Sunder charms really opened up the game to more builds and more farming areas. A huge and welcome change again. Also love that you have to "beat the game" before you can get them. Some people don't understand there is still life before sunders as it exists today.
You may disagree with me, but I'm still of the opinion that immunities were a bad design move because they limited viable build diversity through nightmare and hell. All those fun builds that are enabled in the late game by using sunder charms... should've been playable throughout the entirety of the leveling process! This is how we experienced d2 classic. Putting immunities into the game instantly killed a ton of builds. Locking the ability to customize your character the way you want instead of the way you have to behind endgame progression is bad.
I like that there are immunities. But how they are implemented in certain ways does make them kind of dumb. Like how some damage can be broken on most enemies and others (basically cold) can almost never be broken, and that breaking immunities usually requires a lot of luck for most classes(requires rare drops for all but paladin and necro), If you are just doing solo play(as no help to get past anything )it definitely is a bad design since it really restricts many builds. But at least you can respec to get around this unit, you beat hell Baal and then set your build to the one you want to stay with. If every damage type had the same issues breaking immunities and the drops needed to break each damage type didn’t all have to be so rare, it would balance things out in a much better way when it comes to immunities. And one thing you need to understand is that Diablo 2 was made to be played as an online game with solo play being secondary. So the implementation is really for online play where it doesn’t matter much since you can easily get a group of people to deal with all immunities. But offline play or those who just want to play solo online, it definitely is not implemented well to play this way.
Yes, they "apologized" with sunder charms 20y later, i barely managed to break poison immunity with necromancer, thanks to Deaths web and lower resists, and that is to some monsters, and damage was very poor. You needed to go to such extend just to go around immune monsters. There are many things to fix, but there is no way they will invest to make Diablo greater than ever, they are too lazy.
definitely agree, build diversity is the corner stone of ARPGs. Design decisions that lower/restrict build diversity are generally bad design decisions for this genre. Sunders was their solution to a 20 yr old game but ideally immunities should have never existed to begin with. We could argue resistances for were fine and enable value through stats that lower resistances but full on immunities is bad design.
Good adition to the game. Cheaper(easyer to find than 2Ber 1Mal 1ist, trade can help) than Infinity runeword. Not a must in a party if one rocks Native conviction or lower resist-amp dmg-decrepify.
I think they have been positive The trade-off of breaking immunity At the cost of your own resistance and inventory space Opens up new builds that just would hit a brick wall in endgame content Also im glade i haven't had to make a hammerdin since they came out
D2 includes some interesting design choices that are very un-modern that feels obnoxious on the surface, but give it a lot of longevity. Immunities feel bad when you run into them on a build that can't handle them (especially playing through the game) but avoiding certain monsters is always possible. Immunities also encourage you to play multiple builds if you want to farm everywhere in the endgame. Most characters that do elemental damage can be built to deal multiple damage types - only once you fully optimize a character for farming efficiency by maxing out all the synergies for 1-2 primary offensive skills do immunities become a real problem, which is where sunders come in. I think having respecs available really helps immunities not feel bad - you can level with a catch-all build and then switch to an optimized farming build when you're ready to.
All the changes in D2R have made the game better, but primarily for casters. The gap between casters and melee has only gotten wider. I wish more had been done to make physical melee stronger.
@@Purriah Melee isn't strong. Crushing blow is strong. That entire stat line carries the hell out of melee and they are still inferior to casters in every way with one exception and that is doing uber bosses and once again it is only better then casters due to crushing blow existing. Things like needing attack rating just to hit the target for less damage then a spell that doesn't require attack rating and doesn't miss inherently makes melee worse and more reliant on things like ITD and MTD, which once again is even more stat lines melee need just to be viable when casters can just stack more damage. Casters also inherently just do more AoE/Cleave then the vast majority of melee builds making them significantly faster farmers then basically every melee build in the game. They could buff melee by lowering attack rating requirements and removing the arbitrary 95% cap that make it so melee always has a 5% chance to miss that casters just don't have. They could also create a way for some of the melee abilities to access some form of cleave/AoE.
They are amazing, I agree with all your points. Black cleft should have variable -%magres though. 10-20% range maybe. I understand why they made it useless (hammerdin too strong already, and the new FoH is monstrous as well), but bone spear necros depend too much on corpse explosion, and a viable magic arrow bowzon would be a cool build, although the skill would need some tweaks. An aoe explosion or something. And bone break is an absolute game changer for phys builds, especially once you get access to decrep/amp dmg. It feels really good to destroy PIs without having to resort to gimmicks :)
@@GGMentorcan’t tell you how disappointing it was to try to min max a holy fire paladin, and then you get into hell difficulty, and suddenly everything just ignores your build.
I always hated being so specialized in D2, where if I'm lightning spec I can only do certain things. It's like oh i'm some badass slaying demons but i can't even think of going to some areas because of lightning immunes. I think sunders were a great addition
IMO he best thing about sunder charms isn't the builds, but it's the areas of the game that you could now actually farm effectively. It's much better than only going to areas that weren't immune to your type of damage!
I've been playing D2 pretty much since it launched. Before Sunder Charms, I gave up on dozens of characters because they would get crushed by immune enemies. I think the highest solo player level I ever achieved was around Level 86 or so. Since Sunder Charms, I can now go to every zone in the game and have a fighting chance of surviving.
Sunder charms make sense with the addition of terror zones. Since terror zones incentivize farming various locations, being able to kill wider variety of immunes becomes more important. Though you'd still prefer fewer immunities, because even with -rez gear, immunes take much longer to kill, unless you stack a lot of it, like infinity + griffs + facets. Also point could be made that some elements have better access to -rez gear than the others ones, seems like lightning has it best, albeit with rather rare gear. Also, I feel like preserving the game progression close to 1.14 state is a bit overrated. Respecs changed the progression through the game dramatically, as you no longer needed to plan far far ahead and suffer in early game on a character with no energy and no useful skills. Synergies changed the game drastically as well, as you pointed it out. I don't know if sunder charms brought it back necessarily, because you still have to heavily focus a few skills that synergize with each other, it's just the resulting character can farm more places.
My fondest memories of the game were from the early years of online and ladder. I often played a support paladin or a support necro, it was great to turn up in a game with a maxed conviction/zeal/smite paladin all the sorcs would cheer 'yay' when you entered a game and stuff. Same with a good supoort necro with the curses and SOME skellies as cannon fodder. The game was so rewarding when you played as a team, because it was so hard when you were NOT on a team... Over thenyears almost every change they made was to make a player more powerful, like godly runewords with auras and oskills etc etc. These days every low-skill noob has a "meta build that can solo p8" ... There is just no reward anymore for amazing team work and finding team mates. Imagine turning up in a game these days with a maxed conviction paladin or a cursing necro, people would laugh at you while they stroke their sunder charms and check their merc's infinity... 😢
If someone enters my single player game and does nothing but drop amplify damage/lower resistance, I’ll be overjoyed. I have sunders but no infinity and no lower resistance gear
I almost never use them, but I think they're more positive than negative. I like that they have a heavy cost to resistance. Makes the player have to decide if they're worth it, rather than just a buff.
Same opinion that I have about terror zones: Good add to the game, but needs some polishing. To me, sunder charms needed to be more rare. Maybe double its rarity... Then its good.
yeah good addition I wish they would have supported it a bit better with more negative res gear but i wasn't a big fan of immunes in the first place it seemed like an over reaction to over powered 1.0 builds
I completed the game in Hell with my Lightning Javazon and I eventually stopped playing it because there are so many lightning immunes and very few areas are farmable. When I found my first CotH it made my Javazon fun again. It was a much needed addition to the game.
Love yr videos and ideas. *Somethin strange that i haven't seen it before. I have found a yellow circlet that is kinda odd. The minimum lvl for this item is 60 in most characters I have. But a druid can use it in lvl 24. It has some generic abilities : 20% faster r/w , 1-107 lighting damage , 21 mf , lvl-1 tornado 11/22 charges. defense 26 , durability 66/105. AND required lvl 24 or 60 , as I said. Found in a single player !!! Has anyone seen that before ? or is a thing that I didn't know ?
Don't forget viper bone spear concaves as magic damage dangers :) the increased damage taken is way too much, could be 10-20 like bb and would still hurt! Regarding Bonebreak, it's good, it still needs ampd or decrepify to really work (as you said, needs resistance reduce to be effective) and then the curses alone probably do the trick. But I personally think 10% physical damage increase is not that much, %reduction is so common ... helms, shields, belts, even enigma got 8 of those, never felt like hurting myself too much by wearing one and adding a verdungos. and it makes immunes feel softer before the curse procs
I don't mind them like you said unless you have minus res you don't do much dmg I like using a fire one on my hydra sorc running Andy just to help clear out the Lil minions but other that I don't use them much it is nice to help builds out
Sunder charms made the game better imho, Just wish they would boost the Physical one or just reduce all enemy Physical resistance. good video dude as always.
