Yes OP is right, get rid of Synergies, i want to play barb like 1.09, where i could make a barb with a usefull ww and a usefull zerk!, AND even be able to skill fun skills like all ress and Iron skin!

Now its just like WoW..... and there is northing wow about that!

haha got banned for telling you off for calling me an idiot. gj blizzard!:P
Im uessing nothing happened w u which means that an abusive comment could be ignored but the use of the monstrous F-word to emphasize my demand for a proper tone earned me a 1 week ban...lol...
heres what i wrote back then:

ahh right 3 synergies, so blizzard goes from 400% to 280%, bit more than ½ but ye significant reduction.
like the idea of giving skellies crushing blow but isnt 20% way over the top? If game cant do decimals surely you can still give percentages as 1% pr 4 levels or something? Hope you will get around to fixing poison-skellymage dmg as well then:)
seems like the tip of the iceberg rly. methinx you should be more methodical; some skills are special in terms of area etc but most can be categorised as
1hit physical
1hit elemental
multiple hits
aoe 20-100%
and dmg can fairly easily be balanced between these if you also give and take up to 30% from survivability etc (bonespear should do less dmg than lightning because necro has all his summons to hide behind)

As for the changes you made, I'd say Firegolem does too much with this? 8k from a minion for 40 skills? I'd average all golems dmg at ca something comparable to meleefighters ie ca 10% of avg weapondmg (which is tricky but lets say 350), ie 35 pr skill point. with a factoring after according to attackspeed - would require some testing but lets say x2. Putting golem dmg unsynergized at 1,4k (possibly w 5% synergy).
And would be good to group skeletonmastery, golem mastery and summon resistance into 1 skill called summon mastery. having golemmastery synergize the upped golem dmg w 5%/skill, and possibly replacin summon resistance by skeleton mastery a 2 or 3% bonus to skeleton and mage dmg.


Love what you did with sentinel, long overdue. Could be nice to also add some synergy to the added dmg so you could make a sentinel assasin tho:)

Dont have friends who play d2. at all. Play talisman 4th ed w them instead. heavily modded ofc (atm 27 new chars:P, and most chars tinkered with for balance)

I know there are ways of dealing w immunities, especially w drops/gear, but imo shouldnt be neccesary to play the game for 100s of hours before being able to start playing for real...lower resistance wands and the runes for various words are not just lying around.
again. I get no kick out of working my way around immune monsters. It just annoys me, and usually i simply play in areas and with builds that minimize the issue. Or play my mod where I can change to my alternate dmg ability. And having 80 skillpoints in 1 skill simply reduces my options too much. Most skills in d2 dont aid the others, especially dmg abilities but are alternatives I see no problem with having access to different strategies on the same char, simply adds to the game variety and room for creativity.

true enough, for 5 or 6+ skillpoints you get a great tank, but again having ½ the summon skill tree taken up by a skill that is not worth investing in is not fulfilling the potential of the game. So the question becomes: what could one do to make it worth investing a lot of points in golem?
One way to solve this would be to remove the difficultybased hp and make skillpoints add heavily to hp, would be a viable solution akin to valkyrie but given the necromancers offensive abilities and other summonables would probably simply mean that golem were ignored or used in a gimped version.
Another way would be to keep difficultybased hp and make skillpoints add heavily to hp. Would make more sense, but again given the necromancers offensive abilities, it wouldnt make much sense to sacrifice dmg for an even tougher golem (irongolem might be an exception to this).
In a game like diablo the best defense is a good offense and especially w summonables it rarely makes sense to invest heavily in defense at the cost of damage - theres a reason no pala uses defensive auras (those should add a dmg and attackrate as well as their defensive bonus tbh).
So the options for making serious investment in golem is either adding something to dmg; via the golem itself as above or possibly via a synergy bonus to offensive abilities: or maybe even auras, or possibly by adding a hp bonus to the necromancers - possibly via a soullink wowstyle redirecting dmg to the golem

of these i prefer adding dmg directly to the golem. Its more in key w the idea of a summonmancers and it fixes their primary difficulty by giving them a way of focusing some dmg on a single target beyond the merc, reducing the time it takes to get that first kill for the CE's to start.

I dont see how getting rid of synergies would help that much. They'd have to rework just about every skill to make this viable. Then there would be problems with massive imbalances because you could have 4-5 lvl 20 skills that are all very good.

Synergies may lead to more cookie cutter builds but its not like getting rid of synergies would get rid of cookie builds. There's a reason many people use similar builds. This game has been around a long time and people have figured out what the most effective builds are. Getting rid of synergies would just change what the cookie cutters are, it wouldn't get rid of them.

