministic foundation for builds, especially for those who aren't interested in hunting out the perfect rare or crafting. Rune words were essentially crafted items allowing you to choose which base to transform. The recipes varied wildly from powerful leveling items or niche effects like movement speed on a chest. Crafted items were like rare items but with guaranteed properties making them slightly more deterministic at a significant cost. I believe socketed gear was only white items unless you used a quest to add sockets to an item, and it would only add 1 socket to unique items whereas lower rarity items could have up to 6. This intentional choice helped keep low rarities relevant.

    Another positive of this system is that item progression was linear not exponential. Some uniques dropped from very low enemies and had very low level requirements, and some of those were actually strong enough to use for a long time if not forever. Some uniques have a much higher level requirement like 65, but the majority of uniques aren't only available at end-game, and yet they're not useless. Set items were also worth using independent of their set bonuses in many cases, and while set bonuses were very powerful, you often wanted only a partial set bonus rather than the full set. The most concise way to describe the items in this game is that nothing was universally best. Some uniques were the best in that slot, some were worse than rares. Some uniques were good, some uniques were bad. Items were varied, their value varied, their rarity varied, and thus your builds with them were varied. Importantly, the inferior option was generally not a drastic downgrade, and often the stats on 2 different items were difficult to compare. Chance Guards were good for magic find, Magefist were good for cast speed, Frostburns were good for mana, Soul Drainer were good for dual leech, Laying of Hands was good for 20% attack speed and holy bolt supplements, etc. It's not simple to decide which item is better because they aren't simply part of a math equation.

    All of these different item types is a lot to learn. You don't really need to understand what magic, rare, and unique items are to use them: you can simply read the affixes and decide if you want to use it, but rune words and crafting are unintuitive and complex systems. Broken/cracked/wtvr gear shouldn't exist. Ethereal items are cool flavor but their usefulness is pretty much limited to items that self-repair/replenish or are indestructible. They also provided extra power that is both good and bad but not really necessary. One good example is the unique javelin Titan's Revenge which was easily the best javelin, or at the very least the most commonly used. A non-ethereal titans was usable and very strong, but you always wanted to have an ethereal one instead. A non-ethereal titans is a disappointment, whereas an ethereal of most other uniques was a disappointment. For the most part I don't have a lot of negatives to say about the items in this game as that was the driving factor for why myself and many others played the game so long.

    Diablo 2 Content

    D2 was not focused on any type of end-game or max-level content. The game consists of 5 acts and 3 difficulties with up to 6 quests per act, most of those quests being optional with rewards of a varying significance. After completing act 5 hell, there was only pvp and uber bosses (added post-launch). Uber bosses had a high power requirement so I think most people never did ubers, instead focusing either on PvP or repeatedly playing the main game either through restarting on a new character or farming high level content for rare drops.

    A lot of the replayability from D2 came from simply trying different builds. You could play Explosive Arrow, Freezing Arrow, Strafe, and Multishot as 4 different bow amazons. You could also play javelin or spear amazons with lightning fury, or plague javelin, fend (lol), or jab. There were so many different builds to try, and it went beyond simply trying the skill. You invested it, you saw how far you could push it with synergies. You also often designed a character for a specific purpose. You could plan to farm Diablo, Pindleskin, Baal, Cows, Mephisto, or ubers. You could make a character for the purpose of magic find or rushing people through the game. You might even level a character to unlock more uses of quest-specific rewards like the ability to add sockets to or rename an item or for free guaranteed runes.

    Summary 2: D2 forced you to specialize your character by investing points permanently into skills, but there were enough choices of comparable and varied power and enough restrictions that builds were not predefined. Item bonuses were generic and varied to the point that the better item was not obvious, and any rarity of gear was viable. Power growth was slow and steady with 110 skill points spread over 98 level ups and higher level item affixes staying within relative proximity of lower level item affix values. The majority of power came from gaining levels and high level weapon bases.

    Diablo 3

    D3 removed the skill points and attribute points from D2 in favor of fully-accessible respecialization. Classes are changed, but their significance in build identity unchanged outside of a loss of permanence from skill point and attribute point allocation. Classes are much more homogeneous with unique perks mitigated in favor of balance, and the universal system of mana replaced with infinite or ebb-and-flow systems, though not as homogeneous as D1. PvP was removed entirely and never added back in any form.

    Diablo 3 Content

    Classic mode is equivalent to D2's story mode having 4 acts instead of 5, but D1 and D2's 3-difficulty system was removed post-launch as well as Adventure mode being added to the game. Classic mode remains to this day but is largely irrelevant with Adventure mode being more efficient and convenient for leveling. The level cap of 99 was reduced to 70 and the experience curve dropped substantially to make the cap easily obtained by comparison. Gameplay consists primarily of rifts (procedurally generated copies of zones from classic mode) with supplemental content from bounties, ubers, and challenge dungeons. All content is scaled by a combination of character level and selected difficulty. Players have no control over the type of content they farm with rifts being random tilesets with random monsters, random layouts, and random bosses.

