Teleport just ruins PvM in Hell

Diablo is at its core a slot machine.

Teleport = more slot machine pulls faster = more fun

human_being wrote: 3 days ago

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 days ago

human_being wrote: 4 days 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.

Disagree about both the characterization (abstraction into meaninglessness; many games are "at their core" a slot machine, but the fun isn't in pulling the lever but in having a mechanism more compelling than a lever) and the conclusion (fun (whatever that is) isn't directly proportional to pulls). Additionally, you can have more pulls in many ways, not only this particular one, which has a slew of other issues (some of which have already been mentioned).

varangium wrote: 3 days ago

Diablo is at its core a slot machine.

Teleport = more slot machine pulls faster = more fun

human_being wrote: 3 days ago

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 days ago

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.

varangium wrote: 3 days ago

Diablo is at its core a slot machine.

Teleport = more slot machine pulls faster = more fun

Yeah, if your definition of "more fun" is just bypassing the gameplay, map boundaries, and making YT vids like "1000

Andariel runs" or "1000 Mephy runs", etc. then sure, but that's more of a fulfillment based on personal objectives not real gameplay enjoyment. But If your definition of fun is encouraging more playthrough and people clearing acts as a party, like you'd do in Normal Act 1-3 runs early ladder with a full party hacking through everything with teamwork, then encouraging ppl to abuse Enigma and

Teleport to bypass objectives isn't better for the game.

In the past... like 20 years ago when I was a young teenager, everyone would skip Act 3 relics, you could just kill Trav and it was bugged where you could get Durance WP2; they patched that, now you need to get the Relics, that's a good thing. Now with the new

Terror Zones you're required to kill all enemy minions to unlock the boss, also a good thing.

This thread has been straw man'd into oblivion, but this was my original take:

1) No I don't think Enigma or

Teleport needs to be removed
2) We should take the idea of

Terror Zone (clearing everything) and impose that to Quest restrictions, like can't enter dungeons and places till area is cleared. Not all but some.
3) Enigma should have ilvl req of like 95-99, so ppl can't throw it on half way through Nightmare in every new character, it's just a late game gem for PvP/PvM


And one last thing, to people who "don't like when people tell them how we should play the game"... that's literally what the Forum is for, when it comes to balance discussions. Everyone saying nerf Mosaic and

Echoing Strike is directly or indirectly telling the people currently abusing those characters "I don't like how your character is playing the game, let's change it". It doesn't mean the devs will do anything usually they don't.

JARY wrote: 13 hours ago

varangium wrote: 3 days ago

Diablo is at its core a slot machine.

Teleport = more slot machine pulls faster = more fun

Yeah, if your definition of "more fun" is just bypassing the gameplay, map boundaries, and making YT vids like "1000

Andariel runs" or "1000 Mephy runs", etc. then sure, but that's more of a fulfillment based on personal objectives not real gameplay enjoyment. But If your definition of fun is encouraging more playthrough and people clearing acts as a party, like you'd do in Normal Act 1-3 runs early ladder with a full party hacking through everything with teamwork, then encouraging ppl to abuse Enigma and

Teleport to bypass objectives isn't better for the game.

In the past... like 20 years ago when I was a young teenager, everyone would skip Act 3 relics, you could just kill Trav and it was bugged where you could get Durance WP2; they patched that, now you need to get the Relics, that's a good thing. Now with the new

Terror Zones you're required to kill all enemy minions to unlock the boss, also a good thing.

This thread has been straw man'd into oblivion, but this was my original take:

1) No I don't think Enigma or

Teleport needs to be removed
2) We should take the idea of

Terror Zone (clearing everything) and impose that to Quest restrictions, like can't enter dungeons and places till area is cleared. Not all but some.
3) Enigma should have ilvl req of like 95-99, so ppl can't throw it on half way through Nightmare in every new character, it's just a late game gem for PvP/PvM


And one last thing, to people who "don't like when people tell them how we should play the game"... that's literally what the Forum is for, when it comes to balance discussions. Everyone saying nerf Mosaic and

Echoing Strike is directly or indirectly telling the people currently abusing those characters "I don't like how your character is playing the game, let's change it". It doesn't mean the devs will do anything usually they don't.

I do truly think Diablo is at its core a slot machine, but that doesn't mean I don' think other elements matter. I personally don't enjoy walking OR teleporting, I like to kill things and see what the slot machine roles. I do enjoy some element of the quest/setting, but not to the point where I want to do it 50k times over and over.

To the

Teleport point - I spend only a small portion of my time doing boss runs, simply because I don't enjoy it when 90% of my game play is just teleporting. To the slot machine point though, when I'm in the mood for some good rolls, I still do it. With the new

Herald/tz mechanics, I spend most of my time doing tz/heralds - for now.

