Re: Patch pros and cons: your opinions wanted
I'll paste in the answers I already emailed him, just to start things off.
What inspired this post was the realization that, despite the fact that I’ve beaten Diablo 2 with 4 different character classes, whenever I talk to a hardcore player they have a dramatically different relationship with the game. For me, I would just sample abilities and slap together a basic method for winning the game at Normal. These players, between dueling and playing on Nightmare, would build entire strategies around one ability like the Barbarian’s War Cry or Frost Armor for the Sorceress. Can you give me a basic description of how a more advanced player chooses a tactic? What are the main motivations (dueling, tournaments, etc)?
It differs for everyone, depending on their ultimate goals. At this point there's very little trial and error, since the game has been out for so many years, and it's been a long time since a patch really shook things up. Players have long since figured out the best builds and strategies and equipment, and the skill synergy changes in v1.10 did much to limit character variety.
http://diablo2.diablowiki.net/Synergies
Thanks to synergies you've got to basically decide what your character is going to do long term, and build them from level 1 with that in mind, since you'll generally be devoting 80 skill points to your primary attack.
Also, equipment = destiny, since the high level, high quality gear is very hard to find or create, and it's extremely unlikely that the new character you start today will still be using anything they find themselves by the time they're level 80 or 90. All of their end game gear will come from what your other characters have found, either by magic find runs of bosses, or from runes/runewords you've accumulated over time or through trading (most high level runes are dupes, but few players actually know how to dupe. Most just trade for runes of dubious origin.)
Expanding on that, how does one decide when a tactic is inferior to another one? Obviously there’s the whole, “You lose the fight†test, but when is that just a product of circumstances or someone using rare equipment? What I’m getting at is how Diablo 2, to me, always seemed to revolve around what kind of Loot you could find. Advanced players don’t seem to really work that way, since they throw together Lvl 80 characters in a few hours and then test them out. When does gear become a factor?
Deciding on good vs. bad is not really an active practice, since it's all been figured out by now. Until a new patch comes along and changes some balances or adds new equipment that might shake things up. How players find what works best is much less about trial and error than about reading forum posts, seeing what other players are using, and chatting on battle.net. There are a few items that radically change things, and many of these become almost mandatory for a character of a given build. These days, any non-sorceress who tries to duel without wearing an Enigma is wasting their time, when every other character can teleport and you can't. Owning a Call to Arms weapon is considered essential for most builds, since it grants the Barb's Battle Orders skill and greatly increases your hit points.
Aside from some of the great/unbalancing runewords (such as Enigma and CTA), most equipment is just about incremental improvement. Slightly increasing damage, or resistance, or whatever. The basic needs/requirements are all well-established, so equipment improvement just becomes about getting more of X or Y.
How would a patch typically disarm a tactic? Were you able to tell when something was about to get nerfed? What would the reaction be in the larger community?
Past patches have made major changes by nerfing, but they usually add new things that are just as imbalanced. Players have usually been more interested in finding the new thing than in grieving over the old one, in my experience. One big change came in v1.10, when the buggy nature of Guided Arrow was fixed. In v1.09 the Amazon's Guided Arrow worked with her Pierce skill, which let each GA hit a target multiple times. This wasn't that important against big packs, but against individual enemies (or in PvP) it made Guided Arrow ridiculously overwpowered. The biggest damage bow at that point was the Buriza Xbow, which fired very slowly, but did huge damage. And with the GA and Pierce bug it was unbeatable.
Especially in dueling, if an item that added "slows target" was used. I didn't duel myself since I played Hardcore, but what I heard was that public PvP was almost dead in those days, since some guy would always join in with his Burritozon, plant himself just outside of town, and kill everyone else simply by standing still and holding down the right click.
Once v1.10 came out, GA no longer pierced. That made GA a much less useful skill, elevated Strafe as the best bowazon boss killing skill, and made the Buriza a forgotten weapon, since its slow firing speed was a great handicap when using skills other than GA. The fact that more elite unique bows and high level runeword weapons came out in the same patch was also a factor. I don't think you could get chipped gems for a Buriza in a trade now, while it was one of the most expensive items in the game in v1.09.
I did hear some complaints from players who had loved their overpowered Burizons, but most people were excited to try new stuff, and it took a lot of denial to argue that Burizons hadn't been enormously cheesy and overpowered.
What effect did the Expansion pack have on the game? I’ve heard of people now only playing the original and not dealing with the Expansions stuff. Why?
The expansion is almost universally more popular, and is a much improved and expanded playing experience. It did, however, add a lot of new stuff, and made the game considerably easier (mostly thanks to the new items). Plus all of the patches since then have been for D2X, and have added much, much more stuff. Mostly items, but also there have been huge skill changes.
