Tbh, Llama is one of the only ones who can do a complete roast of Diablo 2 and after two hours do a live 8 hours of D2, and beat the game with a Necromancer with a poison dagger lmao
I've started doing no runewords for most of my SSF runs and am having a blast. My current char is also doing no diamond studded shields because getting 3 pdiamonds in a shield makes it better than any rare you'd find anyway.
@arsteel2388 that was my favorite way to play as a child. I'd spend hours looking for socketed stuff in hell cows, then I'd have 6 chipped emeralds in a maul for my wolf druid lol didn't know how to cube stuff back then
I feel like the meta for a lot of games these days is just run through as fast as you can. Constantly to the next objective. The best play throughs I’ve ever had are when I put limitations on myself and thus have to go slower and think some more. And it’s funny that when you slow down you start to see and appreciate the little details and subtleties that make this game the masterpiece it is
You are right. The most fun playthroughs are something like a frenzy/ww barb when you have to really hunt for items and its challenging. Casters are OP.
I stopped playing d2 Just before the big runewords came out. When i came back to it years later it was truly completely different. The original runewords were Sometimes useful but not op. I somehow like and despise the new runewords at the same time. The new runewords are fun but they completely devalue almost all other items.
Same here, I played with my friend by burning a cd with the single player save file and bringing it to his house to drag into his game folder and keep playing there. Then he would burn a cd with the save file and I'd bring it home to keep playing. It was... magical
I really loved the 1.09 days running a guided arrow amazon with buriza, shaftstop, vamp gaze or just mowing cows down with frozen orb + thunderstorm sorc chasing uniques and rares was fun because it all felt manageable to do and rewarding. Personally when I put in the time to grind an Enigma solo in the end I felt "Oh god it's finally over", I dislike the system behind HR drops and the overall gigantic power boost they provide simply nullifying everything else and it created a boring economy where trading just didnt feel enjoyable and fun anymore.
1.09 was my favourite patch. Getting rushed all the way to hell... Sitting and leeching exp in bloody foothills, going from level 1 to 80 in 2 hours... No need for tokens.
Your entire logic is copium because you don't want to play long enough to build high runewordss. Just get over it, you're not good enough. The rest of us who have spent our time getting godly gear don't need to be hamstrung by old noobs like you.
16:14 I really liked that you mentioned Project Diablo 2. It's a really awesome mod that has improved D2 beyond my wildest expectations. I would love for you to do a more thorough overview of the mod with gameplay footage or at least screenshots covering some of the REALLY cool stuff.
I remember early LoD days, the meta for awhile was WW Barb with dual Fury Balrog Blades. One minor change that amped up the difficulty a lot was when they cut the life and mana leech figures in half. You used to be able to get 6% leech on really low level gear and could leech indefinitely on most monsters, potion chugging wasn't a thing back then. :(
Leech got wrecked in the late patches for sure. Not sure my feelings on it exactly but I guess with how much more leech were on new items it made sense
what era did everyone have a barb with a sick rare pike or lance..i remember it being that or you found a grandfather and was pissed you had to recreate a barb to spec him to sword mastery.
@@MrLlamaSC This reminds me, pre LOD you could get very low-level items with crazy leech. I remember getting a dual leech 5/7 (for level 10) from Ormus
i remember when spirit first came out i couldn't believe an item like that even existed. I thought they had made a huge error on the runes required and thought it had to have high runes and they were gonna hotfix it asap
@@jonathasx the mana pot thing balanced out mages before 1.10. Even if mana pots weren't sold after 1.10, all casters would do is struggle through normal until they made an insight. Before 1.10, it was rare items like lidless and sojs that helped mana mangement and mana after each kill was useful.
Completed LOD 1.07 offline because I didn't have internet back then - and runewords were worthless because there was no way to find out what words worked without losing both runes and equipment. The fundamental problem with runewords is that you have to wiki them, it's unreasonable for anyone who isn't super-online or obsessive to discover their function through play. Even older games like Dungeon Master would at least give you scrolls with recipes for spells. They were implemented in a user-unfriendly way on launch, and then subsequently made worse as time went on. If they were to vanish from the game, I don't think I would miss them. I'd probably enjoy finding loot more, like... I'd actually look at the loot if it doesn''t have sockets.
yes, I bought D2 and then LoD before I could do online gaming. I never even knew runewords existed. Runes were just a new type of gems that you couldn't upgrade as far as i knew. But because I never knew you could get updates, I don't think runewords were ever in my game anyway.
Meh at some point you either powercreep to keep the interest up or let a game rest in peace. Rune hunt is the D2 endgame. I like it. Thats why I still play D2 while D3 and D4 collects dust.
@meatbasedvegan4859 EXACTLY. Looking at item stats all fkking day is a drag, man. Absolute DRAAAAAAAAAAAAG. I don't want to have to read a 1000page book every time an item drops so I can figure out, "are these the best affixes?" Make it simple. Make it compelling. Deleting billions of items IS NOT COMPELLING GAMEPLAY
I always thought it was hilarious devs thought enigma needed faster run walk as well when it should have went on chains of honor. Giving an alternative to people that don’t want to teleport
I agree with your point at the end that there isn’t an easy solution to the power creep. I personally find the same joy of grinding my way up to those words, but, it also makes you feel less value to the gear that carried you to that point. I’ll never forget the joy of grinding LK and Countess in Hell, just to get my first Enigma for my first “real deal” summoners. The pure catharsis of earning something, after weeks of grind and willpower, is why I’ve played RuneScape since ‘05, and have played OldSchool since ‘19. However, yeah, once you get your dream words, nothing compares… and you kill the joy of progressing, that you can only get again by making a new character, but, you’ll be tempted to twink to that point. I find the solution more to be Median’s approach, by altering your own gear, and making it work to your skills. That’s just my idea though, and I think it’s a good start. :)
"once you get your dream words, nothing compares… and you kill the joy of progressing", if runewords are not that powerful, something else is gonna take its place, it's not the fault of runewords.
To me synergies are the biggest issue with power creep. It forces everyone to spec into useless early game skills for the insanely unbalanced powerboost and killed versatile hybrid builds. Also pre-Mosiac they could have made Martial Arts viable by giving it synergies but they didn't for whatever reason
@@JimmyZeng if runewords were more balanced there would be more options. If enigma was more balanced, barbs would never want it, but that’s not the case. If grief was more balanced maybe you would see more death cleavers, grandfathers or doombringers. The point that I think he is trying to make is once you have grief there’s nothing else, there is no point to any other weapon in game. No matter what you pick up you are “done” with that slot, when that was not the case pre runewords.
I think Rune Words didn't ruin D2 initially because of the drop tables they had for runes. They were very rare to drop. Yeah during patch 1.09 was indeed the golden age of D2 I remember playing quite a bit on the old bnet servers back in the day and I had zon with buriza and guided arrow and that was amazing. Also remembering having the full mavs set as well. Also old school Windforce added +35 to dex and I remember how much that item was in demand. Not sure when drop tables for runes changed but once they changed the drop table for runes is when I think RuneWords broke diablo 2 because the runes became more common as drops than they were granted the high runes are still rare but they still drop every now and then. Yeah I agree with you Llama there is no simple solution to the problem because if you do one thing you will alienate one group of people and if you did another thing then you would alienate the other group of people.
I'd say the problem they ran into is some of the most unique elements of those high runewords were introduced to solve the problem of most builds being non viable in Hell difficulty in single player. But they made the rest of the affixes so strong they needed to make them end game cost. But in making them end game cost they made the road to having these build allowing items too long. Really the teleport from enigma (so every non sorc could stop carrying a want with teleport charges), the conviction aura from infinity (so single element casters were viable), the shouts from hoto should have also MUCH weaker but cheaper runeword alternatives that involved giving up overall item slot power for those unique powers. Then you job would be to find other places to make up for the weaker pieces. If they had done it this way they could have left the rune drop rates very low and those super end game replacements could be Post-Hell clear.
@@spaceistheplace8376 at the beginning runes were very hard to find because they rarely dropped so no one could create rune words. But once the drop tables changed is when rune words truly entered the picture. You can't create rune words without the runes. So yeah runes and rune words go hand and hand.
Nice vid. One remark: OP rares mentioned like 300+ ED weapons were only introduced in 1.10. Rare affix pool was very weak in 1.07 1.08 and 1.09. However pre-patch rares (before expansion) were indeed strong, and also very common due to the fact that the affix pool was much smaller than today. It was relatively easy to gamble a triple 3x resist boots with STR.
Noticed that too, cruel(up to 300% ed) of quickness magic weapons were best in slot for most melee characters or I remember making a WW polearm barb socketed with 40/15s. Rares sucked.
They need to buff the base of melee weapons and buff rare and magic affixes again. Imo3os magics should make a comeback at least. For rares to compete with grief they need to roll something like 550% ed or somen ridiculous. Thats how good grief is. Honestly path of exile figured it all out with items +crafting.
Corruptions are always interesting. Many uniques need buffs and reworks. Rares really need an affix pool buff, PD2 did some of that right, like FCR on belts, FCR and +skills on body armors, deadly strike/crushing blow on weapons, things that can get pretty insane, especially with crafting on top. Slapping +skills on everything might sound lame, but not much can be done about it if that's so powerful. Maybe more focus on +% elemental damage affixes to balance it. Immunities were also a mistake in the long run, or rather the limited ways to break them. 95% or so resistances would still be a big roadblock at first, but something that you could deal with using various items with -resistances affixes. Sunders are barely a bandage on that issue when in most cases endgame character prefers Infinity anyway.
+ skills is the only reason I love diablo, it makes it easy for me to understand that I love this skill, and this item provides + to that skill, so this item is for me.
I loved the hunt for uniques. I would love making rares top tier again. Maybe even create the possibility of personal sets with them: your three personalized rares should become a set.
I hate runewords. They took all the versatility out from the game and made every class the same. Literally. I also think they should remove Attack Rating completely from the game, to boost Melee characters, since magic always hit. Why even have attack rating then? It just nerfs Melee builds.
I personally like how project diablo 2 solves these problems. For example nerfing spirit to +1 skills and less fhr, removing absorb. Or enigma having a teleport with 3 charges that replenish called blink, but most classes also get new movement skills. And the crafting system is neat, allowing crafted items to be a huge part of endgame along with rares and uniques. I didn’t even buy D2R when I realized they weren’t going to truly shake things up or add any kind of endgame mechanics. I would rather just play LoD at that point (although I think I’m in a minority of players who feel that way).
My biggest issue with pd2 is the item power creep is a little high for me. But I do think it does a fantastic job of bringing fun and balance back to an item landscape dominated by runewords
@@MrLlamaSC definitely true about powercreep, LoD content becomes trivial with the extra affixes and sockets on everything in pd2. Pd2 is definitely not perfect but I have a lot of love for some of the changes they have made. I had hoped D2R could find a middle ground between LoD and pd2, taking some of the runeword nerfs and unique and crafting buffs but leaving out corruptions and puzzleboxes.
Kind of ironic considering the first season of PD2 was riddled with players complaining about how difficult hell was. The crafting season was peak PD2 and I hope they have another one soon.
Project diablo is great if you want to learn diablo and see how getting drops feels, other than that I played it for 2 months and already had Infinity/griffons etc. It gets boring really fast.
See I like PD2 but I think they are starting to get carried away with the new content/mapping system. I dont mind having maps like the early PD2 days but the more they come out with the more it strays away from the classic D2 style of running baal and chaos etc. They got these custom bosses and keep releasing maps and it's just straying away from the classic d2 experience more and more. Just my take on it.
Ethereal Cruel Colossus Blade Of Quickness (yellow glow) - Or The Lamprey for the red colour. I loved those days, or farming for a cruel hammer of quickness for ur zealot dueller. We were some of the original LLD players as well, and it was so exciting and fun when there wasn't really rules around it like getting hell rushed for the points, then taking your level 21 paladin or 18 paladin in and completely crushing a dueller room. Also in terms of runewords I still love a stepping stone weapon being an Eth " Oath " balrog blade runeword. I wish that runewords like that saw use as a more end game or stepping stone to rare weapon. Anyway, eating dinner don't want to ramble too much.
Lol i went to my buddies house like 20 years ago and he was rolling and rolling his CB.. gave me the mouse and said plz save me.. one try.. ccb of q😂 Those were the days
Hot take, but I think in a world devoid of bots/duping/jsp, Enigma would be a fair item. If you can find/trade for a jah and a ber within a game economy untainted by the issues I mentioned, not only would we see far *less* of them but you would absolutely have earned everything enigma does for you.