Bottom line is immunities are lame, sunder charms make soloing better. I entered hell trying to push holy fire to its limits only to see all the fire immunes, since I had used my respecs trying other gear it felt like I had wasted my time. After struggling to get my respec i struggled with a zealot until arcane sanctuary, having nords tenderizer meant it wasn’t impossible but the area is already one of the worst places in the game. Farmed for other unique items but all of them were kinda worthless, runes felt out of reach with the drop rates. Charges on items have mixed results. Calling a friend is a real cop out. There are options to get around them why can’t sunders be one of them. Immunities aren’t even distributed evenly, magic is on basically no enemies, and physical is scarce until act 2. Byproduct of sunders is that the one runeword used to bypass them in the past is now too strong, since it’s main purpose was to do what sunders current function is. If infinity had its unique traits redistributed among other uniques and runewords it would be better imo. The conviction aura on top of the lightning resist down means lighting is so much stronger in the end game.
Without going the route of creating actual balance changes to skills ,items and the amount of resistances enemies have (to allow for other means to break it) it was really the only way to open up the game for various builds. While I would still prefer the other route (of actual updates to skills and items) that ship will never arrive so, this is better than nothing.
Hello Ginger Gaming Mentor, my apologies but i have off topic question to you cause i really believe you’re the best specialist of diablo 2 game. Im not sure how works superior armors. Increased defense or increased durability is the problem if i dont want to spent tons of gold for repairing it? I’ve heard somewhere the main problem is only increased durability which means it worth to use superior armor with increased defense, without increased durability. Iam wrong about it? Where is the true? Thanks for respond
The costs to repair goes up for enhanced defense. It is a per point cost increase. Enhanced durability increases the total number of points. In otherwords. Let's say it costs 30k to fix a normal item from 0 The superior would be a multiplier of that. Then the durability is an additional multiplier on top of that. The most expensive item would be 15% enhanced with Enhanced durability.
@@GGMentor thank you for explaining. This means im not interested in enhanced defense anymore excluding mercenary beacuse gold have decent value too. Iam playing this game without real money so need to be economical.
I have a big kinship(Guild) with the tag GGM_name It was most likely a kinship member, maybe even one of the captains. Like Bob, or meow, or chunks ect.
As a single player focused D2R fan, I do like that I had to kill Baal without the benefit of sunders at least once. Now that first character has found many sunder charms, and they are available if new characters are struggling with Hell immunities. Coupled with Terror Zones, giving characters the chance to farm Nightmare difficulty at high player count to get lvl75 if needed is a nice way to get them through for their builds to be more consistent. It's weird to have a character that excels at certain elements have to become completely different for a while before they can return to who they really are, but the sunder charms allow that and TZ's let you skip having to do it altogether.
After they "fixed" the skill trees with synergies you really needed something like the sunder charm to allow elemental builds to play all the content in the game
Just had a thought.. Why don't Blizzard let us use Standard of Heroes to reroll Saunder charms? It's a useless item, it's pretty hard to get for a regular "playing over the weekend" gamer and it's an End Game content like Saunder Charms..
I agree they should use standard of heroes for some form of crafting but not sure i agree with rerolling sunder charms. The only reason being is that they are pretty easy to get already and have a fairly high drop rate compared to other uniques in the game. Pretty much anyone can farm a sunder charm in a single after noon of terror zone farming. If we wanted to enable rerolling sunders that i don't see why we couldn't do it via the same way we already reroll charms by using things like pgems and jewels.
The analysis is technically correct 100% HOWEVER , the ideal situation for build diversity would be something alike the freedom of 1.09 before sinergies, so the real solution would be to allow to reach max damage without having to invest 100 points into a single element so that a single skill can kill all the enemies in the game. I always like to point out at current Sorc where every tree has a mini skill that requires less points but it's usable in a dual spec and then a big skill that benefits greatly from investing all the points in that element. Sunders are the perfect band-aid but it would be better if they weren't the endgame gear you get instantly once you kill baal. Enabling a build after getting the item is the bad game design people point out when we talk d3 and d4, D2 was ok because there were very few of them and they enabled fun niche build. Now Sunders enable every build to the point you're a dumb person if you're not using them. So yes, they overall improve the game but they're a lazy solution to the balance problem we got with 1.10.
I like the sunders and use them for specific builds, but I'm currently running a zoo druid, with just a bone break, but I don't really need it since I'm running multiple damage generators: cold damage spirit wolf, poison creeper, enchant Act 3 merc, physical on everything else. I can run players 8 and most of the TZs with a few rough spots. Grinding to 99 with this character, haven't tried the Ubers yet since I'm still farming for SoJs. In all, sunders don't impact this build.
Without watching... 10/10 would sunder again. They basically fix the issue synergies (and the later balancing overhaul) created by funneling people into a single effective damage type. My TS/Orb sorc could do all the content... I still can't remake that build, but at least the game balance guard rails they put up don't keep most builds from doing all the content anymore. Okay... maybe not ubers, but that's kind of part of the challenge since they didn't exist before the previously mentioned changes.
Muh 2 cents: terror zones kinda annoying, but they could fix it by changing the exact things you pointed out, better integration of some zones, alternatives to remove the polarity between great zones you feel you miss out and crappy ones nobody cares about. Sunders are ok, I don't care for balance personally, I enjoy the crappy underpowered builds in fact, so whatever that my already op javazon got even more op if my underpowered whatever build was made viable or even kinda great, it's a good thing imo.
before i ever got a sunder charm, i assumed it would make immunes die like anything else. but its worth mentioning that even at level 90. my maxed orb + sunder sorc still takes a WHILE to kill cold immunes. thats with +13 cold skills and solid endgame gear. I still avoid heavily cold immune areas even with the sunder charm.
@@matthewberry3608 It was like that when they were introduced because they didnt take for account that CM can instantly drop monster's resists by -150 without any gear. But Cold sorc was insane that Season so it was quickly put in check xD. Thats why i believe theyre fairly grounded since the only easiest upgrade to a -res is Crescent Moon and for the others you have to invest abit more so you can melt immunes easier as GGM mentioned Doom or Phoenix,Flickering Flame,Self wielding Infinity,Ravenlore,Facets,Death's Web,Bramble,Crescent Moon and so on.
The magic charm being pointless is just a testament to how overpowered magic damage is. Since it already bypasses all immunities and has basically no issue farming in 99.9% of the game. It's fine being useless as it is. The bone Break needs some love, I thought adding a nice AR bonus on it would be helpful to melee/ranged or - Monster Defense percentage.
Magic sunder state should set enemy magic res to something between 70-80%. This is more for Necromancers going down the Bone Spear route so they can still reliably clear Baal waves without relying on a merc.
Is the magic damage overpowered, or the hammerdin specifically? Bonemancer with their 100+ points in synergies isn't as strong, is he? FoHdin also does magic damage, but I think holy bolts ignore the immunities anyway.
@@HaibaneKuu Hammerdin is very strong. Will just brute force the 95% res. Bone Spear Necromancer can approach Blizzard and Lightning sorcs in damage normally because they don't have as many immunities to worry about... But when they do encounter a magic immune, they MUST skip, even with sunder. No way to crank magic damage or lower magic res to overcome.
Just ok I think. More fun choosing a second weapon/set of skills to swap with when the first loses out. Never combat the forces of hell without a trusty sidearm
The whole idea that sunder charms made the game easier is based on the fact that you can easily get your most useful specific sunder charm before killing Baal through trading (which you called cheating, but happens all the time in ladder). This undoubtly makes the game easier (specially for some elemental builds in a few specific situations, such as fighting the Council in Travincal), but I'd argue that D2R is already way far from the original D2 classic difficulty to begin with, mostly because of the runewords. I wish they'd increase the penalty for using them, reducing the MAXIMUM associated resistance would be great (maybe roll -15% to -10% randomly).
If you buy a sunder just to make Council fight in travincal easier at this point you have a geared char and have way more items to funnel a twink.Most people are rushing themself through hell in the 60s when ladders been on for awhile. Unless you twinking yourself i dont think many people get Sunders that early.D2LoD also had the runewords for alot of patches aswell(maybe less than original LoD without synergies and runewords but still like 4 long patches) unless you were talking about D2 Classic(untill act 4). I mean the easiest one you can synergise atm is Cold(and they kinda gimped that with CM changes so if you dont have Doom the damage is okay but not unreal) and Light(Crescent moon) other than that i dont think they're that powerful unless you can scale them further through -resists like Phoenix,Flickering Flame,Facets,Doom,Infinity wielding Sorc.
@@wtbskilllololo You can get a weak common sunder (fire or cold) very easily, a Ral rune is enough. You don't need to be geared or anything, you go to the Countess once, get the drop and open a trade window.
