Hello @DominicP343, sorry it took me this long to get to your post.
Monsters using too many skills
I am not saying eliminate all unique monster abilities, far from it. It does feel good to see newer skills used from time to time. I repeat I don’t want monsters to only sit back and auto attack, that would be bland and unfun. What I am saying is as the game progresses every monster seems to have an overabundance of skills that are especially dangerous and there should a balance of skills that players can recognize vs every monster having a unique attack that the player must recognize, react, and overcome. In my main argument I propose most of the big unique skills should be saved for the big bosses throughout the story arch.
A good balance would be certain types of monsters using certain types of skills. Lets say you have an archer type mob. Lets give archers the ability to auto attack (obviously), then use maybe a bleed attack and a multi shot attack from time to time. This way wether you are at the beginning of the game or almost at the end, you know archers have the ability to bleed you or do a multi shot that can be dangerous to even summoners as the multi shot might pop you. The joker card here would be that rare archers might gain another random skill which the player would have to watch out for. But what this effectively does for the player is the recognition of the archer archetype and what archers do just by seeing them with a bow in their hand. The instant visual cue is crucial. Currently this game LACKS visual cues on monster archetypes.
Armor requirements
I agree currently the stat system doesn’t really accommodate armor requirements very well. However, if they were to redesign the passive skill trees to remove bloat, perhaps this could be addressed as well, giving classes that don’t typically have access to certain attributes the ability to pay for certain amount of int/str/dex. Items can also roll certain stat attributes and it can be crafted onto items as well, so there are work arounds. However I am not opposed to their way of handling attributes and not having armor requirements, it just needs refinement from the current implementation. I will need more time to think of how best to do this, I am open to feedback.
Too many elements
I think we mostly agree here
Crafting
Good to hear
Runewords
I think copying one of the world’s best ARPGs while giving it a unique spin is a very smart idea. I would gladly shoulder a few criticisms as a developer if it meant that the game was better for it. There will always be descenders in any game that mock it for being “a clone” etc… However as long as it makes the game more fun and gives the player more yield on decision making, such as a runeword/socket system would, it’s a worthy trade off in my book. Again, I don’t know of ANY other game that has tried the runeword system and I just cannot live with the fact that Diablo 2 is the only game that gets to hoard this gem of a mechanic.
As you mentioned the poor implementation of runewords in Diablo, this would be the developer’s opportunity to put a unique spin on it, enhance it, etc… Like I said, runewords were such a phenomenal idea, so take the foundational core of the mechanic and improve on it. Properly balanced there, would be no ENIGMA however the feeling of finding that super rare rune to complete a bad ass runeword has a feeling for an item hunter that can be hardly replicated.
Thank you for your kind words and I look forward to continued discussions.
