Balancing Issues Thread - for complaints and suggestions

[darkdivine]

I understand now. I had such high hopes for skills in the passive tree to go beyond level 5, especially tier 2 and 3.

What else are you working on before the release Xaphan?

[Xaphan]

Not so much. Act 4 uniques related to bosses and the transtion to act 5 (No, act 5 is not in this version ^^).

[Firesnake]

[!] [DONE] Using the /players command now only increase the droprate of weapons, armors and amulets

Ouch... this one hurts. Whenever I find myself missing an ingredient which is available in earlier acts I just rush thruogh the areas on /players 8. Now it will take ages to find those. Last time when I needed four essences of a kind I found myself shooting over 4000 monsters in act 2 on /players 8 before finding the last one.

[Templar_]

Is it on purpose that all skills got increased duration except collossus form? Now i can't even increase its duration with wisdom

Patch looks cool generally. Im going for the 1st boss now. Just had to QQ a little

[Xaphan]

Yeah. Colossus in it's current for is going to disapear anyway, so I don't really take care about it. It may become a summon where you actually sumon one of the ancient instead of being one.

[Templar_]

Ok. Finished diablo. His skills are ok. Only that oversized firewall lasts too long - it's a small jmap so a few seconds less wouldn't hurt, especially for the minion build (it deals huge damage too so it may vaporize whole army.). I'm a bit disappointed with other 2 minibosses - they didn't have anything unique to them. Some skills for them pl0x.
Gold change -> i started with 10k gold in my stash. My merc died once so had to collect 14k for his resurrection -> took whole 1st part till i got to the 2nd town. Then i bought materials for crafting etc. in the whole act 4 spent about 15k for that. Then when the diablo fight came, one of the seal's bosses that got fire enchanted corpse explosion pwnd me. I wanted to resurrect merc and couldn't even afford it Guess now we will have to farm for gold to craft items and respecing too.

About act 3 - Do you intend to keep mephisto's totems and minions untargetable? It makes some skills completely unusable the like my destructive storm. Fire merc i got is absolutely useless even with set items so he doesn't help at all.

New menu looks cool btw.

[powerrrbg]

Ok i am level 47 necromancer already killed diablo few times.I had a great time playing the mod and i have a few things that i want to point out.

1)Mage(caster) weapons are really weak compared to melee i havent even found yet unique ceremonial knife or necro off-hand.I am using ceremonial knife with 1 to poison skills but it gives increased fire dmg and ive noticed that other items are the same they give 1 to x elemental skill and % dmg to other which makes the whole item imo pointless.Why would you have an item with 1 poison skills and +% fire dmg when necros dont even have 1 fire skill as far as i recall.

2)Overall most runewords I made,artefacts i found,or uniques i found/crafted are for physical dmg either melee/ranged.As a matter of fact at lvl 47 i am still playing without artefact the only one i found recipe for that i would even consider making is Eye of the heavens(which drops in act 4).

3)Sets - all set bonuses for gear level 13 were the same i tested at least 2 of them for which i found plan for (assasin and paladin),they had the same stats just the final bonus was giving +1 +1 to both assasin/pala trees.
Making them at least little unique would be really cool.

4)Paladins - i would like to see some changes so a paladin can actaully be a caster he has really cool cold/magic/lighting skills i would like to build around but there isnt any support from either of his stats energy/dex/str unless you use a caster wep but still you wont have any energy to play around with,no caster buffs and i must say paladin has most buffs ingame but not a single one towards caster.I will most likely try it even now but i dont think its worthed since i have whole gear level 13 paladin set and he doesnt have a single stat toward elemental dmg(in my case cold).

5)Necromancer itself - I am running full points into Poison Nova(+Necrosis upgrade) and Masochism(only 1 point in upgrade)nearly maxed death mastery currently at 25/30,10 points in ghost and 1 point in each summon and their buff.Running with high resistence/defefense overall with high surviveability,not pure glass canion.

5.1.It has amazing damage currently hiting for insane amounts,high surviveability with the right stats/gear,usually minions tank most of the dmg.But i still think he can be improved here are some suggestions:

5.2.Soul reaping seems useless for most spells in the tree and overall for caster necro replacing it with something like + % additional increased mana reg or % mana would be a lot better.

5.3.Depravity hex reduces fire and cold resistence of the hexed(cursed) target but we only have 1 summon that would benefit from that and its the cold zombie.
Since most of our spells are poison/magic imo the hex(curse) should reduce poison and magic resist and the upgrade should also gives towards poison and magic.

Here are some of my stats:
http://i974.photobucket.com/albums/ae22 ... aeb6ac.jpg

Overall great job with mod and the balance was just fine i had really hard time at the begining of act 3 which was just great.Keep up the good work.