    Greater rifts being the entire end-game deserve their own section, and the rest of the game being rifts are similar enough that I won't bother addressing them separately. GRs are nice because you don't have to slow down or backtrack to pick up loot and can instead pick it all up at the end. The infinite difficulty is good as a means of testing your ability, but the steady increased of experience gain and drop quantity at higher levels move it to the forefront over other content. The timer in particular changes the experience of GRs from a challenge to a requirement. You don't have the option of being fully tanky (at least not in solo), and you really don't have the option of being a glass cannon either (which I will address later), so the time is a gear check. The previous games didn't have anything like this. You didn't fail Baal if you couldn't kill him in 20 minutes. I see no purpose for this timer other than to mitigate the benefit of people cheesing GRs that should be too difficult for them to clear based on their current gear.

    Diablo 3 Skills

    Active skills are now unlocked every level from 1 to 70 with runes 5 additional versions of each skill. Passive skills are also unlocked over time. Character are able to equip 6 active skills and 4 passive skills in a loadout that can effectively only be changed from in town. Permanence is removed entirely outside of the inability to change skills on the fly during greater rifts or in combat. Paragon levels replace the tedious 70-99 grind with an infinite grind.

    Diablo 3 Items

    This post is already incredibly long at this point but sadly this is the main point of discussion and everything else is just backstory for this, because it's important to have context as to not only everything in these games but also the changes between games. Items are white, magic, rare, or legendary. Legendaries can be ancient or primal ancient and can also be part of a set. Magic, rare, and legendary items have the same pool of affixes with rares and legendaries having more than magic and white items having none. Non-set legendaries commonly have unique affixes that are unavailable on other items. Legendary sets have incredibly powerful bonuses, especially the 6-piece bonus, and are mostly exclusive with sets generally occupying the same slots. Legendaries can now have the same number of sockets as lower rarities.

    Now to start talking about positives of the item system. Legendaries that modify your skill are cool and new. Stuff like adding a vortex to the Twister spell change the way your character plays and makes you feel very powerful. Set bonuses often do the same thing such as causing enemies to burn indefinitely or turning a chicken transformation into your main attack. Enchanting allows you to modify gear by replacing a single affix with another. The cube allows you to have multiple unique affixes from the same slot in effect at the same time. Gems aren't as flexible as in D2 and much more mandatory, but they still provide options suck as defense, cooldown reduction, thorns, or damage. There are still choices to make...

    ...but they are temporary and incredibly simple. It's time to talk about the bad aspects of D3 itemization. I don't need to go on at length about primary stats but instead I'll talk about the general problem they contribute to as well as the results of that.

    All the item affixes D3 are overly simple and overly impactful. Str/dex/int = more damage. Crit chance, crit damage, attack speed = more damage. Unique legendary affixes = more damage. Not everything is damage though. Str/dex/int/vit (every attribute in the game) = more toughness. Resistances, armor, and dodge = more toughness. Unique legendary affixes = more toughness. A lot of people have complained about attack/defense stats in D4 preview content, but the complaint isn't because of the change from D3, it's because of the lack of a change. Primary stats (excluding Vitality) were already attack and defense rolled into 1, and all 3 flavors of primary stat are virtually identical.

    There's also healing, which comes in 2 exciting flavors of heal when you do a thing and heal without doing a thing (on hit vs regen), which are again virtually equivalent. Now I neglected to mention 2 important stats up to this point: area damage and cooldown reduction. Cooldown reduction is really just a hybrid of more damage and more toughness because it's either letting you do more damage more often or it's letting you have more toughness more often. Area damage is...you guessed it, more damage. Now I'm not sure if D3 still has any unique affixes that do something meaningful (pig noises when you attack is not meaningful) and don't also give either damage or toughness, but their existence doesn't lessen the harm done by all the other unique affixes that DO give either damage or toughness.

    What are the results of this stat system? The first is that the items you find while leveling have no significance and no permanence. It doesn't matter if you the sword you find is white, magic, rare, or legendary, the only thing that matters is your damage and toughness, and a level 20 weapon will always give you more damage than a level 10 weapon. If you find a legendary weapon that modifies your skill in a cool way, you'd only be handicapping yourself to use it for more than the 5 minutes it takes you to find a more powerful weapon. Now tell me, would you rather I give you a $500 computer or $500 of bananas? Even if you really like bananas, you're not going to be able to enjoy them before the majority go bad and need to be discarded.

    The result of this is that leveling is no longer fun or interesting. Sure the first time you play the game and you try the skills 1 at a time it's fun, but that's an extended tutorial. When you've played the game for hundreds of hours, you know your skills, you know which rune you want, and you're waiting to get it. At the same time, you know the gear you're finding is ephemeral and insignificant, so you're just waiting to be 70 so you can START finding gear that matters. D3 added free respecs to mitigate the need to level new characters, but in the process of doing so they created a disjointed experience. The game from 1-69 is distinct from the game at 70. Rather than removing skill point allocation, they should have removed experience. Leveling serves no purpose in D3 beyond a tutorial, yet every season you're expected to (get power leveled) again. Instead of having multiple characters of the same class with separate inventories, now you have a wardrobe to swap around the gear that you have to keep stored in the single stash for your entire account. Did they solve a problem? At a surface level it looks like they did, but since they created an even bigger problem I'd say no.

