Teleport just ruins PvM in Hell

I genuinely surprises me how upset some people get about how other people play a game. Its a game, play it the way that makes you happy.

kastle wrote: 3 days ago

AardvarksAdvance wrote: 3 days ago

kastle wrote: 3 days ago

Again you're confusing how the game is intended to be played with how you think it should be played.

Or perhaps you are?

How? I haven't even suggested how anyone should play or how the game is intended to be played.

The bit i quoted; by suggesting that I was confusing "how the game is intended to be played" and how I (or others) think it should be played, you're clearly implying that there is an intended way to play it.

I was replying op, he IS the one that states how the Game is intended to be played. Imho it's intended to be played in a lot of different ways for each player, even a player can play It in different ways depending on the build or his mood.

It's because people wants to do things fast rather than "playing". Even real-life it's like that now, with shorts lol. Welcome to the desert of the real. I remember when I played WoW and it would require strategy but now it's just hack n slash. If the devs would change to the way it was before, most people would quit. Sorry but the problem isn't the game of the devs, it's people

The problem with games is the people who gatekeep how games should be played. How do people come off telling others how they shouldn't enjoy their hobbies?

AardvarksAdvance wrote: 3 days ago

and those who’ve grown up in the resurrected era don’t really know a time when it was done differently.

It has never been done differently. People have been baalbotting since lord of Destruction first released, and they were doing Chaos runs before that. There has never, at any point in the game's history, been a time where people intentionally played poorly because of some imaginary code of Honor you've made up in your head that has never actually existed and has nothing to do with what people find fun.

I play characters with and without Enigma armour. If I am using Enigma, I usually use it to

Teleport into battle, away from tight spots and get through annoying barriers/walls/moats/etc but that's my gameplay. As I said ....my gameplay. I agree with the others who suggested finding like minded folks who don't use teleporting if that's your gameplay. Each to their own. My two cents.

Knappogue wrote: 2 days ago

The problem with games is the people who gatekeep how games should be played. How do people come off telling others how they shouldn't enjoy their hobbies?

That about sums it up.

I

Teleport my heart out on some of my characters, sorc or not.
And some others are intentionally built without Enigma and get to run places instead.

Both are equally valid and solely a matter of preference.

Telling everyone they're supposed to clear everything and never

Teleport anywhere because that's what the devs intended is a bit of a stretch when the game was built with a number of movement and "content-skipping" skills from the very start. Sure,

Teleport is the strongest of those and Enigma made it more prevalent (or more balanced, thanks to no longer being class-locked), but it certainly isn't the only way to speed up your boss-killing and the like by skipping most/all of the stuff on the way there.

If you don't like it, don't do it. If you do like it, do it. But in either case, don't try to impose your purely personal preference on and judge everyone else for preferring a different, faster (or slower) style of play that the devs have actively decided should be part of the game and available to everyone.

gatorized wrote: 2 days ago

AardvarksAdvance wrote: 3 days ago

and those who’ve grown up in the resurrected era don’t really know a time when it was done differently.

It has never been done differently. People have been baalbotting since lord of Destruction first released, and they were doing Chaos runs before that. There has never, at any point in the game's history, been a time where people intentionally played poorly because of some imaginary code of Honor you've made up in your head that has never actually existed and has nothing to do with what people find fun.

Ouch. You’re taking this personally aren’t you? And you’re making a bunch of assumptions in that process..

Not everyone plays or played the game in the same way. Not even back in the open Battlenet days. Not everyone is about meta.

I also didn’t suggest a code of honour, whether in your head or anyone else’s.
Yes people play and replay to farm and level up, and there’s nothing inherently wrong about that, but the modern way of doing so involves asking for carries, using shortcuts and the rest… so the playing itself is often skipped altogether or else relegated to an inconvenient step on your way to maxing. And don’t tell me it was always this way and that this was the only way people ever played; it wasn’t and it isn’t, no matter how much you might want to believe it.

AardvarksAdvance wrote: 2 days ago

gatorized wrote: 2 days ago

AardvarksAdvance wrote: 3 days ago

and those who’ve grown up in the resurrected era don’t really know a time when it was done differently.

It has never been done differently. People have been baalbotting since lord of Destruction first released, and they were doing Chaos runs before that. There has never, at any point in the game's history, been a time where people intentionally played poorly because of some imaginary code of Honor you've made up in your head that has never actually existed and has nothing to do with what people find fun.

Ouch. You’re taking this personally aren’t you? And you’re making a bunch of assumptions in that process..

Not everyone plays or played the game in the same way. Not even back in the open Battlenet days. Not everyone is about meta.

I also didn’t suggest a code of honour, whether in your head or anyone else’s.
Yes people play and replay to farm and level up, and there’s nothing inherently wrong about that, but the modern way of doing so involves asking for carries, using shortcuts and the rest… so the playing itself is often skipped altogether or else relegated to an inconvenient step on your way to maxing. And don’t tell me it was always this way and that this was the only way people ever played; it wasn’t and it isn’t, no matter how much you might want to believe it.

But why do you care how other people play?

Knappogue wrote: 2 days ago

But why do you care how other people play?