Cross class skills from runewords were always so neat to me. They were what made the game so fun especially seeing the interactions with the skills on the new class. Melee dual dream enchantress inspired my builds across other diablo games but also across many other rpgs that weren't even made by blizzard.
I think we can throw in Mosaic in the broken runeword category. Over the time, I feel like we get attached to the runewords as they offer some form of guarantee in achieving a strong character. If you grind long enough, you'll get to them eventually. Applies to the solo self found game experience. The same could be said for uniques but most come short to the runewords in terms of power but I feel like increasing their power will make them equivalent to runewords. Some form of nerfs is required, specifically the low cost runewords. What would be fun though, is adding possibilities for rare items to be best in slots through very rare attributes or crafting, specifically for shields and armors.
I like that idea. With seasons we could test different restriction on runwords (Not every season. People like Runewords.) Next example of season: You can only have 1 Runeword on character. Though it would end up with Enigma. I really thing teleport should be a unique charm.
On the release of D2R, I played SSF non-LOD HC. I had played a lot of Slash Diablo, so I was very familiar with the LOD meta of the game up to that point. I was amazed at how well the game flowed, how exciting it was to identify rare items, & how I had to handle different immunities once I got into Hell. I thoroughly enjoyed it. I didnt need to spam Countess til I got the same item everyone else had. I wasn't disappointed at the Hellforge. I enjoyed it so much, it kinda ruined LOD for me. I haven't played any mods recently & I can imagine vanilla D2 not scaling well long term, but the game itself just was such a joy to play.
I only play solo / offline, so I appreciate i have a very different experience to many others - but I love the runewords, because they're still VERY special to me. I still haven't had many of the great OP ones you list here, I've yet to find a Ber rune myself. Granted i've only been playing a few months now in D2R, but I did play a lot back during LoD days. I think for online players - who essentially get access to everything incredibly quickly by sheer number of ways to gear, its understandable - as your gear journey isn't really a journey anymore - just a destination and you need only trade a few neat things you find to get there. I think seasonal models would be a good route if blizz is deciding to continue D2R support, no runes season etc. I think skill charms would be a sick addition though, would need some real hamstringing though to make sure they aren't equally as busted mind.
I strongly disagree that ruinwords ruined the game, the problem is not with the ruinwords themselves, Its that blizzard never bothered to expand upon the crafting system in the game, Eastern Sun its a great example of how Crafting should have been done in D2... Not only you can add modifiers to items, but also spell skills, How cool is it to have CTC Frozen Orb on an item, or fataticism or chain lightning or spells like curse or lower resist, You can also farm materials and make news items from that, i played Eastern Sun for years and i love it, To balence the powerful crafting options you need to farm a ton of materials as they are not cheap.... My point is the lack of advance crafting options is what ruined Diablo 2 for many in my opinion.
Disagreed because the overwhelming majority of people aren't getting runewords like Enigma or Grief. It's a goal that you can work toward and can make incremental progress to instead of the lottery that is the rest of the item system. Is it perfect? No. But I wouldn't say it ruined the game by any means.
It's one of the reasons I play classic and have absolutely no interest in expansion. In classic, everyone has different gear. You don't farm for runes, you farm for rares. With a rare, you never know what you're going to get and I just love that feeling when I find a gg one. It's just so much more satisfying.
The Big Issue with Runewords is that they are often far better than the majority of items you could get at that level. If they were less powerful or more niche, that would probably feel better, stuff like Ancients Pledge, where it's a solid option if you don't have anything better but it doesn't push out every other shield that exists. I kind of feel like Stealth itself is still problematic though because there's pretty much NO reason to not use it for the entirety of normal and most of nightmare, potentially into Hell because of how many bonuses it gives. And then once you get to endgame runewords like Enigma you can see how warped the game became around them. On one hand they are THEORETICALLY harder to get because they require multiple specific items, but every rune is far more common than most unique items or even a good rolling rare. In my mind, runewords should be good fallback or niche equipment that can help get you through if you don't get good rares or uniques, but they should pretty much never be BIS.
Yeah Stealth definitely gives a LOT of power through 3 simple affixes at 25% a pop. Sure you may find a vipermagi or create smoke or treachery or something but if you don't hit one of those (like you won't most of the time) you just stick with stealth.
As someone who grew up playing Diablo 1, Hellfire and original D2 in its crappy resolution (just turned 39) I remember when patch 1.10 hit like a wrecking ball, it was quite amazing and ppl had mixed feelings for a little bit.. but once ppl started seeing teleporting Assassins with WW and barbs with holy freeze Doom and amazing synergies, 1.10 was the greatest thing to happen to d2. Even though the runewords bullied out the OG uniques and sets, it upped the demand of the game tenfold because of how hard it was to get torches and hi runes.
Seasonal runeword are a cool idea to keep the game fresh though. Similar to how they would implement ladder only runewords back in the day. Also Brevick and Blizz North left before 1.10 was released. They implemented all these items and then blizz north was dissolved and it was never fixed or altered. Peter Hu finished 1.10
Hardcore Solo self found on player 1 difficulty has made the game more rewarding for me. Although it’s definitely time consuming, u may end up playing the same characters for years. It will take a while to find true gg items. And aside from hardcore just playing through the game.. leveling up, facing true challenges is the best experience for me.
Hardcore solo is fun but I still enjoy playing with my friend from high school. We ran 1.09 and 1.10 for hours back then. Still fun to run the game now.
Runewords should never have been a separate item type, to compete against rares/uniques. Runewords are too strong and make uniques in the same slot worthless. But also, the runeword system is just so much more boring than finding unique items. Runewords should have been something different completely. For example, it could have been a system to augment other items with certain abilities (similar to socketing, but a different system). But that's just an example. If there ever will be another D2 expansion (one can dream), I'd wish all runewords were removed from the game completely, and runewords brought in in a completely different way. Of course adjust skill trees (remove Teleport), other uniques, and so on.
@@tobiasleitner6716 D4? 😂D4 is a dead game, sorry. D2R has more Twitch viewers than D4 today. Reality is that nobody cares about D4, Blizzard botched it beyond repair at this point. It's as irrelevant as D3 and it will never recover.
i remember playing diablo 2 and getting rares from time to time and i felt pretty good about their powers, they were pretty interesting, then i visited the Wiki and saw all the crazy stuff and those items never felts as special again.
As a D2 classic player for years, I saw this title and immediately clicked. I was a big trader in D2 classic NL with pre patch dupes and GG's. Although I played D2 expac a decent amount when it came out, it never felt the same. Runewords changed the game and builds became less diversified. I even tried to play classic in D2R when it came out, but the bnet servers not showing games quickly ruined the already small community. You're basically forced to play xpac now or play single player. I decided to make a gg rares only char on D2R and even though it's underwhelming compared to my strong runeword chars, I enjoy it more. Reminds me of a better time in my Diablo 2 history. Thanks for posting this Llama. It's nice to get your take on this.
I'm not in the "They ruined the game" camp, but I'm pretty close. When the runewords came out we were all really excited, because it was so new, and everything was powerful. We hadn't hit that moment where literally everyone had the same gear but it quickly became that. Enigma definitely changed the game for the worse. Botting really took off after that too
This. I keep telling people the easier you make a game the easier you make botting and a lot of these runewords like insight, enigma and infinity made botting extremely easy.
What if the rune word strength varied based on level of the base item used to create it, so a normal base would have stats appropriate for normal play, etc. You would still be godly in Hell, but at least your normal and nightmare play would be more varied
at least they made BER the rune for Enigma. and Infinity.. not impossible, but i can count on my fingers in one hand how many i have found SSF... farming bots ruined that and made rune words a problem... i put 500 hours into a farming sorc and found 1 BER in 500 hours of farming. SSF Infinity and Enigma on 1 character is borderline impossible without 1000s of hours in farming. BUT i do agree with Grief, Spirit and Insight as breaking the game...
Physical dmg characters got completely screwed when they buffed all the monsters but left the base damage of weapons alone. Buffing that would be a HUGE help and honestly one of the first changes I would make if I were them.
What hurt D2 the most was getting rid of blizz north !!!!! And letting them all go . I remember the barb gear upped shaftstop p ruby, arrets summit helm ,stormshield ,string belt, raven and leech ring, grandfather. I rememver when 40/15s armor shield combo for java was deadly. On how i would fix it. Give barb a wall brake skill wont be as good as tele but unquie. Zon shift places with a clone or val Druid have him go into the veins underground Necro have him take tge fourm of a dead corp that is far away. Assassin give her a flash step marshel art step. Make them special not just a single skill for all
The one thing Mr. Llama forgot to mention (which is a big part of changing the game forever) is the fact that back in the days you couldn't just open up a browser page and look at the complete list of all runewords that exist (or at least those kind of helping tool sites weren't so popular). What this meant is that you actually had to experiment yourself with putting different combinations of runes into items just to find out what is the exact combo needed for what runeword, and if you didn't write them down (and you for example had your character deleted/killed), you would struggle a lot later on with creating the same thing from the shear memory. That aspect alone, of experimenting and collecting resources just so you can "gamble" with them and very often waste them but also getting the full on satisfaction when you finally succeed just shattered later on. On the other hand, what also kinda changed D2 forever are so called "builds". Or let's say meta builds. I played for an age (don't ask me how) on version 1.07 and then later on 1.09 (until I switched to D2R) and there weren't so strict "builds" you ran with, you had a bunch of characters that are different classes yet they usually had a bit of everything or what Llama mentioned before character resets, we all had characters that had a bunch of "wasted" skills that never got any use. Ahhhh those were the days my friend! :)
I remember the first time I putting a rune word (probably ancient's pledge) into a something that had 4 slots rather than exactly 3 and being dumbfounded as to why it didn't work lol the days before Google.
This is not true. Blizzard released every runeword themselves in the official strategy guide and they were all on The Arreat Summit. You were playing on self Inflicted hard mode lol
I just started 4 runs of finding a build that I'm interested in playing at end game, then leveling the build in my own way to reach that point. The only Runeword I KNOW is Stealth and after this video I don't plan on looking up any and just want to experiment. But my melee assassin is sooooo much more fun to play than spamming fireblast for 12 levels. Same with my Spearzon without Poison Jav is so much more fun than just... Spam Poison Jav. The other two are Frenzy Barb (my favorite build so I'm making a new one) and Holy Freeze Paladin.
To add to this: Runewords also cemented the choice of mercenary, always choosing from Act 2 either a Might or Holy Freeze (and sometimes prayer) due to the Insight and Infinity being best suited (but not limited to) Polearms.
Sorta, but even before that, Act 2 mercs were simply superior just because that aura was so much more powerful than any other Mercs for most builds. The polearm runewords only doubled down on it. If Insight and Infinity could be put into swords or bows , Act 2 mercs still would have been king.
One interesting change to solve the teleport and enigma dilemma would be to add teleport as a chance to roll on the standard of hero’s. This way you still have to grind to get it just like a torch but it could still roll as worthless like it is now. It would also take up space in your inventory and you could change it to a 2 or 3 slot item in there where now it changes your inventory some as well.
I will never understand people (Not you I get where you're coming from) that just can't get it. . YOU DON'T HAVE TO USE THESE ITEMS OR PLAY A CERTAIN BUILD! It's not like D2 is some massive league level pvp game that needs to be homogeni- i mean "Balanced". I am willing to bet most plyers are solo and others are like a few friends groups. A controlled environment in which you can play the way you guys want. Don't expect it from public players. It's like how everyone complains about sorc teleport. So don't use it? Oh you're not a sorc then who cares that's not your class or it's fantasy. Shutup and slap on enigma or get a tele staff. Or the cold sunder with sorc. Don't want the game to be super easy? Don't use a damn sunder charm its THAT simple, like lol. These people are what got us to D4. Just an everyone can do everything and is the same. That want others to play the way they play "Because". Playing without runewords or off-meta builds can actually come to be an enjoyable experience with the things you have to overcome that you'd normally just slap a runeword on and sail by.
I come from the times where XPing in Outter Steppers was common and finding rare Ornate Plates gave an equal thrill of finding a top-tier items nowadays. If the plate turned red after IDing it, it was godly
i personally would go a rather rough path to some solution, which is just remove grief, and then nerf rest so those wouldnt be so op compared to rest. i want to see rares in use! also perhaps some way to make said rares more viable, similar to what orbbof corruption did, maybe even have the bricking as part of it 😂
i’m torn on these game breaking items, on one hand, each new ladder obtaining these is my end game goal (as i do legit trading /farming to get them), so it’s fun to work towards them, and feels great to finally obtain. on the other hand, it does limit what you can equip and what items can be considered “exciting” because all you want is the same runeword over and over again. side note, love content like this!