    The second result of this stat system is everything is a math problem, but importantly a very simple math problem. The problem with this is that it's intentional, and beyond the stat system everything in D3 makes it clear that this is the case. Since the core gameplay is greater rifts, we can assume that you either don't care about min/maxing or you're trying to push high GRs. So how do you push GRs? Well you can use ZDPS builds to group and crowd-control your enemies when playing in a party, but I don't have anything negative to say about that aspect. The rest of it boils down to whether or not your gear is good enough to enable you to beat the timer both by staying alive and by killing fast enough. Since your goal is infinite, your means of reaching that goal needs to be infinite. You don't unlock power by completing harder content outside of the minor hurdles of leveling to 70, getting a 6-pc set bonus, and unlocking primal ancients. You unlock power by simply playing day after day after day, increasing your paragon level, increasing your legendary gem levels, and enchanting more and more stats onto your gear. Others have made the comparison to a clicker game, and I've made the same one for years, because it's true.

    D3 still has gameplay in the sense that you're pushing buttons to control your character, but the game has systematically removed nearly all difficulty outside of gear checks. In the early days of D3, the Frozen affix looked and behaved very similar to its current form with 1 important difference. At some point fairly early on, they added a pulse of damage around the ice blossoms that is less than the damage of the final explosion. Why do you think this was added? Well before there was a pulse, if you died to Frozen it was because you didn't see or didn't move out of the explosion radius in time. You made a mistake, therefore you died, sounds good right? No, apparently the only difficulty that matters is gear checks. Jailer? Damage on application. Thunderstorm? Instant damage. Frozen? Well if you can avoid the damage then it's not difficult enough.

    What is the benefit of such a change? It dumbs down the game. Why should Blizzard expect players to dodge frozen when they can instead just mitigate the damage? This isn't cherry-picking either. From the start they gave monsters' melee attacks a huge tolerance for range checks. What does that do? It mitigates kiting. Another skill factor removed from the game. Don't dodge enemy attacks, just mitigate them. Don't play the game, just make your number bigger. That's a keystone of D3's system: infinitely scaling enemies and infinitely scaling players. Anything that circumvents that power balance is cancerous and removed.

    All of this is just talking about power and toughness, and there are plenty of other significant problems as well. The next one being sets and unique legendary affixes. I've already discussed power and toughness so we can ignore that aspect to some degree, but since that's the core of D3's system it can't be ignored entirely. Sets are 100% mandatory in D3. Not only do sets gives you approximately 3000% or 30x more damage, a number that's frankly embarrassing, as well as 50% damage reduction, but they also restrict your skill choice either to a handful of skills or to a single main skill. With each class having 4 sets (not including the recent additions cuz I haven't played since), and each set having little to no room for variety, your set now becomes your most significant choice. You're no longer a wizard or a barbarian, you're an IK barb or a tal rasha wizard.

    So there has to be some upside to sets right? Well you have more than 6 items in a set, but you only need 6 for the full bonus, so that gives you room to create your own build right? Not really. All of the strongest unique legendary affixes are, you guessed it, more power or more toughness, and they are usually tied to a specific skill while also being locked to a single slot. So if you have 8 set pieces to choose from, that's 8 slots to consider. How many of those 8 slots have something that boosts your primary skill? Probably at least 1, so then that becomes a mandatory item. If one of the other slots boosts an important secondary skill, either one you're required to use because of your set or, wait for it, one that boosts your power or toughness, then that's also mandatory. This isn't a rigid inflexibility, but it's again a simple math problem, and since D3 was intentionally designed to be about your numbers vs the enemy numbers, that is the only right choice.

    Legacy of Nightmares is the best thing in D3, hands down. It throws away all the 6-piece sets and instead lets you create your own build using whichever skills and legendaries you want. The downside to this set is that it exists in D3 with all the other problems already mentioned. You have the ability to use any skill you want, but since this game is a math problem, you have to compare skills that not only have different damage values but also different support from legendaries. If Firebats has 3 uniques that each give 300% increased damage, but Zombie Charger only has 1 unique that increases its damage by 400%, then you can't really use Zombie Charger without being underpowered. The best set in the game is ruined by the games systems. This is my main problem with D3, the design isn't self aware and it's self-defeating. The goal of the systems, infinite replayability, negate all the game's replayability. The infinite progression is actually flat progression because all the work you put into increasing your own power increases the enemy power as well. People didn't like when enemies in Final Fantasy 8 scaled with your player level, and they largely don't like that in D3 either. Those who do like it are mostly unaware of the hamster wheel they've been put on or so casual that the overly simple gameplay loop, much like a clicker, is what they want. (Please don't see the word casual here as a pejorative, it's not meant as such. Casual gaming is valid and deserves its place, possibly even as an optional mode in a Diablo game, but it should not be the core game's identity).

    That's about all I'll say about items, the system is almost entirely without praise and as a result the game's progression is wholly uninteresting, at least to me.