Regarding leveling - in contrast to many, I like to level my character by going through the game normally, unless I am just doing a socket rush because I just want the socket no the character. But if I intend to fully level the character, I find it pointless to skip over content.

That said, I do not enjoy:
- walking around. 1st time you play the game and there is a sense of exploration seeing what unfolds for you, sure. 10,000th time, no.
- looking for waypoints especially before Enigma/tp access. Probably my least favorite. Can we rework this and just put every waypoint right by the level entrance?
- and yes I enjoy teleporting to get to the next enemy quickly (don't enjoy teleporting through a whole level to get to a boss), versus walking. There is nothing broken about this, it just allows people to do more of the content they like and less of the content they don't like.
- the maggot lair. No one likes the maggot lair.

Teleporting makes the game more fun for the vast majority of players, it would be a terrible decision to get rid of it. For the players that don't like it, don't use it. I don't care when people like to skip quests, that has no impact on me. I personally do them if I am leveling a character I intend to keep, because I like them. And I like to do the quests best with

Teleport.

I will re-state that I don't think they will (and probably shouldn't) remove/nerf

Teleport at this point. I think D2 without it (nerfed to a 1 second cooldown or unable to go through walls) would be a better game for sure, but that's a separate issue.

However, the idea that

Teleport makes the game more fun is questionable at best: players use it overwhelmingly (as with most things) because it's more efficient, not because it's more fun. Unless you can remove that factor, fun is difficult to make a clear case for.

You know what things you can know for sure are fun? The things players do even though they suck.

JARY wrote: 1 week ago

[...]Like every single game, it's like nobody wants to even play the game as intended[...]

Im guessing that as a kid you only ever built what the instructions said on your Legos?

Give me one game, one activity, one anything that everyone "plays by the rules", who "do it as intended". Its human nature to cross boundaries, to do things differently. That's how we innovate. Fuck, life would be so boring otherwise.

I would postulate the devs knew exactly what they were doing with Enigma. The results of giving everyone

Teleport is pretty damn predictable. So we ARE playing as intended. Its a game, its intended to be played in the way you want to play it.

If you just got to hell, you haven't gotten burnt out yet on walking all your characters through the game. After your 30th character it becomes a slog. Sometimes you just want to test a new build without the hassle.

I regularly see games titled "Act 2 walk" or "A1 no rush". Join those games, make those games. Its not that complicated.

I feel like this bit needs attention.

JARY wrote: 13 hours ago

Everyone saying nerf Mosaic and

Echoing Strike is directly or indirectly telling the people currently abusing those characters "I don't like how your character is playing the game, let's change it". It doesn't mean the devs will do anything usually they don't.

Echoing Strike was literally bugged. It's not the same thing to tell the devs "hey, fix your game" as telling them "hey, I don't like your

Teleport skill on this armor". Enigma/

Teleport isn't a bug,

Echoing Strike actually was. That's

Echoing Strike, but that's not other over powered elements like Mosaic or some other warlock capabilities.

I do feel like you're not fully grasping the difference between a game mechanic you don't like (

Teleport), and over-powered damage. I tried to touch on this earlier, but I'll do another lap to make this clear.

What's the problem with overpowered characters? They take the fun out of chase items. One of the greatest thing about Diablo 2 is the itemization. It is genius, and it has depth, and it is fairly balanced at this point. An over powered character, like Mosaic or

Echoing Strike (if it had been intended that way) makes it such that you don't need to worry about ANY of that wonderful itemization because all you need is a few basic runes and a couple of

Claws and you have all the gear that you need to wreck all the content. Or if you had

Echoing Strike all you needed to was Wirts Leg or something from a vendor.

The argument you made above fundamentally misunderstands what diablo offers in its itemization. Over powered characters directly mess up itemization because they make the great rare items that can roll completely irrelevant. That's the danger with having over powered characters.

Teleport is not that.

Teleport dose nothing to remove the itemization in Diablo 2 or make other items irrelevant (unless you want to argue that it makes engima nearly mandatory on a bunch of builds and so you don't look at armor for those, in which case that would be on point).

Teleport doesn't ruin chase items. It doesn't make that amazing charm or

Circlet or amulet or whatever irrelevant. It pairs with those items, in fact it makes you prioritize some of them even more because you're chasing FCR on a character that doesn't need FCR for anything but

Teleport - which is an interesting and challenging situation to solve with careful selection of rare items. And then it heightens even more rare items (like a

Teleport charges mod on a amulet) for some really interesting alternative builds.

So when you say that telling the devs to fix

Echoing Strike is just like telling them to mess with

Teleport, it's fundamentally missing 3 pieces.