People who still play D2C all (I'd guess) played D2X for some time, before returning to the classic version. It's harder, there aren't such overpowered items, and it's much simpler. No runes, no runewords, no charms, no jewels, no way to add sockets, no act 5, no elite items, rares are the best possible items, etc. Players who still play D2C think it's more balanced and like the simpler, old fashioned version of the game. I'm not one of them though, so I'm only extrapolating from knowing the game differences and hearing such people extol the virtues of their game of choice.
Are there any patches that you remember having a larger effect than others? Why? I’m flipping through Blizzard’s record now and a lot of the times it looks like they’re trying to get people to play a class more often, like by boosting the Amazon’s skills. Did this actually work? Did it lead to people gaining an edge over others?
V1.09 was the current version for most of the early days of D2X. I believe v1.07 was the launch version of D2X, and then v1.08 fixed some bugs, most of which were then fixed in v1.09. That version remained current for 2 or 3 years, until v1.10 which brought on huge changes. Tons of new end game items, uniques and runewords, and the introduction of skill synergies, which radically changed the skill builds of most characters. V1.11 pushed that a bit further with some more new items and added the Uber Quests.
http://diablo2.diablowiki.net/Pandemonium_Event
The v1.12 patch did little more than bug fixes. V1.13 is pending and Blizzard solicited bug fixes and other suggestions for it, so hopes that it will shake things up aren't unfounded. Blizzard has also mentioned the possibility of setting up a test realm so players could try it out before it goes live; something they've never done with previous patches.
I don't think blizzard specifically tries to get people to play or not play different characters in patches, but they do note skills that are underutilized and try to improve them. The Druid's Elemental tree was notoriously useless when D2X launched and it remained that way until v1.10, when it was pumped up to Sorceress quality, creating a variety of new viable druid builds.
The buzz before v1.10 (from the designer who was creating it) was that it would have no nerfs. Just buffs. This was somewhat disingenuous, since by changing the overall game state a great deal skills that were formerly overpowered became weak, even though they didn't change any themselves.
One example I remember was the Barbarian's Berserk skill. It hits for magical damage, not physical, and was enormously useful in v1.09, when every monster on hell difficulty had at least 50% physical resistance, and physical immunes abounded. In v1.10 the global physical resistance was removed, PIs became much less common, and monster hit points were greatly increased. This conspired to greatly lower the relative effectiveness of Berserk, while increasing the quality of other physical damage skills.
Were there any patches that ruined the game for you? Any patches that made them significantly better? Or were most of them non-issues for you?
I wasn't a big fan of v1.10 and the synergy changes. (Admittedly, it came out in 2004, when I was working full time and living with my girlfriend and thus had veryl little time for gaming.) Synergies reduced variety for individual characters, while making more different builds viable.
I used to love doing tri-elemental sorcs, with skills from all 3 trees, since this let me deal with every type of monster in the game, and I could use skill and speedy fingers to greatly improve my killing speed. Tri-elementalists became non-viable in v1.10+, since you now need to put so many points into support skills/synergies to up the damage of your main killing spells. Sorcs aren't ruined; the best builds use skills from 2 trees, but in v1.10 you pretty much know what every character's skills look like the minute you see them.
Rant about anything that comes to mind.
Ultimately, it comes down to acquired knowledge. Advanced players might have experimented and fooled around with different builds and equipment options in the early days (their early days or the early days of each major D2X patch), but by now everything is so well known and understood that there's little point in experimenting or varying tactics (in terms of skill builds and items). That's not to say that all or even most advanced players have experimented and arrived at their current tactics through trial and error. Many players have zero experience playing characters at low levels. They've simply built up surplus equipment with one or two item finding characters, read a strategy guide for a Hammerdin or Wind Druid or whatever, and then created one unto whom they twinked all their gear and got them rushed to level 80, instantly taking that character into the end game.
Thanks to shared experience and rushing there's no need to actually "play" a new character at the lower levels, and it's become almost a lost art on Battle.net. New characters are rushed through the game by friends (or players do it for themselves by using multiple accounts/computers), all of their gear is twinked, and come the end game they might only do one or two areas over and over again, and only in large groups. There's very little "skill" required to play as part of a large co-op game engaged in a Baal run. Characters in such enterprises are required for a skill or two, Battle Orders, Fanaticism, Conviction, Blessed Hammer, etc. The ability to provide these skills is entirely dependent upon having proper skill allocation and good equipment; actually knowing what you're doing as a player is helpful, but not that important. Just running along with the rest of the group so your aura stays shared, or remembering to refresh the Battle Orders before it runs out is enough, in many cases.
