My biggest complaint is the mandatory skills you have to take with some classes

[Immoteph]

Some skills give you like 30-40% more damage or survivability, and the other choices basically can’t compete. You end up with a lot of situations where you remove choice from your players.

Paladin: Holy Aura, Sigils, Rebuke, and only then can you make your own choices (unless you’re bad at math).

Basically, there’s a problem if 3/5 skills you use are mandatory. Absolutely kills build diversity.
You already kinda shoehorned us into 1/5 mandatory skills with the specialization. Don’t remove choice past that.

It’s not just the paladin. Felt the same way with the Druid, but I haven’t played that recently.

[Llama8]

You don’t “need” Rebuke. I also don’t see you mentioning the DPS skills that are mandatory. And don’t forget the movement skill.

[GoldenExperience]

Surprised you don’t mention Reaper form and Death seal the must haves for Lich.

[Llama8]

To be fair, he’s only talking about Paladins.

[Deliya]

Seconded.

While it’s not that necessary for content up to corruption 200, there’s a noticeable increase in the importance of certain skills purely for survivability’s sake past a certain point. This varies depending on the class, of course, but the reality is still there.

There’s been improvement in some areas, such as some skills having nodes that will convert them to a movement skill becoming more prevalent in some classes, which does alleviate the “mandatory movement skill” for some classes.

I also think that this comes down more to the endgame design than the skill design.

At present, the modifiers on Monolyths essentially break down to “monsters do more damage” or “monsters take less damage”. There are some conditionals to this (damage types, high health, etc), but it still comes down to those.

McFluffin did a really good video, and some of what I mention here comes from that.

But essentially, if monsters either take less damage, or deal more damage, then past a certain threshold you are going to HAVE to either have more defenses, or more damage, and more mobility on top of that.

If the modifiers in the Monolyths where more interesting, and the “objective” was more varied (in essence right now it’s either “kill 3 patrolling x”, “destroy x turrets”, “kill x miniboss” or “fight x waves of enemies”) then the dependence on certain skills would be lessened as well.

Don’t get me wrong, I think monolyths have improved greatly since I started playing the game back in 0.7, but there’s still a lack of “interesting”. In his video, for example, McFluffin mentions that there’s really no incentive to clear or explore an echo, you really just rush through, kill target, move on. The increased stability from kills has helped, but it still doesn’t make it interesting, it just makes it busywork. I feel like an added “random” element of discovery would make a big difference.

Either way, I think that the “must have” skills are as much tied to the “endgame content” as they are to their relative power.

[Macknum]

Yeah but saying some skill are mandatory is a pretty big joke depending how you look at the game. You can play 200 corruption with realy wonky builds that rent minmaxed at all. Sadly I can’t tell what OP thinks makes the skills he mentioned mandatroy and why he thinks it’s bad not to take them.

I don’t take sigils anymore because making sigils work is a game on it’s own and i don’t like the sigils upkeep game. I only pick Holy Aura because it’sa no brainer skill and not because it’s good and I never needed Rebuke at all even wehen I toyed arround with it.

So I’m not sure what OP is up to.

@Deliya

I also think that this comes down more to the endgame design than the skill design.

Then again 200 Corruption is the endgame and everything above is masochism some people are in to. I can’t see a benefit between 200 corruption and 400 corruption tbh.

[DiceDragon]

@Deliya

While it’s not that necessary for content up to corruption 200, there’s a noticeable increase in the importance of certain skills purely for survivability’s sake past a certain point. This varies depending on the class, of course, but the reality is still there.

And past 500 only some classes/specs become viable.

Welcome to end game in any game ever?

I dunno, I feel like this entire thread is a “why isnt every skill completely and utterly balanced with one another”

which will never be the case. Skills which are utility buttons like holy aura or flame ward or death seal will be on every bar even if they buff attacking skills.

You can only attack with 1 skill at a time, skills with lots of value for little action time investment are just always going to be strong.

You are basically saying you want no passive/utility skills. And only 5 attacking keys, because regardless of how much you nerf sigils, running 1-2 attacks and 3 utility buttons is always going to be the meta in every set up. if im a spin to win build, if sigils gave me even 2% more damage for a full spec and that was it, its better then running a skill im never gonna use.

[Deliya]

Yea, when I play sentinel I refuse to take sigils anymore. It’s a big damage boost, but I just find the skill too obnoxious to constantly spam.

[Basiun]

Well, thinking about it in another way: A forgeguard and void knight doesn’t have access to sigils or aura, and they’re themselves quite strong. As a sentinel you don’t need holy aura, but as a paladin it’s simply the best option as it is passive. If you’re a paladin and picked at LEAST aura, you still have 3-4 slots left over to fill with a primary DPS ability, a survival or supportive ability and a movespeed ability. It’s not as if it’s innovative or useful to want to use 4 different DPS abilities when focusing your build around a single one would yield a much better result. Are 3 movement abilities better than the good one? It’s a dumb argument to make. When you focus your entire build around 1 DPS ability, be it Judgement, Hammers, Warpath or what have you, unless they have a cooldown you wouldn’t need or want another one. There are still 4 slots left to fill your bar with and you only need a certain amount of movement, so what’s left is 2-3 supportive or defensive abilities. Sigils and Aura are just that. Strong, passive support abilities that at most cost you a lot of mana if you want to activate them.

This holds true in essentially any ARPG.

[Llama8]

@Basiun

A forgeguard and void knight doesn’t have access to sigils

They do, Sigils only requires 15 points in the Paladin passive tree & you can get that with 8 points with of Attunement/Ele res (Defiance) and health (Valor) or phys/fire/lightning damage & penetration (Conviction, probably more useful for a Forge Guard than a Void Knight).

@Basiun

Are 3 movement abilities better than the good one?

They will almost always share a cooldown & I believe the Sentinel is the only class that can get that many.

[Basiun]

Ah, thanks for correcting me on the sigils as my brain went splat for a second.
And yeah, I’ve never used more than 1 mobility ability at a time in this game over the past 100 hours, so I didn’t actually know that they had a shared cooldown.

[Llama8]

The only ones that don’t are Transplant & Reap (Reaper Form) if you take a node that decouples them & adds an increased cooldown to Reap.