1) That was a bug
2) Over powered characters actually do mess with the core of the game
3)

Teleport does not cheapen the D2 endgame OR the playthrough because it doesn't render drops irrelevant, and it's entirely optional.

Knappogue wrote: 4 hours ago

JARY wrote: 1 week ago

[...]Like every single game, it's like nobody wants to even play the game as intended[...]

Im guessing that as a kid you only ever built what the instructions said on your Legos?

Give me one game, one activity, one anything that everyone "plays by the rules", who "do it as intended". Its human nature to cross boundaries, to do things differently. That's how we innovate. Fuck, life would be so boring otherwise.

Buddy, I've probably made more creative and innovative builds in D2 from 2001-2010 than you've made characters since you started this game, you're dead wrong.

And to you and the guy above, notice every single post I've stated I'm no interested in removing

Teleport or Enigma, I've stated CRYSTAL clear I don't like that people use it to skip through the game, and my solution was to optimize the Quests to ensure more ppl played through and cleared more areas, before being able to enter certain dungeons and rooms (similar to what

Terror Zone is doing, I think that's good).

And you guys are like go join a "Act 2 run through" game... guess what... I do, all the time. And you'll probably get about 5 min before a character with

Teleport or higher level joins and starts rushing everyone through, it happens all the time. And Chaos runs? If you're a melee hero, you can barely keep up with the teleporting hammerdins clearing the area.

departure wrote: 3 hours ago

I feel like this bit needs attention.

JARY wrote: 13 hours ago

Everyone saying nerf Mosaic and

Echoing Strike is directly or indirectly telling the people currently abusing those characters "I don't like how your character is playing the game, let's change it". It doesn't mean the devs will do anything usually they don't.

Echoing Strike was literally bugged. It's not the same thing to tell the devs "hey, fix your game" as telling them "hey, I don't like your

Teleport skill on this armor". Enigma/

Teleport isn't a bug,

Echoing Strike actually was. That's

Echoing Strike, but that's not other over powered elements like Mosaic or some other warlock capabilities.

I do feel like you're not fully grasping the difference between a game mechanic you don't like (

Teleport), and over-powered damage. I tried to touch on this earlier, but I'll do another lap to make this clear.

What's the problem with overpowered characters? They take the fun out of chase items. One of the greatest thing about Diablo 2 is the itemization. It is genius, and it has depth, and it is fairly balanced at this point. An over powered character, like Mosaic or

Echoing Strike (if it had been intended that way) makes it such that you don't need to worry about ANY of that wonderful itemization because all you need is a few basic runes and a couple of

Claws and you have all the gear that you need to wreck all the content. Or if you had

Echoing Strike all you needed to was Wirts Leg or something from a vendor.

The argument you made above fundamentally misunderstands what diablo offers in its itemization. Over powered characters directly mess up itemization because they make the great rare items that can roll completely irrelevant. That's the danger with having over powered characters.

Teleport is not that.

Teleport dose nothing to remove the itemization in Diablo 2 or make other items irrelevant (unless you want to argue that it makes engima nearly mandatory on a bunch of builds and so you don't look at armor for those, in which case that would be on point).

Teleport doesn't ruin chase items. It doesn't make that amazing charm or

Circlet or amulet or whatever irrelevant. It pairs with those items, in fact it makes you prioritize some of them even more because you're chasing FCR on a character that doesn't need FCR for anything but

Teleport - which is an interesting and challenging situation to solve with careful selection of rare items. And then it heightens even more rare items (like a

Teleport charges mod on a amulet) for some really interesting alternative builds.

So when you say that telling the devs to fix

Echoing Strike is just like telling them to mess with

Teleport, it's fundamentally missing 3 pieces.

1) That was a bug
2) Over powered characters actually do mess with the core of the game
3)

Teleport does not cheapen the D2 endgame OR the playthrough because it doesn't render drops irrelevant, and it's entirely optional.

Fair enough I agree a bug is different, good point; although I'd argue that

Teleport is a pretty OP in combination with other skills, and because it makes maps irrelevant.. doesn't matter what terrain they're just gonna bypass it anyways, and it cheapened the end game for 20 years... you know how many

Baal runs I've joined, a million? A trillion?

Also remember, notice how in every post I, the original poster, never once said "we should ban

Teleport" or Enigma, everyone else said that (straw man'ing me) till everyone started fuming over it. But notice my balance was about balancing the QUESTS to make them requiring more full clears, similar to

Terror Zones, and stuff like that. I was addressing how I had grievances with

Teleport in how it's ruined the teamwork and gameplay, but unlike those "

Echoing Strike" and other ones I mentioned, I was focusing on how to improve the quests and gameplay around it or just increase the ilvl of Enigma so you have to wait longer to use it. Again, everyone immediately starts freaking out in every post like "WHY DO YOU WANT TO REMOVE

Teleport!??" And watch, even after clarifying this again for the hundredth time someone else will post again "...I just don't think we need to remove

Teleport" lol.