@@thebbcjokeI will agree the weak fire is dogwater and you can buy it for a ral yes but Cold Sunders even the close to 90 hold value for atleast a week. Been selling CSunders for 2x ladders and 89s can go for about a Vex at the start. When Cold sunders go for a ral nobody cares if you can beat Baal or not you can just get a free rush in a hell game at that point. Also buying a fire sunder without any -Fire res which you cant find anywhere early one while you rush yourself barely help you with killing fire immunes(maybe only low res can help in that regard) but i agree its little bit easier.
@@wtbskilllololo the point here is not about the ladder start, it's about the difficulty for completing the game. There is a reason nobody rushing at the ladder start plays pure fire builds, only magic and lightning. Even cold is good enough since there is only one required killing monster that can be slain by a merc + telekinesis. And yes, the sunder charm does help. Fire has some high damaging spells such as fireball and firewall. Those 5% opening is enough to complete the game (a pain for MFing, but that is not the point here).
Im like 50/50 on sunder charms. But it's mostly just from a multiplayer PoV. They take away all the limitations that from a multiplayer pov, were better solved with additional party members. Tho i guess that's more of a "lets pretend there's no hdin" that wipes everything p8.
I stand by the belief that they were a band-aid fix for a bigger problem with the game's balance philosophy. the Devs didn't want to tackle the different breakpoints for resistance vs skills and instead opted into a blanket fix that took minimal development time. Personally I would have liked to see more gearing options for elemental pierce, and a reduction of most of the immune monster resists to *edit: much lower values, (ie 100 to 105)* so that anyone willing to invest in pierce or with a LR wand could clear all content. That way builds and classes still have their niche to run at full power, but can build to overcome the problem of immunity as the need arises. By removing the build-farming location niche you actually reduced "meta" diversity as there aren't environmental constraints to encourage different playstyles. The idea that we can loot an item at 60 that invalidates an entire system undermines one of the core principles of the game's design and isn't something I can agree with; despite the "proposed" by-product of build diversity it created.
I think Sunder Charms are a mediocre solution to the poor way immunities were implemented in the game. Not having immunities would have been OK too. Or "soft" immunities. Or it could have been much easier to make a build that does multiple damage types. Or they could have given items that allow selective damage-shifting. Etc. There are *lots* of solutions to the immunity issue. Sunder Charms were a cop-out because they didn't want to piss off the old-school die-hards by either removing or substantially changing immunities. All that said, if just take for granted they weren't going to change or remove immunities, then I think Sunder Charms are an OK solution.
I think the exact opposite, they enabled hundreds of builds that weren't possible with out them. They made items with negative res valuable and created an entire economy of characters looking for those specific pieces of gear. By doing it the way they did, they included the wealth of items that already existed in the game to address the problem. I think overall it was a genius solution to a rather complicated problem.
@@GGMentor I generally agree with this statement as well. I personally think immunities should have never been introduced in the first place but we are talking about potentially hundreds of compounding changes that would have to be either undone or changed again to balance the game around not having immune mobs so i think sunder charms are probably a more elegant solution for the current state of the game.
@@kylesmith987 I don't think immunities were the problem. I think it was synergies. Before synergies you could build a multi-elemental character and have backup plans for monsters that would be immune to your attacks. After synergies it became next to impossible to build anything but a single spec
@@GGMentor Yeah i absolutely get what you saying. I view them as compounding issues. Personally even with synergies i still view immunities as an issue that restrict build diversity but you are absolutely correct in that Synergies compounded that problem of creating less build diversity by a significant amount. I don't entirely hate Synergies but there a significant amounts of builds that way over use Synergies and make it so you physically cannot spec into other abilities to cover the weakness of your builds. To me the prime example of this is bone spear necro. Bone spear has way too many synergies to scale its damage that it makes it near impossible to spec into anything else and have bone spear do even reasonable damage.
I have two issues with Sunder Charms: it gave more power to casters (Phys Sunder should have zero penalty, physical sucks enough as is) and you cannot get them before Hell Baal. I recently re-started solo and have been playing an Enchantress, a build that after 20 years I always wanted to try. Cleared everything, until the Den of Evil. No Fire Sunder, no more Enchantress. If Sunder Charms had like a 1/5th chance to drop in NM, it’d open up more variety of starter characters. As it stands, you are still going Meteorb or Hydra-Orb to clear the game before you can do cool stuff.
Physical Sunder is amazing, I have personally tested it. Physical sunder alone is garbage Amplify damage alone is garbage Amp+Phys sunder absolutely destroys physical immune monsters. As for casters being more powerful than melees, that has always been the case. I don't think it will ever not be. However, melees have always been better at killing bosses.
Sunder charms were definitely needed, especially if you play offline or hardcore. Console players have to pay for online multiplayer. I don't think og d2 would have worked in today's gaming culture.
I disagree on a couple of points, but overall I'm in alignment with you. 1. Bone Break is very useful because physical damage can get ridiculously high(Fury Druids and Zealers who both use Grief, for instance), which can brute force that 95%. Also now that they can take damage, CB can actually apply. It cannot if they are immune. Plus just wearing a Shako can negate most, if not all of the -Ph res on character. 2. Rotting Fissure on a Poisonmancer(Dagger or Nova) absolutely wrecks. It takes nothing to negate the -Poison and D web is absolutely broken. Sunder charm detractors come off as people who think there should only be a handful of viable builds(be it PvE or PvP) and anything that enables more should not be implemented. I think those folks long for the 1.09 days where only 3 classes could actually clear the game hell solo.
I don't think I said bone break is useless, just that it's less useful than the elemental sunders due to the increased amount of negative res gear. I built a Dual Crescent moon barb with an inventory of lightning charms and a lightning sunder and felt way better than a physical build ever did. because I could hit like -100% ELR easily lol. Two Crescent moons is already -70% then you get Gryphons and maybe even an armor too if you want. My point is clear to see, it's way easier for elemental damage characters to take advantage of sunders than physical damage ones.
@@GGMentor Ahh, did not mean to imply "useless," just that your phys characters can still see big benefit from making use of Bone Break. I suppose because Reaper's Toll mercs and Atma's Scarab exists, I can see how enabling CB via sundy isn't necessarily as game changing as what elemental users get access to.
@@MA16v3 I mean those options do stack with bone break but when an elemental damage Character is doubling their damage by hitting -100% resistance. Meanwhile the best a phy damage character can hope for is bone break + amp down to like 75% physical resistance. Lol the difference is massive. I ran a lightning damage barb one whole season and it was so much better than physical damage. Dual crescent moons -70% gryphons -25%, armor facet -5% Full inventory of any lightning damage charms I could get. Nothing could survive. Even easily smashed Uber Diablo. It goes to show you how much more powerful elemental damage is because of the wealth of -res options
I like that more builds are viable now. But I kinda dislike that on single player you cant get it. Just try to finish hell Baal alone with cold sorc. First try just getting there. Players who do want original D2 experience could always not to pick it up by choice. But thankfully since it's a single player it's not really a big deal - you can just use hero editor.
Bone break in combination with amp damage or decrepify is amazing Try fury Druid with reapers toll and a bone break, all those monsters that used to be a huge problem get completely obliterated
They would have been better if they brought some more items into the game that further reduce the enemy immunities. The bone break one is almost completely usless, the one that breaks magic immunity IS completely useless.
They definitely could have tacked it on to some uniques that people call underwhelming. Paying attention to community opinion/ watching trade prices could have helped
I would say they weren't a bad idea, but... maybe making magic and physical resistances a LOT better. And all of them a LOT larger range of resists. 10% to 100% physical resist would've been super cool (with a scaling level requirement so you dont just die after identifying a 100% phys LOL). Or 10-20% minus cold res because those are broken anyways. monsters have little to no cold resistsance anyways (and cold sorc exists). Magic sunder? Make it so you take as much amplified damage as you do regardless of the source! And make bonespirits and spears do 100% more dmg to monsters (only) on the skills themselves >__
Of coarse they were a good idea, because the lobby is still broken AF. Half the lobby games are from bot programs, half of what’s left are abandoned games that stay open for hours for no reason, and the few multiplayer games you can join are either Baal or chaos runs that last for only 3-4 minutes and are rare to even find those. There is absolutely no way to find party play in a game centered around games that only last a couple minutes per run
You sure about the terror zones? I have bought recently D2R and I still haven't beaten Baal... in normal. But I do get in-game messages saying that something was/is terrorized. I play offline 99.9% of the time
I think they never should have made builds and abilities completely useless in the first place. Like if you build a fire build and then in Hell everything is immune to fire. Why would they make it where everything is immune to such a large amount of skills.
