Announcing Ruthless

spare time to make naked mode...

How is this gonna make any difference?

I had been looking forward to "hard mode" and have to say, this announcement describes something worse than I could have imagined and is extremely disappointing. This isn't "hard mode," it's "tedious mode." Rather than a moderate handful of viable builds Path has now, this mode will likely have 99% of players using the 1 or 2 that are still powerful under its constraints.

Guarantee uber bosses will be downed within a week or two by people playing the "correct" ruthless build.

maybe try fixing the actual game first?

Where is the redesigned item generation that was supposed to at least somewhat counter balance the other stuff?

Oh right - you don't properly understand the concept of proper counter balance (or balance in general), which is why SSF when into effect in a way that was not what 99% of people asking for it wanted.

And so, this too comes to pass.

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Flasks and Life/Mana are not restored upon entering town or your hideout. Vendors that sell Flasks (and Helena in your hideout) can refill them for you. This disincentivizes the strategy of using Portal Scrolls as an instant full heal.

Not really - having to walk over to someone to get a free refill doesn't really change anything, and people will just grind up any cost - and such a cost hybridizes your healing solution with the one you really didn't want in your game (purchasable health/mana potions).

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Hardcore Ruthless characters are not migrated to Standard Ruthless upon death. They are just permanently dead.

I still cannot fathom why this is not the default, and that the default is carebear hardcore instead. I mean, you finally do a proper HC, but you restrict it to a mode that is flawed in oh so many ways.

Well, at least you are consistent.

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Ruthless is not consuming significant development resources. It's a pet project that some senior designers have been working on in their spare time over the last 18 months.

IOW, you know this wont be anything anyone wants to hear now, and want to defend against "wasted resources" comments, but that also means this mode receives even less thought and testing than a major one and those have clearly not be great (and getting less so with time) - so this is basically going to be a worse version of a really bad league.

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BINARYGOD wrote:

Oh right - you don't properly understand the concept of proper counter balance (or balance in general), which is why SSF when into effect in a way that was not what 99% of people asking for it wanted.

It's you who don't understand things here ...
SSF was NEVER supposed to be something that "99% of people" asked, it was a game mode that was de facto already existing as many players were already choosing to not engage with trading / grouping and wanted to progress on their own.

GGG merely made it official, nothing more.

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Haddoq wrote:

Cool, I love that there finally is a mode that is meant to be awful that can house all the terrible ideas that go into normal now.

Hopefully, this also means that moving forward we can focus on making Ruthless awful and making normal good again.

oh, you sweet summer child

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Fruz wrote:

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BINARYGOD wrote:

was not what 99% of people asking for it wanted.

was NEVER supposed to be something that "99% of people" asked

cmp.l a0,(a1) ?

something doesn't add up there.

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Fruz wrote:

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BINARYGOD wrote:

Oh right - you don't properly understand the concept of proper counter balance (or balance in general), which is why SSF when into effect in a way that was not what 99% of people asking for it wanted.

It's you who don't understand things here ...
SSF was NEVER supposed to be something that "99% of people" asked, it was a game mode that was de facto already existing as many players were already choosing to not engage with trading / grouping and wanted to progress on their own.

GGG merely made it official, nothing more.

(wow, I love having to hit the Q button four times before the quoting actually happened - what wonderful forum tech you guys have here).

Actually, without anyone asking, there would never have been a SSF - it was added as a result of player feedback, and actually, MORE than 99% of posts never said anything about "same old trade balance, but no trading" - the genesis of the idea was entirely around a trade-less experience, including the balance of loot drops.

Yes, they DID use this odd excuse of 'people already doing a thing, so we added it into the game officially' when it launched, but if you actually think they added it entirely because a vanishingly small percentage of players happen to do something (trade lightly or not at all), and not because of a conversation that had been had (and commented on by even Chris himself) for years, I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.


Anyway, you are missing the forest for the trees.

Hard mode WAS way better itemization (so called loot 2.0) mixed with item scarcity. Now, it's just scarcity, for reasons many others have already mentioned in this thread.

This is similar to people asking for a mod not balanced around the economy, only for them to deliver a mode that just removes trade, but changes none of the balance. Again, for the same reasons many others have pointed out already.

they do this all the time - it's similar to the "people are dying too frequently to monsters, so we have nerfed their damage, and to balance that, we have lowered player life". Either they half implement something with a laughable excuse ("we notice some players don't trade, lets make it official and name that other similar thing people have been talking about for YEARS") or they add in another balance that effectively nullifies the previous entries in a set of highly requested balance changes.


Really, its like the stereotype of the genie or the monkey's paw, or making a deal with the devil.

But any rate - you are wrong, and blindly repeating something the company claims does not make you correct, especially when it ignores years of context.