DIABLO III - J9's thread of infernal enthusiasm!

[Taskmage]

Re: DIABLO III - J9's thread of infernal enthusiasm!

@Mal @ Hayde with regard to drop rates, a post on reddit seems to show that the drop rates in acts 3 and 4 have been hotfixed to reflect the table in the 1.0.3 design preview.

[DakAttack]

Re: DIABLO III - J9's thread of infernal enthusiasm!

I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and say they wanted a cut of the money and hoped to enhance the experience for the players in the process, but there's no disputing that they opened up a big ugly can of worms by doing so. I think that like certain fictional park owners they thought the measures they had implemented would keep everything clean and under control, but like genetically reconstituted velociraptors, RMT always finds a way. It's an open question whether it's even possible for them to entirely secure the environment and a bigger question whether they can do so without putting undue burden and inconvenience on innocent players, but as long as they're trying it's a given that they're going to make missteps and mistakes.

[Icemage]

Re: DIABLO III - J9's thread of infernal enthusiasm!

That's very interesting, what's your source? I'd like to read more about it. Also, would the speed advantage hold true these days, or are floating point calculations comparable in speed to integer math on CPUs these days?

The speed advantage isn't as absolute nowadays as it used to be. Most modern CPUs used on PCs have dedicated floating point calculation registers specifically for fractional math, and those do help a lot. However, it's much easier to optimize integer math at the compiler level, and there are other tricks you can do like multiple addition and bitshifting that still makes integer math a lot faster.


Icemage

[Armando]

Re: DIABLO III - J9's thread of infernal enthusiasm!

Yeah, the dedicated floating point units is part of the reason I asked. I'm not sure at what point that became ubiquitous. How is doing multiple additions faster than multiplication though?

[Icemage]

Re: DIABLO III - J9's thread of infernal enthusiasm!

Yeah, the dedicated floating point units is part of the reason I asked. I'm not sure at what point that became ubiquitous. How is doing multiple additions faster than multiplication though?

Sorry, it's something of a confusing nomenclature. Multiple addition in this context means loading a register with two or more small values that still fit in the register and using one Add command to process them both at the same time. Since integers are (bit-wise) smaller than floats, you can do this very easily, especially for very small values like 8-bit counters or whatever.

Also, you can do some things very VERY fast with bitshift operations. Multiplying a binary integer by 2, for instance, only requires a single left shift:

00001010 (binary) = 10
00010100 (binary) = 20

This doesn't work for floating point numbers because of the way they're represented.


Icemage

[Armando]

Re: DIABLO III - J9's thread of infernal enthusiasm!

I knew about using shifting for multiplication/division by 2, the addition trick never occurred to me. Very clever!

[Hayde]

Re: DIABLO III - J9's thread of infernal enthusiasm!

@Mal @ Hayde with regard to drop rates, a post on reddit seems to show that the drop rates in acts 3 and 4 have been hotfixed to reflect the table in the 1.0.3 design preview.

Patch 1.0.3a Tomorrow - Official Patch Notes, 1.0.3b Soon - News - Diablo Discussion and Community Forums - DiabloFans.com

Not quite. We should however expect 1.0.3b to increase drop rates and hopefully it will hit the servers this week. I'm taking a small from the game--slight burnout from long play hours and hand cramps.

[DakAttack]

Re: DIABLO III - J9's thread of infernal enthusiasm!

I'm on Nightmare, and while I like Barbarian, I'm a little concerned at the amount of damage I'm standing in during some of the more intense fights. I don't mind using my leap to jump out of the spinning lasers, or other hazards, but when there's spinning lasers and freeze bombs, I'm pretty much screwed, and usually the only one. Ranged players can easily move away and either retreat or continue to fight, while I'm stuck in the thick of it, with rarely a way out.

[Malacite]

Re: DIABLO III - J9's thread of infernal enthusiasm!

Dude, you haven't seen shit.

