Will instant cast affect balance?

I saw this come up in another topic and thought it warranted it's own thread. Apologies if one already exists here.

For those out of the loop, there's an update coming circa December which will introduce the instant cast mechanic whereby pressing a spell's hotkey will cast the spell. This opposed to the hotkey selecting the spell for you to cast with the corresponding click.

As someone who is rather skeptical of the idea of a 'balanced' Diablo 2 experience (is it due to my preference of Necromancer and Druid?), I'm nothing but excited for what I see as a UX upgrade. The ability to more seamlessly cast a wider variety of spells seems like nothing short of a good time! I may even stop complaining about the inability to cast many spells on left click...

The player is most often rewarded for specialising in a few skills to maximise synergies, so you don't typically use that many abilities. Typically -- I know on my Necromancer I make good use of about a dozen skill slots, but that's due to a whole skill-tree of one-point-wonders. I could probably cast curses slightly more effectively with instant cast, but given how low my FCR is there probably won't be an appreciable difference....

That being said, I'm aware that there are many aspects of the D2 experience that I'm not privy to -- reading about the weapon-swap glitch's impact on PvP was an eye-opening experience, for instance.

So, is this just a usability upgrade or are there actually balance implications? I'm inclined towards the former, but... what don't I know?

nah. its fine. controller players can already do it so its a welcome upgrade to the old way for M&K

Well, you can already play with/against people on PC who use controllers and have quick cast. Thinking about it it's actually rebalancing the experience for M+KB players.

It's a welcome quality of life change for sure.
I don't see how it could affect PvM balance, those few ms gained won't change much.

It will also make the game a little bit less click-intensive, which will in turn make people slightly less prone to Tendonitins and other stuff. So it is a balance patch not to the game but to real life :p

Diablo 2 has no cast times for spells. ALL spells are already "instant". So a hotbar is going to have zero effect on balancing anything. Its only going to make it so you save a few milliseconds by having to press 1 button instead of 2 rapidly. Its just a real nice quality of life change D2 has needed for a very long time, like the shared stash. Hopefully we get even more common sense QoL changes like Rune/gem stacking.

Loving the way they're going with this.
Bringing the much needed QoL stuff of D3 into D2.

BillyMaysed wrote: 2 years ago

Diablo 2 has no cast times for spells. ALL spells are already "instant". So a hotbar is going to have zero effect on balancing anything. Its only going to make it so you save a few milliseconds by having to press 1 button instead of 2 rapidly. Its just a real nice quality of life change D2 has needed for a very long time, like the shared stash. Hopefully we get even more common sense QoL changes like Rune/gem stacking.

All spells are already instant, in that they don't showcase a "Cast Time" like many other game's spells but they do in fact each have their own time taken to cast. It's represented in the frames of the spell animation(not so much the *cast* animation, that's different). For instance,

Ice Blast starts with a shield/

Wand raise, then arms jutting forward, and then

Ice Blast particle appears, and then of course it travels to it's destination.

I guess this is kind of splitting hairs, because in games *with cast times*(like wow) you can cancel the cast without completing it, where d2 it is firing regardless and you're just locked in place for x milliseconds, depending on your fcr frames.

Personally I haven't read the update yet but am I wrong in that it seems like it's the difference between having a wow styled hotbar where the ability fires at cursor location on

Key-down vs ability fires at cursor location on right click? All this does is negate the need to pre-select skills before rightclicking, really. Or rather, time your skill changes, via hotkey, while holding right click. It's not going to speed up your casting, you can already swap skills via hotkey between animations without losing a beat.

Doesn't sound like a balance issue at all. Am I missing something here?