IMHO, it’s more of an observation than an injunction to play this or that way.
But don’t play like the others, the de facto marginal. The risk of not being accepted by the others becomes high.

Not playing like the others certainly forces him to only be able to play alone.

Similarly, teleporting makes the game faster/simpler, which affects the economy.

I don’t see any other reason to want to change the meta, apart from nostalgia.

Tornado_OLO wrote: 2 days ago

IMHO, it’s more of an observation than an injunction to play this or that way.
But don’t play like the others, the de facto marginal. The risk of not being accepted by the others becomes high.

Not playing like the others certainly forces him to only be able to play alone.

Similarly, teleporting makes the game faster/simpler, which affects the economy.

I don’t see any other reason to want to change the meta, apart from nostalgia.

Getting rid of

Teleport would absolutely wreck the sorc though. And if you don't mess with her skill, then the game just becomes the sorc game and it's still time to play alone.

I don't see how any of this is actually supposed to work. The game is great, why do so many people hate on it still.

departure wrote: 2 days ago

Getting rid of

Teleport would absolutely wreck the sorc though. And if you don't mess with her skill, then the game just becomes the sorc game and it's still time to play alone.

It worked before 1.10.

Nobody hates D2 here. I can even say that everybody loves D2 here.

I whole-heartedly agree that Enigma, in the current state of the game, is just a straight up design blunder. If it were up to me, all versions of

Teleport would have a 1-2 second cooldown and no one will convince me that is not the objectively correct game design choice. But it's too late for that, the game is what it is. With that said, the main issue I see here is that you're comparing your progress to others'.

If you're playing by yourself, who cares? I use Enigma on only one character (even though I have more on others and could definitely craft one per character) because I feel that character's play benefits from it. For the rest, it doesn't matter, I don't feel pressured to sacrifice my fun/aesthetic preferences for some notion of potential farming efficiency that brings me no joy.

kastle wrote: 3 days ago

Again you're confusing how the game is intended to be played with how you think it should be played.

uh, duh? That's the point of discussions like this.

Much of what OP is saying is true.

Teleport is absolutely game breaking. Fans with non-contributing comments like this act as if the original developers had any clue what end game would really look like.

Enigma was released as a bandaid to a much larger problem.

Teleport staves are nice quirk, but it's importance is another indicator of a

Key imbalance.

All that said, i do NOT think "everyone gets

Teleport" or some other dash like D3 and beyond is necessarily the solution. Skill exclusivity is part of what should make any segment of a game feel unique.

IMO What would have been a better design would be for

Teleport to available on the sorc ONLY, but increase its mana cost greatly or put a strong cooldown on it. And then nerf runwalk builds/chars so that they aren't the new imba, or have itemization that makes target RW levels more achievable across classes.

With respect to my previous post, the only other reason to

Teleport quickly through the game is of course when rushing peeps. Again if that's their thing, I'm not very good at fast rushes (or rushing in general) so I don't do it often.

Tornado_OLO wrote: 1 day ago

It worked before 1.10.

Nobody hates D2 here. I can even say that everybody loves D2 here.

I'm basing that on Mr. Llama's in-depth analysis of sorc defensive, life, and maneuverability characteristics, and how

Teleport is so heavily integrated into her character. I defer to him on this.

human_being wrote: 23 hours ago

I whole-heartedly agree that Enigma, in the current state of the game, is just a straight up design blunder. If it were up to me, all versions of

Teleport would have a 1-2 second cooldown and no one will convince me that is not the objectively correct game design choice. But it's too late for that, the game is what it is. With that said, the main issue I see here is that you're comparing your progress to others'.

If you're playing by yourself, who cares? I use Enigma on only one character (even though I have more on others and could definitely craft one per character) because I feel that character's play benefits from it. For the rest, it doesn't matter, I don't feel pressured to

Sacrifice my fun/aesthetic preferences for some notion of potential farming efficiency that brings me no joy.

My 2 cents about

Teleport specifically:
I think the analysis of @human_being is 100% on point.

Teleport is too fast and almost all ARPGs that followed D2 have learned from this and have implemented slower mobility skills, often with cooldowns around 1 second which is significantly slower than D2's

Teleport. The odd feeling comes from realising that

Teleport is too fast but most other characters apart from Paladin (

Charge) and the new Warlock who of course got a movement skill (

Blade Warp) are much slower. So most modern games have tuned down the power of movement skills but have given them to all chars. This is the right approach but D2 is an old nostalgic game. Changing the pace of the game will annoy many players, especially if you tune down

Teleport without implementing good alternatives. D2 is already a very slow game compared to many modern ARPGs (like PoE which is D2 on steroids),

Teleport makes it a little faster and that is not bad imo.

About the appeal of speed and "power" in general:
OP skills or game mechanics (

Teleport, Static and

Blessed Hammer back in LoD, now Mosaic and some Lock skills) are always very tempting to use, firstly because of the raw power they give you (this is a

Key element of gaming, feeling "powerful" in a small little world while you often feel "overwhelmed" in the real world) and secondly because of how much easier they make things. And when you have a limited amount of time at hand like in a ladder season and you want to accomplish some goals (e. g. getting rich enough to make a Metamorphosis for your runeword Chronicle), then having an Enigma just feels good.