    Diablo 3 Paragon

    Not a lot to say here other than it sucks. If paragon levels capped at 50 points in everything, it would be a good (not great) system that actually adds something to the game. It would still be impacted by the problems with the stats themselves that it gives, but it does provide meaningful choices. Those choices are still a simple math problem, but at the very least you can choose toughness, damage, movement speed, gold find, or healing. D3 has nothing but simple choices, but even if they're simple choices, more choices is generally better.

    Summary 3: D3 very much resembles the previous games in the franchise despite its aesthetic differences, but its systems are under-engineered, overly simply, with only surface-level complexity and a lack of difficulty. It succeeds at creating an endless gameplay loop that provides instant gratification without any skill requirement, but fails to provide either challenge or depth to people interested in mastering the game. It manages to provide an exceptionally low floor (good) but fails to offer a high skill ceiling.

    Looking forward to D4 - hopefully pessimistic

    D3 suffers an identity crisis. It conveys itself as a Diablo game, and at the surface it looks similar to D1 and D2, but it's drastically different in terms of gameplay loop and most importantly player agency. D1 and D2 are old games that have aged and don't fit the modern era of gaming, but I would argue that in spite of all their pain points they still provide a better gaming experience than D3. They are both "hardcore" games that were enjoyed by casual players. I wouldn't say D1 is complex but D2 certainly is. D3 on the other hand doesn't seem to care about where it came from and ultimately doesn't deserve to be called an RPG. It is an RPG, but it's more like a faux RPG. I said an RPG lets you make choices that change the course of the game, choices that matter, but that's not the case for D3. Yes you can make wrong choices, but the game doesn't care if your choice was right or wrong because it doesn't challenge you in any way, and since 90% of your power is determined simply by the amount of primary stat you have, it's really impossible to fail. I don't consider something without a failure state to be a game, and while D3 technically has a failure state, and technically it's an RPG, and plenty of people enjoy it (including myself at times in past), I don't consider it to be much of a game.

    I'm not attacking people who like or play D3, only the game's design and the intentions behind it. If the devs cared about their hardcore fanbase as much as they cared about bringing in the far more lucrative casual playerbase (more specifically the general population, not just the casual side), the game would have been a success. We can never know their true intentions beyond what they tell us, which isn't much, but we can judge them based on the product they created. They did include a hardcore mode, but that takes no effort. They didn't include PvP despite knowing how important it was to a significant population. They didn't find a solution to provide both accessibility and depth because it's not easy to design. Instead they turned a game about demons, torture, death, and the depths of hell into a roller coaster through a rainstorm of gold and items so "legendary" that everyone's wearing a full set of them 10 hours into the season and throwing them away by the dozens.

    What I expect from D4 is mostly more of the same, not just D3 but Battle for Azeroth, the most recent WoW expansion. I see Attack and Defense on gear, and I know that they learned nothing. I see a single potion with a cooldown, and I see D3. I see "world bosses" and mounts and I think failure-proof daily quests. I see dungeon keys and I think Mythic+ dungeons. I'm happy to see some sort of pseudo-MMO experience for D4. I hope they manage to create a sense of community, some element of social interaction. I know Diablo is mostly a single-player experience, and I wouldn't want them to make content for the masses require much coordination, but some level of difficulty would be nice. And yes I understand it's early on and things are likely to change, but that's precisely why I decided to waste hours of my life writing this diatribe.

    What D4 needs is to rethink what it means to be an RPG and go back to that. The devs need to be willing to create complex problems for players to solve. There needs to be nuance and subtlety. I'll end this post by explaining what good stats look like. Stats come in 3 flavors:

    Strength in D2 and PoE gives you damage, but not enough damage that you'd want to invest heavily into it. The reason you invest into strength is because of a gear requirement. What this does is make the power of Strength dynamic. When you don't have enough strength to wear a powerful item, each point of strength is giving you a portion of the power of that item. When you have excess strength, each point of excess strength is of lesser value. This has the effect of making your character, your gear, your items all connected. You might call that... a build. An item that gives 20 strength is huge, but 20 strength on all your gear is superfluous. That 20 strength is both powerful and weak at the same time depending on the context that is your character. It requires you to think about items a lot more than simply considering 2 pairs of gloves in a vacuum.

    Resists in D2 and PoE have a cap. It's fairly trivial to reach the cap after you've gotten reasonably far into the game, providing a goal early on but also a meaningful influence on your gearing choices later. Unlike strength, every point above the cap is useless unless you have outside factors to consider like a resist-lowering curse. The stat itself is incredibly simple, but in the context of the game it's complex. It's easy to understand, but it still gives you choices to make. An item that gives a lot of all resist makes gearing very convenient, so even if it's lower power than another piece, you may want to use it. An upgrade you want to equip might cause you to swap out 3 other items in order to keep your resists capped. This gives value to items that you replaced because despite being inferior, they have what you need.

    Lastly, there's critical hit. In D3, critical scaling is pretty much infinite. There are diminishing returns on crit chance, and while crit damage doesn't have diminishing returns, it has less impact the more you have. This results in a system where you want as much of a stat as possible. Now this is also true for stats such as life, but there's an opportunity cost for everything. Life has no cap, but there is probably a point where you don't feel the need to get more (unless content scales infinitely). Crit damage is such a huge multiplier that you cannot ignore it without gimping yourself, and when this stat is available on many slots, you're going to stack as much off it as possible. I don't think critical hit should exist, or if it does it should not be on gear and certainly not universal to all classes. Crits are just damage, they don't change gameplay, but they're a multiplier to damage that never loses value. If an item doesn't have crit, you don't want it, because another item you have does. There is a problem with 1 solution, therefore there is no choice.

