game balance and mechanics

[rusudan]

Long post incoming so lay back and enjoy (hopefully)
Gonna share my opinion from a rogue point of view

-player should be able to move as fast as in town everywhere (100%) because it feels too slow walking so much. It's not fun to spend half the time playing killing stuff and the other half walking around
-mobs also move too fast but if above would be done it would be fine
-hasted mobs should have their movement speed reduced by 50%

I'm ok with some monsters having higher speed and haste than most regular ones but even so as a rogue if you get agro from a hasted miniboss with other nasty mods you are pretty much dead. Yes you might argue that you can prevent this by playing smart clearing everything and having a big room to kite however he can still catch up with you and it's all over.

This leads me to my next point: teleport. It's almost mandatory to have because of the game mechanics and my points above. I do not want to feel as if I am forced to use it on an archer because it feels unatural. (I also hate enigma in diablo 2 because everybody uses it)

Two more things that would also improve the game (again this is my oponion)
-attack speed should be lowered by at least 50%
-faster hit recovery increased by 50%

My rogue uses heartseeker and I do not have any other attack speed items so overall i have 147% attack speed. This feels way too fast to attack and if I am far away in most cases I can fire 4 or more arrows before first one even hits the target so it seems too overpowered.

On the faster hit recovery note, the frames are too low and in some cases you can literally get stuck and unable to perform any action or even move. (infestation quest for example, small clumped up corridor with many poisen spitting snakes)

Furthermore because of this there is yet another thing that the game is forcing you to do: spam potions. It's ok to use some but sometimes you have to use a lot of them in a very short time frame. I personally do not want to rely on potion spamming to play but again I must do it to prevent dying sometimes. Potions should also have a cooldown and if the game mechanics were more balanced we wouldn't need to spam them. If the game speed and everything else I said above would be more balanced there wouldn't be cases where you either kill stuff too fast or the opposite getting one shot by stronger mobs. I feel that a game should offer you encounters where you can use your skill to beat it not how fast you can spam potions to stay alive.

Skills could also be a bit tweaked but from a balance point of view I can see why it is not easy to do in this game (or in any game for that matter). Golem for example also feels that I'm forced to use specifically now in torment because as ranged I cannot really afford to get in close encounters and I need something to tank away the mobs.

Item wise we could do with a few more sets/uniques that offer more diversity in character customization. Also I am wondering if it would be possible to add even more item slots on a character? Because of the game design I doubt it can be but I had to ask. Spell books and scrolls should also have tooltips so we can check them before we can have them in spellbook (this will also help newer players). I also think town portal should be a default ability for all classes that does not require mana. My barbarian cannot use it and I have to keep going back to buy scrolls.

My last point, exploring maps. In diablo 2 single player if you explored everything the next time you would recreate a game you would still have vision which was good. I can understand why on multiplayer they reset it (because of botting) but I cannot see a reason why I would have to explore everything all over again on single player. Monster density can also be a bit more balanced, some areas have too many some too few but overall it's not a big problem. I like the fact that the areas are populated randomly with different mobs everytime as it offers more diversity. Setting a player difficulty is also ok in case the game can get too easy.

Would be nice if we could customize keys as well it's pretty inconvenient to have f1-f2-etc while I could setup to use qwerty or others.

I realize this is an old game and there is only so much you can do on this old engine but I believe some stuff I listed above can be implemented easily. I didn't want to make such a long post originally but I wanted to share my view that would (in my opinion) improve the game and it's mechanics. Thanks for reading!