Roasting the PD2 Feedback Thread: Grush, Splash & Magic Facets

October 9, 2026 — zagd3m

I scrolled into the PD2 feedback channel and basically read all of its somewhat recent content. Most of it is wishlists — items, recipes, QoL — which is normal and fine. But a few posts point at real design questions. Here’s what I found worth reacting to (which isn’t allowed inside the channel, fyi).

Grushing: we need to pick a side

This was the hottest topic in the channel by far. Same complaint, several angles:

The most efficient way to level right now is a level-1 naked character getting carried to hell, then standing a screen behind a high-level in Chaos. Strange that the optimal route is also the most hands-off — and it makes all low-mid items pointless past day one, since your second character never actually plays through the game.

Playing solo gets you players-5 loot, but not players-5 XP. Leveling an alt alone, or league-starting outside a full group, feels like self-punishment. Groups and boosts could stay ahead — just let solo be close enough to be a real choice.

A level-1 character has no business in a hell game. Gate it behind a minimum level, or behind the ancients quest itself.

Someone even brought up the ancient act 3 flail trick — muling Khalim’s Flail onto a level-1 character, letting them die, and looting it so you can smash the Compelling Orb in Nightmare and Hell without assembling the organs. The fact that the optimal way to play an ARPG involves sacrificing a naked mule in a blood ritual just to skip playing the game is peak Diablo 2 jank. You might think it is fun, but maybe it is outdated right ?

Digging deeper, this debate isn’t new. Older posts asked for corrupted playthroughs as an alternative leveling path, waypoints shared across the account once you’ve cleared a difficulty (the argument being: rushes already let people skip the game entirely, so at least reward the ones who play it), and way back, someone proposed gating each difficulty behind the first days of the ladder.

My honest position: either fix works, the status quo doesn’t.

I’d vote for the first. Alts are where build diversity lives. If the ladder feels dead by week three, part of it is that replaying the game just to try a new build asks too much. Make trying builds cheap and people try builds. The current setup is a boring dilemma: the fun way to level is the slow way, so people take the boring shortcut. But mostly I want the devs to answer the question at all — right now we get the worst of both worlds.

Splash through items — agreed, and it’s a smart angle

Ursa’s Nightmare is the kind of item I love — you give up real stats to buy a bigger splash radius. More gear built on that trade, please.

Straight into my favorite wound: melee physical builds can’t map because single-target damage doesn’t scale with pack size. Last week I was arguing in the stream recap that the devs should ask whether base splash is too weak. The S13 review already celebrated local splash fixes for Frenzy, Tiger Strike, Fend, Fury, and Zeal — that’s the kind of change that makes more skills worth trying.

This suggestion is the other way into the exact same problem: keep base splash conservative, but sell radius through items. Using Ursa’s Nightmare as the template is clever. It turns splash into an itemization dial: builds that need mapping pay stats for it, bossers skip it and take raw damage.

I’d take both. Higher base splash so more skills get a baseline shot at maps, and more items that let you convert raw power into AoE. They’re not in competition.

Prerequisite chains are stealth synergies

A fire/cold sorc shouldn’t have to sink points into three unused lightning skills just to unlock Energy Shield.

Same disease as the 80-point builds from Top 10 #6 and the sorc armor discussion: prereq chains are synergies wearing a disguise. They look free — “just put a point in it” — but they tax exactly the builds that want to spread across two elements. Every dead point in a chain is a point not spent on your actual build.

Not every prereq should go. Some are teaching moments, some are power gates. But a long chain to reach a defensive skill feels wrong — defense shouldn’t require offense homework.

The immunities question — where I disagree with Senpai

What if potions stayed viable into nightmare and hell — a slow, inefficient way for a single-element build to fight through immunes instead of skipping them?

The potion part is a band-aid, but the question underneath is the good one. Even Senpai admitted on stream that immunes are a problem — his defense was that they’re core to LoD, so changing them breaks the legacy. I don’t buy it, for two reasons:

  1. Maps already dodge the problem. They’re designed so single-element builds aren’t hard-blocked — so the “sacred legacy” holds for leveling, while endgame quietly works around it. If it’s fine to design around for maps, why is it untouchable for the playthrough? All it does is punish solo players.
  2. Blizzard touched it in recent D2R patches. Not the original designers, sure — but the fossil is allowed to be examined at some point.

Where I’d put the fix hasn’t changed: my Conviction/Infinity proposal. I made the same case in my S13 review and when I disagreed with a cheaper mini-Conviction idea: breaking immunes should exist, but be expensive and limited — not binary. (And for the version where Infinity’s Conviction just gets deleted, see the censored page, where ideas go when they’re too bold to ship.)

Rotating maps out — I’d go the other way

The map pool only grows — should some of the older maps rotate out at this point?

I get the instinct, but it solves the wrong problem. The pool feels bloated partly because a third of it is dead for your build — roll a fire sorc, watch the immune walls pile up. Cutting maps shrinks the pool; cutting immunities inside maps grows the effective one. More maps worth running within a ladder beats variety that only exists between seasons.

Same root cause as the potion ask, by the way. Half of these wishes trace back to immunities if you follow them far enough.

The deterministic crafting pile — mostly no

Reroll recipe for torches? Some currency to reroll staffmods? Rerolling crafts ? Uniques ?

Different asks, same request: less RNG. And mostly no, but let me argue it rather than just vote. Torch/anni rerolling is power creep for bossers — the people farming the most deterministic content get an even more deterministic payout. A staffmod reroll currency doesn’t fix staffmod farming being miserable; it adds a second lottery next to the first. If slam/craft RNG is too punishing, tune the odds — don’t bolt on undo-buttons.

Loot is fun when loot is random. Let’s keep this.

Where I do sympathize: these asks exist because some grinds feel bottomless. That signal is real. But the fix belongs in the base odds and in more things worth farming, not in consumable nonsense.

Magic facets — please no

Every element has rainbow facets except magic — so, magic facets when?

Hard no, because the missing facet is the feature. Magic builds don’t get facets, so they don’t need facets, so their gear slots stay open for other things. That slot freedom is what makes magic feel like its own thing instead of element #5. Add the facets and you’ve traded a real asymmetry for fake symmetry.

Sometimes diversity means one path deliberately doesn’t get the toy.

Overall

Worth the read, genuinely. Under the recipe wishes there’s a pattern: a lot of these posts are secretly asking the same questions — what should leveling be, what’s splash for, are immunities still earning their place, how much RNG is the point of the game. The devs do read the channel (the 60-point-builds idea from Discord made it into my own stream notes), so keep posting.

And next time the post might be about yours. You’ve been warned. If this was interesting, tell me, if it wasn’t, tell me too. Discord is your friend, and maybe I can be too.

About the quotes: everything in blockquotes is a rephrased, compressed version of real messages — no names, not verbatim. I condensed the long ones down to the part I wanted to react to. The point is the ideas, not the people, so sorry for modifying your words a bit.