Solution is simple: Nerf the big 4 Spirit should cost a Mal at least..... mal thul ort amn ....... 1-2 all skills, 5-20 fcr Grief +100-270 damage............. instead of +400 Enigma 1-2 all skills, 5-30 run walk, no mf.......................... infinity nerf.......... insight nerf or cost higher runes "ral tir mal sol"
As a casual player there is nothing wrong with those runewords. It takes forever to find them yourself - so the grind is still there. The only thing I miss from the good old days is the community - but that could be solved by an in game trading system and functional chat...
Yeah took me 2 years and thousands of hours of farming to finally make enigma. Remove those and ill leave a game ive played for 20 years in my past forever. Everyone who complains about this stuff are those who are lucky enough to experience all of these 1:10000000000 chance of rune drop runewords. Ill always be toxic about these crap drop rates. Ive yet to see a Jah in over 2k hours how tf am i supposed to make last wish etc… 4-500mf runs and thousands of runs ive seen like 1 rare diadem. Among only seing 1 white unearthed wand. Im legit cursed on this game.
This is why me and many other stayed in classic D2. So many good rare items and no runewords. Loved my old collection of duped execution swords, lances and ornate armor. I remember people leaving for xpac. They’d get rich instantly by converting their duped ammys, Sojs and boots because those were viable in xpac
I can still vaguely remember the old, old days. I still really love D2, especially pvp. Coooley and DFC simply put gear/stat restrictions in place to balance the characters and builds. I do think D2 could benefit from a rebalancing, and I haven't played PD2 yet but I think they're doing a lot right, but at the same time, from what I've seen it also quickly falls into the same narrow tracks most mods have gone before - you get a little bit Too much freedom and end up with +2 skills on basically every item. I feel like to achieve balance via a mod, the task just moves to then balancing that mod, while also pleasing everyone. Personally, I like early D2 because I like the struggle, the limited items and resources, incrementally getting stronger much slower as a result, while I know most D2 players would prefer quantity, faster, more options, quality of life, to rush through the game and farm bosses at speedrun pace. I prefer D2R as is. At least it is as the game officially stands. I would however maybe be interested in a PD2 Light variant.
It was such a good game players try to extend it as much as possible, beating the game on hardcore max players. Then ubers. Then doing it with every class. Then through builds. Then having one of every kind of superweapon runeword. Then holy grail. And you feel disappointed that you finished it. A great game with an atmosphere that cannot be beat. Diablo 3 and 4 should have been extensions of D2 each giving 4 new acts and increasing level max to 150 overall.
What?? You want D2 to have Greater Rifts 150? Are you dumb or what? Almost infinite monster hp and monster damage scaling. If D2 has GR 150, only Mosaic can do it. Ask Mr Llama how he increased the player count to absurd numbers and purely crowd control and OP damage beat them, 24 32 64 ...... 2000++ So.. You want 5 Mosaic Assassin + 1 Bo Barb + 1 support static field Sorc + support Conviction Paly to be the meta? Jesus Christ!
I still, to this day, play D2 in version 1.09. It is, in my opinion, the best version of the game. It has the expansion and all that it contains but at the same time no OP runewords, the caster/melee characters are more evenly balanced (no mana pots to buy) and more diverse builds (no synergies, more points for different/unrelated skills). Edit: In 1.09 the only way you could get Tal from Countess in normal is by cubing, the highest rune she drops is Eld. Not very time efficient I think.
Build diversity? Eh Diablo had alot going for it but build diversity was not it. Most were just completely not valid skills. There's way more usable skills now than before.
I remember how overjoyed I was as a ten year old, when set items dropped. The feeling seeing that green was glorious. Now all im looking for is orange and gold. As you said, sets and rares are nearly obsolete.
The problem has never been that teleport is too powerful, the problem is that the overwhelming majority of maps aren't designed to have anyone actually walk through efficiently. If things were designed in a manner than made sense for actually walking through, people wouldn't feel so pushed towards teleport. But when it's literally sometimes a) spend 5 minutes walking a circle around the entire map to get to a room adjacent to yours, or b) spending less than 1 second to just teleport through the wall... there really isn't much choice left.
The problem with in theory rolling things back (remove runewords or nerf them) is that people will just find the next thing to complain about. Like if you really want, then go play single player without the runewords or maybe open a duel league with rules around banned runewords. For pvm... a hammerdin will still obliterate the game. If anything it feels like having a segregated forum might be the answer. In any case, I still think diablos an incredible game 😂
Enigma, Infinity, Spirit, and Grief could all use a small nerfing. But more important to me would be making the uniques stronger. Even with a minor nerfing; will something else be better for melee than Grief? Probably not. I feel like hell p8 has basically been tuned with runewords in mind and the root issue is there aren't any uniques that reach the same heights even with how rare some of the unique drops are.
But if you make the uniques stronger, then you have to make sets and rares stronger. Afterwards, you need to make monsters stronger. This is power creep.
The problem with that is 1 those are ENG GAME runewords(Save spirit, if you're talking shield even that, that's Hell at the very least for anyone but pala). And 2 if you nerf them people are just going to find the next best thing, and the cycle continues until we get stale crackers, Like D4. Where everyone is roughly the same. Everyone has equal movement. Everyone has some big oopsie defensive. Everyone has some big damage CD etc.
You make valid points. Anytime there is a single item that's BiS for any (or most) characters, it's a problem. There's never going to be a perfect balance. Given where things are now, the best solution is probably to improve rare and unique items. Give some of them a chance to roll some of the more interesting rune word abilities. Allow them to roll with charges that are actually useful. Like you said, it's just hard to get excited about seeing any unique shield or armor drop when it's just going to be replaced at some point. It would be nice to see better magical items, too. There are only a small handful that are actually good and I've never seen any of them in 20+ years of playing the game.
So I missed out on Diablo 2 for a very, very long time. I played a little bit before D2r, but have played significantly more since the remaster. I mostly play offline, and my luck seems to be a bit skewed as I have found a Zod, a Cham, and several Bers before a Shako (still don't have). But I made my first Enigma like 3 days ago target farming a third Ber at Trav, and that feels incredible. I personally don't mind the power of rune words *right now* because I haven't gotten to play with them as much as others have. I'm looking forward to making an Infinity next. But I also completely understand how stale gameplay can get when it's pretty much only the same stuff in every slot for every character. I like the idea of charms adding a skill like Enigma, but again, I feel like I'm too new to really have a fair assessment of what would work best for the game.
So the problem of Enigma might actually be a problem of teleport. I don't think the creators of DII envisioned people becoming so efficient that they skipped through 95% of the game to reach enemies that can drop anything. It's just so crazy when FCR is high. What could be done about that? * Remove teleport completely. * Make teleport have a smaller cast radius. * Make it take longer to cast teleport. * Perhaps provide some kind of debuff after teleporting, potentially stacking the more used in a row. They could also give in and allow people to play a non-sorc as their first toon... and not teleport staffs that suck away all of your gold. Perhaps, it would be a little stronger on sorc as she is a sorc, but come on... everyone needs a sorc. It kinda forces a person into playing one no matter what build they want to go. Well, if they want to keep up with the 90% of players using the logical sorc upon ladder launch. They could make slaying weaker monsters more beneficial so that teleport isn't needed to snipe the best monsters/bosses. They could provide a reasonable runeword that has teleport. I don't know. I'm not a game designer nor do I ever want to be the person who gets the wrath of DII players for changing DII. But yeah, Enigma/teleport makes the game kinda weird. On the other hand, I do like that ber demand is so strong that it acts as a logical currency for expensive items. Most other items, only a % of people need them. A necro, a barbarian, a sorc, an assassin, a druid, and an amazon usually need different stuff. Enigma is different in that every single class, including a sorc, wants it. That's kind of cool. It makes a common currency out of bers. As for Infinity, I think lowering resistances might just need a balancing change. I suppose that's what the 1/5th was trying to do, but when an item gives flat reduction to resistances regardless of immunities like Griffons, it is just insane. You end up doing like 3x the damage from one item. Perhaps not a popular opinion, but I think the rework should be based on immune monsters first and foremost. Those stink unless you have a pack of people all to play at the same time! So remove that (but keep different creatures having higher resistances against certain types of damages than others), perhaps make every source of negative resistance 1/5th what is listed, and at the end of it, reduce the rarity of these items / the runes needed to make them to compensate for how much worse they become. Spirit and double Spirit is just wild... Oh ,one last thing. Another solution would be to increase the potency of super rare uniques. Perhaps if a 2-handed unique staff did a little more, we wouldn't see everyone using 2 Spirits.
feel like one thing that should be mentioned about items such as enigma (no requirements pretty much since it gave you the strength) is, unlike almost any other item in the game, you *REALLY* wanted to have at least ONE enigma, because then all your characters could use it if necessary. So the impact is a lot different than say a barbarian specific item, this one item you must have and any character you play gets to have enigma. The feeling you'd get was that everyone had enigma, was by far the most common item in the game.
sometime early 2023 was my first play through of D2. i played a sorc and used a guide a little bit. I can't echo enough just how much spirit took away from the game for me. i play games like D2 primarily because i like getting cool items and getting stronger. within the first several hours i got a spirit sword (which rolled 35 fcr) and it was great how strong it was, but literally every single wand that dropped was useless from there on out and I knew that I wouldn't get an upgrade until i get HOTO, more runes. what was especially disappointing about it was I found the wands and oculus-type weapons to be some of the coolest pieces of gear....but all useless....I still ID'ed them all and looked at them...and many looked interesting too....but they were al worse. the best I could find was just a 'slight' downgrade from my spirit.
100% Spirit alone nearly made D2 unbearably boring I nearly quit.... because of spirit and how it RUINED the fun of finding new caster weapons and shields
Great video. Its so annoying that the best in slot bow for a bowazon is unquestionably faith. Nothing else even comes close. That completely destroys build diversity if you want to use a bowazon
I understand what youre saying, but i must disagree. Runewords are incredibly powerful, but actually getting high runes in a normal play through is incredibly rare. Runewords are one of the most iconic items/concept in the diablo world. Some of them are op, yes. But for you to legit obtain these items, you deserve the amount of power they give imo.
I think they fit in SSF better to be honest. Because the grind to get many of them (besides spirit, insight, and a couple other low level ones) takes months usually and is super awesome. But even still once you get there they are possibly a bit too much
@@MrLlamaSC i think my biggest concern is lots of classes would have an immense amount of trouble beating the ubers without the power you gain from runewords(aside from cheese specs like smite and kicksin). You're definitely not wrong that some runeworda might be overtuned, but I think its far fetched to say they RUINED D2. I just think they should have introduced competitive uniques and set pieces. That being said, I know who you are and what you do. I also think you're someone who understands the game more than 99% of players. Maybe I'm just stuck in nostalgia land 🤣
It would have been really cool to see an overhaul of the system for rare items at some point after 1.10, so that the highest-end rare modifiers on any equipment slot could be in competition with end-game runewords. Make it unlikely enough to find such insane mods all together that they would be, in fact, very rare, and runewords would still be the simpler option to have a viable character. But for players who enjoyed the grind and wanted to maximize as much as possible, you could still keep looking and one day identify a rare phase blade that had better modifiers than Grief, or a rare body armor that was so good it made you want to give up having teleport as a non-Sorceress caster. That was actually one thing I enjoyed about playing Diablo 3 single player on console (well after the whole auction house nonsense on PC). Unlike when replaying Diablo 2, there was actually a sense of excitement around finding rare items and even varying modifiers on uniques. When I replay D2 now, the only things I really am trying to find are runes, and then when you find the right ones, you're just set, and the grind to keep maximizing stops.
these items have been an integral part of the game for so long now, I actually enjoy saving up them, and while getting runes is easy on battlenet, gathering runes on SP is by orders of magnitude harder, lots of uniques need re-vamping that's for sure
I played a Bone Spear/Corpse Explosion Necro all the way through hardcore using a Lore, Stealth, White Wand and an Ancients Pledge. Although, at some point, I found a 2os Necro Head with skills on it that I used to make a Rhyme. I could have continued to use the Ancients Pledge and it was perfectly fine. Several of the original runewords you mentioned are pretty powerful and end game viable. I would LOVE to see crafting Armors, Shelds, Weapons, etc. be buffed to compete with runewords. Crafting has always been underused except for caster amulets, blood amulets and rings, blood gloves just to name a few.
