Character Identity: Path of Exile & Diablo II + III

[babinro]

I much prefer Diablo 3's skill/rune system to the traditional skill tree or sphere grid systems. For me, it makes easy level gain interesting as you unlock new skill variations to play around with. In D2 or PoE you can easily spend 5-19 levels of doing nothing but slightly upping your damage output. It's a grind, and not in a good way. The skill/rune system is also great because of all the tweaks and refinements your build goes through at the endgame as your character gradually improves. It's like building and perfecting a Magic:The Gathering deck through testing.

That's not to say the skill/rune system is perfect. It's new.
Like anything else I think there's room to improve with iteration of further design testing.

A couple of ideas I have for it are...

1) When a player gains a level allow them to choose which rune unlocks so they have some control over the progress of their character. Each rune is designed as equally powerful to another so there's no reason NOT to do this.

2) In Reaper of Souls players will have 6 skills and 4 passives to make up their character. I'd like to see a game that simply gave us 10 power slots which could be filled with any combination of passives and skills. If someone wants to use 1 attack power and 9 passives let them. I honestly don't know if this would improve or hinder the experience just that on paper it adds to the customization.

3) Skills should never act as passive buffs. This is the roll of a passive. Skills like Magic Weapon and Battle Rage have no reason to exist as active skills. They typically feel 'mandatory' and make builds less engaging as a result.

 

[Ihateregistering1]

And yes, they won't really be "grinding" for regrets either - they'll just go and fucking buy them [http://exilestats.com/ex/].

I am not that far into PoE yet. But it was my understanding the amount of respec stones you can find is capped at 18 or so. Did that change (recently)?

...Titan Quest have a relatively easy to understand skilltree(even the most green newbie can figure out you need to give a guy using a gun, skills that complement shooting stuff) while still allowing multiple routes to victory

However, to me the Diablo-esque ARPG with the best character creation is still 'Titan Quest' (and likely soon "Grim Dawn" as well).

Interesting you guys mentioned Titan Quest. I used to play the game a lot. The skill tree system is indeed original and interesting; the execution not so much. It has been a while so I can exactly recall the details. I think the biggest issue was the lack of transparency. There are so many different hidden modifiers, you had no idea what effected what. For example, there was lightning damange, burning damage, lightning burn damage. There were all these rules and calculations and it was all a black box. I had to go to the forums a lot and read up on how certain things work. If you make a game (overly) complex, at least make it transparent. The skill system was also somewhat unbalanced (made worse by the hidden modifiers as described).

I am also wondering about the viability of the TQ builds. Certain specialization combinations are just near impossible to work with in new game++. This part is not critism on the game. It's just because you can combine everything doesn't mean you should.

In the end I still like TQ even with it flaws.

Really? I never thought it was too much. There are more types of damage than in most ARPGs, but I didn't find it overwhelming. If I remember correctly, it had lightning, fire, ice, and poison damage (just like D2 did). The additions it had were bleeding damage (which functioned pretty much like poison did) and pierce damage, which basically just meant it did greater damage to armored targets.

 

[irok]

Path has a simple and almost universal truth, your first character will suck and that's ok , because we you do figure out the system , you can make something uniquely your own, how much of that you end up with is up to you but I prefer that to d3's skills, if anyone had better equipment as the same class as you , they could automatically do your job better, if it came out that there was a statistical advantage to doing something, soon 90% of the player base was doing It. Also fully respecting a character in path is common practice at level 60, people use leveling builds and then if they are rich enough they trade regret orbs with others to respect , its expensive and no it shouldn't become a micro transaction because the game itself is fundamentally against giving you basically anything for real money but the option is there if you happen to have a large stack of in game currency to trade.

Also Respec stones aren't capped, that was never a thing.

 

[wulfy42]

D2 had hundreds of playable builds....and much more if you didn't care about being able to play in hell difficulty. People who went online and used just a few recomended builds...ruined the game for themselves. I personally loved playing new characters from the ground up, never rushing...and experimenting with new builds (along with no equipment options as I expanded on my collection).

I would generally play for 3-4 months every year, then wait for a new ladder reset or patch, and start from scratch again...because It was that fun for me.

The problem I had/have with D3 (Even with the recent changes), is twofold. First...I don't feel like I have any control in how my character progresses. Yes, I can switch between powers etc (or what runes they use), but every character has those powers and your basically just choosing which ones are slotted. It's much like playing a MMO (say WoW) with characters who have a set power list they get while leveling. It takes any character customization, strategy, experimentation etc...out of the equation for the player...just so nobody makes.....bad....builds. While could be easily solved by just having a recommended button..that does the exact same thing..but is a choice not forced on you.

Path of exile is a great game, but it takes time to find that out for many...and quite a few gamers do not have much patience anymore. Any time you play PoE...at any level, you'll get currency while doing it. Just as likely to do it when you just start as when your on the highest content (more likely to get better item drops of course...but the currency drop is the same). Path of exile has quite a few.....ways...to customize a character...and the skill tree is just one of them. Equipment in that game can RADICALLY change how a character plays....and is often a bigger determining factor on how you play then your skill tree. That being said, the skill tree can indeed lead to many different ways to play/build a character.

You have a wide variety of defenses...and yes...every character should have some kind of defense. Not every character needs to specialize in max hp/hp regen though. You can go with endurance charges + armor, evasion + acrobatics, eshields + ghost reaver (kinda need shavronnes wraps for chaos damage going to eshields though), Vaal pact + high max health and life leech, Mind over matter for damage going to mana, high block and possibly spell block a few other options and combinations as well.

