Solid analysis as usual. Charges should be like a quarter of their current cost at the very least; you can blow 6 figures on a stupid demon limb and that's one of the few actual useful examples of charges!
Great video on this topic. This time, you nailed it pretty well. There are a few things that you might have overlooked a little bit. One thing is thst poison dagger charges can be used to apply Venom damage over a long tjme. Venom does like 750 dam/sec on level 15 (which is treachery's chance to proc) but usually only for 0.4 seconds. With poison dagger that duration gets to like 5 or 6 seconds on level 5 and it would go beyond 12 seconds on skill level 20 or so. So the combination of venom amd poison dagger can actually kill monsters and it is used in some pvp situations. Second, the chance to cast fire wall or meteor isn't thst bad of an idea. I like meteor especially, because it could povide area damage in a melee range, which is something most melee characters are missing. The level should be higher on this, more like level 15-20 on hell. Level 15 does 500 damage plus almost 200 per second over 9 seconds, potentially stacking. Level 20 would be even 900 damage on the impact and over 260 per second for 12.6 seconds. The same is true for fire wall, at level 15 dealing more than 800 damage per second for 3.6 seconds. Spamming Orbs with rift on a kicksin is already pretty good. Why not give paladins and barbs and druids a chance to spam meteors? I would like to see a chance to cast energy shield when struck on a very sepific unique item like a shield or an armour. I like your idea of binding the level for chance to cast to your character level, like 1 for every 4, 5 or 6 char levels. Besides that, I think items like Tiamat's rebuke could be made useful if they just doubled the elemental damage on that shield and tripled the levels of the proced skills. Anyways, I agree, that almost half of all the chance to cast skills and probably two thirds of the charged skills could be removed. And specifically for the weaken curse, give it -1% resist magic per level, and there is a wonderful use for it on a boner. For iron maiden, make it also get -33% physical resistance. It would be worse on that as decrepify and amplify damage, byt still useful and the reflected damage would have a higher effect.
The core problem is these affixes were made before synergies existed. They were only mediocre in d2 vanilla even then, but the power creep made them completely useless. Level 30 hydra when +skills were harder to come by would have been fantastic even without fire mastery. Number of charges and cost is always a problem though. The psychology of using cobsumables in games is weird and if they were all in the hundred people would probably be more likely to use them
Yes a lot of things were broken by the change from D2 -> D2 LoD Synergies and these things were never properly balanced afterwards. I think it's pretty clear that the addition of synergies broke a lot of stuff that just never got addressed.
@@GGMentor I always thought the synergies should go the other way that is useful skills buffing less useful skills. The way they implemented it seems to limit build diversity rather than increase it. I think your teeth video hit on that a bit with bone wall and bone prison. Like maybe points in teeth/bone spirit add attacker takes damage would encourage use of mages over warriors
@@GGMentorAnd while I've maybe got your attention, an idea I've always wanted expanded to give more use to vengeance and sacrifice is to allow them to work with ranged weapons. Zeal I don't think cause it's just strafe at that point. I played a ranger paladin back in the day and it was really fun, but definitely weak. In the current game, a paladin with a faith (hellrack?), vengeance and might/conviction merc could get into the 40s with fanaticism, still benefit from LL/ML, and do really good single target damage with potentially fast enough attack speed and high enough damage to deal with crowds. Alternatively Holy freeze/ conviction for more crowd control. Or for sacrifice, blessed aim+prayer. I think it's a really interesting build style with a lot of builds opened up by letting one or both of those skills be open to ranged weapons. Sacrifice especially seems completely useless for a melee character but opening it to a ranged character could have some really interesting consequences
I feel like a lot of the charges were developed with only normal difficulty in mind. They don’t scale at all with the increase in monster damage and health.
Some maybe, but most are too high level requirement to ever be useful in normal. Finding an item with level 5 nova charges with a level requirement of 37 isn't useful in normal. And it's not useful in nightmare either. A lot of the charges fall into this category of too high level for normal too low level of a skill for nightmare and hell.
Great video. Charged items and CTC items have been a huge source of my complaints. I agree 100% about the level and number of charges being too low and also the bad placement on the items. If the damage skills aren't going to be high enough to be useful, then why have them in the first place ???
Very informative video. The long duration is no problem as far as I'm concerned. I wanted to know your thoughts on adding a (much) slower version of replenish to replace used charges (in addition to the repair method)
gd that would help remove so many worthless roles to help us get the gg items without having only one gg in the past 12 years of gaming d2(r). 8:32 very true. Near all charge/ctc are crap without the synergy's or passive/pierce elemental's.
In PvM I would use the wolfs/w bo but they eat and shatter corpses(!?) so that eliminates a few builds. I thought about using weaken for the gloms ritual. but it actually prevents them from starting the ritual or its just I only tested with dem vision ;P If lld 18 was not dead. I have some non bm gg afk charge item builds that would have ben fun to test. 59:13 would brake all my non cookicuter vlld/lld 12/18 builds builds.