I have an entire character built around it and it works very well. When sunder charms were first introduced, they did work on minions but didn't do anything because Negative Resistance didn't apply to minions. This list included Hydras, Assassin Traps, Necromancer Minions, and Druid Minions. Setting a monster to 95% resistance is useless on it's own. as he is still negating 95% of all incoming damage. They Eventually fixed most of them except assassin traps, which took some time. But the traps the last outlier were fixed in patch 2.6. "The Assassin's trap skills now benefit from -% to Enemy Resistance." The Irony here was, and no one knew it was that Assassin traps and even hydras were considered minions. There was a time however the negative resistance worked on no minions whatsoever.
@@GGMentor Thanks for the reply. I'm aware of the changes made to traps and hydra about -res, but I never knew they included all types of minions. I just tested on a standard summon necro with a physical sunder (all physical damage from skeles and I removed the merc's weapon). It turns out they did manage to kill wraiths in the forgotten tower in an instant, and went back to zero damage when I took off the sunder. So your statement is true!
Well your mixing two different things. Sunder charms always worked with minions and traps. Negative Res was what got updated. The thing is Sunder charms are useless without negative res you need both in tandem for full damage output. A Bone break alone is worthless, but a bone break + Amp is great. A Fire sunder alone is worthless but a Fire sunder + Lower Res, Conviction, & Negative Res is great.
Synergies are not such a bad thing they're just poorly balanced. Lots of skills with no synergy while others have 3-4. If Synergies were just something like add a given bonus for every skill point added to the same tree, then every skill would have access to Synergies and it would open new builds while maintaining current builds
it also increases the value of - resistance gear. If you get enough of it then they no longer take a long to kill. I have a full decked out fireball/hydra sorc that can 1 to 2 tap any previous fire immune mob in the game. But this is due to have a pretty solid amount of - enemy fire res due to flickering flame helm, fire facets, and an infinity on my merc. I have something like roughly -50% enemy fire resistance with it all added together which is enough for me to melt even previously fire immune mobs.
Sunder charms are awful why do be have other budget builds that can do stuff besides hammerdin. Everyone other build is trash - some hammerdin main somewhere
don't really need any sunder other thank bone break on my shockadin. even though it's based on lightning damage i can kill lighting immunes easier without the sunder
@@slobrat3556 sunder charms have an incredibly high drop rate compared to other uniques. Anyone can farm a sunder charm in a single after noon of farming terror zones. The thing to know about sunder charms is that they can only drop in terror zones and they can only drop from unique, elite, and champion packs. If you are trying to farm sunder charms then just target farm unique/elite/champion packs in terror zones and you will get one quickly enough.
Level 1 😠 This game to easy with those sunders Level 95 😅 Ok Im going to kill Ball Level 1 😠 Way to easy, I stayed in town and finished the game Level 95 😂 Did you try solo?
D2R became more and more casual as many games today. As cold sorc i was farming CS for years. For years Infinity was my endgame goal. Nowdays i dont know what to do with Sunder charms.
@@ЕМТФранц Not sure buddy id reckon there will probably be more people crying about having to invest Ohm,Lo and Cham for a Doom so they can farm everywhere on a blizzard sorc it wouldnt seem that casual to most players in general. Sunder charms in itself dont do shit unless you equip urself with better items ergo Phoenix and Flickering Flame for fire is Phoenix a casual goal you strive for with 2x Vex,Lo and a Jah? Ontop of that you still want Infinity i dont see how the game has been more casual the only thing that changed from introducing Sunder charms is that you can actually kill Immunes a little earlier and it might be barely possible unless you had some -ECR.Most of the items with -ECR arent that cheap either beside Crescent Moon so id say Lightning is the easiest build to push with a sunder vs Immunes Cold,Fire builds still have to get some more expensive items to actually use it at 100%.Before that you barely kill them its not even worth to fight em unless you need to kill those immunes for a reason.
Sunder charms allows single tree meta builds instead of being smart and dual specing or using game mechanics to beat the game. Also, did op ever play before synergies?? Dont think you had druids or assassins back then. The sunder charms made the game much easier, this stay in ur lane talk is you just drooling stupidity. You still farm the same areas over and over. Infinty also made game easier.
Sunder charms are only "good" for the game bc immunity exists on normal monsters. Immunity needs a rework. Only champions & unique should be immune. Normal monsters shouldn't be immune but can have high res to their respective element. Lower resist skills/abilities should work as a flat modifier instead of 20% of the amount. Lastly, the sorc masteries should all be the same -res or +dmg. Sunder was a lazy fix, but that's what happens when the company puts resources into D4 instead of D2R.
It was a half arsed way to make anything other than Hammers usable end game. They actually aren't very good for most characters and physical characters should avoid it entirely.
In my opinion sunder charms were not necessary addition to D2R, they should've focused their energy on adding qol like rune/gem stacking and a loot filter as well as making tyraels might a more useful item.
@@cptcolgenltmajor9246 There's far more things needed to be tweaked in terms of existing items to create more build diversity in your case "qol" sunders are useless, you got infinity for that.
@@GGMentor yeah and one of these things to expand build diversity was to look back on unused uniques that got pushed away by cheap runewords, builds were fine without sunders, melee is still in desperate need of buffs because it is behind casters by miles.
@@goatski8054 D2R has one of the best game itemizations in all of ARPG history. Could it be improved sure, do I trust them to do it? Nope There is a rule for things like this. The closer to perfection something is the more and more likely it is to be ruined if you try to improve it.
Sunder charms really opened up the game to more builds and more farming areas. A huge and welcome change again. Also love that you have to "beat the game" before you can get them. Some people don't understand there is still life before sunders as it exists today.
IMO the bottom line is that adding immunities as aggressively as they did just to try to balance sorc was a mistake.
Sunder charms were a much needed addition to the game.
You may disagree with me, but I'm still of the opinion that immunities were a bad design move because they limited viable build diversity through nightmare and hell. All those fun builds that are enabled in the late game by using sunder charms... should've been playable throughout the entirety of the leveling process! This is how we experienced d2 classic. Putting immunities into the game instantly killed a ton of builds. Locking the ability to customize your character the way you want instead of the way you have to behind endgame progression is bad.
I completely agree.
I like that there are immunities.
But how they are implemented in certain ways does make them kind of dumb. Like how some damage can be broken on most enemies and others (basically cold) can almost never be broken, and that breaking immunities usually requires a lot of luck for most classes(requires rare drops for all but paladin and necro), If you are just doing solo play(as no help to get past anything )it definitely is a bad design since it really restricts many builds. But at least you can respec to get around this unit, you beat hell Baal and then set your build to the one you want to stay with.
If every damage type had the same issues breaking immunities and the drops needed to break each damage type didn’t all have to be so rare, it would balance things out in a much better way when it comes to immunities.
And one thing you need to understand is that Diablo 2 was made to be played as an online game with solo play being secondary. So the implementation is really for online play where it doesn’t matter much since you can easily get a group of people to deal with all immunities. But offline play or those who just want to play solo online, it definitely is not implemented well to play this way.
Yes, they "apologized" with sunder charms 20y later, i barely managed to break poison immunity with necromancer, thanks to Deaths web and lower resists, and that is to some monsters, and damage was very poor. You needed to go to such extend just to go around immune monsters.
There are many things to fix, but there is no way they will invest to make Diablo greater than ever, they are too lazy.
I just think key quest objective bosses (Ancients) having immunities is absurd.
definitely agree, build diversity is the corner stone of ARPGs. Design decisions that lower/restrict build diversity are generally bad design decisions for this genre. Sunders was their solution to a 20 yr old game but ideally immunities should have never existed to begin with. We could argue resistances for were fine and enable value through stats that lower resistances but full on immunities is bad design.
Good adition to the game.
Cheaper(easyer to find than 2Ber 1Mal 1ist, trade can help) than Infinity runeword.
Not a must in a party if one rocks Native conviction or lower resist-amp dmg-decrepify.
I think they have been positive
The trade-off of breaking immunity
At the cost of your own resistance and inventory space
Opens up new builds that just would hit a brick wall in endgame content
Also im glade i haven't had to make a hammerdin since they came out
he's on the wagon! here is your no hammerdin for 2 years coin sir
D2 includes some interesting design choices that are very un-modern that feels obnoxious on the surface, but give it a lot of longevity.
Immunities feel bad when you run into them on a build that can't handle them (especially playing through the game) but avoiding certain monsters is always possible. Immunities also encourage you to play multiple builds if you want to farm everywhere in the endgame. Most characters that do elemental damage can be built to deal multiple damage types - only once you fully optimize a character for farming efficiency by maxing out all the synergies for 1-2 primary offensive skills do immunities become a real problem, which is where sunders come in.
I think having respecs available really helps immunities not feel bad - you can level with a catch-all build and then switch to an optimized farming build when you're ready to.
Sunder charms were by far the best thing they added to the game in the past 20 years.