I would push back a little against the idea that the devs "knew what they were doing." I mean, they knew what they thought they were doing.

My estimation (and this is partly based on things I've heard David Brevik say) is that:

1. Sorceress had
   Teleport and that made it miles better than everyone else.
2. They understood how busted
   Teleport was.
3. They didn't think every character would have access to an Enigma (high runes would remain somewhat rare for a long time).

Part of that is that Diablo II became a much bigger game than they ever could have expected and duping also increased the frequency of high runes. Players would end up gearing and developing characters for way longer than they could've predicted and they might've even thought that Ladder would be the main way to play the game. So, what the devs knew was that they were introducing an item that would give players at very high levels, at a very low frequency, access to

Teleport (and this points to the fact that

Teleport is busted: otherwise, why need Enigma at all?). They also knew that would make it so, at least at the very end game, Sorceress wouldn't be the only right choice to play and, since that's when players typically get to be hyper-efficient (remember: this was before the first thing everyone did when playing a game was looking up the best builds online) it would only impact that area of players. Novice or mid-tier players might never make the choice to only play sorceress due to its efficiency, anyway.

This happens all the time in games; especially games that blow up to levels that are basically unthinkable. Magic: the Gathering was designed thinking that its most powerful cards would exist at a rate of about 0.5 per playgroup because players would spend about 20 bucks on the game and never have enough cards to play fully optimally. That's why there are such incredibly busted cards in its first set: in the world where that's the case, Ancestral Recall/Black Lotus don't break anything. But that, it turns out, wasn't the world MTG would exist in and that led to making a whole bunch of structural changes to adapt.

The devs knew something but thinking that they had a perfect picture of how things would work out is going beyond trusting their intelligence and into assuming they were outright prescient.

Knappogue wrote: 4 hours ago

JARY wrote: 1 week ago

[...]Like every single game, it's like nobody wants to even play the game as intended[...]

Im guessing that as a kid you only ever built what the instructions said on your Legos?

Give me one game, one activity, one anything that everyone "plays by the rules", who "do it as intended". Its human nature to cross boundaries, to do things differently. That's how we innovate. Fuck, life would be so boring otherwise.

I would postulate the devs knew exactly what they were doing with Enigma. The results of giving everyone

Teleport is pretty damn predictable. So we ARE playing as intended. Its a game, its intended to be played in the way you want to play it.

If you just got to hell, you haven't gotten burnt out yet on walking all your characters through the game. After your 30th character it becomes a slog. Sometimes you just want to test a new build without the hassle.

I regularly see games titled "Act 2 walk" or "A1 no rush". Join those games, make those games. Its not that complicated.

JARY wrote: 2 hours ago

Buddy, I've probably made more creative and innovative builds in D2 from 2001-2010 than you've made characters since you started this game, you're dead wrong.

Damn you got issued a crystal ball? I never got one. I need to get one of those.

JARY wrote: 2 hours ago

And to you and the guy above, notice every single post I've stated I'm no interested in removing

Teleport or Enigma, I've stated CRYSTAL clear I don't like that people use it to skip through the game, and my solution was to optimize the Quests to ensure more ppl played through and cleared more areas, before being able to enter certain dungeons and rooms (similar to what

Terror Zone is doing, I think that's good).

Shocking, I know. But I was actually able to pick up on the fact you don't want Enigma removed. You stated that about 3 times now. You probably said it more than 3 times, but I can only count to 3 so I'm not really sure.

What I think you aren't grasping is I find it hilarious that you are conflating how an item is being used and fact of an item being used. You feel people are abusing Enigma. "It should be used how I say its used". But

Echoing Strike and Mosaic you either use them or you don't. Simply using them is somehow abusing something. Enigma is broken 100%. It would still be broken even without

Teleport.

JARY wrote: 2 hours ago

And you guys are like go join a "Act 2 run through" game... guess what... I do, all the time. And you'll probably get about 5 min before a character with

Teleport or higher level joins and starts rushing everyone through, it happens all the time. And Chaos runs? If you're a melee hero, you can barely keep up with the teleporting hammerdins clearing the area.

If Enigma was gate-kept there would just be a ton more sorcs infiltrating your games and ruining your fun.

Forums are meant for discussing and shoving your opinions in other's faces. You posted and it appears you were looking for people to confirm your opinions. Don't be grumpy when not everyone agrees.

Its actually mind-boggling to me that you are out here, in all seriousness, claiming your fun is more important than the fun of other's. That we need to change how the game is played so you can go back to when times you feel were better.