This with the chance to cash I really wish they wouldn't override your natural skills like with the Amazon piece armor if you have a level 30 Valkyrie with peace will override it to a level 15 when eventually making it just a pre buff item if you need more points in that skill
@@GGMentor oh ok I thought it might still have issues, still in the middle of this video LOL. The only thing I was mainly concerned about was teeth skill and hoping they fix it to where cast it would let more then one teeth... tooth hits the enemy. I really want to make a necro build and call myself the dentist.
What would be helpful would be if your toon has a skill, enchant for example, and an equipment that gives proc, it defaults to the higher level. Meaning of my sorc has 45 enchant but my weapon has 5% change to cast lv12, it'll cast lv45 instead.
The proc stuff is a lot of fun to incorporate but the charged items are pretty tame. The ones that make the most sense to me maybe are the bow skills as situational ammunition but I think the unique items that use them by default fit the game better given how many arrows get used. Wouldn't mind seeing the repair cost set at 0 and maybe a self-repairing effect added so they replenish on their own.
How about a change to the necromacer revive skill: 120sec revive duration for the first point in the skill ,with 12 second extra revive duration per any extra skill point in it? Sorry to barge in/ side track this video topic.
They (blizzard) NEEDs to add a on skill hit/attack % chance to activate a skill modifier to items. (skills that can proc would be ones that do damage.). I believe this could fill the missing hole with % chance activated skills.
@@GGMentor for my needs on a Paladin using smite through normal works fine. There actually is a build for using the chance to cast by MacroBioBoi that works surprisingly well. POE pretty much took that same concept and improved it greatly. It’s a thing just poorly implemented by Blizzard. Would look to see that change.
@@GGMentor also does nothing doesn’t compute lol. It does something it’s not meant to be your savior lol but when I have 80% chance to cast nova that actually does a lot for normal for CC.
@@kristopherleslie8343 nova does not apply Crowd control, so I think you might be talking about Frost Nova which I talk about as a good thing and useful for utility. Nova on the other hand which is lightning has no crowd Control, and the damage is about 20 lightning damage. So again I will reiterate Nova Is basically 100% useless as a charge or ctc. Frost Nova is very useful as a Crowd Control, but also does basically 0 Damage even worse than nova. Much of what I talk about during this video is distinguishing the difference between a useful, useless, and could be useful. Nova falls into the useless category. Frost Nova falls into the useful category. Zeal falls into the could be useful category, but it's not. Lightning Novas main issue is that even fully synergized with maximum FCR is struggles a bit. It requires all that and more to be useful, negative res, conviction, lower resistance the works. And that is under the best of circumstances. Nova unsynergiezed, with no support at a low level couldn't even overcome the HP regeneration of most monsters. Let alone do any meaningful damage. The damage is so low also that it won't even trigger a monsters FHR Stun. And as for the talk of using the effects in lower level content. A lot of these modifiers are not available until higher levels where they are completely outclassed.
I would rather another stat rolls on items instead of 99% of these charges/ctc's. I feel that it's wasted potential. It could certainly make good rares more usable and desired instead of everyone only looking for uniques/runewords.
And that's what I touch on during the video. A lot of this is all about carving out the bad charges, the bad ctc, and fix the ones that need fixing and leave the ones that are working. I think overall this accomplishes exactly what is needed less wasted rolls on rares, and more useful rolls on rares.
D2 was made with love effort and care if the team maintaining resurrected cares looking into a little bit of this will make a big difference I made a demon crossbow brand on ladder for my necromaccer and it is one off my favorite characters Iv ever played cause it is just so different but also kicks serious but
@@GGMentoryea you can get like a level 10 charged bolt at level 1 or 3 or something on sorc only though. Non-sorc classes have to be like level 24 I think to use it at which point is useless.
Why do you think everything has to be useful? Let’s removed charms that give 2 to life. Let’s remove skill charms like pally defensive. This is some petty stretchy stuff that I hope your making just to pump out content.
lol 2 life small charms are useful early on, Defensive skillers are useful for the party paladin build. Diablo 2 is a game where almost everything is useful in specific situations and contexts. It is a very well balanced game with a lot of interesting mechanics. So when I say something is useless I am referring to it being useless in basically 100% of all situations. Which would include but not limited to, Class, non class, leveling, low level, mid level, high level, end game, starter, CtC, Charges, ect. There is a misnomer in video games that some items exist for no other reason but to be useless to make other items look more powerful. but in Diablo 2 Almost every single item skill and ability has a use case scenario. The game is so well balanced that It's actually weird for a thing in D2 to not be useful in some way.
No D2R is surprisingly good and well made, but there are some aspects like charges and skeleton mages that are like lost sheep that need to be returned to the flock
@@GGMentor no one said it’s not good. However it is broken. That’s not speculation it’s a known fact. Imagine in any other context getting something or a service knowingly it’s incomplete. Like maybe your doctor didn’t finish school and is practicing, in you. While not as “life threatening”, doesn’t change the facts. We still love that game and make lemonade from the lemons.
@@GGMentor undoubtedly the same people who came up with that concept eventually got merged in Activision because they followed some of that same concept and same thing, player base hates the execution of it. In modern warfare 3 now, it’s still got the same dna of bad design in zombies which basically shared a large design of elements from the diablo series. You can unfortunately follow the trail of bad design when it rears it’s ugly head.