All the changes in D2R have made the game better, but primarily for casters. The gap between casters and melee has only gotten wider. I wish more had been done to make physical melee stronger.
how to balance melee: 1) ban sunder 2) ban infinity/insight
Trust me, casters are still strong
Bro… melee is strong enough.
@@Purriah Melee isn't strong. Crushing blow is strong. That entire stat line carries the hell out of melee and they are still inferior to casters in every way with one exception and that is doing uber bosses and once again it is only better then casters due to crushing blow existing.
Things like needing attack rating just to hit the target for less damage then a spell that doesn't require attack rating and doesn't miss inherently makes melee worse and more reliant on things like ITD and MTD, which once again is even more stat lines melee need just to be viable when casters can just stack more damage. Casters also inherently just do more AoE/Cleave then the vast majority of melee builds making them significantly faster farmers then basically every melee build in the game.
They could buff melee by lowering attack rating requirements and removing the arbitrary 95% cap that make it so melee always has a 5% chance to miss that casters just don't have. They could also create a way for some of the melee abilities to access some form of cleave/AoE.
@@FakeslimshadyI don't think banning items is the answer, that's dumb. They should just make better melee weapons and skills
@@maximos905 obviously, yeah. But that's not gonna happen now
They are amazing, I agree with all your points.
Black cleft should have variable -%magres though. 10-20% range maybe. I understand why they made it useless (hammerdin too strong already, and the new FoH is monstrous as well), but bone spear necros depend too much on corpse explosion, and a viable magic arrow bowzon would be a cool build, although the skill would need some tweaks. An aoe explosion or something.
And bone break is an absolute game changer for phys builds, especially once you get access to decrep/amp dmg. It feels really good to destroy PIs without having to resort to gimmicks :)
Very well articulated and presented. I didn’t plan on watching the whole video but it sucked me in. Thanks for taking the time to make it.
glad you enjoyed it, it's a fun topic I think a lot of people feel strongly about one way or the other.
They're great. Brought a ton of build diversity and a much needed boost for fire characters. Building whole characters to farm one area is BORING
what you don't like being a tunnel dwelling sewer rat sorc?
@@GGMentor I can't say that I do! I'm not building whole characters to run the ancient tunnels
@@GGMentorcan’t tell you how disappointing it was to try to min max a holy fire paladin, and then you get into hell difficulty, and suddenly everything just ignores your build.
I always hated being so specialized in D2, where if I'm lightning spec I can only do certain things. It's like oh i'm some badass slaying demons but i can't even think of going to some areas because of lightning immunes. I think sunders were a great addition
IMO he best thing about sunder charms isn't the builds, but it's the areas of the game that you could now actually farm effectively. It's much better than only going to areas that weren't immune to your type of damage!
I've been playing D2 pretty much since it launched. Before Sunder Charms, I gave up on dozens of characters because they would get crushed by immune enemies. I think the highest solo player level I ever achieved was around Level 86 or so.
Since Sunder Charms, I can now go to every zone in the game and have a fighting chance of surviving.
Sunder charms make sense with the addition of terror zones. Since terror zones incentivize farming various locations, being able to kill wider variety of immunes becomes more important. Though you'd still prefer fewer immunities, because even with -rez gear, immunes take much longer to kill, unless you stack a lot of it, like infinity + griffs + facets. Also point could be made that some elements have better access to -rez gear than the others ones, seems like lightning has it best, albeit with rather rare gear.
Also, I feel like preserving the game progression close to 1.14 state is a bit overrated. Respecs changed the progression through the game dramatically, as you no longer needed to plan far far ahead and suffer in early game on a character with no energy and no useful skills. Synergies changed the game drastically as well, as you pointed it out. I don't know if sunder charms brought it back necessarily, because you still have to heavily focus a few skills that synergize with each other, it's just the resulting character can farm more places.
Yes
I like them, but in a way, it wouldn't hurt my feelings if they take them away lol
Hmm🤨
*Cries in Hammerdin
That Black Cleft is a necessity in Act 2 and in Baal runs
My fondest memories of the game were from the early years of online and ladder. I often played a support paladin or a support necro, it was great to turn up in a game with a maxed conviction/zeal/smite paladin all the sorcs would cheer 'yay' when you entered a game and stuff. Same with a good supoort necro with the curses and SOME skellies as cannon fodder.
The game was so rewarding when you played as a team, because it was so hard when you were NOT on a team...
Over thenyears almost every change they made was to make a player more powerful, like godly runewords with auras and oskills etc etc. These days every low-skill noob has a "meta build that can solo p8" ...
There is just no reward anymore for amazing team work and finding team mates. Imagine turning up in a game these days with a maxed conviction paladin or a cursing necro, people would laugh at you while they stroke their sunder charms and check their merc's infinity... 😢
If someone enters my single player game and does nothing but drop amplify damage/lower resistance, I’ll be overjoyed.
I have sunders but no infinity and no lower resistance gear
I almost never use them, but I think they're more positive than negative. I like that they have a heavy cost to resistance. Makes the player have to decide if they're worth it, rather than just a buff.
Same opinion that I have about terror zones:
Good add to the game, but needs some polishing.
To me, sunder charms needed to be more rare. Maybe double its rarity... Then its good.
yeah good addition I wish they would have supported it a bit better with more negative res gear but i wasn't a big fan of immunes in the first place it seemed like an over reaction to over powered 1.0 builds
I completed the game in Hell with my Lightning Javazon and I eventually stopped playing it because there are so many lightning immunes and very few areas are farmable. When I found my first CotH it made my Javazon fun again. It was a much needed addition to the game.
With sunder charms it opens up to hire other mercs, the game is alot better "mid-endgame" without the need of infinity act2 merc
Love yr videos and ideas.
*Somethin strange that i haven't seen it before. I have found a yellow circlet that is kinda odd. The minimum lvl for this item is 60 in most characters I have. But a druid can use it in lvl 24.
It has some generic abilities : 20% faster r/w , 1-107 lighting damage , 21 mf , lvl-1 tornado 11/22 charges.
defense 26 , durability 66/105. AND required lvl 24 or 60 , as I said.
Found in a single player !!! Has anyone seen that before ? or is a thing that I didn't know ?
Don't forget viper bone spear concaves as magic damage dangers :) the increased damage taken is way too much, could be 10-20 like bb and would still hurt!
Regarding Bonebreak, it's good, it still needs ampd or decrepify to really work (as you said, needs resistance reduce to be effective) and then the curses alone probably do the trick. But I personally think 10% physical damage increase is not that much, %reduction is so common ... helms, shields, belts, even enigma got 8 of those, never felt like hurting myself too much by wearing one and adding a verdungos. and it makes immunes feel softer before the curse procs
I don't mind them like you said unless you have minus res you don't do much dmg I like using a fire one on my hydra sorc running Andy just to help clear out the Lil minions but other that I don't use them much it is nice to help builds out
Sunder charms made the game better imho, Just wish they would boost the Physical one or just reduce all enemy Physical resistance. good video dude as always.
I actually never farmed for one and don't need to as I cheech and have an enchantress so all my builds have alternative damage.
I agree. Sunders allow alot of non meta builds to be viable/useful. Perfect no, but useful. And players that do not like them do not have to use them.
Bottom line is immunities are lame, sunder charms make soloing better. I entered hell trying to push holy fire to its limits only to see all the fire immunes, since I had used my respecs trying other gear it felt like I had wasted my time.
After struggling to get my respec i struggled with a zealot until arcane sanctuary, having nords tenderizer meant it wasn’t impossible but the area is already one of the worst places in the game. Farmed for other unique items but all of them were kinda worthless, runes felt out of reach with the drop rates. Charges on items have mixed results. Calling a friend is a real cop out.
There are options to get around them why can’t sunders be one of them.
Immunities aren’t even distributed evenly, magic is on basically no enemies, and physical is scarce until act 2.
Byproduct of sunders is that the one runeword used to bypass them in the past is now too strong, since it’s main purpose was to do what sunders current function is. If infinity had its unique traits redistributed among other uniques and runewords it would be better imo.
The conviction aura on top of the lightning resist down means lighting is so much stronger in the end game.
Without going the route of creating actual balance changes to skills ,items and the amount of resistances enemies have (to allow for other means to break it) it was really the only way to open up the game for various builds. While I would still prefer the other route (of actual updates to skills and items) that ship will never arrive so, this is better than nothing.
Hello Ginger Gaming Mentor, my apologies but i have off topic question to you cause i really believe you’re the best specialist of diablo 2 game. Im not sure how works superior armors. Increased defense or increased durability is the problem if i dont want to spent tons of gold for repairing it? I’ve heard somewhere the main problem is only increased durability which means it worth to use superior armor with increased defense, without increased durability. Iam wrong about it? Where is the true? Thanks for respond
The costs to repair goes up for enhanced defense. It is a per point cost increase.
