Gearing Up--Input badly needed.

[Fireheart]

Alright gentlemen,

Good news. I'm back, Wesson is back (at least to help somewhat, he's very busy these days) and I've even got Paladin (who did gems and Orbs in CF) hedging on the fence. (I'll get him I think--he's my best friend of twelve years).

Anyway.

Our mistake in the aborted Fusion: Armageddon was in trying to take Cold Fusion and stuff it into LoD. It was a worthy goal, and we wanted to ensure cross-compatibility, but it wasn't all that possible to attempt to port one mod while simultaneously redesigning it to be affected by the expansion.

Its been two years since CF, LoD is well-established, and 1.10 is on the way, but here's the thing--I'm two years out of the loop. Fusion was always heavily player-driven which means I need to know what people are looking for in a mod. There's a lot more available now then there were back in the day, and a lot more things are possible--so lets hear what people are looking for.

For those of you who don't know: Fusion always focused on balancing and tuning Diablo II rather than introducing radical stuff. There were other mods with great single ideas at the time, but we focused on integrating new ideas, skills, balances, etc, into the game as a whole. The goal of Fusion was always to build a better Diablo II then Diablo II had been. We wanted a mod that was tougher, ramped smoother, and rewarded players more--hence the reason we introduced exceptional sets, exceptional uniques, etc, etc.

So--with that as a given--where do people think mod design should go?

And Tactics Central will move over soon, though we'll be redesigning it.

[Myhrginoc]

The balance mods usually start with what the modmakers feel went wrong with LoD. Lots of new items, but people try for only a few. Areas with insufficient variability. Still no game reason for exploring anything outside of the straight track to the end. Low power uniques with excessive level requirements, and high-power uniques better than anything else. Still, addressing balance alone won't differentiate your mod from other balance mods without an overlying theme.

I have a couple of ideas about items, familiar to anybody who has been near my soapbox.

• Rares are all about affix variability. The best possible rares should be better than anything else in the game, because getting six great mods on a rare makes getting a Zod in vanilla D2 commonplace by comparison.
• Sets are an unfulfilled idea. A six item high-grade set should be worth giving up six item slots for.
• Uniques are either underpowered or overpowered now. What might make a unique stand out is the availability of mods that cannot be found any other way, such as a unique shield having magic resistance.
• Crafted items should be sort of unique, sort of rare. As a hybrid of the two, the best affixes on crafted items should be a little less than the best on rares. Crafted items could share with uniques the availability of unusual affixes that won't drop for magical or rare items.

[FoxBat]

Agreed. To a large degree, it's the annoyances that gets the balance mods going. I used to play variants in the RBD community, but even there there was too much uberness for my taste. So I go make a mod that forces everyone playing it to play my way. But the advantage of this then is that it gathers people together in multiplayer looking for similar things. Plus the LoD monsters are so darn brain dead anyway, the drop system so out of wack, the gap between bosses and normal monsters, and that's nothing any variant can help.

My ideas are pretty much summed up here, but then that's all been done before obviously. Hopefully some people will come along demanding something different.

But a significant difference in 7L is that more attention was paid to the later game, wheras past fusions have excelled in the early game. I'm not one to play a lvl 80 charater in hell over and over, so that's certainly no flaw, perhaps more of a bonus in fusion's favor.

A serious flaw that you might want to avoid: I've found that boosting up the monsters makes them a pretty scary challenge for melee players. But rangers usually bring along some sort of minion to tank, and everything gets too easy. It's very hard to make minions useful, without making them overpowered at tanking, and forcing the player to recast them every 5 seconds. I've had to do some crazy things like resummoning timers, slower movement, slower awareness radius, high mana costs, etc. and they are still pretty darn good. This is a real difficult problem to grapple with in LoD in trying to make the game more difficult. Would be nice to give certain monster an AI to just ignore the minion!

Another advantage you have is that you'll likely be starting with 1.10. That means you will have access to some truly crazy stuff, as you can see in this huge thread. You can go ahead and really change the player skills around for example, without fearing annoying existing players like the established mods would!

Starting "my" mod really had nothing to do with players. I'm not selfless enough to do that much work just for someone else. While it's great of you to take in player input, I think you might need to find a theme of your own too. I'd recommend playing LoD, your armageddon beta, or some of the "balance" mods around here, like Middle Earth, Seasons After, (7L ) etc. and figure out what you do and don't like about them, while you're waiting for 1.10. The best education is some hands-on experience.