All of those are choices for defense..and you basically need SOME defense for the hardest content. You can use freeze (cold crits) to help with defense, summons (spell totem with skellies), curses etc to also help...but yes....by end game you need SOME way of staying alive..because....it's end game...it's supposed to be hard.

That does not mean you can't specialize your character into many...many....many different paths outside of the defenses.

There are tons of different spells and skills...and usually a slightly different (at least) specialization in the tree for each of them...of for combinations of them. Add in the effects of unique equipment, and even 1 skill/spell build can have more then 10 different skill tree setups with very different results.

As far as orbs of regret etc...well, you can run a character through normal/cruel difficulty quite fast after a few times, meaning you can get to level 40-50 very fast. That leaves about 15-20 skill points that you will be adding after that point to your character. You get about that many free respec points per character....so you can make changes without needing any orbs of regret.

But say you really want to change EVERYTHING....well orbs of regret are traded on average at a rate of about 2 per chaos orb....and you can probably get a chaos orb worth of currency or items easily every hour or so...which means even if you wanted to redo all 60 points..it would probably take you maybe 30 hours max of playing and saving to do so (or course you could probably just create a new character and level it up in that time...still getting just as much currency..only not spending it lol).

Anyway..Path of exile is an extremely good game for it's price. I have purchased stash tabs etc....because I think the GGG deserves money for their effort...but you can play the whole thing for free. It is by far...and away...the best free game I have ever played.

 

[Isra]

Diablo II gave you freedom... And then you went online to check the 3 to 5 viable builds per character and went with one of those. Fun huh?

Yeah. Fun. This is exactly why I stopped playing after 1.10 - it constrained it to 3-5 builds per class, up to that point there were WAY more builds that were viable.

Yeah, D2 wasn't always this way. You used to be able to use a mixture of almost all different skills. It was synergies that killed build variation, and, by the way, they were one of the stupidest implementations I've ever seen fly under the radar in a game. When synergies were first introduced, to my amazement, almost nobody said anything against them. Many thought they were a really good addition. It's almost like people wanted the devs to make their character choices for them. WTF.

Two other things that killed build variation: runewords which gave class defining abilities to every other class, i.e. enigma's teleport. This killed probably 90% of existing PvP tactics and reduced it to teleport and mass aura stacking. I for one never used my bone spirit / bone prison / bone wall necro again because it was completely useless when everyone had teleport. The old CSME Paladin duels died a quick death. And why play a low HP sorceress when her main strength was just handed out to every other class? Especially when you consider the other thing that killed build variation: the introduction of monster elemental immunities on trash mobs - they destroyed almost every single elemental build swiftly and completely. Everyone suddenly was a hammerdin.

1.10 was a really shitty patch, but oddly it was fondly remembered by millions of gamers. I've never seen a game get fucked so hard while everyone rejoices. C'est la vie.

 

[DoPo]

Diablo II gave you freedom... And then you went online to check the 3 to 5 viable builds per character and went with one of those. Fun huh?

Yeah. Fun. This is exactly why I stopped playing after 1.10 - it constrained it to 3-5 builds per class, up to that point there were WAY more builds that were viable.

Yeah, D2 wasn't always this way. You used to be able to use a mixture of almost all different skills. It was synergies that killed build variation, and, by the way, they were one of the stupidest implementations I've ever seen fly under the radar in a game. When synergies were first introduced, to my amazement, almost nobody said anything against them. Many thought they were a really good addition. It's almost like people wanted the devs to make their character choices for them. WTF.

To be honest, at first I thought the patch was sweet myself. New content, new runewords, the new system with synergies, etc. It was a lot of new stuff all at once. And the fact that you could specialise in skills sounded quite neat. I played it for a while - got a meteor sorc up to level...90-something - maybe 96, I can't recall. But then it hit me - it's all the same. Same builds everywhere, you go for the same old items and you do the same damn stuff over and over again. The new restriction that made you level slower and slower after you hit 90 was probably the catalyst - grinding and grinding for even lesser reward started getting not fun fast.

And the thing with synergies...I still remember that last PvP fight I had. I think it perfectly illustrates why buffing the skills is not that much needed. First just a slight amount of background - see, since skills tend to do a lot of damage, to keep PvP not turn into a one-shot fest, any damage you dealt was cut to 1/6th against other players. Not by 1/6 - to 1/6th - if you deal 60 damage normally, you'll hit players for 10. I had a meteor sorceress, as I said and I played against another sorceress - I think it might have been a Meteor one, too or something but anyway the deal was - we couldn't actually fight. Both of us did so much damage that we would one-shot one another if we got the chance. So what the "battle" consisted of was both of us teleporting and spamming our skills. There was not technique or tactic - just keep casting in the general direction of the other person. We couldn't really kill one another (the travel speed of spells is too slow for a teleporting sorceress), we couldn't even run out of resources (mana is essentially endless, even without potions), so instead the battle was won as soon as somebody lagged for a second. That's it - it came down to sheer luck.

 

[4RM3D]

Both of us did so much damage that we would one-shot one another if we got the chance. So what the "battle" consisted of was both of us teleporting and spamming our skills. There was not technique or tactic - just keep casting in the general direction of the other person. We couldn't really kill one another (the travel speed of spells is too slow for a teleporting sorceress), we couldn't even run out of resources (mana is essentially endless, even without potions), so instead the battle was won as soon as somebody lagged for a second. That's it - it came down to sheer luck.

Sounds a bit like Diablo 3 PVP duels. XD

I wonder how it's going to look in the new expansion.