DIABLO III - J9's thread of infernal enthusiasm!

[Armando]

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

Since when does the dps of a wand dictate how powerful magic is?!

Since when do twigs have DPS?

[Malacite]

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

That too

[cidbahamut]

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

Speaking of skeletons and enchant builds...

Back in college a bunch of my friends and I would play D2 over the LAN. We had one guy running an Enchantress and the rest of us ran skeletons. We pretty much destroyed everything on every difficulty. We didn't finish the last difficulty, but that was more on account of we stopped playing than hitting a wall of bad game design. It was by far the most fun I've ever had with D2.

[Firewind]

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

I didn't play a lot of Diablo II but if I remember right, every build was like this:

Strength: As little as possible to meet equipment requirements.
Dexterity: As above, or exactly enough for maximum block (depending on your class).
Vitality: PUT EVERYTHING YOU HAVE HERE!
Energy: Never put anything into this. (Even when playing a Sorceress)

[Icemage]

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

I didn't play a lot of Diablo II but if I remember right, every build was like this:

Strength: As little as possible to meet equipment requirements.
Dexterity: As above, or exactly enough for maximum block (depending on your class).
Vitality: PUT EVERYTHING YOU HAVE HERE!
Energy: Never put anything into this. (Even when playing a Sorceress)

That implies that character builds in D2 were all about stats (they weren't).

Skills defined your character build much more so than stats in D2, and because the points were (more or less aside from 1 questable re-spec) set in stone, they forced you to live with your decisions.

D3 is much more stat-focused and gear-focused than D2 ever was. Only a small number of builds in D2 were ever heavily gear-dependent, and virtually none were stat-dependent except odd ones like Dexterity-based bow amazons, who dumped every available point into Dexterity aside from the bare minimum to equip their bow of choice, for instance.


Icemage

[Firewind]

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

Yeah I should have made it more clear that my post was about stat builds rather than skill setups.

[Yellow Mage]

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

So, basically, the deal with Diablo III is that it would have been a much better game if the internet didn't exist.

[Icemage]

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

So, basically, the deal with Diablo III is that it would have been a much better game if the internet didn't exist.

The deal with Diablo III is that it was more or less doomed to be freaking terrible, given what we knew from their terrible effort with Lord of Destruction and the constant balance tweaking in World of Warcraft. Even Starcraft II is showing signs of cluelessness in terms of game design, and that's pretty sad.

I don't know where the actually good game designers are all at these days, but it seems very few of them work at Blizzard. RMAH and always-online were terrible and stupid things imposed by Activision, but the rest of the game is all on Blizzard's shoulders.


Icemage

[Malacite]

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

That implies that character builds in D2 were all about stats (they weren't).

Skills defined your character build much more so than stats in D2, and because the points were (more or less aside from 1 questable re-spec) set in stone, they forced you to live with your decisions.

D3 is much more stat-focused and gear-focused than D2 ever was. Only a small number of builds in D2 were ever heavily gear-dependent, and virtually none were stat-dependent except odd ones like Dexterity-based bow amazons, who dumped every available point into Dexterity aside from the bare minimum to equip their bow of choice, for instance.


Icemage

That's not true at all. Lots of builds were heavily gear-dependent in Hell, but then like you said the game got messed up horribly after LoD so yeah...

Assassins also pumped a lot into DEX (well, unless you were trap-based but that was rare) since both STR & DEX increased your damage, but DEX also increased block rate (unless you went for that dual-wield passive that functioned independently). STR also increased your damage for physical skills and melee damage, so it wasn't a total waste to pump it but the general rule was to to only increase it as-needed for gear,

Then in D3 they basically made every stat function like DEX did in D2 (each point = 1% multiplier for your damage). Diablo 3 also works with stupidly high numbers though compared to D2.

[Icemage]

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

That's not true at all. Lots of builds were heavily gear-dependent in Hell, but then like you said the game got messed up horribly after LoD so yeah...

Pre-LoD Diablo 2 builds were almost never heavily gear-dependent. Uniques weren't really all that and a bag of chips (even Stone of Jordan with its +1 to all skills was "useful" but not really tilted toward any specific build).

Sure, you had the occasional challenge build that did need very specific pieces of gear. I personally ran a hammerdin variant that was immune to lightning damage by use of a bunch of weird gear (again, until Lord of Destruction screwed up everything), so I'm no stranger to D2 builds that needed odd stuff, but by and large the most common builds didn't need anything particularly special. A mana leech item here, a life leech item there, maybe a particular weapon class or specific parts of a set for freeze damage or boosts to a skill, but hardly any of it wasn't replaceable with some other reasonable item of the same type with the requisite ability.

In other words, you could get by even on Hell difficulty even with modest gear if you were smart in your skill placement and stat placement; the gear was useful, but aside from a very few, very rare builds, you didn't need anything particularly rare or unique to get where you needed to go.