[Fireheart]

I really like this new forum design. (off-topic).

Ok. ::deep breath::

Much of what you mention, Myhr, surprises me, in that I thought all that would already be fixed. Some of your ideas (restricting certain 'fixes, much better sets, etc, we tried very hard to address in CF. (We never did quite figure how 'crafted items should fill into the mix.).

That makes me happy though because it suggests there's work to do.

Fox:


I definitely intend to do some mod playing and see what people have done. (I'm not sure what the RBD community, is btw). The drop system CAN be overhauled, as can the gaps between bosses and normal monsters. This is where you'd have to talk to Wesson--I'm utterly incapable of describing exactly how he rebuilt monsters, beyond telling you that he had an equation set that made my head spin and when he was done, it WORKED.

About Fusion early game....hmmm, true / untrue. I think we did some significant late-game work by allowing later levels to be a real possibility, but I think its also true that we focused a lot on Normal.

The ranged / melee issue you raise is a very good one--I'm sure a balance can be found somehow, but what exactly that'll be will take some serious work.

As to Fusion, it has always been and will always be player driven. When Crymson dumped it in my lap (and I didn't knwo ANYTHING about modding) I continued it because people wanted it. Ditto for Fusion 2 and CF. The thing is, I've always found that many times what the best players / modders say needs adjusting in the game, I agree with. The above info on drops, range / melee, and affixes is a good example of that.

Up until 1.10 I'll be playing existing mods, doing some brainstorming, and maybe porting CF to 1.09 D2. Not sure of that yet. (I doubt I'll ever do the 1.10 port for CF.)

[Phrozen Heart]

Without going into specific suggestions, there are two basic concepts that impress me personally:

The "Wow" Factor - Being able to encounter a new boss, monster, quest, item or whatever that is so impressive in either it's design or appearance that it's almost hard to believe that it was created using the same D2 engine.

Rebuilding From Scratch - Adding tonnes of new stuff to a mod is great but I always like it when the modder strips away EVERYTHING and starts over with their own system whether that be graphics or game mechanics or whatever. Sir_General's Rune Mod is an awesome example of this.

That said, this is MY opinion which may or may not reflect everyone else's. One idea might be to put up a handful of sticky threads containing various polls to get a little global input.

[max_power]

Wow, great to see you back in the web-reality fireheart. Cold Fusion was by fare the best mod I ever played. That said I can't wait to see what is going to be done for your newest mod .

What I liked about CF was the nice smooth leveling.

My personal problems with D2/LoD are the overly linear charactors. Their redant skills, and either overly powerful (eg, assassines tiger strike) or patheticaly useless (eg, all her traps) skills. CF did fantastic things to skill sets...absolutly brillant, not huge grandiose changes just small changes that created a more smooth running game.

Something I have always thought would be good would be less but massively more powerful uniques, that is, there need not be a unique for ever item in the game. Instead there could be only a few. Maybe only three or four per item type/difficulty. This would make uniques more interusting and they could be justifiable unque and siginifcantly more powerful.

Class-spacific items: these are totaly screwy... They need fixing. The idea is neet but they just don't ever seem to be all that fuctional... In my opinion they should always drop with a plus to charactor skills.

I don't know if this is even possible, but I shall put it out there for consideration. The palladin I have always should be able to have weapon mastries.

Monsters: all monsters that run away in some manner are a [explatves removed] pain in. And when I say pain I mean they suck, stink; are dumb, useless, pointless, and a royal [explatives removed] pain in the [explatives removed].

Runes: need serious re-thinking. The best talk I have ever heard for what to do with runes is creating real words. That is, there is a LION(S) rune, a BANE rune. Put them to-gether and you have the rune word LION(S) BANE. This way rune words are more easily created, and discovered.

Jewels are also fairly, lets just say, crappy.

Gems in CF were great.

Well thats all I can think of at midnight. Great that your back Fireheart.

[SaTaN]

heres what im lookin for in a mod i like a act1 to be nice and easy finish it at say lvl 20 and u level fast in act1 but act 2 is a snowball in hell kinda thing if u didnt make ur char perfect and i mean put alot of thought into it ur dead , BUT like i said act1 needs 2 be fast enuf u can just zip back to act2 with a new char becasue we dont wanna make ppl lose intrest if act2 is to hard. thats what i think LISTEN TO ME I NEED A MOD plz

oooooo and btw im now camping in ur forum