As someone who had played d2 off and on since 2001 LOD, I’ve never had a jah rune in my inventory and have never been close to having enigma. I feel like I can speak for a large portion of the community and say that those end game items are usually unobtainable unless purchased or traded and are not even part of my normal gameplay. I’ve spent 700 hundred+ hours in D2R since its release and over 3 seasons and my single player, I have created 1 grief, 1 coh, 2 cta, 2 hoto, and found a zod, never close to infinity or enigma
I would love to see rares, uniques and particularly set items get a boost so they can hold their own against runewords. Set items, to me, seem like the hardest hit just bc it takes so much time, effort and stash space to have all the pieces of a 6-item or even 4-item set only for it to not compete with one runeword (let alone four). If the set requires using a weapon, armor, helm, shield... it's not going to be worth it.
I agree 100%. It would even be nice to see magical items get a boost so that you might actually consider using one in place of a rare. The "magic only" affixes are not enough of an improvement over the rare ones to consider using one in place of a rare item. There are only a handful of Godly magical items (Jeweler's Monarch of Deflection, Jeweler's Archon Plate of the Whale, Lancer's Matriarchal Javelin of Quickness) and I've never seen any of them.
I like runewords, but I think they needed to constantly be adding new ones back when they first released (and push the power down a lot on the very best ones). I like some of the new rune words they released in D2R. I'd love to see some new high level ones that compete with the current high tier meta. At the same time, I think rares and magic items (and many many sets/uniques) should get enhanced. A cube recipe to merge affixes on items (taking an affix and adding its value to an existing affix) up to a very powerful maximum would make it so you'd still hunt for great rare items.
The runeword Spirit should become ethereal and lose durability over time. It's in the name "Spirit". Then it would be good for leveling but not good as end game gear. It should last for like an hour in a crystal sword and two hours in a monarch.
I think a solution could be to add 3-4 rune words each season, but also facing out 3-4 rune words, so there would be a fixed numbers of rune words. Then it would be new an interesting each season with new rune words, and the old ones should never come back. So those 4 rune words would be gone in a couple of years. That would be so interesting in my opinion.
*CORRECTION* At 3:56 you showcase a rare legendary mallet with the cruel modifier on it. This was NOT able to spawn prior to 1.10 as the cruel affix was limited solely to MAGIC items intil 1.10.
TBH, I’d bet that most of us never even touched D2 before LOD. The enigma runeword specifically is what enables the sorts of shenanigans that make the game more interesting than any other arpg.
enigma, spirit, grief and infinity should be removed: - enigma removal needs : add teleport charges on rare rings/amus - grief removal needs : unique weapons such as grandfather, doombringer, or lightsabre should be buffed up a little; rare weapons should be able to scale up more. - spirit removal needs : none, just remove it. - infinity removal needs : like for enigma, add chance on hit/strike/being hit to trigger conviction/lt/whatever_aura on rare rings/amus (EDIT: thanks for this video it emphasize how blibli cut this community in half at that time and it feels good to ear some else talking about this)
the awesome thing about runewords is the whole crafting aspect, you can even cube low quality stuff into normal quality, and then cube sockets onto them, alongside of course grinding your way up with the runes them selves. but I fully agree that the end reulst is pretty sad. I always pickup rares of exceptional and elite stuff just to see the rolls and more then often im complely amazed at how worthless the affixes are 90% of the time.
No it dint ruin anything, in fact it made things better. It made D2 a platform where you can simulate different types of builds and spend hours and hours to figure out the best items, find glitches. They put hard caps on the bosses so that no matter how strong you become BAAL can still kill you if you don't pay attention. It made trading more accessible. In lobbies the cool thing was to show off your gear because it gave a sense that you're better (even if you got it for free or what ever). Your gear are the trophies you want to show off. Either its a Perfect Ebugged Vortex 45 res or a Perfect Coa 2os you threaten the whole J2SP forum to sell it to Charsi if no one pays 5k for it. Runewords fixed Diablo 2 and made the game even more popular and accessible but still remained very hard to achieve the top end perfect gear
All of your points still remain exactly the same if runewords didn't exist or weren't BiS on 95% of the builds, except the game would have 1000x more variance
@@borisdochev2940 How so? Why should teleport be available just for a sorc? Sorc becomes the default MF hunter and she cant even do all of the it by her self solo or its very difficult to do it without Infinity. When you play solo, achieving an Enigma is a reward for collecting all these hard to find runes. It takes alot of time by it self. If you removed Imunities off monsters i would agree with you. but since you have immunities and the vast majority of the people just want to play solo 50% of the time then it makes sense to have rewards like reunwards in the game.
You can find amulets and helms with teleport charges, which allow you to teleport without needing Enigma or a weapon swap. I used such an amulet on my budget HC uber smiter, where you don't need that many teleports for a run (needed life tap on weapon swap, so couldn't use that), but it would otherwise get annoying (and costly) to repair constantly for general farming. If there was some automated way to repair items with charges (like a charm that used gold from your inventory to repair charges on equipped items every 2 seconds, perhaps at less than the current repair cost), then those other items could be competitive with Enigma (you could also nerf Enigma to use charges). Alternately, you could add an amulet crafting recipe guaranteed to add teleport charges that auto repair using gold, so it's a self contained single item. The crafted teleport ammy could have a high level requirement (so it's late game specific), and would use one of the lower high runes as an ingredient. In return for the high rune cost, it would be guaranteed to have +2 skills for a random character class (in addition to the auto repairing teleport charges), making it competitive with the best unique ammys if it rolls well, even ignoring the teleport charges.
I'm OG as well - played religiously during those times. Right before this patch were the best days. Vampgaze, Shaftstop, Buriza (or ideally WF) come at me bro. I loved the itemization. There was a certain higher level of excitement when those single drops can make you. Runes are exciting too but seemed to take a bit more patience and effort to make the runewords unless you traded for them.
Does anyone remember Peltier the barb? It was the 90+ pike (and later lance) barb that was always in the top 10 on the ladder on U.S. East, gaining #1 for multiple weeks on the ladders back in the first few years of D2. He was obv. played by a team of professionals during that time. Funny story, at one point I happen to see him in a random public game so I joined on my summon necro, he wasn't chatting or anything and like clearing A2 sewers in NM or something. He finally came to A4, and I challenged him to a duel. He literally killed himself on my blood golem after he charged out of the Pandemonium Fortress stairs and instantly went into WW. I cast iron maiden on him immediately since that's the only way to kill a melee as a summon necro if they happen to attack your golem, lol. Pretty sure the grinding team sold the char to some novice, and I don't think he had the gear they were using anymore, his character was half naked.
I agree 100% on the Spirit portion. I was "unfortunate" to find a 45 resist all Crown Shield and now I have a completely stupid shield, that is impossible to replace.
@@War_Maker Well... 1 year later and here we are.. Superior Sacred Targe: 9% enhanced defense, 12 increased durability, and 45 to all resists. So now it can't get replaced.
How were the original rune words discovered? Did players need to find them? Perhaps the issue is not that they exists, but players already know what they want and how to get it before you even start a season.
I play as singleplayer. Started to play again after over 15 years around 1.5 years ago. The only thing that really makes me playing is the high runes and rune words that are incredibly rare. I still never found most of the high runes but it is what makes me play Diablo 2 again and again.
Nah runes are completly balanced for me thats what made the diablo 2 best outthere. Also greif is not Op it needs a buff. Melee chars have the lowest dps even with grief and also single target. Melee needs a splash area damage then greif would be good. A zeal paladin not work with just grief. You need gore rider, Guillaume's Face etc critic and crushing blow and attack speed. So half items are rare/unique/set and half of them are runewords completely balanced. You farm mephisto whatever to get uniques/sets and 85 areas for runes. whats wrong with that and still it takes 5+ minutes to clear the sanctuary :) while a sorc clears it in minutes. Only thing I dont like is teleporting. It should be removed or only with charged items so no spamming.
I think grief emphasizes how bad other weapons are because you are right. It isn't exactly OP overall but just compared to every other weapon which is bad and needs to be buffed.
Tbh, Llama is one of the only ones who can do a complete roast of Diablo 2 and after two hours do a live 8 hours of D2, and beat the game with a Necromancer with a poison dagger lmao
Yes...there's zero other people who can point out the flaws of a game that they are in love with. /sarcasm
I thought some others could @@7gamex
@@7gamexhe literally said “one of the ones” x) feel better buddy
Everyone can. D2 has always been extremely easy but time consuming
@@runerune-_-9727Easy? Play hardcore and go ahead and recommend that bud
Tried a self-restricted no-runeword run with a frenzy barb. It was amazing. So many awesome items out there forgotten by time.
I've started doing no runewords for most of my SSF runs and am having a blast.
My current char is also doing no diamond studded shields because getting 3 pdiamonds in a shield makes it better than any rare you'd find anyway.
You just gave me a good idea. I use Cactus for version switching, so I could use no runewords restriction but still use runes to socket GG items.
@arsteel2388 that was my favorite way to play as a child. I'd spend hours looking for socketed stuff in hell cows, then I'd have 6 chipped emeralds in a maul for my wolf druid lol didn't know how to cube stuff back then
i went through hell necro never using a runeword because i didnt know how
Wrong approach imho, just avoid enigma, grief, last wish. BOTD, for example, is an extremely fun runeword to aim for as the end of your game.
I feel like the meta for a lot of games these days is just run through as fast as you can. Constantly to the next objective. The best play throughs I’ve ever had are when I put limitations on myself and thus have to go slower and think some more. And it’s funny that when you slow down you start to see and appreciate the little details and subtleties that make this game the masterpiece it is
You are right. The most fun playthroughs are something like a frenzy/ww barb when you have to really hunt for items and its challenging. Casters are OP.
I fully agree. I still enjoy Normal difficulty.
@@Rumblingbellyyeah and how painful that class truly is in act two and 3 when all those little bastards are running around and you're on frenzy.
This is actually exactly why I enjoy playing hardcore
the best games dont need this self restriction though... they are designed with those restrictions in place
I still remember having to repair my items before selling them to get max gold
Exactly. I still out of habit just repair all my items automatically when I interact with any blacksmith NPC
And then you accidentally repair a wand with Tier6 skill charger and cost like 10 times the value 😂
I stopped playing d2 Just before the big runewords came out. When i came back to it years later it was truly completely different. The original runewords were Sometimes useful but not op. I somehow like and despise the new runewords at the same time. The new runewords are fun but they completely devalue almost all other items.
How did you manage to type exactly what lama said
@@H3Logan chatgpt
just play without useing the big runewords.... dont blame the game
Same here, I played with my friend by burning a cd with the single player save file and bringing it to his house to drag into his game folder and keep playing there. Then he would burn a cd with the save file and I'd bring it home to keep playing. It was... magical
@@mathollaplays the thing is, the game got harder when the new runewords came in
I really loved the 1.09 days running a guided arrow amazon with buriza, shaftstop, vamp gaze or just mowing cows down with frozen orb + thunderstorm sorc chasing uniques and rares was fun because it all felt manageable to do and rewarding. Personally when I put in the time to grind an Enigma solo in the end I felt "Oh god it's finally over", I dislike the system behind HR drops and the overall gigantic power boost they provide simply nullifying everything else and it created a boring economy where trading just didnt feel enjoyable and fun anymore.
omg 1.09 buriza was the absolute bomb. My freezing/guided arrow Amazon murdered everything.
glory days brother
1.09 was my favourite patch. Getting rushed all the way to hell... Sitting and leeching exp in bloody foothills, going from level 1 to 80 in 2 hours... No need for tokens.
Your entire logic is copium because you don't want to play long enough to build high runewordss. Just get over it, you're not good enough. The rest of us who have spent our time getting godly gear don't need to be hamstrung by old noobs like you.
Seems my comment got deleted, you can still play 1.09, just search for Diablo 09 😊
16:14 I really liked that you mentioned Project Diablo 2. It's a really awesome mod that has improved D2 beyond my wildest expectations. I would love for you to do a more thorough overview of the mod with gameplay footage or at least screenshots covering some of the REALLY cool stuff.