About the game's difficulty:
the goal is to enjoy the game and find challenges to accomplish, even with püowerful items like Enigma. But that's the main problem, D2 is too easy, imo. Heralds and Colossal Ancients are a step in the right direction. I personally would enjoy a 4th difficulty like "

Inferno" which is on players 1 like Hell on players 4-8. Then you would sometimes have to use

Teleport to escape (!!!) from monsters. But this should come without any major power-creep. A Void with +8 to

Abyss (+3 from base +2 Lock skills, +3

Abyss) is just nuts.

Agree with your points, just in general. I would love to do a deep dive into why

Teleport in D2 is so awful and why I think it happened in the first place. Maybe a subject for another time.

However, I love that you mentioned power and speed (and the appeal of OP), because that's what keeps coming up in of all of these conversations. I know it feels awesome to be incredibly powerful, but there's a reason why game designers do not design with a player mindset. If you let players direct your game, they will always want more power, always want more rewards, always want things to be easier (which is just the other side of "more power").

In a sense, it's the role of the game designer to protect players from their own impulses. I know it sounds patronizing, but seriously, it's like having a kid. They will always want more candy, but if you keep giving it to them they will: feel like shit, be poorly nourished, barf it all right up, it won't even feel tasty anymore. There's a thin balance between giving players enough of a challenge that they want to keep going and giving them enough power that they get to feel AWESOME. And you need a bit of both. Also, don't feel so defensive about your rewards: that can always be adjusted. Not having

Teleport doesn't mean not having rewards, it just means there are now more ways to get to them (instead of zip-lining to them being so far and away the best thing to do that everything else vanishes).

So, when these discussions arise, it's tempting from a player perspective to just say "well, don't just take power (speed is just another version of that) away from me, that sucks", to feel protective of what you've accrued. But listening to that too much leads to the game turning into Cookie Clicker: basically, no longer a game.

For

Teleport specifically, but this applies to too much power in general: having your game (unintentionally) revolve around players skipping the game takes away all the capacity designers have to provide any structure. Terrain no longer exists, just like enemies no longer exist if you deal too much damage or take too little. And once that happens, the game doesn't exist anymore and you, as a designer, have no tools to fix that. Had the game been designed with "terrain doesn't matter" from the start, then maybe you would have something cool to do with

Teleport in the end game, but it was all just a bad accident.

EDIT: Sorry, that came out a bit rambly. Not sorry enough to trim it down, though.

mikelessar wrote: 3 hours ago

human_being wrote: 23 hours ago

I whole-heartedly agree that Enigma, in the current state of the game, is just a straight up design blunder. If it were up to me, all versions of

Teleport would have a 1-2 second cooldown and no one will convince me that is not the objectively correct game design choice. But it's too late for that, the game is what it is. With that said, the main issue I see here is that you're comparing your progress to others'.

If you're playing by yourself, who cares? I use Enigma on only one character (even though I have more on others and could definitely craft one per character) because I feel that character's play benefits from it. For the rest, it doesn't matter, I don't feel pressured to

Sacrifice my fun/aesthetic preferences for some notion of potential farming efficiency that brings me no joy.

About the appeal of speed and "power" in general:
OP skills or game mechanics (

Teleport, Static and

Blessed Hammer back in LoD, now Mosaic and some Lock skills) are always very tempting to use, firstly because of the raw power they give you (this is a

Key element of gaming, feeling "powerful" in a small little world while you often feel "overwhelmed" in the real world) and secondly because of how much easier they make things. And when you have a limited amount of time at hand like in a ladder season and you want to accomplish some goals (e. g. getting rich enough to make a Metamorphosis for your runeword Chronicle), then having an Enigma just feels good.

I do think that OP elements are bad for the game. They ruin the chase and ultimately make people bored with the game. Why would you chase a special item when Warlock can clear everything with

Wirt's Leg? You wouldn't, and that ends the game earlier than it needs to.

The lack of OP is why I still play diablo. But Warlock's ES was a real threat to that. I could not see much reason to keep going for long given something that strong.

That being said...

Teleport doesn't offer you any real power. It offers you utility. Utility is different from power.

Teleport allows you very fast speed, and that is great utility, enabling player skill to replace defensive stats like high health, defense, or even resists. This is not a bad thing, giving players the ability to have ultra-fast maneuvering and making glass cannons viable as a result provides a richer player experience.

Teleport is a natural extension of diablo 2's movement strategy. It feels good not because it's OP, but because it's actually just fun and cool. It doesn't ruin anything, and it doesn't come with that downside of making the game boring like Mosaic or

Echoing Strike had the danger of doing.

I think that if folks want to take a lesson from more modern RPGs and make the game feel more like those, folks might be interested in some of the more modern diablo games like Diablo 3 or Diablo 4. There are sequels to this game after all.

The player mindset of taking an old awesome game like D2 and wanting to make it like modern RPGs is definitely one devs should resist. Leave D2 alone.