    This is all my opinion and nothing more. Feel free to dispute anything or point out any errors or inaccuracies.

    submitted by /u/vileguynsj
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    My Lilith Wallpaper Fanart <3

    Posted: 11 Nov 2019 10:45 AM PST

    Focused Feedback: Potions

    Posted: 11 Nov 2019 09:41 AM PST

    Welcome to the first Focused Feedback thread, featuring the Potion system. We're starting off small because we want to get the format right. If you have any suggestions, please post them as a reply to the stickied mod comment.

    Overview

    In ARPGs, potions generally are used in varying capacities for recovery, enhancement, and protection. Health potions are generally the most common type, restoring some amount of health. Potions can be consumable or permanent but cooldown restricted.

    Previous Diablo installments

    In Diablo 1, potions were consumable with two levels: normal potions restored a portion of their stat, while full potions recovered 100% of it. There were three types: Healing, which would restore Life; Mana, which would restore Mana; and Rejuvenation, which would restore both. Players would have eight potion slots to easily access potions and the ability to drink additional potions from their inventory.

    In Diablo 2, potions were consumable with multiple levels of potions restoring increasing amount of resources. Health, Mana, and Rejuvenation potions all returned, along with new Stamina, Antidote, and Thawing Potions. Players could modify how many potion slots they had based on the type of belt used. Players could also drink several potions in quick succession, allowing for their benefits to stack for greater amounts of time/effect.

    In Diablo 3, the potion variety reduced, with a greater emphasis being placed on the new Health Globes, which drop from monsters during combat to keep up the pace of combat. Initially there were many levels of potions though, which were streamlined over time. Potions were reduced to a single slot, limited by a cooldown. Potions would always restore 60% health. Legendary potions were introduced, adding additional effects upon consuming a potion.

    Diablo IV Demo

    Note: This section is purely from the BlizzCon 2019 demo and may not be representative of what appears in the final version of the game.

    The potion system appears to be early in development. We've seen a separate potion inventory and a single potion slot that is cooldown-based so far. Since different classes use different resources, it seems unlikely that there will be potions similar to Mana potions. There may be additional types of potions that we haven't seen thus far.

    Guided Questions

    Please feel free to answer as many of these as you want or just use them as a guide.

    1. Are potions necessary in an ARPG?
    2. What role should they play? Offense, defense, buffing?
    3. How many potions slots is the ideal number?
    4. Should potions be consumable, or cooldown focused?
    5. Should there be different potion rarities (i.e. Normal, Rare, Legendary) with added effects?
    6. Should Health potions primarily restore health instantly, or over a duration?
    7. Should Health Globes make a return if potions are on a cooldown?
    8. How should potions be acquired?

    Strawpoll

    Quick poll about the Potion system here: https://www.strawpoll.me/18923244

    We'd like to include a quick poll with each of these Focused Feedback threads, highlighting hopefully the main question in each thread. Let us know what you think!

    Previous Focused Feedback threads:

    submitted by /u/Thunderclaww
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    Unique/ legendary items shouldn't be mandatory for a skill to work.

    Posted: 10 Nov 2019 10:26 PM PST

    Skills shoulds be good enough on their own to be competitive. In PoE there are unique jewels that fix some skils and make them competitive, but they end up being mandatory. If said effect on the skill is mandatory to work then it should be added to the skill itself. There are some jewels that truly change the gameplay of the skill but it doesn't make the skill itself to feel worse if you don't use them. I think the later is the way to go.

    submitted by /u/baba3000
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    An itemization decision I thought was really cool in the D4 demo.

    Posted: 11 Nov 2019 08:27 AM PST

    I know there's a lot of discussion happening right now on changes and requests that can be made to items in D4, but I wanted to take a second to point out something I thought was really cool in the reveal. The Obsidian Heart mythic item has several affixes that affect talents and skills.

    1. +2 Ranks to Blood Thirst. This small thing is such a big deal to me. I can choose to forgo getting that talent and go down a different tree, or choose to maximize the talent and try for more items to stack ranks on the talent. If this is a randomly rolled affix, it will allow for build diversity as people find more items with different combinations! It also has the added element that the power isn't tied only to the item but the character instead.
    2. Cut to the Bone talent activates against enemies that are hit by your shouts instead of stuns. This one is fun. It changes the style of your play, which I think is really cool. However the best part is that it requires you to have the Cut to the Bone talent, and the power is directly tied to how many points you have in it. In D3, if you didn't have the item that said X skill has X rune effect and XXXX% increased damage, you couldn't even consider using the skill without the item. This is the opposite of that where the talent is good regardless of the item, but the item is there to help change your gameplay into something interesting.
    3. Weapon mastery skills have an additional charge. Same concept as above, but a skill instead. If you don't invest your points into Weapon mastery skills, the affix is less great. Likewise, it can be great for Barbs who choose to put their skill points there.