Enhanced durability increases the total number of points.
In otherwords.
Let's say it costs 30k to fix a normal item from 0
The superior would be a multiplier of that.
Then the durability is an additional multiplier on top of that.
The most expensive item would be 15% enhanced with Enhanced durability.
@@GGMentor thank you for explaining. This means im not interested in enhanced defense anymore excluding mercenary beacuse gold have decent value too. Iam playing this game without real money so need to be economical.
@@rastislavsprla4954 or you can check out my infinite gold video. It even works online
Weird question did you rush a sorc through hell earlier? Either way Sunders are amazing just getting back into d2r and i love them
I have a big kinship(Guild) with the tag GGM_name
It was most likely a kinship member, maybe even one of the captains.
Like Bob, or meow, or chunks ect.
@@GGMentor ahh yes makes sense, someone from your crew hooked it up!
As a single player focused D2R fan, I do like that I had to kill Baal without the benefit of sunders at least once. Now that first character has found many sunder charms, and they are available if new characters are struggling with Hell immunities. Coupled with Terror Zones, giving characters the chance to farm Nightmare difficulty at high player count to get lvl75 if needed is a nice way to get them through for their builds to be more consistent. It's weird to have a character that excels at certain elements have to become completely different for a while before they can return to who they really are, but the sunder charms allow that and TZ's let you skip having to do it altogether.
After they "fixed" the skill trees with synergies you really needed something like the sunder charm to allow elemental builds to play all the content in the game
Just had a thought.. Why don't Blizzard let us use Standard of Heroes to reroll Saunder charms? It's a useless item, it's pretty hard to get for a regular "playing over the weekend" gamer and it's an End Game content like Saunder Charms..
I agree they should use standard of heroes for some form of crafting but not sure i agree with rerolling sunder charms. The only reason being is that they are pretty easy to get already and have a fairly high drop rate compared to other uniques in the game. Pretty much anyone can farm a sunder charm in a single after noon of terror zone farming. If we wanted to enable rerolling sunders that i don't see why we couldn't do it via the same way we already reroll charms by using things like pgems and jewels.
@@kylesmith987 maybe using Standard f Hero to reroll Torches then? Plus 3 pgems.
The analysis is technically correct 100%
HOWEVER , the ideal situation for build diversity would be something alike the freedom of 1.09 before sinergies, so the real solution would be to allow to reach max damage without having to invest 100 points into a single element so that a single skill can kill all the enemies in the game.
I always like to point out at current Sorc where every tree has a mini skill that requires less points but it's usable in a dual spec and then a big skill that benefits greatly from investing all the points in that element.
Sunders are the perfect band-aid but it would be better if they weren't the endgame gear you get instantly once you kill baal.
Enabling a build after getting the item is the bad game design people point out when we talk d3 and d4, D2 was ok because there were very few of them and they enabled fun niche build.
Now Sunders enable every build to the point you're a dumb person if you're not using them.
So yes, they overall improve the game but they're a lazy solution to the balance problem we got with 1.10.
I like the sunders and use them for specific builds, but I'm currently running a zoo druid, with just a bone break, but I don't really need it since I'm running multiple damage generators: cold damage spirit wolf, poison creeper, enchant Act 3 merc, physical on everything else. I can run players 8 and most of the TZs with a few rough spots. Grinding to 99 with this character, haven't tried the Ubers yet since I'm still farming for SoJs. In all, sunders don't impact this build.
Without watching... 10/10 would sunder again.
They basically fix the issue synergies (and the later balancing overhaul) created by funneling people into a single effective damage type.
My TS/Orb sorc could do all the content... I still can't remake that build, but at least the game balance guard rails they put up don't keep most builds from doing all the content anymore.
Okay... maybe not ubers, but that's kind of part of the challenge since they didn't exist before the previously mentioned changes.
Yes
Muh 2 cents: terror zones kinda annoying, but they could fix it by changing the exact things you pointed out, better integration of some zones, alternatives to remove the polarity between great zones you feel you miss out and crappy ones nobody cares about. Sunders are ok, I don't care for balance personally, I enjoy the crappy underpowered builds in fact, so whatever that my already op javazon got even more op if my underpowered whatever build was made viable or even kinda great, it's a good thing imo.
Doest it work on unique monsters that have 2 immunities?
Yes
before i ever got a sunder charm, i assumed it would make immunes die like anything else. but its worth mentioning that even at level 90. my maxed orb + sunder sorc still takes a WHILE to kill cold immunes. thats with +13 cold skills and solid endgame gear. I still avoid heavily cold immune areas even with the sunder charm.
you just need more raw -ECR. Like a Doom Weapon, Cold Facets ect.
@@GGMentor 16 into mastery currently before skillers, havent found a facet yet... will help
so Mastery is penalized by 1/5th vs immunes. It will help some vs immune monsters but not enough without some negative resistance gear.
@@GGMentorthanks. Since that comment I found a deaths fathom and a cold facet.. makes a huge difference!
@@matthewberry3608 It was like that when they were introduced because they didnt take for account that CM can instantly drop monster's resists by -150 without any gear.
But Cold sorc was insane that Season so it was quickly put in check xD.
Thats why i believe theyre fairly grounded since the only easiest upgrade to a -res is Crescent Moon and for the others you have to invest abit more so you can melt immunes easier as GGM mentioned Doom or Phoenix,Flickering Flame,Self wielding Infinity,Ravenlore,Facets,Death's Web,Bramble,Crescent Moon and so on.
I think they need to buff the Physical and Magic Sunder, especially magic charm it is about pointless as is.
I agree, great point. Those two are much less used.
The magic charm being pointless is just a testament to how overpowered magic damage is. Since it already bypasses all immunities and has basically no issue farming in 99.9% of the game.
It's fine being useless as it is.
The bone Break needs some love, I thought adding a nice AR bonus on it would be helpful to melee/ranged or - Monster Defense percentage.
Magic sunder state should set enemy magic res to something between 70-80%. This is more for Necromancers going down the Bone Spear route so they can still reliably clear Baal waves without relying on a merc.
Is the magic damage overpowered, or the hammerdin specifically? Bonemancer with their 100+ points in synergies isn't as strong, is he? FoHdin also does magic damage, but I think holy bolts ignore the immunities anyway.
@@HaibaneKuu Hammerdin is very strong. Will just brute force the 95% res.
Bone Spear Necromancer can approach Blizzard and Lightning sorcs in damage normally because they don't have as many immunities to worry about... But when they do encounter a magic immune, they MUST skip, even with sunder. No way to crank magic damage or lower magic res to overcome.
The up shot to the bone break even if it isnt super helpful it does allow you to life leech them
Informative video. GJ GGM. :-)
Just ok I think. More fun choosing a second weapon/set of skills to swap with when the first loses out. Never combat the forces of hell without a trusty sidearm
The whole idea that sunder charms made the game easier is based on the fact that you can easily get your most useful specific sunder charm before killing Baal through trading (which you called cheating, but happens all the time in ladder). This undoubtly makes the game easier (specially for some elemental builds in a few specific situations, such as fighting the Council in Travincal), but I'd argue that D2R is already way far from the original D2 classic difficulty to begin with, mostly because of the runewords.
I wish they'd increase the penalty for using them, reducing the MAXIMUM associated resistance would be great (maybe roll -15% to -10% randomly).
I could be behind that
If you buy a sunder just to make Council fight in travincal easier at this point you have a geared char and have way more items to funnel a twink.Most people are rushing themself through hell in the 60s when ladders been on for awhile.
Unless you twinking yourself i dont think many people get Sunders that early.D2LoD also had the runewords for alot of patches aswell(maybe less than original LoD without synergies and runewords but still like 4 long patches) unless you were talking about D2 Classic(untill act 4).
I mean the easiest one you can synergise atm is Cold(and they kinda gimped that with CM changes so if you dont have Doom the damage is okay but not unreal) and Light(Crescent moon) other than that i dont think they're that powerful unless you can scale them further through -resists like Phoenix,Flickering Flame,Facets,Doom,Infinity wielding Sorc.
@@wtbskilllololo You can get a weak common sunder (fire or cold) very easily, a Ral rune is enough. You don't need to be geared or anything, you go to the Countess once, get the drop and open a trade window.
@@thebbcjokeI will agree the weak fire is dogwater and you can buy it for a ral yes but Cold Sunders even the close to 90 hold value for atleast a week.
Been selling CSunders for 2x ladders and 89s can go for about a Vex at the start.
When Cold sunders go for a ral nobody cares if you can beat Baal or not you can just get a free rush in a hell game at that point.
Also buying a fire sunder without any -Fire res which you cant find anywhere early one while you rush yourself barely help you with killing fire immunes(maybe only low res can help in that regard) but i agree its little bit easier.
