Prayer

[:1]I'm the kind of guy that needs to be creative. If everyone else is playing a certain way, I need to find a different way--a better way. Unfortunately, conventional wisdom is usually right and I end up with a weaker character.

Anyway, prayer is a skill I sort of fell in love with because it gets zero respect in D2 and it would be absolutely godly in any other similar game. D2's outrageous mechanics--ridiculous damage, everyone has vampiric striking, etc--just make the skill irrelevant. In most games having a massive regeneration aura would be downright overpowered, but in D2 it is utterly worthless. The game is all about killing things before they kill you. You do too much damage and so do the monsters.

I was thinking about prayer today and I was thinking about what a patch could possibly do to entice anyone but me to put 20 points into prayer. I was thinking they should just give every aura the synergy from prayer. You put 20 points in prayer and 20 in fanaticism, and you can run fanat and get prayer for free. That would do it! Then I realized, it actually wouldn't. People STILL wouldn't waste the 20 points! Because it just doesn't matter. You never need to regen. You could put those 20 points in blessed aim and get a passive AR bonus, because again all that matters is killing the monsters faster.

It's strange because D2 is so fun and obviously so ridiculously flawed both at the same time. I'm pretty sure D3 will address these flaws in the gameplay mechanics, but then again people seemed to love the way D2 played, so do you fix them or not?|||Quote:








I'm the kind of guy that needs to be creative. If everyone else is playing a certain way, I need to find a different way--a better way. Unfortunately, conventional wisdom is usually right and I end up with a weaker character.




Making creative builds is great. Making creative AND effective builds is arduous.

Prayer, by way of Cleansing, has gained lots of respect. There's even a guide written, on The Amazon Basin, about a paladin that maxes Prayer and almost never dies.


Quote:








In most games having a massive regeneration aura would be downright overpowered, but in D2 it is utterly worthless. The game is all about killing things before they kill you. You do too much damage and so do the monsters.




It's not quite "massive", but it is regen. With the right kind of items you can mitigage most monster damage and make up the difference with the pulse healing of Prayer/Cleansing/Meditation.


Quote:








I was thinking about prayer today and I was thinking about what a patch could possibly do to entice anyone but me to put 20 points into prayer. I was thinking they should just give every aura the synergy from prayer. You put 20 points in prayer and 20 in fanaticism, and you can run fanat and get prayer for free. That would do it! Then I realized, it actually wouldn't. People STILL wouldn't waste the 20 points! Because it just doesn't matter. You never need to regen. You could put those 20 points in blessed aim and get a passive AR bonus, because again all that matters is killing the monsters faster.

It's strange because D2 is so fun and obviously so ridiculously flawed both at the same time. I'm pretty sure D3 will address these flaws in the gameplay mechanics, but then again people seemed to love the way D2 played, so do you fix them or not?




If Prayer was overpowered, there might not be a reason to use anything else. It it healed enough to not need anything else to gain life, you could devote all of your items and stats to pure damage

The Paladin class isn't very exciting as far as tactics go. You click-Zeal with the left mouse button and keep a damage aura glued to the right skill and every 5 minutes you cast Holy Shield. There's no player vs. monster interaction left over, so all that's left to do is figure out how to beat the monsters of thousands hitpoints that do hundreds of damage - max block, get a huge weapon and some life leech for the attacks that connect.

The Paladin also has tons of Enhanced Damage, so you could spread it around and make a charge/smite/zealot, but Zeal ends up being good enough for 99% of the game on it's own.

A lot of the flaws in D2 are just flaws in the ARPG/H&S genre of games and probably aren't going to be escaped altogether in Diablo 3.

I enjoy D2 because it's hard enough to reward power builds, but easy enough that variant builds can be viable. Classic can shout that LoD made the game easier, and it did, but it also created much more build diversity. And that's what has kept the game alive beyond the slot machine MF play.|||I've kinda thought the same thoughts. Prayer is a good aura, but so unnecessary in this game. It's good for those games where regeneration is really slow, town trips are long and you're stuck, waiting in front of the next monster pack with low life and no back-up.|||I tried a full Cleansing/Insight Paladin before, it's actually really fun since you have no use for potions, and you generally look for things that other people would simply throw away: +to life regeneration items and Paladin Defensive Aura skillers for examples.