Did you ever play back before synergies? They were added in the expansion i think or a patch after it. There were still cookie cutter builds. Lots of WW barbs, orb/static sorcies, multi zons. People still specialized in one or two skills they just had extra skill pts to spend on filler/support skills.

It would be sweet if blizz went and rebalanced the skill trees and fixed things but its not gonna happen. We're lucky there was a patch 1.13 at all. There probably won't be another one for many years if ever. Just wait for D3, hopefully it'll be awesome and will have a large variety of builds for each char.

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I dont see how getting rid of synergies would help that much. They'd have to rework just about every skill to make this viable. Then there would be problems with massive imbalances because you could have 4-5 lvl 20 skills that are all very good.

Synergies may lead to more cookie cutter builds but its not like getting rid of synergies would get rid of cookie builds. There's a reason many people use similar builds. This game has been around a long time and people have figured out what the most effective builds are. Getting rid of synergies would just change what the cookie cutters are, it wouldn't get rid of them.

Did you ever play back before synergies? They were added in the expansion i think or a patch after it. There were still cookie cutter builds. Lots of WW barbs, orb/static sorcies, multi zons. People still specialized in one or two skills they just had extra skill pts to spend on filler/support skills.

It would be sweet if blizz went and rebalanced the skill trees and fixed things but its not gonna happen. We're lucky there was a patch 1.13 at all. There probably won't be another one for many years if ever. Just wait for D3, hopefully it'll be awesome and will have a large variety of builds for each char.

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You clearly dont understand the idea of using 4-5 spells lvl 20, Fx chain lighting can be used in act2 tomp runs casting you chain lighting through the door without getting hit from ranged attackers inside the room. If you had not skilled Chain Lightning you migh skilled Charged Bolt wich makes it harder to focus damage inside the room without getting hit from ranged DPS. In the old system there were different ways you could concentrate your skills in, You could choose only to play with 2 elements Fire/Ice and focus rest of the skills in Energy shields and Warmth, giving you even more possible buids. Now your stuck in a locked system where you always feel like wasting points in something that wont support your main spell...

The same thing comes with souls, they are hard to hit single target with Fireball or Ice Blast but with a Blizzard or Forzen orb it will be easyer. Spells were designed for special situation's. But Bashiok already told us that Synergies havent been a succes and we wont see them in D3, but Blizzard should consider to remove them from Diablo 2 LoD in 1.14

Although it might be nice to have a viable Hell barbarian with 65 points invested in their warcries, you'd either have to retool all the skills or nerf all the monsters (oh wait, there is one. the one I don't play because everyone else does). I can't see a sorceress being viable in hell without synergies at the moment. I suppose, though, it would really earn its nickname as Hell for most characters.

There are viable dual element sorceress characters. Typically, you max out one tree, pick a favored skill in another, add points to its mastery and add skill gear as you obtain it.

Stimmedmarine, that feeling is just a feeling. You are not "locked" into anything but an attitude. There isn't a single build that's been ruined by investing a bit in some other skill. In order to have a lightning javazon with a good valkyrie for lightning immunes, I'd need over 120 skill points. Sacrifices have to be made somewhere, so I'm aware of it and plan accordingly.

well obviously you would need to do something else if you changed something as important as synergy. I still think that a percentage pr level would be the best option, but i have no idea of how to implement something like that- having just one synergy skill would hlp some as well.
even before synergies there was plenty of choices to be made, also beyond which 1 or 2 damagespells to choose. Most classes have a fair amount of passive and defensive skills to choose from as well as various attackskills that work in different ways and are suitable for different situations. Its true that even now u can choose to gimp damage in favor of defensive skills or even a second attack. Especially in HC mode this can sometimes make sense.
Even so its rarely a good idea to split up points in such a way and certainly it usually ends up with simply investing a few points and relying on +skills for the rest. I would prefer if it was possible to have more maxed skills at hand tho....

edit: also a person w some small ability for logic, some knowledge of the game and a pocketcalculator could remake the skills in game in less than a day. dunno how tricky implementing them would be but cant be much more than a day either. why blizzard does not feel that its worth to put in a few man hours to update a game like this is beyond me. the customer loyalty and gratitude they would get would be well worth the small cost.

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edit: also a person w some small ability for logic, some knowledge of the game and a pocketcalculator could remake the skills in game in less than a day. dunno how tricky implementing them would be but cant be much more than a day either. why blizzard does not feel that its worth to put in a few man hours to update a game like this is beyond me. the customer loyalty and gratitude they would get would be well worth the small cost.

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True, Blizzard are no way done with d2...