Haunt/Pestilence. Basically a damage over time that spreads between enemies or refreshes and moves to a new enemy when the original target dies.
Acid Cloud. Just a big AoE that does a few ticks of damage- one of the runes Lob Blob Bomb or something like that also summons a small acid blob at the center of the AoE, that pulses damage as it moves towards enemies.
Phalanx. Summons a small group of spectral warriors/archers that fight with you. One of the runes also conjures a stampede of horses that’s pretty cool.
Heaven’s Fury. It’s a holy laser from the sky.
Cyclone Strike. Large PBAoE that sucks enemies to you.
Blessed Hammer. Conjurers a spiraling holy hammer- I particularly like the rune that allows them to orbit you.
Rain of Vengeance. Summoning a shadow beast to drop various things on your enemies, ranging from grenades, to a barrage of arrows, to the shadow beast itself flying into them and exploding.
From PoE:
Anything resembling Cast on Crit/Poet’s Pen/etc. Basically triggering lots and lots of spell casts with an attack.
Vaal Fireball/Vaal Spark. 60-150 projectiles in a nova. Glorious.
Shield Charge. Probably the best feeling movement ability in any game in my experience.
Bladefall. Conjure a volley of falling swords.
Any sort of chaining/forking projectiles.
Discharge. Build up charges, spend them to make things die with a huge PBAoE. Preferably used in some sort of synergy engine build to rapidly build and spend charges.
Herald of Ice. The sound that this skill makes is my reason for living. Also seeing a screen of enemies explode into ice dust is awesome.
Herald of Ash. Overkill damage explodes into an AoE fire DoT.
Cyclone. Seriously, Cyclone/Whirlwind is basically a genre staple and for a good reason.
Reave. Conical AoE Melee attack, gets bigger every time you hit something within a certain time frame.
Kinetic Blast. Ranged weapon attack that creates numerous small explosions when it hits an enemy.
Ritualist profession was by far my favourite. For the most part, pet focused characters does interest me, but the actual gameplay usually tends to be extremely boring. What the ritualist did for me with it’s spirits, was giving interesting summoning spells (for offense and defence), while also making me feel that I am doing all the work and not just standing back watching my pets do their thing. I haven’t seen this in any other game.
Mesmer with it’s clones/phantasms is also very unique and interesting one. I would like to see a take on that concept in an APRG.
Diablo 2:LoD
Shapeshifting. Rabies. Love it. You could definitely do so much more with shapeshifting than D2 in it’s day.
Necromancers poison nova and curses. Especially curses like attract and confuse which changes monster behaviour. I think those kind of skills feels more satisfying than just lowering monster resistances for example (those are great too obviously, but doesn’t make the gameplay any more fun).
I remember calling mine Forgetful Was Errrr as that followed the theme of Elite Skill names, although I have very fittingly forgotten how many Rs I had in my name.
I do think that it’d be cool to have immobile, ground-targeted minions as that was certainly a very fun playstyle. It could be a fun addition to the Warlock and help to expand her toolkit.
While I think this is a very interesting design space, we have the Beastmaster who’s a bit of a hybrid class that charges into battle with pets at his side, and the Necromancer who summons an undead army to do her bidding. We don’t want classes to feel like they all have the same basic ideas with minor twists, so we might prefer to limit this to a Unique Item-granted skill.
I’ll talk with the team, though.
Those can be very fun!
They remind me of the Eldar Farseer in Dawn of War II’s Last Stand mode. If you like curses then I imagine the Warlock will be right up your alley - particularly if you appreciate different takes on pet classes, but aren’t particularly interested in pet-focused builds and their gameplay.
Another vote here for Whirlwind. Needs to be smooth and flowing like D3. Other games have whirlwind type skills but with CD’s or just don’t seem to flow properly. Nothing like just holding down a button and away you go until you run out of Mana/Rage/HP whatever and work on building a gear set so you never run out.
I really enjoy “plague spreading” skills like Saryn from Warframe, the jumping green stuff from the D3 witch doc or the essence drain/contagion combo from PoE. Chain reactions are usually really satisfying and i hope to see something like this here <3
People told me this isn’t clunky and is fun, and I just couldn’t see it. Eventually enough people told me that (and told me enough times each…) that I decided I might be wrong (and I wanted them to stop). Man, that build is so much fun! That Occultist is probably my favourite character.
I could certainly see something like that being part of the Warlock’s toolkit!
On the theme of summons, I’d really like to see Hydra like from Diablo 2, or make them mobile Hydra dogs that walk around like the pet bears.
If you are able to change a character to give better AI to summons I’d play that for sure, summoned skeleton mages that move with you and you have some sort of amplify damage curse or something like that which causes the summons to prioritize the target. Summoner Necro in D2 was by far my favorite character, not needing to do anything with my character but manage curses and minions life.
Path of Exile Kinetic Blast (when linked to more projectiles), for it’s amazing fast clearing speed (one shot all screen).
Obviously it’s hard to balance a skill that one shot all screen (and even off screen), so it should be good only against trash but need another skill against boss.
No other ARPG since has had proper lycanthropy or shapechanging skills (well, Silverfall actually had a really good implementation, but the game had so many other problems).
No other ARPG since has had proper lycanthropy or shapechanging skills (well, Silverfall actually had a really good implementation, but the game had so many other problems).
We do have shapeshifting abilities planned for the Druid class. 🙂[/quote]