@@wtbskilllololo the point here is not about the ladder start, it's about the difficulty for completing the game. There is a reason nobody rushing at the ladder start plays pure fire builds, only magic and lightning. Even cold is good enough since there is only one required killing monster that can be slain by a merc + telekinesis.
And yes, the sunder charm does help. Fire has some high damaging spells such as fireball and firewall. Those 5% opening is enough to complete the game (a pain for MFing, but that is not the point here).
Im like 50/50 on sunder charms. But it's mostly just from a multiplayer PoV. They take away all the limitations that from a multiplayer pov, were better solved with additional party members. Tho i guess that's more of a "lets pretend there's no hdin" that wipes everything p8.
I stand by the belief that they were a band-aid fix for a bigger problem with the game's balance philosophy. the Devs didn't want to tackle the different breakpoints for resistance vs skills and instead opted into a blanket fix that took minimal development time.
Personally I would have liked to see more gearing options for elemental pierce, and a reduction of most of the immune monster resists to *edit: much lower values, (ie 100 to 105)* so that anyone willing to invest in pierce or with a LR wand could clear all content. That way builds and classes still have their niche to run at full power, but can build to overcome the problem of immunity as the need arises. By removing the build-farming location niche you actually reduced "meta" diversity as there aren't environmental constraints to encourage different playstyles.
The idea that we can loot an item at 60 that invalidates an entire system undermines one of the core principles of the game's design and isn't something I can agree with; despite the "proposed" by-product of build diversity it created.
I think Sunder Charms are a mediocre solution to the poor way immunities were implemented in the game. Not having immunities would have been OK too. Or "soft" immunities. Or it could have been much easier to make a build that does multiple damage types. Or they could have given items that allow selective damage-shifting. Etc. There are *lots* of solutions to the immunity issue. Sunder Charms were a cop-out because they didn't want to piss off the old-school die-hards by either removing or substantially changing immunities. All that said, if just take for granted they weren't going to change or remove immunities, then I think Sunder Charms are an OK solution.
They were an uninteresting solution for the infinity merc being the only endgame setup.
I think the exact opposite, they enabled hundreds of builds that weren't possible with out them. They made items with negative res valuable and created an entire economy of characters looking for those specific pieces of gear.
By doing it the way they did, they included the wealth of items that already existed in the game to address the problem. I think overall it was a genius solution to a rather complicated problem.
@@GGMentor I generally agree with this statement as well. I personally think immunities should have never been introduced in the first place but we are talking about potentially hundreds of compounding changes that would have to be either undone or changed again to balance the game around not having immune mobs so i think sunder charms are probably a more elegant solution for the current state of the game.
@@kylesmith987 I don't think immunities were the problem. I think it was synergies. Before synergies you could build a multi-elemental character and have backup plans for monsters that would be immune to your attacks. After synergies it became next to impossible to build anything but a single spec
@@GGMentor Yeah i absolutely get what you saying. I view them as compounding issues. Personally even with synergies i still view immunities as an issue that restrict build diversity but you are absolutely correct in that Synergies compounded that problem of creating less build diversity by a significant amount.
I don't entirely hate Synergies but there a significant amounts of builds that way over use Synergies and make it so you physically cannot spec into other abilities to cover the weakness of your builds. To me the prime example of this is bone spear necro. Bone spear has way too many synergies to scale its damage that it makes it near impossible to spec into anything else and have bone spear do even reasonable damage.
@@kylesmith987 I miss being able to put 20 points in bone spear on my summon necros 😭
I have two issues with Sunder Charms: it gave more power to casters (Phys Sunder should have zero penalty, physical sucks enough as is) and you cannot get them before Hell Baal. I recently re-started solo and have been playing an Enchantress, a build that after 20 years I always wanted to try. Cleared everything, until the Den of Evil. No Fire Sunder, no more Enchantress. If Sunder Charms had like a 1/5th chance to drop in NM, it’d open up more variety of starter characters. As it stands, you are still going Meteorb or Hydra-Orb to clear the game before you can do cool stuff.
Physical Sunder is amazing, I have personally tested it.
Physical sunder alone is garbage
Amplify damage alone is garbage
Amp+Phys sunder absolutely destroys physical immune monsters.
As for casters being more powerful than melees, that has always been the case.
I don't think it will ever not be.
However, melees have always been better at killing bosses.
IMHO fire is first then I agree with the rest. But fire characters get the best use of sunders.
Thanks!
Glad to help
I quit when sunder charms launched. 1.09 gamer soo lol
That's sad, sunder charms are a great addition.
There is a mod program for D2R which reverts the game to 1.09 rules
Sunder charms were definitely needed, especially if you play offline or hardcore.
Console players have to pay for online multiplayer. I don't think og d2 would have worked in today's gaming culture.
I disagree on a couple of points, but overall I'm in alignment with you.
1. Bone Break is very useful because physical damage can get ridiculously high(Fury Druids and Zealers who both use Grief, for instance), which can brute force that 95%. Also now that they can take damage, CB can actually apply. It cannot if they are immune. Plus just wearing a Shako can negate most, if not all of the -Ph res on character.
2. Rotting Fissure on a Poisonmancer(Dagger or Nova) absolutely wrecks. It takes nothing to negate the -Poison and D web is absolutely broken.
Sunder charm detractors come off as people who think there should only be a handful of viable builds(be it PvE or PvP) and anything that enables more should not be implemented. I think those folks long for the 1.09 days where only 3 classes could actually clear the game hell solo.
I don't think I said bone break is useless, just that it's less useful than the elemental sunders due to the increased amount of negative res gear.
I built a Dual Crescent moon barb with an inventory of lightning charms and a lightning sunder and felt way better than a physical build ever did. because I could hit like -100% ELR easily lol.
Two Crescent moons is already -70% then you get Gryphons and maybe even an armor too if you want.
My point is clear to see, it's way easier for elemental damage characters to take advantage of sunders than physical damage ones.
@@GGMentor Ahh, did not mean to imply "useless," just that your phys characters can still see big benefit from making use of Bone Break. I suppose because Reaper's Toll mercs and Atma's Scarab exists, I can see how enabling CB via sundy isn't necessarily as game changing as what elemental users get access to.
@@MA16v3 I mean those options do stack with bone break but when an elemental damage Character is doubling their damage by hitting -100% resistance.
Meanwhile the best a phy damage character can hope for is bone break + amp down to like 75% physical resistance.
Lol the difference is massive.
I ran a lightning damage barb one whole season and it was so much better than physical damage.
Dual crescent moons -70% gryphons -25%, armor facet -5%
Full inventory of any lightning damage charms I could get. Nothing could survive. Even easily smashed Uber Diablo.
It goes to show you how much more powerful elemental damage is because of the wealth of -res options
@@GGMentor I don't think amp and decrep suffer the 1/5 penalty, so bone break + amp should bring down the physical res of phys immunes res to -5%.
@@EnergyDrinkAdd1ct they do have the penalty otherwise bonebreak would be the best charm In The game.
I like that more builds are viable now. But I kinda dislike that on single player you cant get it. Just try to finish hell Baal alone with cold sorc. First try just getting there. Players who do want original D2 experience could always not to pick it up by choice. But thankfully since it's a single player it's not really a big deal - you can just use hero editor.
Bone break being less useful sucks but physical immunities are less common anyway. Besides the fact that you have amplify damage as a debuff
Bone break in combination with amp damage or decrepify is amazing
Try fury Druid with reapers toll and a bone break, all those monsters that used to be a huge problem get completely obliterated
@@mattcampbell1846 will have to give it a shot
Rocks, stamina potions, bolts/arrows, you forgot an a**hole on the elbow 😂
I couldnt figure out how you got your damage reduction down - Dungos and Coa ??
They would have been better if they brought some more items into the game that further reduce the enemy immunities. The bone break one is almost completely usless, the one that breaks magic immunity IS completely useless.
They definitely could have tacked it on to some uniques that people call underwhelming. Paying attention to community opinion/ watching trade prices could have helped
I would say they weren't a bad idea, but... maybe making magic and physical resistances a LOT better.
And all of them a LOT larger range of resists. 10% to 100% physical resist would've been super cool (with a scaling level requirement so you dont just die after identifying a 100% phys LOL). Or 10-20% minus cold res because those are broken anyways. monsters have little to no cold resistsance anyways (and cold sorc exists). Magic sunder? Make it so you take as much amplified damage as you do regardless of the source! And make bonespirits and spears do 100% more dmg to monsters (only) on the skills themselves >__
I like them great idea
Of coarse they were a good idea, because the lobby is still broken AF. Half the lobby games are from bot programs, half of what’s left are abandoned games that stay open for hours for no reason, and the few multiplayer games you can join are either Baal or chaos runs that last for only 3-4 minutes and are rare to even find those. There is absolutely no way to find party play in a game centered around games that only last a couple minutes per run
I think they could have avoided the need for sunder charms if lower resist items broke immunities.
that would have required rebalancing all of the Negative resistance items I don't think they wanted that kind of headache.