[Firesnake]

You can now download version 4.01 of the mod.

The main features of this version are :
1. ...
2. Removal of life and mana steal, replaced by life and mana per hit
3. ...

To be absolutely honest, this currently totally useless. My crafted bows used to have 1-3% leech, now they have 1-3 life/mana per hit. Even around level 25 I already have over 2000 life and mana and values like this are not helping, they simply waste a stat slot on the item. This change might work if you add one or two zeros after all values...

I assume that this will be much much harder to balance because it doesn't scale with the characters' power, instead it only scales with their attack speed. So it would have to increase drastically on higher level items. Personally I would recommend to keep leech instead, but if you decide to try to balance the mod using only life/mana on hit, I'll try to help as much as I can...

[powerrrbg]

You can now download version 4.01 of the mod.

The main features of this version are :
1. ...
2. Removal of life and mana steal, replaced by life and mana per hit
3. ...

To be absolutely honest, this currently totally useless. My crafted bows used to have 1-3% leech, now they have 1-3 life/mana per hit. Even around level 25 I already have over 2000 life and mana and values like this are not helping, they simply waste a stat slot on the item. This change might work if you add one or two zeros after all values...

I assume that this will be much much harder to balance because it doesn't scale with the characters' power, instead it only scales with their attack speed. So it would have to increase drastically on higher level items. Personally I would recommend to keep leech instead, but if you decide to try to balance the mod using only life/mana on hit, I'll try to help as much as I can...

Tbh it doesnt scale with Attack speed because the faster you attack the more mana your skills requires due to higher spam assuming you dont use common attack.I also agree that at least the mod should keep mana leach.But if the owner of the mod wants to keep life/mana on hit he can make it scale with gear item level for example 3xgear level 2x gear level so a lvl 10 item would have 30 mana per hit or 20 mana per hit for example.

[Firesnake]

Tbh it doesnt scale with Attack speed because the faster you attack the more mana your skills requires due to higher spam assuming you dont use common attack.I also agree that at least the mod should keep mana leach.But if the owner of the mod wants to keep life/mana on hit he can make it scale with gear item level for example 3xgear level 2x gear level so a lvl 10 item would have 30 mana per hit or 20 mana per hit for example.

You are right OFC, LoH scales with attack speed though. Area vs. single target is another problem since Diablo II does not use coefficients for skills like Diablo 3 does, so if I am not completely mistaken it should scale linearly with the number of targets hit.

[Xaphan]

LoH and MoH have low values because they work on each enemy hit.

And about mana, just remember that you can have mana per hit on multiple items. At the end of the game you can have up to +75 mana per hit PER ITEM PER MONSTER. that's a lot

Keep also in mind that many unique and set items are currently missing. (unique armors, and class items) These items will offer you more ptions to get mana per hit. And existing items can also ba altered as well.

I do agree however that mana on hit should be able to spawn on more items types while they are not unique or sets, cause actually only a few of thems can have it.

[Firesnake]

LoH and MoH have low values because they work on each enemy hit.

And about mana, just remember that you can have mana per hit on multiple items. At the end of the game you can have up to +75 mana per hit PER ITEM PER MONSTER. that's a lot

That's yet another problem.

1. Area effect skills need huge mana costs and become almost completely unusable against single or even 2-3 monsters OR area effect skills have moderate mana costs and the MoH trivializes mana management because you leech huge amounts
2. Melee characters with single target spells won't be able to rely on LoH OR Melee characters with area effects will leech rediculous amounts of life

The problem is that you can't adjust the amount of life/mana stole by the amount of damage done, which is the case for normal leech. So even if a melee skill that only hits one target does a huge amount of damage, the leech will still be the same. To stay alive it will always be bettet to use area damage.

[powerrrbg]

Hey Xaphan i would really like to hear you thoughts on my suggestions at least to adress the paladin caster issues hammerdin/fist/cold pala.Because really it has only 1 conviction aura(ward) spell that helps those builds,not even sure if conviction even benefit hammerdins since it reduces elemental resistence and magic is not in that category.

Maybe make it so str gives spell dmg also or something like that or an enchantment(buff) that that makes your str give spell dmg.

In addition there is nothing for mana/mana reg on the paladin trees and since all his spell damage spells have really fast cast time and have to be spammed it really makes paladin mana starving.

I would like to hear your thougts also on the idea of dividing paladin paladin trees into a melee one and caster one,melee on with sacrifice/zeal build + melee auras(wards)+buffs and caster one with 3 viable builds fists/hamerdins/mystic tornado/whirpools builds + caster(mage) auras and buffs.Make his mastery for caster energy focused.

