INTRODUCTION
I got the chance to play a martial arts assassin during the beta, but I only played up halfway through act two in normal. Why? Precision, or the lack of it. The blur of lag even under friendly server conditions was a large impediment to the martial artist. How can you perform split-second combinations and moves when you have to wait for server permission to change which skill you are using? When even a minimal amount of client-server desynch throws off your attacks? For example, quite often I'd end up with two charges built up when I only wanted one. The lag was a problem.
I presumed that the melee asn would be a lot more fun to play in single player, in a lagless environment. She might even be fun enough for me to stick it through. As you may already know, I have never taken a melee character to Hell difficulty, even after all this time? Why not? Two reasons. On Realms, the lag penalties and desynch are too stiff to allow me to enjoy melee there. In single player, the melee build is the one who suffers the most from the harsh clvl-mlvl penalties, while the rate of experience just isn't there to keep up with that curve. Unless you stop ENDLESSLY along the way to level up, once in Nightmare difficulty (in single player), your clvl will NOT keep up with monster levels. Then you suffer. You miss more, no matter how much Attack Rating you have, you automatically miss more. They hit you more, too. No matter how much defense you have, they have an AUTOHIT BONUS percentage based on the ratio of their level to yours. And unlike Diablo 1, I've not been willing to level up and level up and level up endlessly to avoid the harsh penalties.
The game is VERY poorly balanced in that regard, for single player. The game balance for higher difficulties is markedly skewed toward multiplayer balance. If not for the solo-8 loophole, and now the party experience bonuses, I believe this problem would show up more. People who play only single player don't know what's wrong, or even that anything IS wrong. They just know they can't hit as much in higher difficulty, and they get hit more. They think it's harder and supposed to be that way. Well, maybe it is, but you can get around that just by stopping to level up? Kind of silly way to design it, IMO: a test not of skill, but only of patience. In order to get the game to play the way it is nominally designed, you have to "stick close to monsters of your own level", but that's just way WAY too slow in single player for my taste. So I cope with the difficulty, or I play chars that suffer less under the penalties. The clvl-mlvl curve in single player vis-a-vis the experience rate is not my idea of fun or good balance, and it IS harsher than the curve was in Diablo 1. There you could NOT do a one-pass full clear across all three difficulties because it took extra work in nightmare, and you HAD to have a certain level of defense as a melee character or you were toast (well, you could make do on the blocking, if you pumped dex, but that's another matter). So untwinked, you had to get an armor, and that could slow you up, but you weren't otherwise forced to level and level and level just to play. If you started Hell at 30 and full-cleared it, you'd be level 34 by the end of the game, and that was plenty high enough to get by. There was also more randomization to help you better stomach repetition of areas if you decided to go that route. Diablo 2 is just not as much fun to play the same area over and over.
The melee asn is as harshly penalized by clvl-mlvl as any other melee class. Ah, but she may have ways to cope! She has two freezing skills (theoretically -- I say that because one of them DOES NOT WORK, more on that later). She has a skill to convert monsters, just like the paladin, only she can do it from range, and it costs more mana (another broken asn skill). Still, very useful once they get it fixed. She has a minion, which neither the barb nor paladin have. She has the ability to inflict nasty poison: to strike once, then wait for the target to die. And she has lots of different ways to do damage, including a telekill attack. She has attack and foot speed boosts, plus she has traps for scouting and ranged support if you like, and a goodly variety of those. Thus, she may have enough to work around the ridiculous clvl-mlvl curve (ridiculous for single player, at least).
The barbarian had enough to work around the curve, too: mastery bug, war cries, whirlwind, leaping. So why did I never finish the game with a barb? Well, I started out with a barbarian on Realms, and was really enjoying it. But... lag (and WOW was lag bad when the Realms first opened) just caused me too much grief. I mean... 1600 ms ping, and spikey, for my first ever fight with Diablo, with my polearm barb. It was a joke. Then I learn how much stronger spears were, which was another joke (I thought polearms were the big 2handed weapon, and then I learn that even SWORDS are better! Ha! Pathetic balance there). Other arrgh factors combined to steal the fun out of the barb for me, and I never did go back. Melee paladins I played all hit the wall pretty hard with the curve. Just too many whiffs, too many hits, and not enough precision of control. The only way to play was hit and run. You could never really make a stand. It just didn't satisfy me.
If the martial artist can't entertain me through to the end, then no melee class ever will in D2. So we'll see how it goes.
Rill is my first attempt. I'm giving her some restrictions: no Phoenix Strike, for starters. I'd like to go without the minion, too. Dual-wield is all jacked up, so I'm going claw-and-shield, with decent claw mastery, burst of speed, and primary focus on Claws of Thunder and Blades of Ice. I'll use normal attack for finisher, but eventually I will almost surely get Dragon Tail and Flight. I'm going to skip Tiger Strike and Cobra, too. Maybe not forever, but at least through most of Nightmare. I may re-evaluate when I get to NM Act Four. I'm also going to without any mercenaries. I want to enjoy the fighting, the gameplay of playing the assassin, not lean on all these other things. See how it goes. If it's too difficult in an unfun way, then I'll slap on extras. If that still doesn't work, well... let's just play it and see what happens for now.
I HAD intended to convert Sissy over and play her first-thing, but with the item system broken, I just couldn't do that. I care about her adventure. So... she's on hold. Rill was the first character I created and played in D2X. The first chapter of her quest is coming soon.
- Sirian
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