Most things that are immune to magic can be dropped with holy bolt.
Good video! And about diablo 1? Is this good actually in bnet? Is People playing ?
there should be physical damage type facet
15/40 is closest we get :(
You sure about the terror zones? I have bought recently D2R and I still haven't beaten Baal... in normal. But I do get in-game messages saying that something was/is terrorized. I play offline 99.9% of the time
you need to opt-in (tick a box) to play them
I literally showed the check box on screen greyed out and there is still doubt in this guys mind lol
I think they never should have made builds and abilities completely useless in the first place. Like if you build a fire build and then in Hell everything is immune to fire. Why would they make it where everything is immune to such a large amount of skills.
Correct me if I'm wrong but I don't think - fire res from your gears affects your skeles' enchanted fire damage.
I have an entire character built around it and it works very well.
When sunder charms were first introduced, they did work on minions but didn't do anything because Negative Resistance didn't apply to minions. This list included Hydras, Assassin Traps, Necromancer Minions, and Druid Minions. Setting a monster to 95% resistance is useless on it's own. as he is still negating 95% of all incoming damage.
They Eventually fixed most of them except assassin traps, which took some time. But the traps the last outlier were fixed in patch 2.6.
"The Assassin's trap skills now benefit from -% to Enemy Resistance."
The Irony here was, and no one knew it was that Assassin traps and even hydras were considered minions.
There was a time however the negative resistance worked on no minions whatsoever.
@@GGMentor Thanks for the reply. I'm aware of the changes made to traps and hydra about -res, but I never knew they included all types of minions. I just tested on a standard summon necro with a physical sunder (all physical damage from skeles and I removed the merc's weapon). It turns out they did manage to kill wraiths in the forgotten tower in an instant, and went back to zero damage when I took off the sunder. So your statement is true!
Well your mixing two different things.
Sunder charms always worked with minions and traps.
Negative Res was what got updated.
The thing is Sunder charms are useless without negative res you need both in tandem for full damage output.
A Bone break alone is worthless, but a bone break + Amp is great.
A Fire sunder alone is worthless but a Fire sunder + Lower Res, Conviction, & Negative Res is great.
@@GGMentor I stand corrected.
@@GGMentor Wait doesn't enchant only work on physical attackers? So only the golem, melee skeles and melee revives?
Synergies are not such a bad thing they're just poorly balanced. Lots of skills with no synergy while others have 3-4. If Synergies were just something like add a given bonus for every skill point added to the same tree, then every skill would have access to Synergies and it would open new builds while maintaining current builds
I like them but it is still really hard to kill an immune ... or at least takes a long time to do it
I am cool with that, it doesn’t have to be easy, I just want it to be possible
it also increases the value of - resistance gear. If you get enough of it then they no longer take a long to kill. I have a full decked out fireball/hydra sorc that can 1 to 2 tap any previous fire immune mob in the game. But this is due to have a pretty solid amount of - enemy fire res due to flickering flame helm, fire facets, and an infinity on my merc. I have something like roughly -50% enemy fire resistance with it all added together which is enough for me to melt even previously fire immune mobs.
Does Lower Resist have the same effect essentially?
Lower resist is better plus it stacks with sunder charms
Insert comment mentioning how old the game is in relation to this new addition.
EL rune for dark clef sunder charm....
blizzard always sorcerer buyer
Sunder charms are awful why do be have other budget builds that can do stuff besides hammerdin. Everyone other build is trash
- some hammerdin main somewhere
lol
Had me in the first half ngl
don't really need any sunder other thank bone break on my shockadin. even though it's based on lightning damage i can kill lighting immunes easier without the sunder
PD2 did everything better, wish I could play it but it seems like not enough people are on it.
thunder charms were a lazy way to fix the original diablo 2 game. project diablo reworked all the characters and they are all viable.
Relying on a drop, is a bad idea. If you cant farm them solo, after 100 runs, you will feel defeated.
@@GGMentor maybe it's just me 😭
These are the kind of items that are so common you will see people giving them away.
I haven’t had much trouble finding mine. I’ve also gotten bone break and rotting fissure for free
@@slobrat3556 sunder charms have an incredibly high drop rate compared to other uniques. Anyone can farm a sunder charm in a single after noon of farming terror zones. The thing to know about sunder charms is that they can only drop in terror zones and they can only drop from unique, elite, and champion packs. If you are trying to farm sunder charms then just target farm unique/elite/champion packs in terror zones and you will get one quickly enough.
Did you mean to say the ciw lvl have very few im moo naties
lets make skiller charms tier list video
Level 1 😠 This game to easy with those sunders
Level 95 😅 Ok Im going to kill Ball
Level 1 😠 Way to easy, I stayed in town and finished the game
Level 95 😂 Did you try solo?
D2R became more and more casual as many games today. As cold sorc i was farming CS for years. For years Infinity was my endgame goal. Nowdays i dont know what to do with Sunder charms.
Infinity at it's best broke maybe like 10% of cold immunes lol. With a sunder and enough -ECR you can farm anywhere just about.
@@GGMentor thats what am speaking about. Casual gaming. With Infinity I usualy switch to fire sorc.
@@ЕМТФранц Not sure buddy id reckon there will probably be more people crying about having to invest Ohm,Lo and Cham for a Doom so they can farm everywhere on a blizzard sorc it wouldnt seem that casual to most players in general.
Sunder charms in itself dont do shit unless you equip urself with better items ergo Phoenix and Flickering Flame for fire is Phoenix a casual goal you strive for with 2x Vex,Lo and a Jah?
Ontop of that you still want Infinity i dont see how the game has been more casual the only thing that changed from introducing Sunder charms is that you can actually kill Immunes a little earlier and it might be barely possible unless you had some -ECR.Most of the items with -ECR arent that cheap either beside Crescent Moon so id say Lightning is the easiest build to push with a sunder vs Immunes Cold,Fire builds still have to get some more expensive items to actually use it at 100%.Before that you barely kill them its not even worth to fight em unless you need to kill those immunes for a reason.
I think mosaic is the only thing they need to walk back a little bit. Let them hold onto one charge up skill at a time instead of 3
Sunder charms allows single tree meta builds instead of being smart and dual specing or using game mechanics to beat the game. Also, did op ever play before synergies?? Dont think you had druids or assassins back then. The sunder charms made the game much easier, this stay in ur lane talk is you just drooling stupidity. You still farm the same areas over and over. Infinty also made game easier.
Casters are too easy to play and powerful
Since the game was released
lol, yup they been op since day one
Yeah, but sunders don’t really change much for them that it doesn’t change for melee builds
Originally you couldn't just buy mana potions and had to collect them.
i disagree
I think they should remove them and cap every immunity on 100% and not even 1% above, so every source of negative res will break immunity.
i like the "sunder" concept but i would have liked it to spawn randomly on yellow items.
i just play with mods removing immunes but gives them high element res instet
Seems stupid
@@GGMentor its Amazing because immune Mobs is a shit system nobody likes, sunders proves me right. No aRPG since has this dumb System
Lol and Diablo 2 is still the best ARPG, all that proves is the other games are stupid for "Not" including immunities.
Sunder charms are only "good" for the game bc immunity exists on normal monsters. Immunity needs a rework. Only champions & unique should be immune. Normal monsters shouldn't be immune but can have high res to their respective element. Lower resist skills/abilities should work as a flat modifier instead of 20% of the amount. Lastly, the sorc masteries should all be the same -res or +dmg. Sunder was a lazy fix, but that's what happens when the company puts resources into D4 instead of D2R.
They should have made it a small charm.
It was a half arsed way to make anything other than Hammers usable end game. They actually aren't very good for most characters and physical characters should avoid it entirely.
lol they are actually excellent for most characters if you actually build around them. Only a handful of builds get no benefit from them.
Disagree, i was hyped to get it for my javazon and it was very much worth it
In my opinion sunder charms were not necessary addition to D2R, they should've focused their energy on adding qol like rune/gem stacking and a loot filter as well as making tyraels might a more useful item.
Build diversity is one of the most important things to a game, QoL is secondary to that.
Sunders are like qol for builds suffering in the pve content
@@cptcolgenltmajor9246 There's far more things needed to be tweaked in terms of existing items to create more build diversity in your case "qol" sunders are useless, you got infinity for that.
@@GGMentor yeah and one of these things to expand build diversity was to look back on unused uniques that got pushed away by cheap runewords, builds were fine without sunders, melee is still in desperate need of buffs because it is behind casters by miles.
@@goatski8054 D2R has one of the best game itemizations in all of ARPG history.
Could it be improved sure, do I trust them to do it? Nope
There is a rule for things like this.
The closer to perfection something is the more and more likely it is to be ruined if you try to improve it.