I remember early LoD days, the meta for awhile was WW Barb with dual Fury Balrog Blades. One minor change that amped up the difficulty a lot was when they cut the life and mana leech figures in half. You used to be able to get 6% leech on really low level gear and could leech indefinitely on most monsters, potion chugging wasn't a thing back then. :(
Leech got wrecked in the late patches for sure. Not sure my feelings on it exactly but I guess with how much more leech were on new items it made sense
what era did everyone have a barb with a sick rare pike or lance..i remember it being that or you found a grandfather and was pissed you had to recreate a barb to spec him to sword mastery.
I remember when twin doombringers were the go-to. Seeing as how the grandfather was nowhere to be seen Lolol
@@MrLlamaSC This reminds me, pre LOD you could get very low-level items with crazy leech. I remember getting a dual leech 5/7 (for level 10) from Ormus
@@BH-gh6qm Oh i remember that :D and finding the Uniq Lance was so Hype :P
i remember when spirit first came out i couldn't believe an item like that even existed. I thought they had made a huge error on the runes required and thought it had to have high runes and they were gonna hotfix it asap
I had the exact same thought
We should have been on the design team, not the idiot who decided spirit would be so powerful and easy to make
we made a huge error and then we DOUBLED it
@@tremblenceback before 1.10 casters whined that they sucked so they made op runewords for them and nerfed melee.
@@jonathasx the mana pot thing balanced out mages before 1.10. Even if mana pots weren't sold after 1.10, all casters would do is struggle through normal until they made an insight.
Before 1.10, it was rare items like lidless and sojs that helped mana mangement and mana after each kill was useful.
Spirit is ridiculously good. End game item with beginning game runes
Completed LOD 1.07 offline because I didn't have internet back then - and runewords were worthless because there was no way to find out what words worked without losing both runes and equipment. The fundamental problem with runewords is that you have to wiki them, it's unreasonable for anyone who isn't super-online or obsessive to discover their function through play. Even older games like Dungeon Master would at least give you scrolls with recipes for spells. They were implemented in a user-unfriendly way on launch, and then subsequently made worse as time went on. If they were to vanish from the game, I don't think I would miss them. I'd probably enjoy finding loot more, like... I'd actually look at the loot if it doesn''t have sockets.
Good point!
yes, I bought D2 and then LoD before I could do online gaming. I never even knew runewords existed. Runes were just a new type of gems that you couldn't upgrade as far as i knew. But because I never knew you could get updates, I don't think runewords were ever in my game anyway.
So instead of having a small chance of getting runes to improve your gear and a small chance to get improved gear, you want half that chance?
there were magazines that had some rune words
Meh at some point you either powercreep to keep the interest up or let a game rest in peace.
Rune hunt is the D2 endgame.
I like it. Thats why I still play D2 while D3 and D4 collects dust.
The hunt is amazing I do agree. I'll actually drop a video about that part soon
The hunt for legendaries in D3 doesn't scratch that itch for you?
@meatbasedvegan4859 EXACTLY. Looking at item stats all fkking day is a drag, man. Absolute DRAAAAAAAAAAAAG. I don't want to have to read a 1000page book every time an item drops so I can figure out, "are these the best affixes?" Make it simple. Make it compelling. Deleting billions of items IS NOT COMPELLING GAMEPLAY
I always thought it was hilarious devs thought enigma needed faster run walk as well when it should have went on chains of honor. Giving an alternative to people that don’t want to teleport
They really just super buffed enigma in so many ways lol
I agree with your point at the end that there isn’t an easy solution to the power creep. I personally find the same joy of grinding my way up to those words, but, it also makes you feel less value to the gear that carried you to that point.
I’ll never forget the joy of grinding LK and Countess in Hell, just to get my first Enigma for my first “real deal” summoners. The pure catharsis of earning something, after weeks of grind and willpower, is why I’ve played RuneScape since ‘05, and have played OldSchool since ‘19.
However, yeah, once you get your dream words, nothing compares… and you kill the joy of progressing, that you can only get again by making a new character, but, you’ll be tempted to twink to that point.
I find the solution more to be Median’s approach, by altering your own gear, and making it work to your skills. That’s just my idea though, and I think it’s a good start. :)
Median crafting was so fun to me. Still one of my favorite ways to modify items while still having RNG
"once you get your dream words, nothing compares… and you kill the joy of progressing", if runewords are not that powerful, something else is gonna take its place, it's not the fault of runewords.
To me synergies are the biggest issue with power creep. It forces everyone to spec into useless early game skills for the insanely unbalanced powerboost and killed versatile hybrid builds.
Also pre-Mosiac they could have made Martial Arts viable by giving it synergies but they didn't for whatever reason
@@JimmyZeng if runewords were more balanced there would be more options. If enigma was more balanced, barbs would never want it, but that’s not the case. If grief was more balanced maybe you would see more death cleavers, grandfathers or doombringers. The point that I think he is trying to make is once you have grief there’s nothing else, there is no point to any other weapon in game. No matter what you pick up you are “done” with that slot, when that was not the case pre runewords.
@@Hell0spawn0doug not really contradict what I'm saying, all amazon uses ethereal titan's revenge, does that mean it ruines d2/amazon?
I think Rune Words didn't ruin D2 initially because of the drop tables they had for runes. They were very rare to drop. Yeah during patch 1.09 was indeed the golden age of D2 I remember playing quite a bit on the old bnet servers back in the day and I had zon with buriza and guided arrow and that was amazing. Also remembering having the full mavs set as well. Also old school Windforce added +35 to dex and I remember how much that item was in demand. Not sure when drop tables for runes changed but once they changed the drop table for runes is when I think RuneWords broke diablo 2 because the runes became more common as drops than they were granted the high runes are still rare but they still drop every now and then. Yeah I agree with you Llama there is no simple solution to the problem because if you do one thing you will alienate one group of people and if you did another thing then you would alienate the other group of people.
I'd say the problem they ran into is some of the most unique elements of those high runewords were introduced to solve the problem of most builds being non viable in Hell difficulty in single player. But they made the rest of the affixes so strong they needed to make them end game cost. But in making them end game cost they made the road to having these build allowing items too long.
Really the teleport from enigma (so every non sorc could stop carrying a want with teleport charges), the conviction aura from infinity (so single element casters were viable), the shouts from hoto should have also MUCH weaker but cheaper runeword alternatives that involved giving up overall item slot power for those unique powers. Then you job would be to find other places to make up for the weaker pieces. If they had done it this way they could have left the rune drop rates very low and those super end game replacements could be Post-Hell clear.
runes didnt ruin d2 ...yeah the runewords did
@@spaceistheplace8376 at the beginning runes were very hard to find because they rarely dropped so no one could create rune words. But once the drop tables changed is when rune words truly entered the picture. You can't create rune words without the runes. So yeah runes and rune words go hand and hand.
@@gaspara9817 Yeah very true. You make some valid points.
which is why d2 popularized botting
Nice vid. One remark: OP rares mentioned like 300+ ED weapons were only introduced in 1.10. Rare affix pool was very weak in 1.07 1.08 and 1.09. However pre-patch rares (before expansion) were indeed strong, and also very common due to the fact that the affix pool was much smaller than today. It was relatively easy to gamble a triple 3x resist boots with STR.
Noticed that too, cruel(up to 300% ed) of quickness magic weapons were best in slot for most melee characters or I remember making a WW polearm barb socketed with 40/15s. Rares sucked.
@@lildavo87 Yes. And Cruel affix was a magic only affix. 200 ED was the highest possible ED on rares (King's + Merciless).
They need to buff the base of melee weapons and buff rare and magic affixes again. Imo3os magics should make a comeback at least.
For rares to compete with grief they need to roll something like 550% ed or somen ridiculous. Thats how good grief is.
Honestly path of exile figured it all out with items +crafting.
Corruptions are always interesting.
Many uniques need buffs and reworks.
Rares really need an affix pool buff, PD2 did some of that right, like FCR on belts, FCR and +skills on body armors, deadly strike/crushing blow on weapons, things that can get pretty insane, especially with crafting on top. Slapping +skills on everything might sound lame, but not much can be done about it if that's so powerful. Maybe more focus on +% elemental damage affixes to balance it.
Immunities were also a mistake in the long run, or rather the limited ways to break them. 95% or so resistances would still be a big roadblock at first, but something that you could deal with using various items with -resistances affixes. Sunders are barely a bandage on that issue when in most cases endgame character prefers Infinity anyway.
+ skills is the only reason I love diablo, it makes it easy for me to understand that I love this skill, and this item provides + to that skill, so this item is for me.
I loved the hunt for uniques. I would love making rares top tier again. Maybe even create the possibility of personal sets with them: your three personalized rares should become a set.
mate, rares are top tier lol, in many slots
Especially in the slots where you cant use runewords
@@guynamedstevo6581 and then there's arach and war travs and magefist
I hate runewords. They took all the versatility out from the game and made every class the same. Literally.
I also think they should remove Attack Rating completely from the game, to boost Melee characters, since magic always hit. Why even have attack rating then? It just nerfs Melee builds.
I personally like how project diablo 2 solves these problems. For example nerfing spirit to +1 skills and less fhr, removing absorb. Or enigma having a teleport with 3 charges that replenish called blink, but most classes also get new movement skills. And the crafting system is neat, allowing crafted items to be a huge part of endgame along with rares and uniques. I didn’t even buy D2R when I realized they weren’t going to truly shake things up or add any kind of endgame mechanics. I would rather just play LoD at that point (although I think I’m in a minority of players who feel that way).
My biggest issue with pd2 is the item power creep is a little high for me. But I do think it does a fantastic job of bringing fun and balance back to an item landscape dominated by runewords
@@MrLlamaSC definitely true about powercreep, LoD content becomes trivial with the extra affixes and sockets on everything in pd2. Pd2 is definitely not perfect but I have a lot of love for some of the changes they have made. I had hoped D2R could find a middle ground between LoD and pd2, taking some of the runeword nerfs and unique and crafting buffs but leaving out corruptions and puzzleboxes.
Kind of ironic considering the first season of PD2 was riddled with players complaining about how difficult hell was. The crafting season was peak PD2 and I hope they have another one soon.
Project diablo is great if you want to learn diablo and see how getting drops feels, other than that I played it for 2 months and already had Infinity/griffons etc. It gets boring really fast.
See I like PD2 but I think they are starting to get carried away with the new content/mapping system.
I dont mind having maps like the early PD2 days but the more they come out with the more it strays away from the classic D2 style of running baal and chaos etc. They got these custom bosses and keep releasing maps and it's just straying away from the classic d2 experience more and more. Just my take on it.
Ethereal Cruel Colossus Blade Of Quickness (yellow glow) - Or The Lamprey for the red colour. I loved those days, or farming for a cruel hammer of quickness for ur zealot dueller. We were some of the original LLD players as well, and it was so exciting and fun when there wasn't really rules around it like getting hell rushed for the points, then taking your level 21 paladin or 18 paladin in and completely crushing a dueller room. Also in terms of runewords I still love a stepping stone weapon being an Eth " Oath " balrog blade runeword. I wish that runewords like that saw use as a more end game or stepping stone to rare weapon. Anyway, eating dinner don't want to ramble too much.
Lol i went to my buddies house like 20 years ago and he was rolling and rolling his CB.. gave me the mouse and said plz save me.. one try.. ccb of q😂
Those were the days
Hot take, but I think in a world devoid of bots/duping/jsp, Enigma would be a fair item. If you can find/trade for a jah and a ber within a game economy untainted by the issues I mentioned, not only would we see far *less* of them but you would absolutely have earned everything enigma does for you.
Still it's just too easy of a choice which armor to make id you have 3 Bers.
@@UbeogeshBut again... 3 bers in a world without bots and jsp is no small task.
@@UbeogeshI’d make Infinity and farm for a Jah. I could never in good conscience cube two Ber runes.
100% agree. I don't think I've ever dropped a Jar rune in 20 years.
whubout that ith rune. really drives the price up
Cross class skills from runewords were always so neat to me. They were what made the game so fun especially seeing the interactions with the skills on the new class. Melee dual dream enchantress inspired my builds across other diablo games but also across many other rpgs that weren't even made by blizzard.
I think we can throw in Mosaic in the broken runeword category. Over the time, I feel like we get attached to the runewords as they offer some form of guarantee in achieving a strong character. If you grind long enough, you'll get to them eventually. Applies to the solo self found game experience. The same could be said for uniques but most come short to the runewords in terms of power but I feel like increasing their power will make them equivalent to runewords. Some form of nerfs is required, specifically the low cost runewords. What would be fun though, is adding possibilities for rare items to be best in slots through very rare attributes or crafting, specifically for shields and armors.