It only gets worse, much, much worse from Hell and on. Diablo 3 is the worst troll since IWBTG (arguably worse IMO)


I believe TM was headdesking (yeah I made that a verb) a week or so ago over a champion pack on Inferno with Frozen, Waller, Jailer and Arcane Enchanted or some retarded BS like that.

[Taskmage]

Re: DIABLO III - J9's thread of infernal enthusiasm!

Standing around in those damage fields is really not an option at higher levels. Arcane sentries, desecrator pools and freeze bombs are practically instant death if you don't avoid them. Even as a melee character, you need to retreat when too many of those effects go down in the same area and re-engage elsewhere.

And yeah, I think I remember that mob pack. Iirc it was in the sewers, too, so there was no freakin room to maneuver or dodge.

[DakAttack]

Re: DIABLO III - J9's thread of infernal enthusiasm!

Am I forced to use a shield? Is anybody in melee range forced to use a shield? Seems like Monk would be in the same boat.

[Taskmage]

Re: DIABLO III - J9's thread of infernal enthusiasm!

No, but if your defense isn't cutting it, it's easiest to make up that deficit by throwing on a shield. You can get 2-3x the armor in that slot vs any other, before even considering the blocking and possible resistance. Many people consider shields mandatory for a3/4 inferno, but I've seen people pulling off 2-handers with otherwise exceptional gear. It's just more expensive.

[Malacite]

Re: DIABLO III - J9's thread of infernal enthusiasm!

Standing around in those damage fields is really not an option at higher levels. Arcane sentries, desecrator pools and freeze bombs are practically instant death if you don't avoid them. Even as a melee character, you need to retreat when too many of those effects go down in the same area and re-engage elsewhere.

And yeah, I think I remember that mob pack. Iirc it was in the sewers, too, so there was no freakin room to maneuver or dodge.

And as I recall, they were directly in your way towards the exit as well so you had no choice but to slug it out.

You're not *forced* to use a shield, but it's heavily advised for Barbarians. You can get some really nice modifiers on shields like Critical hit rate, Life %, resist all etc. Dual-Wielding generally sucks except for Monks and possibly DH (though I prefer a 2 handed Xbow and Quiver especially post-IAS nerf) and 2 handers tend to suck as well, barring certain high-damage skills.

I'm actually tempted to change my Barbarian from Axe & Shield to a 2-handed Axe to just abuse the crap out of landing gigantic crits; I can already crit for nearly with all my buffs up, regularly for 50~60 otherwise. With a 2 hander for more base damage I can probably drop massive 100k+ crits easily. Too bad they nerfed the shit out of Life Steal on Hell and higher.

[Taskmage]

Re: DIABLO III - J9's thread of infernal enthusiasm!

Just wanted to let all you haters know that thanks to the always-on DRM scheme Blizzard implemented for us, botting, scamming, trade window fraud, and now even rampant item duping are now 100% still a part of the game. Yep, it was completely ineffective at stopping a single damn thing it set out to prevent.

The biggest irony of it all is that the biggest source of exploits has been the auction house itself, because the auction house itself seem to have little to no server-side verification unlike the actual "game" part of the game which literally will not let you take a step without verifying it and even then arbitrarily revokes it anyway. Until a couple of weeks ago, it was possible to convince the AH that your auction was over by changing your local system time. You read that right. So far as I know there is still a live exploit that allows someone using a hex editor to convince the AH server that their bid is actually a buyout. And now this exploit that allows massive item duplication by sending an unsold item to your stash multiple times without confirming to the server that you got it. Of course, a lot of people had given up on finding affordable upgrades on the AH anyway and switched to buying unidentified rares in bulk, except oh wait there's also an exploit that allows you to see which rares are junk without identifying them, so odds are you're still getting conned. Even if the D3 economy wasn't completely broken right now, it'd be completely unsafe to participate in.

So yeah. Always-on DRM: Maximum possible inconvenience to paying customers, minimum possible impact on hacking and cheating. GG Blizzard, seriously.

[Malacite]

Re: DIABLO III - J9's thread of infernal enthusiasm!

That explains how some of my items with no buyout sold right away...

Honest to Christ WTF Blizzard -__-'