    I know there's still a long way to go and that there are additional discussions on itemization, but I thought that these decisions were good and that I would like to recognize them. IMO the best part of the choices above is that the player can choose whether they want to build the character so that the item is great, instead of the item deciding whether or not the character's skills are great! Let me know your thoughts on this and I hope the D4 team decides to keep these decisions in their future iterations. Thanks.

    submitted by /u/10keybytouch
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    Diablo 4 Cross-Platform?

    Posted: 11 Nov 2019 05:42 PM PST

    Would love it if Diablo 4 could not only be cross Platform, but progress synced from PC to console and vice versa. I could play on PC then pick up a switch and keep playing on the go.

    This is the missing piece that kept me from getting it on console. I had already invested thousands of hours on Diablo 3 PC, and the two versions are separate. If you could sync progress, I would totally buy two copies of Diablo 4 for this reason.

    Can Diablo 4 support this?

    submitted by /u/gmar84
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    Diablo II

    Posted: 11 Nov 2019 06:39 AM PST

    I'm currently playing diablo II SUPER fun and addictive gameplay I'm an assassin and I'm close to beating Baal (i think) but the problem is.. i don't have ANY good weapons or armor.. all i have are average crap that do ok damage and i got all of them from the normal shops.. are there any hidden strong weapons that i haven't found in the game? Thanks

    submitted by /u/Brear-the-meme
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    Has anyone seen this Hunter concept found?

    Posted: 11 Nov 2019 08:24 PM PST

    Diablo 2 Cinematic Trailer at E3 1998

    Posted: 11 Nov 2019 08:26 AM PST

    https://youtu.be/KxnWjyvmpnI

    I saw this cinematic years ago and i didn't watch it again since recently when i started to delve into the old cinematics once again. There's not a drop of blood in this cinematic but it is sooo atmospheric. This is the "dark" atmosphere i like, unsettling and mysterious. The new trend seems to be to fill the cinematics with rivers of blood but no real captivating atmosphere and characters, I am not sure this is the best thing to do for the immersion of the game.

    I know i'll be unpopular but as great as the D4 trailer may be, in terms of atmosphere i didn't feel anything remotely close to this cinematic or even any of the D1/D2's cinematics. I saw more a will to put a certain quota of "blood" and "darkness" everywhere, but nothing more. I really hope they'll not consider the D4's cinematics purely as a task they have to do, with a coat of blood they have to put mandatorily over them, but instead they'll put some soul into them (and it goes in hand with the lore/RPG aspect of the game).

    submitted by /u/favtex
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    Upgrading Diablo IV Itemization

    Posted: 11 Nov 2019 11:43 AM PST

    D2 first time playing help*

    Posted: 11 Nov 2019 06:05 PM PST

    Hey guys playing diablo 2 first time i will be playing it basically solo besides time with my friend here and there, so I'm wondering which classes maybe top 3 best classes for a beginner to solo?

    submitted by /u/Srbin189
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    Player Executions

    Posted: 11 Nov 2019 05:09 PM PST

    Now in Diablo 3 there was a demo where the barbarian was executed by the siege demon. But was actually scripted. :(

    I think if a boss executed a player, unshielded by invulnerable, but after they executed the player they receive a buff called "Blood Frenzy" or "Blood of the Nephlim". With this buff their abilities change and so does their behavior. These abilities and behaviors can be picked randomly from table making it more dynamic.

    This will add more variety to boss fights and make the game seem more brutal/horrorish.

    Edit: this isn't necessarily means they will do more damage, maybe be more aggressive in their behavior, or more caution because the blood of a god allowed them to see the future, while also allowing them to use new abilities, auras for minions, etc.

    What are your thoughts,

    Blood-Lord

    submitted by /u/Blood-Lord
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    New Class Idea for DIV: Combining Assassin/Demon Hunter

    Posted: 11 Nov 2019 01:10 PM PST

    PREFACE: I don't have a name for it proper, maybe "Ranger" or something, but the general idea is combining the archetypal styles of the Assassin from Diablo II to bring back a beloved classic, with the style of the Demon Hunter from Diablo 3. Part of this inspiration is from the fact that in Diablo 3 they already started toying with the idea, but with a new game they can really design a character from the beginning to fit that mold rather than trying to shoehorn it in after the fact.

    AESTHETIC: So of all the new classes that made an appearance in Diablo 3, none fit the atmosphere of Diablo better, in my opinion, than the Demon Hunter. The lanky, demonic design of their armour sets, the hood covering their face like the Wanderer, the self-sufficient vigilante archetype specifically out to hunt the Demons of the world, their clever use of medieval technology to give themselves an edge, it's all there. It's all very reminiscent of the Assassin from Diablo II, but in ranged format. And from this is born the idea of a truly hybrid class. A trickster fighter that can effectively use ranged weapons, but has plenty of melee options and fun gadgets up their sleeve! Just not someone that excels at direct, face-tanking melee. The D3 Demon Hunter touched on this, but was primarily a ranged class and only used daggers as throwing weapons...which begs the question, why stick with just knives? Knives are classic, but Demon Hunters and Assassins can do more than just knives! Aye, they should use all manner of creative equipment to augment their arsenal: hidden wrist blades, claws, darts, traps, poisons... kyoketsu-shoge! Everything a clever Diablo ninja needs for their troubles.