Mosaic is the worst offender. Cheap runeword and completely makes the build as without it ma sins suck.
Would definitely come back for a full season of no runewords.
Hey, might be a lot longer videos but it would be nice to see…. Have to grind hard for a set
We need a version 1.09 updated to battle net season
I like that idea. With seasons we could test different restriction on runwords (Not every season. People like Runewords.)
Next example of season: You can only have 1 Runeword on character. Though it would end up with Enigma. I really thing teleport should be a unique charm.
On the release of D2R, I played SSF non-LOD HC. I had played a lot of Slash Diablo, so I was very familiar with the LOD meta of the game up to that point.
I was amazed at how well the game flowed, how exciting it was to identify rare items, & how I had to handle different immunities once I got into Hell.
I thoroughly enjoyed it. I didnt need to spam Countess til I got the same item everyone else had. I wasn't disappointed at the Hellforge.
I enjoyed it so much, it kinda ruined LOD for me.
I haven't played any mods recently & I can imagine vanilla D2 not scaling well long term, but the game itself just was such a joy to play.
I only play solo / offline, so I appreciate i have a very different experience to many others - but I love the runewords, because they're still VERY special to me. I still haven't had many of the great OP ones you list here, I've yet to find a Ber rune myself. Granted i've only been playing a few months now in D2R, but I did play a lot back during LoD days. I think for online players - who essentially get access to everything incredibly quickly by sheer number of ways to gear, its understandable - as your gear journey isn't really a journey anymore - just a destination and you need only trade a few neat things you find to get there. I think seasonal models would be a good route if blizz is deciding to continue D2R support, no runes season etc. I think skill charms would be a sick addition though, would need some real hamstringing though to make sure they aren't equally as busted mind.
You don't need to find a Ber.
You build up into a Ber
Go lower kurast and open super chest on P7
Thank me
@@lespoje8526 The game's a slot machine simulator regardless so you might as well do that.
I strongly disagree that ruinwords ruined the game, the problem is not with the ruinwords themselves, Its that blizzard never bothered to expand upon the crafting system in the game, Eastern Sun its a great example of how Crafting should have been done in D2... Not only you can add modifiers to items, but also spell skills, How cool is it to have CTC Frozen Orb on an item, or fataticism or chain lightning or spells like curse or lower resist, You can also farm materials and make news items from that, i played Eastern Sun for years and i love it, To balence the powerful crafting options you need to farm a ton of materials as they are not cheap.... My point is the lack of advance crafting options is what ruined Diablo 2 for many in my opinion.
Disagreed because the overwhelming majority of people aren't getting runewords like Enigma or Grief. It's a goal that you can work toward and can make incremental progress to instead of the lottery that is the rest of the item system.
Is it perfect? No. But I wouldn't say it ruined the game by any means.
What frustrates me its the huge potential for new items and runewords but blizzard couldn't care less
There is a lot of potential but I would also be scared of what could come out. Seeing items in D4 doesn't make me hopeful
@@MrLlamaSCexactly
Or, as my old boss used to always say, they COULD care less. Classic Charlie.
They don’t care about this game anymore, forgive and forget
I just want a act 6
It's one of the reasons I play classic and have absolutely no interest in expansion. In classic, everyone has different gear. You don't farm for runes, you farm for rares. With a rare, you never know what you're going to get and I just love that feeling when I find a gg one. It's just so much more satisfying.
The Big Issue with Runewords is that they are often far better than the majority of items you could get at that level.
If they were less powerful or more niche, that would probably feel better, stuff like Ancients Pledge, where it's a solid option if you don't have anything better but it doesn't push out every other shield that exists.
I kind of feel like Stealth itself is still problematic though because there's pretty much NO reason to not use it for the entirety of normal and most of nightmare, potentially into Hell because of how many bonuses it gives.
And then once you get to endgame runewords like Enigma you can see how warped the game became around them. On one hand they are THEORETICALLY harder to get because they require multiple specific items, but every rune is far more common than most unique items or even a good rolling rare.
In my mind, runewords should be good fallback or niche equipment that can help get you through if you don't get good rares or uniques, but they should pretty much never be BIS.
Yeah Stealth definitely gives a LOT of power through 3 simple affixes at 25% a pop. Sure you may find a vipermagi or create smoke or treachery or something but if you don't hit one of those (like you won't most of the time) you just stick with stealth.
Spirit only feels overpowered in normal and nightmare not Hell on players 3+, and a major factor is also how skilled you are at D2.
Would be great if Runewords mainly provided mid game consistency. Need cannot be Frozen, get Rhyme. Need res and missile defence, get Sanctuary, etc.
As someone who grew up playing Diablo 1, Hellfire and original D2 in its crappy resolution (just turned 39) I remember when patch 1.10 hit like a wrecking ball, it was quite amazing and ppl had mixed feelings for a little bit.. but once ppl started seeing teleporting Assassins with WW and barbs with holy freeze Doom and amazing synergies, 1.10 was the greatest thing to happen to d2. Even though the runewords bullied out the OG uniques and sets, it upped the demand of the game tenfold because of how hard it was to get torches and hi runes.
Seasonal runeword are a cool idea to keep the game fresh though. Similar to how they would implement ladder only runewords back in the day.
Also Brevick and Blizz North left before 1.10 was released. They implemented all these items and then blizz north was dissolved and it was never fixed or altered. Peter Hu finished 1.10
we all know where community is not split, its stackables currency tab
Amen to that
Hardcore Solo self found on player 1 difficulty has made the game more rewarding for me. Although it’s definitely time consuming, u may end up playing the same characters for years. It will take a while to find true gg items. And aside from hardcore just playing through the game.. leveling up, facing true challenges is the best experience for me.
I just did this with a solo self found zealer paladin and the spider at nm a3 killed me with a single hit while i was cursed
@@Rumblingbelly ribs in crispy zakarum organ grill pieces my mate
Hardcore solo is fun but I still enjoy playing with my friend from high school. We ran 1.09 and 1.10 for hours back then. Still fun to run the game now.
Runewords should never have been a separate item type, to compete against rares/uniques. Runewords are too strong and make uniques in the same slot worthless. But also, the runeword system is just so much more boring than finding unique items.
Runewords should have been something different completely. For example, it could have been a system to augment other items with certain abilities (similar to socketing, but a different system). But that's just an example.
If there ever will be another D2 expansion (one can dream), I'd wish all runewords were removed from the game completely, and runewords brought in in a completely different way. Of course adjust skill trees (remove Teleport), other uniques, and so on.
And there you would be a minority. Lot of people hope for runewords in d4
@@tobiasleitner6716 D4? 😂D4 is a dead game, sorry. D2R has more Twitch viewers than D4 today.
Reality is that nobody cares about D4, Blizzard botched it beyond repair at this point. It's as irrelevant as D3 and it will never recover.
Played D2 since release and I never let myself use teleport on non sorcs. A code of my own invention but a code nonetheless
The real problem is not the power of those runewords , it's the bots finding the runes to actually make them.
Yeah botting hurts a lot because everybody gets access
i remember playing diablo 2 and getting rares from time to time and i felt pretty good about their powers, they were pretty interesting, then i visited the Wiki and saw all the crazy stuff and those items never felts as special again.
At the super end game, some rares are still best in slot. Rings, amulets, and circlets
@@ApathyBM Weapons too.. rare/blue claws > hoto + spirit for a trap sin.
Rares still 100% still shred though especially eth throwing stuff for barbs now
As a D2 classic player for years, I saw this title and immediately clicked. I was a big trader in D2 classic NL with pre patch dupes and GG's. Although I played D2 expac a decent amount when it came out, it never felt the same. Runewords changed the game and builds became less diversified. I even tried to play classic in D2R when it came out, but the bnet servers not showing games quickly ruined the already small community. You're basically forced to play xpac now or play single player. I decided to make a gg rares only char on D2R and even though it's underwhelming compared to my strong runeword chars, I enjoy it more. Reminds me of a better time in my Diablo 2 history. Thanks for posting this Llama. It's nice to get your take on this.
I'm not in the "They ruined the game" camp, but I'm pretty close. When the runewords came out we were all really excited, because it was so new, and everything was powerful. We hadn't hit that moment where literally everyone had the same gear but it quickly became that. Enigma definitely changed the game for the worse. Botting really took off after that too
This. I keep telling people the easier you make a game the easier you make botting and a lot of these runewords like insight, enigma and infinity made botting extremely easy.
What if the rune word strength varied based on level of the base item used to create it, so a normal base would have stats appropriate for normal play, etc. You would still be godly in Hell, but at least your normal and nightmare play would be more varied
at least they made BER the rune for Enigma. and Infinity.. not impossible, but i can count on my fingers in one hand how many i have found SSF... farming bots ruined that and made rune words a problem... i put 500 hours into a farming sorc and found 1 BER in 500 hours of farming. SSF Infinity and Enigma on 1 character is borderline impossible without 1000s of hours in farming. BUT i do agree with Grief, Spirit and Insight as breaking the game...
SSF online or offline? Offline you can get Enigma in 20-30 hours of LK farming.
In thousands of hours of hunting the highest rune I ever saw drop was Um :(
You could get it in 1 minute, or it could take thousands of hours, because that's how odds work. @@Araghos
My biggest issue is that they buffed all monster health, they buffed all skills with the synergies and then left physical damage characters behind
Physical dmg characters got completely screwed when they buffed all the monsters but left the base damage of weapons alone. Buffing that would be a HUGE help and honestly one of the first changes I would make if I were them.
@@MrLlamaSC yeah… this is what keeping me from playing barb…
I think it would have been better if they made a +1 to teleport affix possible on rares. I personally enjoyed 1.09 more than anything since.
What hurt D2 the most was getting rid of blizz north !!!!! And letting them all go .
I remember the barb gear upped shaftstop p ruby, arrets summit helm ,stormshield ,string belt, raven and leech ring, grandfather.
I rememver when 40/15s armor shield combo for java was deadly.
On how i would fix it. Give barb a wall brake skill wont be as good as tele but unquie.
Zon shift places with a clone or val
Druid have him go into the veins underground
Necro have him take tge fourm of a dead corp that is far away.
Assassin give her a flash step marshel art step. Make them special not just a single skill for all
The one thing Mr. Llama forgot to mention (which is a big part of changing the game forever) is the fact that back in the days you couldn't just open up a browser page and look at the complete list of all runewords that exist (or at least those kind of helping tool sites weren't so popular). What this meant is that you actually had to experiment yourself with putting different combinations of runes into items just to find out what is the exact combo needed for what runeword, and if you didn't write them down (and you for example had your character deleted/killed), you would struggle a lot later on with creating the same thing from the shear memory. That aspect alone, of experimenting and collecting resources just so you can "gamble" with them and very often waste them but also getting the full on satisfaction when you finally succeed just shattered later on.
On the other hand, what also kinda changed D2 forever are so called "builds". Or let's say meta builds. I played for an age (don't ask me how) on version 1.07 and then later on 1.09 (until I switched to D2R) and there weren't so strict "builds" you ran with, you had a bunch of characters that are different classes yet they usually had a bit of everything or what Llama mentioned before character resets, we all had characters that had a bunch of "wasted" skills that never got any use. Ahhhh those were the days my friend! :)
I remember the first time I putting a rune word (probably ancient's pledge) into a something that had 4 slots rather than exactly 3 and being dumbfounded as to why it didn't work lol the days before Google.
This is not true. Blizzard released every runeword themselves in the official strategy guide and they were all on The Arreat Summit.
You were playing on self Inflicted hard mode lol
I have printed all the horadric cube features back then. 30 pages. I still have it and search for combination
Yea Atma was name of that program.. cheating .
I just started 4 runs of finding a build that I'm interested in playing at end game, then leveling the build in my own way to reach that point. The only Runeword I KNOW is Stealth and after this video I don't plan on looking up any and just want to experiment.
But my melee assassin is sooooo much more fun to play than spamming fireblast for 12 levels. Same with my Spearzon without Poison Jav is so much more fun than just... Spam Poison Jav.
The other two are Frenzy Barb (my favorite build so I'm making a new one) and Holy Freeze Paladin.
To add to this: Runewords also cemented the choice of mercenary, always choosing from Act 2 either a Might or Holy Freeze (and sometimes prayer) due to the Insight and Infinity being best suited (but not limited to) Polearms.
