“You gotta know when to hold em, know when to fold em, know when to walk away, know when to run…”
Obviously, based on my first post within this thread, I do agree with yerkyerk. What I didn’t realise was that dropping items reset their cooldown.
Would those items which are activated on attack/on being hit (with what is typically a long cooldown) would be better replaced with an item which has a %chance to trigger on attack or on being hit and a reasonably short cooldown period? Unless of course there is a way to fix that exploit?
I think it is only really that “activate on low health” skill that makes the player invulnerable that is a real exploit. Thus far, none of the on-hit activation skills I’ve made have warranted a cool-down. They’re helpful when they go off but not so much so that it is overpowering or requires a cooldown.
I agree in principle with keeping some mystery about the underlying mechanics, but the thing is, trying out new kit is not a free action, and neither is it very easy to assess the results.
Trying out new kit consumes precious play time (I have two small children - play time is precious). I need somewhere to store my old kit, which consumes precious storage space. I need to play for a reasonable time to get a feel for my new kit - which sets an absolute limit on the rate at which I can try out new equipment.
If I play on through the game with the new kit, I’m fighting newer, tougher monsters - so unless the new kit is absolutely awesome, I’m not getting a fair or clear reading on how effective it is. But if I go back and play somewhere earlier, I’m tougher than I was last time I was there anyway, thanks to levelling, so it’s still not a fair reading.
What I need to know, when I pick up my new kit, is how likely it is to be helpful. Whether it’s worth the effort to try it out. And to make that judgement, I need a bit more information - maybe not ‘3% chance to trigger, 2min cooldown’ but ‘very low chance to trigger, long cooldown’.
You say that in TQ players, particularly novice players, would often hold on items for much longer than is wise, because of their cool affixes: maybe this is a sign that there was a bit too much mystery about the mechanics in TQ: after all, how visible are the effects of a 5% increase in armour? How often do you increase armour by a visible percentage?
(actually, on a similar note, I’d love to see the D2 thing where the more you kill of a monster type, the more information the mouse-over display gives you: particularly resistances. I don’t need to know that MookX is 95% fire resistant - but ‘highly fire resistant’ would be nice. Particularly with the way that TQ makes it easy to see DPS & average damage, but very hard to see the damage type breakdown. I know I’m killing MookX who have a firey animation - is that because they’re not fire resistant, because I do more normal damage than I thought, because they’re very vulnerable to a small amount of cold damage I didn’t realise I did, or because they’re just very weak?)
Hm, I could be mistaken there. I’ve noticed some unfortunate limits with modding though. Perhaps I’m mixing it up with set items not being able to give a granted skill on completion - which would be awesome ofcourse, get the ability to turn into a giant dragon for a short time when you wear a completed dragon armor (ofcourse you couldn’t morph in TQ, but that’s besides the point).
That’s true, but affixes can grant skills even with the TQ modding tools; the Malevolent affix in the Uber mod grants a skill that’s activated on low health.
And put me down for being pro-passive-skills-on-items. Having too many active skills is a pain in the ass for the player. In TQ, I found I could reliably handle up to 8 active skills and still play comfortably. Obviously, active skills on items in TQ suffered from level limitations, but even if they didn’t, I can’t think of hardly any active skills on items I would ever have used, besides Stoneform.
Part of the problem is also how it suits the play-style; it’s annoying to work an active skill into your game, only to have to lose it when you get a much better item that replaces the one in that slot. Not to mention, it can muck with balance. I mean, a conqueror who gets the active skill Coldsnap is broken with reliable crowd control. However, if it’s just a chance to activate, it can suit any class and still find a balance point.
Also, as a side-note, Rhis just finished the tech that will me to create leveling equations for affix skills based on the level of the item to which they are being applied.
Can I be a complete noob and get someone to define what an “affix skill” is! :o What’s the difference between an affix skill and a skill granted by an item?
There’s three solutions to this I guess.
Get the game content to force the player to discard redundant gear, no matter how shiny it is. In TQ, this has just happened to me. I have sailed through act 1 and 2 with a couple of blue swords and 2 pieces of Obsidian armour plus greens and blues…but within 2 minutes of hitting Babylon gardens, I was repeatedly dying at the hands of those pesky little spiders!
Make certain items like this scalable (I’m thinking something akin to heirloom items in WoW).
Allow players to modify higher level gear.
The problem with 1) is that people may feel cheated. Items like this shouldn’t be 2-a-penny so when you finally get one, to be forced to dump it a level or two later is likely to be galling to the player.
Solution 2) in particularly for things like set items which take yonks to accumulate, is more elegant I feel. It would obviously take some careful balancing but scaling up the item’s main stats with player level is, IMHO, a nice idea.