    GAMEPLAY: Now this is where it gets fun. The Diablo 4 demo had a really interesting concept with the Druid of fast switching with different forms. If you used a wolf skill, you instantly shapeshifted into a wolf to attack. Use a bear skill, you shifted into bear form and hulk smashed. What if we take this concept and expand the idea to ranged vs melee? Not quite so rapidly mind you, that would be absolutely unplayable chaos... but why not skills that force you to dive in and out of combat hit and running? D3 toyed with this, but never made it a serious gameplay element other than for running away, but what if it was core to a character? Jump into the fray with a dragon kick (D2 <3), drop some lightning traps, claw some people in the face to poison them and setup a combo (like a Rogue from WoW), jump back out, start unloading your dual wielded crossbows at the now paralyzed and vulnerable targets taking lightning dmg simultaneously from your now triggered combo. Something gets close? Wrist blade shank it in the stomach, throw a kyouketsu at a ranged target, rip yourself their direction, and start engaging in martial arts! Really lean into the melee vs ranged combat with gadgets augmenting your abilities, but still allowing people to focus on traps, or focus more on ranged weapons, or focus more on martial arts, thus giving you both DH and Assassin gameplay in one character! It also gives you a bit of a different melee dynamic than the Barbarian or a Paladin type because a Ranger wouldn't necessarily be able to sit in combat, they have to stay mobile to stay alive. You could even have two different resource pools like in D3, but have one be a pool for melee skills and one be a pool for ranged skills; gadgets can be both!

    TALENT TREE: Blizzard wanted a novel talent tree archetype for each character, so in carrying that design philosophy forward, and in the spirit of a hybrid class that aims to be novel, give this "Ranger" class three trees you flip through, like a book. One for Martial Arts, one for Gadgets, one for Ranged weaponry. Not three entirely separate trees filled with talents so they have more than others, but three more simplified trees overlaid with one another, like the different layers on a printed circuit board. And like different layers on a PCB, you can have Vias, pathways from one tree to another, maybe 3-4 of them, that allow you to branch from one tree to one of the other two at various points. Like a hyper-dimensional version of what they want to do with the Druid. I feel like you could do a lot more with this concept than I can think of on my own, but it would create some really interesting back and forth situations between these 3 "trees" and turn into some wild hybrid builds, or allow you to hyper-focus on one of the three trees if you wish, only taking a few key talents from other trees. You can let the player start with any one of these three trees, but only one, and then you can only get access to the other trees through the various Vias connecting them.

    Closing Remarks: I only just came up with this idea today and haven't had the chance to fully flesh it out, but maybe there's some magic here. I'm throwing it out there so that if anyone likes the idea, you guys can discuss it and expand upon it, or trash it if you want, whatever you think is best. I really loved the Assassin in Diablo II, and I loved the Demon Hunter in D3, so it would be really cool to be able to bring them both back into the game in some form by combining the best parts of both of them. I really just love the idea of diving in with a flying kick, dropping some lightning traps, batman grappling my way back out and unloading crossbow bolts into the crowd. Or a big crossbow bolt, or whatever else anyone can come up with. Poisoned claws, martial arts, finishers, ballistas (like big ones, not just normal crossbows), dualy xbows, throwing knives that electrify, etc.

    Alright Diablo sub, have at thee, tell me what you think :)

    submitted by /u/RealityRush
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    Huge Fan of Action RPGs and heard this one is the best. Help with mods to make it look somewhat decent?

    Posted: 11 Nov 2019 09:49 PM PST

    Just a fan of RPGs and looking for mods that'll make this title much more enjoyable for modern pcs. I only use mods that'll enhance gameplay experience.

    submitted by /u/ItzYaBoyDarrell
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    Some thoughts regarding legendary items and their affixes/suffixes in Diablo IV

    Posted: 11 Nov 2019 11:03 AM PST

    I know there's a lot of feedback regarding items and all and I'm loving seeing all the points of view on it, but one thing that for me seems really important is that legendary/unique items are actually designed as a whole item.

    In games like grim dawn/poe/diablo 2, hell, even in diablo 1, unique items are called that because they are designed as their own item. They may have ranges of affixes or a bit of variation into them, but they aren't just a rare item with an extra special power baked into them, all their affixeshave been chosen by the design team and that leads to them being balanced and made interesting.

    I feel like the "rares" being useful and legendaries not being simply "more powerful rares" in those games is also due to them being designed as a whole very predictable item, which makes them more interesting. That's why in those games non-unique/set items are very useful, because they have a wide range of affixes and can have combinations of those not found in their unique counterparts.

    In the diablo IV demo we had that fireball staff legendary, it split your fireball into 3 projs that did ~50% dmg each, although I agree with a lot of other feedback given about that type of item (maybe make it affect projs in general, etc), I feel like if that item were to be designed with a fixed set of affixes in mind instead of just being that effect + random affixes it would be easier to keep it useful while not risking making it "necessary" to find a well rolled version of that item to even play a fireball sorc effectively. With that we could end up with the option of running that staff to get the extra projs (and a bit more single target dmg by shotgunning bosses) or a rare we come up across that heavily increases our damage/survivability due to the stats it has.

