Diablo III: Wyatt Cheng on Combat Balancing
by Whitney "Neinball" Fairchild - 11 years ago show comments
Continuing the trend of devs actively engaging the community, Wyatt Cheng stopped by the forums to give some insight into the devs thoughts on combat in Diablo III.
In his response, Wyatt went into detail of one of the bigger issues that plague combat in D3. Currently most players gear themselves up for as much damage as possible and then set the game to the highest MP they can get away with. This leads to players gearing for only enough armor and resists to survive a few hits with the hopes that their damage and life steal will heal them to full in between the incoming damage. The result of these gearing choices make your health total turn into a roller coaster during combat going from completely full to almost dead to completely full again, barely surviving every wave of incoming attacks and enforcing a a play style of standing there and just taking the damage and not worrying about tactical positioning.
According to Wyatt, this model just doesn’t lead to a very balanced experience and creates issues where upping the damage by even just a little bit will result in the repeated death of your character. This leads to balancing concerns since how do you balance incoming damage against players designed to barely survive the onslaught of attack and life through life steal vs someone who attempts to survive by dodging attacks more tactically? It becomes very difficult to balance since to challenge the tanking player you need to up the damage enough to threaten them, but at the same time you make it so that the tactical player could easily be one shotted and leaving them no room for error.
Within Wyatt’s response he purposely didn’t add any possible solutions to this balance problem and left it open for community discussion, but there are some clues as to what the devs have planned for this situation. In the datamined files from the internal Reaper of Souls build there is one big change to class skills that are is obviously tied to this issue, the complete and total removal of the life steal stat.
Life steal was staple of Diablo II as one of the few ways of recovering health outside of quaffing potions. In D3 we were given a few options on this with the introduction of stats like life per spirit spent, life on hit, etc but life steal ended up being the preferred stat with how well it scaled with our gear. It seems the devs have decided that life steal breaks the choice of gearing for offense vs defense since it allows players to survive through damage and not through armor/resists. Life steal just furthered the ‘need more damage’ mentality by letting players get away with lower defensive stats. This isn’t just a ‘let’s nerf player power’ move, it will allow the devs considerable more control of how combat will play out.
Life steal is difficult to model how effective it will be since your actually damage output varies greatly depending upon your skill choices and class. A monk with Sweeping Wind: Cyclone does considerably more damage then it’s character sheet would imply whereas a demon hunter with lots of attack speed actually does far less damage then you’d might think. Life on hit however is considerably easier to predict since it only scales with three things: number of targets hit, attack speed and the life on hit value. With this in mind it makes a lot more sense as to why the devs would want to move away from life steal and more towards life on hit. It’s moving from an unpredictable system to one that is very easy to track and adjust for. Once the devs have an idea of how much life an average geared or godly gear character will be able to heal via life on hit they can adjust damage values across MP levels more accurately. If certain skills seem to lacking in use due to poor life on hit returns they can have their coefficient modified to bring it up to match the skills it’s competing against on the skill bar. Things like life per spirit spent or life per fury spent are even easier to model and as a side benefit would make the classes feel a bit more unique since they could go separate avenues to deal with survivability and when it comes to long term enjoyment diversification is a key.
Let’s talk about combat.
From a big picture standpoint, it’s not healthy for the game when a player’s health pool goes from full to nearly empty and back to full on a regular basis very quickly, over and over, during regular play. I know not every character build plays this way – but I would assert that it’s not good for the game when this is a dominant or even common way to play.
Why?
Here are a few negative effects it has:
1. A health pool that quickly goes from full to nearly empty implies that there’s not a lot of room for variance in incoming damage. When incoming damage is that high, a 15% increase in monster damage would result in death. This leads to comments like “As soon as I turn up the Monster Power I get 1-shot”. I’d like to see a game where a clever player can handle a higher Monster Power by reducing incoming damage through good play. Unfortunately, if the combat pacing and dominant builds are such that all players are geared to survive the biggest posisble hit from a monster and instantly heal to full then there’s no room for that differentiation. Let’s use mortar as a simple example. If a wave of mortar hits takes me from full to nearly dead, and then I instantly heal back to full, then mortars don’t pose a realistic threat to me. In this state, there’s no way for a clever player (who wants to dodge mortars) to differentiate themselves from somebody who doesn’t care (and just decides to get hit). In both cases you’re healing instantly to full and surviving through the damage no matter what, and in both cases turning up the monster power results in you dying no matter what if you take a single mortar wave. It becomes a pure gear check.
2. For players who push the MP up anyways, it makes the game feel like it was designed around one-shots. In my previous example with mortar, some of you may be thinking “There’s room for turning up the Monster Power, just don’t get hit at all!”. This isn’t great either. It means my death feels very binary. One moment I’m at full health, the next instant I’m dead. It also means that once you decide you are going to accept being one-shot, you don’t care about your health at all. Who cares if you have 20K or 40K health if you’re going to die either way? We’d be in a better place if the mortar-dodger was allowed to take the occasional hit, but can handle a higher monster power as long as a majority of them are dodged.
3. Healing very rapidly back to full also loses all the fidelity of small attacks. If players are regularly going from full to nearly empty and back to full again on a regular basis, then there’s no room for mechanics which act as a slow drain on your health. Plagued is a great example of this. We don’t want Plagued to be something that kills you quickly, but it also shouldn’t be something you ignore forever. Standing in a pool of poison should be something that adds tension to the fight. You know you’re not going to die now, but you can see the threat looming. When healing rates are very high, there is no room for the slow drain damage sources – they become insignificant.
4. My current health loses meaning. Being at 95% health should mean you’re relatively safe. Being at 5% health should mean you’re almost dead. Being at 50% health should mean you’re somewhat in danger and you should play it safe, but as long as you do you should be fine. These are all concepts that make intuitive sense. Unfortunately, they are not at all true in the current Diablo environment. When health pools are rapidly going from empty to full and back again, these health values all blur together.
5. You lose a lot of tactical combat opportunities. Tactical combat requires that the player can properly assess the situation and react accordingly. When your health pool moves up and down rapidly you are no longer reacting to dangers. A rapidly changing health globe means you are playing in a predictable pattern and crossing your fingers hoping that you live through it. You are playing in a way that avoids situations that will instantly kill you, but there’s no tension associated with being low on health that would cause you to make a tactical decision to change your play pattern.
I’m saying all of this without pointing at any specific solutions. That’s because there are no instant-fix solutions. It’s a challenging problem that we’re actively working on. Things aren’t going to be perfect overnight, but improving the pacing of combat is something we constantly work on.
I will say that the first line of defense is reducing the rate at which players heal. After we pull in the rate of healing, next we analyze the patterns in which monsters deal damage. Ultimately, defensive stats will play a role in all of this. If some life regeneration, damage mitigation or (gasp) life on hit lets me play a little more aggressively, that’s a good thing.