Sorta, but even before that, Act 2 mercs were simply superior just because that aura was so much more powerful than any other Mercs for most builds. The polearm runewords only doubled down on it. If Insight and Infinity could be put into swords or bows , Act 2 mercs still would have been king.
Defiance also worked if you were a meteorb sorceress. Stack up that defense and use your own cold skills for the freeze.
One interesting change to solve the teleport and enigma dilemma would be to add teleport as a chance to roll on the standard of hero’s. This way you still have to grind to get it just like a torch but it could still roll as worthless like it is now. It would also take up space in your inventory and you could change it to a 2 or 3 slot item in there where now it changes your inventory some as well.
I will never understand people (Not you I get where you're coming from) that just can't get it. . YOU DON'T HAVE TO USE THESE ITEMS OR PLAY A CERTAIN BUILD! It's not like D2 is some massive league level pvp game that needs to be homogeni- i mean "Balanced". I am willing to bet most plyers are solo and others are like a few friends groups. A controlled environment in which you can play the way you guys want. Don't expect it from public players. It's like how everyone complains about sorc teleport. So don't use it? Oh you're not a sorc then who cares that's not your class or it's fantasy. Shutup and slap on enigma or get a tele staff. Or the cold sunder with sorc. Don't want the game to be super easy? Don't use a damn sunder charm its THAT simple, like lol. These people are what got us to D4. Just an everyone can do everything and is the same. That want others to play the way they play "Because". Playing without runewords or off-meta builds can actually come to be an enjoyable experience with the things you have to overcome that you'd normally just slap a runeword on and sail by.
Nice video, would really love a D2 season without runes, would be very interesting
Yes this so much
Maybe not without runes, but without runewords.
@@grmigrim9834 just without grief and enigma
I come from the times where XPing in Outter Steppers was common and finding rare Ornate Plates gave an equal thrill of finding a top-tier items nowadays. If the plate turned red after IDing it, it was godly
i personally would go a rather rough path to some solution, which is just remove grief, and then nerf rest so those wouldnt be so op compared to rest. i want to see rares in use! also perhaps some way to make said rares more viable, similar to what orbbof corruption did, maybe even have the bricking as part of it 😂
i’m torn on these game breaking items, on one hand, each new ladder obtaining these is my end game goal (as i do legit trading /farming to get them), so it’s fun to work towards them, and feels great to finally obtain. on the other hand, it does limit what you can equip and what items can be considered “exciting” because all you want is the same runeword over and over again.
side note, love content like this!
Solution is simple: Nerf the big 4
Spirit should cost a Mal at least..... mal thul ort amn ....... 1-2 all skills, 5-20 fcr
Grief +100-270 damage............. instead of +400
Enigma 1-2 all skills, 5-30 run walk, no mf.......................... infinity nerf.......... insight nerf or cost higher runes "ral tir mal sol"
As a casual player there is nothing wrong with those runewords. It takes forever to find them yourself - so the grind is still there. The only thing I miss from the good old days is the community - but that could be solved by an in game trading system and functional chat...
Yeah took me 2 years and thousands of hours of farming to finally make enigma. Remove those and ill leave a game ive played for 20 years in my past forever. Everyone who complains about this stuff are those who are lucky enough to experience all of these 1:10000000000 chance of rune
drop runewords. Ill always be toxic about these crap drop rates. Ive yet to see a Jah in over 2k hours how tf am i supposed to make last wish etc… 4-500mf runs and thousands of runs ive seen like 1 rare diadem. Among only seing 1 white unearthed wand. Im legit cursed on this game.
Yeah, tookme half an hour until my character was farming for spirit and insight. So hard! So cruel! Cry cry cry!
This is why me and many other stayed in classic D2. So many good rare items and no runewords. Loved my old collection of duped execution swords, lances and ornate armor. I remember people leaving for xpac. They’d get rich instantly by converting their duped ammys, Sojs and boots because those were viable in xpac
I can still vaguely remember the old, old days. I still really love D2, especially pvp. Coooley and DFC simply put gear/stat restrictions in place to balance the characters and builds.
I do think D2 could benefit from a rebalancing, and I haven't played PD2 yet but I think they're doing a lot right, but at the same time, from what I've seen it also quickly falls into the same narrow tracks most mods have gone before - you get a little bit Too much freedom and end up with +2 skills on basically every item.
I feel like to achieve balance via a mod, the task just moves to then balancing that mod, while also pleasing everyone. Personally, I like early D2 because I like the struggle, the limited items and resources, incrementally getting stronger much slower as a result, while I know most D2 players would prefer quantity, faster, more options, quality of life, to rush through the game and farm bosses at speedrun pace.
I prefer D2R as is. At least it is as the game officially stands. I would however maybe be interested in a PD2 Light variant.
It was such a good game players try to extend it as much as possible, beating the game on hardcore max players. Then ubers. Then doing it with every class. Then through builds. Then having one of every kind of superweapon runeword. Then holy grail. And you feel disappointed that you finished it. A great game with an atmosphere that cannot be beat. Diablo 3 and 4 should have been extensions of D2 each giving 4 new acts and increasing level max to 150 overall.
What?? You want D2 to have Greater Rifts 150?
Are you dumb or what? Almost infinite monster hp and monster damage scaling.
If D2 has GR 150, only Mosaic can do it. Ask Mr Llama how he increased the player count to absurd numbers and purely crowd control and OP damage beat them, 24 32 64 ...... 2000++
So.. You want 5 Mosaic Assassin + 1 Bo Barb + 1 support static field Sorc + support Conviction Paly to be the meta?
Jesus Christ!
I still, to this day, play D2 in version 1.09. It is, in my opinion, the best version of the game. It has the expansion and all that it contains but at the same time no OP runewords, the caster/melee characters are more evenly balanced (no mana pots to buy) and more diverse builds (no synergies, more points for different/unrelated skills).
Edit: In 1.09 the only way you could get Tal from Countess in normal is by cubing, the highest rune she drops is Eld. Not very time efficient I think.
Build diversity? Eh Diablo had alot going for it but build diversity was not it. Most were just completely not valid skills. There's way more usable skills now than before.
I actually didn't know she only dropped up to eld then! TIL
I remember how overjoyed I was as a ten year old, when set items dropped. The feeling seeing that green was glorious.
Now all im looking for is orange and gold.
As you said, sets and rares are nearly obsolete.
Aren't rare ammys/rings/javs/gloves/boots/helms the most godly items? Pretty sure they are.
Orange and gold? What game are you playing bruv cause it ain't D2
@@Industrious420 Runes are displayed orange, uniques gold.
The problem has never been that teleport is too powerful, the problem is that the overwhelming majority of maps aren't designed to have anyone actually walk through efficiently. If things were designed in a manner than made sense for actually walking through, people wouldn't feel so pushed towards teleport. But when it's literally sometimes a) spend 5 minutes walking a circle around the entire map to get to a room adjacent to yours, or b) spending less than 1 second to just teleport through the wall... there really isn't much choice left.
The problem with in theory rolling things back (remove runewords or nerf them) is that people will just find the next thing to complain about. Like if you really want, then go play single player without the runewords or maybe open a duel league with rules around banned runewords. For pvm... a hammerdin will still obliterate the game. If anything it feels like having a segregated forum might be the answer. In any case, I still think diablos an incredible game 😂
1.09 was the golden era for sure. Everybody on running cows in a party. The cow channel used to be a wild place.
Enigma, Infinity, Spirit, and Grief could all use a small nerfing.
But more important to me would be making the uniques stronger.
Even with a minor nerfing; will something else be better for melee than Grief?
Probably not.
I feel like hell p8 has basically been tuned with runewords in mind and the root issue is there aren't any uniques that reach the same heights even with how rare some of the unique drops are.
But if you make the uniques stronger, then you have to make sets and rares stronger. Afterwards, you need to make monsters stronger. This is power creep.
The problem with that is 1 those are ENG GAME runewords(Save spirit, if you're talking shield even that, that's Hell at the very least for anyone but pala). And 2 if you nerf them people are just going to find the next best thing, and the cycle continues until we get stale crackers, Like D4. Where everyone is roughly the same. Everyone has equal movement. Everyone has some big oopsie defensive. Everyone has some big damage CD etc.
2:00 can't say they were cheap. Remember how much rarer runes were back then? Even a Shael was quite hard to get, and you could only cube up to Thul.
I mean cheap ish. But yes old time drop rates are ROUGH lol
Better then d4 😊
D2 will Always be the Best Diablo! #2 is diablo 1 of course ps1 status
You make valid points. Anytime there is a single item that's BiS for any (or most) characters, it's a problem. There's never going to be a perfect balance. Given where things are now, the best solution is probably to improve rare and unique items. Give some of them a chance to roll some of the more interesting rune word abilities. Allow them to roll with charges that are actually useful. Like you said, it's just hard to get excited about seeing any unique shield or armor drop when it's just going to be replaced at some point. It would be nice to see better magical items, too. There are only a small handful that are actually good and I've never seen any of them in 20+ years of playing the game.
Let's discuss how runewords ruined Diablo 2: They didn't. The end.
So I missed out on Diablo 2 for a very, very long time. I played a little bit before D2r, but have played significantly more since the remaster. I mostly play offline, and my luck seems to be a bit skewed as I have found a Zod, a Cham, and several Bers before a Shako (still don't have). But I made my first Enigma like 3 days ago target farming a third Ber at Trav, and that feels incredible. I personally don't mind the power of rune words *right now* because I haven't gotten to play with them as much as others have. I'm looking forward to making an Infinity next. But I also completely understand how stale gameplay can get when it's pretty much only the same stuff in every slot for every character. I like the idea of charms adding a skill like Enigma, but again, I feel like I'm too new to really have a fair assessment of what would work best for the game.
So the problem of Enigma might actually be a problem of teleport. I don't think the creators of DII envisioned people becoming so efficient that they skipped through 95% of the game to reach enemies that can drop anything. It's just so crazy when FCR is high. What could be done about that?
* Remove teleport completely.
* Make teleport have a smaller cast radius.
* Make it take longer to cast teleport.
* Perhaps provide some kind of debuff after teleporting, potentially stacking the more used in a row.
They could also give in and allow people to play a non-sorc as their first toon... and not teleport staffs that suck away all of your gold. Perhaps, it would be a little stronger on sorc as she is a sorc, but come on... everyone needs a sorc. It kinda forces a person into playing one no matter what build they want to go. Well, if they want to keep up with the 90% of players using the logical sorc upon ladder launch.
They could make slaying weaker monsters more beneficial so that teleport isn't needed to snipe the best monsters/bosses.
They could provide a reasonable runeword that has teleport.
I don't know. I'm not a game designer nor do I ever want to be the person who gets the wrath of DII players for changing DII. But yeah, Enigma/teleport makes the game kinda weird.
On the other hand, I do like that ber demand is so strong that it acts as a logical currency for expensive items. Most other items, only a % of people need them. A necro, a barbarian, a sorc, an assassin, a druid, and an amazon usually need different stuff. Enigma is different in that every single class, including a sorc, wants it. That's kind of cool. It makes a common currency out of bers.
As for Infinity, I think lowering resistances might just need a balancing change. I suppose that's what the 1/5th was trying to do, but when an item gives flat reduction to resistances regardless of immunities like Griffons, it is just insane. You end up doing like 3x the damage from one item. Perhaps not a popular opinion, but I think the rework should be based on immune monsters first and foremost. Those stink unless you have a pack of people all to play at the same time! So remove that (but keep different creatures having higher resistances against certain types of damages than others), perhaps make every source of negative resistance 1/5th what is listed, and at the end of it, reduce the rarity of these items / the runes needed to make them to compensate for how much worse they become.
Spirit and double Spirit is just wild... Oh ,one last thing. Another solution would be to increase the potency of super rare uniques. Perhaps if a 2-handed unique staff did a little more, we wouldn't see everyone using 2 Spirits.
feel like one thing that should be mentioned about items such as enigma (no requirements pretty much since it gave you the strength) is, unlike almost any other item in the game, you *REALLY* wanted to have at least ONE enigma, because then all your characters could use it if necessary. So the impact is a lot different than say a barbarian specific item, this one item you must have and any character you play gets to have enigma. The feeling you'd get was that everyone had enigma, was by far the most common item in the game.
sometime early 2023 was my first play through of D2. i played a sorc and used a guide a little bit. I can't echo enough just how much spirit took away from the game for me. i play games like D2 primarily because i like getting cool items and getting stronger. within the first several hours i got a spirit sword (which rolled 35 fcr) and it was great how strong it was, but literally every single wand that dropped was useless from there on out and I knew that I wouldn't get an upgrade until i get HOTO, more runes. what was especially disappointing about it was I found the wands and oculus-type weapons to be some of the coolest pieces of gear....but all useless....I still ID'ed them all and looked at them...and many looked interesting too....but they were al worse. the best I could find was just a 'slight' downgrade from my spirit.