That's just not true at all in Diablo 3. Even marginal builds in Diablo 3 fail because repair costs wreck you if you aren't dealing damage fast enough to win the war of attrition, and the difference between a marginal setup and a functional setup in Diablo 3 has everything to do with gear since skill decisions no longer matter in any significant way.


Icemage

[Malacite]

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

Well, adding in charms that gave +skills was IMO a colossal mistake on their part. Rune Words were also really really stupid. I liked the idea, but in practice it was just too complicated and having to constantly look up online what runes in which order made the words etc... it just drove me nuts after a while. I honestly hated that they had to be inserted in the proper order to work; simply having the right combination should have been sufficient. Complexity for the sake of complexity is never good.

Again, D3 is a joke up until Hell A3 especially after the recent buff to rubies. Repair costs are marginal at best too (they eased up on the nerf they did a while back to lv 60 repair costs).

[Icemage]

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

Well, adding in charms that gave +skills was IMO a colossal mistake on their part. Rune Words were also really really stupid. I liked the idea, but in practice it was just too complicated and having to constantly look up online what runes in which order made the words etc... it just drove me nuts after a while. I honestly hated that they had to be inserted in the proper order to work; simply having the right combination should have been sufficient. Complexity for the sake of complexity is never good.

Again, D3 is a joke up until Hell A3 especially after the recent buff to rubies. Repair costs are marginal at best too (they eased up on the nerf they did a while back to lv 60 repair costs).

This is pertinent to this discussion.

Diablo 3 Director Jay Wilson: Auction Houses 'really hurt' game | Joystiq

Former Diablo 3 Game Director Jay Wilson admitted during a talk at GDC 2013 in San Francisco that both of Diablo 3's Auction Houses (both the real-money and the in-game gold item auction house) "really hurt the game." Wilson said that before Blizzard launched the game, the company had a few assumptions about how the Auction Houses would work: He thought they would help reduce fraud, that they'd provide a wanted service to players, that only a small percentage of players would use it and that the price of items would limit how many were listed and sold.

But he said that once the game went live, Blizzard realized it was completely wrong about those last two points. It turns out that nearly every one of the game's players (of which there are still about 1 million per day, and about 3 million per month, according to Wilson) made use of either house, and that over 50 percent of players used it regularly. That, said Wilson, made money a much higher motivator than the game's original motivation to simply kill Diablo, and "damaged item rewards" in the game.

Were you saying something about how I'm wrong regarding how broken the itemization is in Diablo 3?

The RMAH and standard AH were at the core of the design of Diablo 3. That forced vastly different philosophies into item drop frequency and quality, and got rid of D2's awesome gold gambling in favor of having players trade gold - or heaven forbid real money - to upgrade their gear, and/or spend an inordinate amount of gold crafting gear that, at the end of the day, was pretty mediocre even when it turned out "properly" (not guaranteed, and thus completely defeats the purpose of removing gold gambling in the first place...).

The itemization focus then warped the player progression, which is why there are four shitty stats that do a terrible job at differentiating your character (and which you have zero control over in any case).

With no skill building control, no stat control, the ONLY thing you can really choose to do in D3 is modify gear and spec out skills, and that's only possible if you actually get the gear you need. It's a vicious circle of stupid.


Icemage

[Malacite]

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

What? I never said you were wrong, I said they were finally going to address it in the next patch or so.

[Icemage]

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

Earth to Mal:

The problem isn't the items. It's too late to fix what ails Diablo 3. The items are a symptom, not the cause, which is why Blizzard's item drop fixes will not solve the issue of the game sucking.

The items and drop rates were bad because every other player-controllable customization was taken away. I don't consider picking which skills to use as "customization", at least not in any greater sense than being limited to 8 hotkeys was in Diablo 2.

Even after Blizzard's proposed "fix", you're still held in thrall to the random number generator, praying that you might eventually find something useful for your character. Sure, a random rare drop may be higher quality, but what good does that do you if it's for some other class (as will be the case the majority of the time?). Trade the item away on the auction house and buy something with the proceeds?

How is that in any way. shape or form any different than what's happening now? You still have no control over your destiny if you never get good drops / use the AH, and you're still finding the gear you really need on the AH. It's just the method of how you go about doing so, and how many "bad shinies" you get is reduced (shinies are more rare, but better quality = good shinies are still rare, yes?)


Icemage

[Malacite]

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

too tired/lazy to go look for the developer posts but suffice to say they're aware of the problem and are working on measures. Now, that doesn't mean I'm super confident in them or anything, just saying the light bulb finally turned on and they realized what a shit state the game's in.

I'm personally still in favor of keeping the AH (not the RMAH though) because it's a hell of a lot more convenient than shouting in lobbies/forums for trades. But they have to address a lot of underlying issues first, with regards to itemization, class balance and customization. Removing the mystic was a huge mistake. So was not allowing us to pick stats on the gear Haedrig makes (not to mention crafting costs a ridiculous amount of gold and materials, and 9/10 Haedrig will craft something too shitty to list on the AH).