First, and most important thing is the need for more content, and more challenging content. This can be done by adding even hid difficulty, and even endless dungeons are very easy to implement in the current game engine. Its great that we have new items to craft to get more stats, but we need to have something to do with these new stats. We need things to draw the players back to the game, all the current issues with the economy and such are mostly because of the shrinking player base. Less people in the economy means less people making use of the gold sink mechanics that are already in the game.
New content:
Endless dungeons on each act. They can only activate if you have 5NV stack, and would require you to upgrade the standard infernal machine to a new machine that needs upgraded with demonic essences, and potentially other materials.
Potential Locations:
A1 – warriors rest and/or crypt of the ancients/cemetery of the forsaken (portal in the gazebo)
A2 – Vault of the Assassin, and some of the random dungeons within the act, and one within the sewers.
A3- A 4th level to keep depths, an extra level at each tower, the underbridge.
A4 – TBA.
You could also do some stat tracking for these endless dungeons and have seasonal ladders for scores/time/max level reached etc. But that would require more programming to add this to the existing game engine.
Elemental Damage changes/buffs.
With the addition to increased monster difficulty, make elemental damage meaningful. So that we can make actual choices with elemental weapons and specific skills. Then you can make enemies immune or highly resistant to a single element and add that into the affix rotation. This would also open up the door for lower geared players to try out harder content and still having a decent chance with these extra buffs.
Examples:
Fire damage would burn an enemy for a few seconds (i.e. 3 seconds – 6 ticks), based on the skill or weapons amount of fire damage.
Poison would deal less damage over longer time, but would also debuff the enemy’s resists/armor in the duration.
Cold damage would remain the same with the slow effect
Lightning damage would have a chance to stun and/or chance to chain to nearby enemies.
Holy damage would have a chance to blind enemies, and potentially deal more damage to certain enemy types - i.e. undead/demons.
Arcane damage could be a debuff on enemies so they deal less damage for a period of time.
These effects would work the other way as well, and having more of a single type of resist would decrease the duration of the specific status effect on the player.
This then would also some re-working of skills and runes to make sure there’s enough elemental diversity in each character, and in some cases, like a wizard can specialize in a certain element as a passive to gain some bonuses. Specifically for the wizard, this can make the tal’s bonus somewhat useful. You can also have new affixes rolled on items that increase the effectiveness of these new effects, i.e. duration increase, proc rate increase or just plain damage increase.
Blizzard missed a great opportunity with paragon levels, where they could have expanded the skills to allow augmentation via some points system that you can collect as you level up. Changing the point allocation would cost you gold (or even crafting mats), and act as a small gold sink. In this system, you don’t gain a set amount of main stats at each level, but you gain specialist points which you can assign to an expanded skill system.
Each characters skills and runes would have some skill tree system in place to further augment the skill/rune itself, and at certain points in the tree, the assigned point can also provide main stats. This will allow players to really customize their characters to specialize in skills they like to use, plus some skills/runes may become more viable once augmented to a certain point. This could potentially lead to more builds as skills may synergize differently after a certain amount of augmentation.
Each type of augmentation available on a given skill would be specific to that skill and would not be generic to prevent certain builds become too overpowered.
At the same time, there are some skills that need to be re-worked and potentially some things added or removed.
<to be continued>
Lightning damage would have a chance to stun and/or chance to chain to nearby enemies.
Holy damage would have a chance to blind enemies, and potentially deal more damage to certain enemy types - i.e. undead/demons.
Arcane damage could be a debuff on enemies so they deal less damage for a period of time.
These effects would work the other way as well, and having more of a single type of resist would decrease the duration of the specific status effect on the player.
This then would also some re-working of skills and runes to make sure there’s enough elemental diversity in each character, and in some cases, like a wizard can specialize in a certain element as a passive to gain some bonuses. Specifically for the wizard, this can make the tal’s bonus somewhat useful. You can also have new affixes rolled on items that increase the effectiveness of these new effects, i.e. duration increase, proc rate increase or just plain damage increase.
Mastery levels, or Specialist levels.
Blizzard missed a great opportunity with paragon levels, where they could have expanded the skills to allow augmentation via some points system that you can collect as you level up. Changing the point allocation would cost you gold (or even crafting mats), and act as a small gold sink. In this system, you don’t gain a set amount of main stats at each level, but you gain specialist points which you can assign to an expanded skill system.
Each characters skills and runes would have some skill tree system in place to further augment the skill/rune itself, and at certain points in the tree, the assigned point can also provide main stats. This will allow players to really customize their characters to specialize in skills they like to use, plus some skills/runes may become more viable once augmented to a certain point. This could potentially lead to more builds as skills may synergize differently after a certain amount of augmentation.
Each type of augmentation available on a given skill would be specific to that skill and would not be generic to prevent certain builds become too overpowered.
At the same time, there are some skills that need to be re-worked and potentially some things added or removed.
<to be continued>
Endless dungeons on each act. They can only activate if you have Darkfall Unholy Wars Gold 5NV stack, and would require you to upgrade the standard infernal machine to a new machine that needs upgraded with demonic essences, and potentially other eve isk materials.
ReplyDelete