    Just my two-cents.

    ​

    TLDR: I feel like devs should really be designing whole items when coming up with legendaries (what affixes go in it), not just rares + extra cool effect, make them a cohesive item, and that by itsefl can make rares more relevant as they can roll any combination of affixes.

    submitted by /u/TheBalladOfTheAegis
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    Feature: The Story Of Blizzard's Diablo Junior, The Game Boy Epic That Never Was

    Posted: 11 Nov 2019 05:50 PM PST

    Bizarre issue with Glide wrapper for D2

    Posted: 11 Nov 2019 09:26 PM PST

    When I attempt to run it, it freezes and says not responding, if I try as Admin it runs but doesn't appear to affect the game even with the 3dfx extension.

    I've tried all versions of the wrapper.

    Any ideas?

    Cheers RAAM

    submitted by /u/raamzilla
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    Priorities for first quarter update?

    Posted: 11 Nov 2019 09:20 PM PST

    David Kim mentioned the Diablo 4 team planned on updating the community every quarter (3 months or so).

    What are the key topics you would like covered for the next update?

    submitted by /u/Gibsx
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    Let's talk about the Gameplay Loop of ARPGs OR Why Diablo should be more like HALO

    Posted: 11 Nov 2019 08:53 PM PST

    For nearly 2 decades (Diablo 2) the Gameplay Loop of ARPGs has been: Kill mobs, collect items, upgrade. Rinse repeat.

    ​

    Why is that so? Why does a series like Diablo need to be tied up in numbers, kill rates and stats? When other 3rd person action series have evolved, the ARPG has remained stagnant.

    In the Diablo 4 gameplay videos controversial (at least on this sub) abilities were introduced: Combos and Dodges. It seems at least a vocal percentage of Diablo fans are completely against the thought of "consolizing" Diablo 4. But why are combos and dodges a bad thing? If the processing power was available to the developers of Diablo 1 that we have today I guarantee you that they would have introduced both of those mechanics into the game. It makes combat more thoughtful, strategic and offers up new ways for player to interact with enemies besides swinging sticks until someone dies.

    So back to the point about Gameplay Loops. If Diablo had a slower pace, like that of the original then we don't need 20+ enemies one screen at once. Great. Now we can have each encounter mean something. While blowing through weak mobs is fun, we don't want to be blowing through elite and unique enemies too. It makes the gameplay stagnant and players end up watching cooldowns, resources and the mini-map instead of the action.

    Another franchise that came out around the same time as Diablo 2 was HALO. HALO, while a FPS had an amazingly fantastic Gameplay Loop. Yes, you shoot baddies and move through a level completing objectives. But each enemy had it's own behaviour and AI strategy. You can't rush in against an Elite pack, you will die. you need to use cover, grenades, every and all tricks in the books to progress. When the difficulty is increased, the enemy behaviour is again changed, it's not a matter of HP/Attack numbers getting higher/lower. Enemies do not flood the screen and yet you WILL die if you don't think about your actions. Before every encounter, even a fast-paced one, you have to think about where you will attack from, what gun you will use and where a fallback position will be. Enemy variety changes and mixes often and each type can be deadly, so you are constantly on your toes.

    So let's have the same in Diablo 4! Would you like a tweaked Diablo 2/3 or something like this:

    ​

    • Combos
      • Can be interrupted, timing them is important as an interrupted attack can stun or leave you vulnerable
      • when completed, do more damage than a standard attack
        • Outcome: Players are paying close attention to their character move onscreen
    • Dodge
      • Enemy attacks have a variety of skills and animations
      • Players must pay attention and time dodges and counters
        • Outcome: Players are watching enemy movements and well as their character's position in relation
    • Smaller enemy packs
      • each pack has a leader that has a unique ability (revive, buffs, ranged attack, blocking ability, etc)
      • killing weak minions grants no loot
      • killing the leader grants loot BUT killing the entire pack grants a higher MF%
        • Outcome: Killing ALL enemies becomes the focus, not just plowing through for a high kill rate
    • Elites, Champions and Bosses
      • Variety of skills means a variety of ways to plan attack
      • No two encounters are the same in a 2-3 minute gameplay span
        • Outcome: Combat feels fresh and exciting, you never know what you will need to do next. Players are focused and feel a sense of accomplishment after every gameplay loop, regardless of loot
    • Loot
      • Loot increases stats, grants abilities, all the fun stuff we love
      • White, Magic, rare items are all viable depending on the build and crafting
      • Enemies are not hemorrhaging items
      • While increases to stats and skills are great, a good player can still tackle a difficult mob if they have good attack recognition, timing and skill
        • Outcome: Players are focused completely on the combat action. Pace is slowed but every action is meaningful. Loot pickup is tied to the satisfaction of beating the mob/enemy. Every item can make a difference.

    ​

    Does this sound like a Diablo game you would want to play?

    submitted by /u/Buzzenstein
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