Solution 3) is also workable I feel. It would certainly extend the life of rarer gear if you could add the essences/gems/enchants/ whatever.
Active skills give a lot more identity and uniqueness to a character though; while it’s true that at low levels you don’t want to keep changing your active skills, with endgame equipment active skills open up a ton of possibilities and unique character builds. D2 incorporated a number of active skills with runewords (allowing them to be made in endgame) and they opened up a ton of possibilities, lots of players made funbuilds with the various “oskills” available. And some builds were actually somewhat effective compared to the overpowered cookiecutter builds.
Carefully selecting the available active skills (like, don’t make teleport a granted skill…) would prevent overpowered builds and give a lot of replay value - D2 proofs that this can be done succesfully. A lot of people want to make a unique character build, something they invented (doesn’t matter if it’s been done 100 times). Planning a build is one of the fun aspects of this game - allowing active skills greatly increases the number of available builds, in turn making heroes with these active skills feel a lot more unique. And endgame equipment won’t be easily exchanged; for specific builds, people will probably plan their build around the active skill they’re aiming for (or simply transfer the item they found on another character).
One way to nerf granted skills would be to let them all start at lvl1 - and they can be increased with modifiers like “+X to all skills”, “+X to specific mastery”, “+X to specific skill” and “+X to granted skills”. This way, the skills will be less powerful than the skills of the heroes owning that mastery, but still be powerful enough to have an impact. Also, active skills wouldn’t have tree synergies.
I agree with Munderbunny in principle, and for several of the same reasons posted. The exception case where I’d want to see an active skill applied to an item is in a hypothetical game system where that active skill was already on my skill bar, and a part of my character class.
I rarely use active skills in games like this as they’re a frustrating anomaly - they take up a skill bar slot, they’re situational, and they go away when I get a better piece of kit. I end up perferring to not go through the hassle of trying to work it into a skill rotation and choose passives that I “don’t have to worry about”.
Actives are cool sounding on paper, but in practice they’re just frustrating. Much rather see a chance to activate or have an ‘active’ tied to a skill already on my bar that I’m going to be clicking anyway. Which makes it essentially the same as a passive bonus to an existing character class active skill.
@yerkyerk: I don’t want to ‘plan’ my unique character build and have it fall through because I never did loot the Pauldrons of My Uniqueness. Basing your build on a drop seems counter-intuitive to an actual character build plan. For this reason, I see a fatal flaw in your logic.
Hopefully the active skills on equipment address some of the concerns mentioned. The ideal being to have them fall into the sweet spot between the extremes we see too often in other games, where a given active is either over-used because it’s too good, or under-used because it’s worthless.
Maybe that’s part of what is implied when you wrote, "Also, as a side-note, Rhis just finished the tech that will me to create leveling equations for affix skills based on the level of the item to which they are… "
I do not disagree with the Yerkster about more skills allowing for more unique builds, and more unique builds being a good thing. I never played D2 when there were runewords and stuff.
I loved builds such as the whirlwinding assassin (who wouldn’t, an assassin should totally be able to do that), a barbarian transforming into a wolf (although that was a bit lame, cause you had no special attacks, just a ton of health and armor), a sorceres with a summon army (too bad you had to make do with depleting charges - but fire enchanted summons do good damage), firemancers (so cool, skeletons holding the enemy in line while you cast a firewall on them), etc…
Most fun I had was actually planning the builds though. Finding the equipment was for many builds not possible on battle.net, due to the limited availability of high runes.
One of the guys had mentioned rune words. Please don’t do anything like that those were such a pain in the butt. But i am all for having both active and passive skills on items. I am also one of the fans of passive skills “the fire and forget” weapons. Affixes be possible in crafting as well or only with equipment that you find?
simply /sign … that way you could have “the best” item for your build and yet you could farm some more for a better, suitable affix if you want to and yet you would be not “really” weaker of you don’t …
i like passive skills, it adds to my pack rat mentality of being unable to part with any unique item that i may one day use in some obscure character build that i swear ill get around to making and never seem to.
ill occasionally forgo the best gear for something with a cool random effect. it doesnt always equal win, but it always equals fun!
on a side note, is there going to be a caravan type item bank in GD?
I’m a horder as well. I tend to pack set items and uniques away on various storage characters when there is too many to put in a shared or personal stash in case I want to hand an item down to a new character or to have a general collection of cool stuff.
Speak for yourself, I love stacking a tanking (boring) character with chance on hit gears (YAY EXCITEMENT) then just wading into the melee and seeing what happens. Random = more fun.