100%
Spirit alone nearly made D2 unbearably boring
I nearly quit.... because of spirit and how it RUINED the fun of finding new caster weapons and shields
Great video. Its so annoying that the best in slot bow for a bowazon is unquestionably faith. Nothing else even comes close. That completely destroys build diversity if you want to use a bowazon
Yeah. I mean windforce still does have its uses thanks to big max dmg but faith is very dominant in the space
Happy to see someone with the same take on rune words. They became the meta and over time we stopped seeing unique builds.
I understand what youre saying, but i must disagree. Runewords are incredibly powerful, but actually getting high runes in a normal play through is incredibly rare. Runewords are one of the most iconic items/concept in the diablo world. Some of them are op, yes. But for you to legit obtain these items, you deserve the amount of power they give imo.
I think they fit in SSF better to be honest. Because the grind to get many of them (besides spirit, insight, and a couple other low level ones) takes months usually and is super awesome. But even still once you get there they are possibly a bit too much
@@MrLlamaSC i think my biggest concern is lots of classes would have an immense amount of trouble beating the ubers without the power you gain from runewords(aside from cheese specs like smite and kicksin). You're definitely not wrong that some runeworda might be overtuned, but I think its far fetched to say they RUINED D2. I just think they should have introduced competitive uniques and set pieces. That being said, I know who you are and what you do. I also think you're someone who understands the game more than 99% of players. Maybe I'm just stuck in nostalgia land 🤣
It would have been really cool to see an overhaul of the system for rare items at some point after 1.10, so that the highest-end rare modifiers on any equipment slot could be in competition with end-game runewords. Make it unlikely enough to find such insane mods all together that they would be, in fact, very rare, and runewords would still be the simpler option to have a viable character. But for players who enjoyed the grind and wanted to maximize as much as possible, you could still keep looking and one day identify a rare phase blade that had better modifiers than Grief, or a rare body armor that was so good it made you want to give up having teleport as a non-Sorceress caster.
That was actually one thing I enjoyed about playing Diablo 3 single player on console (well after the whole auction house nonsense on PC). Unlike when replaying Diablo 2, there was actually a sense of excitement around finding rare items and even varying modifiers on uniques. When I replay D2 now, the only things I really am trying to find are runes, and then when you find the right ones, you're just set, and the grind to keep maximizing stops.
How do I play patch 1.09 where Baranars Star was a decent weapon for a zealer?
if they removed any of those top tier runewords they would lose most of the player base, me included
Idk if removal is the solution so much as small nerfs or adjustments to other item types to bring them closer
Too most people those are chase items. It's only people who play this game for a living that actually find this stuff on a regular basis. @@MrLlamaSC
these items have been an integral part of the game for so long now, I actually enjoy saving up them, and while getting runes is easy on battlenet, gathering runes on SP is by orders of magnitude harder, lots of uniques need re-vamping that's for sure
I played a Bone Spear/Corpse Explosion Necro all the way through hardcore using a Lore, Stealth, White Wand and an Ancients Pledge. Although, at some point, I found a 2os Necro Head with skills on it that I used to make a Rhyme. I could have continued to use the Ancients Pledge and it was perfectly fine. Several of the original runewords you mentioned are pretty powerful and end game viable. I would LOVE to see crafting Armors, Shelds, Weapons, etc. be buffed to compete with runewords. Crafting has always been underused except for caster amulets, blood amulets and rings, blood gloves just to name a few.
Crafting really has few uses nowadays in D2. A couple of caster or blood items and that's about it. I agree it would be cool to see more come from it
As someone who had played d2 off and on since 2001 LOD, I’ve never had a jah rune in my inventory and have never been close to having enigma.
I feel like I can speak for a large portion of the community and say that those end game items are usually unobtainable unless purchased or traded and are not even part of my normal gameplay.
I’ve spent 700 hundred+ hours in D2R since its release and over 3 seasons and my single player, I have created 1 grief, 1 coh, 2 cta, 2 hoto, and found a zod, never close to infinity or enigma
I would love to see rares, uniques and particularly set items get a boost so they can hold their own against runewords. Set items, to me, seem like the hardest hit just bc it takes so much time, effort and stash space to have all the pieces of a 6-item or even 4-item set only for it to not compete with one runeword (let alone four). If the set requires using a weapon, armor, helm, shield... it's not going to be worth it.
I agree 100%. It would even be nice to see magical items get a boost so that you might actually consider using one in place of a rare. The "magic only" affixes are not enough of an improvement over the rare ones to consider using one in place of a rare item. There are only a handful of Godly magical items (Jeweler's Monarch of Deflection, Jeweler's Archon Plate of the Whale, Lancer's Matriarchal Javelin of Quickness) and I've never seen any of them.
If you were to play single player only and never trade, then by the time you get to make a great rune word you've earned it...
I like runewords, but I think they needed to constantly be adding new ones back when they first released (and push the power down a lot on the very best ones). I like some of the new rune words they released in D2R. I'd love to see some new high level ones that compete with the current high tier meta. At the same time, I think rares and magic items (and many many sets/uniques) should get enhanced. A cube recipe to merge affixes on items (taking an affix and adding its value to an existing affix) up to a very powerful maximum would make it so you'd still hunt for great rare items.
The runeword Spirit should become ethereal and lose durability over time. It's in the name "Spirit". Then it would be good for leveling but not good as end game gear.
It should last for like an hour in a crystal sword and two hours in a monarch.
I think a solution could be to add 3-4 rune words each season, but also facing out 3-4 rune words, so there would be a fixed numbers of rune words. Then it would be new an interesting each season with new rune words, and the old ones should never come back. So those 4 rune words would be gone in a couple of years. That would be so interesting in my opinion.
id be excited to see a rotation of runewords, but never returning is a hard sell for me.
*CORRECTION*
At 3:56 you showcase a rare legendary mallet with the cruel modifier on it.
This was NOT able to spawn prior to 1.10 as the cruel affix was limited solely to MAGIC items intil 1.10.
TBH, I’d bet that most of us never even touched D2 before LOD. The enigma runeword specifically is what enables the sorts of shenanigans that make the game more interesting than any other arpg.
Will you play classic MrLlama? Maybe you can get blizz to add extended stash for us
Its so sad that items like Grand Father, Arkaines and Hellsalyer lost their value,it was our holy grails back then...
enigma, spirit, grief and infinity should be removed:
- enigma removal needs : add teleport charges on rare rings/amus
- grief removal needs : unique weapons such as grandfather, doombringer, or lightsabre should be buffed up a little; rare weapons should be able to scale up more.
- spirit removal needs : none, just remove it.
- infinity removal needs : like for enigma, add chance on hit/strike/being hit to trigger conviction/lt/whatever_aura on rare rings/amus
(EDIT: thanks for this video it emphasize how blibli cut this community in half at that time and it feels good to ear some else talking about this)
the awesome thing about runewords is the whole crafting aspect, you can even cube low quality stuff into normal quality, and then cube sockets onto them, alongside of course grinding your way up with the runes them selves.
but I fully agree that the end reulst is pretty sad. I always pickup rares of exceptional and elite stuff just to see the rolls and more then often im complely amazed at how worthless the affixes are 90% of the time.
I do love how they bring white and gray items so much value
No it dint ruin anything, in fact it made things better. It made D2 a platform where you can simulate different types of builds and spend hours and hours to figure out the best items, find glitches. They put hard caps on the bosses so that no matter how strong you become BAAL can still kill you if you don't pay attention.
It made trading more accessible.
In lobbies the cool thing was to show off your gear because it gave a sense that you're better (even if you got it for free or what ever). Your gear are the trophies you want to show off.
Either its a Perfect Ebugged Vortex 45 res or a Perfect Coa 2os you threaten the whole J2SP forum to sell it to Charsi if no one pays 5k for it.
Runewords fixed Diablo 2 and made the game even more popular and accessible but still remained very hard to achieve the top end perfect gear
All of your points still remain exactly the same if runewords didn't exist or weren't BiS on 95% of the builds, except the game would have 1000x more variance
@@borisdochev2940 How so? Why should teleport be available just for a sorc? Sorc becomes the default MF hunter and she cant even do all of the it by her self solo or its very difficult to do it without Infinity.
When you play solo, achieving an Enigma is a reward for collecting all these hard to find runes. It takes alot of time by it self.
If you removed Imunities off monsters i would agree with you. but since you have immunities and the vast majority of the people just want to play solo 50% of the time then it makes sense to have rewards like reunwards in the game.
You can find amulets and helms with teleport charges, which allow you to teleport without needing Enigma or a weapon swap. I used such an amulet on my budget HC uber smiter, where you don't need that many teleports for a run (needed life tap on weapon swap, so couldn't use that), but it would otherwise get annoying (and costly) to repair constantly for general farming. If there was some automated way to repair items with charges (like a charm that used gold from your inventory to repair charges on equipped items every 2 seconds, perhaps at less than the current repair cost), then those other items could be competitive with Enigma (you could also nerf Enigma to use charges).
Alternately, you could add an amulet crafting recipe guaranteed to add teleport charges that auto repair using gold, so it's a self contained single item. The crafted teleport ammy could have a high level requirement (so it's late game specific), and would use one of the lower high runes as an ingredient. In return for the high rune cost, it would be guaranteed to have +2 skills for a random character class (in addition to the auto repairing teleport charges), making it competitive with the best unique ammys if it rolls well, even ignoring the teleport charges.
I'm OG as well - played religiously during those times. Right before this patch were the best days. Vampgaze, Shaftstop, Buriza (or ideally WF) come at me bro. I loved the itemization.
There was a certain higher level of excitement when those single drops can make you. Runes are exciting too but seemed to take a bit more patience and effort to make the runewords unless you traded for them.
Does anyone remember Peltier the barb? It was the 90+ pike (and later lance) barb that was always in the top 10 on the ladder on U.S. East, gaining #1 for multiple weeks on the ladders back in the first few years of D2. He was obv. played by a team of professionals during that time. Funny story, at one point I happen to see him in a random public game so I joined on my summon necro, he wasn't chatting or anything and like clearing A2 sewers in NM or something. He finally came to A4, and I challenged him to a duel.
He literally killed himself on my blood golem after he charged out of the Pandemonium Fortress stairs and instantly went into WW. I cast iron maiden on him immediately since that's the only way to kill a melee as a summon necro if they happen to attack your golem, lol. Pretty sure the grinding team sold the char to some novice, and I don't think he had the gear they were using anymore, his character was half naked.
orb of corruption was my favorite part of path of diablo
I agree 100% on the Spirit portion. I was "unfortunate" to find a 45 resist all Crown Shield and now I have a completely stupid shield, that is impossible to replace.
Well you could find a better base like a 45all scared targe 😁
I have a perfect ed/ar vortex shield. One of the rarest rolled bases in the game and its useless lol. Base ed/ar should be like 150%+400AR.
@@War_Maker Well... 1 year later and here we are.. Superior Sacred Targe: 9% enhanced defense, 12 increased durability, and 45 to all resists. So now it can't get replaced.
How were the original rune words discovered? Did players need to find them? Perhaps the issue is not that they exists, but players already know what they want and how to get it before you even start a season.
I play as singleplayer. Started to play again after over 15 years around 1.5 years ago. The only thing that really makes me playing is the high runes and rune words that are incredibly rare. I still never found most of the high runes but it is what makes me play Diablo 2 again and again.
Nah runes are completly balanced for me thats what made the diablo 2 best outthere. Also greif is not Op it needs a buff. Melee chars have the lowest dps even with grief and also single target. Melee needs a splash area damage then greif would be good. A zeal paladin not work with just grief. You need gore rider, Guillaume's Face etc critic and crushing blow and attack speed. So half items are rare/unique/set and half of them are runewords completely balanced. You farm mephisto whatever to get uniques/sets and 85 areas for runes. whats wrong with that and still it takes 5+ minutes to clear the sanctuary :) while a sorc clears it in minutes.
Only thing I dont like is teleporting. It should be removed or only with charged items so no spamming.
I think grief emphasizes how bad other weapons are because you are right. It isn't exactly OP overall but just compared to every other weapon which is bad and needs to be buffed.