This way paladins will really have 4 5 build choices to work around with which overall will be really nice and interesting.

In addition it will lead to new problems and that is that there must be 2 kind of pala sets caster/melee one but that wont be really an issue since you can gear just fine without sets paladins can keep only melee sets,there is no need even to make caster paladin weps they will just use wands.

[Firesnake]

... dividing paladin paladin trees into a melee one and caster one,melee on with sacrifice/zeal build + melee auras(wards)+buffs and caster one with 3 viable builds fists/hamerdins/mystic tornado/whirpools builds + caster(mage) auras and buffs.Make his mastery for caster energy focused.

I second this, missing support kills builds, especially since masteries and energy have such a huge impact on skill damage. I haven't played my guardian too much but I noticed the same problem.

[Xaphan]

Once act 5 is done, we will start discuting on each character to see what can be improved on each of thems, and that will be part of the balance patches

[Aethx]

Hi Xaphan,

Im not use to post in forums but since I enjoyed the mod so much Im taking the time.
First of all, great work once again for all your labor into this piece of art.

I ll start with the good thing : story renewed is awsome, you changed enough the story to make it newly imercive. I only played paladin yet and It fell good.

After some time I got concern about the lack of caracter information like %avoid/dodge/ranged attack etc. im sure I aint alone to enjoy some stats about our heros.

Some sort of wiki whould be welcome too for new players and whould help the player retension. Im not new in this kind of game and I had to check for hours some sort of info and simple thing like"you need a white item for runeword" (I laugh a lot)
oh and make the non set/unique regents from vendor, it feels retarded to run out town to kill 8 mobs for a blue item and a white item ^^
anyway great work again and feel free to PM in french, im from Québec
Aeth

[Firesnake]

Xaphan, I read that you plan to do at least three balancing patches before releasing Nightmar eand Hell difficulties. I know there's quite a lot to balance at the moment, but do you really think it's a good idea to divert so much time and effort into balancing before the whole content is out? What might work at the end of Normal can turn upside down until the end of Nightmare, let alone Hell. Why not do some of it now, then focus on NM/H and finish the balancing on Hell?

[Xaphan]

Yes, at least 3 updates focused on balance, but that dosen't means all 3 will be each after each other. It't not even intended to be that way.

Items will be 1st focus because the way I'm going to do higher difficulties requires all items to be in the game, else If I add thems later they won't be balanced and it's 3 times the worrk instead of 1. In this update I'm also planning to add others features that can drasticely change how the rest of the game work (like the new mana concept or the changes to fame) that should be done as soon as possible to be able to balance the rest of the game taking them into account.

After items I plan to release nightmare difficulty. This will allows characters to reach max level.

Next come skill balance. Now that characters can achieve max level, it will be easier to do it. Sure some things are badly balanced enought that I know I must change thems even now, but I think this is the best time to do most of the changes.

Monsters balance (as well as reworking some bosses, adding new monsters, etc...) will be done based on the balance that have been done previously

Then, Hell difficulty is planned.

See here :

Here is the current plan for future updates :
- Version 6.00 -> Item balance and introduce news unique items (armors). Also introduce missings items related to act 5, such as last sets items.
- Version 7.00 -> Introduce Nightmare difficulty, all items related to this difficulty and allows you to reach max level (all 5 acts will be released at once)
- Version 8.00 -> Introduce Skill balance. All class skills will be rebalanced to make the overall game experience more enjoyable.
- Version 9.00 -> Introduce Monster balance. This include reworking all current monsters as well as adding news ones.
- Version 10.00 -> Introduce Hell difficulty. This will be the first End-game content, and is intended to be a very hard difficulty. (All monsters are stronger than you).

Please also note that some content is probably going to be added in theses updates as well, so it won't be just balance

[qndel]

I don't know much, but I know it would be cool to have a private realm for this mod so it would be much easier to play together

[Sir Kaktus]

Hi

i played on version 6.00 with a friend on players 8 and we (he warrior and me huntress) destroy all enemies we have found. So that's look a kind too easy for 2 or more players. The Uniques Monster are a little harder with the life reg but easy too kill.

[Xaphan]

Hi,

Yes, this is already adressed in my current version I'm working on. Right now on the beta difficukty is super low 'due to various changes made elswere), but that is going to change.

[NxHunter]

Hey Xaphan,

Really pumped to see that you're still working on this project. I've seen that you've got most of the pieces for the next patch done. I'd like to get involved and help out with the testing. If you've got any stable builds, give me a shout.

I work as QA for a large gaming company as it is, so I'd like to commit some time to helping someone like yourself.

Thanks again fella,
Keep up the good work.